“Mark this well,” he declared as early as 1520 in his work “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome,” of all that is ordered of God not one jot or tittle is observed at Rome; indeed, they mock at it as folly when anyone pays any attention to it. They don’t mind a bit that the Gospel and the faith of Christ are perishing throughoutthe world, and would not lift a finger to prevent it.[348]The Popes are simply “Epicureans,” so that, naturally, almost all those who return from Rome bring back home with them an “Epicurean faith.” “For this at least is certain, viz. that the Pope and the Cardinals, together with their schools of knaves, believe in nothing at all; in fact, they smile when they hear faith mentioned.”[349]“What cares the Pope about prayer and God’s Word? He has his own god to serve, viz. the devil. But this is a mere trifle.... What is far worse, and a real masterpiece of all the devils in hell, is, that he usurps the authority to set up laws and articles of faith.... He roars, as though chock-full of devils, that whosoever does not obey him and his Romish Church cannot be saved.... Papistically, knavishly, nay, in a truly devilish way, does the Pope, like the stupid scoundrel he is, use the name of the holy Roman Church, when he really means his school of knaves, his Church of harlots and hermaphrodites, the devil’s own hotchpotch.... For such is the language of his Romish Church, and whoever has to do with the Pope and the Roman See must first learn this or else he fares badly. For the devil, who founded the Papacy, speaks and works everything through the Pope and the Roman See.”[350]His “Heer-Predigt widder den Türcken,” in 1529, supplied him with the occasion for the following aside: “The Pope’s doctrine is mere spiritual murder and not one whit better than the teaching and blasphemy of Mohammed or the Turks.... We have nothing but devils on either side and everywhere.”[351]“They even try to force us poor Christians at the point of the sword to worship the devil and blaspheme Christ. Other tyrants have at least this in their favour, that they crucify the Lord of Glory ignorantly, like the Turks, the heathen and the Jews ... but they [the Papists], say: We know that Christ’s words and acts testify against us, but nevertheless we shall not endure His Word, or yield to it.”[352]“I believe the Pope is the devil incarnate in disguise; for he is Antichrist. For, as Christ is true God and man, so Antichrist is the incarnation of the devil.”[353]“The superstition of the Pope exceeds that of the Jews.” Though the Pope drags countless souls down to hell, yet we may not say to him: “For shame! Why act you thus?” “Had not his prestige been overthrown by the Word [i.e. by my preaching] even the devil would have vomited him forth. But this deliverance [from the Pope] we esteem a small matter and have become ungrateful. God, however, will send other forms of darkness to avenge this ingratitude; we still have this consolation, that the Last Day cannot be far distant; for the prophecyof Daniel has been entirely fulfilled, where he describes the Papacy as though he had actually seen its doings.”[354]“At Rome,” so he assures his readers, “they pull the noses of us German fools,” and then say, that “it is of Divine institution that none can be made bishop without the authority of Rome. I can only wonder that Germany ... has a farthing left for this horde of unspeakable, intolerable Roman fools, scoundrels and robbers.”[355]“Worse even than this rapacious seizing of the money of foreigners is the Pope’s usurped right of deciding matters of faith. He acts just as he pleases in accordance with the imaginary interior inspirations which he believes he receives.” “He does just the same as Thomas Münzer and the Anabaptists, for he treads under foot the outward Word of God, trusts entirely to higher illumination and gives vent to his own fond inventions against Holy Scripture; which is the reason why we blame him. We care not for mere human thoughts; what we want is the outward Word.”[356]“In short, what shall I say? No error, superstition or idolatry is too gross to be admitted and accepted; at Rome they even honour the Pope as God. And the heathen also had a god, whose name it was not lawful to utter.”[357]The Catholics.If we turn from the Pope-God or Pope-devil to the Papists, from the Roman Curia to the Catholics, we find them scourged in similar language.Amidst a wealth of imagery quite bewildering to the mind, one idea emerges clearly, viz. that he has been summoned by God for the purpose of rebuilding Christianity from the very foundation. Nothing but such a mission could justify him in forcing upon himself and others the belief, that the existing Church had been utterly corrupted by the devil and that everybody who dared to oppose him was inspired by Satan.“No one can be a Papist unless he is at the very least a murderer, robber or persecutor,” for “he must agree” that the “Pope and his crew are right in burning and banishing people,”[358]etc. The worst thing about the Papists is the Mass; he would rather he had “kept a brothel, or been a robber, than have sacrificed and blasphemed Christ for fifteen years by saying Mass.”[359]Their bloodthirstiness is beyond belief. “They would not care a scrap were no Prince or ruler left in Germany, and were the whole land bathed in blood, so long as they were free to exercise their tyranny and lead their godless and shameless life.”[360]So shameless is their life that the morals of the Lutherans glitter like gold in comparison. Yea, “our life even when it reeks most of sin is better than all their [the Papists’] sanctity, though it should seem to smell as sweet as balsam.”[361]The Catholics had destroyed the Baptism instituted by Christ, and replaced it by a baptism of works, hence their doctrine is as pernicious as that of the Anabaptists, nay, is exactly on a level with that of the Jews.[362]The Catholics profess “unbelief in God,” and “put to death those guileless Christians who refuse to countenance such idolatry”; they are “not fit to be compared with oxen or asses,” seeing that they exalt “their self-chosen works,” “far above God’s commandment. For in addition to the idolatry and ungodly teaching whereby they daily outrage and blaspheme God, they do not perform any works of charity towards their neighbour, nay, would rather leave anyone to perish in want than stretch out a hand to help him. Again, they are as careful not to deviate by a hair’s breadth from their man-made ordinances, rules and commands as were the Jews with regard to the Sabbath.... They make no scruple of cheating their neighbour of his money and goods in order to fill their own belly.... Such perverse and crazy saints, more foolish than ever ox or ass, are all those, Mohammedans, Turks or whatever else they be called, who refuse to listen to or receive Christ.”[363]It was Luther that Dr. Jonas had heard, on one occasion at table, express the opinion concerning the Papists: “Young fellows, take note of this definition: A Papist is a liar and murderer, nay, the devil himself. Hence they are not to be trusted, for they thirst for our blood.”[364]Luther himself assures us that “the blindness of the Papists and the anger of God against the Papacy was terrible.” “Christians, redeemed by the Blood of Christ, put away this blood and worshipped the crib, surely an awful fall! If this had happened amongst the heathen it would have been regarded as monstrous.”[365]The Catholics, Luther taught, never pray, in fact, they do not know how to pray but only how to blaspheme. We find other almost incredible allegations born of his fancy and voiced in a sermon in 1524, of which we have a transcript. “They taught the Our Father, but warned us not to use it [by instructing us to get others to pray for us in our stead]. It is true that for many years I shouted [’bawled,’ he says elsewhere] in the monastery [in choir], but never did I pray. They mock theLord God with their prayers. Never did they approach God with their hearts so as to pray for anything in faith.”[366]Had it been possible for a man to be saved in Popery? He, Luther, replies that this might have happened because “some laymen” may have “held the crucifix in front of the dying man and said: Look up to Jesus, Who died on the cross for you. By this means many a dying man had turned to Christ in spite of having previously believed in the false, miraculous signs [which the devil performs in Popery] and acted as an idolator. Such, however, were lucky.”[367]He admits incidentally that “many of our forefathers” had been saved in this exceptional way, though only such as “had been led astray into error, but had not clung to it.”[368]In any case it was a miracle. “Those pious souls,” “many of whom had by God’s grace been wonderfully preserved in the true faith in the midst of Popery,” had been saved, so he fancies, in much the same way as “Abraham in Ur of the Chaldeans, and Lot in Sodom.”[369]Now, however, matters stood differently; thanks to his mission light had dawned again, and the unbelief of the Catholics was therefore all the more reprehensible. In the heat of his polemic Luther goes so far as to accuse the Papists who oppose him of the sin against the Holy Ghost. At any rate they were acting against their conscience, as he had pointed out before. He also hints that theirs is that worst sin, of which Christ declares (Matt. xii. 31), that it can be forgiven neither in this world nor in the next. The greater part of a sermon on this text which he preached at Wittenberg, in 1528 or 1529, deals with this criminal blindness on the part of Catholics, this deliberate turning away from the truth of the Holy Ghost to which Matthew refers. Here, as elsewhere, Luther’s presupposition is: I teach “the bright Evangel with which even they can find no fault”; I preach “nothing but what is plain to all and so clearly grounded on Scripture that they themselves are forced to admit it”; “what is so plainly proved by the Holy Ghost” that it stands out as a “truth known to all.” He proceeds: “When I was a learned Doctor I did not believe there was such a thing on earth as the sin against the Holy Ghost, for I never imagined or believed it was possible to find a heart that could be so wicked.” But “now the Papal horde” has descended to this, for they “blaspheme and lie against their conscience”; they “are unable to refute our Evangel or to advance anything against it,” “yet they knowingly oppose our teaching out of waywardness and hatred of the truth, so that no admonition, counsel, prayer or chastisement is of any avail.” “Thus openly to smite the Holy Ghost on the mouth,” nay, “to spit in His Face,” is to emulate the treachery of Judas in the depth of their “obstinate and venomous hearts”; for such it was “forbidden to pray,” according to 1 John v. 16, because this would be to “insult the spirit of grace and tread under foot the Son of God.” The Papists richly deserve that the “Holy Ghost should forsake them,” and that they should go “wantonly to their destruction according to their desire.” In short, “It is better for people to be sunk in sin, to be prostitutes and utter scamps, for at least they may yet come to a knowledge of the truth; but these devil’s saints who go to Divine worship full of good works, when they hear the Holy Ghost openly testifying against them, strike Him on the mouth and say: it is all heresy and devilry.”[370]The tone of hatred and of blind prejudice in favour of his cause which here finds utterance may be explained to some extent by his experience during the sharp struggles of conscience through which he was then going, and which formed the worst crisis of his inner states of terror. (See vol. v., xxxii., 4.) Nor must the connection be overlooked between his apparent confidence here and the attempt which he makes in one passage of the sermon to justify theologically his radical subversion of olden doctrine. The brief argument runs as follows: “From St. Paul everyone can infer that it cannot be achieved by works, otherwise the Blood of Christ is made of no account.” Hence the holiness-by-works of the Catholics was an abomination.[371]On another occasion Luther, speaking of the wilful blindness of the Catholics, declared that “God’s untold wrath must sooner or later fall upon such Epicurean pigs and donkeys”; the devil must be a spirit of tremendous power to incite them “deliberately to withstand God.” They say and admit: “‘That is, I know, the Word of God, but even though it is the Word of God I shall not suffer it, listen to it, nor regard it, but shall reprove it and call it heretical, and whoever is determined to obey God in this matter ... him I will put to death or banish.’ I could never have believed there was such a sin.”[372]As such declarations of the wilful obstinacy of the Catholics are quite commonly made by him, we are tempted to assume that such was really his opinion; if so, we are here face to face with a remarkable instance of what his self-deception was capable.Even at the Wartburg, however, he was already on the road to such an idea, for, while still there, he had declared that the Papists were unworthy to receive the truth which he preached: “Had they been worthy of the truth, they would long ago have been converted by my many writings.” “If I teach them they only revile me; I implore and they merely mock at me; I scold them and they grow angry; I pray for them and they reject my prayer; I forgive them their trespass and they will have none of my forgiveness; I am ready to sacrifice myself for them and yet they only curse me. What more can I do than Christ?”[373]It is true that according to him the Papists were ignorant to the last degree, and such ignorance had indeed always prevailed under Popery. “I myself have been a learned Doctor of theology and yet I never understood the Ten Commandments aright. Nay, there have been many celebrated Doctors who were not sure whether there were nine or ten or eleven Commandments; much less did they know anything of the Gospel or of Christ.”[374]Still, this appalling ignorance on the part of the Papists did not afford any excuse or ground for charitable treatment. Their malice, particularly that of the Popes, is too great. “The Popes are a pot-boil of the very worst men on earth. They boast of the name of Christ, St. Peter and the Churches and yet are full of the worst devils in hell, full, absolutely full, so full that they drivel, spew and vomit nothing but devils.”[375]A passage in the “Table-Talk” collected by Mathesius and recently published, shows that Luther considered his frenzied anti-popery as the most suitable method of combating Popish errors; “Philip [Melanchthon] isn’t as yet angry enough with the Pope,” he said some time in the winter of 1542-43; “he is moderate by nature and always acts with moderation, which may possibly be of some use, as he himself hopes. Butmystorming (impetus) knocks the bottom out of the cask;myway is to fall upon them with clubs ... for the devil can only be vanquished by contempt. Enough has been written and said to the weak, asfor the hardened, nothing is of any avail ... I rush in with all my might, but against the devil.”[376]His attitude towards scholarly Catholics was very apparent in the later episodes of his controversy with Erasmus.[377]After having charged Popes and Cardinals with lack of faith, it can be no matter for surprise that he should have represented Erasmus as an utter infidel and a preacher of Epicureanism. The pretexts upon which Luther based this charge had been triumphantly demolished by Erasmus, and only Luther’s prejudice in favour of his own mission to save Christendom from destruction could have led him to describe Erasmus as a depraved fellow, who personified all the infidelity and corruption of the Papacy.“This man learned his infidelity in Rome,” Luther ventured to say of him; hence his wish “to have his Epicureanism praised.” “He is the worst foe of Christ that has arisen for the last thousand years.”[378]In 1519, before Erasmus took the field against him, Luther had written to him, praising him, and, in the hope of securing his co-operation, had said: “You are our ornament and our hope.... Who is there into whose mind Erasmus has not penetrated, who does not see in him a teacher, or over whom he has not established his sway? You are displeasing to many, but therein I discern the gifts of our Gracious God.... With these my words, barbarous as they are, I would fain pay homage to the excellence of your mind to which we, all of us, are indebted.... Please look on me as a little brother in Christ, who is wholly devoted to you and loves you dearly.”