END OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. THE CHURCH-UNSEEN AND THE VISIBLE CHURCH-BY-LAW
1. From Religious Licence to Religious Constraint
_Freedom as the Watchword_
In the early days of his public protest against the olden Church, when
Luther proclaimed the “universal priesthood of all Christians,” there
could as yet be no question of any compulsion in matters of doctrine,
seeing that he expressly conceded to the Christian congregations the
right and power to weigh all doctrines and “to set up or send adrift
their teachers and soul-herds.” Every Christian, so he wrote, who saw
that a true teacher was lacking, was taught and consecrated by God as a
priest and was also bound, “under pain of the loss of his soul and of
incurring the Divine displeasure, to teach the Word of God.”[802] It
is not necessary after all we have already said[803] to point out how
impossible it is to square such far-reaching concessions to freedom with
any idea of a positive body of doctrine. The concessions may, however,
have appealed to him particularly because he himself was disposed to
claim the utmost freedom in respect of the dogmas of Catholicism. In
those days he was delighted to hear himself extolled as the champion
of freedom and the right of private judgment. The interests of his
party made such extravagant toleration commendable, for any attempt at
compulsion in doctrinal matters, particularly at the beginning, would
have lost him many friends. He was also anxious that it should be said of
the new Church that it had spread of its own accord and only owing to the
power of the Word.
In the sermon he preached at Erfurt in 1522 in support of the change
of religion in that town he had declared, that every Christian, thanks
to his kingly priesthood, was an “image of Christ” and a “cleric,” and
“able to judge of all things”; to his decision, based on the Word of
Christ, “the Pope and all his followers were subject”; “he judges all
things and is judged of none.”[804]
Even two years later, in words proclaiming universal freedom of
belief, he had dissuaded the Saxon Princes from taking violent
measures against the fanatics: “Let the spirits fall upon each other
and clash!” What cannot stand must in any case succumb in the fight,
and only those who fight rightly are assured of the crown. “Just let
them preach as they please!”[805]
In 1525 he told Carlstadt and the Sacramentarians that each one was
free to follow his own conscience and to question the Sacrament or
refuse to receive it.[806] This agrees with his statement of 1521: “No
one must be forced into the faith, but the Gospel must be set before
everyone and all be admonished to believe, yet left free to obey or
not. All the Sacraments must be free to everyone.”[807]
Luther registered a formal protest against the ancient right of
proceeding against heretics by means of temporal penalties, particularly
that of death. “To burn heretics is against the will of the Holy Ghost,”
so he declared in 1518 and again in 1520.[808] In 1520 he said: “Heretics
must be overcome by argument, not by fire.”[809]
Most of what he was to say subsequently on the question of public
toleration refers to the bearing of the authorities, especially towards
the Anabaptists and Zwinglians. That he himself, however, and every
follower of his Evangel, were bound to regard all opinions which diverged
from his own as godless heresies and brand them as such, that he had
never doubted from the moment he had discovered his new Evangel. In
accordance with this he proceeds to demand more and more strongly of the
“heretics” within the pale unconditional acceptance of all the articles
of faith.[810]
What were the authorities to do faced by teachings so divergent? In 1523,
in a writing indeed intended mainly for the Catholic rulers and opponents
of his doctrine, Luther is decidedly quite against any interference on
the part of the authorities: “To resist heretics, that is the bishops’
duty to whom this office is committed, not the princes’; for heresy can
never be overborne by a strong hand.… Here God’s Word must fight.”[811]
In April, 1525, in the midst of the Peasant War, in his “Ermanunge,” he
enunciates, not without some thought of his personal ends, this general
principle—“Yes, the authorities must not oppose what each one chooses to
believe and teach, whether it be Gospel or lie; it is enough that they
hinder the preaching of feud and lawlessness.”[812]
Boehmer justly points out, that Luther’s standpoint and doctrine as a
whole, essentially spelt not only “unfettered freedom of teaching, but
also entire freedom of worship.”
Meanwhile, however, Luther had already repeatedly urged those in power,
especially his own sovereign, to do their supposed duty, and back up the
new Evangel by their authority and by forbidding Catholic worship, the
Mass and Catholic sermons.
In what follows we shall deal with Luther’s behaviour towards the
Catholics, as distinguished from his attitude towards sectarians within
his own camp.
_Intolerance Towards Catholics in Theory and Practice_
We should be making a serious mistake were we to judge of Luther’s
tolerance towards the olden religion from his statements above on behalf
of freedom. In Protestant literature, even to the present day, such a
one-sided view has found a place, though it has long since been rejected
by clear-sighted historians of that faith. In the course of the above
narrative instances have been met with repeatedly of Luther’s intolerance
in theory and practice with regard to those who thought differently. Here
we shall refer concisely to various details already set on record and
then draw some new facts and utterances from the abundant store bearing
on the matter in hand.
It was “his duty to oppose false teachers,” Luther had written to his
Elector on May 8, 1522, of the Canons of Altenburg.[813] In the same
way, with much storming, he had insisted that the secular power should
make an end of Catholic worship in the collegiate church of Wittenberg.
From the standpoint of his principles it is rather remarkable that,
when the persecuted Canons of Wittenberg appealed to the Elector’s
authority, Luther retorted: “What has the Elector to do with us in
such things?”[814] and that, later, in one of his sermons, he boldly
replied to their objections in law: “What care we about the Elector?
He commands only in worldly matters.”[815] In making a stand against
the celebration of Mass at Wittenberg he had frankly declared: “It
is the duty of the authorities to resist and to punish such public
blasphemy,” just as they are bound to punish the blasphemies uttered
in the streets by godless men. The Elector and his Councillors were
quite aware of the contradictions involved in Luther’s teaching.
Hence, at the Prince’s instance, the Court pointed out to him on Nov.
24, 1524, that “he himself preached that the Word should be left to
fight its own way, and that this it would do in its own good time, so
God willed”; he ought himself to be the first “to practise what he
taught and preached.”[816] In spite of this Luther, soon after, was
successful in violently making a clean sweep of the Catholic Mass at
Wittenberg.[817]
The theory that the Evangelical ruler must use force to root out
Catholic worship was proclaimed by the Court chaplain Spalatin, a
man “standing altogether under Luther’s influence, and who, as a
rule, merely voiced his views”;[818] this he did in a letter of May
1, 1525, where he cites the prescriptions of the Mosaic law (Deut.
vii.). According to this the secular authorities are bound “by the Law
of God to abrogate idolatrous and blasphemous worship”; any further
toleration on the part of the Elector of “idolatry” in his lands would
be a great sin; on the other hand it would be a “great, consoling and
Christian work” were he “to put the Christian bit in the mouth of
all the clergy.” “Ah, that would indeed be a noble work!”[819] To the
successor of the then Elector who died shortly after this, Spalatin
wrote on Oct. 1, 1525: “Dr. Martin also says, that Your Electoral
Highness ought in no way to suffer anyone to proceed any longer with
the unchristian ceremonies, or to set them up again”;[820] on Jan.
10, 1526, he, together with two Altenburg preachers, backed up the
petition to the Elector for the extirpation of “idolatry” by pointing
to the example of the pious kings of the Jews.[821] At Altenburg and
elsewhere such exhortations were crowned all too speedily with success.
“A secular ruler,” Luther himself wrote to the Elector Johann on Feb. 9,
1526, “must not permit his underlings to be led into strife and discord
by contumacious preachers, for this may issue in uproar and sedition, but
in each locality there must be but one kind of preaching.”[822]
On such grounds, however, Protestantism itself might just as well have
been denied a hearing, seeing that it had come to disturb the peace, the
“one kind of preaching” and the one faith. The princes, however, spurred
on by their theologians, seized only too eagerly on this principle, using
it in favour of the innovations. The Elector Johann declared as early as
Feb. 31, 1526, that he had “graciously taken note of the Memorandum” and
would, “for the future, conduct himself in such matters as beseemed a
Christian”;[823] and he kept his word.
The intolerance shown to Catholics and their systematic oppression in
Saxony stands in blatant contrast with the claim made, that Luther by
his preaching had won religious freedom for the German lands. Banishment
was the punishment incurred by those who chose to remain steadfast in
their attachment to the Catholic faith. Thus, in 1527, it was expressly
laid down in the regulations for the Saxon Visitation, that: “Whoever is
suspected in the matter of the Sacraments, or of any other error in the
faith” is to “be summoned and questioned, and, if necessary, witnesses
against him are also to be called.” “Such an ‘inquisition’ is also to
be instituted by the Visitors in the case of the laity.”[824] If they
refuse to abjure their “errors” they are to be given a certain time to
sell their possessions and to quit the land, with a “warning of the
severe penalties” with which any ecclesiastic or layman will be visited
who is again found in the country.[825] Bearing in mind the difficulty
emigration presented at that time, particularly in the case of the people
on the land, one can appreciate the injustice of the measure.
Luther and his followers frequently enough appealed to theological
grounds in support of such measures, above all to the Old Testament
enactments against blasphemers and contemners of religion. One-sidedly
they simply applied to their own day and to their own controversial
purposes, the exceptional regulations of the Mosaic dispensation which
sought to preserve the religion of the chosen people in the midst of a
heathen world. In this connection Luther appeals to Moses without the
slightest hesitation though, as a rule, armed with the New Testament,
he is ready enough to assail the Mosaic Law; he also set up the pious
“Kings of Juda and Israel” as patterns. Wenceslaus Link did much the
same when he summoned the Altenburg Town-Council to make a stand
against Catholicism and abrogate the “lies and fond inventions of the
idolaters”;[826] nor did Spalatin hesitate to point out to the Saxon
Elector the commendation the pious rulers of the Jews had earned from
God for their bloody repression of idolatry.[827]
Another ground for compulsion, to which Spalatin gives expression in
a letter to the Elector, was, that: They must not forget how “many a
poor man would more readily come to the Evangel, were that wretched
system [of Popery and its idolatry] no longer in existence.” In other
words, were Catholic worship rooted out, Catholics would more easily
be won over to the Evangel.[828] It was on such a standpoint as this
that the Augsburg declaration of 1530 made by the theologians of
the Saxon Electorate was based. The Emperor had demanded from the
Protesting Princes toleration of the Catholic worship for those of
their subjects who chose to remain Catholic. The theologians thereupon
expressed themselves against such an arrangement, and urged that, in
this case, Lutheran proselytism would be hampered: “Were it to be
said that the rulers were not to hinder it, though the preachers were
to preach against it, it is clear of what [small] good would be all
the teaching and preaching of the ministers.”[829]
In the Duchy of Saxony, as everybody knows, the introduction of
Lutheranism was opposed by Duke George. His severity he justified by
appealing to the thousand-year-old law of the one great world-wide
Church, the Church of the Apostles, of the Fathers and martyrs and
Œcumenical Councils and great missioners of all ages, a law, moreover,
sanctioned by the Empire. When, in 1533, a number of Lutherans were
banished from the Duchy[830] Luther seized upon this as a pretext for
controversy. Roundly scolding the “Ducal tyrant,” he declared this
sentence of banishment to be “a devilish and criminal thing.” The
authority of the sovereign, so he now wrote, again contradicting himself,
“only extends over life and property in secular matters.”[831] But, after
George’s death in 1539 and the accession of his brother Henry, Luther’s
tone changed, for Henry held Lutheran views. In a letter he sent about
that time to the Elector Johann Frederick, he is angry because more than
500 of the Saxon clergy, all of them “venomous Papists,” had not yet been
driven out. “For the sake of the poor souls, many thousands of whom live
neglected under such parsons,” he urges the Elector to do his best “to
help and promote a Visitation.”[832] He demands that Duke Henry, as the
sovereign and protector of the bishopric of Meissen, should “put a damper
on the blasphemous idolatry” as best he could, for “the Princes who are
able to do so should at once abolish Baal and all idolatry.”[833] He also
wished that the bishop of Meissen, though a Prince of the Empire, should
“at once bow his head to the Evangel”; in this matter there is no need
for “much disputing.”
