“If a man feels his manhood,” Luther says, “let him take a wife and not tempt God. ‘Puella propterea habet pudenda,’ to provide him a remedy that he may escape pollution and adultery.”[485]“The sting of the flesh may easily be helped, so long as girls and women are to be found.”[486]Our readers will not have forgotten the reason he gives why women have so little intellect;[487]or the reproof addressed to him by Staupitz.[488]Luther urges early marriage in the words of an old proverb: “To rise early and to marry young will cause regret to no one.” “It will fare with you,” he says to the same addressee, “as with the nuns to whom they gave carved Jesuses. They cast about for others, who at least were living and pleased them better, and sought how best to escape from their convent.”[489]—“What greater service can one do a girl than to get her a baby? This rids her of many fancies.”[490]Here, and elsewhere too, he is anxious that people should marry, even though there should not be enough to live upon; God would not allow the couple to starve if they did their duty.[491]—“A young fellow should be simply given a wife, otherwise he has no peace. Then the troubles of matrimony will soon tame him.”[492]On another occasion (1540) Luther expresses himself with greater caution about too early matches: “It is not good for young people to marry too soon. They are ruined in their prime, exhaust their strength and neglect their studies.” “But the young men are consumed with passion,” one of those present objected, “and the theologians work upon their conscience and tell them that ‘To marry young will cause regret to no one.’” Luther’s reply was: “The young men are unwilling to resist any temptations.... They should console themselves with the hope of future marriage. We used to be forbidden to marry in almost all the Faculties, hence the youths indulged in all kinds of excesses, knowing that, later on, they would no longer be able to do so. Thus they sunk into every kind of disorder. But now everybody is allowed to marry, even the theologian and the bishop. Hence, in their own interests, they ought to learn to wait.”[493]At other times he was inclined to promote hasty marriages from motives of policy, and, without a thought of the dignity of the conjugal union and the respect due to woman, to use it as a means to increase the number of his followers.This happened in the case of many of his converts from the ranks of the clergy and religious.[494]In the case of the Bishop of Samland, George von Polenz, and his adviser, Johann Briesmann, the ex-Franciscan, who both were desirous of marrying, Luther judged that delay would be disastrous. He urged them to make haste and be publicly wedded, both having already contracted a so-called marriage in conscience; in their case there was “danger in delay,” and, as the saying goes, “If you wait a night, you wait a year”; even Paul had said we must not receive the grace of God in vain (2 Cor. vi. 1), and the bride in the Canticle complained that the bridegroom “was gone,” because she had been tardy in opening the door (v. 6). A German proverb said, “Wenn das Ferkel beut soll man den Sack herhalten.” Esau’s lost birthright, and the solemn words of Christ concerning separation from Him (John xii. 35 f.) were also made to serve his purpose. “Take it when, where and how you can, or you won’t get another chance.” A man could not be sure of his own mind on account of the snares of the devil; a marriage not yet publicly ratified remained somewhat uncertain.[495]Before these exhortations reached them both the parties in question had, however, already taken the public step.It was in those very days that Luther celebrated his own wedding and sent his pressing invitation to marry to the Cardinal and Elector of Mayence, telling him that, short of a miracle, or without some peculiar grace, it was a “terrible thing” for a man “to be found without a wife at the hour of death.”[496]It was then, too, that he sent to Albert of Prussia, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who was contemplating marriage, his congratulations on the secularisation of the lands of the Order and the founding of the Duchy, which he had even previously strongly urged him to do. In this letter he tells the Grand Master that it was “God Almighty,” “Who had graciously and mercifully helped him to such a position [that of a secular Prince].”[497]The Grand Master’s marriage and consequent breach of his vow of chastity followed in 1526. He invited Luther to the wedding and wrote to him, that God had given him “the grace to enter the Order [of marriage] instituted by Himself” after he had“laid aside the cross [the sign of the Order] and entered the secular estate.”It cannot be denied, that in all these marriages which Luther promoted, or at least favoured, what he had his eye on was the advantage of the new Church system. Of any raising of the moral position of women, of any deepening of the significance of marriage, there is here no trace; these marriages served quite another purpose. The circumstances attending them were, moreover, frequently far from dignified. “The Bishop of Samland,” so Philip von Creutz, a Knight of the Teutonic Order, relates, “gave up his bishopric to the Duke [Albert] in the presence of the whole assembly.... He caused his mitre to be broken up and, out of its precious stones and jewels, he had ornaments made for his wife.”[498]Practical Consequences of the New View of Woman:Matrimonial Impediments, Divorce.The readiness shown by Luther to annul valid marriages, and the wayward manner in which he disposed of the impediments fixed by the Church, were not calculated to enhance respect either for marriage or for woman.As regards the impediments to marriage we shall here merely refer to the practical and not uncommon case where a person wished to marry a niece. Whereas Canon Law, at one with Roman Law, regarded this relationship as constituting an impediment, which might, however, be dispensed from by the Pope, Luther at first saw fit to declare it no impediment at all; he even issued memoranda to this effect, one of which was printed in 1526 and circulated widely.[499]“If the Pope was able to dispense,” he said later on concerning this, “why can’t I too?”[500]In favour of the lawfulness of such marriages he appealed to the example of Abraham, and in reply to objections declared: “If they blame the work and example of the holy Patriarch Abraham, then let them be scandalised.”[501]At a later date, nevertheless,he changed his mind and held such marriages to be unlawful. His previous statements he explained by saying that once he had indeed given a different decision, not in order to lead others into excesses but in order “to assist consciences at the hour of death against the Pope”; he had merely given advice in Confession to troubled consciences, and had not laid down any law; to make laws was not within his province, either in the State or in the Church. His former memoranda were not to be alleged now; a certain man of the name of Borner, who, on the strength of them, had married his niece, had acted very ill and done injustice to his (Luther’s) decision. The Pope alone, so Luther says, was to blame for his previous advice—because many, owing to his laws, were reduced to despair and had come to Luther for help. “It is true that in Confession and in order to pacify consciences I have advised differently, but I made a mistake in allowing such counsels to be made public. Now, however, it is done. This is a matter for Confession only.”[502]When speaking in this way, in 1544, he probably had in mind his so-called advice in Confession to Philip of Hesse. He was still acting on the principle, that advice given in Confession might afterwards be publicly repudiated as quite wrong; he failed somehow to see that the case of marriage of uncle and niece was of its very nature something public.The multitude of divorces caused him great anxiety. Even the preachers of the new faith were setting a bad example by putting away their spouses and contracting fresh marriages. Melander, for instance, who blessed Philip’s second marriage, after deserting “two wives in succession without even seeking legal aid, married a third.”[503]At Gotha, as Luther himself relates, a woman deserted herhusband and her three children, and sent him a message to tell him he might take another wife. When, however, he had done so the woman again asserted her claims. “Our lawyers,” Luther complains, “at once took her part, but the Elector decided she should quit the country. My own decision would have been to have her done to death by drowning.”[504]In a still existing letter of 1525, Luther permitted Michael Kramer, preacher at Domitsch, near Torgau, to contract a third marriage, two previous ones having turned out unfortunate. Kramer, as a Catholic priest, had first married a servant maid and, for this, had been sent to jail by Duke George his sovereign. When the maid proved unfaithful and married another, Luther, to whom Kramer had attached himself, declared her to be really “deceased” and told the preacher he might use his “Christian freedom.” Kramer thereupon married a girl from Domitsch, where he had been in the meantime appointed Lutheran pastor. This new wife likewise ran away from him three weeks later. He now addressed himself to the local board of magistrates, who, conjointly with him, wrote to Luther, pointing out how the poor man “could not do without a wife.” Luther thereupon sent a memorandum, addressed to the “magistrates and the preacher of Domitsch,” in which he allowed a divorce from the second wife and gave permission for a third marriage, which, apparently, was more of a success. During the Visitations in 1528 this preacher, who had since been transferred to Lucka, got into trouble on account of his three marriages, but saved his skin by appealing to Luther’s letter.[505]The reader already knows that, according to Luther, a woman who has no children by her husband, may, with the latter’s consent, quietly dissolve the marriage and cohabit with another, for instance, with her brother-in-law; this, however, was to be secret, because the children were to be regarded as her first husband’s. Should he refuse his consent, says Luther, “rather than suffer her to burn or have recourse to adultery, I would advise her to marry another and flee to some place where she is unknown. Whatother advice can be given to one who is in constant danger from carnal lusts?”[506]Duke George of Saxony, referring to a similar passage in Luther’s work “On Conjugal Life” (1522),[507]said in a letter to Luther which was immediately printed: “When was it ever heard of that wives should be taken from their husbands and given to other men, as we now find it stated in your Evangel? Has adultery ever been more common than since you wrote: If a woman has no children by her husband, then let her go to another and bear children whom her husband must provide for as though he were the father? This is the fruit of the precious Evangel which you dragged forth out of the gutter. You were quite right when you said you found it in the gutter; what we want to know is, why you didn’t leave it there.”[508]What Luther had said concerning the refusal to render the conjugal due: “If the wife refuse, then let the maid come,” attracted more attention than he probably anticipated, both among his own adherents and among his foes. It is true, as already pointed out, that the context does not justify illicit relations outside marriage (see vol. iii., p. 252 f.), but the words as they stand, to say nothing of the unlikelihood of any real marriage with the maid, and, finally, the significance which may have clung to a coarse saying of the populace possibly alluded to by Luther, all favoured those who chose to make the tempting phrase a pretext for such extra-matrimonial relations.When the sermon on marriage in which the passage occurs was published, Duke George’s representative at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1522 sent his master at Dresden a copy of the booklet, “which the devilish monk,” so he writes, “has unblushingly published, though it has cost him the loss of many followers about here; it would not go well with us poor husbands, should our naughty wives read it. I shall certainly not give my wife one.”[509]Duke George replied with a grim jest which doubtless went the rounds at Nuremberg among those whom the booklet had offended: “As to what you write,” George says, “viz. that you won’t let your wife read the little book on marriage, me thinks you are acting unwisely; in our opinion it contains something which might serve even a jealous husband like you very well; for it says, that if your wife refuses to do your will you have only to turn to the maid. Hence keep a look out forpretty maids. These and similar utterances you may very well hold over your wife.”[510]In 1542 Wicel, in his Postils, speaking of the preachers, says: “The words of St. Paul, ‘Art thou loosed from a wife, seek not a wife,’ 1 Cor. vii. 27, have a very unevangelical sound on the lips of these Evangelists. How then must it be? Quick, take a wife or a husband; whether you be young or old, make haste; should one die, don’t delay to take another. Celebrate the wedding, if it turns out ill, then let the maid come! Divorce this one and take in marriage that one, whether the first be living or dead! For chambering and wantonness shall not be neglected,”—“Since the coming of Christ,” says the same writer elsewhere, “there have never been so many divorces as under Luther’s rule.”[511]Of the unlooked-for effects produced among Luther’s preachers by the above saying, Sebastian Flasch, an ex-Lutheran preacher and native of Mansfeld, complained in 1576: “Although the preachers are married, yet they are so ill-content with their better halves, that, appealing to Luther’s advice, they frequently, in order to gratify their insatiable concupiscence, seduce their maids, and, what is even more shameful, do not blush to misconduct themselves with other men’s wives or to exchange wives among themselves.” He appeals to his long experience of Lutheranism and relates that such a “commutatio uxorum” had been proposed to him by a preacher of high standing.[512]—Much earlier than this, in 1532, Johann Mensing, the Dominican, wrote sadly, that the state of matrimony was dreadfully disgraced by the new preachers; “for they give a man two wives, a woman two husbands, allow the man to use the maid should the wife not prove compliant, and the wife to take another husband should her own prove impotent.” “When they feel disposed or moved to what is sin and shameful, they say the Holy Spirit urges them. Is not that a fine tale that all the world is telling about Melchior Myritsch of Magdeburg, of Jacob Probst of Bremen and of others in the Saxon land. What certain mothers have discovered concerning their daughters and maids, who listened to such preaching, it is useless to relate.”[513]—The name of the ex-Augustinian, Melchior Myritsch, or Meirisch, recalls the coarseness of the advice given by Luther, on Feb. 10, 1525, to the latter’s new spouse. (See vol. ii., p. 144.)Respect for the Female Sex in Luther’s Conversations.Had Luther, as the legend he set on foot would make us believe, really raised the dignity of woman and the married state to a higher level, we might naturally expect, that, when he has to speak of matters sexual or otherwise repugnant to modesty, he would at least be reticent and dignified in his language. We should expect to find him surrounded at Wittenberg by a certain nobility of thought, a higher, purer atmosphere, a nobler general tone, in some degree of harmony with his extraordinary claims. Instead we are confronted with something very different. Luther’s whole mode of speech, his conversations and ethical trend, are characterised by traits which even the most indulgent of later writers found it difficult to excuse, and which, particularly his want of delicacy towards women, must necessarily prove offensive to all.[514]Luther was possibly not aware that the word “nun” comes from the Low Latin “nonna,” i.e. woman, and was originally the name given to those who dwelt in the numerous convents of Upper Egypt; he knew, however, well enough that the word “monk” was but a variant of “monachus.” He jestingly gives to both the former and the latter an odious derivation. “The word nun,” he says, “comes from the German, and cloistered women are thus called, because that is the term for unsexed sows; in the same way the word monk is derived from the horses [viz. the gelded horses]. But the operation was not altogether successful, for they are obliged to wear breeches just like other people.”[515]It may be that Catherine, the ex-nun, was present when this was said; at any rate she is frequently mentioned in the Table-Talk as assisting.[516]He could not let slip the opportunity of having a dig at the ladies who were sometimes present at his post-prandial entertainments. In 1542 conversation turned on Solomon’s many wives and concubines. Luther pointed out,[517]that the figures given in the Bible must be taken as referring to all the women dwelling in the palace, even to such as had no personal intercourse with Solomon. “One might as well say,” he continues, “Dr. Martinhas three wives; one is Katey, another Magdalene, the third the pastoress; also a concubine, viz. the virgin Els.[518]This made him laugh [writes the narrator, Caspar Heydenreich]; and besides these he has many girls. In the same way Solomon had three hundred queens; if he took only one every night, the year would be over, and he would not have had a day’s rest. That cannot be, for he had also to govern.”[519]He advised that those who were troubled with doubts concerning their salvation should speak of improper subjects (“loquaris de venereis”), that was an infallible remedy.[520]In one such case he invited a pupil to jest freely with his own wife, Catherine. “Talk about other things,” Luther urges him, “which entirely distract your thoughts.”[521]As we know, Luther himself made liberal use of such talk to cheer up himself and others. Thus, in the presence of his guests, in 1537, he joked about Ferdinand, the German King, his extreme thinness and his very stout wife who was suspected of misconduct: “Though he is of such an insignificant bodily frame,” he says, “others will be found to assist him in the nuptial bed. But it is a nuisance to have the world filled with alien heirs.”[522]—This leads him to speak of adulteresses in other districts.[523]A coarser tale is the one he related about the same time. A minister came to him complaining of giddiness and asking for a remedy. His answer was: “Lass das Loch daheime,” which, so the narrators explain, meant, “that he should not go to such excess in chambering.”[524]—A similar piece of advice is given by Luther in the doggerel verses which occur in his Table-Talk: “Keep your neck warm and cosy,—Do not overload your belly.—Don’t be too sweet on Gertie;—Then your locks will whiten slowly.”[525]—On one occasion he showed his friends a turquoise (“turchesia”), which had been given him, and said, following the superstition of the day, that when immersed in water it would make movements “sicut isti qui eveniunt juveni cum a virgine in chorea circumfertur,” but, that, in doing so, it broke.[526]On account of the many children he had caused to be begotten from priests and religious, he, as we already know, compared himself to Abraham, the father of a great race: He, like Abraham, wasthe grandfather of all the descendants of the monks, priests and nuns and the father of a mighty people.[527]We may not pass over here Luther’s frequent use of filthy expressions, which, though they agree well with his natural coarseness, harmonise but ill with the high ideals we should expect in one whose vocation it was to rescue marriage and feminine dignity from the slough of the Papacy. He is fond of using such words in his abuse of the Popish teaching on marriage: At one time, he writes, the Papists make out marriage to be a Sacrament, “at another to be impure, i.e. a sort of merdiferous Sacrament.”[528]The Pope, who waywardly teaches this and other doctrines, “has overthrown the Word of God”; “if the Pope’s reputation had not been destroyed by the Word of God, the devil himself would have ejected him” (‘a posteriori’).[529]Elsewhere he voices his conviction as to the most fitting epithet to apply to the Pope’s “human ordinances.” One thing in man, he explains, viz. “the ‘anus,’ cannot be bound; it is determined to be master and to have the upper hand. Hence this is the only thing in man’s body or soul upon which the Pope has not laid his commands.”[530]“The greatest blessing of marriage,” he tells his friends, “lies in the children; this D.G. [Duke George] was not fated to see in his sons, ‘quos spectatissima principissa cacatos in lucem ederat.’”[531]The Pope and his people, he says in a sermon, had “condemned and rejected matrimony as a dirty, stinking state.” “Had the creation of human beings been in the Pope’s power he would never have created woman, or allowed any such to exist in the world.”[532]“The Pope, the devil and his Church,” he says in 1539, “are hostile to the married state.... Matrimony [in their opinion] is mere fornication.”[533]The Pope, he says, had forbidden the married state; he and his followers, “the monks and Papists,” “burn with evil lust and love of fornication, though they refuse to take upon themselves the trouble and labour of matrimony.”