shortly after this, he declared: “He is a poor creature, with neither
talent nor an enlightened spirit.... He bespirts the people with the
grand name of Christ.... The dreamer has stolen a few phrases from
my book, ‘_De ultimis verbis Davidis_’ [of 1543], and with these the
poor wretch seeks to make a great show.” It was on this occasion that
Catherine Bora took exception to a word used by her husband, declaring
that it was “too coarse.”[299]
In his “Kurtz Bekentnis vom heiligen Sacrament” (1545) Luther again
gives vigorous expression to his aversion to the “Fanatics and foes
of the Sacrament, Carlstadt, Zwingli, Œcolampadius and ‘Stinkfield’”;
they were heretics “whom he had warned sufficiently” and who were to be
avoided.[300] He had refused to listen to or to answer that “slanderer
Schwenckfeld” because everything was wasted on him. “This you may well
tell those among whom, no doubt, Stinkfield makes my name to stink. I
like being abused by such slanderers.” If by their attacks upon the
Sacrament they call the “Master of the house Beelzebub, how should they
not abuse His household?”[301]
7. Self-Improvement and the Reformation of the Church
Self-betterment, by the leading of a Christian life and, particularly,
by striving after Christian perfection, had in Catholic times been
inculcated by many writers and even by first-rank theologians. In this
field it was usual to take for granted, both in popular manuals and in
learned treatises, as the general conviction, that religion teaches
people to strive after what is highest, whether in each one’s ordinary
duties of daily life, or in the ecclesiastical or religious state. The
power of the moral teaching was to stand revealed in the struggle after
the ideal thus set forth.
_Did Luther Found a School of True Christian Life?_
Luther, of set purpose, refused to make any attempt to found, in
the strict sense of the term, a spiritual school of Christian life
or perfection. He ever found it a difficult matter even to give any
methodical instructions to this end.
Though he dealt fully and attractively with many details of life, not
only in his sermons and commentaries, but also in special writings
which still serve as inspirations to practical Christianity, yet he
would never consent to draft anything in the shape of a system for
reaching virtue, still less for attaining perfection. On one occasion
he even deliberately refused his friend Bugenhagen’s request that he
would sketch out a rule of Christian life, appealing to his well-known
thesis that “the true Christian has no need of rules for his conduct,
for the spirit of faith guides him to do all that God requires and that
brotherly love demands of him.”[302]
It may indeed be urged that his failure to bequeath to posterity any
regular guide to the spiritual life was due to lack of time, that
his active and unremitting struggle with his opponents left him no
leisure, and, in point of fact, it is quite true that his controversy
did deprive him of the requisite freedom and peace of mind. It may also
be allowed that no one man can do everything and that Luther had not
the methodical mind needed for such a task, which, in his case, was
rendered doubly hard by his revolution in doctrine. The main ground,
however, is that there were too many divergent elements in his moral
teaching which it was impossible to harmonize; so much in it was false
and awry that no logical combination of the whole was possible. Hence
his readiness to invoke the theory, which really sprung from the very
depths of his ethics, viz. that the true Christian has no need of rules
because everything he has to do is the natural outcome of faith.
In his “Sermon von den guten Wercken” (1520), he expressed this in a
way that could not fail to find a following, though it could hardly
be described as in the interests of moral effort. Each one must take
as his first rule of conduct, not on any account to bind himself, but
to keep himself free from all troublesome laws. The very title of the
tract in question, so frequently reprinted during Luther’s lifetime,
would have led people to expect to find in it his practical views on
ethics. Characteristically enough, instead of attempting to define the
exact nature and value of moral effort, Luther penned what, in reality,
was merely an appendix to his new doctrine on faith. He himself, in his
dedication of it to Duke Johann of Saxony, admits this of the first and
principal part: “Here I have striven to show how we must exercise and
make use of faith in all our good works and consider it as the chiefest
of works. If God allows me I shall at some other time deal with faith
itself, how we must each day pray and speak it.”[303]
As, however, no other of Luther’s writings contains so many elements
of moral teaching drawn from his theology, some further remarks on it
may here be in place, especially as he himself set such store on the
sermon, that, while engaged on it, referring evidently to the first
part, he wrote to Spalatin, that, in his opinion it “would be the best
thing he had yet published.”[304] Köstlin felt justified in saying:
“The whole sermon may be termed the Reformer’s first exposition and
vindication of the Evangelical teaching on morals.”[305]
Starting from his doctrine that good works are only those which God
has commanded, and that the highest is “faith, or trust in God’s
mercy,”[306] he endeavours to show, agreeably to his usual idea, that
from faith the works proceed, and for this reason he lingers over the
first four commandments of the Decalogue. He explains the principle
that faith knows no idleness. By this faith the believer is inwardly
set free from the laws and ceremonies by which men were driven to
perform good works. If faith reigned in all, then of such there would
no longer be any need. The Christian must perform good works, but he
is free to perform works of any kind, no man being bound to one or any
work, though he finds no fault with those who bind themselves.[307]
“Here we see, that, by faith, every work and thing is lawful to a
Christian, though, because the others do not yet believe, he bears
with them and performs even what he knows is not really binding.”[308]
Faith issues in works and all works come back to faith, to strengthen
the assurance of salvation.[309]
His explanation of the 3rd Commandment, where he speaks of the ghostly
Sabbath of the soul and of the putting to death of the old man, seems
like an attempt to lay down some sort of a system of moral injunction,
and incidentally recalls the pseudo-mystic phase through which Luther
had passed not so long before. Here we get just a glimpse of his
theory of human unfreedom and of God’s sole action, so far as this was
in place in a work intended for the “unschooled laity.”[310]
In man, because he is “depraved by sin, all works, all words, all
thoughts, in a word his whole life, is wicked and ungodly. If God is
to work and live in him all these vices and this wickedness must be
stamped out.” This he calls “the keeping of the day of rest, when our
works cease and God alone acts within us.” We must, indeed, “resist
our flesh and our sins,” yet “our lusts are so many and so diverse,
and also at times under the inspiration of the Wicked One so clever,
so subtle and so plausible that no man can of his own keep himself in
the right way; he must let his hands and feet go, commend himself to
the Divine guidance, trusting nothing to his reason.... For there is
nothing more dangerous in us than our reason and our will. And this
is the highest and the first work of God in us, and the best thing we
can do, for us to refrain from work, to keep the reason and the will
idle, to rest and commend ourselves to God in all things, particularly
when they are running smoothly and well.” “The spiritual Sabbath is
to leave God alone to work in us and not to do anything ourselves
with any of our powers.”[311] He harks back here to that idea of
self-surrender to the sole action of God, under the spell of which he
had formerly stood: “The works of our flesh must be put to rest and
die, so that in all things we may keep the ghostly Sabbath, leaving
our works alone and letting God work in us.... Then man no longer
guides himself, his lust is stilled and his sadness too; God Himself
is now his leader; nothing remains but godly desires, joy and peace
together with all other works and virtues.”[312]
Though, according to the peculiar mysticism which speaks to the
“unschooled laity” out of these pages, all works and virtues spring up
of themselves during the Sabbath rest of the soul, still Luther finds
it advisable to introduce a chapter on the mortification of the flesh
by fasting.
Fasting is to be made use of for the salvation of our own soul, so
far but no further, as or than each one judges it necessary for the
repression of the “wantonness of the flesh” and for the “putting to
death of our lust.”[313] We are not to “regard the work in itself.” Of
corporal penance and mortification, and fasting in particular, he will
have it, that they are to be used exclusively to “quench the evil”
within us, but not on account of any law of Pope or Church. Luther
dismisses in silence the other motives for penance recommended by the
Church of yore, in the first place satisfaction for sins committed and
the desire to obtain graces by reinforcing our prayers by self-imposed
sacrifices.[314]
He fancies that a few words will suffice to guard against any abuse
of the new ascetical doctrine: “People must beware lest this freedom
degenerate into carelessness and indolence ... into which some indeed
tumble and then say that there is no need or call that we should fast
or practise mortification.”[315]
When, in the 3rd Commandment, he comes to speak of the practice of
prayer one would naturally have expected him to give some advice and
directions concerning its different forms, viz. the prayer of praise,
thanksgiving, petition or penitence. All he seems to know is, however,
the prayer of petition, in the case of temporal trials and needs, and
amidst spiritual difficulties.[316]
Throughout the writing Luther is dominated by the idea that faith in
Christ the Redeemer, and in personal salvation, must at all costs be
increased. At the same time he is no less certain that the Papists
neither prayed aright, nor were able to perform any good works because
they had no faith.
His exhortations to a devout life (some of them fine enough in
themselves, for instance, what he says on the trusting prayer of the
sinner, on the prayers of the congregation which cry aloud to heaven
and on patience under bitter sufferings), are, as a rule, intermingled
to such an extent with polemical matter, that, instead of a school of
the spiritual life, we seem rather to have before us the turmoil of
the battlefield.[317] To understand this we must bear in mind that he
wrote the book amidst the excitement into which he was thrown by the
launching of the ban.
In the somewhat earlier writing on the Magnificat, which might equally
well have served as a medium for the enforcing of virtue and which in
some parts Luther did so use,[318] we also find the same unbridled
spirit of hatred and abuse. Nor is it lacking even in his later works
of edification. The most peaceable ethical excursus Luther contrives
to disfigure by his bitterness, his calumnies and, not seldom, by his
venom.