[379]On another occasion Luther abuses his opponent as follows: “The only foundation of all his teaching is his desire to gain the applause of the world; he weights the scale with ignorance and malice.” “What is the good of reproaching him with being on the same road as Epicurus, Lucian and the sceptics? By doing so I merely succeeded in rousing the viper, and in its fury against me it gave birth to theViperaspides[i.e. the “Hyperaspistes”]. In Italy and at Rome he sucked in the milk of the Lamiæ and Megæræ and now no medicine is of any avail.” Even in what Erasmus says concerning the Creed, we see the “os et organum Satanæ.” He may be compared with the enemy in the Gospel, who, while men slept, sowed cockel in the field. We can understand now how Sacramentarians, Donatists, Arians, Anabaptists, Epicureans and so forth have again made their appearance. He sowed his seed and then disappeared. And yet he stands in high honour with Pope and Prince. “Who wouldhave believed that the hatred of Luther was so strong? A poor man is made great simply through Luther.”[380]This letter Erasmus described in the title of his printed reply as “Epistola non sobria Martini Lutheri.” Others, he says, might well explain it as a mental aberration, or as due to the influence of some evil demon.[381]Luther, quite undismayed, continued to deny that Erasmus was in any sense a believer: “He regards the Christian religion and doctrine as a comedy or tragedy”; he is “a perfect counterfeit and image of Epicurus”; to this “incarnate scoundrel, God—the Father, Son and Holy Ghost—is merely ludicrous.” “Whereas I did not take the trouble to read most of the other screeds published against me, but merely put them to the basest use that paper can be put—which indeed was all they were worth—I read through the whole of the ‘Diatribe’ of Erasmus, though I was often tempted to throw it aside.” He, like Democritus, the cynical heathen philosopher, looks on our whole theology as nothing better than a fairy tale.[382]We may well be permitted to regard such statements made by Luther in his later years concerning the Catholics more as the result of a delusion than as deliberate falsehoods. It may be that Luther gradually persuaded himself that such was really the case. If this be so, we must, however, admit with Döllinger “the unparalleled perversion and darkening of Luther’s judgment”; this, adds Döllinger, would explain “much in his statements which must otherwise appear enigmatical.”[383]Considerations such as those we have seen him (p. 121 ff.) allege concerning the truth of his cause being proved by its success, could scarcely have impressed any save an unsettled mind such as his. He seems to have accustomed himself to explaining the complex and highly questionable movement at the head of which he stood in a light other than the true one, so much so that he could declare: “God knows all this is not my doing, a fact of which the whole world should have been aware long ago.”[384]Brimful of the enthusiasm he had imbibed at theWartburg he wrote, from Wittenberg, on June 27, 1522, in a similar tone to Staupitz, who was then Benedictine Abbot at Salzburg: “God has undertaken it [the destruction of the abomination of the kingdom of the Pope] without our help and without human aid, merely by the Word. Its end has come before the Lord. The matter is beyond our reason or understanding, hence it is useless to expect all to grasp it. For the sake of God’s power it is meet and just that people’s minds be deeply stirred and that there should be great scandals and great signs. Dear father, do not let this disturb you; I am hopeful. You see God’s plan in these matters and His Mighty Hand. Remember how my cause from the outset seemed to the world doubtful and intolerable, and how, notwithstanding, from day to day it has gained the upper hand more and more. It will also gain the upper hand in what you now anticipate with misplaced apprehension; just you wait and see. Satan feels the smart of the wound inflicted on him, that is why he rages so furiously and throws everything into confusion. But Christ Who began the work will tread him under foot in defiance of all the gates of hell.”[385]From the very outset of his career Luther had been paving the way for this delusion as to the true character of his Catholic opponents, his own higher mission and God’s overthrow of all gainsayers.In 1518 he declared, as a sort of prelude to the idea of his Divine mission, that the Catholic Doctors who opposed him were sunk in “chaotic darkness,” and that he preached “the one true light, Jesus Christ.”[386]Even in 1517, in publishing his Resolutions, he had said of the setting up of his Indulgence Theses, that the Lord Himself had compelled him to advance all this. “Let Christ see to it whether it be His cause or mine.”[387]His pupils and Wittenberg adherents treasured up such assurances of his extraordinary mission in order to excite their own enthusiasm. Even Albert Dürer, who was further removed from the sphere of his influence, spoke of him inthe third decade of the century as “a man enlightened by the Holy Ghost and one who has the Spirit of God.”[388]Long after his death the chord which he had struck continued to vibrate among those who were devoted to him. On his tomb at Wittenberg might be read: “Taught by the Divine inspiration and called by God’s Word, he disseminated throughout the world the new light of the Evangel.” Old, orthodox Lutheranism honoured him as God’s own messenger; the Protestant Pietists, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attributed to Luther, to quote the words of Gottfried Arnold, a truly “apostolic call,” received by means of a “direct inspiration, impulse or Divine apprehension”; this Divine mission, Arnold says, was “generally” admitted, although he himself, as a staunch Pietist, was willing to allow to Luther “the power and illumination of the Spirit” only during the period previous to the dispute with Carlstadt, who was equally enlightened from above. “For a while,” says Arnold, i.e. for about seven years, Luther was “in very truth mightily guided by God and employed as His instrument.”[389]Other Lutheran theologians, Gerhard and Calovius, for instance, refused to see in Luther’s case anything more than an indirect call; about the middle of the eighteenth century the editor of Luther’s Works, Consistorialrat Prof. J. G. Walch, of Jena, asserted openly of Luther’s mission that he “was not called directly by God as had been the case with the Prophets and Apostles”; his call had only in so far been beyond the ordinary in that “God, after decreeing in His Divine plans the Reformation, had chosen Luther as His tool”; hence Luther’s providential mission was only to be inferred from the “divinity of the Reformation,” which, however, was apparent to all who “did not wantonly and maliciously shut their eyes to facts.” Extraordinary gifts had not indeed been bestowed upon him by God, though he had all the “gifts pertaining to his office” in rich measure, and likewise the “sanctifying gifts” and the “spiritual graces”; the latter Walch then proceeds to dissect with painstaking exactitude.[390]Such a view marks the transition to the modern conception of Luther so widely prevalent among Protestants to-day, which, while extolling him as the powerful instrument of the Reformation, naturalises him, so to speak, and takes him down from the pedestal of the God-illumined teacher and prophet, who proclaims a Divine interpretation of Scripture binding upon all.[391]Apocalyptico-Mystic Vesture.Against Catholics Luther also used certain pseudo-mystic elements drawn from his consciousness of a higher mission and based principally on Holy Scripture.In this respect his one-sided study of the Bible explains much, and should avail to mitigate our judgment on him. Stories and scenes from the Old Testament, incidents from the heroic times of the prophets, the lives of the patriarchs, to which he had devoted special Commentaries, so engrossed his mind, that, unwittingly, he came to clothe all in the garb of the prominent figures of Bible history. He was fond of imagining himself as one of those privileged heroes living in the same world of miracles as of yore.If a she-ass could speak to Balaam then how much more can he, Luther, proclaim the truth by the power from on high, even though the whole world should be astonished at the solitary figure who dares to stand up against it. He calls to mind, that the prophet Elias was almost alone in refusing to bow the knee to Baal. Discouraged by the opposition he met with from the Catholic party he was ready to liken himself to Jeremias the prophet, and like him to say: “We would have cured Babylon, but she is not healed, let us forsake her.”[392]In the New Testament Christ Himself and the Apostles were Luther’s favourite types, because, like himself, they were against a whole world whose views were different. The fact that they were alone did not, he says, diminish their reputation, and their success proved their mission. Like Paul and Athanasius and Augustine it is his duty to withstand the stream of false opinions: “My rock, that on which I build, stands firm and will not totter or fall in spite of all the gates of hell; of this I am certain.... Who knows what God wills to work by our means?”[393]When, at different periods of his public career, and in preparing his various works for the press, he had occasion to ruminate on the biblical questions connected with Antichrist, he was wont also to consider the prophecies of Daniel on the end of the world. By dint of a diligent comparison of all the passages on the abominations of the latter days he came to find therein the corruption of the Papacy fully described, even down to the smallest details, with an account of its overthrow, and, consequently, also of his own mission. In the same way that he saw the impending fall of the Turkish Empire predicted, so also he recognised that the German Empire must shortly perish, since, as he hadlearnt from Daniel, it was to receive no other constitution. As for the Papacy, at least according to one of the most forcible of his pronouncements, within two years “it would vanish like smoke, together with all its swarm of parasites.”In Daniel viii. we read that a king will come, “of a shameless face, and understanding dark sentences.” He will lay all things waste and destroy the mighty and the people of the saints according to his will. “Craft shall be successful in his hands and his heart shall be puffed up. He shall rise up against the prince of princes, and shall be broken without a hand.” His coming will be “after many days.”[394]The king thus prophesied is generally admitted to have been Antiochus Epiphanes, while the words “after many days” do not refer to the Last Day or to the End of the World, but to the latter end of the Jewish people. Luther, however, took these words and the whole prophecy in an erroneous, apocalyptic sense. He brought the description of the king into connection with the passages on Antichrist, and the great apostasy, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the Second Epistle to Timothy and the Second Epistle of Peter, etc.[395]There seemed to him not the slightest doubt that the Papacy, with its pernicious arrogance and revolt against God, was here described in minutest detail.This idea he finally elaborated while writing his violent work “On the Babylonish Captivity.” He therein promised to tell the Papists things such as they had never heard before. This promise he fulfilled soon after in the detailed reply to Ambrosius Catharinus, which he hastily wrote in the month of March, 1521. In this Latin work he proved in detail to the satisfaction of learned readers, whether in Germany or abroad, that the Papacy was plainly depicted in the Bible as Antichrist, and likewise its approaching great fall.[396]“I think that, through my exposition of the Prophet Daniel, I have carried out excellently what I promised the Papists to do.” Thus to his friend Link, on the completion of the work.[397]Daniel’s Antichrist, according to Luther’s interpretation,assumes various shapes. These, Luther assures us, are the different forms and masks of Romish superstition and Romish hypocrisy. Amongst these he reckons, as the last, the Universities, because they had made use of the Divine Word in order to deceive the world; here he introduces the prophecy in Apocalypse ix., where a star falls from heaven, the fountains of the deep are opened, locusts with the strength of scorpions rise up out of a thick smoke, and a King reigns over them whose name is Apollyon, or destroyer. The star Luther takes to be Thomas Aquinas, the smoke is the empty words and opinions of Aristotle and the philosophers, the destructive locusts are the Universities, and Apollyon is their master, viz. Aristotle. As for Antichrist himself, i.e. the Papacy, Jesus will destroy him with the breath of His mouth, according to the word of St. Paul, which agrees with the “destruction without hands” prophesied by Daniel. “Thus the Pope and his kingdom are not to be destroyed by laymen, although they greatly dread this [at Rome]; they are not worthy of so mild a chastisement, but are being reserved for the Second Coming of Christ because they have been, and still remain, His most furious enemies. Such is the end of Antichrist, who exalts himself above all things and does not fight with hands, but by the breath and spirit of Satan. Breath shall destroy breath, truth unmask deceit, for the unmasking of a lie means bringing it to nought.”[398]Apocalyptic fancies such as the above were to dog Luther’s footsteps for the rest of his life. Both in his writings and in his “Table-Talk” he was never backward in putting forth his views on this abstruse subject.Of the ideas concerning the Papal Antichrist which, since Hus’s time were current among the classes hostile to Rome,[399]Luther selected and absorbed whatever was worst. Hus’s work on the Church he read in February, 1520. The birth and growth of the theory in his mind even previous to this can, however, be traced step by step, and the process affords us a valuable insight into his mentality by revealing so well its pseudo-mystical element.We may distinguish between the earliest private and the earliest public appearance of Luther’s idea of the Papal Antichrist. Its first unmistakable private trace is to be met with in a letter of December 11, 1518, to his brother-monk and sympathiser Wenceslaus Link. Luther was atthat time labouring under the emotion incident on his interrogation at Augsburg, of which he had just published the “Acta.” Sending a copy to his friend he declares, that his pen is already at work at much greater things, that he knew not whence the ideas that filled his mind came, but that he would send Link whatever writings he published, that he might see “whether I am right in my surmise that the real Antichrist, according to Paul [2 Thess. ii., 3 ff.], rules at the Roman Curia.”[400]The first public expression of this idea is, however, to be found in the pronouncement he made subsequent to the Leipzig Disputation in the summer of 1519, viz. that if the Pope arrogated to himself alone the power of interpreting Scripture, then he was exalting himself above God’s Word and was worse than Antichrist.[401]Not long after Luther showed how deeply he had drunk in the ideas of Hus; in February, 1520, he confessed to being a Husite, since both he and Staupitz too had hitherto taught precisely Hus’s doctrine, though without having recognised him as their leader; the plain, evangelical truth had been burnt a hundred years before in the person of Hus. “I am so astonished I know not what to think when I contemplate these terrible judgments of God upon men.”[402]On March 19 he sent to Spalatin a copy of Hus’s writing, which had just been printed for the first time, praising the author as a “marvel of intellect and learning.”[403]In his conception of Antichrist Luther differed from antiquity in that he applied the term not so much to a person as to a system, or a condition of things: the ecclesiastical government of Rome, with its “pretensions” and its “corruption,” appears to him in his apocalyptic dreams as the real Antichrist. That he finally came to see in the person of the Pope more and more an embodiment of Antichrist was, however, only to be expected; when one wearer of the Papal tiara died, the mask of Antichrist passed to his successor, a matter of no difficulty since, as the end of the world was nigh, the number of the Popes was in any case complete.As early as February 24, 1520, having previously foundnew fuel for his ire in the perusal of Hutten’s edition of Lorenzo Valla’s dissertation against the Donation of Constantine, he wrote to Spalatin:[404]“Nothing is too utterly monstrous not to be acceptable at Rome;[405]of the impudent forgery of the Donation they have made a dogma[!]