5. Other Innovations in Religious Doctrine

It is perfectly true that the Catholic Church gladly emphasises the reward charity brings to the giver.If in the times previous to Luther’s day, both in the Middle Ages and before, the Church frequently extolled the temporal and everlasting reward of charity, and if this proved to the faithful an incentive, she could at least in so doing appeal to those passages in the Gospel itself which promise to the charitable a heavenly recompense. Yet the thought of this reward did not exclude other high and worthy motives. So little were such motives slighted in the mediæval practice of charity, that, side by side with the heavenly reward, the original deeds of foundations, gifts and pious legacies still extant allege all kinds of other reasons, for instance, compassion for the helpless and concern for their bodily and spiritual welfare, or the furtherance of the common good by the establishment of institutions of public utility. One formula frequently used, which, taken literally, seems actually to ignore all merit and reward, runs variously: “For God’s sake only”; “for God”; or, “in order to please Him with temporal goods.” Thus the author of the “Wyhegertlin für alle frummen Christenmenschen,”[1699]a German work of edification, wrote in 1509: “Thanks to God’s grace there are still in our towns many hundreds of brothers and sisters who have united themselves out of Christian charity and compassion for the purpose of serving the poor sick people, the infirm, plague-stricken and lepers, purely for God’s sake.”Duke George of Saxony, in his reply to Luther’s “Widder den Meuchler zu Dresen,” really expresses the motive for the active Catholic charity formerly so lavishly displayed, when he speaks of the great possessions given by past ages of which the religious revolt had robbed the Church; of the “gifts freely given by nobles, burghers and peasants out of ardent Christian love and gratitude for His sacred bitter Passion, bright blood and guiltless death, to cloisters, parish churches, altars, chapels, cells, hospitals, religious houses, crafts,” etc.[1700]Neither did such motives or the motive of reward curtail the spirit of charity towards the close of the Middle Ages, as some Protestants have chosen to assert. On the contrary they served to animate it.On the basis of the data furnished by German archives a modern historian remarks of those times: “The spirit of Christian charity showed itself most active in the foundation of benevolent institutions, in which respect hardly any age can compare with the 15th century.”[1701]“Towards the close of the Middle Ages the gifts to hospitals, pest-houses and hostels were simply innumerable”; such is the opinion of another researcher.[1702]Even G. Uhlhorn, in his “Geschichte der christlichen Liebestätigkeit,” had to admit: “No period did so much for the poor as the Middle Ages,” though, agreeably to the standard of his peculiar Lutheranism, this author would fain make out that good works then were done out of mere egotism.Other Protestant authorities allow, that, even according to Luther’s own admission, the Catholic charity far exceeded that displayed by the new faith. “Here” (among the Catholics), says one historian, “Confraternities for the care of the poor and sick arose in the 16th and 17th centuries which far surpassed anything hitherto known in the purity of their aims and their extraordinary achievements.... Among the Catholics the reform in the nursing of the sick proceeded from Spain, which also produced the men who loomed largest in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, viz. the Jesuits and the Dominicans. From Spain came the model of the modern hospital with the nursing staff as we now know it.” “The Protestant communities during the two centuries which followed the Reformation showed a great lack of fruitfulness as regards works of charity.” “The hospitals in the Protestant districts, with few exceptions, were and remained bad, nor was anything done to improve them.”[1703]Although Luther’s praiseworthy efforts to awaken charity were not altogether wasted, yet neither his success in some localities nor the supposed purer and higher spirit he introduced into deeds of love were so apparent as to bear comparison with the charity so sedulously cultivated on the Catholic side. On the contrary, his complaints confirm the suspicion that in Lutheran circles works of charity were as a rule lamed by the lack of that very spirit of piety which should have been so manifest. (More in vol. vi., xxxv., 4.)In 1528 he told the inhabitants of Wittenberg: “This week your offerings will be solicited. I hear that people say they will give nothing to the collectors, but will turn them away. Well, thank God! You most ungrateful creatures, who are so grudging with your money, refuse to give anything, and, not satisfied with this, heap abuse on the ministers of the Church! I wish you a happy year. I am so horrified, that I do not know whether to continue preaching any longer to you, you rude brutes who cannot give even four half-pence ungrudgingly.” It was adisgrace, he says, that so far the fiscal authorities had been obliged to provide for the churches, the schools and the poor in the hospitals, whom it was the people’s duty as Christians to support. “Now that you are called upon to give four beggarly half-pence, you feel it a burden.” “Deceivers will come who will wax fat at your expense as happened formerly [in Catholic times]. I am sorry that you have arrived at such a glorious state of freedom, free from all tyrants and Papists, for, thankless brutes that you are, you don’t deserve this Evangelical treasure. Unless you mend your ways and act differently I shall cease to preach to you in order not to cast pearls before swine and to give what is holy to the dogs, and shall proclaim the Gospel to my real students who are the poor beggar-men. Formerly you gave so much to the wicked seducers [the Catholic clergy] and now ...!”[1704]Already, the year before, he had vigorously complained from the pulpit, though, as it would appear, all to no purpose: “Amongst those who hear the Word, faith is dull and charity has grown cold and hope is at an end, etc. There is no one who pities his brother’s distress. Once upon a time we gave a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand pieces of gold to the monks, canons or priests for the building of monasteries and churches. To-day no one can be found who will give a coin, let alone a piece of gold, for the poor. For this reason God sends His judgments on the world and curses the earth on account of the contempt for His Word and His Evangel; but we may look for yet worse things in the future.”[1705]Amongst the reminiscences of his journey to Italy, Luther retained a kindly memory of the charity as practised by the Catholics, particularly at Florence. We read in Lauterbach’s Diary on Aug. 1, 1538: “Then Luther spoke of charity in Italy and how the hospitals there were cared for. They are located in princely buildings, are amply supplied with food and drink, the servants are most diligent and attentive, the physicians very skilled, the bedding and clothing are perfectly clean and the beds are even painted. When a patient is brought in, he has at once to strip, an inventory of his clothes is made in the presence of a notary and they are then kept carefully for him. Then he is dressed in a white shirt and put in a nice painted bed with clean sheets, and after a little while two physicians are at his bedside; servants come and bring him food and drink in perfectly clean glass goblets, which they do not touch even with a finger, carrying everything on a tray. Even the greatest ladies come there, muffled up completely so as to be unrecognisable, in order to serve the poor for some days, after which they return to their homes. At Florence I have seen what great care is bestowed on the hospitals. Also on the foundling homes where the children are admirably installed, fed and taught, are all dressed alike and in the same colour and treated in a right fatherly way.”[1706]5. Other Innovations in Religious DoctrineThe absence of any logical system in Luther’s theological and moral views is so far from being denied by Protestants who know his theology that they even reproach Luther’s opponents for expecting to find logic in him. No system, but merely “the thought-world of a great religious man” is, so they say, all that we may look for in his works; it is true that he had a “general religious theory,” but it was “faulty, in its details not seldom contradictory, and devised for a practical and polemical object.” “Luther was no dogmatic theologian or man of system,” hence his individual sayings must not always be treated as though they were parts of a system.There can be no doubt that this is a defect in a teacher who comes forward as the founder of a denomination and as the restorer of Christian doctrine, and who, in his quality of “Prophet of the Germans,” declares: “Before me people knew nothing.” After all, precision and coherence of doctrines form a test of their truth.In reality the facts of the case are only indicated in a veiled way in the Protestant admissions just recorded. The truth is, as the reader has already had many an occasion to see, that, with Luther, one assertion frequently invalidates the other. Even in the field of moral teaching we find him at utter variance with himself, and his contradictions become particularly glaring as soon as he passes from theory to practice. Here it is easy to seize the “consummate contradictions of his theology,” of which a present-day Protestant theologian ventures boldly to speak; we may also subscribe to what this same writer says, viz. that Luther hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.[1707](Cp. p. 415, 447; vol. ii., p. 312, etc.)The Regula Fidei.Such a denial of the consequences of the principles of his doctrine lies first and foremost in the fact that Luther summed up in a Rule of Faith the various dogmas to which it was his intention to remain true. The “regula fidei,” such as he wished to bequeath to posterity, he saw expressedin the Confession of Augsburg, and in the oldest Œcumenical Creeds of the Church.It has already been seen that the radicalism involved in his religious attitude should by rights have issued in a freedom, nay, licence, which would have rendered impossible any binding formularies of faith.It is also the opinion of most modern Protestant theologians that the definition of doctrine which began with the Confession of Augsburg, or in fact with the Articles of Marburg, really constituted an unjustifiable encroachment on the freedom of religious thought inaugurated by Luther. Luther indeed invested these doctrinal formularies with all the weight of his authority, yet, according to these theologians, they represented a “narrowing” of the Evangelical ideas advocated by him; nor can it be gainsaid that the revolutionary ideas for which Luther stood from about 1520 to 1523 justify such strictures.[1708]“This promising spring,” writes Adolf Harnack, a representative of theological freedom, “was followed by no real summer. In those years Luther was lifted above himself and seemed to have overcome the limitations of his peculiar temperament.”... But Luther unfortunately reverted to his limitations. Nor were they “merely a light vesture, or as some would fain have us believe, due simply to lack of comprehension on the part of Melanchthon and other henchmen, for Luther himself saw in them the very foundation of his strength and made the fullest use of them as such.”[1709]In other words, his contradiction with his own original principles became to him, so to speak, a second nature. He was in deadly earnest with the dogmas which he retained, and which were comprised in the official Articles of faith. In so far, therefore, he may be said to have turned away from the consequences of his own action and to have striven to slam the door which he had opened to unbelief and private judgment.Of the Confession of Augsburg, the most important of these declarations of faith, Harnack says: “That the Gospel of the Reformation found masterly expression in the ‘Augustana,’ that I cannot admit. The ‘Augustana’ founded a teaching Church; on it must be laid the blame for the narrowing of the movement of reform. Could such a thing have been written previous to 1526, or even previous to 1529?”After admitting elsewhere the advantages of the Confession of Augsburg, Harnack proceeds: “It is possible by retracing our steps to arrive through it at the broader Evangelical ideas without which there would never have been a Reformation or an‘Augustana.’ With regard to their author, however, it is no use blinking the fact, that here Melanchthon undertook, or rather was forced to undertake, a task to which his gifts and his character were not equal.”[1710]“In the theology of Melanchthon the moralist, who stands at the side of Luther the Evangelist, we discern attempts to amend Luther’s theology.... Melanchthon, however, felt himself cramped by having to act as the guardian of Lutheranism. We cannot take it ill if Lutherans prefer to err with Luther their hero, rather than submit to be put in Melanchthon’s leading-strings.”[1711]Harnack and those who think like him are even more antagonistic to the later creeds of Lutheranism than to the Confession composed by Melanchthon. “The ‘symbolic age’ when the ‘Lutheran Church’ gave ‘definite expression’ to her will is nothing more than afable convenue. ‘This Lutheran Church as an actual body,’ says Carl Müller, ‘never really existed and the spokesmen of the strictest Luther faction were just the worst enemies of such a union.... Thus to speak of creeds of the Lutheran Church involves an historic impossibility.’”[1712]According to these theologians Protestantism must hark back to Luther’s original principles of freedom. Moreover, argues Harnack, Protestantism has on the whole already reverted to this earlier standpoint. “We are not forsaking the clear testimony of history when we find in Luther’s Christianity and in the first beginnings of the Reformation all that present-day Protestantism has developed, though amidst weakness and constraint; nor when we state that Luther’s idea of faith is still to-day the moving spirit of Protestantism, however many or however few may have made it their own.”[1713]Luther’s “most effective propositions,” according to him, may well be allowed to stand as the “heirloom of the Evangelical Churches”; it is plain that they do not lead to a mere “dogmatic Christianity,” but to true Christianity consisting in the “disposition which the Father of Jesus Christ awakens in the heart through the Gospel.” Luther himself has only to be rightly appreciated and “allowed to remain Luther.”[1714]Harnack repeatedly insists that Luther by setting aside all authority on dogma, whether of the Church, the hierarchy or tradition, also destroyed the binding character of any “doctrine.” By his attack on all authority he dealt a mortal blow at the vital principle of the ancient Church, traceable back to the second century. According to him “every doctrinal formulary of the past required objective proof”; this objective proof was to him the sole authority. “How then could there be authority when the objective proof failed or seemed to demonstrate the contrary?” To judge of the proof is within the province of each individual, and, according as he is constituted, the result will bedifferent. “Luther—even at the most critical moment, when he seemed to stand in the greatest need of the formal authority of the letter—did not allow himself to be overawed or his mouth to be closed even by the Apostles’ Creed.” He indeed “involved himself later in limitations and restrictions,” “but there can be no doubt ... that by his previous historic behaviour towards them he had undermined all the formal authorities of Catholicism.”[1715]On this fundamental question of the possibility of a “regula fidei” in Luther’s case, we may listen to the opinion of another esteemed Protestant historian of late years.Friedrich Paulsen, in his much-prized “Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts,” writes: “The Word of God does not suffice as a ‘regula fidei,’ but a personal authority is also needed to decide on questions of doctrine, this is what the Luther of 1535 says and thereby confutes the Luther of 1521, who refused to allow anyone on earth to point out to him the faith unless he himself could gather its truth from the Word of God. Had Luther abided by his rejection of all human authority he should have declared: On the interpretation of Scripture there is no final court of appeal, each one believes or errs at his own peril.... What Luther had relied on in 1521 against the Papists, viz. inability to refute him from Scripture, was used against him in his own struggle with the ‘fanatics.’... For the confuting of heretics a rule of faith is needed, and what is more, a living one to decide in each case. The principle of 1521, to allow no authority on earth to prescribe the faith, is anarchical. On these lines there can be no ‘Church’ with an ‘examen doctrinæ’ of its candidates and Visitations of the clergy. This the Reformers also saw and thus there was nothing left for them, if they were to retain a ‘Church,’ than to set up their own authority in the stead of the authority of Pope and Councils. On one vexatious point they were, however, at a loss: Against the later Luther it was always possible to appeal to the Luther of Worms. The starting-point andraison d’êtreof the whole Reformation was the repudiation on principle of all human authority in matters of faith; after this, to find Luther installed as Pope, was scarcely pleasing. If anyone stands in need of a Pope he would surely be better advised in sticking to the real one at Rome.... The hole in Luther’s teaching still remains a hole in the principle of the Protestant Church to-day: There can be no earthly authority in matters of faith, and: Such an authority there must be, this is an antinomy which lies at its very root. Nor is the antinomy accidental, but lies in the very nature of the matter and is expressed as often as we speak of the ‘Protestant Church.’ If there is to be a Church ... then the individual must submit himself and his ‘faith’ to the ‘faith’ of the community.” Paulsen, who had spoken of “Luther as Pope,” refers to Luther’s own remark when taking his seat with Bugenhagen in the carriage in which he went to meet Vergerio the Papal Nuncio: “Here go the German Pope and Cardinal Pomeranus, God’s chosen instruments”; Luther’s remark wasof course spoken in jest, but the jest “was only possible against a background of bitter earnest”; Luther frequently dallied with this idea; “for the position Luther occupied, ages even after his death, there really was no other comparison to be found.... With the above jest Luther reduced himself ad absurdum.”[1716]—Such censures are in reality more in place than those eulogies of Luther’s exclamation at Worms in 1521 on the freedom of Bible conviction, into which orthodox Protestant biographers of Luther sometimes lapse.Some Peculiarities of the New Doctrine on the Sacraments, Particularly on Baptism.The theological pillars of the edifice of public worship are the seven sacraments, the visible signs ordained by Christ by which grace is given to our souls. Held in honour even by the Nestorians and Monophysites as witnesses to ecclesiastical antiquity, they enfold and hallow all the chief events of human life. Luther debased the effect of the sacraments by making it something wholly subjective, produced by the recipients themselves in virtue of the faith infused into them by God, whereas the Church has ever recognised the sacraments as sublime and mysterious signs, which of themselves work in the receiver (“ex opere operato”) according to the extent of his preparation, Christ having made the grace promised dependent on the outward signs instituted by Himself. Luther, on the other hand, by declaring the sacraments mere symbols whereby faith is strengthened, operative only by virtue of the recipient’s faith in the pardon and forgiveness of his sins, reduced them to the status of empty pledges for soothing and consoling consciences. Only later did he again come nearer to the Catholic doctrine of the “opus operatum.” With his view, however, that the sole object of the sacraments is to increase the “fides specialis,” we arrive again at the point which for Luther is the sum total of religion, viz.: “mere forgiveness.”He was not at all conscious of the contradiction involved in his vigorous insistence on the absolute necessity of the sacraments for salvation. From his standpoint Carlstadt was far more logical when he said: “If Christ [alone] is peace and assurance [of salvation], then lifeless creatures [the sacramental, outward signs] can surely not satisfy or make secure.”