[534]“With the help of the Papacy Satan has horribly soiled matrimony, God’s own ordinance”; the fact was, the clergy had been too much afraid of woman; “and so it goes on: Ifa man fears fornication he falls into secret sin, as seems to have been the case with St. Jerome.”[535]He saw sexual excesses increasing to an alarming extent among the youth of his own party. At table a friend of the “young fellows” sought to excuse their “wild, immoral life and fornication” on the ground of their youth; Luther sighed, at the state of things revealed, and said: “Alas, that is how they learn contempt for the female sex.” Contempt will simply lead to abuse; the true remedy for immorality was prayerfully to hold conjugal love in honour.[536]Luther, however, preferred to dwell upon the deep-seated vice of an anti-matrimonial Papacy rather than on the results of his teaching upon the young.“Every false religion,” he once exclaimed in 1542 in his Table-Talk,[537]“has been defiled by sensuality! Just look at the |!”—[He must here have used, says Kroker, “a term forphallus, or something similar,” which Caspar Heydenreich the reporter has suppressed.][538]“What else were the pilgrimages,” Luther goes on, “but opportunities for coming together? What does the Pope do but wallow unceasingly in his lusts?... The heathen held marriage in far higher honour than do the Pope and the Turk. The Pope hates marriage, and the Turk despises it. But it is the devil’s nature to hate God’s Word. What God loves, e.g. the Church, marriage, civic order, that he hates. He desires fornication and impurity; for if he has these, he knows well that people will no longer trouble themselves about God.”The New Matrimonial Conditions and the Slandered Opponents.It is a fact witnessed to by contemporaries, particularly by Catholics, that Luther’s unrestraint when writing on sexual subjects, his open allusions to organs and functions, not usually referred to, and, especially, the stress he laid on the irresistibility of the natural impulse, were not without notable effect on the minds of the people, already excited as they were.In 1522, after having explained his new views on divorce, he puts himself the question, whether this “would not make it easy for wicked men and women to desert each other, and betake themselves to foreign parts”? His reply is: “How can I help it? It is the fault of the authorities. Why do they not strangle adulterers?”[539]Certain preachers of Lutheranism made matters worse by the fanaticism with which they preached the freedom of the Evangel. So compromising was their support, that other of Luther’s followers found fault with it, for instance, the preacher Urbanus Rhegius[540]It was, however, impossible for these more cautious preachers to prevent Luther’s principles being carried to their consequences, in spite of all the care they took to emphasise his reserves and his stricter admonitions.The Protestant Rector, J. Rivius, complained in 1547: “If you are an adulterer or lewdster, preachers say ... only believe and you will be saved. There is no need for you to fear the law, for Christ has fulfilled it and made satisfaction for all men.” “Such words seduce people into a godless life.”[541]E. Sarcerius, the Superintendent of the county of Mansfeld, also bewailed, in a writing of 1555, the growing desecration of the married state: Men took more than one wife; this they did by “fleeing to foreign parts and seeking other wives. Some women do the same. Thus there is no end to the desertions on the part of both husbands and wives.” “In many places horrible adultery and fornication prevail, and these vices have become so common, that people no longer regard them as sinful.” “Thus there is everywhere confusion and scandal both in match-making and in celebrating the marriages, so that holy matrimony is completely dishonoured and trodden under foot.” “Of adultery, lewdness and incest there is no end.”[542]—These complaints were called forth by the state of things in the very county where Luther was born and died.The convert George Wicel, who resided for a considerable time at Mansfeld, had an opportunity of observing the effects of Luther’s matrimonial teaching and of his preaching generally on a population almost entirely Protestant. He writes, in 1536: “It is enough to break a Christian’s heart to see so many falseprophets and heretics flourishing in Germany, whose comforting and frivolous teaching fills the land not merely with adulterers but with regular heathen.”[543]In an earlier work he had said: “Oh, you people, what a fine manner of life according to the Gospel have you introduced by your preaching on Grace! Yes, they cry, you would make of Christ a Moses and a taskmaster; they, however, make of Him a procurer and an Epicurean by their sensual life and knavish example.”[544]Luther, it is true, had an excuse ready. He pleaded that the freedom of the Gospel was not yet rightly understood. “The masses,” he wrote to Margrave George of Brandenburg, on Sep. 14, 1531, “have now fallen under the freedom of the flesh, and there we must leave them for a while until they have satisfied their lust. Things will be different when the Visitation is in working order [the first Visitation in the Margrave’s lands had taken place as early as 1528]. It is quick work pulling down an old house, but building a new one takes longer.... Jerusalem, too, was built very slowly and with difficulty.... Under the Pope we could not endure the constraint, and the lack of the Word; now we cannot endure the freedom and the superabundant treasure of the Gospel.”[545]Amidst all these disorders Luther found great consolation in contemplating the anti-Christian character of the Popish Church and Daniel’s supposed prophecy of Antichrist’s enmity for woman.[546]His preachers only too eagerly followed in his footsteps.George Wicel speaks of the preachers, who, while themselves leading loose lives, used Daniel’s prophecy against the Catholic view of marriage.[547]“They mock at those who wish to remain single or who content themselves with one wife, and quote the words of Daniel: ‘He shall not follow the lust of women nor regard any gods,’ so that anyone belonging to this sect who is not addicted to the pursuit of women, is hardly safe from being taken for Antichrist. The words of St. Paul in Cor. vii., of Our Lord in Mat. xix., concerning the third sex of the eunuchs, and of St. John in Apoc. xiv., on those who have not defiled themselves with women, and, again, of St. Paul when speaking of the ‘vidua digama’ in 1 Tim. v., don’t count a farthing in this Jovinian school[548].... It is an Epicurean school and an Epicurean life and nothing else.” With biting satire, in partthe result of the controversy thrust upon him, in part the outcome of his temper, he had declared shortly before, that Lutheranism was all “love of women,” was “full of senseless lust for women”; he uses “gynecophiles” as an adjective to qualify it, and speaks of its “gynecomania”; by this means men were to become better Christians, and be more secure of salvation than all the Saints of God ever were in the ancient apostolic Church. “See there what Satan is seeking by means of this exalted respect for the love of women, and by his glib, feminist preachers in Saxony. Hence his and his followers’ concern for women, to whom they cling so closely that they can hardly get into their pulpits without them, and, rather than live a celibate life, the Evangelist would prefer to be the husband, not of one wife, but of three or four.”[549]An intimate friend of Luther’s, Johann Brenz, wrote, in 1532, in a book to which Luther supplied the Preface: “The youngsters are barely out of the cradle before they want wives, and girls, not yet marriageable, already dream of husbands.”[550]—After the immoral atmosphere has brought about their fall, writes Fr. Staphylus, “they grow so impudent as to assert that a chaste and continent life is impossible and the gratification of the sexual appetite as essential as eating and drinking.”[551]—The same author, who returned to the Catholic Church, also wrote, in 1562: “So long as matrimony was looked upon as a Sacrament, modesty and an honourable married life was loved and prized, but since the people have read in Luther’s books that matrimony is a human invention ... his advice has been put in practice in such a way, that marriage is observed more chastely and honourably in Turkey than amongst our German Evangelicals.”[552]The list of testimonies such as these might be considerably lengthened.[553]It would, however, be unfair, in view of the large number of such statements, to shut our eyes to the remarkable increase, at that time, in the immorality already prevalent even in Catholic circles, though this was due in great measure to the malignant influence of the unhappy new idea of freedom, and to that contempt for ecclesiastical regulations as mere human inventions, which had penetrated even into regions still faithful to the Church.[554]Owing to the general confusion, ecclesiastical discipline was at a standstill, evil-doers went unpunished, nor could moral obligations be so regularly and zealously enforced. It is true that favourable testimonies arc not lacking on both sides, but they chiefly refer to remote Catholic and Protestant localities. As is usual, such reports are less noticeable than the unfavourable ones, the good being ever less likely to attract attention than the evil. Staphylus complains bitterly of both parties, as the very title of his book proves.[555]Finally, all the unfavourable accounts of the state of married life under Lutheranism are not quite so bad as those given above, in which moreover, maybe, the sad personal experience of the writers made them see things with a jaundiced eye.That, in the matter of clerical morals, there was a great difference between the end of the 15th and the middle of the 16th centuries can be proved by such ecclesiastical archives as still survive; the condemnations pronounced in the 16th century are considerably more numerous than in earlier times.On the grounds of such data Joseph Löhr has quite recently made a very successful attempt to estimate accurately the moral status of the clergy in the Lower Rhine provinces, particularly Westphalia.[556]He has based his examination more particularly on the records of the Archdeaconry of Xanten concerning the fines levied on the clergy for all sorts of offences. The accounts “cover a period of about one hundred years.”[557]In the 16th century we find a quite disproportionate increase in the number of offenders. There are, however, traces, over a long term of years, of a distinct weakening of ecclesiastical discipline which made impossible any effective repression of the growing evil.A glance at the conditions prevailing in the 15th century in the regions on which Löhr’s researches bear is very instructive.It enables us to see how extravagant and untrue were—at least with regard to these localities—the frequent, and in themselves quite incredible, statements made by Luther regarding the utter degradation of both clergy and religious owing to the law of celibacy. “Of a total of from 450 to 600 clergy in the Archdeaconry of the Lower Rhine (probably the number was considerably higher) we find, up to the end of the 15th century, on an average, only five persons a year being prosecuted by the Archdeacon for [various] offences.”[558]“Assuming a like density of clergy in Westphalia, the number prosecuted by the ecclesiastical commissioner in 1495 and in 1499 would amount roughly to 2 per cent., but, in 1515, already to 6 per cent.”[559]The results furnished by such painstaking research are more reliable than the vague accounts and complaints of contemporaries.[560]Should the examination be continued in other dioceses it will undoubtedly do as much to clear up the question as the Visitation reports did for the condition of affairs in the 16th century under Lutheranism, though probably the final result will be different. The Lutheran Visitation reports mostly corroborate the unfavourable testimony of olden writers, whereas the fewness of the culprits shown in the Catholic lists of fines would seem to bear out, at least with regard to certain localities, those contemporaries who report favourably of the clergy at the close of the Middle Ages. One such favourable contemporary testimony comes from the Humanist, Jacob Wimpfeling, and concerns the clergy of the Rhine Lands. The statement of this writer, usually a very severe critic of the clergy, runs quite counter to Luther’s general and greatly exaggerated charges.[561]“God knows, I am acquainted with many, yea,countless pastors amongst the secular clergy in the six dioceses of the Rhine, who are richly equipped with all the knowledge requisite for the cure of souls and whose lives are blameless. I know excellent prelates, canons and vicars both at the Cathedrals and the Collegiate Churches, not a few in number but many, men of unblemished reputation, full of piety and generous and humble-minded towards the poor.”Luther himself made statements which deprive his accusations of their point. Even what he says of the respect paid to the clerical state militates against him. Of the first Mass said by the newly ordained priest he relates, that “it was thought much of”; that the people on such occasions brought offerings and gifts; that the “bridegroom’s” “Hours” were celebrated by torchlight, and that he, together with his mother, if still living, was led through the streets with music and dancing, “the people looking on and weeping for joy.”[562]It is true that he is loud in his blame of the avarice displayed at such first Masses, but the respect shown by the people, and here described by him, would never have been exhibited towards the clergy had they rendered themselves so utterly contemptible by their immorality as he makes out.In a sermon of 1521, speaking of the “majority of the clergy,” he admits that most of them “work, pray and fast a great deal”; that they “sing, speak and preach of the law and lead men to many works”; that they fancy they will gain heaven by means of “pretty works,” though all in vain, so he thinks, owing to their lack of knowledge of the Evangel.[563]During the earlier period of his change of opinions he was quite convinced, that a pernicious self-righteousness (that of the “iustitiarii”) was rampant amongst both clergy and religious; not only in the houses of his own Congregation, but throughout the Church, a painstaking observance of the law and a scrupulous fulfilment of their duty by the clergy and monks constituted a danger to the true spirit of the Gospel, as he understood it. It was his polemics which then caused him to be obsessed with the idea, that the whole world had been seized upon bythe self-righteous. It was his polemics again, which, later, made him regard the whole world as full of immoral clerics.The extravagance of Luther’s utterances in his fight against clerical celibacy might perhaps be regarded as due to the secluded life he had led at Wittenberg during the years he was a monk, which prevented him from knowing the true state of things. Experience gained by more extensive travel and intercourse with others might indeed have corrected his views. But, as a matter of fact, he was not altogether untravelled; besides visiting Rome and Southern Germany he had been to Heidelberg, Worms and Cologne. His stay at the latter city is particularly noteworthy, for there he was in the heart of the very region of which Wimpfeling had given so favourable an account. Can he, during the long journey on foot and in his conversations with his brother monks there, not have convinced himself, that the clergy residing in that city were by no means sunk in immorality and viciousness? His visit to Cologne coincided in all probability with the general Chapter which Staupitz had summoned there at the commencement of May, 1512. Luther only recalls incidentally having seen there the bodies of the Three Kings; having swallowed all the legends told him concerning them; and having drunk such wine as he had never drunk before.[564]Two Concluding Pictures towards the History of Woman.We may, in conclusion, give two pictures which cast a new and lurid light on what has gone before.Luther’s standpoint, and, no less, the confusion which had arisen in married life and the humiliations to which many women were exposed, come out clearly in the story of his relations with the preacher Jodocus Kern and his spouse. Kern, an apostate monk, had wedded at Nuremberg Ursula Tagler, an ex-nun from the convent of Engelthal. On Dec. 24, 1524, Luther joyously commended him as “a monk, metamorphosed into a married man,” to the care of Spalatin.[565]When Kern went to Saxony in search of a post the girl refused to accompany him until he had found employment. During his absence she began to regret the step she had taken, and the letters she received from her former Prioress determined her to return no more to her husband. The persuasion of her Lutheran relatives indeed induced her to go to Allstedt after Kern had been appointed successor to Thomas Münzer in that town, but there her horror only grew for the sacrilegious union she had contracted. Coercion was quite fruitless. The minister, at the advice of her own relatives, treated her very roughly, forced her to eat meat on Good Friday and refused to listen when she urged him to return to the Catholic Church. Having made an attempt to escape to Mansfeld, her case was brought before the secular Courts; she was examined by the commissioner of Allstedt on January 11, 1526, when she declared, that it was against her conscience to look upon Kern as her husband, that her soul was dearer to her than her body and that she would rather die than continue to endure any longer the bonds of sin. This the commissioner reported to the Elector Johann, and the latter, on Jan. 17, forwarded her statement to Luther, together with Kern’s account, for the purpose of hearing from one so “learned in Scripture” “how the matter ought to be treated and disposed of in accordance with God’s Holy Writ.”[566]Luther took a week to reply: The Allstedt woman was suffering such “temptations from the devil and men, that it would verily be a wonder if she could resist them.” The only means of keeping her true to the Evangel and to herduty would be to send her to her people at Nuremberg. Should, even there, “the devil refuse to yield to God’s good exhortation” then she would have to “be allowed to go,” and “be reckoned as dead,” and then the pastor might marry another. Out of the scandal that the wanton spirit had given through her God might yet work some good. “The Evangel neither will nor can be exempt from scandals.”[567]The unhappy nun was, as a matter of fact, forcibly brought to Nuremberg and placed amongst Lutheran surroundings instead of being conveyed to her convent at Engelthal, as the laws of the Empire demanded. From thence she never returned to Allstedt. Kern, during the proceedings, had declared that he did not want her against her conscience, and was ready to submit to the Word of God and to comply exactly with whatever this imposed. In accordance therewith he soon found a fresh bride. During the Visitations, in 1533, he was charged with bigamy and was reprimanded for being a “drinker and gambler,” although his industry and talents were at the same time recognised. Nothing is known of his later doings.[568]Two open letters addressed to Luther by Catholics in 1528 form a companion picture to the above. They portray the view taken by many faithful Catholics of Luther’s own marriage.In that year two Professors at the Leipzig University, Johann Hasenberg and Joachim von der Heyden, published printed circulars addressed to Luther and Catherine von Bora, admonishing them—now that ten years had elapsed since Luther first attacked the Church—on their breaking of their vows, their desecration of the Sacrament of Matrimony and their falling away from the Catholic faith.[569]It is probable that Duke George of Saxony had something to do with this joint attack.[570]It is also likely that hopes ofsterner measures on the part of the Imperial authorities also helped to induce the writers to put pen to paper.[571]In any case it was their plan, vigorously and before all the world, to attack the author of the schism in his most vulnerable spot, where it would not be easy for him to defend himself publicly. Master Hasenberg, a Bohemian, was one of George’s favourites, who had made him three years previously Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He addressed his open letter to “Martinus Luderus,” the “destroyer of the public peace and piety.” Von der Heyden, known in Latin as Myricianus or Phrisomynensis (a Frisian by birth), was likewise a Master, and Papal and academic Notary at Leipzig. Of the two he was the younger. His letter was addressed to “Khete von Bhore, Luther’s pretended wife,” and served as preface to a printed translation he had made of the work: “De lapsu virginis consecratæ,” then attributed to St. Ambrose.[572]Both epistles, according to one of the answers, must have been despatched by special messenger and delivered at Luther’s house. They drew forth printed replies, some of which can be traced to Luther himself, while Euricius Cordus ridiculed the writers in a screed full of biting epigram.The Leipzig letters, the first of which was also published in German, made a great sensation in German circles and constituted an urgent exhortation to thousands of apostates estranged from the Church by Luther’s new doctrine on Christian freedom and on the nullity of vows.
