Fritz's Story.
_December_ 31, 1522.
We are betrothed. Solemnly in the presence of our family and friends Eva
has promised to be my wife; and in a few weeks we are to be married. Our
home (at all events, at first) is to be in the Thuringian forest, in the
parsonage belonging to Ulrich von Gersdorf's castle. The old priest is
too aged to do anything. Chriemhild has set her heart on having us to
reform the peasantry, and they all believe the quiet and the pure air of
the forest will restore my health, which has been rather shattered by
all I have gone through during these last months, although not as much
as they think. I feel strong enough for anything already. What I have
lost during all those years in being separated from her! How poor and
one-sided my life has been! How strong the rest her presence gives me,
makes me to do whatever work God may give me!
Amazing blasphemy on God to assert that the order in which he has
founded human life is disorder, that the love which the Son of God
compares to the relation between himself and his Church sullies or
lowers the heart.
Have these years then been lost? Have I wandered away wilful and deluded
from the lot of blessing God had appointed me, since that terrible time
of the plague, at Eisenach? Have all these been wasted years? Has all
the suffering been fruitless, unnecessary pain? And, after all, do I
return with precious time lost and strength diminished just to the point
I might have reached so long ago!
For Eva I am certain this is not so; every step of her way, the loving
Hand has led her. Did not the convent through her become a home or a way
to the Eternal Home to many? But for me? No, for me also the years have
brought more than they have taken away! Those who are to help the
perplexed and toiling men of their time, must first go down into the
conflicts of their time. Is it not this which makes even Martin Luther
the teacher of our nation? Is it not this which qualifies weak and
sinful men to be preachers of the gospel instead of angels from heaven?
The holy angels sang on their heavenly heights the glad tidings of great
joy, but the shepherds, the fishermen, and the publican spoke it in the
homes of men! The angel who liberated the apostles from prison said, as
if spontaneously, from the fulness of his heart, "Go speak to the people
the words _of this life_." But the trembling lips of Peter who had
denied, and Thomas who had doubted, and John who had misunderstood, were
to speak the life-giving words to men, denying, doubting, misconceiving
men, to tell what they knew, and how the Saviour could forgive.
The voice that had been arrested in cowardly curses by the look of
divine pardoning love, had a tone in it the Archangel Michael's could
never have!
And when the Pharisees, hardest of all, were to be reached, God took a
Pharisee of the Pharisees, a blasphemer, a persecutor, one who could
say, "I might also have confidence in the flesh," "I persecuted the
Church of God."
Was David's secret contest in vain, when slaying the lion and the bear,
to defend those few sheep in the wilderness, he proved the weapons with
which he slew Goliath and rescued the host of Israel? Were Martin
Luther's years in the convent of Erfurt lost? Or have they not been the
school-days of his life, the armoury where his weapons were forged, the
gymnasium in which his eye and hand were trained for the battle-field?
He has seen the monasteries from within; he has felt the monastic life
from within. He can say of all these internal rules, "I have proved
them, and found them powerless to sanctify the heart." It is this which
gives the irresistible power to his speaking and writing. It is this
which by God's grace enables him to translate the Epistles of Paul the
Pharisee and the Apostle as he has done. The truths had been translated
by the Holy Spirit into the language of his experience, and graven on
his heart long before; so that in rendering the Greek into German he
also testified of things he had seen, and the Bible from his pen reads
as if it had been originally written in German, for the German people.
To me also in my measure these years have not been time lost. There are
many truths that one only learns in their fulness by proving the bitter
bondage of the errors they contradict.
Perhaps also we shall help each other and others around us better for
having been thus trained apart. I used to dream of the joy of leading
her into life. But now God gives her back to me enriched with all those
years of separate experience, not as the Eva of childhood, when I saw
her last, but ripened to perfect womanhood; not merely to reflect my
thoughts, but to blend the fulness of her life with mine.