CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIIVOICES FROM THE CAMP OF THE DEFENDERS OF THE CHURCH1. Luther’s “demoniacal” storming. A man “possessed”Wehave plenty descriptions of Luther from the pen of literary opponents, and they have a perfect right to be taken into account, for they are so many voices courageously raised in defence of the heirloom of the faith. What has led to this being so often passed over is the fear lest their censure should be taken as prejudice, and, needless to say, what they tell us must be carefully weighed. Much depends on the circumstances in which they wrote, on the character of the writers, on the content of their statements and on how far they differ from or agree with other witnesses and the known facts. Several striking passages from their writings, in so far as they are confirmed either by Luther himself or by his followers, have already been utilised in the present work and have served to complete our picture of Luther’s mind.Catholic polemists all agree on one point, viz. that the bitter and unkindly ways of their adversary were a clear proof that he had no Divine call. Like Erasmus, they too contend that no man who excited such great commotion and was so insatiable in abuse and vituperation could be honestly furthering God’s cause. Like Erasmus, they too question whether such unheard-of presumption could “be combined with an apostolic spirit or did not rather denote madness.” They compare his inconstancy, his passion and his fickleness to a “restless, stormy sea.” His slanderous tongue, which so unsparingly lashed the olden Church and its doctrines, reminds them of the “roaring lion,” who, according to St. Peter, “goeth about seeking whom he may devour,” or of the “fiery darts” of the wicked one against whom St. Paul utters a warning. With pain and horror they call to mind the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse,that rises out of the deep, bearing names of blasphemy and with a “mouth that speaks great things and profanities.”Their strictures cannot be examined in detail here, but we may instance a trait which is common to many of these writers and which, though kept in the background as not altogether relevant to the discussion, yet deserves consideration as a proof of the effect that Luther’s unbounded hate, his abuse and his arrogance had on the feelings and judgment of contemporaries. Their keen sense of religion made them ascribe his behaviour to the devil, and to assume, or at least to suspect, that he was in some way possessed. It is curious to note how many unhesitatingly have recourse to this explanation.“We must regard it as a sure sign of demoniacal possession,” wrote Johann Hoffmeister, Prior of the Colmar Augustinians, “that Luther should thus persistently enjoin on preachers as a duty to go on cursing and denouncing from the pulpit, though he himself sees and bewails the fact, that contempt for religion, godlessness and every vice is steadily gaining ground in Germany. What can we expect unfortunate youths to learn from such abuse and reviling in the churches?”[1253]“Luther is the devil’s own bellows,” wrote Paul Bachmann, Abbot of Altzelle, in 1534, “with which the devil blows up a whirlwind of error, scandal and heresy.”[1254]He goes even further and appeals to what he had heard from Luther’s brother monks concerning the scene in choir, when, falling into a fit, Luther had frantically protested that he was not the man possessed (vol. i., p. 17).[1255]Bachmann adds: “Luther is the cruel monster that John theApostle saw rising out of the deep, with open jaws to utter abuse and blasphemy.” “This is no mere mistaken man, but the wicked devil himself to whom no lying, deceit or falsehood is too much.”[1256]Even from men who had long sided with Luther we hear similar things; for instance, Willibald Pirkheimer of Nüremberg says bluntly: “Luther, with his impudent and defiant tongue, betrays plainly enough what is in his heart; he seems to have gone quite mad, or to be agitated by some wicked demon.”[1257]Erasmus declared that people, rather than credit his calumnies, would say that he was steeped in vengefulness, mentally deranged, or possessed by some sinister spirit.[1258]Even Luther’s brother monk at Erfurt, Johann Nathin, who had been struck with wonder at the young monk’s sudden conversion, remarked later, when the two had gone different ways, that “a spirit of apostasy had entered him,” which was corrupting all the clergy.[1259]Johann Cochlæus thinks that Luther’s unholy doctrine resembles a dragon with seven heads; such a monster hailed, not from God, but from the devil.[1260]He allows himself to be carried so far away by his conviction that Luther was possessed, as to scorn all caution and to take literally a certain rhetorical statement of Luther’s, where he tells us that he had eaten more than a bushel of salt with the devil, and that he had held a disputation with him on the Mass.[1261]Cochlæus here lays great stress on the views and reports of Luther’s former associates in the monastery.[1262]Under the impression made on him by the vehemence of Luther’s language and his whole conduct, Hieronymus Emser declared subsequently to Luther’s so-called “great Reformation Writings”: “This monk who has gone astray differs from the devil only in that he carries out what the wicked one inspires him with.”[1263]Emser, too, appeals to Luther’s former associates in the monastery: Luther “was possessed by the evil spirit from his youth upwards,” he says, “as is well known in his monastery at Erfurt, where he made his profession.”[1264]Kilian Leib, a contemporary defender of the Church in the Eichstätt district, tells in his Annals of the impression made upon those present by Luther’s behaviour at the Diet of Worms: He displayed such pride in his manner and conduct that we seemed to have before us the image of the enemy of mankind. The latter must have dwelt within him and instructed him, if indeed he does not still do so.[1265]He quotes with approval Emser’s first statement, and, from Cochlæus, the passage where Luther speaks of his eating salt with the devil.[1266]Hieronymus Dungersheim, the opponent to whom we owe Nathin’s remark, given above, upbraids Luther, the “child of Belial,” for his “devilish writings” “whereby he, and Satan through him, blasphemes Christ.”[1267]Aleander the Nuncio reported on April 17, 1521, from the Diet of Worms, that some regarded Luther as mad, others as “possessed”; he also mentions on the testimony of others how Luther, on his arrival, “had gazed about him with the eyes of a demon.”[1268]The Reichstagsabschied of Worms speaks of Luther as “led by the evil spirit,” nay, “as the wicked enemy himself clad in human form.”[1269]In the tract against a pamphlet of Luther’s published by Duke George of Saxony, in 1531 under Franz Arnoldi’s name, we read at the very commencement, that Luther was losing many of his adherents because he showed his hand “so clearly and plainly in his writings, that, as they said, Luther must certainly be possessed of the devil, indeed of the whole legion that Christ drove out of the man possessed and into the herd of swine who forthwith went raving mad and ran headlong into the sea”: “By the fruits [of his words] we may recognise the spirit.”[1270]Johann Dietenberger, as early as 1524, in his “Against the unchristian book of Martin Luther on the abuse of the Mass,” says: “There is no doubt whatever that the horrid, damnable Lutheran doctrine has been brought into the world by the devil, otherwise it would not be so utterly beastly and contentious, quarrelsome and fickle, and so fitted for everything evil.” “These are all manifest lies, nothing but abuse, slander and blasphemy, devilish lies and works by which Luther the arch-liar has driven the world to the devil.” He calls Luther “the devil’s hired messenger” and says of his manner of writing: “Here everything reeks of devils; nothing that the devilish man writes can stand without the devil who endevils all his products.”[1271]The Ratisbon Benedictine, Christopher Hoffmann († 1534), in his sermons to the Chapter preached before 1525 represents Luther as an apostate and as “dæmone plenus.”[1272]The anonymous “Iudicium de Luthero” included in a German codex at Munich and dating from the early years of the controversy, also deserves to be mentioned. The author indeed praises Luther’s learning all too generously, but then goes on tosay, that he looked on him as “no Christian,” and to speak of the “devil’s brood” by whom Martin Luther is possessed.[1273]Berthold of Chiemsee in his “Tewtsche Theologey” considers that in his day false teaching has been spread abroad “by a horrid devil,” who makes use of wicked men; the “devil, with his wicked company, has stirred up heresy.”[1274]Petrus Sylvius, in 1534, after a lengthy discourse on Luther’s “seductive and damnable” manner of “slandering and blaspheming,” says, that he was “in very truth a possessed and devilish man.”[1275]In order the better to explain how these and many other of Luther’s contemporaries came to see a diabolical influence in his work, we may quote a few words from Johann Adam Möhler’s lectures on Church History (published posthumously): “We find Luther in 1520 and 1521 displaying a feverish literary activity that arouses in the reader a horrible misgiving. An uneasy sense of discomfort oppresses us, and a secret shudder runs through our frame when we think of the boundless selfishness and presumption which holds sway in this man; we seem to be standing within the inner circle where that sinister power rules, which, from the beginning of the world, has ever been seeking to taint the history of our race.”[1276]Luther himself, as early as 1518, alludes to opponents of his who descried in him the influence of the devil. In a letter to Trutfetter, his old master, he says: “They speak of me from the pulpit as a heretic, a madman, a tempter and one possessed by I know not how many devils”; but “let people say, hearken to and believe what, where and as much as they will, I shall do what God inspires me to do.”[1277]Paolo Vergerio, the Nuncio, whose detailed account of his interview with Luther has already been related (vol. iii., p. 426 ff.), speaks, like Aleander, of his “strange look,” which, the longer he observed it, the more it reminded him of persons he had formerly seen whom some regarded as possessed; his eyes were restless and uncanny, and bore the stamp of rage and anger. “Whether he be possessed or not,” he says, “in his behaviour he is the personification of presumption, wickedness and indiscretion.”[1278]The statements regarding Luther’s eyes made by various persons who knew him would appear to have furnished many with a ground for thinking him under some diabolical spell. “Luther’s dark and sparkling eyes, deep-set and keen ... must indeed have made an even greater impression than the best of Cranach’s portraits.”[1279]While his friends, Melanchthon for instance, saw in them the expression of a high-minded and noble nature and a “leonine glance,”[1280]many Catholics, like Vergerio, saw the reflection of a spirit hostile to God. At Worms, as already related, Aleander had said, though only on the strength of hearsay, that Luther had “the eyes of a demon,” and a Spanish account from Worms also remarks: “his eyes forebode no good.”[1281]Cardinal Cajetan, in his examination of Luther at Augsburg, stated, that he would confer no more with him; “he has deep-set eyes and strange fancies in his head.”[1282]The University Professor, Martin Pollich, of Melrichstatt (Mellerstadt), seems to have let fall a similar remark during Luther’s early years at Wittenberg; he too mentioned his “deep-set eyes” and “strange fancies.” It may be, however, that Luther, who tells us this, erroneously puts into Pollich’s mouth the remark actually made by Cajetan.[1283]It was Pollich also who often declared, that this monk would one day overthrow the system of teaching which had hitherto prevailed in all the Universities.[1284]Johannes Dantiscus, a Pole, who visited Luther during a journey through Germany and who subsequently became Bishop of Culm and Ermeland, expresses himself very frankly. He says: His eyes were keen and sparkled strangely, as is sometimes the case with those possessed.[1285]Luther’s own pupil, Johann Kessler, also found somethinguncomfortable about his glance: He had “jet-black brows and eyes that sparkled and twinkled like stars, so that it was no easy thing to fix them.”[1286]In the above statement concerning Luther’s look and the likelihood of his being possessed, Vergerio also has a passing allusion to a certain crude tale then current which quite befitted the taste of the age and which he gives for what it may be worth in his official report, viz. that Luther was begotten of the devil.[1287]This tale also found its way into several Catholic works written in that credulous and deeply agitated period.It was not the first time such things had been invented concerning a person who was an object of ill-will in that age when prejudice told so strongly.Luther himself was in the habit of speaking of the actual occurrence of diabolical births and of the “diabolus incubus”;[1288]he not only did not rise above the vulgar beliefs handed down by a credulous past, but even imparted to them, at least so far as the power of the devil went, a still worse shape. He never tired of filling the imagination of the reader with diabolical images (vol. v., xxxi., 4); and he spoke of persons possessed as though the world were replete with them.If we could trust Cochlæus, Luther’s brother monks would seem to have partly been responsible for the report not merely of a diabolical possession (“obsessio,circumsessio”), but also of a certain wilful league with the devil entered into by the young Augustinian. They could not forget the “singularity” of the young monk, particularly that once, during his fit in choir whilst the Gospel of the man possessed was being read, he had cried out,“I am not he.” Cochlæus, who had some intercourse with the Augustinians at Nuremberg, hints in his Commentaries at the “secret intercourse with the demon” of which Luther was suspected, and immediately afterwards refers, though under a misapprehension, to Luther’s own remark about eating salt with the devil, and holding a disputation with him.[1289]The passage frequently attributed to Cochlæus, viz. that it was notorious “the devil Incubus was Luther’s father,” and son of the devil his “real name, therefore remain the devil’s son as long as you live,”[1290]was, however, never penned by him. But he was aware of the reports on this subject already in circulation and never saw fit to treat them with the contempt they deserved.All the passages quoted above regarding Luther’s being possessed of the devil are in every instance quite independent of this stupid tale: they are based throughout on the character of Luther’s writings and on his public behaviour.The first to relate anything concerning Luther’s diabolical parentage was, according to N. Paulus, Petrus Sylvius in his polemics of 1531-1534.[1291]He recounts with perfect seriousness the information which he says he had from an “honest, god-fearing woman,” who had heard it from some former female friends of Luther’s mother to whom the latter had herself disclosed the fact: “At night time, when the doors were locked, a beautiful youth dressed in red had frequently visited her before the Carnival,” etc. Some such idle tale may have reached the ears of the Legate Vergerio during his travels through Germany in that same decade. Possibly he may have expressed himself in private with greater credulity concerning this story than in his official report, for Contarini goes so far as to write that Vergerio “had found that Martin was begotten of the devil.”[1292]The silly story ought to have made all Luther’s later critics more cautious, even with regard to the statements regarding Luther’s obsession by the Evil One. The few Catholic writers, who have ventured even in our own day to assert that Luther was possessed, should have been deterred from entering a region so obscure and where the danger of missing one’s way is so great. Even in the case of persons still living it is rash and often morally impossible to diagnose a case of possession; much more is this the case when the person in question has so long been dead.2. Voices of ConvertsOf the Catholic writers, those in particular were sure of a hearing amongst the educated, who for a long while and until it revealed itself in its true colours, had been inclined to Lutheranism. Such was, for instance, the case with several of the pupils and admirers of Erasmus. Among these were Ulrich Zasius and Silvius Egranus, who, though ready to criticise Luther severely, were not wanting in words of praise. The latter was a good type of the half-fledged convert.Silvius Egranus (see vol. iii., p. 402), for instance, wrote: “I do not deny that Luther has spirit and inventive genius, but I find him utterly wanting in judgment, learning and prudence.... Luther’s foolhardy abuse, his defiance and violence, breed nothing but unutterable confusion. Nowhere do I see Christian godliness flourishing in the hearts of men, nay, owing to Luther, it is not safe even to speak of the Gospel of Christ or of Paul.”[1293]“I declare that Luther’s doctrine is a web of sophisms, is neither ecclesiastical nor Apostolic, but closely related to that sophistical buffoonery and strong language to which he is ever having recourse.”[1294]—Ulrich Zasius, a Humanist, and at the same time learned in the law, after changing his views, publicly took the field against Luther even in official academical discourses; he maintained nevertheless that he had been led by Luther to a deeper knowledge of the spirit of Christ; his skill and talent he never even questioned; he declared: “There is something in Luther’s spirit that meets with my approval.”[1295]What alienated him from Luther was not only his attack on the authority of the Pope—with the grounds of which Zasius was well acquainted from his study of Canon Law—but his denial of the merit of good works. This contention seemed to him diametrically opposed to Holy Scripture. “You reject [meritorious] good works,” he says to Luther’s followers, “and yet I know One Who says: Their works shall follow them.”[1296]He finds it necessary to reprove Luthersharply for his unmeasured, nay, shameless boasting of his gifts, for exciting enmity, strife, dissension and factions, and for inciting to ill-will and murder. “What shall I say,” he exclaims, “of the boldness and impudence with which Luther interprets the Testaments, both Old and New, from the first chapter of Genesis to the very end, as a tissue of menaces and imprecations against Popes, bishops and priests, as though through all the ages God had had nothing to do but to thunder at the priesthood.”[1297]Elsewhere he bewails with noble indignation the fate of his beloved fatherland: “Luther, the foe of peace, and the most worthless of men, has let loose the furies over Germany so that we must regard it as a real mercy if speedy destruction does not ensue. I should have much to write upon the subject if only my grief allowed me.”[1298]Zasius and Egranus, however, like others in a similar walk of life and who were disposed to seek a compromise, never attacked the new teachers, their reputation and their supposed wisdom as decidedly as did those whose deeper knowledge of theology taught them how dangerous the errors were.One well equipped for the literary struggle with Luther was the convert George Wicel, a priest who had married and settled down as a Lutheran pastor and then, after a thorough study of holy Scripture and the Fathers, had resigned his post and published an “Apologia” at Leipzig in 1533 to justify his return to the Church of his Fathers.In a multitude of polemical treatises, often couched in caustic language, he exposed the untenability and the innate contradictions of the Wittenberg doctrines. Of this hated “apostate” Luther speaks in a characteristic letter of 1535.[1299]He writes to the Mansfeld Chancellor, Caspar Müller, about a new work of Wicel’s: This Masterlet, as he hears—for he himself “read none of their books”—has again been throwing sweetmeats to his swine, the Catholics. “Such guests are well served by such a cook.”Owing to his stay at Wittenberg and Eisleben, Wicel was well fitted to paint a reliable picture of the morals there prevailing. He utilised his experiences in his “Retectio Lutheranismi” (1538), and summed up his case against Luther as follows: “The life of the great mass of Evangelicals is so little Evangelicalthat I have thousands and thousands of times felt most heartily ashamed of it.... Only too quickly have most of them sucked in the poisonous doctrine, that works are of no avail and that sin is not imputed to the believer.”[1300]Concerning one phenomenon, which Luther himself bewails as a very pest, viz. the fear of death, which had become the rule since the prevalence of the new teaching, Wicel had some severe things to say; this was strangely at variance with the confidence which Luther’s Evangel was supposed to impart. “Is it not a deep disgrace,” he says, “that those who, formerly, when they were the followers of Antichrist, to use their own Lutheran phrase, did not fear the plague at all, or at any rate not much, now, as ‘Christians,’ display such abject terror when it comes? Hardly anyone visits the sick and no one dares to assist those stricken with the plague. No one will even look at them from a distance, and all are seized with a strange panic. Where is that all-prevailing faith that is now so often extolled, where is their love for their neighbour? Tell me, I adjure you in the name of Christ, whether there has ever been less trust or less charity amongst Christians?”[1301]In the conversations held in that same year in the intimate circle at Wittenberg, and preserved for us by Lauterbach the Deacon, Luther frequently alluded to Wicel; at that time the latter was in the midst of his successful literary labours against the Lutherans, and his proposals for reunion, though by no means wholly satisfactory, had even led Duke George of Saxony to summon him to his Court. Luther, with a hatred quite comprehensible under the circumstances, calls him, according to Lauterbach, “the most treacherous of men, insatiable in his jealousy, a scoundrel who does not even deserve an answer”; Wicel himself, he tells us, was well aware he was defending, against his better feelings, a cause altogether wrong; the ungrateful slanderer richly deserved death; only thanks to Luther’s kindness, had he found a decent means of livelihood. “Let us despise him! We must be silent, pray and bless,” so he concludes, “and not bring new faggots to feed the flames.”[1302]Luther knew perfectly well that any “new faggots” he might have brought would have burst into flame under Wicel’s ardent pen, to his own disadvantage. He does not shrink from indignantly describing Wicel elsewhere as a “sycophant and venomous traitor,”[1303]and as “a man full of malice and presumption.”[1304]He comes along and “boasts of the Fathers. I do not even read his works, for I know his Fathers well; but we have one only Father, Who is in Heaven and Who is over all Fathers.”[1305]Particularly sensitive was he to Wicel’s strictures onhis doctrine of good works, that heel of Achilles of the new Evangel. Wicel, “with scorn and mockery,” says, “that we have taught that, ‘whoever has once been converted can sin no more, and whatever he does is right and good.’ But the same thing happened to St. Paul and he too had to listen to slanderers, who, because he taught that people might be saved without the works of the law and merely by faith in Christ, said: ‘Then let us do what is evil and sin lustily that good may come of it,’ etc. Let us pray against such blasphemy.”[1306]Of the consequences of the new teaching levelled at the meritorious nature of good works, Wicel had said at the end of his “Apologia”: “The Lutheran sect has opened wide the flood-gates to immorality and disorder, so that everybody laments and sighs over it. If there be anything god-fearing, good, moral or right to be found in this sect, then it was there before, and did not originate with it. For, show me seven men in seven thousand, who, having been formerly godless and wicked, have now, because they are Lutherans, become good and full of the fear of God. I could, however, point out some, such as had previously led a devout, peaceable, inward and harmless life, who are now quite changed by this Evangel. May but the Lord grant them to see and acknowledge what misery they have excited within the German nation. Amen.”[1307]Among Wicel’s “blasphemies,” as Luther calls them, were some that traversed the latter’s assertions that the holy works of penitents and ascetics were utterly worthless, and that the business of a house-agent or tax-collector, provided one went about it in faith, ranked higher than all the pious works of any monk or hermit.[1308]“The wretched man,” exclaims Luther, angry because of his inability to answer the objection, “most idly attacks us; he has no respect for the labours of their calling which God has commanded each man to perform in his state of life; all this he disregards and merely gapes at superstitious, grand and showy works”;[1309]“and yet Paul extols the ordinary works of the faithful and lays great stress on them.”