It was but natural that such intolerance often led to scenes of
brutality; such was the case in the cathedral of Meissen, where the
splendid tomb of Benno, the saintly bishop of Meissen, was hewn in
pieces, and the statue of the patron, which was an object of veneration
to all the people, was set up headless at the church door as a
laughing-stock for the Lutherans.[834]
Hand in hand with such legal coercion, which he both approved and
furthered, went Luther’s declaration—which, though seeming to promote
freedom, really constituted a new encroachment on the rights of
conscience—viz. that: No one was to be forced to believe in his heart,
but that “the people were to be driven to the sermons for the sake of the
Ten Commandments, so that they might at least learn the outward works
of obedience.”[835] “It would be grand,” so he told Margrave George of
Brandenburg, “if your Serene Highness on the strength of your secular
authority enjoined on both parsons and parishioners under pain of
penalties the teaching and learning of the Catechism, in order, that, as
they are Christians and wish to be called such, they may, please God, be
compelled to learn and to know what a Christian ought to know, whether
he believes it or not.”[836] At his instance attendance at the sermons
was imposed on all people in the Saxon Electorate under pain of penalty,
whatever they might think of the preaching.[837]
God Himself has abrogated “all authority and power where it is
opposed to the Evangel,”[838] so, as early as 1522, ran one of the
principles he used for the violent suppression of Catholic worship. Of
the Catholic foundations he says in the same year: “If the preacher
does not make men pious (i.e. does not preach according to Luther’s
doctrine), the goods are no longer his.”[839] Violent interference
with the Mass was, according to him, no revolt when it came from the
established authorities.[840] “It is the duty of the sovereign, as
ruler and brother Christian, to drive away the wolves,”[841] and those
who do not preach the Evangel are “wolves”; it is “an urgent duty
to drive away the wolf from the sheepfold.”[842] The Pope himself,
however, deserves the worst fate, for he is the “werwolf who devours
everything. Just as all seek to kill the werwolf, and very rightly,
so is it a duty to suppress the Pope by force.”[843]
“Not only the spiritual but also the secular power must yield to the
Evangel, whether cheerfully or otherwise.”[844]
Hence it follows that the salvation of his soul requires of a
Christian prince the prohibition of the Popish worship.[845] If it is
his duty to resist the Turk far more must he oppose the Pope: “What
harm does the Turk do?” It is clear that, “as regards both body and
soul the government of the Pope is ten times worse than that of the
Turk.”[846]
“Whoever wishes to live amongst the burghers must keep the laws of the
borough and not dishonour or abuse them, else he must pack and go.”
The authorities are not to “allow themselves and their people to be
forced into idolatry and falsehood.”[847] Hence “let the authorities
step in and try the case and whichever party does not agree with
Scripture, let him be ordered to hold his tongue.”[848] The Prince
must behave like David, and hold that, as regards “God and the service
of His Sovereignty everything must be equal and made to intermingle,
whether it be termed spiritual or secular,” being “kneaded together
into one cake.”[849] How many false teachers had David, his model, not
been forced “to expel or in other ways stop their mouths.”[850]
It is not, however, enough to impose silence on them. They must—so
Luther began to teach about 1530—be treated as public blasphemers and
punished accordingly:[851] They “must not be suffered but must be
banished as open blasphemers.” Thus must we act with those who “teach
that Christ did not die for our sins but that each one must atone
for them on his own; for this also is a public blasphemy against the
Gospel.”[852] Hundreds of times does he charge the Catholics with
thus robbing the saving death of Christ of all significance by their
doctrine of good works.
These intolerant principles, which could not but lead to persecution,
were made even worse by the abuse and invective which Luther publicly
showered on the representatives of Catholicism. He taught the mob to
call them “blasphemous ministers of the Babylonian whore,” knaves,
bloodhounds, hypocrites and murderers. In the Articles of Schmalkalden
which found a place among the Symbolic Books, he introduces the Pope as
the “dragon” who leads astray the whole world, as the “real Antichrist”
and as the “devil himself” whom it was impossible to “worship as Master
or as God,” for which reason he would not suffer the Pope as “Head or
Lord”; they must say to him: “May God rebuke thee, Satan!” (Zach. iii.
2).[853] Among his monstrous caricatures of the Pope he also included
one depicting the “well-deserved reward of the Most Satanic Pope and his
Cardinals,” as the inscription runs below. Here the Pope is seen on the
gallows with three Cardinals; their tongues which have been torn out by
the root are nailed to the gibbet and devils are scurrying off with their
souls. The picture is embellished with the following doggerel:
“Did Pope and Card’nal here below
Their due reward receive,
Then would their tongues to gibbets cleave,
As our draughtsman’s lines do show.”[854]
_Threats of Bloody Reprisals against Papists, Priestlings and Monks_
At the right moment let us fall upon the Turks “and the priests and smite
them dead!” Only then shall we be successful against the Turks! So runs
one of Luther’s sayings in the Table-Talk.[855]
“Oh, that our Right Reverend Cardinals, Popes and Roman Legates had more
kings of England to put them to death!”[856] This he wrote in 1535, after
the execution of Thomas More and John Fisher by Henry VIII.
As early as 1520 he had exclaimed against Prierias: If thieves are
punished by the rope, murderers by the sword and heretics by fire,
why not proceed against “these noxious teachers of destruction—these
Cardinals, Popes and the whole swarm of the Roman Sodom, who are ever
ceaselessly destroying the Church of God—with every kind of weapon, and
wash our hands in their blood?”[857]
Towards the end of his life, in 1545, he showed that he was still
faithful to such views in spite of all the changes which had come
over some of his other leading ideas. Let “the Pope, the Cardinals
and the whole scoundrelly train of his idolatrous, Popish Holiness
be seized,” so he declares in “Das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” and
put to the death they deserve, either on the gallows to which their
tongues may be nailed, or by drowning the “blasphemous knaves” in the
Sea at Ostia.[858]
“It pleases me,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1536, to King Christian of
Denmark, “that Your Majesty has extirpated the bishops who never cease
to persecute God’s Word and to worry the secular power; I shall do my
best to explain and vindicate your action.”[859] At Wittenberg, as we
see from a letter of a Wittenberg theologian, the report was current
that the Danish king had “struck off the heads of six bishops.”[860]
This false account “seems to have been credited by Luther.”[861] If
this be so, then it seems that he was perfectly ready to justify so
cruel a deed. The truth is, that, King Christian, after having had the
bishops arrested (Aug. 20, 1536), released them as soon as they had
promised to resign their bishoprics.
In the summer of 1540 Luther had it that the Pope and the monks were
to blame for the many fires in Northern and Central Germany. “If this
turns out true, then there will be nothing left for us but to take up
arms in common against all the monks and shavelings; I too shall join
in, for it is right to slay the miscreants like mad dogs.”[862] The
worst of the lot, according to him, were the Franciscans. “If I had
all the Franciscan friars in one house,” he said a few days later, “I
would set fire to it, for, in the monks the good seed is gone, and
only the chaff is left. To the fire with them!”[863]
No one, in the least familiar with Luther’s writings, will be so foolish
as to believe that it was really his intention to kill the Catholic
clergy and monks. His bloodthirsty demands were but the violent outbursts
of his own deep inward intolerance. They were called forth occasionally
by other alleged misdeeds of Popery, of its advocates and friends, for
instance, by the burdensome taxes imposed by the Church, by her use
of excommunication, and by the action taken against the Lutherans,
particularly by the resolutions of the Diets for the suppression of
Protestantism. Nor must we forget that the religious dissensions grew
into a sort of permanent warfare and that war tends to produce effusions
such as would be unthinkable in times of peace; nor was the warlike
feeling a monopoly of the Lutheran side.
But who was it who was responsible for having provoked the war?
Occasional counsels to patience and endurance, to self-restraint and
consideration were indeed given by Luther from time to time[864] (they
have been diligently collected by his modern supporters), but, generally
speaking, they are drowned in the din of his controversial invective.
What was to be expected when the people, who were already profoundly
excited by the social conditions, were told: “Better were it that all
bishops were put to death, and all foundations and convents rooted
out than that one soul should be seduced” by Popish error.[865] “What
better do they deserve than to be stamped out by a great revolt?”[866]
If his reforms were rejected then it was to be wished that monasteries
and foundations “were all reduced to one great heap of ashes.”[867]
“A grand destruction of all the monasteries, etc., would be the best
reformation!”[868] What wonder “were the Princes, the nobles and the
laity to hit Pope, bishop, priest and monk on the head and drive them out
of the land?”[869] The “Rhine would hardly suffice to drown” the many
“bull-mongers,” Cardinals and “knaves.”[870]
_The Death-Penalty Sectarians within the New Fold_
In the above we have dealt with Luther’s intolerance in theory and
practice towards the Catholic Church. It remains for us to look at his
attitude towards the sects within his own camp.
The question, how far they were to be tolerated, or whether it would be
better forcibly to suppress them was first brought home to Luther by
the Anabaptist movement under Thomas Münzer. Sure of the upper hand,
Luther decided, as we know, at the end of July, 1524, to advise the Saxon
Princes to leave the Anabaptists in peace so far as their doctrines were
concerned. “Let them preach as they please,” was his advice, for “there
‘must needs be heresies’” (1 Cor. xi. 19).[871] He explained to Lazarus
Spengler of Nuremberg on Feb. 4, 1525, that the Anabaptists were not
to be punished, particularly with “bodily penalties,” because, in his
opinion, they were no real blasphemers, but merely “like the Turks or
straying Christians.”[872] In May of the same year he showed himself
disposed to universal toleration. “The authorities are not to hinder
anyone from teaching and believing what he pleases”;[873] a principle
which, as we have shown above (p. 239), he himself had contravened in
practice as early as 1522, and was finally to set aside altogether.
As for the Anabaptists, in 1527 Luther was not yet in favour of the
“putting to death” and bloody “rooting out” of these sectarians. In 1528
he even taught in his exposition of the Parable of the Good Seed and
the Tares that “we are not to fight the fanatics with the sword.”[874]
What made him hesitate to advise the putting to death of these heretics
was, as he told his friend Wenceslaus Link of Nuremberg in 1528, the
apprehension that this might lead to abuses; he feared lest, in the time
to come, we might turn the sword against the best “among us.”[875] But
without a doubt he approved of the Edict of the Elector Johann (Jan. 17,
1528) which proscribed the writings of the Anabaptists, Sacramentarians
and fanatics throughout the land—if indeed the Edict itself may not be
traced directly to Luther, as Zwingli suspected.[876] In 1528 it also
seemed to him right to decree the penalty of banishment in the case of
the Anabaptists.[877]
When, however, the danger had become more evident, which the Anabaptist
heresy spelt both to the land-frith and the foundations of Christianity,
not to speak of the Lutheran teaching, Luther adopted a sterner line of
action.
His views altered in 1530. After a Mandate had been issued in the Saxon
Electorate against the “secret preachers and conventicles, Anabaptists
and other baneful novel teaching,” six Anabaptists were executed early in
the year at Reinhardsbrunn in the duchy of Saxe-Gotha. The discussion
which took place on this event gave Melanchthon occasion to declare in
Feb., 1530, that, “even though the Anabaptists do not advocate anything
seditious or openly blasphemous” it was, “in his opinion, the duty of
the authorities to put them to death.”[878] In the spring of 1530, with
the Anabaptists in his mind, Luther, in his commentary on Ps. lxxxii.
dealt with the question whether the authorities “ought to forbid strange
teachings or heresies and punish them, seeing that no one should or can
force men into the Faith.”[879]
His detailed reply to the question which it was then impossible any
longer to blink, centres round the distinction he makes of two kinds
of heretics, viz. those who were seditious, and those who merely
“teach the opposite of some clear article of faith.” Of the latter,
i.e. the non-revolutionary, he says expressly: “These also must not
be allowed but must be punished like public blasphemers.” Of those,
who, though holding no office, force themselves in as preachers, and
thus imperil the faith and lead to risings, he writes, that their oath
of allegiance obliged the burghers not to listen to them but rather
to report them either to their parson or to the authorities. If such
a one will not desist “then let the authorities hand over knaves
of that ilk to their proper master, to wit Master Hans” (i.e. the
hangman).[880] As for those Anabaptists who preached open revolt, they
had, in his opinion, by that very fact incurred the penalties of the
law. At any rate it was not merely on account of their sedition that
Luther wished to see the Anabaptists punished.
Another statement of his has come down to us from an outside source.
Luther’s friend, Lazarus Spengler of Nuremberg, had a little before
this, on March 17, 1530, sought to secure from Luther, through Veit
Dietrich, some directions on how to deal with heretics. Dietrich
verbally obtained from his master the desired instructions and
promptly sent them to Spengler by letter.[881] They were to the effect
that not merely the heretics who offend against public order were
to be punished, but also those who merely do harm to religion, such
as the Sacramentarians (Zwinglians) and Papists; as they are to be
looked upon as blasphemers, they cannot be suffered. It is noteworthy,
that, in Luther’s correspondence in 1530, in a letter from the Coburg
to Justus Jonas, we find him congratulating himself on the report
(a false one) of the execution of a certain heretic. On receiving
the announcement that Johannes Campanus, the anti-Trinitarian, had
suffered death as a heretic at Liége, Luther wrote: “I learnt this
with joy” (“_lætus audivi_”).[882]
Early in October, 1531, agreeably with the Saxon Elector’s Mandate,
a number of persons suspected of holding Anabaptist views were taken
to Eisenach for punishment and were there put to the torture; it was
now judged advisable to obtain a fresh memorandum from the Wittenberg
theologians.