In the Sermon on Good Works as soon as he comes to speak of prayer he
has a cut at the formalism of the prayer beloved of the Papists;[319]
he then proceeds to abuse the churches and convents for their mode
of life, their chanting and babbling, all performed in “obstinate
unbelief,” etc. At least one-half of his instruction on fasting
consists in mockery of the fasting as practised by the Papists. His
anger, however, reaches its climax in the 4th Commandment, where
he completely forgets his subject, and, losing all mastery over
himself, wildly storms against the spiritual authorities and their
disorders.[320] The only allusion to anything that by any stretch
of imagination would be termed a work, is the following:[321] The
rascally behaviour of the Church’s officers and episcopal or clerical
functionaries “ought to be repressed by the secular sword because no
other means is available.” “The best thing, and the only remaining
remedy, would be, that the King, Princes, nobles, townships and
congregations should take the law into their hands, so that the bishops
and clergy might have good cause to fear and therefore to obey.” For
everything must make room for the Word of God.
“Neither Rome, nor heaven, nor earth” may decree anything contrary to
the first three Commandments.
In dealing with these first three Commandments the booklet releases
the reader at one stroke from all the Church’s laws hitherto observed.
“Hence I allow each man to choose the day, the food and the amount of
his fasting.”[322] “Where the spirit of Christ is, there all is free,
for faith does not allow itself to be tied down to any work.”[323]
“The Christian who lives by faith has no need of any teacher’s good
works.”[324] Here we can see the chief reason why Luther’s instructions
on virtue and the spiritual life are so meagre.
_A Lutheran Theologian on the Lack of any Teaching Concerning
“Emancipation from the World”_
Even from Protestant theologians we hear the admission that Luther’s
Reformation failed to make sufficient allowance for the doctrine of
piety; he neglected, so they urge, the question of man’s “emancipation
from the world,” so that, even to the present day, Protestantism,
and traditional Lutheran theology in particular, lacks any definite
rule of piety. According to these critics, ever since Luther’s day
practical and adequate instructions had been wanting with regard to
what, subsequent to the reconciliation with the Father brought about by
Justification, still remains “to be done in the Father’s house”; nor
are we told how the life in Christ is to be led, of which nevertheless
the Apostle Paul speaks so eloquently, though this is in reality the
“main question in Christianity” and concerns the “vital interests of
the Church.”
The remarks just quoted occur in an article by the theologian Julius
Kaftan, Oberkonsistorialrat at Berlin, published in the “Zeitschrift
für Theologie und Kirche” in 1908 under the title, “Why does the
Evangelical Church know no doctrine of the Redemption in the narrower
sense, and how may this want be remedied?” We all the more gladly
append some further remarks by a theologian, who, as a rule, is by no
means favourably disposed to Catholicism.
According to Kaftan, Luther indeed supplied “all the elements” for the
upbuilding of a doctrine of “redemption from the world”; he gave “the
stimulus” to the thought; it is “not as though we had no conception of
it.”
But he, and the Reformation as a whole, failed to furnish any “actual,
detailed doctrine” on this subject because their attack was directed,
and had to be directed, against the ideal of piety as they found
it in the Church’s monastic life; they destroyed it, so the author
opines, because it was only under this distorted monkish shape that
the “Christian idea of redemption from the world was then met.”[325]
The Reformation omitted to replace it by a better system. It suffers
from having fallen into the way of giving “too great prominence to
the doctrine of Justification,” whereas the salvation “bestowed by
Christ is not merely Justification and forgiveness of sins,” as the
traditional Lutheran theology seems on the surface to assume even
to-day, but rather the “everlasting possession” to be reached by a
Christ-like life; Justification is but the road to this possession.
Because people failed to keep this in view the doctrine of the real
“work of salvation” has from the beginning been made far too little of.
A further reason which explains the neglect is, according to Kaftan,
the following: In Catholicism it is the Church which acts as the
guide to piety and supplies all the spiritual aids required; she acts
as intermediary between God and the faithful. But “the Evangelical
teaching rejected the Church (in this connection) as a supernatural
agency for the dispensation of the means of salvation. In her place
it set the action of the Spirit working by means of the Word of
God.” Since this same teaching stops short at the Incarnation and
Satisfaction of Christ, it has “no room for any doctrine of redemption
(from the world) as a work of God.”[326] Pietism, with all its
irregularities, was merely an outcome of this deficiency; but even the
Pietists never succeeded in formulating such a doctrine of redemption.
It is to the credit of the author that he feels this want deeply and
points out the way in which theology can remedy it.[327] He would fain
see introduced a system of plain directions, though framed on lines
different from those of the “ostensibly final doctrinal teaching”
of the Formula of Concord,[328] i.e. instructions to the devout
Christian how to manifest in his life in the world the death and
resurrection of Christ which St. Paul experienced in himself. Much too
much emphasis had been laid in Protestantism on Luther’s friendliness
to the world and the joy of living, which he was the first to teach
Christians in opposition to the doctrine of the Middle Ages; yet the
other idea, of redemption from the world, must nevertheless retain a
lasting significance in Christianity. Although, before Luther’s day,
the Church had erroneously striven to attain to the latter solely
in the monastic life, yet there is no doubt “that the most delicate
blossoms of pre-Reformation piety sprang from this soil, and that
the best forces in the Church owed their origin to this source.” Is
it merely fortuitous, continues the author, “that the ‘Imitation
of Christ,’ by Thomas à Kempis, should be so widely read throughout
Christendom, even by Evangelicals? Are there not many Evangelical
Christians who could witness that this book has been a great help
to them in a crisis of their inner life? But whoever knows it knows
what the idea of redemption from the world there signifies.” All this
leads our author to the conclusion: “The history of Christianity and
of the Church undoubtedly proves that here [in the case of the defect
in the Lutheran theology he is instancing] it is really a question of
a motive power and central thought of our religion.”[329] He points
out to the world of our day, “that growing civilisation culminates in
disgust with the world and with civilisation.” “Then,” he continues,
“the soul again cries for God, for the God Who is above all the world
and in Whom alone the heart finds rest. As it ever was, so is it still
to-day.”[330]
It is a satisfaction to hear this call which must rejoice the heart
of every believer. The same, however, had been heard throughout
the ancient Church and had met with a happy response. Not in the
“Imitation” only, but in a hundred other writings of Catholics, mystic
and ascetic, could our author have found the ideals of Christian
perfection and of the rest in God which comes from inward severance
from the world, all expressed with the utmost clearness and the warmest
feeling. Nor was Christian perfection imprisoned within the walls of
the monasteries; it also flourished in the breezy atmosphere of the
world. The Church taught the universality of this ideal of perfect love
of God, of the imitation of Christ and of detachment from the world,
and she recommended it indiscriminately to all classes, inviting people
to practise it under all conditions of life and expending liberally
in all directions her supernatural powers in order to attain her aim.
Among the best of those whose writings inaugurated a school of piety
may be classed St. Bernard and Gerson, in whom Luther had found light
and edification when still a zealous monk. With him, however, the
case was very different. Of the works he bequeathed to posterity the
Protestant theologian referred to above, says regretfully: They contain
neither a “doctrine” nor a definite “scheme of instruction” on “that
side of life which faces God.” “No clear, conclusive thoughts on this
all-important matter are to be found.”
On the other hand it must be added that there is no want of “clear,
conclusive thoughts” to a quite opposite effect; not merely on
enjoyment of the world, but on a kind of sovereignty over it which is
scarcely consistent with the effort after self-betterment.
_The Means of Self-Reform and their Reverse Side_
Self-denial as the most effective means of self-education in the good,
and self-conquest in outward and inward things, receive comparatively
small attention from Luther; rather he is set on delivering people from
the “anxiety-breeding,” traditional prejudice in favour of spiritual
renunciation, obedience to the Church and retrenchment in view of
the evil. This deliverance, thanks to its alluring and attractive
character, was welcomed, in spite of Luther’s repeated warnings against
any excess of the spirit of the world. His abandonment of the path of
perfection so strongly recommended by Christ and his depreciation of
“peculiar” works and “singular” practices were more readily understood
and also more engaging than his words in favour of real works of faith.
He set up his own inward experiences of the difficulty and, as he
thought, utter futility of the conflict with self, together with his
hostility to all spiritual efforts exceeding the common bounds, as the
standard for others, and, in fact, even for the Church; in the Catholic
past, on the other hand, the faithful had been taught to recognise the
standard of the Church, their teacher and guide, as the rule by which
to judge of their own experiences.
Here to prove what we have said, would necessitate the repetition of
what has already been given elsewhere.
Luther’s writings, particularly his letters, also contain certain
instructions, which, fortunately, have not become the common property
of Protestants, but which everybody must feel to be absolutely
opposed to anything like self-betterment. We need only call to mind
his teaching, that temptations to despondency and despair are best
withstood by committing some sin in defiance of the devil, or by
diverting the mind to sensual and carnal distractions.[331] The words:
“What matters it if we commit a fresh sin?”[332] since through faith
we have forgiveness, and the other similar utterance, “Be a sinner and
sin boldly, but believe more boldly still,” are characteristic of him,
though he would have been unwilling to see them pressed or taken too
literally. By these and other statements he did, however, seriously
endanger the ethical character of sin; in reality he diminished the
abhorrence for sin, though no doubt he did not fully perceive the
consequences of his act.[333]
* * * * *
To the man who had become sensible of the ensnaring influence of the
world and of its evil effects upon himself, or who on account of his
mental build felt himself endangered by it, Catholic moralists advised
retirement, recollection, self-examination and solitude. Luther was
certainly not furthering the cause of perfection when he repeatedly
insisted, with an emphasis that is barely credible, that solitude must
be avoided as the deadly foe of the true life of the soul, and that
what should be sought was rather company and distraction. Solitude
was a temptation to sin. “I too find,” so he says, “that I never fall
into sin more frequently than when I am alone.... Quietude calls forth
the worst of thoughts. Whatever our trouble be, it then becomes much
more dangerous,” etc.[334] Of course, in the case of persons of gloomy
disposition Luther was quite right in recommending company, but it was
just in doing so that he exceeded the bounds in his praise of sensual
distractions;[335] of his own example, too, he makes far too much. On
the other hand, all the great men in the Church had sought to find the
guiding light of self-knowledge in solitude; this they regarded as a
school for the subjugation of unruly emotions.