. I have come to such a pass that I can scarcely doubt that the Pope is the real Antichrist whom the world, according to the accepted view, awaits. His life, behaviour, words and laws all fit the character too well. But more of this when we meet.” The allusion to the “accepted view” may refer to a work, reprinted at Erfurt in 1516, and which Luther must certainly have known, viz. the “Booklet on the Life and Rule of End-Christ as Divinely decreed, how he corrupteth the world through his false teaching and devilish counsel, and how, after this, the two prophets Enoch and ‘Helyas’ shall win back Christendom by preaching the Christian faith.”Greater even than the influence of such writings, in confirming him in his persuasion that the Pope was Antichrist, was that of the excitement caused by his polemics. We have already had occasion to speak of his stormy replies to the “Epitome” of Silvester Prierias and the controversial pamphlet of Augustine Alveld the Franciscan friar. In the latter rejoinder he promises to handle the Papacy “mercilessly” and to belabour Antichrist as he deserves. “Circumstances demand imperatively that the veil be torn from the mysteries of Antichrist; indeed, in their effrontery they themselves refuse to be any longer shrouded in darkness.” Speaking of Prierias, who was a Roman, he says: “I believe that at Rome they have all gone stark, staring mad, and become senseless fools, stocks, stones, devils and a very hell”; “what now can we expect from Rome where such a monster is permitted to take his place in the Church?”[406]In his replies to Prierias and Alveld he depicts Antichrist in the worst colours to be supplied by a vivid imagination and an over-mastering fury: If such things are taught in Rome, then “the veritable Antichrist is indeed seated in the Temple of God, and rules in the purple-clad Babylon at Rome, while the Roman Curia is the synagogue of Satan....Who can Antichrist be, if not such a Pope? O Satan, Satan, how greatly dost thou abuse the patience of thy Creator to thine own destruction!”[407]The anger of the sensitive and excitable Wittenberg professor had been roused by contradiction, particularly by the tract which hailed from Rome, but the arrival of the Bull of Excommunication moved him to the very depths of his soul and led him to commit to writing the most hateful travesties of the Roman Papacy.In the storm and stress of the struggle, which in the latter half of 1520 produced the so-called great Reformation works, the Antichrist theory, in its final form, was made to serve as a bulwark against the Papal excommunication and its consequences. Luther drops all qualifications and henceforth his assertions are positive. The wider becomes the breach separating him from Rome, the blacker must he paint his opponents in order to justify himself before the world and to his own satisfaction. Previous to its publication he summed up the contents of his “An den christlichen Adel” as follows: “There the Pope is severely mauled and treated as Antichrist.”[408]As a matter of fact, the comparison is so startling that he could well speak of the booklet as “a trumpet-blast against the world-destroying tyranny of the Roman Antichrist.”[409]In the writing “On the Babylonish Captivity,” a few weeks later, he exclaims: “Now I know and am certain that the Papacy is the empire of Babylon.” “The Popes are Antichrists and desire to be honoured in the stead of Christ.... The Papacy is nothing but the empire of Babylon and of the veritable Antichrist, because with its doctrines and laws it merely makes sin more plentiful; hence the Pope is the ‘man of sin’ and the ‘son of destruction.’”[410]Hereby he had prepared the way for his attack upon Leo the Tenth’s Bull of Excommunication, which he published in German and Latin at the end of October, 1520, under the title, “Widder die Bullen des Endchrists” and “Adversus execrabilem Antichristi bullam.”[411]Such a namewas well calculated to strike the fancy of the masses, and there cannot be the slightest doubt that Luther welcomed it as a taking, popular cry.It is easy to meet the objection that the Papal Antichrist was nothing more to Luther than a serviceable catchword, and that he never meant it seriously. That such was not the case we have abundantly proved already; on the contrary, we have here a clear outgrowth of his pseudo-mysticism. He ever preserved it as a sacred possession, and it found its way in due season into the Schmalkald Articles[412]and into the Notes Luther appended to his German Bible.[413]The idea, which never left him, of the world’s approaching end—with this we shall deal at greater length in vol. v., xxxi. 2—is without a doubt closely linked with his cherished theory of his being the revealer of Antichrist and the chosen instrument of God for averting His malice in the latter days.
“Mark this well,” he declared as early as 1520 in his work “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome,” of all that is ordered of God not one jot or tittle is observed at Rome; indeed, they mock at it as folly when anyone pays any attention to it. They don’t mind a bit that the Gospel and the faith of Christ are perishing throughoutthe world, and would not lift a finger to prevent it.[348]The Popes are simply “Epicureans,” so that, naturally, almost all those who return from Rome bring back home with them an “Epicurean faith.” “For this at least is certain, viz. that the Pope and the Cardinals, together with their schools of knaves, believe in nothing at all; in fact, they smile when they hear faith mentioned.”[349]“What cares the Pope about prayer and God’s Word? He has his own god to serve, viz. the devil. But this is a mere trifle.... What is far worse, and a real masterpiece of all the devils in hell, is, that he usurps the authority to set up laws and articles of faith.... He roars, as though chock-full of devils, that whosoever does not obey him and his Romish Church cannot be saved.... Papistically, knavishly, nay, in a truly devilish way, does the Pope, like the stupid scoundrel he is, use the name of the holy Roman Church, when he really means his school of knaves, his Church of harlots and hermaphrodites, the devil’s own hotchpotch.... For such is the language of his Romish Church, and whoever has to do with the Pope and the Roman See must first learn this or else he fares badly. For the devil, who founded the Papacy, speaks and works everything through the Pope and the Roman See.”[350]His “Heer-Predigt widder den Türcken,” in 1529, supplied him with the occasion for the following aside: “The Pope’s doctrine is mere spiritual murder and not one whit better than the teaching and blasphemy of Mohammed or the Turks.... We have nothing but devils on either side and everywhere.”[351]“They even try to force us poor Christians at the point of the sword to worship the devil and blaspheme Christ. Other tyrants have at least this in their favour, that they crucify the Lord of Glory ignorantly, like the Turks, the heathen and the Jews ... but they [the Papists], say: We know that Christ’s words and acts testify against us, but nevertheless we shall not endure His Word, or yield to it.”[352]“I believe the Pope is the devil incarnate in disguise; for he is Antichrist. For, as Christ is true God and man, so Antichrist is the incarnation of the devil.”[353]“The superstition of the Pope exceeds that of the Jews.” Though the Pope drags countless souls down to hell, yet we may not say to him: “For shame! Why act you thus?” “Had not his prestige been overthrown by the Word [i.e. by my preaching] even the devil would have vomited him forth. But this deliverance [from the Pope] we esteem a small matter and have become ungrateful. God, however, will send other forms of darkness to avenge this ingratitude; we still have this consolation, that the Last Day cannot be far distant; for the prophecyof Daniel has been entirely fulfilled, where he describes the Papacy as though he had actually seen its doings.”[354]“At Rome,” so he assures his readers, “they pull the noses of us German fools,” and then say, that “it is of Divine institution that none can be made bishop without the authority of Rome. I can only wonder that Germany ... has a farthing left for this horde of unspeakable, intolerable Roman fools, scoundrels and robbers.”[355]“Worse even than this rapacious seizing of the money of foreigners is the Pope’s usurped right of deciding matters of faith. He acts just as he pleases in accordance with the imaginary interior inspirations which he believes he receives.” “He does just the same as Thomas Münzer and the Anabaptists, for he treads under foot the outward Word of God, trusts entirely to higher illumination and gives vent to his own fond inventions against Holy Scripture; which is the reason why we blame him. We care not for mere human thoughts; what we want is the outward Word.”[356]“In short, what shall I say? No error, superstition or idolatry is too gross to be admitted and accepted; at Rome they even honour the Pope as God. And the heathen also had a god, whose name it was not lawful to utter.”[357]The Catholics.If we turn from the Pope-God or Pope-devil to the Papists, from the Roman Curia to the Catholics, we find them scourged in similar language.Amidst a wealth of imagery quite bewildering to the mind, one idea emerges clearly, viz. that he has been summoned by God for the purpose of rebuilding Christianity from the very foundation. Nothing but such a mission could justify him in forcing upon himself and others the belief, that the existing Church had been utterly corrupted by the devil and that everybody who dared to oppose him was inspired by Satan.“No one can be a Papist unless he is at the very least a murderer, robber or persecutor,” for “he must agree” that the “Pope and his crew are right in burning and banishing people,”[358]etc. The worst thing about the Papists is the Mass; he would rather he had “kept a brothel, or been a robber, than have sacrificed and blasphemed Christ for fifteen years by saying Mass.”[359]Their bloodthirstiness is beyond belief. “They would not care a scrap were no Prince or ruler left in Germany, and were the whole land bathed in blood, so long as they were free to exercise their tyranny and lead their godless and shameless life.”[360]So shameless is their life that the morals of the Lutherans glitter like gold in comparison. Yea, “our life even when it reeks most of sin is better than all their [the Papists’] sanctity, though it should seem to smell as sweet as balsam.”[361]The Catholics had destroyed the Baptism instituted by Christ, and replaced it by a baptism of works, hence their doctrine is as pernicious as that of the Anabaptists, nay, is exactly on a level with that of the Jews.[362]The Catholics profess “unbelief in God,” and “put to death those guileless Christians who refuse to countenance such idolatry”; they are “not fit to be compared with oxen or asses,” seeing that they exalt “their self-chosen works,” “far above God’s commandment. For in addition to the idolatry and ungodly teaching whereby they daily outrage and blaspheme God, they do not perform any works of charity towards their neighbour, nay, would rather leave anyone to perish in want than stretch out a hand to help him. Again, they are as careful not to deviate by a hair’s breadth from their man-made ordinances, rules and commands as were the Jews with regard to the Sabbath.... They make no scruple of cheating their neighbour of his money and goods in order to fill their own belly.... Such perverse and crazy saints, more foolish than ever ox or ass, are all those, Mohammedans, Turks or whatever else they be called, who refuse to listen to or receive Christ.”[363]It was Luther that Dr. Jonas had heard, on one occasion at table, express the opinion concerning the Papists: “Young fellows, take note of this definition: A Papist is a liar and murderer, nay, the devil himself. Hence they are not to be trusted, for they thirst for our blood.”[364]Luther himself assures us that “the blindness of the Papists and the anger of God against the Papacy was terrible.” “Christians, redeemed by the Blood of Christ, put away this blood and worshipped the crib, surely an awful fall! If this had happened amongst the heathen it would have been regarded as monstrous.”[365]The Catholics, Luther taught, never pray, in fact, they do not know how to pray but only how to blaspheme. We find other almost incredible allegations born of his fancy and voiced in a sermon in 1524, of which we have a transcript. “They taught the Our Father, but warned us not to use it [by instructing us to get others to pray for us in our stead]. It is true that for many years I shouted [’bawled,’ he says elsewhere] in the monastery [in choir], but never did I pray. They mock theLord God with their prayers. Never did they approach God with their hearts so as to pray for anything in faith.”[366]Had it been possible for a man to be saved in Popery? He, Luther, replies that this might have happened because “some laymen” may have “held the crucifix in front of the dying man and said: Look up to Jesus, Who died on the cross for you. By this means many a dying man had turned to Christ in spite of having previously believed in the false, miraculous signs [which the devil performs in Popery] and acted as an idolator. Such, however, were lucky.”[367]He admits incidentally that “many of our forefathers” had been saved in this exceptional way, though only such as “had been led astray into error, but had not clung to it.”[368]In any case it was a miracle. “Those pious souls,” “many of whom had by God’s grace been wonderfully preserved in the true faith in the midst of Popery,” had been saved, so he fancies, in much the same way as “Abraham in Ur of the Chaldeans, and Lot in Sodom.”[369]Now, however, matters stood differently; thanks to his mission light had dawned again, and the unbelief of the Catholics was therefore all the more reprehensible. In the heat of his polemic Luther goes so far as to accuse the Papists who oppose him of the sin against the Holy Ghost. At any rate they were acting against their conscience, as he had pointed out before. He also hints that theirs is that worst sin, of which Christ declares (Matt. xii. 31), that it can be forgiven neither in this world nor in the next. The greater part of a sermon on this text which he preached at Wittenberg, in 1528 or 1529, deals with this criminal blindness on the part of Catholics, this deliberate turning away from the truth of the Holy Ghost to which Matthew refers. Here, as elsewhere, Luther’s presupposition is: I teach “the bright Evangel with which even they can find no fault”; I preach “nothing but what is plain to all and so clearly grounded on Scripture that they themselves are forced to admit it”; “what is so plainly proved by the Holy Ghost” that it stands out as a “truth known to all.” He proceeds: “When I was a learned Doctor I did not believe there was such a thing on earth as the sin against the Holy Ghost, for I never imagined or believed it was possible to find a heart that could be so wicked.” But “now the Papal horde” has descended to this, for they “blaspheme and lie against their conscience”; they “are unable to refute our Evangel or to advance anything against it,” “yet they knowingly oppose our teaching out of waywardness and hatred of the truth, so that no admonition, counsel, prayer or chastisement is of any avail.” “Thus openly to smite the Holy Ghost on the mouth,” nay, “to spit in His Face,” is to emulate the treachery of Judas in the depth of their “obstinate and venomous hearts”; for such it was “forbidden to pray,” according to 1 John v. 16, because this would be to “insult the spirit of grace and tread under foot the Son of God.” The Papists richly deserve that the “Holy Ghost should forsake them,” and that they should go “wantonly to their destruction according to their desire.” In short, “It is better for people to be sunk in sin, to be prostitutes and utter scamps, for at least they may yet come to a knowledge of the truth; but these devil’s saints who go to Divine worship full of good works, when they hear the Holy Ghost openly testifying against them, strike Him on the mouth and say: it is all heresy and devilry.”[370]The tone of hatred and of blind prejudice in favour of his cause which here finds utterance may be explained to some extent by his experience during the sharp struggles of conscience through which he was then going, and which formed the worst crisis of his inner states of terror. (See vol. v., xxxii., 4.) Nor must the connection be overlooked between his apparent confidence here and the attempt which he makes in one passage of the sermon to justify theologically his radical subversion of olden doctrine. The brief argument runs as follows: “From St. Paul everyone can infer that it cannot be achieved by works, otherwise the Blood of Christ is made of no account.” Hence the holiness-by-works of the Catholics was an abomination.[371]On another occasion Luther, speaking of the wilful blindness of the Catholics, declared that “God’s untold wrath must sooner or later fall upon such Epicurean pigs and donkeys”; the devil must be a spirit of tremendous power to incite them “deliberately to withstand God.” They say and admit: “‘That is, I know, the Word of God, but even though it is the Word of God I shall not suffer it, listen to it, nor regard it, but shall reprove it and call it heretical, and whoever is determined to obey God in this matter ... him I will put to death or banish.’ I could never have believed there was such a sin.”