[1310]This was one of his habitual falsehoods, viz. to make out that Wicel and his other opponents looked down on lowly and commonplace works and the unobtrusive performance of the duties of one’s calling, more particularly in the life of the world. In reality, however, they recognised in the most large-minded way the high value of the duties of any worldly calling when done in a religious spirit, and repudiated with perfect justice the charge brought against Catholicism of undervaluing the ordinary virtues of the good citizen.The zealous Wicel was not perturbed by Luther’s attacks. He continued to damage the Lutheran cause by his writings, though the position he took up in ecclesiastical matters was not always well advised.Another convert, Veit Amerbach (Amorbach), one of the most capable Humanists of the day, after abandoning the Catholic communion lectured first at Eisleben and then in the philosophical faculty at Wittenberg, till, owing to his patristic studies and after personal conferences with Luther and Melanchthon, he returned to the bosom of the Church in 1543, and at once found a post as lecturer at the University of Ingolstadt. As he declared in a written statement handed to Melanchthon, it was particularly the doctrines of Justification and of the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome that compelled him to side with antiquity and to oppose the innovations.Too high-minded to abuse his former associates (he even refrained from writing against them), Luther nevertheless, on hearing of his conversion, declared that he would surely turn out later a blasphemer.“You know,” Luther wrote to Lauterbach, “Vitus Amerbach, who left us to go to Ingolstadt, was a man who was never really one of us (1 John ii. 19); he will imitate Eck in his blasphemy of our Word, and perhaps do even worse things.”[1311]Amerbach having pointed out that the greatest authorities both of East and West had acknowledged the Pope’s leadership in the Church, Luther replies in Table-Talk in 1544: “Whence do they get the rotten argument, that the Church must have Rome for its outward head? All history is against anything of the kind. The whole of the West was never under the Pope, nor the whole of the East. It is mere pride on Amerbach’s part! O God, this is indeed a fall beyond all other falls! I am sorry about him, for he will occasion great scandal. Poor people, they think not of their last hour.”[1312]“Ah, it is said of them: They went out from us, from the Apostles. But whence came the devil? From the angels surely. Whence the prostitutes if not from virgins? Whence the knaves if not from the ranks of the pious? Evil must needs come from good.”[1313]Amerbach’s opinion of the innovations and of the work of the devil was a different one.In the Preface to his collection of the Capitularies of Charles the Great and Lothair,—the solitary passage in which he alludes to the upheaval he had witnessed, though he refrains from any reference to his former colleagues—he expresses his cherished hopethat the Church will ultimately be restored to unity under the successor of Peter; the most pressing thing was to set some bounds to the extraordinary and utterly unrestrained abuse and vituperation, which was not a little promoted by the avarice and filthy venality of the printers, but which the authorities did nothing to prevent. “At times, when I reflect on this disorder,” he says, “it seems to me that men are not filled merely with gall and wormwood, but are verily led and set in motion by devils incarnate. But otherwise it cannot be, so long as, within the Church, the faithful are split up into opposing factions. And would that the populace alone were to blame! I am very much deceived if in any of the books of history even one other example is to be met with of such madness, such furious, poisonous railing and drunken invective.”[1314]3. Lamentations over the Wounds of the Church and over Her PersecutionsWith the defenders of the Church the depravity of Luther’s teaching, and the immense injury which his work of apostasy was doing to souls, weighed far more heavily than any of the charges we have heard advanced against his person.In the beginning, it is true, they were chiefly concerned in refuting his new and daring propositions. But, as the years passed and the ruin increased, startling accounts of the sad state of religion more and more often find a place in their polemics, the writers urging against Lutheranism the decay of faith and morals which had followed in its train. In their words we can feel even to-day the fervour and the profound anxiety with which they sought to admonish their contemporaries against the destroyer of the Sanctuary and his seductive ways.When Johann Cochlæus composed the Preface to his “Commentaria de actis et scriptis Martini Lutheri,” he could not refrain, at the sight of the state of Germany, from giving lively expression to his grief.To him “the greatest misfortune, which no tears can sufficiently deplore,” is “the fall of so many immortal souls, destined by the grace of baptism for life everlasting.” “This unhappy strife regarding belief,” he writes at the commencement, “has torn them from the bosom and the unity of the Church and will bring them to eternal destruction!” In addition to this there is “a frightful subversion of all things such as no previous heresy had ever brought about.” The bond of charity and concordwhich unites Christian people has been loosened, discipline undermined, reverence for God destroyed, wholesome fear extinguished, obedience cast aside, and in their lieu prevails “sinfulness and a freedom that is alien to God.”[1315]In the body of the work he describes with pain and indignation how the uncalled preachers behaved. “They come,” so he says in one passage, “and prate of that false freedom which is to set us free from all laws of Church, Pope, bishops and Councils. With a cloud of Scriptural texts they undertake to prove, that fasting, prayers, vigils and other penitential works are no good whatever, that Christ has sufficiently atoned for our sins, that faith alone suffices, that our good works, far from being deserving, are really sinful, and so forth. In glibness of tongue and in energy they are not to be outdone.”[1316]Johann Wild, Cathedral preacher at Mayence, also describes in moving words the grievous wounds that were being inflicted on the Church. He was a Franciscan Observantine and was distinguished in his Order for his learning and success. After having been from 1528 preacher at the friary church at Mayence, he was appointed in 1539 to the pulpit of the Cathedral, which he retained till his death in 1554. To him it was in part due that what was then the ecclesiastical metropolis of the Rhine Province was preserved in the Catholic faith. He was a type of those men who attempted to meet the spiritual needs of the day, not by loud-voiced polemics, but in a conciliatory and peaceable fashion, and who insisted that the first requirement was to instruct the people thoroughly in the faith, and to raise the moral tone of the faithful. Luther’s name he does not mention once in the many volumes of his sermons, but the complaints are none the less heart-felt that he pours forth concerning the devastation wrought in the Lord’s vineyard, warning his hearers and exhorting them to pity, labour and prayer in the interests of Catholicism, now in such dire straits.“Woe to all those,” he cries, “who by their preaching have made the world so frivolous and fearless of God! Our forefathers were better advised in this matter. They too preached grace, but they did not forget penance.”[1317]“But now we see, how, by dint of sermons lacking all sense of modesty and urging faith alone, all fear of God is driven out of the hearts of men.”[1318]“One thing, viz. faith, has been extolled to the skies, the other, viz. good works, has been trodden in the mire. The result is that we are now for the most part merely Christians in name, but, so far as works are concerned, more depraved and wicked than even Jews or Turks. Yet they expect it to be said of them: These are Evangelical preachers, comforting folk, who know how to quiet people’s consciences.”[1319]“All sorts of wickedness, injustice and frivolity increase from day to day.” “Since ever there wereChristians in the world a godly life has never been so little esteemed as now.”[1320]This, according to him, is the chief cause of all the “very grievous sufferings of the Church,” in comparison with which the spoliation of the clergy was nothing, of the loss of souls, and ruin of religious life. “The cause of the Church’s pain is that her children have been and are so lamentably led astray, that they refuse any longer to acknowledge their own mother, but avoid and flee from her, despise her old age, mock at her wrinkles, laugh at her feebleness, pay no heed to her admonitions, transgress her laws, forsake her doctrine, reject her commands, despise her sacraments, cling to her enemies, wallow in every sort of sin and defile themselves with all kinds of errors. Who can tell all the misery which is now to be met with among Christians by reason of their sins and errors?” How should this not cause pain to the Church, our loving Mother?[1321]—When the discord was on the point of breaking out into an armed conflict, this patriot, deeply moved at the sight of the dissensions that ravaged the Fatherland, exclaimed: Germany has become a byword to her neighbours. “Everybody wants a bit of us.” We have to submit to bitter scorn. They say: “Ha, these are the haughty Germans who help to destroy all other countries and have a finger in every war; now they are going to set to on each other.... Is it not a lamentable thing that foreigners and aliens should speak thus derisively of us?... We must lay it before God and beg Him to forgive those whose fault it is that we cannot reach any agreement. I have always feared this outcome, yet I ever furthered and counselled peace and unity.”[1322]In a writing presented at the Diet of Ratisbon in 1541 by Duke William of Bavaria, the acts of violence committed by the protesting Estates for years past were thus summarised: “The Protestants clamour for peace and justice, but in their actions they violate both.” The Catholic Estates “are continually molested on account of their religion, and great loss and injury are inflicted on them. Contrary to the commandment of God, in defiance of law and Christian usages, the Protestants forbid them to preach the Gospel and the Word of God openly; their churches and monasteries are seized by force, their subjects enticed away from them by all manner of devices and taken under the shelter of the Protestants; their religious foundations and property are torn from them mercilessly and used for alien purposes, the graves and monuments of the pious dead, both high and low, are desecrated and destroyed; the pictures and images of our Saviour Jesus Christ, of the chaste Virgin Mary and the dear Saints are pitifully damaged and smashed to pieces.” “The Catholics have no dearer wish than for peace and order and justice; they too were clamouring for these, and not like the Protestants, trying at the same time to upset them. All they asked was to be left in the enjoyment of their holy Christian faith and the ordinances of the Christian Church, andnot to have their goods violently taken from them.”[1323]—These complaints were, however, ineffective, as the Protestant party had already the upper hand in the College of Electors.At the Diet of Worms in 1545 the complaints were renewed on the Catholic side: “The Protestants have made themselves masters of churches and monasteries and have driven into misery all who wished to abide by the old faith. They have invaded bishoprics and have been reckless of justice and peace; have constrained the poor inhabitants to embrace their religion, as, for instance, in the land of Brunswick, where they had no other right than the might of the sword. They trample under foot and oppress everything, and then complain of being themselves oppressed.” “They are insatiable in their demands and are for ever producing fresh cards to play, at every Diet putting forward fresh claims which they insist on having conceded to them before they will take part in the transactions or vote supplies.”[1324]The Catholics further declared in the sittings of a committee at Worms, in answer to the charges of their opponents concerning the real abuses which prevailed among the bishops and elsewhere: “Scandals and abuses innumerable certainly existed and were openly flaunted, and were growing worse and worse nowadays, because, owing to the perilous times and the teaching of novel sects and preachers, all good works were being abandoned, and unbelief and contempt for religion was becoming the custom among high and low. Many thousand livings stood vacant and the people were without helm or rudder.” “Where were the schools and the Divine worship? Where the foundations and endowments for the poor which had been so numerous twenty or thirty years ago?” “What the Protestants call proclaiming the Word of God is for the most part, as they themselves complain, mere slander and abuse of the Pope and the clergy and a general reviling of mankind.” The pulpit has “degenerated into a chair of scurrility at which foreign nations are shuddering.” Not many years before Luther had openly exhorted the preachers to “denounce the Duke of Brunswick in their sermons as a servant of the devil, likewise the Archbishop of Mayence and all followers of the Pope.”[1325]“If we wish to discover the causes of the war which is undoubtedly at hand,” so the Cologne doctor, Carl van der Plassen, who was well acquainted with the conditions in Germany, wrote from the Diet of Worms, “we must bear in mind all that has happened in Germany since the subjugation of the peasants by the Princes and municipal authorities, all the countless violations of human and Divine law, of the public peace, of property, civic rights, conscience and honour. Let us but reckon up the numberof churches and monasteries which have been destroyed and pillaged during these twenty years, and all the accompanying crime and iniquity. And to what purpose have these stolen goods been applied? What has become of all the Church property, all the treasures?... A new religion has been forced upon the people by might and by stratagem, and they have been forbidden under threat of punishment to carry on the old service of God, with its rites and Christian usages. Is this the vaunted freedom of the Gospel, to persecute and coerce others, to imprison them or drive them into exile? Everything that was formerly reverenced has now fallen into contempt, with the result that right and property are no longer respected; the endless disturbances in matters of religion have upset the whole national equilibrium; discipline, loyalty and respectability have vanished.... What misery results from want of clergy and schools even in the lands which have remained Catholic! Princes and towns, making their boast of the Gospel, have not been satisfied with introducing the new Church system into their own territories, but have invaded the Catholic bishoprics and secular dominions and turned everything topsy-turvy in order to set up their own institutions. The Schmalkalden confederates extend their operations from year to year and grow more and more audacious. At this moment they are actually preaching a war of extermination against the Pope and his adherents. There will be no checking them if the sword of the Emperor is not used to restrain them, as it ought to have been long ago.”[1326]Another Catholic contemporary complains in similar fashion: “Religion is perverted, all obedience to the Emperor destroyed, justice set aside and insolence of all sorts everywhere encouraged.” The Emperor “has tried many and various means of putting a stop to this insubordination, but all measures have been fruitless and he must now wield in earnest the sword that God put into his hands to bring back his and our fatherland to peace, order and unity.”[1327]In the Emperor’s own circle the conviction had ripened that so much injustice had been done to Catholics and so much detriment to the Church, that armed intervention was the only course that remained. “Things had come to such a pass in Germany,” said the Imperial Chancellor Granvell to Farnese, the Papal Legate, about the time of the Diet of Worms, “that neither the Emperor’s nor the Pope’s name any longer carried any weight; indeed, it was to be feared that the Protestants looked upon the opening of the Council as a signal for war, and that they would at once begin to equip themselves not merely for the sake of being ready for any emergency, but rather in order to suppress the Catholics and to make an attack on Italy, the object of their bitter hatred.”[1328]4. The Literary OppositionMost of those who opposed Luther in the literary field have already made their appearance in the various episodes narrated in the foregoing pages. In the present section, which is in the nature of a retrospect and amplification of certain points, we must first touch on the charge frequently put forward by Luther, viz. that it was the furious polemics of his foes which drew from him his violent rejoinders, and, particularly in the earlier part of his career, drove him to take the field against Rome.We have already repeatedly admitted the too great acrimony of some of the writings against Luther, the exasperation they frequently ill conceal and their needlessly strong and insulting language; of this we saw instances in the case of Tetzel, Eck, Prierias, Emser and many others.[1329]It can, however, readily be proved by a comparison with Luther’s own writings, that the champions of the Church fell far short of their opponent, generally speaking, in the matter of violence and contemptuous satire. Luther not only maintained in this respect his supremacy as a speaker, but the small account he made of truth[1330]lent an immense advantage to his overwhelming invective. It is also easy to discern a difference in the writings directed against his revolutionary movement, according as they were written earlier or later. At first, when it was merely a question of exposing his theological errors, his opponents were comparatively calm; the first counter theses and the discussions to which they led are replete with the ponderous learning of the Schoolmen, though, even there, we find occasional traces of the indignation felt that the sanctuary of the faith should have been attacked in so wanton a fashion. But after the actual subversion of the Church had begun and the social peril of the radical innovations had revealed itself, the voices of Luther’s opponents grow much harsher. Many, in their anguish at the growing evil, do not spare the person of the man responsible for it all, whose own methods of controversy, unfortunately, became a pattern even to his foes. At no time, not even in a warfare such as that then going on, can all the things be justified which were said by Augustine Alveld, Franz Arnoldi, JohannCochlæus, Paul Bachmann, Duke George, King Henry VIII and even, occasionally, by Sir Thomas More.What helped to poison the language was, on the one hand, the coarse tone then generally prevalent amongst the German people, which contrived to find its way into the literary treatment of theological questions to an extent never heard of before, and, on the other, the love of the Humanists for mockery and satire, to which end they ransacked the storehouse of antiquity, classical or otherwise. Among earnest Catholics the most powerful factor was overpowering indignation at the sight of such ruthless trampling under foot of the religion of their forefathers and of a faith so closely bound up with the greatness of the fatherland and with every phase of life. Their indignation led them to utter things that were less praiseworthy than the feeling which inspired them.Besides this, there was a great temptation to use, as the best way of testifying to their abhorrence for the opponent of religious truth, that drastic language handed down by past ages, indeed largely borrowed from the Bible, particularly from the Prophets of the Old Testament. Of this, not theological writers only, but even official ecclesiastical documents, had made such liberal use, that scholars had it at their finger-tips. Even in our own day such mediæval thunders are still sometimes heard rumbling, particularly among the Latin races. When dealing with the Bull of Excommunication against Luther, we already had occasion to remark that much in it was due to the after-effects of the older habits of speech usual in earlier condemnations.[1331]It may be mentioned of Hadrian VI that in a stern missive addressed in 1522 to Frederick the Elector of Saxony, he denounced Luther as a “serpent” infecting heaven and earth with the venom of its tongue, as a “boar” laying waste the vineyard of the Lord, as a “thief” who broke in pieces the cross of Christ, as a man with “diabolical, impious and pestilential lips.” He also, in the words of Scripture, tells the Prince that Luther, whom he was protecting, is a devil who has assumed the appearance of an angel of light.[1332]As regards the beginnings of the controversy, both series of Theses advanced by Johann Tetzel in 1517 against Luther’s attack on the system of indulgences, are exclusively of a technical nature and never even mention by name the originator of the controversy.[1333]Luther, on the other hand, after the publication of the ninety-five Theses, in his German sermon on Indulgences and Grace,[1334]addressed himself directly to the populace. He poured out his scorn on the school-opinions of the theologians and the “bawling” of the envious; they seek, he says, your “pennies,” not your souls, and preach for the sake of their “money-box.” He appealed very cleverly to their more sordid instincts, hinting that the money might be better spent on the poor in their own neighbourhood than on the building of St. Peter’s; at the end, sure of his success with the multitude, he abused those who called him a heretic, as “darkened intellects who had never even sniffed a Bible ... and had never grasped their own teaching.”What was the nature of Tetzel’s reply? His “Vorlegung” of the Sermon,[1335]being intended for the people, was naturally written in German, but in the wearisome style of the Latin theology of the Schools. In point of matter and logical accuracy it was indeed far superior to Luther’s superficialities, but the clumsy German in which it was couched and the number of quotations it borrowed from the Fathers could only make it distasteful to the reader. It is hardly possible to recognise in its language the popular orator who was such a favourite with the people. The seriousness of his tone contrasts strangely with Luther’s airy style. It is easy to believe his honest assurance, that he was ready to submit his views to the judgment of the learned and to the ecclesiastical authorities, and to risk even life itself for the holy Faith of the Catholic past. Only towards the end of the short work, when refuting Luther’s twentieth proposition, does Tetzel, not very skilfully, retaliate upon his opponent—though even here he does not name him—for the coarse and abusive language he had usedin this thesis. Tetzel says, it would be seen from a consideration of their reasons which of the two it was who had “never sniffed a Bible,” never grasped his own teaching and applied to the study of theology “a brain like a sieve”; which of the two was the schismatic, heretic, etc.In his reply to the “Vorlegung,” which he published in his own name under the title “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons Bebstlichen Ablass,”[1336]Luther spared no venom: Sun and moon might well wonder at the light of wisdom displayed by such a poetaster; evidently he had a superabundance of paper and leisure; but his artificial flowers and withered leaves must be scattered to the winds; he had dared to treat “the scriptural text, which is our comfort (Rom. xv. 4), as a sow would treat a sack of oats.” His opponent’s offer to risk a trial by fire or water for the Faith, he treats with the utmost scorn and derision: “My honest advice to him would be, modestly to restrict himself to the juice of the grape and to the steam that arises from the roast goose to which he is so partial.”—Some Protestants have urged that Luther’s rudeness of tone, here displayed for the first time, may be explained by his opponent’s example. How little this defence of Luther accords with the true state of the case is plain from the above.As regards Silvester Prierias the matter stands somewhat differently. The “Dialogus,” composed by the Master of the Palace in hot haste in reply to Luther’s “arrogant Theses on the power of the Pope” (the ninety-five Indulgence Theses he had nailed to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg), a work written with all the weighty scholarship of the Schoolmen and criticising each thesis in detail, contained in its thirty-three octavo pages a number of exaggerations and words calculated to offend.

