LUTHER.--ERASMUS.--SIR T. MORE.--NEW TRANSLATION OF
THE BIBLE.--DEMAND FOR IT.
Such was the condition of England in the fifteenth century: the minds
of men generally alienated from the church of Rome by reason of its
corruption; their religious knowledge improved, and improving daily, by
the wider diffusion of the Scriptures in the mother-tongue, to which
the art of printing now so effectually contributed; and a sect, neither
few in numbers, nor wanting in activity or courage, in the heart of the
kingdom, ready to profit by any occasion which might offer of opening
the eyes of their countrymen. Providence, having now sufficiently
prepared the world for the reception of such a character, raised up a
great reformer, whose labours, though immediately confined to Germany,
still made themselves felt throughout Europe, and more especially in
this island.
Martin Luther, the son of a working miner in Saxony, was born at
Isleben on the 10th of November, 1483, a day much to be remembered. He
was a man for the times; qualified by the force of his character for
giving them a wrench. In his early years he took on himself the vows of
an Augustin monk, and, to use his own words, was a “most mad Papist.”
Various circumstances concurred to disabuse him of his bigotry; they
have been severally advanced with more or less emphasis according to
the respective views of the writers who have treated this subject--the
secular historian tracing his conversion to secondary causes, the
devout, ascribing it wholly to the grace of God. Both may be right; it
was probably the effect of accident, of reflection, and of time, God
working by means of such instruments. At the age of three and twenty
the business of his monastery carried him to Rome. He saw there more
than was expedient. He was surprised to find, on near inspection, that
the image which he had been taught to believe fallen from Jupiter,
wore many appearances of having been made by the craftsman. He was too
sincere himself not to feel disgust at the symptoms of hollow faith
which forced themselves upon his notice in the capital of Christendom
and he returned to Saxony from his mission “with thoughts arising in
his heart.” He betook himself to the study of the Scriptures, with
Erasmus for his help; with whose system of interpretation, however, he
does not seem to have been entirely satisfied. He felt an increasing
dislike of the schoolmen and soon entertained a suspicion, which, by
degrees, ripened into a conviction, of the truth of that doctrine which
proved afterwards the burden of his preaching--justification by faith
in Christ only.[182] Tetzel, a Dominican monk, was commissioned by
the pope (Leo X.,) who wished to recruit his treasury, whether for
the supply of his extravagance, or the erection of his church, or the
prosecution of his war against the Turks, to put up his indulgences
for sale in Germany. Tetzel executed his trust with the most shameless
contempt of all decency. There was no sin, however monstrous (and some
he named,) which he had not both the will and the power to remit. It
was in vain for the German pastors to insist on penance; here was a
papal missionary at hand ready to absolve from all pains and penalties.
The indulgences were farmed; they were sold in the gross to the best
bidders, and were by them dispersed amongst the retail pedlars of
pardons, who resorted to the public houses, exhibited their wares, and
picked the pockets of the credulous. Extravagance like this called up
Luther, excited his honest indignation, and drove him to write. He had
no notion where this first step was to lead him. In the simplicity
of his heart he thought that the pope would be on his side, and
condemn such flagrant excesses in his emissaries. Leo was as little
aware as himself of the critical position of his affairs. “Brother
Martin,” quoth he, “is a man of very fine genius;” and he regarded
the whole matter as a battle of kites and crows. But Martin was in
earnest, whatever Leo might be. Still he had little idea how much he
would have to unlearn. He did not question, for instance, the pope’s
supremacy, till Eckius, one of his indiscreet antagonists, provoked
him to scrutinise the pretension, and then, like honest Latimer, he
found himself hard to be persuaded that our Saviour said--“Peter, I do
mean this by sitting in thy boat, that thou shalt go to Rome, and be
bishop there five and twenty years after mine ascension, and all thy
successors shall be rulers of the universal church after thee.”[183] On
he went, feeling his way and light continued to break upon him. Two
years later than the time when he wrote against indulgences (which was
in 1517) he tells Spalatinus, the secretary of the Elector of Saxony,
and his own confidential correspondent that he had no intention to
separate from the apostolic see.[184] He examines the decretals; and
then he whispers in his friend’s ear that he begins to suspect the pope
to be antichrist. He ponders somewhat longer, and he now acquaints
him that he has not much doubt of the fact;[185] and shortly after
this (in 1520) he publishes his “Tract against the Popedom,” in which
he draws the sword; and then his “Babylonish Captivity,” in which he
throws away the scabbard. Measures are no longer kept by either party.