[1717]Luther raised no objection to infant baptism. He also wished it, and baptism in general, to be given in the usual way in the name of the Trinity. But how did he try to solve the difficulty arising from his theory of the sacraments: If the sacrament only works in virtue of the faith of the receiver and the effect is merely an increase of faith, of what advantage can it be to the infant who is incapable of belief? He endeavoured to remedy the defect with the help of the faith of the congregation.Meeting difficulties on this line he did not shrink from claiming a perpetually recurring miracle, and proposed to assume that, during the act of baptism, the new-born infant was momentarily endowed by God with the use of reason and filled with faith.In his “De captivitate babylonica” he had already attempted to cut the Gordian knot presented by infant baptism by this assumption, which, however arbitrary, is quite intelligible from his psychological standpoint. Thanks to the believing prayer of the congregation who present the children for baptism, so he said, faith is infused into them and they thus become regenerate. In 1523 he states that children have a hidden faith. “From that time onwards the tendency of his teaching was to require faith from candidates for baptism.... Even after the Concord he continued to speak exactly as before.”[1718]The Bible teaches nothing about infant baptism. Yet Luther declares in 1545 in a set of theses: “It is false and outrageous to say that little children do not believe, or are unworthy,” while at the head of the theses these words stand: “Everything that in the Church, which is God’s people, is taught without the Word of God, is assuredly false and unchristian.”[1719]It is of interest to follow up his arguments for the faith of infants. In 1522 already he had attempted in a letter to prove to Melanchthon the possibility of such unconscious faith. He referred him to the circumstance, which, however, is irrelevant, “that we retain the faith while asleep or otherwise engaged.” Moreover, since to him who believes, everything is possible with God, so, too, to the congregation which prays for the children; the children are presentedby the congregation to the Lord of all, and He, by His Omnipotence, kindles faith in them. In the same letter, aimed at the Anabaptists, who were then beginning to be heard of, we find an emphatic appeal to the authority and belief of the Church (“totius orbis constans confessio”), which, as a rule, Luther was so ruthless in opposing. “It would be quite impious to deny that infant baptism agrees with the belief of the Church; to do so would be tantamount to denying the Church”; it was a special miracle that infant baptism had never been attacked by heretics; there was therefore good reason to hope that Christ, now, would trample the new foemen “under our feet.” Luther forgets that the ancient Church was not hampered by such a heel of Achilles as was his own teaching, viz. that the sacraments owed all their efficacy to faith. We can, however, quite understand his admission to Melanchthon: “I have always expected that Satan would lay violent hands on this weak spot, but he has chosen to stir up this pernicious quarrel, not through the Papists, but with the help of our own people.”[1720]The rise of the Anabaptist heresy was indeed merely a natural reaction against Luther’s doctrine of baptism.Seeing that the doctrine of baptism is of such importance to the Christian Church, we may be permitted to consider the inferences regarding the sacrament of baptism drawn in modern times from Luther’s conception of it, and from his whole attitude towards faith and Christianity. A domestic dispute among the Protestants at Bremen in 1905 on the validity of baptism not administered according to the usages of the Church, led to a remarkable discussion among theologians of broader views, some of whom went so far as to argue in Luther’s name and that of his Reformation, that baptism should be abolished.Johannes Gottschick in “Die Lehre der Reformation von der Taufe” (1906) defended the opinion that, according to the real views of the Reformers, baptism was valid even when conferred without any mention of the Trinity.—O. Scheel, on his side,pointed out in his book “Die dogmatische Behandlung der Tauflehre in der modernen positiven Theologie” (1906), that a contradiction with the principle of the Reformation was apparent even in Luther’s own theology, inasmuch as, according to this principle, baptism should merely be the proclaiming of the Word of God; in the ceremony of baptism, according to the Reformation teaching, which should be taken seriously, “the Word is all”; baptism is the solemn declaration that the child has been received into the congregation and the bestowal on it of the promise of salvation, hence requires no repetition. “As to when the Word works faith [in them] we do not know, nor is it necessary that theology should know”; the power of God knows the day and the hour.[1721]—The question: “Can baptism be regarded rightly as the exclusive act of reception into the Church?” was answered negatively by Rietschel in an article under that title in the “Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht,”[1722]in which he too appeals to Luther. At any rate Rietschel’s conclusion is, that, since Luther makes the Christian state dependent on faith, the baptismal act as such cannot, according to him, be of any essential importance; he thinks it possible to complete Luther’s doctrine on baptism in the light of that of Zwingli and Calvin, who were of opinion that the children of Christian parents, by their very birth were received into the Church.Luther’s attitude towards these questions was treated of more in detail by the editor of the Deutsch-Evangelische Blätter, Erich Haupt, Professor of theology at Halle.[1723]Haupt agrees with Gottschick as to the possibility of discarding the Trinitarian formula in baptism, in that, like Rietschel, all he considers necessary is the liturgical retention of some definite form of words. He also subscribes in principle to Rietschel’s contention that it is possible to enter the Church without baptism. Going even further, however, he declares with regard to Luther, that it was not even necessary to borrow from Zwingli and Calvin as Rietschel had proposed. “I believe the admission that salvation may be secured even without baptism, is a necessary corollary of Luther’s theories taken in the lump. One thing that lies at the bottom of Luther’s doctrine of the sacraments is that the salvation bestowed by a sacrament is none other than that communicated by the word of the preacher.... Nay, the sacrament is merely a particular form in which the Evangel comes to men.” But wherever there is faith, there is communion with God, and faith may be wherever there is the Word of God. Just as it was said of the Supper: “crede et manducasti,” so also it might be said: “crede et baptizatus es.” “To deny this would not merely be to ascribe a magical and mechanical effect to the sacrament, but would also imply the denial of the first principle of all Evangelical Christianity, viz. that for man’s salvation nothing further is necessary than to accept in faith the offer of God’s grace given him in theGospel. In this the Reformation was simply holding to the words of Scripture (Mk. xvi. 16),” where, in the second part (“He that believeth not shall be condemned”), baptism is not mentioned.[1724]—Haupt, like Rietschel, draws attention to the fact, that, according to Luther, the unbelieving Christian, in spite of baptism, is inwardly no better than a heathen.[1725]Nevertheless Haupt is unwilling to allow that all children of Christian parents should simply be declared members of the Christian Church on account of their birth and regardless of baptism; for canonical reasons, to be considered Christians, they must be inducted into the congregation by the act of baptism,[1726]although it is “a logical outcome of the Reformer’s opinions that instances may occur where the Gospel awakens faith, and thereby incorporates in the congregation people who have never been baptised; but this is the invisible congregation of the ‘vere credentes,’ not the outward, visible, organised Church.” In order to enter children into the latter, the parents must express their wish; this is the meaning of the ceremony of baptism; the fact remains, that, dismissing the magical effect formerly ascribed to baptism, the principal thing is, “not Christian parentage as such, but the will of the parents as expressed in some way or other.”[1727]These vigorous attempts to shelter such ultra-modern views behind Luther’s authority, and to make him responsible for consequences of his doctrine, which he had been unwilling to face, have a common ground and starting-point.Wilhelm Herrmann, the Marburg theologian, in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche,” thus expresses himself on the subject.[1728]“Christians are becoming more and more conscious,” he says, “that a religion which must base its origin on an assent to ‘dogmas revealed by God’ is at variance with elements of scholarship which they can no longer deny.” He speaks of the “distress of conscience into which the Church, by her demanding assent to revealed doctrine, plunges people as soon as, under the influence of education, they have come to see what alone can induce honest assent to any idea” (viz. the fact “that one evolves it for oneself”). Luther was himself scarcely acquainted with such trouble of conscience concerning faith, notwithstanding the many spiritual troubles he had to endure. On the contrary, he unhesitatingly sought and found a source of strength in supernatural faith. Herrmann continues: “We should be unable to escape from this difficulty had not the true Christian understanding of faith, i.e. of religion, been recovered at the Reformation.” From that standpoint “any demand for an assent to revealed doctrine may well be repudiated.” For it was the teaching of Luther’s Reformation that faith “must be experienced as the gift of God if it is to be the ‘nova et spiritualis vita’ essentially ‘supra naturam.’” This, however, could not be required of all. The demand is subversive of faith itself and“embodies the false Roman principle” that everything depends on the “decision to acquiesce in a doctrine,” and not on the “experienced power of a personal life.” “To lend a hand and clear a path for the chief discovery of the Reformation is the grandest task of theology within the Protestant Church.”[1729]Luther by so incessantly emphasising personal religious experience and by his repudiation of all objective ecclesiastical authority capable of putting before mankind the contents of faith, certainly came very near that which is here represented as the “chief discovery” of the innovations undertaken by him (see above, pp. 403, vol. iii., 8 ff.). But what would the Wittenberg “lover of the Bible and Apostle of the Word” have said to the claim of modern scholars who wish simply to surrender revelation? The passages in which he so indignantly censures the unbelief of his day cannot but recur to one.[1730]Luther arbitrarily reduced the sacraments to two; “there remain,” he says, “two sacraments; baptism and the Supper.”[1731]With regard to Penance his attitude was wavering and full of contradiction. In later years he again came nearer to the Catholic teaching, arguing that Penance must also be a sacrament because, as he said in 1545, “it contains the promise of and belief in the forgiveness of sins.”[1732]He had much at heart the retention of confession and absolution under some shape or form as a remedy against the moral disorders that were creeping in.[1733]Yet, according to him, Penance was only to be regarded as the “exercise and virtue of baptism,”[1734]so that the number of the sacraments underwent no actual increase.Here, as everywhere else, the changeableness of Luther’sdoctrinal opinions is deserving of notice. The numerous instances where he relinquishes a position previously held and virtually betakes himself to another, are scarcely to the credit either of his logic or of his foresight. Such wavering and groping hither and thither is the stamp of error. In the “Histoire des variations” which might be written on the fate of Luther’s views even during his lifetime, much would be found truly characteristic of them.One sacramentarian doctrine, which to the end of his life he would never consent to relinquish, was, as we know, the Presence of Christ in the Supper. And relentless as he was in combating the Sacrifice of the Mass (see below, p. 506 ff.), yet he insisted steadfastly on the literal acceptance of Christ’s words of institution: “This is My Body.”His Teaching on the Supper.Luther’s retention of the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist may to some extent be explained by the influence which, side by side with the Bible, tradition and the authority of the Church still exercised over him, at least on such points as did not call for modification on account of his new doctrine of Justification. He had grown up in this faith, and was accustomed to give practical proof of it even when on other scores he had already broken with the Church. In this matter Scripture presented no difficulty. Had he shared Zwingli’s rationalistic leanings it is likely that, like him, he might have sought for some other interpretation of the words of institution than the obvious and literal one. It is also possible that the mysticism to which he was addicted in early years may have contributed to make him acknowledge the “mysterium tremendum” of the Sacrament, as he terms it in the language of olden days.It is true there came a time—according to him the year 1519-1520—when he felt strongly tempted to throw the Sacrament overboard, because, as he says in the well-known words, “I could thus have given a great smack in the face to Popery.” At that time I “wrestled and struggled and would gladly have escaped.” But from the plain text of the Bible, he had, so he declares, been unable to free himself. This statement, which is on the whole worthy ofbelief, we find in “Eyn Brieff an die Christen zu Straspurg” which he published in 1525, and it is further corroborated by the fact, that he there refers to two men who had been anxious to move him to the denial of the Presence of Christ, but who had failed to convince him. The two, whose names he does not mention, were probably Cornelius Hendriks Hoen, a Dutchman, and Franz Kolb of Baden, whose letters to Luther, in 1522 and 1524, trying to induce him to accept the Zwinglian sense of the Sacrament, still exist.[1735]When Carlstadt began his attack on the Real Presence, this, in view of the then situation, so Luther declares in his letter to the people of Strasburg, merely “confirmed his opinion.” “Even had I not believed it before, I should at once have known that his opinions were nought, because of his worthless, feeble stuff, devoid of any Scripture and based only on reason and conceit.” Offended vanity and annoyance with Carlstadt were here not without their effect on Luther; to deny this would argue a poor acquaintance with Luther’s psychology. It is true that the arguments of his opponent were very weak; it was not without reason that Luther speaks of his “stuff and nonsense” and “ridiculous tales.” He ranks the objections of the two letter-writers mentioned above higher than the proofs adduced by Carlstadt; at least they “wrote more skilfully and did not mangle the Word quite so badly.” Luther was, however, tactless enough to give the Strasburgers a glimpse of the secondary motives which led him to defend the Presence of Christ so strongly and defiantly from that time forward. He complains that Carlstadt was making such an ado as though he wanted “to darken the sun and light of the Evangel,” so “that the world might forget everything that had been taught them by us [by Luther] hitherto.” “I have up till now managed well and rightly in all the main points, and whoever says the contrary has no good spirit; I trust I shall not spoil it in the matter of the externals on which alone prophets such as these lay stress.”[1736]It is unnecessary to show anew here how Luther’s later defence of the Real Presence in the Eucharist against the Zwinglians contains indubitable evidence in its virulencethat Luther felt hurt. This personal element is, however, quite insufficient for one to base upon it any suspicion as to the genuineness of his convictions.If, on the other hand, we consider the strange and arbitrary form he gave to the doctrine of the Supper, more particularly by insisting that the sole aim and effect of communion is to inspire faith in the personal forgiveness of sins, then his belief in the presence of Christ appears to a certain extent to harmonise with his peculiar theological views. Amidst the storm of his struggle after certainty of salvation the pledge of it which Christ bestows in the Sacrament seems to him like a blessed anchor. That this Body was “given” for us, and this blood shed for us, and that the celebration is in memory of the saving death of Christ, as the very words of institution declare, was frequently brought forward by him as a means to reassure anxious souls. The need of strengthening our faith should, according to him, impel us to receive the Sacrament.He demands accordingly of others the same traditional faith in the Eucharist in which he found his own stay and support. While clinging to the literal interpretation of the words of the Bible, he, as we already know, is quite ready to appeal to the “dear Fathers” and to the whole of the Church’s past, at least when thereby he hopes to make an impression.[1737]To such lengths does he go in the interests of the confirmation of faith to which he strives to attain by means of this indispensable Sacrament.He overlooks the fact, however, that his view of the Supper, according to which its only purpose is to be a sign for the stimulating of saving faith, in reality undermines the doctrine of the Real Presence. True to his theory of the Sacrament and of faith he reduces the Supper to an outward sign destined to confirm the forgiveness of sins. One might ask: If it is merely a sign, is so sublime a mystery as the Real Presence at all called for? And, if it is a question of assurance, how can we be rendered secure of our salvation by something which is so far removed above the senses as the belief in the Real Presence of Christ, or by an act which makes such great demands on human reason? Luther’s theory requires a sign which should appeal to the senses and vividly remind the mind of the Redemption and thusawaken faith. This is scarcely the case in the Eucharist where Christ is invisibly present and only to be apprehended by “the Word.” If bread and wine are merely to call forth a remembrance of Christ which inspires faith, then the Zwinglian doctrine of the Sacrament fulfils all that is required. Luther does not face this difficulty, but Protestants were not slow to urge it against him.[1738]A peculiarity of Luther’s teaching on the Sacrament is to be found in his two theories of Impanation and Ubiquity. Impanation, viz. the opinion that the substance of the bread persists in the Sacrament and that Christ is present together with the bread, served him as a means to escape the Catholic doctrine of a change of substance (Transubstantiation). With the help of the theory of Ubiquity which affirmed the presence everywhere of the Body of Christ, he fancied he could extricate himself from certain difficulties raised by opponents of the Sacrament. Thehistory of both opinions presents much that is instructive. Here, however, we shall consider only the second, viz. the ubiquity of Christ’s Body.The theory of the omnipresence of the Body of Christ which Luther reached together with his doctrine of the Supper, like his other theory of the faith of infants, shows plainly not only of how much his imagination was capable, but also what curious theses he could propound in all calmness and serenity. Thus we hear him asserting that the Redeemer, the Lord of Creation, is present, in His spiritualised Body, everywhere and penetrates all things! He is present bodily at the right hand of God according to the Scriptures; but the right hand of God is everywhere, hence also in the consecrated Bread and Wine lying on the altar; consequently the Body and Blood of Christ must be there too.[1739]To the question how this comes about, he replies: “It is not for us to know,” nor does reason even understand how God can be in every creature.Much more important is it, so he says, that we should learn to seize, grasp and appropriate this ever-present Christ. “For though Christ is everywhere present, He does not everywhere allow Himself to be seized and laid hold of.... Why? Because it is one thing for God to be present and another for Him to be presentto you. He is present to you then when He pledges His Word to it and binds Himself by it and says: Here you shall find Me. When you have His Word for it, then you can truly seize Him and say: Here I have Thee, as Thou hast said.”[1740]In this way Christ assures us of His presence in the Sacrament, and invites us, so Luther teaches, to partake of Him in the Bread of the Supper. This, however, is practically to explain away the presence of Christ in the Bread (to which Luther adheres so firmly) and to dissolve it into a purely subjective apprehension. Nevertheless, at least according to certain passages, he was anxious to see the Sacrament adored and did not hesitate to do so himself.[1741]To the belief that Christ’s Body is truly received in Communion he held fast, as already stated, till the end of his life.