“If a man feels his manhood,” Luther says, “let him take a wife and not tempt God. ‘Puella propterea habet pudenda,’ to provide him a remedy that he may escape pollution and adultery.”[485]“The sting of the flesh may easily be helped, so long as girls and women are to be found.”[486]Our readers will not have forgotten the reason he gives why women have so little intellect;[487]or the reproof addressed to him by Staupitz.[488]Luther urges early marriage in the words of an old proverb: “To rise early and to marry young will cause regret to no one.” “It will fare with you,” he says to the same addressee, “as with the nuns to whom they gave carved Jesuses. They cast about for others, who at least were living and pleased them better, and sought how best to escape from their convent.”[489]—“What greater service can one do a girl than to get her a baby? This rids her of many fancies.”[490]Here, and elsewhere too, he is anxious that people should marry, even though there should not be enough to live upon; God would not allow the couple to starve if they did their duty.[491]—“A young fellow should be simply given a wife, otherwise he has no peace. Then the troubles of matrimony will soon tame him.”[492]On another occasion (1540) Luther expresses himself with greater caution about too early matches: “It is not good for young people to marry too soon. They are ruined in their prime, exhaust their strength and neglect their studies.” “But the young men are consumed with passion,” one of those present objected, “and the theologians work upon their conscience and tell them that ‘To marry young will cause regret to no one.’” Luther’s reply was: “The young men are unwilling to resist any temptations.... They should console themselves with the hope of future marriage. We used to be forbidden to marry in almost all the Faculties, hence the youths indulged in all kinds of excesses, knowing that, later on, they would no longer be able to do so. Thus they sunk into every kind of disorder. But now everybody is allowed to marry, even the theologian and the bishop. Hence, in their own interests, they ought to learn to wait.”[493]At other times he was inclined to promote hasty marriages from motives of policy, and, without a thought of the dignity of the conjugal union and the respect due to woman, to use it as a means to increase the number of his followers.This happened in the case of many of his converts from the ranks of the clergy and religious.[494]In the case of the Bishop of Samland, George von Polenz, and his adviser, Johann Briesmann, the ex-Franciscan, who both were desirous of marrying, Luther judged that delay would be disastrous. He urged them to make haste and be publicly wedded, both having already contracted a so-called marriage in conscience; in their case there was “danger in delay,” and, as the saying goes, “If you wait a night, you wait a year”; even Paul had said we must not receive the grace of God in vain (2 Cor. vi. 1), and the bride in the Canticle complained that the bridegroom “was gone,” because she had been tardy in opening the door (v. 6). A German proverb said, “Wenn das Ferkel beut soll man den Sack herhalten.” Esau’s lost birthright, and the solemn words of Christ concerning separation from Him (John xii. 35 f.) were also made to serve his purpose. “Take it when, where and how you can, or you won’t get another chance.” A man could not be sure of his own mind on account of the snares of the devil; a marriage not yet publicly ratified remained somewhat uncertain.[495]Before these exhortations reached them both the parties in question had, however, already taken the public step.It was in those very days that Luther celebrated his own wedding and sent his pressing invitation to marry to the Cardinal and Elector of Mayence, telling him that, short of a miracle, or without some peculiar grace, it was a “terrible thing” for a man “to be found without a wife at the hour of death.”[496]It was then, too, that he sent to Albert of Prussia, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who was contemplating marriage, his congratulations on the secularisation of the lands of the Order and the founding of the Duchy, which he had even previously strongly urged him to do. In this letter he tells the Grand Master that it was “God Almighty,” “Who had graciously and mercifully helped him to such a position [that of a secular Prince].”[497]The Grand Master’s marriage and consequent breach of his vow of chastity followed in 1526. He invited Luther to the wedding and wrote to him, that God had given him “the grace to enter the Order [of marriage] instituted by Himself” after he had“laid aside the cross [the sign of the Order] and entered the secular estate.”It cannot be denied, that in all these marriages which Luther promoted, or at least favoured, what he had his eye on was the advantage of the new Church system. Of any raising of the moral position of women, of any deepening of the significance of marriage, there is here no trace; these marriages served quite another purpose. The circumstances attending them were, moreover, frequently far from dignified. “The Bishop of Samland,” so Philip von Creutz, a Knight of the Teutonic Order, relates, “gave up his bishopric to the Duke [Albert] in the presence of the whole assembly.... He caused his mitre to be broken up and, out of its precious stones and jewels, he had ornaments made for his wife.”[498]Practical Consequences of the New View of Woman:Matrimonial Impediments, Divorce.The readiness shown by Luther to annul valid marriages, and the wayward manner in which he disposed of the impediments fixed by the Church, were not calculated to enhance respect either for marriage or for woman.As regards the impediments to marriage we shall here merely refer to the practical and not uncommon case where a person wished to marry a niece. Whereas Canon Law, at one with Roman Law, regarded this relationship as constituting an impediment, which might, however, be dispensed from by the Pope, Luther at first saw fit to declare it no impediment at all; he even issued memoranda to this effect, one of which was printed in 1526 and circulated widely.[499]“If the Pope was able to dispense,” he said later on concerning this, “why can’t I too?”[500]In favour of the lawfulness of such marriages he appealed to the example of Abraham, and in reply to objections declared: “If they blame the work and example of the holy Patriarch Abraham, then let them be scandalised.”[501]At a later date, nevertheless,he changed his mind and held such marriages to be unlawful. His previous statements he explained by saying that once he had indeed given a different decision, not in order to lead others into excesses but in order “to assist consciences at the hour of death against the Pope”; he had merely given advice in Confession to troubled consciences, and had not laid down any law; to make laws was not within his province, either in the State or in the Church. His former memoranda were not to be alleged now; a certain man of the name of Borner, who, on the strength of them, had married his niece, had acted very ill and done injustice to his (Luther’s) decision. The Pope alone, so Luther says, was to blame for his previous advice—because many, owing to his laws, were reduced to despair and had come to Luther for help. “It is true that in Confession and in order to pacify consciences I have advised differently, but I made a mistake in allowing such counsels to be made public. Now, however, it is done. This is a matter for Confession only.”[502]When speaking in this way, in 1544, he probably had in mind his so-called advice in Confession to Philip of Hesse. He was still acting on the principle, that advice given in Confession might afterwards be publicly repudiated as quite wrong; he failed somehow to see that the case of marriage of uncle and niece was of its very nature something public.The multitude of divorces caused him great anxiety. Even the preachers of the new faith were setting a bad example by putting away their spouses and contracting fresh marriages. Melander, for instance, who blessed Philip’s second marriage, after deserting “two wives in succession without even seeking legal aid, married a third.”[503]At Gotha, as Luther himself relates, a woman deserted herhusband and her three children, and sent him a message to tell him he might take another wife. When, however, he had done so the woman again asserted her claims. “Our lawyers,” Luther complains, “at once took her part, but the Elector decided she should quit the country. My own decision would have been to have her done to death by drowning.”[504]In a still existing letter of 1525, Luther permitted Michael Kramer, preacher at Domitsch, near Torgau, to contract a third marriage, two previous ones having turned out unfortunate. Kramer, as a Catholic priest, had first married a servant maid and, for this, had been sent to jail by Duke George his sovereign. When the maid proved unfaithful and married another, Luther, to whom Kramer had attached himself, declared her to be really “deceased” and told the preacher he might use his “Christian freedom.” Kramer thereupon married a girl from Domitsch, where he had been in the meantime appointed Lutheran pastor. This new wife likewise ran away from him three weeks later. He now addressed himself to the local board of magistrates, who, conjointly with him, wrote to Luther, pointing out how the poor man “could not do without a wife.” Luther thereupon sent a memorandum, addressed to the “magistrates and the preacher of Domitsch,” in which he allowed a divorce from the second wife and gave permission for a third marriage, which, apparently, was more of a success. During the Visitations in 1528 this preacher, who had since been transferred to Lucka, got into trouble on account of his three marriages, but saved his skin by appealing to Luther’s letter.[505]The reader already knows that, according to Luther, a woman who has no children by her husband, may, with the latter’s consent, quietly dissolve the marriage and cohabit with another, for instance, with her brother-in-law; this, however, was to be secret, because the children were to be regarded as her first husband’s. Should he refuse his consent, says Luther, “rather than suffer her to burn or have recourse to adultery, I would advise her to marry another and flee to some place where she is unknown. Whatother advice can be given to one who is in constant danger from carnal lusts?”[506]Duke George of Saxony, referring to a similar passage in Luther’s work “On Conjugal Life” (1522),[507]said in a letter to Luther which was immediately printed: “When was it ever heard of that wives should be taken from their husbands and given to other men, as we now find it stated in your Evangel? Has adultery ever been more common than since you wrote: If a woman has no children by her husband, then let her go to another and bear children whom her husband must provide for as though he were the father? This is the fruit of the precious Evangel which you dragged forth out of the gutter. You were quite right when you said you found it in the gutter; what we want to know is, why you didn’t leave it there.”[508]What Luther had said concerning the refusal to render the conjugal due: “If the wife refuse, then let the maid come,” attracted more attention than he probably anticipated, both among his own adherents and among his foes. It is true, as already pointed out, that the context does not justify illicit relations outside marriage (see vol. iii., p. 252 f.), but the words as they stand, to say nothing of the unlikelihood of any real marriage with the maid, and, finally, the significance which may have clung to a coarse saying of the populace possibly alluded to by Luther, all favoured those who chose to make the tempting phrase a pretext for such extra-matrimonial relations.When the sermon on marriage in which the passage occurs was published, Duke George’s representative at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1522 sent his master at Dresden a copy of the booklet, “which the devilish monk,” so he writes, “has unblushingly published, though it has cost him the loss of many followers about here; it would not go well with us poor husbands, should our naughty wives read it. I shall certainly not give my wife one.”[509]Duke George replied with a grim jest which doubtless went the rounds at Nuremberg among those whom the booklet had offended: “As to what you write,” George says, “viz. that you won’t let your wife read the little book on marriage, me thinks you are acting unwisely; in our opinion it contains something which might serve even a jealous husband like you very well; for it says, that if your wife refuses to do your will you have only to turn to the maid. Hence keep a look out forpretty maids. These and similar utterances you may very well hold over your wife.”[510]In 1542 Wicel, in his Postils, speaking of the preachers, says: “The words of St. Paul, ‘Art thou loosed from a wife, seek not a wife,’ 1 Cor. vii. 27, have a very unevangelical sound on the lips of these Evangelists. How then must it be? Quick, take a wife or a husband; whether you be young or old, make haste; should one die, don’t delay to take another. Celebrate the wedding, if it turns out ill, then let the maid come! Divorce this one and take in marriage that one, whether the first be living or dead! For chambering and wantonness shall not be neglected,”—“Since the coming of Christ,” says the same writer elsewhere, “there have never been so many divorces as under Luther’s rule.”[511]Of the unlooked-for effects produced among Luther’s preachers by the above saying, Sebastian Flasch, an ex-Lutheran preacher and native of Mansfeld, complained in 1576: “Although the preachers are married, yet they are so ill-content with their better halves, that, appealing to Luther’s advice, they frequently, in order to gratify their insatiable concupiscence, seduce their maids, and, what is even more shameful, do not blush to misconduct themselves with other men’s wives or to exchange wives among themselves.” He appeals to his long experience of Lutheranism and relates that such a “commutatio uxorum” had been proposed to him by a preacher of high standing.[512]—Much earlier than this, in 1532, Johann Mensing, the Dominican, wrote sadly, that the state of matrimony was dreadfully disgraced by the new preachers; “for they give a man two wives, a woman two husbands, allow the man to use the maid should the wife not prove compliant, and the wife to take another husband should her own prove impotent.” “When they feel disposed or moved to what is sin and shameful, they say the Holy Spirit urges them. Is not that a fine tale that all the world is telling about Melchior Myritsch of Magdeburg, of Jacob Probst of Bremen and of others in the Saxon land. What certain mothers have discovered concerning their daughters and maids, who listened to such preaching, it is useless to relate.”[513]—The name of the ex-Augustinian, Melchior Myritsch, or Meirisch, recalls the coarseness of the advice given by Luther, on Feb. 10, 1525, to the latter’s new spouse. (See vol. ii., p. 144.)Respect for the Female Sex in Luther’s Conversations.Had Luther, as the legend he set on foot would make us believe, really raised the dignity of woman and the married state to a higher level, we might naturally expect, that, when he has to speak of matters sexual or otherwise repugnant to modesty, he would at least be reticent and dignified in his language. We should expect to find him surrounded at Wittenberg by a certain nobility of thought, a higher, purer atmosphere, a nobler general tone, in some degree of harmony with his extraordinary claims. Instead we are confronted with something very different. Luther’s whole mode of speech, his conversations and ethical trend, are characterised by traits which even the most indulgent of later writers found it difficult to excuse, and which, particularly his want of delicacy towards women, must necessarily prove offensive to all.[514]Luther was possibly not aware that the word “nun” comes from the Low Latin “nonna,” i.e. woman, and was originally the name given to those who dwelt in the numerous convents of Upper Egypt; he knew, however, well enough that the word “monk” was but a variant of “monachus.” He jestingly gives to both the former and the latter an odious derivation. “The word nun,” he says, “comes from the German, and cloistered women are thus called, because that is the term for unsexed sows; in the same way the word monk is derived from the horses [viz. the gelded horses]. But the operation was not altogether successful, for they are obliged to wear breeches just like other people.”[515]It may be that Catherine, the ex-nun, was present when this was said; at any rate she is frequently mentioned in the Table-Talk as assisting.