CHAPTER XXVIIVOICES FROM THE CAMP OF THE DEFENDERS OF THE CHURCH1. Luther’s “demoniacal” storming. A man “possessed”Wehave plenty descriptions of Luther from the pen of literary opponents, and they have a perfect right to be taken into account, for they are so many voices courageously raised in defence of the heirloom of the faith. What has led to this being so often passed over is the fear lest their censure should be taken as prejudice, and, needless to say, what they tell us must be carefully weighed. Much depends on the circumstances in which they wrote, on the character of the writers, on the content of their statements and on how far they differ from or agree with other witnesses and the known facts. Several striking passages from their writings, in so far as they are confirmed either by Luther himself or by his followers, have already been utilised in the present work and have served to complete our picture of Luther’s mind.Catholic polemists all agree on one point, viz. that the bitter and unkindly ways of their adversary were a clear proof that he had no Divine call. Like Erasmus, they too contend that no man who excited such great commotion and was so insatiable in abuse and vituperation could be honestly furthering God’s cause. Like Erasmus, they too question whether such unheard-of presumption could “be combined with an apostolic spirit or did not rather denote madness.” They compare his inconstancy, his passion and his fickleness to a “restless, stormy sea.” His slanderous tongue, which so unsparingly lashed the olden Church and its doctrines, reminds them of the “roaring lion,” who, according to St. Peter, “goeth about seeking whom he may devour,” or of the “fiery darts” of the wicked one against whom St. Paul utters a warning. With pain and horror they call to mind the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse,that rises out of the deep, bearing names of blasphemy and with a “mouth that speaks great things and profanities.”Their strictures cannot be examined in detail here, but we may instance a trait which is common to many of these writers and which, though kept in the background as not altogether relevant to the discussion, yet deserves consideration as a proof of the effect that Luther’s unbounded hate, his abuse and his arrogance had on the feelings and judgment of contemporaries. Their keen sense of religion made them ascribe his behaviour to the devil, and to assume, or at least to suspect, that he was in some way possessed. It is curious to note how many unhesitatingly have recourse to this explanation.“We must regard it as a sure sign of demoniacal possession,” wrote Johann Hoffmeister, Prior of the Colmar Augustinians, “that Luther should thus persistently enjoin on preachers as a duty to go on cursing and denouncing from the pulpit, though he himself sees and bewails the fact, that contempt for religion, godlessness and every vice is steadily gaining ground in Germany. What can we expect unfortunate youths to learn from such abuse and reviling in the churches?”[1253]“Luther is the devil’s own bellows,” wrote Paul Bachmann, Abbot of Altzelle, in 1534, “with which the devil blows up a whirlwind of error, scandal and heresy.”[1254]He goes even further and appeals to what he had heard from Luther’s brother monks concerning the scene in choir, when, falling into a fit, Luther had frantically protested that he was not the man possessed (vol. i., p. 17).[1255]Bachmann adds: “Luther is the cruel monster that John theApostle saw rising out of the deep, with open jaws to utter abuse and blasphemy.” “This is no mere mistaken man, but the wicked devil himself to whom no lying, deceit or falsehood is too much.”[1256]Even from men who had long sided with Luther we hear similar things; for instance, Willibald Pirkheimer of Nüremberg says bluntly: “Luther, with his impudent and defiant tongue, betrays plainly enough what is in his heart; he seems to have gone quite mad, or to be agitated by some wicked demon.”[1257]Erasmus declared that people, rather than credit his calumnies, would say that he was steeped in vengefulness, mentally deranged, or possessed by some sinister spirit.[1258]Even Luther’s brother monk at Erfurt, Johann Nathin, who had been struck with wonder at the young monk’s sudden conversion, remarked later, when the two had gone different ways, that “a spirit of apostasy had entered him,” which was corrupting all the clergy.[1259]Johann Cochlæus thinks that Luther’s unholy doctrine resembles a dragon with seven heads; such a monster hailed, not from God, but from the devil.[1260]He allows himself to be carried so far away by his conviction that Luther was possessed, as to scorn all caution and to take literally a certain rhetorical statement of Luther’s, where he tells us that he had eaten more than a bushel of salt with the devil, and that he had held a disputation with him on the Mass.[1261]Cochlæus here lays great stress on the views and reports of Luther’s former associates in the monastery.[1262]Under the impression made on him by the vehemence of Luther’s language and his whole conduct, Hieronymus Emser declared subsequently to Luther’s so-called “great Reformation Writings”: “This monk who has gone astray differs from the devil only in that he carries out what the wicked one inspires him with.”[1263]Emser, too, appeals to Luther’s former associates in the monastery: Luther “was possessed by the evil spirit from his youth upwards,” he says, “as is well known in his monastery at Erfurt, where he made his profession.”[1264]Kilian Leib, a contemporary defender of the Church in the Eichstätt district, tells in his Annals of the impression made upon those present by Luther’s behaviour at the Diet of Worms: He displayed such pride in his manner and conduct that we seemed to have before us the image of the enemy of mankind. The latter must have dwelt within him and instructed him, if indeed he does not still do so.[1265]He quotes with approval Emser’s first statement, and, from Cochlæus, the passage where Luther speaks of his eating salt with the devil.[1266]Hieronymus Dungersheim, the opponent to whom we owe Nathin’s remark, given above, upbraids Luther, the “child of Belial,” for his “devilish writings” “whereby he, and Satan through him, blasphemes Christ.”[1267]Aleander the Nuncio reported on April 17, 1521, from the Diet of Worms, that some regarded Luther as mad, others as “possessed”; he also mentions on the testimony of others how Luther, on his arrival, “had gazed about him with the eyes of a demon.”[1268]The Reichstagsabschied of Worms speaks of Luther as “led by the evil spirit,” nay, “as the wicked enemy himself clad in human form.”[1269]In the tract against a pamphlet of Luther’s published by Duke George of Saxony, in 1531 under Franz Arnoldi’s name, we read at the very commencement, that Luther was losing many of his adherents because he showed his hand “so clearly and plainly in his writings, that, as they said, Luther must certainly be possessed of the devil, indeed of the whole legion that Christ drove out of the man possessed and into the herd of swine who forthwith went raving mad and ran headlong into the sea”: “By the fruits [of his words] we may recognise the spirit.”[1270]Johann Dietenberger, as early as 1524, in his “Against the unchristian book of Martin Luther on the abuse of the Mass,” says: “There is no doubt whatever that the horrid, damnable Lutheran doctrine has been brought into the world by the devil, otherwise it would not be so utterly beastly and contentious, quarrelsome and fickle, and so fitted for everything evil.” “These are all manifest lies, nothing but abuse, slander and blasphemy, devilish lies and works by which Luther the arch-liar has driven the world to the devil.” He calls Luther “the devil’s hired messenger” and says of his manner of writing: “Here everything reeks of devils; nothing that the devilish man writes can stand without the devil who endevils all his products.”[1271]The Ratisbon Benedictine, Christopher Hoffmann († 1534), in his sermons to the Chapter preached before 1525 represents Luther as an apostate and as “dæmone plenus.”[1272]The anonymous “Iudicium de Luthero” included in a German codex at Munich and dating from the early years of the controversy, also deserves to be mentioned. The author indeed praises Luther’s learning all too generously, but then goes on tosay, that he looked on him as “no Christian,” and to speak of the “devil’s brood” by whom Martin Luther is possessed.[1273]Berthold of Chiemsee in his “Tewtsche Theologey” considers that in his day false teaching has been spread abroad “by a horrid devil,” who makes use of wicked men; the “devil, with his wicked company, has stirred up heresy.”[1274]Petrus Sylvius, in 1534, after a lengthy discourse on Luther’s “seductive and damnable” manner of “slandering and blaspheming,” says, that he was “in very truth a possessed and devilish man.”[1275]In order the better to explain how these and many other of Luther’s contemporaries came to see a diabolical influence in his work, we may quote a few words from Johann Adam Möhler’s lectures on Church History (published posthumously): “We find Luther in 1520 and 1521 displaying a feverish literary activity that arouses in the reader a horrible misgiving. An uneasy sense of discomfort oppresses us, and a secret shudder runs through our frame when we think of the boundless selfishness and presumption which holds sway in this man; we seem to be standing within the inner circle where that sinister power rules, which, from the beginning of the world, has ever been seeking to taint the history of our race.”[1276]Luther himself, as early as 1518, alludes to opponents of his who descried in him the influence of the devil. In a letter to Trutfetter, his old master, he says: “They speak of me from the pulpit as a heretic, a madman, a tempter and one possessed by I know not how many devils”; but “let people say, hearken to and believe what, where and as much as they will, I shall do what God inspires me to do.”[1277]Paolo Vergerio, the Nuncio, whose detailed account of his interview with Luther has already been related (vol. iii., p. 426 ff.), speaks, like Aleander, of his “strange look,” which, the longer he observed it, the more it reminded him of persons he had formerly seen whom some regarded as possessed; his eyes were restless and uncanny, and bore the stamp of rage and anger. “Whether he be possessed or not,” he says, “in his behaviour he is the personification of presumption, wickedness and indiscretion.”[1278]The statements regarding Luther’s eyes made by various persons who knew him would appear to have furnished many with a ground for thinking him under some diabolical spell. “Luther’s dark and sparkling eyes, deep-set and keen ... must indeed have made an even greater impression than the best of Cranach’s portraits.”[1279]While his friends, Melanchthon for instance, saw in them the expression of a high-minded and noble nature and a “leonine glance,”[1280]many Catholics, like Vergerio, saw the reflection of a spirit hostile to God. At Worms, as already related, Aleander had said, though only on the strength of hearsay, that Luther had “the eyes of a demon,” and a Spanish account from Worms also remarks: “his eyes forebode no good.”[1281]Cardinal Cajetan, in his examination of Luther at Augsburg, stated, that he would confer no more with him; “he has deep-set eyes and strange fancies in his head.”[1282]The University Professor, Martin Pollich, of Melrichstatt (Mellerstadt), seems to have let fall a similar remark during Luther’s early years at Wittenberg; he too mentioned his “deep-set eyes” and “strange fancies.” It may be, however, that Luther, who tells us this, erroneously puts into Pollich’s mouth the remark actually made by Cajetan.[1283]It was Pollich also who often declared, that this monk would one day overthrow the system of teaching which had hitherto prevailed in all the Universities.[1284]Johannes Dantiscus, a Pole, who visited Luther during a journey through Germany and who subsequently became Bishop of Culm and Ermeland, expresses himself very frankly. He says: His eyes were keen and sparkled strangely, as is sometimes the case with those possessed.[1285]Luther’s own pupil, Johann Kessler, also found somethinguncomfortable about his glance: He had “jet-black brows and eyes that sparkled and twinkled like stars, so that it was no easy thing to fix them.”[1286]In the above statement concerning Luther’s look and the likelihood of his being possessed, Vergerio also has a passing allusion to a certain crude tale then current which quite befitted the taste of the age and which he gives for what it may be worth in his official report, viz. that Luther was begotten of the devil.[1287]This tale also found its way into several Catholic works written in that credulous and deeply agitated period.It was not the first time such things had been invented concerning a person who was an object of ill-will in that age when prejudice told so strongly.Luther himself was in the habit of speaking of the actual occurrence of diabolical births and of the “diabolus incubus”;[1288]he not only did not rise above the vulgar beliefs handed down by a credulous past, but even imparted to them, at least so far as the power of the devil went, a still worse shape. He never tired of filling the imagination of the reader with diabolical images (vol. v., xxxi., 4); and he spoke of persons possessed as though the world were replete with them.If we could trust Cochlæus, Luther’s brother monks would seem to have partly been responsible for the report not merely of a diabolical possession (“obsessio,circumsessio”), but also of a certain wilful league with the devil entered into by the young Augustinian. They could not forget the “singularity” of the young monk, particularly that once, during his fit in choir whilst the Gospel of the man possessed was being read, he had cried out,“I am not he.” Cochlæus, who had some intercourse with the Augustinians at Nuremberg, hints in his Commentaries at the “secret intercourse with the demon” of which Luther was suspected, and immediately afterwards refers, though under a misapprehension, to Luther’s own remark about eating salt with the devil, and holding a disputation with him.[1289]The passage frequently attributed to Cochlæus, viz. that it was notorious “the devil Incubus was Luther’s father,” and son of the devil his “real name, therefore remain the devil’s son as long as you live,”[1290]was, however, never penned by him. But he was aware of the reports on this subject already in circulation and never saw fit to treat them with the contempt they deserved.All the passages quoted above regarding Luther’s being possessed of the devil are in every instance quite independent of this stupid tale: they are based throughout on the character of Luther’s writings and on his public behaviour.The first to relate anything concerning Luther’s diabolical parentage was, according to N. Paulus, Petrus Sylvius in his polemics of 1531-1534.[1291]He recounts with perfect seriousness the information which he says he had from an “honest, god-fearing woman,” who had heard it from some former female friends of Luther’s mother to whom the latter had herself disclosed the fact: “At night time, when the doors were locked, a beautiful youth dressed in red had frequently visited her before the Carnival,” etc. Some such idle tale may have reached the ears of the Legate Vergerio during his travels through Germany in that same decade. Possibly he may have expressed himself in private with greater credulity concerning this story than in his official report, for Contarini goes so far as to write that Vergerio “had found that Martin was begotten of the devil.”[1292]The silly story ought to have made all Luther’s later critics more cautious, even with regard to the statements regarding Luther’s obsession by the Evil One. The few Catholic writers, who have ventured even in our own day to assert that Luther was possessed, should have been deterred from entering a region so obscure and where the danger of missing one’s way is so great. Even in the case of persons still living it is rash and often morally impossible to diagnose a case of possession; much more is this the case when the person in question has so long been dead.2. Voices of ConvertsOf the Catholic writers, those in particular were sure of a hearing amongst the educated, who for a long while and until it revealed itself in its true colours, had been inclined to Lutheranism. Such was, for instance, the case with several of the pupils and admirers of Erasmus. Among these were Ulrich Zasius and Silvius Egranus, who, though ready to criticise Luther severely, were not wanting in words of praise. The latter was a good type of the half-fledged convert.Silvius Egranus (see vol. iii., p. 402), for instance, wrote: “I do not deny that Luther has spirit and inventive genius, but I find him utterly wanting in judgment, learning and prudence.... Luther’s foolhardy abuse, his defiance and violence, breed nothing but unutterable confusion. Nowhere do I see Christian godliness flourishing in the hearts of men, nay, owing to Luther, it is not safe even to speak of the Gospel of Christ or of Paul.”[1293]“I declare that Luther’s doctrine is a web of sophisms, is neither ecclesiastical nor Apostolic, but closely related to that sophistical buffoonery and strong language to which he is ever having recourse.”[1294]—Ulrich Zasius, a Humanist, and at the same time learned in the law, after changing his views, publicly took the field against Luther even in official academical discourses; he maintained nevertheless that he had been led by Luther to a deeper knowledge of the spirit of Christ; his skill and talent he never even questioned; he declared: “There is something in Luther’s spirit that meets with my approval.”[1295]What alienated him from Luther was not only his attack on the authority of the Pope—with the grounds of which Zasius was well acquainted from his study of Canon Law—but his denial of the merit of good works. This contention seemed to him diametrically opposed to Holy Scripture. “You reject [meritorious] good works,” he says to Luther’s followers, “and yet I know One Who says: Their works shall follow them.”[1296]He finds it necessary to reprove Luthersharply for his unmeasured, nay, shameless boasting of his gifts, for exciting enmity, strife, dissension and factions, and for inciting to ill-will and murder. “What shall I say,” he exclaims, “of the boldness and impudence with which Luther interprets the Testaments, both Old and New, from the first chapter of Genesis to the very end, as a tissue of menaces and imprecations against Popes, bishops and priests, as though through all the ages God had had nothing to do but to thunder at the priesthood.”[1297]Elsewhere he bewails with noble indignation the fate of his beloved fatherland: “Luther, the foe of peace, and the most worthless of men, has let loose the furies over Germany so that we must regard it as a real mercy if speedy destruction does not ensue. I should have much to write upon the subject if only my grief allowed me.”[1298]Zasius and Egranus, however, like others in a similar walk of life and who were disposed to seek a compromise, never attacked the new teachers, their reputation and their supposed wisdom as decidedly as did those whose deeper knowledge of theology taught them how dangerous the errors were.One well equipped for the literary struggle with Luther was the convert George Wicel, a priest who had married and settled down as a Lutheran pastor and then, after a thorough study of holy Scripture and the Fathers, had resigned his post and published an “Apologia” at Leipzig in 1533 to justify his return to the Church of his Fathers.In a multitude of polemical treatises, often couched in caustic language, he exposed the untenability and the innate contradictions of the Wittenberg doctrines. Of this hated “apostate” Luther speaks in a characteristic letter of 1535.[1299]He writes to the Mansfeld Chancellor, Caspar Müller, about a new work of Wicel’s: This Masterlet, as he hears—for he himself “read none of their books”—has again been throwing sweetmeats to his swine, the Catholics. “Such guests are well served by such a cook.”Owing to his stay at Wittenberg and Eisleben, Wicel was well fitted to paint a reliable picture of the morals there prevailing. He utilised his experiences in his “Retectio Lutheranismi” (1538), and summed up his case against Luther as follows: “The life of the great mass of Evangelicals is so little Evangelicalthat I have thousands and thousands of times felt most heartily ashamed of it.... Only too quickly have most of them sucked in the poisonous doctrine, that works are of no avail and that sin is not imputed to the believer.”[1300]Concerning one phenomenon, which Luther himself bewails as a very pest, viz. the fear of death, which had become the rule since the prevalence of the new teaching, Wicel had some severe things to say; this was strangely at variance with the confidence which Luther’s Evangel was supposed to impart. “Is it not a deep disgrace,” he says, “that those who, formerly, when they were the followers of Antichrist, to use their own Lutheran phrase, did not fear the plague at all, or at any rate not much, now, as ‘Christians,’ display such abject terror when it comes? Hardly anyone visits the sick and no one dares to assist those stricken with the plague. No one will even look at them from a distance, and all are seized with a strange panic. Where is that all-prevailing faith that is now so often extolled, where is their love for their neighbour? Tell me, I adjure you in the name of Christ, whether there has ever been less trust or less charity amongst Christians?”[1301]In the conversations held in that same year in the intimate circle at Wittenberg, and preserved for us by Lauterbach the Deacon, Luther frequently alluded to Wicel; at that time the latter was in the midst of his successful literary labours against the Lutherans, and his proposals for reunion, though by no means wholly satisfactory, had even led Duke George of Saxony to summon him to his Court. Luther, with a hatred quite comprehensible under the circumstances, calls him, according to Lauterbach, “the most treacherous of men, insatiable in his jealousy, a scoundrel who does not even deserve an answer”; Wicel himself, he tells us, was well aware he was defending, against his better feelings, a cause altogether wrong; the ungrateful slanderer richly deserved death; only thanks to Luther’s kindness, had he found a decent means of livelihood. “Let us despise him! We must be silent, pray and bless,” so he concludes, “and not bring new faggots to feed the flames.”[1302]Luther knew perfectly well that any “new faggots” he might have brought would have burst into flame under Wicel’s ardent pen, to his own disadvantage. He does not shrink from indignantly describing Wicel elsewhere as a “sycophant and venomous traitor,”[1303]and as “a man full of malice and presumption.”[1304]He comes along and “boasts of the Fathers. I do not even read his works, for I know his Fathers well; but we have one only Father, Who is in Heaven and Who is over all Fathers.”[1305]Particularly sensitive was he to Wicel’s strictures onhis doctrine of good works, that heel of Achilles of the new Evangel. Wicel, “with scorn and mockery,” says, “that we have taught that, ‘whoever has once been converted can sin no more, and whatever he does is right and good.’ But the same thing happened to St. Paul and he too had to listen to slanderers, who, because he taught that people might be saved without the works of the law and merely by faith in Christ, said: ‘Then let us do what is evil and sin lustily that good may come of it,’ etc. Let us pray against such blasphemy.”[1306]Of the consequences of the new teaching levelled at the meritorious nature of good works, Wicel had said at the end of his “Apologia”: “The Lutheran sect has opened wide the flood-gates to immorality and disorder, so that everybody laments and sighs over it. If there be anything god-fearing, good, moral or right to be found in this sect, then it was there before, and did not originate with it. For, show me seven men in seven thousand, who, having been formerly godless and wicked, have now, because they are Lutherans, become good and full of the fear of God. I could, however, point out some, such as had previously led a devout, peaceable, inward and harmless life, who are now quite changed by this Evangel. May but the Lord grant them to see and acknowledge what misery they have excited within the German nation. Amen.”[1307]Among Wicel’s “blasphemies,” as Luther calls them, were some that traversed the latter’s assertions that the holy works of penitents and ascetics were utterly worthless, and that the business of a house-agent or tax-collector, provided one went about it in faith, ranked higher than all the pious works of any monk or hermit.[1308]“The wretched man,” exclaims Luther, angry because of his inability to answer the objection, “most idly attacks us; he has no respect for the labours of their calling which God has commanded each man to perform in his state of life; all this he disregards and merely gapes at superstitious, grand and showy works”;[1309]“and yet Paul extols the ordinary works of the faithful and lays great stress on them.”