It is perfectly true that the Catholic Church gladly emphasises the reward charity brings to the giver.If in the times previous to Luther’s day, both in the Middle Ages and before, the Church frequently extolled the temporal and everlasting reward of charity, and if this proved to the faithful an incentive, she could at least in so doing appeal to those passages in the Gospel itself which promise to the charitable a heavenly recompense. Yet the thought of this reward did not exclude other high and worthy motives. So little were such motives slighted in the mediæval practice of charity, that, side by side with the heavenly reward, the original deeds of foundations, gifts and pious legacies still extant allege all kinds of other reasons, for instance, compassion for the helpless and concern for their bodily and spiritual welfare, or the furtherance of the common good by the establishment of institutions of public utility. One formula frequently used, which, taken literally, seems actually to ignore all merit and reward, runs variously: “For God’s sake only”; “for God”; or, “in order to please Him with temporal goods.” Thus the author of the “Wyhegertlin für alle frummen Christenmenschen,”[1699]a German work of edification, wrote in 1509: “Thanks to God’s grace there are still in our towns many hundreds of brothers and sisters who have united themselves out of Christian charity and compassion for the purpose of serving the poor sick people, the infirm, plague-stricken and lepers, purely for God’s sake.”Duke George of Saxony, in his reply to Luther’s “Widder den Meuchler zu Dresen,” really expresses the motive for the active Catholic charity formerly so lavishly displayed, when he speaks of the great possessions given by past ages of which the religious revolt had robbed the Church; of the “gifts freely given by nobles, burghers and peasants out of ardent Christian love and gratitude for His sacred bitter Passion, bright blood and guiltless death, to cloisters, parish churches, altars, chapels, cells, hospitals, religious houses, crafts,” etc.[1700]Neither did such motives or the motive of reward curtail the spirit of charity towards the close of the Middle Ages, as some Protestants have chosen to assert. On the contrary they served to animate it.On the basis of the data furnished by German archives a modern historian remarks of those times: “The spirit of Christian charity showed itself most active in the foundation of benevolent institutions, in which respect hardly any age can compare with the 15th century.”[1701]“Towards the close of the Middle Ages the gifts to hospitals, pest-houses and hostels were simply innumerable”; such is the opinion of another researcher.[1702]Even G. Uhlhorn, in his “Geschichte der christlichen Liebestätigkeit,” had to admit: “No period did so much for the poor as the Middle Ages,” though, agreeably to the standard of his peculiar Lutheranism, this author would fain make out that good works then were done out of mere egotism.Other Protestant authorities allow, that, even according to Luther’s own admission, the Catholic charity far exceeded that displayed by the new faith. “Here” (among the Catholics), says one historian, “Confraternities for the care of the poor and sick arose in the 16th and 17th centuries which far surpassed anything hitherto known in the purity of their aims and their extraordinary achievements.... Among the Catholics the reform in the nursing of the sick proceeded from Spain, which also produced the men who loomed largest in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, viz. the Jesuits and the Dominicans. From Spain came the model of the modern hospital with the nursing staff as we now know it.” “The Protestant communities during the two centuries which followed the Reformation showed a great lack of fruitfulness as regards works of charity.” “The hospitals in the Protestant districts, with few exceptions, were and remained bad, nor was anything done to improve them.”[1703]Although Luther’s praiseworthy efforts to awaken charity were not altogether wasted, yet neither his success in some localities nor the supposed purer and higher spirit he introduced into deeds of love were so apparent as to bear comparison with the charity so sedulously cultivated on the Catholic side. On the contrary, his complaints confirm the suspicion that in Lutheran circles works of charity were as a rule lamed by the lack of that very spirit of piety which should have been so manifest. (More in vol. vi., xxxv., 4.)In 1528 he told the inhabitants of Wittenberg: “This week your offerings will be solicited. I hear that people say they will give nothing to the collectors, but will turn them away. Well, thank God! You most ungrateful creatures, who are so grudging with your money, refuse to give anything, and, not satisfied with this, heap abuse on the ministers of the Church! I wish you a happy year. I am so horrified, that I do not know whether to continue preaching any longer to you, you rude brutes who cannot give even four half-pence ungrudgingly.” It was adisgrace, he says, that so far the fiscal authorities had been obliged to provide for the churches, the schools and the poor in the hospitals, whom it was the people’s duty as Christians to support. “Now that you are called upon to give four beggarly half-pence, you feel it a burden.” “Deceivers will come who will wax fat at your expense as happened formerly [in Catholic times]. I am sorry that you have arrived at such a glorious state of freedom, free from all tyrants and Papists, for, thankless brutes that you are, you don’t deserve this Evangelical treasure. Unless you mend your ways and act differently I shall cease to preach to you in order not to cast pearls before swine and to give what is holy to the dogs, and shall proclaim the Gospel to my real students who are the poor beggar-men. Formerly you gave so much to the wicked seducers [the Catholic clergy] and now ...!”[1704]Already, the year before, he had vigorously complained from the pulpit, though, as it would appear, all to no purpose: “Amongst those who hear the Word, faith is dull and charity has grown cold and hope is at an end, etc. There is no one who pities his brother’s distress. Once upon a time we gave a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand pieces of gold to the monks, canons or priests for the building of monasteries and churches. To-day no one can be found who will give a coin, let alone a piece of gold, for the poor. For this reason God sends His judgments on the world and curses the earth on account of the contempt for His Word and His Evangel; but we may look for yet worse things in the future.”[1705]Amongst the reminiscences of his journey to Italy, Luther retained a kindly memory of the charity as practised by the Catholics, particularly at Florence. We read in Lauterbach’s Diary on Aug. 1, 1538: “Then Luther spoke of charity in Italy and how the hospitals there were cared for. They are located in princely buildings, are amply supplied with food and drink, the servants are most diligent and attentive, the physicians very skilled, the bedding and clothing are perfectly clean and the beds are even painted. When a patient is brought in, he has at once to strip, an inventory of his clothes is made in the presence of a notary and they are then kept carefully for him. Then he is dressed in a white shirt and put in a nice painted bed with clean sheets, and after a little while two physicians are at his bedside; servants come and bring him food and drink in perfectly clean glass goblets, which they do not touch even with a finger, carrying everything on a tray. Even the greatest ladies come there, muffled up completely so as to be unrecognisable, in order to serve the poor for some days, after which they return to their homes. At Florence I have seen what great care is bestowed on the hospitals. Also on the foundling homes where the children are admirably installed, fed and taught, are all dressed alike and in the same colour and treated in a right fatherly way.”[1706]5. Other Innovations in Religious DoctrineThe absence of any logical system in Luther’s theological and moral views is so far from being denied by Protestants who know his theology that they even reproach Luther’s opponents for expecting to find logic in him. No system, but merely “the thought-world of a great religious man” is, so they say, all that we may look for in his works; it is true that he had a “general religious theory,” but it was “faulty, in its details not seldom contradictory, and devised for a practical and polemical object.” “Luther was no dogmatic theologian or man of system,” hence his individual sayings must not always be treated as though they were parts of a system.There can be no doubt that this is a defect in a teacher who comes forward as the founder of a denomination and as the restorer of Christian doctrine, and who, in his quality of “Prophet of the Germans,” declares: “Before me people knew nothing.” After all, precision and coherence of doctrines form a test of their truth.In reality the facts of the case are only indicated in a veiled way in the Protestant admissions just recorded. The truth is, as the reader has already had many an occasion to see, that, with Luther, one assertion frequently invalidates the other. Even in the field of moral teaching we find him at utter variance with himself, and his contradictions become particularly glaring as soon as he passes from theory to practice. Here it is easy to seize the “consummate contradictions of his theology,” of which a present-day Protestant theologian ventures boldly to speak; we may also subscribe to what this same writer says, viz. that Luther hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.[1707](Cp. p. 415, 447; vol. ii., p. 312, etc.)The Regula Fidei.Such a denial of the consequences of the principles of his doctrine lies first and foremost in the fact that Luther summed up in a Rule of Faith the various dogmas to which it was his intention to remain true. The “regula fidei,” such as he wished to bequeath to posterity, he saw expressedin the Confession of Augsburg, and in the oldest Œcumenical Creeds of the Church.It has already been seen that the radicalism involved in his religious attitude should by rights have issued in a freedom, nay, licence, which would have rendered impossible any binding formularies of faith.It is also the opinion of most modern Protestant theologians that the definition of doctrine which began with the Confession of Augsburg, or in fact with the Articles of Marburg, really constituted an unjustifiable encroachment on the freedom of religious thought inaugurated by Luther. Luther indeed invested these doctrinal formularies with all the weight of his authority, yet, according to these theologians, they represented a “narrowing” of the Evangelical ideas advocated by him; nor can it be gainsaid that the revolutionary ideas for which Luther stood from about 1520 to 1523 justify such strictures.[1708]“This promising spring,” writes Adolf Harnack, a representative of theological freedom, “was followed by no real summer. In those years Luther was lifted above himself and seemed to have overcome the limitations of his peculiar temperament.”... But Luther unfortunately reverted to his limitations. Nor were they “merely a light vesture, or as some would fain have us believe, due simply to lack of comprehension on the part of Melanchthon and other henchmen, for Luther himself saw in them the very foundation of his strength and made the fullest use of them as such.”[1709]In other words, his contradiction with his own original principles became to him, so to speak, a second nature. He was in deadly earnest with the dogmas which he retained, and which were comprised in the official Articles of faith. In so far, therefore, he may be said to have turned away from the consequences of his own action and to have striven to slam the door which he had opened to unbelief and private judgment.Of the Confession of Augsburg, the most important of these declarations of faith, Harnack says: “That the Gospel of the Reformation found masterly expression in the ‘Augustana,’ that I cannot admit. The ‘Augustana’ founded a teaching Church; on it must be laid the blame for the narrowing of the movement of reform. Could such a thing have been written previous to 1526, or even previous to 1529?”After admitting elsewhere the advantages of the Confession of Augsburg, Harnack proceeds: “It is possible by retracing our steps to arrive through it at the broader Evangelical ideas without which there would never have been a Reformation or an‘Augustana.’ With regard to their author, however, it is no use blinking the fact, that here Melanchthon undertook, or rather was forced to undertake, a task to which his gifts and his character were not equal.”[1710]“In the theology of Melanchthon the moralist, who stands at the side of Luther the Evangelist, we discern attempts to amend Luther’s theology.... Melanchthon, however, felt himself cramped by having to act as the guardian of Lutheranism. We cannot take it ill if Lutherans prefer to err with Luther their hero, rather than submit to be put in Melanchthon’s leading-strings.”[1711]Harnack and those who think like him are even more antagonistic to the later creeds of Lutheranism than to the Confession composed by Melanchthon. “The ‘symbolic age’ when the ‘Lutheran Church’ gave ‘definite expression’ to her will is nothing more than afable convenue. ‘This Lutheran Church as an actual body,’ says Carl Müller, ‘never really existed and the spokesmen of the strictest Luther faction were just the worst enemies of such a union.... Thus to speak of creeds of the Lutheran Church involves an historic impossibility.’”[1712]According to these theologians Protestantism must hark back to Luther’s original principles of freedom. Moreover, argues Harnack, Protestantism has on the whole already reverted to this earlier standpoint. “We are not forsaking the clear testimony of history when we find in Luther’s Christianity and in the first beginnings of the Reformation all that present-day Protestantism has developed, though amidst weakness and constraint; nor when we state that Luther’s idea of faith is still to-day the moving spirit of Protestantism, however many or however few may have made it their own.”[1713]Luther’s “most effective propositions,” according to him, may well be allowed to stand as the “heirloom of the Evangelical Churches”; it is plain that they do not lead to a mere “dogmatic Christianity,” but to true Christianity consisting in the “disposition which the Father of Jesus Christ awakens in the heart through the Gospel.” Luther himself has only to be rightly appreciated and “allowed to remain Luther.”[1714]Harnack repeatedly insists that Luther by setting aside all authority on dogma, whether of the Church, the hierarchy or tradition, also destroyed the binding character of any “doctrine.” By his attack on all authority he dealt a mortal blow at the vital principle of the ancient Church, traceable back to the second century. According to him “every doctrinal formulary of the past required objective proof”; this objective proof was to him the sole authority. “How then could there be authority when the objective proof failed or seemed to demonstrate the contrary?” To judge of the proof is within the province of each individual, and, according as he is constituted, the result will bedifferent. “Luther—even at the most critical moment, when he seemed to stand in the greatest need of the formal authority of the letter—did not allow himself to be overawed or his mouth to be closed even by the Apostles’ Creed.” He indeed “involved himself later in limitations and restrictions,” “but there can be no doubt ... that by his previous historic behaviour towards them he had undermined all the formal authorities of Catholicism.”[1715]On this fundamental question of the possibility of a “regula fidei” in Luther’s case, we may listen to the opinion of another esteemed Protestant historian of late years.Friedrich Paulsen, in his much-prized “Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts,” writes: “The Word of God does not suffice as a ‘regula fidei,’ but a personal authority is also needed to decide on questions of doctrine, this is what the Luther of 1535 says and thereby confutes the Luther of 1521, who refused to allow anyone on earth to point out to him the faith unless he himself could gather its truth from the Word of God. Had Luther abided by his rejection of all human authority he should have declared: On the interpretation of Scripture there is no final court of appeal, each one believes or errs at his own peril.... What Luther had relied on in 1521 against the Papists, viz. inability to refute him from Scripture, was used against him in his own struggle with the ‘fanatics.’... For the confuting of heretics a rule of faith is needed, and what is more, a living one to decide in each case. The principle of 1521, to allow no authority on earth to prescribe the faith, is anarchical. On these lines there can be no ‘Church’ with an ‘examen doctrinæ’ of its candidates and Visitations of the clergy. This the Reformers also saw and thus there was nothing left for them, if they were to retain a ‘Church,’ than to set up their own authority in the stead of the authority of Pope and Councils. On one vexatious point they were, however, at a loss: Against the later Luther it was always possible to appeal to the Luther of Worms. The starting-point andraison d’êtreof the whole Reformation was the repudiation on principle of all human authority in matters of faith; after this, to find Luther installed as Pope, was scarcely pleasing. If anyone stands in need of a Pope he would surely be better advised in sticking to the real one at Rome.... The hole in Luther’s teaching still remains a hole in the principle of the Protestant Church to-day: There can be no earthly authority in matters of faith, and: Such an authority there must be, this is an antinomy which lies at its very root. Nor is the antinomy accidental, but lies in the very nature of the matter and is expressed as often as we speak of the ‘Protestant Church.’ If there is to be a Church ... then the individual must submit himself and his ‘faith’ to the ‘faith’ of the community.” Paulsen, who had spoken of “Luther as Pope,” refers to Luther’s own remark when taking his seat with Bugenhagen in the carriage in which he went to meet Vergerio the Papal Nuncio: “Here go the German Pope and Cardinal Pomeranus, God’s chosen instruments”; Luther’s remark wasof course spoken in jest, but the jest “was only possible against a background of bitter earnest”; Luther frequently dallied with this idea; “for the position Luther occupied, ages even after his death, there really was no other comparison to be found.... With the above jest Luther reduced himself ad absurdum.”[1716]—Such censures are in reality more in place than those eulogies of Luther’s exclamation at Worms in 1521 on the freedom of Bible conviction, into which orthodox Protestant biographers of Luther sometimes lapse.Some Peculiarities of the New Doctrine on the Sacraments, Particularly on Baptism.The theological pillars of the edifice of public worship are the seven sacraments, the visible signs ordained by Christ by which grace is given to our souls. Held in honour even by the Nestorians and Monophysites as witnesses to ecclesiastical antiquity, they enfold and hallow all the chief events of human life. Luther debased the effect of the sacraments by making it something wholly subjective, produced by the recipients themselves in virtue of the faith infused into them by God, whereas the Church has ever recognised the sacraments as sublime and mysterious signs, which of themselves work in the receiver (“ex opere operato”) according to the extent of his preparation, Christ having made the grace promised dependent on the outward signs instituted by Himself. Luther, on the other hand, by declaring the sacraments mere symbols whereby faith is strengthened, operative only by virtue of the recipient’s faith in the pardon and forgiveness of his sins, reduced them to the status of empty pledges for soothing and consoling consciences. Only later did he again come nearer to the Catholic doctrine of the “opus operatum.” With his view, however, that the sole object of the sacraments is to increase the “fides specialis,” we arrive again at the point which for Luther is the sum total of religion, viz.: “mere forgiveness.”He was not at all conscious of the contradiction involved in his vigorous insistence on the absolute necessity of the sacraments for salvation. From his standpoint Carlstadt was far more logical when he said: “If Christ [alone] is peace and assurance [of salvation], then lifeless creatures [the sacramental, outward signs] can surely not satisfy or make secure.”