CHAPTER XXXIIA LIFE FULL OF STRUGGLES OF CONSCIENCE1. On Luther’s “Temptations” in GeneralAnaccount given by Luther himself in 1537 and taken down by his pupils from his own lips is the best introduction to the subject now to be considered.“He spoke of his spiritual sickness (‘morbus spiritualis’). For a fortnight he had tasted neither food nor drink and had had no sleep. ‘During this time,’ so he said, ‘I wrestled frequently with God and impatiently upbraided Him with His promises.’” While in this state he had been forced to complain, with the sick and troubled Job, that God was killing him and hiding His countenance from him; like Job, however, he had learnt to wait for His assistance, for here too his case was like that of the “man crushed, and delivered over to the gates of death” and on whom the devil had poured forth his wrath. How many, he adds, have to wrestle like he and Job until they are able to say “I know, O God, that Thou art gracious.”[1287]Other statements of Luther’s at a later period supply us with further information. Lauterbach notes, on Oct. 7, 1538, the complaint already quoted: “I have my mortal combats daily. We have to struggle and wrangle with the devil who has very hard bones, till we learn how to crack them. Paul and Christ had hard work enough with the devil.”[1288]On Aug. 16 of the same year Lauterbach takes down the statement: “Had anyone else had to undergo such temptations as I, he would long since have expired. I should not of my own have been able to endure the blows of Satan, just as Paul could not endure the all-too-great temptations of Christ. In short, sadness is a death in itself.”[1289]With the spiritual sickness above mentioned was combined, ashas been already pointed out (above, p. 226 f.), a growing state of depression: “I have lived long enough,” he said in 1542; “the devil is weary of my life and I am sick of hating the devil.”[1290]Terrible thoughts of the “Judgment of God” repeatedly rose up before him and caused him great fear.[1291]Before this, according to other notes, he had said to his table companions, that he was daily “at grips with Satan”;[1292]that during the attacks of the devil he had often not known whether he were “dead or alive.”[1293]“The devil,” so he assures them, “brought me to such a pitch of despair that I did not even know if there was a God.”[1294]“When the devil finds me idle, unmindful of God’s Word, and thus unarmed, he assails my conscience with the thought that I have taught what is false, that I have rent asunder the churches which were so peaceful and content under the Papacy, and caused many scandals, dissensions and factions by my teaching, etc. Well, I can’t deny that I am often anxious and uneasy about this, but, as soon as I lay hold on the Word, I again get the best.”[1295]To the people he said, in a sermon in 1531: “The devil is closer to us than we dream. I myself often feel the devil raging within me. Sometimes I believe and sometimes I don’t, sometimes I am cheerful and sometimes sad.”[1296]—A year later he describes in a sermon how the devil, who “attacks the pious,” had often made him “sweat much and his heart to beat,” before he could withstand him with the right weapon, viz. with God’s Word, namely, the office committed to him and the service he had rendered to the world, “which it was not his to belie!”[1297]Some ten years before this he had spoken still more plainly to his hearers at Wittenberg, telling them, strange to say, of his experience in early days of the good effects of confession: “I would not for all the treasures of the world give up private confession, for I know what strength and comfort it has been to me. No one knows what it can do unless he has fought often and much with the devil. Indeed, the devil would long ago have done for me, had not confession saved me.” In fact whoever tells his troubles to his brother, receives from him, as from God, comfort “for his simple conscience and faint heart”; seldom indeed did one find a “strong, firm faith” which did not stand in need ofthis; hardly anyone could boast of possessing it. “You do not know yet,” he concludes, “what labour and trouble it costs to fight with and conquer the devil. But I know it well, for I have eaten a mouthful or two of salt with him. I know him well, and so does he know me.”[1298]After all these remarkably frank admissions there can remain no doubt that a heavy mist of doubts and anxieties overshadowed Luther’s inner life.A closer examination of this darker side of his soul seems to promise further information concerning his inner life. Here, too, it is advisable to sum up the phenomena, retracing them back to their very starting-point. Though much of what is to be said has already been mentioned, still, it is only now, towards the end of his life, that the various traits can in any sense be combined so as to form something as near a complete picture as possible. We have to thank Luther’s communicativeness, talkativeness and general openness to his friends, that a tragic side of his inner life has been to some extent revealed, which otherwise might for ever have been buried in oblivion.It is true that, to forestall what follows, few nowadays will be disposed to follow Luther and to look on the devil as the originator of his doubts and qualms of conscience. His fantastic ideas of the “diabolical combats” he had to wage, form, as we shall see (below, p. 329 ff.), part of his devil-mania. Nevertheless his many references to his ordinary, nay, almost daily, inward combats or “temptations,” as he is accustomed to style them, are not mere fabrications, but really seem to come from a profoundly troubled soul. In what follows many such utterances will be quoted, because only thus can one reach a faithful picture of his changing moods which otherwise would seem barely credible. These utterances, though usually much alike, at times strike a different note and thus depict his inner life from a new and sometimes surprising side.2. The Subject-matter of the “Temptations”The spiritual warfare Luther had to wage concerned primarily his calling and his work as a whole.“You have preached the Evangel,” so the inner voice,which he describes as the devil’s tempting, says to him; “But who commanded you to do so, ‘quis iussit?’ Who called upon you to do things such as no man ever did before? How if this were displeasing to God and you had to answer for all the souls that perish?”[1299]“Satan has often said to me: How if your own doctrine were false which charges the Pope, monks and Mass-priests with such errors? Often he so overwhelmed me that the sweat has poured off me, until I said to him, go and carry your complaints to my God Who has commanded me to obey this Christ.”[1300]—“The devil would often have laid me low with his argument: ‘Thou art not called,’ had I not been a Doctor.”[1301]—“I have had no greater temptation,” he said after dinner on Dec. 14, 1531, “and none more grievous than that about my preaching; for I have said to myself: You alone are at the bottom of this; if it’s all wrong you have to answer for all the many souls which it brings down to hell. In this temptation I have often myself descended into hell till God recalled me and strengthened me, telling me that it was indeed the Word of God and true doctrine; but it costs much until one reaches this comfort.”[1302]—“Now the devil troubles me with other thoughts [than in the Papacy], for he accuses me thus: Oh, what a vast multitude have you led astray by your teaching! Sometimes amidst such temptation one single word consoles me and gives me fresh courage.”[1303]Not merely does he say this in the Table-Talk but even writes it in his Bible Commentaries. In his exposition of Psalm xlv. he speaks of an “argumentation and objection” which the devil urges against him: “Lo, you stand all alone and are seeking to overthrow the good order [of the Church] established with so much wisdom. For even though the Papacy be not without its sins and errors, what aboutyou? Areyouinfallible? Areyouwithout sin? Why raise the standard of revolt against the house of the Lord when you yourself can only teach them what you yourself are full of, viz. error and sin? These thoughts,” he continues, “upset one very much.... Hence we must learn that all our strength lies in hearing God’s Word and laying hold on it, in seeing God’s works and believing in them. Whoever does not do this will be taken captive by the devil and overthrown.” He is fully cognisant of the strength of the objection which dogs his footsteps: Though sins and faults are to be met with in individual members of the hierarchy, still we must honour their “office and authority.”