Not only were self-control and self-restraint something strange to
Luther,[336] but he often went so far as to adduce curious theoretical
reasonings of his own to prove that they could have no place in
his public life and controversies, and why he and his helpers were
compelled to give the reins to anger, hatred and abuse. Thus the work
of self-improvement was renounced in yet another essential point.
Then again with regard to prayer. His exhortations thereto are numerous
enough and he himself prayed frequently. But it is not necessary to be
an ascetic to see that several things are wanting in his admonitions
to prayer. The first is the salt of contrition and compunction. He
was less alive to the wholesome underlying feeling of melancholy
that characterises the soul which prays to God in the consciousness
of having abused its free-will, than he was to the suggestions of
self-confidence and assurance of salvation. The second thing wanting
is the humility which should permeate prayer even when exalted to the
highest limits of trusting confidence. If man, as Luther taught, is
incapable of any work, then of course there can be no sense of shame
at not having done more to please God and to merit greater grace from
Him. Moreover, Luther indirectly encouraged people to pray in the bold
consciousness of being justified and to look for the keeping of the
law as a natural consequence of such “faith.” Lastly, and this sums
up everything, we miss the spirit of love in his often so strongly
worded and eloquent exhortations to prayer; the spirit which should
have led him to resignation to God’s designs, and to commit his life’s
work to the Will of God with a calm indifference as to its eventual
success.[337] Hardly ever do we find any trace of that zeal for souls
which embraces the whole of God’s broad kingdom even to the heathen,
in short, the whole of the Church’s sphere.[338] On the other hand,
however, he expressly exhorts his followers to increase the ardour of
their prayers, after his own example, by interspersing them with curses
on all whose views were different.[339]
In place of the pleasing variety of the old exercises of prayer—from
the Office recited by the clergy with its daily commemoration of
the Saints down to the multifarious devotions of the people, to say
nothing of the great Sacrifice of the Altar, the very heart’s pulse
of the Church—he recommends as a rule only the Our Father, the Creed
and the Psalms—prayers indeed rich beyond all others and which will
ever hold the first place among Christian devotions. But had they not
been brought closer to the heart formerly in the inner and outer
life of prayer dealt with in the writings of the Catholic masters of
the spiritual life, and exemplified in the churches and monasteries,
and even in private houses and the very streets? But behind all this
rich display Luther saw lurking the demon of “singular works.” The
monk absorbed in contemplation was, in Luther’s eyes, an unhappy
wretch sitting “in filth” up to his neck. Thus he restricts himself
to recommending the old short formulas of prayer. In accordance with
his doctrine that faith alone avails, he desires that sin, and the
intention of sinning, should be withstood by the use of the Our Father:
“That you diligently learn to say the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten
Commandments.”[340] “Grant, O God (thus must you pray), that Thy Name
be hallowed by me, Thy Kingdom come to me, and Thy Will be done in me”;
in this wise they would come to scorn “devil, death and hell.”[341] He
indeed kept in touch with the people by means of the olden prayers,
but, even into them, he knew how to introduce his own new views; the
Kingdom of God, which to him is forgiveness of sins,[342] “must come
to us by faith,” and the chief article of the whole Creed with which
to defy “death, devil and hell” was the “_remissio peccatorum_.” These
remarks must not, however, be understood as detracting from the value
of his fine, practical, and often sympathetic expositions of the Our
Father, whether in his special work on it in 1518 or in the Larger
Catechism.[343]
Of the numerous “man-made laws” which he banished at one stroke by
denying the Church’s authority there is no need to speak here. Without
a doubt the overturning of all these barriers erected against human
lusts and wilfulness was scarcely conducive to the progress of the
individual.
Nor does the absence of any higher standard of life in his own
case[344] serve to recommend his system of ethics. Seeing that, as has
been already pointed out,[345] he himself is disposed to admit his
failings, the apparent confidence with which, in order to exalt his
reform of ethics, he appeals to the biblical verity, that the truth of
a doctrine is proved by its moral fruits, is all the more surprising.
* * * * *
Of this confidence we have a remarkable example in a sermon devoted
to the explanation of the 1st Epistle of St. John. At the same time
the exceptional boldness of his language and the resolute testimony
he bears in his own favour constitute striking proof of how the very
firmness of his attitude impressed his followers and exercised over
many a seductive spell. The weakness of the Reformer’s ethics seems all
at once to vanish before his mighty eloquence.
The discourse in question, where at the same time he vindicates his
own conduct, belongs to 1532. About that time he preached frequently
at Wittenberg on St. John’s sublime words concerning the love of
God and our neighbour (1 Jo. iv. 16-21). His object was to cleanse
and better the morals of Wittenberg, the low standard of which he
deplores, that the results of justification by faith might shine forth
more brightly. At that very time he was treating with the Elector and
the Saxon Estates in view of a new visitation of all the parishes to
be held the next year, which might promote the good of morality. The
sermons were duly reported by his pupil Cruciger, whose notes were
published at Wittenberg in 1533 under the general title of “A Sermon
on Love.”[346]
Dealing therein with ethical practice he starts by proclaiming that,
according to the “pious Apostle” whose doctrines he was expounding,
everything depends on Christians proving by their fruits whether
they really “walk in love.” Of many, however, who not only declared
themselves well acquainted with the principles of faith and ethics but
even professed to be qualified to teach them, it was true that, “if we
applied and manifested in our lives their ethics after their example,
then we should be but poorly off.”[347] Such men must, nevertheless,
be tested by their works. Nor does he exempt himself from this duty of
putting ethics to a practical test.
Nowhere else does he insist more boldly than in these sermons on proof
by actual deeds, even in his own case. According to the words of John,
so he says, a life of love would give them “confidence in the Day of
Judgment” (iv. 17). Confidence, nay, a spirit of holy defiance, even
in the presence of death and judgment, must fill the hearts of all
who acted aright, owing to the very testimony of their fellow-men to
the blamelessness of their lives. “We must be able to boast [with
Christ, ‘the reconciliation for our sins’] not before God alone but
before God and all Christendom, and against the whole world, that no
one can truthfully condemn or even accuse us.” “We must be able to
assure ourselves that we have lived in such a way that no one can take
scandal at us”; we must have this testimony, “that we have walked on
earth in simplicity and godly piety, and that no one can charge us
with having been given to ‘trickery.’” In this wise had Paul countered
false doctrines by boasting, just as Moses and Samuel had already done
under the Old Covenant.[348]
Coming to his own person the speaker thinks he can honestly say the
same of himself, though, like the rest, he too must confess to being
still in need of the article of the forgiveness of sins. There were
false teachers who could not appeal so confidently to the morality
of their lives, “proud, puffed-up spirits who lay claim to a great
and wonderful holiness, who want to reform the whole world and to do
something singular in order that all may say that they alone are true
Christians. This sort of thing lasts indeed for a while, during which
they parade and strut, but, when the hour of death comes, that is the
end of all such idle nonsense.”[349] He himself, with the faithful
teachers and good Christians, is in a very different case: “If I must
boast of how I have acted in my position towards everyone then I will
say: I witness before you and all the world, and know that God too
witnesses on my behalf together with all His angels, that I have not
falsified God’s Word, His Baptism or the Sacrament but have preached
and acted faithfully as much as was in me, and suffered all ill solely
for God’s and His Word’s sake. Thus must all the Saints boast.”[350]
He lays the greatest stress on the unanimous testimony which the
preacher must receive from his fellow-men and from posterity. He must
be able to say, “you shall be my witnesses,” he “must be able to call
upon all men to bear him witness”; they must bear us witness on the
Last Day that we have lived aright and shown by our deeds that we were
Christians. If this is the case, if they can point to their practice
of good works, then the preaching of good works can be insisted on
with all the emphasis required.[351] It is natural, however, that
towards the end Luther lays greater stress on his teaching than on his
works.
On his preaching of the value of good works he solemnly assures us:
“We can testify before the whole world that we have preached much more
grandly and forcefully on good works than even those who calumniate
us.”[352]
_Self-Reform and Hatred of the Foe_
In speaking of Luther, his staunch friends are wont to boast of
his lifelong struggle against the fetters of the Papacy and of the
overwhelming power of his assault on the olden Church; this, so they
imply, redounded to his glory and showed his moral superiority.
In what follows we shall therefore consider some of the main ethical
features of this struggle of Luther’s and of the attitude he adopted
in his conflict with Popery. His very defence of himself and of the
moral effects of his preaching, which we have just heard him pronounce
subsequent to the Diet of Augsburg, invites us to consider in the light
of ethics his public line of action, as traced in his writings of that
period. These years represent a turning-point in his life, and here,
if anywhere, we should be able to detect his higher moral standard
and the power of his new principles to effect a change first of all
in himself. In the sermon of 1532 (above, p. 96) he had said: The new
Gospel which he had “preached rightly and faithfully” made those who
accepted it “to walk in simplicity and godly piety” according to the
law of love, and to stand forth “blameless before all the world.” Could
he truthfully, he, the champion of this Gospel, really lay any claim to
these qualities as here he seems to do, at least indirectly?
