“We say,” so he teaches in opposition to Luther concerning the destruction of sin in man by baptism, “that baptism brings the remission of all sins, and not merely erases them, but actually removes them (‘auferre crimina non radere’); the roots of sin do not remain in the corrupt flesh, so that the sins have not to grow again and be again cut off like the hair of our heads.”[1648]The righteousness which is bestowed on the sinner is, in his view, no imputed righteousness of Christ but a personal righteousness actually residing in man. Hence he explains that the “Justice of God,” referred to in Rom. iii. 21 f., is not that whereby God is just, but that with which He provides the impious man when justifying him; in the same way the “faith of Christ” mentioned there is “not a faith by which Christ believes, but the faith that is in us.” “Both are ours, but they are ascribed to God and Christ because bestowed on us by the Divine favour.”[1649]The righteousness bestowed on us is “that which Adam lost by sin”; Adam’s righteousness was a quality inherent in him, not the imputed righteousness of Christ.[1650]It is also the same grace which is infused into adults in Justification and which children receive in baptism.[1651]By sanctifying grace the soul is inwardly ennobled, “for when nature’s Creator justifies it by grace, it ceases to be an object of horror and becomes a thing of beauty.”[1652]The Holy Ghost dwells in us and “God gives us therewith no less a gift than Himself.”[1653]Thus “as the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul.”[1654]Our state of grace may, however, be dimmed, and that not only by lack of faith; for it has its enemies in imperfections and sins. “Though our righteousness is a true one, yet in this life the forgiveness of sins plays a greater part than the perfection of virtue.”[1655]“If our will turns against God, we separate ourselvesfrom Him, and the light which enlightened us during His presence at once changes into darkness.”[1656]In order to prevent any such danger on the part of the will, Augustine frequently reminds his readers of such exhortations of our Saviour, as: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.”Man is also spurred to be faithful, so he says, by the merit of good works. “God Himself has become our debtor,” so he said when preaching to the assembled faithful; “not as though He had received something from us, but because He has promised what He pleased. To a man we speak differently and say: You are my debtor because I have given to you. To God we say, on the contrary: Thou art my debtor because Thou hast made me promises; ... in this sense therefore we may urge on God our demands and say: Give what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1657]To recommend the practice of good works out of love of God and zeal for His honour, and to heap up merit for heaven, is the purpose of long and eloquent portions of the literary legacy which Augustine left behind him. The whole of the book “De fide et operibus” and long chapters of his “Enchiridion” were written with this object. In the former work he introduces, for instance, the Judgment scene described by our Saviour, and says: “Those who are placed on the left hand of Christ, according to this passage (Mat. xxv. 41), He will reproach not for not having believed in Him, but for not having performed good works. How could this be true if we were to attain to salvation without keeping the commandments or by faith alone (‘per solam fidem’), which without works is dead? Christ wished to impress on us that no one can promise himself eternal life by a dead faith, minus works. Hence He causes all the nations who have received the same spiritual food [of faith] to be separated out before Him, and clearly it is such as have believed but have not performed good works who will say: When did we see Thee suffering this and that [and did not minister to Thee]? They had fancied that by a dead faith they could attain to everlasting life.”[1658]The voice of the bishop of Hippo, supported by the whole Church whose doctrine was also his, was re-echoed by later ecclesiastical writers who made greedy use of his works; nor were the exhortations of the Fathers without result among the faithful. Later Fathers frequently discourse on the testimony of Holy Writ in favour of works just as Augustine had done; the following texts were frequently adduced: “God will render to every man according to his works”; “Not the hearers of the law are just before God,but the doers of the law shall be justified”; “The Son of Man will come and render to every man according to his works” (Rom. ii. 6, 13; Mat. xvi. 27).Gregory the Great, who trained himself on Augustine’s model, states, in a homily to his congregation: “Possibly we may say to ourselves: I believe, hence I shall be saved. This is only true when we prove our faith by our works.” “Then are we true believers when we execute in work what we confess in our faith.”[1659]A faith proved by works was the sign manual of the Middle Ages. Nor did Luther and his preachers ever complain of the lack of works of piety in the days previous to the Reformation, although they thought it their duty to blame the spirit in which those works had been performed.What, however, did Luther and his followers think of the moral consequences of the preaching directed against all merit of good works?The New Doctrine of Works in Practice, as Judged by Lutheran Opinion in the 16th Century.We have already listened to Luther’s own complaints and those of many of his contemporaries concerning the parlous state of morals amongst the adherents of the new teaching, and the almost entire absence of any practical fruits of piety under the amended Gospel.[1660]Since the mainstay of the innovations was the doctrine of grace and works it is necessary to seek out more closely the connection between the new doctrine of works and the sad moral results of the revolt against the Church. Luther himself makes no odds about referring to these results and their real cause: “The surer we are of the freedom won by Christ, the more indolent do we become”; “because we teach that man attains to grace without any works whatever, we grow lazy”; he almost wishes “that the old teaching again came into its own.”[1661]Only his shortsightedness and the psychological effect of his passionate temper prevented his foreseeing the inevitable consequences of his theory of the all-sufficiency of faith and of his reckless denunciation of the regard for commandments and works previously obtaining. How little his own frequent exhortations to lead a moral life and toperform works of Christian charity (see below, p. 472 ff.) could prevail against the fell charm of the doctrine of Evangelical freedom, remained hid from his eyes, until the extent of the moral corruption and the growing savagery of the people in certain regions began to frighten him and to cause him to long ardently for the end of the world and even to predict its imminence.There was some truth in what he said, viz. that, as the world was constituted, if one preached faith (i.e. the justifying faith so much belauded by him) works went to the wall, and that, on the other hand, “faith” must needs perish wherever works were preached.[1662]The two were indeed self-exclusive, however much, in his recommendation of works, he might affirm the contrary.This is not the place to point out anew the dangers inherent in Luther’s doctrine of justification, for we have already seen the necessary result of one of its presuppositions, viz. the denial of free-will, and how right Erasmus was when he urged against Luther, that, on this assumption, all laws and commandments, even those of Scripture, were simply superfluous. A Protestant has aptly remarked, that, in the last instance, “the difference between good and evil becomes quite illusory”; we might well ask: “How can we feel ourselves responsible towards God ... if we do nothing and God works all in all?” Luther himself even goes so far as to make Scripture teach that “the will not only desires nothing good, but is even unaware of how much evil it does and of what good is.”[1663]Since the imputed merits of Christ are, as a matter of fact, merely like a screen set upin front of the soul, many might naturally feel tempted to extenuate and excuse all that the sin which persists in man still does behind it.To appreciate the peculiar nature of the danger it is necessary to take Luther’s teaching, not by itself, but in conjunction with the mental atmosphere of the day. We must of course take it for granted that many of his followers refrained from putting into practice Luther’s teaching in its entirety, for instance, his peculiar doctrine of the lack of free-will. Many well-disposed Lutherans whose good faith was above suspicion, doubtless remained more or less outside the influence of such ideas, were actuated by good religious motives and expressed them in Christian works. Assisted by the grace of God, which is at the disposal of all men of good-will, they, all unknowingly, were gaining merit in heaven. On the other hand, the ill-disposed, those who sought the enjoyments of life—and of such there were thousands—found a sanction in the Wittenberg doctrine for neglecting good works. In the case of many the “joyful tidings” could not under the circumstances of the age be expected to produce any other result. We have only to think of what was going on all about; of the prevalent yearning after release from irksome bonds; of the unkindly feeling towards rulers, both ecclesiastical and secular; of the seething discontent among the peasants on account of their oppression and toilsome duties; of the spirit of independence so vigorous in the towns; of the boundless ambition of the mighty; of the influence, sometimes sceptical, sometimes immoral, of Humanism, and of the worldliness and degradation of so many of the clergy and monks, to be able to understand how momentous was the effect of Luther’s doctrine of justification and his preaching concerning works.We know on the one hand from many examples with what zest the newly-won promoters of Lutheranism—for the most part former ministers of the Church who had discarded their calling—concentrated their attacks on the practice of good works, and, on the other, how the better-disposed followers of the new doctrine admitted the danger to works accruing from Luther’s views and even their actually evil consequences.The declamation of the preachers against works was partly intended to silence their own scruples. At any rate it was thespeediest method of obtaining a numerous following. The preachers were obliged to deal in some way with the objection constituted by the existence of far greater religious zeal in the olden Church than amongst the new believers; they solved it by denouncing zeal for “outward works.” They were also frequently obliged to extenuate their own laxity of morals, and this they did in the most convenient fashion by branding moral strictness as pharisaical holiness-by-works.Thus it came about that some, even of the more cautious and moderate Lutherans, for instance Urban Rhegius, complained that the preachers were confining themselves to the denunciation of works and to proclaiming the power of faith alone, as though the great gift of the new religious system merely spelt release from everything displeasing to the flesh; there they came very near justifying the constant assertion to this effect of the defenders of Catholicism, indeed the Catholics’ most effective weapon.Rhegius, who died in 1541, as General Superintendent of Lüneburg, summed up his experiences of the effect on the people of Luther’s doctrine of Evangelical freedom, in the sermons he delivered at Hall in the Tyrol: “The rude, carnal people here think that the Law has been abolished and that we are released from it, so that we can do as we please; hence, quite shamelessly and to the disgrace of the Evangel, they say: To steal and to commit adultery is no longer sinful, for the Law is no more of any account. Alas, what crass blindness has fallen upon this people, that they think the Son of God came into the world and suffered so much on account of sin in order that we might lead a shameful, dissolute and bestial life.”[1664]A man of no great firmness of character, he had previously been episcopal vicar at Constance, and could speak from experience of the condition of things amongst the preachers of both Southern and Northern Germany.He accused them of being responsible for the disastrous consequences, but forgot to seek the real cause in the doctrine itself. According to him not only did no two preachers agree in their preaching, so that the people complained they did not know which religion to follow, but too many were in the habit of speaking, “as though it were possible without doing penance and without any contrition or sorrow for sin to believe Christ’s Gospel and rest secure in the proffered forgiveness.”[1665]They gave vent to utterances such as these: “Our works are no good and stink in God’s nostrils. He does not want them. They only make hypocrites. Faith alone does all. If only you believe, you will become pious and be saved.”[1666]In 1535 he had recourse to the pen in order to impress on the preachers “How to speak with caution,” as the title of his work runs. In this tract, published in German and Latin, he attempts to show from a number of instances “how the preachers run off the track on one side or the other,” and how many of them “merely destroy and fail to build.”[1667]Anxious to drive home Luther’s doctrine of good works, in the chapter devoted to this subject,[1668]he mentions six different ways in which good works were profitable, which the preachers were not to forget. In all six, however, the real advantage and necessity of good works is not established on its true foundation. The curious tract was an imitation and enlargement of a work published in 1529 under the title: “Anweisung wie und was wir Ernst von Gots Gnaden Hertzog zu Braunswick und Leuneburg unseres Fürstenthumbs Pfarhern und Predigern zu predigen befohlen.”[1669]The secular rulers were often obliged, as in this instance, to intervene in order to safeguard the new faith from preachers who were either thoughtless, or too logical, or in some cases half crazy.The complaints current among Luther’s friends about the bad effects of the doctrine of justification were even heard long after the tumults of the earliest religious struggles were over.For this reason we are not justified in making out the decline which followed in the train of the new system of faith to have been merely an episode in the history of civilisation and simply the inevitable after-effect of the great upheaval in the intellectual world. It has been argued that far-reaching and disturbing changes in public life are usually accompanied by an increase of immorality among the masses, and also that the disorders dating from Catholic times bore fruit only when brought in contact with the new religion. Unfortunately in the present case we have to do with conditions which, as later witnesses show, persisted even when tranquillity had once more been restored and when the fruits of the new ideas should already have ripened. “What is here disclosed,” justly remarks Döllinger, “was the result of a system already firmly established, no mere after-effect of former conditions, but a true home produce continuing to flourish even when the thousand ties which had once linked human life and consciousness with the olden Church had long been torn and rent asunder, and when the memory of the doctrines, imagery, practices and institutions of that Church had either been completely forgotten by the people, or were known to them only through controversial references made in the pulpits and in the manuals of religious instruction.”[1670]Andreas Hyperius, Professor at the University of Marburg and the best theological authority in Hesse († 1564), in view of the low religious and moral standards of the Protestants which he had had occasion to notice during his many journeys, declaredthat it was necessary, particularly in the pulpit, to be more reticent on the article of Justification by faith alone. Not indeed that he was unwilling to have this preached, yet he did not consider it advisable to continue to “declaim to the masses with such violence on faith alone,” as had hitherto been done. The state of the Church most urgently required that the people, who already troubled themselves little enough about doing good, should be spurred on to good works and, as far as possible, brought back to a faith productive of fruit.[1671]Elsewhere he describes with indignation the generally prevailing indifference towards the poor; this annoyed him all the more, as he was well aware of the loving care displayed towards them by both clergy and laity in the past.[1672]In a document dealing with Luther’s (or rather Flacius’s) doctrine of man’s passivity in the work of conversion, the theologians of Leipzig and Wittenberg, in 1570, attributed to it the prevailing corruption. “The masses,” they said, “have been led into a wild, dissolute and godless life.... There is hardly a spot to be found in the whole world where greater modesty, honesty and virtue are not to be met with than amongst those who listen daily to God’s Word.”[1673]Thirty years later Polycarp Leyser, the Wittenberg Professor and Superintendent, who stood for the strictest form of Lutheranism, declared: “The moral corruption to-day is so great everywhere that not only pious souls but even nature herself gives vent to uneasy groans”; as the cause of it all he mentions the delusion under which many members of the new Church laboured, viz. of fancying themselves excellent Christians so long as they boasted loudly of faith and repeated Scripture passages concerning the unspeakable mercy of God Who received sinners into His favour without any co-operation on their part, even though meanwhile they led the most shameful life.[1674]“All these people have ever the faith in their mouths,” wrote Wolfgang Franz, the Wittenberg professor of theology, in an admonition to the Lutheran preachers (1610); “they are ever prating of faith and of nothing but faith, and yet no one can adequately describe how brimful they are of vice and sin.” For this the preachers were chiefly to blame, because they dinned Justification by faith alone into the people’s ears without further explaining it; hence many of their hearers, who did not even know the Our Father, could discourse on faith more learnedly than St. Paul; they fancied that if only they protested now and then during their lifetime that they believed in Jesus Christ, theirsalvation was assured; they thought that if a murderer who died after committing his crime had only time to confess Jesus with his lips he would at once soar up to heaven.[1675]Johannes Rivius, Rector of Freiberg, and a personal friend of Luther’s, declared the very year after Luther’s death that his experience had shown him that the Lutheran peasants knew neither what they should believe nor how they ought to live, and troubled themselves little about it; the people might well be taken for Epicureans were they not perpetually boasting of their faith in Christ. He bewailed his times, distinguished as they were beyond all past ages by their immorality; corruption of morals had indeed grown so bad that ungodliness and Epicureanism had quite ousted Christianity.[1676]—Not long after, in another writing, he continued his description of the moral decay, and again and again points to the cause, viz. the false ideas of faith, law and works. “By far the greater number of people to-day take not the slightest pains to restrain the lusts of the flesh; ... they indulge in every kind of impiety, while at the same time boasting of faith and bragging of the Gospel.... When the people hear nowadays that there is no other satisfaction for sin than the death of the Redeemer, they fancy they can sin with impunity and give themselves up to luxury.... How many are there who practise real penance though making so brave a show of faith?... They say: ‘Even should you be stained with every vice, only believe and you will be saved; you need not be scared by the Law, for Christ has fulfilled it and done enough for men!’ Such words [which Luther himself had used] give great scandal to pious souls, lead men astray into a godless life and are the cause of their continuing to live hardened in vice and shame and without a thought of amendment; thus such views only serve to encourage the ungodly in vice and deprive them of every incentive to amend their lives.”