[1310]This was one of his habitual falsehoods, viz. to make out that Wicel and his other opponents looked down on lowly and commonplace works and the unobtrusive performance of the duties of one’s calling, more particularly in the life of the world. In reality, however, they recognised in the most large-minded way the high value of the duties of any worldly calling when done in a religious spirit, and repudiated with perfect justice the charge brought against Catholicism of undervaluing the ordinary virtues of the good citizen.The zealous Wicel was not perturbed by Luther’s attacks. He continued to damage the Lutheran cause by his writings, though the position he took up in ecclesiastical matters was not always well advised.Another convert, Veit Amerbach (Amorbach), one of the most capable Humanists of the day, after abandoning the Catholic communion lectured first at Eisleben and then in the philosophical faculty at Wittenberg, till, owing to his patristic studies and after personal conferences with Luther and Melanchthon, he returned to the bosom of the Church in 1543, and at once found a post as lecturer at the University of Ingolstadt. As he declared in a written statement handed to Melanchthon, it was particularly the doctrines of Justification and of the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome that compelled him to side with antiquity and to oppose the innovations.Too high-minded to abuse his former associates (he even refrained from writing against them), Luther nevertheless, on hearing of his conversion, declared that he would surely turn out later a blasphemer.“You know,” Luther wrote to Lauterbach, “Vitus Amerbach, who left us to go to Ingolstadt, was a man who was never really one of us (1 John ii. 19); he will imitate Eck in his blasphemy of our Word, and perhaps do even worse things.”[1311]Amerbach having pointed out that the greatest authorities both of East and West had acknowledged the Pope’s leadership in the Church, Luther replies in Table-Talk in 1544: “Whence do they get the rotten argument, that the Church must have Rome for its outward head? All history is against anything of the kind. The whole of the West was never under the Pope, nor the whole of the East. It is mere pride on Amerbach’s part! O God, this is indeed a fall beyond all other falls! I am sorry about him, for he will occasion great scandal. Poor people, they think not of their last hour.”[1312]“Ah, it is said of them: They went out from us, from the Apostles. But whence came the devil? From the angels surely. Whence the prostitutes if not from virgins? Whence the knaves if not from the ranks of the pious? Evil must needs come from good.”[1313]Amerbach’s opinion of the innovations and of the work of the devil was a different one.In the Preface to his collection of the Capitularies of Charles the Great and Lothair,—the solitary passage in which he alludes to the upheaval he had witnessed, though he refrains from any reference to his former colleagues—he expresses his cherished hopethat the Church will ultimately be restored to unity under the successor of Peter; the most pressing thing was to set some bounds to the extraordinary and utterly unrestrained abuse and vituperation, which was not a little promoted by the avarice and filthy venality of the printers, but which the authorities did nothing to prevent. “At times, when I reflect on this disorder,” he says, “it seems to me that men are not filled merely with gall and wormwood, but are verily led and set in motion by devils incarnate. But otherwise it cannot be, so long as, within the Church, the faithful are split up into opposing factions. And would that the populace alone were to blame! I am very much deceived if in any of the books of history even one other example is to be met with of such madness, such furious, poisonous railing and drunken invective.”[1314]3. Lamentations over the Wounds of the Church and over Her PersecutionsWith the defenders of the Church the depravity of Luther’s teaching, and the immense injury which his work of apostasy was doing to souls, weighed far more heavily than any of the charges we have heard advanced against his person.In the beginning, it is true, they were chiefly concerned in refuting his new and daring propositions. But, as the years passed and the ruin increased, startling accounts of the sad state of religion more and more often find a place in their polemics, the writers urging against Lutheranism the decay of faith and morals which had followed in its train. In their words we can feel even to-day the fervour and the profound anxiety with which they sought to admonish their contemporaries against the destroyer of the Sanctuary and his seductive ways.When Johann Cochlæus composed the Preface to his “Commentaria de actis et scriptis Martini Lutheri,” he could not refrain, at the sight of the state of Germany, from giving lively expression to his grief.To him “the greatest misfortune, which no tears can sufficiently deplore,” is “the fall of so many immortal souls, destined by the grace of baptism for life everlasting.” “This unhappy strife regarding belief,” he writes at the commencement, “has torn them from the bosom and the unity of the Church and will bring them to eternal destruction!” In addition to this there is “a frightful subversion of all things such as no previous heresy had ever brought about.” The bond of charity and concordwhich unites Christian people has been loosened, discipline undermined, reverence for God destroyed, wholesome fear extinguished, obedience cast aside, and in their lieu prevails “sinfulness and a freedom that is alien to God.”[1315]In the body of the work he describes with pain and indignation how the uncalled preachers behaved. “They come,” so he says in one passage, “and prate of that false freedom which is to set us free from all laws of Church, Pope, bishops and Councils. With a cloud of Scriptural texts they undertake to prove, that fasting, prayers, vigils and other penitential works are no good whatever, that Christ has sufficiently atoned for our sins, that faith alone suffices, that our good works, far from being deserving, are really sinful, and so forth. In glibness of tongue and in energy they are not to be outdone.”[1316]Johann Wild, Cathedral preacher at Mayence, also describes in moving words the grievous wounds that were being inflicted on the Church. He was a Franciscan Observantine and was distinguished in his Order for his learning and success. After having been from 1528 preacher at the friary church at Mayence, he was appointed in 1539 to the pulpit of the Cathedral, which he retained till his death in 1554. To him it was in part due that what was then the ecclesiastical metropolis of the Rhine Province was preserved in the Catholic faith. He was a type of those men who attempted to meet the spiritual needs of the day, not by loud-voiced polemics, but in a conciliatory and peaceable fashion, and who insisted that the first requirement was to instruct the people thoroughly in the faith, and to raise the moral tone of the faithful. Luther’s name he does not mention once in the many volumes of his sermons, but the complaints are none the less heart-felt that he pours forth concerning the devastation wrought in the Lord’s vineyard, warning his hearers and exhorting them to pity, labour and prayer in the interests of Catholicism, now in such dire straits.“Woe to all those,” he cries, “who by their preaching have made the world so frivolous and fearless of God! Our forefathers were better advised in this matter. They too preached grace, but they did not forget penance.”[1317]“But now we see, how, by dint of sermons lacking all sense of modesty and urging faith alone, all fear of God is driven out of the hearts of men.”[1318]“One thing, viz. faith, has been extolled to the skies, the other, viz. good works, has been trodden in the mire. The result is that we are now for the most part merely Christians in name, but, so far as works are concerned, more depraved and wicked than even Jews or Turks. Yet they expect it to be said of them: These are Evangelical preachers, comforting folk, who know how to quiet people’s consciences.”[1319]“All sorts of wickedness, injustice and frivolity increase from day to day.” “Since ever there wereChristians in the world a godly life has never been so little esteemed as now.”[1320]This, according to him, is the chief cause of all the “very grievous sufferings of the Church,” in comparison with which the spoliation of the clergy was nothing, of the loss of souls, and ruin of religious life. “The cause of the Church’s pain is that her children have been and are so lamentably led astray, that they refuse any longer to acknowledge their own mother, but avoid and flee from her, despise her old age, mock at her wrinkles, laugh at her feebleness, pay no heed to her admonitions, transgress her laws, forsake her doctrine, reject her commands, despise her sacraments, cling to her enemies, wallow in every sort of sin and defile themselves with all kinds of errors. Who can tell all the misery which is now to be met with among Christians by reason of their sins and errors?” How should this not cause pain to the Church, our loving Mother?[1321]—When the discord was on the point of breaking out into an armed conflict, this patriot, deeply moved at the sight of the dissensions that ravaged the Fatherland, exclaimed: Germany has become a byword to her neighbours. “Everybody wants a bit of us.” We have to submit to bitter scorn. They say: “Ha, these are the haughty Germans who help to destroy all other countries and have a finger in every war; now they are going to set to on each other.... Is it not a lamentable thing that foreigners and aliens should speak thus derisively of us?... We must lay it before God and beg Him to forgive those whose fault it is that we cannot reach any agreement. I have always feared this outcome, yet I ever furthered and counselled peace and unity.”[1322]In a writing presented at the Diet of Ratisbon in 1541 by Duke William of Bavaria, the acts of violence committed by the protesting Estates for years past were thus summarised: “The Protestants clamour for peace and justice, but in their actions they violate both.” The Catholic Estates “are continually molested on account of their religion, and great loss and injury are inflicted on them. Contrary to the commandment of God, in defiance of law and Christian usages, the Protestants forbid them to preach the Gospel and the Word of God openly; their churches and monasteries are seized by force, their subjects enticed away from them by all manner of devices and taken under the shelter of the Protestants; their religious foundations and property are torn from them mercilessly and used for alien purposes, the graves and monuments of the pious dead, both high and low, are desecrated and destroyed; the pictures and images of our Saviour Jesus Christ, of the chaste Virgin Mary and the dear Saints are pitifully damaged and smashed to pieces.” “The Catholics have no dearer wish than for peace and order and justice; they too were clamouring for these, and not like the Protestants, trying at the same time to upset them. All they asked was to be left in the enjoyment of their holy Christian faith and the ordinances of the Christian Church, andnot to have their goods violently taken from them.”[1323]—These complaints were, however, ineffective, as the Protestant party had already the upper hand in the College of Electors.At the Diet of Worms in 1545 the complaints were renewed on the Catholic side: “The Protestants have made themselves masters of churches and monasteries and have driven into misery all who wished to abide by the old faith. They have invaded bishoprics and have been reckless of justice and peace; have constrained the poor inhabitants to embrace their religion, as, for instance, in the land of Brunswick, where they had no other right than the might of the sword. They trample under foot and oppress everything, and then complain of being themselves oppressed.” “They are insatiable in their demands and are for ever producing fresh cards to play, at every Diet putting forward fresh claims which they insist on having conceded to them before they will take part in the transactions or vote supplies.”[1324]The Catholics further declared in the sittings of a committee at Worms, in answer to the charges of their opponents concerning the real abuses which prevailed among the bishops and elsewhere: “Scandals and abuses innumerable certainly existed and were openly flaunted, and were growing worse and worse nowadays, because, owing to the perilous times and the teaching of novel sects and preachers, all good works were being abandoned, and unbelief and contempt for religion was becoming the custom among high and low. Many thousand livings stood vacant and the people were without helm or rudder.” “Where were the schools and the Divine worship? Where the foundations and endowments for the poor which had been so numerous twenty or thirty years ago?” “What the Protestants call proclaiming the Word of God is for the most part, as they themselves complain, mere slander and abuse of the Pope and the clergy and a general reviling of mankind.” The pulpit has “degenerated into a chair of scurrility at which foreign nations are shuddering.” Not many years before Luther had openly exhorted the preachers to “denounce the Duke of Brunswick in their sermons as a servant of the devil, likewise the Archbishop of Mayence and all followers of the Pope.”[1325]“If we wish to discover the causes of the war which is undoubtedly at hand,” so the Cologne doctor, Carl van der Plassen, who was well acquainted with the conditions in Germany, wrote from the Diet of Worms, “we must bear in mind all that has happened in Germany since the subjugation of the peasants by the Princes and municipal authorities, all the countless violations of human and Divine law, of the public peace, of property, civic rights, conscience and honour. Let us but reckon up the numberof churches and monasteries which have been destroyed and pillaged during these twenty years, and all the accompanying crime and iniquity. And to what purpose have these stolen goods been applied? What has become of all the Church property, all the treasures?... A new religion has been forced upon the people by might and by stratagem, and they have been forbidden under threat of punishment to carry on the old service of God, with its rites and Christian usages. Is this the vaunted freedom of the Gospel, to persecute and coerce others, to imprison them or drive them into exile? Everything that was formerly reverenced has now fallen into contempt, with the result that right and property are no longer respected; the endless disturbances in matters of religion have upset the whole national equilibrium; discipline, loyalty and respectability have vanished.... What misery results from want of clergy and schools even in the lands which have remained Catholic! Princes and towns, making their boast of the Gospel, have not been satisfied with introducing the new Church system into their own territories, but have invaded the Catholic bishoprics and secular dominions and turned everything topsy-turvy in order to set up their own institutions. The Schmalkalden confederates extend their operations from year to year and grow more and more audacious. At this moment they are actually preaching a war of extermination against the Pope and his adherents. There will be no checking them if the sword of the Emperor is not used to restrain them, as it ought to have been long ago.”[1326]Another Catholic contemporary complains in similar fashion: “Religion is perverted, all obedience to the Emperor destroyed, justice set aside and insolence of all sorts everywhere encouraged.” The Emperor “has tried many and various means of putting a stop to this insubordination, but all measures have been fruitless and he must now wield in earnest the sword that God put into his hands to bring back his and our fatherland to peace, order and unity.”[1327]In the Emperor’s own circle the conviction had ripened that so much injustice had been done to Catholics and so much detriment to the Church, that armed intervention was the only course that remained. “Things had come to such a pass in Germany,” said the Imperial Chancellor Granvell to Farnese, the Papal Legate, about the time of the Diet of Worms, “that neither the Emperor’s nor the Pope’s name any longer carried any weight; indeed, it was to be feared that the Protestants looked upon the opening of the Council as a signal for war, and that they would at once begin to equip themselves not merely for the sake of being ready for any emergency, but rather in order to suppress the Catholics and to make an attack on Italy, the object of their bitter hatred.”[1328]4. The Literary OppositionMost of those who opposed Luther in the literary field have already made their appearance in the various episodes narrated in the foregoing pages. In the present section, which is in the nature of a retrospect and amplification of certain points, we must first touch on the charge frequently put forward by Luther, viz. that it was the furious polemics of his foes which drew from him his violent rejoinders, and, particularly in the earlier part of his career, drove him to take the field against Rome.We have already repeatedly admitted the too great acrimony of some of the writings against Luther, the exasperation they frequently ill conceal and their needlessly strong and insulting language; of this we saw instances in the case of Tetzel, Eck, Prierias, Emser and many others.[1329]It can, however, readily be proved by a comparison with Luther’s own writings, that the champions of the Church fell far short of their opponent, generally speaking, in the matter of violence and contemptuous satire. Luther not only maintained in this respect his supremacy as a speaker, but the small account he made of truth[1330]lent an immense advantage to his overwhelming invective. It is also easy to discern a difference in the writings directed against his revolutionary movement, according as they were written earlier or later. At first, when it was merely a question of exposing his theological errors, his opponents were comparatively calm; the first counter theses and the discussions to which they led are replete with the ponderous learning of the Schoolmen, though, even there, we find occasional traces of the indignation felt that the sanctuary of the faith should have been attacked in so wanton a fashion. But after the actual subversion of the Church had begun and the social peril of the radical innovations had revealed itself, the voices of Luther’s opponents grow much harsher. Many, in their anguish at the growing evil, do not spare the person of the man responsible for it all, whose own methods of controversy, unfortunately, became a pattern even to his foes. At no time, not even in a warfare such as that then going on, can all the things be justified which were said by Augustine Alveld, Franz Arnoldi, JohannCochlæus, Paul Bachmann, Duke George, King Henry VIII and even, occasionally, by Sir Thomas More.What helped to poison the language was, on the one hand, the coarse tone then generally prevalent amongst the German people, which contrived to find its way into the literary treatment of theological questions to an extent never heard of before, and, on the other, the love of the Humanists for mockery and satire, to which end they ransacked the storehouse of antiquity, classical or otherwise. Among earnest Catholics the most powerful factor was overpowering indignation at the sight of such ruthless trampling under foot of the religion of their forefathers and of a faith so closely bound up with the greatness of the fatherland and with every phase of life. Their indignation led them to utter things that were less praiseworthy than the feeling which inspired them.Besides this, there was a great temptation to use, as the best way of testifying to their abhorrence for the opponent of religious truth, that drastic language handed down by past ages, indeed largely borrowed from the Bible, particularly from the Prophets of the Old Testament. Of this, not theological writers only, but even official ecclesiastical documents, had made such liberal use, that scholars had it at their finger-tips. Even in our own day such mediæval thunders are still sometimes heard rumbling, particularly among the Latin races. When dealing with the Bull of Excommunication against Luther, we already had occasion to remark that much in it was due to the after-effects of the older habits of speech usual in earlier condemnations.[1331]It may be mentioned of Hadrian VI that in a stern missive addressed in 1522 to Frederick the Elector of Saxony, he denounced Luther as a “serpent” infecting heaven and earth with the venom of its tongue, as a “boar” laying waste the vineyard of the Lord, as a “thief” who broke in pieces the cross of Christ, as a man with “diabolical, impious and pestilential lips.” He also, in the words of Scripture, tells the Prince that Luther, whom he was protecting, is a devil who has assumed the appearance of an angel of light.[1332]As regards the beginnings of the controversy, both series of Theses advanced by Johann Tetzel in 1517 against Luther’s attack on the system of indulgences, are exclusively of a technical nature and never even mention by name the originator of the controversy.[1333]Luther, on the other hand, after the publication of the ninety-five Theses, in his German sermon on Indulgences and Grace,[1334]addressed himself directly to the populace. He poured out his scorn on the school-opinions of the theologians and the “bawling” of the envious; they seek, he says, your “pennies,” not your souls, and preach for the sake of their “money-box.” He appealed very cleverly to their more sordid instincts, hinting that the money might be better spent on the poor in their own neighbourhood than on the building of St. Peter’s; at the end, sure of his success with the multitude, he abused those who called him a heretic, as “darkened intellects who had never even sniffed a Bible ... and had never grasped their own teaching.”What was the nature of Tetzel’s reply? His “Vorlegung” of the Sermon,[1335]being intended for the people, was naturally written in German, but in the wearisome style of the Latin theology of the Schools. In point of matter and logical accuracy it was indeed far superior to Luther’s superficialities, but the clumsy German in which it was couched and the number of quotations it borrowed from the Fathers could only make it distasteful to the reader. It is hardly possible to recognise in its language the popular orator who was such a favourite with the people. The seriousness of his tone contrasts strangely with Luther’s airy style. It is easy to believe his honest assurance, that he was ready to submit his views to the judgment of the learned and to the ecclesiastical authorities, and to risk even life itself for the holy Faith of the Catholic past. Only towards the end of the short work, when refuting Luther’s twentieth proposition, does Tetzel, not very skilfully, retaliate upon his opponent—though even here he does not name him—for the coarse and abusive language he had usedin this thesis. Tetzel says, it would be seen from a consideration of their reasons which of the two it was who had “never sniffed a Bible,” never grasped his own teaching and applied to the study of theology “a brain like a sieve”; which of the two was the schismatic, heretic, etc.In his reply to the “Vorlegung,” which he published in his own name under the title “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons Bebstlichen Ablass,”[1336]Luther spared no venom: Sun and moon might well wonder at the light of wisdom displayed by such a poetaster; evidently he had a superabundance of paper and leisure; but his artificial flowers and withered leaves must be scattered to the winds; he had dared to treat “the scriptural text, which is our comfort (Rom. xv. 4), as a sow would treat a sack of oats.” His opponent’s offer to risk a trial by fire or water for the Faith, he treats with the utmost scorn and derision: “My honest advice to him would be, modestly to restrict himself to the juice of the grape and to the steam that arises from the roast goose to which he is so partial.”—Some Protestants have urged that Luther’s rudeness of tone, here displayed for the first time, may be explained by his opponent’s example. How little this defence of Luther accords with the true state of the case is plain from the above.As regards Silvester Prierias the matter stands somewhat differently. The “Dialogus,” composed by the Master of the Palace in hot haste in reply to Luther’s “arrogant Theses on the power of the Pope” (the ninety-five Indulgence Theses he had nailed to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg), a work written with all the weighty scholarship of the Schoolmen and criticising each thesis in detail, contained in its thirty-three octavo pages a number of exaggerations and words calculated to offend.