Accordingly, at the end of 1530, Melanchthon at the instance of the
Electoral Court once more took the matter in hand. He drafted a
memorandum on the duty of the secular authorities in the matter of
religious differences, with particular reference to the Anabaptists.
In it he set forth at length the grounds for a regular system of
coercion by the sword. Luther, too, set his name to the document with
the words: “It pleases me, Martin Luther.” In it the sectarians were
reprobated as blasphemers because they reject “the public preaching
office [the ministry] and teach that men can become holy without any
preaching and ecclesiastical worship.” They ought to be visited with
death by the public authorities whose duty it is to “befriend and uphold
ecclesiastical order”; and in like manner should their adherents and
those whom they have led astray be dealt with, who insist, “that our
baptism and preaching is not Christian and therefore that ours is not the
Church of Christ.”[883] Nevertheless, we can see from the words Luther
adds after his signature that the decision, or at least its severity,
aroused some misgivings in him. He says: “Though it may appear cruel to
punish them by the sword, yet it is even more cruel of them to condemn
the preaching office and not to teach any certain doctrine, to persecute
the true doctrine, and, over and above all this, to seek to destroy the
kingdoms of this world.”
It is quite true that Luther and Melanchthon had an eye on the seditious
character of these sects, yet present-day Protestant theologians are
not justified when they try to explain and excuse their severity on
this ground. On the contrary, as we have already pointed out, the texts
plainly show that they were chiefly concerned with the punishment of
the sectarians’ offences against the faith. This was made the principal
point, as we see in Melanchthon’s memorandum just referred to. He says,
for instance: “Though many Anabaptists do not openly teach any seditious
doctrines,” yet “it was both sedition and blasphemy for them to condemn
the public ministry.” It was therefore the duty of the authorities, above
all “on account of the second commandment of the Decalogue, to uphold the
public ministry” and to take steps against them. If, to boot, they also
taught seditious doctrines then it was “all the easier to judge them,”
as we read in another memorandum of the Wittenberg theologians (1536) of
which Melanchthon was also the draughtsman.[884]
To N. Paulus belongs the credit of having thrown light on the true state
of affairs, for, even previous to the publication of his “Protestantismus
und Toleranz im 16 Jahrhundert” (1911) he had discussed Luther’s attitude
both in his shorter writing, “Luther und die Gewissensfreiheit” (1905)
and in various articles in reviews. After him, the Protestant historian
P. Wappler took up the same views, particularly in his “Die Stellung
Kursachsens … zur Täuferbewegung” (1910). In the “Neues Archiv für
sächsische Geschichte” (1911) O. A. Hecker also quite agrees in rejecting
the opinion of certain recent Protestant theologians, who, as he says,
“all try to exonerate Luther from any hand in the executions for heresy,
though they can only do so by dint of forced interpretations, as Paulus
pointed out.”[885]
Between 1530 and 1532 Luther’s intolerance comes yet more to the fore;
it was indeed his way, when once he had made any view his own, to
urge it in the strongest terms. Thus, at the end of 1531, he again
alludes to Master Hans: “Those who force themselves in without any
office or commission are not worthy of being called false prophets but
are vagrants and knaves, who ought to be handed over to the tender
mercies of Master Hans.”[886] “It is not allowed that each one should
proceed according to his own ideas and set up his own doctrine and
fancy himself a sage, and dictate to, and find fault with, others.”
“This I call judging of doctrine, which is one of the greatest and
most scatheful vices on earth, whence indeed all the fanatics have
sprung.” The two last sentences occur in his sermons on St. Matthew’s
Gospel.[887]
Still more striking is the demand he makes of Duke Albert of Prussia
concerning the Zwinglians; here his zeal against these heretics
seems to blind him, for his arguments recoil against himself,
though apparently he does not notice it. Every Prince, he says in a
psychologically remarkable passage, who does not wish “most gruesomely
to burden his conscience” must cast out the Zwinglians from his land,
because, by their denial of the presence of Christ in the Supper, they
set up a doctrine “contrary to the traditional belief held everywhere
and to the unanimous testimony of all.”
But how many doctrines had not Luther himself set up contrary to the
ancient faith and to the unanimous testimony of all? It was, so he
goes on, “both dangerous and terrible” to “believe anything contrary
to the unanimous testimony, belief and teaching of the whole of the
Holy Christian Church, which, from the beginning and for more than
1500 years, had been universally received throughout the world.” This
was tantamount to “not believing in the Christian Church at all, and
not merely to condemn the whole of the Holy Christian Church as a
damned heretic, but also Christ Himself together with all the Apostles
and Prophets, who had formulated the Article which we now recite, ‘I
believe one Holy Christian Church,’ and borne such powerful witness to
it.”[888]
“The worldly authorities bear the sword,” so Luther said in his
Home-Postils, “with orders to prevent all scandal, so that it may not
intrude and do harm. But the most dangerous and horrible scandal is
where false doctrine and worship finds its way in.… For this reason the
Christian authorities must be on the look-out for such scandal.… They
must resist it stoutly and realise that nothing else will do save they
make use of the sword and of the full extent of their power in order to
preserve the doctrine pure and the worship clean and undefiled.”
“Then everything will go well.”[889]
We have also his exposition of Ps. ci. (1534), where there occurs the
eulogy of David, the “scourge of heretics.”[890]
How he was in the habit of dealing with the Sacramentarians at a later
date the following instance may serve to show, which at the same time
reveals his coarseness and his reliance on the secular authorities. To
Luther’s doctrine that Christ was bodily present, not only in the Host,
but throughout the world, the Sacramentarians had rejoined: Good, then we
shall partake of Him everywhere, in “spoon, plate and beer-can!”[891] To
this Luther’s reply ran: See “what graceless swine we abandoned Germans
for the most part are, lacking both manners and reason, who, when we
hear of God, esteem it a fairy tale.… All seek to do their business into
it and to wipe their back parts on it. The temporal authorities ought
to punish such blasphemers.… God knows I write of such high things most
unwillingly because they must needs be set before such dogs and swine.…
Hearken you, you pig, dog, or fanatic, or whatever brainless donkey you
may be: Though Christ’s body is everywhere, yet you will not be able to
lay hold of it so easily.… Begone to your pigsty and wallow in your own
muck! … there is a distinction between His Presence and your laying hold
of Him; He is free and nowhere bound,” etc.—Luther himself was, however,
very far from making clear what the distinction was. After much else not
to the point he concludes: “Oh, how few there are, even among the highly
learned, who have ever meditated so profoundly on this article concerning
Christ!”[892]
* * * * *
The treatment of the sectarians in the Saxon Electorate was in keeping
with the theories and counsels of Luther and his theologians.
Relentless measures were taken against them on account of their deviation
from the faith even when no charge of sedition was forthcoming. On Jan.
15, 1532, the Elector Johann admitted the following as his guiding
principle for interfering: “It is the duty of the authorities to punish
such teachers and seducers, with God and with a good conscience.… For
were heretics and contemners of the Word of God not punished we should
be acting against the prescribed laws which we are in every way bound to
observe.”[893]
As early as 1527 twelve men and one woman, who had received baptism at
each other’s hands, were beheaded.[894] Similar executions took place
in 1530, 1532 and 1538.[895]
In 1539 the members of the Wittenberg High Court wrote concerning
three Anabaptists then in prison at Eisenach: “If they do not recant
or allow themselves to be reduced to obedience, it will be right and
proper that they be put to death by the sword, on account of such
blasphemy and because they have allowed themselves to be baptised
elsewhere.” Of any seditious teaching there was no question in these
proceedings.[896]
One Anabaptist, Fritz Erbe, who had only gone astray in matters
of faith, was kept in jail from 1530 to 1541, when death set him
free.[897] Hans Sturm and Peter Pestel, both of Zwickau, were harmless
sectarians without any seditious leanings; the first was put in prison
in 1529 and died there; the latter was beheaded on June 16, 1536.[898]
Hans Steinsdorf and Hans Hamster, were condemned to death in 1538 as
“stubborn blasphemers.”[899] In the ’forties Duke Henry of Saxony
caused an Anabaptist to be burnt as a heretic at Dresden.[900]
The Saxon lawyer, Matthias Coler (†1587), taught in his “_Decisiones
Germaniæ_,” that, according to the laws of Saxony those were to be
punished by death at the stake (“_de iure saxonico cremandi veniunt_”)
who openly denied either the Divinity of Christ, or other important
truths of faith; before being burnt they were, however, to be questioned
under torture concerning their confederates in order that the land might
be purged of such wicked men.[901]
In thus interfering the sovereigns were well aware that they had the
warm official approval of Luther and his fellows. To this, for instance,
the Elector Johann Frederick appealed in 1533 when milder measures were
suggested. He referred to the memorandum which his father had obtained
from the Wittenberg theologians and lawyers concerning the execution of
the Anabaptists; their decision had been, “that His Highness might with
a good conscience cause those charged with Anabaptism to be punished by
death,” and, soon after, several of them were executed.[902] The person
who had thought otherwise, and to whom this vindication was accordingly
addressed, was no less a man than Landgrave Philip of Hesse.
Luther himself, too, had been obliged on various occasions to justify the
severity of his opinions.
_Luther’s Self-justification and Excuses_
Philip of Hesse, though he treated Catholics with the utmost intolerance,
refused to hear of punishing the Anabaptists with death unless indeed
they were the cause of public disturbances. “We cannot find it in our
conscience to put anyone to death by the sword on account of religion
unless we have sufficient proof of other crimes as well.” Such was the
declaration he made in 1532 to Elector Johann of Saxony, and which
he emphasised in 1545 to the latter’s successor: “Were all those to
be executed who are not of our faith what then should we do to the
Papists, to say nothing of the Jews, who err even more greatly than the
Anabaptists?”[903]
Luther was apparently far surer of his case. He is as confident,
subsequent to 1530, in drawing from Scripture the principles for the
treatment of the heretics as he is in defending them against the obvious
objections so often brought against them.
Luther had it that the line of action for which he stood was not coercion
to any definite religious practices. “Our Princes,” so he sought to
reassure himself as early as 1525, “do not force people to the faith and
to the Evangel but merely set a term to outward abominations.”[904]
The Elector, as was to be expected, expressed himself likewise: “Though
it is not our intention to prescribe to anyone what he must hold or
believe, yet, in order to guard against harmful uprisings and other
disorders, we refuse to recognise or permit any sects or schisms within
our Princedom.”[905]
Many a one amongst the new Doctors had begun, as a Protestant
historian of Saxony points out,[906] “to claim for his conscience the
same right” (as Luther), while “following other paths than Luther
had trodden” (in his search after God). May not, indeed, must not,
such a one, so ran the objection, follow his conscience, seeing that
Luther himself tells us to consult our conscience? Yes, he may, is
Luther’s reply, but, if he be truthful, then he will admit my plain
interpretation of the Bible as the right one, for “I have floored and
overcome all my foes on the sure groundwork of Holy Scripture.”[907]
Moreover, might not the Princes holding Popish views seize on the
coercion taught by the Lutherans as a pretext for similar measures
against the Lutherans in their territories?
No, replies Luther, they must not do so for they would be committing
the same sin as the Kings of Israel when they “slew the true
prophets”; but on account of the injustice of such slaughter, we
are not to make nought of the law or refrain from stoning the false
prophets. “Pious authorities will not punish anyone unless they see,
hear, learn or know for certain that they are blasphemers.”[908]—Even
should Kaiser Charles come and tell us, that he is convinced that
“the doctrine of the Papists is true, and that he must therefore, in
accordance with God’s command, use all his power to extirpate our
heretical doctrines in his Empire,” we must answer, that: “We know he
is not certain of this, and, in fact, cannot be certain.”[909]
But does this not come to much the same as imposing faith by some sort
of compulsion?
No, is his answer. “The faith is not thereby forced on anyone, for he
is free to believe what he pleases. He is only forbidden to indulge
in that teaching and blaspheming whereby he seeks to rob God and
Christians of their doctrine and Word, whilst all the while enjoying
their protection and all temporal advantages. Let him go where there
are no Christians and have things his way there.”[910]
The severity of his demands is hardly mitigated or excused by the right
he gives people to leave the country. At any rate those who do not see
eye to eye with him must get themselves gone, for, as he frequently
remarks, whoever wishes to dwell among the burghers must not disregard
the laws of the borough.[911]
“By all this, however,” so he says on another occasion, “no one is forced
into the faith but the common man is merely set free from troublesome and
obstinate spirits, and the knavery of the hole-and-corner preachers is
checked.”[912] Thus, if the man who thinks otherwise wishes to lock up
his convictions in his own breast, he is quite free to do so. Within, he
may enjoy the most far-reaching freedom, since no earthly power extends
to his thoughts. The reply of those concerned was, however, obvious;
what right, they asked, had the new religious tribunal to prevent a man
from revealing his convictions and openly living up to them, and was not
the order to keep silence tantamount to a stifling of conscience and to
forcing people to become hypocrites?