His controversial tracts dating from that time display anything but
“simplicity and godly piety.” His hate was without bounds, and his
fury blazed forth in thunderbolts which slew all who dared to attempt
to bridge the chasm between him and the Catholic Church. Reproaching
voices, about him and within him, seemed to him to come from so many
devils. The Coburg, where he stayed, was assuredly “full of devils,”
so he wrote.[353] There, in spite of his previous attempts to jest
and be cheerful,[354] and notwithstanding the violent and distracting
labours in which he was engaged, the devil had actually established an
“embassy,” troubling him with many anxieties and temptations.[355]
The devil he withstood by paroxysms of that hate and rage which he
had always in store for his enemies. “The Castle may be crammed with
devils, yet Christ reigneth there in the midst of His foes!”[356]
He includes in the same category the Papists, and the Turks who then
were threatening Europe: Both are “monsters,” both have been “let
loose by the fury of the devil,” both represent a common “woe doomed
to overwhelm the world in these last days of Christendom.”[357] These
“stout jackasses” (of the Diet of Augsburg), so he cried from the
ramparts of his stronghold, “want to meddle in the business of the
Church. Let them try!”[358] “The very frenzy and madness of our foes of
itself alone proves that we are in the right.”[359] “Their blasphemy,
their murders, their contempt of the Gospel, and other enormities
against it, increase day by day and must bring the Turk into the field
against us.”[360] “I am a preacher of Christ,” so he assures us, “and
Christ is the truth.”—But is hatred a mark of a disciple of Christ, or
of a higher mission for the reformation of doctrine and worship?
Elsewhere Luther himself describes hate as a “true image of the devil;
in fact, it is neither human nor diabolical but the devil himself whose
whole being is nothing but an everlasting burning,” etc. “The devil is
always acting contrary to love.” “Such is his way; God works nothing
but benefits and deeds of charity, while he on the contrary performs
nothing but works of hate.”[361] On other occasions in his sermons he
speaks in familiar and at the same time inspiring words of the beauty
of Christian love. “Love is a great and rich treasure, worth many
hundred thousand gulden, or a great kingdom. Who is there who would
not esteem it highly and pursue it to the limit of his power, nay,
pour out sweat and blood for it if he only hoped or knew how to obtain
it!... What is sun, moon, heavens or all creation, all the angels, all
the saints compared with it? Love is nothing but the one, unspeakable,
eternal good and the highest treasure, which is God Himself.”[362]
But his “Vermanũg an die geistlichen versammelt auff dem Reichstag
zu Augsburg” (which he wrote from the Coburg) was the fruit, not
of love, but of the most glowing hate.[363] In a private letter he
calls it quite rightly, not an “exhortation” (Vermanũg), but “an
invective” against the clergy,[364] and, in another letter, admits
the “violent spirit” in which he had written it; when composing it
the abusive thoughts had rushed in on him like an “uninvited band of
moss-troopers.”[365] But, that he drove them back as he declares he
did, is not discernible from the work in question.
In the booklet under discussion he several times uses what would seem
to be words of peace, and, in one passage, even sketches a scheme
for reunion; but, as a Protestant critic of the latter says, not
altogether incorrectly, the “idea was of its very nature impossible
of execution.”[366] Indeed, we may say that Luther himself could see
well enough that the idea was a mere deception; the best motto for the
writing would be: Enmity and hatred until death!
The Catholic members of the Diet are there represented as “obstinate
and stiff-necked,” and as “bloodhounds raging wantonly”; they had
hitherto, but all to no purpose, “tried fraud and trickery, force
and anger, murder and penalties.” To the bishops he cries: “May the
devil who drives them dog their footsteps, and all our misfortunes
fall on their head!” He puts them on a level with “procurers and
whoremongers,” and trounces them as “the biggest robbers of benefices,
bawds and procurers to be found in all the world.”[367]—There had
been many cases of infringement of the law of celibacy among both
lower and higher clergy previous to Luther’s advent, while the
Wittenberg spirit of freedom set free in the German lands helped
considerably to increase the evil amongst the ranks of the Catholic
clergy; but to what unheard-of exaggerations, all steeped in hate,
did not Luther have recourse the better to inflame the people and to
defend the illicit marriages of those of the clergy who now were the
preachers of the new religion? He was about “to sweep out of the house
the harlots and abducted spouses” of the bishops, and not merely to
show up the bishops as real “lechers and brothel-keepers” (a favourite
expression of his), but to drag them still deeper in the mire. It was
his unclean fancy, which delighted to collect the worst to be found
in corrupt localities abroad, that led him to say: “And, moreover, we
shall do clean away with your Roman Sodom, your Italian weddings, your
Venetian and Turkish brides, and your Florentine bridegrooms!”[368]
The pious founders of the bishoprics and monasteries, he cries, “never
intended to found bawdy-houses or Roman robber-churches,” nor yet
to endow with their money “strumpets and rascals, or Roman thieves
and robbers.” The bishops, however, are set on “hiding, concealing
and burying in silence the whole pot-broth of their abominations and
corrupt, unepiscopal abuses, shame, vice and noxious perversion of
Christendom, and on seeing them lauded and praised,” whereas it is
high time that they “spat upon their very selves”; their auxiliary
bishops “smear the unschooled donkeys with chrism” (ordain priests)
and these in turn seek “to rise to power”; yet revolt against them
and against all authority is brewing in the distance; if the bloody
deeds of Münzer’s time were repeated, then, he, Luther, would not be
to blame; “men’s minds are prepared and greatly embittered and, that,
not without due cause”; if you “go to bits” then “your blood be upon
your own head!” Meanwhile it is too bad that the bishops “should go
about in mitres and great pomp,” as though we were “old fools”; but
still worse is it that they should make of all this pomp “articles of
faith and a matter of conscience, so that people must commit sin if
they refuse to worship such child’s play; surely this is the devil’s
own work.” Of such hateful misrepresentations, put forward quite
seriously, a dozen other instances might be cited from this writing.
“But that we _must_ look upon such child’s play as articles of faith,
and befool ourselves with bishops’ mitres, from that we cannot get
away, no matter how much we may storm or jeer.”[369]
The writing culminates in the following outburst: “In short we and you
alike know that you are living without God’s Word, but that, on our
side, we have God’s Word.”
“If I live I shall be your bane; if I die I shall be your death! For
God Himself has driven me to attack you! I must, as Hosea says, be to
you as a bear and a lion in the way of Assur. You shall have no peace
from me until you amend or rush to your own destruction.”[370]
At a later date, of the saying “If I live,” etc., Luther made the Latin
couplet: “_Pestis eram vivus moriens ero mors tua papa_.” In life,
O Pope, I was thy plague, in dying I shall be thy death. He first
produced this verse at Spalatin’s home at Altenburg on his return
journey from the Coburg; afterwards he frequently repeated it, for
instance, at Schmalkalden in 1537, when he declared, that he would
bequeath his hatred of the Papacy as an heirloom to his disciples.[371]
As early as 1522 he had also made use of the Bible passage concerning
the lion and the bear in his “Wyder den falsch genantten geystlichen
Standt” with the like assurance of the Divine character of his
undertaking, and in a form which shows how obsessed he was by the
spirit of hate: He was sure of his doctrine and by it would judge even
the angels; without it no one could be saved, for it was God’s and not
his, for which reason his sentence too was God’s and not his: “Let
this be my conclusion. If I live you shall have no peace from me, if
you kill me, you shall have ten times less peace; and I shall be to
you as Oseas says, xiii. 8, a bear in the path and a lion in the road.
However you may treat me you shall not have your will, until your
brazen front and iron neck are broken either unwillingly or by grace.
Unless you amend, as I would gladly wish, then we may persist, you in
your anger and hostility and I in paying no heed.”[372]
On another occasion he tells us how he would gladly have left
Wittenberg with Melanchthon and the others who were going by way of
Nuremberg to the Diet of Augsburg, but a friend had said to him: “Hold
your tongue! Your tongue is an evil one!”[373]
After the publication of the “Vermanũg an die Geistlichen,” or
possibly even before, Melanchthon seems to have written to him,
re-echoing the observations of startled and anxious friends, and
saying that the writing had been “variously” appreciated, in itself
a significant remark; Luther himself at that time certainly dreaded
the censure of his adherents. Still, he insists as defiantly as ever
on his “invective”: “Let not your heart be troubled,” he admonishes
Melanchthon, “My God is a God of fools, Who is wont to laugh at the
wise. Whence I trouble myself about them not the least bit.”[374] On
the contrary, he even came near regarding his writing as a special work
of God.
As we have already pointed out, the defiant and violent steps he took,
only too often became in his eyes special works of God. His notorious,
boundless sense of his own greatness, to which this gave rise, is the
first of the phenomena which accompanied his hate; these it will now
be our duty briefly to examine in order better to appreciate the real
strength of his ethical principles in his own case.
_Companion-Phenomena of his Hate_
As a matter of fact Luther’s sense of his superiority was so great that
the opponents he attacked had to listen to language such as no mortal
had ever before dreamed of making use of against the Church.
The Church is being reformed “in my age” in “a Divine way, not after
human ways.” “Were we to fall, then Christ would fall with us.”[375]
Whenever he meets with contradiction, whenever he hears even the hint
of a reproach or accusation, he at once ranges himself—as he does, for
instance, in the “Vermanũg”—on the side of the persecuted “prophets
and apostles,” nay, he even likens himself to Christ.[376] He stood
alone, without miracles, and devoid of holiness, as he himself candidly
informed Henry VIII. of England; nevertheless he pits himself against
the heads of both Church and Empire assembled at the Diet.
