the frauds on which it was based; monastic corruptions; penance, and
indulgences for sin, and the sale of them, more shameful still; the
secular character of the clergy; the pomp, wealth, and arrogance of
bishops; auricular confession; celibacy of the clergy, their idle and
dissolute lives, their ignorance and superstition; the worship of the
images of saints, and masses for the dead; the gorgeous ritualism of the
mass; the substitution of legends for the Scriptures, which were not
translated, or read by the people; pilgrimages, processions, idle pomps,
and the multiplication of holy days; above all, the grinding spiritual
despotism exercised by priests, with their inquisitions and
excommunications, all centring in the terrible usurpation of the popes,
keeping the human mind in bondage, and suppressing all intellectual
independence,--these evils prevailed everywhere. I say nothing here of
the massacres, the poisonings, the assassinations, the fornications, the
abominations of which history accuses many of the pontiffs who sat on
papal thrones. Such evils did not stare the German and English in the
face, as they did the Italians in the fifteenth century. In Germany the
vices were mediaeval and monkish, not the unblushing infidelity and
levities of the Renaissance, which made a radical reformation in Italy
impossible. In Germany and England there was left among the people the
power of conscience, a rough earnestness of character, the sense of
moral accountability, and a fear of divine judgment.
Luther was just the man for his work. Sprung from the people, poor,
popular, fervent; educated amid privations, religious by nature, yet
with exuberant animal spirits; dogmatic, boisterous, intrepid, with a
great insight into realities; practical, untiring, learned, generally
cheerful and hopeful; emancipated from the terrors of the Middle Ages,
scorning the Middle Ages; progressive in his spirit, lofty in his
character, earnest in his piety, believing in the future and in
God,--such was the great leader of this emancipating movement. He was
not so learned as Erasmus, nor so logical as Calvin, nor so scholarly as
Melancthon, nor so broad as Cranmer. He was not a polished man; he was
often offensively rude and brusque, and lavish of epithets, Nor was he
what we call a modest and humble man; he was intellectually proud,
disdainful, and sometimes, when irritated, abusive. None of his pictures
represent him as a refined-looking man, scarcely intellectual, but
coarse and sensual rather, as Socrates seemed to the Athenians. But with
these defects and drawbacks he had just such traits and gifts as fitted
him to lead a great popular movement,--bold, audacious, with deep
convictions and rapid intellectual processes; prompt, decided,
kind-hearted, generous, brave; in sympathy with the people, eloquent,
Herculean in energies, with an amazing power of work; electrical in his
smile and in his words, and always ready for contingencies. Had he been
more polished, more of a gentleman, more fastidious, more scrupulous,
more ascetic, more modest, he would have shrunk from his tasks; he would
have lost the elasticity of his mind,--he would have been discouraged.
Even Saint Augustine, a broader and more catholic man than Luther, could
not have done his work. He was a sort of converted Mirabeau. He loved
the storms of battle; he impersonated revolutionary ideas. But he was a
man of thought, as well as of action.
Luther's origin was of the humblest. Born in Eisleben, Nov. 10, 1483,
the son of a poor peasant, his childhood was spent in penury. He was
religious from a boy. He was religious when he sang hymns for a living,
from house to house, before the people of Mansfield while at school
there, and also at the schools of Magdeburg and Eisenach, where he still
earned his bread by his voice. His devotional character and his music
gained for him a friend who helped him through his studies, till at the
age of eighteen he entered the University at Erfurt, where he
distinguished himself in the classics and the Mediaeval philosophy. And
here his religious meditations led him to enter the Augustinian
monastery: he entered that strict retreat, as others did, to lead a
religious life. The great question of all time pressed upon his mind
with peculiar force, "What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
And it shows that religious life in Germany still burned in many a
heart, in spite of the corruptions of the Church, that a young man like
Luther should seek the shades of monastic seclusion, for meditation and
study. He was a monk, like other monks; but it seems he had religious
doubts and fears more than ordinary monks. At first he conformed to the
customary ways of men seeking salvation. He walked in the beaten road,
like Saint Dominic and Saint Francis; he accepted the great ideas of the
Middle Ages, which he was afterwards to repudiate,--he was not beyond
them, or greater than they were, at first; he fasted like monks, and
tormented his body with austerities, as they did from the time of
Benedict; he sang in the choir from early morn, and practised the usual
severities. But his doubts and fears remained. He did not, like other
monks, find peace and consolation; he did not become seraphic, like
Saint Francis, or Bonaventura, or Loyola. Perhaps his nature repelled
asceticism; perhaps his inquiring and original mind wanted something
better and surer to rest upon than the dreams and visions of a
traditionary piety. Had he been satisfied with the ordinary mode of
propitiating the Deity, he would never have emerged from his retreat.