[1677]If the leaders of the innovations could speak in such a way then yet stronger charges against the doctrine of Justification and its effects may be expected from Luther’s opponents.Johann Haner of Nuremberg, who there, in 1534, turned his back on the new faith, wrote a small book on the interpretation of Scripture which is accounted among the best and calmest of the period. The Preface shows that it was the sight of the immoral outcome of Luther’s views on faith and grace which led him to revert to Catholicism. Without mentioning Luther’s name he tells us that in his book he is going “to withstand all false, fleshly confidence,” “all freedom of the spirit which leads to destruction”; the object of his attack is that faith which is “a mere presumptuous laying claim to grace, and that Evangelwhich opens the door to licence of every kind,” while “telling us to trust solely in an alien righteousness, viz. the righteousness of Christ”; “these anti-Evangelicals, as they ought to be called, by their roguery and their carnal mind had turned topsy-turvy the teaching which led to true piety.”[1678]To Wicel the convert Haner wrote a letter which was one of the causes of his expulsion from Nuremberg by the preachers and the magistrates. Here he said: “By the worthless dogma of Justification by faith alone, which is their alpha and omega, they have not merely loosed all the bonds of discipline in the Church, but also abolished all penance towards God and all unity and friendship among the brethren. Never since the earliest heresies in the Church has there been seen so poisonous and noxious a dogma, the effect of which has been none other than to make the word of the Cross foolishness to us, and to cause both charity towards the brethren and the spirit of repentance towards God to wax cold.”[1679]From Protestant Nuremberg it also was that Willibald Pirkheimer the patrician, as early as 1528, after his own return to the Church, wrote to a friend at Vienna, the architect Tschertte, “I confess that in the beginning I was a good Lutheran, just like our departed Albert [Dürer]. For we hoped that the Roman knavery and the roguery of the monks and priests would be amended. But now we see that matters have become so much worse, that, in comparison with the Evangelical scoundrels, those other scamps are quite pious.” The Evangelicals with their “shameful and criminal behaviour” wished nevertheless “not to be judged by their works,” and pointed to their faith. But “when a man acts wickedly and criminally he shows thereby that he is no honest man, however much he may boast of his faith; for without works faith is dead, just as works are dead without faith.... The works show plainly that there is neither faith nor truth there, no fear of God, or love of our neighbour, but a discarding of all honesty and clean living, art and learning.... Almsgiving has ceased, for these knaves have so abused it that no one will give any longer.”[1680]A few years before this, Othmar Luscinius, an Alsacian theologian, then one of the most weighty scholars of Germany, who, save for having taken a passing fancy for Luther, remained true to the Church, described the “rude Christians,” “whom really we ought to pity, who of the articles necessary for Justification take those only that please them and are sweet, viz. faith and the Evangel, arguing: ‘I have only to believe and I shall be saved’; as for the other, which is bitter and far fromeasy, viz. the putting to death of the old Adam, that they take good care to leave alone.”[1681]The above is sufficient to show that there was a consensus of opinion in tracing back the moral decadence to the Lutheran doctrine of works. As against this there is a certain strangeness in the explanation variously given by Protestants of this real retrogression: The complaints of Luther and his preachers, so they aver, only prove that they were dissatisfied, as it was their right and duty to be, with what had been achieved in the moral order.—At any rate, the distressing results of the doctrine of faith alone proved strikingly how ineffectual had been all Luther’s exhortations to good works.Luther’s Utterances in Favour of Good Works.Many and earnest are Luther’s exhortations to prove our faith by works of love towards God and our neighbour; to sinners he frequently speaks of the path of penance which they must tread; conversion he wishes to be accomplished with lively faith and the state of grace preserved by practical piety. It was assuredly not the lack of such counsels which occasioned the decline described above; this was rather due to the system itself, combined with the evil effects of the general overthrow of the old ecclesiastical law and practice which safeguarded morals, and with the contempt aroused for the sacraments, for public worship and the spiritual authorities. History must, however, allow Luther’s exhortations on behalf of good works and the keeping of the commandments to speak for themselves.We may begin with his thesis: “We are bound to bring our will into entire conformity with the Divine Will.”[1682]In accordance with this, in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” he does not fail to speak agreeably with the teaching of the olden Church of the assistance God gives for the zealous keeping of the commandments. “If you desire to keep all the commandments, to be rid of your evil lusts and of sin as the commandments enjoin and demand, then believe in Christ, for in Him I make bold to promise you all grace and righteousness, peace and freedom. If you believe, then you have it; if you donot believe, you have it not. For what is impossible to you with all the works of the Law, of which there must be many though all to no profit, will be short and easy to you by faith.... The promises of God give both the command and the fulfilment.”[1683]What he means to say is, that, by faith, we receive grace in order to wage a successful “conflict with sin.” Grace is, however, equivalent to faith. “Without grace,” he had already taught before, “man cannot keep God’s commandments.” “The old man ... is led by concupiscence.” “But to faith all things are possible through Christ.”[1684]Elsewhere he clearly teaches that faith alone is not nearly enough; to rely exclusively on this must indeed be termed “folly”; with the assistance of grace man must also keep the Law.[1685]In spite of all he has to say against Moses and his harsh and terrifying “Law”—the Ten Commandments inclusive—when he is busy exalting the Evangel, he nevertheless has occasionally high praise for the Decalogue on account of its agreement with the law of nature. His exposition of it contains much that is worth taking to heart.[1686]Faith, he points out, shows us whence the strength for keeping the Ten Commandments is to be drawn.[1687]The Christian, according to a lengthy and beautiful passage in the Church Postils (in a sermon for the Feast of the Conception), must “struggle and fight” against his lusts and must seek to resist the darts of the wicked one.[1688]“If we have been baptised and believe, we have received grace, and this contends with the evil inclinations within us and expels and destroys original sin; then good and honest desires for humility, chastity, longanimity and all the virtues awaken in us, and at once good works begin to be performed with a cheerful heart. All this is done by the grace which we receive in baptism by faith in Christ; it is impossible for such grace to remain idle, but it must needs bring forth good works.”Emphatic admonitions to preserve chastity and a reminder of the religious means to be employed are also frequent with him, for instance, in his “Von guten Wercken,” written in 1520 at Spalatin’s instigation, to repel the charge that his teaching was antagonistic to any striving after virtue, to morality or Christian works. He dedicated the writing to Duke Johann, the brother of the Saxon Elector. Chastity, he there says, is indeed a hard matter, but it must be acquired. “Even were no other work commanded besides chastity we should all of us have enough to do, so dangerous and furious is the [contrary] vice.... To get the better of all this requires labour and trouble, and in fact all the commandments of God teach us how important is the rightful performance of good works, nay that it is impossible of our own strength even to plan a good work, let alone commence andaccomplish it.... This work of chastity, if it is to be preserved, impels us to many other good works, to fasting and temperance, in order to resist gluttony and drunkenness, to watching and early rising, in spite of our laziness and love for slumber, to strive and to labour in overcoming idleness. For gluttony and drinking, too much sleep, idleness and loitering are the weapons of unchastity.... These exercises, however, must not be carried further than is necessary to subdue unchastity, not to the extent of damaging our frame. The strongest weapons of all are prayer and the Word of God.... Thus you see that each one finds enough to do in himself and good works in plenty to perform. Yet now no one makes use of prayer, fasting, watching and labour for this purpose, but looks upon these works as an end in themselves, though the performance of these works of the Law ought to be regulated daily so as to be ever more and more purified [the sentence contains Luther’s usual perversion of Catholic doctrine and practice]. Other things also have been mentioned as to be avoided, such as soft beds and clothing, unnecessary adornments, the society, sight and conversation of men or women, and much else conducive to chastity. In all this no one can lay down a fixed rule and measure. Each one must decide for himself what things and how many are helpful to chastity, and for how long.” Here he even pays a tribute to the monasteries founded in bygone ages to teach the “young people discipline and cleanliness.” Finally he insists that “a good, strong faith” “helps greatly in this work,” since “faith ever liveth and doth all our works.”[1689]The ravings of the fanatics repeatedly furnished him with an occasion to emphasise good works more strongly and even to speak of a faith working by love.His dislike for their lawless behaviour and their praise of the Spirit, to some extent directed against ordinary works, called him into the arena. To call back the disturbers to a more moral life and to the considerations of charity, he appealed to them to “exercise themselves in the faith that worketh by charity” (Gal. v. 6). Even the Epistle of James now appeared to him good enough to quote, particularly the verse (i. 22): “Be ye doers of the the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves”; from this Epistle he also borrows the comparison of a dead faith, viz. of a faith not made living through charity, with the face as seen in a glass, which is merely the semblance of a countenance and not the reality.[1690]It was the fanatics again who in 1530 drew from him some eloquent statements in favour of good works, because, so he said, they had misrepresented his doctrine that “Good works neither make a man pious nor blot out sin.” They said “they would give their good works for a groat,” and that all good works were not worth a peppercorn. Here he professes to see great danger in contempt for good works and the perversion of his teaching bythe “devil’s lying tongue.” Good works, according to him, are rather to be esteemed very highly because they are God’s own. “If it is a good work, then God has wrought it in and by me”; “it was done for the honour and glory of God and for the profit and salvation of my neighbour.” He himself had been far from questioning this and had merely taught that works did not conduce to piety, i.e. “to justify the soul and to placate God”; this, on the contrary, was “entirely the work of the One true God and of His grace.”[1691]Just as during his public career Luther looked upon such statements as all the more useful seeing they blunted the edge of the awkward inferences drawn from the new Evangel, and served to vindicate his action from the charge of loosening the bonds of morality, so, at the close of his days, he was obliged in a similar way to hark back to the defence of good works against Antinomianism, of which the principal spokesman was Johann Agricola. It is true that the Antinomians based their contempt for the Law, which they said was harmful, and for the excessive respect for commandments and good works which, according to them, still prevailed, on nothing less than Luther’s own teaching. In reality it was to his advantage that their exaggerations forced him to explain away much that he had said, or at least to exercise greater caution. The encounter with Agricola the Antinomian will be described later (vol. v., xxix., 3). In spite of his being thus compelled to take the Law and good works under his wing in this controversy, Luther never, then or later, put forward the true relation of the Law to the Gospel nor the real foundation of good works.[1692]He became involved in contradictions, and to the end of his days it became more and more apparent how forced had been the introduction into his theology of good works and the keeping of the Law.Nicholas Amsdorf, Luther’s intimate friend and most docile pupil, published in 1559 a tract entitled “That the proposition ‘Good works are harmful to salvation’ is a good and Christian one preached both by St. Paul and by Luther.” Their “harmfulness” resided in their being regarded as meritorious for salvation. We may wonder what Luther would have thought of this writing had he been alive? In any case the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577 contains a mild protest against it: “The assertion that good works are necessary is not to be reprehended, seeing that it may be understood in a favourable sense”;[1693]it also appeals to what had been laid down in the AugsburgConfession; it could “not be gainsaid that, in both the Confession and the ‘Apologia,’ the words: ‘Good works are necessary,’ are frequently used.”[1694]As for the attitude of the Augsburg Confession, it declares concerning works—a declaration for which Melanchthon’s cautious pen was solely responsible—“We also teach that such faith [in Christ, whereby man is justified] must produce good fruit and good works, and that we must perform all manner of good works which God has commanded, for God’s sake.”[1695]No one was so much concerned as Melanchthon in insisting that the performance of good works should be represented as indispensable to the people, particularly from the pulpit. It vexed him, the more prudent of the two, to hear Luther again and again, and that often in hyperbolical and paradoxical form, laying such stress on faith alone. How far Melanchthon’s name may justifiably be quoted against what was undesirable in the olden Protestant teaching on works, should be clear from what has already been said concerning this theological henchman of Luther’s (cp. vol. iii., p. 347 ff.).Luther’s admirers are wont to quote the following utterance of his when praising his attitude towards works: “Good, pious works never made a good, pious man, but a good, pious man performs good, pious works. Wicked works never made a wicked man, but wicked men perform wicked works.”[1696]That “wicked deeds never made a wicked man” he probably found some difficulty in really convincing many. If Luther meant that an unjust man or sinner, who is not cleansed by faith in Christ, can never act but wickedly, then it is the same error as we find in other passages and which is repeated in connection with the words just quoted: “Unless a man believes beforehand and is a Christian [’consecrated by faith’] all his works are of no account, but are vain, foolish, criminal and damnably sinful.” This is surely as much beside the mark as the above statement of Luther’s concerning the relation between a “pious man” and “pious works.” Of supernatural works that are meritorious for heaven what Luther adds is indeed correct:“Hence, in every instance the person must first be good and pious previous to all works, and the good works follow and proceed from a good and pious person.” We must, however, decline to accept Luther’s other inferences, viz. that the sinner is not in a position to perform natural good works of his own, and that the just man does not become more righteous through good works.Hence Luther’s statement, however apparently ingenious, cannot remove the unfavourable impression produced by his doctrine of works. That it was highly valued by its author is plain from the number of times he repeats it under different forms. “Works do not make a Christian, but a Christian performs works,” so he exclaimed in a sermon in 1523, summing up in these specious words the instruction he had just given, viz. that the faithful must struggle to remove whatever of evil there is in them, and that they must “work good to their neighbour,” but not on any account try “to blot out sin by works, for this would be to shame and blaspheme God and Christ and to disgrace their own heritage,” viz. Justification by faith alone.[1697]Works of Charity. Luther and the Ages of the Past.For the purpose of recommending the Lutheran doctrine of works it is sometimes urged that Luther, while slighting other works of less account, assigned a place of honour to active works of charity, done for the sake of our neighbour, that he placed them on a firmer moral basis than they had hitherto occupied and promoted them so far as the unfavourable circumstances of his age allowed. A few words on the conception and particularly on the practice of charity as advocated by him may serve as a fit conclusion to the present section.First, we may mention that Luther is disposed to exaggerate the importance of works of charity done to our neighbour.It was an unjustifiable and paralysing restriction on the pious impulse towards works pleasing to God that Luther embodied in the rule he repeatedly lays down regarding works, viz. that they must be directed exclusively towards the benefit of others. “On this earth,” so he teaches in his Church postils, “man does not live for the sake of works,nor that they may profit him, for he has no need of them, but all works must be done for the sake of our neighbour.” “Thus must all works be done, that we see to it that they tend to the service of other people, impart to them the right faith and bring them to Christ’s Kingdom.” They bring them the “right faith” when they serve to “quiet their conscience.” Thus even here the Kingdom of God, which consists in the forgiveness of sins, must also play its part.Catholic doctrine recognises a wider field for good works. It regards as such even the works which the faithful perform directly for their own soul without any reference to their neighbour, such as self-conquest in contending against one’s own passions, or those works which are concerned primarily with honouring God whether in public worship or in the private life of the Christian. Luther himself, at least incidentally, also knows how to speak of the value of such works, though thereby he contradicts his other statements like the above.If, however, we neglect the principle, we have to admit, that Luther’s frequent exhortations to neighbourly charity and kindness contain some fine and truly Evangelical thoughts. With deep feeling he expresses his sorrow that his admonitions are not heeded to the extent he would have wished.In his statements already quoted concerning the corruption of morals consequent on the change of religion, we have heard him several times lamenting the notorious falling off in private benevolence and the quite remarkable decrease of public works of Christian charity. Everywhere avarice reigns supreme, so we have heard Luther repeatedly exclaim, and a reprehensible indolence in the doing of what is good has spread far and wide; everything is now different from what it had been “in the time of the monks and parsons,” when people “founded and built” right and left, and when even the poorest was anxious to contribute.[1698]His defenders now declare, that he “unlocked the truesource of charity” by denying any meritorious character to works, thus sending to limbo the imperfect, mediæval motive of charity and substituting a better one in its place, viz. a “grateful love springing from faith.” Luther’s own words have been used to decry earlier ages, as though charity then had “merely had itself in view,” people in those days having been intent solely on laying up merit “for them and theirs.”