All he could appeal to was his degree of Doctor of Theology: “Had I
not been a Doctor, the devil would have given me much trouble, for it
is no small matter to attack the whole Papacy and to charge it” (with
error).[377] In the last instance, however, his self-confidence recalls
him to the proud consciousness of his entire certainty. “Thus our cause
stands firm, because we know how we believe and how we live.”[378]
With these words from his “Vermanũg” he defies the whole of the present
and of the past, the Pope and all his Councils.
He knows—and that suffices—that what he has and proclaims is God’s
Word; “and if you have God’s Word you may say: Now that I have the Word
what need have I to ask what the Councils say?”[379] “Among all the
Councils I have never found one where the Holy Spirit rules.... There
will never be no Council [_sic_], according to the Holy Spirit, where
the people have to agree. God allows this because He Himself wills to
be the Judge and suffers not men to judge. Hence He commands every man
to know what he believes.”[380] Luther only, and those who follow him,
know what they believe; he takes the place of all the councils, Doctors
of the Church, Popes and bishops, in short, of all the ecclesiastical
sources of theology.
“The end of the world may now come,” he said, in 1540, “for all that
pertains to the knowledge of God has now been supplied” (by me).[381]
With this contempt for the olden Church he combines a most imperious
exclusiveness in his treatment even of those who like him were
opposed to the Pope, whether they were individuals or formed schools
of thought. They must follow his lead, otherwise there awaits them
the sentence he launched at the Zwinglians from the Coburg: “These
Sacramentarians are not merely liars but the very embodiment of lying,
deceit and hypocrisy; this both Carlstadt and Zwingli prove by word
and deed.” Their books, he says, contain pestilential stuff; they
refused to retract even when confuted by him, but simply because they
stood in fear of their own following; he would continue to put them
to shame by those words, which so angered them: “You have a spirit
different from ours.” He could not look upon them as brothers; this
was duly expressed in the article in which he went so far as to
promise them that love which was due even to enemies. On his own
authority he curtly dubs them “heretics,” and is resolved in this
way to tread unharmed with Christ through Satan’s kingdom and all
his lying artifices.[382] Luther’s aggravating exclusiveness went
hand-in-hand with his overweening self-confidence.
In consequence of this treatment the Swiss, through the agency of
Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor, complained to Bucer, “Beware of not
believing Luther readily or of not yielding to him! He is a scorpion;
no matter how carefully he is handled he will sting, even though to
begin with he seems to caress your hand.”[383] To this Bucer, who
had also ventured to differ from Luther, wrote in his reply: “He has
flung another scathing book at us.... He speaks, and means to speak,
much more harshly than heretofore.” “He will not now endure even the
smallest contradiction, and I am sure that, were I to go any further,
I should cause such a tragedy that all the churches would once more
be convulsed.”[384] Another Protestant voice we hear exclaiming with
a fine irony: “Luther rages, thunders and lightens as though he were
a Jupiter and had all the bolts of heaven at his command to launch
against us.... Has he then become an emperor of the Christian army on
the model of the Pope, so as to be able to issue every pronouncement
that his brain suggests?”[385] “He confuses the two Natures in Christ
and brings forward foolish, nay godless, statements. If we may not
condemn this, then what, pray, may be condemned?”[386]
His natural lack of charity, of which we shall have later on to
add many fresh and appalling examples to those already enumerated,
aggravated his hatred, his sense of his own greatness and his
exclusiveness. What malicious hatred is there not apparent in his
advice that Zwingli and Œcolampadius should be condemned, “even though
this led to violence being offered them.”[387] It is with reluctance
that one gazes on Luther’s abuse of the splendid gifts of mind and
heart with which he had been endowed.
A recent Protestant biographer of Carlstadt’s laments the “frightful
harshness of his (Luther’s) polemics.” “How deep the traces left by
his mode of controversy were, ought not to be overlooked,” so he
writes. “From that time forward this sort of thing took the place of
any real discussion of differences of opinion between members of the
Lutheran camp, nor did people even seem aware of how far they were
thus drifting from the kindliness and dignity of Christian modes of
thought.”[388] What is here said of the treatment of opponents within
the camp applies even more strongly to Luther’s behaviour towards
Catholics.
The following episode of his habitual persecution of Albert,
Archbishop and Elector of Mayence, illustrates this very well.
On June 21, 1535, the Archbishop in accordance with the then law
and with the sentence duly pronounced by the judge, had caused Hans
von Schönitz, once his trusted steward, to be executed; the charge
of which he had been proved guilty was embezzlement on a gigantic
scale. The details of the case, which was dealt with rather hurriedly,
have not yet been adequately cleared up, but even Protestant
researchers agree that Schönitz deserved to be dealt with as a “public
thief,”[389] seeing that “in the pecuniary transactions which he
undertook for Albert he was not unmindful of his own advantage”;[390]
“there is no doubt that he was rightly accused of all manner of
peculation and cheating.”[391] Luther, however, furiously entered
the lists on behalf of the executed man and against the detested
Archbishop who, in spite of his private faults, remained faithful
to the Church and was a hindrance to the spread of Lutheranism in
Germany. Luther implicitly believed all that was told him, of Hans’s
innocence and of Albert’s supposed abominable motives, by Schönitz’s
brother and his friend Ludwig Rabe—who himself was implicated in the
matter—and both of whom came to Wittenberg. “Both naturally related
the case from their own point of view.”[392] Luther sent two letters
to the Cardinal, one more violent than the other.[393] The second
would seem to have been intended for publication and was sent to
the press, though at present no copy of it can be discovered. In it
in words of frightful violence he lays at the door of the Prince of
the Church the blood of the man done to death. The Archbishop was a
“thorough-paced Epicurean who does not believe that Abel lives in God
and that his blood still cries more loudly than Cain, his brother’s
murderer, fancies.” He, Luther, like another Elias, must call down
woes “upon Achab and Isabel.” He had indeed heard of many evil deeds
done by Cardinals, “but I had not taken your Cardinalitial Holiness
for such an insolent, wicked dragon.... Your Electoral Highness may
if he likes commit a nuisance in the Emperor’s Court of Justice,
infringe the freedom of the city of Halle, usurp the sword of Justice
belonging to Saxony, and, over and above this, look on the world and
on all reason as rags fit only for the closet”—such is a fair sample
of the language—and, moreover, treat everything in a Popish, Roman,
Cardinalitial way, but, please God, our Lord God will by our prayers
one day compel your Electoral Highness to sweep out all the filth
yourself.
In the first letter he had threatened fiercely the hated Cardinal
with publishing what he knew (or possibly only feigned to know)
of his faults; he would not “advise him to stir up the filth any
further”; here in the second letter he charges him in a general
way with robbery, petty theft and fraud in the matter of Church
property, also with having cheated a woman of the town whom he used
to keep; he deserved to be “hanged on a gallows three times as high
as the Giebichstein,” where Schönitz had been executed. Incidentally
he promises him a new work that shall reveal all his doings. The
threatened work was, however, never published, Albert’s family, the
Brandenburgs, having raised objections at the Electoral Court of
Saxony. Albert, however, offered quite frankly to submit the Schönitz
case and the grievances raised by his relatives to the judgment of
George of Anhalt, one of the princes who had gone over to Lutheranism,
who was perfectly at liberty to take the advice of Jonas, nay, even
of Luther himself. “In this we may surely see a proof that he was not
conscious of being in the least blameworthy.”[394] At any rate he
seems to have been quite willing to lay his case even before his most
bitter foe.[395]
* * * * *
Such was Luther’s irritability and quickness of temper, even in private
concerns, that, at times, even in his letters, he would pour forth the
most incredible threats.
On one occasion, in 1542, when a messenger sent by Justus Jonas
happened to offend him, he at once wrote an “angry letter” to Jonas
and on the next day followed it up with another in which he says, that
his anger has not yet been put to rest; never is Jonas to send such
people into his house again or else he will order them to be gagged
and put under restraint. “Remember this, for I have said it. This
man may scold and do the grand elsewhere, but not in Luther’s house,
unless indeed he wants to have his tongue torn out. Are we going to
allow such caitiffs as these to play the emperor?”[396]—He had, as
we already know, a sad experience with a certain girl named Rosina,
whom he had engaged as a servant, but who turned out to be a person
of loose morals and brought his house into disrepute. “She shall
never again have the chance of deceiving anyone so long as there is
water enough in the Elbe,” so he writes of her to a judge. In letters
to other persons he accuses her of “villainy and fornication”; she
had “shamed all the inmates of his house with the [assumed] name of
Truchsess”; he could only think that she had been “foisted on him by
the Papists as an arch-prostitute—the god-forsaken minx and lying
bag of trouble, who has damaged my household from garret to cellar ...
accursed harridan and perjured, thieving drab that she is!” Away with
her “for the honour of the Evangel.”[397]
Even in younger days he had been too much accustomed to give the reins
to his excitement, as his two indignant letters (his own description
of them) to his brother monks at Erfurt show.[398] Even his upbringing
of his own children, highly lauded as it has been, suffered from this
same lack of self-control. “The mere disobedience of a boy would stir
him to his very depths. For instance, he admits of a nephew he had
living with him—a son of his brother James—that once ‘he angered me
so greatly as almost to be the death of me, so that for a while I lost
the use of my bodily powers.’”[399]—So exasperated was he with the
lawyers who treacherously deceived the people that he went so far as
to demand that their tongues should be torn out. At times he confesses
his hot temper, owning and acknowledging that it was “sinful”; to
such fits of passion he was still subject, but, as a rule, his anger
was at least both right and called for, for he could not avoid being
angry where it was “a question of the soul and of hell.” Anger, he
also says, refreshed his inner man, sharpened his wits and chased away
his temptations; he had to be angry in order to write, preach or pray
well.[400]
Repeatedly he seemed on the point of quitting Wittenberg for ever
in revenge for all the neglect he met with there; “I can no longer
contain my anger and disappointment.”[401] It was to this depression
of spirits that he was referring when he said, that, often, in
his indignation, he had “flung down the keys on Our Lord God’s
threshold.”[402] He sees his inability to change his surroundings
and how Popery refuses to be overthrown; yet, as he told us, he is
determined to “rain abuse and curses on the miscreants [the Papists]
till he is carried to the grave,” and to provide the “thunder and
lightning for the funeral” of the foe.[403]
A gloomy, uncanny passion often glows in his words and serves to fire
the fanatism of the misguided masses.