To a scholar the monastery had great attractions, even in that age. It
was still invested with poetic associations and consecrated usages; it
was indorsed by the venerable Fathers of the Church; it was favorable to
study, and free from the noisy turmoil of the world. But with all these
advantages Luther was miserable. He felt the agonies of an unforgiven
soul in quest of peace with God; he could not get rid of them, they
pursued him into the immensity of an intolerable night. He was in
despair. What could austerities do for _him_? He hungered and thirsted
after the truth, like Saint Augustine in Milan. He had no taste for
philosophy, but he wanted the repose that philosophers pretended to
teach. He was then too narrow to read Plato or Boëthius. He was a
self-tormented monk without relief; he suffered all that Saint Paul
suffered at Tarsus. In some respects this monastic pietism resembled the
pharisaism of Saul, in the schools of Tarsus,--a technical, rigid, and
painful adherence to rules, fastings, obtrusive prayers, and petty
ritualisms, which form the essence and substance of all pharisaism and
all monastic life; based on the enormous error that man deserves heaven
by external practices, in which, however, he can never perfect himself,
though he were to live, like Simeon Stylites, on the top of a pillar for
twenty years without once descending; an eternal unrest, because
perfection cannot be attained; the most terrible slavery to which a man
can be conscientiously doomed, verging into hypocrisy and fanaticism.
It was then that a kind and enlightened friend visited him, and
recommended him to read the Bible. The Bible never has been a sealed
book to monks; it was ever highly prized; no convent was without it: but
it was read with the spectacles of the Middle Ages. Repentance meant
penance. In Saint Paul's Epistles Luther discovers the true ground of
justification,--not works, but faith; for Paul had passed through
similar experiences. Works are good, but faith is the gift of God. Works
are imperfect with the best of men, even the highest form of works, to a
Mediaeval eye,--self-expiation and penance; but faith is infinite,
radiating from divine love; faith is a boundless joy,--salvation by the
grace of God, his everlasting and precious boon to people who cannot
climb to heaven on their hands and knees, the highest gift which God
ever bestowed on men,--eternal life.
Luther is thus emancipated from the ideas of the Middle Ages and of the
old Syriac monks and of the Jewish Pharisees. In his deliverance he has
new hopes and aspirations; he becomes cheerful, and devotes himself to
his studies. Nothing can make a man more cheerful and joyful than the
cordial reception of a gift which is infinite, a blessing which is too
priceless to be bought. The pharisee, the monk, the ritualist, is
gloomy, ascetic, severe, intolerant; for he is not quite sure of his
salvation. A man who accepts heaven as a gift is full of divine
enthusiasm, like Saint Augustine. Luther now comprehends Augustine, the
great doctor of the Church, embraces his philosophy and sees how much it
has been misunderstood. The rare attainments and interesting character
of Luther are at last recognized; he is made a professor of divinity in
the new university, which the Elector of Saxony has endowed, at
Wittenberg. He becomes a favorite with the students; he enters into the
life of the people. He preaches with wonderful power, for he is popular,
earnest, original, fresh, electrical. He is a monk still, but the monk
is merged in the learned doctor and eloquent preacher. He does not yet
even dream of attacking monastic institutions, or the Pope; he is a good
Catholic in his obedience to authorities; but he hates the Middle Ages,
and all their ghostly, funereal, burdensome, and technical religious
customs. He is human, almost convivial,--fond of music, of poetry, of
society, of friends, and of the good cheer of the social circle. The
people love Luther, for he has a broad humanity. They never did love
monks, only feared their maledictions.