[1717]Luther raised no objection to infant baptism. He also wished it, and baptism in general, to be given in the usual way in the name of the Trinity. But how did he try to solve the difficulty arising from his theory of the sacraments: If the sacrament only works in virtue of the faith of the receiver and the effect is merely an increase of faith, of what advantage can it be to the infant who is incapable of belief? He endeavoured to remedy the defect with the help of the faith of the congregation.Meeting difficulties on this line he did not shrink from claiming a perpetually recurring miracle, and proposed to assume that, during the act of baptism, the new-born infant was momentarily endowed by God with the use of reason and filled with faith.In his “De captivitate babylonica” he had already attempted to cut the Gordian knot presented by infant baptism by this assumption, which, however arbitrary, is quite intelligible from his psychological standpoint. Thanks to the believing prayer of the congregation who present the children for baptism, so he said, faith is infused into them and they thus become regenerate. In 1523 he states that children have a hidden faith. “From that time onwards the tendency of his teaching was to require faith from candidates for baptism.... Even after the Concord he continued to speak exactly as before.”[1718]The Bible teaches nothing about infant baptism. Yet Luther declares in 1545 in a set of theses: “It is false and outrageous to say that little children do not believe, or are unworthy,” while at the head of the theses these words stand: “Everything that in the Church, which is God’s people, is taught without the Word of God, is assuredly false and unchristian.”[1719]It is of interest to follow up his arguments for the faith of infants. In 1522 already he had attempted in a letter to prove to Melanchthon the possibility of such unconscious faith. He referred him to the circumstance, which, however, is irrelevant, “that we retain the faith while asleep or otherwise engaged.” Moreover, since to him who believes, everything is possible with God, so, too, to the congregation which prays for the children; the children are presentedby the congregation to the Lord of all, and He, by His Omnipotence, kindles faith in them. In the same letter, aimed at the Anabaptists, who were then beginning to be heard of, we find an emphatic appeal to the authority and belief of the Church (“totius orbis constans confessio”), which, as a rule, Luther was so ruthless in opposing. “It would be quite impious to deny that infant baptism agrees with the belief of the Church; to do so would be tantamount to denying the Church”; it was a special miracle that infant baptism had never been attacked by heretics; there was therefore good reason to hope that Christ, now, would trample the new foemen “under our feet.” Luther forgets that the ancient Church was not hampered by such a heel of Achilles as was his own teaching, viz. that the sacraments owed all their efficacy to faith. We can, however, quite understand his admission to Melanchthon: “I have always expected that Satan would lay violent hands on this weak spot, but he has chosen to stir up this pernicious quarrel, not through the Papists, but with the help of our own people.”[1720]The rise of the Anabaptist heresy was indeed merely a natural reaction against Luther’s doctrine of baptism.Seeing that the doctrine of baptism is of such importance to the Christian Church, we may be permitted to consider the inferences regarding the sacrament of baptism drawn in modern times from Luther’s conception of it, and from his whole attitude towards faith and Christianity. A domestic dispute among the Protestants at Bremen in 1905 on the validity of baptism not administered according to the usages of the Church, led to a remarkable discussion among theologians of broader views, some of whom went so far as to argue in Luther’s name and that of his Reformation, that baptism should be abolished.Johannes Gottschick in “Die Lehre der Reformation von der Taufe” (1906) defended the opinion that, according to the real views of the Reformers, baptism was valid even when conferred without any mention of the Trinity.—O. Scheel, on his side,pointed out in his book “Die dogmatische Behandlung der Tauflehre in der modernen positiven Theologie” (1906), that a contradiction with the principle of the Reformation was apparent even in Luther’s own theology, inasmuch as, according to this principle, baptism should merely be the proclaiming of the Word of God; in the ceremony of baptism, according to the Reformation teaching, which should be taken seriously, “the Word is all”; baptism is the solemn declaration that the child has been received into the congregation and the bestowal on it of the promise of salvation, hence requires no repetition. “As to when the Word works faith [in them] we do not know, nor is it necessary that theology should know”; the power of God knows the day and the hour.[1721]—The question: “Can baptism be regarded rightly as the exclusive act of reception into the Church?” was answered negatively by Rietschel in an article under that title in the “Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht,”[1722]in which he too appeals to Luther. At any rate Rietschel’s conclusion is, that, since Luther makes the Christian state dependent on faith, the baptismal act as such cannot, according to him, be of any essential importance; he thinks it possible to complete Luther’s doctrine on baptism in the light of that of Zwingli and Calvin, who were of opinion that the children of Christian parents, by their very birth were received into the Church.Luther’s attitude towards these questions was treated of more in detail by the editor of the Deutsch-Evangelische Blätter, Erich Haupt, Professor of theology at Halle.[1723]Haupt agrees with Gottschick as to the possibility of discarding the Trinitarian formula in baptism, in that, like Rietschel, all he considers necessary is the liturgical retention of some definite form of words. He also subscribes in principle to Rietschel’s contention that it is possible to enter the Church without baptism. Going even further, however, he declares with regard to Luther, that it was not even necessary to borrow from Zwingli and Calvin as Rietschel had proposed. “I believe the admission that salvation may be secured even without baptism, is a necessary corollary of Luther’s theories taken in the lump. One thing that lies at the bottom of Luther’s doctrine of the sacraments is that the salvation bestowed by a sacrament is none other than that communicated by the word of the preacher.... Nay, the sacrament is merely a particular form in which the Evangel comes to men.” But wherever there is faith, there is communion with God, and faith may be wherever there is the Word of God. Just as it was said of the Supper: “crede et manducasti,” so also it might be said: “crede et baptizatus es.” “To deny this would not merely be to ascribe a magical and mechanical effect to the sacrament, but would also imply the denial of the first principle of all Evangelical Christianity, viz. that for man’s salvation nothing further is necessary than to accept in faith the offer of God’s grace given him in theGospel. In this the Reformation was simply holding to the words of Scripture (Mk. xvi. 16),” where, in the second part (“He that believeth not shall be condemned”), baptism is not mentioned.[1724]—Haupt, like Rietschel, draws attention to the fact, that, according to Luther, the unbelieving Christian, in spite of baptism, is inwardly no better than a heathen.[1725]Nevertheless Haupt is unwilling to allow that all children of Christian parents should simply be declared members of the Christian Church on account of their birth and regardless of baptism; for canonical reasons, to be considered Christians, they must be inducted into the congregation by the act of baptism,[1726]although it is “a logical outcome of the Reformer’s opinions that instances may occur where the Gospel awakens faith, and thereby incorporates in the congregation people who have never been baptised; but this is the invisible congregation of the ‘vere credentes,’ not the outward, visible, organised Church.” In order to enter children into the latter, the parents must express their wish; this is the meaning of the ceremony of baptism; the fact remains, that, dismissing the magical effect formerly ascribed to baptism, the principal thing is, “not Christian parentage as such, but the will of the parents as expressed in some way or other.”[1727]These vigorous attempts to shelter such ultra-modern views behind Luther’s authority, and to make him responsible for consequences of his doctrine, which he had been unwilling to face, have a common ground and starting-point.Wilhelm Herrmann, the Marburg theologian, in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche,” thus expresses himself on the subject.[1728]“Christians are becoming more and more conscious,” he says, “that a religion which must base its origin on an assent to ‘dogmas revealed by God’ is at variance with elements of scholarship which they can no longer deny.” He speaks of the “distress of conscience into which the Church, by her demanding assent to revealed doctrine, plunges people as soon as, under the influence of education, they have come to see what alone can induce honest assent to any idea” (viz. the fact “that one evolves it for oneself”). Luther was himself scarcely acquainted with such trouble of conscience concerning faith, notwithstanding the many spiritual troubles he had to endure. On the contrary, he unhesitatingly sought and found a source of strength in supernatural faith. Herrmann continues: “We should be unable to escape from this difficulty had not the true Christian understanding of faith, i.e. of religion, been recovered at the Reformation.” From that standpoint “any demand for an assent to revealed doctrine may well be repudiated.” For it was the teaching of Luther’s Reformation that faith “must be experienced as the gift of God if it is to be the ‘nova et spiritualis vita’ essentially ‘supra naturam.’” This, however, could not be required of all. The demand is subversive of faith itself and“embodies the false Roman principle” that everything depends on the “decision to acquiesce in a doctrine,” and not on the “experienced power of a personal life.” “To lend a hand and clear a path for the chief discovery of the Reformation is the grandest task of theology within the Protestant Church.”[1729]Luther by so incessantly emphasising personal religious experience and by his repudiation of all objective ecclesiastical authority capable of putting before mankind the contents of faith, certainly came very near that which is here represented as the “chief discovery” of the innovations undertaken by him (see above, pp. 403, vol. iii., 8 ff.). But what would the Wittenberg “lover of the Bible and Apostle of the Word” have said to the claim of modern scholars who wish simply to surrender revelation? The passages in which he so indignantly censures the unbelief of his day cannot but recur to one.[1730]Luther arbitrarily reduced the sacraments to two; “there remain,” he says, “two sacraments; baptism and the Supper.”[1731]With regard to Penance his attitude was wavering and full of contradiction. In later years he again came nearer to the Catholic teaching, arguing that Penance must also be a sacrament because, as he said in 1545, “it contains the promise of and belief in the forgiveness of sins.”[1732]He had much at heart the retention of confession and absolution under some shape or form as a remedy against the moral disorders that were creeping in.[1733]Yet, according to him, Penance was only to be regarded as the “exercise and virtue of baptism,”[1734]so that the number of the sacraments underwent no actual increase.Here, as everywhere else, the changeableness of Luther’sdoctrinal opinions is deserving of notice. The numerous instances where he relinquishes a position previously held and virtually betakes himself to another, are scarcely to the credit either of his logic or of his foresight. Such wavering and groping hither and thither is the stamp of error. In the “Histoire des variations” which might be written on the fate of Luther’s views even during his lifetime, much would be found truly characteristic of them.One sacramentarian doctrine, which to the end of his life he would never consent to relinquish, was, as we know, the Presence of Christ in the Supper. And relentless as he was in combating the Sacrifice of the Mass (see below, p. 506 ff.), yet he insisted steadfastly on the literal acceptance of Christ’s words of institution: “This is My Body.”His Teaching on the Supper.Luther’s retention of the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist may to some extent be explained by the influence which, side by side with the Bible, tradition and the authority of the Church still exercised over him, at least on such points as did not call for modification on account of his new doctrine of Justification. He had grown up in this faith, and was accustomed to give practical proof of it even when on other scores he had already broken with the Church. In this matter Scripture presented no difficulty. Had he shared Zwingli’s rationalistic leanings it is likely that, like him, he might have sought for some other interpretation of the words of institution than the obvious and literal one. It is also possible that the mysticism to which he was addicted in early years may have contributed to make him acknowledge the “mysterium tremendum” of the Sacrament, as he terms it in the language of olden days.It is true there came a time—according to him the year 1519-1520—when he felt strongly tempted to throw the Sacrament overboard, because, as he says in the well-known words, “I could thus have given a great smack in the face to Popery.” At that time I “wrestled and struggled and would gladly have escaped.” But from the plain text of the Bible, he had, so he declares, been unable to free himself. This statement, which is on the whole worthy ofbelief, we find in “Eyn Brieff an die Christen zu Straspurg” which he published in 1525, and it is further corroborated by the fact, that he there refers to two men who had been anxious to move him to the denial of the Presence of Christ, but who had failed to convince him. The two, whose names he does not mention, were probably Cornelius Hendriks Hoen, a Dutchman, and Franz Kolb of Baden, whose letters to Luther, in 1522 and 1524, trying to induce him to accept the Zwinglian sense of the Sacrament, still exist.[1735]When Carlstadt began his attack on the Real Presence, this, in view of the then situation, so Luther declares in his letter to the people of Strasburg, merely “confirmed his opinion.” “Even had I not believed it before, I should at once have known that his opinions were nought, because of his worthless, feeble stuff, devoid of any Scripture and based only on reason and conceit.” Offended vanity and annoyance with Carlstadt were here not without their effect on Luther; to deny this would argue a poor acquaintance with Luther’s psychology. It is true that the arguments of his opponent were very weak; it was not without reason that Luther speaks of his “stuff and nonsense” and “ridiculous tales.” He ranks the objections of the two letter-writers mentioned above higher than the proofs adduced by Carlstadt; at least they “wrote more skilfully and did not mangle the Word quite so badly.” Luther was, however, tactless enough to give the Strasburgers a glimpse of the secondary motives which led him to defend the Presence of Christ so strongly and defiantly from that time forward. He complains that Carlstadt was making such an ado as though he wanted “to darken the sun and light of the Evangel,” so “that the world might forget everything that had been taught them by us [by Luther] hitherto.” “I have up till now managed well and rightly in all the main points, and whoever says the contrary has no good spirit; I trust I shall not spoil it in the matter of the externals on which alone prophets such as these lay stress.”[1736]It is unnecessary to show anew here how Luther’s later defence of the Real Presence in the Eucharist against the Zwinglians contains indubitable evidence in its virulencethat Luther felt hurt. This personal element is, however, quite insufficient for one to base upon it any suspicion as to the genuineness of his convictions.If, on the other hand, we consider the strange and arbitrary form he gave to the doctrine of the Supper, more particularly by insisting that the sole aim and effect of communion is to inspire faith in the personal forgiveness of sins, then his belief in the presence of Christ appears to a certain extent to harmonise with his peculiar theological views. Amidst the storm of his struggle after certainty of salvation the pledge of it which Christ bestows in the Sacrament seems to him like a blessed anchor. That this Body was “given” for us, and this blood shed for us, and that the celebration is in memory of the saving death of Christ, as the very words of institution declare, was frequently brought forward by him as a means to reassure anxious souls. The need of strengthening our faith should, according to him, impel us to receive the Sacrament.He demands accordingly of others the same traditional faith in the Eucharist in which he found his own stay and support. While clinging to the literal interpretation of the words of the Bible, he, as we already know, is quite ready to appeal to the “dear Fathers” and to the whole of the Church’s past, at least when thereby he hopes to make an impression.[1737]To such lengths does he go in the interests of the confirmation of faith to which he strives to attain by means of this indispensable Sacrament.He overlooks the fact, however, that his view of the Supper, according to which its only purpose is to be a sign for the stimulating of saving faith, in reality undermines the doctrine of the Real Presence. True to his theory of the Sacrament and of faith he reduces the Supper to an outward sign destined to confirm the forgiveness of sins. One might ask: If it is merely a sign, is so sublime a mystery as the Real Presence at all called for? And, if it is a question of assurance, how can we be rendered secure of our salvation by something which is so far removed above the senses as the belief in the Real Presence of Christ, or by an act which makes such great demands on human reason? Luther’s theory requires a sign which should appeal to the senses and vividly remind the mind of the Redemption and thusawaken faith. This is scarcely the case in the Eucharist where Christ is invisibly present and only to be apprehended by “the Word.” If bread and wine are merely to call forth a remembrance of Christ which inspires faith, then the Zwinglian doctrine of the Sacrament fulfils all that is required. Luther does not face this difficulty, but Protestants were not slow to urge it against him.[1738]A peculiarity of Luther’s teaching on the Sacrament is to be found in his two theories of Impanation and Ubiquity. Impanation, viz. the opinion that the substance of the bread persists in the Sacrament and that Christ is present together with the bread, served him as a means to escape the Catholic doctrine of a change of substance (Transubstantiation). With the help of the theory of Ubiquity which affirmed the presence everywhere of the Body of Christ, he fancied he could extricate himself from certain difficulties raised by opponents of the Sacrament. Thehistory of both opinions presents much that is instructive. Here, however, we shall consider only the second, viz. the ubiquity of Christ’s Body.The theory of the omnipresence of the Body of Christ which Luther reached together with his doctrine of the Supper, like his other theory of the faith of infants, shows plainly not only of how much his imagination was capable, but also what curious theses he could propound in all calmness and serenity. Thus we hear him asserting that the Redeemer, the Lord of Creation, is present, in His spiritualised Body, everywhere and penetrates all things! He is present bodily at the right hand of God according to the Scriptures; but the right hand of God is everywhere, hence also in the consecrated Bread and Wine lying on the altar; consequently the Body and Blood of Christ must be there too.[1739]To the question how this comes about, he replies: “It is not for us to know,” nor does reason even understand how God can be in every creature.Much more important is it, so he says, that we should learn to seize, grasp and appropriate this ever-present Christ. “For though Christ is everywhere present, He does not everywhere allow Himself to be seized and laid hold of.... Why? Because it is one thing for God to be present and another for Him to be presentto you. He is present to you then when He pledges His Word to it and binds Himself by it and says: Here you shall find Me. When you have His Word for it, then you can truly seize Him and say: Here I have Thee, as Thou hast said.”[1740]In this way Christ assures us of His presence in the Sacrament, and invites us, so Luther teaches, to partake of Him in the Bread of the Supper. This, however, is practically to explain away the presence of Christ in the Bread (to which Luther adheres so firmly) and to dissolve it into a purely subjective apprehension. Nevertheless, at least according to certain passages, he was anxious to see the Sacrament adored and did not hesitate to do so himself.[1741]To the belief that Christ’s Body is truly received in Communion he held fast, as already stated, till the end of his life.