“Lo and behold how my blood boils and how I long to see the Papacy
punished!” And what was the punishment he looked for? Just before
he had said that the Pope, his Cardinals and all his court should
have “the skins of their bodies drawn off over their heads; the hides
might then be flung into the healing bath [the sea] at Ostia, or into
the fire,” unless indeed they found means to pay back all the alien
property that the Pope, the “Robber of the Churches, had stolen only to
waste, lose and squander it, and to spend it on whores and their ilk.”
Yet even this punishment fell short of the crime, for “my spirit knows
well that no temporal penalty can avail to make amends even for one
Bull or Decree.”[404]
Side by side with language so astonishing we must put other sayings
which paint his habitual frame of mind in a light anything but
favourable: “It is God’s Word! Let what cannot stand fall ... no
matter what!”[405] “The Word is true, or everything crumbles into
ruin!”[406] “Even if _you_ will not follow”—such were his words to
Staupitz as early as 1521, “at least suffer _me_ to go on and be
carried away [’_ire et rapi_’].” “I have put on my horns against the
Roman Antichrists”;[407] in these words Luther compares himself to a
raving bull.
This frame of mind tended to promote his natural tendency to violence,
hitherto repressed. His proposal to flay all the members of the Roman
Curia was not by any means his first hint at deeds of blood; such
allusions occur in other shapes in earlier discourses, particularly
in his predictions of the judgments to come. The Princes, nobility
and towns, so he declared, must put their foot down and prevent the
shameful abuses of Rome: “If we mean to fight against the Turks let us
begin at home where they are worst; if we do right in hanging thieves
and beheading robbers, why then do we let Roman avarice go scot free,
when all the time it is the biggest thief and robber there ever has
been or will ever be upon the earth.” Whoever comes from Rome bringing
in his pocket a collation to a benefice ought to be warned either “to
desist, or else to jump into the Rhine or the nearest pond, and give
the Roman Brief—letter, seals and all, a cold bath.”[408] Not without
a shudder can one read the description in his “Bapstum vom Teuffel
gestifft,” written in his last days, of the kinds of death best suited
to the Pope and his Curia, of which the flaying and the “bath” at
Ostia is only one example. (Cp. below, xxx., 2.) True enough he is
careful to point out that such a death will be theirs only should they
refuse to amend their ways and accept the Lutheran Evangel!
Ten years previously, in 1535, he had written to Melanchthon, who
shrank from acts of violence with what appeared to Luther too great
timidity: “Oh, that our most venerable Cardinals, Popes and Roman
Legates had more Kings of England to put them to death!”[409] These
words he penned soon after Henry VIII of England had sacrificed the
lives of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and his Chancellor, Sir
Thomas More, to his sensual passions and his thirst for blood. Luther
adds, of the Pope and the Curia, with the object of vindicating the
sentence of death he had passed on them, “They are traitors, thieves,
robbers and regular devils.... They are out and out miscreants to
the very bottom of their hearts. May God only grant you too to see
this.”[410]
Fury had stood by the cradle of Luther’s undertaking and under its
gloomy auspices his cause continued to progress. Without repeating
what has already been said, it may suffice to point out how his
excitement frequently led him to take even momentous steps which he
would otherwise have boggled at. Only too frankly he admitted to
his friend Lang in 1519 and soon after to Spalatin, that Eck had so
exasperated him that he would now shake himself loose and write and do
things from which he would otherwise have refrained. His early “jest”
at Rome’s expense would now become a real warfare against her[411]—as
though Rome was to be made to suffer for Eck and his violence. In
1521, from apprehension of his violence and out of consideration for
the Court, Spalatin had kept back two of Luther’s writings which the
latter wished to be printed. “I shall get into a towering rage,” so
the author wrote to him, “and bring out much worse things on this
subject afterwards if my manuscripts are lost, or you refuse to
surrender them. You cannot destroy the spirit even though you destroy
the lifeless paper.”[412]—This incident at so early a date shows
how deeply seated in him was his tendency to violence; even at the
outset it was to some extent personal animus which led him to shape
his action as he did. Self-esteem and the plaudits of the mob had even
then begun to dim his mental vision.
The part played by the first person is great indeed in Luther’s
writings.
“We should all have fallen back into the state of the brute!” “Not for
a thousand years has God bestowed such great graces on any bishop as on
me.” “I, wonderful monk that I am,” have, by God’s grace, overthrown
the devil of Rome; “I have stamped off the heads of more than twenty
factions, as though they had been worms.” Countless other such
utterances are to be found in what has gone before.[413] “He,” so he
declares, “was surely far too learned to allow himself to be taught
by the Swiss theologians”; this was one of the sayings that led the
friends of the latter to speak of his “tyrannical pride.”[414]
Here come the fractious Sacramentarians, he says, and want a share
in my fame; they want to celebrate a “glorious victory” as though it
was not from me that they got everything. This is how things turn
out, “one labours and some other man takes the fruit.”[415] Carlstadt
comes forward and seeks to become a new doctor; “he is anxious to
detract from my importance and to introduce among the people his own
regulations.”[416]
A character where the first person asserted itself so imperiously could
not but be a disputatious one. Down to his very last years Luther’s
whole life was filled with strife: quarrels with the jurists; with
his own theologians; with the Jews; with the Princes and rapacious
nobility; with the Popish foemen and with his own colleagues and
followers, even with the preachers and writers dearest to him.
Luther sought to safeguard his cause on every side, even at the cost of
concessions at variance with his duty, or by grovelling subserviency
to the Princes, whether he actually granted their desire,[417] or, as
in the case of the bigamy of Henry VIII of England, merely threw out a
suggestion.[418]
His new ethical principles should surely have been attested in his own
person, above all by truthfulness. In this connection we must, however,
recall to mind the observations made elsewhere. (Above, vol. iv., p. 80
ff.)
Who is the lover of truth who does not regret the advice Luther gave
from the Coburg to his followers at the Diet of Augsburg, viz. to
make use of cunning when the cause seemed endangered? Where does
self-betterment come in if “tricks and lapses” are to form a part of
his life’s task, even though “with God’s help” they were afterwards
to be amended;[419] if, when treating of the most important church
matters, “reservation and subterfuge (‘_insidiæ_’)” are not only to be
used but even to be represented as the work of Christ? Wherever the
principle holds: Against the malice of our opponents everything is
lawful,[420] there, undoubtedly, the least honest will always have the
upper hand. As to how far Luther thought himself justified in going in
order to conceal his real intentions we may see from his letters to the
Pope, particularly from the last letter he addressed to him, where the
public assertion of his devotion to the Roman Church coincides with his
private admission to friends that the Pope was Antichrist and that he
had sworn to attack him.[421]
* * * * *
In his relentless polemics against the Church—where he does not
hesitate to bring the most baseless of charges against both her
dignitaries and her institutions—we might dismiss as not uncommon
his tendency to see only what was evil, eagerly setting this in the
foreground while passing over all that was good; his eyes also served
to magnify and distort the dark spots into all manner of grotesque
shapes. But what tells more heavily against him is his having evolved
out of his own mind a mountain of false doctrines which he foists on
the Church as hers, though in reality not one of them but the very
opposite was taught in and by the Church.
The Pope, he writes, for instance, in his “Vermanũg” from the Coburg,
wants to “forbid marriage” and teaches that the “love of woman”
is to be despised; this is one of the abominations and plagues of
Antichrist, for God created woman for the honour and help of man.[422]
The state of celibacy, willingly embraced by many under the Papacy,
Luther decried in the same violent writing as a “state befitting
whores and knaves,”[423] and he even connects with it unmentionable
abominations.
He had declared “contempt of God” to be the mark of the Papal
Antichrist, but, in the booklet in question, and elsewhere, we find
him tirelessly charging with utter forgetfulness of God, hatred of
religion, nay, complete absence of Christian faith not only the Pope
and his advisers—who, none of them rose above an Epicurean faith—but
all his opponents, particularly those who by their pen had damaged his
doctrine. “Willingly enough would I obey the Pope and all the bishops,
but they require me to deny Christ and His Gospel and to take of God
a liar, therefore I prefer to attack them.”[424] When, in addition to
this, he tries in all seriousness to make the people believe that at
Rome the Gospel and all it contained was scoffed at; that the Papists
were all sceptics; that their Doctors did not even know the Ten
Commandments; that their priests were quite unable to quiet any man’s
conscience; that the popish doctrine spelt nothing but murder, and
that indeed every Papist must be a murderer, etc.,[425] one is tempted
to seek for a pathological explanation of so strange a phenomenon.
Such explanations will, it is true, be forthcoming in due course and
will furnish grounds for a more lenient judgment. Here it may suffice
to instance the terrific strength of will which dominated Luther’s
fiery warfare, and which at times made him see things that others,
even his own followers, were absolutely unable to see. Fortunately his
mad statements concerning the Papists’ love of murder found little
credence, any more than his repeated assurance that the Papists were
at heart on his side, at any rate their leaders, writers and educated
men.