[516]He could not let slip the opportunity of having a dig at the ladies who were sometimes present at his post-prandial entertainments. In 1542 conversation turned on Solomon’s many wives and concubines. Luther pointed out,[517]that the figures given in the Bible must be taken as referring to all the women dwelling in the palace, even to such as had no personal intercourse with Solomon. “One might as well say,” he continues, “Dr. Martinhas three wives; one is Katey, another Magdalene, the third the pastoress; also a concubine, viz. the virgin Els.[518]This made him laugh [writes the narrator, Caspar Heydenreich]; and besides these he has many girls. In the same way Solomon had three hundred queens; if he took only one every night, the year would be over, and he would not have had a day’s rest. That cannot be, for he had also to govern.”[519]He advised that those who were troubled with doubts concerning their salvation should speak of improper subjects (“loquaris de venereis”), that was an infallible remedy.[520]In one such case he invited a pupil to jest freely with his own wife, Catherine. “Talk about other things,” Luther urges him, “which entirely distract your thoughts.”[521]As we know, Luther himself made liberal use of such talk to cheer up himself and others. Thus, in the presence of his guests, in 1537, he joked about Ferdinand, the German King, his extreme thinness and his very stout wife who was suspected of misconduct: “Though he is of such an insignificant bodily frame,” he says, “others will be found to assist him in the nuptial bed. But it is a nuisance to have the world filled with alien heirs.”[522]—This leads him to speak of adulteresses in other districts.[523]A coarser tale is the one he related about the same time. A minister came to him complaining of giddiness and asking for a remedy. His answer was: “Lass das Loch daheime,” which, so the narrators explain, meant, “that he should not go to such excess in chambering.”[524]—A similar piece of advice is given by Luther in the doggerel verses which occur in his Table-Talk: “Keep your neck warm and cosy,—Do not overload your belly.—Don’t be too sweet on Gertie;—Then your locks will whiten slowly.”[525]—On one occasion he showed his friends a turquoise (“turchesia”), which had been given him, and said, following the superstition of the day, that when immersed in water it would make movements “sicut isti qui eveniunt juveni cum a virgine in chorea circumfertur,” but, that, in doing so, it broke.[526]On account of the many children he had caused to be begotten from priests and religious, he, as we already know, compared himself to Abraham, the father of a great race: He, like Abraham, wasthe grandfather of all the descendants of the monks, priests and nuns and the father of a mighty people.[527]We may not pass over here Luther’s frequent use of filthy expressions, which, though they agree well with his natural coarseness, harmonise but ill with the high ideals we should expect in one whose vocation it was to rescue marriage and feminine dignity from the slough of the Papacy. He is fond of using such words in his abuse of the Popish teaching on marriage: At one time, he writes, the Papists make out marriage to be a Sacrament, “at another to be impure, i.e. a sort of merdiferous Sacrament.”[528]The Pope, who waywardly teaches this and other doctrines, “has overthrown the Word of God”; “if the Pope’s reputation had not been destroyed by the Word of God, the devil himself would have ejected him” (‘a posteriori’).[529]Elsewhere he voices his conviction as to the most fitting epithet to apply to the Pope’s “human ordinances.” One thing in man, he explains, viz. “the ‘anus,’ cannot be bound; it is determined to be master and to have the upper hand. Hence this is the only thing in man’s body or soul upon which the Pope has not laid his commands.”[530]“The greatest blessing of marriage,” he tells his friends, “lies in the children; this D.G. [Duke George] was not fated to see in his sons, ‘quos spectatissima principissa cacatos in lucem ederat.’”[531]The Pope and his people, he says in a sermon, had “condemned and rejected matrimony as a dirty, stinking state.” “Had the creation of human beings been in the Pope’s power he would never have created woman, or allowed any such to exist in the world.”[532]“The Pope, the devil and his Church,” he says in 1539, “are hostile to the married state.... Matrimony [in their opinion] is mere fornication.”[533]The Pope, he says, had forbidden the married state; he and his followers, “the monks and Papists,” “burn with evil lust and love of fornication, though they refuse to take upon themselves the trouble and labour of matrimony.”[534]“With the help of the Papacy Satan has horribly soiled matrimony, God’s own ordinance”; the fact was, the clergy had been too much afraid of woman; “and so it goes on: Ifa man fears fornication he falls into secret sin, as seems to have been the case with St. Jerome.”[535]He saw sexual excesses increasing to an alarming extent among the youth of his own party. At table a friend of the “young fellows” sought to excuse their “wild, immoral life and fornication” on the ground of their youth; Luther sighed, at the state of things revealed, and said: “Alas, that is how they learn contempt for the female sex.” Contempt will simply lead to abuse; the true remedy for immorality was prayerfully to hold conjugal love in honour.[536]Luther, however, preferred to dwell upon the deep-seated vice of an anti-matrimonial Papacy rather than on the results of his teaching upon the young.“Every false religion,” he once exclaimed in 1542 in his Table-Talk,[537]“has been defiled by sensuality! Just look at the |!”—[He must here have used, says Kroker, “a term forphallus, or something similar,” which Caspar Heydenreich the reporter has suppressed.][538]“What else were the pilgrimages,” Luther goes on, “but opportunities for coming together? What does the Pope do but wallow unceasingly in his lusts?... The heathen held marriage in far higher honour than do the Pope and the Turk. The Pope hates marriage, and the Turk despises it. But it is the devil’s nature to hate God’s Word. What God loves, e.g. the Church, marriage, civic order, that he hates. He desires fornication and impurity; for if he has these, he knows well that people will no longer trouble themselves about God.”The New Matrimonial Conditions and the Slandered Opponents.It is a fact witnessed to by contemporaries, particularly by Catholics, that Luther’s unrestraint when writing on sexual subjects, his open allusions to organs and functions, not usually referred to, and, especially, the stress he laid on the irresistibility of the natural impulse, were not without notable effect on the minds of the people, already excited as they were.In 1522, after having explained his new views on divorce, he puts himself the question, whether this “would not make it easy for wicked men and women to desert each other, and betake themselves to foreign parts”? His reply is: “How can I help it? It is the fault of the authorities. Why do they not strangle adulterers?”[539]Certain preachers of Lutheranism made matters worse by the fanaticism with which they preached the freedom of the Evangel. So compromising was their support, that other of Luther’s followers found fault with it, for instance, the preacher Urbanus Rhegius[540]It was, however, impossible for these more cautious preachers to prevent Luther’s principles being carried to their consequences, in spite of all the care they took to emphasise his reserves and his stricter admonitions.The Protestant Rector, J. Rivius, complained in 1547: “If you are an adulterer or lewdster, preachers say ... only believe and you will be saved. There is no need for you to fear the law, for Christ has fulfilled it and made satisfaction for all men.” “Such words seduce people into a godless life.”[541]E. Sarcerius, the Superintendent of the county of Mansfeld, also bewailed, in a writing of 1555, the growing desecration of the married state: Men took more than one wife; this they did by “fleeing to foreign parts and seeking other wives. Some women do the same. Thus there is no end to the desertions on the part of both husbands and wives.” “In many places horrible adultery and fornication prevail, and these vices have become so common, that people no longer regard them as sinful.” “Thus there is everywhere confusion and scandal both in match-making and in celebrating the marriages, so that holy matrimony is completely dishonoured and trodden under foot.” “Of adultery, lewdness and incest there is no end.”[542]—These complaints were called forth by the state of things in the very county where Luther was born and died.The convert George Wicel, who resided for a considerable time at Mansfeld, had an opportunity of observing the effects of Luther’s matrimonial teaching and of his preaching generally on a population almost entirely Protestant. He writes, in 1536: “It is enough to break a Christian’s heart to see so many falseprophets and heretics flourishing in Germany, whose comforting and frivolous teaching fills the land not merely with adulterers but with regular heathen.”[543]In an earlier work he had said: “Oh, you people, what a fine manner of life according to the Gospel have you introduced by your preaching on Grace! Yes, they cry, you would make of Christ a Moses and a taskmaster; they, however, make of Him a procurer and an Epicurean by their sensual life and knavish example.”[544]Luther, it is true, had an excuse ready. He pleaded that the freedom of the Gospel was not yet rightly understood. “The masses,” he wrote to Margrave George of Brandenburg, on Sep. 14, 1531, “have now fallen under the freedom of the flesh, and there we must leave them for a while until they have satisfied their lust. Things will be different when the Visitation is in working order [the first Visitation in the Margrave’s lands had taken place as early as 1528]. It is quick work pulling down an old house, but building a new one takes longer.... Jerusalem, too, was built very slowly and with difficulty.... Under the Pope we could not endure the constraint, and the lack of the Word; now we cannot endure the freedom and the superabundant treasure of the Gospel.”[545]Amidst all these disorders Luther found great consolation in contemplating the anti-Christian character of the Popish Church and Daniel’s supposed prophecy of Antichrist’s enmity for woman.[546]His preachers only too eagerly followed in his footsteps.George Wicel speaks of the preachers, who, while themselves leading loose lives, used Daniel’s prophecy against the Catholic view of marriage.[547]“They mock at those who wish to remain single or who content themselves with one wife, and quote the words of Daniel: ‘He shall not follow the lust of women nor regard any gods,’ so that anyone belonging to this sect who is not addicted to the pursuit of women, is hardly safe from being taken for Antichrist. The words of St. Paul in Cor. vii., of Our Lord in Mat. xix., concerning the third sex of the eunuchs, and of St. John in Apoc. xiv., on those who have not defiled themselves with women, and, again, of St. Paul when speaking of the ‘vidua digama’ in 1 Tim. v., don’t count a farthing in this Jovinian school[548].... It is an Epicurean school and an Epicurean life and nothing else.” With biting satire, in partthe result of the controversy thrust upon him, in part the outcome of his temper, he had declared shortly before, that Lutheranism was all “love of women,” was “full of senseless lust for women”; he uses “gynecophiles” as an adjective to qualify it, and speaks of its “gynecomania”; by this means men were to become better Christians, and be more secure of salvation than all the Saints of God ever were in the ancient apostolic Church. “See there what Satan is seeking by means of this exalted respect for the love of women, and by his glib, feminist preachers in Saxony. Hence his and his followers’ concern for women, to whom they cling so closely that they can hardly get into their pulpits without them, and, rather than live a celibate life, the Evangelist would prefer to be the husband, not of one wife, but of three or four.”[549]An intimate friend of Luther’s, Johann Brenz, wrote, in 1532, in a book to which Luther supplied the Preface: “The youngsters are barely out of the cradle before they want wives, and girls, not yet marriageable, already dream of husbands.”[550]—After the immoral atmosphere has brought about their fall, writes Fr. Staphylus, “they grow so impudent as to assert that a chaste and continent life is impossible and the gratification of the sexual appetite as essential as eating and drinking.”[551]—The same author, who returned to the Catholic Church, also wrote, in 1562: “So long as matrimony was looked upon as a Sacrament, modesty and an honourable married life was loved and prized, but since the people have read in Luther’s books that matrimony is a human invention ... his advice has been put in practice in such a way, that marriage is observed more chastely and honourably in Turkey than amongst our German Evangelicals.”[552]The list of testimonies such as these might be considerably lengthened.[553]It would, however, be unfair, in view of the large number of such statements, to shut our eyes to the remarkable increase, at that time, in the immorality already prevalent even in Catholic circles, though this was due in great measure to the malignant influence of the unhappy new idea of freedom, and to that contempt for ecclesiastical regulations as mere human inventions, which had penetrated even into regions still faithful to the Church.[554]Owing to the general confusion, ecclesiastical discipline was at a standstill, evil-doers went unpunished, nor could moral obligations be so regularly and zealously enforced. It is true that favourable testimonies arc not lacking on both sides, but they chiefly refer to remote Catholic and Protestant localities. As is usual, such reports are less noticeable than the unfavourable ones, the good being ever less likely to attract attention than the evil. Staphylus complains bitterly of both parties, as the very title of his book proves.[555]Finally, all the unfavourable accounts of the state of married life under Lutheranism are not quite so bad as those given above, in which moreover, maybe, the sad personal experience of the writers made them see things with a jaundiced eye.That, in the matter of clerical morals, there was a great difference between the end of the 15th and the middle of the 16th centuries can be proved by such ecclesiastical archives as still survive; the condemnations pronounced in the 16th century are considerably more numerous than in earlier times.On the grounds of such data Joseph Löhr has quite recently made a very successful attempt to estimate accurately the moral status of the clergy in the Lower Rhine provinces, particularly Westphalia.[556]He has based his examination more particularly on the records of the Archdeaconry of Xanten concerning the fines levied on the clergy for all sorts of offences. The accounts “cover a period of about one hundred years.”[557]In the 16th century we find a quite disproportionate increase in the number of offenders. There are, however, traces, over a long term of years, of a distinct weakening of ecclesiastical discipline which made impossible any effective repression of the growing evil.A glance at the conditions prevailing in the 15th century in the regions on which Löhr’s researches bear is very instructive.It enables us to see how extravagant and untrue were—at least with regard to these localities—the frequent, and in themselves quite incredible, statements made by Luther regarding the utter degradation of both clergy and religious owing to the law of celibacy. “Of a total of from 450 to 600 clergy in the Archdeaconry of the Lower Rhine (probably the number was considerably higher) we find, up to the end of the 15th century, on an average, only five persons a year being prosecuted by the Archdeacon for [various] offences.”[558]“Assuming a like density of clergy in Westphalia, the number prosecuted by the ecclesiastical commissioner in 1495 and in 1499 would amount roughly to 2 per cent., but, in 1515, already to 6 per cent.”[559]The results furnished by such painstaking research are more reliable than the vague accounts and complaints of contemporaries.[560]Should the examination be continued in other dioceses it will undoubtedly do as much to clear up the question as the Visitation reports did for the condition of affairs in the 16th century under Lutheranism, though probably the final result will be different. The Lutheran Visitation reports mostly corroborate the unfavourable testimony of olden writers, whereas the fewness of the culprits shown in the Catholic lists of fines would seem to bear out, at least with regard to certain localities, those contemporaries who report favourably of the clergy at the close of the Middle Ages. One such favourable contemporary testimony comes from the Humanist, Jacob Wimpfeling, and concerns the clergy of the Rhine Lands. The statement of this writer, usually a very severe critic of the clergy, runs quite counter to Luther’s general and greatly exaggerated charges.