[1304]Among Luther’s peculiar doctrines the principal ones which became the butt of “temptations” were his fundamental theses on Justification, on the Law and on good works.With regard to his doctrine of Justification, on Dec. 14, 1531, he gave his pupil Schlaginhaufen, who also failed to find comfort in it, some advice as to how he was to help himself. The devil was wont “to come to him” [Luther] with righteousness and to “insist on our being actively righteous,” and since none of us are, “no one can venture to stand up to him”; what one should do was, however, resolutely to fall back on passive righteousness and to say to Satan: Not by my own righteousness am I justified, but by the righteousness of the man Christ. “Do you know Him?” In this way we vanquish him by “the Word.” Another method, also a favourite one of his,[1305]so he instructs his anxious pupil, was to rid oneself of such ideas by “thinking of dancing, or of a pretty girl; that also is good, eating and drinking are likewise helpful; for one who is tempted, fasting is a hundred times worse than eating and drinking.”[1306]—“This is the great art,” he repeats at the beginning of the following year, looking back upon his own bitter experiences, “to pass from my sin to Christ’s righteousness to know that Christ’s righteousness is mine as surely as I know that this body is mine.... What astonishes me is that I cannot learn this doctrine, and yet all my pupils believe they have it at their finger-tips.”[1307]The doctrine of the Law in its relation to the Gospel, a point which he was never able to make quite clear to himself, constituted in his case an obstacle to peace of mind.[1308]In consequence of his own experience he warns others from the outset against giving way to any anxious thoughts about this: “Whoever, Law in hand, begins to dispute with the devil is already a beaten man and a prisoner.... Hence let no one dare to dispute with him about the Law, or about sin, but let him rather desist in good time.”[1309]“When Satan reproaches me and says: ‘The Law is also the Word of God,’ I reply: ‘God’s Word is only the promise of God whereby He says: Let me be Thy God. In addition to this, however, He also gives the Law, but for another purpose, not that we may be saved thereby.”[1310]But God, as Luther was well aware, will, as He threatens, judge people by their fulfilment of the Law and only grant salvation to those who keep it.The stern and clear exhortations of Scripture on fidelity to theLaw and on penance for its transgression often filled his soul with the utmost terror, and so did the text: “Unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Luke xiii. 3). Even in one of his sermons he confessed to the people in this connection, that he was acquainted from experience “with the cunning of the devil and his malicious tricks, how he is wont to upbraid us with the Law ... to make a real hell for us so that the wide world seems all too narrow to hold us”; the devil depicts Christ “as though He were angry with sinners”; “he grabs a text of Holy Scripture, or one of Christ’s warnings, and suddenly stabs us so hard in the heart ... that we actually believe it, nay, our conscience would swear to it a thousand times,” that “it was indeed Christ Who inspired such thoughts, whereas all the while it was the devil himself.” “Of what I say I have had some experience myself.”[1311]He then goes on to quote the above exhortation to penance as an instance of the sort of warning on which the devil seizes, though these words have ever been regarded by God-fearing Christians as a powerful incentive to religion and not at all as productive of excessive fear, at least in those who put their trust in grace. Luther, however, thinks it right to add: “By fear the devil fouls and poisons with his venom the pure and true knowledge of Christ.”Hence it is useless, or at best but a temporary expedient, to refrain from disputing with Satan on the Law. Nor is Luther’s invitation much better: “When a man is tempted, or is with those who are tempted, let him slay Moses and throw every stone at him on which he can lay hands.”[1312]His doctrine of good works was no less a source of disquietude to Luther. He declared that Satan was sure of an “easy victory” “once he gets a man to think of what he has done or left undone.” What one had to do was to retort to the devil, strong in one’s fiducial faith: “Though I may not have done this or that good work, still I am saved by the forgiveness of sins, as baptised and redeemed by the flesh and blood of Christ”; beyond this he should not go: “Faith ranks above deeds”; still, so he adds, before a man reaches this point, all may be over for him. “It is hard in the time of temptation to get so far; even Christ found it difficult”; “it is hard to escape from the idea of works,” i.e. from believing that they as much as faith are required for salvation and that they are meritorious.[1313]The “devil” also frequently twitted Luther, so he declares, with the consequences of his doctrines.“Often he tormented me,” he says, “with words such as these: ‘Look at the cloisters; formerly they enjoyed a delightful peace,of which you have made an end; who told you to do such a thing?’” On one occasion, when making some such admissions concerning the effect of his teaching on the religious vows, one interrupted him and tried to show that he had merely insisted that God was not to be worshipped by the doctrines and commandments of men (Mt. xv. 9), and that the dissolution of the monasteries was not so much his work as a consequence ordained by God; Luther replied frankly: “My friend, before such a thought would have occurred to me during such temptations I should indeed have been in a fine sweat.”[1314]“When Satan finds me idle and not armed with the Word,” so we read in the notes made of one of his sermons,[1315]“he puts it into my conscience that I am a disturber of the public order, a preacher of false doctrines and a herald of revolt. This he often does. But as soon as I make use of the Word as a weapon I get the best, for I answer him.... It is written you must hear this man [the Son of God] or everything falls. God heeds not the world, even were there ten rebellious worlds. It was thus that Paul, too, had to console himself when accused of preaching sedition against God and the Emperor.”[1316]In this wise does Luther seek to fall back on Christ and on his divine commission.He frequently, indeed usually, appeals to this source of consolation, and it is therefore due to him to quote a few more such statements. He struggles, in spite of all his fears, not to relinquish his peculiar trust in Christ.Yet, as he often complains in this connection, “the devil knows well how to get me away.”[1317]“He says to me: See how much evil arises from your doctrine. To which I reply: Much good has also come of it. Oh, says he, that is a mere nothing! He is a fine talker and can make a great beam of a little splinter, and destroy what is good and dissolve it into thin air. He has never been so angry in his life.... I must hold fast to Christ and to the Evangel. He frequently begins to dispute with me about this, and well knows how to get me away. He is very wroth, I feel it and understand it well.”[1318]—The moral consequences of the religious innovations, and the disunion so rife undoubtedly weighed heavily on Luther. “We, who boast of being Evangelical,” so he is impelled to exclaim in 1538, “fling the most holy Gospel to the winds as though it were but a quotation from Terence.” “Alas, Good God, how bitter the devil must be against us, to incite the very ministers of the Word against each other and to inspire them with mutual hatred!”[1319]Misgivings as to his own salvation also constituted a source of profound anxiety for Luther.So repeatedly did he hear in fancy the devil announcing to him in a voice of thunder his eternal damnation, that he was, as he confesses, almost reduced to despair and to blasphemy.