He seems, however, also to believe many other monstrous things: it
was his discovery, that, “in the Papacy, men sought to find salvation
in Aristotle”; this belief he attempted to instil into the people in
a sermon of 1528.[426] In 1542 he assured his friends in tones no
less confident that the Papists had succeeded in teaching nothing but
idolatry, “for every work [as taught by them] is idolatry. What they
learnt was nothing but holiness-by-works.... Man was to perform this
or that; to put on a cowl or get his head shaved; whoever did not do
or believe this was damned. Yet, on the other hand, even if a man did
all this they were unable to say with certainty whether thereby he
would be saved. Fie, devil, what sort of doctrine was this!”[427]
The cowl and tonsure of the monks were particularly obnoxious to
him. He cherished the view that he had for ever extirpated monkery;
he declared that even the heads of Catholicism would not in future
endure these hateful guests. To have been instrumental in preparing
such a fate for the sons of the most noble-minded men, of St. Francis
of Assisi and St. Dominic, and for all the monks generally, who had
been the trustiest supports of the faith, of the missions and of
civilisation, this appears to him a triumph, which he proceeds to
magnify out of all proportion the better to gloat over it.
“No greater service has ever been rendered to the bishops and
pastors,” so he writes in his “Vermanũg,” “than that they should thus
be rid of the monks; and I venture to surmise that there is hardly
anyone now at Augsburg who would take the part of the monks and beg
for their reinstatement. Indeed the bishops will not permit such bugs
and lice again to fasten on their fur [their cappas], but are right
glad that I have washed the fur so clean for them.”[428]—The untruth
of this is self-evident. If some few short-sighted or tepid bishops
among them were willing to dispense with the monks, still this was
not the general feeling towards those auxiliaries of the Church, whom
Luther himself on the same page dubs the “Pope’s right-hand men.” But
the lie was calculated to impress those who possessed influence.
Further untruths are found in this booklet: Hitherto, the monks, not
the bishops, had “governed the churches”; it was merely his peaceable
teaching and the power of the Word that had “destroyed” the monks;
this the bishops, “backed by the might of all the kings and with all
the learning of the universities at their command had not been able to
do.”[429] Let no one accuse him of “preaching sedition,” so he goes
on; he had merely “taught the people to keep the peace”;[430] he would
much rather have preferred to end his days in retirement; “for me
there will be no better tidings than to hear that I had been removed
from the office of preacher”; better and more pious heretics than the
Lutherans had never before been met with; he cannot deny that there
is nothing lacking in his doctrine and in that of his “followers ...
whatever their life may be.”[431]
We have here a row of instances of the honesty of his polemics and
of the way in which he treated with the State authorities concerning
the deepest matters of the Church’s life. Often enough his polemics
consist solely of unwarrantable statements concerning his own pacific
intentions and salutary achievements, supported by revolting untruths,
misrepresentations and exaggerations tending to damage his opponents’
case.
Beyond this we frequently find him having recourse to low and unworthy
language, and to filthy and unmannerly abuse. (Vol. iv., p. 318 ff.)
“When they are most angry I say to the Papists,” he cries in his
“Warnunge an seine lieben Deudschen,” “My dear sirs, leave the wall,
relieve yourselves into your drawers and sling it round your neck....
If they do not care to accept my services, then the devil may well be
thankful to them!” etc.[432] “Oh, the shameful Diet, such as has never
before been held or heard of ... an everlasting blot on the whole
Empire! What will the Turk say ... to our allowing the accursed Pope
with his minions to fool and mock at us, to treat us as children, nay,
as clouts and blocks, to our behaving contrary to justice and truth,
nay, with such utter shamelessness in open Diet as regards their
blasphemies, their shameful and Sodomitic life and doctrines?”[433]
These were the words in which he described the Diet of Augsburg in
1530.
We may here recall the saying of Valentine Ickelsamer the Anabaptist.
At one time he had thought of espousing Luther’s cause, but “owing to
the diabolical abuse” which he piled on “erring men” it was possible
to regard him only “as a non-Christian.” Luther wanted to overthrow
his opponents simply by words “of abuse”; these “Saxon rogues of
Wittenberg,” “when unable to get what they want by means of a few kind
words, invoke on you all the curses of the devil.”
Heinrich Bullinger complains repeatedly, and quite as bitterly, of the
frightful storm into which Luther’s eloquence was apt to break out. It
is noteworthy that he applies what he says to Luther’s polemics, not
merely against the Swiss, but against other opponents. “Here all men
have in their hands Luther’s King Harry of England, and another Harry
as well, in his unsavoury Hans Worst; _item_, they have Luther’s book
on the Jews with its hideous letters of the Bible dropped from the
posterior of the pig, which the Jews may swallow, indeed, but never
read; then, again, there is Luther’s filthy, swinish Schemhamphorasch,
for which some small excuse might have been found had it been written
by a swine-herd and not by a famous pastor of souls.”[434]
“And yet most people,” so Bullinger says, “even go so far as to
worship the houndish, filthy eloquence of the man. Thus it comes
that he goes his way and seeks to outdo himself in vituperation....
Many pious and learned people take scandal at his insolence, which
really is beyond measure.” He should have someone at his side to keep
a check on him, so Bullinger tells Bucer, for instance, his friend
Melanchthon, “so that Luther may not ruin a good cause with his
wonted invective, his bitterness, his torrent of bad words and his
ridicule.”[435]
And yet Luther at this very time, in his “Warnunge,” calls himself
“the German Prophet” and “a faithful teacher.”[436]
The following words of Erasmus contain a general censure: “You wish to
be taken for a teacher of the Gospel. In that case, however, would it
not better beseem you not to repel all the prudent and well-meaning
by your vituperation nor to incite men to strife and revolt in these
already troubled times?”[437]—“You snarl at me as an Epicurean. Had
I been an Epicurean and lived in the time of the Apostles and heard
them proclaim the Gospel with such invective, then I fear I should
have remained an Epicurean.... Whoever is conscious of teaching a holy
doctrine should not behave with insolence and delight in malicious
misrepresentation.”[438]—“To what class of spirits,” he had already
asked him, “does yours belong, if indeed it be a spirit at all? And
what unevangelical way is this of inculcating the holy Gospel? Has
perchance the risen Gospel done away with all the laws of public order
so that now one may say and write anything against anyone? Does the
freedom you are bringing back to us spell no more than this?”[439]
_Kindlier Traits and Episodes_
The unprejudiced reader will gladly turn his gaze from pictures such as
the above to the more favourable traits in Luther’s character, which,
as already shown elsewhere,[440] are by no means lacking.
Whoever has the least acquaintance with his Kirchenpostille and
Hauspostille will not scruple to acknowledge the good and morally
elevating undercurrent which runs below his polemics and peculiar
theories. For instance, his exhortations, so warm and eloquent, to
give alms to the needy; his glowing praise of Holy Scripture and of
the consolation its divine words bring to troubled hearts; again, his
efforts to promote education and juvenile instruction; his admonitions
to assist at the sermon and at Divine worship, to avoid envy, strife,
avarice and gluttony, and private no less than public vice of every
kind.
The many who are familiar only with this beautiful and inspiring side
of his writings, and possibly of his labours, must not take it amiss
if, in a work like the present, the historian is no less concerned with
the opposite side of Luther’s writings and whole conduct.
As a matter of fact, gentler tones often mingle with the harsher notes,
while the unpleasant traits just described alter at times and tend
to assume a more favourable aspect. This is occasionally true of his
severity, his defiant and imperious behaviour. He not seldom, thanks
to this art of his, achieved good and eminently creditable results,
particularly in the protection of the poor or oppressed. Many who
were in dire straits were wont to apply to him in order to secure his
powerful intervention with the authorities on their behalf.
During the famine of 1539, when the nobles avariciously cornered the
grain, Luther made strong representations to the Elector and begged him
to come to the assistance of the town. Nor, in the same year, did he
hesitate to address a severe “warning” to the Electoral steward, the
Knight Franz Schott of Coburg, when the town-council at his instigation
was moved to take too precipitate action.[441]
Best known of all, however, was his powerful intervention in the case
of a certain man whose misdeeds were the plague of the Saxon Electorate
from 1534 to 1540; this was Hans Kohlhase, a Berlin merchant. He had
been overreached in a matter of two horses by a certain Saxon squire
of Zaschwitz, and had afterwards lost his case in the courts. In order
to obtain satisfaction Kohlhase formally gave out, that he would
“rob, burn, capture and hold to ransom” the Saxons until he obtained
redress. Incendiary fires broke out shortly after in Wittenberg and
the neighbourhood which were laid to the charge of Kohlhase’s men. The
Elector could think of no better plan than to suggest a settlement
between the merchant, now turned robber-knight, and the heirs of the
above-mentioned squire; it was then that Kohlhase appealed to Luther
for advice.
Luther replied with authority and dignity, not hesitating to rebuke
him for his unprincipled action. He would not escape the wrath of God
if he continued to pursue his unheard-of course of private revenge,
since it stands written that “Vengeance is mine”; the shameful acts of
violence which had been perpetrated by his men would be put down to his
account. He ought not to take the devil as his sponsor. If in spite of
all peaceful efforts he failed to succeed in obtaining his due, then
nothing was left but for him to submit to the Divine decree, which was
always for our best, and to suffer in patience. He consoled him at the
same time in a friendly way for such injury and outrage as he might
have endured; nor was it wrong to seek redress, but this must be done
within the right bounds.[442]
The well-meaning letter, which does Luther credit, had unfortunately no
effect.