[561]“God knows, I am acquainted with many, yea,countless pastors amongst the secular clergy in the six dioceses of the Rhine, who are richly equipped with all the knowledge requisite for the cure of souls and whose lives are blameless. I know excellent prelates, canons and vicars both at the Cathedrals and the Collegiate Churches, not a few in number but many, men of unblemished reputation, full of piety and generous and humble-minded towards the poor.”Luther himself made statements which deprive his accusations of their point. Even what he says of the respect paid to the clerical state militates against him. Of the first Mass said by the newly ordained priest he relates, that “it was thought much of”; that the people on such occasions brought offerings and gifts; that the “bridegroom’s” “Hours” were celebrated by torchlight, and that he, together with his mother, if still living, was led through the streets with music and dancing, “the people looking on and weeping for joy.”[562]It is true that he is loud in his blame of the avarice displayed at such first Masses, but the respect shown by the people, and here described by him, would never have been exhibited towards the clergy had they rendered themselves so utterly contemptible by their immorality as he makes out.In a sermon of 1521, speaking of the “majority of the clergy,” he admits that most of them “work, pray and fast a great deal”; that they “sing, speak and preach of the law and lead men to many works”; that they fancy they will gain heaven by means of “pretty works,” though all in vain, so he thinks, owing to their lack of knowledge of the Evangel.[563]During the earlier period of his change of opinions he was quite convinced, that a pernicious self-righteousness (that of the “iustitiarii”) was rampant amongst both clergy and religious; not only in the houses of his own Congregation, but throughout the Church, a painstaking observance of the law and a scrupulous fulfilment of their duty by the clergy and monks constituted a danger to the true spirit of the Gospel, as he understood it. It was his polemics which then caused him to be obsessed with the idea, that the whole world had been seized upon bythe self-righteous. It was his polemics again, which, later, made him regard the whole world as full of immoral clerics.The extravagance of Luther’s utterances in his fight against clerical celibacy might perhaps be regarded as due to the secluded life he had led at Wittenberg during the years he was a monk, which prevented him from knowing the true state of things. Experience gained by more extensive travel and intercourse with others might indeed have corrected his views. But, as a matter of fact, he was not altogether untravelled; besides visiting Rome and Southern Germany he had been to Heidelberg, Worms and Cologne. His stay at the latter city is particularly noteworthy, for there he was in the heart of the very region of which Wimpfeling had given so favourable an account. Can he, during the long journey on foot and in his conversations with his brother monks there, not have convinced himself, that the clergy residing in that city were by no means sunk in immorality and viciousness? His visit to Cologne coincided in all probability with the general Chapter which Staupitz had summoned there at the commencement of May, 1512. Luther only recalls incidentally having seen there the bodies of the Three Kings; having swallowed all the legends told him concerning them; and having drunk such wine as he had never drunk before.[564]Two Concluding Pictures towards the History of Woman.We may, in conclusion, give two pictures which cast a new and lurid light on what has gone before.Luther’s standpoint, and, no less, the confusion which had arisen in married life and the humiliations to which many women were exposed, come out clearly in the story of his relations with the preacher Jodocus Kern and his spouse. Kern, an apostate monk, had wedded at Nuremberg Ursula Tagler, an ex-nun from the convent of Engelthal. On Dec. 24, 1524, Luther joyously commended him as “a monk, metamorphosed into a married man,” to the care of Spalatin.[565]When Kern went to Saxony in search of a post the girl refused to accompany him until he had found employment. During his absence she began to regret the step she had taken, and the letters she received from her former Prioress determined her to return no more to her husband. The persuasion of her Lutheran relatives indeed induced her to go to Allstedt after Kern had been appointed successor to Thomas Münzer in that town, but there her horror only grew for the sacrilegious union she had contracted. Coercion was quite fruitless. The minister, at the advice of her own relatives, treated her very roughly, forced her to eat meat on Good Friday and refused to listen when she urged him to return to the Catholic Church. Having made an attempt to escape to Mansfeld, her case was brought before the secular Courts; she was examined by the commissioner of Allstedt on January 11, 1526, when she declared, that it was against her conscience to look upon Kern as her husband, that her soul was dearer to her than her body and that she would rather die than continue to endure any longer the bonds of sin. This the commissioner reported to the Elector Johann, and the latter, on Jan. 17, forwarded her statement to Luther, together with Kern’s account, for the purpose of hearing from one so “learned in Scripture” “how the matter ought to be treated and disposed of in accordance with God’s Holy Writ.”[566]Luther took a week to reply: The Allstedt woman was suffering such “temptations from the devil and men, that it would verily be a wonder if she could resist them.” The only means of keeping her true to the Evangel and to herduty would be to send her to her people at Nuremberg. Should, even there, “the devil refuse to yield to God’s good exhortation” then she would have to “be allowed to go,” and “be reckoned as dead,” and then the pastor might marry another. Out of the scandal that the wanton spirit had given through her God might yet work some good. “The Evangel neither will nor can be exempt from scandals.”[567]The unhappy nun was, as a matter of fact, forcibly brought to Nuremberg and placed amongst Lutheran surroundings instead of being conveyed to her convent at Engelthal, as the laws of the Empire demanded. From thence she never returned to Allstedt. Kern, during the proceedings, had declared that he did not want her against her conscience, and was ready to submit to the Word of God and to comply exactly with whatever this imposed. In accordance therewith he soon found a fresh bride. During the Visitations, in 1533, he was charged with bigamy and was reprimanded for being a “drinker and gambler,” although his industry and talents were at the same time recognised. Nothing is known of his later doings.[568]Two open letters addressed to Luther by Catholics in 1528 form a companion picture to the above. They portray the view taken by many faithful Catholics of Luther’s own marriage.In that year two Professors at the Leipzig University, Johann Hasenberg and Joachim von der Heyden, published printed circulars addressed to Luther and Catherine von Bora, admonishing them—now that ten years had elapsed since Luther first attacked the Church—on their breaking of their vows, their desecration of the Sacrament of Matrimony and their falling away from the Catholic faith.[569]It is probable that Duke George of Saxony had something to do with this joint attack.[570]It is also likely that hopes ofsterner measures on the part of the Imperial authorities also helped to induce the writers to put pen to paper.[571]In any case it was their plan, vigorously and before all the world, to attack the author of the schism in his most vulnerable spot, where it would not be easy for him to defend himself publicly. Master Hasenberg, a Bohemian, was one of George’s favourites, who had made him three years previously Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He addressed his open letter to “Martinus Luderus,” the “destroyer of the public peace and piety.” Von der Heyden, known in Latin as Myricianus or Phrisomynensis (a Frisian by birth), was likewise a Master, and Papal and academic Notary at Leipzig. Of the two he was the younger. His letter was addressed to “Khete von Bhore, Luther’s pretended wife,” and served as preface to a printed translation he had made of the work: “De lapsu virginis consecratæ,” then attributed to St. Ambrose.[572]Both epistles, according to one of the answers, must have been despatched by special messenger and delivered at Luther’s house. They drew forth printed replies, some of which can be traced to Luther himself, while Euricius Cordus ridiculed the writers in a screed full of biting epigram.The Leipzig letters, the first of which was also published in German, made a great sensation in German circles and constituted an urgent exhortation to thousands of apostates estranged from the Church by Luther’s new doctrine on Christian freedom and on the nullity of vows.
“If a man feels his manhood,” Luther says, “let him take a wife and not tempt God. ‘Puella propterea habet pudenda,’ to provide him a remedy that he may escape pollution and adultery.”[485]“The sting of the flesh may easily be helped, so long as girls and women are to be found.”[486]Our readers will not have forgotten the reason he gives why women have so little intellect;[487]or the reproof addressed to him by Staupitz.[488]Luther urges early marriage in the words of an old proverb: “To rise early and to marry young will cause regret to no one.” “It will fare with you,” he says to the same addressee, “as with the nuns to whom they gave carved Jesuses. They cast about for others, who at least were living and pleased them better, and sought how best to escape from their convent.”[489]—“What greater service can one do a girl than to get her a baby? This rids her of many fancies.”[490]Here, and elsewhere too, he is anxious that people should marry, even though there should not be enough to live upon; God would not allow the couple to starve if they did their duty.[491]—“A young fellow should be simply given a wife, otherwise he has no peace. Then the troubles of matrimony will soon tame him.”[492]On another occasion (1540) Luther expresses himself with greater caution about too early matches: “It is not good for young people to marry too soon. They are ruined in their prime, exhaust their strength and neglect their studies.” “But the young men are consumed with passion,” one of those present objected, “and the theologians work upon their conscience and tell them that ‘To marry young will cause regret to no one.’” Luther’s reply was: “The young men are unwilling to resist any temptations.... They should console themselves with the hope of future marriage. We used to be forbidden to marry in almost all the Faculties, hence the youths indulged in all kinds of excesses, knowing that, later on, they would no longer be able to do so. Thus they sunk into every kind of disorder. But now everybody is allowed to marry, even the theologian and the bishop. Hence, in their own interests, they ought to learn to wait.”[493]At other times he was inclined to promote hasty marriages from motives of policy, and, without a thought of the dignity of the conjugal union and the respect due to woman, to use it as a means to increase the number of his followers.This happened in the case of many of his converts from the ranks of the clergy and religious.[494]In the case of the Bishop of Samland, George von Polenz, and his adviser, Johann Briesmann, the ex-Franciscan, who both were desirous of marrying, Luther judged that delay would be disastrous. He urged them to make haste and be publicly wedded, both having already contracted a so-called marriage in conscience; in their case there was “danger in delay,” and, as the saying goes, “If you wait a night, you wait a year”; even Paul had said we must not receive the grace of God in vain (2 Cor. vi. 1), and the bride in the Canticle complained that the bridegroom “was gone,” because she had been tardy in opening the door (v. 6). A German proverb said, “Wenn das Ferkel beut soll man den Sack herhalten.” Esau’s lost birthright, and the solemn words of Christ concerning separation from Him (John xii. 35 f.) were also made to serve his purpose. “Take it when, where and how you can, or you won’t get another chance.” A man could not be sure of his own mind on account of the snares of the devil; a marriage not yet publicly ratified remained somewhat uncertain.[495]Before these exhortations reached them both the parties in question had, however, already taken the public step.It was in those very days that Luther celebrated his own wedding and sent his pressing invitation to marry to the Cardinal and Elector of Mayence, telling him that, short of a miracle, or without some peculiar grace, it was a “terrible thing” for a man “to be found without a wife at the hour of death.”[496]It was then, too, that he sent to Albert of Prussia, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who was contemplating marriage, his congratulations on the secularisation of the lands of the Order and the founding of the Duchy, which he had even previously strongly urged him to do. In this letter he tells the Grand Master that it was “God Almighty,” “Who had graciously and mercifully helped him to such a position [that of a secular Prince].”[497]The Grand Master’s marriage and consequent breach of his vow of chastity followed in 1526. He invited Luther to the wedding and wrote to him, that God had given him “the grace to enter the Order [of marriage] instituted by Himself” after he had“laid aside the cross [the sign of the Order] and entered the secular estate.”It cannot be denied, that in all these marriages which Luther promoted, or at least favoured, what he had his eye on was the advantage of the new Church system. Of any raising of the moral position of women, of any deepening of the significance of marriage, there is here no trace; these marriages served quite another purpose. The circumstances attending them were, moreover, frequently far from dignified. “The Bishop of Samland,” so Philip von Creutz, a Knight of the Teutonic Order, relates, “gave up his bishopric to the Duke [Albert] in the presence of the whole assembly.... He caused his mitre to be broken up and, out of its precious stones and jewels, he had ornaments made for his wife.”[498]
“If a man feels his manhood,” Luther says, “let him take a wife and not tempt God. ‘Puella propterea habet pudenda,’ to provide him a remedy that he may escape pollution and adultery.”[485]
“The sting of the flesh may easily be helped, so long as girls and women are to be found.”[486]
Our readers will not have forgotten the reason he gives why women have so little intellect;[487]or the reproof addressed to him by Staupitz.[488]
Luther urges early marriage in the words of an old proverb: “To rise early and to marry young will cause regret to no one.” “It will fare with you,” he says to the same addressee, “as with the nuns to whom they gave carved Jesuses. They cast about for others, who at least were living and pleased them better, and sought how best to escape from their convent.”[489]—“What greater service can one do a girl than to get her a baby? This rids her of many fancies.”[490]Here, and elsewhere too, he is anxious that people should marry, even though there should not be enough to live upon; God would not allow the couple to starve if they did their duty.[491]—“A young fellow should be simply given a wife, otherwise he has no peace. Then the troubles of matrimony will soon tame him.”[492]
On another occasion (1540) Luther expresses himself with greater caution about too early matches: “It is not good for young people to marry too soon. They are ruined in their prime, exhaust their strength and neglect their studies.” “But the young men are consumed with passion,” one of those present objected, “and the theologians work upon their conscience and tell them that ‘To marry young will cause regret to no one.’” Luther’s reply was: “The young men are unwilling to resist any temptations.... They should console themselves with the hope of future marriage. We used to be forbidden to marry in almost all the Faculties, hence the youths indulged in all kinds of excesses, knowing that, later on, they would no longer be able to do so. Thus they sunk into every kind of disorder. But now everybody is allowed to marry, even the theologian and the bishop. Hence, in their own interests, they ought to learn to wait.”[493]
At other times he was inclined to promote hasty marriages from motives of policy, and, without a thought of the dignity of the conjugal union and the respect due to woman, to use it as a means to increase the number of his followers.