VOICES FROM THE CAMP OF THE DEFENDERS OF THE CHURCH

Wehave plenty descriptions of Luther from the pen of literary opponents, and they have a perfect right to be taken into account, for they are so many voices courageously raised in defence of the heirloom of the faith. What has led to this being so often passed over is the fear lest their censure should be taken as prejudice, and, needless to say, what they tell us must be carefully weighed. Much depends on the circumstances in which they wrote, on the character of the writers, on the content of their statements and on how far they differ from or agree with other witnesses and the known facts. Several striking passages from their writings, in so far as they are confirmed either by Luther himself or by his followers, have already been utilised in the present work and have served to complete our picture of Luther’s mind.

Catholic polemists all agree on one point, viz. that the bitter and unkindly ways of their adversary were a clear proof that he had no Divine call. Like Erasmus, they too contend that no man who excited such great commotion and was so insatiable in abuse and vituperation could be honestly furthering God’s cause. Like Erasmus, they too question whether such unheard-of presumption could “be combined with an apostolic spirit or did not rather denote madness.” They compare his inconstancy, his passion and his fickleness to a “restless, stormy sea.” His slanderous tongue, which so unsparingly lashed the olden Church and its doctrines, reminds them of the “roaring lion,” who, according to St. Peter, “goeth about seeking whom he may devour,” or of the “fiery darts” of the wicked one against whom St. Paul utters a warning. With pain and horror they call to mind the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse,that rises out of the deep, bearing names of blasphemy and with a “mouth that speaks great things and profanities.”

Their strictures cannot be examined in detail here, but we may instance a trait which is common to many of these writers and which, though kept in the background as not altogether relevant to the discussion, yet deserves consideration as a proof of the effect that Luther’s unbounded hate, his abuse and his arrogance had on the feelings and judgment of contemporaries. Their keen sense of religion made them ascribe his behaviour to the devil, and to assume, or at least to suspect, that he was in some way possessed. It is curious to note how many unhesitatingly have recourse to this explanation.

“We must regard it as a sure sign of demoniacal possession,” wrote Johann Hoffmeister, Prior of the Colmar Augustinians, “that Luther should thus persistently enjoin on preachers as a duty to go on cursing and denouncing from the pulpit, though he himself sees and bewails the fact, that contempt for religion, godlessness and every vice is steadily gaining ground in Germany. What can we expect unfortunate youths to learn from such abuse and reviling in the churches?”[1253]“Luther is the devil’s own bellows,” wrote Paul Bachmann, Abbot of Altzelle, in 1534, “with which the devil blows up a whirlwind of error, scandal and heresy.”[1254]He goes even further and appeals to what he had heard from Luther’s brother monks concerning the scene in choir, when, falling into a fit, Luther had frantically protested that he was not the man possessed (vol. i., p. 17).[1255]Bachmann adds: “Luther is the cruel monster that John theApostle saw rising out of the deep, with open jaws to utter abuse and blasphemy.” “This is no mere mistaken man, but the wicked devil himself to whom no lying, deceit or falsehood is too much.”[1256]Even from men who had long sided with Luther we hear similar things; for instance, Willibald Pirkheimer of Nüremberg says bluntly: “Luther, with his impudent and defiant tongue, betrays plainly enough what is in his heart; he seems to have gone quite mad, or to be agitated by some wicked demon.”[1257]Erasmus declared that people, rather than credit his calumnies, would say that he was steeped in vengefulness, mentally deranged, or possessed by some sinister spirit.[1258]Even Luther’s brother monk at Erfurt, Johann Nathin, who had been struck with wonder at the young monk’s sudden conversion, remarked later, when the two had gone different ways, that “a spirit of apostasy had entered him,” which was corrupting all the clergy.[1259]Johann Cochlæus thinks that Luther’s unholy doctrine resembles a dragon with seven heads; such a monster hailed, not from God, but from the devil.[1260]He allows himself to be carried so far away by his conviction that Luther was possessed, as to scorn all caution and to take literally a certain rhetorical statement of Luther’s, where he tells us that he had eaten more than a bushel of salt with the devil, and that he had held a disputation with him on the Mass.[1261]Cochlæus here lays great stress on the views and reports of Luther’s former associates in the monastery.[1262]Under the impression made on him by the vehemence of Luther’s language and his whole conduct, Hieronymus Emser declared subsequently to Luther’s so-called “great Reformation Writings”: “This monk who has gone astray differs from the devil only in that he carries out what the wicked one inspires him with.”[1263]Emser, too, appeals to Luther’s former associates in the monastery: Luther “was possessed by the evil spirit from his youth upwards,” he says, “as is well known in his monastery at Erfurt, where he made his profession.”[1264]Kilian Leib, a contemporary defender of the Church in the Eichstätt district, tells in his Annals of the impression made upon those present by Luther’s behaviour at the Diet of Worms: He displayed such pride in his manner and conduct that we seemed to have before us the image of the enemy of mankind. The latter must have dwelt within him and instructed him, if indeed he does not still do so.[1265]He quotes with approval Emser’s first statement, and, from Cochlæus, the passage where Luther speaks of his eating salt with the devil.[1266]Hieronymus Dungersheim, the opponent to whom we owe Nathin’s remark, given above, upbraids Luther, the “child of Belial,” for his “devilish writings” “whereby he, and Satan through him, blasphemes Christ.”[1267]Aleander the Nuncio reported on April 17, 1521, from the Diet of Worms, that some regarded Luther as mad, others as “possessed”; he also mentions on the testimony of others how Luther, on his arrival, “had gazed about him with the eyes of a demon.”[1268]The Reichstagsabschied of Worms speaks of Luther as “led by the evil spirit,” nay, “as the wicked enemy himself clad in human form.”[1269]In the tract against a pamphlet of Luther’s published by Duke George of Saxony, in 1531 under Franz Arnoldi’s name, we read at the very commencement, that Luther was losing many of his adherents because he showed his hand “so clearly and plainly in his writings, that, as they said, Luther must certainly be possessed of the devil, indeed of the whole legion that Christ drove out of the man possessed and into the herd of swine who forthwith went raving mad and ran headlong into the sea”: “By the fruits [of his words] we may recognise the spirit.”[1270]Johann Dietenberger, as early as 1524, in his “Against the unchristian book of Martin Luther on the abuse of the Mass,” says: “There is no doubt whatever that the horrid, damnable Lutheran doctrine has been brought into the world by the devil, otherwise it would not be so utterly beastly and contentious, quarrelsome and fickle, and so fitted for everything evil.” “These are all manifest lies, nothing but abuse, slander and blasphemy, devilish lies and works by which Luther the arch-liar has driven the world to the devil.” He calls Luther “the devil’s hired messenger” and says of his manner of writing: “Here everything reeks of devils; nothing that the devilish man writes can stand without the devil who endevils all his products.”[1271]The Ratisbon Benedictine, Christopher Hoffmann († 1534), in his sermons to the Chapter preached before 1525 represents Luther as an apostate and as “dæmone plenus.”[1272]The anonymous “Iudicium de Luthero” included in a German codex at Munich and dating from the early years of the controversy, also deserves to be mentioned. The author indeed praises Luther’s learning all too generously, but then goes on tosay, that he looked on him as “no Christian,” and to speak of the “devil’s brood” by whom Martin Luther is possessed.[1273]Berthold of Chiemsee in his “Tewtsche Theologey” considers that in his day false teaching has been spread abroad “by a horrid devil,” who makes use of wicked men; the “devil, with his wicked company, has stirred up heresy.”[1274]Petrus Sylvius, in 1534, after a lengthy discourse on Luther’s “seductive and damnable” manner of “slandering and blaspheming,” says, that he was “in very truth a possessed and devilish man.”[1275]In order the better to explain how these and many other of Luther’s contemporaries came to see a diabolical influence in his work, we may quote a few words from Johann Adam Möhler’s lectures on Church History (published posthumously): “We find Luther in 1520 and 1521 displaying a feverish literary activity that arouses in the reader a horrible misgiving. An uneasy sense of discomfort oppresses us, and a secret shudder runs through our frame when we think of the boundless selfishness and presumption which holds sway in this man; we seem to be standing within the inner circle where that sinister power rules, which, from the beginning of the world, has ever been seeking to taint the history of our race.”[1276]Luther himself, as early as 1518, alludes to opponents of his who descried in him the influence of the devil. In a letter to Trutfetter, his old master, he says: “They speak of me from the pulpit as a heretic, a madman, a tempter and one possessed by I know not how many devils”; but “let people say, hearken to and believe what, where and as much as they will, I shall do what God inspires me to do.”[1277]Paolo Vergerio, the Nuncio, whose detailed account of his interview with Luther has already been related (vol. iii., p. 426 ff.), speaks, like Aleander, of his “strange look,” which, the longer he observed it, the more it reminded him of persons he had formerly seen whom some regarded as possessed; his eyes were restless and uncanny, and bore the stamp of rage and anger. “Whether he be possessed or not,” he says, “in his behaviour he is the personification of presumption, wickedness and indiscretion.”[1278]The statements regarding Luther’s eyes made by various persons who knew him would appear to have furnished many with a ground for thinking him under some diabolical spell. “Luther’s dark and sparkling eyes, deep-set and keen ... must indeed have made an even greater impression than the best of Cranach’s portraits.”[1279]While his friends, Melanchthon for instance, saw in them the expression of a high-minded and noble nature and a “leonine glance,”[1280]many Catholics, like Vergerio, saw the reflection of a spirit hostile to God. At Worms, as already related, Aleander had said, though only on the strength of hearsay, that Luther had “the eyes of a demon,” and a Spanish account from Worms also remarks: “his eyes forebode no good.”[1281]Cardinal Cajetan, in his examination of Luther at Augsburg, stated, that he would confer no more with him; “he has deep-set eyes and strange fancies in his head.”[1282]The University Professor, Martin Pollich, of Melrichstatt (Mellerstadt), seems to have let fall a similar remark during Luther’s early years at Wittenberg; he too mentioned his “deep-set eyes” and “strange fancies.” It may be, however, that Luther, who tells us this, erroneously puts into Pollich’s mouth the remark actually made by Cajetan.[1283]It was Pollich also who often declared, that this monk would one day overthrow the system of teaching which had hitherto prevailed in all the Universities.[1284]Johannes Dantiscus, a Pole, who visited Luther during a journey through Germany and who subsequently became Bishop of Culm and Ermeland, expresses himself very frankly. He says: His eyes were keen and sparkled strangely, as is sometimes the case with those possessed.[1285]Luther’s own pupil, Johann Kessler, also found somethinguncomfortable about his glance: He had “jet-black brows and eyes that sparkled and twinkled like stars, so that it was no easy thing to fix them.”[1286]In the above statement concerning Luther’s look and the likelihood of his being possessed, Vergerio also has a passing allusion to a certain crude tale then current which quite befitted the taste of the age and which he gives for what it may be worth in his official report, viz. that Luther was begotten of the devil.[1287]This tale also found its way into several Catholic works written in that credulous and deeply agitated period.It was not the first time such things had been invented concerning a person who was an object of ill-will in that age when prejudice told so strongly.Luther himself was in the habit of speaking of the actual occurrence of diabolical births and of the “diabolus incubus”;[1288]he not only did not rise above the vulgar beliefs handed down by a credulous past, but even imparted to them, at least so far as the power of the devil went, a still worse shape. He never tired of filling the imagination of the reader with diabolical images (vol. v., xxxi., 4); and he spoke of persons possessed as though the world were replete with them.If we could trust Cochlæus, Luther’s brother monks would seem to have partly been responsible for the report not merely of a diabolical possession (“obsessio,circumsessio”), but also of a certain wilful league with the devil entered into by the young Augustinian. They could not forget the “singularity” of the young monk, particularly that once, during his fit in choir whilst the Gospel of the man possessed was being read, he had cried out,“I am not he.” Cochlæus, who had some intercourse with the Augustinians at Nuremberg, hints in his Commentaries at the “secret intercourse with the demon” of which Luther was suspected, and immediately afterwards refers, though under a misapprehension, to Luther’s own remark about eating salt with the devil, and holding a disputation with him.[1289]The passage frequently attributed to Cochlæus, viz. that it was notorious “the devil Incubus was Luther’s father,” and son of the devil his “real name, therefore remain the devil’s son as long as you live,”[1290]was, however, never penned by him. But he was aware of the reports on this subject already in circulation and never saw fit to treat them with the contempt they deserved.All the passages quoted above regarding Luther’s being possessed of the devil are in every instance quite independent of this stupid tale: they are based throughout on the character of Luther’s writings and on his public behaviour.The first to relate anything concerning Luther’s diabolical parentage was, according to N. Paulus, Petrus Sylvius in his polemics of 1531-1534.[1291]He recounts with perfect seriousness the information which he says he had from an “honest, god-fearing woman,” who had heard it from some former female friends of Luther’s mother to whom the latter had herself disclosed the fact: “At night time, when the doors were locked, a beautiful youth dressed in red had frequently visited her before the Carnival,” etc. Some such idle tale may have reached the ears of the Legate Vergerio during his travels through Germany in that same decade. Possibly he may have expressed himself in private with greater credulity concerning this story than in his official report, for Contarini goes so far as to write that Vergerio “had found that Martin was begotten of the devil.”[1292]