“We say,” so he teaches in opposition to Luther concerning the destruction of sin in man by baptism, “that baptism brings the remission of all sins, and not merely erases them, but actually removes them (‘auferre crimina non radere’); the roots of sin do not remain in the corrupt flesh, so that the sins have not to grow again and be again cut off like the hair of our heads.”[1648]The righteousness which is bestowed on the sinner is, in his view, no imputed righteousness of Christ but a personal righteousness actually residing in man. Hence he explains that the “Justice of God,” referred to in Rom. iii. 21 f., is not that whereby God is just, but that with which He provides the impious man when justifying him; in the same way the “faith of Christ” mentioned there is “not a faith by which Christ believes, but the faith that is in us.” “Both are ours, but they are ascribed to God and Christ because bestowed on us by the Divine favour.”[1649]The righteousness bestowed on us is “that which Adam lost by sin”; Adam’s righteousness was a quality inherent in him, not the imputed righteousness of Christ.[1650]It is also the same grace which is infused into adults in Justification and which children receive in baptism.[1651]By sanctifying grace the soul is inwardly ennobled, “for when nature’s Creator justifies it by grace, it ceases to be an object of horror and becomes a thing of beauty.”[1652]The Holy Ghost dwells in us and “God gives us therewith no less a gift than Himself.”[1653]Thus “as the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul.”[1654]Our state of grace may, however, be dimmed, and that not only by lack of faith; for it has its enemies in imperfections and sins. “Though our righteousness is a true one, yet in this life the forgiveness of sins plays a greater part than the perfection of virtue.”[1655]“If our will turns against God, we separate ourselvesfrom Him, and the light which enlightened us during His presence at once changes into darkness.”[1656]In order to prevent any such danger on the part of the will, Augustine frequently reminds his readers of such exhortations of our Saviour, as: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.”Man is also spurred to be faithful, so he says, by the merit of good works. “God Himself has become our debtor,” so he said when preaching to the assembled faithful; “not as though He had received something from us, but because He has promised what He pleased. To a man we speak differently and say: You are my debtor because I have given to you. To God we say, on the contrary: Thou art my debtor because Thou hast made me promises; ... in this sense therefore we may urge on God our demands and say: Give what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1657]To recommend the practice of good works out of love of God and zeal for His honour, and to heap up merit for heaven, is the purpose of long and eloquent portions of the literary legacy which Augustine left behind him. The whole of the book “De fide et operibus” and long chapters of his “Enchiridion” were written with this object. In the former work he introduces, for instance, the Judgment scene described by our Saviour, and says: “Those who are placed on the left hand of Christ, according to this passage (Mat. xxv. 41), He will reproach not for not having believed in Him, but for not having performed good works. How could this be true if we were to attain to salvation without keeping the commandments or by faith alone (‘per solam fidem’), which without works is dead? Christ wished to impress on us that no one can promise himself eternal life by a dead faith, minus works. Hence He causes all the nations who have received the same spiritual food [of faith] to be separated out before Him, and clearly it is such as have believed but have not performed good works who will say: When did we see Thee suffering this and that [and did not minister to Thee]? They had fancied that by a dead faith they could attain to everlasting life.”[1658]The voice of the bishop of Hippo, supported by the whole Church whose doctrine was also his, was re-echoed by later ecclesiastical writers who made greedy use of his works; nor were the exhortations of the Fathers without result among the faithful. Later Fathers frequently discourse on the testimony of Holy Writ in favour of works just as Augustine had done; the following texts were frequently adduced: “God will render to every man according to his works”; “Not the hearers of the law are just before God,but the doers of the law shall be justified”; “The Son of Man will come and render to every man according to his works” (Rom. ii. 6, 13; Mat. xvi. 27).Gregory the Great, who trained himself on Augustine’s model, states, in a homily to his congregation: “Possibly we may say to ourselves: I believe, hence I shall be saved. This is only true when we prove our faith by our works.” “Then are we true believers when we execute in work what we confess in our faith.”[1659]A faith proved by works was the sign manual of the Middle Ages. Nor did Luther and his preachers ever complain of the lack of works of piety in the days previous to the Reformation, although they thought it their duty to blame the spirit in which those works had been performed.What, however, did Luther and his followers think of the moral consequences of the preaching directed against all merit of good works?The New Doctrine of Works in Practice, as Judged by Lutheran Opinion in the 16th Century.We have already listened to Luther’s own complaints and those of many of his contemporaries concerning the parlous state of morals amongst the adherents of the new teaching, and the almost entire absence of any practical fruits of piety under the amended Gospel.[1660]Since the mainstay of the innovations was the doctrine of grace and works it is necessary to seek out more closely the connection between the new doctrine of works and the sad moral results of the revolt against the Church. Luther himself makes no odds about referring to these results and their real cause: “The surer we are of the freedom won by Christ, the more indolent do we become”; “because we teach that man attains to grace without any works whatever, we grow lazy”; he almost wishes “that the old teaching again came into its own.”[1661]Only his shortsightedness and the psychological effect of his passionate temper prevented his foreseeing the inevitable consequences of his theory of the all-sufficiency of faith and of his reckless denunciation of the regard for commandments and works previously obtaining. How little his own frequent exhortations to lead a moral life and toperform works of Christian charity (see below, p. 472 ff.) could prevail against the fell charm of the doctrine of Evangelical freedom, remained hid from his eyes, until the extent of the moral corruption and the growing savagery of the people in certain regions began to frighten him and to cause him to long ardently for the end of the world and even to predict its imminence.There was some truth in what he said, viz. that, as the world was constituted, if one preached faith (i.e. the justifying faith so much belauded by him) works went to the wall, and that, on the other hand, “faith” must needs perish wherever works were preached.[1662]The two were indeed self-exclusive, however much, in his recommendation of works, he might affirm the contrary.This is not the place to point out anew the dangers inherent in Luther’s doctrine of justification, for we have already seen the necessary result of one of its presuppositions, viz. the denial of free-will, and how right Erasmus was when he urged against Luther, that, on this assumption, all laws and commandments, even those of Scripture, were simply superfluous. A Protestant has aptly remarked, that, in the last instance, “the difference between good and evil becomes quite illusory”; we might well ask: “How can we feel ourselves responsible towards God ... if we do nothing and God works all in all?” Luther himself even goes so far as to make Scripture teach that “the will not only desires nothing good, but is even unaware of how much evil it does and of what good is.”[1663]Since the imputed merits of Christ are, as a matter of fact, merely like a screen set upin front of the soul, many might naturally feel tempted to extenuate and excuse all that the sin which persists in man still does behind it.To appreciate the peculiar nature of the danger it is necessary to take Luther’s teaching, not by itself, but in conjunction with the mental atmosphere of the day. We must of course take it for granted that many of his followers refrained from putting into practice Luther’s teaching in its entirety, for instance, his peculiar doctrine of the lack of free-will. Many well-disposed Lutherans whose good faith was above suspicion, doubtless remained more or less outside the influence of such ideas, were actuated by good religious motives and expressed them in Christian works. Assisted by the grace of God, which is at the disposal of all men of good-will, they, all unknowingly, were gaining merit in heaven. On the other hand, the ill-disposed, those who sought the enjoyments of life—and of such there were thousands—found a sanction in the Wittenberg doctrine for neglecting good works. In the case of many the “joyful tidings” could not under the circumstances of the age be expected to produce any other result. We have only to think of what was going on all about; of the prevalent yearning after release from irksome bonds; of the unkindly feeling towards rulers, both ecclesiastical and secular; of the seething discontent among the peasants on account of their oppression and toilsome duties; of the spirit of independence so vigorous in the towns; of the boundless ambition of the mighty; of the influence, sometimes sceptical, sometimes immoral, of Humanism, and of the worldliness and degradation of so many of the clergy and monks, to be able to understand how momentous was the effect of Luther’s doctrine of justification and his preaching concerning works.We know on the one hand from many examples with what zest the newly-won promoters of Lutheranism—for the most part former ministers of the Church who had discarded their calling—concentrated their attacks on the practice of good works, and, on the other, how the better-disposed followers of the new doctrine admitted the danger to works accruing from Luther’s views and even their actually evil consequences.The declamation of the preachers against works was partly intended to silence their own scruples. At any rate it was thespeediest method of obtaining a numerous following. The preachers were obliged to deal in some way with the objection constituted by the existence of far greater religious zeal in the olden Church than amongst the new believers; they solved it by denouncing zeal for “outward works.” They were also frequently obliged to extenuate their own laxity of morals, and this they did in the most convenient fashion by branding moral strictness as pharisaical holiness-by-works.Thus it came about that some, even of the more cautious and moderate Lutherans, for instance Urban Rhegius, complained that the preachers were confining themselves to the denunciation of works and to proclaiming the power of faith alone, as though the great gift of the new religious system merely spelt release from everything displeasing to the flesh; there they came very near justifying the constant assertion to this effect of the defenders of Catholicism, indeed the Catholics’ most effective weapon.Rhegius, who died in 1541, as General Superintendent of Lüneburg, summed up his experiences of the effect on the people of Luther’s doctrine of Evangelical freedom, in the sermons he delivered at Hall in the Tyrol: “The rude, carnal people here think that the Law has been abolished and that we are released from it, so that we can do as we please; hence, quite shamelessly and to the disgrace of the Evangel, they say: To steal and to commit adultery is no longer sinful, for the Law is no more of any account. Alas, what crass blindness has fallen upon this people, that they think the Son of God came into the world and suffered so much on account of sin in order that we might lead a shameful, dissolute and bestial life.”[1664]A man of no great firmness of character, he had previously been episcopal vicar at Constance, and could speak from experience of the condition of things amongst the preachers of both Southern and Northern Germany.He accused them of being responsible for the disastrous consequences, but forgot to seek the real cause in the doctrine itself. According to him not only did no two preachers agree in their preaching, so that the people complained they did not know which religion to follow, but too many were in the habit of speaking, “as though it were possible without doing penance and without any contrition or sorrow for sin to believe Christ’s Gospel and rest secure in the proffered forgiveness.”[1665]They gave vent to utterances such as these: “Our works are no good and stink in God’s nostrils. He does not want them. They only make hypocrites. Faith alone does all. If only you believe, you will become pious and be saved.”[1666]In 1535 he had recourse to the pen in order to impress on the preachers “How to speak with caution,” as the title of his work runs. In this tract, published in German and Latin, he attempts to show from a number of instances “how the preachers run off the track on one side or the other,” and how many of them “merely destroy and fail to build.”[1667]Anxious to drive home Luther’s doctrine of good works, in the chapter devoted to this subject,[1668]he mentions six different ways in which good works were profitable, which the preachers were not to forget. In all six, however, the real advantage and necessity of good works is not established on its true foundation. The curious tract was an imitation and enlargement of a work published in 1529 under the title: “Anweisung wie und was wir Ernst von Gots Gnaden Hertzog zu Braunswick und Leuneburg unseres Fürstenthumbs Pfarhern und Predigern zu predigen befohlen.”[1669]The secular rulers were often obliged, as in this instance, to intervene in order to safeguard the new faith from preachers who were either thoughtless, or too logical, or in some cases half crazy.The complaints current among Luther’s friends about the bad effects of the doctrine of justification were even heard long after the tumults of the earliest religious struggles were over.For this reason we are not justified in making out the decline which followed in the train of the new system of faith to have been merely an episode in the history of civilisation and simply the inevitable after-effect of the great upheaval in the intellectual world. It has been argued that far-reaching and disturbing changes in public life are usually accompanied by an increase of immorality among the masses, and also that the disorders dating from Catholic times bore fruit only when brought in contact with the new religion. Unfortunately in the present case we have to do with conditions which, as later witnesses show, persisted even when tranquillity had once more been restored and when the fruits of the new ideas should already have ripened. “What is here disclosed,” justly remarks Döllinger, “was the result of a system already firmly established, no mere after-effect of former conditions, but a true home produce continuing to flourish even when the thousand ties which had once linked human life and consciousness with the olden Church had long been torn and rent asunder, and when the memory of the doctrines, imagery, practices and institutions of that Church had either been completely forgotten by the people, or were known to them only through controversial references made in the pulpits and in the manuals of religious instruction.”[1670]Andreas Hyperius, Professor at the University of Marburg and the best theological authority in Hesse († 1564), in view of the low religious and moral standards of the Protestants which he had had occasion to notice during his many journeys, declaredthat it was necessary, particularly in the pulpit, to be more reticent on the article of Justification by faith alone. Not indeed that he was unwilling to have this preached, yet he did not consider it advisable to continue to “declaim to the masses with such violence on faith alone,” as had hitherto been done. The state of the Church most urgently required that the people, who already troubled themselves little enough about doing good, should be spurred on to good works and, as far as possible, brought back to a faith productive of fruit.[1671]Elsewhere he describes with indignation the generally prevailing indifference towards the poor; this annoyed him all the more, as he was well aware of the loving care displayed towards them by both clergy and laity in the past.[1672]In a document dealing with Luther’s (or rather Flacius’s) doctrine of man’s passivity in the work of conversion, the theologians of Leipzig and Wittenberg, in 1570, attributed to it the prevailing corruption. “The masses,” they said, “have been led into a wild, dissolute and godless life.... There is hardly a spot to be found in the whole world where greater modesty, honesty and virtue are not to be met with than amongst those who listen daily to God’s Word.”