Luther performed the journey on foot, passing from monastery to
monastery, noting the extravagances, indolence, gluttony, and
infidelity of the monks, and sometimes in danger of his life, both
from the changes of climate and from the murderous resentments of some
of these cloister-saints which his rebukes of their vices engendered.
When Rome first broke upon his sight, he hailed it reverently as the
city of saints and holy martyrs. He almost envied those whose parents
were dead, and who had it in their power to offer prayers for the
repose of their souls by the side of such holy shrines. But when he
beheld the vulgarities, profanities, paganism, and unconcealed
unbelief which pervaded even the ecclesiastical circles of that city,
his soul sunk within him.
There was much to be seen in Rome; and the Roman Catholic writers find
great fault with Luther for being so dull and unappreciative as to
move amid it without being touched with a single spark of poetic fire.
They tell of the glory of the cardinals, in litters, on horseback, in
glittering carriages, blazing with jewels and shaded with gorgeous
canopies; of marble palaces, grand walks, alabaster columns, gigantic
obelisks, villas, gardens, grottoes, flowers, fountains, cascades; of
churches adorned with polished pillars, gilded soffits, mosaic floors,
altars sparkling with diamonds, and gorgeous pictures from
master-hands looking down from every wall; of monuments, statues,
images, and holy relics; and they blame Luther that he could gaze upon
it all without a stir of admiration--that he could look upon the
sculpture and statuary and see nothing but pagan devices, the gods
Demosthenes and Praxiteles, the feasts and pomps of Delos, and the
idle scenes of the heathen Forum--that no gleam from the crown of
Perugino or Michael Angelo dazzled his eyes, and no strain of Virgil
or of Dante, which the people sung in the streets, attracted his
ear--that he was only cold and dumb before all the treasures and
glories of art and all the grandeur of the high dignitaries of the
Church, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, exclaiming over nothing but
the licentious impurities of the priests, the pagan pomps of the
pontiff, the profane jests of the ministers of religion, the bare
shoulders of the Roman ladies.
Luther was not dead to the æsthetic, but to see faith and
righteousness thus smothered and buried under a godless Epicurean life
was an offence to his honest German conscience. It looked to him as if
the popes had reversed the Saviour's choice, and accepted the devil's
bid for Christ to worship him. From what his own eyes and ears had now
seen and heard, he knew what to believe concerning the state of things
in the metropolis of Christendom, and was satisfied that, as surely as
there is a hell, the Rome of those days was its mouth.[3]