“We must regard it as a sure sign of demoniacal possession,” wrote Johann Hoffmeister, Prior of the Colmar Augustinians, “that Luther should thus persistently enjoin on preachers as a duty to go on cursing and denouncing from the pulpit, though he himself sees and bewails the fact, that contempt for religion, godlessness and every vice is steadily gaining ground in Germany. What can we expect unfortunate youths to learn from such abuse and reviling in the churches?”[1253]

“Luther is the devil’s own bellows,” wrote Paul Bachmann, Abbot of Altzelle, in 1534, “with which the devil blows up a whirlwind of error, scandal and heresy.”[1254]He goes even further and appeals to what he had heard from Luther’s brother monks concerning the scene in choir, when, falling into a fit, Luther had frantically protested that he was not the man possessed (vol. i., p. 17).[1255]

Bachmann adds: “Luther is the cruel monster that John theApostle saw rising out of the deep, with open jaws to utter abuse and blasphemy.” “This is no mere mistaken man, but the wicked devil himself to whom no lying, deceit or falsehood is too much.”[1256]

Even from men who had long sided with Luther we hear similar things; for instance, Willibald Pirkheimer of Nüremberg says bluntly: “Luther, with his impudent and defiant tongue, betrays plainly enough what is in his heart; he seems to have gone quite mad, or to be agitated by some wicked demon.”[1257]

Erasmus declared that people, rather than credit his calumnies, would say that he was steeped in vengefulness, mentally deranged, or possessed by some sinister spirit.[1258]

Even Luther’s brother monk at Erfurt, Johann Nathin, who had been struck with wonder at the young monk’s sudden conversion, remarked later, when the two had gone different ways, that “a spirit of apostasy had entered him,” which was corrupting all the clergy.[1259]

Johann Cochlæus thinks that Luther’s unholy doctrine resembles a dragon with seven heads; such a monster hailed, not from God, but from the devil.[1260]He allows himself to be carried so far away by his conviction that Luther was possessed, as to scorn all caution and to take literally a certain rhetorical statement of Luther’s, where he tells us that he had eaten more than a bushel of salt with the devil, and that he had held a disputation with him on the Mass.[1261]Cochlæus here lays great stress on the views and reports of Luther’s former associates in the monastery.[1262]

Under the impression made on him by the vehemence of Luther’s language and his whole conduct, Hieronymus Emser declared subsequently to Luther’s so-called “great Reformation Writings”: “This monk who has gone astray differs from the devil only in that he carries out what the wicked one inspires him with.”[1263]Emser, too, appeals to Luther’s former associates in the monastery: Luther “was possessed by the evil spirit from his youth upwards,” he says, “as is well known in his monastery at Erfurt, where he made his profession.”[1264]

Kilian Leib, a contemporary defender of the Church in the Eichstätt district, tells in his Annals of the impression made upon those present by Luther’s behaviour at the Diet of Worms: He displayed such pride in his manner and conduct that we seemed to have before us the image of the enemy of mankind. The latter must have dwelt within him and instructed him, if indeed he does not still do so.[1265]He quotes with approval Emser’s first statement, and, from Cochlæus, the passage where Luther speaks of his eating salt with the devil.[1266]

Hieronymus Dungersheim, the opponent to whom we owe Nathin’s remark, given above, upbraids Luther, the “child of Belial,” for his “devilish writings” “whereby he, and Satan through him, blasphemes Christ.”[1267]

Aleander the Nuncio reported on April 17, 1521, from the Diet of Worms, that some regarded Luther as mad, others as “possessed”; he also mentions on the testimony of others how Luther, on his arrival, “had gazed about him with the eyes of a demon.”[1268]

The Reichstagsabschied of Worms speaks of Luther as “led by the evil spirit,” nay, “as the wicked enemy himself clad in human form.”[1269]

In the tract against a pamphlet of Luther’s published by Duke George of Saxony, in 1531 under Franz Arnoldi’s name, we read at the very commencement, that Luther was losing many of his adherents because he showed his hand “so clearly and plainly in his writings, that, as they said, Luther must certainly be possessed of the devil, indeed of the whole legion that Christ drove out of the man possessed and into the herd of swine who forthwith went raving mad and ran headlong into the sea”: “By the fruits [of his words] we may recognise the spirit.”[1270]

Johann Dietenberger, as early as 1524, in his “Against the unchristian book of Martin Luther on the abuse of the Mass,” says: “There is no doubt whatever that the horrid, damnable Lutheran doctrine has been brought into the world by the devil, otherwise it would not be so utterly beastly and contentious, quarrelsome and fickle, and so fitted for everything evil.” “These are all manifest lies, nothing but abuse, slander and blasphemy, devilish lies and works by which Luther the arch-liar has driven the world to the devil.” He calls Luther “the devil’s hired messenger” and says of his manner of writing: “Here everything reeks of devils; nothing that the devilish man writes can stand without the devil who endevils all his products.”[1271]

The Ratisbon Benedictine, Christopher Hoffmann († 1534), in his sermons to the Chapter preached before 1525 represents Luther as an apostate and as “dæmone plenus.”[1272]

The anonymous “Iudicium de Luthero” included in a German codex at Munich and dating from the early years of the controversy, also deserves to be mentioned. The author indeed praises Luther’s learning all too generously, but then goes on tosay, that he looked on him as “no Christian,” and to speak of the “devil’s brood” by whom Martin Luther is possessed.[1273]

Berthold of Chiemsee in his “Tewtsche Theologey” considers that in his day false teaching has been spread abroad “by a horrid devil,” who makes use of wicked men; the “devil, with his wicked company, has stirred up heresy.”[1274]

Petrus Sylvius, in 1534, after a lengthy discourse on Luther’s “seductive and damnable” manner of “slandering and blaspheming,” says, that he was “in very truth a possessed and devilish man.”[1275]

In order the better to explain how these and many other of Luther’s contemporaries came to see a diabolical influence in his work, we may quote a few words from Johann Adam Möhler’s lectures on Church History (published posthumously): “We find Luther in 1520 and 1521 displaying a feverish literary activity that arouses in the reader a horrible misgiving. An uneasy sense of discomfort oppresses us, and a secret shudder runs through our frame when we think of the boundless selfishness and presumption which holds sway in this man; we seem to be standing within the inner circle where that sinister power rules, which, from the beginning of the world, has ever been seeking to taint the history of our race.”[1276]

Luther himself, as early as 1518, alludes to opponents of his who descried in him the influence of the devil. In a letter to Trutfetter, his old master, he says: “They speak of me from the pulpit as a heretic, a madman, a tempter and one possessed by I know not how many devils”; but “let people say, hearken to and believe what, where and as much as they will, I shall do what God inspires me to do.”[1277]

Paolo Vergerio, the Nuncio, whose detailed account of his interview with Luther has already been related (vol. iii., p. 426 ff.), speaks, like Aleander, of his “strange look,” which, the longer he observed it, the more it reminded him of persons he had formerly seen whom some regarded as possessed; his eyes were restless and uncanny, and bore the stamp of rage and anger. “Whether he be possessed or not,” he says, “in his behaviour he is the personification of presumption, wickedness and indiscretion.”[1278]

The statements regarding Luther’s eyes made by various persons who knew him would appear to have furnished many with a ground for thinking him under some diabolical spell. “Luther’s dark and sparkling eyes, deep-set and keen ... must indeed have made an even greater impression than the best of Cranach’s portraits.”[1279]

While his friends, Melanchthon for instance, saw in them the expression of a high-minded and noble nature and a “leonine glance,”[1280]many Catholics, like Vergerio, saw the reflection of a spirit hostile to God. At Worms, as already related, Aleander had said, though only on the strength of hearsay, that Luther had “the eyes of a demon,” and a Spanish account from Worms also remarks: “his eyes forebode no good.”[1281]Cardinal Cajetan, in his examination of Luther at Augsburg, stated, that he would confer no more with him; “he has deep-set eyes and strange fancies in his head.”[1282]The University Professor, Martin Pollich, of Melrichstatt (Mellerstadt), seems to have let fall a similar remark during Luther’s early years at Wittenberg; he too mentioned his “deep-set eyes” and “strange fancies.” It may be, however, that Luther, who tells us this, erroneously puts into Pollich’s mouth the remark actually made by Cajetan.[1283]It was Pollich also who often declared, that this monk would one day overthrow the system of teaching which had hitherto prevailed in all the Universities.[1284]Johannes Dantiscus, a Pole, who visited Luther during a journey through Germany and who subsequently became Bishop of Culm and Ermeland, expresses himself very frankly. He says: His eyes were keen and sparkled strangely, as is sometimes the case with those possessed.[1285]Luther’s own pupil, Johann Kessler, also found somethinguncomfortable about his glance: He had “jet-black brows and eyes that sparkled and twinkled like stars, so that it was no easy thing to fix them.”[1286]

In the above statement concerning Luther’s look and the likelihood of his being possessed, Vergerio also has a passing allusion to a certain crude tale then current which quite befitted the taste of the age and which he gives for what it may be worth in his official report, viz. that Luther was begotten of the devil.[1287]This tale also found its way into several Catholic works written in that credulous and deeply agitated period.

It was not the first time such things had been invented concerning a person who was an object of ill-will in that age when prejudice told so strongly.

Luther himself was in the habit of speaking of the actual occurrence of diabolical births and of the “diabolus incubus”;[1288]he not only did not rise above the vulgar beliefs handed down by a credulous past, but even imparted to them, at least so far as the power of the devil went, a still worse shape. He never tired of filling the imagination of the reader with diabolical images (vol. v., xxxi., 4); and he spoke of persons possessed as though the world were replete with them.

If we could trust Cochlæus, Luther’s brother monks would seem to have partly been responsible for the report not merely of a diabolical possession (“obsessio,circumsessio”), but also of a certain wilful league with the devil entered into by the young Augustinian. They could not forget the “singularity” of the young monk, particularly that once, during his fit in choir whilst the Gospel of the man possessed was being read, he had cried out,“I am not he.” Cochlæus, who had some intercourse with the Augustinians at Nuremberg, hints in his Commentaries at the “secret intercourse with the demon” of which Luther was suspected, and immediately afterwards refers, though under a misapprehension, to Luther’s own remark about eating salt with the devil, and holding a disputation with him.[1289]The passage frequently attributed to Cochlæus, viz. that it was notorious “the devil Incubus was Luther’s father,” and son of the devil his “real name, therefore remain the devil’s son as long as you live,”[1290]was, however, never penned by him. But he was aware of the reports on this subject already in circulation and never saw fit to treat them with the contempt they deserved.

All the passages quoted above regarding Luther’s being possessed of the devil are in every instance quite independent of this stupid tale: they are based throughout on the character of Luther’s writings and on his public behaviour.

The first to relate anything concerning Luther’s diabolical parentage was, according to N. Paulus, Petrus Sylvius in his polemics of 1531-1534.[1291]He recounts with perfect seriousness the information which he says he had from an “honest, god-fearing woman,” who had heard it from some former female friends of Luther’s mother to whom the latter had herself disclosed the fact: “At night time, when the doors were locked, a beautiful youth dressed in red had frequently visited her before the Carnival,” etc. Some such idle tale may have reached the ears of the Legate Vergerio during his travels through Germany in that same decade. Possibly he may have expressed himself in private with greater credulity concerning this story than in his official report, for Contarini goes so far as to write that Vergerio “had found that Martin was begotten of the devil.”[1292]

The silly story ought to have made all Luther’s later critics more cautious, even with regard to the statements regarding Luther’s obsession by the Evil One. The few Catholic writers, who have ventured even in our own day to assert that Luther was possessed, should have been deterred from entering a region so obscure and where the danger of missing one’s way is so great. Even in the case of persons still living it is rash and often morally impossible to diagnose a case of possession; much more is this the case when the person in question has so long been dead.

Of the Catholic writers, those in particular were sure of a hearing amongst the educated, who for a long while and until it revealed itself in its true colours, had been inclined to Lutheranism. Such was, for instance, the case with several of the pupils and admirers of Erasmus. Among these were Ulrich Zasius and Silvius Egranus, who, though ready to criticise Luther severely, were not wanting in words of praise. The latter was a good type of the half-fledged convert.

Silvius Egranus (see vol. iii., p. 402), for instance, wrote: “I do not deny that Luther has spirit and inventive genius, but I find him utterly wanting in judgment, learning and prudence.... Luther’s foolhardy abuse, his defiance and violence, breed nothing but unutterable confusion. Nowhere do I see Christian godliness flourishing in the hearts of men, nay, owing to Luther, it is not safe even to speak of the Gospel of Christ or of Paul.”[1293]“I declare that Luther’s doctrine is a web of sophisms, is neither ecclesiastical nor Apostolic, but closely related to that sophistical buffoonery and strong language to which he is ever having recourse.”[1294]—Ulrich Zasius, a Humanist, and at the same time learned in the law, after changing his views, publicly took the field against Luther even in official academical discourses; he maintained nevertheless that he had been led by Luther to a deeper knowledge of the spirit of Christ; his skill and talent he never even questioned; he declared: “There is something in Luther’s spirit that meets with my approval.”[1295]What alienated him from Luther was not only his attack on the authority of the Pope—with the grounds of which Zasius was well acquainted from his study of Canon Law—but his denial of the merit of good works. This contention seemed to him diametrically opposed to Holy Scripture. “You reject [meritorious] good works,” he says to Luther’s followers, “and yet I know One Who says: Their works shall follow them.”[1296]He finds it necessary to reprove Luthersharply for his unmeasured, nay, shameless boasting of his gifts, for exciting enmity, strife, dissension and factions, and for inciting to ill-will and murder. “What shall I say,” he exclaims, “of the boldness and impudence with which Luther interprets the Testaments, both Old and New, from the first chapter of Genesis to the very end, as a tissue of menaces and imprecations against Popes, bishops and priests, as though through all the ages God had had nothing to do but to thunder at the priesthood.”[1297]Elsewhere he bewails with noble indignation the fate of his beloved fatherland: “Luther, the foe of peace, and the most worthless of men, has let loose the furies over Germany so that we must regard it as a real mercy if speedy destruction does not ensue. I should have much to write upon the subject if only my grief allowed me.”[1298]

Zasius and Egranus, however, like others in a similar walk of life and who were disposed to seek a compromise, never attacked the new teachers, their reputation and their supposed wisdom as decidedly as did those whose deeper knowledge of theology taught them how dangerous the errors were.

One well equipped for the literary struggle with Luther was the convert George Wicel, a priest who had married and settled down as a Lutheran pastor and then, after a thorough study of holy Scripture and the Fathers, had resigned his post and published an “Apologia” at Leipzig in 1533 to justify his return to the Church of his Fathers.

In a multitude of polemical treatises, often couched in caustic language, he exposed the untenability and the innate contradictions of the Wittenberg doctrines. Of this hated “apostate” Luther speaks in a characteristic letter of 1535.[1299]He writes to the Mansfeld Chancellor, Caspar Müller, about a new work of Wicel’s: This Masterlet, as he hears—for he himself “read none of their books”—has again been throwing sweetmeats to his swine, the Catholics. “Such guests are well served by such a cook.”Owing to his stay at Wittenberg and Eisleben, Wicel was well fitted to paint a reliable picture of the morals there prevailing. He utilised his experiences in his “Retectio Lutheranismi” (1538), and summed up his case against Luther as follows: “The life of the great mass of Evangelicals is so little Evangelicalthat I have thousands and thousands of times felt most heartily ashamed of it.... Only too quickly have most of them sucked in the poisonous doctrine, that works are of no avail and that sin is not imputed to the believer.”[1300]Concerning one phenomenon, which Luther himself bewails as a very pest, viz. the fear of death, which had become the rule since the prevalence of the new teaching, Wicel had some severe things to say; this was strangely at variance with the confidence which Luther’s Evangel was supposed to impart. “Is it not a deep disgrace,” he says, “that those who, formerly, when they were the followers of Antichrist, to use their own Lutheran phrase, did not fear the plague at all, or at any rate not much, now, as ‘Christians,’ display such abject terror when it comes? Hardly anyone visits the sick and no one dares to assist those stricken with the plague. No one will even look at them from a distance, and all are seized with a strange panic. Where is that all-prevailing faith that is now so often extolled, where is their love for their neighbour? Tell me, I adjure you in the name of Christ, whether there has ever been less trust or less charity amongst Christians?”[1301]In the conversations held in that same year in the intimate circle at Wittenberg, and preserved for us by Lauterbach the Deacon, Luther frequently alluded to Wicel; at that time the latter was in the midst of his successful literary labours against the Lutherans, and his proposals for reunion, though by no means wholly satisfactory, had even led Duke George of Saxony to summon him to his Court. Luther, with a hatred quite comprehensible under the circumstances, calls him, according to Lauterbach, “the most treacherous of men, insatiable in his jealousy, a scoundrel who does not even deserve an answer”; Wicel himself, he tells us, was well aware he was defending, against his better feelings, a cause altogether wrong; the ungrateful slanderer richly deserved death; only thanks to Luther’s kindness, had he found a decent means of livelihood. “Let us despise him! We must be silent, pray and bless,” so he concludes, “and not bring new faggots to feed the flames.”[1302]Luther knew perfectly well that any “new faggots” he might have brought would have burst into flame under Wicel’s ardent pen, to his own disadvantage. He does not shrink from indignantly describing Wicel elsewhere as a “sycophant and venomous traitor,”[1303]and as “a man full of malice and presumption.”[1304]He comes along and “boasts of the Fathers. I do not even read his works, for I know his Fathers well; but we have one only Father, Who is in Heaven and Who is over all Fathers.”[1305]Particularly sensitive was he to Wicel’s strictures onhis doctrine of good works, that heel of Achilles of the new Evangel. Wicel, “with scorn and mockery,” says, “that we have taught that, ‘whoever has once been converted can sin no more, and whatever he does is right and good.’ But the same thing happened to St. Paul and he too had to listen to slanderers, who, because he taught that people might be saved without the works of the law and merely by faith in Christ, said: ‘Then let us do what is evil and sin lustily that good may come of it,’ etc. Let us pray against such blasphemy.”[1306]Of the consequences of the new teaching levelled at the meritorious nature of good works, Wicel had said at the end of his “Apologia”: “The Lutheran sect has opened wide the flood-gates to immorality and disorder, so that everybody laments and sighs over it. If there be anything god-fearing, good, moral or right to be found in this sect, then it was there before, and did not originate with it. For, show me seven men in seven thousand, who, having been formerly godless and wicked, have now, because they are Lutherans, become good and full of the fear of God. I could, however, point out some, such as had previously led a devout, peaceable, inward and harmless life, who are now quite changed by this Evangel. May but the Lord grant them to see and acknowledge what misery they have excited within the German nation. Amen.”[1307]Among Wicel’s “blasphemies,” as Luther calls them, were some that traversed the latter’s assertions that the holy works of penitents and ascetics were utterly worthless, and that the business of a house-agent or tax-collector, provided one went about it in faith, ranked higher than all the pious works of any monk or hermit.[1308]“The wretched man,” exclaims Luther, angry because of his inability to answer the objection, “most idly attacks us; he has no respect for the labours of their calling which God has commanded each man to perform in his state of life; all this he disregards and merely gapes at superstitious, grand and showy works”;[1309]“and yet Paul extols the ordinary works of the faithful and lays great stress on them.”[1310]This was one of his habitual falsehoods, viz. to make out that Wicel and his other opponents looked down on lowly and commonplace works and the unobtrusive performance of the duties of one’s calling, more particularly in the life of the world. In reality, however, they recognised in the most large-minded way the high value of the duties of any worldly calling when done in a religious spirit, and repudiated with perfect justice the charge brought against Catholicism of undervaluing the ordinary virtues of the good citizen.The zealous Wicel was not perturbed by Luther’s attacks. He continued to damage the Lutheran cause by his writings, though the position he took up in ecclesiastical matters was not always well advised.