It is perfectly true that the Catholic Church gladly emphasises the reward charity brings to the giver.If in the times previous to Luther’s day, both in the Middle Ages and before, the Church frequently extolled the temporal and everlasting reward of charity, and if this proved to the faithful an incentive, she could at least in so doing appeal to those passages in the Gospel itself which promise to the charitable a heavenly recompense. Yet the thought of this reward did not exclude other high and worthy motives. So little were such motives slighted in the mediæval practice of charity, that, side by side with the heavenly reward, the original deeds of foundations, gifts and pious legacies still extant allege all kinds of other reasons, for instance, compassion for the helpless and concern for their bodily and spiritual welfare, or the furtherance of the common good by the establishment of institutions of public utility. One formula frequently used, which, taken literally, seems actually to ignore all merit and reward, runs variously: “For God’s sake only”; “for God”; or, “in order to please Him with temporal goods.” Thus the author of the “Wyhegertlin für alle frummen Christenmenschen,”[1699]a German work of edification, wrote in 1509: “Thanks to God’s grace there are still in our towns many hundreds of brothers and sisters who have united themselves out of Christian charity and compassion for the purpose of serving the poor sick people, the infirm, plague-stricken and lepers, purely for God’s sake.”Duke George of Saxony, in his reply to Luther’s “Widder den Meuchler zu Dresen,” really expresses the motive for the active Catholic charity formerly so lavishly displayed, when he speaks of the great possessions given by past ages of which the religious revolt had robbed the Church; of the “gifts freely given by nobles, burghers and peasants out of ardent Christian love and gratitude for His sacred bitter Passion, bright blood and guiltless death, to cloisters, parish churches, altars, chapels, cells, hospitals, religious houses, crafts,” etc.[1700]Neither did such motives or the motive of reward curtail the spirit of charity towards the close of the Middle Ages, as some Protestants have chosen to assert. On the contrary they served to animate it.On the basis of the data furnished by German archives a modern historian remarks of those times: “The spirit of Christian charity showed itself most active in the foundation of benevolent institutions, in which respect hardly any age can compare with the 15th century.”[1701]“Towards the close of the Middle Ages the gifts to hospitals, pest-houses and hostels were simply innumerable”; such is the opinion of another researcher.[1702]Even G. Uhlhorn, in his “Geschichte der christlichen Liebestätigkeit,” had to admit: “No period did so much for the poor as the Middle Ages,” though, agreeably to the standard of his peculiar Lutheranism, this author would fain make out that good works then were done out of mere egotism.Other Protestant authorities allow, that, even according to Luther’s own admission, the Catholic charity far exceeded that displayed by the new faith. “Here” (among the Catholics), says one historian, “Confraternities for the care of the poor and sick arose in the 16th and 17th centuries which far surpassed anything hitherto known in the purity of their aims and their extraordinary achievements.... Among the Catholics the reform in the nursing of the sick proceeded from Spain, which also produced the men who loomed largest in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, viz. the Jesuits and the Dominicans. From Spain came the model of the modern hospital with the nursing staff as we now know it.” “The Protestant communities during the two centuries which followed the Reformation showed a great lack of fruitfulness as regards works of charity.” “The hospitals in the Protestant districts, with few exceptions, were and remained bad, nor was anything done to improve them.”[1703]Although Luther’s praiseworthy efforts to awaken charity were not altogether wasted, yet neither his success in some localities nor the supposed purer and higher spirit he introduced into deeds of love were so apparent as to bear comparison with the charity so sedulously cultivated on the Catholic side. On the contrary, his complaints confirm the suspicion that in Lutheran circles works of charity were as a rule lamed by the lack of that very spirit of piety which should have been so manifest. (More in vol. vi., xxxv., 4.)In 1528 he told the inhabitants of Wittenberg: “This week your offerings will be solicited. I hear that people say they will give nothing to the collectors, but will turn them away. Well, thank God! You most ungrateful creatures, who are so grudging with your money, refuse to give anything, and, not satisfied with this, heap abuse on the ministers of the Church! I wish you a happy year. I am so horrified, that I do not know whether to continue preaching any longer to you, you rude brutes who cannot give even four half-pence ungrudgingly.” It was adisgrace, he says, that so far the fiscal authorities had been obliged to provide for the churches, the schools and the poor in the hospitals, whom it was the people’s duty as Christians to support. “Now that you are called upon to give four beggarly half-pence, you feel it a burden.” “Deceivers will come who will wax fat at your expense as happened formerly [in Catholic times]. I am sorry that you have arrived at such a glorious state of freedom, free from all tyrants and Papists, for, thankless brutes that you are, you don’t deserve this Evangelical treasure. Unless you mend your ways and act differently I shall cease to preach to you in order not to cast pearls before swine and to give what is holy to the dogs, and shall proclaim the Gospel to my real students who are the poor beggar-men. Formerly you gave so much to the wicked seducers [the Catholic clergy] and now ...!”[1704]Already, the year before, he had vigorously complained from the pulpit, though, as it would appear, all to no purpose: “Amongst those who hear the Word, faith is dull and charity has grown cold and hope is at an end, etc. There is no one who pities his brother’s distress. Once upon a time we gave a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand pieces of gold to the monks, canons or priests for the building of monasteries and churches. To-day no one can be found who will give a coin, let alone a piece of gold, for the poor. For this reason God sends His judgments on the world and curses the earth on account of the contempt for His Word and His Evangel; but we may look for yet worse things in the future.”[1705]Amongst the reminiscences of his journey to Italy, Luther retained a kindly memory of the charity as practised by the Catholics, particularly at Florence. We read in Lauterbach’s Diary on Aug. 1, 1538: “Then Luther spoke of charity in Italy and how the hospitals there were cared for. They are located in princely buildings, are amply supplied with food and drink, the servants are most diligent and attentive, the physicians very skilled, the bedding and clothing are perfectly clean and the beds are even painted. When a patient is brought in, he has at once to strip, an inventory of his clothes is made in the presence of a notary and they are then kept carefully for him. Then he is dressed in a white shirt and put in a nice painted bed with clean sheets, and after a little while two physicians are at his bedside; servants come and bring him food and drink in perfectly clean glass goblets, which they do not touch even with a finger, carrying everything on a tray. Even the greatest ladies come there, muffled up completely so as to be unrecognisable, in order to serve the poor for some days, after which they return to their homes. At Florence I have seen what great care is bestowed on the hospitals. Also on the foundling homes where the children are admirably installed, fed and taught, are all dressed alike and in the same colour and treated in a right fatherly way.”[1706]

