authority of the Scriptures_, to which Protestants of every denomination
have since professed to cling. They may differ in the interpretation of
texts,--and thus sects and parties gradually arose, who quarrelled about
their meaning,--but none of them deny their supreme authority. All the
issues of Protestants have been on the meaning of texts, on the
interpretation of the Scriptures,--to be settled by learning and reason.
It was not until rationalism arose, and rejected plain and obvious
declarations of Scripture, as inconsistent with reason, as
interpolations, as uninspired, that the authority of the Scriptures was
weakened; and these rationalists--and the land of Luther became full of
them--have gone infinitely beyond the Catholics in undermining the
Bible. The Catholics never have taken such bold ground as the
rationalists respecting the Scriptures. The Catholic Church still
accepts the Bible, but explains away the meaning of many of its
doctrines; the rationalists would sweep away its divine authority,
extinguish faith, and leave the world in night. Satan came into the
theological school of the Protestants, disguised in the robes of learned
doctors searching for truth, and took away the props of religious faith.
This was worse than baptizing repentance with the name of penance.
Better have irrational fears of hell than no fears at all, for this
latter is Paganism. Pagan culture and Pagan philosophy could not keep
society together in the old Roman world; but Mediaeval appeals to the
fears of men did keep them from crimes and force upon them virtues.
The triumph of Luther at Leipsic was, however, incomplete. The Catholics
rallied after their stunning blow. They said, in substance: "We, too,
accept the Scriptures; we even put them above Augustine and Thomas
Aquinas and the councils. But who can interpret them? Can peasants and
women, or even merchants and nobles? The Bible, though inspired, is full
of difficulties; there are contradictory texts. It is a sealed book,
except to the learned; only the Church can reconcile its difficulties.
And what we mean by the Church is the clergy,--the learned clergy,
acknowledging allegiance to their spiritual head, who in matters of
faith is also infallible. We can accept nothing which is not indorsed by
popes and councils. No matter how plain the Scriptures seem to be, on
certain disputed points only the authority of the Church can enlighten
and instruct us. We distrust reason,--that is, what you call
reason,--for reason can twist anything, and pervert it; but what the
Church says, is true,--its collective intelligence is our supreme law
[thus putting papal dogmas above reason, above the literal and plain
declarations of Scripture]. Moreover, since the Scriptures are to be
interpreted only by priests, it is not a safe book for the people. We,
the priests, will keep it out of their hands. They will get notions from
it fatal to our authority; they will become fanatics; they will, in
their conceit, defy us."
Then Luther rose, more powerful, more eloquent, more majestic than
before; he rose superior to himself. "What," said he, "keep the light of
life from the people; take away their guide to heaven; keep them in
ignorance of what is most precious and most exalting; deprive them of
the blessed consolations which sustain the soul in trial and in death;
deny the most palpable truths, because your dignitaries put on them a
construction to bolster up their power! What an abomination! what
treachery to heaven! what peril to the souls of men! Besides, your
authorities differ: Augustine takes different ground from Pelagius;
Bernard from Abélard; Thomas Aquinas from Dun Scotus. Have not your
grand councils given contradictory decisions? Whom shall we believe?
Yea, the popes themselves, your infallible guides,--have they not at
different times rendered different decisions? What would Gregory I. say
to the verdicts of Gregory VII.?