About this time the Pope was in great need of money: this was Leo X. He
not only squandered his vast revenues in pleasures and pomps, like any
secular monarch; he not only collected pictures and statues,--but he
wanted to complete St. Peter's Church. It was the crowning glory of
papal magnificence. Where was he to get money except from the
contributions of Christendom? But kings and princes and bishops and
abbots were getting tired of this everlasting drain of money to Rome, in
the shape of annats and taxes; so Leo revived an old custom of the Dark
Ages,--he would sell indulgences for sin; and he sent his agents to
peddle them in every country.
The agent in Saxony was a very vulgar, boisterous, noisy, bullying
Dominican, by the name of Tetzel. Luther abhorred him, not so much
because he was vulgar and noisy, but because his infamous business
derogated from the majesty of God and religion. In wrathful indignation
he preached against Tetzel and his practices,--the abominable traffic
of indulgences. Only God can forgive sins. It seemed to him to be an
insult to the human understanding that any man, even a pope, should
grant an absolution for crime. These indulgences were the very worst
form of penance, since they made a mockery of virtue. And it was useless
to preach against them so long as the principles on which they were
based were not assailed. Everybody believed in penance; everybody
believed that this, in some form, would insure salvation. It consisted
in a temporal penalty or punishment inflicted on the sinner after
confession to the priest, as a condition of his receiving absolution or
an authoritative pardon of his sin by the Church as God's
representative. And the indulgence was originally an official remission
of this penalty, to be gained by offerings of money to the Church for
its sacred uses. However ingenious this theory, the practice inevitably
ran into corruption. The people who bought, the agents who sold, the
popes who dispensed, these indulgences used them for the
vilest purposes.
Fortunately, in those times in Germany everybody felt he had a soul to
save. Neither the popes nor the Church ever lost that idea. The clergy
ruled by its force,--by stimulating fears of divine wrath, whereby the
wretched sinner would be physically tormented forever, unless he escaped
by a propitiation of the Deity,--the common form of which was penance,
deeds of supererogation, donations to the Church, self-expiation, works
of fear and penitence, which commended themselves to the piety of the
age; and this piety Luther now believed to be unenlightened, not the
kind enjoined by Christ or Paul.
So, to instruct his students and the people as to the true ground of
justification, which he had worked out from the study of the Bible and
Saint Augustine amid the agonies of a tormented conscience, Luther
prepared his theses,--those celebrated ninety-five propositions, which
he affixed to the gates of the church of Wittenberg, and which excited
a great sensation throughout Northern Germany, reaching even the eyes of
the Pope himself, who did not comprehend their tendency, but was struck
with their power. "This Doctor Luther," said he, "is a man of fine
genius." The students of the university, and the people generally, were
kindled as if by Pentecostal fires. The new invention of printing
scattered those theses everywhere, far and near; they reached the humble
hamlet as well as the palaces of bishops and princes. They excited
immediate and immense enthusiasm: there was freshness in them,
originality, and great ideas. We cannot wonder at the enthusiasm which
those religious ideas excited nearly four hundred years ago when we
reflect that they were not cant words then, not worn-out platitudes, not
dead dogmas, but full of life and exciting interest,--even as were the
watchwords of Rousseau--"Liberty, Fraternity, Equality"--to Frenchmen,
on the outbreak of their political revolution. And as those
watchwords--abstractly true--roused the dormant energies of the French
to a terrible conflict against feudalism and royalty, so those theses of
Luther kindled Germany into a living flame. And why? Because they
presented more cheerful and comforting grounds of justification than had
been preached for one thousand years,--faith rather than penance; for
works hinged on penance. The underlying principle of those propositions
was _grace_,--divine grace to save the world,--the principle of Paul and
Saint Augustine; therefore not new, but forgotten; a mighty comfort to
miserable people, mocked and cheated and robbed by a venal and a
gluttonous clergy. Even Taine admits that this doctrine of grace is the
foundation stone of Protestantism as it spread over Europe in the
sixteenth century. In those places where Protestantism is dead,--where
rationalism or Pelagian speculations have taken its place,--this fact
may be denied; but the history of Northern Europe blazes with it,--a
fact which no historian of any honesty can deny.