[372]As such declarations of the wilful obstinacy of the Catholics are quite commonly made by him, we are tempted to assume that such was really his opinion; if so, we are here face to face with a remarkable instance of what his self-deception was capable.Even at the Wartburg, however, he was already on the road to such an idea, for, while still there, he had declared that the Papists were unworthy to receive the truth which he preached: “Had they been worthy of the truth, they would long ago have been converted by my many writings.” “If I teach them they only revile me; I implore and they merely mock at me; I scold them and they grow angry; I pray for them and they reject my prayer; I forgive them their trespass and they will have none of my forgiveness; I am ready to sacrifice myself for them and yet they only curse me. What more can I do than Christ?”[373]It is true that according to him the Papists were ignorant to the last degree, and such ignorance had indeed always prevailed under Popery. “I myself have been a learned Doctor of theology and yet I never understood the Ten Commandments aright. Nay, there have been many celebrated Doctors who were not sure whether there were nine or ten or eleven Commandments; much less did they know anything of the Gospel or of Christ.”[374]Still, this appalling ignorance on the part of the Papists did not afford any excuse or ground for charitable treatment. Their malice, particularly that of the Popes, is too great. “The Popes are a pot-boil of the very worst men on earth. They boast of the name of Christ, St. Peter and the Churches and yet are full of the worst devils in hell, full, absolutely full, so full that they drivel, spew and vomit nothing but devils.”[375]A passage in the “Table-Talk” collected by Mathesius and recently published, shows that Luther considered his frenzied anti-popery as the most suitable method of combating Popish errors; “Philip [Melanchthon] isn’t as yet angry enough with the Pope,” he said some time in the winter of 1542-43; “he is moderate by nature and always acts with moderation, which may possibly be of some use, as he himself hopes. Butmystorming (impetus) knocks the bottom out of the cask;myway is to fall upon them with clubs ... for the devil can only be vanquished by contempt. Enough has been written and said to the weak, asfor the hardened, nothing is of any avail ... I rush in with all my might, but against the devil.”[376]His attitude towards scholarly Catholics was very apparent in the later episodes of his controversy with Erasmus.[377]After having charged Popes and Cardinals with lack of faith, it can be no matter for surprise that he should have represented Erasmus as an utter infidel and a preacher of Epicureanism. The pretexts upon which Luther based this charge had been triumphantly demolished by Erasmus, and only Luther’s prejudice in favour of his own mission to save Christendom from destruction could have led him to describe Erasmus as a depraved fellow, who personified all the infidelity and corruption of the Papacy.“This man learned his infidelity in Rome,” Luther ventured to say of him; hence his wish “to have his Epicureanism praised.” “He is the worst foe of Christ that has arisen for the last thousand years.”[378]In 1519, before Erasmus took the field against him, Luther had written to him, praising him, and, in the hope of securing his co-operation, had said: “You are our ornament and our hope.... Who is there into whose mind Erasmus has not penetrated, who does not see in him a teacher, or over whom he has not established his sway? You are displeasing to many, but therein I discern the gifts of our Gracious God.... With these my words, barbarous as they are, I would fain pay homage to the excellence of your mind to which we, all of us, are indebted.... Please look on me as a little brother in Christ, who is wholly devoted to you and loves you dearly.”[379]On another occasion Luther abuses his opponent as follows: “The only foundation of all his teaching is his desire to gain the applause of the world; he weights the scale with ignorance and malice.” “What is the good of reproaching him with being on the same road as Epicurus, Lucian and the sceptics? By doing so I merely succeeded in rousing the viper, and in its fury against me it gave birth to theViperaspides[i.e. the “Hyperaspistes”]. In Italy and at Rome he sucked in the milk of the Lamiæ and Megæræ and now no medicine is of any avail.” Even in what Erasmus says concerning the Creed, we see the “os et organum Satanæ.” He may be compared with the enemy in the Gospel, who, while men slept, sowed cockel in the field. We can understand now how Sacramentarians, Donatists, Arians, Anabaptists, Epicureans and so forth have again made their appearance. He sowed his seed and then disappeared. And yet he stands in high honour with Pope and Prince. “Who wouldhave believed that the hatred of Luther was so strong? A poor man is made great simply through Luther.”[380]This letter Erasmus described in the title of his printed reply as “Epistola non sobria Martini Lutheri.” Others, he says, might well explain it as a mental aberration, or as due to the influence of some evil demon.[381]Luther, quite undismayed, continued to deny that Erasmus was in any sense a believer: “He regards the Christian religion and doctrine as a comedy or tragedy”; he is “a perfect counterfeit and image of Epicurus”; to this “incarnate scoundrel, God—the Father, Son and Holy Ghost—is merely ludicrous.” “Whereas I did not take the trouble to read most of the other screeds published against me, but merely put them to the basest use that paper can be put—which indeed was all they were worth—I read through the whole of the ‘Diatribe’ of Erasmus, though I was often tempted to throw it aside.” He, like Democritus, the cynical heathen philosopher, looks on our whole theology as nothing better than a fairy tale.[382]We may well be permitted to regard such statements made by Luther in his later years concerning the Catholics more as the result of a delusion than as deliberate falsehoods. It may be that Luther gradually persuaded himself that such was really the case. If this be so, we must, however, admit with Döllinger “the unparalleled perversion and darkening of Luther’s judgment”; this, adds Döllinger, would explain “much in his statements which must otherwise appear enigmatical.”[383]Considerations such as those we have seen him (p. 121 ff.) allege concerning the truth of his cause being proved by its success, could scarcely have impressed any save an unsettled mind such as his. He seems to have accustomed himself to explaining the complex and highly questionable movement at the head of which he stood in a light other than the true one, so much so that he could declare: “God knows all this is not my doing, a fact of which the whole world should have been aware long ago.”[384]Brimful of the enthusiasm he had imbibed at theWartburg he wrote, from Wittenberg, on June 27, 1522, in a similar tone to Staupitz, who was then Benedictine Abbot at Salzburg: “God has undertaken it [the destruction of the abomination of the kingdom of the Pope] without our help and without human aid, merely by the Word. Its end has come before the Lord. The matter is beyond our reason or understanding, hence it is useless to expect all to grasp it. For the sake of God’s power it is meet and just that people’s minds be deeply stirred and that there should be great scandals and great signs. Dear father, do not let this disturb you; I am hopeful. You see God’s plan in these matters and His Mighty Hand. Remember how my cause from the outset seemed to the world doubtful and intolerable, and how, notwithstanding, from day to day it has gained the upper hand more and more. It will also gain the upper hand in what you now anticipate with misplaced apprehension; just you wait and see. Satan feels the smart of the wound inflicted on him, that is why he rages so furiously and throws everything into confusion. But Christ Who began the work will tread him under foot in defiance of all the gates of hell.”[385]From the very outset of his career Luther had been paving the way for this delusion as to the true character of his Catholic opponents, his own higher mission and God’s overthrow of all gainsayers.In 1518 he declared, as a sort of prelude to the idea of his Divine mission, that the Catholic Doctors who opposed him were sunk in “chaotic darkness,” and that he preached “the one true light, Jesus Christ.”[386]Even in 1517, in publishing his Resolutions, he had said of the setting up of his Indulgence Theses, that the Lord Himself had compelled him to advance all this. “Let Christ see to it whether it be His cause or mine.”[387]His pupils and Wittenberg adherents treasured up such assurances of his extraordinary mission in order to excite their own enthusiasm. Even Albert Dürer, who was further removed from the sphere of his influence, spoke of him inthe third decade of the century as “a man enlightened by the Holy Ghost and one who has the Spirit of God.”[388]Long after his death the chord which he had struck continued to vibrate among those who were devoted to him. On his tomb at Wittenberg might be read: “Taught by the Divine inspiration and called by God’s Word, he disseminated throughout the world the new light of the Evangel.” Old, orthodox Lutheranism honoured him as God’s own messenger; the Protestant Pietists, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attributed to Luther, to quote the words of Gottfried Arnold, a truly “apostolic call,” received by means of a “direct inspiration, impulse or Divine apprehension”; this Divine mission, Arnold says, was “generally” admitted, although he himself, as a staunch Pietist, was willing to allow to Luther “the power and illumination of the Spirit” only during the period previous to the dispute with Carlstadt, who was equally enlightened from above. “For a while,” says Arnold, i.e. for about seven years, Luther was “in very truth mightily guided by God and employed as His instrument.”[389]Other Lutheran theologians, Gerhard and Calovius, for instance, refused to see in Luther’s case anything more than an indirect call; about the middle of the eighteenth century the editor of Luther’s Works, Consistorialrat Prof. J. G. Walch, of Jena, asserted openly of Luther’s mission that he “was not called directly by God as had been the case with the Prophets and Apostles”; his call had only in so far been beyond the ordinary in that “God, after decreeing in His Divine plans the Reformation, had chosen Luther as His tool”; hence Luther’s providential mission was only to be inferred from the “divinity of the Reformation,” which, however, was apparent to all who “did not wantonly and maliciously shut their eyes to facts.” Extraordinary gifts had not indeed been bestowed upon him by God, though he had all the “gifts pertaining to his office” in rich measure, and likewise the “sanctifying gifts” and the “spiritual graces”; the latter Walch then proceeds to dissect with painstaking exactitude.[390]Such a view marks the transition to the modern conception of Luther so widely prevalent among Protestants to-day, which, while extolling him as the powerful instrument of the Reformation, naturalises him, so to speak, and takes him down from the pedestal of the God-illumined teacher and prophet, who proclaims a Divine interpretation of Scripture binding upon all.[391]Apocalyptico-Mystic Vesture.Against Catholics Luther also used certain pseudo-mystic elements drawn from his consciousness of a higher mission and based principally on Holy Scripture.In this respect his one-sided study of the Bible explains much, and should avail to mitigate our judgment on him. Stories and scenes from the Old Testament, incidents from the heroic times of the prophets, the lives of the patriarchs, to which he had devoted special Commentaries, so engrossed his mind, that, unwittingly, he came to clothe all in the garb of the prominent figures of Bible history. He was fond of imagining himself as one of those privileged heroes living in the same world of miracles as of yore.If a she-ass could speak to Balaam then how much more can he, Luther, proclaim the truth by the power from on high, even though the whole world should be astonished at the solitary figure who dares to stand up against it. He calls to mind, that the prophet Elias was almost alone in refusing to bow the knee to Baal. Discouraged by the opposition he met with from the Catholic party he was ready to liken himself to Jeremias the prophet, and like him to say: “We would have cured Babylon, but she is not healed, let us forsake her.”[392]In the New Testament Christ Himself and the Apostles were Luther’s favourite types, because, like himself, they were against a whole world whose views were different. The fact that they were alone did not, he says, diminish their reputation, and their success proved their mission. Like Paul and Athanasius and Augustine it is his duty to withstand the stream of false opinions: “My rock, that on which I build, stands firm and will not totter or fall in spite of all the gates of hell; of this I am certain.... Who knows what God wills to work by our means?”[393]When, at different periods of his public career, and in preparing his various works for the press, he had occasion to ruminate on the biblical questions connected with Antichrist, he was wont also to consider the prophecies of Daniel on the end of the world. By dint of a diligent comparison of all the passages on the abominations of the latter days he came to find therein the corruption of the Papacy fully described, even down to the smallest details, with an account of its overthrow, and, consequently, also of his own mission. In the same way that he saw the impending fall of the Turkish Empire predicted, so also he recognised that the German Empire must shortly perish, since, as he hadlearnt from Daniel, it was to receive no other constitution. As for the Papacy, at least according to one of the most forcible of his pronouncements, within two years “it would vanish like smoke, together with all its swarm of parasites.”In Daniel viii. we read that a king will come, “of a shameless face, and understanding dark sentences.” He will lay all things waste and destroy the mighty and the people of the saints according to his will. “Craft shall be successful in his hands and his heart shall be puffed up. He shall rise up against the prince of princes, and shall be broken without a hand.” His coming will be “after many days.”[394]The king thus prophesied is generally admitted to have been Antiochus Epiphanes, while the words “after many days” do not refer to the Last Day or to the End of the World, but to the latter end of the Jewish people. Luther, however, took these words and the whole prophecy in an erroneous, apocalyptic sense. He brought the description of the king into connection with the passages on Antichrist, and the great apostasy, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the Second Epistle to Timothy and the Second Epistle of Peter, etc.[395]There seemed to him not the slightest doubt that the Papacy, with its pernicious arrogance and revolt against God, was here described in minutest detail.This idea he finally elaborated while writing his violent work “On the Babylonish Captivity.” He therein promised to tell the Papists things such as they had never heard before. This promise he fulfilled soon after in the detailed reply to Ambrosius Catharinus, which he hastily wrote in the month of March, 1521. In this Latin work he proved in detail to the satisfaction of learned readers, whether in Germany or abroad, that the Papacy was plainly depicted in the Bible as Antichrist, and likewise its approaching great fall.[396]“I think that, through my exposition of the Prophet Daniel, I have carried out excellently what I promised the Papists to do.” Thus to his friend Link, on the completion of the work.[397]Daniel’s Antichrist, according to Luther’s interpretation,assumes various shapes. These, Luther assures us, are the different forms and masks of Romish superstition and Romish hypocrisy. Amongst these he reckons, as the last, the Universities, because they had made use of the Divine Word in order to deceive the world; here he introduces the prophecy in Apocalypse ix., where a star falls from heaven, the fountains of the deep are opened, locusts with the strength of scorpions rise up out of a thick smoke, and a King reigns over them whose name is Apollyon, or destroyer. The star Luther takes to be Thomas Aquinas, the smoke is the empty words and opinions of Aristotle and the philosophers, the destructive locusts are the Universities, and Apollyon is their master, viz. Aristotle. As for Antichrist himself, i.e. the Papacy, Jesus will destroy him with the breath of His mouth, according to the word of St. Paul, which agrees with the “destruction without hands” prophesied by Daniel. “Thus the Pope and his kingdom are not to be destroyed by laymen, although they greatly dread this [at Rome]; they are not worthy of so mild a chastisement, but are being reserved for the Second Coming of Christ because they have been, and still remain, His most furious enemies. Such is the end of Antichrist, who exalts himself above all things and does not fight with hands, but by the breath and spirit of Satan. Breath shall destroy breath, truth unmask deceit, for the unmasking of a lie means bringing it to nought.”