“When we are thus tempted to blasphemy on account of God’s judgment,” so he said on June 18, 1540, “we fail to see either that it is a sin, or how to avoid it,” “such abominable thoughts does the prince of this world suggest to the mind: Hatred of God, blasphemy, despair; these are the devil’s own fiery darts; St. Paul understood them to some extent when he felt the sting of the devil in his flesh [2 Cor. xii. 7]. These are the high temptations [which, as he explains elsewhere, were reserved for himself and for his preachers]. No Pope has known them. These stupid donkeys were familiar with no other temptations than those of carnal passion.... To such they capitulated, and so did ‘Jeronimus.’ Yet such temptations are easily to be remedied while virgins and women remain with us.”[1320]—But in that other sort of temptation it is hard to “keep cheerful” and to tell the devil boldly: “God is not angry as you say.”[1321]On one occasion Melanchthon watched him during such a struggle, when he was battling against despair and the appalling thought that he had been delivered over to the “wrath of God and the punishment of sin.” Luther, he says, was in “such sore terror that he almost lost consciousness,” and sighed much as he wrestled with a text of Paul on unbelief and grace.[1322]Several incidents and many utterances noted down from Luther’s own lips give us an even better insight into the varying character of his “temptations” and into their nature as a whole.3. An Episode. Terrors of Conscience become Temptations of the DevilSchlaginhaufen and LutherJohann Schlaginhaufen, the pupil of Luther whom we have had so frequent occasion to mention, complained to hismaster in the winter of 1531 of the deep anxiety from which he could not shake himself free, which led him to fear for the salvation of his soul. Luther sought in vain to comfort the troubled man by pointing to his own case.[1323]The fact that the master attributed the whole matter to the devil only added to the confusion of his unfortunate pupil. So much was Schlaginhaufen upset, that on one occasion, on New Year’s Eve, 1531, he actually swooned whilst on a visit to Luther’s house. Luther, nothing abashed, promptly exorcised the devil who had brought on the fainting-fit, using thereto the Bible words: “The Lord rebuke thee, Satan” (Zach. iii. 2: “Increpet te Dominus”); he added: “He [the devil], who should be an angel of life, is an angel of death. He tries us with lying and with murder.”Schlaginhaufen, after having been put to bed, began to come to, whereupon Luther consoled him thus: “David suffered such temptations; I too have often experienced similar ones, though to-day I have been free from them and have had nothing to complain of save only a natural weakness of the head. Let the godless, Cochlæus, Faber and the Margrave [Joachim I of Brandenburg] be afraid and tremble. This is a temptation of the spirit; it is not meant for us, for we are ministers and vicars of God.” Here Schlaginhaufen groaned: “Oh, my sins!” Luther now tried to make him understand that he must turn to the thought of grace and forget all about the Law. “Oh, my God,” replied the young man, echoing his master’s own thoughts, “the tiniest devil is stronger than the whole world!” But Luther pointed out that there were even stronger good angels present for the Christian’s protection. He went on, “Satan is as hostile as can be to us. Were we only to agree to worship the Pope, we should be his dear children, enjoy perfect peace and probably become cardinals. It is not you alone who endure such temptations; I am inured to them, and Peter too and Paul were acquainted with them.... We must not be afraid of the miscreant.” When Schlaginhaufen had sufficiently recovered to return to his lodgings close by, Luther paternally admonished him to mix more freely with others and, for the rest, to trust entirely in his teacher. His own waverings did not prevent him from giving the latter piece of advice.[1324]Of the temptations by which he himself was visited, “to despair, and to dread the wrath of God,” he had already said to Schlaginhaufen, on Dec. 14, 1531: Had it not been for them he would never have been able to do so much harm to the devil, or to preserve his own humility; now, however, he knew to his shame that “when the temptation comes I am unable to get thebetter of a single venial sin. Thanks to these temptations I have attained to such knowledge and to such gifts, that, with the help of God, I won that glorious victory (‘illam præclaram victoriam’), vanquishing my monkish state, the vows, the Mass and all those abominations.” “After that I had peace,” he says, speaking of those earlier years, “so that I even took a wife, such good days had I.”[1325]—Yet his own contemporary statements show that inward peace was not his at the time when he took a wife.[1326]An incident related of Luther by Schlaginhaufen shows how a single text of Scripture, and the train of ideas it awakened, could reduce him, and Bugenhagen too, to a state verging on distraction. “The devil on one occasion,” so Luther said to him, “tormented and almost slew me with Paul’s words to Timothy [1 Tim. v. 11-12], so that my heart melted in my bosom; the reason was the abandoning by so many monks and nuns of the religious state in which they had vowed to God to live.” (Paul, in the passage cited, has strong things to say of widows who prove unfaithful to the widowhood in which they had promised to live.) “The devil,” he continues concerning his attitude towards the devil at that time, “hid from my sight the doctrine of Justification so that I never even thought of it, and obtruded on me the text; he led me away from the doctrine of grace to dispute on the Law, and then he had me at his mercy. Bugenhagen happened to be near at the time. I submitted it to him and went with him into the corridor. But he too began to doubt, for he did not know that I was so hard put about it. Thereupon I was at first much upset and passed the night with a heavy heart. Next day Bugenhagen came to me. ‘I am downright angry,’ he said, ‘I have now looked into that text more closely, and, right enough, the argument is ridiculous!’ Thus he [the devil] is always on the watch for us. But nevertheless we have Christ!”[1327]—We are not told why the argument from this Bible-passage, which insists so solemnly on the sacred character of vows, was regarded as “ridiculous.”The last incident reminds us of the scene between Luther and Bugenhagen on June, 1540, narrated in the Table-Talk; there Luther declares: “No sooner am I assailed by temptation than the flesh begins to rebel even though I understand the spirit.... Gladly would I be formally just, but I do not find it in me.” And Bugenhagen chimed in: “Herr Doctor, neither do I.”[1328]From Remorse of Conscience to Onslaughts of the DevilThe actual cause of Luther’s anxiety, as is plain from the above, was a certain quite intelligible disquiet of conscience. Yet, he chose to regard all reproaches from within as merely the sting of the Evil One. As time went on this became more and more his habit; it is always the evil spirit who is at his heels, at whose person and doings, Luther, following his bent, pokes his jokes.Hieronymus Weller, another pupil tormented with inner pangs, once, without any beating about the bush, put down all his sadness to his conscience; he declared in Luther’s presence in the spring of 1532: “Rather than endure such troubles of conscience I would willingly go through the worst illnesses.”[1329]Luther tried his best to pacify him with the assurance that the devil was “a murderer,” and that “God’s Mercy endureth for ever and ever.”Yet Luther himself had admitted to his friend Wenceslaus Link, that “it is extremely difficult thoroughly to convince oneself that such thoughts of hopelessness emanate from Satan and are not our very own, but the best help is to be found in this conviction. One must by a supreme effort contrive to turn one’s mind to other things and chase such thoughts away.” “But you can guess how hard it is,” he continues, “when the thoughts refer to God and to our eternal salvation; they are of such a nature that our conscience can neither tear itself away from them nor yet despise them.”