In a multitude of polemical treatises, often couched in caustic language, he exposed the untenability and the innate contradictions of the Wittenberg doctrines. Of this hated “apostate” Luther speaks in a characteristic letter of 1535.[1299]He writes to the Mansfeld Chancellor, Caspar Müller, about a new work of Wicel’s: This Masterlet, as he hears—for he himself “read none of their books”—has again been throwing sweetmeats to his swine, the Catholics. “Such guests are well served by such a cook.”

Owing to his stay at Wittenberg and Eisleben, Wicel was well fitted to paint a reliable picture of the morals there prevailing. He utilised his experiences in his “Retectio Lutheranismi” (1538), and summed up his case against Luther as follows: “The life of the great mass of Evangelicals is so little Evangelicalthat I have thousands and thousands of times felt most heartily ashamed of it.... Only too quickly have most of them sucked in the poisonous doctrine, that works are of no avail and that sin is not imputed to the believer.”[1300]Concerning one phenomenon, which Luther himself bewails as a very pest, viz. the fear of death, which had become the rule since the prevalence of the new teaching, Wicel had some severe things to say; this was strangely at variance with the confidence which Luther’s Evangel was supposed to impart. “Is it not a deep disgrace,” he says, “that those who, formerly, when they were the followers of Antichrist, to use their own Lutheran phrase, did not fear the plague at all, or at any rate not much, now, as ‘Christians,’ display such abject terror when it comes? Hardly anyone visits the sick and no one dares to assist those stricken with the plague. No one will even look at them from a distance, and all are seized with a strange panic. Where is that all-prevailing faith that is now so often extolled, where is their love for their neighbour? Tell me, I adjure you in the name of Christ, whether there has ever been less trust or less charity amongst Christians?”[1301]

In the conversations held in that same year in the intimate circle at Wittenberg, and preserved for us by Lauterbach the Deacon, Luther frequently alluded to Wicel; at that time the latter was in the midst of his successful literary labours against the Lutherans, and his proposals for reunion, though by no means wholly satisfactory, had even led Duke George of Saxony to summon him to his Court. Luther, with a hatred quite comprehensible under the circumstances, calls him, according to Lauterbach, “the most treacherous of men, insatiable in his jealousy, a scoundrel who does not even deserve an answer”; Wicel himself, he tells us, was well aware he was defending, against his better feelings, a cause altogether wrong; the ungrateful slanderer richly deserved death; only thanks to Luther’s kindness, had he found a decent means of livelihood. “Let us despise him! We must be silent, pray and bless,” so he concludes, “and not bring new faggots to feed the flames.”[1302]Luther knew perfectly well that any “new faggots” he might have brought would have burst into flame under Wicel’s ardent pen, to his own disadvantage. He does not shrink from indignantly describing Wicel elsewhere as a “sycophant and venomous traitor,”[1303]and as “a man full of malice and presumption.”[1304]He comes along and “boasts of the Fathers. I do not even read his works, for I know his Fathers well; but we have one only Father, Who is in Heaven and Who is over all Fathers.”[1305]Particularly sensitive was he to Wicel’s strictures onhis doctrine of good works, that heel of Achilles of the new Evangel. Wicel, “with scorn and mockery,” says, “that we have taught that, ‘whoever has once been converted can sin no more, and whatever he does is right and good.’ But the same thing happened to St. Paul and he too had to listen to slanderers, who, because he taught that people might be saved without the works of the law and merely by faith in Christ, said: ‘Then let us do what is evil and sin lustily that good may come of it,’ etc. Let us pray against such blasphemy.”[1306]

Of the consequences of the new teaching levelled at the meritorious nature of good works, Wicel had said at the end of his “Apologia”: “The Lutheran sect has opened wide the flood-gates to immorality and disorder, so that everybody laments and sighs over it. If there be anything god-fearing, good, moral or right to be found in this sect, then it was there before, and did not originate with it. For, show me seven men in seven thousand, who, having been formerly godless and wicked, have now, because they are Lutherans, become good and full of the fear of God. I could, however, point out some, such as had previously led a devout, peaceable, inward and harmless life, who are now quite changed by this Evangel. May but the Lord grant them to see and acknowledge what misery they have excited within the German nation. Amen.”[1307]

Among Wicel’s “blasphemies,” as Luther calls them, were some that traversed the latter’s assertions that the holy works of penitents and ascetics were utterly worthless, and that the business of a house-agent or tax-collector, provided one went about it in faith, ranked higher than all the pious works of any monk or hermit.[1308]“The wretched man,” exclaims Luther, angry because of his inability to answer the objection, “most idly attacks us; he has no respect for the labours of their calling which God has commanded each man to perform in his state of life; all this he disregards and merely gapes at superstitious, grand and showy works”;[1309]“and yet Paul extols the ordinary works of the faithful and lays great stress on them.”[1310]This was one of his habitual falsehoods, viz. to make out that Wicel and his other opponents looked down on lowly and commonplace works and the unobtrusive performance of the duties of one’s calling, more particularly in the life of the world. In reality, however, they recognised in the most large-minded way the high value of the duties of any worldly calling when done in a religious spirit, and repudiated with perfect justice the charge brought against Catholicism of undervaluing the ordinary virtues of the good citizen.

The zealous Wicel was not perturbed by Luther’s attacks. He continued to damage the Lutheran cause by his writings, though the position he took up in ecclesiastical matters was not always well advised.

Another convert, Veit Amerbach (Amorbach), one of the most capable Humanists of the day, after abandoning the Catholic communion lectured first at Eisleben and then in the philosophical faculty at Wittenberg, till, owing to his patristic studies and after personal conferences with Luther and Melanchthon, he returned to the bosom of the Church in 1543, and at once found a post as lecturer at the University of Ingolstadt. As he declared in a written statement handed to Melanchthon, it was particularly the doctrines of Justification and of the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome that compelled him to side with antiquity and to oppose the innovations.

Too high-minded to abuse his former associates (he even refrained from writing against them), Luther nevertheless, on hearing of his conversion, declared that he would surely turn out later a blasphemer.

“You know,” Luther wrote to Lauterbach, “Vitus Amerbach, who left us to go to Ingolstadt, was a man who was never really one of us (1 John ii. 19); he will imitate Eck in his blasphemy of our Word, and perhaps do even worse things.”[1311]Amerbach having pointed out that the greatest authorities both of East and West had acknowledged the Pope’s leadership in the Church, Luther replies in Table-Talk in 1544: “Whence do they get the rotten argument, that the Church must have Rome for its outward head? All history is against anything of the kind. The whole of the West was never under the Pope, nor the whole of the East. It is mere pride on Amerbach’s part! O God, this is indeed a fall beyond all other falls! I am sorry about him, for he will occasion great scandal. Poor people, they think not of their last hour.”[1312]“Ah, it is said of them: They went out from us, from the Apostles. But whence came the devil? From the angels surely. Whence the prostitutes if not from virgins? Whence the knaves if not from the ranks of the pious? Evil must needs come from good.”[1313]Amerbach’s opinion of the innovations and of the work of the devil was a different one.In the Preface to his collection of the Capitularies of Charles the Great and Lothair,—the solitary passage in which he alludes to the upheaval he had witnessed, though he refrains from any reference to his former colleagues—he expresses his cherished hopethat the Church will ultimately be restored to unity under the successor of Peter; the most pressing thing was to set some bounds to the extraordinary and utterly unrestrained abuse and vituperation, which was not a little promoted by the avarice and filthy venality of the printers, but which the authorities did nothing to prevent. “At times, when I reflect on this disorder,” he says, “it seems to me that men are not filled merely with gall and wormwood, but are verily led and set in motion by devils incarnate. But otherwise it cannot be, so long as, within the Church, the faithful are split up into opposing factions. And would that the populace alone were to blame! I am very much deceived if in any of the books of history even one other example is to be met with of such madness, such furious, poisonous railing and drunken invective.”[1314]

“You know,” Luther wrote to Lauterbach, “Vitus Amerbach, who left us to go to Ingolstadt, was a man who was never really one of us (1 John ii. 19); he will imitate Eck in his blasphemy of our Word, and perhaps do even worse things.”[1311]Amerbach having pointed out that the greatest authorities both of East and West had acknowledged the Pope’s leadership in the Church, Luther replies in Table-Talk in 1544: “Whence do they get the rotten argument, that the Church must have Rome for its outward head? All history is against anything of the kind. The whole of the West was never under the Pope, nor the whole of the East. It is mere pride on Amerbach’s part! O God, this is indeed a fall beyond all other falls! I am sorry about him, for he will occasion great scandal. Poor people, they think not of their last hour.”[1312]“Ah, it is said of them: They went out from us, from the Apostles. But whence came the devil? From the angels surely. Whence the prostitutes if not from virgins? Whence the knaves if not from the ranks of the pious? Evil must needs come from good.”[1313]

Amerbach’s opinion of the innovations and of the work of the devil was a different one.

In the Preface to his collection of the Capitularies of Charles the Great and Lothair,—the solitary passage in which he alludes to the upheaval he had witnessed, though he refrains from any reference to his former colleagues—he expresses his cherished hopethat the Church will ultimately be restored to unity under the successor of Peter; the most pressing thing was to set some bounds to the extraordinary and utterly unrestrained abuse and vituperation, which was not a little promoted by the avarice and filthy venality of the printers, but which the authorities did nothing to prevent. “At times, when I reflect on this disorder,” he says, “it seems to me that men are not filled merely with gall and wormwood, but are verily led and set in motion by devils incarnate. But otherwise it cannot be, so long as, within the Church, the faithful are split up into opposing factions. And would that the populace alone were to blame! I am very much deceived if in any of the books of history even one other example is to be met with of such madness, such furious, poisonous railing and drunken invective.”[1314]

With the defenders of the Church the depravity of Luther’s teaching, and the immense injury which his work of apostasy was doing to souls, weighed far more heavily than any of the charges we have heard advanced against his person.

In the beginning, it is true, they were chiefly concerned in refuting his new and daring propositions. But, as the years passed and the ruin increased, startling accounts of the sad state of religion more and more often find a place in their polemics, the writers urging against Lutheranism the decay of faith and morals which had followed in its train. In their words we can feel even to-day the fervour and the profound anxiety with which they sought to admonish their contemporaries against the destroyer of the Sanctuary and his seductive ways.

When Johann Cochlæus composed the Preface to his “Commentaria de actis et scriptis Martini Lutheri,” he could not refrain, at the sight of the state of Germany, from giving lively expression to his grief.To him “the greatest misfortune, which no tears can sufficiently deplore,” is “the fall of so many immortal souls, destined by the grace of baptism for life everlasting.” “This unhappy strife regarding belief,” he writes at the commencement, “has torn them from the bosom and the unity of the Church and will bring them to eternal destruction!” In addition to this there is “a frightful subversion of all things such as no previous heresy had ever brought about.” The bond of charity and concordwhich unites Christian people has been loosened, discipline undermined, reverence for God destroyed, wholesome fear extinguished, obedience cast aside, and in their lieu prevails “sinfulness and a freedom that is alien to God.”[1315]In the body of the work he describes with pain and indignation how the uncalled preachers behaved. “They come,” so he says in one passage, “and prate of that false freedom which is to set us free from all laws of Church, Pope, bishops and Councils. With a cloud of Scriptural texts they undertake to prove, that fasting, prayers, vigils and other penitential works are no good whatever, that Christ has sufficiently atoned for our sins, that faith alone suffices, that our good works, far from being deserving, are really sinful, and so forth. In glibness of tongue and in energy they are not to be outdone.”[1316]Johann Wild, Cathedral preacher at Mayence, also describes in moving words the grievous wounds that were being inflicted on the Church. He was a Franciscan Observantine and was distinguished in his Order for his learning and success. After having been from 1528 preacher at the friary church at Mayence, he was appointed in 1539 to the pulpit of the Cathedral, which he retained till his death in 1554. To him it was in part due that what was then the ecclesiastical metropolis of the Rhine Province was preserved in the Catholic faith. He was a type of those men who attempted to meet the spiritual needs of the day, not by loud-voiced polemics, but in a conciliatory and peaceable fashion, and who insisted that the first requirement was to instruct the people thoroughly in the faith, and to raise the moral tone of the faithful. Luther’s name he does not mention once in the many volumes of his sermons, but the complaints are none the less heart-felt that he pours forth concerning the devastation wrought in the Lord’s vineyard, warning his hearers and exhorting them to pity, labour and prayer in the interests of Catholicism, now in such dire straits.“Woe to all those,” he cries, “who by their preaching have made the world so frivolous and fearless of God! Our forefathers were better advised in this matter. They too preached grace, but they did not forget penance.”[1317]“But now we see, how, by dint of sermons lacking all sense of modesty and urging faith alone, all fear of God is driven out of the hearts of men.”[1318]“One thing, viz. faith, has been extolled to the skies, the other, viz. good works, has been trodden in the mire. The result is that we are now for the most part merely Christians in name, but, so far as works are concerned, more depraved and wicked than even Jews or Turks. Yet they expect it to be said of them: These are Evangelical preachers, comforting folk, who know how to quiet people’s consciences.”[1319]“All sorts of wickedness, injustice and frivolity increase from day to day.” “Since ever there wereChristians in the world a godly life has never been so little esteemed as now.”[1320]This, according to him, is the chief cause of all the “very grievous sufferings of the Church,” in comparison with which the spoliation of the clergy was nothing, of the loss of souls, and ruin of religious life. “The cause of the Church’s pain is that her children have been and are so lamentably led astray, that they refuse any longer to acknowledge their own mother, but avoid and flee from her, despise her old age, mock at her wrinkles, laugh at her feebleness, pay no heed to her admonitions, transgress her laws, forsake her doctrine, reject her commands, despise her sacraments, cling to her enemies, wallow in every sort of sin and defile themselves with all kinds of errors. Who can tell all the misery which is now to be met with among Christians by reason of their sins and errors?” How should this not cause pain to the Church, our loving Mother?[1321]—When the discord was on the point of breaking out into an armed conflict, this patriot, deeply moved at the sight of the dissensions that ravaged the Fatherland, exclaimed: Germany has become a byword to her neighbours. “Everybody wants a bit of us.” We have to submit to bitter scorn. They say: “Ha, these are the haughty Germans who help to destroy all other countries and have a finger in every war; now they are going to set to on each other.... Is it not a lamentable thing that foreigners and aliens should speak thus derisively of us?... We must lay it before God and beg Him to forgive those whose fault it is that we cannot reach any agreement. I have always feared this outcome, yet I ever furthered and counselled peace and unity.”[1322]In a writing presented at the Diet of Ratisbon in 1541 by Duke William of Bavaria, the acts of violence committed by the protesting Estates for years past were thus summarised: “The Protestants clamour for peace and justice, but in their actions they violate both.” The Catholic Estates “are continually molested on account of their religion, and great loss and injury are inflicted on them. Contrary to the commandment of God, in defiance of law and Christian usages, the Protestants forbid them to preach the Gospel and the Word of God openly; their churches and monasteries are seized by force, their subjects enticed away from them by all manner of devices and taken under the shelter of the Protestants; their religious foundations and property are torn from them mercilessly and used for alien purposes, the graves and monuments of the pious dead, both high and low, are desecrated and destroyed; the pictures and images of our Saviour Jesus Christ, of the chaste Virgin Mary and the dear Saints are pitifully damaged and smashed to pieces.” “The Catholics have no dearer wish than for peace and order and justice; they too were clamouring for these, and not like the Protestants, trying at the same time to upset them. All they asked was to be left in the enjoyment of their holy Christian faith and the ordinances of the Christian Church, andnot to have their goods violently taken from them.”[1323]—These complaints were, however, ineffective, as the Protestant party had already the upper hand in the College of Electors.At the Diet of Worms in 1545 the complaints were renewed on the Catholic side: “The Protestants have made themselves masters of churches and monasteries and have driven into misery all who wished to abide by the old faith. They have invaded bishoprics and have been reckless of justice and peace; have constrained the poor inhabitants to embrace their religion, as, for instance, in the land of Brunswick, where they had no other right than the might of the sword. They trample under foot and oppress everything, and then complain of being themselves oppressed.” “They are insatiable in their demands and are for ever producing fresh cards to play, at every Diet putting forward fresh claims which they insist on having conceded to them before they will take part in the transactions or vote supplies.”[1324]The Catholics further declared in the sittings of a committee at Worms, in answer to the charges of their opponents concerning the real abuses which prevailed among the bishops and elsewhere: “Scandals and abuses innumerable certainly existed and were openly flaunted, and were growing worse and worse nowadays, because, owing to the perilous times and the teaching of novel sects and preachers, all good works were being abandoned, and unbelief and contempt for religion was becoming the custom among high and low. Many thousand livings stood vacant and the people were without helm or rudder.” “Where were the schools and the Divine worship? Where the foundations and endowments for the poor which had been so numerous twenty or thirty years ago?” “What the Protestants call proclaiming the Word of God is for the most part, as they themselves complain, mere slander and abuse of the Pope and the clergy and a general reviling of mankind.” The pulpit has “degenerated into a chair of scurrility at which foreign nations are shuddering.” Not many years before Luther had openly exhorted the preachers to “denounce the Duke of Brunswick in their sermons as a servant of the devil, likewise the Archbishop of Mayence and all followers of the Pope.”[1325]“If we wish to discover the causes of the war which is undoubtedly at hand,” so the Cologne doctor, Carl van der Plassen, who was well acquainted with the conditions in Germany, wrote from the Diet of Worms, “we must bear in mind all that has happened in Germany since the subjugation of the peasants by the Princes and municipal authorities, all the countless violations of human and Divine law, of the public peace, of property, civic rights, conscience and honour. Let us but reckon up the numberof churches and monasteries which have been destroyed and pillaged during these twenty years, and all the accompanying crime and iniquity. And to what purpose have these stolen goods been applied? What has become of all the Church property, all the treasures?... A new religion has been forced upon the people by might and by stratagem, and they have been forbidden under threat of punishment to carry on the old service of God, with its rites and Christian usages. Is this the vaunted freedom of the Gospel, to persecute and coerce others, to imprison them or drive them into exile? Everything that was formerly reverenced has now fallen into contempt, with the result that right and property are no longer respected; the endless disturbances in matters of religion have upset the whole national equilibrium; discipline, loyalty and respectability have vanished.... What misery results from want of clergy and schools even in the lands which have remained Catholic! Princes and towns, making their boast of the Gospel, have not been satisfied with introducing the new Church system into their own territories, but have invaded the Catholic bishoprics and secular dominions and turned everything topsy-turvy in order to set up their own institutions. The Schmalkalden confederates extend their operations from year to year and grow more and more audacious. At this moment they are actually preaching a war of extermination against the Pope and his adherents. There will be no checking them if the sword of the Emperor is not used to restrain them, as it ought to have been long ago.”[1326]Another Catholic contemporary complains in similar fashion: “Religion is perverted, all obedience to the Emperor destroyed, justice set aside and insolence of all sorts everywhere encouraged.” The Emperor “has tried many and various means of putting a stop to this insubordination, but all measures have been fruitless and he must now wield in earnest the sword that God put into his hands to bring back his and our fatherland to peace, order and unity.”[1327]In the Emperor’s own circle the conviction had ripened that so much injustice had been done to Catholics and so much detriment to the Church, that armed intervention was the only course that remained. “Things had come to such a pass in Germany,” said the Imperial Chancellor Granvell to Farnese, the Papal Legate, about the time of the Diet of Worms, “that neither the Emperor’s nor the Pope’s name any longer carried any weight; indeed, it was to be feared that the Protestants looked upon the opening of the Council as a signal for war, and that they would at once begin to equip themselves not merely for the sake of being ready for any emergency, but rather in order to suppress the Catholics and to make an attack on Italy, the object of their bitter hatred.”[1328]

