Else's Story.
WITTEMBERG, _July_ 13, 1520.
Many events have happened since last I wrote, both in this little world
and in the large world outside.
Our Gretchen has two little brothers, who are as ingenious in
destruction, and seem to have as many designs against their own welfare,
as their uncles had at their age, and seem likely to perplex Gretchen,
dearly as she loves them, much as Christopher and Pollux did me.
Chriemhild is married, and has gone to her home in the Thuringian
Forest. Atlantis is betrothed to Conrad Winkelried, a Swiss student.
Pollux is gone to Spain, on some mercantile affairs of the Eisenach
house of Cotta, in which he is a partner; and Fritz has been among us
once more. That is now about two years since. He was certainly much
graver than of old. Indeed he often looked more than grave, as if some
weight of sorrow rested on him. But with our mother and the children he
was always cheerful.
Gretchen and Uncle Fritz formed the strongest mutual attachment, and to
this day she often asks me when he will come back; and nothing delights
her more than to sit on my knee before his picture, and hear me tell
over and over again the stories of our old talks in the lumber-room at
Eisenach, or of the long days we used to spend in the pine forests,
gathering wood for the winter fires. She thinks no festival could be so
delightful as that; and her favourite amusement is to gather little
bundles of willow or oak twigs, by the river Elbe, or on the Dueben
Heath, and bring them home for household use. All the splendid puppets
and toys her father brings her from Nueremberg, or has sent from Venice,
do not give her half the pleasure that she finds in the heath, when he
takes her there, and she returns with her little apron full of dry
sticks, and her hands as brown and dirty as a little wood-cutter's,
fancying she is doing what Uncle Fritz and I did when we were children,
and being useful.
Last summer she was endowed with a special apple and pear tree of her
own, and the fruit of these she stores with her little fagots to give at
Christmas to a poor old woman we know.
Gottfried and I want the children to learn early that pure joy of
giving, and of doing kindnesses, which transmutes wealth from dust into
true gold, and prevents these possessions which are such good servants
from becoming our masters, and reducing us, as they seem to do so many
wealthy people, into the mere slaves and hired guardians of _things_.
I pray God often that the experience of poverty which I had for so many
years may never be lost. It seems to me a gift God has given me, just as
a course at the university is a gift. I have graduated in the school of
poverty, and God grant I may never forget the secrets poverty taught me
about the struggles and wants of the poor.
The room in which I write now, with its carpets, pictures, and carved
furniture, is very different from the dear bare old lumber-room where I
began my Chronicle; and the inlaid ebony and ivory cabinet on which my
paper lies is a different desk from the piles of old books where I used
to trace the first pages slowly in a childish hand. But the poor man's
luxuries will always be the most precious to me. The warm sunbeams,
shining through the translucent vine-leaves at the open window, are
fairer than all the jewel-like Venetian glass of the closed casements
which are now dying crimson the pages of Dr. Luther's Commentary, left
open on the window-seat an hour since by Gottfried.
But how can I be writing so much about my own tiny world, when all the
world around me is agitated by such great fears and hopes?
At this moment, through the open window, I see Dr. Luther and Dr. Philip
Melancthon walking slowly up the street in close conversation. The hum
of their voices reaches me here, although they are talking low. How
different they look, and are; and yet what friends they have become!
Probably, in a great degree, because of the difference. The one looks
like a veteran soldier, with his rock-like brow, his dark eyes, his
vigorous form, and his firm step; the other, with his high, expanded
forehead, his thin worn face, and his slight youthful frame, like a
combination of a young student and an old philosopher.
Gottfried says God has given them to each other and to Germany, blessing
the Church as he does the world by the union of opposites, rain and
sunshine, heat and cold, sea and land, husband and wife.
How those two great men (for Gottfried says Dr. Melancthon is great, and
I know that Dr. Luther is) love and reverence each other! Dr. Luther
says he is but the forerunner, and Melancthon the true prophet; that he
is but the wood-cutter clearing the forest with rough blows, that Dr.
Philip may sow the precious seed; and when he went to encounter the
legate at Augsburg, he wrote, that if Philip lived it mattered little
what became of him.
But _we_ do not think so, nor does Dr. Melancthon. "No one," he says,
"comes near Dr. Luther, and indeed the heart of the whole nation hangs
on him. Who stirs the heart of Germany--of nobles, peasants, princes,
women, children--as he does with his noble, faithful words?"
Twice during these last years we have been in the greatest anxiety about
his safety,--once when he was summoned before the legate at Augsburg,
and once when he went to the great disputation with Dr. Eck at Leipsic.
But how great the difference between his purpose when he went to
Augsburg, and when he returned from Leipsic!