[1330]Simply to tear itself away from such disquieting thoughts was certainly not possible for a conscience in so luckless a position as Luther’s, oppressed as it was with the weight of a world catastrophe.Luther once, in 1532, says quite outspokenly and not without a certain reference to himself: “The spirit of sadness is conscience itself”; here, however, he probably only means that we are always conscious within ourselves of a painful antagonism to the Law, for he at once goes on: “This we must ever endure,” we must necessarily be ever in a state of woe because in this life we “lie amidst the throes of childbirth that precede the Last Day;” but the devil who condemns us inwardly “has not yet condemned”Christ. Those who are thus tempted “do not feel those carnal temptations, which are so petty compared with the spiritual.”[1331]At any rate, so he will have it, there was a call to struggle most earnestly against all the inward voices that make themselves heard against the new teaching and the apostasy, just as though they came from the devil.[1332]He was helped in this, on the one hand, by his terrible energy, and, on the other, by a theological fallacy: “God has commanded that we should look to Christ for forgiveness of our sins; hence whoever does not do so makes God a liar; I must therefore say to the devil: Even though I be a scamp, yet Christ is just.”[1333]Thus we find him declaring, for instance, in July, 1528: “to yield to such disquiet of conscience is to be overcome by Satan, nay, to set Satan on the throne!” “Such thoughts may appear to be quite heavenly and called for, but they are nevertheless Satanic and cannot but be so.” When they refuse to depart, even though spurned by us, and we endure them patiently, then do we indeed “present a sublime spectacle to God and the angels.”[1334]—“Away with the devil’s sadness!” so, at a later date, in 1544, he exhorts his old friend Spalatin; “conscience stands in the cruel service of the devil; a man must learn to find consolation even against his own conscience.”[1335]4. Progress of his Mental Sufferings until their Flood-tide in 1527-1528If we glance at the history of Luther’s so-called “temptations” throughout the whole course of his career, we shall find that they were very marked at the beginning of his enterprise. Before 1525 they had fallen off, but they became again more frequent during the terrors of the Peasant War and then reasserted themselves with great violence in 1527. After abating somewhat for the next twoyears they again assumed alarming proportions in 1530 in the solitude of the Coburg and thus continue, with occasional breaks, until 1538. From that time until the end of his life he seemed to enjoy greater peace, at least from doubts regarding his own salvation, though, on the other hand, gloomy depression undoubtedly darkened the twilight of his days, and he complains more than ever of the weakness of his own faith; we miss, however, those vivid accounts of his struggles of conscience which he had been wont to give.The Period Previous to 1527Let us listen first of all to Luther’s self-reproach in the early days of his public labours; we may recall those words of 1521 where he confesses, that, before he had grown so bold and confident, “his heart had often quaked with fear,” when he thought of the words of his foes: “Are you alone wise and are all others mistaken? Is it likely that so many centuries were all in the wrong? Supposing, on the contrary, you were in the wrong and were leading so many others with you into error and to eternal perdition!”[1336]He admits similarly that he had still to fight with his conscience even after having passed through the storm in which, “amidst excitement and confusion of conscience,” he had discovered the true doctrine of salvation.[1337]That discovery did not bring him into a haven of rest even though we have his word that, for a while, he was quite overcome with joy. “Oh, what great trouble and labour did it cost me, even though grounded on Holy Scripture, to convince my conscience that I had a right to stand up all alone against the Pope, and denounce him as Antichrist, the Bishops as his Apostles and the Universities as his brothels.”[1338]The days he spent in the Wartburg and the opportunity they afforded him to look back on his past, awakened anew these self-reproaches; whilst in the solitude, we hear him complaining, that his “distress of soul still persisted andthat his former weakness of spirit and of faith had not yet left him.”[1339]Later on he remembered having had to battle with every kind of despair (“omnibus desperationibus”) for three long years.[1340]At a much later date, in 1541, he reminds his friends of the many inward struggles (“tot agones”) the first proclamation of the Evangel and his crusade against the word of man had cost him.[1341]About 1521 he must have arrived at a pitch of “despair and temptation regarding the wrath of God” such as he never before had tasted; for he told one of his pupils, on Dec. 14, 1532, that it was “about ten years since he had felt this struggle so severely; after that better days had dawned, but later the difficulties began anew.”[1342]But, as he often admits, he was all too addicted to thoughts of despair, thanks to the devil who was ever lying in wait for him; as for the “better days” they might easily be counted. “When these thoughts come upon me I forget everything about Christ and God, and even begin to look upon God as a miscreant”; the “Laudate” stops, so he says, and the “Blasphemate” begins as soon as we begin to think of the fate to which from all eternity we are predestined.[1343]Subsequent to 1525 his new state of life with its domestic cares and distractions, added to his satisfaction with the growing damage inflicted on the Papacy, appear to have contributed to diminish his trouble of mind.Later, however, in 1527, it “began anew.”Atrocious suffering of mind and bitter anxiety concerning the abuses in the new Church—“a vinegar sourer than all other vinegars, as he calls it,”—immediately preceded his illness which began about July 7, 1527.[1344]Mental uneasiness and self-reproaches accompanied the fainting-fits which at that time seemed tothreaten his life. His inward struggles were so severe that Bugenhagen, who tried to comfort him, compares them with the darkness of the soul “so frequently mentioned in the Psalms as illustrative of the spiritual pangs of hell.” “Dr. Martin,” writes the latter, who was pastor at Wittenberg and Luther’s “confessor,” “had in all likelihood been through other such temptations, but none had ever been so severe; this he admitted on the following day to Dr. Jonas, to Dr. Christian [Schurf] and to me. He said they were worse and more dangerous than the bodily ailment which befell him on that same Saturday evening about five o’clock and which was so serious that we feared he would succumb under it.” Luther himself, in those critical days, declared “that he would not retract his doctrine,” and, after making his confession to Bugenhagen as the latter relates, “spoke at considerable length of the spiritual temptation he had been through the same morning, with such fear and trembling as could not be described in words.”[1345]It was then that the curious complaint was involuntarily wrung from him that those who saw his outward behaviour fancied he “lay on a bed of roses, though God knew how it stood with him.” Bugenhagen and Jonas have embellished their accounts of this illness of their friend with many pious utterances supposed to have been spoken by him then.[1346]The Height of the Storm, 1527-28The worst struggles, lasting over many months, followed upon Luther’s illness of 1527.Hardly had he recovered his normal health than we find his letters full of sad allusions to his abiding state of despair and to his fears concerning the faith, probably the most melancholy outpourings of his whole life.“For more than a week I have been tossed about between death and hell,” he writes to Melanchthon, “so that I still tremble in every limb and feel utterly broken. Waves and storms of despair and blasphemy against God broke over me and I lost Christ almost entirely. But, at the intercession of the saints [his friends] God has begun to take pity on me and has delivered my soul from the lowest hell.”