[398]Apocalyptic fancies such as the above were to dog Luther’s footsteps for the rest of his life. Both in his writings and in his “Table-Talk” he was never backward in putting forth his views on this abstruse subject.Of the ideas concerning the Papal Antichrist which, since Hus’s time were current among the classes hostile to Rome,[399]Luther selected and absorbed whatever was worst. Hus’s work on the Church he read in February, 1520. The birth and growth of the theory in his mind even previous to this can, however, be traced step by step, and the process affords us a valuable insight into his mentality by revealing so well its pseudo-mystical element.We may distinguish between the earliest private and the earliest public appearance of Luther’s idea of the Papal Antichrist. Its first unmistakable private trace is to be met with in a letter of December 11, 1518, to his brother-monk and sympathiser Wenceslaus Link. Luther was atthat time labouring under the emotion incident on his interrogation at Augsburg, of which he had just published the “Acta.” Sending a copy to his friend he declares, that his pen is already at work at much greater things, that he knew not whence the ideas that filled his mind came, but that he would send Link whatever writings he published, that he might see “whether I am right in my surmise that the real Antichrist, according to Paul [2 Thess. ii., 3 ff.], rules at the Roman Curia.”[400]The first public expression of this idea is, however, to be found in the pronouncement he made subsequent to the Leipzig Disputation in the summer of 1519, viz. that if the Pope arrogated to himself alone the power of interpreting Scripture, then he was exalting himself above God’s Word and was worse than Antichrist.[401]Not long after Luther showed how deeply he had drunk in the ideas of Hus; in February, 1520, he confessed to being a Husite, since both he and Staupitz too had hitherto taught precisely Hus’s doctrine, though without having recognised him as their leader; the plain, evangelical truth had been burnt a hundred years before in the person of Hus. “I am so astonished I know not what to think when I contemplate these terrible judgments of God upon men.”[402]On March 19 he sent to Spalatin a copy of Hus’s writing, which had just been printed for the first time, praising the author as a “marvel of intellect and learning.”[403]In his conception of Antichrist Luther differed from antiquity in that he applied the term not so much to a person as to a system, or a condition of things: the ecclesiastical government of Rome, with its “pretensions” and its “corruption,” appears to him in his apocalyptic dreams as the real Antichrist. That he finally came to see in the person of the Pope more and more an embodiment of Antichrist was, however, only to be expected; when one wearer of the Papal tiara died, the mask of Antichrist passed to his successor, a matter of no difficulty since, as the end of the world was nigh, the number of the Popes was in any case complete.As early as February 24, 1520, having previously foundnew fuel for his ire in the perusal of Hutten’s edition of Lorenzo Valla’s dissertation against the Donation of Constantine, he wrote to Spalatin:[404]“Nothing is too utterly monstrous not to be acceptable at Rome;[405]of the impudent forgery of the Donation they have made a dogma[!]. I have come to such a pass that I can scarcely doubt that the Pope is the real Antichrist whom the world, according to the accepted view, awaits. His life, behaviour, words and laws all fit the character too well. But more of this when we meet.” The allusion to the “accepted view” may refer to a work, reprinted at Erfurt in 1516, and which Luther must certainly have known, viz. the “Booklet on the Life and Rule of End-Christ as Divinely decreed, how he corrupteth the world through his false teaching and devilish counsel, and how, after this, the two prophets Enoch and ‘Helyas’ shall win back Christendom by preaching the Christian faith.”Greater even than the influence of such writings, in confirming him in his persuasion that the Pope was Antichrist, was that of the excitement caused by his polemics. We have already had occasion to speak of his stormy replies to the “Epitome” of Silvester Prierias and the controversial pamphlet of Augustine Alveld the Franciscan friar. In the latter rejoinder he promises to handle the Papacy “mercilessly” and to belabour Antichrist as he deserves. “Circumstances demand imperatively that the veil be torn from the mysteries of Antichrist; indeed, in their effrontery they themselves refuse to be any longer shrouded in darkness.” Speaking of Prierias, who was a Roman, he says: “I believe that at Rome they have all gone stark, staring mad, and become senseless fools, stocks, stones, devils and a very hell”; “what now can we expect from Rome where such a monster is permitted to take his place in the Church?”[406]In his replies to Prierias and Alveld he depicts Antichrist in the worst colours to be supplied by a vivid imagination and an over-mastering fury: If such things are taught in Rome, then “the veritable Antichrist is indeed seated in the Temple of God, and rules in the purple-clad Babylon at Rome, while the Roman Curia is the synagogue of Satan....Who can Antichrist be, if not such a Pope? O Satan, Satan, how greatly dost thou abuse the patience of thy Creator to thine own destruction!”[407]The anger of the sensitive and excitable Wittenberg professor had been roused by contradiction, particularly by the tract which hailed from Rome, but the arrival of the Bull of Excommunication moved him to the very depths of his soul and led him to commit to writing the most hateful travesties of the Roman Papacy.In the storm and stress of the struggle, which in the latter half of 1520 produced the so-called great Reformation works, the Antichrist theory, in its final form, was made to serve as a bulwark against the Papal excommunication and its consequences. Luther drops all qualifications and henceforth his assertions are positive. The wider becomes the breach separating him from Rome, the blacker must he paint his opponents in order to justify himself before the world and to his own satisfaction. Previous to its publication he summed up the contents of his “An den christlichen Adel” as follows: “There the Pope is severely mauled and treated as Antichrist.”[408]As a matter of fact, the comparison is so startling that he could well speak of the booklet as “a trumpet-blast against the world-destroying tyranny of the Roman Antichrist.”[409]In the writing “On the Babylonish Captivity,” a few weeks later, he exclaims: “Now I know and am certain that the Papacy is the empire of Babylon.” “The Popes are Antichrists and desire to be honoured in the stead of Christ.... The Papacy is nothing but the empire of Babylon and of the veritable Antichrist, because with its doctrines and laws it merely makes sin more plentiful; hence the Pope is the ‘man of sin’ and the ‘son of destruction.’”[410]Hereby he had prepared the way for his attack upon Leo the Tenth’s Bull of Excommunication, which he published in German and Latin at the end of October, 1520, under the title, “Widder die Bullen des Endchrists” and “Adversus execrabilem Antichristi bullam.”[411]Such a namewas well calculated to strike the fancy of the masses, and there cannot be the slightest doubt that Luther welcomed it as a taking, popular cry.It is easy to meet the objection that the Papal Antichrist was nothing more to Luther than a serviceable catchword, and that he never meant it seriously. That such was not the case we have abundantly proved already; on the contrary, we have here a clear outgrowth of his pseudo-mysticism. He ever preserved it as a sacred possession, and it found its way in due season into the Schmalkald Articles[412]and into the Notes Luther appended to his German Bible.[413]The idea, which never left him, of the world’s approaching end—with this we shall deal at greater length in vol. v., xxxi. 2—is without a doubt closely linked with his cherished theory of his being the revealer of Antichrist and the chosen instrument of God for averting His malice in the latter days.
“Mark this well,” he declared as early as 1520 in his work “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome,” of all that is ordered of God not one jot or tittle is observed at Rome; indeed, they mock at it as folly when anyone pays any attention to it. They don’t mind a bit that the Gospel and the faith of Christ are perishing throughoutthe world, and would not lift a finger to prevent it.[348]The Popes are simply “Epicureans,” so that, naturally, almost all those who return from Rome bring back home with them an “Epicurean faith.” “For this at least is certain, viz. that the Pope and the Cardinals, together with their schools of knaves, believe in nothing at all; in fact, they smile when they hear faith mentioned.”[349]“What cares the Pope about prayer and God’s Word? He has his own god to serve, viz. the devil. But this is a mere trifle.... What is far worse, and a real masterpiece of all the devils in hell, is, that he usurps the authority to set up laws and articles of faith.... He roars, as though chock-full of devils, that whosoever does not obey him and his Romish Church cannot be saved.... Papistically, knavishly, nay, in a truly devilish way, does the Pope, like the stupid scoundrel he is, use the name of the holy Roman Church, when he really means his school of knaves, his Church of harlots and hermaphrodites, the devil’s own hotchpotch.... For such is the language of his Romish Church, and whoever has to do with the Pope and the Roman See must first learn this or else he fares badly. For the devil, who founded the Papacy, speaks and works everything through the Pope and the Roman See.”[350]His “Heer-Predigt widder den Türcken,” in 1529, supplied him with the occasion for the following aside: “The Pope’s doctrine is mere spiritual murder and not one whit better than the teaching and blasphemy of Mohammed or the Turks.... We have nothing but devils on either side and everywhere.”[351]“They even try to force us poor Christians at the point of the sword to worship the devil and blaspheme Christ. Other tyrants have at least this in their favour, that they crucify the Lord of Glory ignorantly, like the Turks, the heathen and the Jews ... but they [the Papists], say: We know that Christ’s words and acts testify against us, but nevertheless we shall not endure His Word, or yield to it.”[352]“I believe the Pope is the devil incarnate in disguise; for he is Antichrist. For, as Christ is true God and man, so Antichrist is the incarnation of the devil.”[353]“The superstition of the Pope exceeds that of the Jews.” Though the Pope drags countless souls down to hell, yet we may not say to him: “For shame! Why act you thus?” “Had not his prestige been overthrown by the Word [i.e. by my preaching] even the devil would have vomited him forth. But this deliverance [from the Pope] we esteem a small matter and have become ungrateful. God, however, will send other forms of darkness to avenge this ingratitude; we still have this consolation, that the Last Day cannot be far distant; for the prophecyof Daniel has been entirely fulfilled, where he describes the Papacy as though he had actually seen its doings.”[354]“At Rome,” so he assures his readers, “they pull the noses of us German fools,” and then say, that “it is of Divine institution that none can be made bishop without the authority of Rome. I can only wonder that Germany ... has a farthing left for this horde of unspeakable, intolerable Roman fools, scoundrels and robbers.”[355]“Worse even than this rapacious seizing of the money of foreigners is the Pope’s usurped right of deciding matters of faith. He acts just as he pleases in accordance with the imaginary interior inspirations which he believes he receives.” “He does just the same as Thomas Münzer and the Anabaptists, for he treads under foot the outward Word of God, trusts entirely to higher illumination and gives vent to his own fond inventions against Holy Scripture; which is the reason why we blame him. We care not for mere human thoughts; what we want is the outward Word.”[356]“In short, what shall I say? No error, superstition or idolatry is too gross to be admitted and accepted; at Rome they even honour the Pope as God. And the heathen also had a god, whose name it was not lawful to utter.”[357]
“Mark this well,” he declared as early as 1520 in his work “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome,” of all that is ordered of God not one jot or tittle is observed at Rome; indeed, they mock at it as folly when anyone pays any attention to it. They don’t mind a bit that the Gospel and the faith of Christ are perishing throughoutthe world, and would not lift a finger to prevent it.[348]The Popes are simply “Epicureans,” so that, naturally, almost all those who return from Rome bring back home with them an “Epicurean faith.” “For this at least is certain, viz. that the Pope and the Cardinals, together with their schools of knaves, believe in nothing at all; in fact, they smile when they hear faith mentioned.”[349]
“What cares the Pope about prayer and God’s Word? He has his own god to serve, viz. the devil. But this is a mere trifle.... What is far worse, and a real masterpiece of all the devils in hell, is, that he usurps the authority to set up laws and articles of faith.... He roars, as though chock-full of devils, that whosoever does not obey him and his Romish Church cannot be saved.... Papistically, knavishly, nay, in a truly devilish way, does the Pope, like the stupid scoundrel he is, use the name of the holy Roman Church, when he really means his school of knaves, his Church of harlots and hermaphrodites, the devil’s own hotchpotch.... For such is the language of his Romish Church, and whoever has to do with the Pope and the Roman See must first learn this or else he fares badly. For the devil, who founded the Papacy, speaks and works everything through the Pope and the Roman See.”[350]
His “Heer-Predigt widder den Türcken,” in 1529, supplied him with the occasion for the following aside: “The Pope’s doctrine is mere spiritual murder and not one whit better than the teaching and blasphemy of Mohammed or the Turks.... We have nothing but devils on either side and everywhere.”[351]“They even try to force us poor Christians at the point of the sword to worship the devil and blaspheme Christ. Other tyrants have at least this in their favour, that they crucify the Lord of Glory ignorantly, like the Turks, the heathen and the Jews ... but they [the Papists], say: We know that Christ’s words and acts testify against us, but nevertheless we shall not endure His Word, or yield to it.”[352]“I believe the Pope is the devil incarnate in disguise; for he is Antichrist. For, as Christ is true God and man, so Antichrist is the incarnation of the devil.”[353]
“The superstition of the Pope exceeds that of the Jews.” Though the Pope drags countless souls down to hell, yet we may not say to him: “For shame! Why act you thus?” “Had not his prestige been overthrown by the Word [i.e. by my preaching] even the devil would have vomited him forth. But this deliverance [from the Pope] we esteem a small matter and have become ungrateful. God, however, will send other forms of darkness to avenge this ingratitude; we still have this consolation, that the Last Day cannot be far distant; for the prophecyof Daniel has been entirely fulfilled, where he describes the Papacy as though he had actually seen its doings.”[354]
“At Rome,” so he assures his readers, “they pull the noses of us German fools,” and then say, that “it is of Divine institution that none can be made bishop without the authority of Rome. I can only wonder that Germany ... has a farthing left for this horde of unspeakable, intolerable Roman fools, scoundrels and robbers.”[355]“Worse even than this rapacious seizing of the money of foreigners is the Pope’s usurped right of deciding matters of faith. He acts just as he pleases in accordance with the imaginary interior inspirations which he believes he receives.” “He does just the same as Thomas Münzer and the Anabaptists, for he treads under foot the outward Word of God, trusts entirely to higher illumination and gives vent to his own fond inventions against Holy Scripture; which is the reason why we blame him. We care not for mere human thoughts; what we want is the outward Word.”[356]
“In short, what shall I say? No error, superstition or idolatry is too gross to be admitted and accepted; at Rome they even honour the Pope as God. And the heathen also had a god, whose name it was not lawful to utter.”[357]
If we turn from the Pope-God or Pope-devil to the Papists, from the Roman Curia to the Catholics, we find them scourged in similar language.
