5. Abasement of Practical Christianity

In 1537 in a Disputation on June 1 he denounced the thesis, “Good works are necessary for salvation.”[142]In the same way, in a sermon of 1535, he asserted that it was by no means necessary for us to perform good works “in order to blot out sin, to overcome death and win heaven, but merely for the profit and assistance of our neighbour.” “Our works,” he there says, “can only shape what concerns our temporal life and being”; higher than this they cannot rise.[143]Yet, when thus degrading works, he had again and again to struggle within his own heart against the faith of the ancient Church concerning the merit of good deeds. Especially was this the case when he considered the “texts which demand a good life on account of the eternal reward,”[144]for instance, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments” (Mt. xix. 17), or “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven” (ib., vi. 20). With them he deals in a sermon of 1522. The eternal reward, he here says, follows the works because it is a result of the faith whichitself is the cause of the works. But the believer must not “look to the reward,” or trouble about it. Why then does God promise a reward?—In order that “all may know what the natural result of a good life will be.” Yet he also admits a certain anxiety on the part of the pious Christian to be certain of his reward, and the favourable effect of such a certainty on the good man’s will.[145]Here he exhorts his listeners; “that you be content to know and be assured that this indeed will be the result,” whilst in another sermon of that same year he describes as follows the promise of eternal life as the reward of works: “It is an incentive and inducement that makes us zealous in piety and in the service and praise of God.... That God should guide us so kindly makes us esteem the more His Fatherly Will and the Mercy of Christ”—but on no account “must we be good as if for the sake of the reward.”[146]He also quotes incidentally Mt. xix. 29, where our Lord says that all who leave home, brethren, etc. for His name’s sake “shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting”; also Heb. x. 35 concerning the “great reward” that awaits those who lose not their confidence. Such statements, he refuses, however, to see referred to salvation, which will be the equal portion of all true believers, but, in his arbitrary fashion, explains them as denoting some extra ornament of glory.[147]“Good works will be present wherever faith is.” As this supposition, a favourite one with Luther from early days, fails to verify itself in practice, and as the expedients he proposed to meet the new difficulty are scattered throughout his writings, an admirer in recent times ventured to sum up these elements into a system under the following headings: “Faulty morality is a proof of a faulty faith.” “The fact of morality being present proves the presence of faith.” “Moral indolence induces loss of faith.” “Zeal for morality causes faith to increase.”[148]The true explanation would therefore seem always to be in the assumption of a want of “faith,” i.e. of a lack of that absolute certainty of personal salvation which should regulate all religious life,[149]in other words moral failings should be held to prove the absence of this saving certainty.Seen in this light good works are of importance, as the outward demonstration that a person possesses the “fides specialis,” and in this wise alone are they a guarantee of everlasting happiness. They prove “before the world and before his own conscience” that a Christian really has the “faith.” This is what Luther expressly teaches in his Church-Postils: “Therefore hold fast to this, that a man who is inwardly a Christian is justified before God solely by faith and without any works; but outwardly and publicly, before the people and to himself, he is justified by works, i.e. he becomes known to others as, and certain in himselfthat, he is inwardly just, believing and pious. Thus you may term one an open or outward justification and the other an inward justification.”[150]Hence Luther’s certainty of salvation, however strong it may be, still requires to be tested by something else as to whether it is the true “faith” deserving of God’s compassion; for “it is quite possible for a man never to doubt God’s mercy towards him though all the while he does not really possess it”;[151]according to Luther, namely, there is such a thing as a fictitious faith.In Luther’s opinion “faith” was a grasping of something actually there. Hence if God’s mercy was not there, then neither was there any “faith.” Accordingly, an “unwarrantable assurance of salvation” was not at all impossible, and works served as a means of detecting it. Walther, to whom we owe our summary, does not, it is true, prove the existence of such a state of “unwarrantable assurance” by any direct quotation from Luther’s writings, and, indeed, it might be difficult to find any definite statement to this effect, seeing that Luther was chary of speaking of any failure in the personal certainty of salvation, on which alone, exclusive of works, he based the whole work of justification.And yet, as Luther himself frequently says, moods and feelings are no guarantee of true faith; what is required are the works, which, like good fruit, always spring from a good tree.—So strongly, in spite of all his predilection for faith alone, is he impelled again and again to have recourse to works. In many passages they tend to become something more than mere signs confirmatory of faith. We need not examine here how far his statements concerning faith and works are consistent, and to what extent the sane Catholic teaching continued to influence him.What is remarkable, however, is, that, in his commendable efforts to urge the performance of works in order to curtail the pernicious results of his doctrine, Luther comes to attribute a saving action to “faith,” only on condition that, out of love of God, we “strive” against sin. In one of his last sermons at Eisleben he tells his hearers: Sins are forgiven by faith and “are not imputedso far as you set yourself to fight against them, and learn to repeat the Our Father diligently ... and to grow in strength as you grow in age; and you must be at pains to exercise your faith by resisting the sins that remain in you ... in short, you must become stronger, humbler, more patient and believe more firmly.”[152]The conditional “so far as” furnishes a key which has to be used in many other passages where works are demanded as well as faith. Faith, there, is real and wholesome “in so far as” it produces works: “For we too admit it and have always taught it, better and more forcibly than they [the Papists], that we must both preach and perform works, and that they must follow the faith, and, that, where they do not follow there the faith is not as it should be.”[153]Nor does he merely say that works of charity must follow eventually, but that charity must be infused by the Spirit of God together with faith of which it is the fruit.“For though faith makes us righteous and pure, yet it cannot be without love, and the Spirit must infuse love together with faith. In short, where there is true faith, there the Holy Ghost is also present, and where the Holy Ghost is, there love and all good things must also be.... Love is a consequence or fruit of the Spirit which comes to us wrapped up in the faith.”[154]“Charity is so closely bound up [with faith and hope] that it can never be parted from faith where this is true faith, and as little as there can be fire without heat and smoke, so little can faith exist without charity.”[155]From gratitude (as we have heard him state above, p. 26) the man who is assured of salvation must be “well disposed towards God and keep His commandments.” But if he be “sweetly disposed towards God” this must “show itself in all charity.”Taking the words at their face value we might find in these and similar statements on charity something reminiscent of the Catholic doctrine of a faith working through love.[156]But though this is what Luther should logically have arrived at, he was in reality always kept far from it by his idea both of faith and of imputation. It should be noted that he was fond of taking shelter behind the assertion, that his “faith” also included, or was accompanied by, charity. He was obliged to do this in self-defence against the objections of certain Evangelicals—who rushed to conclusions he would not accept—or of Catholic opponents. Indeed, in order to pacify the doubters, he even went so far as to say, that love preceded the “faith” he taught, and that “faith” itself was simply a work like any other work done for the fulfilling of the commandments.It was in this sense that he wrote in the “Sermon von den guten Werken,” composed at the instance of his prudent friend Spalatin for the Duke of Saxony: “Such trust and faith brings with it charity and hope; indeed, if we look at the matter aright, charity comes first, or at least simultaneously with faith. For I should not care to trust God unless I believed He would be kindly and gracious to me, whereby I am well disposed towards Him, trust Him heartily and perform all that is good in His sight.” In the same connection he characterises “faith” as a “work of the first Commandment,” and as a “true keeping of that command,” and as the “first, topmost and best work from which all others flow.”[157]It might seem, though this is but apparent, that he had actually come to acknowledge the reality and merit of man’s works, in the teeth of his denial of free-will and of the possibility of meriting.Of charity as involved in faith he wrote in a similar strain in 1519 to Johann Silvius Egranus, who at that time still belonged to his party, but was already troubled with scruples concerning the small regard shown for ethical motives and the undue stress laid on faith alone: “I do not separate justifying faith from charity,” Luther told him, “on the contrary we believe because God, in Whom we believe, pleases us and is loved by us.” To him all this was quite clear and plain, but the new-comers who had busied themselves with faith, hope and charity “understood not one of the three.”[158]We may recall how the enquiring mind of Egranus was by no means entirely satisfied by this explanation. In 1534 he published a bitter attack on the Lutheran doctrine of works, though he never returned more than half-way from Lutheranism to the olden Church.[159]Many, like Silvius Egranus, who at the outset had been won over to the new religion, took fright when they saw that, owing to the preference shown to faith (i.e. the purely personal assurance of salvation), the ethical principles regarding Christian perfection and man’s aim in life, received but scant consideration.Many truly saw therein an alarming abasement of the moral standard and accordingly returned to the doctrine of their fathers. As the ideal to be aimed at throughout life the Church had set up before them progress in the love of God, encouraging them to put this love in practice by fidelity to the duties of their calling and by a humble and confident trust in God’s Fatherly promises rather than in any perilous “fides specialis.”In previous ages Christian perfection had rightly been thought to consist in the development of the moral virtues, particularlyof charity, the queen of all the others. Now, however, Luther represented “the consoling faith in the forgiveness of sins as the sum of Christian perfection.”[160]According to him the “real essence of personal Christianity lies in the confidence of the justified sinner that he shares the paternal love of the Almighty of which he has been assured by the work and person of Jesus Christ.” In this sense alone can he be said to have “rediscovered Christianity” as a religion. We are told that “the essence of Lutheran Christianity is to be found in Luther’s reduction of practical Christianity to the doctrine of salvation.”[161]He “altered the ideal of religious perfection as no other Christian before his day had ever done.” The “revulsion” in moral ideals which this necessarily involved spelt “a huge decline.”[162]George Wicel, who, after having long been an adherent of Lutheranism, broke away from it in consequence of the moral results referred to, wrote, in 1533, with much bitterness in the defence he addressed to Justus Jonas: “Amongst you one hears of nothing but of remitting and forgiving; you don’t seem to see that your seductions sow more sins than ever you can take away. Your people, it is true, are so constituted that they will only hear of the forgiving and never of the retaining of sin (John xx. 23); evidently they stand more in need of being loosed than of being bound. Ah, you comfortable theologians! You are indeed sharp-sighted enough in all this business, for were you to bind as often as you loose, you, the ringleaders of the party, would soon find yourselves all alone with your faith, and might then withdraw into some hole to weep for the loss of your authority and congregation.” “Ah, you rascals, what a fine Evangelical mode of life have you wrought with your preachment on grace.”[163]5. Abasement of Practical ChristianityTo follow up the above statement emanating from a Protestant source, concerning the “huge decline” in moral ideals and practical Christianity involved in Luther’s work, we shall go on to consider how greatly he did in point of fact narrow and restrict ethical effort in comparison with what was required by the ethics of earlier days. In so doing he was following the psychological impulse discernible even in the first beginnings of his dislike for the austerity of his Order and the precepts of the Church.Lower Moral Standards1. The only works of obligation in the service of God are faith, praise and thanksgiving. God, he says, demands only our faith, our praise and our gratitude. Of our works He has no need.[164]He restricts our “deeds towards God” to the praise-offering or thank-offering for the good received, and to the prayer-offering “or Our Father, against the evil and badness we would wish to be rid of.”[165]This service is the duty of each individual Christian and is practised in common in Divine worship. The latter is fixed and controlled with the tacit consent of the congregation by the ministers who represent the people; in this we find the trace of Luther’s innate aversion to any law or obligation which leads him to avoid anything savouring of legislative action.[166]In the preface to his instructions to the Visitors in 1528 he declares, for instance, that the rules laid down were not meant to “found new Papal Decretals”; they were rather to be taken as a “history of and witness to our faith” and not as “strict commands.”[167]This well expresses his antipathy to the visible Catholic Church, her hierarchy and her so-called man-made ordinances for public worship.Since, to his mind, it is impossible to offer God anything but love, thanksgiving and prayer, it follows that, firstly, the Eucharistic Sacrifice falls, and, with it, all the sacrifices made to the greater glory of God by self-denial and abnegation, obedience or bodily penances, together with all those works—practised in imitation of Christ by noble souls—done over and above the bounden duties of each one’s calling. He held that it was wrong to say of such sacrifices, made by contrite and loving hearts, that they were both to God’s glory and to our own advantage, or to endeavour to justify them by arguing that: Whoever does not do great things for God must expect small recompense. Among the things which fell before him were: vows, processions, pilgrimages, veneration of relics and of the Saints, ecclesiasticalblessings and sacramentals, not to speak of holy days and prescribed fasts. With good reason can one speak of a “huge decline.”He justifies as follows his radical opposition to the Catholic forms of Divine worship: “The only good we can do in God’s service is to praise and thank Him, in which in fact the only true worship of God consists.... If any other worship of God be proposed to you, know that it is error and deception.”[168]“It is a rank scandal that the Papists should encourage people to toil for God with works so as thereby to expiate their sins and secure grace.... If you wish to believe aright and really to lay hold on Christ, you must discard all works whereby you may think you labour for God; all such are nothing but scandals leading you away from Christ and from God; in God’s sight no work is of any value except Christ’s own; this you must leave to toil for you in God’s sight; you yourself must perform no other work for Him than to believe that Christ does His work for you.”[169]In the same passage he attempts to vindicate this species of Quietism with the help of some recollections from his own earlier career, viz. by the mystic principle which had at one time ruled him: “You must be blind and lame, deaf and dead, poor and leprous, or else you will be scandalised in Christ. This is what it means to know Christ aright and to accept Him; this is to believe as befits a true Christian.”[170]2. “All other works, apart from faith, must be directed towards our neighbour.”[171]As we know, besides that faith, gratitude and love which are God’s due, Luther admits no good works but those of charity towards our neighbour. By our faith we give to God all that He asks of us. “After this, think only of doing for your neighbour what Christ has done for you, and let all your works and all your life go to the service of your neighbour.”[172]—God, he says elsewhere, asks only for our thank-offering; “look upon Me as a Gracious God and I am content”; “thereafter serve your neighbour, freely and for nothing.”[173]Good works in his eyes are only “good when they are profitable to others and not toyourself.” Indeed he goes so far as to assert: “If you find yourself performing a work for God, or for His Saints, or for yourself and not alone for your neighbour, know that the work is not good.”[174]The only explanation of such sentences, as already hinted, is to be found in his passionate polemics against the worship and the pious exercises of the Catholics. It is true that such practices were sullied at that time by certain blemishes, owing to the abuses rampant in the Church; yet the Catholic could confidently answer in self-defence in the words Luther proceeds to put on his lips: Such “works are spiritual and profitable to the soul of our neighbour, and God thereby is served and propitiated and His Grace obtained.”Luther rudely retorts: “You lie in your throat; God is served not by works but by faith; faith must do everything that is to be done as between God and ourselves.” That the priests and monks should vaunt their religious exercises as spiritual treasures, he brands as a “Satanic lie.” “The works of the Papists such as organ-playing, chanting, vesting, ringing, smoking [incensation], sprinkling, pilgriming and fasting, etc., are doubtless fine and many, grand and long, broad and thick works, but about them there is nothing good, useful or profitable.”3. “Know that there are no good works but such as God has commanded.” What, apart from faith, makes a work a good one is solely God’s express command. Luther, while finding fault with the self-chosen works of the Catholics, points to the Ten Commandments as summing up every good work willed by God. “There used to be ecclesiastical precepts which were to supersede the Decalogue.” “The commandments of the Church were invented and set up by men in addition to and beyond God’s Word. Luther therefore deals with the true worship of God in the light of the Ten Commandments.”[175]As for the Evangelical Counsels so solemnly enacted in the New Testament, viz. the striving after a perfection which is not of obligation, Luther, urged on by his theory that only what is actually commandedpartakes of the nature of a good work, came very near branding them as an invention of the Papists.They have “made the Counsels twelve” in number,[176]he says, “and twist the Gospel as they please.” They have split the Gospel into two, into “Consilia et præcepta.” “Christ,” so he teaches, “gave only one Counsel in the whole of the Gospel, viz. that of chastity, which even a layman can preserve, assuming him to have the grace.” He sneers at the Pope and the Doctors because they had established not only a clerical order which should be superior to the laity, but also an order of the counsels the duty of whose members it was to portray the Evangelical perfection by the keeping of the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “By this the common Christian life and faith became like flat, sour beer; everyone rubbed his eyes, despised the commandments and ran after the counsels. And after a good while they at last discovered man-made ordinances in the shape of habits, foods, chants, lessons, tonsures, etc., and thus God’s Law went the way of faith, both being blotted out and forgotten, so that, henceforth, to be perfect and to live according to the counsels means to wear a black, white, grey or coloured cowl, to bawl in church, wear a tonsure and to abstain from eggs, meat, butter, etc.”[177]In the heat of his excitement he even goes so far as to deny the necessity of any service in the churches, because God demands only the praise and thanks of the heart, and “this may be given ... equally well in the home, in the field, or anywhere else.” “If they should force any other service upon you, know that it is error and deception; just as hitherto the world has been crazy, with its houses, churches and monasteries set aside for the worship of God, and its vestments of gold and silk, etc. ... which expenditure had better been used to help our neighbour, if it was really meant for God.”[178]It was of course impossible for him to vindicate in the long run so radical a standpoint concerning the churches, and, elsewhere, he allows people their own way on the question of liturgical vestments and other matters connected with worship.4. The good works which are performed where there is no “faith” amount to sin. This strangely unethical assertion Luther is fond of repeating in so extravagant a form as can only be explained psychologically by the utter blindness of his bias in favour of the “fides specialis” by him discovered. True morality belongs solely to those who have been justified after his own fashion, and no others have the slightest right to credit themselves with anything of the sort.When, in 1528, in his “Great Confession” he expounded his “belief bit by bit,” declaring that he had “most diligently weighed all these articles” as in the presence of death and judgment, he there wrote: “Herewith I reject and condemn as rank error every doctrine that exalts our free-will, which is directly opposed to the help and grace of our Saviour Jesus Christ. For seeing, that, outside of Christ, death and sin are our masters and the devil our God and sovereign, there can be no power or might, no wit or understanding whereby we could make ourselves fit for, or could even strive after, righteousness and life, but on the contrary we must remain blind and captive, slaves of sin and the devil, and must do what pleases them and runs counter to God and His Commandments.”[179]Even the most pious of the Papists, he goes on to say, since they lack Christ and the “Faith,” have “merely a great semblance of holiness,” and although “there seem to be many good works” among them, “yet all is lost”; chastity, poverty and obedience as practised in the convents is nothing but “blasphemous holiness,” and “what is horrible is that thereby they refuse Christ’s help and grace.”[180]This, his favourite idea, finds its full expression in his learned Latin Commentary on Galatians (1535): “In the man who does not believe in Christ not only are all sins mortal, but even his good works are sins”;[181]for the benefit of the people he enunciates the same in his Church-Postils. “The works performed without faith are sins ... for such works of ours are soiled and foul in God’s eyes, nay, He looks on them with horror and loathing.” As a matter of course he thinks that God looks upon concupiscence as sin, even in its permissible manifestations, e.g. in the “opus conjugalis.” Amongst the heathen even virtues such as patriotism, continence, justice and courage in which, owing to the divine impulses (“divini motus”), they may shine, are tainted by the presence in them of original sin (“in ipsis heroicis virtutibus depravata”).[182]As to whether such men were saved, Luther refuses to say anything definite; he holds fast to the text that without faith it is impossible to please God. Only those who, in the days of Noe, did not believe may, so he declares, be saved in accordance with his reading of 1 Peter iii. 19 by Christ’s preaching of salvation on the occasion of His descent into hell. He is also disposed to include among those saved by this supposed course of sermons delivered “in inferis,” such fine men of every nation as Scipio, Fabius and others of their like.[183]In general, however, the following holds good: Before “faith and grace” are infused into the heart “by the Spirit alone,” “as the work of God which He works in us”—everything inman is the “work of the Law, of no value for justification, but unholy and opposed to God owing to the unbelief in which it is performed.”[184]Annulment of the Supernatural and Abasement of the Natural OrderFrom the above statements it is clear that Luther, in doing away with the distinction between the natural and supernatural order, also did away with the olden doctrine of virtue, and without setting up anything positive in its place. He admits no naturally good action different from that performed “by faith and grace”; no such thing exists as a natural, moral virtue of justice. This opinion is closely bound up with his whole warfare on man’s natural character and endowments in respect of what is good. Moreover, what he terms the state of grace is not the supernatural state the Church had always understood, but an outward imputation by God; it is indeed God’s goodness towards man, but no new vital principle thanks to which we act justly.[185]Not only does he deny the distinction between natural and supernatural goodness, essential as it is for forming an ethical estimate of man, but he practically destroys both the natural and supernatural order. Even in other points of Luther’s doctrine we can notice the abrogation of the fundamental difference between the two orders; for instance in his view of Adam’s original state, which, according to him, was a natural not a supernatural one, “no gift,” as he says, “apart from man’s nature, and bestowed on him from without, but a natural righteousness so that it came natural to him to love God [as he did], to believe in Him and to acknowledge Him.”[186]It is, however, in the moral domain that this peculiarity of his new theology comes out most glaringly. Owing to his way of proceeding and the heat of his polemics he seems never to have become fully conscious of how far-reaching the consequences were of hisdestruction of all distinction between the natural and the supernatural order.Natural morality, viz. that to which man attains by means of his unaided powers, appears to him simply an invention of the pagan Aristotle. He rounds on all the theologians of his day for having swallowed so dangerous an error in their Aristotelian schools to the manifest detriment of the divine teaching. This he does, for instance, at the commencement of his recently published Commentary on Romans. He calls it a “righteousness of the philosophers and lawyers” in itself utterly worthless.[187]A year later, in his manuscript Commentary on Hebrews, he has already reached the opinion, that, “the virtues of all the philosophers, nay, of all men, whether they be lawyers or theologians, have only a semblance of virtue, but in reality are vices (‘vitia’).”[188]But what would be quite incomprehensible, had he actually read the scholastic theologians whose “civil, Aristotelian doctrine of justice” he was so constantly attacking, is, that he charges them with having stopped short at this natural justice and with not having taught anything higher; this higher justice was what he himself had brought to light, this was the “Scriptural justice which depended more on the Divine imputation than on the nature of things,”[189]and was not acquired by deeds but bestowed by God. The fact is, however, that the Schoolmen did not rest content merely with natural justice, but insist that true justice is something higher, supernatural and only to be attained to with the help of grace; it is only in some few later theologians with whom Luther may possibly have been acquainted, that this truth fails to find clear expression. Thomas of Aquin, for instance, distinguishes between the civil virtue of justice and the justice infused in the act of justification. He says expressly: “A man may be termed just in two ways, on account of civil [natural] justice and on account of infused justice. Civil justice is attained to without the grace which comes to the assistance of the natural powers, but infused justice is the work of grace. Neither the one nor the other, however, consists in the mere doing ofwhat is good, for not everyone who does what is good is just, but only he who does it as do the just.”[190]With regard to supernatural (infused) justice, the Church’s representatives, quite differently from Luther, had taught that man by his natural powers could only attain to God as the Author of nature but not to God as He is in Himself, i.e. to God as He has revealed and will communicate Himself in heaven; it is infused, sanctifying grace alone that places us in a higher order than that of nature and raises us to the status of being children of God; in it we love God, by virtue of the “habit” of love bestowed upon us, as He is in Himself, i.e. as He wills to be loved; sanctifying grace it is that brings us into a true relation with our supernatural and final end, viz. the vision of God in heaven, in which sense it may be called a vital principle infused into the soul.[191]This language Luther either did not or would not understand. On this point particularly he had to suffer for his ignorance of the better class of theologians. He first embraced Occam’s hypothesis of thepossibilityof an imputation of justice, and then, going further along the wrong road, he changed this possibility into a reality; soon, owing to his belief in the entire corruption of the natural man, imputed justice became, to him, the only justice. In this way he deprived theology of supernatural as well as of natural justice; for imputed justice is really no justice at all, but merely an alien one. “With Luther we have the end of the supernatural. His basic view, of justifying faith as the work of God in us performed without our co-operation, bears indeed a semblance of the supernatural.... But the supernatural is ever something alien.”[192]What he had in his mind was always a foreign righteousness produced, not by man’s own works and acts performed under the help of grace, but only by the work of another; this we are told by Luther in so many words: “True and real piety which is of worth in God’s sight consists in alien works and not in our own.”[193]“If we wish to work for God we must not approach Him with our own works but with foreign ones.” “These are the works of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” “All that He has is ours.... I may attribute to myself all His works as though I had actually done them, if only I believe in Christ.... Our workswill not suffice, all our powers together are too weak to resist even the smallest sin.... Hence when the Law comes and accuses you of not having kept it, send it to Christ and say: There is the Man who has fulfilled it, to Him I cling, He has fulfilled it for me and bestowed His fulfilment of it upon me; then the Law will have to hold its tongue.”[194]The Book of Concord on the Curtailment of Free-Will.When orthodox Lutheranism gained a local and temporary victory in 1580 with the so-called Book of Concord, the authors of the book deplored the inferences drawn from Luther’s moral teaching, particularly from his denial of free-will, the dangers of which had already long been apparent.“It is not unknown to us,” they say, “that this holy doctrine of the malice and impotence of free-will, the doctrine whereby our conversion and regeneration is ascribed solely to God and in no way to our own powers, has been godlessly, shamelessly and hatefully abused.... Many are becoming immoral and savage and neglectful of all pious exercises; they say: ‘Since we cannot turn to God of our own natural powers, let us remain hostile to God or wait until He converts us by force and against our will.’” “It is true that they possess no power to act in spiritual things, and that the whole business of conversion is merely the work of the Holy Ghost. And thus they refuse to listen to the Word of God, or to study it, or to receive the Sacraments; they prefer to wait until God infuses His gifts into them directly from above, and until they feel and are certain by inward experience that they have been converted by God.”“Others,” they continue, speaking of the case as a possibility and not as a sad reality, “may possibly give themselves up to sad and dangerous doubts as to whether they have been predestined by God to heaven, and as to whether God will really work His gifts in them by the help of the Holy Ghost. Being weak and troubled in mind they do not grasp aright our pious doctrine of free-will, and they are confirmed in their doubts by the fact that they do not find within themselves any firm and ardent faith or hearty devotion to God, but only weakness, misery and fear.” The authors then proceed to deal with the widespread fear of predestination to hell.[195]We have as it were a sad monument set up to the morality of the enslaved will and the doctrine of imputation, when the Book of Concord, in spite of the sad results it has justadmitted, goes on in the same chapter to insist that all Luther’s principles should be preserved intact. “This matter Dr. Luther settled most excellently and thoroughly in his ‘De servo arbitrio’ against Erasmus, where he showed this opinion to be pious and irrefutable. Later on he repeated and further explained the same doctrine in his splendid Commentary on Genesis, particularly in his exposition of ch. xxvi. There, too, he made other matters clear—e.g. the doctrine of the ‘absoluta necessitas’—defended them against the objections of Erasmus and, by his pious explanations, set them above all evil insinuations and misrepresentations. All of which we here corroborate and commend to the diligent study of all.”[196]Melanchthon’s and his school’s modifications of these extreme doctrines are here sharply repudiated, though Luther himself “never spoke with open disapproval” of Melanchthon’s Synergism.[197]“From our doctrinal standpoint,” we there read, “it is plain that the teaching of the Synergists is false, who allege that man in spiritual things is notaltogetherdead to what is good but merely badly wounded andhalfdead.... They teach wrongly, that after the Holy Spirit has given us, through the Evangel, grace, forgiveness and salvation, then free-will is able to meet God by its natural powers and ... co-operate with the Holy Ghost. In reality the ability to lay hold upon grace (‘facultas applicandi se ad gratiam’) is solely due to the working of the Holy Ghost.”What then is man to do, and how are the consequences described above to be obviated, on the one hand libertinism, on the other fear of predestination to hell?Man still possesses a certain freedom, so the Book of Concord teaches, e.g. “to be present or not at the Church’s assemblies, to listen or close his ears to the Word of God.”“The preaching of the Word of God is however the tool whereby the Holy Ghost seeks to effect man’s conversion and to make him ready to will and to work (‘in ipsis et velle et perficere operari vult’).” “Man is free to open his ears to the Word of God or to read it even when not yet converted to God or born again. In some way or other man still has free-will in such outward things even since Adam’s Fall.” Hence, by the Word, “bythe preaching and contemplation of the sweet Evangel of the forgiveness of sins, the spark of ‘faith’ is enkindled in his heart.”[198]“Although all effort without the power and work of the Holy Spirit is worthless, yet neither the preacher nor the hearer must doubt of this grace or work of the Holy Spirit,” so long as the preacher proceeds according to God’s will and command and “the hearer listens earnestly and diligently and dwells on what he hears.” We are not to judge of the working of the Holy Ghost by our feelings, but “agreeably with the promises of God’s Word.” We must hold that “the Word preached is the organ of the Holy Ghost whereby He truly works and acts in our hearts.”[199]With the help of this queer, misty doctrine which, as we may notice, makes of preaching a sort of Sacrament working “ex opere operato,” Luther’s followers attempted to construct a system out of their master’s varying and often so arbitrary statements. At any rate they upheld his denial of any natural order of morality distinct from the order of grace. It was to remain true that man, “previous to conversion, possesses indeed an understanding, but not of divine things, and a will, though not for anything good and wholesome.” In this respect man stands far below even a stock or stone, because he resists the Word and Will of God (which they cannot do) until God raises him up from the death of sin, enlightens and creates him anew.[200]Nevertheless several theses, undoubtedly Luther’s own, are here glossed over or quietly bettered. If, for instance, according to Luther everything takes place of absolute necessity (a fact to which the Formula of Concord draws attention), if man, even in the natural acts of the mind, is bound by what is fore-ordained,[201]then even the listening to a sermon and the dwelling on it cannot be matters of real freedom. Moreover the man troubled with fears on predestination, is comforted by the well-known Bible texts, which teach that it is the Will of God that all should be saved; whilst nothing is said of Luther’s doctrine that it is only the revealed God who speaks thus, whereas the hidden God acts quite otherwise, plans and carries out the very opposite, “damns even those who have not deserved it—and, yet, does not thereby become unjust.”[202]Reference is made to Adam’s Fall, whereby nature has been depraved; but nothing is said of Luther’s view that Adam himself simply could not avoid falling because God did not then “bestow on him the spirit of obedience.”[203]But, though these things are passed over in silence, due prominence is given to those ideas of Luther’s of which the result is the destruction of all moral order, natural as well assupernatural. According to the Formula of Concord the natural order was shattered by Adam’s Fall; as for the supernatural order it is replaced by the alien, mechanical order of imputation.Christianity merely Inward. The Church Sundered from the WorldAmong the things which Luther did to the detriment of the moral principle must be numbered his merciless tearing asunder of spiritual and temporal, of Christian and secular life.The olden Church sought to permeate the world with the religious spirit. Luther’s trend was in a great measure towards making the secular state and its office altogether independent; this, indeed, the more up-to-date sort of ethics is disposed to reckon among his greatest achievements. Luther even went so far as to seek to erect into a regular system this inward, necessary opposition of world and Church. Of this we have a plain example in certain of his instructions to the authorities.[204]Whereas the Church had exhorted people in power to temper with Christianity their administration of civil justice and their use of physical force—urging that the sovereign was a Christian not merely in his private but also in his official capacity,—Luther tells the ruler: The Kingdom of Christ wholly belongs to the order of grace, but the kingdom of the world and worldly life belong to the order of the Law; the two kingdoms are of a different species and belong to different worlds. To the one you belong as a Christian, to the other as a man and a ruler. Christ has nothing to do with the regulations of worldly life, but leaves them to the world; earthly life stands in no need of being outwardly hallowed by the Church.[205]Certain statements to a different effect will be considered elsewhere.

In 1537 in a Disputation on June 1 he denounced the thesis, “Good works are necessary for salvation.”[142]In the same way, in a sermon of 1535, he asserted that it was by no means necessary for us to perform good works “in order to blot out sin, to overcome death and win heaven, but merely for the profit and assistance of our neighbour.” “Our works,” he there says, “can only shape what concerns our temporal life and being”; higher than this they cannot rise.[143]Yet, when thus degrading works, he had again and again to struggle within his own heart against the faith of the ancient Church concerning the merit of good deeds. Especially was this the case when he considered the “texts which demand a good life on account of the eternal reward,”[144]for instance, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments” (Mt. xix. 17), or “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven” (ib., vi. 20). With them he deals in a sermon of 1522. The eternal reward, he here says, follows the works because it is a result of the faith whichitself is the cause of the works. But the believer must not “look to the reward,” or trouble about it. Why then does God promise a reward?—In order that “all may know what the natural result of a good life will be.” Yet he also admits a certain anxiety on the part of the pious Christian to be certain of his reward, and the favourable effect of such a certainty on the good man’s will.[145]Here he exhorts his listeners; “that you be content to know and be assured that this indeed will be the result,” whilst in another sermon of that same year he describes as follows the promise of eternal life as the reward of works: “It is an incentive and inducement that makes us zealous in piety and in the service and praise of God.... That God should guide us so kindly makes us esteem the more His Fatherly Will and the Mercy of Christ”—but on no account “must we be good as if for the sake of the reward.”[146]He also quotes incidentally Mt. xix. 29, where our Lord says that all who leave home, brethren, etc. for His name’s sake “shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting”; also Heb. x. 35 concerning the “great reward” that awaits those who lose not their confidence. Such statements, he refuses, however, to see referred to salvation, which will be the equal portion of all true believers, but, in his arbitrary fashion, explains them as denoting some extra ornament of glory.[147]“Good works will be present wherever faith is.” As this supposition, a favourite one with Luther from early days, fails to verify itself in practice, and as the expedients he proposed to meet the new difficulty are scattered throughout his writings, an admirer in recent times ventured to sum up these elements into a system under the following headings: “Faulty morality is a proof of a faulty faith.” “The fact of morality being present proves the presence of faith.” “Moral indolence induces loss of faith.” “Zeal for morality causes faith to increase.”[148]The true explanation would therefore seem always to be in the assumption of a want of “faith,” i.e. of a lack of that absolute certainty of personal salvation which should regulate all religious life,[149]in other words moral failings should be held to prove the absence of this saving certainty.Seen in this light good works are of importance, as the outward demonstration that a person possesses the “fides specialis,” and in this wise alone are they a guarantee of everlasting happiness. They prove “before the world and before his own conscience” that a Christian really has the “faith.” This is what Luther expressly teaches in his Church-Postils: “Therefore hold fast to this, that a man who is inwardly a Christian is justified before God solely by faith and without any works; but outwardly and publicly, before the people and to himself, he is justified by works, i.e. he becomes known to others as, and certain in himselfthat, he is inwardly just, believing and pious. Thus you may term one an open or outward justification and the other an inward justification.”[150]Hence Luther’s certainty of salvation, however strong it may be, still requires to be tested by something else as to whether it is the true “faith” deserving of God’s compassion; for “it is quite possible for a man never to doubt God’s mercy towards him though all the while he does not really possess it”;[151]according to Luther, namely, there is such a thing as a fictitious faith.In Luther’s opinion “faith” was a grasping of something actually there. Hence if God’s mercy was not there, then neither was there any “faith.” Accordingly, an “unwarrantable assurance of salvation” was not at all impossible, and works served as a means of detecting it. Walther, to whom we owe our summary, does not, it is true, prove the existence of such a state of “unwarrantable assurance” by any direct quotation from Luther’s writings, and, indeed, it might be difficult to find any definite statement to this effect, seeing that Luther was chary of speaking of any failure in the personal certainty of salvation, on which alone, exclusive of works, he based the whole work of justification.And yet, as Luther himself frequently says, moods and feelings are no guarantee of true faith; what is required are the works, which, like good fruit, always spring from a good tree.—So strongly, in spite of all his predilection for faith alone, is he impelled again and again to have recourse to works. In many passages they tend to become something more than mere signs confirmatory of faith. We need not examine here how far his statements concerning faith and works are consistent, and to what extent the sane Catholic teaching continued to influence him.What is remarkable, however, is, that, in his commendable efforts to urge the performance of works in order to curtail the pernicious results of his doctrine, Luther comes to attribute a saving action to “faith,” only on condition that, out of love of God, we “strive” against sin. In one of his last sermons at Eisleben he tells his hearers: Sins are forgiven by faith and “are not imputedso far as you set yourself to fight against them, and learn to repeat the Our Father diligently ... and to grow in strength as you grow in age; and you must be at pains to exercise your faith by resisting the sins that remain in you ... in short, you must become stronger, humbler, more patient and believe more firmly.”[152]The conditional “so far as” furnishes a key which has to be used in many other passages where works are demanded as well as faith. Faith, there, is real and wholesome “in so far as” it produces works: “For we too admit it and have always taught it, better and more forcibly than they [the Papists], that we must both preach and perform works, and that they must follow the faith, and, that, where they do not follow there the faith is not as it should be.”[153]Nor does he merely say that works of charity must follow eventually, but that charity must be infused by the Spirit of God together with faith of which it is the fruit.“For though faith makes us righteous and pure, yet it cannot be without love, and the Spirit must infuse love together with faith. In short, where there is true faith, there the Holy Ghost is also present, and where the Holy Ghost is, there love and all good things must also be.... Love is a consequence or fruit of the Spirit which comes to us wrapped up in the faith.”[154]“Charity is so closely bound up [with faith and hope] that it can never be parted from faith where this is true faith, and as little as there can be fire without heat and smoke, so little can faith exist without charity.”[155]From gratitude (as we have heard him state above, p. 26) the man who is assured of salvation must be “well disposed towards God and keep His commandments.” But if he be “sweetly disposed towards God” this must “show itself in all charity.”Taking the words at their face value we might find in these and similar statements on charity something reminiscent of the Catholic doctrine of a faith working through love.[156]But though this is what Luther should logically have arrived at, he was in reality always kept far from it by his idea both of faith and of imputation. It should be noted that he was fond of taking shelter behind the assertion, that his “faith” also included, or was accompanied by, charity. He was obliged to do this in self-defence against the objections of certain Evangelicals—who rushed to conclusions he would not accept—or of Catholic opponents. Indeed, in order to pacify the doubters, he even went so far as to say, that love preceded the “faith” he taught, and that “faith” itself was simply a work like any other work done for the fulfilling of the commandments.It was in this sense that he wrote in the “Sermon von den guten Werken,” composed at the instance of his prudent friend Spalatin for the Duke of Saxony: “Such trust and faith brings with it charity and hope; indeed, if we look at the matter aright, charity comes first, or at least simultaneously with faith. For I should not care to trust God unless I believed He would be kindly and gracious to me, whereby I am well disposed towards Him, trust Him heartily and perform all that is good in His sight.” In the same connection he characterises “faith” as a “work of the first Commandment,” and as a “true keeping of that command,” and as the “first, topmost and best work from which all others flow.”[157]It might seem, though this is but apparent, that he had actually come to acknowledge the reality and merit of man’s works, in the teeth of his denial of free-will and of the possibility of meriting.Of charity as involved in faith he wrote in a similar strain in 1519 to Johann Silvius Egranus, who at that time still belonged to his party, but was already troubled with scruples concerning the small regard shown for ethical motives and the undue stress laid on faith alone: “I do not separate justifying faith from charity,” Luther told him, “on the contrary we believe because God, in Whom we believe, pleases us and is loved by us.” To him all this was quite clear and plain, but the new-comers who had busied themselves with faith, hope and charity “understood not one of the three.”[158]We may recall how the enquiring mind of Egranus was by no means entirely satisfied by this explanation. In 1534 he published a bitter attack on the Lutheran doctrine of works, though he never returned more than half-way from Lutheranism to the olden Church.[159]Many, like Silvius Egranus, who at the outset had been won over to the new religion, took fright when they saw that, owing to the preference shown to faith (i.e. the purely personal assurance of salvation), the ethical principles regarding Christian perfection and man’s aim in life, received but scant consideration.Many truly saw therein an alarming abasement of the moral standard and accordingly returned to the doctrine of their fathers. As the ideal to be aimed at throughout life the Church had set up before them progress in the love of God, encouraging them to put this love in practice by fidelity to the duties of their calling and by a humble and confident trust in God’s Fatherly promises rather than in any perilous “fides specialis.”In previous ages Christian perfection had rightly been thought to consist in the development of the moral virtues, particularlyof charity, the queen of all the others. Now, however, Luther represented “the consoling faith in the forgiveness of sins as the sum of Christian perfection.”[160]According to him the “real essence of personal Christianity lies in the confidence of the justified sinner that he shares the paternal love of the Almighty of which he has been assured by the work and person of Jesus Christ.” In this sense alone can he be said to have “rediscovered Christianity” as a religion. We are told that “the essence of Lutheran Christianity is to be found in Luther’s reduction of practical Christianity to the doctrine of salvation.”[161]He “altered the ideal of religious perfection as no other Christian before his day had ever done.” The “revulsion” in moral ideals which this necessarily involved spelt “a huge decline.”[162]George Wicel, who, after having long been an adherent of Lutheranism, broke away from it in consequence of the moral results referred to, wrote, in 1533, with much bitterness in the defence he addressed to Justus Jonas: “Amongst you one hears of nothing but of remitting and forgiving; you don’t seem to see that your seductions sow more sins than ever you can take away. Your people, it is true, are so constituted that they will only hear of the forgiving and never of the retaining of sin (John xx. 23); evidently they stand more in need of being loosed than of being bound. Ah, you comfortable theologians! You are indeed sharp-sighted enough in all this business, for were you to bind as often as you loose, you, the ringleaders of the party, would soon find yourselves all alone with your faith, and might then withdraw into some hole to weep for the loss of your authority and congregation.” “Ah, you rascals, what a fine Evangelical mode of life have you wrought with your preachment on grace.”[163]5. Abasement of Practical ChristianityTo follow up the above statement emanating from a Protestant source, concerning the “huge decline” in moral ideals and practical Christianity involved in Luther’s work, we shall go on to consider how greatly he did in point of fact narrow and restrict ethical effort in comparison with what was required by the ethics of earlier days. In so doing he was following the psychological impulse discernible even in the first beginnings of his dislike for the austerity of his Order and the precepts of the Church.Lower Moral Standards1. The only works of obligation in the service of God are faith, praise and thanksgiving. God, he says, demands only our faith, our praise and our gratitude. Of our works He has no need.[164]He restricts our “deeds towards God” to the praise-offering or thank-offering for the good received, and to the prayer-offering “or Our Father, against the evil and badness we would wish to be rid of.”[165]This service is the duty of each individual Christian and is practised in common in Divine worship. The latter is fixed and controlled with the tacit consent of the congregation by the ministers who represent the people; in this we find the trace of Luther’s innate aversion to any law or obligation which leads him to avoid anything savouring of legislative action.[166]In the preface to his instructions to the Visitors in 1528 he declares, for instance, that the rules laid down were not meant to “found new Papal Decretals”; they were rather to be taken as a “history of and witness to our faith” and not as “strict commands.”[167]This well expresses his antipathy to the visible Catholic Church, her hierarchy and her so-called man-made ordinances for public worship.Since, to his mind, it is impossible to offer God anything but love, thanksgiving and prayer, it follows that, firstly, the Eucharistic Sacrifice falls, and, with it, all the sacrifices made to the greater glory of God by self-denial and abnegation, obedience or bodily penances, together with all those works—practised in imitation of Christ by noble souls—done over and above the bounden duties of each one’s calling. He held that it was wrong to say of such sacrifices, made by contrite and loving hearts, that they were both to God’s glory and to our own advantage, or to endeavour to justify them by arguing that: Whoever does not do great things for God must expect small recompense. Among the things which fell before him were: vows, processions, pilgrimages, veneration of relics and of the Saints, ecclesiasticalblessings and sacramentals, not to speak of holy days and prescribed fasts. With good reason can one speak of a “huge decline.”He justifies as follows his radical opposition to the Catholic forms of Divine worship: “The only good we can do in God’s service is to praise and thank Him, in which in fact the only true worship of God consists.... If any other worship of God be proposed to you, know that it is error and deception.”[168]“It is a rank scandal that the Papists should encourage people to toil for God with works so as thereby to expiate their sins and secure grace.... If you wish to believe aright and really to lay hold on Christ, you must discard all works whereby you may think you labour for God; all such are nothing but scandals leading you away from Christ and from God; in God’s sight no work is of any value except Christ’s own; this you must leave to toil for you in God’s sight; you yourself must perform no other work for Him than to believe that Christ does His work for you.”[169]In the same passage he attempts to vindicate this species of Quietism with the help of some recollections from his own earlier career, viz. by the mystic principle which had at one time ruled him: “You must be blind and lame, deaf and dead, poor and leprous, or else you will be scandalised in Christ. This is what it means to know Christ aright and to accept Him; this is to believe as befits a true Christian.”[170]2. “All other works, apart from faith, must be directed towards our neighbour.”[171]As we know, besides that faith, gratitude and love which are God’s due, Luther admits no good works but those of charity towards our neighbour. By our faith we give to God all that He asks of us. “After this, think only of doing for your neighbour what Christ has done for you, and let all your works and all your life go to the service of your neighbour.”[172]—God, he says elsewhere, asks only for our thank-offering; “look upon Me as a Gracious God and I am content”; “thereafter serve your neighbour, freely and for nothing.”[173]Good works in his eyes are only “good when they are profitable to others and not toyourself.” Indeed he goes so far as to assert: “If you find yourself performing a work for God, or for His Saints, or for yourself and not alone for your neighbour, know that the work is not good.”[174]The only explanation of such sentences, as already hinted, is to be found in his passionate polemics against the worship and the pious exercises of the Catholics. It is true that such practices were sullied at that time by certain blemishes, owing to the abuses rampant in the Church; yet the Catholic could confidently answer in self-defence in the words Luther proceeds to put on his lips: Such “works are spiritual and profitable to the soul of our neighbour, and God thereby is served and propitiated and His Grace obtained.”Luther rudely retorts: “You lie in your throat; God is served not by works but by faith; faith must do everything that is to be done as between God and ourselves.” That the priests and monks should vaunt their religious exercises as spiritual treasures, he brands as a “Satanic lie.” “The works of the Papists such as organ-playing, chanting, vesting, ringing, smoking [incensation], sprinkling, pilgriming and fasting, etc., are doubtless fine and many, grand and long, broad and thick works, but about them there is nothing good, useful or profitable.”3. “Know that there are no good works but such as God has commanded.” What, apart from faith, makes a work a good one is solely God’s express command. Luther, while finding fault with the self-chosen works of the Catholics, points to the Ten Commandments as summing up every good work willed by God. “There used to be ecclesiastical precepts which were to supersede the Decalogue.” “The commandments of the Church were invented and set up by men in addition to and beyond God’s Word. Luther therefore deals with the true worship of God in the light of the Ten Commandments.”[175]As for the Evangelical Counsels so solemnly enacted in the New Testament, viz. the striving after a perfection which is not of obligation, Luther, urged on by his theory that only what is actually commandedpartakes of the nature of a good work, came very near branding them as an invention of the Papists.They have “made the Counsels twelve” in number,[176]he says, “and twist the Gospel as they please.” They have split the Gospel into two, into “Consilia et præcepta.” “Christ,” so he teaches, “gave only one Counsel in the whole of the Gospel, viz. that of chastity, which even a layman can preserve, assuming him to have the grace.” He sneers at the Pope and the Doctors because they had established not only a clerical order which should be superior to the laity, but also an order of the counsels the duty of whose members it was to portray the Evangelical perfection by the keeping of the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “By this the common Christian life and faith became like flat, sour beer; everyone rubbed his eyes, despised the commandments and ran after the counsels. And after a good while they at last discovered man-made ordinances in the shape of habits, foods, chants, lessons, tonsures, etc., and thus God’s Law went the way of faith, both being blotted out and forgotten, so that, henceforth, to be perfect and to live according to the counsels means to wear a black, white, grey or coloured cowl, to bawl in church, wear a tonsure and to abstain from eggs, meat, butter, etc.”[177]In the heat of his excitement he even goes so far as to deny the necessity of any service in the churches, because God demands only the praise and thanks of the heart, and “this may be given ... equally well in the home, in the field, or anywhere else.” “If they should force any other service upon you, know that it is error and deception; just as hitherto the world has been crazy, with its houses, churches and monasteries set aside for the worship of God, and its vestments of gold and silk, etc. ... which expenditure had better been used to help our neighbour, if it was really meant for God.”[178]It was of course impossible for him to vindicate in the long run so radical a standpoint concerning the churches, and, elsewhere, he allows people their own way on the question of liturgical vestments and other matters connected with worship.4. The good works which are performed where there is no “faith” amount to sin. This strangely unethical assertion Luther is fond of repeating in so extravagant a form as can only be explained psychologically by the utter blindness of his bias in favour of the “fides specialis” by him discovered. True morality belongs solely to those who have been justified after his own fashion, and no others have the slightest right to credit themselves with anything of the sort.When, in 1528, in his “Great Confession” he expounded his “belief bit by bit,” declaring that he had “most diligently weighed all these articles” as in the presence of death and judgment, he there wrote: “Herewith I reject and condemn as rank error every doctrine that exalts our free-will, which is directly opposed to the help and grace of our Saviour Jesus Christ. For seeing, that, outside of Christ, death and sin are our masters and the devil our God and sovereign, there can be no power or might, no wit or understanding whereby we could make ourselves fit for, or could even strive after, righteousness and life, but on the contrary we must remain blind and captive, slaves of sin and the devil, and must do what pleases them and runs counter to God and His Commandments.”[179]Even the most pious of the Papists, he goes on to say, since they lack Christ and the “Faith,” have “merely a great semblance of holiness,” and although “there seem to be many good works” among them, “yet all is lost”; chastity, poverty and obedience as practised in the convents is nothing but “blasphemous holiness,” and “what is horrible is that thereby they refuse Christ’s help and grace.”[180]This, his favourite idea, finds its full expression in his learned Latin Commentary on Galatians (1535): “In the man who does not believe in Christ not only are all sins mortal, but even his good works are sins”;[181]for the benefit of the people he enunciates the same in his Church-Postils. “The works performed without faith are sins ... for such works of ours are soiled and foul in God’s eyes, nay, He looks on them with horror and loathing.” As a matter of course he thinks that God looks upon concupiscence as sin, even in its permissible manifestations, e.g. in the “opus conjugalis.” Amongst the heathen even virtues such as patriotism, continence, justice and courage in which, owing to the divine impulses (“divini motus”), they may shine, are tainted by the presence in them of original sin (“in ipsis heroicis virtutibus depravata”).[182]As to whether such men were saved, Luther refuses to say anything definite; he holds fast to the text that without faith it is impossible to please God. Only those who, in the days of Noe, did not believe may, so he declares, be saved in accordance with his reading of 1 Peter iii. 19 by Christ’s preaching of salvation on the occasion of His descent into hell. He is also disposed to include among those saved by this supposed course of sermons delivered “in inferis,” such fine men of every nation as Scipio, Fabius and others of their like.[183]In general, however, the following holds good: Before “faith and grace” are infused into the heart “by the Spirit alone,” “as the work of God which He works in us”—everything inman is the “work of the Law, of no value for justification, but unholy and opposed to God owing to the unbelief in which it is performed.”[184]Annulment of the Supernatural and Abasement of the Natural OrderFrom the above statements it is clear that Luther, in doing away with the distinction between the natural and supernatural order, also did away with the olden doctrine of virtue, and without setting up anything positive in its place. He admits no naturally good action different from that performed “by faith and grace”; no such thing exists as a natural, moral virtue of justice. This opinion is closely bound up with his whole warfare on man’s natural character and endowments in respect of what is good. Moreover, what he terms the state of grace is not the supernatural state the Church had always understood, but an outward imputation by God; it is indeed God’s goodness towards man, but no new vital principle thanks to which we act justly.[185]Not only does he deny the distinction between natural and supernatural goodness, essential as it is for forming an ethical estimate of man, but he practically destroys both the natural and supernatural order. Even in other points of Luther’s doctrine we can notice the abrogation of the fundamental difference between the two orders; for instance in his view of Adam’s original state, which, according to him, was a natural not a supernatural one, “no gift,” as he says, “apart from man’s nature, and bestowed on him from without, but a natural righteousness so that it came natural to him to love God [as he did], to believe in Him and to acknowledge Him.”[186]It is, however, in the moral domain that this peculiarity of his new theology comes out most glaringly. Owing to his way of proceeding and the heat of his polemics he seems never to have become fully conscious of how far-reaching the consequences were of hisdestruction of all distinction between the natural and the supernatural order.Natural morality, viz. that to which man attains by means of his unaided powers, appears to him simply an invention of the pagan Aristotle. He rounds on all the theologians of his day for having swallowed so dangerous an error in their Aristotelian schools to the manifest detriment of the divine teaching. This he does, for instance, at the commencement of his recently published Commentary on Romans. He calls it a “righteousness of the philosophers and lawyers” in itself utterly worthless.[187]A year later, in his manuscript Commentary on Hebrews, he has already reached the opinion, that, “the virtues of all the philosophers, nay, of all men, whether they be lawyers or theologians, have only a semblance of virtue, but in reality are vices (‘vitia’).”[188]But what would be quite incomprehensible, had he actually read the scholastic theologians whose “civil, Aristotelian doctrine of justice” he was so constantly attacking, is, that he charges them with having stopped short at this natural justice and with not having taught anything higher; this higher justice was what he himself had brought to light, this was the “Scriptural justice which depended more on the Divine imputation than on the nature of things,”[189]and was not acquired by deeds but bestowed by God. The fact is, however, that the Schoolmen did not rest content merely with natural justice, but insist that true justice is something higher, supernatural and only to be attained to with the help of grace; it is only in some few later theologians with whom Luther may possibly have been acquainted, that this truth fails to find clear expression. Thomas of Aquin, for instance, distinguishes between the civil virtue of justice and the justice infused in the act of justification. He says expressly: “A man may be termed just in two ways, on account of civil [natural] justice and on account of infused justice. Civil justice is attained to without the grace which comes to the assistance of the natural powers, but infused justice is the work of grace. Neither the one nor the other, however, consists in the mere doing ofwhat is good, for not everyone who does what is good is just, but only he who does it as do the just.”[190]With regard to supernatural (infused) justice, the Church’s representatives, quite differently from Luther, had taught that man by his natural powers could only attain to God as the Author of nature but not to God as He is in Himself, i.e. to God as He has revealed and will communicate Himself in heaven; it is infused, sanctifying grace alone that places us in a higher order than that of nature and raises us to the status of being children of God; in it we love God, by virtue of the “habit” of love bestowed upon us, as He is in Himself, i.e. as He wills to be loved; sanctifying grace it is that brings us into a true relation with our supernatural and final end, viz. the vision of God in heaven, in which sense it may be called a vital principle infused into the soul.[191]This language Luther either did not or would not understand. On this point particularly he had to suffer for his ignorance of the better class of theologians. He first embraced Occam’s hypothesis of thepossibilityof an imputation of justice, and then, going further along the wrong road, he changed this possibility into a reality; soon, owing to his belief in the entire corruption of the natural man, imputed justice became, to him, the only justice. In this way he deprived theology of supernatural as well as of natural justice; for imputed justice is really no justice at all, but merely an alien one. “With Luther we have the end of the supernatural. His basic view, of justifying faith as the work of God in us performed without our co-operation, bears indeed a semblance of the supernatural.... But the supernatural is ever something alien.”[192]What he had in his mind was always a foreign righteousness produced, not by man’s own works and acts performed under the help of grace, but only by the work of another; this we are told by Luther in so many words: “True and real piety which is of worth in God’s sight consists in alien works and not in our own.”[193]“If we wish to work for God we must not approach Him with our own works but with foreign ones.” “These are the works of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” “All that He has is ours.... I may attribute to myself all His works as though I had actually done them, if only I believe in Christ.... Our workswill not suffice, all our powers together are too weak to resist even the smallest sin.... Hence when the Law comes and accuses you of not having kept it, send it to Christ and say: There is the Man who has fulfilled it, to Him I cling, He has fulfilled it for me and bestowed His fulfilment of it upon me; then the Law will have to hold its tongue.”[194]The Book of Concord on the Curtailment of Free-Will.When orthodox Lutheranism gained a local and temporary victory in 1580 with the so-called Book of Concord, the authors of the book deplored the inferences drawn from Luther’s moral teaching, particularly from his denial of free-will, the dangers of which had already long been apparent.“It is not unknown to us,” they say, “that this holy doctrine of the malice and impotence of free-will, the doctrine whereby our conversion and regeneration is ascribed solely to God and in no way to our own powers, has been godlessly, shamelessly and hatefully abused.... Many are becoming immoral and savage and neglectful of all pious exercises; they say: ‘Since we cannot turn to God of our own natural powers, let us remain hostile to God or wait until He converts us by force and against our will.’” “It is true that they possess no power to act in spiritual things, and that the whole business of conversion is merely the work of the Holy Ghost. And thus they refuse to listen to the Word of God, or to study it, or to receive the Sacraments; they prefer to wait until God infuses His gifts into them directly from above, and until they feel and are certain by inward experience that they have been converted by God.”“Others,” they continue, speaking of the case as a possibility and not as a sad reality, “may possibly give themselves up to sad and dangerous doubts as to whether they have been predestined by God to heaven, and as to whether God will really work His gifts in them by the help of the Holy Ghost. Being weak and troubled in mind they do not grasp aright our pious doctrine of free-will, and they are confirmed in their doubts by the fact that they do not find within themselves any firm and ardent faith or hearty devotion to God, but only weakness, misery and fear.” The authors then proceed to deal with the widespread fear of predestination to hell.[195]We have as it were a sad monument set up to the morality of the enslaved will and the doctrine of imputation, when the Book of Concord, in spite of the sad results it has justadmitted, goes on in the same chapter to insist that all Luther’s principles should be preserved intact. “This matter Dr. Luther settled most excellently and thoroughly in his ‘De servo arbitrio’ against Erasmus, where he showed this opinion to be pious and irrefutable. Later on he repeated and further explained the same doctrine in his splendid Commentary on Genesis, particularly in his exposition of ch. xxvi. There, too, he made other matters clear—e.g. the doctrine of the ‘absoluta necessitas’—defended them against the objections of Erasmus and, by his pious explanations, set them above all evil insinuations and misrepresentations. All of which we here corroborate and commend to the diligent study of all.”[196]Melanchthon’s and his school’s modifications of these extreme doctrines are here sharply repudiated, though Luther himself “never spoke with open disapproval” of Melanchthon’s Synergism.[197]“From our doctrinal standpoint,” we there read, “it is plain that the teaching of the Synergists is false, who allege that man in spiritual things is notaltogetherdead to what is good but merely badly wounded andhalfdead.... They teach wrongly, that after the Holy Spirit has given us, through the Evangel, grace, forgiveness and salvation, then free-will is able to meet God by its natural powers and ... co-operate with the Holy Ghost. In reality the ability to lay hold upon grace (‘facultas applicandi se ad gratiam’) is solely due to the working of the Holy Ghost.”What then is man to do, and how are the consequences described above to be obviated, on the one hand libertinism, on the other fear of predestination to hell?Man still possesses a certain freedom, so the Book of Concord teaches, e.g. “to be present or not at the Church’s assemblies, to listen or close his ears to the Word of God.”“The preaching of the Word of God is however the tool whereby the Holy Ghost seeks to effect man’s conversion and to make him ready to will and to work (‘in ipsis et velle et perficere operari vult’).” “Man is free to open his ears to the Word of God or to read it even when not yet converted to God or born again. In some way or other man still has free-will in such outward things even since Adam’s Fall.” Hence, by the Word, “bythe preaching and contemplation of the sweet Evangel of the forgiveness of sins, the spark of ‘faith’ is enkindled in his heart.”[198]“Although all effort without the power and work of the Holy Spirit is worthless, yet neither the preacher nor the hearer must doubt of this grace or work of the Holy Spirit,” so long as the preacher proceeds according to God’s will and command and “the hearer listens earnestly and diligently and dwells on what he hears.” We are not to judge of the working of the Holy Ghost by our feelings, but “agreeably with the promises of God’s Word.” We must hold that “the Word preached is the organ of the Holy Ghost whereby He truly works and acts in our hearts.”[199]With the help of this queer, misty doctrine which, as we may notice, makes of preaching a sort of Sacrament working “ex opere operato,” Luther’s followers attempted to construct a system out of their master’s varying and often so arbitrary statements. At any rate they upheld his denial of any natural order of morality distinct from the order of grace. It was to remain true that man, “previous to conversion, possesses indeed an understanding, but not of divine things, and a will, though not for anything good and wholesome.” In this respect man stands far below even a stock or stone, because he resists the Word and Will of God (which they cannot do) until God raises him up from the death of sin, enlightens and creates him anew.[200]Nevertheless several theses, undoubtedly Luther’s own, are here glossed over or quietly bettered. If, for instance, according to Luther everything takes place of absolute necessity (a fact to which the Formula of Concord draws attention), if man, even in the natural acts of the mind, is bound by what is fore-ordained,[201]then even the listening to a sermon and the dwelling on it cannot be matters of real freedom. Moreover the man troubled with fears on predestination, is comforted by the well-known Bible texts, which teach that it is the Will of God that all should be saved; whilst nothing is said of Luther’s doctrine that it is only the revealed God who speaks thus, whereas the hidden God acts quite otherwise, plans and carries out the very opposite, “damns even those who have not deserved it—and, yet, does not thereby become unjust.”[202]Reference is made to Adam’s Fall, whereby nature has been depraved; but nothing is said of Luther’s view that Adam himself simply could not avoid falling because God did not then “bestow on him the spirit of obedience.”[203]But, though these things are passed over in silence, due prominence is given to those ideas of Luther’s of which the result is the destruction of all moral order, natural as well assupernatural. According to the Formula of Concord the natural order was shattered by Adam’s Fall; as for the supernatural order it is replaced by the alien, mechanical order of imputation.Christianity merely Inward. The Church Sundered from the WorldAmong the things which Luther did to the detriment of the moral principle must be numbered his merciless tearing asunder of spiritual and temporal, of Christian and secular life.The olden Church sought to permeate the world with the religious spirit. Luther’s trend was in a great measure towards making the secular state and its office altogether independent; this, indeed, the more up-to-date sort of ethics is disposed to reckon among his greatest achievements. Luther even went so far as to seek to erect into a regular system this inward, necessary opposition of world and Church. Of this we have a plain example in certain of his instructions to the authorities.[204]Whereas the Church had exhorted people in power to temper with Christianity their administration of civil justice and their use of physical force—urging that the sovereign was a Christian not merely in his private but also in his official capacity,—Luther tells the ruler: The Kingdom of Christ wholly belongs to the order of grace, but the kingdom of the world and worldly life belong to the order of the Law; the two kingdoms are of a different species and belong to different worlds. To the one you belong as a Christian, to the other as a man and a ruler. Christ has nothing to do with the regulations of worldly life, but leaves them to the world; earthly life stands in no need of being outwardly hallowed by the Church.[205]Certain statements to a different effect will be considered elsewhere.

In 1537 in a Disputation on June 1 he denounced the thesis, “Good works are necessary for salvation.”[142]In the same way, in a sermon of 1535, he asserted that it was by no means necessary for us to perform good works “in order to blot out sin, to overcome death and win heaven, but merely for the profit and assistance of our neighbour.” “Our works,” he there says, “can only shape what concerns our temporal life and being”; higher than this they cannot rise.[143]Yet, when thus degrading works, he had again and again to struggle within his own heart against the faith of the ancient Church concerning the merit of good deeds. Especially was this the case when he considered the “texts which demand a good life on account of the eternal reward,”[144]for instance, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments” (Mt. xix. 17), or “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven” (ib., vi. 20). With them he deals in a sermon of 1522. The eternal reward, he here says, follows the works because it is a result of the faith whichitself is the cause of the works. But the believer must not “look to the reward,” or trouble about it. Why then does God promise a reward?—In order that “all may know what the natural result of a good life will be.” Yet he also admits a certain anxiety on the part of the pious Christian to be certain of his reward, and the favourable effect of such a certainty on the good man’s will.[145]Here he exhorts his listeners; “that you be content to know and be assured that this indeed will be the result,” whilst in another sermon of that same year he describes as follows the promise of eternal life as the reward of works: “It is an incentive and inducement that makes us zealous in piety and in the service and praise of God.... That God should guide us so kindly makes us esteem the more His Fatherly Will and the Mercy of Christ”—but on no account “must we be good as if for the sake of the reward.”[146]He also quotes incidentally Mt. xix. 29, where our Lord says that all who leave home, brethren, etc. for His name’s sake “shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting”; also Heb. x. 35 concerning the “great reward” that awaits those who lose not their confidence. Such statements, he refuses, however, to see referred to salvation, which will be the equal portion of all true believers, but, in his arbitrary fashion, explains them as denoting some extra ornament of glory.[147]“Good works will be present wherever faith is.” As this supposition, a favourite one with Luther from early days, fails to verify itself in practice, and as the expedients he proposed to meet the new difficulty are scattered throughout his writings, an admirer in recent times ventured to sum up these elements into a system under the following headings: “Faulty morality is a proof of a faulty faith.” “The fact of morality being present proves the presence of faith.” “Moral indolence induces loss of faith.” “Zeal for morality causes faith to increase.”[148]The true explanation would therefore seem always to be in the assumption of a want of “faith,” i.e. of a lack of that absolute certainty of personal salvation which should regulate all religious life,[149]in other words moral failings should be held to prove the absence of this saving certainty.Seen in this light good works are of importance, as the outward demonstration that a person possesses the “fides specialis,” and in this wise alone are they a guarantee of everlasting happiness. They prove “before the world and before his own conscience” that a Christian really has the “faith.” This is what Luther expressly teaches in his Church-Postils: “Therefore hold fast to this, that a man who is inwardly a Christian is justified before God solely by faith and without any works; but outwardly and publicly, before the people and to himself, he is justified by works, i.e. he becomes known to others as, and certain in himselfthat, he is inwardly just, believing and pious. Thus you may term one an open or outward justification and the other an inward justification.”[150]Hence Luther’s certainty of salvation, however strong it may be, still requires to be tested by something else as to whether it is the true “faith” deserving of God’s compassion; for “it is quite possible for a man never to doubt God’s mercy towards him though all the while he does not really possess it”;[151]according to Luther, namely, there is such a thing as a fictitious faith.In Luther’s opinion “faith” was a grasping of something actually there. Hence if God’s mercy was not there, then neither was there any “faith.” Accordingly, an “unwarrantable assurance of salvation” was not at all impossible, and works served as a means of detecting it. Walther, to whom we owe our summary, does not, it is true, prove the existence of such a state of “unwarrantable assurance” by any direct quotation from Luther’s writings, and, indeed, it might be difficult to find any definite statement to this effect, seeing that Luther was chary of speaking of any failure in the personal certainty of salvation, on which alone, exclusive of works, he based the whole work of justification.And yet, as Luther himself frequently says, moods and feelings are no guarantee of true faith; what is required are the works, which, like good fruit, always spring from a good tree.—So strongly, in spite of all his predilection for faith alone, is he impelled again and again to have recourse to works. In many passages they tend to become something more than mere signs confirmatory of faith. We need not examine here how far his statements concerning faith and works are consistent, and to what extent the sane Catholic teaching continued to influence him.What is remarkable, however, is, that, in his commendable efforts to urge the performance of works in order to curtail the pernicious results of his doctrine, Luther comes to attribute a saving action to “faith,” only on condition that, out of love of God, we “strive” against sin. In one of his last sermons at Eisleben he tells his hearers: Sins are forgiven by faith and “are not imputedso far as you set yourself to fight against them, and learn to repeat the Our Father diligently ... and to grow in strength as you grow in age; and you must be at pains to exercise your faith by resisting the sins that remain in you ... in short, you must become stronger, humbler, more patient and believe more firmly.”[152]The conditional “so far as” furnishes a key which has to be used in many other passages where works are demanded as well as faith. Faith, there, is real and wholesome “in so far as” it produces works: “For we too admit it and have always taught it, better and more forcibly than they [the Papists], that we must both preach and perform works, and that they must follow the faith, and, that, where they do not follow there the faith is not as it should be.”[153]Nor does he merely say that works of charity must follow eventually, but that charity must be infused by the Spirit of God together with faith of which it is the fruit.“For though faith makes us righteous and pure, yet it cannot be without love, and the Spirit must infuse love together with faith. In short, where there is true faith, there the Holy Ghost is also present, and where the Holy Ghost is, there love and all good things must also be.... Love is a consequence or fruit of the Spirit which comes to us wrapped up in the faith.”[154]“Charity is so closely bound up [with faith and hope] that it can never be parted from faith where this is true faith, and as little as there can be fire without heat and smoke, so little can faith exist without charity.”[155]From gratitude (as we have heard him state above, p. 26) the man who is assured of salvation must be “well disposed towards God and keep His commandments.” But if he be “sweetly disposed towards God” this must “show itself in all charity.”

In 1537 in a Disputation on June 1 he denounced the thesis, “Good works are necessary for salvation.”[142]In the same way, in a sermon of 1535, he asserted that it was by no means necessary for us to perform good works “in order to blot out sin, to overcome death and win heaven, but merely for the profit and assistance of our neighbour.” “Our works,” he there says, “can only shape what concerns our temporal life and being”; higher than this they cannot rise.[143]

Yet, when thus degrading works, he had again and again to struggle within his own heart against the faith of the ancient Church concerning the merit of good deeds. Especially was this the case when he considered the “texts which demand a good life on account of the eternal reward,”[144]for instance, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments” (Mt. xix. 17), or “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven” (ib., vi. 20). With them he deals in a sermon of 1522. The eternal reward, he here says, follows the works because it is a result of the faith whichitself is the cause of the works. But the believer must not “look to the reward,” or trouble about it. Why then does God promise a reward?—In order that “all may know what the natural result of a good life will be.” Yet he also admits a certain anxiety on the part of the pious Christian to be certain of his reward, and the favourable effect of such a certainty on the good man’s will.[145]Here he exhorts his listeners; “that you be content to know and be assured that this indeed will be the result,” whilst in another sermon of that same year he describes as follows the promise of eternal life as the reward of works: “It is an incentive and inducement that makes us zealous in piety and in the service and praise of God.... That God should guide us so kindly makes us esteem the more His Fatherly Will and the Mercy of Christ”—but on no account “must we be good as if for the sake of the reward.”[146]He also quotes incidentally Mt. xix. 29, where our Lord says that all who leave home, brethren, etc. for His name’s sake “shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting”; also Heb. x. 35 concerning the “great reward” that awaits those who lose not their confidence. Such statements, he refuses, however, to see referred to salvation, which will be the equal portion of all true believers, but, in his arbitrary fashion, explains them as denoting some extra ornament of glory.[147]

“Good works will be present wherever faith is.” As this supposition, a favourite one with Luther from early days, fails to verify itself in practice, and as the expedients he proposed to meet the new difficulty are scattered throughout his writings, an admirer in recent times ventured to sum up these elements into a system under the following headings: “Faulty morality is a proof of a faulty faith.” “The fact of morality being present proves the presence of faith.” “Moral indolence induces loss of faith.” “Zeal for morality causes faith to increase.”[148]The true explanation would therefore seem always to be in the assumption of a want of “faith,” i.e. of a lack of that absolute certainty of personal salvation which should regulate all religious life,[149]in other words moral failings should be held to prove the absence of this saving certainty.

Seen in this light good works are of importance, as the outward demonstration that a person possesses the “fides specialis,” and in this wise alone are they a guarantee of everlasting happiness. They prove “before the world and before his own conscience” that a Christian really has the “faith.” This is what Luther expressly teaches in his Church-Postils: “Therefore hold fast to this, that a man who is inwardly a Christian is justified before God solely by faith and without any works; but outwardly and publicly, before the people and to himself, he is justified by works, i.e. he becomes known to others as, and certain in himselfthat, he is inwardly just, believing and pious. Thus you may term one an open or outward justification and the other an inward justification.”[150]Hence Luther’s certainty of salvation, however strong it may be, still requires to be tested by something else as to whether it is the true “faith” deserving of God’s compassion; for “it is quite possible for a man never to doubt God’s mercy towards him though all the while he does not really possess it”;[151]according to Luther, namely, there is such a thing as a fictitious faith.

In Luther’s opinion “faith” was a grasping of something actually there. Hence if God’s mercy was not there, then neither was there any “faith.” Accordingly, an “unwarrantable assurance of salvation” was not at all impossible, and works served as a means of detecting it. Walther, to whom we owe our summary, does not, it is true, prove the existence of such a state of “unwarrantable assurance” by any direct quotation from Luther’s writings, and, indeed, it might be difficult to find any definite statement to this effect, seeing that Luther was chary of speaking of any failure in the personal certainty of salvation, on which alone, exclusive of works, he based the whole work of justification.

And yet, as Luther himself frequently says, moods and feelings are no guarantee of true faith; what is required are the works, which, like good fruit, always spring from a good tree.—So strongly, in spite of all his predilection for faith alone, is he impelled again and again to have recourse to works. In many passages they tend to become something more than mere signs confirmatory of faith. We need not examine here how far his statements concerning faith and works are consistent, and to what extent the sane Catholic teaching continued to influence him.

What is remarkable, however, is, that, in his commendable efforts to urge the performance of works in order to curtail the pernicious results of his doctrine, Luther comes to attribute a saving action to “faith,” only on condition that, out of love of God, we “strive” against sin. In one of his last sermons at Eisleben he tells his hearers: Sins are forgiven by faith and “are not imputedso far as you set yourself to fight against them, and learn to repeat the Our Father diligently ... and to grow in strength as you grow in age; and you must be at pains to exercise your faith by resisting the sins that remain in you ... in short, you must become stronger, humbler, more patient and believe more firmly.”[152]The conditional “so far as” furnishes a key which has to be used in many other passages where works are demanded as well as faith. Faith, there, is real and wholesome “in so far as” it produces works: “For we too admit it and have always taught it, better and more forcibly than they [the Papists], that we must both preach and perform works, and that they must follow the faith, and, that, where they do not follow there the faith is not as it should be.”[153]

Nor does he merely say that works of charity must follow eventually, but that charity must be infused by the Spirit of God together with faith of which it is the fruit.

“For though faith makes us righteous and pure, yet it cannot be without love, and the Spirit must infuse love together with faith. In short, where there is true faith, there the Holy Ghost is also present, and where the Holy Ghost is, there love and all good things must also be.... Love is a consequence or fruit of the Spirit which comes to us wrapped up in the faith.”[154]“Charity is so closely bound up [with faith and hope] that it can never be parted from faith where this is true faith, and as little as there can be fire without heat and smoke, so little can faith exist without charity.”[155]From gratitude (as we have heard him state above, p. 26) the man who is assured of salvation must be “well disposed towards God and keep His commandments.” But if he be “sweetly disposed towards God” this must “show itself in all charity.”

Taking the words at their face value we might find in these and similar statements on charity something reminiscent of the Catholic doctrine of a faith working through love.[156]But though this is what Luther should logically have arrived at, he was in reality always kept far from it by his idea both of faith and of imputation. It should be noted that he was fond of taking shelter behind the assertion, that his “faith” also included, or was accompanied by, charity. He was obliged to do this in self-defence against the objections of certain Evangelicals—who rushed to conclusions he would not accept—or of Catholic opponents. Indeed, in order to pacify the doubters, he even went so far as to say, that love preceded the “faith” he taught, and that “faith” itself was simply a work like any other work done for the fulfilling of the commandments.

It was in this sense that he wrote in the “Sermon von den guten Werken,” composed at the instance of his prudent friend Spalatin for the Duke of Saxony: “Such trust and faith brings with it charity and hope; indeed, if we look at the matter aright, charity comes first, or at least simultaneously with faith. For I should not care to trust God unless I believed He would be kindly and gracious to me, whereby I am well disposed towards Him, trust Him heartily and perform all that is good in His sight.” In the same connection he characterises “faith” as a “work of the first Commandment,” and as a “true keeping of that command,” and as the “first, topmost and best work from which all others flow.”[157]It might seem, though this is but apparent, that he had actually come to acknowledge the reality and merit of man’s works, in the teeth of his denial of free-will and of the possibility of meriting.Of charity as involved in faith he wrote in a similar strain in 1519 to Johann Silvius Egranus, who at that time still belonged to his party, but was already troubled with scruples concerning the small regard shown for ethical motives and the undue stress laid on faith alone: “I do not separate justifying faith from charity,” Luther told him, “on the contrary we believe because God, in Whom we believe, pleases us and is loved by us.” To him all this was quite clear and plain, but the new-comers who had busied themselves with faith, hope and charity “understood not one of the three.”[158]We may recall how the enquiring mind of Egranus was by no means entirely satisfied by this explanation. In 1534 he published a bitter attack on the Lutheran doctrine of works, though he never returned more than half-way from Lutheranism to the olden Church.[159]Many, like Silvius Egranus, who at the outset had been won over to the new religion, took fright when they saw that, owing to the preference shown to faith (i.e. the purely personal assurance of salvation), the ethical principles regarding Christian perfection and man’s aim in life, received but scant consideration.

It was in this sense that he wrote in the “Sermon von den guten Werken,” composed at the instance of his prudent friend Spalatin for the Duke of Saxony: “Such trust and faith brings with it charity and hope; indeed, if we look at the matter aright, charity comes first, or at least simultaneously with faith. For I should not care to trust God unless I believed He would be kindly and gracious to me, whereby I am well disposed towards Him, trust Him heartily and perform all that is good in His sight.” In the same connection he characterises “faith” as a “work of the first Commandment,” and as a “true keeping of that command,” and as the “first, topmost and best work from which all others flow.”[157]It might seem, though this is but apparent, that he had actually come to acknowledge the reality and merit of man’s works, in the teeth of his denial of free-will and of the possibility of meriting.

Of charity as involved in faith he wrote in a similar strain in 1519 to Johann Silvius Egranus, who at that time still belonged to his party, but was already troubled with scruples concerning the small regard shown for ethical motives and the undue stress laid on faith alone: “I do not separate justifying faith from charity,” Luther told him, “on the contrary we believe because God, in Whom we believe, pleases us and is loved by us.” To him all this was quite clear and plain, but the new-comers who had busied themselves with faith, hope and charity “understood not one of the three.”[158]

We may recall how the enquiring mind of Egranus was by no means entirely satisfied by this explanation. In 1534 he published a bitter attack on the Lutheran doctrine of works, though he never returned more than half-way from Lutheranism to the olden Church.[159]

Many, like Silvius Egranus, who at the outset had been won over to the new religion, took fright when they saw that, owing to the preference shown to faith (i.e. the purely personal assurance of salvation), the ethical principles regarding Christian perfection and man’s aim in life, received but scant consideration.

Many truly saw therein an alarming abasement of the moral standard and accordingly returned to the doctrine of their fathers. As the ideal to be aimed at throughout life the Church had set up before them progress in the love of God, encouraging them to put this love in practice by fidelity to the duties of their calling and by a humble and confident trust in God’s Fatherly promises rather than in any perilous “fides specialis.”

In previous ages Christian perfection had rightly been thought to consist in the development of the moral virtues, particularlyof charity, the queen of all the others. Now, however, Luther represented “the consoling faith in the forgiveness of sins as the sum of Christian perfection.”[160]According to him the “real essence of personal Christianity lies in the confidence of the justified sinner that he shares the paternal love of the Almighty of which he has been assured by the work and person of Jesus Christ.” In this sense alone can he be said to have “rediscovered Christianity” as a religion. We are told that “the essence of Lutheran Christianity is to be found in Luther’s reduction of practical Christianity to the doctrine of salvation.”[161]He “altered the ideal of religious perfection as no other Christian before his day had ever done.” The “revulsion” in moral ideals which this necessarily involved spelt “a huge decline.”[162]George Wicel, who, after having long been an adherent of Lutheranism, broke away from it in consequence of the moral results referred to, wrote, in 1533, with much bitterness in the defence he addressed to Justus Jonas: “Amongst you one hears of nothing but of remitting and forgiving; you don’t seem to see that your seductions sow more sins than ever you can take away. Your people, it is true, are so constituted that they will only hear of the forgiving and never of the retaining of sin (John xx. 23); evidently they stand more in need of being loosed than of being bound. Ah, you comfortable theologians! You are indeed sharp-sighted enough in all this business, for were you to bind as often as you loose, you, the ringleaders of the party, would soon find yourselves all alone with your faith, and might then withdraw into some hole to weep for the loss of your authority and congregation.” “Ah, you rascals, what a fine Evangelical mode of life have you wrought with your preachment on grace.”[163]

In previous ages Christian perfection had rightly been thought to consist in the development of the moral virtues, particularlyof charity, the queen of all the others. Now, however, Luther represented “the consoling faith in the forgiveness of sins as the sum of Christian perfection.”[160]According to him the “real essence of personal Christianity lies in the confidence of the justified sinner that he shares the paternal love of the Almighty of which he has been assured by the work and person of Jesus Christ.” In this sense alone can he be said to have “rediscovered Christianity” as a religion. We are told that “the essence of Lutheran Christianity is to be found in Luther’s reduction of practical Christianity to the doctrine of salvation.”[161]He “altered the ideal of religious perfection as no other Christian before his day had ever done.” The “revulsion” in moral ideals which this necessarily involved spelt “a huge decline.”[162]

George Wicel, who, after having long been an adherent of Lutheranism, broke away from it in consequence of the moral results referred to, wrote, in 1533, with much bitterness in the defence he addressed to Justus Jonas: “Amongst you one hears of nothing but of remitting and forgiving; you don’t seem to see that your seductions sow more sins than ever you can take away. Your people, it is true, are so constituted that they will only hear of the forgiving and never of the retaining of sin (John xx. 23); evidently they stand more in need of being loosed than of being bound. Ah, you comfortable theologians! You are indeed sharp-sighted enough in all this business, for were you to bind as often as you loose, you, the ringleaders of the party, would soon find yourselves all alone with your faith, and might then withdraw into some hole to weep for the loss of your authority and congregation.” “Ah, you rascals, what a fine Evangelical mode of life have you wrought with your preachment on grace.”[163]

To follow up the above statement emanating from a Protestant source, concerning the “huge decline” in moral ideals and practical Christianity involved in Luther’s work, we shall go on to consider how greatly he did in point of fact narrow and restrict ethical effort in comparison with what was required by the ethics of earlier days. In so doing he was following the psychological impulse discernible even in the first beginnings of his dislike for the austerity of his Order and the precepts of the Church.

1. The only works of obligation in the service of God are faith, praise and thanksgiving. God, he says, demands only our faith, our praise and our gratitude. Of our works He has no need.[164]He restricts our “deeds towards God” to the praise-offering or thank-offering for the good received, and to the prayer-offering “or Our Father, against the evil and badness we would wish to be rid of.”[165]This service is the duty of each individual Christian and is practised in common in Divine worship. The latter is fixed and controlled with the tacit consent of the congregation by the ministers who represent the people; in this we find the trace of Luther’s innate aversion to any law or obligation which leads him to avoid anything savouring of legislative action.[166]

In the preface to his instructions to the Visitors in 1528 he declares, for instance, that the rules laid down were not meant to “found new Papal Decretals”; they were rather to be taken as a “history of and witness to our faith” and not as “strict commands.”[167]This well expresses his antipathy to the visible Catholic Church, her hierarchy and her so-called man-made ordinances for public worship.

Since, to his mind, it is impossible to offer God anything but love, thanksgiving and prayer, it follows that, firstly, the Eucharistic Sacrifice falls, and, with it, all the sacrifices made to the greater glory of God by self-denial and abnegation, obedience or bodily penances, together with all those works—practised in imitation of Christ by noble souls—done over and above the bounden duties of each one’s calling. He held that it was wrong to say of such sacrifices, made by contrite and loving hearts, that they were both to God’s glory and to our own advantage, or to endeavour to justify them by arguing that: Whoever does not do great things for God must expect small recompense. Among the things which fell before him were: vows, processions, pilgrimages, veneration of relics and of the Saints, ecclesiasticalblessings and sacramentals, not to speak of holy days and prescribed fasts. With good reason can one speak of a “huge decline.”

He justifies as follows his radical opposition to the Catholic forms of Divine worship: “The only good we can do in God’s service is to praise and thank Him, in which in fact the only true worship of God consists.... If any other worship of God be proposed to you, know that it is error and deception.”[168]“It is a rank scandal that the Papists should encourage people to toil for God with works so as thereby to expiate their sins and secure grace.... If you wish to believe aright and really to lay hold on Christ, you must discard all works whereby you may think you labour for God; all such are nothing but scandals leading you away from Christ and from God; in God’s sight no work is of any value except Christ’s own; this you must leave to toil for you in God’s sight; you yourself must perform no other work for Him than to believe that Christ does His work for you.”[169]

In the same passage he attempts to vindicate this species of Quietism with the help of some recollections from his own earlier career, viz. by the mystic principle which had at one time ruled him: “You must be blind and lame, deaf and dead, poor and leprous, or else you will be scandalised in Christ. This is what it means to know Christ aright and to accept Him; this is to believe as befits a true Christian.”[170]

2. “All other works, apart from faith, must be directed towards our neighbour.”[171]As we know, besides that faith, gratitude and love which are God’s due, Luther admits no good works but those of charity towards our neighbour. By our faith we give to God all that He asks of us. “After this, think only of doing for your neighbour what Christ has done for you, and let all your works and all your life go to the service of your neighbour.”[172]—God, he says elsewhere, asks only for our thank-offering; “look upon Me as a Gracious God and I am content”; “thereafter serve your neighbour, freely and for nothing.”[173]Good works in his eyes are only “good when they are profitable to others and not toyourself.” Indeed he goes so far as to assert: “If you find yourself performing a work for God, or for His Saints, or for yourself and not alone for your neighbour, know that the work is not good.”[174]The only explanation of such sentences, as already hinted, is to be found in his passionate polemics against the worship and the pious exercises of the Catholics. It is true that such practices were sullied at that time by certain blemishes, owing to the abuses rampant in the Church; yet the Catholic could confidently answer in self-defence in the words Luther proceeds to put on his lips: Such “works are spiritual and profitable to the soul of our neighbour, and God thereby is served and propitiated and His Grace obtained.”

Luther rudely retorts: “You lie in your throat; God is served not by works but by faith; faith must do everything that is to be done as between God and ourselves.” That the priests and monks should vaunt their religious exercises as spiritual treasures, he brands as a “Satanic lie.” “The works of the Papists such as organ-playing, chanting, vesting, ringing, smoking [incensation], sprinkling, pilgriming and fasting, etc., are doubtless fine and many, grand and long, broad and thick works, but about them there is nothing good, useful or profitable.”

3. “Know that there are no good works but such as God has commanded.” What, apart from faith, makes a work a good one is solely God’s express command. Luther, while finding fault with the self-chosen works of the Catholics, points to the Ten Commandments as summing up every good work willed by God. “There used to be ecclesiastical precepts which were to supersede the Decalogue.” “The commandments of the Church were invented and set up by men in addition to and beyond God’s Word. Luther therefore deals with the true worship of God in the light of the Ten Commandments.”[175]As for the Evangelical Counsels so solemnly enacted in the New Testament, viz. the striving after a perfection which is not of obligation, Luther, urged on by his theory that only what is actually commandedpartakes of the nature of a good work, came very near branding them as an invention of the Papists.

They have “made the Counsels twelve” in number,[176]he says, “and twist the Gospel as they please.” They have split the Gospel into two, into “Consilia et præcepta.” “Christ,” so he teaches, “gave only one Counsel in the whole of the Gospel, viz. that of chastity, which even a layman can preserve, assuming him to have the grace.” He sneers at the Pope and the Doctors because they had established not only a clerical order which should be superior to the laity, but also an order of the counsels the duty of whose members it was to portray the Evangelical perfection by the keeping of the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “By this the common Christian life and faith became like flat, sour beer; everyone rubbed his eyes, despised the commandments and ran after the counsels. And after a good while they at last discovered man-made ordinances in the shape of habits, foods, chants, lessons, tonsures, etc., and thus God’s Law went the way of faith, both being blotted out and forgotten, so that, henceforth, to be perfect and to live according to the counsels means to wear a black, white, grey or coloured cowl, to bawl in church, wear a tonsure and to abstain from eggs, meat, butter, etc.”[177]In the heat of his excitement he even goes so far as to deny the necessity of any service in the churches, because God demands only the praise and thanks of the heart, and “this may be given ... equally well in the home, in the field, or anywhere else.” “If they should force any other service upon you, know that it is error and deception; just as hitherto the world has been crazy, with its houses, churches and monasteries set aside for the worship of God, and its vestments of gold and silk, etc. ... which expenditure had better been used to help our neighbour, if it was really meant for God.”[178]It was of course impossible for him to vindicate in the long run so radical a standpoint concerning the churches, and, elsewhere, he allows people their own way on the question of liturgical vestments and other matters connected with worship.

They have “made the Counsels twelve” in number,[176]he says, “and twist the Gospel as they please.” They have split the Gospel into two, into “Consilia et præcepta.” “Christ,” so he teaches, “gave only one Counsel in the whole of the Gospel, viz. that of chastity, which even a layman can preserve, assuming him to have the grace.” He sneers at the Pope and the Doctors because they had established not only a clerical order which should be superior to the laity, but also an order of the counsels the duty of whose members it was to portray the Evangelical perfection by the keeping of the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “By this the common Christian life and faith became like flat, sour beer; everyone rubbed his eyes, despised the commandments and ran after the counsels. And after a good while they at last discovered man-made ordinances in the shape of habits, foods, chants, lessons, tonsures, etc., and thus God’s Law went the way of faith, both being blotted out and forgotten, so that, henceforth, to be perfect and to live according to the counsels means to wear a black, white, grey or coloured cowl, to bawl in church, wear a tonsure and to abstain from eggs, meat, butter, etc.”[177]

In the heat of his excitement he even goes so far as to deny the necessity of any service in the churches, because God demands only the praise and thanks of the heart, and “this may be given ... equally well in the home, in the field, or anywhere else.” “If they should force any other service upon you, know that it is error and deception; just as hitherto the world has been crazy, with its houses, churches and monasteries set aside for the worship of God, and its vestments of gold and silk, etc. ... which expenditure had better been used to help our neighbour, if it was really meant for God.”[178]

It was of course impossible for him to vindicate in the long run so radical a standpoint concerning the churches, and, elsewhere, he allows people their own way on the question of liturgical vestments and other matters connected with worship.

4. The good works which are performed where there is no “faith” amount to sin. This strangely unethical assertion Luther is fond of repeating in so extravagant a form as can only be explained psychologically by the utter blindness of his bias in favour of the “fides specialis” by him discovered. True morality belongs solely to those who have been justified after his own fashion, and no others have the slightest right to credit themselves with anything of the sort.

When, in 1528, in his “Great Confession” he expounded his “belief bit by bit,” declaring that he had “most diligently weighed all these articles” as in the presence of death and judgment, he there wrote: “Herewith I reject and condemn as rank error every doctrine that exalts our free-will, which is directly opposed to the help and grace of our Saviour Jesus Christ. For seeing, that, outside of Christ, death and sin are our masters and the devil our God and sovereign, there can be no power or might, no wit or understanding whereby we could make ourselves fit for, or could even strive after, righteousness and life, but on the contrary we must remain blind and captive, slaves of sin and the devil, and must do what pleases them and runs counter to God and His Commandments.”[179]Even the most pious of the Papists, he goes on to say, since they lack Christ and the “Faith,” have “merely a great semblance of holiness,” and although “there seem to be many good works” among them, “yet all is lost”; chastity, poverty and obedience as practised in the convents is nothing but “blasphemous holiness,” and “what is horrible is that thereby they refuse Christ’s help and grace.”[180]This, his favourite idea, finds its full expression in his learned Latin Commentary on Galatians (1535): “In the man who does not believe in Christ not only are all sins mortal, but even his good works are sins”;[181]for the benefit of the people he enunciates the same in his Church-Postils. “The works performed without faith are sins ... for such works of ours are soiled and foul in God’s eyes, nay, He looks on them with horror and loathing.” As a matter of course he thinks that God looks upon concupiscence as sin, even in its permissible manifestations, e.g. in the “opus conjugalis.” Amongst the heathen even virtues such as patriotism, continence, justice and courage in which, owing to the divine impulses (“divini motus”), they may shine, are tainted by the presence in them of original sin (“in ipsis heroicis virtutibus depravata”).[182]As to whether such men were saved, Luther refuses to say anything definite; he holds fast to the text that without faith it is impossible to please God. Only those who, in the days of Noe, did not believe may, so he declares, be saved in accordance with his reading of 1 Peter iii. 19 by Christ’s preaching of salvation on the occasion of His descent into hell. He is also disposed to include among those saved by this supposed course of sermons delivered “in inferis,” such fine men of every nation as Scipio, Fabius and others of their like.[183]In general, however, the following holds good: Before “faith and grace” are infused into the heart “by the Spirit alone,” “as the work of God which He works in us”—everything inman is the “work of the Law, of no value for justification, but unholy and opposed to God owing to the unbelief in which it is performed.”[184]

When, in 1528, in his “Great Confession” he expounded his “belief bit by bit,” declaring that he had “most diligently weighed all these articles” as in the presence of death and judgment, he there wrote: “Herewith I reject and condemn as rank error every doctrine that exalts our free-will, which is directly opposed to the help and grace of our Saviour Jesus Christ. For seeing, that, outside of Christ, death and sin are our masters and the devil our God and sovereign, there can be no power or might, no wit or understanding whereby we could make ourselves fit for, or could even strive after, righteousness and life, but on the contrary we must remain blind and captive, slaves of sin and the devil, and must do what pleases them and runs counter to God and His Commandments.”[179]Even the most pious of the Papists, he goes on to say, since they lack Christ and the “Faith,” have “merely a great semblance of holiness,” and although “there seem to be many good works” among them, “yet all is lost”; chastity, poverty and obedience as practised in the convents is nothing but “blasphemous holiness,” and “what is horrible is that thereby they refuse Christ’s help and grace.”[180]

This, his favourite idea, finds its full expression in his learned Latin Commentary on Galatians (1535): “In the man who does not believe in Christ not only are all sins mortal, but even his good works are sins”;[181]for the benefit of the people he enunciates the same in his Church-Postils. “The works performed without faith are sins ... for such works of ours are soiled and foul in God’s eyes, nay, He looks on them with horror and loathing.” As a matter of course he thinks that God looks upon concupiscence as sin, even in its permissible manifestations, e.g. in the “opus conjugalis.” Amongst the heathen even virtues such as patriotism, continence, justice and courage in which, owing to the divine impulses (“divini motus”), they may shine, are tainted by the presence in them of original sin (“in ipsis heroicis virtutibus depravata”).[182]As to whether such men were saved, Luther refuses to say anything definite; he holds fast to the text that without faith it is impossible to please God. Only those who, in the days of Noe, did not believe may, so he declares, be saved in accordance with his reading of 1 Peter iii. 19 by Christ’s preaching of salvation on the occasion of His descent into hell. He is also disposed to include among those saved by this supposed course of sermons delivered “in inferis,” such fine men of every nation as Scipio, Fabius and others of their like.[183]

In general, however, the following holds good: Before “faith and grace” are infused into the heart “by the Spirit alone,” “as the work of God which He works in us”—everything inman is the “work of the Law, of no value for justification, but unholy and opposed to God owing to the unbelief in which it is performed.”[184]

From the above statements it is clear that Luther, in doing away with the distinction between the natural and supernatural order, also did away with the olden doctrine of virtue, and without setting up anything positive in its place. He admits no naturally good action different from that performed “by faith and grace”; no such thing exists as a natural, moral virtue of justice. This opinion is closely bound up with his whole warfare on man’s natural character and endowments in respect of what is good. Moreover, what he terms the state of grace is not the supernatural state the Church had always understood, but an outward imputation by God; it is indeed God’s goodness towards man, but no new vital principle thanks to which we act justly.[185]

Not only does he deny the distinction between natural and supernatural goodness, essential as it is for forming an ethical estimate of man, but he practically destroys both the natural and supernatural order. Even in other points of Luther’s doctrine we can notice the abrogation of the fundamental difference between the two orders; for instance in his view of Adam’s original state, which, according to him, was a natural not a supernatural one, “no gift,” as he says, “apart from man’s nature, and bestowed on him from without, but a natural righteousness so that it came natural to him to love God [as he did], to believe in Him and to acknowledge Him.”[186]It is, however, in the moral domain that this peculiarity of his new theology comes out most glaringly. Owing to his way of proceeding and the heat of his polemics he seems never to have become fully conscious of how far-reaching the consequences were of hisdestruction of all distinction between the natural and the supernatural order.

Natural morality, viz. that to which man attains by means of his unaided powers, appears to him simply an invention of the pagan Aristotle. He rounds on all the theologians of his day for having swallowed so dangerous an error in their Aristotelian schools to the manifest detriment of the divine teaching. This he does, for instance, at the commencement of his recently published Commentary on Romans. He calls it a “righteousness of the philosophers and lawyers” in itself utterly worthless.[187]A year later, in his manuscript Commentary on Hebrews, he has already reached the opinion, that, “the virtues of all the philosophers, nay, of all men, whether they be lawyers or theologians, have only a semblance of virtue, but in reality are vices (‘vitia’).”[188]

But what would be quite incomprehensible, had he actually read the scholastic theologians whose “civil, Aristotelian doctrine of justice” he was so constantly attacking, is, that he charges them with having stopped short at this natural justice and with not having taught anything higher; this higher justice was what he himself had brought to light, this was the “Scriptural justice which depended more on the Divine imputation than on the nature of things,”[189]and was not acquired by deeds but bestowed by God. The fact is, however, that the Schoolmen did not rest content merely with natural justice, but insist that true justice is something higher, supernatural and only to be attained to with the help of grace; it is only in some few later theologians with whom Luther may possibly have been acquainted, that this truth fails to find clear expression. Thomas of Aquin, for instance, distinguishes between the civil virtue of justice and the justice infused in the act of justification. He says expressly: “A man may be termed just in two ways, on account of civil [natural] justice and on account of infused justice. Civil justice is attained to without the grace which comes to the assistance of the natural powers, but infused justice is the work of grace. Neither the one nor the other, however, consists in the mere doing ofwhat is good, for not everyone who does what is good is just, but only he who does it as do the just.”[190]

With regard to supernatural (infused) justice, the Church’s representatives, quite differently from Luther, had taught that man by his natural powers could only attain to God as the Author of nature but not to God as He is in Himself, i.e. to God as He has revealed and will communicate Himself in heaven; it is infused, sanctifying grace alone that places us in a higher order than that of nature and raises us to the status of being children of God; in it we love God, by virtue of the “habit” of love bestowed upon us, as He is in Himself, i.e. as He wills to be loved; sanctifying grace it is that brings us into a true relation with our supernatural and final end, viz. the vision of God in heaven, in which sense it may be called a vital principle infused into the soul.[191]This language Luther either did not or would not understand. On this point particularly he had to suffer for his ignorance of the better class of theologians. He first embraced Occam’s hypothesis of thepossibilityof an imputation of justice, and then, going further along the wrong road, he changed this possibility into a reality; soon, owing to his belief in the entire corruption of the natural man, imputed justice became, to him, the only justice. In this way he deprived theology of supernatural as well as of natural justice; for imputed justice is really no justice at all, but merely an alien one. “With Luther we have the end of the supernatural. His basic view, of justifying faith as the work of God in us performed without our co-operation, bears indeed a semblance of the supernatural.... But the supernatural is ever something alien.”[192]What he had in his mind was always a foreign righteousness produced, not by man’s own works and acts performed under the help of grace, but only by the work of another; this we are told by Luther in so many words: “True and real piety which is of worth in God’s sight consists in alien works and not in our own.”[193]“If we wish to work for God we must not approach Him with our own works but with foreign ones.” “These are the works of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” “All that He has is ours.... I may attribute to myself all His works as though I had actually done them, if only I believe in Christ.... Our workswill not suffice, all our powers together are too weak to resist even the smallest sin.... Hence when the Law comes and accuses you of not having kept it, send it to Christ and say: There is the Man who has fulfilled it, to Him I cling, He has fulfilled it for me and bestowed His fulfilment of it upon me; then the Law will have to hold its tongue.”[194]

With regard to supernatural (infused) justice, the Church’s representatives, quite differently from Luther, had taught that man by his natural powers could only attain to God as the Author of nature but not to God as He is in Himself, i.e. to God as He has revealed and will communicate Himself in heaven; it is infused, sanctifying grace alone that places us in a higher order than that of nature and raises us to the status of being children of God; in it we love God, by virtue of the “habit” of love bestowed upon us, as He is in Himself, i.e. as He wills to be loved; sanctifying grace it is that brings us into a true relation with our supernatural and final end, viz. the vision of God in heaven, in which sense it may be called a vital principle infused into the soul.[191]

This language Luther either did not or would not understand. On this point particularly he had to suffer for his ignorance of the better class of theologians. He first embraced Occam’s hypothesis of thepossibilityof an imputation of justice, and then, going further along the wrong road, he changed this possibility into a reality; soon, owing to his belief in the entire corruption of the natural man, imputed justice became, to him, the only justice. In this way he deprived theology of supernatural as well as of natural justice; for imputed justice is really no justice at all, but merely an alien one. “With Luther we have the end of the supernatural. His basic view, of justifying faith as the work of God in us performed without our co-operation, bears indeed a semblance of the supernatural.... But the supernatural is ever something alien.”[192]

What he had in his mind was always a foreign righteousness produced, not by man’s own works and acts performed under the help of grace, but only by the work of another; this we are told by Luther in so many words: “True and real piety which is of worth in God’s sight consists in alien works and not in our own.”[193]“If we wish to work for God we must not approach Him with our own works but with foreign ones.” “These are the works of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” “All that He has is ours.... I may attribute to myself all His works as though I had actually done them, if only I believe in Christ.... Our workswill not suffice, all our powers together are too weak to resist even the smallest sin.... Hence when the Law comes and accuses you of not having kept it, send it to Christ and say: There is the Man who has fulfilled it, to Him I cling, He has fulfilled it for me and bestowed His fulfilment of it upon me; then the Law will have to hold its tongue.”[194]

When orthodox Lutheranism gained a local and temporary victory in 1580 with the so-called Book of Concord, the authors of the book deplored the inferences drawn from Luther’s moral teaching, particularly from his denial of free-will, the dangers of which had already long been apparent.

“It is not unknown to us,” they say, “that this holy doctrine of the malice and impotence of free-will, the doctrine whereby our conversion and regeneration is ascribed solely to God and in no way to our own powers, has been godlessly, shamelessly and hatefully abused.... Many are becoming immoral and savage and neglectful of all pious exercises; they say: ‘Since we cannot turn to God of our own natural powers, let us remain hostile to God or wait until He converts us by force and against our will.’” “It is true that they possess no power to act in spiritual things, and that the whole business of conversion is merely the work of the Holy Ghost. And thus they refuse to listen to the Word of God, or to study it, or to receive the Sacraments; they prefer to wait until God infuses His gifts into them directly from above, and until they feel and are certain by inward experience that they have been converted by God.”“Others,” they continue, speaking of the case as a possibility and not as a sad reality, “may possibly give themselves up to sad and dangerous doubts as to whether they have been predestined by God to heaven, and as to whether God will really work His gifts in them by the help of the Holy Ghost. Being weak and troubled in mind they do not grasp aright our pious doctrine of free-will, and they are confirmed in their doubts by the fact that they do not find within themselves any firm and ardent faith or hearty devotion to God, but only weakness, misery and fear.” The authors then proceed to deal with the widespread fear of predestination to hell.[195]

“It is not unknown to us,” they say, “that this holy doctrine of the malice and impotence of free-will, the doctrine whereby our conversion and regeneration is ascribed solely to God and in no way to our own powers, has been godlessly, shamelessly and hatefully abused.... Many are becoming immoral and savage and neglectful of all pious exercises; they say: ‘Since we cannot turn to God of our own natural powers, let us remain hostile to God or wait until He converts us by force and against our will.’” “It is true that they possess no power to act in spiritual things, and that the whole business of conversion is merely the work of the Holy Ghost. And thus they refuse to listen to the Word of God, or to study it, or to receive the Sacraments; they prefer to wait until God infuses His gifts into them directly from above, and until they feel and are certain by inward experience that they have been converted by God.”

“Others,” they continue, speaking of the case as a possibility and not as a sad reality, “may possibly give themselves up to sad and dangerous doubts as to whether they have been predestined by God to heaven, and as to whether God will really work His gifts in them by the help of the Holy Ghost. Being weak and troubled in mind they do not grasp aright our pious doctrine of free-will, and they are confirmed in their doubts by the fact that they do not find within themselves any firm and ardent faith or hearty devotion to God, but only weakness, misery and fear.” The authors then proceed to deal with the widespread fear of predestination to hell.[195]

We have as it were a sad monument set up to the morality of the enslaved will and the doctrine of imputation, when the Book of Concord, in spite of the sad results it has justadmitted, goes on in the same chapter to insist that all Luther’s principles should be preserved intact. “This matter Dr. Luther settled most excellently and thoroughly in his ‘De servo arbitrio’ against Erasmus, where he showed this opinion to be pious and irrefutable. Later on he repeated and further explained the same doctrine in his splendid Commentary on Genesis, particularly in his exposition of ch. xxvi. There, too, he made other matters clear—e.g. the doctrine of the ‘absoluta necessitas’—defended them against the objections of Erasmus and, by his pious explanations, set them above all evil insinuations and misrepresentations. All of which we here corroborate and commend to the diligent study of all.”[196]

Melanchthon’s and his school’s modifications of these extreme doctrines are here sharply repudiated, though Luther himself “never spoke with open disapproval” of Melanchthon’s Synergism.[197]

“From our doctrinal standpoint,” we there read, “it is plain that the teaching of the Synergists is false, who allege that man in spiritual things is notaltogetherdead to what is good but merely badly wounded andhalfdead.... They teach wrongly, that after the Holy Spirit has given us, through the Evangel, grace, forgiveness and salvation, then free-will is able to meet God by its natural powers and ... co-operate with the Holy Ghost. In reality the ability to lay hold upon grace (‘facultas applicandi se ad gratiam’) is solely due to the working of the Holy Ghost.”What then is man to do, and how are the consequences described above to be obviated, on the one hand libertinism, on the other fear of predestination to hell?Man still possesses a certain freedom, so the Book of Concord teaches, e.g. “to be present or not at the Church’s assemblies, to listen or close his ears to the Word of God.”“The preaching of the Word of God is however the tool whereby the Holy Ghost seeks to effect man’s conversion and to make him ready to will and to work (‘in ipsis et velle et perficere operari vult’).” “Man is free to open his ears to the Word of God or to read it even when not yet converted to God or born again. In some way or other man still has free-will in such outward things even since Adam’s Fall.” Hence, by the Word, “bythe preaching and contemplation of the sweet Evangel of the forgiveness of sins, the spark of ‘faith’ is enkindled in his heart.”[198]“Although all effort without the power and work of the Holy Spirit is worthless, yet neither the preacher nor the hearer must doubt of this grace or work of the Holy Spirit,” so long as the preacher proceeds according to God’s will and command and “the hearer listens earnestly and diligently and dwells on what he hears.” We are not to judge of the working of the Holy Ghost by our feelings, but “agreeably with the promises of God’s Word.” We must hold that “the Word preached is the organ of the Holy Ghost whereby He truly works and acts in our hearts.”[199]With the help of this queer, misty doctrine which, as we may notice, makes of preaching a sort of Sacrament working “ex opere operato,” Luther’s followers attempted to construct a system out of their master’s varying and often so arbitrary statements. At any rate they upheld his denial of any natural order of morality distinct from the order of grace. It was to remain true that man, “previous to conversion, possesses indeed an understanding, but not of divine things, and a will, though not for anything good and wholesome.” In this respect man stands far below even a stock or stone, because he resists the Word and Will of God (which they cannot do) until God raises him up from the death of sin, enlightens and creates him anew.[200]Nevertheless several theses, undoubtedly Luther’s own, are here glossed over or quietly bettered. If, for instance, according to Luther everything takes place of absolute necessity (a fact to which the Formula of Concord draws attention), if man, even in the natural acts of the mind, is bound by what is fore-ordained,[201]then even the listening to a sermon and the dwelling on it cannot be matters of real freedom. Moreover the man troubled with fears on predestination, is comforted by the well-known Bible texts, which teach that it is the Will of God that all should be saved; whilst nothing is said of Luther’s doctrine that it is only the revealed God who speaks thus, whereas the hidden God acts quite otherwise, plans and carries out the very opposite, “damns even those who have not deserved it—and, yet, does not thereby become unjust.”[202]Reference is made to Adam’s Fall, whereby nature has been depraved; but nothing is said of Luther’s view that Adam himself simply could not avoid falling because God did not then “bestow on him the spirit of obedience.”[203]But, though these things are passed over in silence, due prominence is given to those ideas of Luther’s of which the result is the destruction of all moral order, natural as well assupernatural. According to the Formula of Concord the natural order was shattered by Adam’s Fall; as for the supernatural order it is replaced by the alien, mechanical order of imputation.

“From our doctrinal standpoint,” we there read, “it is plain that the teaching of the Synergists is false, who allege that man in spiritual things is notaltogetherdead to what is good but merely badly wounded andhalfdead.... They teach wrongly, that after the Holy Spirit has given us, through the Evangel, grace, forgiveness and salvation, then free-will is able to meet God by its natural powers and ... co-operate with the Holy Ghost. In reality the ability to lay hold upon grace (‘facultas applicandi se ad gratiam’) is solely due to the working of the Holy Ghost.”

What then is man to do, and how are the consequences described above to be obviated, on the one hand libertinism, on the other fear of predestination to hell?

Man still possesses a certain freedom, so the Book of Concord teaches, e.g. “to be present or not at the Church’s assemblies, to listen or close his ears to the Word of God.”

“The preaching of the Word of God is however the tool whereby the Holy Ghost seeks to effect man’s conversion and to make him ready to will and to work (‘in ipsis et velle et perficere operari vult’).” “Man is free to open his ears to the Word of God or to read it even when not yet converted to God or born again. In some way or other man still has free-will in such outward things even since Adam’s Fall.” Hence, by the Word, “bythe preaching and contemplation of the sweet Evangel of the forgiveness of sins, the spark of ‘faith’ is enkindled in his heart.”[198]

“Although all effort without the power and work of the Holy Spirit is worthless, yet neither the preacher nor the hearer must doubt of this grace or work of the Holy Spirit,” so long as the preacher proceeds according to God’s will and command and “the hearer listens earnestly and diligently and dwells on what he hears.” We are not to judge of the working of the Holy Ghost by our feelings, but “agreeably with the promises of God’s Word.” We must hold that “the Word preached is the organ of the Holy Ghost whereby He truly works and acts in our hearts.”[199]

With the help of this queer, misty doctrine which, as we may notice, makes of preaching a sort of Sacrament working “ex opere operato,” Luther’s followers attempted to construct a system out of their master’s varying and often so arbitrary statements. At any rate they upheld his denial of any natural order of morality distinct from the order of grace. It was to remain true that man, “previous to conversion, possesses indeed an understanding, but not of divine things, and a will, though not for anything good and wholesome.” In this respect man stands far below even a stock or stone, because he resists the Word and Will of God (which they cannot do) until God raises him up from the death of sin, enlightens and creates him anew.[200]

Nevertheless several theses, undoubtedly Luther’s own, are here glossed over or quietly bettered. If, for instance, according to Luther everything takes place of absolute necessity (a fact to which the Formula of Concord draws attention), if man, even in the natural acts of the mind, is bound by what is fore-ordained,[201]then even the listening to a sermon and the dwelling on it cannot be matters of real freedom. Moreover the man troubled with fears on predestination, is comforted by the well-known Bible texts, which teach that it is the Will of God that all should be saved; whilst nothing is said of Luther’s doctrine that it is only the revealed God who speaks thus, whereas the hidden God acts quite otherwise, plans and carries out the very opposite, “damns even those who have not deserved it—and, yet, does not thereby become unjust.”[202]Reference is made to Adam’s Fall, whereby nature has been depraved; but nothing is said of Luther’s view that Adam himself simply could not avoid falling because God did not then “bestow on him the spirit of obedience.”[203]But, though these things are passed over in silence, due prominence is given to those ideas of Luther’s of which the result is the destruction of all moral order, natural as well assupernatural. According to the Formula of Concord the natural order was shattered by Adam’s Fall; as for the supernatural order it is replaced by the alien, mechanical order of imputation.

Among the things which Luther did to the detriment of the moral principle must be numbered his merciless tearing asunder of spiritual and temporal, of Christian and secular life.

The olden Church sought to permeate the world with the religious spirit. Luther’s trend was in a great measure towards making the secular state and its office altogether independent; this, indeed, the more up-to-date sort of ethics is disposed to reckon among his greatest achievements. Luther even went so far as to seek to erect into a regular system this inward, necessary opposition of world and Church. Of this we have a plain example in certain of his instructions to the authorities.[204]Whereas the Church had exhorted people in power to temper with Christianity their administration of civil justice and their use of physical force—urging that the sovereign was a Christian not merely in his private but also in his official capacity,—Luther tells the ruler: The Kingdom of Christ wholly belongs to the order of grace, but the kingdom of the world and worldly life belong to the order of the Law; the two kingdoms are of a different species and belong to different worlds. To the one you belong as a Christian, to the other as a man and a ruler. Christ has nothing to do with the regulations of worldly life, but leaves them to the world; earthly life stands in no need of being outwardly hallowed by the Church.[205]Certain statements to a different effect will be considered elsewhere.

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