Hence, in the ensuing discussions, we find that Luther and his friends
were ever making fresh efforts to meet the objections; in itself this
was a sign of the weakness of the exclusivism adopted by the Lutherans,
in spite of all they had formerly said, as soon as they had succeeded in
winning the favour of the State.
“Some argue,” we read in the memorandum of the Wittenbergers published in
1536, “that the secular authorities have no concern whatever with ghostly
matters. This is going much too far.… The rulers must not only protect
the life and belongings of their underlings, but their highest duty is
to promote the honour of God and to prevent blasphemy and idolatry,”
etc.[913]
The memorandum was intended for Philip of Hesse. As Luther was aware that
the Landgrave was loath to proceed to extremities with the Anabaptists,
he added to the memorandum a note of his own. “Seeing that His Serene
Highness the Landgrave reports that certain leaders and teachers of the
Anabaptists … have not kept their promise (viz. to quit the land) Your
Serene Highness may with a good conscience cause them to be punished with
the sword, for this reason also, to wit, that they have not kept their
oath or promise. Such is the rule. Yet Your Serene Highness, needless to
say, may at all times allow justice to be tempered with mercy, according
to the circumstances.”[914]
If meant in earnest the latter recommendation to mercy does the speaker
credit and is the more noteworthy because, in his later years, we do not
often hear him pleading for the heretics. As a rule he is all too intent
on emphasising the wickedness of what he terms “blasphemy and idolatry,”
i.e. of whatever was at variance with his own teaching.
But what—and this is the main objection—entitles Luther’s doctrine
to be regarded as the standard of belief? This point Luther usually
evaded. He says: Those heretics are to be punished “whose teaching
is at variance with the public articles of the faith which are
plainly grounded on Scripture and believed throughout the world by
the whole of Christendom.”[915] “Such articles, common to the whole
of Christendom, have already been sufficiently tested, examined,
proved and determined by Scripture and by the confession of the whole
of Christendom, confirmed by many miracles, sealed by the blood of
the holy Martyrs, witnessed to and defended by the books of all
the Doctors and are not now to become the prey of faultfinders or
cavillers.”[916] A sharp answer, one very much to the point, was given
by Bullinger of Zürich, who spoke of it as “truly laughable” that his
opponent should suddenly appeal to the fact “of the Church having so
long held this.” “If Luther’s argument, based on longstanding usage,
be admitted, then is Popery quite in the right when it harps on the
Church and her age. But then the whole of Luther’s own doctrine
tumbles over, for his teaching is not that which the Roman Church
has held for so long.”[917]—Nor is it easy to tell which points of
doctrine Luther, in his elastic fashion, included among the articles
“clearly founded on Scripture” and held unquestioningly by the whole
of Christendom. His words occasionally presuppose that all divergent
doctrines, not only those of the Sacramentarians and Anabaptists, but
even those of the Papists, were to be punished by the authorities.
If everyone is to be punished who teaches “that Christ has not died
for our sins but that each one must himself make satisfaction for
them,”[918] (a doctrine unjustly foisted on the Papists by Luther),
or who “condemns the public ministry and draws the people away from
it,” or who “insists that our baptism and preaching are not Christian
and therefore that our Church is not the Church of Christ,”[919]
etc.,—then many Catholics could not but fall victims to the sword of
the authorities. How often did not Luther designate every specifically
Catholic doctrine as rank “blasphemy,” and stigmatise every Catholic
practice as idolatry? Blasphemy and idolatry were, however, according
to him, to be rooted out by violence. Truly his words gave promise of
an abundant harvest of persecution.
As a reason of his animus against heretics within his own fold Luther
finally brings forward those personal considerations which are familiar
to all who have followed his controversies.
His natural foes are those who in their “peculiar wisdom” “seek to
teach something besides Christ and beyond our preaching.”[920] Hence
he was fond of insisting that Christ was slaying the Papacy through
him, and of rejecting all who “make a great pother” and “claim to know
something new.” They come, and, like Carlstadt, want to “seize upon
the prize and poach upon my preserves.” Had not Carlstadt come along
“with the fanatics, Münzer and the Anabaptists, all would have gone
well with my undertaking.”[921] These men want to “darken the sun of
the Evangel” so that the world “may forget all that has hitherto been
taught by us.”[922]
“They want to have nothing to do with me,” he complains of the
fanatics, “and I want to have nothing to do with them. They boast that
they have nothing from me, for which I heartily thank God; I have
borrowed even less from them, for which, too, God be praised.”[923]
The rupture with the Swiss came about because they “wished to be
first.”[924]
In all these dissensions he finds many a one saying to the Christians:
“I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin.” And yet he alone had the
right to call himself the “great Doctor” “to whom God first revealed
His Word to preach.”[925]
But did not his very self-reliance finally broaden the ideas of the
preacher of coercion? Did not Luther in a sermon preached at Eisleben on
Feb. 7, 1546, as good as repudiate his former exclusivism?
It is true that this has been confidently asserted by Protestants,
but the text of this sermon, known only through Aurifaber’s Notes,
does not justify such an inference.[926] In it the preacher is not
treating of the attitude of the Christian authorities towards heresy,
but is only showing how the faithful and the preachers must behave,
surrounded as they are by wicked folk, by Anabaptists and sectarians.
The occasion for speaking of this was supplied by the Sunday Gospel of
the Tares, Matt. xiii. 24-30, which grow up together with the wheat in
God’s field, and which the Lord wishes to be left undisturbed until
the Day of Judgment. Hence he explains how this must be understood,
the local conditions probably supplying him with a particular reason
for doing so, seeing that, in the County of Mansfeld, there must
still have been some Catholics and that the Jews stood in favour. The
greater part of the Sermon on the Tares is devoted to describing the
passions and lusts which Christians must fight against in their own
hearts with patience and perseverance. It is only towards the end
that he speaks of the wickedness rampant in the world. He refutes
the opinion of those, who “would have a Church in which there is no
evil but where all are prudent and pious, and pure and holy”; thus
“the Anabaptists, Münzer and such like, wish to root out and put to
death everything that is not holy.” Hence “how are we to suffer the
heretics and yet not to suffer them? How am I to act? If I tear up
or root out the tares in one place then I spoil the wheat [according
to the Parable], and the weeds will still grow up again elsewhere.
Thus if I root out one heretic, yet the same devil-sown seed springs
up again in ten other places.” Hence we must look to it that we do
not make matters worse by violence and suppression. “Papists and
Jews will ever be with us.” “You will not succeed in this world in
entirely separating the heretics and false Christians from the just.”
“Look to it that you remain master in your own household; see to it,
you preachers, parsons and hearers [it is only to these that he is
addressing himself, not to the State authorities], that heretics and
seditious men, such as Münzer was, do not rule or dominate; grumble
in a corner, that indeed they may do, but that they should mount the
rostrum, get into the pulpit or go up to the altar, that, so far as
in you lies, you must not allow.” Care must be taken that the “pulpit
and the Sacrament are kept undefiled.” “By human might and power we
cannot root them out, or make them different. For, in this point, they
are often far superior to us, can get themselves a following, draw the
masses to them, and, on the top of it all, they have on their side the
prince of this world, viz. the devil.”
The main thing therefore is that the heretics “should not rule in our
Churches.”
But what are we to do against the tares, against the Papists and
Sophists, against Cologne, Louvain and the devil’s other thistles? Of
boils it holds good: “Let them swell until they burst. So too it is in
secular and domestic government: Where [whether in the Town Council or
among the servants] we cannot get rid of the wicked without harm or
detriment, there we must put up with them until the time is ripe.”
In this much-discussed Sermon on the Tares Luther is very far from
wishing to give the authorities directions as to how to treat the
sectarians. On the contrary he makes it plain that some other line
of action than that described by him must be followed even by the
faithful and the preachers, and much more so by the Christian
authorities, whenever the heretics come out of their “corner” and try
to climb into the pulpit or mount the altar. What was to be done that
the pulpit and the Sacrament might remain undefiled, he had already
sufficiently explained elsewhere. Naturally, a sermon on the Gospel
which tells us to leave the Tares until the harvest was scarcely the
place for Luther to expound his severer theories on the treatment to
be meted out to unbelievers and misbelievers, so that his silence here
cannot be taken as a repudiation of the measures for which he so long
had stood. At the close of the next sermon, the last he was ever to
preach, addressing himself to the nobility, he speaks very harshly
of the Jews. “If they refuse to be converted, then, as blasphemers,
they deserve that we should not suffer or endure them among us.” “You
Lords ought not to tolerate but rather expel them.” This duty he bases
on his usual principle: “Were I to tolerate the man who dishonours,
blasphemes and curses Christ my Master, I should be making myself a
partaker in the sins of others.”
His system of coercing and punishing heretics he certainly never
repudiated.
_Compulsory Attendance at Church_
“Facts have shown,” Luther wrote to Spalatin in 1527 of the conditions
in his new churches, “that men despise the Evangel and insist on being
compelled by the law and the sword.”[927] He was very anxious to make
attendance at the Lutheran preaching a matter of obligation.
According to his earlier statements, attendance at the preaching had
been voluntary, for the matter of the sermons was to be judged by the
hearers, in order that they might avoid what was harmful; his subsequent
practice of driving all to the preaching made an end of this freedom,
or rather duty. Through the authorities, so far as his influence went,
he insisted on this principle: “Even though they do not believe they
must nevertheless, for the sake of the Ten Commandments, be driven
to the preaching, so that they may at least learn the outward work
of obedience.” He wrote this at a time when he had already justified
such coercion at Wittenberg, viz. on Aug. 26, 1529, in a letter to the
“strict and steadfast” Joseph Levin Metzsch of Mila, who was shortly
after appointed by the Elector to take part in the Visitation.[928]
Instructions sent by Luther on the same day to Thomas Löscher, pastor of
the same locality, are to the same effect (“_cogendi sunt ad conciones …
audiant etiam inviti_”).[929] The orders of the authorities concerning
public worship were represented in the Visitation Rules for the pastors
(1528) as universally binding: “All secular authority is to be obeyed
because the secular powers are not ordering a new worship but enforcing
peace and charity.”[930] The Preface of the Smaller Catechism (1531) was
on the same lines. “Although we neither can nor should force anyone into
the faith, yet the masses must be held and driven to it in order that
they may know what is right or wrong in those among whom they live.”[931]
In the same year Luther advised Margrave George of Brandenburg to
compel the people to attend the Catechism “at the behest of the secular
authority,” for, since they “are Christians and wish to be so called,” it
was only fitting “they should be obliged to learn what a Christian ought
to know.” The Ansbach preachers embodied this requirement in the same
year in the alterations they proposed in the church-regulations.[932]
Wittenberg served as the pattern. It was to Wittenberg that Leonard Beyer
addressed himself when he succeeded Luther’s friend, Nicholas Hausmann,
as pastor of Zwickau. Luther answered his letter by describing the system
of coercion practised in Wittenberg and the neighbourhood when people
persistently neglected to attend the sermons: “With the authority and in
the name of our Most Noble Prince it is our custom to affright those who
disregard all piety and fail to attend the preaching, and to threaten
them with banishment and the law. This is the first step. Then, if they
do not amend, the pastors are enjoined by us to ply them for a month or
more with instructions and representations, and, finally, in the event
of their still proving contumacious, to excommunicate them, and to break
off all intercourse with them as though they were heathen.” He concludes:
“The words of the Bible [Matt. xviii. 17; 2 Thes. iii. 6] concerning the
avoidance of heretics are quite clear.”[933]—He, however, forgets to add
that neither he nor the pastors had ever been quite successful in their
attempts at excommunication.
The above regulations of the authorities were to remain in force. In
1533 the Prince once more insisted that: No one is to be permitted
to absent himself from the “common church-going,” everyone must be
“earnestly reminded of this.”[934] In the General Articles of 1557 it
was determined by the Elector August, that, whoever absented himself
without permission from the sermon on Sundays and festivals, whether in
the morning or afternoon, “more particularly in the villages” was to be
fined, or, if he was poor, “to be punished with the pillory, either at
the church or at some prison.”[935] The parsons, however, were to notify
the authorities of any who contemned the preaching and the sacraments,
or who obstinately persisted in their false opinion. Even the practice
of auricular confession was, at a later date, made a strict law; whoever
evaded confession and the Supper was liable to banishment.[936] The
Saxon lawyer, Benedict Carpzov (1595-1666) in his “_Iurisprudentia
ecclesiastica_” defended as self-evident the legal principle based
on the practice of Luther’s own country: “Those, who, after repeated
admonitions, maliciously absent themselves from the Supper, are to be
expelled from the land; they are to be compelled to sell their goods and
emigrate.”[937] The same scholarly lawyer elsewhere alludes to the Saxon
custom of condemning seditious and blasphemous heretics to die at the
stake.[938]
* * * * *
At Wittenberg strong ramparts were set up for the protection of the
Lutheran doctrine and to prevent divergent opinions finding their way in.