Amidst a wealth of imagery quite bewildering to the mind, one idea emerges clearly, viz. that he has been summoned by God for the purpose of rebuilding Christianity from the very foundation. Nothing but such a mission could justify him in forcing upon himself and others the belief, that the existing Church had been utterly corrupted by the devil and that everybody who dared to oppose him was inspired by Satan.
“No one can be a Papist unless he is at the very least a murderer, robber or persecutor,” for “he must agree” that the “Pope and his crew are right in burning and banishing people,”[358]etc. The worst thing about the Papists is the Mass; he would rather he had “kept a brothel, or been a robber, than have sacrificed and blasphemed Christ for fifteen years by saying Mass.”[359]Their bloodthirstiness is beyond belief. “They would not care a scrap were no Prince or ruler left in Germany, and were the whole land bathed in blood, so long as they were free to exercise their tyranny and lead their godless and shameless life.”[360]So shameless is their life that the morals of the Lutherans glitter like gold in comparison. Yea, “our life even when it reeks most of sin is better than all their [the Papists’] sanctity, though it should seem to smell as sweet as balsam.”[361]The Catholics had destroyed the Baptism instituted by Christ, and replaced it by a baptism of works, hence their doctrine is as pernicious as that of the Anabaptists, nay, is exactly on a level with that of the Jews.[362]The Catholics profess “unbelief in God,” and “put to death those guileless Christians who refuse to countenance such idolatry”; they are “not fit to be compared with oxen or asses,” seeing that they exalt “their self-chosen works,” “far above God’s commandment. For in addition to the idolatry and ungodly teaching whereby they daily outrage and blaspheme God, they do not perform any works of charity towards their neighbour, nay, would rather leave anyone to perish in want than stretch out a hand to help him. Again, they are as careful not to deviate by a hair’s breadth from their man-made ordinances, rules and commands as were the Jews with regard to the Sabbath.... They make no scruple of cheating their neighbour of his money and goods in order to fill their own belly.... Such perverse and crazy saints, more foolish than ever ox or ass, are all those, Mohammedans, Turks or whatever else they be called, who refuse to listen to or receive Christ.”[363]It was Luther that Dr. Jonas had heard, on one occasion at table, express the opinion concerning the Papists: “Young fellows, take note of this definition: A Papist is a liar and murderer, nay, the devil himself. Hence they are not to be trusted, for they thirst for our blood.”[364]Luther himself assures us that “the blindness of the Papists and the anger of God against the Papacy was terrible.” “Christians, redeemed by the Blood of Christ, put away this blood and worshipped the crib, surely an awful fall! If this had happened amongst the heathen it would have been regarded as monstrous.”[365]The Catholics, Luther taught, never pray, in fact, they do not know how to pray but only how to blaspheme. We find other almost incredible allegations born of his fancy and voiced in a sermon in 1524, of which we have a transcript. “They taught the Our Father, but warned us not to use it [by instructing us to get others to pray for us in our stead]. It is true that for many years I shouted [’bawled,’ he says elsewhere] in the monastery [in choir], but never did I pray. They mock theLord God with their prayers. Never did they approach God with their hearts so as to pray for anything in faith.”[366]Had it been possible for a man to be saved in Popery? He, Luther, replies that this might have happened because “some laymen” may have “held the crucifix in front of the dying man and said: Look up to Jesus, Who died on the cross for you. By this means many a dying man had turned to Christ in spite of having previously believed in the false, miraculous signs [which the devil performs in Popery] and acted as an idolator. Such, however, were lucky.”[367]He admits incidentally that “many of our forefathers” had been saved in this exceptional way, though only such as “had been led astray into error, but had not clung to it.”[368]In any case it was a miracle. “Those pious souls,” “many of whom had by God’s grace been wonderfully preserved in the true faith in the midst of Popery,” had been saved, so he fancies, in much the same way as “Abraham in Ur of the Chaldeans, and Lot in Sodom.”[369]Now, however, matters stood differently; thanks to his mission light had dawned again, and the unbelief of the Catholics was therefore all the more reprehensible. In the heat of his polemic Luther goes so far as to accuse the Papists who oppose him of the sin against the Holy Ghost. At any rate they were acting against their conscience, as he had pointed out before. He also hints that theirs is that worst sin, of which Christ declares (Matt. xii. 31), that it can be forgiven neither in this world nor in the next. The greater part of a sermon on this text which he preached at Wittenberg, in 1528 or 1529, deals with this criminal blindness on the part of Catholics, this deliberate turning away from the truth of the Holy Ghost to which Matthew refers. Here, as elsewhere, Luther’s presupposition is: I teach “the bright Evangel with which even they can find no fault”; I preach “nothing but what is plain to all and so clearly grounded on Scripture that they themselves are forced to admit it”; “what is so plainly proved by the Holy Ghost” that it stands out as a “truth known to all.” He proceeds: “When I was a learned Doctor I did not believe there was such a thing on earth as the sin against the Holy Ghost, for I never imagined or believed it was possible to find a heart that could be so wicked.” But “now the Papal horde” has descended to this, for they “blaspheme and lie against their conscience”; they “are unable to refute our Evangel or to advance anything against it,” “yet they knowingly oppose our teaching out of waywardness and hatred of the truth, so that no admonition, counsel, prayer or chastisement is of any avail.” “Thus openly to smite the Holy Ghost on the mouth,” nay, “to spit in His Face,” is to emulate the treachery of Judas in the depth of their “obstinate and venomous hearts”; for such it was “forbidden to pray,” according to 1 John v. 16, because this would be to “insult the spirit of grace and tread under foot the Son of God.” The Papists richly deserve that the “Holy Ghost should forsake them,” and that they should go “wantonly to their destruction according to their desire.” In short, “It is better for people to be sunk in sin, to be prostitutes and utter scamps, for at least they may yet come to a knowledge of the truth; but these devil’s saints who go to Divine worship full of good works, when they hear the Holy Ghost openly testifying against them, strike Him on the mouth and say: it is all heresy and devilry.”[370]
“No one can be a Papist unless he is at the very least a murderer, robber or persecutor,” for “he must agree” that the “Pope and his crew are right in burning and banishing people,”[358]etc. The worst thing about the Papists is the Mass; he would rather he had “kept a brothel, or been a robber, than have sacrificed and blasphemed Christ for fifteen years by saying Mass.”[359]
Their bloodthirstiness is beyond belief. “They would not care a scrap were no Prince or ruler left in Germany, and were the whole land bathed in blood, so long as they were free to exercise their tyranny and lead their godless and shameless life.”[360]So shameless is their life that the morals of the Lutherans glitter like gold in comparison. Yea, “our life even when it reeks most of sin is better than all their [the Papists’] sanctity, though it should seem to smell as sweet as balsam.”[361]The Catholics had destroyed the Baptism instituted by Christ, and replaced it by a baptism of works, hence their doctrine is as pernicious as that of the Anabaptists, nay, is exactly on a level with that of the Jews.[362]
The Catholics profess “unbelief in God,” and “put to death those guileless Christians who refuse to countenance such idolatry”; they are “not fit to be compared with oxen or asses,” seeing that they exalt “their self-chosen works,” “far above God’s commandment. For in addition to the idolatry and ungodly teaching whereby they daily outrage and blaspheme God, they do not perform any works of charity towards their neighbour, nay, would rather leave anyone to perish in want than stretch out a hand to help him. Again, they are as careful not to deviate by a hair’s breadth from their man-made ordinances, rules and commands as were the Jews with regard to the Sabbath.... They make no scruple of cheating their neighbour of his money and goods in order to fill their own belly.... Such perverse and crazy saints, more foolish than ever ox or ass, are all those, Mohammedans, Turks or whatever else they be called, who refuse to listen to or receive Christ.”[363]
It was Luther that Dr. Jonas had heard, on one occasion at table, express the opinion concerning the Papists: “Young fellows, take note of this definition: A Papist is a liar and murderer, nay, the devil himself. Hence they are not to be trusted, for they thirst for our blood.”[364]
Luther himself assures us that “the blindness of the Papists and the anger of God against the Papacy was terrible.” “Christians, redeemed by the Blood of Christ, put away this blood and worshipped the crib, surely an awful fall! If this had happened amongst the heathen it would have been regarded as monstrous.”[365]
The Catholics, Luther taught, never pray, in fact, they do not know how to pray but only how to blaspheme. We find other almost incredible allegations born of his fancy and voiced in a sermon in 1524, of which we have a transcript. “They taught the Our Father, but warned us not to use it [by instructing us to get others to pray for us in our stead]. It is true that for many years I shouted [’bawled,’ he says elsewhere] in the monastery [in choir], but never did I pray. They mock theLord God with their prayers. Never did they approach God with their hearts so as to pray for anything in faith.”[366]
Had it been possible for a man to be saved in Popery? He, Luther, replies that this might have happened because “some laymen” may have “held the crucifix in front of the dying man and said: Look up to Jesus, Who died on the cross for you. By this means many a dying man had turned to Christ in spite of having previously believed in the false, miraculous signs [which the devil performs in Popery] and acted as an idolator. Such, however, were lucky.”[367]He admits incidentally that “many of our forefathers” had been saved in this exceptional way, though only such as “had been led astray into error, but had not clung to it.”[368]In any case it was a miracle. “Those pious souls,” “many of whom had by God’s grace been wonderfully preserved in the true faith in the midst of Popery,” had been saved, so he fancies, in much the same way as “Abraham in Ur of the Chaldeans, and Lot in Sodom.”[369]
Now, however, matters stood differently; thanks to his mission light had dawned again, and the unbelief of the Catholics was therefore all the more reprehensible. In the heat of his polemic Luther goes so far as to accuse the Papists who oppose him of the sin against the Holy Ghost. At any rate they were acting against their conscience, as he had pointed out before. He also hints that theirs is that worst sin, of which Christ declares (Matt. xii. 31), that it can be forgiven neither in this world nor in the next. The greater part of a sermon on this text which he preached at Wittenberg, in 1528 or 1529, deals with this criminal blindness on the part of Catholics, this deliberate turning away from the truth of the Holy Ghost to which Matthew refers. Here, as elsewhere, Luther’s presupposition is: I teach “the bright Evangel with which even they can find no fault”; I preach “nothing but what is plain to all and so clearly grounded on Scripture that they themselves are forced to admit it”; “what is so plainly proved by the Holy Ghost” that it stands out as a “truth known to all.” He proceeds: “When I was a learned Doctor I did not believe there was such a thing on earth as the sin against the Holy Ghost, for I never imagined or believed it was possible to find a heart that could be so wicked.” But “now the Papal horde” has descended to this, for they “blaspheme and lie against their conscience”; they “are unable to refute our Evangel or to advance anything against it,” “yet they knowingly oppose our teaching out of waywardness and hatred of the truth, so that no admonition, counsel, prayer or chastisement is of any avail.” “Thus openly to smite the Holy Ghost on the mouth,” nay, “to spit in His Face,” is to emulate the treachery of Judas in the depth of their “obstinate and venomous hearts”; for such it was “forbidden to pray,” according to 1 John v. 16, because this would be to “insult the spirit of grace and tread under foot the Son of God.” The Papists richly deserve that the “Holy Ghost should forsake them,” and that they should go “wantonly to their destruction according to their desire.” In short, “It is better for people to be sunk in sin, to be prostitutes and utter scamps, for at least they may yet come to a knowledge of the truth; but these devil’s saints who go to Divine worship full of good works, when they hear the Holy Ghost openly testifying against them, strike Him on the mouth and say: it is all heresy and devilry.”[370]
The tone of hatred and of blind prejudice in favour of his cause which here finds utterance may be explained to some extent by his experience during the sharp struggles of conscience through which he was then going, and which formed the worst crisis of his inner states of terror. (See vol. v., xxxii., 4.) Nor must the connection be overlooked between his apparent confidence here and the attempt which he makes in one passage of the sermon to justify theologically his radical subversion of olden doctrine. The brief argument runs as follows: “From St. Paul everyone can infer that it cannot be achieved by works, otherwise the Blood of Christ is made of no account.” Hence the holiness-by-works of the Catholics was an abomination.[371]
On another occasion Luther, speaking of the wilful blindness of the Catholics, declared that “God’s untold wrath must sooner or later fall upon such Epicurean pigs and donkeys”; the devil must be a spirit of tremendous power to incite them “deliberately to withstand God.” They say and admit: “‘That is, I know, the Word of God, but even though it is the Word of God I shall not suffer it, listen to it, nor regard it, but shall reprove it and call it heretical, and whoever is determined to obey God in this matter ... him I will put to death or banish.’ I could never have believed there was such a sin.”[372]
As such declarations of the wilful obstinacy of the Catholics are quite commonly made by him, we are tempted to assume that such was really his opinion; if so, we are here face to face with a remarkable instance of what his self-deception was capable.