"No, the Scriptures are the legacy of the early Church to universal
humanity; they are the equal and treasured inheritance of all nations
and tribes and kindreds upon the face of the earth, and will be till the
day of judgment. It was intended that they should be diffused, and that
every one should read them, and interpret them each for himself; for he
has a soul to save, and he dare not intrust such a precious thing as his
soul into the keeping of selfish and ambitious priests. Take away the
Bible from a peasant, or a woman, or any layman, and cannot the priest,
armed with the terrors and the frauds of the Middle Ages, shut up his
soul in a gloomy dungeon, as noisome and funereal as your Mediaeval
crypts? And will you, ye boasted intellectual guides of the people,
extinguish reason in this world in reference to the most momentous
interests? What other guide has a man but his reason? And you would
prevent this very reason from being enlightened by the Gospel! You would
obscure reason itself by your traditions, O ye blind leaders of the
blind! O ye legal and technical men, obscuring the light of truth! O ye
miserable Pharisees, ye bigots, ye selfish priests, tenacious of your
power, your inventions, your traditions,--will ye withhold the free
redemption, God's greatest boon, salvation by the blood of Christ,
offered to all the world? Yea, will you suffer the people to perish,
soul and body, because you fear that, instructed by God himself, they
will rebel against your accursed despotism? Have you considered what a
mighty crime you thus commit against God, against man? Ye rule by an
infernal appeal to the superstitious fears of men; but how shall ye
yourselves, for such crimes, escape the damnation of that hell into
which you would push your victims unless they obey _you_?
"No, I say, let the Scriptures be put into the hands of everybody; let
every one interpret them for himself, according to the light he has; let
there be private judgment; let spiritual liberty be revived, as in
Apostolic days. Then only will the people be emancipated from the Middle
Ages, and arise in their power and majesty, and obey the voice of
enlightened conscience, and be true to their convictions, and practise
the virtues which Christianity commands, and obey God rather than man,
and defy all sorts of persecution and martyrdom, having a serene faith
in those blessed promises which the Gospel unfolds. Then will the
people become great, after the conflicts of generations, and put under
their feet the mockeries and lies and despotisms which grind them
to despair."
Thus was born the third great idea of the Reformation, out of Luther's
brain, a logical sequence from the first idea,--_the right of private
judgment_, religious liberty, call it what you will; a great inspiration
which in after times was destined to march triumphantly over
battlefields, and give dignity and power to the people, and lead to the
reception of great truths obscured by priests for one thousand years;
the motive of an irresistible popular progress, planting England with
Puritans, and Scotland with heroes, and France with martyrs, and North
America with colonists; yea, kindling a fervid religious life; creating
such men as Knox and Latimer and Taylor and Baxter and Howe, who owed
their greatness to the study of the Scriptures,--at last put into every
hand, and scattered far and wide, even to India and China. Can anybody
doubt the marvellous progress of Protestant nations in consequence of
the translation and circulation of the Scriptures? How these are bound
up with their national life, and all their social habits, and all their
religious aspirations; how they have elevated the people, ten hundred
millions of times more than the boasted Renaissance which sprang from
apostate and infidel and Pagan Italy, when she dug up the buried
statues of Greece and Rome, and revived the literature and arts which
soften, but do not save!--for private judgment and religious liberty
mean nothing more and nothing less than the unrestricted perusal of the
Scriptures as the guide of life.
This right of private judgment, on which Luther was among the first to
insist, and of which certainly he was the first great champion in
Europe, was in that age a very bold idea, as well as original. It
flattered as well as stimulated the intellect of the people, and gave
them dignity; it gave to the Reformation its popular character; it
appealed to the mind and heart of Christendom. It gave consolation to
the peasantry of Europe; for no family was too poor to possess a Bible,
the greatest possible boon and treasure,--read and pondered in the
evening, after hard labors and bitter insults; read aloud to the family
circle, with its inexhaustible store of moral wealth, its beautiful and
touching narratives, its glorious poetry, its awful prophecies, its
supernal counsels, its consoling and emancipating truths,--so tender and
yet so exalting, raising the soul above the grim trials of toil and
poverty into the realms of seraphic peace and boundless joy. The Bible
even gave hope to heretics. All sects and parties could take shelter
under it; all could stand on the broad platform of religion, and survey
from it the wonders and glories of God. At last men might even differ
on important points of doctrine and worship, and yet be Protestants.
Religious liberty became as wide in its application as the unity of the
Church. It might create sects, but those sects would be all united as to
the value of the Scriptures and their cardinal declarations. On this
broad basis John Milton could shake hands with John Knox, and John Locke
with Richard Baxter, and Oliver Cromwell with Queen Elizabeth, and Lord
Bacon with William Penn, and Bishop Butler with John Wesley, and
Jonathan Edwards with Doctor Channing.
