CHAPTER XXXIX

END OF LUTHER’S LIFE

1. The Flight from Wittenberg

“Old age is here,” so wrote Luther in a fit of depression to his Elector

on March 30, 1544, in his sixty-first year; “old age which in itself is

cold and ungainly, weak and sickly. The pitcher goes to the well until

one fine day it breaks; I have lived long enough, may God grant me a

happy deathbed.… Methinks, too, I have already seen the best I am like

to see on earth, for it looks as though evil days were coming. May God

help His own! Amen.” He recommends his sovereign to seek comfort in the

“Dear Word of God” and in prayer, assuring him: “These two unspeakable

treasures shall never be the portion of the devil, the Turk, or of the

Pope and his followers.”[1272]

About this time he had to complain of palpitations, dizziness and

calculus. His will he had already drawn up on Jan. 6, 1542.[1273] In it

he refused to make use of the usual legal forms, being determined to have

nothing to do with the lawyers, with whom he was always at variance.

He was quite aware that lawyers still insisted on the objections to

the validity of the marriages of clerics and monks and the rights of

inheritance of their children, as they indeed were bound to do not only

by Canon Law but also by the law of the Empire.

How cheerfully he was inclined to look forward to death even the year

before is apparent from a letter to Myconius, “the bishop of the Churches

of Gotha and Thuringia,” who was then lying seriously ill; here he says:

“I pray our Lord Jesus not to call to everlasting rest you and our

followers and leave me here among the devils to be still longer tormented

by them. Truly I have been long enough plagued by them and really I

deserve that my turn should come before yours. Hence my prayer is: May

the Lord lay your illness upon me and rid me of my earthly habitation

which is so useless, worn-out and exhausted. I see right well that I am

no longer good for anything.”[1274]

After his above farewell-letter to the Elector Luther’s thoughts reverted

to death more frequently than before. He cast up the books he had still

to write and took stock of his powers to see whether he would have time

to finish them. For his energy and spirit of enterprise were by no means

yet dead, though at times they seem to be paralysed. Often enough he

pulls himself together in his letters sufficiently to make jokes with his

friends, the better both to banish his own gloomy thoughts and to inspire

the addressees with greater courage and confidence. Nevertheless, through

it all, we can detect his disquiet and suffering.

“You often importune me,” so he wrote to his pupil Anton Lauterbach

about the end of 1544, “for a work on ecclesiastical discipline,

but you do not tell me where I am to find the leisure and health,

seeing that I am a worn-out and idle old man. I am ceaselessly snowed

under with letters. I have promised the young princes a sermon on

drunkenness, others and myself I have promised a book on secret

marriages, others again, one against the Sacramentarians; some now

want me to set all else aside and write a ‘Summa’ and running gloss

on the whole Bible. Thus one thing stands in the way of the other and

I get through nothing. And yet I had imagined that, as one who had

already done his work, I had earned the right to some leisure, and

to live quietly and in peace and so pass away. But I am compelled to

pursue my restless way of life. Well, I shall do what I can, and, what

I can’t, I shall leave undone.… Pray for us as we do for you.”[1275]

In Jan., 1545, when he had almost completed his long and arduous

work on Genesis, he sighed: “May God put an end to this moribund and

sinful life as soon as this book is finished, or even before should

it please Him; do you ask God this for me.… Yes, truly, pray for my

happy dissolution and that I may die a good death.”[1276] “Pray for

me,” he wrote to Amsdorf in May of the same year, “that I may be set

free as soon as may be from my fetters and be united to Christ, but

that, if my life, or rather my sickness, is to last still longer, God

may bestow on me strength of body and force of soul.” He praises God

that he himself and his friends, “though unworthy sinners, had been

chosen for this blessed and glorious office, viz. to hear the voice of

God’s Majesty in the Word of the Evangel; on this the angels and all

creation wish us luck, but the Pope is dismayed and all the gates of

hell shake.”[1277]

Luther’s extant letters covering the period from May to December, 1545,

afford us an insight into the emotions through which he passed.

From the month of May onwards he sank deeper and deeper into a dreary

state of annoyance and sadness, and, at last, at the end of July, he

shook the dust of Wittenberg from his feet. In the latter half of August,

after he had allowed himself to be persuaded to return, his spirits

rapidly revived, and such was the reaction that his new mystical ardour

knew no bounds while his exertions seem almost incredible.

To take the period in question in its chronological order: The

month of May commenced with a bitter attack on Agricola, and, on

the latter’s arrival at Wittenberg, he refused even to see him. “Of

this monster,” he wrote on May 2, “I will hear nothing but words of

condemnation; of him and his friends may I be rid for all eternity.…

Satan may rage and boast as he pleases!”[1278] His annoyance, as is

usual with him, is speedily transferred to Satan. That same day,

plagued with a tiresome matrimonial dispute, he asked: “Is then the

devil master of the world?”[1279] Shortly after he declared the Pope

to be the “monster of Satan, the end of whose days was at hand.”[1280]

His joy at the approaching end (“_gaudeamus omnes in Domino_”) is,

however, not unmixed. The thought depresses him that the devil should

still be active even at Halle which had recently been won over to the

Evangel, and that he had there “just blessed, or rather cursed, two

nuns, thereby proving how much more he fain would do.”[1281]

Annoyance at the bad treatment of his preachers also lets loose a

flood of complaints. “In many places,” so he laments, “they are

treated very ill so that they are minded to depart and are even

compelled to take flight.”[1282] The hostility of the politicians at

Court and the lawyers, was also a cause of profound grief to him.[1283]

With greater apprehension than usual he saw at the beginning of June

terrifying natural portents and prayed with passionate longing for the

“overthrow of all things” which he was confidently awaiting.[1284]

Already in spirit he saw the sparks of the coming conflagration which

was to consume Germany for her chastisement, “before the outbreak of

which may God deliver us and ours from this misery!”[1285]

In July anger at the “contempt of the Word on our side and the

blasphemy of our foes,”[1286] the sad sight of the want of unity and

growing number of sects in his own camp, where “each one insists

on following his own ideas,”[1287] the “decline of learning”

amongst his followers, where “many bellies are set only on feeding

themselves,”[1288] all this combined with other experiences tended to

make his depression unendurable. To be obliged to set in order the

public worship spelt a positive torture to him.[1289] Even in his

own household he had cause for bitter disappointment in his niece

Magdalene who had insisted on making love to a man (whom she was

ultimately to marry) of whom Luther did not approve, thus giving Satan

an opportunity for “maliciously attacking” Luther’s good name.[1290]

Yes indeed, “Satan rules,” he said to Amsdorf, in a letter of July 9,

“and all have lost their wits.”[1291] Here the cause of his vexation

was the Emperor, who, so he had been told, was insisting that the

Protestants should attend the Council of Trent and submit to it. It is

true Luther does not give up all hope of God again making a mockery

of Satan,[1292] but, in the meantime, he execrates and curses the

Council.[1293] He also vents his wrath on the Emperor, Ferdinand the

German King, the King of France and the Pope. And why? Because he was

only too ready to give credence to a report which had reached him that

they had despatched ambassadors to the Grand Turk with gifts and an

offer of peace, and that, clothed in long Turkish garments, they were

humbling themselves before the infidel.[1294] “Are these Christians?

They are hellish idols of the devil. Yet I hope they are at the same

time a glad token of the coming of the end of all things. Let them

worship the Turk, but let us call upon the true God, Who will humble

both them and the Turk in the Day of His Coming.”[1295]

He is still suffering from the after-effects of the excitement in

which he had, as he says, penned his “book brimful of bitter wrath,

against the Papal monster,” viz. his “Against the Popedom founded by

the Devil.” He has not the strength left to write a sequel to it, but

he tells his friend Ratzeberger: “I have not yet done justice either

to myself or to the greatness of my anger; I know too that I can never

do full justice to it, so great and boundless is the enormity of the

Papistic monster.” In such a frame of mind he feels keenly that he is

the “trump heralding the Last Judgment.”[1296]

He is conscious, however, that his trump cannot peal loud enough in

the world (“_parum sonamus_”) owing to his state, borne down as he is

by pains of body and soul. He was unable to summon up the force to

write either the continuation of his work against the Pope, or even

the short reply to the Swiss which he had promised Amsdorf.[1297]

The above false report of the Christian embassy to Turkey current at

Wittenberg he was at once ready to accept because it was in keeping

with his pessimistic outlook. The evil spirits of suspicion, distrust

and the mania of persecution made his unhappy mind willing to credit

everything that was unfavourable, and even embittered the life of

those about him. Melanchthon in particular suffered under this mood

owing to his disposition to find a _modus vivendi_ with the Swiss,

whilst all the while concealing his leanings under a prudent and timid

silence.[1298]

“The wild and immoral life at Wittenberg, a town so greatly favoured

by God,”[1299] and the danger this spelt to the good name of the whole

of Luther’s work stung him now more keenly than ever before. Of his

own remorse of conscience we hear nothing at this time; his letters

even to his intimates, usually so communicative, are silent as to any

temptations or inward conflicts with the devil. There is no doubt that

public affairs were then weighing more heavily on him, for instance

the troubles arising from the Hessian bigamy. He was now again

suffering from calculus. “I would dearly like to die,” he writes, “a

plague on these excruciating pains! If, however, it is the Will of God

that I succumb to them, He will give me grace to endure them and to

die, if not sweetly, at least bravely!”[1300]

When his physical sufferings diminished there came to his mind the

recollection of how, more than a year before, early in 1544, he had

determined to leave Wittenberg, of which he had sickened, in order to

seek a more peaceful life elsewhere. It was only the extraordinary

exertions of his friends that had then succeeded in keeping him back.

Bugenhagen and the other preachers, the University and the magistrates,

had besought him with tears and entreaties. On that occasion he

was “incensed,” so Cruciger, his friend and pupil, says, “at some

trivial matter, or rather he was full of suspicion about us all, as I

believe.”[1301] Already in 1530, and again in 1539, he had declared that,

owing to the annoyance given him, he would never again mount the pulpit

at Wittenberg.[1302] Now, however, his chagrin was even deeper and he

resolved to carry out his plan prudently and quit the town for ever.

Without acquainting even Catherine Bora of the length of his absence from

the town he left Wittenberg at the end of July accompanied by his son

Hans, his guest Ferdinand von Maupis, travelling with Cruciger, who was

to decide a quarrel between Medler and Mohr, the two Naumburg preachers

at Zeitz, on July 27. Luther also repaired to Zeitz and took part in the

negotiations, but instead of returning with Cruciger to Wittenberg, he

wrote a letter to Katey from Zeitz on the 28th,[1303] stating that he

had no intention of returning to Wittenberg. “My heart has grown cold so

that I no longer like being there; I advise you to sell the garden and

courtyard, the house and stabling; then I would make over the big house

[the old monastery in which Luther used to live] to my gracious Lord,

and it would be best for you to settle down at Zulsdorf [i.e. on her own

little property] while I am yet alive.”[1304] He hoped, he goes on, that

the Elector would continue to pay him his stipend as professor, “at least

during the last year of his life.”