On the 15th June, 1520, Leo issued his damnatory bull excommunicating
Luther, delivering him over to Satan, requiring the secular princes
to apprehend him, and condemning his books to be burned.[186] Luther,
nothing dismayed, on the 10th December of the same year returns
measure for measure, and raising a huge pile of wood without the walls
of Wittenberg, commits decretals, canon law, and bull to the flames
together.[187] Time was when this would have been frenzy; it was still
perilous; but public opinion, which the art of printing had called into
being, and which was now gathering strength, was with the reformer.
The anathema was torn in pieces at Erfurt, and was ill received every
where.[188] Politics again stood Luther’s friend. Frederick, the
elector of Saxony, his cautious but constant protector, had laid the
new emperor (Charles V.) under personal obligations, by declining the
imperial crown for himself and transferring his interest to him;--here
was a lion’s mouth stopped. Then Charles and Francis were rival
monarchs, and in the midst of their rivalry, the Lutheran heresy
(like the earthquake at Thrasymenæ, which rolled away unperceived
by the combatants) did not rivet their exclusive attention amidst
the intrigues of the cabinet, or the clashing of arms; and moreover
the Lutheran party might be useful to either to turn a balance.
Accordingly, Luther ventured to encounter the diet of Worms, and felt,
what he exclaimed to the vast multitude who hailed him as he stepped
out of his carriage, that “God was on his side.” He came out of that
trial unharmed, however the smell of fire might have passed on him, and
invested even with greater influence on public opinion than before. He
found it necessary to submit to a friendly imprisonment in the castle
of Wartburg, till the tyranny of the diet should be overpast; but he
availed himself of this unacceptable leisure for the manufacture of
his arms. On the one hand, he taught the people out of the Scriptures,
giving them an admirable translation, first of the New, and then of the
Old Testament, a translation which our own Cranmer kept ever by his
side;[189] he laboured with still greater care his Commentary on the
Epistle to the Galatians, a work containing wholesome doctrine and most
necessary for those times, when (as in the days of St. Paul) faith in
Christ was overlaid by ritual observances, and merit was pleaded where
mercy should have been craved. On the other hand, he did not scruple
to wield more ignoble implements of war; if the sword was not at hand,
he could smite with the ox-goad. Coarse and grotesque caricatures of
his opponents in a frontispiece, often recommended his works to his
plebeian readers; a cardinal decorated with a fox’s brush which he
trailed through the mire, and with which he bespattered his neighbours;
a pope seated astride upon a sow, or furnished with a pair of ass’s
ears, whilst a legion of imps, busy like the Rosicrucian gnomes, on
mischief, would be crowning him with a nauseous mitre, or lowering
him into an infernal abyss or preparing faggots for his burning.[190]
To these and the like weapons of warfare did this intrepid and
unceremonious assailant descend, partly excused by the grosser taste
of the times in which he lived, and partly by that disregard for petty
proprieties, which is felt in a degree by most men of masculine minds,
and which is felt by all men in moments of excitement and when the
cause which they have at heart is at stake. Melancthon it is true,
poured oil upon the waves, or, as Erasmus was pleased to express it
walked after Luther, as Lite after Ate;[191] still the whole surface
of society was troubled, and many who had once thought that a storm
might clear the air, now heard the sound as of abundance of rain,
with alarm, and girt up their mantles and ran before it. Erasmus,
no doubt, was in this respect a type of many: he was in theory (at
least in his earlier days) a reformer; he promoted the Reformation
very essentially, and in a great variety of ways. The perspicuity and
neatness of his style, the peculiar edge which he could put upon all
his thoughts, the playfulness of his fancy, the copiousness of his
knowledge, made him the most popular writer of the age. As a critic,
he caused Scripture to be better known to scholars, by publishing
the first printed edition of the Greek Testament: as a commentator
he caused it to be better understood; though by some fatality, as
Bishop Bull complains,[192] he is prone, like Grotius after him, to
give certain important texts an Arian bias; the effect perhaps of a
capricious temperament, since his writings in general furnish proof
enough of his Trinitarian orthodoxy. Certainly we ourselves owe him
a debt of gratitude for his paraphrase of the New Testament, a work
which Cranmer introduced into all the parish churches in England,
not indeed as faultless, but as the best he could find for that use,
and done by “the most indifferent writer;”[193] and mutilated and
moth-eaten copies of it are still occasionally to be seen chained to
their desks. In his colloquies, too, of which the influence must have
been very great, he lashes the abuses of the Roman Catholic church, and
