In truth, he says, “Carlstadt blasphemed himself to

death.”[1067]—Œcolampadius saw the “curse” of God fulfilled in

himself, “and withered away with fear the night after Zwingli had been

struck down” (at Cappel).[1068] Zwingli himself, like the rest, was

urged on merely by “his boundless ambition.”[1069]—Egranus (Johann

Wildenauer) was a “proud donkey.”[1070]—Bucer is a “gossip,”[1071]

“a miscreant through and through, in every case, inflection and rule

of grammar; I trust him not at all, for Paul says [Titus iii. 10]

‘A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition,

avoid.’”[1072]—Sebastian Franck is a “wicked, venomous knave and it

is a wonder to me that those at Ulm care to keep him.”[1073] “He only

loved to do harm, is inconstant and boasts of the spirit; but his

wife has plenty of spirit and it is she who inspirits him with her

spirit.”[1074]—Schwenckfeld deserves as little as Franck to be written

against. “Agricola is only puffed up with hatred and ambition.”[1075]

He “is and should be called a godless man who denies God, which

is what the Sacramentarians do.”[1076]—“Of false brethren we must

above all things beware.”[1077]—With such a one “there is no hope of

repentance; he is bold, impudent.”[1078]—“He remains obdurate,” he

says of one of these heretics, “a cunning, evil-minded scoffer”; he

betrays us as “Judas betrayed Christ.”[1079]

The depth of the yawning abyss between the heretics and Luther and also

the hatred they bore him on account of his treatment of them is plain

from the words of Münzer and Ickelsamer already quoted.[1080]

3. The Church-Unseen, its Origin and Early History

His doctrine of the Church may in many respects be regarded as the

key-stone and centre of the rest of Luther’s theology.

It is practically important in that it affords a clue to anyone desirous

of ascertaining to which of the competing religious bodies he should

belong. It was usually to this article on the Church that those who

afterwards returned to Catholicism appealed in vindication of their step.

It was also the practice of Catholic writers, in their controversies

with Luther, to appeal to the doctrine of the one Church which has never

erred in dogma in order to convict him more speedily of the guilt of his

separation. All of them started from the old definition, according to

which the Church is the visible commonwealth of the faithful, founded by

Christ on Peter, the Rock, which confesses the same Christian belief and

unites in the same Sacraments under the guidance of its lawful pastors,

in particular of the successors of St. Peter.

Luther himself was fully aware of the supreme importance of this

doctrine; he frequently enough brings his opponents on the scene “crying

Church, Church!”[1081] Among the Papists, he says, they do nothing

but shriek Church, Church, Church, and this is the chief obstacle to

reunion.[1082] “Hence there is indeed need that we should see what the

Holy Christian Church is. If it is the clergy and their mob, then the

devil has won and we two, God and His Word, are the losers.”[1083] “The

Pope quotes this text [John xiv. 17: ‘The spirit of truth shall remain

with you’] strongly and impressively.… They have become so certain of

their cause that they take their stand on it as on a wall of iron.… This

we ourselves must believe and say, viz. that the Holy Ghost is with

the Church which is certainly on earth and will remain.”[1084] But was

Luther’s Church a visible or an invisible one?

_Invisibility of Luther’s Church_

Bearing in mind the religious compulsion practised by Luther, the

question would seem already answered. His practice involved the existence

of an outward ecclesiastical authority with outward rules, a congregation

to which it was impossible to belong without submitting to the doctrine

of a visible head or corporation. Of the visible nature of this Church

there can be no question. It is with this tangible authority that he

confronts the Anabaptists, for instance when he says: “The presumption

of these fanatics is unbearable, for they altogether repudiate the

authority of the Church and will have it all their own way.”[1085]

The best-grounded maxims of the best teachers are despised by them,

so he complains, and they only esteem the opinions they themselves

have rummaged for in Scripture! “Yet great heed should be paid to the

Church.”[1086]

Nevertheless, according to Luther’s own views which had not changed much

since 1519, the Church is in reality invisible.

The Church is not an outward, tangible institution, with a divinely

appointed spiritual government and direction, such as it had been to

Catholics through all the ages; rather it is the ghostly congregation of

true believers known to Christ alone, Who alone is their head, guide and

teacher. Men holding “office” in the Church there must indeed be, but

only in order to preach and to dispense the sacraments; any spiritual

authority with full powers for legislating and guiding the faithful is

non-existent.[1087] It is the “true” faith and the possession of the

“right” sacraments that constitute the Church. It is accordingly clear to

him that the Holy Church in which we are to believe, must be a “ghostly,

not a bodily one,” “for what we believe,” so he proceeds, “is not bodily

but ghostly. The outward Roman Church we can all of us see, hence she

cannot be the true Church in which we believe which is a congregation

or assembly of the saints in faith; but no one can see who is a saint

or who has the faith.” This he said in his “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome”

(1520).[1088]

“The Church is altogether in the spirit,” so he again says in the

following year, “she is altogether a spiritual thing.”[1089] “Christ,”

so he says later, “works in the spirit so that it is hardly possible

to smell His Church and bishops from afar, and the Holy Ghost behaves

as though He were not there”; but that Church which is so close at

hand “that it is possible to lay hold on her,” as is the case with

the Popish Church, is only the Church of the devil.[1090] “Who will

show us the Church,” he asks, “seeing that she is hidden in the spirit

and is only believed in, just as we say: ‘I believe in one Holy

Church.’”[1091] “The Church is _believed_ in but she is not seen,

and for the most part she is oppressed and hidden, under weakness,

crosses and scandals.”[1092] In short, as a Lutheran theologian puts

it, “he is speaking merely of a Holy Church or congregation whose real

complement of Saints is not apparent, and which is therefore termed

invisible.”[1093] Nor could he speak otherwise, for the absence of

a divinely appointed hierarchy, and likewise his principle of the

free examination of Scripture, could not but lead him to assume an

invisible Church which lives only in the hearts of those who share the

faith and the possession of the Holy Ghost.

Although, as the theologian in question points out, in Luther’s idea

of the Church visible elements are not lacking, e.g. preaching and

the sacraments, yet the actual congregation of Saints is visible to

God alone; indeed the Church would still be there even should her

only members consist of “babes in the cradle.”[1094] For instance,

according to him, the Church before his day comprised very few people,

and those unknown, who kept the Gospel undefiled and thus preserved the

Church; some “elect souls must needs have come back, at least on their

death-beds, to the true path.”[1095]—“Such persons [inspired by the Holy

Ghost] there must always be on earth, even though there should only be

two or three, or just the children. Of the old there are, alas, but few.

Such as do not belong to this class have no right to look upon themselves

as Christians; nor are they to be consoled as though they were Christians

by much talk of the forgiveness of sins and the Grace of Christ.”[1096]

Thus, in so far as the visible elements were recognised by Luther,

Protestants are justified in teaching that Luther’s Church-Unseen was

“not a mere idea or empty phantom”; if, however, they go on to say that,

according to Luther, the Church is “the living sum total of all who are

united in the Spirit,” one sees at a glance that, though, mentally, we

can make a class of all who come under the category of “believers,” this

implies no actual relation between such, and consequently no “Church” or

real though invisible _society_.[1097]

_The Marks of the Church. Gradual Disappearance of the Old Conception of

the Church_

It is a matter of common knowledge that the marks or “_notæ_” of the

Church had been the subject of many disquisitions before Luther’s day.

We may now inquire whether Luther himself also admitted the existence of

these “marks,” by which the true Church of Christ might be known.

Though the admission of such marks seems incompatible with his theory of

the Church-Unseen, Luther repeatedly seeks to prove the truth of his own

Church and the falsehood of Catholicism by this means. Especially is this

the case in his “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen” (1539).

Thus he asks: How can “a poor, blundering man know where to find this

holy Christian folkdom [the Church]? For we are told that it is [to

be found] in this life and on this earth … where it will also remain

till the end of time.”[1098] This leads him to speak of the marks of

the true Church.

“First of all the holy Christian people can be told by its having

the Holy Word of God.” Luther forgets to say how the latter is to be

recognised, though on this all depends; for he was far from being the

only one who laid claim to possessing the pure Word of God. Hence

many were not slow in pointing out how useless it was on his part to

say: “Where you hear or see this Word preached, believed, confessed

and acted upon, have no doubt that there, assuredly, must be the true

‘_ecclesia sancta catholica_,’ and the Holy Christian people, even

though in number they be but few.”[1099] Nor did his theological

opponents think any more highly of the other marks of the true Church

which he sets up in the same work. They urged that the distinguishing

marks should surely be clearer than what was to be distinguished, and

patent and evident even to the unlearned. Concerning the marks set

up by Luther, however, there was doubt even among those who had cut

themselves adrift from Catholicism.

For instance, the second mark was “the Sacrament of Baptism where it

is rightly taught and believed, and administered according to Christ’s

ordinance.”[1100] But, among the Zwinglians and Anabaptists, baptism,

so at least they claimed, was also rightly administered according to

the ordinance of Christ; and, as for the Popish Church, Luther himself

admits that she had always preserved baptism in its purity. Hence,

here again, we have no clear, distinctive mark.

The other marks, according to Luther’s “Von den Conciliis,” were,

thirdly, “the Sacrament of the Altar where it is rightly given,

believed and received according to the institution of Christ”;

and, fourthly, “the keys [forgiveness through faith] of which they

make public use.” “Fifthly, the Church is known outwardly by her

consecrating or calling of ministers of the Church, to the offices

which it is her duty to fill.” Sixthly, “by her public prayer, praise,

and thanks to God.” “Seventhly, the Christian people is recognised

outwardly by the sacred emblem of the holy Cross since it has to

suffer misfortune and persecution, all kinds of temptation and

trouble—as we learn from the Our Father—from the devil, the world

and the flesh; must be inwardly in pain, foolish and affrighted, and

outwardly poor, despised, weak and sick.”[1101]

Bellarmine, the sharp-witted controversialist, and other polemics

even earlier, dealt with these marks and showed their inadequacy.

As regards the last mark Bellarmine, not unnaturally, expressed his

wonder that Luther should have spoken of it, seeing that inward

suffering, sadness and apprehension are of their very nature hidden

things. Luther, however, hit upon this mark because he was accustomed

to regard his “temptations” as a witness to the truth of his doctrine,

and was convinced that the devil was causing them solely out of hatred

for the truth.[1102] He thus carried his fancied experiences[1103]

into his teaching on the Church, a fresh proof that his theology was

the outcome rather of his inner life than of revealed doctrine. The

idea that the Church was ever to be sick, weak, foolish and despised

appealed to him all the more because his Evangel had not brought forth

the good moral fruits he desiderated, and because he had vainly to

struggle against the dissensions within his congregations and their

abuse of the freedom of the Gospel.

It was this experience of his which led him to the fantastic plan

already described of forming an “assembly of earnest Christians,”

i.e. a Church-apart enrolled from the true believers who would then

realise the idea of a Church even to the extent of having the power of

excommunicating.

The seven marks of the Church were reduced to two in the Augsburg

Confession of 1530, viz. pure doctrine, and true sacraments, and it is

thus that they appear in the “Symbolic Books” of Lutheranism. On the

other hand, Luther makes no appeal to the marks of the Church as given

in the olden so-called Nicene Creed, “though all the olden Councils

had insisted that it was these marks, particularly the attribute of

‘Apostolicity,’ which distinguished the Church from the sects.”[1104]

As a matter of fact the marks on which Catholic theologians laid

stress, viz. the Church’s “oneness, holiness, Catholicity” and

apostolicity furnished a striking answer to the question: Where is

the Church? She is Apostolic because her connection with the Apostles

has never been broken; Catholic because of her universal existence

throughout the world; holy in her aims and means and in the practice

of Christian virtue by the generality of her followers, and also on

account of the special gifts of grace which have ever brightened her

path through the ages; lastly, she is one, outwardly in being alone,

and also inwardly, in the unity of her faith and belief, liturgy and

sacraments, and in her character as a society in which a divinely

appointed spiritual authority rules which the rest obey. In the

latter respect the Church, to the Catholic mind, is even a “_societas

perfecta_,” visible, moreover, to the whole world like the “city set

on a hill” (Matt. v. 12) in which the Fathers of the Church indeed

always saw an image of the Church;[1105] she is as a building built

upon a rock, as a flock gathered round the shepherd, both of them

comparisons which we owe to the Church’s Divine Founder.

It was not without reason that Luther was averse to any appeal to the

four marks of the Church just referred to. What unity had he wherewith

to confront that of Catholicism under its Pope? Apostolicity, as an

historical union with Christ’s Apostles was so evidently wanting in

his case that he declared that the doctrine he had come to preach had

died out shortly after Apostolic times. Any claim to Catholicity in

the usual sense of the word was not to be thought of for a moment.