It is perfectly true that the Catholic Church gladly emphasises the reward charity brings to the giver.

If in the times previous to Luther’s day, both in the Middle Ages and before, the Church frequently extolled the temporal and everlasting reward of charity, and if this proved to the faithful an incentive, she could at least in so doing appeal to those passages in the Gospel itself which promise to the charitable a heavenly recompense. Yet the thought of this reward did not exclude other high and worthy motives. So little were such motives slighted in the mediæval practice of charity, that, side by side with the heavenly reward, the original deeds of foundations, gifts and pious legacies still extant allege all kinds of other reasons, for instance, compassion for the helpless and concern for their bodily and spiritual welfare, or the furtherance of the common good by the establishment of institutions of public utility. One formula frequently used, which, taken literally, seems actually to ignore all merit and reward, runs variously: “For God’s sake only”; “for God”; or, “in order to please Him with temporal goods.” Thus the author of the “Wyhegertlin für alle frummen Christenmenschen,”[1699]a German work of edification, wrote in 1509: “Thanks to God’s grace there are still in our towns many hundreds of brothers and sisters who have united themselves out of Christian charity and compassion for the purpose of serving the poor sick people, the infirm, plague-stricken and lepers, purely for God’s sake.”

Duke George of Saxony, in his reply to Luther’s “Widder den Meuchler zu Dresen,” really expresses the motive for the active Catholic charity formerly so lavishly displayed, when he speaks of the great possessions given by past ages of which the religious revolt had robbed the Church; of the “gifts freely given by nobles, burghers and peasants out of ardent Christian love and gratitude for His sacred bitter Passion, bright blood and guiltless death, to cloisters, parish churches, altars, chapels, cells, hospitals, religious houses, crafts,” etc.[1700]

Neither did such motives or the motive of reward curtail the spirit of charity towards the close of the Middle Ages, as some Protestants have chosen to assert. On the contrary they served to animate it.

On the basis of the data furnished by German archives a modern historian remarks of those times: “The spirit of Christian charity showed itself most active in the foundation of benevolent institutions, in which respect hardly any age can compare with the 15th century.”[1701]“Towards the close of the Middle Ages the gifts to hospitals, pest-houses and hostels were simply innumerable”; such is the opinion of another researcher.[1702]Even G. Uhlhorn, in his “Geschichte der christlichen Liebestätigkeit,” had to admit: “No period did so much for the poor as the Middle Ages,” though, agreeably to the standard of his peculiar Lutheranism, this author would fain make out that good works then were done out of mere egotism.

Other Protestant authorities allow, that, even according to Luther’s own admission, the Catholic charity far exceeded that displayed by the new faith. “Here” (among the Catholics), says one historian, “Confraternities for the care of the poor and sick arose in the 16th and 17th centuries which far surpassed anything hitherto known in the purity of their aims and their extraordinary achievements.... Among the Catholics the reform in the nursing of the sick proceeded from Spain, which also produced the men who loomed largest in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, viz. the Jesuits and the Dominicans. From Spain came the model of the modern hospital with the nursing staff as we now know it.” “The Protestant communities during the two centuries which followed the Reformation showed a great lack of fruitfulness as regards works of charity.” “The hospitals in the Protestant districts, with few exceptions, were and remained bad, nor was anything done to improve them.”[1703]

Although Luther’s praiseworthy efforts to awaken charity were not altogether wasted, yet neither his success in some localities nor the supposed purer and higher spirit he introduced into deeds of love were so apparent as to bear comparison with the charity so sedulously cultivated on the Catholic side. On the contrary, his complaints confirm the suspicion that in Lutheran circles works of charity were as a rule lamed by the lack of that very spirit of piety which should have been so manifest. (More in vol. vi., xxxv., 4.)

In 1528 he told the inhabitants of Wittenberg: “This week your offerings will be solicited. I hear that people say they will give nothing to the collectors, but will turn them away. Well, thank God! You most ungrateful creatures, who are so grudging with your money, refuse to give anything, and, not satisfied with this, heap abuse on the ministers of the Church! I wish you a happy year. I am so horrified, that I do not know whether to continue preaching any longer to you, you rude brutes who cannot give even four half-pence ungrudgingly.” It was adisgrace, he says, that so far the fiscal authorities had been obliged to provide for the churches, the schools and the poor in the hospitals, whom it was the people’s duty as Christians to support. “Now that you are called upon to give four beggarly half-pence, you feel it a burden.” “Deceivers will come who will wax fat at your expense as happened formerly [in Catholic times]. I am sorry that you have arrived at such a glorious state of freedom, free from all tyrants and Papists, for, thankless brutes that you are, you don’t deserve this Evangelical treasure. Unless you mend your ways and act differently I shall cease to preach to you in order not to cast pearls before swine and to give what is holy to the dogs, and shall proclaim the Gospel to my real students who are the poor beggar-men. Formerly you gave so much to the wicked seducers [the Catholic clergy] and now ...!”[1704]Already, the year before, he had vigorously complained from the pulpit, though, as it would appear, all to no purpose: “Amongst those who hear the Word, faith is dull and charity has grown cold and hope is at an end, etc. There is no one who pities his brother’s distress. Once upon a time we gave a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand pieces of gold to the monks, canons or priests for the building of monasteries and churches. To-day no one can be found who will give a coin, let alone a piece of gold, for the poor. For this reason God sends His judgments on the world and curses the earth on account of the contempt for His Word and His Evangel; but we may look for yet worse things in the future.”[1705]

Amongst the reminiscences of his journey to Italy, Luther retained a kindly memory of the charity as practised by the Catholics, particularly at Florence. We read in Lauterbach’s Diary on Aug. 1, 1538: “Then Luther spoke of charity in Italy and how the hospitals there were cared for. They are located in princely buildings, are amply supplied with food and drink, the servants are most diligent and attentive, the physicians very skilled, the bedding and clothing are perfectly clean and the beds are even painted. When a patient is brought in, he has at once to strip, an inventory of his clothes is made in the presence of a notary and they are then kept carefully for him. Then he is dressed in a white shirt and put in a nice painted bed with clean sheets, and after a little while two physicians are at his bedside; servants come and bring him food and drink in perfectly clean glass goblets, which they do not touch even with a finger, carrying everything on a tray. Even the greatest ladies come there, muffled up completely so as to be unrecognisable, in order to serve the poor for some days, after which they return to their homes. At Florence I have seen what great care is bestowed on the hospitals. Also on the foundling homes where the children are admirably installed, fed and taught, are all dressed alike and in the same colour and treated in a right fatherly way.”[1706]

The absence of any logical system in Luther’s theological and moral views is so far from being denied by Protestants who know his theology that they even reproach Luther’s opponents for expecting to find logic in him. No system, but merely “the thought-world of a great religious man” is, so they say, all that we may look for in his works; it is true that he had a “general religious theory,” but it was “faulty, in its details not seldom contradictory, and devised for a practical and polemical object.” “Luther was no dogmatic theologian or man of system,” hence his individual sayings must not always be treated as though they were parts of a system.

There can be no doubt that this is a defect in a teacher who comes forward as the founder of a denomination and as the restorer of Christian doctrine, and who, in his quality of “Prophet of the Germans,” declares: “Before me people knew nothing.” After all, precision and coherence of doctrines form a test of their truth.

In reality the facts of the case are only indicated in a veiled way in the Protestant admissions just recorded. The truth is, as the reader has already had many an occasion to see, that, with Luther, one assertion frequently invalidates the other. Even in the field of moral teaching we find him at utter variance with himself, and his contradictions become particularly glaring as soon as he passes from theory to practice. Here it is easy to seize the “consummate contradictions of his theology,” of which a present-day Protestant theologian ventures boldly to speak; we may also subscribe to what this same writer says, viz. that Luther hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.[1707](Cp. p. 415, 447; vol. ii., p. 312, etc.)

Such a denial of the consequences of the principles of his doctrine lies first and foremost in the fact that Luther summed up in a Rule of Faith the various dogmas to which it was his intention to remain true. The “regula fidei,” such as he wished to bequeath to posterity, he saw expressedin the Confession of Augsburg, and in the oldest Œcumenical Creeds of the Church.

It has already been seen that the radicalism involved in his religious attitude should by rights have issued in a freedom, nay, licence, which would have rendered impossible any binding formularies of faith.

It is also the opinion of most modern Protestant theologians that the definition of doctrine which began with the Confession of Augsburg, or in fact with the Articles of Marburg, really constituted an unjustifiable encroachment on the freedom of religious thought inaugurated by Luther. Luther indeed invested these doctrinal formularies with all the weight of his authority, yet, according to these theologians, they represented a “narrowing” of the Evangelical ideas advocated by him; nor can it be gainsaid that the revolutionary ideas for which Luther stood from about 1520 to 1523 justify such strictures.[1708]

“This promising spring,” writes Adolf Harnack, a representative of theological freedom, “was followed by no real summer. In those years Luther was lifted above himself and seemed to have overcome the limitations of his peculiar temperament.”... But Luther unfortunately reverted to his limitations. Nor were they “merely a light vesture, or as some would fain have us believe, due simply to lack of comprehension on the part of Melanchthon and other henchmen, for Luther himself saw in them the very foundation of his strength and made the fullest use of them as such.”[1709]In other words, his contradiction with his own original principles became to him, so to speak, a second nature. He was in deadly earnest with the dogmas which he retained, and which were comprised in the official Articles of faith. In so far, therefore, he may be said to have turned away from the consequences of his own action and to have striven to slam the door which he had opened to unbelief and private judgment.Of the Confession of Augsburg, the most important of these declarations of faith, Harnack says: “That the Gospel of the Reformation found masterly expression in the ‘Augustana,’ that I cannot admit. The ‘Augustana’ founded a teaching Church; on it must be laid the blame for the narrowing of the movement of reform. Could such a thing have been written previous to 1526, or even previous to 1529?”After admitting elsewhere the advantages of the Confession of Augsburg, Harnack proceeds: “It is possible by retracing our steps to arrive through it at the broader Evangelical ideas without which there would never have been a Reformation or an‘Augustana.’ With regard to their author, however, it is no use blinking the fact, that here Melanchthon undertook, or rather was forced to undertake, a task to which his gifts and his character were not equal.”[1710]“In the theology of Melanchthon the moralist, who stands at the side of Luther the Evangelist, we discern attempts to amend Luther’s theology.... Melanchthon, however, felt himself cramped by having to act as the guardian of Lutheranism. We cannot take it ill if Lutherans prefer to err with Luther their hero, rather than submit to be put in Melanchthon’s leading-strings.”[1711]Harnack and those who think like him are even more antagonistic to the later creeds of Lutheranism than to the Confession composed by Melanchthon. “The ‘symbolic age’ when the ‘Lutheran Church’ gave ‘definite expression’ to her will is nothing more than afable convenue. ‘This Lutheran Church as an actual body,’ says Carl Müller, ‘never really existed and the spokesmen of the strictest Luther faction were just the worst enemies of such a union.... Thus to speak of creeds of the Lutheran Church involves an historic impossibility.’”[1712]According to these theologians Protestantism must hark back to Luther’s original principles of freedom. Moreover, argues Harnack, Protestantism has on the whole already reverted to this earlier standpoint. “We are not forsaking the clear testimony of history when we find in Luther’s Christianity and in the first beginnings of the Reformation all that present-day Protestantism has developed, though amidst weakness and constraint; nor when we state that Luther’s idea of faith is still to-day the moving spirit of Protestantism, however many or however few may have made it their own.”[1713]Luther’s “most effective propositions,” according to him, may well be allowed to stand as the “heirloom of the Evangelical Churches”; it is plain that they do not lead to a mere “dogmatic Christianity,” but to true Christianity consisting in the “disposition which the Father of Jesus Christ awakens in the heart through the Gospel.” Luther himself has only to be rightly appreciated and “allowed to remain Luther.”[1714]Harnack repeatedly insists that Luther by setting aside all authority on dogma, whether of the Church, the hierarchy or tradition, also destroyed the binding character of any “doctrine.” By his attack on all authority he dealt a mortal blow at the vital principle of the ancient Church, traceable back to the second century. According to him “every doctrinal formulary of the past required objective proof”; this objective proof was to him the sole authority. “How then could there be authority when the objective proof failed or seemed to demonstrate the contrary?” To judge of the proof is within the province of each individual, and, according as he is constituted, the result will bedifferent. “Luther—even at the most critical moment, when he seemed to stand in the greatest need of the formal authority of the letter—did not allow himself to be overawed or his mouth to be closed even by the Apostles’ Creed.” He indeed “involved himself later in limitations and restrictions,” “but there can be no doubt ... that by his previous historic behaviour towards them he had undermined all the formal authorities of Catholicism.”[1715]On this fundamental question of the possibility of a “regula fidei” in Luther’s case, we may listen to the opinion of another esteemed Protestant historian of late years.Friedrich Paulsen, in his much-prized “Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts,” writes: “The Word of God does not suffice as a ‘regula fidei,’ but a personal authority is also needed to decide on questions of doctrine, this is what the Luther of 1535 says and thereby confutes the Luther of 1521, who refused to allow anyone on earth to point out to him the faith unless he himself could gather its truth from the Word of God. Had Luther abided by his rejection of all human authority he should have declared: On the interpretation of Scripture there is no final court of appeal, each one believes or errs at his own peril.... What Luther had relied on in 1521 against the Papists, viz. inability to refute him from Scripture, was used against him in his own struggle with the ‘fanatics.’... For the confuting of heretics a rule of faith is needed, and what is more, a living one to decide in each case. The principle of 1521, to allow no authority on earth to prescribe the faith, is anarchical. On these lines there can be no ‘Church’ with an ‘examen doctrinæ’ of its candidates and Visitations of the clergy. This the Reformers also saw and thus there was nothing left for them, if they were to retain a ‘Church,’ than to set up their own authority in the stead of the authority of Pope and Councils. On one vexatious point they were, however, at a loss: Against the later Luther it was always possible to appeal to the Luther of Worms. The starting-point andraison d’êtreof the whole Reformation was the repudiation on principle of all human authority in matters of faith; after this, to find Luther installed as Pope, was scarcely pleasing. If anyone stands in need of a Pope he would surely be better advised in sticking to the real one at Rome.... The hole in Luther’s teaching still remains a hole in the principle of the Protestant Church to-day: There can be no earthly authority in matters of faith, and: Such an authority there must be, this is an antinomy which lies at its very root. Nor is the antinomy accidental, but lies in the very nature of the matter and is expressed as often as we speak of the ‘Protestant Church.’ If there is to be a Church ... then the individual must submit himself and his ‘faith’ to the ‘faith’ of the community.” Paulsen, who had spoken of “Luther as Pope,” refers to Luther’s own remark when taking his seat with Bugenhagen in the carriage in which he went to meet Vergerio the Papal Nuncio: “Here go the German Pope and Cardinal Pomeranus, God’s chosen instruments”; Luther’s remark wasof course spoken in jest, but the jest “was only possible against a background of bitter earnest”; Luther frequently dallied with this idea; “for the position Luther occupied, ages even after his death, there really was no other comparison to be found.... With the above jest Luther reduced himself ad absurdum.”[1716]—Such censures are in reality more in place than those eulogies of Luther’s exclamation at Worms in 1521 on the freedom of Bible conviction, into which orthodox Protestant biographers of Luther sometimes lapse.

“This promising spring,” writes Adolf Harnack, a representative of theological freedom, “was followed by no real summer. In those years Luther was lifted above himself and seemed to have overcome the limitations of his peculiar temperament.”... But Luther unfortunately reverted to his limitations. Nor were they “merely a light vesture, or as some would fain have us believe, due simply to lack of comprehension on the part of Melanchthon and other henchmen, for Luther himself saw in them the very foundation of his strength and made the fullest use of them as such.”[1709]

In other words, his contradiction with his own original principles became to him, so to speak, a second nature. He was in deadly earnest with the dogmas which he retained, and which were comprised in the official Articles of faith. In so far, therefore, he may be said to have turned away from the consequences of his own action and to have striven to slam the door which he had opened to unbelief and private judgment.