[1673]Thirty years later Polycarp Leyser, the Wittenberg Professor and Superintendent, who stood for the strictest form of Lutheranism, declared: “The moral corruption to-day is so great everywhere that not only pious souls but even nature herself gives vent to uneasy groans”; as the cause of it all he mentions the delusion under which many members of the new Church laboured, viz. of fancying themselves excellent Christians so long as they boasted loudly of faith and repeated Scripture passages concerning the unspeakable mercy of God Who received sinners into His favour without any co-operation on their part, even though meanwhile they led the most shameful life.[1674]“All these people have ever the faith in their mouths,” wrote Wolfgang Franz, the Wittenberg professor of theology, in an admonition to the Lutheran preachers (1610); “they are ever prating of faith and of nothing but faith, and yet no one can adequately describe how brimful they are of vice and sin.” For this the preachers were chiefly to blame, because they dinned Justification by faith alone into the people’s ears without further explaining it; hence many of their hearers, who did not even know the Our Father, could discourse on faith more learnedly than St. Paul; they fancied that if only they protested now and then during their lifetime that they believed in Jesus Christ, theirsalvation was assured; they thought that if a murderer who died after committing his crime had only time to confess Jesus with his lips he would at once soar up to heaven.[1675]Johannes Rivius, Rector of Freiberg, and a personal friend of Luther’s, declared the very year after Luther’s death that his experience had shown him that the Lutheran peasants knew neither what they should believe nor how they ought to live, and troubled themselves little about it; the people might well be taken for Epicureans were they not perpetually boasting of their faith in Christ. He bewailed his times, distinguished as they were beyond all past ages by their immorality; corruption of morals had indeed grown so bad that ungodliness and Epicureanism had quite ousted Christianity.[1676]—Not long after, in another writing, he continued his description of the moral decay, and again and again points to the cause, viz. the false ideas of faith, law and works. “By far the greater number of people to-day take not the slightest pains to restrain the lusts of the flesh; ... they indulge in every kind of impiety, while at the same time boasting of faith and bragging of the Gospel.... When the people hear nowadays that there is no other satisfaction for sin than the death of the Redeemer, they fancy they can sin with impunity and give themselves up to luxury.... How many are there who practise real penance though making so brave a show of faith?... They say: ‘Even should you be stained with every vice, only believe and you will be saved; you need not be scared by the Law, for Christ has fulfilled it and done enough for men!’ Such words [which Luther himself had used] give great scandal to pious souls, lead men astray into a godless life and are the cause of their continuing to live hardened in vice and shame and without a thought of amendment; thus such views only serve to encourage the ungodly in vice and deprive them of every incentive to amend their lives.”[1677]If the leaders of the innovations could speak in such a way then yet stronger charges against the doctrine of Justification and its effects may be expected from Luther’s opponents.Johann Haner of Nuremberg, who there, in 1534, turned his back on the new faith, wrote a small book on the interpretation of Scripture which is accounted among the best and calmest of the period. The Preface shows that it was the sight of the immoral outcome of Luther’s views on faith and grace which led him to revert to Catholicism. Without mentioning Luther’s name he tells us that in his book he is going “to withstand all false, fleshly confidence,” “all freedom of the spirit which leads to destruction”; the object of his attack is that faith which is “a mere presumptuous laying claim to grace, and that Evangelwhich opens the door to licence of every kind,” while “telling us to trust solely in an alien righteousness, viz. the righteousness of Christ”; “these anti-Evangelicals, as they ought to be called, by their roguery and their carnal mind had turned topsy-turvy the teaching which led to true piety.”[1678]To Wicel the convert Haner wrote a letter which was one of the causes of his expulsion from Nuremberg by the preachers and the magistrates. Here he said: “By the worthless dogma of Justification by faith alone, which is their alpha and omega, they have not merely loosed all the bonds of discipline in the Church, but also abolished all penance towards God and all unity and friendship among the brethren. Never since the earliest heresies in the Church has there been seen so poisonous and noxious a dogma, the effect of which has been none other than to make the word of the Cross foolishness to us, and to cause both charity towards the brethren and the spirit of repentance towards God to wax cold.”[1679]From Protestant Nuremberg it also was that Willibald Pirkheimer the patrician, as early as 1528, after his own return to the Church, wrote to a friend at Vienna, the architect Tschertte, “I confess that in the beginning I was a good Lutheran, just like our departed Albert [Dürer]. For we hoped that the Roman knavery and the roguery of the monks and priests would be amended. But now we see that matters have become so much worse, that, in comparison with the Evangelical scoundrels, those other scamps are quite pious.” The Evangelicals with their “shameful and criminal behaviour” wished nevertheless “not to be judged by their works,” and pointed to their faith. But “when a man acts wickedly and criminally he shows thereby that he is no honest man, however much he may boast of his faith; for without works faith is dead, just as works are dead without faith.... The works show plainly that there is neither faith nor truth there, no fear of God, or love of our neighbour, but a discarding of all honesty and clean living, art and learning.... Almsgiving has ceased, for these knaves have so abused it that no one will give any longer.”[1680]A few years before this, Othmar Luscinius, an Alsacian theologian, then one of the most weighty scholars of Germany, who, save for having taken a passing fancy for Luther, remained true to the Church, described the “rude Christians,” “whom really we ought to pity, who of the articles necessary for Justification take those only that please them and are sweet, viz. faith and the Evangel, arguing: ‘I have only to believe and I shall be saved’; as for the other, which is bitter and far fromeasy, viz. the putting to death of the old Adam, that they take good care to leave alone.”[1681]The above is sufficient to show that there was a consensus of opinion in tracing back the moral decadence to the Lutheran doctrine of works. As against this there is a certain strangeness in the explanation variously given by Protestants of this real retrogression: The complaints of Luther and his preachers, so they aver, only prove that they were dissatisfied, as it was their right and duty to be, with what had been achieved in the moral order.—At any rate, the distressing results of the doctrine of faith alone proved strikingly how ineffectual had been all Luther’s exhortations to good works.Luther’s Utterances in Favour of Good Works.Many and earnest are Luther’s exhortations to prove our faith by works of love towards God and our neighbour; to sinners he frequently speaks of the path of penance which they must tread; conversion he wishes to be accomplished with lively faith and the state of grace preserved by practical piety. It was assuredly not the lack of such counsels which occasioned the decline described above; this was rather due to the system itself, combined with the evil effects of the general overthrow of the old ecclesiastical law and practice which safeguarded morals, and with the contempt aroused for the sacraments, for public worship and the spiritual authorities. History must, however, allow Luther’s exhortations on behalf of good works and the keeping of the commandments to speak for themselves.We may begin with his thesis: “We are bound to bring our will into entire conformity with the Divine Will.”[1682]In accordance with this, in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” he does not fail to speak agreeably with the teaching of the olden Church of the assistance God gives for the zealous keeping of the commandments. “If you desire to keep all the commandments, to be rid of your evil lusts and of sin as the commandments enjoin and demand, then believe in Christ, for in Him I make bold to promise you all grace and righteousness, peace and freedom. If you believe, then you have it; if you donot believe, you have it not. For what is impossible to you with all the works of the Law, of which there must be many though all to no profit, will be short and easy to you by faith.... The promises of God give both the command and the fulfilment.”[1683]What he means to say is, that, by faith, we receive grace in order to wage a successful “conflict with sin.” Grace is, however, equivalent to faith. “Without grace,” he had already taught before, “man cannot keep God’s commandments.” “The old man ... is led by concupiscence.” “But to faith all things are possible through Christ.”[1684]Elsewhere he clearly teaches that faith alone is not nearly enough; to rely exclusively on this must indeed be termed “folly”; with the assistance of grace man must also keep the Law.[1685]In spite of all he has to say against Moses and his harsh and terrifying “Law”—the Ten Commandments inclusive—when he is busy exalting the Evangel, he nevertheless has occasionally high praise for the Decalogue on account of its agreement with the law of nature. His exposition of it contains much that is worth taking to heart.[1686]Faith, he points out, shows us whence the strength for keeping the Ten Commandments is to be drawn.[1687]The Christian, according to a lengthy and beautiful passage in the Church Postils (in a sermon for the Feast of the Conception), must “struggle and fight” against his lusts and must seek to resist the darts of the wicked one.[1688]“If we have been baptised and believe, we have received grace, and this contends with the evil inclinations within us and expels and destroys original sin; then good and honest desires for humility, chastity, longanimity and all the virtues awaken in us, and at once good works begin to be performed with a cheerful heart. All this is done by the grace which we receive in baptism by faith in Christ; it is impossible for such grace to remain idle, but it must needs bring forth good works.”Emphatic admonitions to preserve chastity and a reminder of the religious means to be employed are also frequent with him, for instance, in his “Von guten Wercken,” written in 1520 at Spalatin’s instigation, to repel the charge that his teaching was antagonistic to any striving after virtue, to morality or Christian works. He dedicated the writing to Duke Johann, the brother of the Saxon Elector. Chastity, he there says, is indeed a hard matter, but it must be acquired. “Even were no other work commanded besides chastity we should all of us have enough to do, so dangerous and furious is the [contrary] vice.... To get the better of all this requires labour and trouble, and in fact all the commandments of God teach us how important is the rightful performance of good works, nay that it is impossible of our own strength even to plan a good work, let alone commence andaccomplish it.... This work of chastity, if it is to be preserved, impels us to many other good works, to fasting and temperance, in order to resist gluttony and drunkenness, to watching and early rising, in spite of our laziness and love for slumber, to strive and to labour in overcoming idleness. For gluttony and drinking, too much sleep, idleness and loitering are the weapons of unchastity.... These exercises, however, must not be carried further than is necessary to subdue unchastity, not to the extent of damaging our frame. The strongest weapons of all are prayer and the Word of God.... Thus you see that each one finds enough to do in himself and good works in plenty to perform. Yet now no one makes use of prayer, fasting, watching and labour for this purpose, but looks upon these works as an end in themselves, though the performance of these works of the Law ought to be regulated daily so as to be ever more and more purified [the sentence contains Luther’s usual perversion of Catholic doctrine and practice]. Other things also have been mentioned as to be avoided, such as soft beds and clothing, unnecessary adornments, the society, sight and conversation of men or women, and much else conducive to chastity. In all this no one can lay down a fixed rule and measure. Each one must decide for himself what things and how many are helpful to chastity, and for how long.” Here he even pays a tribute to the monasteries founded in bygone ages to teach the “young people discipline and cleanliness.” Finally he insists that “a good, strong faith” “helps greatly in this work,” since “faith ever liveth and doth all our works.”[1689]The ravings of the fanatics repeatedly furnished him with an occasion to emphasise good works more strongly and even to speak of a faith working by love.His dislike for their lawless behaviour and their praise of the Spirit, to some extent directed against ordinary works, called him into the arena. To call back the disturbers to a more moral life and to the considerations of charity, he appealed to them to “exercise themselves in the faith that worketh by charity” (Gal. v. 6). Even the Epistle of James now appeared to him good enough to quote, particularly the verse (i. 22): “Be ye doers of the the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves”; from this Epistle he also borrows the comparison of a dead faith, viz. of a faith not made living through charity, with the face as seen in a glass, which is merely the semblance of a countenance and not the reality.[1690]It was the fanatics again who in 1530 drew from him some eloquent statements in favour of good works, because, so he said, they had misrepresented his doctrine that “Good works neither make a man pious nor blot out sin.” They said “they would give their good works for a groat,” and that all good works were not worth a peppercorn. Here he professes to see great danger in contempt for good works and the perversion of his teaching bythe “devil’s lying tongue.” Good works, according to him, are rather to be esteemed very highly because they are God’s own. “If it is a good work, then God has wrought it in and by me”; “it was done for the honour and glory of God and for the profit and salvation of my neighbour.” He himself had been far from questioning this and had merely taught that works did not conduce to piety, i.e. “to justify the soul and to placate God”; this, on the contrary, was “entirely the work of the One true God and of His grace.”[1691]Just as during his public career Luther looked upon such statements as all the more useful seeing they blunted the edge of the awkward inferences drawn from the new Evangel, and served to vindicate his action from the charge of loosening the bonds of morality, so, at the close of his days, he was obliged in a similar way to hark back to the defence of good works against Antinomianism, of which the principal spokesman was Johann Agricola. It is true that the Antinomians based their contempt for the Law, which they said was harmful, and for the excessive respect for commandments and good works which, according to them, still prevailed, on nothing less than Luther’s own teaching. In reality it was to his advantage that their exaggerations forced him to explain away much that he had said, or at least to exercise greater caution. The encounter with Agricola the Antinomian will be described later (vol. v., xxix., 3). In spite of his being thus compelled to take the Law and good works under his wing in this controversy, Luther never, then or later, put forward the true relation of the Law to the Gospel nor the real foundation of good works.[1692]He became involved in contradictions, and to the end of his days it became more and more apparent how forced had been the introduction into his theology of good works and the keeping of the Law.Nicholas Amsdorf, Luther’s intimate friend and most docile pupil, published in 1559 a tract entitled “That the proposition ‘Good works are harmful to salvation’ is a good and Christian one preached both by St. Paul and by Luther.” Their “harmfulness” resided in their being regarded as meritorious for salvation. We may wonder what Luther would have thought of this writing had he been alive? In any case the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577 contains a mild protest against it: “The assertion that good works are necessary is not to be reprehended, seeing that it may be understood in a favourable sense”;[1693]it also appeals to what had been laid down in the AugsburgConfession; it could “not be gainsaid that, in both the Confession and the ‘Apologia,’ the words: ‘Good works are necessary,’ are frequently used.”