The only olden marks which he does not throw over is that of holiness.

He here relies on the existence of holiness in the case of a few as

being sufficient for his purpose.

Nevertheless, due justice must be done to the stress he is ever

disposed to lay on the holiness of the Church. He practically makes

all the other marks to centre in this, for he speaks of the seven

marks mentioned above as the sevenfold “sanctuary whereby the Holy

Ghost sanctifies Christ’s holy nation.”[1106]

“Even though it was impossible for him,” remarks Johann Adam Möhler,

“to teach that the Church was to be regarded as a living institution

in which men become holy, yet he sticks fast to the idea that she

ought by rights to be composed of saints.… The inner Church [called

by theologians the “soul” to distinguish it from the outward “body”

of the Church] is everywhere in evidence, and the fact that no one is

a true citizen of the heavenly kingdom if he belongs only outwardly

to the Church and has not entered into the spirit of Christ and felt

within himself its vivifying power, is pointed out [by Luther] in a

way which merits all praise.”[1107]

Such true believers, according to Luther’s teaching, are so much the sole

representatives of the visible Church that the wicked, the unbelieving,

the hypocritical Christians who only expose her to the scorn and derision

of her foes, do not really belong to the Church at all.[1108] They are

members of the Church merely in name, but, in reality, are not Christians

at all.[1109]

It was not, however, easy for him to shake off the true feeling he had

inherited from youthful days, viz. that whoever wished to be pious

and pleasing to God, must become so through the true Church. “Let us

therefore pray in the Church,” so we hear him say, “let us pray with the

Church and for her.”[1110] According to him the Church was the ghostly

Eve taken from the side of Christ, a pure virgin and one body with

Christ, great and splendid in God’s sight, the chief of His works, dear

to Him, precious and highly esteemed in His sight, etc.[1111] Hence we

find him re-echoing the beautiful words in which Catholic mystics had

been wont to extol the Church and her “soul.”

Yet there is no doubt, that, in spite of all this, Luther had explained

away the Church’s very essence.

It was indeed his tendency to spiritualise, and his favourite idea

that true believers must be enlightened by God directly concerning His

outward “Word” that helped him thus to explain away the Church. As for

any outward doctrinal establishment or institutional Church having an

authority of her own, no such thing existed. Thus the Church which Luther

extols as so holy turns out to be something quite intangible—water that

for want of a holder runs away and is lost. Even Köstlin admits this,

though in guarded words: “Certain main problems which the Reformed view

of the Church must necessarily face” “were only very insufficiently

grasped and discussed” by Luther and his friends. Among such questions

Köstlin includes some that touch the Church’s very essence: How far

is purity of doctrine necessary in order to belong to the Church; how

far are the old Creeds still professed by Protestantism obligatory or

binding upon preachers; where, finally, does the freedom preached by

Luther precisely end?[1112] But, in spite of all the _lacunæ_ in his

doctrine of the Church, Luther bitterly insists, that, outside the

Church there can be no salvation.[1113] Nor did he even admit the usual

Catholic limitation, viz. that those, who through no fault of their own

are ignorant of the Church, may possibly be saved if their life has been

otherwise good. Luther indeed, as already shown (p. 292), is of opinion

that some olden Catholics may have been saved, if, in the end, they laid

hold on Christ as Luther taught;[1114] he also opines that salvation had

been brought to all “worthy men of every nation” who had died before the

coming of Christ, through His preaching during His visit to Limbo;[1115]

yet he does not believe that it was the Will of God that _all_ men,

whether within or outside the Church, should be saved.[1116]

After having in the above examined Luther’s conception of the Church,

irrespective of its mode of growth, we may now turn our attention to the

genesis and historical development of this conception.

_Origin and Early Outbuilding of the New Idea of the Church_

A curious psychological process accompanies the growth of Luther’s idea

of the Church. We know that, even long after he had fallen a victim to

his theory of justification by faith alone, he had still no thought

of breaking away from the Church’s communion or of questioning the

conception then in vogue of the Church. It was only when the olden Church

refused to come over to his new doctrine and prepared to condemn it, that

he decided, after great struggles within, to cut himself adrift, and it

was in order to justify this step to himself and to vindicate it to the

world that he gradually formed his new views on the Church. (Cp. above,

vol. i., p. 321 ff.)

Characteristically enough we find a first trace of what was to come,

in his sermon on the power of the Papal Ban, which he published in

Latin in 1518 and in German in the following year. Here, of course,

he had to deal with the question of the effects of the threatened

excommunication; in so doing he reached the false proposition,

censured amongst his 41 errors in the Bull Exsurge Domine of May 16,

1520: “Excommunications are merely outward penalties and do not rob a

man of the Church’s common spiritual prayers.”[1117] Not long after,

according to his wont, he went a step further. Among the condemned

Theses we find the paradoxical one: “Christians must be taught to love

excommunication rather than to fear it.”[1118]

At Dresden on July 25, 1518, when he was found fault with on account

of his Wittenberg Sermon on Excommunication (which was then probably

not yet known in its entirety), he seems to have shown scant respect

for the supreme authority in the Church. Emser, his then opponent,

writes expressly that Luther had declared he cared nothing for the

Pope’s Ban.[1119]

Some weeks later, on Sep. 1, Luther himself wrote to Staupitz, his

superior, that his conscience told him he was in the right and with

the truth on his side; “Christ liveth and reigneth yesterday, to-day

and for ever”; he also tells him, that, in his “Resolutions,” and in

his replies to Prierias he had spoken freely, and in a language that

would wound the Romanists, and that he was ready, nay anxious, to

give the brassy Romans an even ruder German answer in the service of

Christ, the Shepherd of the people. “Have no fear; I shall continue

untrammelled my study of the Word of God without any fear of the

citation [to Augsburg].”[1120]

During the negotiations in the presence of Cajetan at Augsburg we can

see even more clearly how Luther stood under the spell of his idea,

that the only Church was a spiritual one, and that, even should he

break away from ecclesiastical authority by rising against the Ban, he

would still remain in this Church.

It was after his return from Augsburg, during the stormy days when

he appealed “from the Pope to a General Christian Council,” i.e. in

the winter of 1518, that he discovered the true “Antichrist” who

reigned at Rome.[1121] This discovery deprived him of the last vestige

of respect for the authority of the Church and for her head.[1122]

His own inward state when he made this discovery was one of curious

turmoil. In his letter to Link, of Dec. 11, 1518, we hear him speaking

of his commotion of mind, of new projects just on the point of birth

which would show that, so far, he had hardly made a serious beginning

with the struggle; he had a “premonition” then that Antichrist

described by St. Paul (2 Thes. ii. 3 ff.) was seated in Rome where he

behaved even worse than the Turk.[1123] At the beginning of 1519 with

bated breath he announced to his friends the impending war on all the

Papal ordinances.[1124]

Thus, even previous to the Leipzig Disputation, he must have busied

himself with his new idea of the Church.

It was, however, only during the Disputation that, pressed hard by

Eck, he was induced to deny openly the Primacy and to proclaim his

belief in an invisible Church controlled by no authority.[1125] In the

Disputation on July 4 and the following days, he attacked the divine

institution of the Pope’s authority, asserted that even Œcumenical

Councils could err, and, on July 6, declared that the Council of

Constance had actually done so in rejecting the doctrine of Hus that

there is “a Holy Catholic Church which is the whole body of the elect.”

In thus cutting the idea of the Church to his own measure, Luther had

reached the Husite theory of the predestined as the sole members of the

Church. “Luther found in this his own view of the Church, for, according

to him, on the one hand there was no need of submission to Rome, and, on

the other, only the real Christians and the elect were actual members

of the Church.”[1126] In the “Resolutions,” which he published at the

end of August immediately after the Disputation, he adheres to the

statement that even Œcumenical Councils had erred and that, even on the

most important questions of the faith. Still, strange to say, he does not

think there is any reason for fearing that the Church had been forsaken

by the Spirit of Christ, for by the Church was to be understood neither

the Pope nor a Council.[1127] Here we have the basis of his new idea

of the Church.… It is combined with another idea towards which he had

long been drifting, viz. of seeing in Holy Scripture the sole source of

faith.[1128] In the “Resolutions” he says: “Faith does not spring from

any external authority but is aroused in the heart by the Holy Ghost,

though man is moved thereto by the Word and by example.”[1129] Wherever

Luther’s doctrine is believed, there is the Church.[1130]

The Papal Bull of 1520 condemned among the other selected theses of

Luther’s, his attack on the Primacy and the Councils, though saying

nothing of his doctrine of the Church, then still in process of growth.

“The Roman Pope, the successor of Peter,” so the 25th of these condemned

Theses runs, “is not the Vicar of Christ set over all the Churches

throughout the whole world and appointed by Christ Himself in the person

of St. Peter.” And the 29th declares: “It is open to us to set aside the

Councils, freely to question their actions and judge their decrees and to

profess with all confidence whatever appears to be the truth whether it

has been approved or reproved of any Council.”[1131]

The originator of principles so subversive to all ecclesiastical

order had perforce to reassure himself by claiming freedom in the

interpretation of Scripture.

Hence, for himself and all who chose to follow him, he set up in the

clearest and most decided terms the personal reading of the written Word

of God, above all tradition and all the pronouncements of the teaching

office of the Church; in this he went much further than he had done

hitherto in the questions he had raised concerning justification, grace,

indulgences, etc. It is easy to understand why it was so necessary for

him to claim for himself a direct enlightenment by the Spirit of God

in his reading of the Bible;[1132] in no other way could he vindicate

his daring in thus setting himself in opposition to a Church with a

history of 1500 years. At the same time he saw that this same gift of

illumination would have to be allowed to others, hence he declared that

all faithful and devout readers of the Bible enjoyed a certain kind of

inspiration, all according to him being directly guided by the Spirit

into the truth without any outward interference of Church doctrine,

though the first fruits of revelation belonged to him alone.[1133]

By thus exalting the personal element into a principle, he dealt a

mortal blow at the idea of a Church to whom was committed the true

interpretation of doctrine.

Before pointing out, how, in spite of the boundless liberty proclaimed by

Luther, he nevertheless was anxious to retain some sort of Church in the

stead of the ancient one, we may here put on record certain statements

of his on the illumination of the individual by God that have not as

yet been quoted; albeit difficult to understand this is of the very

essence of Lutheranism and quite indispensable to the new doctrine of an

invisible Church.[1134]

According to the “Resolutions” he published after the Leipzig

Disputation, every man is born into the faith through the Evangel

owing to the bestowal of certainty from on high without the

intervention of the Church’s authority or of any doctrine outwardly

binding upon him. Satan and all the heretics, so he declares, could

not have forged a more dangerous opinion than that in vogue among

Catholics concerning the relations between the Church’s authority

and the Bible Word; needless to say Luther makes out that, in their

opinion, the Pope was put above the Written Word and even above God

Himself.[1135] The genuine Catholic doctrine, viz. that the Church is

the guardian of the true sense of Holy Scripture and at the same time

a witness to the faithful of the authenticity and inspiration of the

Holy Books, is indeed poles asunder from the teaching foisted on her.

Moreover, it is in these very Resolutions to the Leipzig Disputation

that Luther disparages the Epistle of James, arguing that its style

falls far short of the apostolic dignity and could in no way compare

with that of Paul. Here the “freedom” which he exalts into a principle

already begins to undermine his new foundation, viz. the Bible itself.

Not long after this, in 1520, he lays claim in his “Von dem Bapstum”

and “_De captivitate Babylonica_,” to having been instructed solely

by the Holy Ghost and out of the Bible regarding the sense of Holy

Scripture.

In the “_De captivitate Babylonica_” he teaches: the faithful who

surrender themselves to the Spirit of God and allow Him to work upon

them through the “Word” (he calls them the Church), received from the

same Spirit an infallible sense and an inspiration by which to judge

of doctrine, a sense which is indeed not susceptible of proof yet

which creates absolute certainty. The same thing held good here as

in the case of the truth, of which Augustine had said, that the soul

was so laid hold of and carried away by it as to be enabled by its

means to judge of all things, though unable to prove the truth itself

which nevertheless it was forced to acknowledge with an infallible

certainty.[1136] Luther also appeals as a comparison to the evidence

of certain fundamental truths of mathematics or philosophy. This would

at first sight make it appear as though he excluded arbitrary freedom

in the interpretation of the Bible, since the mind must necessarily

bow to such logical and unquestionable truths as he instances; this

is, however, not the case, and we may recall what a wide field he

opened up for delusion in this matter of inspiration.[1137]

When he teaches that the perception of the truth of religion

penetrates into every Christian soul as the direct result of a

certainty operated by God Himself we must, in order to understand him,

keep in view the other points of his teaching, above all his opinion

of man’s utter incapacity to do what is good, the depravity of man’s

mental powers, his lack of free-will and absolute passivity under the

hand of God. Above all he needed some such theory in order to justify

his attack on the olden conception of the Church and to defend his own

alleged certainty.