The Statutes of the Theological Faculty, probably drawn up in 1533 by
Melanchthon with Luther’s approval,[939] made it strictly incumbent
on the teachers to preach the pure doctrine in accordance with the
Confession of Augsburg; in the event of any difference of opinion a
commission of judges was to decide; “after that the false opinion
shall no longer be defended; if anyone obstinately persists in so
doing, he is to be punished with such severity as to prevent him any
more spreading abroad his wicked views.”[940] “The same Luther,” says
Paulsen of this, “who, twelve years before, had declared that his
conscience would not allow of his conceding to Christendom assembled
in Council the right to determine the formula of faith, now claimed
for the Wittenberg faculty—for this is what it amounts to—the
unquestionable right to decide on faith. From 1535 to the day of his
death Luther was without a break Dean of this Faculty.”[941]
Again, subsequent to 1535, the preachers and pastors sent out or
officially recommended by Wittenberg had to take the so-called
“Ordination Oath” which had been suggested by the Elector in order
to exclude false preachers. The ministers to be appointed within
the Electorate, and likewise those destined to take up appointments
elsewhere, had to submit at Wittenberg to a searching examination on
doctrine; only after passing it and taking an oath as to the future
could they receive their commission. The examination is referred
to in the Certificate of Ordination. Thus, in the Certificate of
Heinrich Bock (who was sent to Reval in Livonia) which is dated May
17, 1540, and signed by Luther, Bugenhagen, Jonas and Melanchthon,
it is set forth that he had undertaken to “preach to the people
steadfastly and faithfully the pure doctrine of the Gospel which
our Church confesses.” It is also stated that he adheres to the
“consensus” of the “Catholic Church of Christ,” and, for this reason,
is recommended to the Church of Reval.[942] A similar Certificate for
the schoolmaster Johann Fischer, who had received a call to Rudolstadt
“to the ministry of the Gospel,” is dated a month earlier. His
doctrine, so it declares, had been found on examination to be pure and
in accordance with the Catholic doctrine of the Gospel as professed
by the Wittenbergers; a promise had also been received from him to
teach the same faithfully to the people; for this reason “his call has
been confirmed by public ordination.”[943] Fischer had received the
“diaconate.”
As early as 1535 we read of the solemn ordination of a certain Johann
(Golhart?), “examined by us and publicly ordained in the presence of
our Church with prayers and hymns.” He was “ordained and confirmed by
order of our sovereign,” having been called and chosen as “assistant
minister” at Gotha by the local congregation headed by their pastor
Myconius.[944]
The doctrine of the punishment of heretics was afterwards incorporated by
Melanchthon in 1552, in the Wittenberg instructions composed by him and
entitled: “The Examination of Ordinands.”[945]
_Opinions of Protestant Historians_
The above account of Luther’s intolerance is very much at variance with
the Protestant view still current to some extent in erudite circles, but
more particularly in popular literature. Luther, for all the harshness
of his disposition, is yet regarded as having in principle advocated
leniency, as having been a champion of personal religious freedom, and
having only sanctioned severity towards the Anabaptists because of the
danger of revolt. Below we shall, however, quote a series of statements
from Protestant writers who have risen superior to such party prejudice.
Walther Köhler, in his “Reformation und Ketzerprozess” (1901), wrote:
“In Luther’s case it is impossible to speak of liberty of conscience
or religious freedom.” “The death-penalty for heresy rested on the
highest Lutheran authority.”[946] According to Köhler there can
be no doubt that prosecution for heresy among the Protestants was
practically Luther’s doing. “The views of the other reformers on
the persecution and bringing to justice of heretics were merely the
outgrowth of Luther’s plan, they contributed nothing fresh.”[947] The
same writer is of opinion that the question, whether Luther would have
approved of the execution of Servetus “must undoubtedly be answered
in the affirmative.”[948] “It is certain that Luther would have
agreed to the execution of Servetus; heresy as heresy is according
to him deserving of death.”[949] One observation made by Köhler
is significant enough, viz. “that, when the preaching of the Word
proved ineffectual against the heretics,” Luther had recourse to the
intervention of the secular authorities.[950]
The matter has been examined with equal frankness by P. Wappler
in various studies in which he utilises new data taken from the
archives.[951]
“That Luther in principle regarded the death penalty in the case of
heretics as just, even where there was no harm done to the ‘_regna
mundi_,’” says Wappler, “is plain from the advice given by him on
Oct. 20, 1534, to Prince Johann of Anhalt in reply to his inquiry
concerning the attitude to be adopted towards the Anabaptists at
Zerbst.” “The fact is, that from the commencement of 1530 the
reformers cease to make any real distinction between the two classes
of heretics [the seditious ones and those who merely taught false
doctrines]. Heretics who merely ‘blasphemed’ were always regarded by
them, at least where they remained obdurate, as practically guilty
of sedition, and, consequently, as deserving the death penalty.”
“The principal part in this was played by Luther, Melanchthon being
merely the draughtsman of the memoranda in which Luther’s ideas on
the question of heretics were reduced to a certain system.”[952]
“The many executions, even of Anabaptists who are known to have
not been revolutionaries and who were put to death on the strength
of the declarations of the Wittenberg theologians, refute only too
plainly all attempts to deny the clear fact, viz. that Luther himself
approved of the death penalty even in the case of such as were merely
heretics.”[953]
Wappler, after showing how Luther’s wish was, that everyone who
preached without orders should be handed over to “Master Hans,”
adds: “And what he said, was undoubtedly meant in earnest; shortly
before this, on Jan. 18, 1530, as Luther had doubtless learned from
Melanchthon, at Reinhardsbrunn near Gotha, six such persons had
been handed over to Master Hans, i.e. to the executioner, and duly
executed.” Wappler regards it as futile to urge that: “Luther could
not prevent executions taking place in the Saxon Electorate”; it is
wrong to put the blame on Melanchthon rather than on Luther for the
putting to death of heretics.[954]
Speaking of the execution of Peter Pestel at Zwickau, the same
author[955] declares that it was “a sad sign of the unfortunate
direction so early [1536] taken by the Lutheran reformation that its
representatives should allow this man, who had neither disseminated
his doctrine in his native land nor rebaptised … to die a felon’s
death.” “Even contempt of the outward Word,” he says, “carelessness
about going to church and contempt of Scripture—in this instance
contempt for the Bible as interpreted by Luther—was now regarded as
‘rank blasphemy,’ which it was the duty of the authorities to punish
as such. To such lengths had the vaunted freedom of the Gospel now
gone.”[956] The introduction of the Saxon Inquisition (See above, vol.
v., 593) leads him to remark: “The principle of evangelical freedom of
belief and liberty of conscience, which Luther had championed barely
two years earlier, was here most shamefully repudiated, particularly
by this lay inquisition, and yet Luther said never a word in
protest.”[957]
In 1874 W. Maurenbrecher expressed it as his opinion that “Luther’s
tolerance in theory as well as in practice amounted to this: The
Church and her ministers were to denounce such as went astray in the
faith, whereupon it became the duty of the secular authorities to
chastise them as open heretics.”[958] In 1885 L. Keller declared:
“It merely displays ignorance of the actual happenings of that
epoch, when many people, even to-day, take it for granted that such
executions and the wholesale persecution of the Anabaptists were only
on account of sedition, and that the reformers had no hand in these
things.”[959] “Luther indeed demands toleration,” says K. Rieker, “but
only for the Evangelicals; he demands freedom, but merely for the
preaching of the Evangel.”[960] According to Adolf Harnack “one of the
Reformer’s most noticeable limitations was his inability either fully
to absorb the cultural elements of his time, or to recognise the right
and duty of unfettered research.”[961]
In Saxony, so H. Barge, Carlstadt’s biographer, complains, “the
police-force was mobilised for the defence of pure doctrine”;
“and Luther played the part of prompter” to the intolerant Saxon
government.[962] “Luther’s harsh, violent and impatient ways” and
their “unfortunate” outcome are admitted unreservedly by P. Kalkhoff,
another Luther researcher.[963] G. Lœsche calls Paulus’s studies on
Strasburg a “Warning against the edifying sentimentality of Protestant
make-believe.”[964] Luther “demanded freedom for himself alone and
for his doctrine,” remarks E. Friedberg, “not for those doctrines,
which he regarded as erroneous.”[965] Neander, the Protestant
Church-historian, speaking of Luther’s views in general as given by
Dietrich, says they “would justify all sorts of oppression on the
part of the State, and all kinds of intellectual tyranny, and were in
fact the same as those on which the Roman Emperors acted when they
persecuted Christianity.”[966]
Two quotations from Catholic authors may be added. The above passage
from Köhler reads curiously like the following statement of C.
Ulenburg, an olden Catholic polemic; writing in 1589 he said: “When
Luther saw that his disciples were gradually falling away from him
and, acting on the principle of freedom of conscience, were treating
him as he had previously treated the olden Church, he came to think of
having recourse to coercion against such folk.”[967]
“Historically nothing is more incorrect,” wrote Döllinger in his
Catholic days, “than the assertion that the Reformation was a movement
in favour of intellectual freedom. The exact contrary is the truth.
For themselves it is true, Lutherans and Calvinists claimed liberty
of conscience as all men have done in every age, but to grant it to
others never occurred to them so long as they were the stronger side.
The complete suppression and extirpation of the Catholic Church, and
in fact of everything that stood in their way, was regarded by the
reformers as something entirely natural.”[968]—Luther’s principles,
aided by the arbitrary interference of the secular power in matters
of faith, especially where Catholics were concerned, led both in his
age and in the following, “to a despotism” “the like of which,” as
Döllinger expresses it, “had not hitherto been known; the new system
as worked out by the theologians and lawyers was even worse than the
Byzantine practice.”[969]
_Luther’s Spirit in his Fellows_
The question concerning Melanchthon raised by Protestant historians,
viz. whether it was he who converted Luther to his intolerance, or,
whether, on the other hand, he himself was influenced by Luther, cannot,
on the strength of the documents, be answered either affirmatively or
negatively. In some respects Melanchthon struck out his own paths, in
others he merely followed in Luther’s wake.[970] He was by no means loath
to making use of coercion in the case of doctrines differing from his
own. His able pen had the doubtful merit of expressing in fluent language
what Luther thought and said in private, as we see from the Memoranda
still extant. His ill-will with the Papacy and the hostile sects within
the new fold, was, it is true, as a rule not so blatant as Luther’s; he
was fond of displaying in his style that moderation dear to the humanist;
yet we have spontaneous outbursts of his which sound a very harsh note
and which doubtless were due to his old and intimate spiritual kinship
with Luther.
For instance, we have the wish he expressed, that God would send
King Henry VIII a “valiant murderer to make an end of him,”[971]
and, again, his warm approval of Calvin’s execution of the heretic
Michael Servetus in 1554 (a “pious and memorable example for all
posterity”)[972]. He himself wrote about that time a special treatise
in defence of the use of the sword against those who spread erroneous
doctrines.[973]
With regard to Melanchthon A. Hänel says: To Protestantism “religious
freedom was denied at every point.” When Melanchthon wrote to Calvin
in praise of the execution of Servetus, his letter, according to
Hänel, “was not, as has been imagined, dictated by the mere passion of
the moment, but was the harsh consequence of a harsh doctrine.”[974]
It must be admitted, remarks the Protestant theologian A. Hunzinger,
“that Melanchthon was wont to lose no time in having recourse to
fire and sword. This forms a dark blot on his life. Many a man fell
a victim to his memorandum, who certainly had no wish to destroy the
‘_regna mundi_.’”[975]
In consequence of the precipitate and often brutal intervention of
the authorities against real or alleged heretics Melanchthon had
afterwards abundant reason to regret his appeal to the secular power.
He himself, as early as Aug. 31, 1530, had foretold, “that, later,
a far more insufferable tyranny would arise than had ever before
been known,” viz. the tyranny due to the interference of the Princes
in whose hands the power of persecution had been laid. Hence his
exclamation: “If only I could revive the jurisdiction of the bishops!
For I see what sort of Church we shall have if the ecclesiastical
constitution is destroyed.”[976] As we know, he was anxious gradually
to graft the old ecclesiastical constitution on Luther’s congregations.