Very likely those who are not in sympathy with this great idea of
Luther, Augustine, and Paul may ignore the fact,--even as Caleb Gushing
once declared to me, that the Reformation sprang from the desire of
Luther to marry Catherine Bora; and that learned and ingenious sophist
overwhelmed me with his citations from infidel and ribald Catholic
writers like Audin. Greater men than he deny that grace underlies the
whole original movement of the reformers, and they talk of the
Reformation as a mere revolt from Rome, as a war against papal
corruption, as a protest against monkery and the dark ages, brought
about by the spirit of a new age, the onward march of humanity, the
necessary progress of society. I admit the secondary causes of the
Reformation, which are very important,--the awakened spirit of inquiry
in the sixteenth century, the revival of poetry and literature and art,
the breaking up of feudalism, fortunate discoveries, the introduction of
Greek literature, the Renaissance, the disgusts of Christendom, the
voice of martyrs calling aloud from their funeral pyres; yea, the
friendly hand of princes and scholars deploring the evils of a corrupted
Church. But how much had Savonarola, or Erasmus, or John Huss, or the
Lollards aroused the enthusiasm of Europe, great and noble as were their
angry and indignant protests? The genius of the Reformation in its early
stages was a _religious_ movement, not a political or a moral one,
although it became both political and moral. Its strength and fervor
were in the new ideas of salvation,--the same that gave power to the
early preachers of Christianity,--not denunciations of imperialism and
slavery, and ten thousand evils which disgraced the empire, but the
proclamation of the ideas of Paul as to the grounds of hope when the
soul should leave the body; the salvation of the Lord, declared to a
world in bondage. Luther kindled the same religious life among the
masses that the apostles did; the same that Wyclif did, and by the same
means,--the declaration of salvation by belief in the incarnate Son of
God, shedding his blood in infinite love. Why, see how this idea spread
through Germany, Switzerland, and France and took possession of the
minds of the English and Scotch yeomanry, with all their stern and
earnest ruggedness. See how it was elaborately expanded by Calvin, how
it gave birth to a new and strong theology, how it entered into the very
life of the people, especially among the Puritans,--into the souls of
even Cromwell's soldiers. What made "The Pilgrim's Progress" the most
popular book ever published in England? Because it reflected the
theology of the age, the religion of the people, all based on Luther's
theses,--the revival of those old doctrines which converted the Roman
provinces from Paganism. I do not care if these statements are denied by
Catholics, or rationalists, or progressive savants. What is it to me
that the old views have become unfashionable, or are derided, or are
dead, in the absorbing materialism of this Epicurean yet brilliant age?
I know this, that I am true to history when I declare that the glorious
Reformation in which we all profess to rejoice, and which is the
greatest movement, and the best, of our modern time,--susceptible of
indefinite application, interlinked with the literature and the progress
of England and America,--took its first great spiritual start from the
ideas of Luther as to justification. This was the voice of heaven's
messenger proclaiming aloud, so that the heavens re-echoed to the
glorious and triumphant annunciation, and the earth heard and rejoiced
with exceeding joy, "Behold, I send tidings of salvation: it is grace,
divine grace, which shall undermine the throne of popes and pagans, and
reconcile a fallen world to God!"
Yes, it was a Christian philosopher, a theologian,--a doctor of
divinity, working out in his cell and study, through terrible internal
storm and anguish, and against the whole teaching of monks and bishops
and popes and universities, from the time of Charlemagne, the same truth
which Augustine learned in his wonderful experiences,--who started the
Reformation in the right direction; who became the greatest benefactor
of these modern times, because he based his work on everlasting and
positive ideas, which had life in them, and hope, and the sanction of
divine authority; thus virtually invoking the aid of God Almighty to
bring about and restore the true glory of his Church on earth,--a glory
forever to be identified with the death of his Son. I see no law of
progress here, no natural and necessary development of nations; I see
only the light and power of individual genius, brushing away the cobwebs
and sophistries and frauds of the Middle Ages, and bringing out to the
gaze of Europe the vital truth which, with supernatural aid, made in old
times the day of Pentecost. And I think I hear the emancipated people of
Saxony exclaim, from the Elector downwards, "If these ideas of Doctor
Luther are true, and we feel them to be, then all our penances have
been worse than wasted,--we have been Pagans. Away with our miserable
efforts to scale the heavens! Let us accept what we cannot buy; let us
make our palaces and our cottages alike vocal with the praises of Him
whom we now accept as our Deliverer, our King, and our Eternal Lord."