The attempted arbitration, owing to the leniency of the Electoral
agent, Hans Metzsch, ended so much to the advantage of Kohlhase that
the Elector, partly owing to his strained relations with Brandenburg,
refused to ratify it. Kohlhase’s bands came from Brandenburg and fell
upon the undefended castles and villages in the Saxon Electorate.
Their raids were also to some extent connived at by the Elector of
Brandenburg. They excited great terror even at Wittenberg itself owing
to sudden attacks made in the vicinity of the town. New attempts to
reach a settlement brought them to a standstill for a while, but soon
the strange civil war—an echo of the Peasant Rising and Revolt of the
Knights—broke out anew and lasted until 1539.
Luther told his friends that such things could never have taken place
under the Landgrave of Hesse; that, as the principal actor had shed
blood, he would himself die a violent death. In 1539 he invited the
Elector of Saxony by letter to act as the father of his country; he
should come to the assistance of his people who were at the mercy of a
criminal, nor should he leave the Elector of Brandenburg a free hand if
it were true that he was implicated in the business.[443]
Finally Kohlhase, after committing excesses even in Brandenburg itself,
was executed at Berlin on March 22, 1540, being broken on the wheel.
On Luther’s admonition to the robber, Protestant legend soon laid
hold, and, even in the second half of the 16th century, we find it
further embellished. There is hardly a popular history of Luther to-day
which does not give the scene where Kohlhase, in disguise, knocks at
Luther’s door one dark night and on his reply to the question, “Art
thou Kohlhase?” is admitted by the latter, explains his quarrel in the
presence of Melanchthon, Cruciger and others and is reconciled with God
and his fellow-men; he then promises to abstain from violence in future
as Luther and his people are willing to help him to his rights, and the
romantic visit closes by the repentant sinner making his confession and
receiving the Supper.
The only chronicler of the March who relates this at the date mentioned
above fails to give any authority for his narrative, nor can it,
as Köstlin-Kawerau points out, be assigned its place “anywhere in
Kohlhase’s life-story as otherwise known to us.”[444] Luther’s own
statements concerning the affair, particularly his last ones, do not
agree with such an ending; throughout he appears as the champion of
outraged justice against a public offender. The not unkindly words in
which Luther had answered Kohlhase’s request were probably responsible
for the legend, which sprang up all the easier seeing that numerous
instances were known where Luther’s powerful intervention had succeeded
in restraining violence and in securing victory for the cause of
justice against the oppressor.[445]
_The Reformation of the Church and Luther’s Ethics_
The defenders of the ancient faith urged very strongly that the first
step towards a real moral reformation of the Church was to depict the
Church as she was to be in accordance with Christ’s institution and
the best traditions, and then, with the help of this standard, to see
how far the Church of the times fell short of this ideal; in order to
reform any institution, so they argued, we must be acquainted with its
primitive shape so as to be able to revert to it.
This they declared they had in vain asked of Luther, who, on the
contrary, seemed bent on subverting the whole Church. They even failed
to see that he had suggested any means wherewith to withstand the moral
shortcomings of the age. In their eyes the radical and destructive
changes on which he so vehemently insisted spelt no real improvement;
the discontent with prevailing conditions which he preached to
the people could not but create a wrong atmosphere; nor could the
abolishing of the Church’s spiritual remedies, the slighting of her
commands and the revolting treatment of the hierarchy serve the cause
of prudent Church reform.
Luther himself, in his so-called “Bull and Reformation,” put forth
his demands for the reform of ecclesiastical conditions as they
presented themselves to his mind during the days of his fiercest
struggle.[446] The “Bull” does not, however, afford any positive scheme
of reformation, as the title might lead one to suppose. It is made up
wholly of denials and polemics, and the same is true of his later works.
According to this writing the bishops are “not merely phantoms and
idols, but folk accursed in God’s sight”; they corrupt souls, and,
against them, “every Christian should strive with body and substance.”
One should “cheerfully do to them everything that they disliked, just
as though they were the devil himself.” All those who now are pastors
must repudiate the obedience which they gave “with the promise of
chastity,” seeing that this obedience was promised, not to God, but to
the devil, “just as a man must repudiate a compact he has made with the
devil.” “This is my Bull, yea, Dr. Luther’s own,” etc.
In this Luther was striking out a new road. Christ and his Apostles had
begun the moral reform of the world by preaching the doing of “penance,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” True enough such a preaching can
never have been so popular with the masses as Luther’s invitation to
overthrow the Church.
Luther’s “Reformation” did not, however, consist merely in the
overthrow of the olden ecclesiasticism; it also strove to counteract
much that was really amiss.
His action had this to recommend it, that it threw into the full light
of day the shady side of ecclesiastical life; after all, knowledge
of the evil is already a step towards its betterment. For centuries
few had had the courage to point a finger at the Church’s wounds so
insistently as Luther; at the ills rampant in the clergy, Church
government and in the faith and morals of the people. His piercing
glance saw into every corner, and, assisted by expert helpers, some of
them formerly officials of the Curia, he laid bare every regrettable
disorder, needless to say not without exaggerating everything to his
heart’s content. Practically, however, Luther’s revelations represent
what was best in the movement which professed to aim at a reform of
morals. Had he not embittered with such unspeakable hate the long list
of shortcomings with which he persistently confronted the olden Church,
had he used it as a means of amendment and not rather as a goad whereby
to excite the masses, then one might have been even more thankful to
him.
It cannot be gainsaid that, particularly at the outset, ethical motives
were at work in him; that he like others felt the burden of the evil,
was certainly no lie.
Yet it must not be forgotten that he attacked the Pope and the Church
so violently, not on account of any refusal to amend, but in order to
clear a path for his subversive views of theology and for the “Evangel”
which had been condemned by ecclesiastical authority. The very
magnitude of the attack he led on the whole conception of the Church,
in itself proves that it was no mere question of defending the rights
of Christian ethics; the removal of moral disorders from Christendom
was to him but a secondary concern, and, moreover, he certainly did
everything he could to render impossible any ordered abolishment of
abuses and any real improvement.
One may even ask whether he had any programme at all for the betterment
of the Church. The question is made almost superfluous by the history
of the struggle. He himself never set up before his mind any regular
programme for his work, whether ecclesiastical, social or even ethical,
when once he had come to see that the idealist scheme in his “An
den christlichen Adel” was impossible of realisation. Hence, when
he had succeeded in destroying the old order in a small portion of
the Church’s territory, he had perforce to begin an uncertain search
after something new whereby to replace it; nothing could be more
hopeless than his efforts to build up from the ruins a new Church and
a new society, a new liturgy and a new canon law, and to improve the
morals of the adherents of his cause. In spite of Luther’s aversion
to the scheme, it came about that the whole work of reformation was,
by the force of circumstances, left to the secular authorities; from
the Consistories down to the school-teachers, from the Marriage
Courts down to the guardians of the poor, everything came into the
hands of the State. Luther had been wont to complain that the Church
in olden days had drawn all secular affairs to herself. Since his
day, on the other hand, everything that pertained to the Church was
secularised. The actual result was a gradual alienation of secular
and ecclesiastical, quite at variance with the theories embodied in
the faith. In this it is impossible to see a true reformation in any
moral meaning of the word, and Luther’s ethics, which made all secular
callings independent of the Church, failed in the event to celebrate
any triumph.
The better to appreciate certain striking contrasts between the
olden Church and her ratification of morality on the one hand and
Luther’s thought on the other, we may glance at his attitude towards
canonisation and excommunication.
Canonisation and excommunication are two opposite poles of the
Church’s life; by the one the Church stamps her heroes with the seal
of perfection and sets them up for the veneration of the faithful; by
the other she excludes the unworthy from her communion, using thereto
the greatest punishment at her command. Both are, to the eye of faith,
powerful levers in the moral life.
Luther, however, laughed both to scorn. The ban he attacked on
principle, particularly after he himself had fallen under it; in this
his action differed from that of Catholic writers, many of whom had
written against the ban though only to lament its abuse and its too
frequent employment for the defence of the material position of the
clergy.
The Pope, according to Luther, had made such a huge “mess in the
Church by means of the Greater Excommunication that the swine could
not get to the end with devouring it.”[447] Christians, according to
him, ought to be taught rather to love the ban of the Church than
to fear it. We ourselves, he cries, put the Pope under the ban and
declare that “the Pope and his followers are no believers.”
Later on, however, he came to see better the use of ghostly penalties
for unseemly conduct and made no odds in emphasising the right of the
community as such to make use of exclusion as a punishment; in view of
the increase of disorders he essayed repeatedly to reintroduce on his
own authority a sort of ban in his Churches.[448]
As early as 1519 Luther had expressed his disapproval of the
canonising of Saints by the Church, a practice which stimulated
the moral efforts of the faithful by setting up an ideal and by
encouraging daily worship; he added, however, that “each one was
free to canonise as much as he pleased.”[449] In 1524, however, he
poured forth his wrath on the never-ending canonisations; as a rule
they were “nothing but Popish Saints and no Christian Saints”;[450]
the foundations made in their honour served “merely to fatten lazy
gluttons and indolent swine in the Churches”; before the Judgment Day
no one could “pronounce any man holy”; Elisabeth, Augustine, Jerome,
Ambrose, Bernard and Francis, even he regarded as holy, though he
would not stake his life on it, seeing there was nothing about them in
Holy Scripture; “but the Pope, nay, all the angels, had not the power
of setting up a new article of faith not contained in Scripture.”[451]