Of the Confession of Augsburg, the most important of these declarations of faith, Harnack says: “That the Gospel of the Reformation found masterly expression in the ‘Augustana,’ that I cannot admit. The ‘Augustana’ founded a teaching Church; on it must be laid the blame for the narrowing of the movement of reform. Could such a thing have been written previous to 1526, or even previous to 1529?”

After admitting elsewhere the advantages of the Confession of Augsburg, Harnack proceeds: “It is possible by retracing our steps to arrive through it at the broader Evangelical ideas without which there would never have been a Reformation or an‘Augustana.’ With regard to their author, however, it is no use blinking the fact, that here Melanchthon undertook, or rather was forced to undertake, a task to which his gifts and his character were not equal.”[1710]“In the theology of Melanchthon the moralist, who stands at the side of Luther the Evangelist, we discern attempts to amend Luther’s theology.... Melanchthon, however, felt himself cramped by having to act as the guardian of Lutheranism. We cannot take it ill if Lutherans prefer to err with Luther their hero, rather than submit to be put in Melanchthon’s leading-strings.”[1711]

Harnack and those who think like him are even more antagonistic to the later creeds of Lutheranism than to the Confession composed by Melanchthon. “The ‘symbolic age’ when the ‘Lutheran Church’ gave ‘definite expression’ to her will is nothing more than afable convenue. ‘This Lutheran Church as an actual body,’ says Carl Müller, ‘never really existed and the spokesmen of the strictest Luther faction were just the worst enemies of such a union.... Thus to speak of creeds of the Lutheran Church involves an historic impossibility.’”[1712]According to these theologians Protestantism must hark back to Luther’s original principles of freedom. Moreover, argues Harnack, Protestantism has on the whole already reverted to this earlier standpoint. “We are not forsaking the clear testimony of history when we find in Luther’s Christianity and in the first beginnings of the Reformation all that present-day Protestantism has developed, though amidst weakness and constraint; nor when we state that Luther’s idea of faith is still to-day the moving spirit of Protestantism, however many or however few may have made it their own.”[1713]Luther’s “most effective propositions,” according to him, may well be allowed to stand as the “heirloom of the Evangelical Churches”; it is plain that they do not lead to a mere “dogmatic Christianity,” but to true Christianity consisting in the “disposition which the Father of Jesus Christ awakens in the heart through the Gospel.” Luther himself has only to be rightly appreciated and “allowed to remain Luther.”[1714]

Harnack repeatedly insists that Luther by setting aside all authority on dogma, whether of the Church, the hierarchy or tradition, also destroyed the binding character of any “doctrine.” By his attack on all authority he dealt a mortal blow at the vital principle of the ancient Church, traceable back to the second century. According to him “every doctrinal formulary of the past required objective proof”; this objective proof was to him the sole authority. “How then could there be authority when the objective proof failed or seemed to demonstrate the contrary?” To judge of the proof is within the province of each individual, and, according as he is constituted, the result will bedifferent. “Luther—even at the most critical moment, when he seemed to stand in the greatest need of the formal authority of the letter—did not allow himself to be overawed or his mouth to be closed even by the Apostles’ Creed.” He indeed “involved himself later in limitations and restrictions,” “but there can be no doubt ... that by his previous historic behaviour towards them he had undermined all the formal authorities of Catholicism.”[1715]

On this fundamental question of the possibility of a “regula fidei” in Luther’s case, we may listen to the opinion of another esteemed Protestant historian of late years.

Friedrich Paulsen, in his much-prized “Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts,” writes: “The Word of God does not suffice as a ‘regula fidei,’ but a personal authority is also needed to decide on questions of doctrine, this is what the Luther of 1535 says and thereby confutes the Luther of 1521, who refused to allow anyone on earth to point out to him the faith unless he himself could gather its truth from the Word of God. Had Luther abided by his rejection of all human authority he should have declared: On the interpretation of Scripture there is no final court of appeal, each one believes or errs at his own peril.... What Luther had relied on in 1521 against the Papists, viz. inability to refute him from Scripture, was used against him in his own struggle with the ‘fanatics.’... For the confuting of heretics a rule of faith is needed, and what is more, a living one to decide in each case. The principle of 1521, to allow no authority on earth to prescribe the faith, is anarchical. On these lines there can be no ‘Church’ with an ‘examen doctrinæ’ of its candidates and Visitations of the clergy. This the Reformers also saw and thus there was nothing left for them, if they were to retain a ‘Church,’ than to set up their own authority in the stead of the authority of Pope and Councils. On one vexatious point they were, however, at a loss: Against the later Luther it was always possible to appeal to the Luther of Worms. The starting-point andraison d’êtreof the whole Reformation was the repudiation on principle of all human authority in matters of faith; after this, to find Luther installed as Pope, was scarcely pleasing. If anyone stands in need of a Pope he would surely be better advised in sticking to the real one at Rome.... The hole in Luther’s teaching still remains a hole in the principle of the Protestant Church to-day: There can be no earthly authority in matters of faith, and: Such an authority there must be, this is an antinomy which lies at its very root. Nor is the antinomy accidental, but lies in the very nature of the matter and is expressed as often as we speak of the ‘Protestant Church.’ If there is to be a Church ... then the individual must submit himself and his ‘faith’ to the ‘faith’ of the community.” Paulsen, who had spoken of “Luther as Pope,” refers to Luther’s own remark when taking his seat with Bugenhagen in the carriage in which he went to meet Vergerio the Papal Nuncio: “Here go the German Pope and Cardinal Pomeranus, God’s chosen instruments”; Luther’s remark wasof course spoken in jest, but the jest “was only possible against a background of bitter earnest”; Luther frequently dallied with this idea; “for the position Luther occupied, ages even after his death, there really was no other comparison to be found.... With the above jest Luther reduced himself ad absurdum.”[1716]—Such censures are in reality more in place than those eulogies of Luther’s exclamation at Worms in 1521 on the freedom of Bible conviction, into which orthodox Protestant biographers of Luther sometimes lapse.

The theological pillars of the edifice of public worship are the seven sacraments, the visible signs ordained by Christ by which grace is given to our souls. Held in honour even by the Nestorians and Monophysites as witnesses to ecclesiastical antiquity, they enfold and hallow all the chief events of human life. Luther debased the effect of the sacraments by making it something wholly subjective, produced by the recipients themselves in virtue of the faith infused into them by God, whereas the Church has ever recognised the sacraments as sublime and mysterious signs, which of themselves work in the receiver (“ex opere operato”) according to the extent of his preparation, Christ having made the grace promised dependent on the outward signs instituted by Himself. Luther, on the other hand, by declaring the sacraments mere symbols whereby faith is strengthened, operative only by virtue of the recipient’s faith in the pardon and forgiveness of his sins, reduced them to the status of empty pledges for soothing and consoling consciences. Only later did he again come nearer to the Catholic doctrine of the “opus operatum.” With his view, however, that the sole object of the sacraments is to increase the “fides specialis,” we arrive again at the point which for Luther is the sum total of religion, viz.: “mere forgiveness.”

He was not at all conscious of the contradiction involved in his vigorous insistence on the absolute necessity of the sacraments for salvation. From his standpoint Carlstadt was far more logical when he said: “If Christ [alone] is peace and assurance [of salvation], then lifeless creatures [the sacramental, outward signs] can surely not satisfy or make secure.”[1717]

Luther raised no objection to infant baptism. He also wished it, and baptism in general, to be given in the usual way in the name of the Trinity. But how did he try to solve the difficulty arising from his theory of the sacraments: If the sacrament only works in virtue of the faith of the receiver and the effect is merely an increase of faith, of what advantage can it be to the infant who is incapable of belief? He endeavoured to remedy the defect with the help of the faith of the congregation.

Meeting difficulties on this line he did not shrink from claiming a perpetually recurring miracle, and proposed to assume that, during the act of baptism, the new-born infant was momentarily endowed by God with the use of reason and filled with faith.

In his “De captivitate babylonica” he had already attempted to cut the Gordian knot presented by infant baptism by this assumption, which, however arbitrary, is quite intelligible from his psychological standpoint. Thanks to the believing prayer of the congregation who present the children for baptism, so he said, faith is infused into them and they thus become regenerate. In 1523 he states that children have a hidden faith. “From that time onwards the tendency of his teaching was to require faith from candidates for baptism.... Even after the Concord he continued to speak exactly as before.”[1718]The Bible teaches nothing about infant baptism. Yet Luther declares in 1545 in a set of theses: “It is false and outrageous to say that little children do not believe, or are unworthy,” while at the head of the theses these words stand: “Everything that in the Church, which is God’s people, is taught without the Word of God, is assuredly false and unchristian.”[1719]

It is of interest to follow up his arguments for the faith of infants. In 1522 already he had attempted in a letter to prove to Melanchthon the possibility of such unconscious faith. He referred him to the circumstance, which, however, is irrelevant, “that we retain the faith while asleep or otherwise engaged.” Moreover, since to him who believes, everything is possible with God, so, too, to the congregation which prays for the children; the children are presentedby the congregation to the Lord of all, and He, by His Omnipotence, kindles faith in them. In the same letter, aimed at the Anabaptists, who were then beginning to be heard of, we find an emphatic appeal to the authority and belief of the Church (“totius orbis constans confessio”), which, as a rule, Luther was so ruthless in opposing. “It would be quite impious to deny that infant baptism agrees with the belief of the Church; to do so would be tantamount to denying the Church”; it was a special miracle that infant baptism had never been attacked by heretics; there was therefore good reason to hope that Christ, now, would trample the new foemen “under our feet.” Luther forgets that the ancient Church was not hampered by such a heel of Achilles as was his own teaching, viz. that the sacraments owed all their efficacy to faith. We can, however, quite understand his admission to Melanchthon: “I have always expected that Satan would lay violent hands on this weak spot, but he has chosen to stir up this pernicious quarrel, not through the Papists, but with the help of our own people.”[1720]The rise of the Anabaptist heresy was indeed merely a natural reaction against Luther’s doctrine of baptism.

Seeing that the doctrine of baptism is of such importance to the Christian Church, we may be permitted to consider the inferences regarding the sacrament of baptism drawn in modern times from Luther’s conception of it, and from his whole attitude towards faith and Christianity. A domestic dispute among the Protestants at Bremen in 1905 on the validity of baptism not administered according to the usages of the Church, led to a remarkable discussion among theologians of broader views, some of whom went so far as to argue in Luther’s name and that of his Reformation, that baptism should be abolished.

Johannes Gottschick in “Die Lehre der Reformation von der Taufe” (1906) defended the opinion that, according to the real views of the Reformers, baptism was valid even when conferred without any mention of the Trinity.—O. Scheel, on his side,pointed out in his book “Die dogmatische Behandlung der Tauflehre in der modernen positiven Theologie” (1906), that a contradiction with the principle of the Reformation was apparent even in Luther’s own theology, inasmuch as, according to this principle, baptism should merely be the proclaiming of the Word of God; in the ceremony of baptism, according to the Reformation teaching, which should be taken seriously, “the Word is all”; baptism is the solemn declaration that the child has been received into the congregation and the bestowal on it of the promise of salvation, hence requires no repetition. “As to when the Word works faith [in them] we do not know, nor is it necessary that theology should know”; the power of God knows the day and the hour.[1721]—The question: “Can baptism be regarded rightly as the exclusive act of reception into the Church?” was answered negatively by Rietschel in an article under that title in the “Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht,”[1722]in which he too appeals to Luther. At any rate Rietschel’s conclusion is, that, since Luther makes the Christian state dependent on faith, the baptismal act as such cannot, according to him, be of any essential importance; he thinks it possible to complete Luther’s doctrine on baptism in the light of that of Zwingli and Calvin, who were of opinion that the children of Christian parents, by their very birth were received into the Church.Luther’s attitude towards these questions was treated of more in detail by the editor of the Deutsch-Evangelische Blätter, Erich Haupt, Professor of theology at Halle.[1723]Haupt agrees with Gottschick as to the possibility of discarding the Trinitarian formula in baptism, in that, like Rietschel, all he considers necessary is the liturgical retention of some definite form of words. He also subscribes in principle to Rietschel’s contention that it is possible to enter the Church without baptism. Going even further, however, he declares with regard to Luther, that it was not even necessary to borrow from Zwingli and Calvin as Rietschel had proposed. “I believe the admission that salvation may be secured even without baptism, is a necessary corollary of Luther’s theories taken in the lump. One thing that lies at the bottom of Luther’s doctrine of the sacraments is that the salvation bestowed by a sacrament is none other than that communicated by the word of the preacher.... Nay, the sacrament is merely a particular form in which the Evangel comes to men.” But wherever there is faith, there is communion with God, and faith may be wherever there is the Word of God. Just as it was said of the Supper: “crede et manducasti,” so also it might be said: “crede et baptizatus es.” “To deny this would not merely be to ascribe a magical and mechanical effect to the sacrament, but would also imply the denial of the first principle of all Evangelical Christianity, viz. that for man’s salvation nothing further is necessary than to accept in faith the offer of God’s grace given him in theGospel. In this the Reformation was simply holding to the words of Scripture (Mk. xvi. 16),” where, in the second part (“He that believeth not shall be condemned”), baptism is not mentioned.[1724]—Haupt, like Rietschel, draws attention to the fact, that, according to Luther, the unbelieving Christian, in spite of baptism, is inwardly no better than a heathen.[1725]Nevertheless Haupt is unwilling to allow that all children of Christian parents should simply be declared members of the Christian Church on account of their birth and regardless of baptism; for canonical reasons, to be considered Christians, they must be inducted into the congregation by the act of baptism,[1726]although it is “a logical outcome of the Reformer’s opinions that instances may occur where the Gospel awakens faith, and thereby incorporates in the congregation people who have never been baptised; but this is the invisible congregation of the ‘vere credentes,’ not the outward, visible, organised Church.” In order to enter children into the latter, the parents must express their wish; this is the meaning of the ceremony of baptism; the fact remains, that, dismissing the magical effect formerly ascribed to baptism, the principal thing is, “not Christian parentage as such, but the will of the parents as expressed in some way or other.”[1727]These vigorous attempts to shelter such ultra-modern views behind Luther’s authority, and to make him responsible for consequences of his doctrine, which he had been unwilling to face, have a common ground and starting-point.Wilhelm Herrmann, the Marburg theologian, in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche,” thus expresses himself on the subject.[1728]“Christians are becoming more and more conscious,” he says, “that a religion which must base its origin on an assent to ‘dogmas revealed by God’ is at variance with elements of scholarship which they can no longer deny.” He speaks of the “distress of conscience into which the Church, by her demanding assent to revealed doctrine, plunges people as soon as, under the influence of education, they have come to see what alone can induce honest assent to any idea” (viz. the fact “that one evolves it for oneself”). Luther was himself scarcely acquainted with such trouble of conscience concerning faith, notwithstanding the many spiritual troubles he had to endure. On the contrary, he unhesitatingly sought and found a source of strength in supernatural faith. Herrmann continues: “We should be unable to escape from this difficulty had not the true Christian understanding of faith, i.e. of religion, been recovered at the Reformation.” From that standpoint “any demand for an assent to revealed doctrine may well be repudiated.” For it was the teaching of Luther’s Reformation that faith “must be experienced as the gift of God if it is to be the ‘nova et spiritualis vita’ essentially ‘supra naturam.’” This, however, could not be required of all. The demand is subversive of faith itself and“embodies the false Roman principle” that everything depends on the “decision to acquiesce in a doctrine,” and not on the “experienced power of a personal life.” “To lend a hand and clear a path for the chief discovery of the Reformation is the grandest task of theology within the Protestant Church.”[1729]Luther by so incessantly emphasising personal religious experience and by his repudiation of all objective ecclesiastical authority capable of putting before mankind the contents of faith, certainly came very near that which is here represented as the “chief discovery” of the innovations undertaken by him (see above, pp. 403, vol. iii., 8 ff.). But what would the Wittenberg “lover of the Bible and Apostle of the Word” have said to the claim of modern scholars who wish simply to surrender revelation? The passages in which he so indignantly censures the unbelief of his day cannot but recur to one.[1730]