Coming from Luther and fostered by Melanchthon, these intolerant ideas
profoundly influenced all their friends.
Not as though there was ever any lack of opponents of the theory of
coercion among the Protestants, or even in Luther’s own flock. On the
contrary there were some who had the sense of justice and the courage
to resist the current of intolerance coming from Wittenberg. Indeed it
was the protests which Luther encountered at Nuremberg which led him to
emphasise his harsh demands.
Already in 1530 Luther’s follower Lazarus Spengler wrote from
Nuremberg to Veit Dietrich begging him to seek advice of Luther and to
request his literary help; in the town there were some who opposed any
measures of coercion against the divergent doctrines, “some of ours,
who are not fanatics but are regarded as good Christians,” desire that
neither the “Sacramentarians nor the Anabaptists” should be prosecuted
so long as they do not “stir up revolt,” nor yet the errors prohibited
of “the preachers of the godless Mass and other idolatries”; “they
appeal on behalf of this to Dr. Luther’s booklet, which he some while
ago addressed to Duke Frederick the Elector of Saxony against the
fanatic Thomas Münzer, in which he approves this view and admits it to
be quite sound.”[977]
At Augsburg (1533) the Lutheran lawyer, Conrad Hel, siding with his
Catholic-minded confrères Conrad Peutinger and Johann Rehlinger[978]
openly and courageously denied the Town-Councils any rights in the
matter. In 1534 Christoph Ehem, a patrician of Augsburg, who also held
Lutheran views, wrote a little work in which he demanded universal
and unconditional toleration and invited the Council to place some
“bridle and restraint” on the new preachers.[979] At that time (1536)
the Lutheran preacher Johann Forster protested very strongly against
Bucer, and refused to hear of the forcible suppression of Catholic
worship in Cathedral churches outside the jurisdiction of the civic
authorities; he appealed in this matter to Luther. Bucer just then
was bent on suppressing the Catholic worship with the help of the
magistrates. Forster was finally silenced by dint of “ranting, raging
and shouting” and was indignantly asked: “Whether he wished to
tolerate Popery and submit to such idolatry?”[980]
At Strasburg in 1528 the Protestant Town-Clerk, Peter Butz, set a
brave example by openly and severely condemning in the Council the
system of coercion planned by some of the preachers. Against the
intolerance towards sectarians advocated by Bucer, preachers and
scholars like Anton Engelbrecht, Wolfgang Schultheiss, Johann Sapidus
and Jacob Ziegler were not slow to protest,[981] though they had
nothing to say against the violent abolition of Catholic worship.
At Coire the preacher Johann Gantner came into conflict with Bullinger
on account of the coercive measures favoured by the latter; he
reproached the inhabitants of Zürich and Berne with having fallen
away from the freedom of the Evangel into the Mosaic bondage. Gantner
and others, in support of their protest, usually appealed against the
prevailing tendency to Sebastian Franck’s “Chronica,” published at
Strasburg in 1531.[982]
Sebastian Franck, the witty and learned opponent of Luther, “after Luther
himself, the best and most popular German prose writer of the day,” took
the line of pushing to its bitter end Luther’s subjectivism. He declared
that the new preachers had made of Holy Scripture a paper idol for the
benefit of their private views, and that the Lutheran Church was the
invisible kingdom of Christ and as such numbered among its members men
of every sect; hence he argued that what was termed false doctrine and
false worship should not be interfered with.[983] As Kawerau points
out, Franck found in the 16th century “not a few readers wherever
dissatisfaction prevailed with the Papacy of the theologians”;[984]
nevertheless, in 1531, he was expelled from Strasburg on account of
his liberal views; later on, when he had taken up his residence at
Ulm, Melanchthon wrote thither, in 1535, that he should be “dealt with
severely” (“_severe coercendum_”) no less than Schwenckfeld.[985] Driven
from Ulm he went to Basle in 1539, but even there the echo of the verdict
of the Wittenbergers reached him; in March, 1540, the theologians
assembled at Schmalkalden, condemned him and charged him with “inducing
people to seek the spirit while neglecting the ‘Word’”; they themselves,
they added, had broken with the Churches of the Pope because of their
idolatry, but there was “no reason whatever for throwing over the
ministry in our own Churches.”[986]
As we have already shown, Landgrave Philip of Hesse was likewise
disposed to be less intolerant than Luther, at least with regard to
the Anabaptists. Relentlessly as he refused any public toleration to
the Catholic faith and banished those Catholics who persisted in their
religious practices, yet, in a letter of 1532, addressed to Elector
Johann of Saxony, he declared himself against the execution of the
Anabaptists; the actual words have been quoted above (p. 256). In another
letter, in 1545, to the Elector Johann Frederick, he also points out,
that: “If this sect be punished so severely by us, then we, by our
example, give our foes, the Papists, reason to treat us in the same way,
for they regard us as no better than the Anabaptists.”[987]
* * * * *
These and similar remonstrances were unavailing to change the views which
had taken root at Wittenberg.
George Major, Professor of theology at Wittenberg University, was a
learned and zealous disciple of Luther’s. He, like Melanchthon, on
hearing of the execution of Servetus at Geneva, declared that Calvin
was to be commended for having put to death the heretic, and, at a
Disputation held in 1555, expressly defended the thesis, that it was
the duty of the authorities to punish contumacious heretics with death.
They must “get rid of blasphemers, perjurers and wizards. Amongst the
blasphemers must, however, be reckoned those who persistently defend
idolatrous worship, or heresies which clearly disagree with the articles
of the faith.”[988]
Luther’s code of penalties for any deviation from the Wittenberg teaching
fitted in well with Bugenhagen’s natural harshness, who showed himself
only too ready to make his own the words of Moses concerning the slaying
of unbelievers. We may recall how, in conversation, when Luther mentioned
the difficulties he had with Carlstadt, Agricola and Schenk, Bugenhagen
broke in with the remark: “Sir Doctor, we ought to do what is commanded
in Deuteronomy where Moses says they should be put to death.”[989]
Bugenhagen, in the many places into which he brought the new faith, was
relentlessly severe in enforcing against the Catholics the principles
he had carried with him from Wittenberg. Very characteristic is the
tone in which he reported to Luther that the Mass had been forbidden
in Denmark and the monks driven out of the land as “seditionmongers”
and “blasphemers.”[990] Not only had the bishops been imprisoned, but,
according to the account of Peter Palladius the superintendent, some of
the monks “had been hanged.”[991]
Justus Jonas began his labours at Halle in 1542 by a written invitation
to the Town-Council “completely to purge the town of false doctrine
and every kind of idolatrous worship”; Luther and Melanchthon had
sufficiently proved in their works that this “was incumbent on Christian
magistrates.” He declared that the monks still living in the town were
“obstinate and impenitent idolaters,” “adders and snakes” whom he “must
reduce to silence with the use of the gag”; already, throughout the
whole neighbourhood, “merely at the exhortations of the preachers, the
monasteries, with their Masses and idolatrous worship, had crumbled
into ruins.”[992] Later, in a memorandum addressed to the Town-Council
in 1546, Jonas again inveighed against the remaining handful of
well-disposed and zealous monks, and called to mind how “our beloved
father, Dr. Martin, in the very last sermon he preached at Halle
shortly before his decease, had exhorted the Town-Council and the whole
Church with all his burning, stormy earnestness to rid themselves of
the crawling things.”[993] Jonas appealed to his own “conscience” and
threatened to report matters to the Elector of Saxony and “his Electoral
Highness’s scholars at Wittenberg.”[994] With the outbreak of the
Schmalkalden war, when the Electoral troops laid waste the monasteries
his hopes at last found their fulfilment. He announced on March 3, 1547,
that, at Halle, the “Papistic idolatry” had now been swept away;[995]
when he wrote this he did not expect the change in the position of the
Catholics in the town, for which the defeat of the Elector’s troops in
the following month was responsible.
We are reminded how greatly Spalatin was imbued with Luther’s exclusivism
and spirit of intolerance by his words concerning the “Christian bit”
which he wished placed in the mouths of all the clergy.[996] He was
at great pains to press upon the sovereign that he was not to permit
“unchristian ceremonies” and “idolatry.”[997]
The Elector Johann was merely giving expression to the views with which
Spalatin and Luther had inspired him when he declared that, “heretics
and contemners of the Word” must in every instance be punished by the
authorities.[998] His successor, Johann Frederick, likewise followed
obediently the “Wittenberg theologians and lawyers,” as he terms his
authorities.[999] He instructed Melanchthon in 1536 to write and have
printed a popular “Answer to sundry unchristian articles” against the
Anabaptists, which was to be read aloud from the pulpit every third
Sunday, and which insisted that the secular authorities were bound to
punish “all contempt of Scripture and the outward Word” as “blatant
blasphemy.”[1000]
At the Religious Conference at Worms in 1557 quite a number of
respected Lutheran theologians (J. Brenz, J. Marbach, M. Diller,
J. Pistorius, J. Andreæ, G. Karg, P. Eber and G. Rungius) signed
a lengthy statement by Melanchthon aimed at the Anabaptists. As
one of the errors of the sect is instanced their teaching that God
communicates Himself without the intermediary of the ministry, of
preaching or the Sacrament. Those “heads and ringleaders” of the
sect who persisted in their doctrines were “to be condemned as
guilty of sedition and blasphemy and put to death by the sword”; the
death penalty prescribed in Leviticus for blasphemers was asserted
to be a “natural law, binding, by virtue of their office, on all in
authority,” hence “the judges had done the right thing” when they
condemned to death the heretic Servetus at Geneva.[1001]
Johann Brenz, who helped to promote Lutheranism in Würtemberg, had,
in 1528, written and published a pamphlet in which he deprecated the
Anabaptists’ being put to death “merely on account of heresy” when
not guilty of sedition.[1002] He was for this reason regarded by
Melanchthon as “too mild.”[1003] His later writings, however, show
that the intolerant spirit of Wittenberg finally seized on him too.
In his treatment of Catholics—both previous to 1528, and, even more
so when the olden worship had been suppressed at Schwäbisch-Halle and
he had been called to Stuttgart—he was in the forefront in advising
violent measures against Catholic practices. When he reorganised the
Church in Würtemberg, in 1536, after the victory of Duke Ulrich,
attendance at the Protestant sermons was made obligatory on the
Catholics of Stuttgart under pain of a fine, or of imprisonment in
the tower on bread and water.[1004] Brenz, though widely extolled
as tolerant and broadminded, in his quality of spiritual adviser to
Duke Christopher, stooped to the meanest and most petty regulations
in order to induce the nuns who still remained faithful to their
religion—many of whom were of high birth and advanced in years—to
accept the new faith; they were compelled to attend the sermons and
religious colloquies, deprived of their books of devotion, their
correspondence was supervised, they had to entertain Protestant guests
at table and to be served by Lutheran maids, etc.[1005]
* * * * *
The unenviable distinction of having most thoroughly assimilated
Luther’s intolerant views was enjoyed by two men in close mental
kinship with him, viz. Justus Menius and Johann Spangenberg.
Johann Spangenberg, an enthusiastic pupil of Luther’s, and, later,
Superintendent at Eisleben, when preacher at Nordhausen declared in
a tract that “fear of God’s wrath and His extreme displeasure” had
rightly led the Town-Council to forbid Catholics to attend Catholic
sermons, because, there, souls were “horribly murdered”; even
Nabuchodonosor and Darius had set the authorities an example of how
“blasphemy against religion” was to be treated.[1006]
Justus Menius, Luther’s friend, who worked as superintendent at
Eisenach and Gotha, followed Luther in qualifying the Anabaptists as
the emissaries of the devil, as “rebels and murderers,” who had fallen
under the ban of the authorities because they did not “profess the
true faith according to the Word of God” and live a “godly life.” Of
the authorities who were negligent in punishing them he exclaims: “The
devil rides such rulers so that they sin and do what is unrighteous.”
Luther himself wrote laudatory prefaces to his works on the subject.
In 1552 Menius demanded from Duke Albert of Prussia a severe
prohibition against the new believers’ teaching or writing anything
that was at variance with the Confession of Augsburg. When, however,
his opponents secured the ear of the Court he had himself to suffer;
the ruler pointed out to him that, in accordance with his own theories
of the supremacy of the sovereign, it was the duty of the authorities,
by virtue of their princely office, to withstand false doctrine and,
consequently, he himself must either submit or go to prison; upon this
Menius made his escape to Leipzig (†1558).[1007]
Urban Rhegius, appointed General Superintendent by Duke Ernest of
Brunswick-Lüneburg after the Diet of Augsburg, not only defended
in his writings a relentless system of compulsion whereby Catholic
parents were no longer permitted even in their homes to instruct
their children in the Catholic faith, but also allowed “Zwinglians
and Papists to be beaten with rods and banished from the town.” The
authorities he invited to appropriate the property of the clergy. The
inglorious war he waged against the nuns of Lüneburg, who, in spite of
every kind of persecution, stood true to their religion, has recently
been brought to light, and that, thanks to Protestant research;
it forms one of the blackest pages in the history of Lutheran
intolerance.[1008]
A memorial of the Strasburg preachers dating from 1535 (printed in
1537) which might be termed the fullest and most complete exposition
of the Royal Supremacy in church affairs drafted in that period,
is the work of Wolfgang Capito, a preacher often extolled for his
moderation and prudence.[1009] In it we have the picture of a
Government-Church with a “Caliph” (Döllinger’s expression) at its
head, who combines in himself the highest secular and spiritual
authority.