This idea of private judgment is what separates the Catholics from the
Protestants; not most ostensibly, but most vitally. Many are the
Catholics who would accept Luther's idea of grace, since it is the idea
of Saint Augustine; and of the supreme authority of the Scriptures,
since they were so highly valued by the Fathers: but few of the Catholic
clergy have ever tolerated religious liberty,--that is, the
interpretation of the Scriptures by the people,--for it is a vital blow
to their supremacy, their hierarchy, and their institutions. They will
no more readily accept it than William the Conqueror would have accepted
the Magna Charta; for the free circulation and free interpretation of
the Scriptures are the charter of human liberties fought for at Leipsic
by Gustavus Adolphus, at Ivry by Henry IV. This right of worshipping
God according to the dictates of conscience, enlightened by the free
reading of the Scriptures, is just what the "invincible armada" was sent
by Philip II. to crush; just what Alva, dictated by Rome, sought to
crush in Holland; just what Louis XIV., instructed by the Jesuits, did
crush out in France, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The
Satanic hatred of this right was the cause of most of the martyrdoms and
persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was the
declaration of this right which emancipated Europe from the dogmas of
the Middle Ages, the thraldom of Rome, and the reign of priests. Why
should not Protestants of every shade cherish and defend this sacred
right? This is what made Luther the idol and oracle of Germany, the
admiration of half Europe, the pride and boast of succeeding ages, the
eternal hatred of Rome; not his religious experiences, not his doctrine
of justification by faith, but the emancipation he gave to the mind of
the world. This is what peculiarly stamps Luther as a man of genius, and
of that surprising audacity and boldness which only great geniuses
evince when they follow out the logical sequence of their ideas, and
penetrate at a blow the hardened steel of vulcanic armor beneath which
the adversary boasts.
Great was the first Leo, when from his rifled palace on one of the
devastated hills of Rome he looked out upon the Christian world,
pillaged, sacked, overrun with barbarians, full of untold
calamities,--order and law crushed; literature and art prostrate;
justice a byword; murders and assassinations unavenged; central power
destroyed; vice, in all its enormities, vulgarities, and obscenities,
rampant and multiplying itself; false opinions gaining ground; soldiers
turned into banditti, and senators into slaves; women shrieking in
terror; bishops praying in despair; barbarism everywhere, paganism in
danger of being revived; a world disordered, forlorn, and dismal;
Pandemonium let loose, with howling and shouting and screaming, in view
of the desolation predicted alike by Jeremy the prophet and the Cumaean
sybil;--great was that Leo, when in view of all this he said, with old
patrician heroism, "I will revive government once more upon this earth;
not by bringing back the Caesars, but by declaring a new theocracy, by
making myself the vicegerent of Christ, by virtue of the promise made to
Peter, whose successor I am, in order to restore law, punish crime, head
off heresy, encourage genius, conserve peace, heal dissensions, protect
learning; appealing to love, but ruling by fear. Who but the Church can
do this? A theocracy will create a new civilization. Not a diadem, but a
tiara will I wear, the symbol of universal sovereignty, before which
barbarism shall flee away, and happiness be restored once more." As he
sent out his legates, he fulminated his bulls and established tribunals
of appeal; he made a net-work of ecclesiastical machinery, and
proclaimed the dangers of eternal fire, and brought kings and princes
before him on their knees. The barbaric world was saved.
But greater than Leo was Luther, when--outraged by the corruptions of
this spiritual despotism, and all the false and Pagan notions which had
crept into theology, obscuring the light of faith and creating an
intolerable bondage, and opposing the new spirit of progress which
science and art and industry and wealth had invoked--he courageously yet
modestly comes forward as the champion of a new civilization, and
declares, with trumpet tones, "Let there be private judgment; liberty of
conscience; the right to read and interpret Scripture, in spite of
priests! so that men may think for themselves, not only on the doctrines
of eternal salvation but on all the questions to be deduced from them,
or interlinked with the past or present or future institutions of the
world. Then shall arise a new creation from dreaded destruction, and
emancipated millions shall be filled with an unknown enthusiasm, and
advance with the new weapons of reason and truth from conquering to
conquer, until all the strongholds of sin and Satan shall be subdued,
and laid triumphantly at the foot of His throne whose right it is
to reign."