This happened in the case of many of his converts from the ranks of the clergy and religious.[494]
In the case of the Bishop of Samland, George von Polenz, and his adviser, Johann Briesmann, the ex-Franciscan, who both were desirous of marrying, Luther judged that delay would be disastrous. He urged them to make haste and be publicly wedded, both having already contracted a so-called marriage in conscience; in their case there was “danger in delay,” and, as the saying goes, “If you wait a night, you wait a year”; even Paul had said we must not receive the grace of God in vain (2 Cor. vi. 1), and the bride in the Canticle complained that the bridegroom “was gone,” because she had been tardy in opening the door (v. 6). A German proverb said, “Wenn das Ferkel beut soll man den Sack herhalten.” Esau’s lost birthright, and the solemn words of Christ concerning separation from Him (John xii. 35 f.) were also made to serve his purpose. “Take it when, where and how you can, or you won’t get another chance.” A man could not be sure of his own mind on account of the snares of the devil; a marriage not yet publicly ratified remained somewhat uncertain.[495]
Before these exhortations reached them both the parties in question had, however, already taken the public step.
It was in those very days that Luther celebrated his own wedding and sent his pressing invitation to marry to the Cardinal and Elector of Mayence, telling him that, short of a miracle, or without some peculiar grace, it was a “terrible thing” for a man “to be found without a wife at the hour of death.”[496]It was then, too, that he sent to Albert of Prussia, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who was contemplating marriage, his congratulations on the secularisation of the lands of the Order and the founding of the Duchy, which he had even previously strongly urged him to do. In this letter he tells the Grand Master that it was “God Almighty,” “Who had graciously and mercifully helped him to such a position [that of a secular Prince].”[497]The Grand Master’s marriage and consequent breach of his vow of chastity followed in 1526. He invited Luther to the wedding and wrote to him, that God had given him “the grace to enter the Order [of marriage] instituted by Himself” after he had“laid aside the cross [the sign of the Order] and entered the secular estate.”
It cannot be denied, that in all these marriages which Luther promoted, or at least favoured, what he had his eye on was the advantage of the new Church system. Of any raising of the moral position of women, of any deepening of the significance of marriage, there is here no trace; these marriages served quite another purpose. The circumstances attending them were, moreover, frequently far from dignified. “The Bishop of Samland,” so Philip von Creutz, a Knight of the Teutonic Order, relates, “gave up his bishopric to the Duke [Albert] in the presence of the whole assembly.... He caused his mitre to be broken up and, out of its precious stones and jewels, he had ornaments made for his wife.”[498]
The readiness shown by Luther to annul valid marriages, and the wayward manner in which he disposed of the impediments fixed by the Church, were not calculated to enhance respect either for marriage or for woman.
As regards the impediments to marriage we shall here merely refer to the practical and not uncommon case where a person wished to marry a niece. Whereas Canon Law, at one with Roman Law, regarded this relationship as constituting an impediment, which might, however, be dispensed from by the Pope, Luther at first saw fit to declare it no impediment at all; he even issued memoranda to this effect, one of which was printed in 1526 and circulated widely.[499]“If the Pope was able to dispense,” he said later on concerning this, “why can’t I too?”[500]In favour of the lawfulness of such marriages he appealed to the example of Abraham, and in reply to objections declared: “If they blame the work and example of the holy Patriarch Abraham, then let them be scandalised.”[501]At a later date, nevertheless,he changed his mind and held such marriages to be unlawful. His previous statements he explained by saying that once he had indeed given a different decision, not in order to lead others into excesses but in order “to assist consciences at the hour of death against the Pope”; he had merely given advice in Confession to troubled consciences, and had not laid down any law; to make laws was not within his province, either in the State or in the Church. His former memoranda were not to be alleged now; a certain man of the name of Borner, who, on the strength of them, had married his niece, had acted very ill and done injustice to his (Luther’s) decision. The Pope alone, so Luther says, was to blame for his previous advice—because many, owing to his laws, were reduced to despair and had come to Luther for help. “It is true that in Confession and in order to pacify consciences I have advised differently, but I made a mistake in allowing such counsels to be made public. Now, however, it is done. This is a matter for Confession only.”[502]
When speaking in this way, in 1544, he probably had in mind his so-called advice in Confession to Philip of Hesse. He was still acting on the principle, that advice given in Confession might afterwards be publicly repudiated as quite wrong; he failed somehow to see that the case of marriage of uncle and niece was of its very nature something public.
The multitude of divorces caused him great anxiety. Even the preachers of the new faith were setting a bad example by putting away their spouses and contracting fresh marriages. Melander, for instance, who blessed Philip’s second marriage, after deserting “two wives in succession without even seeking legal aid, married a third.”[503]At Gotha, as Luther himself relates, a woman deserted herhusband and her three children, and sent him a message to tell him he might take another wife. When, however, he had done so the woman again asserted her claims. “Our lawyers,” Luther complains, “at once took her part, but the Elector decided she should quit the country. My own decision would have been to have her done to death by drowning.”[504]
In a still existing letter of 1525, Luther permitted Michael Kramer, preacher at Domitsch, near Torgau, to contract a third marriage, two previous ones having turned out unfortunate. Kramer, as a Catholic priest, had first married a servant maid and, for this, had been sent to jail by Duke George his sovereign. When the maid proved unfaithful and married another, Luther, to whom Kramer had attached himself, declared her to be really “deceased” and told the preacher he might use his “Christian freedom.” Kramer thereupon married a girl from Domitsch, where he had been in the meantime appointed Lutheran pastor. This new wife likewise ran away from him three weeks later. He now addressed himself to the local board of magistrates, who, conjointly with him, wrote to Luther, pointing out how the poor man “could not do without a wife.” Luther thereupon sent a memorandum, addressed to the “magistrates and the preacher of Domitsch,” in which he allowed a divorce from the second wife and gave permission for a third marriage, which, apparently, was more of a success. During the Visitations in 1528 this preacher, who had since been transferred to Lucka, got into trouble on account of his three marriages, but saved his skin by appealing to Luther’s letter.[505]
The reader already knows that, according to Luther, a woman who has no children by her husband, may, with the latter’s consent, quietly dissolve the marriage and cohabit with another, for instance, with her brother-in-law; this, however, was to be secret, because the children were to be regarded as her first husband’s. Should he refuse his consent, says Luther, “rather than suffer her to burn or have recourse to adultery, I would advise her to marry another and flee to some place where she is unknown. Whatother advice can be given to one who is in constant danger from carnal lusts?”[506]Duke George of Saxony, referring to a similar passage in Luther’s work “On Conjugal Life” (1522),[507]said in a letter to Luther which was immediately printed: “When was it ever heard of that wives should be taken from their husbands and given to other men, as we now find it stated in your Evangel? Has adultery ever been more common than since you wrote: If a woman has no children by her husband, then let her go to another and bear children whom her husband must provide for as though he were the father? This is the fruit of the precious Evangel which you dragged forth out of the gutter. You were quite right when you said you found it in the gutter; what we want to know is, why you didn’t leave it there.”[508]
What Luther had said concerning the refusal to render the conjugal due: “If the wife refuse, then let the maid come,” attracted more attention than he probably anticipated, both among his own adherents and among his foes. It is true, as already pointed out, that the context does not justify illicit relations outside marriage (see vol. iii., p. 252 f.), but the words as they stand, to say nothing of the unlikelihood of any real marriage with the maid, and, finally, the significance which may have clung to a coarse saying of the populace possibly alluded to by Luther, all favoured those who chose to make the tempting phrase a pretext for such extra-matrimonial relations.When the sermon on marriage in which the passage occurs was published, Duke George’s representative at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1522 sent his master at Dresden a copy of the booklet, “which the devilish monk,” so he writes, “has unblushingly published, though it has cost him the loss of many followers about here; it would not go well with us poor husbands, should our naughty wives read it. I shall certainly not give my wife one.”[509]Duke George replied with a grim jest which doubtless went the rounds at Nuremberg among those whom the booklet had offended: “As to what you write,” George says, “viz. that you won’t let your wife read the little book on marriage, me thinks you are acting unwisely; in our opinion it contains something which might serve even a jealous husband like you very well; for it says, that if your wife refuses to do your will you have only to turn to the maid. Hence keep a look out forpretty maids. These and similar utterances you may very well hold over your wife.”[510]In 1542 Wicel, in his Postils, speaking of the preachers, says: “The words of St. Paul, ‘Art thou loosed from a wife, seek not a wife,’ 1 Cor. vii. 27, have a very unevangelical sound on the lips of these Evangelists. How then must it be? Quick, take a wife or a husband; whether you be young or old, make haste; should one die, don’t delay to take another. Celebrate the wedding, if it turns out ill, then let the maid come! Divorce this one and take in marriage that one, whether the first be living or dead! For chambering and wantonness shall not be neglected,”—“Since the coming of Christ,” says the same writer elsewhere, “there have never been so many divorces as under Luther’s rule.”[511]Of the unlooked-for effects produced among Luther’s preachers by the above saying, Sebastian Flasch, an ex-Lutheran preacher and native of Mansfeld, complained in 1576: “Although the preachers are married, yet they are so ill-content with their better halves, that, appealing to Luther’s advice, they frequently, in order to gratify their insatiable concupiscence, seduce their maids, and, what is even more shameful, do not blush to misconduct themselves with other men’s wives or to exchange wives among themselves.” He appeals to his long experience of Lutheranism and relates that such a “commutatio uxorum” had been proposed to him by a preacher of high standing.[512]—Much earlier than this, in 1532, Johann Mensing, the Dominican, wrote sadly, that the state of matrimony was dreadfully disgraced by the new preachers; “for they give a man two wives, a woman two husbands, allow the man to use the maid should the wife not prove compliant, and the wife to take another husband should her own prove impotent.” “When they feel disposed or moved to what is sin and shameful, they say the Holy Spirit urges them. Is not that a fine tale that all the world is telling about Melchior Myritsch of Magdeburg, of Jacob Probst of Bremen and of others in the Saxon land. What certain mothers have discovered concerning their daughters and maids, who listened to such preaching, it is useless to relate.”[513]—The name of the ex-Augustinian, Melchior Myritsch, or Meirisch, recalls the coarseness of the advice given by Luther, on Feb. 10, 1525, to the latter’s new spouse. (See vol. ii., p. 144.)
What Luther had said concerning the refusal to render the conjugal due: “If the wife refuse, then let the maid come,” attracted more attention than he probably anticipated, both among his own adherents and among his foes. It is true, as already pointed out, that the context does not justify illicit relations outside marriage (see vol. iii., p. 252 f.), but the words as they stand, to say nothing of the unlikelihood of any real marriage with the maid, and, finally, the significance which may have clung to a coarse saying of the populace possibly alluded to by Luther, all favoured those who chose to make the tempting phrase a pretext for such extra-matrimonial relations.
When the sermon on marriage in which the passage occurs was published, Duke George’s representative at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1522 sent his master at Dresden a copy of the booklet, “which the devilish monk,” so he writes, “has unblushingly published, though it has cost him the loss of many followers about here; it would not go well with us poor husbands, should our naughty wives read it. I shall certainly not give my wife one.”[509]Duke George replied with a grim jest which doubtless went the rounds at Nuremberg among those whom the booklet had offended: “As to what you write,” George says, “viz. that you won’t let your wife read the little book on marriage, me thinks you are acting unwisely; in our opinion it contains something which might serve even a jealous husband like you very well; for it says, that if your wife refuses to do your will you have only to turn to the maid. Hence keep a look out forpretty maids. These and similar utterances you may very well hold over your wife.”[510]
In 1542 Wicel, in his Postils, speaking of the preachers, says: “The words of St. Paul, ‘Art thou loosed from a wife, seek not a wife,’ 1 Cor. vii. 27, have a very unevangelical sound on the lips of these Evangelists. How then must it be? Quick, take a wife or a husband; whether you be young or old, make haste; should one die, don’t delay to take another. Celebrate the wedding, if it turns out ill, then let the maid come! Divorce this one and take in marriage that one, whether the first be living or dead! For chambering and wantonness shall not be neglected,”—“Since the coming of Christ,” says the same writer elsewhere, “there have never been so many divorces as under Luther’s rule.”[511]
Of the unlooked-for effects produced among Luther’s preachers by the above saying, Sebastian Flasch, an ex-Lutheran preacher and native of Mansfeld, complained in 1576: “Although the preachers are married, yet they are so ill-content with their better halves, that, appealing to Luther’s advice, they frequently, in order to gratify their insatiable concupiscence, seduce their maids, and, what is even more shameful, do not blush to misconduct themselves with other men’s wives or to exchange wives among themselves.” He appeals to his long experience of Lutheranism and relates that such a “commutatio uxorum” had been proposed to him by a preacher of high standing.[512]—Much earlier than this, in 1532, Johann Mensing, the Dominican, wrote sadly, that the state of matrimony was dreadfully disgraced by the new preachers; “for they give a man two wives, a woman two husbands, allow the man to use the maid should the wife not prove compliant, and the wife to take another husband should her own prove impotent.” “When they feel disposed or moved to what is sin and shameful, they say the Holy Spirit urges them. Is not that a fine tale that all the world is telling about Melchior Myritsch of Magdeburg, of Jacob Probst of Bremen and of others in the Saxon land. What certain mothers have discovered concerning their daughters and maids, who listened to such preaching, it is useless to relate.”[513]—The name of the ex-Augustinian, Melchior Myritsch, or Meirisch, recalls the coarseness of the advice given by Luther, on Feb. 10, 1525, to the latter’s new spouse. (See vol. ii., p. 144.)