When Johann Cochlæus composed the Preface to his “Commentaria de actis et scriptis Martini Lutheri,” he could not refrain, at the sight of the state of Germany, from giving lively expression to his grief.

To him “the greatest misfortune, which no tears can sufficiently deplore,” is “the fall of so many immortal souls, destined by the grace of baptism for life everlasting.” “This unhappy strife regarding belief,” he writes at the commencement, “has torn them from the bosom and the unity of the Church and will bring them to eternal destruction!” In addition to this there is “a frightful subversion of all things such as no previous heresy had ever brought about.” The bond of charity and concordwhich unites Christian people has been loosened, discipline undermined, reverence for God destroyed, wholesome fear extinguished, obedience cast aside, and in their lieu prevails “sinfulness and a freedom that is alien to God.”[1315]In the body of the work he describes with pain and indignation how the uncalled preachers behaved. “They come,” so he says in one passage, “and prate of that false freedom which is to set us free from all laws of Church, Pope, bishops and Councils. With a cloud of Scriptural texts they undertake to prove, that fasting, prayers, vigils and other penitential works are no good whatever, that Christ has sufficiently atoned for our sins, that faith alone suffices, that our good works, far from being deserving, are really sinful, and so forth. In glibness of tongue and in energy they are not to be outdone.”[1316]

Johann Wild, Cathedral preacher at Mayence, also describes in moving words the grievous wounds that were being inflicted on the Church. He was a Franciscan Observantine and was distinguished in his Order for his learning and success. After having been from 1528 preacher at the friary church at Mayence, he was appointed in 1539 to the pulpit of the Cathedral, which he retained till his death in 1554. To him it was in part due that what was then the ecclesiastical metropolis of the Rhine Province was preserved in the Catholic faith. He was a type of those men who attempted to meet the spiritual needs of the day, not by loud-voiced polemics, but in a conciliatory and peaceable fashion, and who insisted that the first requirement was to instruct the people thoroughly in the faith, and to raise the moral tone of the faithful. Luther’s name he does not mention once in the many volumes of his sermons, but the complaints are none the less heart-felt that he pours forth concerning the devastation wrought in the Lord’s vineyard, warning his hearers and exhorting them to pity, labour and prayer in the interests of Catholicism, now in such dire straits.

“Woe to all those,” he cries, “who by their preaching have made the world so frivolous and fearless of God! Our forefathers were better advised in this matter. They too preached grace, but they did not forget penance.”[1317]“But now we see, how, by dint of sermons lacking all sense of modesty and urging faith alone, all fear of God is driven out of the hearts of men.”[1318]“One thing, viz. faith, has been extolled to the skies, the other, viz. good works, has been trodden in the mire. The result is that we are now for the most part merely Christians in name, but, so far as works are concerned, more depraved and wicked than even Jews or Turks. Yet they expect it to be said of them: These are Evangelical preachers, comforting folk, who know how to quiet people’s consciences.”[1319]“All sorts of wickedness, injustice and frivolity increase from day to day.” “Since ever there wereChristians in the world a godly life has never been so little esteemed as now.”[1320]This, according to him, is the chief cause of all the “very grievous sufferings of the Church,” in comparison with which the spoliation of the clergy was nothing, of the loss of souls, and ruin of religious life. “The cause of the Church’s pain is that her children have been and are so lamentably led astray, that they refuse any longer to acknowledge their own mother, but avoid and flee from her, despise her old age, mock at her wrinkles, laugh at her feebleness, pay no heed to her admonitions, transgress her laws, forsake her doctrine, reject her commands, despise her sacraments, cling to her enemies, wallow in every sort of sin and defile themselves with all kinds of errors. Who can tell all the misery which is now to be met with among Christians by reason of their sins and errors?” How should this not cause pain to the Church, our loving Mother?[1321]—When the discord was on the point of breaking out into an armed conflict, this patriot, deeply moved at the sight of the dissensions that ravaged the Fatherland, exclaimed: Germany has become a byword to her neighbours. “Everybody wants a bit of us.” We have to submit to bitter scorn. They say: “Ha, these are the haughty Germans who help to destroy all other countries and have a finger in every war; now they are going to set to on each other.... Is it not a lamentable thing that foreigners and aliens should speak thus derisively of us?... We must lay it before God and beg Him to forgive those whose fault it is that we cannot reach any agreement. I have always feared this outcome, yet I ever furthered and counselled peace and unity.”[1322]

In a writing presented at the Diet of Ratisbon in 1541 by Duke William of Bavaria, the acts of violence committed by the protesting Estates for years past were thus summarised: “The Protestants clamour for peace and justice, but in their actions they violate both.” The Catholic Estates “are continually molested on account of their religion, and great loss and injury are inflicted on them. Contrary to the commandment of God, in defiance of law and Christian usages, the Protestants forbid them to preach the Gospel and the Word of God openly; their churches and monasteries are seized by force, their subjects enticed away from them by all manner of devices and taken under the shelter of the Protestants; their religious foundations and property are torn from them mercilessly and used for alien purposes, the graves and monuments of the pious dead, both high and low, are desecrated and destroyed; the pictures and images of our Saviour Jesus Christ, of the chaste Virgin Mary and the dear Saints are pitifully damaged and smashed to pieces.” “The Catholics have no dearer wish than for peace and order and justice; they too were clamouring for these, and not like the Protestants, trying at the same time to upset them. All they asked was to be left in the enjoyment of their holy Christian faith and the ordinances of the Christian Church, andnot to have their goods violently taken from them.”[1323]—These complaints were, however, ineffective, as the Protestant party had already the upper hand in the College of Electors.

At the Diet of Worms in 1545 the complaints were renewed on the Catholic side: “The Protestants have made themselves masters of churches and monasteries and have driven into misery all who wished to abide by the old faith. They have invaded bishoprics and have been reckless of justice and peace; have constrained the poor inhabitants to embrace their religion, as, for instance, in the land of Brunswick, where they had no other right than the might of the sword. They trample under foot and oppress everything, and then complain of being themselves oppressed.” “They are insatiable in their demands and are for ever producing fresh cards to play, at every Diet putting forward fresh claims which they insist on having conceded to them before they will take part in the transactions or vote supplies.”[1324]The Catholics further declared in the sittings of a committee at Worms, in answer to the charges of their opponents concerning the real abuses which prevailed among the bishops and elsewhere: “Scandals and abuses innumerable certainly existed and were openly flaunted, and were growing worse and worse nowadays, because, owing to the perilous times and the teaching of novel sects and preachers, all good works were being abandoned, and unbelief and contempt for religion was becoming the custom among high and low. Many thousand livings stood vacant and the people were without helm or rudder.” “Where were the schools and the Divine worship? Where the foundations and endowments for the poor which had been so numerous twenty or thirty years ago?” “What the Protestants call proclaiming the Word of God is for the most part, as they themselves complain, mere slander and abuse of the Pope and the clergy and a general reviling of mankind.” The pulpit has “degenerated into a chair of scurrility at which foreign nations are shuddering.” Not many years before Luther had openly exhorted the preachers to “denounce the Duke of Brunswick in their sermons as a servant of the devil, likewise the Archbishop of Mayence and all followers of the Pope.”[1325]

“If we wish to discover the causes of the war which is undoubtedly at hand,” so the Cologne doctor, Carl van der Plassen, who was well acquainted with the conditions in Germany, wrote from the Diet of Worms, “we must bear in mind all that has happened in Germany since the subjugation of the peasants by the Princes and municipal authorities, all the countless violations of human and Divine law, of the public peace, of property, civic rights, conscience and honour. Let us but reckon up the numberof churches and monasteries which have been destroyed and pillaged during these twenty years, and all the accompanying crime and iniquity. And to what purpose have these stolen goods been applied? What has become of all the Church property, all the treasures?... A new religion has been forced upon the people by might and by stratagem, and they have been forbidden under threat of punishment to carry on the old service of God, with its rites and Christian usages. Is this the vaunted freedom of the Gospel, to persecute and coerce others, to imprison them or drive them into exile? Everything that was formerly reverenced has now fallen into contempt, with the result that right and property are no longer respected; the endless disturbances in matters of religion have upset the whole national equilibrium; discipline, loyalty and respectability have vanished.... What misery results from want of clergy and schools even in the lands which have remained Catholic! Princes and towns, making their boast of the Gospel, have not been satisfied with introducing the new Church system into their own territories, but have invaded the Catholic bishoprics and secular dominions and turned everything topsy-turvy in order to set up their own institutions. The Schmalkalden confederates extend their operations from year to year and grow more and more audacious. At this moment they are actually preaching a war of extermination against the Pope and his adherents. There will be no checking them if the sword of the Emperor is not used to restrain them, as it ought to have been long ago.”[1326]

Another Catholic contemporary complains in similar fashion: “Religion is perverted, all obedience to the Emperor destroyed, justice set aside and insolence of all sorts everywhere encouraged.” The Emperor “has tried many and various means of putting a stop to this insubordination, but all measures have been fruitless and he must now wield in earnest the sword that God put into his hands to bring back his and our fatherland to peace, order and unity.”[1327]In the Emperor’s own circle the conviction had ripened that so much injustice had been done to Catholics and so much detriment to the Church, that armed intervention was the only course that remained. “Things had come to such a pass in Germany,” said the Imperial Chancellor Granvell to Farnese, the Papal Legate, about the time of the Diet of Worms, “that neither the Emperor’s nor the Pope’s name any longer carried any weight; indeed, it was to be feared that the Protestants looked upon the opening of the Council as a signal for war, and that they would at once begin to equip themselves not merely for the sake of being ready for any emergency, but rather in order to suppress the Catholics and to make an attack on Italy, the object of their bitter hatred.”[1328]

Most of those who opposed Luther in the literary field have already made their appearance in the various episodes narrated in the foregoing pages. In the present section, which is in the nature of a retrospect and amplification of certain points, we must first touch on the charge frequently put forward by Luther, viz. that it was the furious polemics of his foes which drew from him his violent rejoinders, and, particularly in the earlier part of his career, drove him to take the field against Rome.

We have already repeatedly admitted the too great acrimony of some of the writings against Luther, the exasperation they frequently ill conceal and their needlessly strong and insulting language; of this we saw instances in the case of Tetzel, Eck, Prierias, Emser and many others.[1329]

It can, however, readily be proved by a comparison with Luther’s own writings, that the champions of the Church fell far short of their opponent, generally speaking, in the matter of violence and contemptuous satire. Luther not only maintained in this respect his supremacy as a speaker, but the small account he made of truth[1330]lent an immense advantage to his overwhelming invective. It is also easy to discern a difference in the writings directed against his revolutionary movement, according as they were written earlier or later. At first, when it was merely a question of exposing his theological errors, his opponents were comparatively calm; the first counter theses and the discussions to which they led are replete with the ponderous learning of the Schoolmen, though, even there, we find occasional traces of the indignation felt that the sanctuary of the faith should have been attacked in so wanton a fashion. But after the actual subversion of the Church had begun and the social peril of the radical innovations had revealed itself, the voices of Luther’s opponents grow much harsher. Many, in their anguish at the growing evil, do not spare the person of the man responsible for it all, whose own methods of controversy, unfortunately, became a pattern even to his foes. At no time, not even in a warfare such as that then going on, can all the things be justified which were said by Augustine Alveld, Franz Arnoldi, JohannCochlæus, Paul Bachmann, Duke George, King Henry VIII and even, occasionally, by Sir Thomas More.

What helped to poison the language was, on the one hand, the coarse tone then generally prevalent amongst the German people, which contrived to find its way into the literary treatment of theological questions to an extent never heard of before, and, on the other, the love of the Humanists for mockery and satire, to which end they ransacked the storehouse of antiquity, classical or otherwise. Among earnest Catholics the most powerful factor was overpowering indignation at the sight of such ruthless trampling under foot of the religion of their forefathers and of a faith so closely bound up with the greatness of the fatherland and with every phase of life. Their indignation led them to utter things that were less praiseworthy than the feeling which inspired them.

Besides this, there was a great temptation to use, as the best way of testifying to their abhorrence for the opponent of religious truth, that drastic language handed down by past ages, indeed largely borrowed from the Bible, particularly from the Prophets of the Old Testament. Of this, not theological writers only, but even official ecclesiastical documents, had made such liberal use, that scholars had it at their finger-tips. Even in our own day such mediæval thunders are still sometimes heard rumbling, particularly among the Latin races. When dealing with the Bull of Excommunication against Luther, we already had occasion to remark that much in it was due to the after-effects of the older habits of speech usual in earlier condemnations.[1331]It may be mentioned of Hadrian VI that in a stern missive addressed in 1522 to Frederick the Elector of Saxony, he denounced Luther as a “serpent” infecting heaven and earth with the venom of its tongue, as a “boar” laying waste the vineyard of the Lord, as a “thief” who broke in pieces the cross of Christ, as a man with “diabolical, impious and pestilential lips.” He also, in the words of Scripture, tells the Prince that Luther, whom he was protecting, is a devil who has assumed the appearance of an angel of light.[1332]

As regards the beginnings of the controversy, both series of Theses advanced by Johann Tetzel in 1517 against Luther’s attack on the system of indulgences, are exclusively of a technical nature and never even mention by name the originator of the controversy.[1333]

Luther, on the other hand, after the publication of the ninety-five Theses, in his German sermon on Indulgences and Grace,[1334]addressed himself directly to the populace. He poured out his scorn on the school-opinions of the theologians and the “bawling” of the envious; they seek, he says, your “pennies,” not your souls, and preach for the sake of their “money-box.” He appealed very cleverly to their more sordid instincts, hinting that the money might be better spent on the poor in their own neighbourhood than on the building of St. Peter’s; at the end, sure of his success with the multitude, he abused those who called him a heretic, as “darkened intellects who had never even sniffed a Bible ... and had never grasped their own teaching.”

What was the nature of Tetzel’s reply? His “Vorlegung” of the Sermon,[1335]being intended for the people, was naturally written in German, but in the wearisome style of the Latin theology of the Schools. In point of matter and logical accuracy it was indeed far superior to Luther’s superficialities, but the clumsy German in which it was couched and the number of quotations it borrowed from the Fathers could only make it distasteful to the reader. It is hardly possible to recognise in its language the popular orator who was such a favourite with the people. The seriousness of his tone contrasts strangely with Luther’s airy style. It is easy to believe his honest assurance, that he was ready to submit his views to the judgment of the learned and to the ecclesiastical authorities, and to risk even life itself for the holy Faith of the Catholic past. Only towards the end of the short work, when refuting Luther’s twentieth proposition, does Tetzel, not very skilfully, retaliate upon his opponent—though even here he does not name him—for the coarse and abusive language he had usedin this thesis. Tetzel says, it would be seen from a consideration of their reasons which of the two it was who had “never sniffed a Bible,” never grasped his own teaching and applied to the study of theology “a brain like a sieve”; which of the two was the schismatic, heretic, etc.

In his reply to the “Vorlegung,” which he published in his own name under the title “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons Bebstlichen Ablass,”[1336]Luther spared no venom: Sun and moon might well wonder at the light of wisdom displayed by such a poetaster; evidently he had a superabundance of paper and leisure; but his artificial flowers and withered leaves must be scattered to the winds; he had dared to treat “the scriptural text, which is our comfort (Rom. xv. 4), as a sow would treat a sack of oats.” His opponent’s offer to risk a trial by fire or water for the Faith, he treats with the utmost scorn and derision: “My honest advice to him would be, modestly to restrict himself to the juice of the grape and to the steam that arises from the roast goose to which he is so partial.”—Some Protestants have urged that Luther’s rudeness of tone, here displayed for the first time, may be explained by his opponent’s example. How little this defence of Luther accords with the true state of the case is plain from the above.

As regards Silvester Prierias the matter stands somewhat differently. The “Dialogus,” composed by the Master of the Palace in hot haste in reply to Luther’s “arrogant Theses on the power of the Pope” (the ninety-five Indulgence Theses he had nailed to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg), a work written with all the weighty scholarship of the Schoolmen and criticising each thesis in detail, contained in its thirty-three octavo pages a number of exaggerations and words calculated to offend.

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