[1347]—“This struggle,” hewrites to Justus Menius, “goes beyond my strength.... I am tried not only in body but still more, and worst of all, in soul. God allows Satan and his angels thus to torment me.”[1348]In a letter of Aug. 21, addressed to Johann Agricola, then still his friend, he informed him that the fight was not yet at an end. “Satan rages against me with all his might. Like another Job (Job xvi. 12), God has set me up as a mark, and He tempts me with intolerable weakness of spirit. The prayers of holy men indeed save me from remaining in his hands, but the wounds I have received in my heart will be hard to heal. I trust that my strivings will turn to the salvation of many.” He concludes by saying that those in power (the Catholics) were unable to get at him, but that so much the more was he plagued in spirit “by the Prince of this world.”[1349]He writes in much the same vein on Aug. 26 to Nicholas Hausmann.Truly, so he again wrote to Johann Agricola, on Aug. 31, “neither world nor reason can understand how hard it is to realise that Christ is our righteousness, so deeply rooted in us is the doctrine of works, which has grown up with us and become part of us. That Christ may strengthen me I commend myself to your prayers.”[1350]Hence it was his chief dogma, the very rock of his Evangel, that “Satan” was then tampering with. The call for good works was, as he felt, beyond even his power to deny.“For wellnigh three months I have been feeling wretched,” he wrote on Oct. 8, “not so much in body as in soul, so that I have written little or nothing, so greatly has Satan tossed me in the sieve [Luke xxii. 31]”[1351]—“God has not yet completely restored me to health,” he announces on Oct. 19, “but in His wisdom leaves me a prey to Satan who assails me and buffets me; but God also sends help and protection.”[1352]He speaks of himself, on Oct. 27, as “a wretched and abject worm, harassed by the spirit of sadness,” “I seek and thirst for nought else than for a gracious God, for as such He reveals Himself even to His enemies and contemners.”[1353]Luther had claimed, that, through his new doctrine and through flinging aside his monkish frock he had found “a gracious God,” and proclaimed Him to men for their reconciliation; this has been extolled as the greatest gain achieved by the Lutheran schism; yet here we have his word for it that the solace of a Gracious God was still withheld from him.—“I have always been in the habit of comforting others,” he says in a letter to Amsdorf on Nov. 1; “and now I myself stand in desperate need of such consolation; only one thing, however, do I wish, viz. never to be the foe of Christ, although I have offended Him by many and great sins.Satan tries to make a Job of me; he would like to sift me like Peter and his brethren. Oh, that God would say to him: ‘Yet spare his life’ [Job ii. 6], and to me: ‘I am thy salvation’ [Ps. xxxiv. 3]. Even now I still hope that His anger at my sins will not last for ever.... Meanwhile fighting goes on outside and fears reign within, yea, very bitter ones indeed.”[1354]Thus in spite of everything he tries to buoy himself up with hope.Yet his lamentations continue. “Hardly can I breathe for storms and faintheartedness.... My Katey, however, is strong in faith and in good health.... As for me, my body is whole but I am tempted” (Nov. 4).[1355]—“From several sides at once fears rush in on me. My temptations torment me ... for months storms and faintness of spirit have never left me; pray that my faith may not fail” (Nov. 7).—“I have surely troubles enough already, please do not add to them by crucifying me with your dissensions” (Nov. 9).—“Erasmus and the Sacramentarians are now come to stamp me under foot, to persecute a man already utterly worn out in spirit!”[1356]—“I endure God’s wrath because I have sinned against Him. My sins, death, and Satan with his angels all rage against me without a break; and now Pope and Emperor, Princes, Bishops and the whole world too storms in upon me, making common cause with the crew who vex me”; everything would be endurable provided only Christ—for Whose sake he, the “most abject of all sinners,” was hated—did not desert one “whom God has smitten”[1357]and whom they persecute (Nov. 10).—“I believe that it is no mere fiend from the ranks of the devil’s hosts who fights with me, but the Prince of the demons himself; so powerful is he and so armed to the teeth with Bible-texts that my knowledge of the Bible is left stranded and I am obliged to have recourse to the words of others; from this you may get some idea of the devil’s height, as they say” (Nov. 17).“I am well in body, but as to how it stands with me in spirit I am not certain.... I seek only for a gracious Christ.... Satan wants to prevent me from writing and to drag me down with him to hell. May Christ tread him under foot, Amen!” (Nov. 22).[1358]His work and his doctrine must, according to him, be pleasing to heaven; the difficulties and the attacks from without and from within, all these he attributes to Satan’s raging and sees inthem proofs “that our word is the Word of God; this alone it is that makes him so furious against us” (Dec. 30).—It has been said that Luther held fast to this with a “bold faith”; it would, however, be more correct to say that he catches at such thoughts as a drowning man does at a straw, a phenomenon which of itself throws a lurid light on his delusions and the misty trend of his thoughts. He is determined to be sure of his cause—and at this very time, with the help of the State, he has a Coburg Zwinglian put to silence, because the latter “neither is nor can be sure of his cause.”[1359]“I myself am weak and in wretchedness,” he again confesses. “If only Christ does not forsake me.... Satan expends his fury on me because I have attacked him by deed, and word, and writing; but I feel consoled when I boldly believe (‘fortiter credo’) that what I did was pleasing to the Lord and to His Christ. I am tossed about between the two warring princes [Christ and Satan] till all my bones are sore. Many works of Satan have I done and still do, nevertheless I hope to please my Christ Who is merciful and inclined to forgive; but from Satan I desire no forgiveness for what I have done against him and for Christ. He is a murderer and the father of lies.... I feel in the depths of my soul how, with unbelievable wrath, he plots against me, assuming even the guise of Christ, to say nothing of that of the angel of light” (Nov. 27, 1527).—The “guise of Christ” and of the “angel of light,” to which he here alludes, are sufficient to show those who look below the surface that what was troubling him was something not very different from the inner voice of conscience.How far he could go in deluding himself the better to appease his conscience is plain from what he says in his letter “to the Christians at Erfurt”: During the whole time he had spent at Erfurt in his Catholic days he had longed in vain to hear “a Gospel or even a little Psalm”; there, as was everywhere the case in Popery, Holy Scripture lay buried deep, and “no one had even thought of preaching a really Christian sermon.”[1360]No less vain than this consolation from the past was that which he sought in the future. He clung wildly to his delusion that the end of all was at hand; “Satan,” he cries, “has but a short respite before being completely overthrown, therefore does he make such furious and incredible efforts” (Dec. 31).“Now that the Word is preached Satan plainly comes off second best; hence he persecutes me secretly; he is unchained, and, with all his engines he seeks to tear Christ from me.” Thus (on Nov. 28).—“I am the wretched ‘off-scourings of Christ’” (Nov. 29).—“I am to all intents and purposes dead, as the Apostle calls it, yet still I live” (Dec. 10).The long and terrible year was drawing to a close. He had almost grown accustomed to his inward troubles. “I have not yet shaken off my temptation, nor do I desire to be free if it is to God’s glory. The devil rages against me simply because Christ has vanquished him through me, his most wretched of vessels” (Dec. 14).—“Well in body, in soul I am as Christ wills, to Whom I am now bound only by a slender thread. The devil on the other hand is moored to me with mighty cords, nay, real cables; he drags me down into the depths, but the weak Christ has still the upper hand owing to your prayers, or at least He puts up a brave fight” (Dec. 29).The Trouble ContinuesEven his lectures on the 1st Epistle of St. John testify to Luther’s inward excitement during that unhappy year (1527). The Preface to the commentary as preserved in the Vatican MS. (Palat., 1825) is dated Aug. 19, and begins: “You know that we are so placed by God in this life as to be exposed to all the darts of Satan. And not Satan alone storms against us, but also the world, and our heart, and our flesh. Hence we must despair of peace so long as we remain here below. Against all these evils God has given us no other weapon than His Word which He commands us to preach, who live in the midst of wolves.... Thus, since we are exposed to all these dangers, to death, sin, heretics and the whole might of Satan, I have undertaken to expound this Epistle.”