Martin Bucer though differing from Luther in much else was yet at one
with him in asserting that it was the duty of the secular authority to
abolish “false doctrine and perverted ceremonials,” and that, as the
sole authority, it was to be obeyed by “all the bishops and clergy.”
Though anxious to be regarded as considerate and peaceable, he defended
the prohibition against Catholic sermons issued at Augsburg by the
City-Council in 1534, and even incited it to still more stringent
measures against the Catholics. He advocated quite openly “the power of
the authorities over consciences.”[1010] “Among us Christians,” he asks,
“is injury and slaughter of souls by false worship of less importance
than the ravishing of wives and daughters?”[1011] He never rested until,
in 1537, with the help of such hot-heads as Wolfgang Musculus, he brought
about the entire suppression of the Mass at Augsburg. At his instigation
“many fine paintings, monuments and ancient works of art in the churches
were wantonly torn, broken and smashed.”[1012] Whoever refused to submit
and attend public worship was obliged within eight days to quit the
city-boundaries. Catholic citizens were forbidden under severe penalties
to attend Catholic worship elsewhere, and special guards were stationed
at the gates to prevent any such attempt.[1013]
In other of the Imperial cities Bucer acted with no less violence and
intolerance, for instance, at Ulm, where he supported Œcolampadius and
Ambrose Blaurer in 1531, and at Strasburg where he acted in concert with
Capito, Caspar Hedio, Matthæus Zell and others. Here, in 1529, after
the Town-Council had prohibited Catholic worship, the Councillors were
requested by the preachers to help to fill the empty churches by issuing
regulations prescribing attendance at the sermons. Bucer adhered till
his death (1551), as his work “_De Regno Christi_” (1550) proves, to
the principle of the rights and duties of authorities towards the new
religion.[1014]
In the above survey of those who preached religious intolerance only
Luther’s own pupils and followers have been considered; the result would
be even less cheering were the leaders of the other Protestant sects
added to the list.
At Zürich, Zwingli’s State-Church grew up much as Luther’s did in
Germany; Œcolampadius at Basle and Zwingli’s successor, Bullinger, were
strong compulsionists. Calvin’s name is even more closely bound up
with the idea of religious absolutism, while the task of handing down
to posterity his harsh doctrine of religious compulsion was undertaken
by Beza in his notorious work “_De hæreticis a civili magistratu
puniendis_.” The annals of the Established Church of England were
likewise at the outset written in blood.
The sufferings endured by the Catholics in Germany owing to the wave of
intolerance which spread from Wittenberg are reflected in the countless
complaints we hear at that time. Many writings still tell to-day of
the injustice under which they groaned. In a “Manual of Complaint and
Consolation for all oppressed Christians” we read as follows: “Oh, what
a mockery it is that these tyrants and abusers of power should exclaim
everywhere that their gospel is Christian freedom, that they have no wish
to tyrannise over consciences when there could never have been worse
tyrants than those men who do not scruple to go on unceasingly tormenting
the consciences of the people, robbing them of the consolation of the
holy sacraments of the religious ministrations of consecrated priests,
of all their prayer-books and devotional works, and, even on their
death-beds, in spite of their piteous entreaties refusing them the Holy
Viaticum!”[1015] This touching complaint is made more particularly in the
name of those most defenceless members of society, who were devoid of
legal protection and whose very poverty made emigration impossible. “All
the iniquities committed in German lands and cities are attested at the
Judgment-Seat of God by the souls of thousands of consecrated nuns, who
never did wrong to anyone and who asked for nothing more than permission
to live and die in their ancient faith, even though their worldly
goods should be taken away from them and they shut up within closed
walls.”[1016]
2. Luther as Judge
It must not be overlooked that Luther’s severity towards heretics within
his fold is to be set down largely to his nervous irritability arising
partly out of his natural temperament, partly out of his unceasing
labours, so that, if we are to be just to him, his conviction that his
doctrine was the only authorised one must not be held to be entirely
responsible for his behaviour. At the same time it is plain how deeply he
was affected by belief in his higher mission. Thus he practically made
himself a religious dictator, when, in 1542, he demanded that the Meissen
nobles who had come over to him should not only ratify their new belief
by doing penance, but also should “signify their approval of everything
which has hitherto been done by us and shall be done in the future.”[1017]
Another point on which we must also do him justice is the service
performed by him in his controversies with rivals, in the field both
of theology and Scripture-exegesis, by repressing with such energy and
general success the dangerous tendencies apparent in the Anabaptist
heresy and the Antinomianism of Johann Agricola. In the attacks of
the Antinomians on all law, even on the Decalogue, there undoubtedly
lay a great danger for morality and religion. Certain of Luther’s
own principles were carried to rash, nay, foolhardy, lengths by the
Antinomians. Hence it was not unfortunate that Agricola found pitted
against him so redoubtable an opponent as Luther who, as was his wont,
interfered and nipped the evil in the bud.
_The Conceit and the Obstinacy of the “Heretics”_
Luther bitterly accuses of boundless presumption all the heretics within
the New Faith, but particularly Agricola. The latter might even be
classed with those doctors who might most fittingly be compared with
Arius and treated in the same way.
“This man,” he says of Agricola, “is presumption itself. Neither with
the flute nor with tears is he to be won.… I see it is my goodness
that puffs him up. He says he is a guiltless Abel. He is, forsooth,
being made a martyr at my hands.…” But, so Luther continues, he will
be such a martyr as was Arius and Satan.[1018]
In 1542, when the conversation at table turned on the teachers of the
New Faith whose opinions differed from Luther’s, a good many names
were mentioned, “Those at Zürich” (Zwingli’s pupils), Carlstadt, Bucer
and Capito, “Grickel and Jeckel”—some of them living and some of them
already dead—all of whom were insufferably presumptuous. It was then
that Bugenhagen, who was present, could not refrain from quoting the
passage in the Old Testament where Moses had commanded in God’s name
“That prophet shall be slain because he spoke to draw you away from
the Lord your God.… If thy brother would persuade thee (to serve other
gods), thou shalt presently put him to death. Let thy hand be the
first upon him and afterwards the hands of all the people. With stones
shall he be stoned to death: because he would have withdrawn thee
from the Lord thy God. If in one of the cities thou hear that some
have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, inquire carefully and
diligently the truth of the thing by looking well into it, and if thou
find that which is said to be certain and that this abomination hath
been committed, thou shalt forthwith kill the inhabitants of that city
with the edge of the sword, and shalt destroy it and all things that
are in it, even to the cattle.”[1019]
Hence it was perhaps rather lucky that the Wittenberg tribunal
was presided over by the sovereign of the land, and that the
sentences pronounced at Luther’s table or in the learned circles
of the Theological Faculty required subsequent ratification by the
authorities.
Luther’s complaints elsewhere about the pride of the heretics throw
still further light on the jealousy which was at work in him (above,
p. 260).
“How is it that all the insurgents say ‘I am the man?’ They want all
the glory for themselves and hate and are grim with all others, just
like the Pope who also wants to stand alone.”[1020] Zwingli appears to
be one of the foremost among those desirous of robbing him of his due
glory. “He was ambitious through and through.”[1021] On hearing that
Zwingli had said that, in three years, he would have France, Spain and
England “on his side and for his share,” Luther became very bitter
and several times complained of Zwingli’s intention to seize upon his
harvest; such words seemed to him the “boasting of a braggart.”[1022]
“Œcolampadius, too, fancied himself the doctor of doctors and far
above me, even before he had ever heard me.” And in the same way
Carlstadt said: “As for you, Sir Doctor, I don’t care a snap! Münzer,
too, preached against two Popes, the old one and the new,[1023]
said I must be a Saul, and that though I had made a good beginning,
the Spirit of God had left me.… Hence let all the theologians and
preachers look to it and diligently beware lest they seek their glory
in Holy Scripture and in God’s Word; otherwise they will have a
fall.”[1024]—“Mr. Eisleben [Johann Agricola] labours under great pride
and presumption; he wants to be the only one, and, with his pride and
his puffed-up spirit, to surpass all others.”[1025] “They are scamps,”
so he abuses them in another passage, “fain would they get at us and
surpass us, as though forsooth we were blind and could not see through
their tricks.”[1026]
Elsewhere in the Table-Talk we read: “My best friends,” said Dr.
Martin, with a deep sigh, “seek to stamp me under foot and to trouble
and besmirch the Evangel; hence I am going to hold a disputation.”
“Alas, that, in my own lifetime, I should see them strutting about and
seeking to rule.” It was with him as with St. Paul to whom God wished
to show how much he must suffer for His Name’s sake (Acts ix. 16).
Some indeed were trying to persuade him that these foes in his own
household were not really against Luther, but only against Cruciger,
Rörer, etc. But this was false. “For the Catechism, the Exposition
of the Ten Commandments and the Confession of Augsburg are mine, not
Cruciger’s or Rörer’s.”[1027]
Of those near him “Mr. Eisleben” (Agricola) seemed to him his chief
rival; those abroad troubled him less; for a while Luther was obsessed
by the idea that Agricola, “with his cool head, was set on securing
the reins and was seeking to become a great lord.”[1028]
Of Carlstadt Luther once said, referring to the rivalry between
the pair: “He persuaded himself that there was no more learned man
on earth than he; what I write that he imitates and seeks to copy
me.” After a profession of personal humility, Luther concludes: “And
yet, by God’s Grace, I am more learned than all the Sophists and
theologians of the Schools.”[1029]
Though Luther never grows weary of insisting against the heretics at
home on the “public, common doctrine,” and of instancing the fell
consequences of pride and obstinacy, even going so far as to predict that
they will in all likelihood never be converted because founders of sects
rarely retrace their steps and recant,[1030] yet he never seems to have
perceived that the point of all this might equally well have been turned
against himself.
The blindness of such heretics he describes in a tract of 1526 dedicated
to Queen Mary of Hungary:
“Here we may all of us well be afraid, and particularly all heretics
and false teachers.… Such a temper [obstinacy in sticking to one’s
own opinion] penetrates like water into the inmost recesses and like
oil into the very bone, and becomes our daily clothing. Then it comes
about that one party curses the other, and the doctrine of one is rank
poison and malediction to the other, and his own doctrine nothing
but blessing and salvation; this we now see among our fanatics and
Papists. Then everything is lost. The masses are not converted; a few,
whom God has chosen, come right again, but the others remain under
the curse and even regard it as a precious thing.… Nor have I ever
read of heresiarchs being converted; they remain obdurate in their
own conceit, the oil has gone into the bone … and has become part of
their nature. They allow none to find fault with them and brook no
opposition. This is the sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is
no forgiveness.”[1031]
In the same writing he describes the heretics’ way of speaking: “The
heretics give themselves up to idle talk so that one hears of nothing
but their dreams.… They overflow with words; all evildoers tend to
become garrulous. As a boiling pot foams and bubbles over, so they too
overflow with the talk of which their heart is full.… They stand stiff
upon their doctrine about which there is no lack of ranting.”[1032]
The description (which seats so well on Luther himself) proceeds:
“Those are heretics and apostates who follow their own ideas rather
than the common tradition of Christendom, who transgress the teaching
of their fathers and separate themselves from the common ways and
usages of the whole of Christendom, who, out of pure wantonness,
invent new ways and methods without cause, and contrary to Holy
Writ.”[1033]—“They misread the Word of God according to their whim and
make it mean what they please. In short they undertake something out
of the common and invent a belief of their own, regardless of God’s
Word.… God must put up with their doctrine and life as being alone
holy and Godly.”[1034]
Again and again he brands pride as the cause of all heresy: “This
is the reason; they think much of themselves, which, indeed, is the
cause and well-spring of all heresies, for, as Augustine also says,
‘Ambition is the mother of all heresies.’ Thus Zwingli and Bucer
now put forward a new doctrine.… So dangerous a thing is pride in
the clergy.”[1035]—“We cannot sufficiently be on our guard against
this deadly vice. Vices of the body are gross, and we feel them to
be such, but this vice can always deck itself out with the glory of
God, as though it had God’s Word on its side. But beneath the outward
veil there is nothing but vain glory.”[1036]—“Lo, here you have in
brief the cause and ground of all idolatry, heresy, hypocrisy and
error, what the prophets inveigh against, and what was the cause of
their being put to death, and against which the whole of Scripture
witnesses. It all comes from obstinacy and conceit and the ideas of
natural reason which puffs itself up … and fancies it knows enough,
and can find its way for itself, etc.”[1037]
Such statements of Luther’s are of supreme importance for judging of his
Divine Mission. In his frame of mind it became at last an impossibility
for him to realise that his hostility and intolerance towards “heretics”
within his fold could redound on himself, or that he was contradicting
himself in continuing to proclaim freedom, or at least in continuing
to make the fullest use of it himself. In reality he was living in a
world of his own, and his mental state cannot be judged of by the usual
standards.