the monks, and friars above all, as the authors and abettors of those
abuses, with a rod of nettles; and a system of things in which even
the most sober thinker would see much to ridicule, found in Erasmus an
assailant who could discover matter for merriment even in subjects the
most grave. In truth, he had more wit than he could well manage; it is
often ill-timed and ill-directed;[194] often he hits religion itself
when he aims it at superstition only; and whilst he “shoots his random
arrow o’er the house, he hurts a brother.”[195] It is possible to
imagine that had an infidel age, instead of an age of sound religious
inquiry, immediately succeeded the times of Erasmus, his levity would
have frequently proved mischievous, and the blows which he had intended
should tell against the church of Rome only, and which under Luther’s
management did there spend themselves, would have been found misplaced,
and apt to recoil. He was, perhaps, even more ambitious of reviving
learning than religion; it was popish ignorance as much as popish
heterodoxy that called him out. Literature was what he lived for. He
could have wished that such a scholar as Melancthon, so splendidly
endowed with talents for serving the cause of letters, had devoted
himself to letters alone;[196] and when at last he was moved to take
an active part against the Gospellers, as they were called, it seems
to have been in some measure from a notion that the Reformation was
absorbing every other question, and that in consequence of it the
study of profane authors was unreasonably neglected.[197] Erasmus,
however, as we have already hinted, was alarmed at the commotions which
Luther’s innovations threatened. When the tug of war came, he showed
that he had only been for a reformation on paper; he would detect
abuses, but not correct them; he was desirous of the end, but afraid
of the means; he was for the excision of the pound of flesh, but then
it must be done without shedding one drop of blood. Sir Thomas More,
though a person of much greater courage, both moral and physical, than
Erasmus, herein partook of his feelings; he saw the evil, but could
not see his way through it. His Utopia, written about the year 1513,
when he was yet young, is the work of a man alive to the corruptions
of a church of which he lived to be the champion, the inquisitor, and
the martyr. He could then, through the medium of his ideal republic,
and by the mouth of an imaginary speaker, pass censure upon the monks
as the drones of society[198]--reduce the number of the priests to the
number of the churches[199]--remove images[200]--advocate the right
of private judgment[201]--exhort that the work of conversion should
be done by persuasion, but not coercion, holding the faith of a man
to be not always an affair of volition;[202] he could banish from his
imaginary kingdom those who condemned all heretics to eternal torments
as bigots,[203] and extend his principles of concession even far beyond
those afterwards adopted by the author of the Liberty of Prophesying,
and to a degree incompatible with the existence of any religious
establishment whatever.[204] It is true, that a salvo is added in
conclusion[205] (just as Erasmus would have added it under similar
circumstances), that Sir Thomas More, for his part, thought much of
this visionary; but if so, why agitate such questions and unsettle the
minds of men to no purpose? Their author might indeed be disposed to
shut his eyes when he pulled the trigger, but it is pretty clear that
he aimed his piece at the church. But when that work was published,
More little thought what he should live to witness, or that a Luther
was nigh, even at the door--five years later, and probably Utopia would
never have seen the light; for the chancellor was one of the first to
take alarm at the progress of the Lutheran heresy, and to prophesy
no smooth things concerning it.[206] He wrote against it, attacking
Luther, Tindall, and Frith, with great acrimony, and opposing his
“Supplication of the Souls in Purgatory,” to a very popular pamphlet
by one Fish, published at that time, entitled “The Supplication of
Beggars,” in which the latter complained that they were robbed of
their rightful property in the people’s alms by the friars; and that
whereas the Pope had it in his power to release souls from purgatory
for nothing, he would only do it for money; nay, that when he might
extinguish it altogether, by a general gaol-delivery of the spirits
in prison, he still persisted in tolerating its continuance.[207] A
memorable instance it is of the force of religious prejudice, that Sir
T. More, placid and gentle as was his natural temper, and averse as he
had once shown himself to persecution for matters of opinion, should,
nevertheless, have hardened his heart against the reformers, and been
more than consenting to the death of Bilney and of Bainham.[208] In
this last case, indeed, he seems to have known no touch of pity; for
in the hope of making his victim discover his books and impeach his
acquaintance who were members of the Temple, he whipped him at a tree
in his garden at Chelsea, called the “tree of troth,” and afterwards
stood by when he was racked in the Tower. This is a sad falling off