CHAPTER XXXIIA LIFE FULL OF STRUGGLES OF CONSCIENCE1. On Luther’s “Temptations” in GeneralAnaccount given by Luther himself in 1537 and taken down by his pupils from his own lips is the best introduction to the subject now to be considered.“He spoke of his spiritual sickness (‘morbus spiritualis’). For a fortnight he had tasted neither food nor drink and had had no sleep. ‘During this time,’ so he said, ‘I wrestled frequently with God and impatiently upbraided Him with His promises.’” While in this state he had been forced to complain, with the sick and troubled Job, that God was killing him and hiding His countenance from him; like Job, however, he had learnt to wait for His assistance, for here too his case was like that of the “man crushed, and delivered over to the gates of death” and on whom the devil had poured forth his wrath. How many, he adds, have to wrestle like he and Job until they are able to say “I know, O God, that Thou art gracious.”[1287]Other statements of Luther’s at a later period supply us with further information. Lauterbach notes, on Oct. 7, 1538, the complaint already quoted: “I have my mortal combats daily. We have to struggle and wrangle with the devil who has very hard bones, till we learn how to crack them. Paul and Christ had hard work enough with the devil.”[1288]On Aug. 16 of the same year Lauterbach takes down the statement: “Had anyone else had to undergo such temptations as I, he would long since have expired. I should not of my own have been able to endure the blows of Satan, just as Paul could not endure the all-too-great temptations of Christ. In short, sadness is a death in itself.”[1289]With the spiritual sickness above mentioned was combined, ashas been already pointed out (above, p. 226 f.), a growing state of depression: “I have lived long enough,” he said in 1542; “the devil is weary of my life and I am sick of hating the devil.”[1290]Terrible thoughts of the “Judgment of God” repeatedly rose up before him and caused him great fear.[1291]Before this, according to other notes, he had said to his table companions, that he was daily “at grips with Satan”;[1292]that during the attacks of the devil he had often not known whether he were “dead or alive.”[1293]“The devil,” so he assures them, “brought me to such a pitch of despair that I did not even know if there was a God.”[1294]“When the devil finds me idle, unmindful of God’s Word, and thus unarmed, he assails my conscience with the thought that I have taught what is false, that I have rent asunder the churches which were so peaceful and content under the Papacy, and caused many scandals, dissensions and factions by my teaching, etc. Well, I can’t deny that I am often anxious and uneasy about this, but, as soon as I lay hold on the Word, I again get the best.”[1295]To the people he said, in a sermon in 1531: “The devil is closer to us than we dream. I myself often feel the devil raging within me. Sometimes I believe and sometimes I don’t, sometimes I am cheerful and sometimes sad.”[1296]—A year later he describes in a sermon how the devil, who “attacks the pious,” had often made him “sweat much and his heart to beat,” before he could withstand him with the right weapon, viz. with God’s Word, namely, the office committed to him and the service he had rendered to the world, “which it was not his to belie!”[1297]Some ten years before this he had spoken still more plainly to his hearers at Wittenberg, telling them, strange to say, of his experience in early days of the good effects of confession: “I would not for all the treasures of the world give up private confession, for I know what strength and comfort it has been to me. No one knows what it can do unless he has fought often and much with the devil. Indeed, the devil would long ago have done for me, had not confession saved me.” In fact whoever tells his troubles to his brother, receives from him, as from God, comfort “for his simple conscience and faint heart”; seldom indeed did one find a “strong, firm faith” which did not stand in need ofthis; hardly anyone could boast of possessing it. “You do not know yet,” he concludes, “what labour and trouble it costs to fight with and conquer the devil. But I know it well, for I have eaten a mouthful or two of salt with him. I know him well, and so does he know me.”[1298]After all these remarkably frank admissions there can remain no doubt that a heavy mist of doubts and anxieties overshadowed Luther’s inner life.A closer examination of this darker side of his soul seems to promise further information concerning his inner life. Here, too, it is advisable to sum up the phenomena, retracing them back to their very starting-point. Though much of what is to be said has already been mentioned, still, it is only now, towards the end of his life, that the various traits can in any sense be combined so as to form something as near a complete picture as possible. We have to thank Luther’s communicativeness, talkativeness and general openness to his friends, that a tragic side of his inner life has been to some extent revealed, which otherwise might for ever have been buried in oblivion.It is true that, to forestall what follows, few nowadays will be disposed to follow Luther and to look on the devil as the originator of his doubts and qualms of conscience. His fantastic ideas of the “diabolical combats” he had to wage, form, as we shall see (below, p. 329 ff.), part of his devil-mania. Nevertheless his many references to his ordinary, nay, almost daily, inward combats or “temptations,” as he is accustomed to style them, are not mere fabrications, but really seem to come from a profoundly troubled soul. In what follows many such utterances will be quoted, because only thus can one reach a faithful picture of his changing moods which otherwise would seem barely credible. These utterances, though usually much alike, at times strike a different note and thus depict his inner life from a new and sometimes surprising side.2. The Subject-matter of the “Temptations”The spiritual warfare Luther had to wage concerned primarily his calling and his work as a whole.“You have preached the Evangel,” so the inner voice,which he describes as the devil’s tempting, says to him; “But who commanded you to do so, ‘quis iussit?’ Who called upon you to do things such as no man ever did before? How if this were displeasing to God and you had to answer for all the souls that perish?”[1299]“Satan has often said to me: How if your own doctrine were false which charges the Pope, monks and Mass-priests with such errors? Often he so overwhelmed me that the sweat has poured off me, until I said to him, go and carry your complaints to my God Who has commanded me to obey this Christ.”[1300]—“The devil would often have laid me low with his argument: ‘Thou art not called,’ had I not been a Doctor.”[1301]—“I have had no greater temptation,” he said after dinner on Dec. 14, 1531, “and none more grievous than that about my preaching; for I have said to myself: You alone are at the bottom of this; if it’s all wrong you have to answer for all the many souls which it brings down to hell. In this temptation I have often myself descended into hell till God recalled me and strengthened me, telling me that it was indeed the Word of God and true doctrine; but it costs much until one reaches this comfort.”