Had Luther, as the legend he set on foot would make us believe, really raised the dignity of woman and the married state to a higher level, we might naturally expect, that, when he has to speak of matters sexual or otherwise repugnant to modesty, he would at least be reticent and dignified in his language. We should expect to find him surrounded at Wittenberg by a certain nobility of thought, a higher, purer atmosphere, a nobler general tone, in some degree of harmony with his extraordinary claims. Instead we are confronted with something very different. Luther’s whole mode of speech, his conversations and ethical trend, are characterised by traits which even the most indulgent of later writers found it difficult to excuse, and which, particularly his want of delicacy towards women, must necessarily prove offensive to all.[514]
Luther was possibly not aware that the word “nun” comes from the Low Latin “nonna,” i.e. woman, and was originally the name given to those who dwelt in the numerous convents of Upper Egypt; he knew, however, well enough that the word “monk” was but a variant of “monachus.” He jestingly gives to both the former and the latter an odious derivation. “The word nun,” he says, “comes from the German, and cloistered women are thus called, because that is the term for unsexed sows; in the same way the word monk is derived from the horses [viz. the gelded horses]. But the operation was not altogether successful, for they are obliged to wear breeches just like other people.”[515]It may be that Catherine, the ex-nun, was present when this was said; at any rate she is frequently mentioned in the Table-Talk as assisting.[516]
He could not let slip the opportunity of having a dig at the ladies who were sometimes present at his post-prandial entertainments. In 1542 conversation turned on Solomon’s many wives and concubines. Luther pointed out,[517]that the figures given in the Bible must be taken as referring to all the women dwelling in the palace, even to such as had no personal intercourse with Solomon. “One might as well say,” he continues, “Dr. Martinhas three wives; one is Katey, another Magdalene, the third the pastoress; also a concubine, viz. the virgin Els.[518]This made him laugh [writes the narrator, Caspar Heydenreich]; and besides these he has many girls. In the same way Solomon had three hundred queens; if he took only one every night, the year would be over, and he would not have had a day’s rest. That cannot be, for he had also to govern.”[519]He advised that those who were troubled with doubts concerning their salvation should speak of improper subjects (“loquaris de venereis”), that was an infallible remedy.[520]In one such case he invited a pupil to jest freely with his own wife, Catherine. “Talk about other things,” Luther urges him, “which entirely distract your thoughts.”[521]As we know, Luther himself made liberal use of such talk to cheer up himself and others. Thus, in the presence of his guests, in 1537, he joked about Ferdinand, the German King, his extreme thinness and his very stout wife who was suspected of misconduct: “Though he is of such an insignificant bodily frame,” he says, “others will be found to assist him in the nuptial bed. But it is a nuisance to have the world filled with alien heirs.”[522]—This leads him to speak of adulteresses in other districts.[523]A coarser tale is the one he related about the same time. A minister came to him complaining of giddiness and asking for a remedy. His answer was: “Lass das Loch daheime,” which, so the narrators explain, meant, “that he should not go to such excess in chambering.”[524]—A similar piece of advice is given by Luther in the doggerel verses which occur in his Table-Talk: “Keep your neck warm and cosy,—Do not overload your belly.—Don’t be too sweet on Gertie;—Then your locks will whiten slowly.”[525]—On one occasion he showed his friends a turquoise (“turchesia”), which had been given him, and said, following the superstition of the day, that when immersed in water it would make movements “sicut isti qui eveniunt juveni cum a virgine in chorea circumfertur,” but, that, in doing so, it broke.[526]On account of the many children he had caused to be begotten from priests and religious, he, as we already know, compared himself to Abraham, the father of a great race: He, like Abraham, wasthe grandfather of all the descendants of the monks, priests and nuns and the father of a mighty people.[527]We may not pass over here Luther’s frequent use of filthy expressions, which, though they agree well with his natural coarseness, harmonise but ill with the high ideals we should expect in one whose vocation it was to rescue marriage and feminine dignity from the slough of the Papacy. He is fond of using such words in his abuse of the Popish teaching on marriage: At one time, he writes, the Papists make out marriage to be a Sacrament, “at another to be impure, i.e. a sort of merdiferous Sacrament.”[528]The Pope, who waywardly teaches this and other doctrines, “has overthrown the Word of God”; “if the Pope’s reputation had not been destroyed by the Word of God, the devil himself would have ejected him” (‘a posteriori’).[529]Elsewhere he voices his conviction as to the most fitting epithet to apply to the Pope’s “human ordinances.” One thing in man, he explains, viz. “the ‘anus,’ cannot be bound; it is determined to be master and to have the upper hand. Hence this is the only thing in man’s body or soul upon which the Pope has not laid his commands.”[530]“The greatest blessing of marriage,” he tells his friends, “lies in the children; this D.G. [Duke George] was not fated to see in his sons, ‘quos spectatissima principissa cacatos in lucem ederat.’”[531]The Pope and his people, he says in a sermon, had “condemned and rejected matrimony as a dirty, stinking state.” “Had the creation of human beings been in the Pope’s power he would never have created woman, or allowed any such to exist in the world.”[532]“The Pope, the devil and his Church,” he says in 1539, “are hostile to the married state.... Matrimony [in their opinion] is mere fornication.”[533]
He could not let slip the opportunity of having a dig at the ladies who were sometimes present at his post-prandial entertainments. In 1542 conversation turned on Solomon’s many wives and concubines. Luther pointed out,[517]that the figures given in the Bible must be taken as referring to all the women dwelling in the palace, even to such as had no personal intercourse with Solomon. “One might as well say,” he continues, “Dr. Martinhas three wives; one is Katey, another Magdalene, the third the pastoress; also a concubine, viz. the virgin Els.[518]This made him laugh [writes the narrator, Caspar Heydenreich]; and besides these he has many girls. In the same way Solomon had three hundred queens; if he took only one every night, the year would be over, and he would not have had a day’s rest. That cannot be, for he had also to govern.”[519]
He advised that those who were troubled with doubts concerning their salvation should speak of improper subjects (“loquaris de venereis”), that was an infallible remedy.[520]In one such case he invited a pupil to jest freely with his own wife, Catherine. “Talk about other things,” Luther urges him, “which entirely distract your thoughts.”[521]
As we know, Luther himself made liberal use of such talk to cheer up himself and others. Thus, in the presence of his guests, in 1537, he joked about Ferdinand, the German King, his extreme thinness and his very stout wife who was suspected of misconduct: “Though he is of such an insignificant bodily frame,” he says, “others will be found to assist him in the nuptial bed. But it is a nuisance to have the world filled with alien heirs.”[522]—This leads him to speak of adulteresses in other districts.[523]
A coarser tale is the one he related about the same time. A minister came to him complaining of giddiness and asking for a remedy. His answer was: “Lass das Loch daheime,” which, so the narrators explain, meant, “that he should not go to such excess in chambering.”[524]—A similar piece of advice is given by Luther in the doggerel verses which occur in his Table-Talk: “Keep your neck warm and cosy,—Do not overload your belly.—Don’t be too sweet on Gertie;—Then your locks will whiten slowly.”[525]—On one occasion he showed his friends a turquoise (“turchesia”), which had been given him, and said, following the superstition of the day, that when immersed in water it would make movements “sicut isti qui eveniunt juveni cum a virgine in chorea circumfertur,” but, that, in doing so, it broke.[526]On account of the many children he had caused to be begotten from priests and religious, he, as we already know, compared himself to Abraham, the father of a great race: He, like Abraham, wasthe grandfather of all the descendants of the monks, priests and nuns and the father of a mighty people.[527]
We may not pass over here Luther’s frequent use of filthy expressions, which, though they agree well with his natural coarseness, harmonise but ill with the high ideals we should expect in one whose vocation it was to rescue marriage and feminine dignity from the slough of the Papacy. He is fond of using such words in his abuse of the Popish teaching on marriage: At one time, he writes, the Papists make out marriage to be a Sacrament, “at another to be impure, i.e. a sort of merdiferous Sacrament.”[528]The Pope, who waywardly teaches this and other doctrines, “has overthrown the Word of God”; “if the Pope’s reputation had not been destroyed by the Word of God, the devil himself would have ejected him” (‘a posteriori’).[529]Elsewhere he voices his conviction as to the most fitting epithet to apply to the Pope’s “human ordinances.” One thing in man, he explains, viz. “the ‘anus,’ cannot be bound; it is determined to be master and to have the upper hand. Hence this is the only thing in man’s body or soul upon which the Pope has not laid his commands.”[530]
“The greatest blessing of marriage,” he tells his friends, “lies in the children; this D.G. [Duke George] was not fated to see in his sons, ‘quos spectatissima principissa cacatos in lucem ederat.’”[531]
The Pope and his people, he says in a sermon, had “condemned and rejected matrimony as a dirty, stinking state.” “Had the creation of human beings been in the Pope’s power he would never have created woman, or allowed any such to exist in the world.”[532]“The Pope, the devil and his Church,” he says in 1539, “are hostile to the married state.... Matrimony [in their opinion] is mere fornication.”[533]
The Pope, he says, had forbidden the married state; he and his followers, “the monks and Papists,” “burn with evil lust and love of fornication, though they refuse to take upon themselves the trouble and labour of matrimony.”[534]“With the help of the Papacy Satan has horribly soiled matrimony, God’s own ordinance”; the fact was, the clergy had been too much afraid of woman; “and so it goes on: Ifa man fears fornication he falls into secret sin, as seems to have been the case with St. Jerome.”[535]
He saw sexual excesses increasing to an alarming extent among the youth of his own party. At table a friend of the “young fellows” sought to excuse their “wild, immoral life and fornication” on the ground of their youth; Luther sighed, at the state of things revealed, and said: “Alas, that is how they learn contempt for the female sex.” Contempt will simply lead to abuse; the true remedy for immorality was prayerfully to hold conjugal love in honour.[536]
Luther, however, preferred to dwell upon the deep-seated vice of an anti-matrimonial Papacy rather than on the results of his teaching upon the young.
“Every false religion,” he once exclaimed in 1542 in his Table-Talk,[537]“has been defiled by sensuality! Just look at the |!”—[He must here have used, says Kroker, “a term forphallus, or something similar,” which Caspar Heydenreich the reporter has suppressed.][538]“What else were the pilgrimages,” Luther goes on, “but opportunities for coming together? What does the Pope do but wallow unceasingly in his lusts?... The heathen held marriage in far higher honour than do the Pope and the Turk. The Pope hates marriage, and the Turk despises it. But it is the devil’s nature to hate God’s Word. What God loves, e.g. the Church, marriage, civic order, that he hates. He desires fornication and impurity; for if he has these, he knows well that people will no longer trouble themselves about God.”
It is a fact witnessed to by contemporaries, particularly by Catholics, that Luther’s unrestraint when writing on sexual subjects, his open allusions to organs and functions, not usually referred to, and, especially, the stress he laid on the irresistibility of the natural impulse, were not without notable effect on the minds of the people, already excited as they were.
In 1522, after having explained his new views on divorce, he puts himself the question, whether this “would not make it easy for wicked men and women to desert each other, and betake themselves to foreign parts”? His reply is: “How can I help it? It is the fault of the authorities. Why do they not strangle adulterers?”[539]
Certain preachers of Lutheranism made matters worse by the fanaticism with which they preached the freedom of the Evangel. So compromising was their support, that other of Luther’s followers found fault with it, for instance, the preacher Urbanus Rhegius[540]It was, however, impossible for these more cautious preachers to prevent Luther’s principles being carried to their consequences, in spite of all the care they took to emphasise his reserves and his stricter admonitions.
The Protestant Rector, J. Rivius, complained in 1547: “If you are an adulterer or lewdster, preachers say ... only believe and you will be saved. There is no need for you to fear the law, for Christ has fulfilled it and made satisfaction for all men.” “Such words seduce people into a godless life.”[541]E. Sarcerius, the Superintendent of the county of Mansfeld, also bewailed, in a writing of 1555, the growing desecration of the married state: Men took more than one wife; this they did by “fleeing to foreign parts and seeking other wives. Some women do the same. Thus there is no end to the desertions on the part of both husbands and wives.” “In many places horrible adultery and fornication prevail, and these vices have become so common, that people no longer regard them as sinful.” “Thus there is everywhere confusion and scandal both in match-making and in celebrating the marriages, so that holy matrimony is completely dishonoured and trodden under foot.” “Of adultery, lewdness and incest there is no end.”[542]—These complaints were called forth by the state of things in the very county where Luther was born and died.The convert George Wicel, who resided for a considerable time at Mansfeld, had an opportunity of observing the effects of Luther’s matrimonial teaching and of his preaching generally on a population almost entirely Protestant. He writes, in 1536: “It is enough to break a Christian’s heart to see so many falseprophets and heretics flourishing in Germany, whose comforting and frivolous teaching fills the land not merely with adulterers but with regular heathen.”[543]In an earlier work he had said: “Oh, you people, what a fine manner of life according to the Gospel have you introduced by your preaching on Grace! Yes, they cry, you would make of Christ a Moses and a taskmaster; they, however, make of Him a procurer and an Epicurean by their sensual life and knavish example.”[544]Luther, it is true, had an excuse ready. He pleaded that the freedom of the Gospel was not yet rightly understood. “The masses,” he wrote to Margrave George of Brandenburg, on Sep. 14, 1531, “have now fallen under the freedom of the flesh, and there we must leave them for a while until they have satisfied their lust. Things will be different when the Visitation is in working order [the first Visitation in the Margrave’s lands had taken place as early as 1528]. It is quick work pulling down an old house, but building a new one takes longer.... Jerusalem, too, was built very slowly and with difficulty.... Under the Pope we could not endure the constraint, and the lack of the Word; now we cannot endure the freedom and the superabundant treasure of the Gospel.”[545]Amidst all these disorders Luther found great consolation in contemplating the anti-Christian character of the Popish Church and Daniel’s supposed prophecy of Antichrist’s enmity for woman.[546]His preachers only too eagerly followed in his footsteps.George Wicel speaks of the preachers, who, while themselves leading loose lives, used Daniel’s prophecy against the Catholic view of marriage.[547]“They mock at those who wish to remain single or who content themselves with one wife, and quote the words of Daniel: ‘He shall not follow the lust of women nor regard any gods,’ so that anyone belonging to this sect who is not addicted to the pursuit of women, is hardly safe from being taken for Antichrist. The words of St. Paul in Cor. vii., of Our Lord in Mat. xix., concerning the third sex of the eunuchs, and of St. John in Apoc. xiv., on those who have not defiled themselves with women, and, again, of St. Paul when speaking of the ‘vidua digama’ in 1 Tim. v., don’t count a farthing in this Jovinian school[548].... It is an Epicurean school and an Epicurean life and nothing else.” With biting satire, in partthe result of the controversy thrust upon him, in part the outcome of his temper, he had declared shortly before, that Lutheranism was all “love of women,” was “full of senseless lust for women”; he uses “gynecophiles” as an adjective to qualify it, and speaks of its “gynecomania”; by this means men were to become better Christians, and be more secure of salvation than all the Saints of God ever were in the ancient apostolic Church. “See there what Satan is seeking by means of this exalted respect for the love of women, and by his glib, feminist preachers in Saxony. Hence his and his followers’ concern for women, to whom they cling so closely that they can hardly get into their pulpits without them, and, rather than live a celibate life, the Evangelist would prefer to be the husband, not of one wife, but of three or four.”[549]An intimate friend of Luther’s, Johann Brenz, wrote, in 1532, in a book to which Luther supplied the Preface: “The youngsters are barely out of the cradle before they want wives, and girls, not yet marriageable, already dream of husbands.”[550]—After the immoral atmosphere has brought about their fall, writes Fr. Staphylus, “they grow so impudent as to assert that a chaste and continent life is impossible and the gratification of the sexual appetite as essential as eating and drinking.”[551]—The same author, who returned to the Catholic Church, also wrote, in 1562: “So long as matrimony was looked upon as a Sacrament, modesty and an honourable married life was loved and prized, but since the people have read in Luther’s books that matrimony is a human invention ... his advice has been put in practice in such a way, that marriage is observed more chastely and honourably in Turkey than amongst our German Evangelicals.”[552]
The Protestant Rector, J. Rivius, complained in 1547: “If you are an adulterer or lewdster, preachers say ... only believe and you will be saved. There is no need for you to fear the law, for Christ has fulfilled it and made satisfaction for all men.” “Such words seduce people into a godless life.”[541]
E. Sarcerius, the Superintendent of the county of Mansfeld, also bewailed, in a writing of 1555, the growing desecration of the married state: Men took more than one wife; this they did by “fleeing to foreign parts and seeking other wives. Some women do the same. Thus there is no end to the desertions on the part of both husbands and wives.” “In many places horrible adultery and fornication prevail, and these vices have become so common, that people no longer regard them as sinful.” “Thus there is everywhere confusion and scandal both in match-making and in celebrating the marriages, so that holy matrimony is completely dishonoured and trodden under foot.” “Of adultery, lewdness and incest there is no end.”[542]—These complaints were called forth by the state of things in the very county where Luther was born and died.