[1694]As for the attitude of the Augsburg Confession, it declares concerning works—a declaration for which Melanchthon’s cautious pen was solely responsible—“We also teach that such faith [in Christ, whereby man is justified] must produce good fruit and good works, and that we must perform all manner of good works which God has commanded, for God’s sake.”[1695]No one was so much concerned as Melanchthon in insisting that the performance of good works should be represented as indispensable to the people, particularly from the pulpit. It vexed him, the more prudent of the two, to hear Luther again and again, and that often in hyperbolical and paradoxical form, laying such stress on faith alone. How far Melanchthon’s name may justifiably be quoted against what was undesirable in the olden Protestant teaching on works, should be clear from what has already been said concerning this theological henchman of Luther’s (cp. vol. iii., p. 347 ff.).Luther’s admirers are wont to quote the following utterance of his when praising his attitude towards works: “Good, pious works never made a good, pious man, but a good, pious man performs good, pious works. Wicked works never made a wicked man, but wicked men perform wicked works.”[1696]That “wicked deeds never made a wicked man” he probably found some difficulty in really convincing many. If Luther meant that an unjust man or sinner, who is not cleansed by faith in Christ, can never act but wickedly, then it is the same error as we find in other passages and which is repeated in connection with the words just quoted: “Unless a man believes beforehand and is a Christian [’consecrated by faith’] all his works are of no account, but are vain, foolish, criminal and damnably sinful.” This is surely as much beside the mark as the above statement of Luther’s concerning the relation between a “pious man” and “pious works.” Of supernatural works that are meritorious for heaven what Luther adds is indeed correct:“Hence, in every instance the person must first be good and pious previous to all works, and the good works follow and proceed from a good and pious person.” We must, however, decline to accept Luther’s other inferences, viz. that the sinner is not in a position to perform natural good works of his own, and that the just man does not become more righteous through good works.Hence Luther’s statement, however apparently ingenious, cannot remove the unfavourable impression produced by his doctrine of works. That it was highly valued by its author is plain from the number of times he repeats it under different forms. “Works do not make a Christian, but a Christian performs works,” so he exclaimed in a sermon in 1523, summing up in these specious words the instruction he had just given, viz. that the faithful must struggle to remove whatever of evil there is in them, and that they must “work good to their neighbour,” but not on any account try “to blot out sin by works, for this would be to shame and blaspheme God and Christ and to disgrace their own heritage,” viz. Justification by faith alone.[1697]Works of Charity. Luther and the Ages of the Past.For the purpose of recommending the Lutheran doctrine of works it is sometimes urged that Luther, while slighting other works of less account, assigned a place of honour to active works of charity, done for the sake of our neighbour, that he placed them on a firmer moral basis than they had hitherto occupied and promoted them so far as the unfavourable circumstances of his age allowed. A few words on the conception and particularly on the practice of charity as advocated by him may serve as a fit conclusion to the present section.First, we may mention that Luther is disposed to exaggerate the importance of works of charity done to our neighbour.It was an unjustifiable and paralysing restriction on the pious impulse towards works pleasing to God that Luther embodied in the rule he repeatedly lays down regarding works, viz. that they must be directed exclusively towards the benefit of others. “On this earth,” so he teaches in his Church postils, “man does not live for the sake of works,nor that they may profit him, for he has no need of them, but all works must be done for the sake of our neighbour.” “Thus must all works be done, that we see to it that they tend to the service of other people, impart to them the right faith and bring them to Christ’s Kingdom.” They bring them the “right faith” when they serve to “quiet their conscience.” Thus even here the Kingdom of God, which consists in the forgiveness of sins, must also play its part.Catholic doctrine recognises a wider field for good works. It regards as such even the works which the faithful perform directly for their own soul without any reference to their neighbour, such as self-conquest in contending against one’s own passions, or those works which are concerned primarily with honouring God whether in public worship or in the private life of the Christian. Luther himself, at least incidentally, also knows how to speak of the value of such works, though thereby he contradicts his other statements like the above.If, however, we neglect the principle, we have to admit, that Luther’s frequent exhortations to neighbourly charity and kindness contain some fine and truly Evangelical thoughts. With deep feeling he expresses his sorrow that his admonitions are not heeded to the extent he would have wished.In his statements already quoted concerning the corruption of morals consequent on the change of religion, we have heard him several times lamenting the notorious falling off in private benevolence and the quite remarkable decrease of public works of Christian charity. Everywhere avarice reigns supreme, so we have heard Luther repeatedly exclaim, and a reprehensible indolence in the doing of what is good has spread far and wide; everything is now different from what it had been “in the time of the monks and parsons,” when people “founded and built” right and left, and when even the poorest was anxious to contribute.[1698]His defenders now declare, that he “unlocked the truesource of charity” by denying any meritorious character to works, thus sending to limbo the imperfect, mediæval motive of charity and substituting a better one in its place, viz. a “grateful love springing from faith.” Luther’s own words have been used to decry earlier ages, as though charity then had “merely had itself in view,” people in those days having been intent solely on laying up merit “for them and theirs.”
“We say,” so he teaches in opposition to Luther concerning the destruction of sin in man by baptism, “that baptism brings the remission of all sins, and not merely erases them, but actually removes them (‘auferre crimina non radere’); the roots of sin do not remain in the corrupt flesh, so that the sins have not to grow again and be again cut off like the hair of our heads.”[1648]The righteousness which is bestowed on the sinner is, in his view, no imputed righteousness of Christ but a personal righteousness actually residing in man. Hence he explains that the “Justice of God,” referred to in Rom. iii. 21 f., is not that whereby God is just, but that with which He provides the impious man when justifying him; in the same way the “faith of Christ” mentioned there is “not a faith by which Christ believes, but the faith that is in us.” “Both are ours, but they are ascribed to God and Christ because bestowed on us by the Divine favour.”[1649]The righteousness bestowed on us is “that which Adam lost by sin”; Adam’s righteousness was a quality inherent in him, not the imputed righteousness of Christ.[1650]It is also the same grace which is infused into adults in Justification and which children receive in baptism.[1651]By sanctifying grace the soul is inwardly ennobled, “for when nature’s Creator justifies it by grace, it ceases to be an object of horror and becomes a thing of beauty.”[1652]The Holy Ghost dwells in us and “God gives us therewith no less a gift than Himself.”[1653]Thus “as the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul.”[1654]Our state of grace may, however, be dimmed, and that not only by lack of faith; for it has its enemies in imperfections and sins. “Though our righteousness is a true one, yet in this life the forgiveness of sins plays a greater part than the perfection of virtue.”[1655]“If our will turns against God, we separate ourselvesfrom Him, and the light which enlightened us during His presence at once changes into darkness.”[1656]In order to prevent any such danger on the part of the will, Augustine frequently reminds his readers of such exhortations of our Saviour, as: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.”Man is also spurred to be faithful, so he says, by the merit of good works. “God Himself has become our debtor,” so he said when preaching to the assembled faithful; “not as though He had received something from us, but because He has promised what He pleased. To a man we speak differently and say: You are my debtor because I have given to you. To God we say, on the contrary: Thou art my debtor because Thou hast made me promises; ... in this sense therefore we may urge on God our demands and say: Give what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1657]To recommend the practice of good works out of love of God and zeal for His honour, and to heap up merit for heaven, is the purpose of long and eloquent portions of the literary legacy which Augustine left behind him. The whole of the book “De fide et operibus” and long chapters of his “Enchiridion” were written with this object. In the former work he introduces, for instance, the Judgment scene described by our Saviour, and says: “Those who are placed on the left hand of Christ, according to this passage (Mat. xxv. 41), He will reproach not for not having believed in Him, but for not having performed good works. How could this be true if we were to attain to salvation without keeping the commandments or by faith alone (‘per solam fidem’), which without works is dead? Christ wished to impress on us that no one can promise himself eternal life by a dead faith, minus works. Hence He causes all the nations who have received the same spiritual food [of faith] to be separated out before Him, and clearly it is such as have believed but have not performed good works who will say: When did we see Thee suffering this and that [and did not minister to Thee]? They had fancied that by a dead faith they could attain to everlasting life.”[1658]
“We say,” so he teaches in opposition to Luther concerning the destruction of sin in man by baptism, “that baptism brings the remission of all sins, and not merely erases them, but actually removes them (‘auferre crimina non radere’); the roots of sin do not remain in the corrupt flesh, so that the sins have not to grow again and be again cut off like the hair of our heads.”[1648]
The righteousness which is bestowed on the sinner is, in his view, no imputed righteousness of Christ but a personal righteousness actually residing in man. Hence he explains that the “Justice of God,” referred to in Rom. iii. 21 f., is not that whereby God is just, but that with which He provides the impious man when justifying him; in the same way the “faith of Christ” mentioned there is “not a faith by which Christ believes, but the faith that is in us.” “Both are ours, but they are ascribed to God and Christ because bestowed on us by the Divine favour.”[1649]The righteousness bestowed on us is “that which Adam lost by sin”; Adam’s righteousness was a quality inherent in him, not the imputed righteousness of Christ.[1650]It is also the same grace which is infused into adults in Justification and which children receive in baptism.[1651]By sanctifying grace the soul is inwardly ennobled, “for when nature’s Creator justifies it by grace, it ceases to be an object of horror and becomes a thing of beauty.”[1652]The Holy Ghost dwells in us and “God gives us therewith no less a gift than Himself.”[1653]Thus “as the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul.”[1654]
Our state of grace may, however, be dimmed, and that not only by lack of faith; for it has its enemies in imperfections and sins. “Though our righteousness is a true one, yet in this life the forgiveness of sins plays a greater part than the perfection of virtue.”[1655]“If our will turns against God, we separate ourselvesfrom Him, and the light which enlightened us during His presence at once changes into darkness.”[1656]In order to prevent any such danger on the part of the will, Augustine frequently reminds his readers of such exhortations of our Saviour, as: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.”
Man is also spurred to be faithful, so he says, by the merit of good works. “God Himself has become our debtor,” so he said when preaching to the assembled faithful; “not as though He had received something from us, but because He has promised what He pleased. To a man we speak differently and say: You are my debtor because I have given to you. To God we say, on the contrary: Thou art my debtor because Thou hast made me promises; ... in this sense therefore we may urge on God our demands and say: Give what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1657]
To recommend the practice of good works out of love of God and zeal for His honour, and to heap up merit for heaven, is the purpose of long and eloquent portions of the literary legacy which Augustine left behind him. The whole of the book “De fide et operibus” and long chapters of his “Enchiridion” were written with this object. In the former work he introduces, for instance, the Judgment scene described by our Saviour, and says: “Those who are placed on the left hand of Christ, according to this passage (Mat. xxv. 41), He will reproach not for not having believed in Him, but for not having performed good works. How could this be true if we were to attain to salvation without keeping the commandments or by faith alone (‘per solam fidem’), which without works is dead? Christ wished to impress on us that no one can promise himself eternal life by a dead faith, minus works. Hence He causes all the nations who have received the same spiritual food [of faith] to be separated out before Him, and clearly it is such as have believed but have not performed good works who will say: When did we see Thee suffering this and that [and did not minister to Thee]? They had fancied that by a dead faith they could attain to everlasting life.”[1658]
The voice of the bishop of Hippo, supported by the whole Church whose doctrine was also his, was re-echoed by later ecclesiastical writers who made greedy use of his works; nor were the exhortations of the Fathers without result among the faithful. Later Fathers frequently discourse on the testimony of Holy Writ in favour of works just as Augustine had done; the following texts were frequently adduced: “God will render to every man according to his works”; “Not the hearers of the law are just before God,but the doers of the law shall be justified”; “The Son of Man will come and render to every man according to his works” (Rom. ii. 6, 13; Mat. xvi. 27).
Gregory the Great, who trained himself on Augustine’s model, states, in a homily to his congregation: “Possibly we may say to ourselves: I believe, hence I shall be saved. This is only true when we prove our faith by our works.” “Then are we true believers when we execute in work what we confess in our faith.”[1659]
A faith proved by works was the sign manual of the Middle Ages. Nor did Luther and his preachers ever complain of the lack of works of piety in the days previous to the Reformation, although they thought it their duty to blame the spirit in which those works had been performed.
What, however, did Luther and his followers think of the moral consequences of the preaching directed against all merit of good works?
We have already listened to Luther’s own complaints and those of many of his contemporaries concerning the parlous state of morals amongst the adherents of the new teaching, and the almost entire absence of any practical fruits of piety under the amended Gospel.[1660]Since the mainstay of the innovations was the doctrine of grace and works it is necessary to seek out more closely the connection between the new doctrine of works and the sad moral results of the revolt against the Church. Luther himself makes no odds about referring to these results and their real cause: “The surer we are of the freedom won by Christ, the more indolent do we become”; “because we teach that man attains to grace without any works whatever, we grow lazy”; he almost wishes “that the old teaching again came into its own.”[1661]Only his shortsightedness and the psychological effect of his passionate temper prevented his foreseeing the inevitable consequences of his theory of the all-sufficiency of faith and of his reckless denunciation of the regard for commandments and works previously obtaining. How little his own frequent exhortations to lead a moral life and toperform works of Christian charity (see below, p. 472 ff.) could prevail against the fell charm of the doctrine of Evangelical freedom, remained hid from his eyes, until the extent of the moral corruption and the growing savagery of the people in certain regions began to frighten him and to cause him to long ardently for the end of the world and even to predict its imminence.
There was some truth in what he said, viz. that, as the world was constituted, if one preached faith (i.e. the justifying faith so much belauded by him) works went to the wall, and that, on the other hand, “faith” must needs perish wherever works were preached.[1662]The two were indeed self-exclusive, however much, in his recommendation of works, he might affirm the contrary.
This is not the place to point out anew the dangers inherent in Luther’s doctrine of justification, for we have already seen the necessary result of one of its presuppositions, viz. the denial of free-will, and how right Erasmus was when he urged against Luther, that, on this assumption, all laws and commandments, even those of Scripture, were simply superfluous. A Protestant has aptly remarked, that, in the last instance, “the difference between good and evil becomes quite illusory”; we might well ask: “How can we feel ourselves responsible towards God ... if we do nothing and God works all in all?” Luther himself even goes so far as to make Scripture teach that “the will not only desires nothing good, but is even unaware of how much evil it does and of what good is.”[1663]Since the imputed merits of Christ are, as a matter of fact, merely like a screen set upin front of the soul, many might naturally feel tempted to extenuate and excuse all that the sin which persists in man still does behind it.
To appreciate the peculiar nature of the danger it is necessary to take Luther’s teaching, not by itself, but in conjunction with the mental atmosphere of the day. We must of course take it for granted that many of his followers refrained from putting into practice Luther’s teaching in its entirety, for instance, his peculiar doctrine of the lack of free-will. Many well-disposed Lutherans whose good faith was above suspicion, doubtless remained more or less outside the influence of such ideas, were actuated by good religious motives and expressed them in Christian works. Assisted by the grace of God, which is at the disposal of all men of good-will, they, all unknowingly, were gaining merit in heaven. On the other hand, the ill-disposed, those who sought the enjoyments of life—and of such there were thousands—found a sanction in the Wittenberg doctrine for neglecting good works. In the case of many the “joyful tidings” could not under the circumstances of the age be expected to produce any other result. We have only to think of what was going on all about; of the prevalent yearning after release from irksome bonds; of the unkindly feeling towards rulers, both ecclesiastical and secular; of the seething discontent among the peasants on account of their oppression and toilsome duties; of the spirit of independence so vigorous in the towns; of the boundless ambition of the mighty; of the influence, sometimes sceptical, sometimes immoral, of Humanism, and of the worldliness and degradation of so many of the clergy and monks, to be able to understand how momentous was the effect of Luther’s doctrine of justification and his preaching concerning works.
We know on the one hand from many examples with what zest the newly-won promoters of Lutheranism—for the most part former ministers of the Church who had discarded their calling—concentrated their attacks on the practice of good works, and, on the other, how the better-disposed followers of the new doctrine admitted the danger to works accruing from Luther’s views and even their actually evil consequences.
The declamation of the preachers against works was partly intended to silence their own scruples. At any rate it was thespeediest method of obtaining a numerous following. The preachers were obliged to deal in some way with the objection constituted by the existence of far greater religious zeal in the olden Church than amongst the new believers; they solved it by denouncing zeal for “outward works.” They were also frequently obliged to extenuate their own laxity of morals, and this they did in the most convenient fashion by branding moral strictness as pharisaical holiness-by-works.Thus it came about that some, even of the more cautious and moderate Lutherans, for instance Urban Rhegius, complained that the preachers were confining themselves to the denunciation of works and to proclaiming the power of faith alone, as though the great gift of the new religious system merely spelt release from everything displeasing to the flesh; there they came very near justifying the constant assertion to this effect of the defenders of Catholicism, indeed the Catholics’ most effective weapon.Rhegius, who died in 1541, as General Superintendent of Lüneburg, summed up his experiences of the effect on the people of Luther’s doctrine of Evangelical freedom, in the sermons he delivered at Hall in the Tyrol: “The rude, carnal people here think that the Law has been abolished and that we are released from it, so that we can do as we please; hence, quite shamelessly and to the disgrace of the Evangel, they say: To steal and to commit adultery is no longer sinful, for the Law is no more of any account. Alas, what crass blindness has fallen upon this people, that they think the Son of God came into the world and suffered so much on account of sin in order that we might lead a shameful, dissolute and bestial life.”[1664]A man of no great firmness of character, he had previously been episcopal vicar at Constance, and could speak from experience of the condition of things amongst the preachers of both Southern and Northern Germany.He accused them of being responsible for the disastrous consequences, but forgot to seek the real cause in the doctrine itself. According to him not only did no two preachers agree in their preaching, so that the people complained they did not know which religion to follow, but too many were in the habit of speaking, “as though it were possible without doing penance and without any contrition or sorrow for sin to believe Christ’s Gospel and rest secure in the proffered forgiveness.”[1665]They gave vent to utterances such as these: “Our works are no good and stink in God’s nostrils. He does not want them. They only make hypocrites. Faith alone does all. If only you believe, you will become pious and be saved.”[1666]In 1535 he had recourse to the pen in order to impress on the preachers “How to speak with caution,” as the title of his work runs. In this tract, published in German and Latin, he attempts to show from a number of instances “how the preachers run off the track on one side or the other,” and how many of them “merely destroy and fail to build.”[1667]Anxious to drive home Luther’s doctrine of good works, in the chapter devoted to this subject,[1668]he mentions six different ways in which good works were profitable, which the preachers were not to forget. In all six, however, the real advantage and necessity of good works is not established on its true foundation. The curious tract was an imitation and enlargement of a work published in 1529 under the title: “Anweisung wie und was wir Ernst von Gots Gnaden Hertzog zu Braunswick und Leuneburg unseres Fürstenthumbs Pfarhern und Predigern zu predigen befohlen.”[1669]The secular rulers were often obliged, as in this instance, to intervene in order to safeguard the new faith from preachers who were either thoughtless, or too logical, or in some cases half crazy.The complaints current among Luther’s friends about the bad effects of the doctrine of justification were even heard long after the tumults of the earliest religious struggles were over.For this reason we are not justified in making out the decline which followed in the train of the new system of faith to have been merely an episode in the history of civilisation and simply the inevitable after-effect of the great upheaval in the intellectual world. It has been argued that far-reaching and disturbing changes in public life are usually accompanied by an increase of immorality among the masses, and also that the disorders dating from Catholic times bore fruit only when brought in contact with the new religion. Unfortunately in the present case we have to do with conditions which, as later witnesses show, persisted even when tranquillity had once more been restored and when the fruits of the new ideas should already have ripened. “What is here disclosed,” justly remarks Döllinger, “was the result of a system already firmly established, no mere after-effect of former conditions, but a true home produce continuing to flourish even when the thousand ties which had once linked human life and consciousness with the olden Church had long been torn and rent asunder, and when the memory of the doctrines, imagery, practices and institutions of that Church had either been completely forgotten by the people, or were known to them only through controversial references made in the pulpits and in the manuals of religious instruction.”[1670]Andreas Hyperius, Professor at the University of Marburg and the best theological authority in Hesse († 1564), in view of the low religious and moral standards of the Protestants which he had had occasion to notice during his many journeys, declaredthat it was necessary, particularly in the pulpit, to be more reticent on the article of Justification by faith alone. Not indeed that he was unwilling to have this preached, yet he did not consider it advisable to continue to “declaim to the masses with such violence on faith alone,” as had hitherto been done. The state of the Church most urgently required that the people, who already troubled themselves little enough about doing good, should be spurred on to good works and, as far as possible, brought back to a faith productive of fruit.[1671]Elsewhere he describes with indignation the generally prevailing indifference towards the poor; this annoyed him all the more, as he was well aware of the loving care displayed towards them by both clergy and laity in the past.[1672]In a document dealing with Luther’s (or rather Flacius’s) doctrine of man’s passivity in the work of conversion, the theologians of Leipzig and Wittenberg, in 1570, attributed to it the prevailing corruption. “The masses,” they said, “have been led into a wild, dissolute and godless life.... There is hardly a spot to be found in the whole world where greater modesty, honesty and virtue are not to be met with than amongst those who listen daily to God’s Word.”[1673]Thirty years later Polycarp Leyser, the Wittenberg Professor and Superintendent, who stood for the strictest form of Lutheranism, declared: “The moral corruption to-day is so great everywhere that not only pious souls but even nature herself gives vent to uneasy groans”; as the cause of it all he mentions the delusion under which many members of the new Church laboured, viz. of fancying themselves excellent Christians so long as they boasted loudly of faith and repeated Scripture passages concerning the unspeakable mercy of God Who received sinners into His favour without any co-operation on their part, even though meanwhile they led the most shameful life.[1674]“All these people have ever the faith in their mouths,” wrote Wolfgang Franz, the Wittenberg professor of theology, in an admonition to the Lutheran preachers (1610); “they are ever prating of faith and of nothing but faith, and yet no one can adequately describe how brimful they are of vice and sin.” For this the preachers were chiefly to blame, because they dinned Justification by faith alone into the people’s ears without further explaining it; hence many of their hearers, who did not even know the Our Father, could discourse on faith more learnedly than St. Paul; they fancied that if only they protested now and then during their lifetime that they believed in Jesus Christ, theirsalvation was assured; they thought that if a murderer who died after committing his crime had only time to confess Jesus with his lips he would at once soar up to heaven.[1675]Johannes Rivius, Rector of Freiberg, and a personal friend of Luther’s, declared the very year after Luther’s death that his experience had shown him that the Lutheran peasants knew neither what they should believe nor how they ought to live, and troubled themselves little about it; the people might well be taken for Epicureans were they not perpetually boasting of their faith in Christ. He bewailed his times, distinguished as they were beyond all past ages by their immorality; corruption of morals had indeed grown so bad that ungodliness and Epicureanism had quite ousted Christianity.[1676]—Not long after, in another writing, he continued his description of the moral decay, and again and again points to the cause, viz. the false ideas of faith, law and works. “By far the greater number of people to-day take not the slightest pains to restrain the lusts of the flesh; ... they indulge in every kind of impiety, while at the same time boasting of faith and bragging of the Gospel.... When the people hear nowadays that there is no other satisfaction for sin than the death of the Redeemer, they fancy they can sin with impunity and give themselves up to luxury.... How many are there who practise real penance though making so brave a show of faith?... They say: ‘Even should you be stained with every vice, only believe and you will be saved; you need not be scared by the Law, for Christ has fulfilled it and done enough for men!’ Such words [which Luther himself had used] give great scandal to pious souls, lead men astray into a godless life and are the cause of their continuing to live hardened in vice and shame and without a thought of amendment; thus such views only serve to encourage the ungodly in vice and deprive them of every incentive to amend their lives.”[1677]If the leaders of the innovations could speak in such a way then yet stronger charges against the doctrine of Justification and its effects may be expected from Luther’s opponents.Johann Haner of Nuremberg, who there, in 1534, turned his back on the new faith, wrote a small book on the interpretation of Scripture which is accounted among the best and calmest of the period. The Preface shows that it was the sight of the immoral outcome of Luther’s views on faith and grace which led him to revert to Catholicism. Without mentioning Luther’s name he tells us that in his book he is going “to withstand all false, fleshly confidence,” “all freedom of the spirit which leads to destruction”; the object of his attack is that faith which is “a mere presumptuous laying claim to grace, and that Evangelwhich opens the door to licence of every kind,” while “telling us to trust solely in an alien righteousness, viz. the righteousness of Christ”; “these anti-Evangelicals, as they ought to be called, by their roguery and their carnal mind had turned topsy-turvy the teaching which led to true piety.”[1678]To Wicel the convert Haner wrote a letter which was one of the causes of his expulsion from Nuremberg by the preachers and the magistrates. Here he said: “By the worthless dogma of Justification by faith alone, which is their alpha and omega, they have not merely loosed all the bonds of discipline in the Church, but also abolished all penance towards God and all unity and friendship among the brethren. Never since the earliest heresies in the Church has there been seen so poisonous and noxious a dogma, the effect of which has been none other than to make the word of the Cross foolishness to us, and to cause both charity towards the brethren and the spirit of repentance towards God to wax cold.”[1679]From Protestant Nuremberg it also was that Willibald Pirkheimer the patrician, as early as 1528, after his own return to the Church, wrote to a friend at Vienna, the architect Tschertte, “I confess that in the beginning I was a good Lutheran, just like our departed Albert [Dürer]. For we hoped that the Roman knavery and the roguery of the monks and priests would be amended. But now we see that matters have become so much worse, that, in comparison with the Evangelical scoundrels, those other scamps are quite pious.” The Evangelicals with their “shameful and criminal behaviour” wished nevertheless “not to be judged by their works,” and pointed to their faith. But “when a man acts wickedly and criminally he shows thereby that he is no honest man, however much he may boast of his faith; for without works faith is dead, just as works are dead without faith.... The works show plainly that there is neither faith nor truth there, no fear of God, or love of our neighbour, but a discarding of all honesty and clean living, art and learning.... Almsgiving has ceased, for these knaves have so abused it that no one will give any longer.”[1680]A few years before this, Othmar Luscinius, an Alsacian theologian, then one of the most weighty scholars of Germany, who, save for having taken a passing fancy for Luther, remained true to the Church, described the “rude Christians,” “whom really we ought to pity, who of the articles necessary for Justification take those only that please them and are sweet, viz. faith and the Evangel, arguing: ‘I have only to believe and I shall be saved’; as for the other, which is bitter and far fromeasy, viz. the putting to death of the old Adam, that they take good care to leave alone.”[1681]
The declamation of the preachers against works was partly intended to silence their own scruples. At any rate it was thespeediest method of obtaining a numerous following. The preachers were obliged to deal in some way with the objection constituted by the existence of far greater religious zeal in the olden Church than amongst the new believers; they solved it by denouncing zeal for “outward works.” They were also frequently obliged to extenuate their own laxity of morals, and this they did in the most convenient fashion by branding moral strictness as pharisaical holiness-by-works.
Thus it came about that some, even of the more cautious and moderate Lutherans, for instance Urban Rhegius, complained that the preachers were confining themselves to the denunciation of works and to proclaiming the power of faith alone, as though the great gift of the new religious system merely spelt release from everything displeasing to the flesh; there they came very near justifying the constant assertion to this effect of the defenders of Catholicism, indeed the Catholics’ most effective weapon.
Rhegius, who died in 1541, as General Superintendent of Lüneburg, summed up his experiences of the effect on the people of Luther’s doctrine of Evangelical freedom, in the sermons he delivered at Hall in the Tyrol: “The rude, carnal people here think that the Law has been abolished and that we are released from it, so that we can do as we please; hence, quite shamelessly and to the disgrace of the Evangel, they say: To steal and to commit adultery is no longer sinful, for the Law is no more of any account. Alas, what crass blindness has fallen upon this people, that they think the Son of God came into the world and suffered so much on account of sin in order that we might lead a shameful, dissolute and bestial life.”[1664]
A man of no great firmness of character, he had previously been episcopal vicar at Constance, and could speak from experience of the condition of things amongst the preachers of both Southern and Northern Germany.
He accused them of being responsible for the disastrous consequences, but forgot to seek the real cause in the doctrine itself. According to him not only did no two preachers agree in their preaching, so that the people complained they did not know which religion to follow, but too many were in the habit of speaking, “as though it were possible without doing penance and without any contrition or sorrow for sin to believe Christ’s Gospel and rest secure in the proffered forgiveness.”[1665]They gave vent to utterances such as these: “Our works are no good and stink in God’s nostrils. He does not want them. They only make hypocrites. Faith alone does all. If only you believe, you will become pious and be saved.”[1666]
In 1535 he had recourse to the pen in order to impress on the preachers “How to speak with caution,” as the title of his work runs. In this tract, published in German and Latin, he attempts to show from a number of instances “how the preachers run off the track on one side or the other,” and how many of them “merely destroy and fail to build.”[1667]Anxious to drive home Luther’s doctrine of good works, in the chapter devoted to this subject,[1668]he mentions six different ways in which good works were profitable, which the preachers were not to forget. In all six, however, the real advantage and necessity of good works is not established on its true foundation. The curious tract was an imitation and enlargement of a work published in 1529 under the title: “Anweisung wie und was wir Ernst von Gots Gnaden Hertzog zu Braunswick und Leuneburg unseres Fürstenthumbs Pfarhern und Predigern zu predigen befohlen.”[1669]The secular rulers were often obliged, as in this instance, to intervene in order to safeguard the new faith from preachers who were either thoughtless, or too logical, or in some cases half crazy.
The complaints current among Luther’s friends about the bad effects of the doctrine of justification were even heard long after the tumults of the earliest religious struggles were over.
For this reason we are not justified in making out the decline which followed in the train of the new system of faith to have been merely an episode in the history of civilisation and simply the inevitable after-effect of the great upheaval in the intellectual world. It has been argued that far-reaching and disturbing changes in public life are usually accompanied by an increase of immorality among the masses, and also that the disorders dating from Catholic times bore fruit only when brought in contact with the new religion. Unfortunately in the present case we have to do with conditions which, as later witnesses show, persisted even when tranquillity had once more been restored and when the fruits of the new ideas should already have ripened. “What is here disclosed,” justly remarks Döllinger, “was the result of a system already firmly established, no mere after-effect of former conditions, but a true home produce continuing to flourish even when the thousand ties which had once linked human life and consciousness with the olden Church had long been torn and rent asunder, and when the memory of the doctrines, imagery, practices and institutions of that Church had either been completely forgotten by the people, or were known to them only through controversial references made in the pulpits and in the manuals of religious instruction.”[1670]
Andreas Hyperius, Professor at the University of Marburg and the best theological authority in Hesse († 1564), in view of the low religious and moral standards of the Protestants which he had had occasion to notice during his many journeys, declaredthat it was necessary, particularly in the pulpit, to be more reticent on the article of Justification by faith alone. Not indeed that he was unwilling to have this preached, yet he did not consider it advisable to continue to “declaim to the masses with such violence on faith alone,” as had hitherto been done. The state of the Church most urgently required that the people, who already troubled themselves little enough about doing good, should be spurred on to good works and, as far as possible, brought back to a faith productive of fruit.[1671]Elsewhere he describes with indignation the generally prevailing indifference towards the poor; this annoyed him all the more, as he was well aware of the loving care displayed towards them by both clergy and laity in the past.[1672]
In a document dealing with Luther’s (or rather Flacius’s) doctrine of man’s passivity in the work of conversion, the theologians of Leipzig and Wittenberg, in 1570, attributed to it the prevailing corruption. “The masses,” they said, “have been led into a wild, dissolute and godless life.... There is hardly a spot to be found in the whole world where greater modesty, honesty and virtue are not to be met with than amongst those who listen daily to God’s Word.”[1673]
Thirty years later Polycarp Leyser, the Wittenberg Professor and Superintendent, who stood for the strictest form of Lutheranism, declared: “The moral corruption to-day is so great everywhere that not only pious souls but even nature herself gives vent to uneasy groans”; as the cause of it all he mentions the delusion under which many members of the new Church laboured, viz. of fancying themselves excellent Christians so long as they boasted loudly of faith and repeated Scripture passages concerning the unspeakable mercy of God Who received sinners into His favour without any co-operation on their part, even though meanwhile they led the most shameful life.[1674]
“All these people have ever the faith in their mouths,” wrote Wolfgang Franz, the Wittenberg professor of theology, in an admonition to the Lutheran preachers (1610); “they are ever prating of faith and of nothing but faith, and yet no one can adequately describe how brimful they are of vice and sin.” For this the preachers were chiefly to blame, because they dinned Justification by faith alone into the people’s ears without further explaining it; hence many of their hearers, who did not even know the Our Father, could discourse on faith more learnedly than St. Paul; they fancied that if only they protested now and then during their lifetime that they believed in Jesus Christ, theirsalvation was assured; they thought that if a murderer who died after committing his crime had only time to confess Jesus with his lips he would at once soar up to heaven.[1675]
Johannes Rivius, Rector of Freiberg, and a personal friend of Luther’s, declared the very year after Luther’s death that his experience had shown him that the Lutheran peasants knew neither what they should believe nor how they ought to live, and troubled themselves little about it; the people might well be taken for Epicureans were they not perpetually boasting of their faith in Christ. He bewailed his times, distinguished as they were beyond all past ages by their immorality; corruption of morals had indeed grown so bad that ungodliness and Epicureanism had quite ousted Christianity.[1676]—Not long after, in another writing, he continued his description of the moral decay, and again and again points to the cause, viz. the false ideas of faith, law and works. “By far the greater number of people to-day take not the slightest pains to restrain the lusts of the flesh; ... they indulge in every kind of impiety, while at the same time boasting of faith and bragging of the Gospel.... When the people hear nowadays that there is no other satisfaction for sin than the death of the Redeemer, they fancy they can sin with impunity and give themselves up to luxury.... How many are there who practise real penance though making so brave a show of faith?... They say: ‘Even should you be stained with every vice, only believe and you will be saved; you need not be scared by the Law, for Christ has fulfilled it and done enough for men!’ Such words [which Luther himself had used] give great scandal to pious souls, lead men astray into a godless life and are the cause of their continuing to live hardened in vice and shame and without a thought of amendment; thus such views only serve to encourage the ungodly in vice and deprive them of every incentive to amend their lives.”[1677]
If the leaders of the innovations could speak in such a way then yet stronger charges against the doctrine of Justification and its effects may be expected from Luther’s opponents.
Johann Haner of Nuremberg, who there, in 1534, turned his back on the new faith, wrote a small book on the interpretation of Scripture which is accounted among the best and calmest of the period. The Preface shows that it was the sight of the immoral outcome of Luther’s views on faith and grace which led him to revert to Catholicism. Without mentioning Luther’s name he tells us that in his book he is going “to withstand all false, fleshly confidence,” “all freedom of the spirit which leads to destruction”; the object of his attack is that faith which is “a mere presumptuous laying claim to grace, and that Evangelwhich opens the door to licence of every kind,” while “telling us to trust solely in an alien righteousness, viz. the righteousness of Christ”; “these anti-Evangelicals, as they ought to be called, by their roguery and their carnal mind had turned topsy-turvy the teaching which led to true piety.”[1678]
To Wicel the convert Haner wrote a letter which was one of the causes of his expulsion from Nuremberg by the preachers and the magistrates. Here he said: “By the worthless dogma of Justification by faith alone, which is their alpha and omega, they have not merely loosed all the bonds of discipline in the Church, but also abolished all penance towards God and all unity and friendship among the brethren. Never since the earliest heresies in the Church has there been seen so poisonous and noxious a dogma, the effect of which has been none other than to make the word of the Cross foolishness to us, and to cause both charity towards the brethren and the spirit of repentance towards God to wax cold.”[1679]
From Protestant Nuremberg it also was that Willibald Pirkheimer the patrician, as early as 1528, after his own return to the Church, wrote to a friend at Vienna, the architect Tschertte, “I confess that in the beginning I was a good Lutheran, just like our departed Albert [Dürer]. For we hoped that the Roman knavery and the roguery of the monks and priests would be amended. But now we see that matters have become so much worse, that, in comparison with the Evangelical scoundrels, those other scamps are quite pious.” The Evangelicals with their “shameful and criminal behaviour” wished nevertheless “not to be judged by their works,” and pointed to their faith. But “when a man acts wickedly and criminally he shows thereby that he is no honest man, however much he may boast of his faith; for without works faith is dead, just as works are dead without faith.... The works show plainly that there is neither faith nor truth there, no fear of God, or love of our neighbour, but a discarding of all honesty and clean living, art and learning.... Almsgiving has ceased, for these knaves have so abused it that no one will give any longer.”[1680]
A few years before this, Othmar Luscinius, an Alsacian theologian, then one of the most weighty scholars of Germany, who, save for having taken a passing fancy for Luther, remained true to the Church, described the “rude Christians,” “whom really we ought to pity, who of the articles necessary for Justification take those only that please them and are sweet, viz. faith and the Evangel, arguing: ‘I have only to believe and I shall be saved’; as for the other, which is bitter and far fromeasy, viz. the putting to death of the old Adam, that they take good care to leave alone.”[1681]
The above is sufficient to show that there was a consensus of opinion in tracing back the moral decadence to the Lutheran doctrine of works. As against this there is a certain strangeness in the explanation variously given by Protestants of this real retrogression: The complaints of Luther and his preachers, so they aver, only prove that they were dissatisfied, as it was their right and duty to be, with what had been achieved in the moral order.—At any rate, the distressing results of the doctrine of faith alone proved strikingly how ineffectual had been all Luther’s exhortations to good works.
Many and earnest are Luther’s exhortations to prove our faith by works of love towards God and our neighbour; to sinners he frequently speaks of the path of penance which they must tread; conversion he wishes to be accomplished with lively faith and the state of grace preserved by practical piety. It was assuredly not the lack of such counsels which occasioned the decline described above; this was rather due to the system itself, combined with the evil effects of the general overthrow of the old ecclesiastical law and practice which safeguarded morals, and with the contempt aroused for the sacraments, for public worship and the spiritual authorities. History must, however, allow Luther’s exhortations on behalf of good works and the keeping of the commandments to speak for themselves.
We may begin with his thesis: “We are bound to bring our will into entire conformity with the Divine Will.”[1682]In accordance with this, in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” he does not fail to speak agreeably with the teaching of the olden Church of the assistance God gives for the zealous keeping of the commandments. “If you desire to keep all the commandments, to be rid of your evil lusts and of sin as the commandments enjoin and demand, then believe in Christ, for in Him I make bold to promise you all grace and righteousness, peace and freedom. If you believe, then you have it; if you donot believe, you have it not. For what is impossible to you with all the works of the Law, of which there must be many though all to no profit, will be short and easy to you by faith.... The promises of God give both the command and the fulfilment.”[1683]What he means to say is, that, by faith, we receive grace in order to wage a successful “conflict with sin.” Grace is, however, equivalent to faith. “Without grace,” he had already taught before, “man cannot keep God’s commandments.” “The old man ... is led by concupiscence.” “But to faith all things are possible through Christ.”[1684]Elsewhere he clearly teaches that faith alone is not nearly enough; to rely exclusively on this must indeed be termed “folly”; with the assistance of grace man must also keep the Law.[1685]In spite of all he has to say against Moses and his harsh and terrifying “Law”—the Ten Commandments inclusive—when he is busy exalting the Evangel, he nevertheless has occasionally high praise for the Decalogue on account of its agreement with the law of nature. His exposition of it contains much that is worth taking to heart.[1686]Faith, he points out, shows us whence the strength for keeping the Ten Commandments is to be drawn.[1687]The Christian, according to a lengthy and beautiful passage in the Church Postils (in a sermon for the Feast of the Conception), must “struggle and fight” against his lusts and must seek to resist the darts of the wicked one.[1688]“If we have been baptised and believe, we have received grace, and this contends with the evil inclinations within us and expels and destroys original sin; then good and honest desires for humility, chastity, longanimity and all the virtues awaken in us, and at once good works begin to be performed with a cheerful heart. All this is done by the grace which we receive in baptism by faith in Christ; it is impossible for such grace to remain idle, but it must needs bring forth good works.”Emphatic admonitions to preserve chastity and a reminder of the religious means to be employed are also frequent with him, for instance, in his “Von guten Wercken,” written in 1520 at Spalatin’s instigation, to repel the charge that his teaching was antagonistic to any striving after virtue, to morality or Christian works. He dedicated the writing to Duke Johann, the brother of the Saxon Elector. Chastity, he there says, is indeed a hard matter, but it must be acquired. “Even were no other work commanded besides chastity we should all of us have enough to do, so dangerous and furious is the [contrary] vice.... To get the better of all this requires labour and trouble, and in fact all the commandments of God teach us how important is the rightful performance of good works, nay that it is impossible of our own strength even to plan a good work, let alone commence andaccomplish it.... This work of chastity, if it is to be preserved, impels us to many other good works, to fasting and temperance, in order to resist gluttony and drunkenness, to watching and early rising, in spite of our laziness and love for slumber, to strive and to labour in overcoming idleness. For gluttony and drinking, too much sleep, idleness and loitering are the weapons of unchastity.... These exercises, however, must not be carried further than is necessary to subdue unchastity, not to the extent of damaging our frame. The strongest weapons of all are prayer and the Word of God.... Thus you see that each one finds enough to do in himself and good works in plenty to perform. Yet now no one makes use of prayer, fasting, watching and labour for this purpose, but looks upon these works as an end in themselves, though the performance of these works of the Law ought to be regulated daily so as to be ever more and more purified [the sentence contains Luther’s usual perversion of Catholic doctrine and practice]. Other things also have been mentioned as to be avoided, such as soft beds and clothing, unnecessary adornments, the society, sight and conversation of men or women, and much else conducive to chastity. In all this no one can lay down a fixed rule and measure. Each one must decide for himself what things and how many are helpful to chastity, and for how long.” Here he even pays a tribute to the monasteries founded in bygone ages to teach the “young people discipline and cleanliness.” Finally he insists that “a good, strong faith” “helps greatly in this work,” since “faith ever liveth and doth all our works.”[1689]The ravings of the fanatics repeatedly furnished him with an occasion to emphasise good works more strongly and even to speak of a faith working by love.His dislike for their lawless behaviour and their praise of the Spirit, to some extent directed against ordinary works, called him into the arena. To call back the disturbers to a more moral life and to the considerations of charity, he appealed to them to “exercise themselves in the faith that worketh by charity” (Gal. v. 6). Even the Epistle of James now appeared to him good enough to quote, particularly the verse (i. 22): “Be ye doers of the the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves”; from this Epistle he also borrows the comparison of a dead faith, viz. of a faith not made living through charity, with the face as seen in a glass, which is merely the semblance of a countenance and not the reality.[1690]It was the fanatics again who in 1530 drew from him some eloquent statements in favour of good works, because, so he said, they had misrepresented his doctrine that “Good works neither make a man pious nor blot out sin.” They said “they would give their good works for a groat,” and that all good works were not worth a peppercorn. Here he professes to see great danger in contempt for good works and the perversion of his teaching bythe “devil’s lying tongue.” Good works, according to him, are rather to be esteemed very highly because they are God’s own. “If it is a good work, then God has wrought it in and by me”; “it was done for the honour and glory of God and for the profit and salvation of my neighbour.” He himself had been far from questioning this and had merely taught that works did not conduce to piety, i.e. “to justify the soul and to placate God”; this, on the contrary, was “entirely the work of the One true God and of His grace.”[1691]Just as during his public career Luther looked upon such statements as all the more useful seeing they blunted the edge of the awkward inferences drawn from the new Evangel, and served to vindicate his action from the charge of loosening the bonds of morality, so, at the close of his days, he was obliged in a similar way to hark back to the defence of good works against Antinomianism, of which the principal spokesman was Johann Agricola. It is true that the Antinomians based their contempt for the Law, which they said was harmful, and for the excessive respect for commandments and good works which, according to them, still prevailed, on nothing less than Luther’s own teaching. In reality it was to his advantage that their exaggerations forced him to explain away much that he had said, or at least to exercise greater caution. The encounter with Agricola the Antinomian will be described later (vol. v., xxix., 3). In spite of his being thus compelled to take the Law and good works under his wing in this controversy, Luther never, then or later, put forward the true relation of the Law to the Gospel nor the real foundation of good works.[1692]He became involved in contradictions, and to the end of his days it became more and more apparent how forced had been the introduction into his theology of good works and the keeping of the Law.
We may begin with his thesis: “We are bound to bring our will into entire conformity with the Divine Will.”[1682]In accordance with this, in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” he does not fail to speak agreeably with the teaching of the olden Church of the assistance God gives for the zealous keeping of the commandments. “If you desire to keep all the commandments, to be rid of your evil lusts and of sin as the commandments enjoin and demand, then believe in Christ, for in Him I make bold to promise you all grace and righteousness, peace and freedom. If you believe, then you have it; if you donot believe, you have it not. For what is impossible to you with all the works of the Law, of which there must be many though all to no profit, will be short and easy to you by faith.... The promises of God give both the command and the fulfilment.”[1683]What he means to say is, that, by faith, we receive grace in order to wage a successful “conflict with sin.” Grace is, however, equivalent to faith. “Without grace,” he had already taught before, “man cannot keep God’s commandments.” “The old man ... is led by concupiscence.” “But to faith all things are possible through Christ.”[1684]
Elsewhere he clearly teaches that faith alone is not nearly enough; to rely exclusively on this must indeed be termed “folly”; with the assistance of grace man must also keep the Law.[1685]
In spite of all he has to say against Moses and his harsh and terrifying “Law”—the Ten Commandments inclusive—when he is busy exalting the Evangel, he nevertheless has occasionally high praise for the Decalogue on account of its agreement with the law of nature. His exposition of it contains much that is worth taking to heart.[1686]Faith, he points out, shows us whence the strength for keeping the Ten Commandments is to be drawn.[1687]
The Christian, according to a lengthy and beautiful passage in the Church Postils (in a sermon for the Feast of the Conception), must “struggle and fight” against his lusts and must seek to resist the darts of the wicked one.[1688]“If we have been baptised and believe, we have received grace, and this contends with the evil inclinations within us and expels and destroys original sin; then good and honest desires for humility, chastity, longanimity and all the virtues awaken in us, and at once good works begin to be performed with a cheerful heart. All this is done by the grace which we receive in baptism by faith in Christ; it is impossible for such grace to remain idle, but it must needs bring forth good works.”
Emphatic admonitions to preserve chastity and a reminder of the religious means to be employed are also frequent with him, for instance, in his “Von guten Wercken,” written in 1520 at Spalatin’s instigation, to repel the charge that his teaching was antagonistic to any striving after virtue, to morality or Christian works. He dedicated the writing to Duke Johann, the brother of the Saxon Elector. Chastity, he there says, is indeed a hard matter, but it must be acquired. “Even were no other work commanded besides chastity we should all of us have enough to do, so dangerous and furious is the [contrary] vice.... To get the better of all this requires labour and trouble, and in fact all the commandments of God teach us how important is the rightful performance of good works, nay that it is impossible of our own strength even to plan a good work, let alone commence andaccomplish it.... This work of chastity, if it is to be preserved, impels us to many other good works, to fasting and temperance, in order to resist gluttony and drunkenness, to watching and early rising, in spite of our laziness and love for slumber, to strive and to labour in overcoming idleness. For gluttony and drinking, too much sleep, idleness and loitering are the weapons of unchastity.... These exercises, however, must not be carried further than is necessary to subdue unchastity, not to the extent of damaging our frame. The strongest weapons of all are prayer and the Word of God.... Thus you see that each one finds enough to do in himself and good works in plenty to perform. Yet now no one makes use of prayer, fasting, watching and labour for this purpose, but looks upon these works as an end in themselves, though the performance of these works of the Law ought to be regulated daily so as to be ever more and more purified [the sentence contains Luther’s usual perversion of Catholic doctrine and practice]. Other things also have been mentioned as to be avoided, such as soft beds and clothing, unnecessary adornments, the society, sight and conversation of men or women, and much else conducive to chastity. In all this no one can lay down a fixed rule and measure. Each one must decide for himself what things and how many are helpful to chastity, and for how long.” Here he even pays a tribute to the monasteries founded in bygone ages to teach the “young people discipline and cleanliness.” Finally he insists that “a good, strong faith” “helps greatly in this work,” since “faith ever liveth and doth all our works.”[1689]
The ravings of the fanatics repeatedly furnished him with an occasion to emphasise good works more strongly and even to speak of a faith working by love.
His dislike for their lawless behaviour and their praise of the Spirit, to some extent directed against ordinary works, called him into the arena. To call back the disturbers to a more moral life and to the considerations of charity, he appealed to them to “exercise themselves in the faith that worketh by charity” (Gal. v. 6). Even the Epistle of James now appeared to him good enough to quote, particularly the verse (i. 22): “Be ye doers of the the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves”; from this Epistle he also borrows the comparison of a dead faith, viz. of a faith not made living through charity, with the face as seen in a glass, which is merely the semblance of a countenance and not the reality.[1690]
It was the fanatics again who in 1530 drew from him some eloquent statements in favour of good works, because, so he said, they had misrepresented his doctrine that “Good works neither make a man pious nor blot out sin.” They said “they would give their good works for a groat,” and that all good works were not worth a peppercorn. Here he professes to see great danger in contempt for good works and the perversion of his teaching bythe “devil’s lying tongue.” Good works, according to him, are rather to be esteemed very highly because they are God’s own. “If it is a good work, then God has wrought it in and by me”; “it was done for the honour and glory of God and for the profit and salvation of my neighbour.” He himself had been far from questioning this and had merely taught that works did not conduce to piety, i.e. “to justify the soul and to placate God”; this, on the contrary, was “entirely the work of the One true God and of His grace.”[1691]
Just as during his public career Luther looked upon such statements as all the more useful seeing they blunted the edge of the awkward inferences drawn from the new Evangel, and served to vindicate his action from the charge of loosening the bonds of morality, so, at the close of his days, he was obliged in a similar way to hark back to the defence of good works against Antinomianism, of which the principal spokesman was Johann Agricola. It is true that the Antinomians based their contempt for the Law, which they said was harmful, and for the excessive respect for commandments and good works which, according to them, still prevailed, on nothing less than Luther’s own teaching. In reality it was to his advantage that their exaggerations forced him to explain away much that he had said, or at least to exercise greater caution. The encounter with Agricola the Antinomian will be described later (vol. v., xxix., 3). In spite of his being thus compelled to take the Law and good works under his wing in this controversy, Luther never, then or later, put forward the true relation of the Law to the Gospel nor the real foundation of good works.[1692]He became involved in contradictions, and to the end of his days it became more and more apparent how forced had been the introduction into his theology of good works and the keeping of the Law.
Nicholas Amsdorf, Luther’s intimate friend and most docile pupil, published in 1559 a tract entitled “That the proposition ‘Good works are harmful to salvation’ is a good and Christian one preached both by St. Paul and by Luther.” Their “harmfulness” resided in their being regarded as meritorious for salvation. We may wonder what Luther would have thought of this writing had he been alive? In any case the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577 contains a mild protest against it: “The assertion that good works are necessary is not to be reprehended, seeing that it may be understood in a favourable sense”;[1693]it also appeals to what had been laid down in the AugsburgConfession; it could “not be gainsaid that, in both the Confession and the ‘Apologia,’ the words: ‘Good works are necessary,’ are frequently used.”[1694]
As for the attitude of the Augsburg Confession, it declares concerning works—a declaration for which Melanchthon’s cautious pen was solely responsible—“We also teach that such faith [in Christ, whereby man is justified] must produce good fruit and good works, and that we must perform all manner of good works which God has commanded, for God’s sake.”[1695]
No one was so much concerned as Melanchthon in insisting that the performance of good works should be represented as indispensable to the people, particularly from the pulpit. It vexed him, the more prudent of the two, to hear Luther again and again, and that often in hyperbolical and paradoxical form, laying such stress on faith alone. How far Melanchthon’s name may justifiably be quoted against what was undesirable in the olden Protestant teaching on works, should be clear from what has already been said concerning this theological henchman of Luther’s (cp. vol. iii., p. 347 ff.).
Luther’s admirers are wont to quote the following utterance of his when praising his attitude towards works: “Good, pious works never made a good, pious man, but a good, pious man performs good, pious works. Wicked works never made a wicked man, but wicked men perform wicked works.”[1696]That “wicked deeds never made a wicked man” he probably found some difficulty in really convincing many. If Luther meant that an unjust man or sinner, who is not cleansed by faith in Christ, can never act but wickedly, then it is the same error as we find in other passages and which is repeated in connection with the words just quoted: “Unless a man believes beforehand and is a Christian [’consecrated by faith’] all his works are of no account, but are vain, foolish, criminal and damnably sinful.” This is surely as much beside the mark as the above statement of Luther’s concerning the relation between a “pious man” and “pious works.” Of supernatural works that are meritorious for heaven what Luther adds is indeed correct:“Hence, in every instance the person must first be good and pious previous to all works, and the good works follow and proceed from a good and pious person.” We must, however, decline to accept Luther’s other inferences, viz. that the sinner is not in a position to perform natural good works of his own, and that the just man does not become more righteous through good works.
Hence Luther’s statement, however apparently ingenious, cannot remove the unfavourable impression produced by his doctrine of works. That it was highly valued by its author is plain from the number of times he repeats it under different forms. “Works do not make a Christian, but a Christian performs works,” so he exclaimed in a sermon in 1523, summing up in these specious words the instruction he had just given, viz. that the faithful must struggle to remove whatever of evil there is in them, and that they must “work good to their neighbour,” but not on any account try “to blot out sin by works, for this would be to shame and blaspheme God and Christ and to disgrace their own heritage,” viz. Justification by faith alone.[1697]
For the purpose of recommending the Lutheran doctrine of works it is sometimes urged that Luther, while slighting other works of less account, assigned a place of honour to active works of charity, done for the sake of our neighbour, that he placed them on a firmer moral basis than they had hitherto occupied and promoted them so far as the unfavourable circumstances of his age allowed. A few words on the conception and particularly on the practice of charity as advocated by him may serve as a fit conclusion to the present section.
First, we may mention that Luther is disposed to exaggerate the importance of works of charity done to our neighbour.
It was an unjustifiable and paralysing restriction on the pious impulse towards works pleasing to God that Luther embodied in the rule he repeatedly lays down regarding works, viz. that they must be directed exclusively towards the benefit of others. “On this earth,” so he teaches in his Church postils, “man does not live for the sake of works,nor that they may profit him, for he has no need of them, but all works must be done for the sake of our neighbour.” “Thus must all works be done, that we see to it that they tend to the service of other people, impart to them the right faith and bring them to Christ’s Kingdom.” They bring them the “right faith” when they serve to “quiet their conscience.” Thus even here the Kingdom of God, which consists in the forgiveness of sins, must also play its part.
Catholic doctrine recognises a wider field for good works. It regards as such even the works which the faithful perform directly for their own soul without any reference to their neighbour, such as self-conquest in contending against one’s own passions, or those works which are concerned primarily with honouring God whether in public worship or in the private life of the Christian. Luther himself, at least incidentally, also knows how to speak of the value of such works, though thereby he contradicts his other statements like the above.
If, however, we neglect the principle, we have to admit, that Luther’s frequent exhortations to neighbourly charity and kindness contain some fine and truly Evangelical thoughts. With deep feeling he expresses his sorrow that his admonitions are not heeded to the extent he would have wished.
In his statements already quoted concerning the corruption of morals consequent on the change of religion, we have heard him several times lamenting the notorious falling off in private benevolence and the quite remarkable decrease of public works of Christian charity. Everywhere avarice reigns supreme, so we have heard Luther repeatedly exclaim, and a reprehensible indolence in the doing of what is good has spread far and wide; everything is now different from what it had been “in the time of the monks and parsons,” when people “founded and built” right and left, and when even the poorest was anxious to contribute.[1698]
His defenders now declare, that he “unlocked the truesource of charity” by denying any meritorious character to works, thus sending to limbo the imperfect, mediæval motive of charity and substituting a better one in its place, viz. a “grateful love springing from faith.” Luther’s own words have been used to decry earlier ages, as though charity then had “merely had itself in view,” people in those days having been intent solely on laying up merit “for them and theirs.”