Thus was born the first great idea of the Reformation, out of Luther's
brain, out of his agonized soul, and sent forth to conquer, and produce
changes most marvellous to behold.
It is not my object to discuss the truth or error of this fundamental
doctrine. There are many who deny it, even among Protestants. I am not a
controversialist, or a theologian: I am simply an historian. I wish to
show what is historically true and clear; and I defy all the scholars
and critics of the world to prove that this doctrine is not the basal
pillar of the Reformation of Luther. I wish to make emphatic the
statement that _justification by faith_ was, as an historical fact, the
great primal idea of Luther; not new, but new to him and to his age.
I have now to show how this idea led to others; how they became
connected together; how they produced not only a spiritual movement, but
political, moral, and intellectual forces, until all Europe was in
a blaze.
Thus far the agitation under Luther had been chiefly theological. It was
not a movement against popes or institutions, it was not even the
vehement denunciation against sin in high places, which inflamed the
anger of the Pope against Savonarola. To some it doubtless seemed like
the old controversy between Augustine and Pelagius, like the contentions
between Dominican and Franciscan monks. But it was too important to
escape the attention of even Leo X., although at first he gave it no
thought. It was a dangerous agitation; it had become popular; there was
no telling where it would end, or what it might not assail. It was
deemed necessary to stop the mouth of this bold and intellectual Saxon
theologian.
So the voluptuous, infidel, elegant Pope--accomplished in manners and
pagan arts and literature--sent one of the most learned men of the
Church which called him Father, to argue with Doctor Luther, confute
him, conquer him,--deeming this an easy task. But the doctor could not
be silenced. His convictions were grounded on the rock; not on Peter,
but on the rock from which Peter derived his name. All the papal legates
and cardinals in the world could neither convince nor frighten him. He
courted argument; he challenged the whole Church to refute him.
Then the schools took up the controversy. All that was imposing in
names, in authority, in traditions, in associations, was arrayed against
him. They came down upon him with the whole array of scholastic
learning. The great Goliath of controversy in that day was Doctor Eck,
who challenged the Saxon monk to a public disputation at Leipsic. All
Germany was interested. The question at issue stirred the nation to its
very depths.
The disputants met in the great hall of the palace of the Elector. Never
before was seen in Germany such an array of doctors and theologians and
dignitaries. It rivalled in importance and dignity the Council of Nice,
when the great Constantine presided, to settle the Trinitarian
controversy. The combatants were as great as Athanasius and Arius,--as
vehement, as earnest, though not so fierce. Doctor Eck was superior to
Luther in reputation, in dialectical skill, in scholastic learning. He
was the pride of the universities. Luther, however, had deeper
convictions, more genius, greater eloquence, and at that time he
was modest.
The champion of the schools, of sophistries and authorities, of
dead-letter literature, of quibbles, refinements, and words, soon
overwhelmed the Saxon monk with his citations, decrees of councils,
opinions of eminent ecclesiastics, the literature of the Church, its
mighty authority. He was on the eve of triumph. Had the question been
settled, as Doctor Eck supposed, by authorities, as lawyers and pedants
would settle the question, Luther would have been beaten. But his genius
came to his aid, and the consciousness of truth. He swept away the
premises of the argument. He denied the supreme authority of popes and
councils and universities. He appealed to the Scriptures, as the only
ultimate ground of authority. He did not deny authority, but appealed to
it in its highest form. This was unexpected ground. The Church was not
prepared openly to deny the authority of Saint Paul or Saint Peter; and
Luther, if he did not gain his case, was far from being beaten,
and--what was of vital importance to his success--he had the Elector and
the people with him.