The convert George Wicel, who resided for a considerable time at Mansfeld, had an opportunity of observing the effects of Luther’s matrimonial teaching and of his preaching generally on a population almost entirely Protestant. He writes, in 1536: “It is enough to break a Christian’s heart to see so many falseprophets and heretics flourishing in Germany, whose comforting and frivolous teaching fills the land not merely with adulterers but with regular heathen.”[543]In an earlier work he had said: “Oh, you people, what a fine manner of life according to the Gospel have you introduced by your preaching on Grace! Yes, they cry, you would make of Christ a Moses and a taskmaster; they, however, make of Him a procurer and an Epicurean by their sensual life and knavish example.”[544]
Luther, it is true, had an excuse ready. He pleaded that the freedom of the Gospel was not yet rightly understood. “The masses,” he wrote to Margrave George of Brandenburg, on Sep. 14, 1531, “have now fallen under the freedom of the flesh, and there we must leave them for a while until they have satisfied their lust. Things will be different when the Visitation is in working order [the first Visitation in the Margrave’s lands had taken place as early as 1528]. It is quick work pulling down an old house, but building a new one takes longer.... Jerusalem, too, was built very slowly and with difficulty.... Under the Pope we could not endure the constraint, and the lack of the Word; now we cannot endure the freedom and the superabundant treasure of the Gospel.”[545]
Amidst all these disorders Luther found great consolation in contemplating the anti-Christian character of the Popish Church and Daniel’s supposed prophecy of Antichrist’s enmity for woman.[546]His preachers only too eagerly followed in his footsteps.
George Wicel speaks of the preachers, who, while themselves leading loose lives, used Daniel’s prophecy against the Catholic view of marriage.[547]“They mock at those who wish to remain single or who content themselves with one wife, and quote the words of Daniel: ‘He shall not follow the lust of women nor regard any gods,’ so that anyone belonging to this sect who is not addicted to the pursuit of women, is hardly safe from being taken for Antichrist. The words of St. Paul in Cor. vii., of Our Lord in Mat. xix., concerning the third sex of the eunuchs, and of St. John in Apoc. xiv., on those who have not defiled themselves with women, and, again, of St. Paul when speaking of the ‘vidua digama’ in 1 Tim. v., don’t count a farthing in this Jovinian school[548].... It is an Epicurean school and an Epicurean life and nothing else.” With biting satire, in partthe result of the controversy thrust upon him, in part the outcome of his temper, he had declared shortly before, that Lutheranism was all “love of women,” was “full of senseless lust for women”; he uses “gynecophiles” as an adjective to qualify it, and speaks of its “gynecomania”; by this means men were to become better Christians, and be more secure of salvation than all the Saints of God ever were in the ancient apostolic Church. “See there what Satan is seeking by means of this exalted respect for the love of women, and by his glib, feminist preachers in Saxony. Hence his and his followers’ concern for women, to whom they cling so closely that they can hardly get into their pulpits without them, and, rather than live a celibate life, the Evangelist would prefer to be the husband, not of one wife, but of three or four.”[549]
An intimate friend of Luther’s, Johann Brenz, wrote, in 1532, in a book to which Luther supplied the Preface: “The youngsters are barely out of the cradle before they want wives, and girls, not yet marriageable, already dream of husbands.”[550]—After the immoral atmosphere has brought about their fall, writes Fr. Staphylus, “they grow so impudent as to assert that a chaste and continent life is impossible and the gratification of the sexual appetite as essential as eating and drinking.”[551]—The same author, who returned to the Catholic Church, also wrote, in 1562: “So long as matrimony was looked upon as a Sacrament, modesty and an honourable married life was loved and prized, but since the people have read in Luther’s books that matrimony is a human invention ... his advice has been put in practice in such a way, that marriage is observed more chastely and honourably in Turkey than amongst our German Evangelicals.”[552]
The list of testimonies such as these might be considerably lengthened.[553]
It would, however, be unfair, in view of the large number of such statements, to shut our eyes to the remarkable increase, at that time, in the immorality already prevalent even in Catholic circles, though this was due in great measure to the malignant influence of the unhappy new idea of freedom, and to that contempt for ecclesiastical regulations as mere human inventions, which had penetrated even into regions still faithful to the Church.[554]Owing to the general confusion, ecclesiastical discipline was at a standstill, evil-doers went unpunished, nor could moral obligations be so regularly and zealously enforced. It is true that favourable testimonies arc not lacking on both sides, but they chiefly refer to remote Catholic and Protestant localities. As is usual, such reports are less noticeable than the unfavourable ones, the good being ever less likely to attract attention than the evil. Staphylus complains bitterly of both parties, as the very title of his book proves.[555]Finally, all the unfavourable accounts of the state of married life under Lutheranism are not quite so bad as those given above, in which moreover, maybe, the sad personal experience of the writers made them see things with a jaundiced eye.
That, in the matter of clerical morals, there was a great difference between the end of the 15th and the middle of the 16th centuries can be proved by such ecclesiastical archives as still survive; the condemnations pronounced in the 16th century are considerably more numerous than in earlier times.
On the grounds of such data Joseph Löhr has quite recently made a very successful attempt to estimate accurately the moral status of the clergy in the Lower Rhine provinces, particularly Westphalia.[556]He has based his examination more particularly on the records of the Archdeaconry of Xanten concerning the fines levied on the clergy for all sorts of offences. The accounts “cover a period of about one hundred years.”[557]In the 16th century we find a quite disproportionate increase in the number of offenders. There are, however, traces, over a long term of years, of a distinct weakening of ecclesiastical discipline which made impossible any effective repression of the growing evil.A glance at the conditions prevailing in the 15th century in the regions on which Löhr’s researches bear is very instructive.It enables us to see how extravagant and untrue were—at least with regard to these localities—the frequent, and in themselves quite incredible, statements made by Luther regarding the utter degradation of both clergy and religious owing to the law of celibacy. “Of a total of from 450 to 600 clergy in the Archdeaconry of the Lower Rhine (probably the number was considerably higher) we find, up to the end of the 15th century, on an average, only five persons a year being prosecuted by the Archdeacon for [various] offences.”[558]“Assuming a like density of clergy in Westphalia, the number prosecuted by the ecclesiastical commissioner in 1495 and in 1499 would amount roughly to 2 per cent., but, in 1515, already to 6 per cent.”[559]
On the grounds of such data Joseph Löhr has quite recently made a very successful attempt to estimate accurately the moral status of the clergy in the Lower Rhine provinces, particularly Westphalia.[556]He has based his examination more particularly on the records of the Archdeaconry of Xanten concerning the fines levied on the clergy for all sorts of offences. The accounts “cover a period of about one hundred years.”[557]In the 16th century we find a quite disproportionate increase in the number of offenders. There are, however, traces, over a long term of years, of a distinct weakening of ecclesiastical discipline which made impossible any effective repression of the growing evil.
A glance at the conditions prevailing in the 15th century in the regions on which Löhr’s researches bear is very instructive.
It enables us to see how extravagant and untrue were—at least with regard to these localities—the frequent, and in themselves quite incredible, statements made by Luther regarding the utter degradation of both clergy and religious owing to the law of celibacy. “Of a total of from 450 to 600 clergy in the Archdeaconry of the Lower Rhine (probably the number was considerably higher) we find, up to the end of the 15th century, on an average, only five persons a year being prosecuted by the Archdeacon for [various] offences.”[558]“Assuming a like density of clergy in Westphalia, the number prosecuted by the ecclesiastical commissioner in 1495 and in 1499 would amount roughly to 2 per cent., but, in 1515, already to 6 per cent.”[559]
The results furnished by such painstaking research are more reliable than the vague accounts and complaints of contemporaries.[560]Should the examination be continued in other dioceses it will undoubtedly do as much to clear up the question as the Visitation reports did for the condition of affairs in the 16th century under Lutheranism, though probably the final result will be different. The Lutheran Visitation reports mostly corroborate the unfavourable testimony of olden writers, whereas the fewness of the culprits shown in the Catholic lists of fines would seem to bear out, at least with regard to certain localities, those contemporaries who report favourably of the clergy at the close of the Middle Ages. One such favourable contemporary testimony comes from the Humanist, Jacob Wimpfeling, and concerns the clergy of the Rhine Lands. The statement of this writer, usually a very severe critic of the clergy, runs quite counter to Luther’s general and greatly exaggerated charges.[561]“God knows, I am acquainted with many, yea,countless pastors amongst the secular clergy in the six dioceses of the Rhine, who are richly equipped with all the knowledge requisite for the cure of souls and whose lives are blameless. I know excellent prelates, canons and vicars both at the Cathedrals and the Collegiate Churches, not a few in number but many, men of unblemished reputation, full of piety and generous and humble-minded towards the poor.”
Luther himself made statements which deprive his accusations of their point. Even what he says of the respect paid to the clerical state militates against him. Of the first Mass said by the newly ordained priest he relates, that “it was thought much of”; that the people on such occasions brought offerings and gifts; that the “bridegroom’s” “Hours” were celebrated by torchlight, and that he, together with his mother, if still living, was led through the streets with music and dancing, “the people looking on and weeping for joy.”[562]It is true that he is loud in his blame of the avarice displayed at such first Masses, but the respect shown by the people, and here described by him, would never have been exhibited towards the clergy had they rendered themselves so utterly contemptible by their immorality as he makes out.
In a sermon of 1521, speaking of the “majority of the clergy,” he admits that most of them “work, pray and fast a great deal”; that they “sing, speak and preach of the law and lead men to many works”; that they fancy they will gain heaven by means of “pretty works,” though all in vain, so he thinks, owing to their lack of knowledge of the Evangel.[563]During the earlier period of his change of opinions he was quite convinced, that a pernicious self-righteousness (that of the “iustitiarii”) was rampant amongst both clergy and religious; not only in the houses of his own Congregation, but throughout the Church, a painstaking observance of the law and a scrupulous fulfilment of their duty by the clergy and monks constituted a danger to the true spirit of the Gospel, as he understood it. It was his polemics which then caused him to be obsessed with the idea, that the whole world had been seized upon bythe self-righteous. It was his polemics again, which, later, made him regard the whole world as full of immoral clerics.
The extravagance of Luther’s utterances in his fight against clerical celibacy might perhaps be regarded as due to the secluded life he had led at Wittenberg during the years he was a monk, which prevented him from knowing the true state of things. Experience gained by more extensive travel and intercourse with others might indeed have corrected his views. But, as a matter of fact, he was not altogether untravelled; besides visiting Rome and Southern Germany he had been to Heidelberg, Worms and Cologne. His stay at the latter city is particularly noteworthy, for there he was in the heart of the very region of which Wimpfeling had given so favourable an account. Can he, during the long journey on foot and in his conversations with his brother monks there, not have convinced himself, that the clergy residing in that city were by no means sunk in immorality and viciousness? His visit to Cologne coincided in all probability with the general Chapter which Staupitz had summoned there at the commencement of May, 1512. Luther only recalls incidentally having seen there the bodies of the Three Kings; having swallowed all the legends told him concerning them; and having drunk such wine as he had never drunk before.[564]
We may, in conclusion, give two pictures which cast a new and lurid light on what has gone before.
Luther’s standpoint, and, no less, the confusion which had arisen in married life and the humiliations to which many women were exposed, come out clearly in the story of his relations with the preacher Jodocus Kern and his spouse. Kern, an apostate monk, had wedded at Nuremberg Ursula Tagler, an ex-nun from the convent of Engelthal. On Dec. 24, 1524, Luther joyously commended him as “a monk, metamorphosed into a married man,” to the care of Spalatin.[565]When Kern went to Saxony in search of a post the girl refused to accompany him until he had found employment. During his absence she began to regret the step she had taken, and the letters she received from her former Prioress determined her to return no more to her husband. The persuasion of her Lutheran relatives indeed induced her to go to Allstedt after Kern had been appointed successor to Thomas Münzer in that town, but there her horror only grew for the sacrilegious union she had contracted. Coercion was quite fruitless. The minister, at the advice of her own relatives, treated her very roughly, forced her to eat meat on Good Friday and refused to listen when she urged him to return to the Catholic Church. Having made an attempt to escape to Mansfeld, her case was brought before the secular Courts; she was examined by the commissioner of Allstedt on January 11, 1526, when she declared, that it was against her conscience to look upon Kern as her husband, that her soul was dearer to her than her body and that she would rather die than continue to endure any longer the bonds of sin. This the commissioner reported to the Elector Johann, and the latter, on Jan. 17, forwarded her statement to Luther, together with Kern’s account, for the purpose of hearing from one so “learned in Scripture” “how the matter ought to be treated and disposed of in accordance with God’s Holy Writ.”[566]
Luther took a week to reply: The Allstedt woman was suffering such “temptations from the devil and men, that it would verily be a wonder if she could resist them.” The only means of keeping her true to the Evangel and to herduty would be to send her to her people at Nuremberg. Should, even there, “the devil refuse to yield to God’s good exhortation” then she would have to “be allowed to go,” and “be reckoned as dead,” and then the pastor might marry another. Out of the scandal that the wanton spirit had given through her God might yet work some good. “The Evangel neither will nor can be exempt from scandals.”[567]
The unhappy nun was, as a matter of fact, forcibly brought to Nuremberg and placed amongst Lutheran surroundings instead of being conveyed to her convent at Engelthal, as the laws of the Empire demanded. From thence she never returned to Allstedt. Kern, during the proceedings, had declared that he did not want her against her conscience, and was ready to submit to the Word of God and to comply exactly with whatever this imposed. In accordance therewith he soon found a fresh bride. During the Visitations, in 1533, he was charged with bigamy and was reprimanded for being a “drinker and gambler,” although his industry and talents were at the same time recognised. Nothing is known of his later doings.[568]
Two open letters addressed to Luther by Catholics in 1528 form a companion picture to the above. They portray the view taken by many faithful Catholics of Luther’s own marriage.
In that year two Professors at the Leipzig University, Johann Hasenberg and Joachim von der Heyden, published printed circulars addressed to Luther and Catherine von Bora, admonishing them—now that ten years had elapsed since Luther first attacked the Church—on their breaking of their vows, their desecration of the Sacrament of Matrimony and their falling away from the Catholic faith.[569]It is probable that Duke George of Saxony had something to do with this joint attack.[570]It is also likely that hopes ofsterner measures on the part of the Imperial authorities also helped to induce the writers to put pen to paper.[571]In any case it was their plan, vigorously and before all the world, to attack the author of the schism in his most vulnerable spot, where it would not be easy for him to defend himself publicly. Master Hasenberg, a Bohemian, was one of George’s favourites, who had made him three years previously Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He addressed his open letter to “Martinus Luderus,” the “destroyer of the public peace and piety.” Von der Heyden, known in Latin as Myricianus or Phrisomynensis (a Frisian by birth), was likewise a Master, and Papal and academic Notary at Leipzig. Of the two he was the younger. His letter was addressed to “Khete von Bhore, Luther’s pretended wife,” and served as preface to a printed translation he had made of the work: “De lapsu virginis consecratæ,” then attributed to St. Ambrose.[572]Both epistles, according to one of the answers, must have been despatched by special messenger and delivered at Luther’s house. They drew forth printed replies, some of which can be traced to Luther himself, while Euricius Cordus ridiculed the writers in a screed full of biting epigram.
The Leipzig letters, the first of which was also published in German, made a great sensation in German circles and constituted an urgent exhortation to thousands of apostates estranged from the Church by Luther’s new doctrine on Christian freedom and on the nullity of vows.