Even at the Wartburg, however, he was already on the road to such an idea, for, while still there, he had declared that the Papists were unworthy to receive the truth which he preached: “Had they been worthy of the truth, they would long ago have been converted by my many writings.” “If I teach them they only revile me; I implore and they merely mock at me; I scold them and they grow angry; I pray for them and they reject my prayer; I forgive them their trespass and they will have none of my forgiveness; I am ready to sacrifice myself for them and yet they only curse me. What more can I do than Christ?”[373]
It is true that according to him the Papists were ignorant to the last degree, and such ignorance had indeed always prevailed under Popery. “I myself have been a learned Doctor of theology and yet I never understood the Ten Commandments aright. Nay, there have been many celebrated Doctors who were not sure whether there were nine or ten or eleven Commandments; much less did they know anything of the Gospel or of Christ.”[374]
Still, this appalling ignorance on the part of the Papists did not afford any excuse or ground for charitable treatment. Their malice, particularly that of the Popes, is too great. “The Popes are a pot-boil of the very worst men on earth. They boast of the name of Christ, St. Peter and the Churches and yet are full of the worst devils in hell, full, absolutely full, so full that they drivel, spew and vomit nothing but devils.”[375]
A passage in the “Table-Talk” collected by Mathesius and recently published, shows that Luther considered his frenzied anti-popery as the most suitable method of combating Popish errors; “Philip [Melanchthon] isn’t as yet angry enough with the Pope,” he said some time in the winter of 1542-43; “he is moderate by nature and always acts with moderation, which may possibly be of some use, as he himself hopes. Butmystorming (impetus) knocks the bottom out of the cask;myway is to fall upon them with clubs ... for the devil can only be vanquished by contempt. Enough has been written and said to the weak, asfor the hardened, nothing is of any avail ... I rush in with all my might, but against the devil.”[376]
His attitude towards scholarly Catholics was very apparent in the later episodes of his controversy with Erasmus.[377]After having charged Popes and Cardinals with lack of faith, it can be no matter for surprise that he should have represented Erasmus as an utter infidel and a preacher of Epicureanism. The pretexts upon which Luther based this charge had been triumphantly demolished by Erasmus, and only Luther’s prejudice in favour of his own mission to save Christendom from destruction could have led him to describe Erasmus as a depraved fellow, who personified all the infidelity and corruption of the Papacy.“This man learned his infidelity in Rome,” Luther ventured to say of him; hence his wish “to have his Epicureanism praised.” “He is the worst foe of Christ that has arisen for the last thousand years.”[378]In 1519, before Erasmus took the field against him, Luther had written to him, praising him, and, in the hope of securing his co-operation, had said: “You are our ornament and our hope.... Who is there into whose mind Erasmus has not penetrated, who does not see in him a teacher, or over whom he has not established his sway? You are displeasing to many, but therein I discern the gifts of our Gracious God.... With these my words, barbarous as they are, I would fain pay homage to the excellence of your mind to which we, all of us, are indebted.... Please look on me as a little brother in Christ, who is wholly devoted to you and loves you dearly.”[379]On another occasion Luther abuses his opponent as follows: “The only foundation of all his teaching is his desire to gain the applause of the world; he weights the scale with ignorance and malice.” “What is the good of reproaching him with being on the same road as Epicurus, Lucian and the sceptics? By doing so I merely succeeded in rousing the viper, and in its fury against me it gave birth to theViperaspides[i.e. the “Hyperaspistes”]. In Italy and at Rome he sucked in the milk of the Lamiæ and Megæræ and now no medicine is of any avail.” Even in what Erasmus says concerning the Creed, we see the “os et organum Satanæ.” He may be compared with the enemy in the Gospel, who, while men slept, sowed cockel in the field. We can understand now how Sacramentarians, Donatists, Arians, Anabaptists, Epicureans and so forth have again made their appearance. He sowed his seed and then disappeared. And yet he stands in high honour with Pope and Prince. “Who wouldhave believed that the hatred of Luther was so strong? A poor man is made great simply through Luther.”[380]This letter Erasmus described in the title of his printed reply as “Epistola non sobria Martini Lutheri.” Others, he says, might well explain it as a mental aberration, or as due to the influence of some evil demon.[381]Luther, quite undismayed, continued to deny that Erasmus was in any sense a believer: “He regards the Christian religion and doctrine as a comedy or tragedy”; he is “a perfect counterfeit and image of Epicurus”; to this “incarnate scoundrel, God—the Father, Son and Holy Ghost—is merely ludicrous.” “Whereas I did not take the trouble to read most of the other screeds published against me, but merely put them to the basest use that paper can be put—which indeed was all they were worth—I read through the whole of the ‘Diatribe’ of Erasmus, though I was often tempted to throw it aside.” He, like Democritus, the cynical heathen philosopher, looks on our whole theology as nothing better than a fairy tale.[382]
His attitude towards scholarly Catholics was very apparent in the later episodes of his controversy with Erasmus.[377]
After having charged Popes and Cardinals with lack of faith, it can be no matter for surprise that he should have represented Erasmus as an utter infidel and a preacher of Epicureanism. The pretexts upon which Luther based this charge had been triumphantly demolished by Erasmus, and only Luther’s prejudice in favour of his own mission to save Christendom from destruction could have led him to describe Erasmus as a depraved fellow, who personified all the infidelity and corruption of the Papacy.
“This man learned his infidelity in Rome,” Luther ventured to say of him; hence his wish “to have his Epicureanism praised.” “He is the worst foe of Christ that has arisen for the last thousand years.”[378]In 1519, before Erasmus took the field against him, Luther had written to him, praising him, and, in the hope of securing his co-operation, had said: “You are our ornament and our hope.... Who is there into whose mind Erasmus has not penetrated, who does not see in him a teacher, or over whom he has not established his sway? You are displeasing to many, but therein I discern the gifts of our Gracious God.... With these my words, barbarous as they are, I would fain pay homage to the excellence of your mind to which we, all of us, are indebted.... Please look on me as a little brother in Christ, who is wholly devoted to you and loves you dearly.”[379]
On another occasion Luther abuses his opponent as follows: “The only foundation of all his teaching is his desire to gain the applause of the world; he weights the scale with ignorance and malice.” “What is the good of reproaching him with being on the same road as Epicurus, Lucian and the sceptics? By doing so I merely succeeded in rousing the viper, and in its fury against me it gave birth to theViperaspides[i.e. the “Hyperaspistes”]. In Italy and at Rome he sucked in the milk of the Lamiæ and Megæræ and now no medicine is of any avail.” Even in what Erasmus says concerning the Creed, we see the “os et organum Satanæ.” He may be compared with the enemy in the Gospel, who, while men slept, sowed cockel in the field. We can understand now how Sacramentarians, Donatists, Arians, Anabaptists, Epicureans and so forth have again made their appearance. He sowed his seed and then disappeared. And yet he stands in high honour with Pope and Prince. “Who wouldhave believed that the hatred of Luther was so strong? A poor man is made great simply through Luther.”[380]
This letter Erasmus described in the title of his printed reply as “Epistola non sobria Martini Lutheri.” Others, he says, might well explain it as a mental aberration, or as due to the influence of some evil demon.[381]
Luther, quite undismayed, continued to deny that Erasmus was in any sense a believer: “He regards the Christian religion and doctrine as a comedy or tragedy”; he is “a perfect counterfeit and image of Epicurus”; to this “incarnate scoundrel, God—the Father, Son and Holy Ghost—is merely ludicrous.” “Whereas I did not take the trouble to read most of the other screeds published against me, but merely put them to the basest use that paper can be put—which indeed was all they were worth—I read through the whole of the ‘Diatribe’ of Erasmus, though I was often tempted to throw it aside.” He, like Democritus, the cynical heathen philosopher, looks on our whole theology as nothing better than a fairy tale.[382]
We may well be permitted to regard such statements made by Luther in his later years concerning the Catholics more as the result of a delusion than as deliberate falsehoods. It may be that Luther gradually persuaded himself that such was really the case. If this be so, we must, however, admit with Döllinger “the unparalleled perversion and darkening of Luther’s judgment”; this, adds Döllinger, would explain “much in his statements which must otherwise appear enigmatical.”[383]Considerations such as those we have seen him (p. 121 ff.) allege concerning the truth of his cause being proved by its success, could scarcely have impressed any save an unsettled mind such as his. He seems to have accustomed himself to explaining the complex and highly questionable movement at the head of which he stood in a light other than the true one, so much so that he could declare: “God knows all this is not my doing, a fact of which the whole world should have been aware long ago.”[384]Brimful of the enthusiasm he had imbibed at theWartburg he wrote, from Wittenberg, on June 27, 1522, in a similar tone to Staupitz, who was then Benedictine Abbot at Salzburg: “God has undertaken it [the destruction of the abomination of the kingdom of the Pope] without our help and without human aid, merely by the Word. Its end has come before the Lord. The matter is beyond our reason or understanding, hence it is useless to expect all to grasp it. For the sake of God’s power it is meet and just that people’s minds be deeply stirred and that there should be great scandals and great signs. Dear father, do not let this disturb you; I am hopeful. You see God’s plan in these matters and His Mighty Hand. Remember how my cause from the outset seemed to the world doubtful and intolerable, and how, notwithstanding, from day to day it has gained the upper hand more and more. It will also gain the upper hand in what you now anticipate with misplaced apprehension; just you wait and see. Satan feels the smart of the wound inflicted on him, that is why he rages so furiously and throws everything into confusion. But Christ Who began the work will tread him under foot in defiance of all the gates of hell.”[385]
From the very outset of his career Luther had been paving the way for this delusion as to the true character of his Catholic opponents, his own higher mission and God’s overthrow of all gainsayers.
In 1518 he declared, as a sort of prelude to the idea of his Divine mission, that the Catholic Doctors who opposed him were sunk in “chaotic darkness,” and that he preached “the one true light, Jesus Christ.”[386]Even in 1517, in publishing his Resolutions, he had said of the setting up of his Indulgence Theses, that the Lord Himself had compelled him to advance all this. “Let Christ see to it whether it be His cause or mine.”[387]
His pupils and Wittenberg adherents treasured up such assurances of his extraordinary mission in order to excite their own enthusiasm. Even Albert Dürer, who was further removed from the sphere of his influence, spoke of him inthe third decade of the century as “a man enlightened by the Holy Ghost and one who has the Spirit of God.”[388]Long after his death the chord which he had struck continued to vibrate among those who were devoted to him. On his tomb at Wittenberg might be read: “Taught by the Divine inspiration and called by God’s Word, he disseminated throughout the world the new light of the Evangel.” Old, orthodox Lutheranism honoured him as God’s own messenger; the Protestant Pietists, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attributed to Luther, to quote the words of Gottfried Arnold, a truly “apostolic call,” received by means of a “direct inspiration, impulse or Divine apprehension”; this Divine mission, Arnold says, was “generally” admitted, although he himself, as a staunch Pietist, was willing to allow to Luther “the power and illumination of the Spirit” only during the period previous to the dispute with Carlstadt, who was equally enlightened from above. “For a while,” says Arnold, i.e. for about seven years, Luther was “in very truth mightily guided by God and employed as His instrument.”[389]
Other Lutheran theologians, Gerhard and Calovius, for instance, refused to see in Luther’s case anything more than an indirect call; about the middle of the eighteenth century the editor of Luther’s Works, Consistorialrat Prof. J. G. Walch, of Jena, asserted openly of Luther’s mission that he “was not called directly by God as had been the case with the Prophets and Apostles”; his call had only in so far been beyond the ordinary in that “God, after decreeing in His Divine plans the Reformation, had chosen Luther as His tool”; hence Luther’s providential mission was only to be inferred from the “divinity of the Reformation,” which, however, was apparent to all who “did not wantonly and maliciously shut their eyes to facts.” Extraordinary gifts had not indeed been bestowed upon him by God, though he had all the “gifts pertaining to his office” in rich measure, and likewise the “sanctifying gifts” and the “spiritual graces”; the latter Walch then proceeds to dissect with painstaking exactitude.[390]
Such a view marks the transition to the modern conception of Luther so widely prevalent among Protestants to-day, which, while extolling him as the powerful instrument of the Reformation, naturalises him, so to speak, and takes him down from the pedestal of the God-illumined teacher and prophet, who proclaims a Divine interpretation of Scripture binding upon all.[391]
Against Catholics Luther also used certain pseudo-mystic elements drawn from his consciousness of a higher mission and based principally on Holy Scripture.