Johannes Gottschick in “Die Lehre der Reformation von der Taufe” (1906) defended the opinion that, according to the real views of the Reformers, baptism was valid even when conferred without any mention of the Trinity.—O. Scheel, on his side,pointed out in his book “Die dogmatische Behandlung der Tauflehre in der modernen positiven Theologie” (1906), that a contradiction with the principle of the Reformation was apparent even in Luther’s own theology, inasmuch as, according to this principle, baptism should merely be the proclaiming of the Word of God; in the ceremony of baptism, according to the Reformation teaching, which should be taken seriously, “the Word is all”; baptism is the solemn declaration that the child has been received into the congregation and the bestowal on it of the promise of salvation, hence requires no repetition. “As to when the Word works faith [in them] we do not know, nor is it necessary that theology should know”; the power of God knows the day and the hour.[1721]—The question: “Can baptism be regarded rightly as the exclusive act of reception into the Church?” was answered negatively by Rietschel in an article under that title in the “Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht,”[1722]in which he too appeals to Luther. At any rate Rietschel’s conclusion is, that, since Luther makes the Christian state dependent on faith, the baptismal act as such cannot, according to him, be of any essential importance; he thinks it possible to complete Luther’s doctrine on baptism in the light of that of Zwingli and Calvin, who were of opinion that the children of Christian parents, by their very birth were received into the Church.

Luther’s attitude towards these questions was treated of more in detail by the editor of the Deutsch-Evangelische Blätter, Erich Haupt, Professor of theology at Halle.[1723]

Haupt agrees with Gottschick as to the possibility of discarding the Trinitarian formula in baptism, in that, like Rietschel, all he considers necessary is the liturgical retention of some definite form of words. He also subscribes in principle to Rietschel’s contention that it is possible to enter the Church without baptism. Going even further, however, he declares with regard to Luther, that it was not even necessary to borrow from Zwingli and Calvin as Rietschel had proposed. “I believe the admission that salvation may be secured even without baptism, is a necessary corollary of Luther’s theories taken in the lump. One thing that lies at the bottom of Luther’s doctrine of the sacraments is that the salvation bestowed by a sacrament is none other than that communicated by the word of the preacher.... Nay, the sacrament is merely a particular form in which the Evangel comes to men.” But wherever there is faith, there is communion with God, and faith may be wherever there is the Word of God. Just as it was said of the Supper: “crede et manducasti,” so also it might be said: “crede et baptizatus es.” “To deny this would not merely be to ascribe a magical and mechanical effect to the sacrament, but would also imply the denial of the first principle of all Evangelical Christianity, viz. that for man’s salvation nothing further is necessary than to accept in faith the offer of God’s grace given him in theGospel. In this the Reformation was simply holding to the words of Scripture (Mk. xvi. 16),” where, in the second part (“He that believeth not shall be condemned”), baptism is not mentioned.[1724]—Haupt, like Rietschel, draws attention to the fact, that, according to Luther, the unbelieving Christian, in spite of baptism, is inwardly no better than a heathen.[1725]Nevertheless Haupt is unwilling to allow that all children of Christian parents should simply be declared members of the Christian Church on account of their birth and regardless of baptism; for canonical reasons, to be considered Christians, they must be inducted into the congregation by the act of baptism,[1726]although it is “a logical outcome of the Reformer’s opinions that instances may occur where the Gospel awakens faith, and thereby incorporates in the congregation people who have never been baptised; but this is the invisible congregation of the ‘vere credentes,’ not the outward, visible, organised Church.” In order to enter children into the latter, the parents must express their wish; this is the meaning of the ceremony of baptism; the fact remains, that, dismissing the magical effect formerly ascribed to baptism, the principal thing is, “not Christian parentage as such, but the will of the parents as expressed in some way or other.”[1727]

These vigorous attempts to shelter such ultra-modern views behind Luther’s authority, and to make him responsible for consequences of his doctrine, which he had been unwilling to face, have a common ground and starting-point.

Wilhelm Herrmann, the Marburg theologian, in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche,” thus expresses himself on the subject.[1728]“Christians are becoming more and more conscious,” he says, “that a religion which must base its origin on an assent to ‘dogmas revealed by God’ is at variance with elements of scholarship which they can no longer deny.” He speaks of the “distress of conscience into which the Church, by her demanding assent to revealed doctrine, plunges people as soon as, under the influence of education, they have come to see what alone can induce honest assent to any idea” (viz. the fact “that one evolves it for oneself”). Luther was himself scarcely acquainted with such trouble of conscience concerning faith, notwithstanding the many spiritual troubles he had to endure. On the contrary, he unhesitatingly sought and found a source of strength in supernatural faith. Herrmann continues: “We should be unable to escape from this difficulty had not the true Christian understanding of faith, i.e. of religion, been recovered at the Reformation.” From that standpoint “any demand for an assent to revealed doctrine may well be repudiated.” For it was the teaching of Luther’s Reformation that faith “must be experienced as the gift of God if it is to be the ‘nova et spiritualis vita’ essentially ‘supra naturam.’” This, however, could not be required of all. The demand is subversive of faith itself and“embodies the false Roman principle” that everything depends on the “decision to acquiesce in a doctrine,” and not on the “experienced power of a personal life.” “To lend a hand and clear a path for the chief discovery of the Reformation is the grandest task of theology within the Protestant Church.”[1729]

Luther by so incessantly emphasising personal religious experience and by his repudiation of all objective ecclesiastical authority capable of putting before mankind the contents of faith, certainly came very near that which is here represented as the “chief discovery” of the innovations undertaken by him (see above, pp. 403, vol. iii., 8 ff.). But what would the Wittenberg “lover of the Bible and Apostle of the Word” have said to the claim of modern scholars who wish simply to surrender revelation? The passages in which he so indignantly censures the unbelief of his day cannot but recur to one.[1730]

Luther arbitrarily reduced the sacraments to two; “there remain,” he says, “two sacraments; baptism and the Supper.”[1731]With regard to Penance his attitude was wavering and full of contradiction. In later years he again came nearer to the Catholic teaching, arguing that Penance must also be a sacrament because, as he said in 1545, “it contains the promise of and belief in the forgiveness of sins.”[1732]He had much at heart the retention of confession and absolution under some shape or form as a remedy against the moral disorders that were creeping in.[1733]Yet, according to him, Penance was only to be regarded as the “exercise and virtue of baptism,”[1734]so that the number of the sacraments underwent no actual increase.

Here, as everywhere else, the changeableness of Luther’sdoctrinal opinions is deserving of notice. The numerous instances where he relinquishes a position previously held and virtually betakes himself to another, are scarcely to the credit either of his logic or of his foresight. Such wavering and groping hither and thither is the stamp of error. In the “Histoire des variations” which might be written on the fate of Luther’s views even during his lifetime, much would be found truly characteristic of them.

One sacramentarian doctrine, which to the end of his life he would never consent to relinquish, was, as we know, the Presence of Christ in the Supper. And relentless as he was in combating the Sacrifice of the Mass (see below, p. 506 ff.), yet he insisted steadfastly on the literal acceptance of Christ’s words of institution: “This is My Body.”

Luther’s retention of the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist may to some extent be explained by the influence which, side by side with the Bible, tradition and the authority of the Church still exercised over him, at least on such points as did not call for modification on account of his new doctrine of Justification. He had grown up in this faith, and was accustomed to give practical proof of it even when on other scores he had already broken with the Church. In this matter Scripture presented no difficulty. Had he shared Zwingli’s rationalistic leanings it is likely that, like him, he might have sought for some other interpretation of the words of institution than the obvious and literal one. It is also possible that the mysticism to which he was addicted in early years may have contributed to make him acknowledge the “mysterium tremendum” of the Sacrament, as he terms it in the language of olden days.

It is true there came a time—according to him the year 1519-1520—when he felt strongly tempted to throw the Sacrament overboard, because, as he says in the well-known words, “I could thus have given a great smack in the face to Popery.” At that time I “wrestled and struggled and would gladly have escaped.” But from the plain text of the Bible, he had, so he declares, been unable to free himself. This statement, which is on the whole worthy ofbelief, we find in “Eyn Brieff an die Christen zu Straspurg” which he published in 1525, and it is further corroborated by the fact, that he there refers to two men who had been anxious to move him to the denial of the Presence of Christ, but who had failed to convince him. The two, whose names he does not mention, were probably Cornelius Hendriks Hoen, a Dutchman, and Franz Kolb of Baden, whose letters to Luther, in 1522 and 1524, trying to induce him to accept the Zwinglian sense of the Sacrament, still exist.[1735]

When Carlstadt began his attack on the Real Presence, this, in view of the then situation, so Luther declares in his letter to the people of Strasburg, merely “confirmed his opinion.” “Even had I not believed it before, I should at once have known that his opinions were nought, because of his worthless, feeble stuff, devoid of any Scripture and based only on reason and conceit.” Offended vanity and annoyance with Carlstadt were here not without their effect on Luther; to deny this would argue a poor acquaintance with Luther’s psychology. It is true that the arguments of his opponent were very weak; it was not without reason that Luther speaks of his “stuff and nonsense” and “ridiculous tales.” He ranks the objections of the two letter-writers mentioned above higher than the proofs adduced by Carlstadt; at least they “wrote more skilfully and did not mangle the Word quite so badly.” Luther was, however, tactless enough to give the Strasburgers a glimpse of the secondary motives which led him to defend the Presence of Christ so strongly and defiantly from that time forward. He complains that Carlstadt was making such an ado as though he wanted “to darken the sun and light of the Evangel,” so “that the world might forget everything that had been taught them by us [by Luther] hitherto.” “I have up till now managed well and rightly in all the main points, and whoever says the contrary has no good spirit; I trust I shall not spoil it in the matter of the externals on which alone prophets such as these lay stress.”[1736]

It is unnecessary to show anew here how Luther’s later defence of the Real Presence in the Eucharist against the Zwinglians contains indubitable evidence in its virulencethat Luther felt hurt. This personal element is, however, quite insufficient for one to base upon it any suspicion as to the genuineness of his convictions.

If, on the other hand, we consider the strange and arbitrary form he gave to the doctrine of the Supper, more particularly by insisting that the sole aim and effect of communion is to inspire faith in the personal forgiveness of sins, then his belief in the presence of Christ appears to a certain extent to harmonise with his peculiar theological views. Amidst the storm of his struggle after certainty of salvation the pledge of it which Christ bestows in the Sacrament seems to him like a blessed anchor. That this Body was “given” for us, and this blood shed for us, and that the celebration is in memory of the saving death of Christ, as the very words of institution declare, was frequently brought forward by him as a means to reassure anxious souls. The need of strengthening our faith should, according to him, impel us to receive the Sacrament.

He demands accordingly of others the same traditional faith in the Eucharist in which he found his own stay and support. While clinging to the literal interpretation of the words of the Bible, he, as we already know, is quite ready to appeal to the “dear Fathers” and to the whole of the Church’s past, at least when thereby he hopes to make an impression.[1737]To such lengths does he go in the interests of the confirmation of faith to which he strives to attain by means of this indispensable Sacrament.

He overlooks the fact, however, that his view of the Supper, according to which its only purpose is to be a sign for the stimulating of saving faith, in reality undermines the doctrine of the Real Presence. True to his theory of the Sacrament and of faith he reduces the Supper to an outward sign destined to confirm the forgiveness of sins. One might ask: If it is merely a sign, is so sublime a mystery as the Real Presence at all called for? And, if it is a question of assurance, how can we be rendered secure of our salvation by something which is so far removed above the senses as the belief in the Real Presence of Christ, or by an act which makes such great demands on human reason? Luther’s theory requires a sign which should appeal to the senses and vividly remind the mind of the Redemption and thusawaken faith. This is scarcely the case in the Eucharist where Christ is invisibly present and only to be apprehended by “the Word.” If bread and wine are merely to call forth a remembrance of Christ which inspires faith, then the Zwinglian doctrine of the Sacrament fulfils all that is required. Luther does not face this difficulty, but Protestants were not slow to urge it against him.[1738]

A peculiarity of Luther’s teaching on the Sacrament is to be found in his two theories of Impanation and Ubiquity. Impanation, viz. the opinion that the substance of the bread persists in the Sacrament and that Christ is present together with the bread, served him as a means to escape the Catholic doctrine of a change of substance (Transubstantiation). With the help of the theory of Ubiquity which affirmed the presence everywhere of the Body of Christ, he fancied he could extricate himself from certain difficulties raised by opponents of the Sacrament. Thehistory of both opinions presents much that is instructive. Here, however, we shall consider only the second, viz. the ubiquity of Christ’s Body.

The theory of the omnipresence of the Body of Christ which Luther reached together with his doctrine of the Supper, like his other theory of the faith of infants, shows plainly not only of how much his imagination was capable, but also what curious theses he could propound in all calmness and serenity. Thus we hear him asserting that the Redeemer, the Lord of Creation, is present, in His spiritualised Body, everywhere and penetrates all things! He is present bodily at the right hand of God according to the Scriptures; but the right hand of God is everywhere, hence also in the consecrated Bread and Wine lying on the altar; consequently the Body and Blood of Christ must be there too.[1739]To the question how this comes about, he replies: “It is not for us to know,” nor does reason even understand how God can be in every creature.

Much more important is it, so he says, that we should learn to seize, grasp and appropriate this ever-present Christ. “For though Christ is everywhere present, He does not everywhere allow Himself to be seized and laid hold of.... Why? Because it is one thing for God to be present and another for Him to be presentto you. He is present to you then when He pledges His Word to it and binds Himself by it and says: Here you shall find Me. When you have His Word for it, then you can truly seize Him and say: Here I have Thee, as Thou hast said.”[1740]In this way Christ assures us of His presence in the Sacrament, and invites us, so Luther teaches, to partake of Him in the Bread of the Supper. This, however, is practically to explain away the presence of Christ in the Bread (to which Luther adheres so firmly) and to dissolve it into a purely subjective apprehension. Nevertheless, at least according to certain passages, he was anxious to see the Sacrament adored and did not hesitate to do so himself.[1741]

To the belief that Christ’s Body is truly received in Communion he held fast, as already stated, till the end of his life.

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