_“Heretics” who cannot be sure of their Cause_
Apart from the “pride of the heretics,” another idea of Luther’s deserves
attention, viz. that those teachers who differed from him, in their heart
of hearts, knew him to be in the right, or at least neither were nor
could be quite certain of their own doctrines. Of any call in their case
there could be no question; his call, however, was above doubt, seeing
his certainty. Hence, in his dealings with the “sectarians” we once
again find the same strange attitude, as he had exhibited towards the
“Papists,” who, according to him, likewise were withstanding their own
conscience and lacked any real call.
To a man so full of such fiery enthusiasm for his cause and so dominated
by his imagination as Luther, it seems to have been an easy task to
persuade himself ever more and more firmly, that all his opponents’
doings were against their own conscience.
The “teachers of faith,” he says, speaking of the sectarians, ought
first of all “to be certain about their mission. Otherwise all is
up with them. It was this [argument] that killed Œcolampadius. He
could not endure the self-accusation: How if you have taught what is
false?”[1038] Concerning Œcolampadius Luther professed to know that,
even in his prayers, he had been doubtful of his own doctrine. But,
so he argues, if a man goes so far as to pray for the spread of his
doctrine he must surely first be “quite certain and not doubt thus
of the Word and of his doctrine, for doubts and uncertainty have
no place in theology, but a man must be certain of his case in the
face of God.” Before the world, indeed, he continues, with a strange
limitation of his previous assertion, “it behoves one to be humble,
to proceed gently and to say: If anyone knows better, let him say so;
to God’s Word I will gladly yield when I am better instructed.”[1039]
Yet, in the same works, where seemingly he professes such willingness
to listen to others, he himself proclaims most emphatically his great
mission and its exclusive character.[1040]
All heretics, he once remarked, were disarmed by this one question:
“My friend, is it the command of our Lord God [that you should teach
thus]? At this, one and all are struck dumb.”[1041] Only by dint
of lying are they able to boast of their inward assurance of their
cause. Here we have Campanus for instance: “He boasts that he is
as sure as sure can be of his cause and that it is impossible for
him to be mistaken.” “But he is an accursed lump of filth whom we
ought to despise and not bother our heads about writing against, for
this only makes him more bold, proud and brave.… Whereupon Master
Philip [Melanchthon] said: his suggestion would be that he should be
strung up on the gallows, and this he had written to his lord [the
Elector].”[1042]
With his own “certainty” Luther triumphantly confronts his opponents
who at heart were uncertain: “Every man who speaks the Word of Christ
is free to boast that his mouth is the mouth of Christ”; such a one,
confiding in his certainty, may help to “tear Antichrist out of men’s
hearts, so that his cause may no longer avail.”[1043]—“But, now,
the articles of pure doctrine are proved [by me] from Scripture in
the clearest way, and yet it carries no weight with them; never has
an article of the faith been preached which has not more than once
been attacked and contradicted by heretics, who, nevertheless, read
the same Scriptures as we.”[1044]—“In short, ‘heretics must needs
arise’ (1 Cor. xi. 19), and that cannot be stopped, for it was so
even in the Apostles’ time. We are no better off than our fathers;
Christ Himself was persecuted.”[1045] “No heretic allows himself to
be convinced. They neither see nor hear anything, like Master Stiffel
[Michael Stiefel]; he saw me not nor heard me.… It is forbidden to
curse, swear, etc., far more to cause heresy.”[1046]—Then one becomes
hardened against God the Holy Ghost; these fanatics “do not even
doubt”—which is astonishing—“they stand firm.” He had warned the
Anabaptist Marcus (Stübner), so he relates, “to beware lest he err,”
to which he answered that “God Himself shall not dissuade me from
this.”[1047]
In short, since Luther’s own cause is so clear and certain, those who
disagree, particularly the sectarians, must simply have discarded the
faith. For instance, “of Master Jeckel [Jacob Schenk] I hold that he
believes nothing.”[1048] He, Luther, has “at all times taught God’s
Word in all simplicity; to this I adhere, and will surrender myself
a prisoner to it or else—become a Pope who believes neither in the
again-rising of the dead nor in life everlasting.”[1049] Thus he sees
no middle course between the most frivolous unbelief and the Word of
God as he believes and interprets it. Hence, with heretics, whether
among the Pope’s men or in his own flock, “he will have nothing to do
outside of Scripture—unless indeed they start working miracles.”
_Where are your Miracles?_
The stress Luther lays on miracles as a proof of doctrine is another
trait to add to the picture of his psychology. Again and again he
repeated anew what he had already, in 1524, said of Münzer and some of
the preachers: They must be told to corroborate their mission by signs
and wonders, or else be forbidden to preach; for whenever God wills
to change the order of things He always works miracles.[1050] There
is something almost tragic in the courage with which he appealed to
miracles in this connection, when we bear in mind his own difficulties,
in accounting for their absence in his own case.[1051] Here it is
enough to recall Hier. Weller’s words: “I still remember right well,”
Weller writes, “how he once said that he had never thought of asking
God for the gift of raising the dead, or of performing other miracles,
though he did not doubt he might have obtained such of God had he
wished; he had, however, preferred to be content with the rich gift of
Scripture-interpretation; he further said that he had raised two persons
from the dead, one of them being Philip Melanchthon and the other a
God-fearing man.”[1052]
As against the sects and fanatics, Luther urges that he himself laid
no claim to any extraordinary mission; as they, however, did make such
a claim, they must vindicate it by miracles. “I have never preached or
sought to preach unless I was asked and called for by men, for I cannot
boast as they do that God has sent me from heaven without means; they
run of their own accord, though no one sends them, as Jeremias writes
[xxiii. 21]; for this reason they work no good.”[1053] Neither here nor
elsewhere does he explicitly state by whom it is necessary to be “asked”
or “called.” His account of the source whence he derives his mission also
varies, being now the Wittenberg magistrates, now his Doctor’s degree,
now the sovereign, now the enthusiastic hearers and readers of his
word.[1054]
Such was his confidence that Luther forgot that it was by no means
difficult for the “false brethren” within his camp to pick out the
weak spots in his doctrine. He refused to recognise that much of
their criticism was valid; on the negative side it even took the
place of miracles. It was not every Catholic polemic who succeeded in
demonstrating so clearly and convincingly the anomalies in Luther’s
views, for instance, on the Law and Gospel, as the Antinomian, Johann
Agricola.
On the other hand, Luther could well note with satisfaction the inability
of the heretics to bring forward anything positive of importance.
They were dwarfs compared with him. With his knowledge of the Bible
it was child’s play to him to overthrow the fanatics’ often ludicrous
applications of Scripture. Of Zwingli, too, it was easy for him to get
the better by dint of sticking to the literal sense of Christ’s words
of institution: “This is My Body.” Luther was not slow in pointing out
the blemishes of the “fanatics,” their vanity and blind obedience to
ambition and self-will, and the impracticability of their fantastic, and
often revolutionary, theories. The very truth of his strictures, for all
his lack of miracles, raised him in his own eyes, far above these clumsy
teachers; this perhaps enables us to understand better the utter contempt
he expresses for them.
_His Anger with Lemnius and Others_
One had but to praise those whom he condemned to call forth Luther’s
implacable anger.
This was the experience in 1538 of the humanist, Simon Lemnius (Lemchen)
of Wittenberg, a man otherwise kindly disposed to the new teaching. A
humanist above all, he had won Melanchthon’s favour on account of his
talent.
Lemnius had thoughtlessly dared to publish two books of epigrams in
which he not only attacked with biting sarcasm certain Wittenberg
personages, but actually ventured to praise Archbishop Albert of
Mayence, Luther’s powerful opponent. The poet, no doubt, was anxious
to curry favour with the Archbishop so as to find in him a Mæcenas;
he even went so far as to extol him as the man who “had kept alive
the olden faith.” The censorship for which Melanchthon as Rector of
the University was then responsible, was caught napping. Lemnius
was indeed arrested by the University, but he escaped and fled from
Wittenberg. On Trinity Sunday, June 16th, Luther read out from the
pulpit a Mandate in which he abused Archbishop Albert in disgraceful
terms, and scourged as a criminal act the praise bestowed in the
“shameful, shocking book of lies” on Bishop Albert, “a devil out of
whom it made a saint.” In it he also declared that, “by every code of
law, and no matter whither the fugitive knave had fled, his head was
forfeit.”[1055] Thus Lemnius was as good as outlawed—though no Court
of Justice had yet sentenced him. On July 4th Melanchthon formally
expelled him from the University on account of “faithlessness, perjury
and slander.”[1056] The “perjury” consisted in his having fled, in
defiance of the obedience he owed to the University, so as to evade
the harsh penalties he had reason to apprehend. The whole edition of
the Epigrams was destroyed.
“It is the devil who hatches out such knaves,” remarked Luther,
“particularly among the Papists, through whom he attacks and thwarts
us.… Because we preach Christ alone he persecutes us in every way he
can.” The bishops deserve to be called “lost and godless knaves and
foes of God,” hence “those must not be tolerated here who praise them
in verse and prose.”[1057]
When Lemnius had a second edition of the Epigrams printed at
Wittenberg this also was suppressed. He had added a third book,
devoted to abuse of Luther and containing the famous “Merd-Song” on
Luther, who was then ailing from diarrhœa. Luther retorted with a
“Merd-Song” of his own on Lemnius. His verses he read aloud to his
friends and they became public property through being incorporated in
Lauterbach’s notes of the Table-Talk.[1058]
Lemnius, whose career had been wrecked by Luther’s anger and revenge,
then wrote an “Apologia against the unjust and lying decree” which the
Wittenberg University had published against him at the instigation
(“_imperio et tyrannide_”) of Martin Luther and Justus Jonas. He still
retained his loose humanistic style after his return in 1538 to his
native Switzerland, where he obtained a position as schoolmaster at
Coire.
The above Apologia was printed at Cologne, it would seem in 1539,
but very few copies survive owing to the energy shown in their
suppression. It is only of recent years that the complete text has
become generally known;[1059] till then Protestants like Schelhorn
and Hausen had only ventured to give fragments of the work. In it
the writer complains bitterly that Luther “has published a pamphlet
against him [the mandate read aloud in the church] in which, playing
both the judge and the sovereign, Luther had condemned and abused
him.” “Such authority in civil matters” does this soul-herd arrogate
to himself. He robs the bishops of their secular power, but he himself
is a tyrant. The charges against Luther’s private life made in this
work are glaring, and they come, moreover, from a man who knew his
Wittenberg, but it must not be forgotten that he was now a bitter foe
of Luther.[1060] He goes so far as to declare that Luther’s shameless
attacks on the sovereigns, for instance on the Elector of Mayence,
gave grounds for apprehending contempt of all authority and the
outbreak of a war that would spell the ruin of Germany.
Meanwhile “Luther sits like a dictator at Wittenberg and rules;
what he says must be taken as law.”[1061] He calls his opponent the
“Wittenberg Pope” (“_Papa Albiacus_”), who had been faithless to his
Vows.
In order rightly to appreciate, from their psychological side, Luther’s
angry outbursts against the heretics in his party we must above all
remember his fears of a coming collapse of theology among his following;
that he foresaw something of the sort has already been shown above.[1062]
He was also keenly alive to the harm these dissensions were doing to
his reputation. Nor must we forget the threatening and highly insulting
behaviour of many of these heretics. Taking all things together, it is
easy to understand how a temper such as his was lashed to fury when
denouncing the “presumption and foolhardiness” of his foes.[1063]
“A muddled and obstinate head” sits on the neck of the fanatics’
ringleader; “his horns must be blunted.”[1064]—“Carlstadt and Zwingli
behave with insolence and defiance”; “We must needs decry the fanatics
as damned”; “they actually dare to pick holes in our doctrine; ah,
the scoundrelly rabble do a great injury to our Evangel even in the
outland and enable our foes to scoff at us.”[1065]—“Their pride and
audacity will bring about their downfall.”[1066]