In this respect his one-sided study of the Bible explains much, and should avail to mitigate our judgment on him. Stories and scenes from the Old Testament, incidents from the heroic times of the prophets, the lives of the patriarchs, to which he had devoted special Commentaries, so engrossed his mind, that, unwittingly, he came to clothe all in the garb of the prominent figures of Bible history. He was fond of imagining himself as one of those privileged heroes living in the same world of miracles as of yore.
If a she-ass could speak to Balaam then how much more can he, Luther, proclaim the truth by the power from on high, even though the whole world should be astonished at the solitary figure who dares to stand up against it. He calls to mind, that the prophet Elias was almost alone in refusing to bow the knee to Baal. Discouraged by the opposition he met with from the Catholic party he was ready to liken himself to Jeremias the prophet, and like him to say: “We would have cured Babylon, but she is not healed, let us forsake her.”[392]In the New Testament Christ Himself and the Apostles were Luther’s favourite types, because, like himself, they were against a whole world whose views were different. The fact that they were alone did not, he says, diminish their reputation, and their success proved their mission. Like Paul and Athanasius and Augustine it is his duty to withstand the stream of false opinions: “My rock, that on which I build, stands firm and will not totter or fall in spite of all the gates of hell; of this I am certain.... Who knows what God wills to work by our means?”[393]
If a she-ass could speak to Balaam then how much more can he, Luther, proclaim the truth by the power from on high, even though the whole world should be astonished at the solitary figure who dares to stand up against it. He calls to mind, that the prophet Elias was almost alone in refusing to bow the knee to Baal. Discouraged by the opposition he met with from the Catholic party he was ready to liken himself to Jeremias the prophet, and like him to say: “We would have cured Babylon, but she is not healed, let us forsake her.”[392]
In the New Testament Christ Himself and the Apostles were Luther’s favourite types, because, like himself, they were against a whole world whose views were different. The fact that they were alone did not, he says, diminish their reputation, and their success proved their mission. Like Paul and Athanasius and Augustine it is his duty to withstand the stream of false opinions: “My rock, that on which I build, stands firm and will not totter or fall in spite of all the gates of hell; of this I am certain.... Who knows what God wills to work by our means?”[393]
When, at different periods of his public career, and in preparing his various works for the press, he had occasion to ruminate on the biblical questions connected with Antichrist, he was wont also to consider the prophecies of Daniel on the end of the world. By dint of a diligent comparison of all the passages on the abominations of the latter days he came to find therein the corruption of the Papacy fully described, even down to the smallest details, with an account of its overthrow, and, consequently, also of his own mission. In the same way that he saw the impending fall of the Turkish Empire predicted, so also he recognised that the German Empire must shortly perish, since, as he hadlearnt from Daniel, it was to receive no other constitution. As for the Papacy, at least according to one of the most forcible of his pronouncements, within two years “it would vanish like smoke, together with all its swarm of parasites.”
In Daniel viii. we read that a king will come, “of a shameless face, and understanding dark sentences.” He will lay all things waste and destroy the mighty and the people of the saints according to his will. “Craft shall be successful in his hands and his heart shall be puffed up. He shall rise up against the prince of princes, and shall be broken without a hand.” His coming will be “after many days.”[394]The king thus prophesied is generally admitted to have been Antiochus Epiphanes, while the words “after many days” do not refer to the Last Day or to the End of the World, but to the latter end of the Jewish people. Luther, however, took these words and the whole prophecy in an erroneous, apocalyptic sense. He brought the description of the king into connection with the passages on Antichrist, and the great apostasy, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the Second Epistle to Timothy and the Second Epistle of Peter, etc.[395]There seemed to him not the slightest doubt that the Papacy, with its pernicious arrogance and revolt against God, was here described in minutest detail.
This idea he finally elaborated while writing his violent work “On the Babylonish Captivity.” He therein promised to tell the Papists things such as they had never heard before. This promise he fulfilled soon after in the detailed reply to Ambrosius Catharinus, which he hastily wrote in the month of March, 1521. In this Latin work he proved in detail to the satisfaction of learned readers, whether in Germany or abroad, that the Papacy was plainly depicted in the Bible as Antichrist, and likewise its approaching great fall.[396]
“I think that, through my exposition of the Prophet Daniel, I have carried out excellently what I promised the Papists to do.” Thus to his friend Link, on the completion of the work.[397]Daniel’s Antichrist, according to Luther’s interpretation,assumes various shapes. These, Luther assures us, are the different forms and masks of Romish superstition and Romish hypocrisy. Amongst these he reckons, as the last, the Universities, because they had made use of the Divine Word in order to deceive the world; here he introduces the prophecy in Apocalypse ix., where a star falls from heaven, the fountains of the deep are opened, locusts with the strength of scorpions rise up out of a thick smoke, and a King reigns over them whose name is Apollyon, or destroyer. The star Luther takes to be Thomas Aquinas, the smoke is the empty words and opinions of Aristotle and the philosophers, the destructive locusts are the Universities, and Apollyon is their master, viz. Aristotle. As for Antichrist himself, i.e. the Papacy, Jesus will destroy him with the breath of His mouth, according to the word of St. Paul, which agrees with the “destruction without hands” prophesied by Daniel. “Thus the Pope and his kingdom are not to be destroyed by laymen, although they greatly dread this [at Rome]; they are not worthy of so mild a chastisement, but are being reserved for the Second Coming of Christ because they have been, and still remain, His most furious enemies. Such is the end of Antichrist, who exalts himself above all things and does not fight with hands, but by the breath and spirit of Satan. Breath shall destroy breath, truth unmask deceit, for the unmasking of a lie means bringing it to nought.”[398]
“I think that, through my exposition of the Prophet Daniel, I have carried out excellently what I promised the Papists to do.” Thus to his friend Link, on the completion of the work.[397]
Daniel’s Antichrist, according to Luther’s interpretation,assumes various shapes. These, Luther assures us, are the different forms and masks of Romish superstition and Romish hypocrisy. Amongst these he reckons, as the last, the Universities, because they had made use of the Divine Word in order to deceive the world; here he introduces the prophecy in Apocalypse ix., where a star falls from heaven, the fountains of the deep are opened, locusts with the strength of scorpions rise up out of a thick smoke, and a King reigns over them whose name is Apollyon, or destroyer. The star Luther takes to be Thomas Aquinas, the smoke is the empty words and opinions of Aristotle and the philosophers, the destructive locusts are the Universities, and Apollyon is their master, viz. Aristotle. As for Antichrist himself, i.e. the Papacy, Jesus will destroy him with the breath of His mouth, according to the word of St. Paul, which agrees with the “destruction without hands” prophesied by Daniel. “Thus the Pope and his kingdom are not to be destroyed by laymen, although they greatly dread this [at Rome]; they are not worthy of so mild a chastisement, but are being reserved for the Second Coming of Christ because they have been, and still remain, His most furious enemies. Such is the end of Antichrist, who exalts himself above all things and does not fight with hands, but by the breath and spirit of Satan. Breath shall destroy breath, truth unmask deceit, for the unmasking of a lie means bringing it to nought.”[398]
Apocalyptic fancies such as the above were to dog Luther’s footsteps for the rest of his life. Both in his writings and in his “Table-Talk” he was never backward in putting forth his views on this abstruse subject.
Of the ideas concerning the Papal Antichrist which, since Hus’s time were current among the classes hostile to Rome,[399]Luther selected and absorbed whatever was worst. Hus’s work on the Church he read in February, 1520. The birth and growth of the theory in his mind even previous to this can, however, be traced step by step, and the process affords us a valuable insight into his mentality by revealing so well its pseudo-mystical element.
We may distinguish between the earliest private and the earliest public appearance of Luther’s idea of the Papal Antichrist. Its first unmistakable private trace is to be met with in a letter of December 11, 1518, to his brother-monk and sympathiser Wenceslaus Link. Luther was atthat time labouring under the emotion incident on his interrogation at Augsburg, of which he had just published the “Acta.” Sending a copy to his friend he declares, that his pen is already at work at much greater things, that he knew not whence the ideas that filled his mind came, but that he would send Link whatever writings he published, that he might see “whether I am right in my surmise that the real Antichrist, according to Paul [2 Thess. ii., 3 ff.], rules at the Roman Curia.”[400]The first public expression of this idea is, however, to be found in the pronouncement he made subsequent to the Leipzig Disputation in the summer of 1519, viz. that if the Pope arrogated to himself alone the power of interpreting Scripture, then he was exalting himself above God’s Word and was worse than Antichrist.[401]
Not long after Luther showed how deeply he had drunk in the ideas of Hus; in February, 1520, he confessed to being a Husite, since both he and Staupitz too had hitherto taught precisely Hus’s doctrine, though without having recognised him as their leader; the plain, evangelical truth had been burnt a hundred years before in the person of Hus. “I am so astonished I know not what to think when I contemplate these terrible judgments of God upon men.”[402]On March 19 he sent to Spalatin a copy of Hus’s writing, which had just been printed for the first time, praising the author as a “marvel of intellect and learning.”[403]
In his conception of Antichrist Luther differed from antiquity in that he applied the term not so much to a person as to a system, or a condition of things: the ecclesiastical government of Rome, with its “pretensions” and its “corruption,” appears to him in his apocalyptic dreams as the real Antichrist. That he finally came to see in the person of the Pope more and more an embodiment of Antichrist was, however, only to be expected; when one wearer of the Papal tiara died, the mask of Antichrist passed to his successor, a matter of no difficulty since, as the end of the world was nigh, the number of the Popes was in any case complete.
As early as February 24, 1520, having previously foundnew fuel for his ire in the perusal of Hutten’s edition of Lorenzo Valla’s dissertation against the Donation of Constantine, he wrote to Spalatin:[404]“Nothing is too utterly monstrous not to be acceptable at Rome;[405]of the impudent forgery of the Donation they have made a dogma[!]. I have come to such a pass that I can scarcely doubt that the Pope is the real Antichrist whom the world, according to the accepted view, awaits. His life, behaviour, words and laws all fit the character too well. But more of this when we meet.” The allusion to the “accepted view” may refer to a work, reprinted at Erfurt in 1516, and which Luther must certainly have known, viz. the “Booklet on the Life and Rule of End-Christ as Divinely decreed, how he corrupteth the world through his false teaching and devilish counsel, and how, after this, the two prophets Enoch and ‘Helyas’ shall win back Christendom by preaching the Christian faith.”
Greater even than the influence of such writings, in confirming him in his persuasion that the Pope was Antichrist, was that of the excitement caused by his polemics. We have already had occasion to speak of his stormy replies to the “Epitome” of Silvester Prierias and the controversial pamphlet of Augustine Alveld the Franciscan friar. In the latter rejoinder he promises to handle the Papacy “mercilessly” and to belabour Antichrist as he deserves. “Circumstances demand imperatively that the veil be torn from the mysteries of Antichrist; indeed, in their effrontery they themselves refuse to be any longer shrouded in darkness.” Speaking of Prierias, who was a Roman, he says: “I believe that at Rome they have all gone stark, staring mad, and become senseless fools, stocks, stones, devils and a very hell”; “what now can we expect from Rome where such a monster is permitted to take his place in the Church?”[406]In his replies to Prierias and Alveld he depicts Antichrist in the worst colours to be supplied by a vivid imagination and an over-mastering fury: If such things are taught in Rome, then “the veritable Antichrist is indeed seated in the Temple of God, and rules in the purple-clad Babylon at Rome, while the Roman Curia is the synagogue of Satan....Who can Antichrist be, if not such a Pope? O Satan, Satan, how greatly dost thou abuse the patience of thy Creator to thine own destruction!”[407]
The anger of the sensitive and excitable Wittenberg professor had been roused by contradiction, particularly by the tract which hailed from Rome, but the arrival of the Bull of Excommunication moved him to the very depths of his soul and led him to commit to writing the most hateful travesties of the Roman Papacy.
In the storm and stress of the struggle, which in the latter half of 1520 produced the so-called great Reformation works, the Antichrist theory, in its final form, was made to serve as a bulwark against the Papal excommunication and its consequences. Luther drops all qualifications and henceforth his assertions are positive. The wider becomes the breach separating him from Rome, the blacker must he paint his opponents in order to justify himself before the world and to his own satisfaction. Previous to its publication he summed up the contents of his “An den christlichen Adel” as follows: “There the Pope is severely mauled and treated as Antichrist.”[408]As a matter of fact, the comparison is so startling that he could well speak of the booklet as “a trumpet-blast against the world-destroying tyranny of the Roman Antichrist.”[409]In the writing “On the Babylonish Captivity,” a few weeks later, he exclaims: “Now I know and am certain that the Papacy is the empire of Babylon.” “The Popes are Antichrists and desire to be honoured in the stead of Christ.... The Papacy is nothing but the empire of Babylon and of the veritable Antichrist, because with its doctrines and laws it merely makes sin more plentiful; hence the Pope is the ‘man of sin’ and the ‘son of destruction.’”[410]
Hereby he had prepared the way for his attack upon Leo the Tenth’s Bull of Excommunication, which he published in German and Latin at the end of October, 1520, under the title, “Widder die Bullen des Endchrists” and “Adversus execrabilem Antichristi bullam.”[411]Such a namewas well calculated to strike the fancy of the masses, and there cannot be the slightest doubt that Luther welcomed it as a taking, popular cry.
It is easy to meet the objection that the Papal Antichrist was nothing more to Luther than a serviceable catchword, and that he never meant it seriously. That such was not the case we have abundantly proved already; on the contrary, we have here a clear outgrowth of his pseudo-mysticism. He ever preserved it as a sacred possession, and it found its way in due season into the Schmalkald Articles[412]and into the Notes Luther appended to his German Bible.[413]The idea, which never left him, of the world’s approaching end—with this we shall deal at greater length in vol. v., xxxi. 2—is without a doubt closely linked with his cherished theory of his being the revealer of Antichrist and the chosen instrument of God for averting His malice in the latter days.