Thus far Luther has appeared as a theologian, a philosopher, a man of
ideas, a man of study and reflection, whom the Catholic Church distrusts
and fears, as she always has distrusted genius and manly independence;
but he is henceforth to appear as a reformer, a warrior, to carry out
his idea, and also to defend himself against the wrath he has provoked;
impelled step by step to still bolder aggressions, until he attacks
those venerable institutions which he once respected,--all the frauds
and inventions of Mediaeval despotism, all the machinery by which Europe
had been governed for one thousand years; yea, the very throne of the
Pope himself, whom he defies, whom he insults, and against whom he urges
Christendom to rebel. As a combatant, a warrior, a reformer, his person
and character somewhat change. He is coarser, he is more
sensual-looking, he drinks more beer, he tells more stories, he uses
harder names; he becomes arrogant, dogmatic; he dictates and commands;
he quarrels with his friends; he is imperious; he fears nobody, and is
scornful of old usages; he marries a nun; he feels that he is a great
leader and general, and wields new powers; he is an executive and
administrative man, for which his courage and insight and will and
Herculean physical strength wonderfully fit him,--the man for the times,
the man to head a new movement, the forces of an age of protest and
rebellion and conquest.
How can I compress into a few sentences the demolitions and
destructions which this indignant and irritated reformer now makes in
Germany, where he is protected by the Elector from Papal vengeance?
Before the reconstruction, the old rubbish must be cleared away, and
Augean stables must be cleansed. He is now at issue with the whole
Catholic régime, and the whole Catholic world abuse him. They call him a
glutton, a wine-bibber, an adulterer, a scoffer, an atheist, an imp of
Satan; and he calls the Pope the scarlet mother of abominations,
Antichrist, Babylon. That age is prodigal in offensive epithets; kings
and prelates and doctors alike use hard words. They are like angry
children and women and pugilists; their vocabulary of abuse is amusing
and inexhaustible. See how prodigal Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are in the
language of vituperation. But they were all defiant and fierce, for the
age was rough and earnest. The Pope, in wrath, hurls the old weapons of
the Gregorys and the Clements. But they are impotent as the darts of
Priam; Luther laughs at them, and burns the Papal bull before a huge
concourse of excited students and shopkeepers and enthusiastic women. He
severs himself completely from Rome, and declares an unextinguishable
warfare. He destroys and breaks up the ceremonies of the Mass; he pulls
down the consecrated altars, with their candles and smoking incense and
vessels of silver and gold, since they are the emblems of Jewish and
Pagan worship; he tears off the vestments of priests, with their
embroideries and their gildings and their millineries and their laces,
since these are made to impose on the imagination and appeal to the
sense; he breaks up monasteries and convents, since they are dens of
infamy, cages of unclean birds, nurseries of idleness and pleasure,
abodes at the best of narrow-minded, ascetic Asiatic recluses, who
rejoice in penance and self-expiation and other modes of propitiating
the Deity, like soofists and fakirs and Braminical devotees. In defiance
of the most sacred of the institutions of the Middle Ages, he openly
marries Catherine Bora and sets up a hilarious household, and yet a
household of prayer and singing. He abolishes the old Gregorian service;
and for Mediaeval chants, monotonous and gloomy, he prepares hymns and
songs,--not for boys and priests to intone in the distant choir, but for
the whole congregation to sing, inspired by the melodies of David and
the exulting praises of a Saviour who redeems from darkness into light.
How grand that hymn of his,--
"A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing."