[1302]—“Now the devil troubles me with other thoughts [than in the Papacy], for he accuses me thus: Oh, what a vast multitude have you led astray by your teaching! Sometimes amidst such temptation one single word consoles me and gives me fresh courage.”[1303]Not merely does he say this in the Table-Talk but even writes it in his Bible Commentaries. In his exposition of Psalm xlv. he speaks of an “argumentation and objection” which the devil urges against him: “Lo, you stand all alone and are seeking to overthrow the good order [of the Church] established with so much wisdom. For even though the Papacy be not without its sins and errors, what aboutyou? Areyouinfallible? Areyouwithout sin? Why raise the standard of revolt against the house of the Lord when you yourself can only teach them what you yourself are full of, viz. error and sin? These thoughts,” he continues, “upset one very much.... Hence we must learn that all our strength lies in hearing God’s Word and laying hold on it, in seeing God’s works and believing in them. Whoever does not do this will be taken captive by the devil and overthrown.” He is fully cognisant of the strength of the objection which dogs his footsteps: Though sins and faults are to be met with in individual members of the hierarchy, still we must honour their “office and authority.”[1304]Among Luther’s peculiar doctrines the principal ones which became the butt of “temptations” were his fundamental theses on Justification, on the Law and on good works.With regard to his doctrine of Justification, on Dec. 14, 1531, he gave his pupil Schlaginhaufen, who also failed to find comfort in it, some advice as to how he was to help himself. The devil was wont “to come to him” [Luther] with righteousness and to “insist on our being actively righteous,” and since none of us are, “no one can venture to stand up to him”; what one should do was, however, resolutely to fall back on passive righteousness and to say to Satan: Not by my own righteousness am I justified, but by the righteousness of the man Christ. “Do you know Him?” In this way we vanquish him by “the Word.” Another method, also a favourite one of his,[1305]so he instructs his anxious pupil, was to rid oneself of such ideas by “thinking of dancing, or of a pretty girl; that also is good, eating and drinking are likewise helpful; for one who is tempted, fasting is a hundred times worse than eating and drinking.”[1306]—“This is the great art,” he repeats at the beginning of the following year, looking back upon his own bitter experiences, “to pass from my sin to Christ’s righteousness to know that Christ’s righteousness is mine as surely as I know that this body is mine.... What astonishes me is that I cannot learn this doctrine, and yet all my pupils believe they have it at their finger-tips.”[1307]The doctrine of the Law in its relation to the Gospel, a point which he was never able to make quite clear to himself, constituted in his case an obstacle to peace of mind.[1308]In consequence of his own experience he warns others from the outset against giving way to any anxious thoughts about this: “Whoever, Law in hand, begins to dispute with the devil is already a beaten man and a prisoner.... Hence let no one dare to dispute with him about the Law, or about sin, but let him rather desist in good time.”[1309]“When Satan reproaches me and says: ‘The Law is also the Word of God,’ I reply: ‘God’s Word is only the promise of God whereby He says: Let me be Thy God. In addition to this, however, He also gives the Law, but for another purpose, not that we may be saved thereby.”[1310]But God, as Luther was well aware, will, as He threatens, judge people by their fulfilment of the Law and only grant salvation to those who keep it.The stern and clear exhortations of Scripture on fidelity to theLaw and on penance for its transgression often filled his soul with the utmost terror, and so did the text: “Unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Luke xiii. 3). Even in one of his sermons he confessed to the people in this connection, that he was acquainted from experience “with the cunning of the devil and his malicious tricks, how he is wont to upbraid us with the Law ... to make a real hell for us so that the wide world seems all too narrow to hold us”; the devil depicts Christ “as though He were angry with sinners”; “he grabs a text of Holy Scripture, or one of Christ’s warnings, and suddenly stabs us so hard in the heart ... that we actually believe it, nay, our conscience would swear to it a thousand times,” that “it was indeed Christ Who inspired such thoughts, whereas all the while it was the devil himself.” “Of what I say I have had some experience myself.”[1311]He then goes on to quote the above exhortation to penance as an instance of the sort of warning on which the devil seizes, though these words have ever been regarded by God-fearing Christians as a powerful incentive to religion and not at all as productive of excessive fear, at least in those who put their trust in grace. Luther, however, thinks it right to add: “By fear the devil fouls and poisons with his venom the pure and true knowledge of Christ.”Hence it is useless, or at best but a temporary expedient, to refrain from disputing with Satan on the Law. Nor is Luther’s invitation much better: “When a man is tempted, or is with those who are tempted, let him slay Moses and throw every stone at him on which he can lay hands.”[1312]His doctrine of good works was no less a source of disquietude to Luther. He declared that Satan was sure of an “easy victory” “once he gets a man to think of what he has done or left undone.” What one had to do was to retort to the devil, strong in one’s fiducial faith: “Though I may not have done this or that good work, still I am saved by the forgiveness of sins, as baptised and redeemed by the flesh and blood of Christ”; beyond this he should not go: “Faith ranks above deeds”; still, so he adds, before a man reaches this point, all may be over for him. “It is hard in the time of temptation to get so far; even Christ found it difficult”; “it is hard to escape from the idea of works,” i.e. from believing that they as much as faith are required for salvation and that they are meritorious.[1313]The “devil” also frequently twitted Luther, so he declares, with the consequences of his doctrines.“Often he tormented me,” he says, “with words such as these: ‘Look at the cloisters; formerly they enjoyed a delightful peace,of which you have made an end; who told you to do such a thing?’” On one occasion, when making some such admissions concerning the effect of his teaching on the religious vows, one interrupted him and tried to show that he had merely insisted that God was not to be worshipped by the doctrines and commandments of men (Mt. xv. 9), and that the dissolution of the monasteries was not so much his work as a consequence ordained by God; Luther replied frankly: “My friend, before such a thought would have occurred to me during such temptations I should indeed have been in a fine sweat.”[1314]“When Satan finds me idle and not armed with the Word,” so we read in the notes made of one of his sermons,[1315]“he puts it into my conscience that I am a disturber of the public order, a preacher of false doctrines and a herald of revolt. This he often does. But as soon as I make use of the Word as a weapon I get the best, for I answer him.... It is written you must hear this man [the Son of God] or everything falls. God heeds not the world, even were there ten rebellious worlds. It was thus that Paul, too, had to console himself when accused of preaching sedition against God and the Emperor.”[1316]In this wise does Luther seek to fall back on Christ and on his divine commission.He frequently, indeed usually, appeals to this source of consolation, and it is therefore due to him to quote a few more such statements. He struggles, in spite of all his fears, not to relinquish his peculiar trust in Christ.Yet, as he often complains in this connection, “the devil knows well how to get me away.”[1317]“He says to me: See how much evil arises from your doctrine. To which I reply: Much good has also come of it. Oh, says he, that is a mere nothing! He is a fine talker and can make a great beam of a little splinter, and destroy what is good and dissolve it into thin air. He has never been so angry in his life.... I must hold fast to Christ and to the Evangel. He frequently begins to dispute with me about this, and well knows how to get me away. He is very wroth, I feel it and understand it well.”