From the letter it is plain that it was annoyance at the decline of

morals in the town rather than any strained relations with his friends at

Wittenberg that drove him to this sudden decision. “Let us begone out of

this Sodom!” he writes and hints that, in addition to the disorders with

which he was already acquainted fresh scandals had reached his ears on

this journey; the “government,” i.e. the authorities, aroused his deepest

indignation. “There is no one to punish or restrain, and besides this the

Word of God is derided”; maybe the town “will catch the Beelzebub-dance,

now that they have begun to uncover the women and girls [an allusion to

the low-cut dresses] in front and behind.” “So I will wander about and

rather eat the bread of charity than allow my last days to be tortured

and upset by the disorderly life at Wittenberg and see all my hard work

brought to nought. You may tell Dr. Pommer and Master Philip of this if

you please,” he concludes, “and see whether Dr. Pommer will bid farewell

to Wittenberg for me, for I can no longer contain my anger and annoyance.”

The Wittenberg notabilities were filled with consternation on hearing of

what Luther had done; they could not regard it as a mere passing whim,

for they knew Luther’s determination. The University made representations

in writing to the Elector, begging him to intervene to prevent such a

misfortune; the foes of the Evangel would rejoice at the departure of

the great teacher, other professors would leave, and the result would

be new dissensions.[1305] As we know, Melanchthon, by his own account,

was ready “to slink away.” Luther, so the University stated, like a new

Elias, was the chariot and horseman of Israel and quite indispensable; if

he wished any changes made and order established this would be done even

should he find “fault with the teaching of some.” The University also

sent Bugenhagen and Melanchthon to talk the matter over with Luther; the

town despatched its burgomaster and the Elector sent him his own medical

attendant, Ratzeberger, with a friendly letter.[1306]

In the meantime Luther had left Zeitz and gone on to Merseburg, whither

he had been invited by George of Anhalt, formerly canon of the chapter

there. The latter had gone over to Protestantism, and, when the bishopric

was sequestrated in 1541 by a secular prince—August, the brother of Duke

Maurice of Saxony—was appointed “spiritual administrator” of the see. He

now wanted to be formally “consecrated” by Luther as bishop of Merseburg.

To this the latter readily agreed. On Aug. 2, with the assistance of

Jonas, Pfeffinger and others he reiterated the ceremonial which he had

once before performed on Amsdorf at Naumburg (above, vol. v., p. 194).

The festivities at Merseburg, the kindness and hospitality of which he

was the recipient at Lobnitz and Leipzig, and, lastly, the change of air

and surroundings brought Luther to a much better frame of mind.

The messengers from Wittenberg found him at Merseburg. After they had

seen him and listened to his stern admonitions, they were delighted to

receive his assurance that, after all, he would return to Wittenberg. His

resolve had, in fact, been merely the result of strong excitement. Now,

moreover, not only had the depression ceased of which he had so long been

the victim but a notable change of mood had supervened and his confidence

and courage had been restored. Such sudden changes are not without their

parallel in Luther’s earlier life, as has been sufficiently shown above.

He now returned in a better temper to Leipzig, where he preached a

vigorous sermon on Aug. 12, and was there entertained by Camerarius,

Melanchthon’s confidant; he also “associated with his circle of friends

in the best of humours.”[1307]

After his return to Wittenberg on the 16th we hear no more of his

vexation, though he did not put much faith in the disciplinary measures

that had been drawn up for the town, notwithstanding that they were

backed by the Elector; the Court itself, so he wrote, read nothing and

only scoffed at everything.[1308]

* * * * *

He now threw himself once more into the struggle with his theological

foes. A glance at these labours and at his lectures shows him working

at high pressure, while, as his letters show, he retained his sense of

humour.

He set to work immediately on the 32 articles which the Louvain

Faculty of Theology had published with the object of enlightening

Catholics on the nature of the Protestant doctrines.

Already in Aug. he had set up his 76 theses “Against the Articles of

the Theologists of Louvain.”[1309] Here he does not take his opponents

seriously, but, for the most part, simply pours forth his annoyance on

them and their theses, sneering at them and scourging them with coarse

invective. He calls them arch-idolaters, a school of blockheads, lazy

bellies and rude asses, the accursed, hellish brew of Louvain; speaks

of their mad, raving conceit; they are bloodthirsty incendiaries

and fratricides, a stinking cesspool, a school of obscenity and

muck, are these great, gross epicurean swine of Louvain. “They come

straight from hell and teach what they have seen in the Mirror of

Marcolfus,[1310] i.e. the ordure of man-made laws.” “For, instead

of giving the people Holy Scripture, they do nothing else but cack,

spew, belch forth and fling human filth amongst them.… And thus Holy

Church is to be looked upon as no better than a latrine for the scamps

of Louvain wherein they, playing the lord, may void their belly when

over-full, and where, moreover, they slay and lay waste. This indeed

may be termed foolery and raving!”[1311] The strange elation in which

Luther penned so odd-sounding a “reply” is, again, not to be explained

by any ordinary psychology.

In Sep. Luther commenced a work on a larger scale against the

Louvain theologians and their Paris colleagues, which, however, he

was not able to finish. The fragment “Against the Donkeys in Paris

and Louvain,” which exists in two drafts, shows plainly enough what

sort of book it would have been had death not interrupted his work.

He urges that, whoever wishes to teach theology whilst refusing to

acknowledge the truths taught by him concerning the Law, sin and

Grace, is as well fitted to do so as an ass is to play upon the harp,

as the Papacy is to govern the Church, or as the Louvain scholars

to promote the cause of learning.[1312] In this work he fancied he

had recovered his olden stormy vigour. To his friend Jacob Probst he

candidly admitted: “I am more angry with these Louvain quadrupeds than

beseems me, an old man and so great a theologian; but I want it to be

said of me that I took the field against these monsters of Satan, even

though it should cost me my last breath.”[1313]

He was busy at the same time on a revised edition of his Latin

“Chronology of the World,” of which the aim was to show the near

advent of Christ.[1314] On Oct. 16 he finished his Latin Commentary

on the Prophet Osee, and sent a copy as a gift to Mohr, the dismissed

pastor of Zeitz, with a kindly letter of religious consolation and

encouragement.[1315] He also despatched a lengthy circular to the

printers on the capture of Duke Henry of Brunswick, the enemy of the

Evangel; this letter is a monument to his aggressiveness so nearly

verging on the fanatical;[1316] in this he had been strengthened by

the supposed intervention of heaven on his behalf against Henry and

against the Pope and the Mass.[1317]

His intimate correspondence was also steeped in the new enthusiasm

which had laid hold on him. “What a joyful victory has God, Who

hearkens to our prayer, given us,” so he wrote on Oct. 26 to Jonas.

“Let us believe and let us pray! He is faithful to His promises!… O

God, do Thou maintain our joy, or, rather, Thine Own Glory!”[1318]

The jokes we had missed for a while now once more made their

appearance in his letters. In the first epistle written after

his return he hastens to tell Amsdorf of Mutian’s reading of the

inscription “_Soli Deo gloria_” (viz. “To the Sun-God be glory”) on

a tower belonging to the Archbishop of Mayence; after all the “Satan

of Mayence” was perhaps right, so he says, in having the inscription

taken down.[1319] In another letter he cheerfully relates the old

tale of the peasant who, with hands devoutly folded, said to Satan:

“Thou art my Gracious Master the Devil.”[1320] He is also delighted

to be able to tell the story of a Popish preacher, who, before the

war, exhorting the people to pray for the Duke of Brunswick, had said:

“If he is worsted then 14 parsons will be had for the price of a

penny.”[1321]

His last lecture was delivered just before Christmas, 1545, when he

ended his exposition of Genesis. At its close he said: “Here you

have our dear Genesis; God grant that, after me, someone may do it

better; I am weak and can go on no longer; pray that God may grant

me a happy deathbed.”[1322] But his “weakness” was merely temporary.

A little after he wrote: “Whoever must fall let him fall if he

refuses to listen to the Son of God. We pray and look for the day

of our deliverance and destruction of the world with its pomps and

wickedness. Would that it come speedily. Amen. I have taken the field

against the donkeys of Louvain and Paris, but, nevertheless, feel

pretty well, considering my advanced years.”[1323]

Impelled by the ardent desire to do something for the furtherance of

peace within his camp, in spite of his bodily weakness and his distaste

for worldly business, he undertook at the request of Count Albert of

Mansfeld to act as arbiter in the dispute between the latter and his

brother and nephew concerning the royalties from the mines and certain

other legal claims.

“My time is entirely taken up,” so he says, “with affairs which do not

in the least interest me; I must serve the belly and the table.”[1324]

Already at the beginning of October these matters had induced him, with

Melanchthon and Jonas, to proceed to Mansfeld. As soon as his course of

lectures was finished, viz. at Christmas, he again repaired thither, in

spite of the severity of the weather, again accompanied by Melanchthon,

who was inclined to grumble at being called upon to listen to the

squabbles of quarrelsome people. Luther, however, as he wrote to Count

Albert, wished to see the “beloved lords of his native land reconciled

and on good terms” before “laying himself to rest in his coffin.”[1325]

He returned to Wittenberg shortly after Christmas, owing to Melanchthon’s

falling ill.

These two journeys to Mansfeld, afterwards to be followed by a third and

last, have, by controversialists, wrongly been made out to have been due

to Luther’s desire to escape from Wittenberg on account of his bitter

experiences there.

2. Last Troubles and Cares

_Theological Disruption_

“The sad controversies of the last few years had made Luther recognise

that a race of theological fighting-cocks, gamesters and idle rioters

had arisen, and that dissensions of the worst sort might be anticipated

in the future. The nation in which each one obstinately followed his

own way was beyond help.… The Swiss refused to have anything to do with

the German Reformation; the Bucerites held themselves aloof from both

Lutherans and Swiss, the Brandenburgers wanted to belong neither to

the Church of Rome nor to that of Wittenberg; at Wittenberg itself the

Martinians and the Philippists (so-called after Luther and Melanchthon)

were hostile to each other, and finally the Princes and magistrates all

went their own way. ‘Things will fare badly when I am dead,’ such was

Luther’s repeated prediction. Whether he looked at this Prince of the

Church, at that Landgrave, or that other Duke Maurice, there was not one

in whom he could entirely trust. More than one Mene Tekel was written on

the wall, yet none perceived it save the old man at Wittenberg at whom

they all shrugged their shoulders.”[1326]

Such is the description by Luther’s latest Protestant biographer of the

“sad decline of the Evangelical party.”

The Zwinglians had received a severe blow from Luther in his “Kurtz

Bekentnis” of Sep., 1544;[1327] but the Swiss, who were hardy and

independent fellows, soon prepared a furious counter-reply.[1328]

The “old man at Wittenberg” was not deceived as to the profound and

irremediable breach, yet he succeeded, at least outwardly, in driving

away his annoyance and cares by the use of ridicule. Early in 1546, to

one of his confidants who had bewailed the new step taken by the Swiss,

he wrote the following, which forms his last utterance against the

Zwinglians: “If they condemn me, it is a joy to me. For by my writing

I wished to do nothing else than force them to declare themselves my

open foes. I have succeeded in this, hence so much the better. To adapt

the words of the Psalmist: ‘Blessed is the man who hath not sat in the

council of the Sacramentarians, nor stood in the way of the Zwinglians,

nor sat in the chair of the men of Zürich.’”[1329] To another intimate,

Amsdorf, the “Bishop” of Naumburg, who was allowed a deeper insight

into his soul than others, Luther confided that one of the principal

reasons of his hatred of his competitors in Switzerland and South-West

Germany was that “they are proud, fanatical men, and also idlers. At the

beginning of our enterprise, when I was fighting all alone in fear and

dread against the fury of the Pope, they were bravely silent and waited

to see how things would go. Later on they suddenly posed as victors, and

as though, forsooth, they alone had done it all. So it ever is: one does

the work and another seeks to enjoy his labour. Now they even go so far

as to attack me, who won their freedom for them.… But they will find

their judge. If I answer them at all it will be nothing more than a brief

recapitulation of the sentence of condemnation irrevocably passed upon

them.”[1330]—No such answer was, however, to be forthcoming.

Against Melanchthon Luther’s ardent followers, the Martinians, were,

as we know, highly incensed for attempting to modify the doctrines of

the Master. Melanchthon’s sufferings on this account have already been

described (vol. v., p. 252 ff.). With a grudging silence Luther bore

with his friend’s Zwinglian leanings on the doctrine of the Supper, and

with their other differences.

Both, moreover, were surrounded by an atmosphere of theological

bickerings, “where individuals, who, had it not been for these squabbles,

would never have achieved notoriety, gave themselves great airs.”[1331]

We may recall how Melanchthon had even thought of leaving Saxony, where,

as he wrote to Camerarius, he was bound down by undignified fetters; such

was his weakness, however, that he could not bring himself to do even

this. Luther’s coarseness, lack of consideration and dictatorial bearing

it was that led Melanchthon to say that he who ruled at Wittenberg was

not a Pericles, but a new Cleon and an unsufferable tyrant.[1332]

On the question of the veneration of the Sacrament differences at last

sprung up even between Bugenhagen and Luther; the former, usually his

pliant instrument, took upon himself during Luther’s absence to abolish

at Wittenberg the elevation of the elements during the celebration.

Apparently this was in the second half of Jan., 1542. Luther expressed

his disapproval of this action and declared he would revive the

rite.[1333] In 1544, when the three Princes of Anhalt were at Wittenberg

and asked him whether it would be right to abolish the Elevation, he

replied: “On no account; such abrogation detracts from the dignity of

the Sacrament.” There is no doubt that it was his antagonism to the

Zwinglians that was here the determining factor; moreover, as he admitted

Christ to be present in the Sacrament during reception in the wider

sense, i.e. during the liturgical action, he had no theological grounds

for doing away with the elevation and adoration of the elements. In his

own justification he went so far as to say: “Christ is in the bread,

why then should He not be treated with the greatest respect and also be

adored?”[1334]

The Lutheran preacher Wolferinus of Eisleben was in the habit of pouring

back into the barrel what remained of the consecrated Wine after

communion. Luther called him sharply to account, as he found that his

conduct was tainted with Zwinglianism; in order to evade the difficulty

he ordered that, in future, preachers and communicants should see that

nothing was left over after communion.[1335]

Luther, towards the end of his life, had to taste a good deal of that

“theological ire” of which Melanchthon frequently speaks, and not only

from the Swiss. We need only call to mind Johann Agricola, and his

“antinomian sow-theology,” as Melanchthon termed it. His inferences from

Luther’s doctrine of the inability of man to fulfil the Law he never

really withdrew even when he had betaken himself to Brandenburg. In

the Table-Talk dating from the latest period and published by Kroker,

Luther’s frequent bitter references to Agricola show the speaker was well

aware that his Berlin opponent still hated and distrusted him as much as

ever. After Luther’s death it became evident that Agricola “was capable

of everything,” and that Luther was not so far wrong, when, on another

occasion, he declared that he was not a man to be taken seriously.[1336]

Agricola finally died, loaded with worldly honours, in 1566.

A more serious critic of Luther, at any rate on the question of the

Sacrament, was Martin Bucer. The latter’s friendship with the Swiss

and the too independent spirit in which he planned the reformation of

Cologne, caused Luther great anxiety towards the end of his life. In his

plan Luther, so he says, was unable to find any clear confession of faith

in the Sacrament, but merely “much idle talk of its profit, fruit and

dignity,” all carefully “wrapped up that no one might know what he really

thought of it, just as is the way with the fanatics.” In all this talk he

could “readily discern the chatterbox Bucer.”[1337] Bucer, on his side,

was dissatisfied with the progress of Luther’s work in Germany. Owing to

the Interim he was no longer able to remain at Strasburg and accordingly

accepted a post at the English University of Cambridge and died in

England in 1551.

_The Controversy on Clandestine Marriages_

It was, however, annoyances and disagreements of a different sort that

kept Luther to the end of his days in a state of extreme indignation

against the lawyers and politicians of the Court.

A letter of Luther’s to the Elector Johann Frederick dated Jan.

18, 1545, on the controversy with the Saxon lawyers about Luther’s

denunciation of clandestine marriages (those entered upon without the

knowledge of the parents) as illegal, carries us into the thick of

these disagreements.[1338] His sovereign, he says, had ordered him to

confer with the lawyers and come to an arrangement with them; Luther,

however, after summoning them before him, had declared categorically

that, “I had no intention of holding a disputation with them; I had a

divine command to preach the 4th commandment[1339] in these matters.”

Thus, in the questions under discussion, he is determined not to

submit either to the secular or the canon law but only to the Divine.

“Otherwise I should have to give up the Gospel and creep back into the

cowl [become a monk again] in the devil’s name, by the strength and

virtue of both the spiritual and the imperial law. And, besides this,

your Electoral Highness would have to cut off my head, doing likewise

with all those who have wedded nuns, as the Emperor Jovian commanded

more than a thousand years back.” As a result of his arguments, “the

lawyers of the Consistory and Courts agreed to give up and reject

altogether the clandestine espousals [i.e. marriages ‘_sponsalia de

præsenti_’].” In these words he announces his final apparent victory

in this long-drawn controversy.

In the same letter he touches on the deeper side of the quarrel.

The lawyers at the High Court have always stuck to many points of

“the Pope’s laws” which “we of the clergy” don’t want. “Some, too,

made out [in accordance with Canon Law then still in force] that,

on our death, our wives and children could not inherit our goods

and wished to adjudicate them to our friends, etc.” They had paid

no attention to the writings of the new theologians; and yet the

latter, “few in number and insignificant maybe, have done more good

in the Churches than all the Popes and jurists in a lump.” Hence the

preachers had simply disregarded the lawyers, viz. in respect of the

clandestine marriages; this had brought about peace. When, however,

the “Consistory had been set up” (1539), the whole business had begun

anew. “The jurists fancied they had found a loophole through which

to raise a disturbance in my Churches with their damnable procedure,

which, to-day and to all eternity, I want to have condemned and

execrated in my Churches.” “Spoon-fed jurists” thrust themselves

forward; but these “merry customers” are not going to make “of my

Churches, for which I have to answer before God,” “such dens of

murderers.”

In order to understand the victory over the lawyers of which he speaks it

will be necessary to cast a glance back on the whole struggle.

As we have already pointed out in the words of a Protestant biographer

of Luther the legal status of Lutheranism threatened to give rise to

dire complications, while any downright abrogation of Canon Law, such

as Luther wished for, was out of the question.[1340] The sober view of

the situation taken by the lawyers did not deserve Luther’s offensive

treatment. Moreover, under the leadership of Schurf, the lay professors

of jurisprudence at the Wittenberg University had many objections

to raise against Luther’s demands. They not only upheld clandestine

marriages as valid, but, at the same time, defended the indissolubility

of marriage, even in the case of adultery, in accordance with the laws

of the olden Church; they also held that second marriages were not

lawful to the clergy. Schurf likewise wanted the “Evangelical bishops”

to be consecrated by papal bishops. A further cause of constant friction

lay in the fact that the professors of law were obliged to base their

lectures on the books of Canon Law in the absence of any others; whence

it came that Luther had to listen to many disagreeable references to the

questions of Church property, of the right of inheriting of the children

of former monks, of the marriage of nuns, of the legal status of the

monasteries, etc. Schurf was otherwise a good Lutheran and had assisted

Luther with advice at the Diet of Worms. Melchior Kling, his pupil and

colleague at Wittenberg, agreed with him in following the Canon Law

on the question of clandestine marriages, according to which (before

the Council of Trent had required for the validity of marriage, that

it should be performed publicly in the presence of the parish-priest),

they were regarded as valid, albeit wrong and forbidden, so that no new

marriage could be entered into so long as the parties lived.

Luther hoped, by opposing such marriages, to bring about some improvement

in the sad state of morals which the Visitations of 1528 and 1529 had

disclosed in the Saxon Electorate. The facility with which such marriages

were contracted by the Wittenberg students, and the bad effect they

had on the peace of the burghers seemed to him a real blot on the New

Evangel. He insisted very strongly that the consent of the parents was

required as a condition for marriage; without the parents’ consent

the marriages were in his eyes neither public nor valid; it was only

where the parents refused their consent on insufficient grounds that he

would admit that the bride had any right to enter into a real marriage

contract. The decision as to whether the parents’ objections held good

was, however, one on which opinions were bound to differ.

Shortly after the Visitations referred to above, in 1529, he wrote his

“Von Ehesachen,” published early in 1530; in it he declared: “A secret

betrothal simply constitutes no marriage whatsoever,” whilst, as a secret

betrothal (i.e. invalid marriage) he regards “any betrothal which takes

place without the knowledge and consent of those in authority, and who

have the right and power to settle the marriage, viz. the father, mother

or whoever stands in their stead.”[1341]

In 1532 he also proclaimed his views against the lawyers from the pulpit

without, however, being able to alter thereby either their practice or

their teaching. He lamented in 1538 the blindness of Schurf, who paid

more attention to man-made laws than to God’s Word and authority.[1342]

After some new disputes he delivered a sermon on Feb. 23, 1539, in

which he threatened to put on his horns. In it he called his opponents

blockheads; they ought “to reverence our doctrine as the Word of God,

coming from the mouth of the Holy Ghost.”[1343] He was not going to

worship the Pope’s ordure for the sake of the jurists; “let them let

our Church be”; but “now the lawyers are seeking to corrupt our young

students of theology with their Papal filth.”[1344]

Schurf seems to have yielded so far as no longer to attempt to make his

opinions public or official.

The greatest tussle, however, ensued on the establishment of the

Consistories in 1539, as the lawyers who were entrusted with the

matrimonial cases, treated the clandestine marriages as valid, and, in

other ways, also took Schurf’s side.

Luther asserted that by countenancing the “espousals,” which were “an

institution of the devil and the Pope,” the good name and the morals of

Wittenberg were being undermined. “Many of the parents say that, when

they send their boys to us to study, we hang wives round their necks

and rob them of their children.” Not only the burghers and students but

even the girls themselves “who have waxed bold” use their freedom most

wantonly.[1345] In Jan., 1544, in the pulpit, he poured out his wrath

in most unmeasured language, particularly on the second Sunday after

the Epiphany; in his tragic delivery he said, for instance: “I, Martin

Luther, preacher in this Church of Christ, take thee, secret promise and

the paternal consent that follows, together with the Pope and the devil

who instituted thee, I bind you all together and fling you into the abyss

of hell, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.”[1346]

His anger and annoyance had been aroused by certain concrete cases.

One of Melanchthon’s sons had contracted such a marriage as he was

denouncing. In his own family circle the same thing happened, probably in

the case of his nephew, Fabian Kaufmann. A student, Caspar Beier, who was

on intimate terms with Luther’s household, wished to marry at Wittenberg,

but was prevented by the lawyers of the Consistory on account of a

previous clandestine marriage which, however, he denied; he appealed

from the Consistory to the sovereign, and was supported by a letter from

Luther. This quarrel kindled a conflagration at Luther’s home. Cruciger,

a friend of the house, was against Beier and described his cause as “none

of the best”; Catherine Bora, on the other hand, the “_fax domestica_” as

Cruciger called her,[1347] seems to have fanned the flames of Luther’s

wrath, in the interests of Beier who was a relative of hers.

To a friend Luther admitted in Jan. that he “was so indignant with the

lawyers as he had never before been in all his life during all the

struggle on behalf of the Evangel.”[1348]

When the controversy was at its height, viz. in Jan., 1544, the Elector

arranged for an interview between Luther and the Consistory. Later, in

Dec., those negotiations were followed by others, in which the members

of the Wittenberg High Court took part; at last Luther’s obstinacy and

violence won the day: All marriages without the knowledge or approval

of the parents were to be invalid until the latter consented, or the

Consistory had pronounced their opposition groundless. To the Elector,

who from the first had agreed with Luther’s view, the latter then

addressed the letter referred to above (p. 355) where, appealing to his

“Divine mission” to preach the 4th commandment, he announces his final

triumph over the lawyers and their edicts.

His triumph he owed to his strong will and, also, possibly, to the fact

that the Elector was on his side. The victory also affected the case of

Beier, whom Luther hastened to acquaint of his freedom;[1349] it further

decided to some extent, the yet more important question whether or not

the lawyers were to yield to Luther in ecclesiastical matters. They

accepted their humiliation with the best grace possible, but we shall not

be far wrong in assuming that they were not over-pleased with Luther’s

irregular and illogical handling of questions of law.

_Difficulties with the State Church_

The far-reaching encroachments of the secular authorities in his Church

became for Luther in his later years a source of keen vexation.

Much of his Table-Talk, which turns on the lawyers, voices nothing

more than his indignation at the unwarranted interference of the State

in his new Church which he was powerless to prevent. Thus, according

to notes made at this time by Hieronymus Besold of Nuremberg who was a

guest at Luther’s table in 1545, the Master on one occasion gave free

rein to his anger with the lawyers in the matter of the sequestration

of Church lands: “The lawyers shriek, ‘They are Church lands.’ Give

them back ‘their monasteries that they may become monks and nuns and

celebrate Mass, and then they too will allow you to preach.’ [In

other words their proposal was that the new faith should make its way

peacefully. To this Luther’s answer is]: ‘Yes, but then where are we

to get our bread and butter?’ ‘We leave that to you,’ they say. Yes,

and take the devil’s thanks! We theologians have no worse enemies than

the lawyers. If they are asked, ‘What is the Church?’ they reply,

‘The assembly of the Bishops, Abbots, etc. And these lands are the

lands of the Church, hence they belong to the bishops.’ That is their

dialectics. But we have another dialectics at the right hand of the

Father and it tells us, ‘They are tyrants, wolves and robbers’ [and

must accordingly be deprived of the lands]. Therefore we here condemn

all lawyers, even the pious ones, for they know not what the Church

is. If they search through all their books they will not discover what

the Church is. Hence we are not going to take any reforms from them.

Every lawyer is either a miscreant or an ignoramus (”_Omnis iurista

est nequista aut ignorista_“).… They shall not teach us what ‘Church’

is. There is an old proverb, ‘A good lawyer makes a bad Christian,’

and it is a true one.”[1350]

It is somewhat astonishing to hear Luther in his “Table-Talk on the

lawyers”[1351] declaring that it was he who had whitewashed these

“bad Christians” and made them to be respected, and that consequently

he also could bring them again into disrepute, in other words, that

his tongue was powerful enough to do and to undo. “Do not tempt me.

If you are too well off I can soon make things warm for you. If you

don’t like being whitewashed, well and good, I can soon paint you

black again. May the devil make you blush!”[1352]—In one of his very

last letters (Feb., 1546), owing to new friction with the lawyers

about the Mansfeld revenues, he overwhelms them all with the following

general charges: “The lawyers have taught the whole world such a

mass of artifices, deceptions and calumnies that their very language

has become an utter Babel. At Babel no one _could_ understand his

neighbour, but here nobody _wants_ to understand what the other means.

Out upon you, you sycophants, sophists and plague-boils of the human

race! I write in anger, whether, were I calm, I should give a better

report I know not. But the wrath of God is upon our sins. The Lord

will judge His people; may He be gracious to His servants. Amen. If

this is all the wisdom that the jurists can show then there is really

no need for them to be so proud as they all are.”[1353]

Luther’s attitude towards the lawyers is of special importance from

two points of view. It shows afresh the high opinion he entertained of

himself, and, at the same time, it reveals his jealousy of any outside

influence.

“Before my time there was not a lawyer,” he says for instance in

an earlier outburst, “who knew what it meant to be righteous. They

learnt it from me. In the Gospel there is nothing about the duty of

worshipping jurists. Yes, before the world I will allow them to be in

the right, but, before God, they shall be beneath me. If I can judge

of Moses and bring him into subjection [i.e. criticise the Law in the

light of the Gospel] what then of the lawyers?… If of the two one must

perish, then let the law go and let Christ remain.”[1354] He was not

learned in the law, but, as the proclaimer of the Evangel, he was “the

supreme law in the field of conscience (‘_ego sum ius iurium in re

conscientiarum_’).”[1355]

“When I give an opinion and have to break my head over it and a

lawyer comes along and tries to dispute it, I say: ‘Do you look after

the Government and leave us in peace. You men of the law seek to

oppress us, but it is written: Thou art a priest for ever’” (Ps. cx.

4).[1356]—“The justice of the jurists is heathen justice,” he says;

but, after all, even the justice [righteousness] of his own school of

theology fell short of the mark. “Our justice is a relative justice;

but if I am not pious yet Christ is pious; we are at least able to

expound the commandments of God, and do so in the course of our

calling. But, even if you distil a jurist five times over, he still

cannot interpret even one of the Commandments.”[1357]

The other trait that comes out in his dealings with the lawyers

is his distaste for any outside interference with his Church. He

looked askance at the attempts of secular authorities, statesmen and

Court-lawyers to have a say in Church matters, which, strictly, should

have been submitted to him alone and his preachers. Yet it was he

himself who had put the Church under State control; he had invited

the sovereigns and magistrates to decide on the most vital questions,

doing so partly owing to the needs of the time, partly as a logical

result of the new system. He himself had legalised the sequestration

of the Church’s lands and had helped to set up the State Consistories.

So long as the secular authorities were of his way of thinking he left

them a free hand, more or less. He was, however, forced to realise

more and more, particularly in the evening of his days, that their

arbitrary behaviour was ruining his influence and only making worse

the evils that his work had laid bare to the world.

In his last utterances he is fond of calling “Centaurs” the officials

and Court personages who, according to him, were stifling the Church

in her growth by their wantonness, ambition and avarice. He bewails

his inability to vanquish them; they are a necessary evil. “Make a

Visitation of your Churches all the same,” he told his friend Amsdorf,

early in January in the last year of his life; “the Lord will be with

you, and even should one or other of the Centaurs forbid you, you are

excused. Let them answer for it.”[1358]

We have also other utterances which testify to his deep distrust of the

secular authorities, on account of their real or imaginary encroachments.

“The Princes seize upon all the lands of the Church and leave the

poor students to starve, and thus the parishes become desolate, as is

already the case.”[1359]—“The Princes and the towns do little for the

support of our holy religion, leave everything in the lurch and do not

punish wickedness. Highly dangerous times are to come.”[1360]—“The

magistrates misuse their power against the Evangel; for this they will

pay dearly.”[1361]—“The politicians show that they regard our words

as those of men”; in this case we had better quit “Babylon” and leave

them to themselves.[1362]

“I see what is coming,” he wrote in 1541, “unless the tyranny of the

Turk assists us by frightening our [lower] nobles and humbling them,

they will illtreat us worse than do the Turks. Their only thought is

to put the sovereigns in leading-strings and to lay the burghers and

peasants in irons. The slavery of the Pope will be followed by a new

enslaving of the people under the nobles.”[1363]—In the same year he

says: “If the nobles go on in this way,” i.e. neglecting their duty

of “protecting the pious and punishing the wicked,” there will be “an

end of Germany and we shall soon be worse than even the Spaniards and

Turks; but they will catch it soon.”[1364]—In 1543 he indignantly

told a councillor who opposed him and his followers: “You are not

lords over the parishes and the preaching office; it was not you

who founded it but the Son of God, nor have you ever given anything

towards it, so that you have far less right to it than the devil has

to the kingdom of heaven; it is not for you to find fault with it,

or to teach, nor yet to forbid the administration of punishment.…

There is no shepherd-lad so humble that he will take a harsh word

from a strange master; it is the minister alone who must be the butt

of everyone, and put up with everything from all, while they will

suffer nothing from him, not even God’s own Word.”[1365]—In 1544 he

even said of his own Elector: “After all, the Court is of no use, its

rule is like that of the crab and snail. It either cannot get on or

else is always wanting to go back. Christ did well by His Church in

not confiding its government to the Courts. Otherwise the devil would

have nothing to do but to devour the souls of Christians.”[1366]—“The

rulers shut their eyes,” he had written shortly before, “they leave

great wantonness unpunished, and now have nothing better to do than

impose one tax after another on their poor underlings. Therefore will

the Lord destroy them in His wrath.”[1367]

“What then is to become of the Church if the world does not shortly

come to an end? I have lived my allotted span,” so he sighed in 1542,

“the devil is sick of my life and I am sick of the devil’s hate.”[1368]

He often gives vent to his wounded feelings in unseemly words. A strange

mixture of glowing fanaticism and coarse jocularity flows forth like a

stream of molten lava from the furnace within him.

Thus we have the famous utterances recorded above (vol. iii., p. 233

and vol. v., p. 229) called forth by the decline of his Church, the

carelessness of the rulers and the remissness of the preachers.

“Our Lord God sees,” he declares, “how the dogs [the princes who were

against him] soil the pavements, wet every corner and smash the basins

and platters; but when He begins to visit them, His anger will be

terrible.”[1369]

“To these swine,” so he wrote to Anton Lauterbach of the politicians

in the Duchy of Saxony, “we will leave their muck and hell-fire to

boot, if they wish. But they shall leave us our Lord, the Son of God,

and the kingdom of heaven as well!… With a good conscience we regard

them as reprobate servants of the devil; … be brave and cheerfully

despise the devil in these devil’s sons, and devil’s progeny until

they drive you away. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof’

(Ps xxiii. 1).… By your joy you will crucify them and, with them,

Satan, who seeks to destroy us. To speak plain German, we shall s⸺

into his mouth. Whether he likes it or not he must submit to having

his head trodden under foot, however much he may seek to snap at us

with his dreadful fangs. The seed of the woman is with us, whom also

we teach and confess and Whom we shall help to the mastery. Fare you

well in Him and pray for me.”[1370]

The minor State-officials he also handled roughly enough. These

“Junkers” take it upon them “to sing the praises of the papal filth.”

“They stick to the Pope’s behind like clotted manure.” “I know better

what ‘_Ius canonicum_’ is than you all will ever know or understand.

It is donkey’s dung, and, if you want it, I will readily give you it

to eat!” “If donkey’s dung be so much to your taste, go and eat it

elsewhere and do not make a stench in our churches.”[1371]

_The Present and the To-come_

On his last birthday, which he kept on Martinmas-Eve, 1545, Luther

assembled about him Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, Cruciger, George Major and

other guests, and to them opened his mind. According to the account left

by his friend Ratzeberger he spoke of the coming dissensions: “As soon

as he was gone the best of our men would fall away. I do not fear the

Papists, he remarked; they are for the most part rude, ignorant asses and

Epicureans; but our own brethren will injure the Evangel because they

have gone forth from us but were not of us. This will do more harm to the

Evangel than the Papists can.” The sad political outlook of Germany led

him to add: “Our children will have to take up the spear, for things will

fare ill in Germany.” Of the Catholics he said: “The Council of Trent is

very angry and means mischief; hence be careful to pray diligently, for

there will be great need of prayer when I am gone.” All, he exhorted “to

stand fast by the Evangel.”[1372]

“For it is the command of our stern Lord [the Elector],” he says

elsewhere, “that we should maintain undefiled the government of

the Church, dispense aright the Word, the Absolution and the

Sacraments according to the institution of Christ, and also comfort

consciences.”[1373]

Towards his end, according to Ratzeberger, he frequently told the

faithful at Wittenberg that, in order to fight shy of false doctrines,

they must hate reason as their greatest foe. “As soon as he was

dead they would preach and teach at Wittenberg a very different

doctrine”; hence they must “pray diligently and learn to prove the

spirits aright”; they were to keep their eyes open to see whether

what was preached agreed with Holy Scripture (here again the right of

judging falling on the simple faithful). But if it was “outside of

and apart from God’s Word, sweet and agreeable to reason and easy of

comprehension, then they were to avoid such doctrine and say: No, thou

hateful reason, thou art a whore, thee I will not follow.”[1374]

In a sermon on the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, 1546, published

three years later after Luther’s death by Stephen Tucher under the

title “The last Sermon of Dr. Martin Luther of blessed memory,”[1375]

Luther again speaks at length of the “heresiarchs” who had already

arisen and whom more would follow; what the devil had been unable to

do by means of the Kaiser and Pope, that he “would do through those

who are still at one with us in doctrine”; “there will be a dreadful

time. Ah, the lawyers and the wise men at Court will say: ‘You are

proud, a revolt will ensue, etc., hence let us give way.’” But, in

matters of faith, there must be no talk of giving way, “pride may well

please us if it be not against the faith.”[1376]

The picture of reason as a mere prostitute was now once more vividly

before him. He hoped to dispose of the variant doctrines of others,

who, like himself, interpreted the Bible in their own fashion, simply

by urging contempt for reason. The faith in his own teaching, so he

declared, “in the doctrine which I have, not from them but from the

Grace of God,”[1377] must be preserved by means of a deadly warfare

against “reason, the devil’s bride and beautiful prostitute”; “for

she is the greatest seductress the devil has. The other gross sins

can be seen, but reason no one is able to judge; it goes its way and

leads to fanaticism.” The evil that is inherent in the flesh had not

yet been completely driven out; “I am speaking of concupiscence which

is a gross sin and of which everyone is sensible.” “But what I say

of concupiscence, which is a gross sin, is also to be understood of

reason, for the latter dishonours and insults God in His spiritual

gifts and indeed is far more whorish a sin than whoredom.”[1378]

When a Christian hears a Sacramentarian fanatic putting forward his

reasonable grounds he ought to say to that reason, which is speaking:

“Dear me, has the devil such a learned bride?—Away to the privy with

you and your bride; cease, accursed whore,” etc.[1379] Hence some

restriction was to be placed on private judgment; it was to be used

in moderation and only in so far as it tallied with faith (“_secundum

analogiam fidei_”).[1380] This “faith,” however, was in many instances

simply Luther’s own.

As Luther’s personality could not replace the outward rule of faith,

viz. the authoritative voice of the teaching Church, his dreary

prognostications were only too soon to be fulfilled. Hence in the

appendix to another Wittenberg edition of Luther’s last sermon these

words, as early as 1558, are represented as “the late Dr. Martin

Luther’s excellent _prophecies_ about the impending corruption and

falling away of the chief teachers in our churches, particularly at

Wittenberg.”[1381]

It is curious that, towards the close of his life, the Wittenberg

Professor should have come again to insist so strongly on those points

in his teaching for which he had fought at the outset, in spite of all

the difficulties and contradictions they had been shown to involve,

with the Bible, tradition and reason. He could at least claim that

he had not abandoned his olden theses of the blindness of reason, of

the unfreedom of the will, of the sinfulness of that concupiscence,

from which none can get away, of the saving power of faith alone and

the worthlessness of good works for the gaining of a heavenly reward,

of the Bible as the sole source of faith and each man’s right of

interpreting it, and, last, but not least, that of his own mission and

call received from God Himself.

The decline of morals, now so obvious, was another phantom that haunted

the evening of his days.

In the beginning of 1546 he confided to Amsdorf his anxiety regarding

Meissen, Leipzig and other places where licence prevailed, together

with contempt of the Gospel and its ministers. “This much is certain:

Satan and his whole kingdom is terribly wroth with our Elector. To

this kingdom your men of Meissen belong; they are the most dissolute

folk on earth. Leipzig is pride and avarice personified, worse than

any Sodom could be.… A new evil that Satan is hatching for us may be

seen in the spread of the spirit of the Münster Dippers. After laying

hold of the common people this spirit of revolt against all authority

has also infected the great, and many Counts and Princes. May God

prevent and overreach it!”[1382]

He tells “Bishop” George of Merseburg, in Feb., 1546, that “steps must

be taken against the scandals into which the people are plunging head

over heels, as though all law were at an end.” It seems to him that a

new Deluge is coming. “Let us beware lest what Moses wrote of the days

before the flood repeats itself, how ‘they took to wife whomsoever

they pleased, even their own sisters and mothers and those they had

carried off from their husbands.’ Instances of the sort have reached

my ear privately. May God prevent such doings from becoming public as

in the case of Herod and the kings of Egypt!”[1383] “The world is full

of Satan and Satanic men,” so he groans even in an otherwise cheerful

letter.[1384]

Up to the day of his death he was concerned for the welfare of the

students at Wittenberg University. Among the 2000 young men at the

University (for such was their number in Luther’s last years) there

were many who were in bitter want. Luther sought to alleviate this by

attacking, even in his sermons, those who were bent on fleecing the

young; he not only gave readily out of his own slender means but also

wrote to others asking them to be mindful of the students; of this we

have an instance in a note he wrote in his later years, in which he asks

certain “dear gentlemen” (possibly of the University or the magistracy)

for help for a “pious and learned fellow” who would have to leave

Wittenberg “for very hunger”; he declares that he himself was ready to

contribute a share, though he was no longer able to afford the gifts he

was daily called upon to bestow.[1385]

We know how grieved he was at the downfall of the schools and how loud

his complaints were of the lawlessness of youth; how it distressed him

to see the schools looked down upon though their contribution to the

maintenance of the Churches was “entirely out of question.”[1386]

For his University of Wittenberg he requests the prayers of others

against those who were undermining its reputation. He sees the

small effect of his earnest exhortations to the students against

immorality.[1387] The excellent statutes he had laid down for the town

and the University were nullified by the bad example of men in high

places. “Ah, how bitterly hostile the devil is to our Churches and

schools.… Tyranny and sects are everywhere gaining the upper hand by

dint of violence.… I believe there are many wicked knaves and spies here

on the watch for us, who rejoice when scandals and dissensions arise.

Hence we must watch and pray diligently. Unless God preserves us all is

up. And so it looks. Pray, therefore, pray! This school [of Wittenberg]

is as it were the foundation and stronghold of pure religion.”[1388]

He once declared sadly that, among all the students in the town there

were scarcely two from whom something might be hoped as future pastors

of souls. “If out of all the young men present here two or three

honest theologians grow up then we should have reason to thank God!

Good theologians are indeed rare birds on this earth. Among a thousand

you will seldom find two, or even one. And indeed the world no longer

deserves such good teachers, nor does it want them; things will go ill

when I, and you and some few others are gone.”[1389]

“The world was like this before the flood, before the destruction of

Sodom, before the Babylonian captivity, before the destruction of

Jerusalem—and so again it is before the fall of Germany.… Should you,

however, ask what good has come of our teaching, answer me first, what

good came of Lot’s preaching in Sodom?”[1390]

To divert his thoughts from these saddening cares he often turned to

Æsop. It is of interest to note how highly he always prized Æsop’s

Fables, not merely as a means of education for the young in the

elementary schools, but even as furnishing a stimulating topic for

conversation with his friends.

He is very fond of adducing morals from these fables both in his

Table-Talk and in his writings.

Æsop’s tale of the fight between the wounded snake and the crab he

dictated to his son Hans as a Latin exercise,[1391] and, in 1540, when

a Mandate of the Kaiser aroused his suspicions owing to its kindly

wording, the old man at once related to his guests the fable of the

wolf who seeks to lead the sheep to a good pasture, and declared that

he could easily see through this “Lycophilia.”[1392]

For a long time he had a work on hand which he was destined never

to complete; he was anxious to provide a new and better edition

of Æsop for the schools, which, so he hoped, should replace the,

in some respects unseemly, fables of Steinhöwel’s edition then in

use which had been corrupted by additions from Poggio’s Facetiæ. A

series of amusing and at the same time instructive fables which he

translated with this object in view is still extant. That he found

time for such a work in the midst of all his other pressing labours

is sufficient evidence that he had it much at heart. The Preface to

his unfinished little work, which he read aloud to a friend in 1538,

pointed out, that writings of this kind were intended for “children

and the simple,” whose mental development he wished to keep in view,

carefully excluding anything that was offensive. The collection of

Fables then in circulation, “though written professedly for the

young,” unfortunately contained tales with narratives of “shameful and

unchaste knavery such as no chaste or pious man, let alone any youth,

could hear or read without injury to himself; it was as though the

book had been written in a common house of ill fame or among dissolute

scamps.”[1393]

He was very determined in putting down scandals when they occurred in

his own home. A young relative, who was addicted to drunkenness, he

took severely to task, pointing out the good example, which in the

interests of the Evangel his household was strictly bound to give; when

the maidservant, Rosina, whom he had taken into his house, turned out a

person of bad life, he could not sufficiently express his indignation and

dismissed her from the family. A similar case also occurred at the time

of his flight from Wittenberg in July, 1545; he writes to Catherine in

the letter in which he tells her of his intention of not returning: “If

Leck’s ‘Bachscheisse,’ our second Rosina and deceiver, has not yet been

laid by the heels, do what you can that the miscreant may feel ashamed of

herself.”[1394]

Catherine Bora was a good helper in matters of this sort. In fact she

performed with zeal and assiduity the duties that fell to her lot in

tending the aged and infirm man, and looking after the house and the

small property. Amidst his many and great difficulties he often confessed

that she was a comfort to him, and gratefully acknowledges her work.

In his letters to her during his later years he writes in so religious

a strain, and in such heartfelt language, that the reader might be

forgiven for thinking that Luther had entirely succeeded in forgetting

the irreligious nature of the union between a monk and a nun. “Grace

and peace in the Lord,” he writes in a letter from Eisleben of Feb. 7,

1546, to his “housewife.” “Read, you dear Katey, John and the Smaller

Catechism, of which you once said: All that is told in this book applies

to me. For you try to care for your God just as though He were not

Almighty and could not make ten Dr. Martins should the old one be drowned

in the Saale, etc. Leave me in peace with your cares, I have a better

guardian than even you and all the angels.”[1395]

3. Luther’s Death at Eisleben (1546)

In March, 1545, there was sent to Luther by Philip of Hesse an Italian

broadside purporting to have been printed in Rome, and containing a

fearsome account of Luther’s supposed death. In it “the ambassador of

the King of France” announces that Luther had wished his body set up

on the altar for adoration; also that before he died he had received

the Body of Christ, but that the Host had hovered untouched over the

grave after the funeral; a diabolical din had been heard coming from the

grave, but, on opening it, it was found to be empty though it emitted a

murderous stench of brimstone. Luther at once published the narrative

with an half-ironical, half-indignant commentary. He sought to persuade

the people that the Pope had actually wished for his death and damnation.

In a poem which he prefixed to the pamphlet he tells the Pope in his

usual style that: his life was indeed the Pope’s plague, but that his

death would be the Pope’s death too; the Pope might choose which he liked

best, the plague or death.—About the real origin of this alleged Italian

production nothing is known.[1396]

In his bodily sufferings and anxiety of mind concerning the present and

the future of his life’s work Luther frequently spoke of his desire for a

speedy release by death. His words on this subject throw a strong light

on his frame of mind.

As things are “ever growing worse,” he says, “let our Lord God take

away His own. He will remove the pious and then make an end of

Germany.” “I am very weary of life,” he declared, “may Our Lord come

right speedily and take me away, and, above all, may He come with His

Judgment Day! I will reach out my neck to Him that He may strike me

down with His thunderbolt where I am. Amen.”[1397]—As early as June

11, 1539 (?), when he was wished another forty years of life, he said

that, even were he offered a Paradise on earth for forty years, “I

would not accept it. I would rather hire an executioner to chop off

my head. So wicked is the world now! And the people are becoming real

devils, so that one could wish him nothing better than a good death

and then away!”[1398]

Do you know, he said on one occasion, who it is that holds back God’s

arm? “I am the block that stops God’s way. When I die He will strike.

No doubt we are despised; but let them gather up the leavings when

they are most despised; that is my advice.”[1399]

That, “even in our own lifetime, the world should thus repay us,”

seemed to him intolerable.[1400] “I hold that, for a thousand years,

the world has never been so unfriendly to anyone as to me. I am also

unfriendly to it, and know of nothing in life that I take pleasure

in.”[1401]

Of the sudden death that confronted him he had, however, no idea. On

the contrary, in 1543, when he was suffering from severe trouble in

the head, he said to Catherine Bora, that he would summon his son

Hans from Torgau to Wittenberg to be present at his death, which now

seemed near at hand; but, he added: “I shall not die so suddenly, I

shall first take to my bed and be ill; but I shall not lie there long.

I have had enough of the world and it has had enough of me.… I give

thanks to Thee My God that Thou hast numbered me in Thy little flock

which endures persecution for the sake of Thy Word.”[1402]

Incidentally he declared: “If I die in my bed it will be to defy the

Papists and put them to shame.” Why? Because they will not have been

able to do me the harm “they wished, and, in fact, were in duty bound

to have done me.”[1403]

The thought of death often made his hatred of the Catholics to flame

up more luridly. “Only after my death will they feel what Luther

really was”; should he fall a prey to his adversaries before his

time, he would carry with him to the grave “a long train of bishops,

priestlings and monks, for my life shall be their hangman, my death

their devil.” He announces angrily, “They shall not be able to resist

me,” and that, “in God’s name, he will tread the lion and the dragon

under foot,” but of all this, according to him, they were to have only

a taste during his lifetime; only after his death would matters be

carried out in earnest.[1404]

Brooding over his own death he says of the death of the believing

Christian, viz. of the man who puts his trust in the Evangel: “If a

man seriously meditates in his heart on God’s Word, believes it and

falls asleep and dies in it, he will pass away before he realises that

death has come, and is assuredly saved by the Word in which he has

thus believed and died.”[1405] These words he wrote on Feb. 7, 1546,

to an Eisleben gentleman in a copy of his Home-Postils. He prefaced

them with a passage from Scripture in which he himself doubtless had

often sought comfort: “He that keepeth my Word shall not taste of

death for ever” (John viii. 51). In one of his last lengthy notes

he also seeks to make his own this believing confidence: “Christ

commands us to believe in Him. Although we are not able to believe

as firmly as we should yet God has patience with us.” “I hide myself

under the shelter of the Son of God; Him I hold and honour as my Lord

to Whom I must fly when the devil, sin or any other ill assails me.

For He is my shield, extending beyond the heavens and the earth and

the foster-hen under whose wings I creep from the wrath of God.” Thus

he was so steeped in the delusion of faith alone that he could thus

wish to die in sole reliance on the “Word of God,” thanks to which he

is to escape “the devil, death, hell and sin.”[1406] We may remember

that, in one of his earliest controversial sermons, where a glimpse

of his new doctrine is already to be detected, he had used the simile

of the foster-hen. Now, in his old age, he returns to it, the richer

by the experience of a long lifetime, albeit he now sees that it is

difficult, nay impossible, “to believe as firmly as we should.”

In Jan., 1546, Luther set out for the third time for Mansfeld, in order

to settle the business of Count Albert of Mansfeld; only as a corpse was

he to return home.

The Elector did not look with approval on Luther’s arduous labours as

peacemaker, while Chancellor Brück even went so far as to characterise

the Counts’ interminable lawsuits about the mines and the rest as a

“pig-market.” Luther, nevertheless, set out again on Jan. 23, regardless

of his already impaired health, betaking himself this time to Eisleben.

He was accompanied by his three sons, their tutor and his famulus

Aurifaber, the editor of the German Table-Talk. At Halle they were

detained three days in the house of Jonas on account of the floating ice

and the flooded state of the Saale. “We did not wish to take to the water

and tempt God,” so he wrote to Catherine on Jan. 25, “for the devil bears

us a grudge and also dwells in the water; and, moreover, ‘discretion is

the best part of valour’; nor is there any need for us to give the Pope

and his myrmidons such cause for delight.”[1407]

On the 26th Luther preached a sermon in which, with all the strength

at his command, he poured forth his anger against Popery, “which had

cheated and befooled the whole world.” “The Pope, the Cardinals and the

lousy, scurvy, mangy monks have hoaxed and deluded us.” He proceeded to

storm against the unfortunate monks who had dared to remain in a town

now almost entirely won over to the innovations: “I am above measure

astonished that you gentlemen of Halle can still tolerate amongst you

these knaves, the crawling, lousy monks.… These wanton, verminous

miscreants take pleasure only in folly.… You gentlemen ought to drive

the imbecile, sorry creatures out of the town.… What we teach and preach

we do not teach as our own words, discovered or invented by us, like

the visions of the monks which they preach; their lies are like bulging

hop-pockets or sacks of wool.”[1408]

On the 28th, after having been joined by Jonas, Luther and his companions

crossed the swollen Saale. On this occasion he said to Jonas: “Dear Dr.

Jonas, wouldn’t it be a fine thing were I, Dr. Martin, my three sons and

you to be all drowned!” Not far from Eisleben they were overtaken by a

cold wind which brought the traveller in the carriage to such a state of

weakness and breathlessness that he nearly fainted. “The devil always

plays me this trick,” so he consoled himself, “when I have something

great on hand.”[1409]

At Eisleben he took up his abode with the town-clerk, and soon got well

enough to take part in the negotiations; he visited the several families

of the Counts and amused himself in his hours of leisure by looking at

the young nobles and their ladies tobogganing.[1410] To Catherine he

wrote jestingly on Feb. 1, that his fit near Eisleben was the work of the

Jews, numbers of whom lived there (at Rissdorf); they had raised up a

bitter wind against him, which “penetrated the back of the carriage and

passed right through my cap into my head, and tried to turn my brain to

ice. This may have brought on the fainting; now, however, thank God, I

am quite well, were it not for the pretty women, etc.” (cp. above, vol.

iii., p. 281). He extols the Naumburg beer, which suits him well, says

that his three sons have gone on to Jena and alludes to the blow he was

planning against the Mansfeld Jews, on whom Count Albert frowned and whom

he was determined to abandon.[1411]

When Catherine again expressed fears about his health he replied in a

joking vein on Feb. 10, giving her an account of all that her anxious

thoughts had brought upon him: The fire that broke out just in front of

his door had almost burnt him up, the plaster that fell from the ceiling

of his room had almost killed him, “having a mind to verify your pious

fears if the dear and holy angels had not been watching over me. I fear,

if you don’t put your fears to rest, the earth will finally open and

swallow us up.… We are, thank God, well and sound.“[1412]

In the interval, while the negotiations were still proceeding, he had

dealt very rudely with the Jews in a sermon on Feb. 7, in spite of the

fact that the Countess of Mansfeld, Solms’s widow, was said to be in

their favour. He was displeased to see them left unmolested. “No one

lifts a finger against them.” In a manuscript “exhortation against the

Jews,” written at that time,[1413] he briefly sums up his wishes: “You

Lords ought not to tolerate them, but rather drive them out,” at least if

they refuse to become Christians. Not long before he had declared that,

with his own hands, he could put a Jew to death who dared to blaspheme

Christ; when writing to Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg he also praised

one of his partisans, a certain provost, simply and solely for his hatred

of the Jews: “The provost pleases me beyond measure because he is so

strong against the Jews.”[1414]

Altogether, Luther preached four sermons at Eisleben. Twice he went

to the Supper, so we are told, after having previously received

“Absolution.” On the second occasion “he ordained” two priests,[1415]

his friend’s account narrates, “in the apostolic way.” Every evening

he assembled his friends about him, the chief being Justus Jonas and

the Eisleben preacher, Michael Cœlius. In their company he showed a

good temper, much as the long-drawn, tedious negotiations annoyed him.

He put it down to the devil that the scheme of settlement drawn up by

expert lawyers, encountered so much opposition on both sides; indeed he

fancied that all the devils had gathered together at Eisleben to mock at

his efforts in this dreary business. He would fain have himself played

the poltergeist among the combatants, to “grease the wheels of the

lazy coach” and “bring them back at last to some sense of the duty of

Christian charity.”[1416] The reader will remember the apparition that

Luther thought he saw in those days.[1417] At last, on Feb. 14, he was

able to write to his “dear, kind housewife”: “God has shown us great

mercy here, for, through their solicitors, the Lords have settled almost

everything save two or three points.”[1418] These outstanding matters

were satisfactorily adjusted shortly afterwards.

In the same letter Luther said: “We hope, please God, to return home

this week.” Thus he scarcely expected to die yet, but still hoped to be

able to get back to Wittenberg before the end came. “Here we eat and

drink like lords,” so he assures his Catherine, “and are very well looked

after.”[1419] On Feb. 16, at table, when the talk turned on sickness

and death, Luther said: “When I get home to Wittenberg I shall at once

lay myself in my coffin and give the grubs a nice fat doctor to feed

on.”[1420] For all his weakness his cheerfulness had not left him.

New cares were now troubling his mind. He had learnt how the Kaiser was

insisting on submission to the Council, how the religious conference at

Ratisbon had been a failure, and had merely given the Imperial forces

time to arm themselves for an attack on the Schmalkalden Leaguers. The

coming defeat of the League at Mühlberg was already casting its shadow.

“May God help His Highness our Master” (the Elector), remarked Luther;

“he is in for a bad time.”[1421] His annoyance with Kaiser Charles led

him to say: The “Emperor is dead against us, and now he is showing the

hand he so long had concealed.”[1422]

Luther, however, was not to live to see the blow delivered which the

flouted Imperial power had so long been threatening.

“During those three weeks” Luther frequently left the supper-table with

the admonition to “pray for our Lord God [i.e. for His cause][1423] that

it may go well with His Churches; the Council of Trent is highly wroth.”

Holy Scripture, to which he had always devoted himself with so much

energy, even now engrossed him. He felt keenly its obscurity and depth.

The last short note he made was on the Book of Books and the difficulty

of reaching its innermost meaning. After instancing the difficulty of

rightly understanding even Virgil or Cicero, it proceeds: “Let no one

think he has sufficiently tasted Holy Scripture, unless, for a hundred

years, he has ruled the Churches with prophets such as Elias, Eliseus,

John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles.”[1424] By this significant

admission he had of course no intention of repudiating the principle,

whereby in the stead of the teaching authority of the Church he had put

the written Word of God as the clear and final rule for each individual.

At this time, just before his death, he was less inclined than ever to

retract one jot of his doctrine. Nevertheless the fact that he himself

was compelled to admit in such terms the depth and the difficulty of the

Bible seems scarcely to bear out his usual contention, viz. that Holy

Scripture is the one and all-sufficient guide and master for all.

On Feb. 17, the first symptoms showed themselves of the attack which was

to carry him off before the next dawn.[1425] During the day he was very

restless; once he said: “Here at Eisleben I was baptised, how if I were

to remain here?” In the evening he felt the oppression on the chest of

which he had had to complain in previous illnesses; he therefore had

himself rubbed down with hot flannels and, as soon as he felt better,

went off to supper. During the meal he was, as usual, talkative and in

good humour; he told some humorous anecdotes and also spoke of more

serious things, and ate and drank heartily. He casually said that,

were he to die as a man of sixty-three, he would have attained a quite

respectable age, “for people do not now live to be very old. Well, we old

men must live so long in order to be able to look behind the devil [i.e.

learn his wickedness] and experience so much malice, faithlessness and

misery in the world that we may bear witness what a wicked spirit the

devil is.” With the pessimism peculiar to him he concludes: “The human

race is like the sheep being led to the slaughter.”

According to Ratzeberger, the Elector’s medical adviser, who collected

the latest particulars concerning Luther, the latter, on the evening of

the 17th, “when about to lie down to sleep after supper,” wrote “with

a piece of chalk on the wall the verse: In life, O Pope, I was thy

plague, in dying I shall be thy death” (cp. above, vol. iii., p. 435).

If we may trust this account, then, on this occasion Luther again used

the words which had once before served him under similar circumstances

at Schmalkalden. Those actually present at Eisleben make, however, no

mention of this, and, in his funeral address, Jonas merely says, that

these verses were Luther’s fitting “epitaph” which he had once written

for himself. Cœlius also, in his panegyric on Luther, says that though

dead he still survives in his books; “he will also after his death,

please God, be the death of the Pope, thanks to his writings, just as he

was his plague during life.” As no mention of the writing on the wall is

made by either of these two, nor yet in the account of his death given

by his three friends, though there was no reason for their omitting it,

Ratzeberger’s account stands alone and must be taken for what it is

worth.[1426]

The following is based principally on the narratives of Jonas, Cœlius and

Aurifaber, though the fact that it emanates from enthusiastic friends of

Luther’s has not been overlooked. Even though, as is highly probable, the

three writers in question made the most of the edifying traits they were

able to mention, yet this is no sufficient ground for rejecting their

account as a whole. Even the short prayers which they put on Luther’s

lips may not be pure inventions.

After supper Luther betook himself rather early to his sitting-room

and, as his custom was, said his prayers at the open window. Another

severe attack of heart oppression then came on; his friends hurried to

his assistance and again tried to mend matters by rubbing him with hot

cloths; he was, however, only able to get an hour’s sleep on a sofa in

the room. He refused to have the doctors called in as he did not think

there was any danger. For the next two or three hours, viz. till 1 a.m.

he slept in his own bed in the adjoining bedroom, after telling his

anxious friends and his two sons, Martin and Paul, to go to rest. Jonas,

the principal witness at his death, had a couch in the same room as

Luther.

About one o’clock Luther suddenly felt very unwell. “Oh, my God, how ill

I feel,” he said to Jonas, and, getting out of bed, he dragged himself

into the sitting-room, saying he would probably die at Eisleben after

all, and repeating the prayer: “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”

He complained of an intolerable burden on his chest. Two physicians,

one a doctor and the other a master of medicine, were now summoned in

haste. Before they arrived the patient seems to have suddenly collapsed;

they found him on the sofa, unconscious and with no perceptible pulse.

Recovering consciousness he said, all bathed in the cold sweat of death:

“My God, I feel so ill and anxious, I am going,” and then, according to

Jonas, he said a short prayer of thanks to God for having revealed to him

His Son Jesus Christ in Whom he believed and Whom he had preached and

confessed, whilst the hateful Pope and all the ungodly had blasphemed

this same Christ; thereupon, all trustfully, he commended his soul to the

Lord. No less than three times, according to this witness, did he repeat

in Latin the familiar Bible text: “God so loved the world that He gave

His Only Begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish

but have everlasting life.” This text (John iii. 16) he had, indeed,

always esteemed highly, and seen in it the seal of his doctrine. He is

also said to have repeated other Bible texts while medicines were being

given him. Count Albert and his relatives, who had come in, also offered

him various remedies. Soon after he seemed again to lose consciousness.

In spite of the confessions just mentioned Jonas and Cœlius shouted once

more in his ear the question, whether he remained steadfast in the faith

in Christ and His doctrine which he had preached; to which they caught

the reply “Yes.” That was his last word.—To all appearance his death was

due to an apoplectic seizure.

All things considered, it is very odd that Luther apparently never gave

a thought to his life’s partner, whom he had left at Wittenberg, and

that, at least as it seems, his sons were not with him at his death. The

argument from the silence of his friends on this point is not devoid of

force, for it would have been so easy for them to supply what we here

miss. Their silence might even be adduced in support of the substantial

reliability of their narrative. The best explanation of Luther’s apparent

oblivion is probably to be sought in the result of the stroke which

stupefied him and blotted out the memory of those dear to him.[1427]

Towards 3 a.m., after drawing a last deep breath. Luther yielded up his

soul into the hands of the Judge. This was on Feb. the 18th.

At the demand of both the physicians the apothecary of Eisleben was sent

for, either immediately after death had taken place, or possibly just

before, to administer a stimulant by means of a clysteral injection. The

apothecary, Johann Landau by name, was a Catholic and a convert, a nephew

of the convert polemic Wicel. He drew up a report of his visit which has

become famous in the discussion of the question stupidly broached anew of

recent years as to whether Luther committed suicide.[1428] We here give

the principal passages of his very realistic narrative. He speaks of

himself in the third person.

“The apothecary was awakened at the third hour after midnight.… When

he arrived he said to the doctors: ‘He is quite dead, of what use can

an injection be?’ Count Albert and some scholars were present. The

physicians, however, replied: ‘At any rate have a try with the instrument

that he may come again to himself if there be any life yet in him.’ When

the apothecary inserted the nozzle he noticed some flatulency given

off into the ball of the syringe.”[1429] The apothecary persevered in

his efforts until the physicians saw that all was useless. “The two

physicians disputed together as to the cause of death. The doctor said

it was a fit of apoplexy, for the mouth was drawn down and the whole of

the right side discoloured.”[1430] The master, on the other hand, thought

it incredible that so holy a man could have been thus stricken down by

the hand of God, and thought it was rather the result of a suffocating

catarrh and that death was due to choking. After this all the other

Counts arrived. Jonas, however, who was seated at the head of the bed,

wept aloud and wrung his hands. When asked whether Luther had complained

of any pain the evening before he replied: “Dear me, no, he was more

cheerful yesterday than he had been for many a day. Oh, God Almighty,

God Almighty, etc.”—by this Jonas did not mean to deny the fit of heart

oppression that had occurred the previous day, since he himself reports

it to the Elector; distracted by grief as he was he probably only thought

of the good spirits Luther had been in that evening, and of the contrast

with the dead body he now saw lying before him. Or it may be that he did

not regard the heart oppression as actual “pain.”

Landau’s report continues: “In the meantime the Counts brought costly

scents to be applied to the body of the deceased, for on several

occasions before this he had been thought to be dead when he lay for a

long time motionless and giving no sign of life, as happened to him, for

instance, at Schmalkalden when he was tormented with the stone.… The

apothecary vigorously rubbed his nose, mouth, forehead and left side for

some time with the oils. Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt came and bent over the

corpse and asked the apothecary whether any sign of life remained. The

latter, however, replied that there was not the least life in him seeing

that the hands, nose, forehead, cheeks and ears were already stiff and

cold in death.… Jonas said: It will be best now for us to send a swift

rider to the Elector and for one of us to sit down and write and tell him

all that has happened.”

Jonas himself wrote this first still extant account to his sovereign

“about four o’clock in the morning.”

On Feb. 20 Luther’s body was taken to Halle, and early on the 22nd to

Wittenberg, where it was received at the Elster Gate—the scene of the

famous burning of the Bull—by the University, the Town Council and the

burghers. He was buried in the Schlosskirche. There his bones still rest

in the grave as was proved by an examination made on Feb. 14, 1892.[1431]

4. In the World of Legend

Barely twenty years later a report that Luther had committed suicide went

the rounds among certain of his opponents, the report being subsequently

grounded on the alleged statement of a servant.

The first writer who mentions the servant is the Italian Oratorian,

Thomas Bozius, in a book on the marks of the Church printed in Rome in

1591. “Luther after having supped heartily that evening and gone to bed

quite content,” so he writes, “died that same night by suffocation. I

hear that it has recently been discovered through the confession of a

witness who was then his servant and who came over to us in late years,

that Luther brought himself to a miserable end by hanging; but that

all the inmates of the house who knew of the incident were bound under

oath not to divulge the matter, for the honour of the Evangel as it was

said.”[1432]

It was not till the beginning of the 17th century that the text of the

supposed letter of Luther’s servant began to be circulated, according

to which, when the latter went one morning to awaken Luther “as usual”

(i.e. about 7 a.m.) he found he had committed suicide; this, however,

is quite at variance with the definite accounts we have of the time of

death. The supposed servant claims to have been alone when he found “our

Master Martin hanging from the bedpost, miserably strangled,” whereas the

notes made at the time speak of the presence of witnesses both before and

after the death which, moreover, was quite a natural one. The apocryphal

letter bears no writer’s name nor do we know anything of its source; it

seems to have made its first public appearance at Antwerp in 1606 in the

work of the Franciscan Sedulius, who probably took it in good faith. It

is remarkable, that, down to 1650, as Paulus has proved, only one German

writer mentions this fictitious letter, though foreign polemics were busy

with it. Outside of Germany such inventions found more ready credence,

particularly among the zealous and more imaginative Catholics of the

Latin race, who were only too willing to seize on any tale which was to

the discredit of the lives of the German foes of Catholicism.[1433]

The falsehood of the legend of Luther’s suicide was most convincingly

proved by N. Paulus in his special work on the subject (1898). This

scholar submitted the fable to the sharp knife of criticism with a

broadminded love of truth that honours his Catholicism as much as his

acumen does honour to him as a critic.

It is barely credible to us to-day what inventions grew up in the 16th

century, both on the Catholic and the Protestant side, about the deaths

of well-known public men who happened to be the object of animosity to

one party or the other. Suicide, or murder at the hands of friend or

foe, or, more frequently, dreadful maladies or sudden death under the

most horrible shapes were the ordinary penalties assigned to opponents,

not only by the populace but even by the more credulous type of learned

writers. We must not forget that Luther himself had at hand a list of the

persecutors of the Evangel, who, in his own day, had been snatched away

by sudden death, and that it served him on occasion in his sermons and

writings.[1434]

It is an undeniable fact that Luther did much to pave the way for such

stories. His printed Table-Talk could well be taken as a model. Among

the fearsome tales of death he himself related was e.g. that of Mutian

the humanist, who, refusing to become a Lutheran, fell from poverty into

despair and poisoned himself;[1435] of the Archbishop of Treves, Richard

of Greiffenklau, who was “bodily carried off to hell by the devil”;[1436]

of the Catholic preacher, Urban of Kunewalde, who, “having fallen away

from the Evangel,” was “struck by a thunderbolt” in the church, and then

again by a flash of lightning that passed through his body from head to

foot, because he had asked heaven for a sign to prove that he was in the

right,[1437] etc.[1438] “All these perished miserably,” he says, “like

senseless swine. And so too it will happen with the others.”[1439]

In those days, partly owing to Luther’s influence, people were very ready

to admit the devil’s intervention in the horrible death that befell their

foes; the Catholic champions would all seem to have had a shocking end,

could we but trust the writers in the Protestant camp.[1440]

Eck they depicted entirely possessed by the devil and “dying like a

brute beast, quite out of his mind.” Of Emser (when still living) Luther

himself says, that he had been killed suddenly by the “fiery darts and

arrows of the devil.”[1441] Cochlæus, according to other writers, was

removed from the world in an awful way. Johann Fabri it was said had

died in despair, saying to those who exhorted him to have confidence:

“Too late, too late.” Pighius was made out to have died by his own hand.

Latomus was represented as crying out on his death-bed that he was a

devil incarnate and had claws on his fingers and toes. Hofmeister, the

learned Augustinian, according to the Protestant version, repeatedly said

before dying: “I belong to the devil body and soul.” Of the Jesuits,

even their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, had a bad death. Canisius was

struck dumb in the pulpit at Worms and was carried off by the judgment

of God; some were not wanting, however, who declared that he had been

converted to Luther’s doctrine. Seven years before his death, it was

reported of Bellarmine, the great controversialist of that day, that “he

had died miserably and in despair,” carried off on the back of a fiery

he-goat from hell; and “even to this very day,” so it was told during

his lifetime, “Bellarmine may be heard gruesomely howling in the wind,

astride his flaming, winged steed.”

Needless to say, many of the converts who turned their back on Luther and

took the part of the Catholic Church “perished miserably”! “Many of these

devil’s henchmen,” writes a “simple minister of the Word,” “who knowingly

and of malice aforethought, as they themselves admit, deny the known

truth of the Evangel, have been carried off alive by the devil, or have

howled before their death like wolves and tigers, as notoriously happened

in the case of that firebrand Staphylus.”[1442]

If similar tales, representing in an unfavourable light Luther’s life

and death, were equally rife among the Catholics, this can be no matter

for surprise if we bear in mind how greatly they were vexed by the

exaggerated eulogies passed on him and his life’s work, and how much

they had been stung by his polemics and furious onslaught on the Church.

Whoever loved the olden Church held Luther’s very name in execration.

One such tale early current at Halle was that, when the funeral

procession arrived at Wittenberg, the coffin was found empty, Luther’s

corpse having vanished on the road. A number of rooks having described

circles in the air about the corpse at Halle, a later tale made them out

to have been devils “streaming to the funeral of their prophet.”[1443]

Proof of this general foregathering of the devils was even found in

the comparative calmness of those possessed, who, it was argued, had

evidently been forsaken for a while by their diabolical tenants, the

latter’s presence at the burial explaining their temporary departure from

their usual habitats.[1444] The corpse, it was also said, gave out so

evil a smell that the bearers had to leave it on the road to Wittenberg.

Other versions of these tales deserve to be mentioned. According to

Johann Oldecop, the Hildesheim Dominican (†1574), who, however, is not

reliable in what he had at second hand, Luther was simply found dead in

his bed. According to Simon Fontaine (1558), a French writer, who also

speaks of his sudden death, he had “his nun” with him that night; this

is also affirmed in the works of Jérôme Bolsec and James Laing, printed

in Paris, as well as in a work published at Ingolstadt. According to

William Reginald, Professor at the English College of Douay (1597),

Luther had been strangled in the night by Catherine Bora. The same tale

was afterwards told at Münster in Westphalia by Johann Münch (1617).

Even more common were the reports, quite in accordance with the manners

which Luther had fostered, that the devil had murdered him. The Polish

scholar, Stanislaus Hosius, asserted this in 1558, and, later, it is

mentioned, though only tentatively, by the Dutch theologian, William

Lindanus and the Paris theologian Prateolus. In 1615, Robert Bellarmine,

speaking in general terms, says that Luther, after an illness lasting

only a few hours, “yielded up his soul to the devil”;[1445] but the

“_Compendium fidei_” 1607 of Franz Coster (already published in Dutch

in 1595) had been beforehand in particulars of Luther’s death at the

devil’s hands. He tells how, according to the statement of a noble

lady of Eichsfeld, Luther’s body had been found with the “neck red and

out of joint,” hence it was plain that “he had been strangled by the

devil.” Peter Pázmány a Magyar writer (1613) had heard that the devil had

appeared in the shape of a great sheep-dog to the guests at table on the

evening previous to Luther’s death, and that Luther had exclaimed: “What,

so soon?” Claude de Sainctes (1575) a French theologian, finds nothing

extraordinary in Luther’s horrible death, since most of the Church’s

foes had been brought to a violent end by the devil as the examples of

Zwingli, Carlstadt, Œcolampadius and others showed!