At Augsburg he would have conceded anything, but the truth about the
free justification of every sinner who believes in Christ. He reverenced
the Pope; he would not for the world become a heretic! No name of
opprobrium was so terrible to him as that.
At Leipsic he had learned to disbelieve that the Pope had any authority
to determine doctrine, and he boldly confessed that the Hussites (men
till now abhorred in Saxony as natural enemies as well as deadly
heretics) ought to be honoured for confessing sound truth. And from that
time both Dr. Luther and Melancthon have stood forth openly as the
champions of the Word of God against the Papacy.
Now, however, a worse danger threatens him, even the bull of
excommunication which they say is now being forged at Rome, and which
has never yet failed to crush where it has fallen. Dr. Luther has,
indeed, taught us not to dread it as a spiritual weapon, but we fear its
temporal effects, especially if followed by the ban of the empire.
Often, indeed, he talks of taking refuge in some other land; the good
Elector, even himself, has at times advised it, fearing no longer to be
able to protect him. But God preserve him to Germany!
_June_ 23, 1520.
This evening, as we were sitting in my father's house, Christopher
brought us, damp from the press, a copy of Dr. Luther's Appeal to His
Imperial Majesty, and to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, on
the Reformation of Christendom. Presenting it to our grandmother, he
said,--
"Here, madam, is a weapon worthy of the bravest days of the Schoenbergs,
mighty to the pulling down of strongholds."
"Ah," sighed our mother, "always wars and fightings! It is a pity the
good work cannot be done more quietly."
"Ah, grandmother," said my father, "only see how her burgher life has
destroyed the heroic spirit of her crusading ancestors. She thinks that
the Holy Places are to be won back from the infidels without a blow,
only by begging their pardon and kissing the hem of their garments."
"You should hear Catherine Krapp, Dr. Melancthon's wife!" rejoined our
mother; "she agrees with me that these are terrible times. She says she
never sees the doctor go away without thinking he may be immured in some
dreadful dungeon before they meet again."
"But remember, dear mother," I said, "your fears when first Dr. Luther
assailed Tetzel and his indulgences three years ago! And who has gained
the victory there? Dr. Martin is the admiration of all good men
throughout Germany; and poor Tetzel, despised by his own party, rebuked
by the legate, died, they say, of a broken heart just after the great
Leipsic disputation."
"Poor Tetzel!" said my father, "his indulgences could not bind up a
broken heart. I shall always love Dr. Luther for writing him a letter of
comfort when he was dying, despised and forsaken even by his own party.
I trust that He who can pardon has had mercy on his soul."
"Read to us, Christopher," said our grandmother; "your mother would not
shrink from any battle-field if there were wounds there which her hands
could bind."
"No," said Gottfried, "the end of war is peace,--God's peace, based on
His truth. Blessed are those who in the struggle never lose sight of the
end."
Christopher read, not without interruption. Many things in the book were
new and startling to most of us:--
"It is not rashly," Dr. Luther began, "that I, a man of the people,
undertake to address your lord-ships. The wretchedness and oppression
that now overwhelm all the states of Christendom, and Germany in
particular, force from me a cry of distress. I am constrained to call
for help; I must see whether God will not bestow his Spirit on some man
belonging to our country, and stretch forth his hand to our unhappy
nation."
Dr. Luther never seems to think _he_ is to do the great work. He speaks
as if he were only fulfilling some plain humble duty, and calling other
men to undertake the great achievement; and all the while that humble
duty _is_ the great achievement, and he is doing it.
Dr. Luther spoke of the wretchedness of Italy, the unhappy land where
the Pope's throne is set, her ruined monasteries, her decayed cities,
her corrupted people; and then he showed how Roman avarice and pride
were seeking to reduce Germany to a state as enslaved. He appealed to
the young emperor, Charles, soon about to be crowned. He reminded all
the rulers of their responsibilities. He declared that the papal
territory, called the patrimony of St. Peter, was the fruit of robbery.
Generously holding out his hand to the very outcasts his enemies had
sought to insult him most grievously by comparing him with, he said,--
"It is time that we were considering the cause of the Bohemians, and
re-uniting ourselves to them."
At these words my grandmother dropped her work, and fervently clasping
her hands, leant forward, and fixing her eyes on Christopher, drank in
every word with intense eagerness.
When he came to the denunciation of the begging friars, and the
recommendation that the parish priests should marry, Christopher
interrupted himself by an enthusiastic "vivat."
When, however, after a vivid picture of the oppressions and avarice of
the legates, came the solemn abjuration:--
"Hearest thou this, O Pope, not most holy, but most sinful? May God from
the heights of his heaven soon hurl thy throne into the abyss!" my
mother turned pale, and crossed herself.