The universal priesthood also serves him as a prop for his idea of the

Church. This priesthood, with the right to judge of doctrine, such

as he pictures in his “To the German Nobility” and “On the Freedom

of a Christian Man,” was a logical outcome of the above doctrine

of inspiration and of his own inclination to break away from the

olden Church. It gave to all complete independence in spiritual and

ecclesiastical matters.[1138]

The above writings were followed in 1521 by his “_Ad librum Ambrosii

Catharini Responsio_.” Here he treats in detail of the Church, and of

Christ the spiritual and invisible rock on which alone she is built

(without Peter and his successors); the Church’s nature is therefore

spiritual and invisible; he emphasises anew the right of all the

faithful individually to disregard all teaching authority and to give

ear to the voice of the Holy Ghost Who speaks inwardly through the

Evangel, and thus brings forth, nourishes, educates, strengthens and

preserves the true Church. In this work Luther is, however, already at

greater pains to bring down the Church to the region of the visible;

he points out that at least she possesses visible elements, Baptism,

the Supper and the Gospel. Nevertheless, direct inspiration of the

Holy Ghost still looms large in the “_Responsio_” as we may gather

from the elucubrations embellished with Bible texts in which he

declares that the Papal Antichrist had been foretold in the Word of

God and his appearance and workings even described in detail.[1139]

In “Von Menschen leren tzu meyden” (1522), which is still saturated

with the spirit of the Wartburg he had just left, he insists that:

“Each one must simply believe that it is God’s Word because he feels

in his heart that it is the truth, even should an angel from heaven

or all the world preach the contrary.”—His writing of 1523, “Das eyn

Christliche Versamlung odder Gemeyne Recht und Macht habe alle Lere

zu urteylen,” etc., was intended to promote unfettered freedom of

spirit, but, of course, only in the interests of the removal of the

Popish-minded clergy, for, naturally, there could be no question of

such freedom being used against Luther, or of anyone setting himself

up as judge of Luther’s new doctrine. Here, and even more strongly

in the “_De instituendis ministris Ecclesiæ_,” which he published in

the same year, he starts again from the standpoint of the universal

priesthood; this was inconsistent with the clerical order of the

Popish Church; by it every man was qualified to decide independently

on doctrine in accordance with Scripture; but whoever preached

openly in the Church of God only did so as representing the others

and at their request; hence no preacher was to be at the head of any

congregation unless the latter wanted him, and, taught by the unction

of the Holy Spirit, found his doctrine right. A Christian might

also, so he continues, whether amongst other Christians or amongst

those who had formerly been unbelievers, instruct his fellow-men

in the Gospel merely by virtue of his Christian calling; anyone, if

he detected the ordinary teacher in error, might stand up and teach

without any call, as the Apostle says (1 Cor. xiv. 30) “if anything be

revealed to another, let the first hold his peace.”[1140]

But how is a man to be so certain in his heart as to be able to come

forward in this way? “You can then be certain of the matter if you

are able to decide freely and surely and to say this is the pure

and simple truth, for it I will live or die, and whoever teaches

otherwise, whatsoever be his title and standing, is accursed.”[1141]

It would be a waste of words to point out that this was to deal a

death-blow at the olden conception of the Church.

Startling, nay, utterly stupefying, is the sharp contrast all this

presents to Luther’s later attitude already described above (pp. 241,

251, 262). There we have a rigid, coercive Church held fast in the ban

of the Wittenberg doctrine, whereas here, in the days of the early

development of Lutheranism, we find an exuberant wealth of individual

freedom which scoffs even at the possibility of any ecclesiastical order.

Only a dreamer and hot-head like Luther could have seen in such an

individualism, where each one is teacher and priest, anything else than

chaos.

Luther’s expectations in those early days were strange indeed and

quite incapable of realisation; not only were all delusions to be

excluded but everything, as he says of the enduring of opposition,

was to be done “decently and piously”! If he is really speaking in

earnest, then he shows himself a hermit utterly ignorant of human

nature. And yet even in the seclusion of the convent walls, the

greatest enthusiast should have seen that this was not the way to form

a congregation on earth of believers, or anything resembling a Church.

We can, nevertheless, easily understand, to cite Möhler in

confirmation of what has been said, “how the doctrine in question

could, nay, had to, arise in Luther’s mind: Since the authority of the

existing Church was against him he had perforce to seek for support

in the authority of God working directly in him.… He saw no other way

than to appeal to an intangible, inward authorisation.”[1142]—This he

then proceeded to work out into a system for the other believers.

“In the fashion of the true demagogue he flatters every Christian

and invests him with such perfection as any unprejudiced mind must

repudiate on the most cursory glance into his own heart.”[1143]

The truth is, the doctrine put forward by Luther against the Church,

i.e. that Holy Scripture is the sole judge, has no meaning except on

the assumption of a certainty through direct divine illumination.

Luther was quite right in declaring Holy Scripture to be the source of

the doctrine of salvation; but it was a very different thing to assert

that Holy Writ is the judge which determines what is the doctrine of

salvation contained therein. He only reached the latter assertion by

taking for granted the direct action of God in man for imparting a

knowledge of the true sense of Scripture. Hence in his statements on

Holy Scripture we frequently find one thing strangely confused with

the other, the outward Book with the inward knowledge of the same,

so that, as Möhler puts it, “the direct transmission of its contents

to the reader is assumed in a quite childish fashion.”[1144] Even

Köstlin has to admit this confusion, though he does so with reserve:

“In Luther,” he says, “we see in many passages an intermingling of the

pure Word and pure doctrine.”[1145]

_Luther’s Later Attitude Towards the Idea of the Church. Objections_

Henceforward there remained deeply rooted in Luther’s mind the

conviction that the individual was taught by God and that this Divine

enlightenment was always leading to the adoption of his own chief

articles of faith and to the promotion of the Lutheran Church.[1146]

There is no call to follow up this idea through all his various

writings. We may, however, call to mind a remarkable and warlike

statement with which, towards the end of his life, he sought to

justify his attacks on the Pope and the ancient Church, and that,

too, at a time when he must long since have been disappointed at the

results of the freedom of judging which he had once allowed but had

now already in many ways curtailed.

In his “Wider das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” he quotes the words

of Christ which refer to prayer in common: “Where two or three are

gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.”

This leads him to conclude, strange to say, “that even two or three

gathered together in Christ’s name hold all the power of St. Peter

and all the Apostles.” And, at once, he proceeds in his old vein

to declare that two or three, nay, even a single one, who has been

enlightened by Christ, is as good a teacher as the whole Church,

and, indeed, in certain cases, even takes precedence of her. “Hence

it comes,” he says, “that, often, a man who believes in Christ has

withstood a whole crowd … as the prophets withstood the Kings of

Israel, the priests and the whole nation [to say nothing of Luther

himself who had withstood the whole Church]. In short, God will

not be bound as to numbers, greatness, height, power, or anything

personal to man, but will only be with those who love and keep His

Word even though they be no more than stable boys. What does He care

for high, great and mighty lords? He alone is the greatest, highest

and mightiest.”[1147] Thus he practically claims a Divine dignity

for an undertaking such as his, and paints his career afresh as that

of a prophet who had a right to exalt himself even over the topmost

hierarchy; only that he invests all the faithful, and even the “stable

boy,” with the like high calling.

But, in such a system, what place was there left for anything more than a

phantom Church? Obviously the Church had to withdraw into the region of

the invisible. For her again to become visible and assume the shape to be

considered below, seems almost a paradox.

In view of the elasticity and vagueness of Luther’s teaching on the

Church it is not surprising that his followers, to this very day, are

divided as to whether, in point of fact, Luther wanted a “Church” or not.

A well-known Lutheran theologian admits in plain language that Luther

left the problem of the Church unsolved; only after the Reformer’s

time did certain “important problems” arise in respect of Luther’s

tentative definition of the Church.[1148] Another theologian, writing

in a Protestant periodical, says that Luther left behind him no

“Evangelical Church.” “The Reformation,” he says, “spelt Christendom’s

deliverance from the Church.… His great anticlerical bias was never

repudiated by Luther.… He committed the care of the pure Evangel to

the hands of the civil authorities. It ought no longer to be disputed

that Luther and the Reformers were not the founders of the Evangelical

Church—and that their ideal Protestantism was one minus a Church.

It is only necessary to take the idea of the Church in its strict

sense—not as the congregation, or the people of God, nor yet as a body

of men holding the same opinions, nor as the kingdom of Christ—but as

an independent complexus of regulations ordering the religious life,

as a special institution to provide for the particular needs of the

religious commonwealth within traditional limits.” Hence “the fact

that, in our homeland, three hundred years after Luther’s time, we

find the Evangelical preacherdom firmly consolidated in a body not

unlike the State, and professing to be the official representative

of Protestantism is one of the most astounding paradoxes in all the

history of the Church.”[1149]

There is no need to go so far, nor is it really necessary to put

the words evangelical “Church” or “Churches” in inverted commas, as

Protestants sometimes do in order to mark the quite unusual meaning of

the word Church according to Luther’s view. It is obvious that logic

had no place in Luther’s ideas and aims in respect of the Church, and

his subjectivism imposed on him in this matter the utmost vagueness.

Frequently we find in Catholic works on dogma extracts from Luther’s

writings dating from 1519 and 1520, which, it is alleged, show his

positive conviction at that time that a Church—i.e. one in the olden

Catholic sense—was to be recognised. But this is a mistake. The documents

containing such utterances were of a diplomatic character, and we have no

right to build upon them. They do not in any way invalidate what has been

said above.

One of these is Luther’s “Unterricht auff etlich Artikell,” dating

from the end of Feb., 1519, i.e. from a time when he had already

discovered the Roman Antichrist;[1150] the other, his “_Oblatio sive

Protestatio_,” dating from the summer of 1520, is a tract unmistakably

intended to forestall the publication of the Roman Bull.[1151] In the

first work, composed at the instance of Miltitz, it is true he says in

praise of the Roman Church that, in her, “St. Peter and St. Paul, 46

Popes and many hundred thousand martyrs had shed their blood,” that

she was honoured by God above all others, and that, for the sake of

Christian charity and unity, it was not lawful to separate from her

for all her present blemishes; he will not, however, express himself

regarding the “authority and supremacy of the Roman Church,” “seeing

that this does not concern the salvation of souls”; Christ, on the

contrary, had founded His Church on charity, meekness and oneness,

and, for the sake of this oneness, the Papal commands ought to be

obeyed. By this he fancies that he has proved that he “does not wish

to detract from the Roman Church.”[1152]

What he says in the other writing referred to above is even less

acceptable, though here too he wishes to appear “as a submissive and

obedient son of the Holy Christian Churches.”[1153] The circumstance

that many shortsighted persons doubtless took him at his word at this

critical time of his excommunication must have served powerfully to

promote the apostasy.

As to the changes to which Luther’s mode of thought was liable, we

may perhaps be permitted to make a general observation before passing

from the consideration of the invisible Church to that of the Church

visible.

The charge brought against him of having formerly taught differently

on many points from what he did at a later date, Luther lightly swept

aside with the assurance that he had gone on gradually advancing

in the knowledge of the truth. His defenders seek to escape the

difficulty in a like way. His changeableness and inconstancy must

undoubtedly weigh heavily in the balance. We must not, however,

be unfair to him or argue that the fact of his having at first

defended elements of Catholic doctrine which he afterwards abandoned

constituted a grave self-contradiction.

Luther openly admits that it was only gradually that he came to attack

the Church so bitterly.

When King Henry VIII reproached him with the contradictions apparent

between his earlier and later teaching on the Papacy and the Church,

Luther boldly appealed in 1522 in his “_Contra Henricum regem Angliæ_”

to his having only gradually learnt the whole truth: “I did not

yet know that the Papacy was contrary to Scripture.… God had then

given me a cheerful spirit that suffered itself to be despised [by

his opponents].… By dint of so doing they forced me on, so that the

further I went the more lies I discovered … until it became plain

from Scripture, thanks to God’s Grace, that the Papacy, episcopacy,

foundations, cloisters, universities, together with all the monkery,

nunnery, Masses, services were nothing but damnable sects of the

devil.… Hence it came about that I had to write other books in

condemnation and retractation of my earlier ones.”[1154] He will also,

so he adds ironically, retract what he had previously said in his

“_De captivitate Babylonica_,” viz. that the Papacy was the prey of a

strong Nimrod, as this had scandalised the lying King of England, who

was himself the robber of his country. This, in his own style, he now

proposes to amend as follows: “I should have said: The Papacy is the

arch-devil’s most poisonous abomination hitherto seen on earth.”[1155]

If it was a difficult matter to give an account of Luther’s invisible

Church, owing to the changes which took place in his own views, even more

difficult is the task of tracing the further growth of his teaching. His

invisible Church becomes more and more clearly a visible Church; yet all

the while it protests, that, in its nature, it is invisible.

4. The Church becomes visible. Its organisation

What was Luther’s view of the Church’s character when the time came to

set up new congregations within the circle of the “Evangel”?

Theologically the question is answered in the authentic publicly accepted

explanations he gave of his doctrine on the Church. Of these the oldest

is comprised in the Schwabach Articles of 1529,[1156] where we read in

Article XII:

There is “no doubt that there is and ever will be on earth a holy

Christian Church until the end of the world, as Christ says in Matt,

xxviii. 20.… This Church is nothing else than the believers in Christ,

who hold, believe and teach the above-mentioned articles and provisions

[of the Schwabach Confession], and who, on this account, are persecuted

and tormented in the world. For where the Gospel is preached and the

sacraments rightly used, there is the holy Christian Church, bound by no

laws and outward pomp to place or time, persons or ceremonies.”—“Thus

did the Evangelical idea of the Church,” so we read in Köstlin-Kawerau,

“find expression once and for all in the fundamental confessions of

Protestantism, faith in Christ being identified with faith in the said

‘articles and provisions.’”[1157]

In the “Augsburg Confession” of 1530—“which Confession,” according

to Luther, “was to last till the end of the world and the Last

Judgment”[1158]—we read: “The Church is the mateship of the saints

(‘_congregatio sanctorum_’) in which the Evangel is rightly taught

and the sacraments rightly dispensed.”[1159] The “Apologia” to this

Confession contains the following: “The Church is not merely a

commonwealth of outward things and rites like other institutions,

but it is rather a society of hearts in faith and the Holy Ghost.

She has, however, outward signs by which she may be known, viz.

the pure doctrine of the Gospel and a dispensing of the sacraments

in accordance with Christ’s Gospel.”[1160] Of “Church government”

the Confession of Augsburg states: “Concerning the government of

the Church we hold that no one may teach publicly or dispense the

sacraments without being duly called”; this is further explained

in the “Apologia”: “The Church has the command of God to appoint

preachers.”[1161]

Regarding the same matter the Schmalkalden Articles of 1537-1538,

which also form a part of the “Symbolic Books,” have the following:

“The Churches must have power to call, choose and ordain the ministers

of the Church, and such power is in fact bestowed on the Church by God

… just as, in case of necessity, even a layman can absolve another and

become his pastor.… The words of Peter: ‘You are a kingly priesthood’

refer only to the true Church, which, since she alone has the

priesthood, must also have the power to choose and ordain ministers.

To this the general usage of the Churches also bears witness.”[1162]

When the above was penned, indeed, even when Melanchthon wrote the

“_Confessio Augustana_,” the new Church, though theoretically invisible,

had long since received an established outward form. Yet its invisibility

is emphasised in the Schwabach Articles which reject such outward laws as

are inconsistent with the Church’s character; the Confession and Apologia

also refer to the (ghostly) union of hearts in the faith, and to the

assembly of the (unknown) saints.

Nevertheless the visibility, so strongly insisted on in the Schmalkalden

Articles, was practically indispensable, and was also a logical result of

the whole work undertaken by Luther.

First of all it was called for by the very nature of this “ministry”

of those who were to preach and to dispense the sacraments in the name

of the congregation; according to Luther’s teaching, the dispensing of

the sacraments went hand in hand with preaching, the sacraments being

efficacious only through the faith of the recipient, and the dispenser’s

duty being confined to making the recipient more worthy of the inpouring

of grace through the word of faith which accompanies the visible sign of

the sacrament. The ministerial “office” was not conferred by a sacrament

as was the case in the priestly ordination of the olden Church, but,

as Luther teaches, “ordination, if understood aright, is no more than

being called or ‘ordered’ to the office of parson or preacher.” Among

the Papists “Baptism and Christ had been weakened and darkened” by the

ordinations. “We are born priests and as such we want to be known.” “By

Holy Baptism we have become the true priests of Christendom as St. Peter

says: ‘You are a royal priesthood.’”[1163] Ministers (i.e. servants) of

the Word was the proper title for those who performed all their functions

in the name of the common priesthood of the whole people.

As soon, however, as it became a question of appointing preachers a

visible Church at once appeared on the scene, though one without either

Pope or hierarchy.

It may be recalled that Luther’s plan was originally to leave it to

each congregation to appoint a preacher either from its own body or an

outsider, who was then to act in their name and with their authority.

There seemed no better way of securing control over the preacher’s

doctrine. As for the ecclesiastical penalties, Luther, even in his

“Deudsche Messe,” left their use to the congregation as a whole.[1164]

At a later date he still clung to the idea of the ecclesiastical

jurisdiction of the congregation. Even to absolve from sin belonged,

in his opinion,—and to this he adhered to the end,—to all believers,

and such absolution was as valid as had it been pronounced by God

Himself (always assuming that faith had already been awakened in the

penitent).[1165] On the authority of the congregation was to rest, not

only the lower ministry, but also the quasi-episcopate. The scheme he

sketched in 1523 in the Latin work he addressed to the Bohemians, “_De

instituendis ministris ecclesiæ_,” has already been described.[1166]

The many abuses which arose, and indeed were bound to arise, from the

independence of the congregations soon compelled him to cast about for a

more reliable framework. The phantom of a community of believers united

in spirit, of a “brotherhood” minus any social or constitutional cohesion

and devoid of any vigorous direction, proved incapable of realisation.

Help was to be looked for only from the State.

By clinging to its solid structure the religious innovations would

have a chance of avoiding the conventicle system and the danger of

its congregations falling asunder. The tendency to drift towards the

State was also promoted by the opposition of the fanatical Anabaptists,

for this sect was a menace to order in the congregations owing to its

excesses and also to the pertinacity with which, following out Luther’s

own teaching, it insisted on individualism and repudiated the “office”

of the ministry. Not only did Luther, after the rise of the Anabaptists,

emphasise the outward rather than the inward Word, but, for the same

reason, he also laid much greater stress than formerly on the “office”

and on the external representation of the Church’s members—invisibly

united by the faith—by duly called officials.

Thus, the Church, whose invisibility and spirituality Luther had been so

fond of emphasising, became, in course of time, more and more a visible

and concrete body, though remaining closely bound up with the State. Yet,

even in Luther’s earlier views on the Church, certain indications pointed

to the visible Church yet to come; indeed the ideas he retained from

Catholic days were to prove stronger than he then anticipated.

Of a statement contained in “_De servo arbitrio_” (1525), a book written

after the rise of the Anabaptist subjectivism, Möhler justly remarks:

“This passage views the clergy as the representatives of the Church which

is thus quite visible; professing the faith of the invisible Church and

expressing its mind, this Church has a definite doctrinal standpoint

which she advocates through her clergy, and, which, as the dictum of the

Saints, she regards as true and infallible. Hence the visible Church

appears as the expression and facsimile of the invisible Church.”[1167]

Already in his books against Alveld and Catharinus Luther was at pains

to insist that the Church which he taught was a real community living

on earth in the flesh, though not tied down to any definite place or

persons.[1168] Wavering and confusion, here as elsewhere, characterise

Luther’s teaching.

We can understand how his Catholic opponents, for instance Staphylus,

make much of the change from the visible to the invisible Church.

Staphylus dubs those who persisted in advocating her invisibility, the

“_Invisibiles_,” such being the followers of Flacius, Schwenckfeld and

Osiander, and also the Anabaptists.[1169]

It is a fact that Melanchthon, particularly in his later years, insists

on the Church as an institution and on her visible nature more than

Luther does. The centuriators defined the Church as “_cœtus visibilis_”

and, after Chemnitz’s day (†1586), the Church of the Lutheran theologians

is something quite visible, and is spoken of as an institution for the

preservation and promotion of pure doctrine and of the means of grace

which work by faith.[1170]

Nor can the Wittenberg view of the Church be taken otherwise when we

see how the theologians of that town in Luther’s own time proceeded in

appointing ministers and controlling and supervising their office. The

preachers and pastors, after their doctrine had been found consonant with

that of Wittenberg,[1171] were “entrusted with the ministry” though it

is not apparent whether the authorisation came from the congregations

who applied for them, or from the theological examiners, or from the

sovereign and his mixed consistory. The formulas used are by no means

clear, save on one point, viz. that they expressly claim for the

Wittenbergers the character of a true “Catholic Church,” or at least

their harmony with such a Church.

In the ordination-certificate of Heinrich Bock (above, p. 265), who

received a call as pastor and Superintendent to Reval, the quondam

city of the Teutonic Order in Esthland, and who had been “ordained”

on April 25, 1540, by Bugenhagen, the pastor of Wittenberg, we find

it stated: “His doctrine tallies with the consensus of the Catholic

Church which our Church also holds, and he is free from every kind

of fanaticism condemned by the Catholic Church of Christ.”[1172]

Hence they claimed to be one with the universal Church throughout the

world and not to form an isolated community apart; this, as we know,

was Melanchthon’s favourite view. The olden hierarchy was, however,

replaced by that of Wittenberg, as we read in the same certificate:

“We”—the signatories, Luther, Bugenhagen, Jonas and Melanchthon—“have

entrusted him with the ministry of the Church, that he may teach the

Gospel and dispense the sacraments instituted by Christ,” “_iuxta

vocationem_,” i.e. in accordance with the call of the authorities

at Reval who had summoned the ordinand to govern their Church (“_ad

gubernationem ecclesiæ suæ_”). The testimonial was the work of

Melanchthon.

Other testimonials of this kind are similarly worded.

The certificate of Johann Fischer who went from Wittenberg to

Rudolstadt in 1540 (above, p. 265) sets forth that “he had been called

to the ministry of the Gospel by the people there, who had also borne

witness to his good moral character”; they had asked that “his call

might be reinforced by public ordination”; this had been conferred on

him when it had been shown that he held “the pure, Catholic doctrine

of the Gospel which our Church also teaches and professes,” and that

he rejected all the fanatical opinions which the Catholic Church of

Christ rejects.[1173] The statement embodied in the testimonial,

giving the grounds on which the signatories, the pastor of Wittenberg

and other “ministers of the Gospel,” undertook such an ordination is

noteworthy: “We may not refuse to do our duty to the neighbouring

Churches for the Nicene Council made the godly rule that ordination

should be requested of the neighbouring Churches.” Of the objections

that theology and Canon Law might have raised those who drafted the

document seem to have no inkling.

In this case the Wittenbergers claim to be no more than a

“neighbouring Church”; elsewhere they are more ambitious.

The fact is, Wittenberg was anxious to stand at the head of the visible

Church.

It was at Wittenberg that Luther, as the leader of the young Church,

had first preached the truth of the Gospel urged thereto “by Divine

command”; on the strength of such a command he was compelled to defend

himself against the Elector’s lawyers who wanted to play havoc with “his

Church.”[1174]

“By divine authority we have begun to ameliorate the world.”[1175]

Foes at home twitted him with setting up an “office of the Word” by

which an end was made of all freedom; they urged, that, at Wittenberg,

people were trying to “breathe new life into despotism, to seat

themselves in the chair and to exercise compulsion just as the Pope

had done heretofore.”[1176] Luther proclaims loudly: “We, who preach

the Evangel, have full powers to ordain; the Pope and the bishops can

ordain no one.”[1177]—“You are a bishop,” said Luther once jokingly to

a Superintendent, “just as I am Pope.”[1178] Beneath the jest there lay

bitter earnest, for the authority of the “Wittenberg school” in Luther’s

estimation stood high indeed; whoever “despises it, so long as the Church

and school remain as they are, is a heretic and a bad man,” seeing that,

in this school, God has “revealed His Word.”[1179]—Nevertheless, the

Wittenberg theologians complained that this authority was not recognised,

that the Church was a “spectacle of woe,” without “oneness either in

doctrine or in worship”; “our princes and cities” ought to bring about

unity. Moreover things are bound to grow worse, seeing that “each one

wants to be his own Rabbi.”[1180] Outside Wittenberg, and even within

the city walls, and that even in Luther’s time, the prediction of Duke

George about the 72 sects of the Protestant Babel seemed about to be

fulfilled.[1181]

Yet Luther, in setting up the Wittenberg Primacy, retained his

former principles which were altogether at variance with unity and

subordination. “Who holds the public office of preacher,” so he declared

in 1531, is not “forbidden to judge of doctrine” (before this, as the

reader may remember, every “miller’s maid” had been free to do this); but

whoever has no such office may not do so, because he would be acting “of

his own doctrine and spirit.”[1182]

Where is your office? Such was his question in 1525 to his opponent

Carlstadt. The latter appealed to the call he had received from the

congregation of Orlamünde. But of this Luther even then refuses to

hear. He required from Carlstadt, in addition, the ratification of the

sovereign, viz. of the Saxon Elector.

Even in those days he was most anxious to see Church discipline

established and excommunication resorted to, even though this involved

making the Church something visible; the disruption and confusion

everywhere rampant cried aloud for regulations, laws and penalties.[1183]

“Such punishment and discipline through the Ban,” so he says, “is

utterly odious to the world and causes the faithful ministers much work

and danger; for vice has already grown into a habit; it is no longer

a sin; the ungodly have power, riches and position on their side. The

greater the rascal the better his luck.”[1184] Yet, according to him it

was impossible for the Church to make laws, otherwise we would again be

putting up “snares for consciences” as in Popery.[1185] Laws must be

made only by the sovereigns—whatever discipline was enforced against the

unruly was enforced by the secular authorities. “The most the parsons

did for discipline was in following out the Electoral instructions to

the Visitors and denouncing offenders to the secular officials and

judges.”[1186] Of the “blasphemers,” viz. those who were obstinate or

opposed the New Evangel, Luther wrote in 1529 to Thomas Löscher, parson

of Milau: “They must be forced to attend the preaching,” needless to say

by temporal penalties; in this way they will be taught the obedience they

owe as citizens and also their duty to the State, “whether they believe

in the Evangel or not.… If they wish to live among the people, then they

must learn the laws of the people, even though unwillingly.”[1187] Hence

here and in other instructions it is no longer a question of the Church

but only of the sovereigns; these, so he urged, were to be backed by the

preachers. He praised the Bohemian Brethren and the Swiss for having

better discipline in their Churches, he also admitted that the action of

the authorities would not of itself alone be sufficient to correct grave

moral disorders.[1188]

“Unless the Court gives its support to our regulations,” Melanchthon once

said, the result will be mere “platonic laws.”[1189]

References such as these to the State, which was now seen to be necessary

for the support of the Church when once it had become a visible

body,[1190] are to be met with repeatedly by anyone who follows the

history of Lutheranism in its beginnings, more particularly in the years

1525-1528. It was during this period that the union of the new Church

with the State, which has been described above, was accomplished. The

sovereign arrogated to himself those powers which gradually made him the

supreme head of the Church and permanent “emergency-bishop.”[1191] The

visibility of the Church, or rather Churches—as all claim to catholicity

was abandoned save in the credal formularies—rested on the enactments of

the rulers, who, not without Luther’s connivance, soon introduced the

compulsory element into religion. To make use of the invisible power of

the Gospel and to give advice to consciences as to moral conduct, was

indeed left to the ministers of the Word. But it was the State that had

to establish “the right form of worship and the right ecclesiastical

organisation.”[1192]

All heretical communities from the commencement of the Church had looked

to the State for help. But no heresiarch ever put himself so completely

in the hands of the State in all outward matters as Luther and his

fellows did where princes of their own party were concerned. “The common

Christian Church” was, according to him, to retain for herself only the

true faith and the sacraments which worked by faith.

When, in the State Church thus called into being, the authorities

proceeded too vigorously against the preachers and treated Luther

without due consideration, the latter had himself a taste of the state

of servitude into which he had brought the Church. Döllinger says truly

that this restriction must have been “doubly irksome to a man who had

known the old episcopal, ecclesiastical rule and who now had to admit to

himself that it was he who had brought about the destruction of a system

which, in spite of all its defects, had dealt with Church matters in an

ecclesiastical spirit, and that it was he who had paved the way for the

new and quite unecclesiastical order of things.”[1193]

Not seldom do we hear Luther reproaching himself bitterly for the changes.

Among the thoughts that chiefly disturbed his conscience was, as he

himself repeatedly admits, that of having rent asunder the great

Church. How can you justify your revolt against the one great Church

of antiquity, the heir to the promises, so the inner voices said to

him as he himself relates: “The words ‘_sancta ecclesia_’ affright a

man. They rise up and say: ‘Preach and act as you like and can, the

‘_ecclesia christiana_’ is still here. Here is the bark of Peter, it

may be tossed about on the waves, but perish it will not!…’ What was I

to do? And how was I to comfort myself?… And yet I had to do it [i.e.

preach against this Church] as here [John viii. 28] the Lord Christ also

does and preaches against those who in name are God’s Kingdom and God’s

priesthood.”[1194]

Elsewhere he admits: “What am I doing in preaching against such

[representatives of the olden Church], like a pupil against his masters?

Thoughts such as these storm in upon me: Now I see that I am in the

wrong; oh, that I had never begun, never preached a single word! For

who is allowed to set himself up against the Church?… It is hard to

persist and to preach against such a Ban.”[1195]—And yet, in his defiant

spirit, he does persist: “This hits one smartly in the face, as has

often happened to me … yet the One Man, my Beloved Lord and Healer Jesus

Christ, is more to me than all the holiest people on earth.” Since he

thinks it is His Evangel he is defending, he is able, though only at

great costs, “to rise above the cry of ‘Church, Church,’” though he has

to admit that, “this troubles me greatly,” and “it is truly a hard thing

… to leave the Church herself and not to believe or trust her doctrine

any more.”[1196]

It was no real parallel when Luther, in order to justify the State

Church, appealed to the conditions in the Middle Ages where the rulers

had a share in Church matters,[1197] for if then the princes had

intervened in Church matters their action, at least in principle, was

always subordinate to the ecclesiastical authority which kept the power

in its own hands, and concerned moreover only those outward things in

which the Church was thankful for their assistance: The two co-ordinate

powers, the secular and the spiritual, helped one another mutually—such

at least was the ideal of world-government in those days,—acting in

Christian agreement in the service of God and for the general welfare of

mankind. Now, however, that the olden spiritual authority had been either

completely paralysed or reduced to the shadow of its former self, Luther

undertook to replace it by the State, and thus the Church ceased to be

any longer a co-ordinate power.

Though the Wittenberg theologians insisted that to them belonged the

care of souls and this alone, still the limits between this domain and

that of the State became everywhere confused when once the new system

had begun to work. Owing to the friction this caused, Luther, in the

course of time, came to emphasise merely the duty of the authorities to

arrange by law for the establishment of “schools and pulpits,” and to

“allow us divergency in preaching or morals.”[1198] Otherwise he left

those in power, the high-handed nobles and officials, to do as they

pleased, or, else, he lashed them ineffectually with violent and abusive

language. In 1586 he declared, speaking of the marriage questions:

“The peasants and the rude people who seek nothing but the freedom of

the flesh, and likewise the lawyers who are always bent on thwarting

our decisions, have wearied me so greatly that I have thrown aside the

marriage cases and written to some that they may do as they please in

the name of all the devils; let the dead bury their dead.”[1199] It

was chiefly in the matter of these matrimonial cases that he came into

conflict with the Court lawyers, e.g. as to the validity of the secret

marriage contracts. It was in this connection that he declared that, “in

his Church,” which was God’s own institution, he would retain in his

own hands the decision on such matters by virtue of his ecclesiastical

office. In other strong remonstrances wrung from him by the arbitrary

interference of the State officials and the nobles in Church matters,

he sometimes spoke so strongly of the inalienable rights of the Church

that one might well think that he regarded the Church as essentially an

independent institution with an organisation and spiritual authority of

its own.[1200] More usually, however, he simply sighs. When the Court

of Dresden interfered with his plans for the improvement of Church

discipline he wrote resignedly: “Satan is still Satan. Under the Pope he

pushed the Church into the world’s sphere and now, in our day, he seeks

to bring the State system into the Church.”[1201]

* * * * *

Without reverting to the subject of the State and Established Church

already dealt with (vol. v., 568 ff.) we may refer to the close

connection between Luther’s theology on the Church and the development

which was its outcome. His theology, from the outset, had aimed at

undermining the authority of the Church, while at the same time enlarging

the sphere of the secular power.

As early as 1520 in his work addressed to the German nobility he had

praised the secular lords as “priests like us, equal in all things”;

“they were to give free scope to the office and work which they have

from God, wherever it is needed or useful.” Of the clergy, without

considering their authority in ecclesiastical matters, he writes:

“The priests, bishops or popes must deal with the Word of God and the

sacraments, this is their work and office.”[1202]

“The direction of the outward business of the Church, i.e. what we

now term Church government,” so Sehling, the Protestant Professor

of Canon Law, says, “Luther in his writing to the German nobility,

and ever after, attributes directly to the worldly authorities.… Nor,

above all, does he claim for the Church any power of legislating. The

Reformed Canon Law, so far as it was reorganised legislatively, was

based entirely on the code of the State.”[1203]

Luther, in fact, recognised no other authority throughout the whole of

the social order than that of the State; nowhere excepting amongst the

secular authorities was there, according to him, any real power; there

is on earth only one power, viz. the secular. “Worldly superiors, by

virtue of their calling, maintain order and rule according to law and

equity; as for the Church she has, by God’s ordinance, her common

ministry of Word and Sacrament.”[1204] “The power of the Churches,”

says the Schwabach Visitation Convention of 1528, “only extends to the

choosing of ministers and the enforcing of the Christian Ban”; besides

this they may also provide for the care of the poor; “all other power

belongs either to Christ in heaven or to the secular authorities on

earth.”[1205]

Nor could he well recognise any apostolic teaching authority in the

“higher orders of the Church,” seeing that a “little maid of seven

years” on the side of the New Faith “knows more than the Apostles,

Evangelists and Prophets” on the other side; the latter are but the

“devil’s apostles, evangelists and prophets.”[1206]

How he casts aside all the authority of the Church is perhaps shown

most plainly in the short Theses of 1530 in his writing “Ettlich

Artickelstück, so M. L. erhalten wil wider die gantze Satans Schüle

uñ alle Pforten der Hellen”: “The Christian Church has no power to

issue the least order concerning good works, never has done so and

never will.” “The parson or bishop [i.e. the Evangelical ministers]

has not the right to assert his authority everywhere for he is not

the Christian Church. Such parson or bishop may exhort his Church

to sanction certain fasts, prayers, holidays, etc., on account of

the present needs, to be observed for a time and then be allowed to

drop.”[1207]—But what the Evangelical ministers cannot do, that the

secular authorities may do, for, in another passage, Luther points out

expressly the binding character of the rules which the authorities

might draw up, for instance regarding fasts; should the sovereign

order fast-days, everyone must obey. In the same way if the German

Prince-Bishops gave such an order it was to be obeyed, but only

because they were Princes, not because they were bishops.[1208] During

the Diet of Augsburg he refused to admit that, in future, there

should be bishops having at the same time princely powers. On the

other hand, however, he himself made the princes to all intents and

purposes bishops.

The contradiction in which he here involves himself has been brought

out very strongly by a recent historian and theologian who as a rule

is on Luther’s side: “To our mind there is a glaring contradiction

between Luther’s theses on the spirituality of faith and the rights of

the Christian authorities. Luther never noticed this contradiction,

and, all his life, stood for both simultaneously. … From the religious

standpoint he advocates the principle of unlimited freedom as inherent

in the nature of faith; in the secular sphere, i.e. in the domain of

the State, he is unwilling to overthrow the principle shared by all

[?] in his day, viz. that the authorities have a right to assist in

deciding on public worship and doctrine; in the rightful domain of

the worldly authorities his controversies have no right to intervene.

Hence the contradiction.”[1209] “Luther, who, where the peasants are

concerned, plays the part of Evangelist, refuses to tamper anywhere

with the existing [?] laws of the State where it is a question of

their lords.”[1210]

Here Luther’s fundamental idea of the separation between Church and

world also comes into play.

The Church of his theology must necessarily be absorbed by the State,

because, being a stranger to the world, it was not conversant with the

conditions and, even with the best will in the world, was unable to

hold its own against the visible powers. The spiritual rule, according

to him, was to be as widely sundered from the secular “as the heavens

are from the earth.”[1211] Thus the Church fled into a spirit realm

and left the world to the tender mercies of the secular power. She

thus became herself the cause of her “alienation and isolation from

real life.”[1212] It naturally, indeed necessarily, followed that

the sovereign set up government departments, which called themselves

spiritual, but which in reality were secular and derived all their

jurisdiction from him alone. Such were the consistories.

The relations between State and Church in Lutheranism may be regarded

as an indirect justification of the Catholic doctrine of the Church’s

nature. According to the Catholic view Christ founded the sublime

structure of the Church as a free spiritual society. He willed that the

saving grace he had won by His Death should be applied to the souls of

men by means of a visible and independent institution, which, inspired by

Him with His own ideal and holy aims and equipped with her own peculiar

rights, should work for the salvation of mankind until the end of the

world. Hence, the advocates of the olden Church not only set the idea of

the Church in the foreground of the struggle, but they also explored,

enlarged on and illumined this idea with the help of Holy Scripture and

the teaching of the Fathers. Such was the work of men like Eck, Cochlæus,

Johann Fabri, Bishop of Vienna, and Catharinus, and, in the same century,

of Melchior Canus, Peter Canisius, Bellarmine and Stapleton. They indeed

allowed the inward side of the Church—its soul as it has been called—to

come into its rights, but, at the same time, they maintained with equal

firmness its thoroughly visible character, above all they insisted on the

hierarchy with the successor of St. Peter at its head as the holder of

the threefold spiritual power—which Luther denied—of shepherd, teacher

and priest. On this point there could be no yielding.

To those adherents of Luther’s who fancied they could reach union without

the Church’s help and without an entire acceptance of the Catholic

doctrine, Eck addressed the following: “There is no middle course and

words are of no avail; whoever wishes to make himself one in faith with

the Catholic Church must submit to the Pope and the Councils and believe

what the Roman Church teaches; all else is wind and vapour, though one

should go on disputing for a hundred years.”[1213]

What the above Catholic polemics said may be summed up as follows:—

Because the Church, according to Christ’s plan, was to be an

independent and living institution, His future “kingdom” and “heavenly

vineyard,” it replaced the Jewish synagogue by an even better

institution. This Church was to be indestructible and the gates of

hell were not to prevail against her (Matt. xvi. 18).

As a real institution the Church was marked out by the gifts bestowed

on it at the outset by the Divine Founder; out of the plenitude of

the power He possessed “in heaven and on earth” He created in her a

real, and no mere phantom office, comprising ghostly superiors, viz.

the “_ministerium ecclesiasticum_”; hence a twofold society arose

consisting of those whose duty it is to guide and those who are

guided. The latter receive from the former, i.e. from the hierarchy

of priests, bishops and Pope, viz. the successor of Peter, the

doctrine handed down by Christ, and preserved intact and infallible,

together with Holy Scripture and its true reading. Those who have the

oversight over the rest admit the faithful into the sacred company by

means of visible rites, and, thanks to the obedience they receive as

God’s representatives, there results “a body” of faithful united with

Christ, the One True Head.

It was to this hierarchy that, according to the Catholic theologians,

the solemn words of Christ were spoken: “He that heareth you heareth

Me, and he that despiseth you despiseth Me” (Luke x. 16). “Go ye and

teach all nations baptising them in the name of the Father and of the

Son and of the Holy Ghost … and lo I am with you all days even to the

consummation of the world” (Matt. xxviii. 19 f.). The “Keys of the

Kingdom of Heaven” are entrusted to them and they are told: “Amen I

say unto you, whatsoever you shall bind on earth, shall be bound also

in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, shall be loosed

also in heaven” (Matt. xviii. 18). They may “command” as Paul did, who

journeyed from place to place and “commanded them to keep the precepts

of the apostles and the ancients” (Acts xv. 41). Peter, moreover, and

his successors, received the right and duty to feed “the sheep” as

well as the “lambs” (John xxi. 16), besides the especial custody of

the keys (Matt. xvi. 19); on him and on his God-given constancy the

Church of Christ was built (Matt. xvi. 18).

The Holy Ghost “placed” the bishops “to rule the Church of God” (Acts

xx. 28). Whoever “will not hear the Church” is shut out from salvation

and is to be regarded “as the heathen and publican” (Matt. xviii. 17).

Nowhere in these passages, so it was pointed out, is there ever a word

about the secular power having any hand in the growth of the great

society of God upon earth. Nor could Christ, in view of the object to

which He had founded His Church, without proving untrue to Himself,

have left behind Him a helpless and unfinished work, dependent for its

very life on the discretion of the secular authorities and taking its

laws from the State. The Church’s four marks (above, p. 295) point to

something higher.

Even did Luther wish to disregard the words of institution, he should

at least, so it was urged, not shut his eyes to history; now, from

the earliest historical times, the Church had always existed under

the form of a society, i.e. divided into the two categories of the

teachers and the taught. Even according to Protestant writers this

form may be traced back at least as far as the 2nd century, and, to

an unprejudiced eye, its traces will be discernible even earlier in

the authentic sources, i.e. the Bible and history. None, however,

was better fitted to bear witness to the earliest organisation of

the Church than the Church herself, for she could do so out of the

unbroken and untarnished consciousness of her existence; her testimony

confirms her Divine appointment to be an independent society and a

hierarchically governed institution.

Lutheranism, however, took scant notice of these Biblical and historical

proofs.[1214] Its founder, at the end of his life, left it as his

legacy a church, or rather churches, of a different structure. In the

evening of his days, in spite of the hopeless and imperilled state of

his congregations, he refused to admit any gleam of light that might

have brought him back to the unwavering authority of the ancient Church

which once, in the days of his crisis, he had extolled. By heavenly

signs and wonders, so he had pointed out in his Commentary on Romans

(1516), this Church was introduced into the world; she is the mother of

those who teach; to her decision every doctrine must bow if it is not

to become a heresy, “robbed of the witness of God and of that divinely

authenticated authority” which “down to the present day supports the

Roman Church.”[1215]

Since he had descended into the arena of controversy his attitude

towards the dogma of the Church had become not so much a matter of

doctrine (for the essential question was, as Köstlin aptly remarks, “very

insufficiently grasped and explained by him”[1216]) as one of policy.

5. Luther’s Tactics in Questions concerning the Church

Both for Luther’s views on doctrine and for his psychology his tactics

in his controversy about the nature of the Church offer matter for

consideration.

Controversy, as we know, tended to accentuate his peculiarities. His

talents, his gift of swift perception, his skill for vivid description,

his art of exploiting every advantage to the delight of the masses

were all of value to him. What he wrote when not under the stress of

controversy lacked these advantages, advantages, moreover, which, for the

most part, were merely superficial, and sometimes, when he was in the

wrong, display a very unpleasing side.

_The Erfurt Preachers in a Tight Place_

In 1536 Luther took a hand in a controversy which had arisen at Erfurt

as to whether the “true Church was there,” and whether his preachers,

who represented the Church and were being persecuted by some of the Town

Council, should leave the town.[1217]

As early as 1527 he had had occasion to complain of the Erfurt

Councillors; they had not the courage “to go to the root of the

matter”; they tolerated the “dissensions” in the town arising from

the divergent preaching of the “Evangelicals” and the “Papists,”

instead of “making all the preachers dispute together and silencing

those who could not make good their cause.”[1218] Since the Convention

of Hamelburg in 1530[1219] both forms of worship had been tolerated

in the town. To the great vexation of Johann Lang and the other

preachers the quick-witted Franciscan, Conrad Kling, an Erfurt Doctor

of Theology (above, vol. v., p. 341), delivered in the Spitalkirche

sermons which were so well attended that the audience overflowed

even into the churchyard. Catholic citizens of standing in the town

and possessed of influence over the Council, spread the report that

the Lutheran preachers were intruders who had no legitimate mission

or call, and had not even been validly appointed by the Council. In

consequence of this, Luther, with Melanchthon and Jonas, addressed

a circular letter in 1533 to his old friend Lang and the latter’s

colleagues, in which he encourages them to stand firm and not to quit

the town; he points out that their call, in spite of all that was

alleged, had been “with the knowledge of the magistracy,” and not the

result of “intrigue.”[1220] It is plain from this letter that the

tables had to some extent been turned on Lang and his followers who

had once behaved in so high-handed a manner at Erfurt,[1221] and that

they were now tasting “want and misery” as well as contempt. In vain

did the preachers attempt to shake off the authority of the Council by

claiming to hold their commission from God.

Some while after, owing to the further efforts of Kling and his

friends, the situation of the Lutherans became even worse; it was then

that Frederick Myconius, Superintendent at Gotha, took their side and

persuaded Luther to write the above memorandum of Aug. 22(?), 1536, on

the True Church of Christ at Erfurt. This was signed by Melanchthon,

Bugenhagen, Jonas and Myconius, and may have been the latter’s

work. The document is highly characteristic of Luther’s tactics in

the shifty character of the proofs adduced to prove the call of

the Erfurt pastors. It did not succeed in inducing the Council to

grant the preachers independence or to abrogate the restrictions of

which they complained, although, as Enders remarks, “it exalted the

spiritual power as supreme over the secular.”[1222]

There can be no doubt, so Luther argues, that, among his followers in

the town of Erfurt, there was indeed the true “Holy Catholic Church,

the Bride of Christ,” for they possessed the true Word and the true

Sacraments. God had indeed “sent down on the people of Erfurt the Holy

Ghost, Who worked in some of them a knowledge of tongues, discernment

of spirits,” etc. (1 Cor. xii. 10), in the same way He had given them

Evangelists, teachers, interpreters and everything necessary for the

upbringing of His Body (Eph. iv. 11 f.). He urges that the ministers

of the Word were rightly appointed, though here he does not appeal

as much as usual, to the supposed validity of the call by the Town

Council, as the whole trouble had its source in the town magistracy.

The appointment of the preachers, so he now says, was the duty of the

Church rather than of the magistrates; the Town Council had given them

the call only in its capacity as a “member of the Church,” for which

reason their dismissal or persecution was quite unjustifiable. He

also brings forward other personal, mystic grounds for the validity

of their call: they were “very learned men and full of all grace”;

the appointment, which they had received not only from the “people

and the Church, but also from the supreme authority,” had taken place

under the breath of the Spirit (“_impetu quodam spiritus_”) Who had

sent them as reapers into the harvest; they are recognised by all

the Churches abroad, even the most important, and no less do their

sheep hear their voice. Hence, if some of the magistrates now refuse

to recognise them, they must simply appeal to their calling “by the

Holy Ghost and the Church”; the efficient cause here is, and remains,

Christ, Who gives the Church her authority. Hence at all costs they

must stick to their post.

The whole of the extremely involved explanation points to the reaction

now taking place in his mind owing to his bitter experiences with the

authorities in the question of Church government.

In this frame of mind he often makes the call depend solely on the

Church, nay, on Christ Himself. If the Courts are to rule as they

please, so he wrote in the midst of one of these conflicts with the

authorities, the last state of things will be worse than the first.

They ought to leave the Churches to the care of those to whom they

have been committed and who will have to render an account to God.

Hence Luther urges that the two callings be kept separate.[1223]

What is also noteworthy in the memorandum for the people of Erfurt

is that, in order to defend the legal standing of the preachers,

he insists on the fact of their having been recognised by their

congregation, who are willing to listen to them as their shepherds.

Here we have the revival of an old idea of his, viz. that the

soul-herd was really appointed by the people and in their name.

In his later years he tended to revert to this view, though, in

reality, the people never had a say in the matter. After having, in

1542, consecrated Amsdorf as “Bishop” of Naumburg, in the ensuing

controversies he referred to the will of the “Church,” i.e. of the

Naumburg Lutherans. “All depends,” so he wrote, “whether the Church

and the Bishop are at one, and whether the Church will listen to the

Bishop and the Bishop will teach the Church. This is exemplified

here.”[1224]

_Controversies with the Catholics on the Question of the Church_

In what Luther wrote against the Catholics we occasionally meet some fine

sayings on the unfettered authority of the Church in its relations to the

secular rulers,[1225] so greatly was his versatile mind governed by the

spirit of opportunism.

It was from motives of expediency that, in 1529, in his “Vom

Kriege widder die Türcken” he makes out Emperors and kings to be

no protectors of the Church; these worldly powers are “as a rule

the worst foes of Christendom and the faith.” “The Emperor’s sword

has nothing to do with the faith, but only with bodily and worldly

affairs.”[1226] It must be remembered that he wrote this just before

the dreaded Diet of Augsburg.—Again, in 1545, in the Theses against

the “Theologists of Louvain” who had requested the State to protect

the Catholic faith as heretofore, Luther says: “It is not the duty of

Kings and Princes to confirm right doctrine; they have themselves to

bow to it and obey it as the Word of God and God Himself.”[1227]—If

the “Emperor’s sword” and the “Kings and Princes” had been on his

side, then his language would have been quite different. As it was,

however, whenever he thought it might prove useful, he was not

unwilling to come back even later to the standpoint of his writing

“Von welltlicher Uberkeytt.”[1228]

When the Catholics, for instance at the Diet of Augsburg, reproached

his party with having completely secularised the Church and with

prohibiting Catholic worship with the help of the Princes who favoured

him, his replies were eminently characteristic both of his temper and

his mode of controversy.

He knew very well, so he wrote in 1530, “that the Prince’s office

and the preacher’s are not one and the same, and that the Prince as

such ought not to do this [i.e. prohibit the Mass].” But in this the

Prince was acting, not as a Prince, but as a Christian. It is also

“a different thing whether a Prince ought to preach or whether he

ought to consent to the preaching. It is not the Prince, but rather

Scripture, that prohibits ‘winkle-masses’”; if a Prince chose to take

the side of Scripture that was his own business.[1229]

Another answer of Luther’s was to the effect that the abominations of

Catholic worship which were being abolished by the secular authorities

were, after all, outward things, and that the power of the sovereign

without a doubt stretched over “_res externæ_.”[1230]

Of these attempts at justification and of his doctrine of the Church

in general, Köstlin’s observations hold good: “We cannot escape the

fact that, here, there is much vacillation and that Luther stands

in danger of contradicting himself.” “We must admit that he had not

studied deeply enough the questions arising out of the relations of

the authorities to matters ecclesiastical.”[1231] “The decision [of

the sovereigns] as to what constituted right doctrine was final as

regards the substance of the preaching in their lands.” “A nobleman

who had received orders from his sovereign, the Duke of Saxony, to

expel the Evangelical preachers, was told by Luther—though what

he said was undeniably at variance with other utterances—that the

sovereign had no right to do this because God’s command obliged him to

rule only in secular and not in spiritual concerns.” “In fact the only

answer he could give to the Popish persecutors when they alleged they

were forced by _their_ office and conscience to act as they did was:

‘What is that to me?’ for it was clear enough that they were using

their authority wantonly.”[1232]

But how are we to explain his apparent readiness at the time of the

Diet of Augsburg in 1530 to recognise the olden Church, and the power

of the bishops, and even himself to submit to them if only they

would allow him and his followers freedom to preach the Evangel? The

statements to this effect in his “Vermanug” of this year have been

widely misunderstood through being taken apart from their setting. He

does not for a moment imagine, as he has been falsely credited with

doing, that it was not “his vocation to found a new Church separate

from Catholicism”; neither has he any desire to remain united with his

foes “in one communion under the Catholic bishops.”

Luther, as he here says, is only willing, “for the sake of peace, to

allow the bishops to be princes and lords,” and this only on condition

that “they help to administer the Evangel”—i.e. take his part; in

that case they “would be free to appoint clerics to the parishes

and pulpits.” His offer is, “that we and the preachers should teach

the Evangel in your stead,” and “that you should back us by means

of your episcopal powers; only your personal mode of life and your

princely state would we leave to your conscience and to the judgment

of God.”[1233] In the meantime, on account of the Catholic faith

to which they clung, he calls them “foes of God,” speaks of their

“anti-Christian bishopry,” and, because of the infringements of the

law of celibacy, scourges them as the “greatest whoremongers and

panders upon earth.”[1234]

In his controversies with the Catholics he often enough found himself

faced by the objection, that the true Church could not be with him,

because on his side all the fruits of holiness were wanting; the Church

being essentially holy should needs be able to point to her good

influence on morals.

Thus, for instance, a Dominican adversary had written: According to

Luther the Gospel had been under the bench for the last four hundred

years; but, now, surely enough, “it is under the bench even more than

heretofore, for the Gospel and the whole of Scripture have never been

so despised as at present owing to Luther’s teaching, who excludes all

love of God and man, all concord between lords and serfs, priests and

laity, men and women, rejects all good works and discipline, obscures

the truth and replaces it by nothing but lies and introduces hatred

and envy, unchastity, blasphemy and disobedience.”[1235]

In his replies to such arguments against the truth of his Church

Luther was loath to attempt the difficult task of proving the

existence of holiness in the domain of the Evangel. On the contrary,

with surprising candour, he usually meets his opponents half-way as

regards the facts. Thus, in his “Wider Hans Worst,” in 1541, he admits

that things are just as bad as they had been in Jerusalem in the days

of the prophets, “with us too there is flesh and blood, nay, the

devil among the sons of Job. The peasants are savage, the burghers

avaricious and the nobles grasping. We shout and storm our best,

helped by the Word of God, and resist as far as we can.… Willingly we

confess and frankly that we are not as holy as we should be.”[1236]

Such admissions are followed by astonishing attempts to evade the

force of the objection and by coarse attacks on the immorality of the

Papacy which he exaggerates beyond all measure.

The few, he declares, who are good and virtuous suffice to prove the

Church’s holiness. “Some do more than their part; that they are few

in number does not matter. God can help a whole nation for the sake

of one man as he did by Naaman, the Syrian (4 Kings v.). In short,

one’s life cannot be made a subject of debate.”—On another occasion

he replies shrewdly that the mark of holiness was not nearly so

safe as other marks, for distinguishing the true Church; for pious

works were also practised at times by the heathen.… As regards its

importance as a mark, holiness must be subordinated to the true

preaching of the Word and to pure doctrine, which in the end will

always bring amendment of life; whereas corrupt doctrine poisoned the

whole mass, a scandalous life was damaging chiefly to the man who

lived it; but corruption of doctrine had penetrated Popery through and

through.[1237] “We do not laugh when wickedness is committed amongst

us as they [the Papists] do in their Churches; as Solomon says (Prov.

ii. 14): ‘Who are glad when they have done evil and rejoice in most

wicked things,’ and also seek to defend them by fire and sword.”[1238]

We have here an instance of the tactics by which he turns on his

adversaries and abuses them. In his anxiety to turn the reproach of

his foes against themselves he selects by preference the celibacy

of the clergy and the religious vows; nor does he attack merely the

blemishes which the Church herself bewailed and countered, but the

very institution itself.

In his “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen” he exclaims: “The Pope condemns

the married life of the bishops and priests, this is plain enough

now”; “if a man has been married twice he is declared by the Papists

incapable of being promoted to the higher Orders.[1239] But if he has

soiled himself by abominable behaviour he is nevertheless tolerated in

these offices.”[1240] “Why,” he asks, most unjustly misrepresenting

the Catholic view of the sacrament of marriage, “why do they look upon

it as the lowest of the sacraments, nay, as an impure thing and a sin

in which it is impossible to serve God?”[1241]

To what monstrous and repulsive images he can have recourse when

painting the “whore Church” of the Papacy, the following from “Wider

Hans Worst” will serve to show: You are, so he there writes in 1541 of

the Catholics, “the runaway, apostate, strumpet-Church as the prophets

term it”; “you whoremongers preach in your own brothels and devil’s

Churches”; it is with you as though the bride of a loving bridegroom

“were to allow every man to abuse her at his will. This whore—once a

pure virgin and beloved bride—is now an apostate, vagrant whore, a

house-whore,” etc. “You become the diligent pupils and whorelings of

the Lenæ, the arch-whores, as the comedies say, till you old whores

bear in your turn young whores, and so increase and multiply the

Pope’s Church, which is the devil’s own, and make many of Christ’s

chaste virgins who were born by baptism, arch-whores like yourselves.

This, I take it, is to talk plain German, understandable to you and

everybody else.”[1242]

Without following him through all he says we shall merely draw the

reader’s attention to a proverb and a picture Luther here uses. The

proverb runs: “The sow has been washed in the pond and now wallows

again in the filth. Such are you, and such was I once.”[1243] In

the picture “the Pope’s Church,” i.e. hell, is represented as a

“great dragon’s head” with gaping jaws, as it is depicted in the old

paintings of the Last Judgment; “there, in the midst of the flames,

are the Pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, emperors, kings,

princes and men and women of all sorts (but no children). Verily I

know not how one could better paint and describe the Church of the

Pope,”[1244] etc.

After such rude abuse he comes back in the same writing to his usual

apology. There was, he says, no object in alluding to the moral evils

in the Lutheran Churches because of the Church being of its very

nature invisible.[1245] Everything depends on the doctrine “which

must be pure and undefiled, i.e. the one, dear, saving, holy Word of

God without anything thrown in. But the life that ought to be ruled,

cleansed and hallowed daily by such teaching is not yet altogether

pure and holy because our carrion of flesh and blood still lives.”

Yet “for the sake of the Word whereby he is healed and cleansed all

this is overlooked, pardoned and forgiven him, and he must be termed

clean.”[1246]

The Papists have a beam in their own eye, i.e. their false doctrine,

but they see the mote in the eye of others “as regards the

life.”[1247] If it is a question with whom the true Church is to be

found he assures us: “We who teach God’s Word with such certainty are

indeed weak, and, by reason of our great humility, so foolish that we

do not like to boast of being God’s Churches, witnesses, ministers

and preachers or that God speaks through us, though this we certainly

are because without a doubt we have His Word and teach it”; it is

only the Papists “who venture boldly to proclaim out of their great

holiness: Here is God and we are God’s Church.”[1248]

It was not, however, bold presumption and lack of humility that led

Luther’s literary opponents among the Catholics to appeal to the promises

Christ had made to His Church; rather it was their conviction that these

solemn assurances excluded the possibility of the Church’s having ever

erred in the way Luther maintained that she had done.

_The Indefectibility of the Church and Her Thousand-Year-Long Error_

When the question arose, how the Church, in spite of Christ’s protection,

could nevertheless have fallen into such monstrous errors,[1249] Luther

was disposed to admit in his polemics that the true Church, i.e. the

community of real believers, could not go astray. “The Church cannot

teach lies and errors, not even in details.… How could it then be

otherwise when God’s mouth is the mouth of the Church. As God cannot lie

neither therefore can the Church.”[1250]

Such an immutable and reliable guide to erring men for their perfect

peace of mind and sure salvation, the Catholics retorted, did Christ

intend to leave in His visible Church, ruled by the successors of St.

Peter.

An able Catholic work of 1528, already referred to above, emphasises

the Church’s immutability in her dogma: “That preacher who does

not preach in accordance with the Holy Catholic Church and the

holy Fathers sins against the truth.… With due reverence we firmly

believe all that is written in the approved Books of the Old and

New Testament. We must not, however, so confine ourselves to this

as to look upon what the Holy Church teaches apart from Scripture

as human dross, seeing that Scripture itself commands us to keep

the doctrine of the Church and the Fathers.” The author goes on to

show his opponent Luther what services are rendered by the Church’s

authority, how she preserves intact and vouches for the Canon of

Scripture. It is only from the lips of the Church that we learn which

books were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. “For

where is it written that we must believe the Gospels of Matthew, John

and the rest? But, if it is nowhere written, how is it you believe

in these Gospels? How much at variance is your practice with your

teaching?”[1251]

As to the infallibility of the Church Luther retorted: The invisible

Church cannot err, but “that Church which we usually mean when we use

the word, can and does err; the congregation of true believers cannot

be assembled in one particular spot and is often to be found where

least expected. Moreover, even this Church, i.e. the true believers

and the saints, can sometimes go astray by allowing themselves to be

drawn away from the Word.… Hence we must always regard the Church and

the saints from two points of view, first according to the Spirit,

and, then, according to the flesh, lest their piety and their Word

savours of the flesh.”[1252] The Church teaches according to the

Spirit when her “belief tallies with the Word of God and the belief

of Christ Himself in heaven. To speak in this manner and meaning is

right.”[1253] But “we must not build on her opinion or belief where

she holds or believes anything outside of and beyond the Word of

God.”[1254] It was according to the flesh that all those abominations

of errors were taught which were termed “opinions of the Churches,

though they were nothing of the kind but merely human conceits,

invented outside of scripture and parading under the Church’s

name.”[1255]

With this Luther’s reader is flung back once more into the most

subjective of systems, for who is to decide whether this or that

doctrine “savours of the flesh.” Each one for himself, solely

according to the standard of Holy Scripture or, rather, each one as

Luther dictates. But Luther’s decisions touched only the doctrines

known to him; who is to decide on the questions yet to arise after his

death?

He condemns the errors of the Middle Ages. Yet he is occasionally

ready to praise the Mediæval Church. As we know he acknowledged

that she had preserved Baptism. When the Church says that “Baptism

washes away sin,” this, to Luther, does not savour of the flesh.

“She also holds and believes that in [?] the bread and wine the Body

and Blood of Christ are given.… Summa, in these beliefs the Church

cannot err.”[1256] These, however, merely happened to be Luther’s

own opinions. Infant-Baptism Luther defended against the Anabaptists

without seeking help in the Bible; as for the presence of Christ in

the Sacrament against the Zwinglians he indeed had the words of the

Bible, yet here, too, he was only too glad to reinforce what he said

by the traditions and infallible teaching office of the Church,

though in so doing he was contradicting his own theory.[1257]

Luther, with characteristic disregard of logic, calls the earlier

Church a “Holy place of abominations.” She was a “holy place,” for

“there, even under the Pope, God maintained with might and by wonders

first Holy Baptism; secondly, in the pulpits, the text of the Holy

Gospel in the language of each country; thirdly, the Forgiveness of

Sins and Absolution both in Confession and publicly; fourthly, the

Blessed Sacrament of the Altar; … fifthly, the calling or ordination

to the preaching office.… Many retained the custom of holding up

the crucifix before the eyes of the dying and reminding them of the

sufferings of Christ on which they must rely; finally, prayer, the

Psalter, the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments, item

many good hymns and canticles both in Latin and in German. Where

such things survived there must undoubtedly have been a Church, and

also Saints. Hence Christ was assuredly there with His Holy Spirit,

upholding in them the Christian faith though everything was in a bad

way, even as in the time of Elias, when the 7000 left were so weak

that Elias fancied himself the only Christian still living.”[1258]

Nevertheless, this was the selfsame Church, which not only connived

at the teaching of heretical abominations but actually herself taught

all the depravities which Luther describes in the same writing, such

as her peculiar doctrine of priestly ordination, of the validity

of the secret Canon of the Mass, of the spiritual authority of the

bishops, of justification, good works and satisfaction, of purgatory,

saint-worship, etc.

That here he does not condemn the olden Church off-hand and fling

her to the jaws of the dragon as he was wont to do is a casual

inconsistency; his moderation here is to be explained by the necessity

he was under then (after the Diet of Augsburg), of showing that he

could claim a certain continuity with the Church of the past, and also

by his desire to influence those Catholics who were still sitting on

the fence and whom he would gladly have drawn over to his own side by

seeming concessions, in accordance with his tactics at Augsburg.

Yet, in spite of the above concessions, the Mediæval Church remains

in his eyes a “place of abominations”; her members, though validly

baptised, are not members of the Church; they might indeed sit in the

Church, but only as Antichrist sits in the Temple of God (2 Thess. ii.

4); her children would be saved if they died before coming to a full

knowledge of the Popish Church, but if they grew up and followed her

lying preaching then they would become devil’s whores;[1259] even as I

myself “was stuck fast in the behind of the devil’s whore, i.e. of the

Pope’s new Churches, so that it is a grief to us to have spent so much

time and pains in that shameful hole. But praise and thanks be to God Who

has delivered us from the Scarlet Woman!”[1260]

So low is his esteem for the authority of the tradition of the “Holy

Place of abominations,” that he includes among the doubtful and fallible

statements of that Doctor of the Church the famous saying of St.

Augustine, that he would not believe the Gospel were it not for the

Church.[1261] He urges that Augustine himself had declared, that his

doctrines were to be examined, and only those to be accepted which were

found correct. He prefers to harp on another passage where St. Augustine

says: “The Church is begotten, fed, brought up and strengthened by the

Word of God,”[1262] as though St. Augustine in speaking thus of the

soul of the Church was denying her external organisation, her spiritual

supremacy, and her teaching office. Luther, however, treated tradition

just as he pleased; theologians had always distinguished between those

traditions of the olden Doctors that had been guaranteed by the Church

and those views which were merely personal to them; the latter no

theologian regarded as binding, whereas the former were accepted by

them with the respect befitting the witnesses. Here, once more, we see

Luther’s subjective principle at work, which excludes all authoritative

doctrine that comes to man from without, leaves him exposed to doubt

and negation, and quite overlooks the fact that all revelation in last

resort comes to the individual from without with an irresistible and

authoritative claim to respect. Just as the Divine revelation vindicates

its claim to acceptance by the faithful by means of proofs, so too, the

teaching authority of the Church—as Luther’s Catholic opponents were

not slow to point out—could show proofs that what was presented to the

faithful as an article of belief might reasonably be accepted without

any need of previously testing it to see whether it agreed with Holy

Scripture—an examination, which, as a matter of fact, most people were

not capable of undertaking.

As the polemic we quoted above argues, Protestants held Holy Scripture to

be so clear that everyone could understand it without outside help. “But,

if the heretics think Scripture to be so plain and clear, why do they

write so many books in order to explain it? If Scripture is so clear,

plain and easy to understand how is it that they are so much at variance

concerning that one text: ‘This is My Body?’”[1263]

* * * * *

Luther now fell back on the Holy Spirit. “Without the Holy Ghost,” he

says, “it is impossible to discern the abominations from the Holy Place.”

But, so he was justly asked, who is to vouch for it that a man has truly

the Holy Spirit? And, if, as Luther opines, the Holy Ghost points to

the fruits as the means whereby He may be recognised, everything again

depends on the fruits being judged according to Luther’s own moral

standard. In short, in these controversies, Luther revolves in a vicious

circle.

In his Table-Talk Luther’s habit of shielding himself from objections

behind the strangest misrepresentations is again apparent. Such

misrepresentations, occurring in his most intimate conversations,

show that he was very far from merely using them in public or from

motives of policy; rather they influence his whole mode of thought and

feeling and were a second nature with him. We have only to turn to his

conversations on the subject of the “Church,” collected in 1538 by his

friend and companion Anton Lauterbach.[1264]

Here we meet with the revolting assertion that, in the Papistical

Church, the Pope claimed to be the only one who had a right to

interpret Scripture, and that he did this “out of his own brain”; this

Church, so Luther goes on, had set up a mass of human regulations and

vain observances which stifled all freedom and true religion; “the

name Church was a pretext for the most abominable errors.” Further,

“the true Church [i.e. mine] teaches the free forgiveness of sins,

secondly, she teaches us to believe firmly, and, thirdly, to bear

the cross with patience. But the false Church [the Pope’s] ascribes

the forgiveness of sins to our own merits, teaches men to waver,

and, finally does not carry the cross but rather persecutes others.”

Besides, how can the Papists have the true Church, seeing that they

are “some of them Epicureans, some of them idolaters?”—Fancy talking

about the authority of the Church! Is it with this that the fanatical

Anabaptists are to be vanquished? “Moreover, we know that: The true

Church never at any time bore the name or title that the godless so

boldly claim; she was ever nameless and is therefore believed rather

than seen; for the most part she lies downtrodden and neglected;

weakness, crosses and scandals are her portion. Only look at the

Church under the tyranny of the Pope; the Papal Decretals are the _ne

plus ultra_ of ungodliness.”

“I am astonished,” so he ends, speaking of the Roman Primacy, “at the

great blindness with which men worshipped the Pope’s lies and his

boundless and utterly shameless audacity, as though Holy Scripture

depended on the authority of the Roman Church whose head he claimed to

be, basing his claim on the words of Christ (Matt. xvi. 18) ‘Thou art

Peter and on this rock I will build My Church.’”

_Luther’s Tactics in the Interpretation of the Bible_

The text just quoted leads us to glance at his Biblical arguments; to

conclude this chapter we shall therefore give as a sample of his exegesis

on the Church a more detailed account of his exposition of the chief

argument for the papal primacy, viz. Christ’s promise to Peter, using for

this purpose his last book against Popery.[1265]

He would fain, so he says, “point out the Christian sense of this

text” as against that read into it by the hierarchical Church;

nevertheless, at his first effort he cannot rise above a coarse

witticism. “For very fear,” on approaching this text “Thou art Peter,”

etc., something “might easily have happened had I not had my breeches

on; and I might have done something that people do not like to smell,

so anxious and affrighted was I.” Why did not the Pope appeal rather

to the text: “In the beginning Cod created the heavens—that is the

Pope—and the earth, that is the Christian Church,” etc. This is the

first answer.

The second is a perversion of the Catholic view; he accuses the Pope

of deducing from the text under discussion, that he has “all power

in heaven as well as on earth” and authority “over all the Churches

and the Emperor to boot.” This parody of the truth Luther proceeds

triumphantly to demolish as “blasphemous idolatry.”—There follows

thirdly an appeal to the “Emperor, Kings, Princes and nobles” to seize

upon the Papal States which the Pope has stolen by dint of “lying and

trickery” and to slay as blasphemers him and his Cardinals.

He goes on to explain the Bible passage in question by proving,

fourthly, against the “wicked, shameless, stiff-necked” Papists from

Eph. iv. 15, and from Augustine and Cyprian, “that the whole of

Christendom throughout the world has no other head set over it save

only Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The true sense of Eph. iv. 15 and

the real teaching of both the Fathers in question are too well known

for us to need to waste words on them here.—Fifthly, he brings forward

John vi. 63: “My words are Spirit and life” and argues: “According

to this the words Matt. xvi. 18 [concerning Peter and the rock] must

also be Spirit and life.… The upbuilding must here mean a spiritual

and living upbuilding; the rock must be a living and spiritual rock;

the Church a living and spiritual assembly, nay, something that lives

for all eternity.”—These facts, however, had always been admitted by

Catholic commentators without causing them any apprehension as to

the primacy or the visible Church.—Sixthly, he seeks to demonstrate

that the Church can only be built on the rock indicated by Christ “by

faith”; this, however, excludes the primacy of Peter, for “whoever

believes is built upon this rock.”—Seventhly: “It is thus that St.

Peter himself interprets it, 1 Peter ii. 3 ff.,”—though this is a fact

only credible to one who is already of Luther’s opinion.—Eighthly, he

will have it that, in the famous passage, Christ meant to say no more

than: “Thou art Peter, that is a rock, for thou hast perceived and

named the Right Man, viz. Christ, Who is the true Rock, as Scripture

terms Him. On this rock, i.e. on Me, Christ, I will build the whole of

My Christendom.”

This reading would certainly cut away the ground from under the

argument of the Catholics.[1266] Nevertheless Protestant scholars

have repeatedly shown themselves willing to apply Christ’s promise

to the person of Peter, as ecclesiastical tradition has ever done,

and to defend this as the true sense of the words. Thus the Berlin

exegetist, Bernhard Weiss, writes: “By using ταύτῃ for the name

(Peter), signifying a rock, any application of the words either to

Jesus or to the faith or confession of Peter is shut out.… It can only

be understood of his person,” etc.[1267] By Holtzmann, the Strasburg

exegetist, the opposite interpretation was uncharitably described as a

fruit of the “school of Protestant _ex parte_ exegesis.”[1268]

We must, however, allow that, both here and in his treatment of the

promise of the keys (Matt. xvi. 19), Luther shows himself an adept

in the use of language. “To speak plain German we may say this,”

so he begins one of his commentaries, and indeed he knows how to

speak well and in a manner calculated to impress his hearers. Of the

matter, however, we may judge from the following: “To thee I will give

the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” this means that, should anyone

refuse to believe the apostles, on him they should pass sentence and

condemn him; their “office” still remains in the Church, there always

being “retaining of sins for the impenitent and unbelieving, and

forgiveness for the penitent and the believing”; but, quite apart from

this “office,” believers have absolute power “where two or three are

gathered together in the name of Christ (Matt. xviii. 20).”[1269] Here

again we have Christ’s promise misconstrued, which does not refer to

spiritual authority but solely to the effect of the prayer in common

of two or more of the faithful.[1270]

“Hence, let the Pope and his Peter be gone,” so he concludes … even

though there were a hundred thousand St. Peters, even though all the

world were nothing but Popes, and even though an angel from heaven

stood beside him; for we have here [Matt. xviii. 18, where the power

of binding and loosing is bestowed on _all_ the apostles] the Lord

Himself, above all angels and creatures, Who says they are _all_

to have equal power, keys and office, even where only two simple

Christians are gathered together in His name. This Lord we shall

not allow the Pope and all the devils to make into a fool, liar or

drunkard; but we will tread the Pope under foot and tell him that he

is a desperate blasphemer and idolatrous devil, who, in St. Peter’s

name, has snatched the keys for himself alone which Christ gave to

them all in common. “It is the Lord Himself Who says this [John xx. 21

ff.]; therefore we care nothing for the ravings of the Pope-Ass in his

filthy decretals.”[1271]