He makes worship more heartfelt, and revives apostolic usages: preaching
and exhortation and instruction from the pulpit,--a forgotten power. He
appeals to reason rather than sense; denounces superstitions, while he
rebukes sins; and kindles a profound fervor, based on the recognition of
new truths. He is not fully emancipated from the traditions of the past;
for he retains the doctrine of transubstantiation, and keeps up the
holidays of the Church, and allows recreation on the Sabbath. But what
he thinks the most of is the circulation of the Scriptures among plain
people. So he translates them into German,--a gigantic task; and this
work, almost single-handed, is done so well that it becomes the standard
of the German language, as the Bible of Tindale helped to form the
English tongue; and not only so, but it has remained the common version
in use throughout Germany, even as the authorized King James version,
made nearly a century later by the labor of many scholars and divines,
has remained the standard English Bible. Moreover, he finds time to make
liturgies and creeds and hymns, and to write letters to all parts of
Christendom,--a Jerome, a Chrysostom, and an Augustine united; a kind of
Protestant pope, to whom everybody looks for advice and consolation.
What a wonderful man! No wonder the Germans are so fond of him and so
proud of him,--a Briareus with a hundred arms; a marvel, a wonder, a
prodigy of nature; the most gifted, versatile, hard-working man of his
century or nation!
At last, this great theologian, this daring innovator, is summoned by
imperial, not papal, authority before the Diet of the empire at Worms,
where the Emperor, the great Charles V., presides, amid bishops,
princes, cardinals, legates, generals, and dignitaries. Thither Luther
must go,--yet under imperial safe conduct,--and consummate his protests,
and perhaps offer up his life. Painters, poets, historians, have made
that scene familiar,--the most memorable in the life of Luther, as well
as one of the grandest spectacles of the age. I need not dwell on that
exciting scene, where, in the presence of all that was illustrious and
powerful in Germany, this defenceless doctor dares to say to supremest
temporal and spiritual authority, "Unless you confute me by arguments
drawn from Scripture, I cannot and will not recant anything ... Here I
stand; I cannot otherwise: God help me! Amen." How superior to Galileo
and other scientific martyrs! He is not afraid of those who can kill
only the body; he is afraid only of Him who hath power to cast both soul
and body into hell. So he stands as firm as the eternal pillars of
justice, and his cause is gained. What if he did not live long enough'
to accomplish all he designed! What if he made mistakes, and showed in
his career many of the infirmities of human nature! What if he cared
very little for pictures and statues,--the revived arts of Greece and
Rome, the Pagan Renaissance in which he only sees infidelity, levities,
and luxuries, and other abominations which excited his disgust and
abhorrence when he visited Italy! _He_ seeks, not to amuse and adorn the
Papal empire, but to reform it; as Paul before him sought to plant new
sentiments and ideas in the Roman world, indifferent to the arts of
Greece, and even the beauties of nature, in his absorbing desire to
convert men to Christ. And who, since Paul, has rendered greater service
to humanity than Luther? The whole race should be proud that such a man
has lived.
We will not follow the great reformer to the decline of his years; we
will not dwell on his subsequent struggles and dangers, his marvellous
preservation, his personal habits, his friendships and his hatreds, his
joys and sorrows, his bitter alienations, his vexations, his
disappointments, his gloomy anticipations of approaching strife, his
sickened yet exultant soul, his last days of honor and of victory, his
final illness, and his triumphant death in the town where he was born.
It is his legacy that we are concerned in, the inheritance he left to
succeeding generations,--the perpetuated ideas of the Reformation, which
he worked out in anguish and in study, and which we will not let die,
but will cherish in our memories and our hearts, as among the most
precious of the heirlooms of genius, susceptible of boundless
application. And it is destined to grow brighter and richer, in spite of
counter-reformation and Jesuitism, of Pagan levities and Pagan lies, of
boastful science and Epicurean pleasures, of material glories, of
dissensions and sects and parties, as the might and majesty of ages
coursing round the world regenerates institutions and nations, and
proclaims the sovereignty of intelligence, the glory and the power
of God.
AUTHORITIES.
Ranke's Reformation in Germany; D'Aubigné's History of the Reformation;
Luther's Letters; Mosheim's History of the Church; Melancthon's Life of
Luther: Erasmi Epistolae; Encyclopaedia Britannica.
THOMAS CRANMER.
* * * * *
A. D. 1489-1556.
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION.