MORAL CONDITIONS ACCOMPANYING THE REFORMATION PRINCELY PATRONS
1. Reports from various Lutheran Districts
AFTER Duke George of Saxony had been carried off by death on April 17,
1539, a sudden revulsion in favour of Lutheranism took place in his
land. Duke Henry, his brother, who succeeded him, introduced the new
teaching to which he had long been favourable. Luther came at once
to Leipzig with Melanchthon, Jonas and Cruciger to render at least
temporary assistance, by preaching and private counsel. In July of that
same year an Evangelical Visitation was already arranged by Duke Henry
on the lines of that in the Saxon Electorate; this was carried out by
Luther’s preachers.
Many abuses dating from Catholic times were prevalent amongst both
people and parochial clergy. Concubinage in particular had increased
greatly in the clerical ranks under the influence of the new ideas.
Luther himself boasted of having advised “several parish-priests under
Duke George to marry their cook secretly.”[625] But much greater
disorders than had previously existed crept in everywhere at the
commencement of the change.
Luther himself was soon at a loss to discover any religious spirit
or zeal for ecclesiastical affairs, either in the ruler or in his
councillors. The Duke seemed to him “old, feeble and incapable.” He
complained, on March 3, 1540, to his friend Anton Lauterbach, then
minister at Pirna: “I see well enough, that, at the Dresden Court
there is an extraordinary unwillingness to advance the cause of God or
man; there pride and greed of gain reign supreme. The old Prince can’t
do anything, the younger Princes dare not, and would not even had
they the courage. May God keep the guidance of His Church in His own
Hands until He finds suitable tools.”[626] On the moral conditions
at the Ducal Court he passes a startling and hasty judgment when he
says, writing to his Elector in 1540, that there the “scandals were
ten times worse” than those caused by the Hessian bigamy. He was
annoyed to find that, even after the introduction of the new teaching,
the courtiers and nobles thought only of replenishing their purses.
He speaks of them as the “aristocratic harpies of the land,” and
exclaims: “These courtiers will end by eating themselves up by their
own avarice.”[627] They refused to support the ministers of the Word
and disputed amongst themselves as to whose duty it was to do so;
they did not hide their old contempt for Wittenberg, i.e. for its
theologians and theology, and yet they expected Wittenberg to carry
out the Visitations free of cost. “Even should you get nothing for the
Visitation,” he nevertheless instructs one of the preachers, “still
you must hold it as well as you can, comfort souls to the best of your
power and, in any case, expel the poisonous Papists.”[628]
The unexpected and apparently so favourable change in the Duchy really
did little to dispel his gloom, though he occasionally intones a hymn
of gratitude and admiration for the working of Providence displayed in
the change of rulers.
About this time (1539), in Brandenburg, the Elector Joachim II. also
ushered in the innovations. The rights and possessions of the ancient
Church fell a prey to the spoilers. Luther praised the ruler for going
forward so bravely “to the welfare and salvation of many souls.” He
was, however, apprehensive lest the “roaring of the lion in high
places” might influence the Elector; with the Divine assistance,
however, he would not fear even this.[629] He showed himself strangely
lenient in regard to the Elector’s prudent retention of much more of
the Catholic ceremonial than had been preserved in any other German
land. Even the Elevation of the Sacrament at Mass (or rather at the
sham Mass still in use) was tolerated by Luther; he writes: “We had
good reasons for doing away with the elevation [of the Sacrament] here
at Wittenberg, but perhaps at Berlin you have not.”[630]
In the Duchy of Prussia, formerly ecclesiastical property of the
Teutonic Knights, the way had been paved for the apostasy of these
Knights, all bound by the vow of chastity, by Luther’s alluring tract
“An die Herrn Deutschs Ordens, das sic falsche Keuscheyt meyden und zur
rechten ehlichen Keuscheyt greyffen.”[631] Albert, the Grand Master,
who had visited Luther twice, as already narrated, seized upon the
lands of the Order belonging to the Church and caused himself to be
solemnly invested and proclaimed hereditary Duke of Prussia on April
10, 1525; thereupon Luther sent him his congratulations that God should
have so graciously called him to this new Estate. The Grand Master,
himself a married man, with the assistance of the two apostate Bishops
of Samland and Pomerania, then established Lutheranism. As chief Bishop
he assumed the position of head of the territorial Church, agreeably
with the Protestant practice in the other German lands. The episcopal
jurisdiction was transferred to the civil Consistorial Courts.
Violent appropriation of alien property, as well as illegal assumption
of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, also characterised the advent of the
new faith in Würtemberg. Duke Ulrich, who had been raised to the
throne in 1534 by a breach of the peace of the Empire and contrary to
all law and justice, thanks to the successful raid of Philip of Hesse
(above, p. 47; vol. iii., p. 67 f.), continued to labour under the
stigma attaching to the manner in which he had obtained the Duchy, in
spite of the peace he had patched up with the Emperor. The religious
transformation of the country was however, soon accomplished, thanks to
his pressure.
The chief part in this, so far as Upper Würtemberg was concerned,
devolved on the preacher, Ambrosius Blaurer (Blarer), who favoured the
Zwinglian leanings of Bucer.
Blaurer was openly accused of deception and hypocrisy in the matter
of his profession of faith. Though he had formerly sided with Zwingli
in the denial of the Sacrament, he vindicated his Lutheran orthodoxy
to his patron, the Duke, by means of a formulary[632] tallying with
Luther’s doctrine on the Supper. Subsequently, however, he issued
an “Apology,” in which he declared he had not in the least altered
his views. “Who does not see the deception?” wrote Luther’s friend,
Veit Dietrich; “formerly he made a profession of faith in our own
words, and now he attacks everybody who says he has retracted his
previous opinion.”[633] Luther had been a prey to the greatest
anxiety on learning that Blaurer had become the Duke’s favourite.
“If this be true,” he wrote, “what hope is left for the whole of
Upper Germany?”[634] Much as he had rejoiced at Blaurer’s apparent
retractation in the matter of the Sacrament, he was very mistrustful
of his bewildering “Apology.” “I only hope it be meant seriously,” he
declared; “it scandalises many that Blaurer should be so anxious to
make out that he never thought differently. People find this hard to
believe.” “For the sake of unity I shall, however, put a favourable
interpretation on everything. I am ready to forgive anyone who in his
heart thinks aright, even though he may have been in error or hostile
to me.”[635] Thus he practically pledged himself to silence regarding
the work.
Of “Blaurer’s” doings in Würtemberg, now won over to the new Evangel,
the Bavarian agent, Hans Werner, a violent opponent of Duke Ulrich’s,
wrote: “He preaches every day; yet none save the low classes and
common people, etc., attend his sermons, for these readily accept
the Evangel of mine being thine and thine mine. _Item_, Blaurer has
full powers, writes hither and thither in the land, turns out here
a provost, there a canon, vicar, rector or priest and banishes them
from the country by order of Duke Ulrich; he appoints foreigners,
Zwinglians or Lutheran scamps, of whom no one knows anything; all must
have wife and child, and if there be still a priest found in the land,
he is forced to take a wife.”[636]
In the Würtemberg lowlands, north of Stuttgart, a zealous Lutheran,
Erhard Schnepf, laboured for the destruction of the old Church system;
Duke Ulrich also summoned Johann Brenz, the Schwäbisch-Hall preacher,
to his land for two years.
At Christmas, 1535, Ulrich gave orders to all the prelates in his realm
to dismiss the Catholic clergy in their districts and appoint men of
the new faith, as the former “did nothing but blaspheme and abuse
the Divine truth.”[637] Even the assisting at Mass in neighbouring
districts was prohibited by the regulation issued in the summer of
1536, which at the same time prescribed the attendance of Catholics
at least once every Sunday and Holiday at the preaching of the new
ministers of the Word; under this intolerable system of compulsion
Catholics were reduced to performing all their religious exercises
in their own homes.[638] The violent suppression of the monasteries
and the sequestration of monastic property went hand in hand with the
above. In the convents of women, which still existed, the nuns were
forced against their will to listen to the sermons of the preachers.
Church property was everywhere confiscated so far as the ancient
Austrian law did not prevent it. The public needs and the scarcity of
money were alleged as pretexts for this robbery. The Mass vestments
and church vessels were allotted to the so-called poor-boxes. At
Stuttgart, for instance, the costly church vestments were sold for the
benefit of the poor. In the troubles many noble works of art perished,
for “all precious metal was melted down and minted, nor were cases of
embezzlement altogether unknown.” “The Prince, with the approach of old
age, manifested pitiable miserliness and cupidity.”[639] Unfortunately
he was left a free hand in the use of the great wealth that poured
into his coffers. But, not even in the interests of the new worship,
would he expend what was necessary, so that the vicarages fell into
a deplorable state. In other matters, too, the new Church of the
country suffered in consequence of the way in which Church property
was handled. The inevitable consequence was the rise of many quarrels,
complaints were heard on all sides and even the Schmalkalden League was
moved to remonstrate with Ulrich.[640]
Terrible details concerning the alienation of church and monastic
property are reported from Würtemberg by contemporaries. The preacher
Erhard Schnepf, the Duke’s chief tool, was also his right hand in the
seizure of property. Loud complaints concerning Schnepf’s doings, and
demands that he should be made to render an account, were raised even
by such Protestants as Bucer and Myconius, and by the speakers at the
religious conference at Worms. He found means, however, to evade this
duty. One of those voices of the past bewails the treatment meted out
to the unfortunate religious: “Even were the Würtemberg monks and
nuns all devils incarnate and no men, still Duke Ulrich ought not to
proceed against them in so un-Christian, inhuman and tyrannical a
fashion.”[641]
The relentless work of religious subversion bore everywhere a political
stamp. The leaders were simply tools of the Court. Frequently they
were at variance amongst themselves in matters of theology, and their
people, too, were dragged into the controversy. To the magistrates it
was left to decide such differences unless indeed some dictatorial
official forestalled them, as was the case when the Vogt of Herrenberg
took it into his own hands to settle a matter of faith. In the
struggles between Lutherans and Zwinglians, the highest court of appeal
above the town-Councillors and the officials was the Ducal Chancery.
Ulrich himself did not explicitly side either with the Confession of
Augsburg or with the “_Confessio Tetrapolitana_,” viz. with the more
Zwinglian form of faith agreed upon at the Diet of Augsburg by the four
South-German townships of Strasburg, Constance, Memmingen and Lindau.
The preachers who assembled in 1537 at the so-called Idols-meeting of
Urach, to discuss the question of the veneration of images which had
given rise to serious dissensions amongst them, appealed to Ulrich.
Blaurer inveighed against the use of images as idolatrous. Brenz
declared that their removal in Würtemberg would be tantamount to a
condemnation of the Lutheran Church in Saxony and elsewhere where they
were permitted. The Court, to which the majority of the theologians
appealed, ordered the removal of all images on Jan. 20, 1540.
Distressing scenes were witnessed in many places when the images and
pictures in the churches, which were not only prized by the people,
but were also, many of them, of great artistic value,[642] were broken
and torn to pieces in spite of the warning issued by the authorities
against their violent destruction. The “_Tetrapolitana_” had already
forcibly denounced the use of images.
At Ulm, which so far had refused to accept the “_Tetrapolitana_,”
the magistrates in 1544 decided to adhere to the Confession of
Augsburg and the “_Apologia_.” Blaurer, some years before (1541),
had justifiably complained of the arbitrary action of the civic
authorities and said that every town acted according to its own ideas.
But the preachers were frequently so exorbitant in the material
demands they made on behalf of themselves and their families that the
Town Council of Ulm declared, they behaved as though “each one had the
right to receive a full saucepan every day.”[643]
In place of any amendment of the many moral disorders already
prevailing, still greater moral corruption became the rule among the
people of Würtemberg, as is attested by Myconius the Zwinglian in
1539, and thirty years later by the Chancellor of the University of
Tübingen, Jacob Andreæ.
The former declared that the “people are full of impudence and
godlessness; of blasphemy, drunkenness, sins of the flesh and wild
licentiousness there is no end.”[644] Andreæ directly connects with
the new faith this growing demoralisation: “A dissolute, Epicurean,
bestial life, feeding, swilling, avarice, pride and blasphemy.” “We
have learnt,” so the people said, according to him, “that only through
faith in Jesus Christ are we saved, Who by His death has atoned for
all our sins; ... that all the world may see they are not Papists and
rely not at all on good works, they perform none. Instead of fasting
they gorge and swill day and night, instead of giving alms, they flay
the poor.” “Everyone admits this cannot go on longer, for things have
come to a crisis. Amongst the people there is little fear of God and
little or no veracity or faith; all forms of injustice have increased
and we have reached the limit.”[645]
A General Rescript had to be issued on May 22, 1542, for the whole of
Würtemberg, to check “the drunkenness, blasphemy, swearing, gluttony,
coarseness and quarrelsomeness rampant in the parishes.”[646]
Few bright spots are to be seen in the accounts of the early days of
the Reformation in Würtemberg, if we except the lives of one or two
blameless ministers. It is no fault of the historian’s that there
is nothing better to chronicle. Even the Protestant historians of
Würtemberg, albeit predisposed to paint the change of religion in
bright colours, have to admit this. They seek to explain the facts on
the score that the period was one of restless and seething transition,
and to throw the blame on earlier times and on the questionable
elements among the Catholic clergy from whose ranks most of the
preachers were recruited.[647] But though grave responsibility may rest
on earlier times, not only here but in the other districts which fell
away from the Church, and though those of the clergy who forgot their
duty and the honour of their calling may have contributed even more
than usual to damage the fair reputation of Protestantism, yet the
increase of immorality which has been proved to have endured for a long
course of years, brings the historian face to face with a question not
lightly to be dismissed: Why did the preaching of the new Evangel, with
its supposedly higher standard of religion and morality, especially at
the springtide of its existence and in its full vigour, not bring about
an improvement, but rather the reverse?
This question applies, however, equally to other countries which were
then torn from the Church, and to the persons principally instrumental
in the work.
* * * * *
In Hesse the religious upheaval, as even Protestant contemporaries
conceded, also promoted a great decline of morals.
The bad example given by Landgrave Philip tended to increase the
evil.[648] A harmful influence was exercised not only by the
Landgrave’s Court but also by certain preachers, such as Johann
Lening,[649] who enjoyed Philip’s favour. Elisabeth, Duchess of
Rochlitz, the Landgrave’s sister, and a zealous patron of the Evangel,
like the Prince himself, cherished rather lax views on morality. At
first she was indignant at the bigamy, though not on purely moral
grounds. The sovereign met her anger with a threat of telling the world
what she herself had done during her widowhood. The result was that the
Duchess said no more.[650] The Landgrave’s Court-preacher, Dionysius
Melander, who performed the marriage ceremony with the second wife,
had, five years before, laid down his office as preacher and leader
of the innovations at Frankfort on the Maine, “having fallen out with
his fellows and personally compromised himself by carrying on with his
housekeeper.” He was a “violent, despotic and, at times, coarse and
obscene, popular orator whose personal record was not unblemished.”[651]
A Hessian church ordinance of 1539 complains of the moral
retrogression: Satan has estranged men from the communion of Christ
“not only by means of factions and sects, but also by carnal
wantonness and dissolute living.”[652] The old Hessian historian
Wigand Lauze writes, in his “Life and deeds of Philip the Magnanimous,
Landgrave of Hesse,” that, the people have become very savage and
uncouth, “as though God had given us His precious Word, and thereby
delivered us from the innumerable abominations of Popery and its
palpable idolatry, simply that each one might be free to do or leave
undone whatever he pleased”; “many evil deeds were beginning to be
looked upon by many as no longer sinful or vicious.” He accuses “the
magistrates, ministers and governors” of corrupting the people by
themselves transgressing the “good, Christian regulations” which had
been set up, and charges both preachers and hearers with serving
Mammon, and with “barefaced extortion,” “not to mention other sins and
vices.”[653]
The Hessian theologians and preachers transferred the responsibility
for the abolition of “law and order,” for the increase of the
“freedom of the flesh within the Evangel” and for the falling away
into a “state like that of Sodom and Gomorrha” to the shoulders of
the “magistrates and officials.”[654] The latter, on the other hand,
boldly asserted that the preachers themselves were the cause of the
evil, since they led a “wicked, scandalous life, drinking, gambling,
practising usury and so forth, and were, some of them, guilty of
still worse things, brawling, fighting and wrangling with the people
in the taverns and behaving improperly with the women.”[655] Bucer
himself, Philip’s adviser in ecclesiastical matters, wrote sadly
to the Landgrave, in 1539, from Marburg: “The people are becoming
demoralised and immorality is gaining the upper hand.” “Where such
contempt prevails for God and the authorities there the devil is
omnipotent.”[656]
2. At the Centre of the New Faith
If we glance at the Saxon Electorate we shall find the deep despondency
frequently displayed by Luther concerning the deplorable moral
decadence prevailing there only too well justified.
The downward trend appeared to have set in in earnest and all hope of
remedying affairs seemed lost.[657]
The Court and those in authority not only did little to check the evil
but, by their example, even tended to promote many disorders. The
Elector, Johann Frederick “the Magnanimous” (1532-1547), was addicted
to drink. The banquets which he gave to his friends--in which wine
was indulged in to an extent unusual even in those days when men were
accustomed to heavy drinking--became a byword. Luther himself came to
speak strongly on his excessive drinking. “His only faults,” he laments
in the Table-Talk, “are his drinking and routing too much with his
companions.”[658] “He has all the virtues--but just fancy him swilling
like that!”[659] Yet Luther has an excuse ready: “He is a stout man and
can stand a deep draught; what he must needs drink would make another
man dead drunk.”[660] “Unfortunately not only our Court here but the
whole of Germany is plagued with this vice of drunkenness. It is a
bad old custom in the German lands which has gone on growing and will
continue to grow. Henry, Duke of [Brunswick] Wolfenbüttel calls our
Elector a drunkard and very Nabal with whom Abigail could not speak
until he had slept off his carouse.”[661] We have the Elector’s own
comment on this in a letter to Chancellor Brück: “If the Brunswick
fellow writes that we are a drunken Nabal and Benadad, we cannot
entirely deny that we sometimes follow the German custom”; at any rate
the Brunswicker was not the man to find fault, for he was an even
harder drinker.[662]
Johann Frederick was accused by Philip of Hesse of the grossest
immorality. This happened when the former refused to defend Philip’s
bigamy and when his Superintendent, Justus Menius, who was given
to lauding the Elector’s virtues, showed an inclination to protest
publicly against the Landgrave’s bigamy. This led Philip to write this
warning to his theologian Bucer: “If those saintly folk, Justus Menius
and his crew, amuse themselves by writing against us, they shall have
their answer. And we shall not leave hidden under a bushel how this
most august and quite sinless Elector, once, under our roof at Cassel,
and again, at the time of the first Diet of Spires, committed the
crime of sodomy.”[663]
A. Hausrath remarks concerning this in his “Luthers Leben”: That
Philip was lying “can hardly be taken for granted”;[664] G. Mentz,
likewise, in his recent work, “Joh. Friedrich der Grossmütige,”[665]
says: “It is difficult simply to ignore the Landgrave’s statement, but
we do not know whether the allusion may not be to some sin committed
in youth.” Here belongs also the passage in Philip of Hesse’s letter
to Luther of July 27, 1540 (above, p. 60), where he calls the Elector
to bear witness that he (the Landgrave) had done “the worst.” The
Biblical expression “_peccatum pessimum_” stood for sodomy. Further
charges of a similar nature were even more explicitly laid at the door
of Johann Frederick. A Catholic, relating the proceedings in Brunswick
at the close of the conquest of that country by the Protestant troops
in 1542, speaks of “vices and outrages against nature then indulged in
by the Elector at the Castle as is commonly reported and concerning
which there is much talk among the Court people.”[666] Duke Henry
of Brunswick in a tract of 1544 referred not only to the Elector’s
sanction of the Landgrave’s bigamy, in return for which he was spared
by the latter, but also to the “many other pranks which might be
circumstantially proved against them and which deserved more severe
punishment” than that of the sword.[667] The “more severe punishment”
means burning at the stake, which was the penalty decreed by the laws
of the Empire for sodomy, whereas polygamy and adultery were simply
punished by decapitation. Both sovereigns in their reply flatly denied
the charge, but, evidently, they clearly understood its nature; they
had never been guilty, they said, of “shameful, dishonourable pranks
deserving of death by fire.”[668]
Whatever the truth may be concerning this particular charge which
involves them both,[669] both Landgrave and Elector certainly left
behind them so bad a record that Adolf Hausrath could say: The pair
(but the Landgrave even more than the Elector) did their best “to make
mockery of the claim of the Evangelicals that their Evangel would
revive the morality of the German nation.” He instances in particular
the bigamy, “which put any belief in the reality of their piety to a
severe test and prepared the way for a great moral defeat of Luther’s
cause.”[670]
In the matter of the bigamy attempts were made to exculpate the Elector
Johann Frederick by alleging, that he regarded the Landgrave’s step
not as a real new marriage but as mere concubinage. The fact is,
however, he was sufficiently well informed by Bucer in Dec. 1539,
i.e. from the very beginning, learnt further details two months later
from the Landgrave’s own lips, and declared himself “satisfied with
everything.” When, later, the Elector began to take an unfavourable
view of the business, Philip wrote to Bucer (July 24, 1540), pointing
out that he had nevertheless sent his representative to the wedding.
It is, however, true that the Elector had all along been against any
making public of so compromising an affair and had backed up his
theologians when they urged the Landgrave to deny it.[671]
There is no more ground for crediting Johann Frederick with “strictness
of morals” than for saying that the Elector Frederick the Wise
(1486-1525), under whose reign Lutheranism took root in the land, was
upright and truthful in his dealings with the Pope and the Empire.
The diplomatic artifices by which the latter protected Luther whilst
pretending not to do so, the dissembling and double-dealing of his
policy throws a slur on the memory of one who was a powerful patron
of Lutheranism. Even in Köstlin-Kawerau[672] we find his behaviour
characterised as “one long subterfuge, seeing, that, whilst giving
Luther a free hand, he persisted in making out that Luther’s cause was
not his”; his declaration, that “it did not become him as a layman to
decide in such a controversy,” is rightly branded as misleading.
The Protestant Pietists were loudest in their complaints. In his
“Kirchenhistorie,” Gottfried Arnold, who was one of them, blamed, in
1699, this Elector for the “cunning and the political intrigues” of
which he was suspected; he is angry that this so undevout promoter of
Lutheranism should have written to Duke George, his cousin, “that he
never undertook nor ever would undertake to defend Luther’s sermons
or his controversial writings,” and that he should have sent to his
minister at Rome the following instructions, simply to pacify the Pope:
“It did not become him as a secular Prince to judge of these matters,
and he left Luther to answer for everything at his own risk.”[673] The
same historian also points out with dissatisfaction that the Elector
Frederick, “though always unmarried, had, by a certain female, two sons
called Frederick and Sebastian. How he explained this to his spiritual
directors is nowhere recorded.”[674] The “female” in question was Anna
Weller, by whom he had, besides these two sons, also a daughter.[675]
Against his brother and successor, Johann, surnamed the Constant
(1525-1532), Luther’s friends brought forward no such complaints, but
merely reproached him with letting things take their course. Arnold
instances a statement of Melanchthon’s according to which this good
Lutheran Prince “had been very negligent in examining this thing
and that,” so that grave disorders now called for a remedy. Luther,
too, whilst praising the Elector’s good qualities, declares, that
“he was far too indulgent.”[676] “I interfere with no one,” was his
favourite saying, “but merely trust more in God’s Word than in man.”
The protests of the Emperor and the representations of the Catholics,
politics and threats of war left him quite unmoved, whence his title
of “the Constant”; “he was just the right man for Luther,” says
Hausrath,[677] “for the latter did not like to see the gentlemen of the
Saxon Chancery, Brück, Beyer, Planitz and the rest, interfering and
urging considerations of European politics. ‘Our dear old father, the
Elector,’ Luther said of him in 1530, ‘has broad shoulders, and must
now bear everything.’”
The favour of these Princes caused Luther frequently to overstep the
bounds of courtesy in his behaviour towards them. Julius Boehmer, who
is sorry for this, in the Introduction to his selection of Luther’s
works remarks, that he was guilty of “want of respect, nay, of
rudeness, towards the Elector Frederick and his successor Johann.”[678]
Of Luther’s relations with Johann Frederick, Hausrath says: “It is by
no means certain that the Duke’s [Henry of Brunswick’s] opinion [viz.
that Luther used to speak of his own Elector as Hans Wurst (i.e. Jack
Pudding)] was without foundation; in any case, it was not far from the
mark. With his eternal plans and his narrow-minded obstinacy, Luther’s
corpulent master was a thorn in the side of the aged Reformer.... ‘He
works like a donkey,’ Luther once said of him, and, unfortunately, this
was perfectly true.”[679]
In his will, dated 1537, Luther addressed the following words of
consolation to the princely patrons and promoters of his work, the
Landgrave and the Elector Johann Frederick: It was true they were not
quite stainless, but the Papists were even worse; they had indeed
trespassed on the rights and possessions of others, but this was of no
great consequence; they must continue to work for the Evangel, though
in what way he would not presume to dictate to them.[680]--Melanchthon,
who was so often distressed at the way the Princes behaved on the
pretext of defending the Evangel, complains that “the sophistry and
wickedness of our Princes are bringing the Empire to ruin,” in which
“bitter cry,” writes a Protestant historian, “he sums up the result of
his own unhappy experiences.”[681]
From the accounts of the Visitations in the Electorate we learn more
details of the condition of morality, law and order in this the focus
of the new Evangel. The proximity and influence of Luther and of his
best and most faithful preachers did not constitute any bulwark against
the growing corruption of morals, which clear-sighted men indeed
attributed mainly to the new doctrines on good works, on faith alone
and on Evangelical freedom.
In the protocols of the first Visitation (1527-1529) we read: The
greater number of those entrusted with a cure of souls, are “in an
evil case”; reckless marriages are frequent amongst the preachers;
complaints were lodged with the Electoral Visitors concerning the
preacher at Lucka who “had three wives living.”[682] At a later
Visitation a preacher was discovered to have had six children by two
sisters. Many of the preachers had wives whom they had stolen from
husbands still living. The account of the people whether in town or
country was not much more reassuring; many localities had earned
themselves a bad repute for blasphemy and general adultery. In many
places the people were declared to be so wicked that only “the hangman
and the jailer would be of any avail.” Besides this, the parsonages
were in a wretched state. The foundations had fallen in, or, in many
instances, had been seized by the nobles, the lands and meadows
belonging to the parsonages had been sold by the parish-councils, and
the money from the sale of chalices and monstrances spent on drink.
The educational system was so completely ruined that in the Wittenberg
district, for instance, in which there were 145 town and country
livings with hundreds of chapels of ease, only 21 schools remained.
As early as 1527 Melanchthon had viewed with profound dismay the
“serious ruin and decay that menaces everything good,” which, he
says, was clearly perceived at Wittenberg. “You see,” he writes,
“how greatly men hate one another, how great is the contempt for all
uprightness, how great the ignorance of those who stand at the head of
the churches, and above all how forgetful the rulers are of God.” And
again, in 1528: “No one hates the Evangel more bitterly than those who
like to be considered ours.” “We see,” he laments in the same year,
“how greatly the people hate us.”[683]
His friend Justus Jonas, who was acquainted with the conditions in
the Saxon Electorate from long personal experience, wrote in 1530:
“Those who call themselves Evangelical are becoming utterly depraved,
and not only is there no longer any fear of God among them but there
is no respect for outward appearances either; they are weary of and
disgusted with sermons, they despise their pastors and preachers and
treat them like the dirt and dust of the streets.” “And, besides all
this, the common people are becoming utterly shameless, insolent and
ruffianly, as if the Evangel had only been sent to give lewd fellows
liberty and scope for the practice of all their vices.”[684]
The next Visitation, held seven years later, only confirmed the growth
of the evil. In the Wittenberg district in particular complaints were
raised concerning “the increase in godless living, the prevailing
contempt and blasphemy of the Word of God, the complete neglect of the
Supper and the general flippant and irreverent behaviour during Divine
service.”[685]
Of a later period, when the fruits of the change of religion had still
further ripened, Melanchthon’s friend Camerarius says: “Mankind have
now attained the goal of their desires--boundless liberty to think and
act exactly as they please. Reason, moderation, law, morality and duty
have lost all value, there is no reverence for contemporaries and no
respect for posterity.”[686]
The Elector Augustus of Saxony goes more into particulars when he
writes: “A disgraceful custom has become established in our villages.
The peasants at the high festivals, such as Christmas and Whitsuntide,
begin their drinking-bouts on the eve of the festival and prolong them
throughout the night, and the next day they either sleep through the
morning or else come drunk to church and snore and grunt like pigs
during the whole service.” He reproves the custom of making use of the
churches as wine-cellars, the contempt displayed for the preachers,
the scoffing at sacred rites and the “frequent blasphemy and cursing.”
“Murder and abominable lasciviousness” were the consequences of such
contempt for religion. But any improvement was not to be looked for
seeing that there were hardly any schools remaining, and the cure of
souls was left principally in the charge of ministers such as the
Elector proceeds to describe. The nobles and the other feudal lords,
he says, “appoint everywhere to the ministry ignorant, destitute
artisans, or else rig out their scribes, outriders or grooms as
priests and set them in the livings so as to have them all the more
under their thumb.”[687]
The state of things in Saxony provided the Landgrave with a
serviceable weapon against Luther when the latter showed an
inclination to repudiate the bigamy, or to say he had merely “acted
the fool” in sanctioning it. The passage has been quoted above (p.
56), where the Landgrave exhorted him to pay less attention to the
world’s opinion, but rather to set himself and all the preachers in
the Saxon Electorate to the task of checking the “vices of adultery,
usury and drunkenness which were no longer regarded as sins, and that,
not merely by writings and sermons, but by earnest admonition and by
means of the ban.”
It is true that the conditions which accompanied the introduction of
his new system were a trial to Luther, which he sought to remedy. The
Landgrave could not reproach him with actual indifference. Not merely
by “writings and sermons,” but also by “earnest admonition” and even
by re-introducing the “ban of the Church” he strove to check the
rising tide of moral evil. But the evil was the stronger of the two,
and the causes, for which he himself was responsible, lay too deep. We
have an example of the way in which he frequently sought to curb the
mischief, in his quarrel with Hans Metzsch, the depraved Commandant of
Wittenberg, whom he excluded from the Supper.[688]
He sums up his grievances against the state of things in the
Electorate and at Wittenberg in a letter to Johann Mantel, in which
he calls Wittenberg a new Sodom. He writes to this preacher (Nov.
10, 1539): “Together with Lot (2 Peter ii. 8), you and other pious
Christians, I, too, am tormented, plagued and martyred in this awful
Sodom by shameful ingratitude and horrible contempt of the Divine Word
of our beloved Saviour, when I see how Satan seizes upon and takes
possession of the hearts of those who think themselves the first and
most important in the kingdom of Christ and of God; beyond this I
am tempted and plagued with interior anxiety and distress.” He then
goes on to console his friend, who was also troubled with melancholy
and the fear of death, by a sympathetic reference to the death of
Christ. He then admits again of himself that he was “distressed and
greatly plagued” and “compassed by more than one kind of death in this
miserable, lamentable age, where there is nothing but ingratitude, and
where every kind of wickedness gains the upper hand.... Wait for the
Lord with patience, for He is now at hand and will not delay to come.
Amen.”[689]
3. Luther’s Attempts to Explain the Decline in Morals
Luther quite candidly admitted the distressing state of things
described above without in the least glossing it over, which indeed
he could not well have done; in fact, his own statements give us an
even clearer insight into the seamy side of life in his day. He speaks
of the growing disorders with pain and vexation; the more so since he
could not but see that they were being fomented by his doctrine of
justification by faith alone.
“This preaching,” he says, “ought by rights to be accepted and
listened to with great joy, and everyone ought to improve himself
thereby and become more pious. But, unfortunately, the reverse is now
the case and the longer it endures the worse the world becomes; this
is [the work of] the devil himself, for now we see the people becoming
more infamous, more avaricious, more unmerciful, more unchaste and in
every way worse than they were under Popery.”[690]
The Evangelicals now are not merely worse, but “seven times worse than
before,” so he complains as early as 1529. “For after having heard the
Evangel we still continue to steal, lie, cheat, feed and swill and to
practise every vice. Now that one devil [that of Popery] has been
driven out seven others worse than it have entered into us, as may be
seen from the way the Princes, lords, nobles, burghers and peasants
behave, who have lost all sense of fear, and regard not God and His
menaces.”[691]
From his writings a long, dreary list of sins might be compiled, of
which each of the classes here mentioned had been guilty. In the last
ten years of his life such lamentations give the tone to most of what
he wrote.
“The nobles scrape money together, rob and plunder”; “like so many
devils they grind the poor churches, the pastors and the preachers.”
“The burghers and peasants do nothing but hoard, are usurers and
cheats and behave defiantly and wantonly without any fear of
punishment, so that it cries to heaven for vengeance and the earth
can endure it no longer.” “On all hands and wherever we turn we see
nothing in all classes but a deluge of dreadful ingratitude for the
beloved Evangel.”[692]
“Nowadays the Gospel is preached, and whoever chooses can hear it
... but burghers, peasants and nobles all scorn their ministers and
preachers.”[693]
“I have often said that a plague must fall upon Germany; the Princes
and gentry deserve that our Lord God should play them a trick; there
will be such bloodshed that no one will know his own home.”[694] “Now
that all this [the Evangel] is preached rightly and plainly, people
cannot despise it enough. In old days monasteries and churches were
built with no regard for cost, now people won’t even repair a hole
in the roof that the minister may lie dry; of their contempt I say
nothing, it is enough to move one to tears to witness such scorn.
Hence I say: Take care, you are young; it may be you will live to see
and experience the coming misfortune that will break over Germany. For
a storm will burst over Germany, and that without fail.... I do not
mind so much the peasants’ avarice and the fornication and immorality
now on the increase everywhere, as the contempt for the Evangel....
That peasants, burghers and nobles thus contemn the Word of God will
be their undoing.”[695]
To the question whence the moral decline amongst the adherents of
the new teaching came, Luther was wont to give various answers.
Their difference and his occasional self-contradictions show how his
consciousness of the disorders and the complaints they drew from every
side drive him into a corner.
The most correct explanation was, of course, that the mischief was
due to the nature of his teaching on faith and good works; to this,
involuntarily, he comes back often enough.
“That we are now so lazy and cold in the performance of good works,”
he says, in a recently published sermon of 1528, “is due to our no
longer regarding them as a means of justification. For when we still
hoped to be justified by our works our zeal for doing good was a
marvel. One sought to excel the other in uprightness and piety. Were
the old teaching to be revived to-day and our works made contributory
to righteousness, we should be readier and more willing to do what is
good. Of this there is, however, no prospect and thus, when it is a
question of serving our neighbour and praising God by means of good
works, we are sluggish and not disposed to do anything.”[696] “The
surer we are of the righteousness which Christ has won for us, the
colder and idler we are in teaching the Word, in prayer, in good works
and in enduring misfortune.”[697]
“We teach,” he continues, “that we attain to God’s grace without any
work on our part. Hence it comes that we are so listless in doing
good. When, once upon a time, we believed that God rewarded our works,
I ran to the monastery, and you gave ten gulden towards building a
church. Men then were glad to do something through their works and to
be their own ‘_Justus et Salvator_’ (Zach. ix., 9).” Now, when asked
to give, everybody protests he is poor and a beggar, and says there is
no obligation of giving or of performing good works. “We have become
worse than formerly and are losing our old righteousness. Moreover,
avarice is increasing everywhere.”[698]
Though here Luther finds the reason of the neglect of good works so
clearly in his own teaching, yet on other occasions, for instance, in
a sermon of 1532, he grows angry when his doctrine is made responsible
for the mischief.
Only “clamourers,” so he says, could press such a charge. Yet, at the
same time, he fully admits the decline: “I own, and others doubtless
do the same, that there is not now such earnestness in the Gospel as
formerly under the monks and priests when so many foundations were
made, when there was so much building and no one was so poor as not
to be able to give. But now there is not a town willing to support
a preacher, there is nothing but plundering and thieving among the
people and no one can prevent it. Whence comes this shameful plague?
The clamourers answer, ‘from the teaching that we must not build upon
or trust in works.’ But it is the devil himself who sets down such an
effect to pure and wholesome doctrine, whereas it is in reality due
to his own and the people’s malice who ill-use such doctrines, and to
our old Adam.... We are, all unawares, becoming lazy, careless and
remiss.”[699]
“The devil’s malice!” This is another explanation to which Luther
and others not unfrequently had recourse. The devil could do such
extraordinary and apparently contradictory things! He could even teach
men to “pray fervently.” In the Table-Talk, for instance, when asked by
his wife why it was, that, whereas in Popery “we prayed so diligently
and frequently, we are now so cold and pray so seldom,” Luther put it
down to the devil. “The devil made us fervent,” he says; “he ever urges
on his servants, but the Holy Ghost teaches and exhorts us how to pray
aright; yet we are so tepid and slothful in prayer that nothing comes
of it.”[700] Thus it might well be the devil who was answerable for the
misuse of the Evangel.
On another occasion, in order to counteract the bad impression made on
his contemporaries by the fruits of his preaching, he says: “Our morals
only look so bad on account of the sanctity of the Evangel; in Catholic
times they stood very low and many vices prevailed, but all this was
unperceived amidst the general darkness which shrouded doctrine and the
moral standards which then held; now, on the other hand, our eyes have
been opened by a purer faith and even small abuses are seen in their
true colours.” His words on this subject will be given below.
It even seemed to Luther that the decay of almsgiving and the parsimony
displayed towards the churches and the preachers proved the truth of
the Evangel (“_signum est, verum esse evangelium nostrum_”), for, so
he teaches in a sermon preached at Wittenberg in 1527, “the devil is
the Prince of this world and all its riches, as we learn from the
story of Christ’s Temptation. He is now defending his kingdom from the
Evangel which has risen up against him. He does not now allow us so
many possessions and gifts as he formerly did to those who served him
(i.e. the Papists), for their Masses, Vigils, etc.; nay, he robs us of
everything and spends it on himself. Formerly we supported many hundred
monks and now we cannot raise the needful for one Evangelical preacher,
a sign that our Evangel is the true one and that the Pope’s empire was
the devil’s own, where he bestowed gifts on his followers with open
hands and incited them to luxury, avarice, fornication and gluttony.
And their teaching was in conformity therewith, for they urged those
works which pleased them.”[701]
The observer may well marvel at such strange trains of thought.
Luther’s doctrine has become to him like a pole-star around which the
whole firmament must revolve. Experience and logic alike must perforce
be moulded at his pleasure to suit the idea which dominates him.
It was impossible to suppress the inexorable question put by his
opponents, and the faint-hearted doubts of many of his own followers:
Since our Saviour taught: “By their fruits shall you know them,” how
can you be a Divinely sent teacher if these are the moral effects of
your new Evangel? And yet Luther, to the very close of his career, in
tones ever more confident, insists on his higher, nay, Divine, calling,
and on his election to “reveal” hidden doctrines of faith, strange to
say, those very doctrines to which he, like others too, attributed the
decline.
Concerning his Divine mission he had not hesitated to say in so many
words: Unless God calls a man to do a work no one who does not wish
to be a fool may venture to undertake it; “for a certain Divine
call and not a mere whim” is essential to every good work.[702]
Hence he frequently sees in success the best test of a good work.
In his own case, however, he could point only to one great result,
and that a negative one, viz. the harm done to Popery; the Papacy
had been no match for him and had failed to check the apostasy. The
Papists’ undertaking, such is his proof, is not a success; it goes
sideways “after the fashion of the crab.” “Even for those who had a
sure Divine vocation it was difficult to undertake and carry through
anything good, though God was with them and assisted them; what then
could those silly fools, who wished to undertake it without being
called, expect to do?” “But I, Dr. Martin, was called and compelled
to become a Doctor.... Thus I was obliged to accept the office of a
Doctor. Hence, owing to my work, this which you see has befallen the
Papacy, and worse things are yet in store for it.” To those who still
refused to acknowledge Luther’s call to teach he addresses a sort of
command: St. Paul, 1 Cor. xiv., 30, commanded all, even superiors, to
be silent and obey “when some other than the chief teacher receives a
revelation.” “The work that Luther undertakes,” “the great work of the
Reformation,” he assures all, was given not to the other side, but to
him alone.[703]--It is no wonder that his gainsayers and the doubters
on his own side refused to be convinced by such arguments and appeals
to the work of destruction accomplished, but continued to harp on the
words: “By their fruits you shall know them,” which text they took
literally, viz. as referring to actual fruits of moral improvement.
* * * * *
The “great work of the Reformation,” i.e. of real reform, to which
Luther appeals--unless he was prepared to regard it as consisting
solely in the damage done to the Roman Church--surely demanded that,
at least at Wittenberg and in Luther’s immediate sphere, some definite
fruits in the shape of real moral amelioration should be apparent. Yet
it was precisely of Wittenberg and his own surroundings that Luther
complained so loudly. The increase of every kind of disorder caused him
to write to George of Anhalt: “We live in Sodom and Babylon, or rather
must die there; the good men, our Lots and Daniels, whom we so urgently
need now that things are daily becoming worse, are snatched from us
by death.”[704] So bad were matters that Luther was at last driven to
flee from Wittenberg. The sight of the immorality, the vexation and the
complaints to which he was exposed became too much for him; perhaps
Wittenberg would catch the “Beggars’ dance, or Beelzebub’s dance,” he
wrote; “at any rate get us gone from this Sodom.”[705]
According to his letters, the Wittenberg authorities did not interfere
even in the case of the gravest disorders, but allowed themselves to
be “playthings of the devils”; they looked on whilst the students
“were ruined by bad women,” and “though half the town is guilty of
adultery, usury, theft and cheating, no one tries to put the law in
force. They all simply smile, wink at it and do the same themselves.
The world is a troublesome thing.”[706] “The hoiden-folk have grown
bold,” he writes to the Elector, “they pursue the young fellows into
their very rooms and chambers, freely offering them their love; and I
hear that many parents are recalling their children home because, they
say, when they send their children to us to study we hang women about
their necks.”[707] He is aghast at the thought that the “town and the
school” should have heard God’s Word so often and so long and yet,
“instead of growing better, become worse as time goes on.” He fears
that at his end he may hear, “that things were never worse than now,”
and sees Wittenberg threatened with the curse of Chorazin, Bethsaida
and Capharnaum.[708]
In point of fact he did preach a sermon to the Wittenbergers in which,
like a prophet, he predicts the judgments of heaven.[709]
In another sermon he angrily acquaints them with his determination:
“What am I to do with you Wittenbergers? I am not going to preach to
you any longer of Christ’s Kingdom, seeing that you will not accept
it. You are thieves, robbers and men of no mercy. I shall have to
preach you the ‘Sachsenspiegel.’” They refuse, he says, to give
anything to clergy, church or schools. “Are you still ignorant, you
unthankful beasts (‘_ingratæ bestiæ_’) of what they do for you?” He
concludes: They must make up their minds to provide the needful,
“otherwise I shall abandon the pulpit.”[710]
“Later you will find my prophecy fulfilled,” he cried on one occasion
after having foretold “woes”; “then you will long for one of those
exhortations of Martin Luther.”[711]
His Table-Talk bears, if possible, even stronger witness than his
letters and sermons to the conditions at Wittenberg, for there he
freely lets himself go. Some of the things he says of the town and
neighbourhood, found in the authentic notes of docile pupils, such as
Mathesius, Lauterbach and Schlaginhaufen, are worth consideration.
We hear from Lauterbach not only that Hans Metzsch, the town
Commandant whom Luther had “excommunicated,” continued to persecute
the good at Wittenberg “with satanic malice” and to “boast of his
wickedness,”[712] but that in the same year Luther had to complain
of other men of influence and standing in the town who injured the
Evangel by their example. “So great is the godlessness of those of
rank that one was not ashamed to boast of having begotten forty-three
children in a single year; another asked whether he might not take 40
per cent interest _per annum_.” In the same year Luther was obliged
to exclude from the Sacrament another notorious, highly-placed
usurer.[713]
“The soil of Wittenberg is bad,” he declared, speaking from sad
experience; “even were good, honest people sown here the crop would be
one of coarse Saxons.”[714]
“The Gospel at Wittenberg,” he once said poetically, if we may trust
Mathesius, “is like rain that falls on water, i.e. it has no effect.
The good catch the law and the wicked the Gospel.”[715]
“I have often wondered,” he said in 1532, according to Schlaginhaufen,
“why Our Lord God sent His Word to this unfaithful world of
Wittenberg: I believe that He sent it to Jerusalem, Wittenberg and
such-like places that He might, at the Last Day, be able to reprove
their ingratitude.” And again, “My opinion is that God will punish
severely the ingratitude shown to His Word; for there is not a man of
position or a peasant who does not stamp on the ministers; but the
service of the Word must remain; even the Turk has his ministers,
otherwise he could not maintain his rule.”[716]
Luther’s Evangel had made “law and command” to retreat into the
background as compared with the liberty of the children of God; the
penalties he devised, e.g. his exclusion of persons from the reception
of the Sacrament, proved ineffectual. He would willingly have made
use of excommunication if only “there had been people who would let
themselves be excommunicated.” “The Pope’s ban which kept the people
in check,” he says, “has been abolished, and it would be a difficult
task to re-establish law and command.”[717]
“No, I should not like to endure this life for another forty years,”
so he told his friends on June 11, 1539, “even were God to turn it
into a Paradise for me. I would rather hire an executioner to chop off
my head; the world is so bad that all are turning into devils, so that
they could wish one nothing better than a happy death-bed, and then
away!”[718] “The dear, holy Evangel of Christ, that great and precious
treasure, we account as insignificant, as if it were a verse from
Terence or Virgil.”[719]
He found such disdain of his teaching even in his own household and
family. This it was which caused him, in 1532, to preach a course of
sermons to his family circle on Sundays. No head of a family, least
of all here, could connive at any “contempt of the Word.” To the
question of Dr. Jonas as to the wherefore of these private addresses,
he replied: “I see and know that the Word of God is as much neglected
in my house as in the Church.”[720]
There was no more hope for the world; nothing remains “unspoiled
and incorrupt” although, “now, God’s Word is revealed,” yet “it is
despised, spurned, corrupted, mocked at and persecuted,” even by the
adherents of his teaching.[721]
Luther made Mathesius the recipient of some of his confidences, as
the latter relates in his sermons; on account of the scandals among
the preachers of the neighbourhood he was forced and urged by his own
people to appeal to the Elector to erect a jail “into which such wild
and turbulent folk might be clapped.” “Satan causes great scandals
amongst the patrons and hearers of the new doctrine,” says Mathesius.
The common people have become rough and self-confident and have begun
to regard the ministers as worthless. “Verily,” he exclaims, “the
soul of this pious old gentleman was sadly tormented day by day by
the unrighteous deeds he was obliged to witness, like pious Lot in
Sodom.”[722]
With a deep sigh, as we read in Lauterbach’s Notes, Luther pointed
to the calamities which were about to overtake the world; it was so
perverse and incorrigible that discipline or admonition would be of
no avail. Already there was the greatest consternation throughout
the world on account of the revelation of the Word. “It is cracking
and I hope it will soon burst,” and the Last Day arrive for which we
are waiting. For all vices have now become habitual and people will
not bear reproof. His only comfort was the progress made by studies
at Wittenberg, and in some other places now thrown open to the
Evangel.[723]
But how were the future preachers now growing up there to improve
matters? This he must well have asked himself when declaring, “with
sobs,” as Lauterbach relates, that “preachers were treated in most
godless and ungrateful fashion. The churches will soon be left without
preachers and ministers; we shall shortly experience this misfortune
in the churches; there will be a dearth not only of learned men but
even of men of the commonest sort. Oh, that our young men would study
more diligently and devote themselves to theology.”[724]
In view of the above it cannot surprise us that Luther gradually became
a victim to habitual discouragement and melancholy, particularly
towards the end of his life. Proofs of the depression from which he
suffered during the latter years of his life will be brought forward in
a later volume.
Such fits of depression were, however, in those days more than usually
common everywhere.
4. A Malady of the Age: Doubts and Melancholy
One of the phenomena which accompanied the religious revulsion and
which it is impossible to pass over, was, as contemporary writers
relate, the sadness, discontent and depression, in a word “melancholy,”
so widespread under the new Evangel even amongst its zealous promoters.
Melanchthon, one of Luther’s most intimate friends, furnished on many
occasions of his life a sad spectacle of interior dejection. Of a
weaker and more timid mental build than Luther, he appeared at times
ready to succumb under the weight of faint-heartedness and scruples,
doubts and self-reproaches. (Cp. vol. iii., p. 363 ff.) We may recall
how his anxieties, caused by the scandal subsequent on his sanctioning
of Philip’s bigamy, almost cost him his life. So many are the records
he left behind of discouragement and despondency that his death must
appear in the light of a welcome deliverance. Luther sought again and
again to revive in him the waning consciousness of the Divine character
of their work. It is just in these letters of Luther to Melanchthon
that we find him most emphatic in his assertion that their common
mission is from God. It was to Melanchthon, that, next to himself,
Luther applied the words already quoted, spoken to comfort a dejected
pupil: “There must be some in the Church as ready to slap Satan as we
three; but not all are able or willing to endure this.”[725]
Spalatin, who has so frequently been referred to as Luther’s go-between
at the Electoral Court, and who afterwards became pastor of Altenburg,
towards the end of his life fell into incurable despondency.[726]
Justus Jonas, likewise, was for a considerable time a prey to
melancholy.[727] Hieronymus Weller, one of Luther’s best friends,
confessed to having suffered at times such violent doubts and fears
as would have driven a heathen to commit suicide.[728] The preachers
George Mohr[729] and Nicholas Hausmann (a very intimate friend of
Luther’s[730]) had to endure dreadful pangs of soul; the same was the
case with Johann Beltzius, Pastor at Allerstedt in Thuringia,[731] and
with Simon Musæus, who died at Mansfeld in 1576 as Superintendent and
who composed two works against the devil of melancholy.[732] Nicholas
Selnecker, who died Superintendent at Leipzig, was responsible for the
rearranged edition of Luther’s Table-Talk; according to the title his
hope was to produce a work “which it might console all Christians to
read, especially in these wretched last days.” Elsewhere he confirms
the need of such consolation when he says: “We experience in our own
selves” that sadness is of frequent occurrence.[733]
Wolfgang Capito, the Strasburg preacher, wrote in 1536 to Luther
that his experience of the want of agreement in doctrine had caused
him such distress of mind that he was on the verge of the “malady of
melancholia”; he trusted he would succeed in reaching a better frame
of mind; the burden of gloom, so he comforts himself, was, after all,
not without its purpose in God’s plan in the case of many under the
Evangel. With Capito, too, melancholy was a “frequent guest.”[734]
Bucer wrote in 1532 to A. Blaurer that Capito had often bemoaned “his
rejection by God.”[735]
Joachim Camerarius, the celebrated Humanist and writer, confessed in
a letter to Luther, that he was oppressed and reduced to despair by
the sight of the decline in morals “in people of every age and sex,
in every condition and grade of life”; everything, in both public and
private life, was so corrupt that he felt all piety and virtue was
done for. Of the Schools in particular he woefully exclaimed that it
would perhaps be better to have none than to have “such haunts of
godlessness and vice.” At the same time, however, he makes admissions
concerning faults of his own which may have served to increase
his dejection: He himself, in his young days, had, like others,
disgraced himself by a very vicious life (“_turpissime in adolescentia
deformatum_”).[736]
The Nuremberg preacher, George Besler, fell into a state of
melancholia, declared “in his ravings that things were not going right
in the Church,” began to see hidden enemies everywhere and finally
committed suicide with a “hogspear” in 1536.[737] William Bidembach,
preacher at Stuttgart, and his brother Balthasar, Abbot of Bebenhausen,
both became a prey to melancholia towards the end of their life.[738]
It would, of course, be foolish to think that many good souls, in the
simplicity of their heart, found no consolation in the new teaching
and in working for its furtherance. Of the preachers, for instance,
Beltzius, who has just been mentioned, declares, that, amidst his
sadness Luther’s consolations had “saved him from the abyss of
hell.”[739] Amongst those who adhered in good faith to the innovations
there were some who highly lauded the solace of the Evangel. But,
notwithstanding all that may be alleged to the contrary, we cannot get
over such testimonies as the following.
Felix, son of the above-mentioned William Bidembach, and Court preacher
in Würtemberg, declared in a “Handbook for young church ministers”:
“It happens more and more frequently that many pious people fall into
distressing sadness and real melancholia, to such an extent that they
constantly experience in their hearts fear, apprehension, dread and
despair”; in the course of his ministry he had met with both persons of
position and common folk who were oppressed with such melancholia.[740]
Nicholas Selnecker (above, p. 220) assures us that not only were
theologians perplexed with many “melancholy and anxious souls and
consciences whom nothing could console,” but physicians, too, “never
remembered such prevalence of evil melancholia, depression and sadness,
even in the young, and of other maladies arising therefrom, as during
these few years, and such misfortune continues still to grow and
increase.”[741]
The Leipzig Pastor, Erasmus Sarcerius, speaks in a similar strain of
the “general faint-heartedness prevalent in every class,” who are
acquainted with nothing but “fear and apprehension”;[742] Victorinus
Strigel, Professor at the University of Leipzig, of the “many persons
who in our day have died simply and solely of grief”;[743] Michael
Sachse, preacher at Wechmar, of people generally as being “timid and
anxious, trembling and despairing from fear.”[744]
When the preacher Leonard Beyer related to Luther how in his great
“temptations” the devil had tried to induce him to stab himself, Luther
consoled him by telling him that the same had happened in his own
case.[745]
We are told that in latter life Luther’s pupil Mathesius was a prey to
a “hellish fear” which lasted almost three months; “he could not even
look at a knife because the sight tempted him to suicide.”[746] Later,
his condition improved. The same Mathesius relates how Pastor Musa
found consolation in his gloomy doubts on faith in Luther’s account of
his own similar storms of doubt.[747]
In the 16th century we hear many lamentations in Protestant circles
concerning the unheard-of increase in the number of suicides.
“There is such an outcry amongst the people,” wrote the Lausitz
Superintendent, Zacharias Rivander, “that it deafens one’s ears and
makes one’s hair stand on end. The people are so heavy-hearted and yet
know not why. Amidst such lowness of spirit many are unable to find
consolation, and, so, cut their throats and slay themselves.”[748]--In
1554 the Nuremberg Councillor, Hieronymus Baumgärtner, lamented at
a meeting attended by the clergy of the town: “We hear, alas, how
daily and more than ever before, people, whether in good health or
not, fall into mortal fear and despair, lose their minds and kill
themselves.”[749] In 1569, within three weeks, fourteen suicides
occurred at Nuremberg.[750]--“You will readily recall,” Lucas Osiander
said in a sermon about the end of the century, “how in the years gone
by many otherwise good people became so timorous, faint-hearted and
full of despair that they could not be consoled; and how of these
not a few put an end to their own lives; this is a sign of the Last
Day.”[751]
Luther himself confirms the increase in the number of suicides which
took place owing to troubles of conscience.
In a sermon of 1532 he bemoans, that “so many people are so disquieted
and distressed that they give way to despair”; this was chiefly
induced by the “spirits,” for there “have been, and still are, many
who are driven by the devil and plagued with temptations and despair
till they hang themselves, or destroy themselves in some other
way out of very fear.”[752] He is quite convinced that the devil
“drives” all suicides and makes them helpless tools of his plans
against human life.--It was to this idea that the Lutheran preacher
Hamelmann clung when he wrote, in 1568, that many trusted “that those
who had been overtaken and destroyed by the devil would not be lost
irretrievably.”[753]
Andreas Celichius, Superintendent in the Mark of Brandenburg, was
of opinion that such suicides, such “very sudden and heartrending
murders,” “gave a bad name to the Evangel in the world”; one sees and
hears “that some in our very midst are quite unable to find comfort
in the Evangelical sanctuary.... This makes men distrustful of the
preaching of Jesus Christ and even causes it to be hated.”[754]
Michael Helding, Bishop-auxiliary of Mayence, found a special reason
for the increase in the number of suicides amongst those who had
broken with the Church, in their rejection of the Catholic means of
grace. In a sermon which he delivered towards the end of 1547 at
the Diet of Augsburg he pointed out that, ever since the use of the
Sacraments had been scorned, people were more exposed to the strength
of the evil one and to discouragement. “When has the devil ever
driven so many to desperation, so that they lose all hope and kill
themselves? Whose fault is it? Ah, we deprive ourselves of God’s grace
and refuse to accept the Divine strength which is offered us in the
Holy Sacraments.”[755]
Among the Lutheran preachers the expected end of the world was made
to play a part and to explain the increase of faint-heartedness and
despair.
Mathesius says in his Postils: “Many pine away and lose hope; there is
no more joy or courage left among the people; therefore let us look
for the end of the world, and prepare, and be ready at any moment for
our departure home!” “For the end is approaching; heaven and earth and
all government now begin to crack and break.”[756]
Luther’s example proved catching, and the end of the world became a
favourite topic both in the pulpit and in books, one on which the
preachers’ own gloom could aptly find vent. The end of all was thought
to be imminent. Such forebodings are voiced, for instance, in the
following: “No consolation is of any help to consciences”;[757] “many
pine away in dejection and die of grief”;[758] “in these latter days
the wicked one by his tyranny drives men into fear and fright”;[759]
“many despair for very dejection and sadness”;[760] “many pious hearts
wax cowardly, seeing their sins and the wickedness of the world”;[761]
“the people hang their heads as though they were walking corpses and
live in a constant dread”;[762] “all joy is dead and all consolation
from God’s Word has become as weak as water”;[763] the number of
those “possessed of the devil body and soul” is growing beyond all
measure.[764]
Though the special advantage claimed for the new Evangel lay in the
sure comfort it afforded troubled consciences, many found themselves
unable to arouse within them the necessary faith in the forgiveness of
their sins. Luther’s own experience, viz. that “faith won’t come,”[765]
was also that of many of the preachers in the case of their own uneasy
and tortured parishioners; their complaints of the fruitlessness
of their labours sound almost like an echo of some of Luther’s own
utterances.
“There are many pious souls in our churches,” says Simon Pauli, of
Rostock, “who are much troubled because they cannot really believe
what they say they do, viz. that God will be gracious to them and will
justify and save them.”[766]
The widespread melancholy existing among the parishioners quite as
much and sometimes more so than among the pastors, explains the
quantity of consolatory booklets which appeared on the market during
the second half of the 16th century, many of which were expressly
designed to check the progress of this morbid melancholy.[767]
Selnecker’s work, mentioned above, is a specimen of this sort of
literature. The Hamburg preacher, J. Magdeburgius, wrote: “Never has
there been such need of encouragement as at this time.”[768] The
Superintendent, Andreas Celichius, laments that people “are quite
unable to find comfort in the sanctuary of the Evangel, but, like the
heathen who knew not God, are becoming melancholy and desperate,” and
this too at a time when “God, by means of the evangelical preaching,
is daily dispensing abundantly all manner of right excellent and
efficacious consolation, by the shovelful and not merely by the
spoonful.”[769]--It was, however, a vastly more difficult matter
to find comfort in the bare “_Sola Fides_” than it had been for the
ancestors of these Evangelicals to find it in the Church’s way.
Thanks to their co-operation, it was given to them to experience the
vivifying and saving strength of the Sacraments and of the Eucharistic
Sacrifice, to find example and encouragement in the veneration of
the Saints and in the ritual, to be led to display their faith by
the performance of good works in the hope of an eternal reward, and
to enjoy in all the guidance and help of pastors duly called and
ordained. In spite of all the abuses which existed, their Catholic
forebears had never been deprived of these helps.
Many Protestants were driven by such considerations to return to the
Church. Of this Nicholas Amsdorf complained. Many, he says, “have
fallen away from Christ to Antichrist in consequence of such despair
and doubts,” and the uncertainty in matters of faith is nourished
by the want of any unity in teaching, so that the people “do not
know whom or what to believe”;[770] this was also one of the reasons
alleged by Simon Pauli why “many in the Netherlands and in Austria are
now relapsing into Popery.”[771]
“We find numerous instances in our day,” Laurence Albertus said in
1574, “of how, in many places where Catholics and sectarians live
together, no one was able to help a poor, deluded sectarian in
spiritual or temporal distress, save the Catholic Christians, and
especially their priests; such persons who have been helped admit that
they first found real comfort among the Catholics, and now refuse to
be disobedient to the Church any longer.” Albertus wrote a “Defence”
of such converts.[772]
Johann Schlaginhaufen, Luther’s pupil, with the statements he makes
concerning his own sad interior experiences, brings us back to his
master.[773] Schlaginhaufen himself, even more than the rest, fell
a prey to sadness, fear and thoughts of despair on account of his
sins. Luther, to whom he freely confided this, told him it was “false
that God hated sinners, otherwise He would not have sent His Son”;
God hated only the self-righteous “who didn’t want to be sinners.”
If Satan had not tried and persecuted me so much, “I should not
now be so hostile to him.” Schlaginhaufen, however, was unable to
convince himself so readily that all his trouble came from the devil
and not from his conscience. He said to Luther: “Doctor, I can’t
believe that it is only the devil who causes sadness, for the Law
[the consciousness of having infringed it] makes the conscience sad;
but the Law is good, for it comes from God, consequently neither is
the sadness from Satan.” Luther was only able to give an evasive
answer and fell back on the proximity of the Last Day as a source
of consolation: “In short, why we are so plagued, vexed and troubled
is due to the Last Day.... The devil feels his kingdom is coming to
an end, hence the fuss he makes. Therefore, my dear Turbicida [i.e.
Schlaginhaufen], be comforted, hold fast to the Word of God, let us
pray.” Such words, however, did not suffice to calm the troubled man,
who only became ever more dejected; his inference appeared to him only
too well founded: “The Law with its obligations and its terrifying
menaces is just as much God’s as the Gospel.”
“How doleful you look,” Luther said to him some weeks later. “I
replied,” so Schlaginhaufen relates: “‘Ah, dear Doctor, I was
brooding; my thoughts worry me and yet I can do nothing. I am unable
to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel.’ The Doctor replied:
‘Yes, dear Master Hans, if you could do that then you would be indeed
a Doctor yourself,’ saying which he stood up and doffed his cap....
‘Paul and I have never been able to get so far ... the best thing to
do is to hold fast to the man Who is called Christ.’” In answer to a
new objection Luther referred the young man to the secret counsels
of God, for, according to him, there was a hidden God Who had not
revealed Himself and of Whom men “were unable to know what He secretly
planned,”[774] and a revealed God Who indeed speaks of a Divine
Will that all should be saved; how, however, this was to afford any
consolation it is not easy to see.[775] On other occasions Luther
simply ordered Schlaginhaufen to rely on his authority; God Himself
was speaking through him words of command and consolation. “You are
to believe without doubting what God Himself has spoken to you, for
I have God’s authority and commission to speak to and to comfort
you.”[776]