from the tolerant principles of his youth; but meanwhile many feverish
years had passed over the head of Sir Thomas More, and inspired him
with a dread of those who were given to change--the crisis which he
had helped in a degree to call up, had come at the call, and the
magician stood aghast at the potency of his own spell. We are unfair
judges of the sentiments and conduct of men who lived upon the verge of
the Reformation. We are born when order has arisen out of confusion,
and a pure faith come forth from the refiner’s fire; but it must be
confessed, that before the event it was impossible to calculate its
probable consequences. This only was certain, that in number they
must be very many, in magnitude very great; and well might a wise
and thoughtful man, who stood upon the edge of that heaving sea of
troubles, contemplate the scene before him with an eye of anxiety,
of jealousy, and of fear for the issue. Indeed the Reformation was,
as one might expect, the cause of the _young_; a circumstance
of which Sir Thomas More does not fail to take advantage, when,
in his controversy with Frith on the corporal presence, he always
contemptuously speaks of him as “this _young_ man.”[209] And in a
curious interlude entitled “Lusty Juventus,” written on the side of the
Reformation, we read (loquitur Diabolus)--[210]
“The old people would beleve stil in my lawes,
But the yonger sort lead them a contrary way;
They wyll not beleve, they playnly say,
In old traditions as made by men,
But they wyll ’leve as the Scripture teacheth them.”
There was too much hazard in it, and the sacrifice of too many early
associations, principles, and prejudices, for gray hairs. Time,
however, that gentle innovator, settled these differences. At the
period when the papal power was put down in England, nearly twenty
years had elapsed since Luther first took up his parable against papal
abuses. In this interval, a generation of aged defenders of the ancient
faith had been gathered to their fathers, and had given place to such
as had grown up under the influence of a better star. The press had
been active, of which the wonderful influence was first made known
upon this great question. The pure doctrines and heroic deeds of the
German reformers circulated throughout England. Luther was in every
mouth--ballads sung of him. His writings, together with those of Huss,
of Zuingle, and of many anonymous authors whom the times evoked, were
clandestinely dispersed. Tracts, with popular titles, such as “A
booke of the Olde God and New,” “The burying of the Masse;” “A, B, C,
against the Clergy,” made their appeals to the people. The confessions
of some of the more eminent Lollards, and expositions of particular
chapters of Scripture, which were thought to militate the most strongly
against the errors of Rome, were industriously scattered abroad.
Above all, Tindall’s translation of the New Testament was now in the
hands of many; for the price, as compared with that of Wickliffe’s a
century before, was just forty-fold less[211]; and by means of it,
the multitude were enabled to compare what the Gospel actually was,
with what Rome had made it by traditions.[212] The art of printing in
this age of the revival of the Gospel, answered in some measure to
the miraculous gift of tongues in the age of its first publication.
It was soon perceived, that if the pope did not put an end to the
press, the press would put an end to the pope. Awkward attempts were
made to defeat its labours. It was a new principle introduced into the
social system, which in its application, after the experience of three
centuries, is found to involve many difficulties, and with which, at
that time of day, neither its friends nor its foes knew how to deal.
Tonstall, bishop of London, a man of a very different spirit from
his brutal successor Bonner, bought up all the copies of Tindall’s
Translation, and burnt them up at Paul’s Cross:[213] a humane but
useless measure; for it soon appeared, that unless he could buy up ink,
paper, and types, he was only making himself Tindall’s best customer.
Accordingly, a new edition speedily issued from the Antwerp press,
in which former errors were corrected; and though one golden branch
had been torn away, another, not of the same but of a better metal,
succeeded it. The importation of these foreign wares was strictly
forbidden; but there was a demand for them in the country, and they
were smuggled notwithstanding. Proclamations were uttered against the
possessors of all heretical writings, but they were set at nought.[214]
Spies were encouraged; the husband tempted to betray the wife, the
parent the child, and a man’s foes became literally those of his own
household.[215] Nay, more, by a refinement in cruelty, the strongest
instincts of nature were outraged, and a daughter was compelled to
fire the fagots with her own hands, by which her father was to be
burned.[216] But measures like these were only calculated to defeat the
object which they were intended to promote.
Strong public feeling, when matured in its growth and righteous in its
principle, cannot be effectually suppressed--check it, and it rages
impatiently; whilst, if its fair course be not hindered, it may only
make sweet music.