[1318]—The moral consequences of the religious innovations, and the disunion so rife undoubtedly weighed heavily on Luther. “We, who boast of being Evangelical,” so he is impelled to exclaim in 1538, “fling the most holy Gospel to the winds as though it were but a quotation from Terence.” “Alas, Good God, how bitter the devil must be against us, to incite the very ministers of the Word against each other and to inspire them with mutual hatred!”[1319]Misgivings as to his own salvation also constituted a source of profound anxiety for Luther.So repeatedly did he hear in fancy the devil announcing to him in a voice of thunder his eternal damnation, that he was, as he confesses, almost reduced to despair and to blasphemy.“When we are thus tempted to blasphemy on account of God’s judgment,” so he said on June 18, 1540, “we fail to see either that it is a sin, or how to avoid it,” “such abominable thoughts does the prince of this world suggest to the mind: Hatred of God, blasphemy, despair; these are the devil’s own fiery darts; St. Paul understood them to some extent when he felt the sting of the devil in his flesh [2 Cor. xii. 7]. These are the high temptations [which, as he explains elsewhere, were reserved for himself and for his preachers]. No Pope has known them. These stupid donkeys were familiar with no other temptations than those of carnal passion.... To such they capitulated, and so did ‘Jeronimus.’ Yet such temptations are easily to be remedied while virgins and women remain with us.”[1320]—But in that other sort of temptation it is hard to “keep cheerful” and to tell the devil boldly: “God is not angry as you say.”[1321]On one occasion Melanchthon watched him during such a struggle, when he was battling against despair and the appalling thought that he had been delivered over to the “wrath of God and the punishment of sin.” Luther, he says, was in “such sore terror that he almost lost consciousness,” and sighed much as he wrestled with a text of Paul on unbelief and grace.[1322]Several incidents and many utterances noted down from Luther’s own lips give us an even better insight into the varying character of his “temptations” and into their nature as a whole.3. An Episode. Terrors of Conscience become Temptations of the DevilSchlaginhaufen and LutherJohann Schlaginhaufen, the pupil of Luther whom we have had so frequent occasion to mention, complained to hismaster in the winter of 1531 of the deep anxiety from which he could not shake himself free, which led him to fear for the salvation of his soul. Luther sought in vain to comfort the troubled man by pointing to his own case.[1323]The fact that the master attributed the whole matter to the devil only added to the confusion of his unfortunate pupil. So much was Schlaginhaufen upset, that on one occasion, on New Year’s Eve, 1531, he actually swooned whilst on a visit to Luther’s house. Luther, nothing abashed, promptly exorcised the devil who had brought on the fainting-fit, using thereto the Bible words: “The Lord rebuke thee, Satan” (Zach. iii. 2: “Increpet te Dominus”); he added: “He [the devil], who should be an angel of life, is an angel of death. He tries us with lying and with murder.”Schlaginhaufen, after having been put to bed, began to come to, whereupon Luther consoled him thus: “David suffered such temptations; I too have often experienced similar ones, though to-day I have been free from them and have had nothing to complain of save only a natural weakness of the head. Let the godless, Cochlæus, Faber and the Margrave [Joachim I of Brandenburg] be afraid and tremble. This is a temptation of the spirit; it is not meant for us, for we are ministers and vicars of God.” Here Schlaginhaufen groaned: “Oh, my sins!” Luther now tried to make him understand that he must turn to the thought of grace and forget all about the Law. “Oh, my God,” replied the young man, echoing his master’s own thoughts, “the tiniest devil is stronger than the whole world!” But Luther pointed out that there were even stronger good angels present for the Christian’s protection. He went on, “Satan is as hostile as can be to us. Were we only to agree to worship the Pope, we should be his dear children, enjoy perfect peace and probably become cardinals. It is not you alone who endure such temptations; I am inured to them, and Peter too and Paul were acquainted with them.... We must not be afraid of the miscreant.” When Schlaginhaufen had sufficiently recovered to return to his lodgings close by, Luther paternally admonished him to mix more freely with others and, for the rest, to trust entirely in his teacher. His own waverings did not prevent him from giving the latter piece of advice.[1324]Of the temptations by which he himself was visited, “to despair, and to dread the wrath of God,” he had already said to Schlaginhaufen, on Dec. 14, 1531: Had it not been for them he would never have been able to do so much harm to the devil, or to preserve his own humility; now, however, he knew to his shame that “when the temptation comes I am unable to get thebetter of a single venial sin. Thanks to these temptations I have attained to such knowledge and to such gifts, that, with the help of God, I won that glorious victory (‘illam præclaram victoriam’), vanquishing my monkish state, the vows, the Mass and all those abominations.” “After that I had peace,” he says, speaking of those earlier years, “so that I even took a wife, such good days had I.”[1325]—Yet his own contemporary statements show that inward peace was not his at the time when he took a wife.[1326]An incident related of Luther by Schlaginhaufen shows how a single text of Scripture, and the train of ideas it awakened, could reduce him, and Bugenhagen too, to a state verging on distraction. “The devil on one occasion,” so Luther said to him, “tormented and almost slew me with Paul’s words to Timothy [1 Tim. v. 11-12], so that my heart melted in my bosom; the reason was the abandoning by so many monks and nuns of the religious state in which they had vowed to God to live.” (Paul, in the passage cited, has strong things to say of widows who prove unfaithful to the widowhood in which they had promised to live.) “The devil,” he continues concerning his attitude towards the devil at that time, “hid from my sight the doctrine of Justification so that I never even thought of it, and obtruded on me the text; he led me away from the doctrine of grace to dispute on the Law, and then he had me at his mercy. Bugenhagen happened to be near at the time. I submitted it to him and went with him into the corridor. But he too began to doubt, for he did not know that I was so hard put about it. Thereupon I was at first much upset and passed the night with a heavy heart. Next day Bugenhagen came to me. ‘I am downright angry,’ he said, ‘I have now looked into that text more closely, and, right enough, the argument is ridiculous!’ Thus he [the devil] is always on the watch for us. But nevertheless we have Christ!”[1327]—We are not told why the argument from this Bible-passage, which insists so solemnly on the sacred character of vows, was regarded as “ridiculous.”The last incident reminds us of the scene between Luther and Bugenhagen on June, 1540, narrated in the Table-Talk; there Luther declares: “No sooner am I assailed by temptation than the flesh begins to rebel even though I understand the spirit.... Gladly would I be formally just, but I do not find it in me.” And Bugenhagen chimed in: “Herr Doctor, neither do I.”[1328]From Remorse of Conscience to Onslaughts of the DevilThe actual cause of Luther’s anxiety, as is plain from the above, was a certain quite intelligible disquiet of conscience. Yet, he chose to regard all reproaches from within as merely the sting of the Evil One. As time went on this became more and more his habit; it is always the evil spirit who is at his heels, at whose person and doings, Luther, following his bent, pokes his jokes.Hieronymus Weller, another pupil tormented with inner pangs, once, without any beating about the bush, put down all his sadness to his conscience; he declared in Luther’s presence in the spring of 1532: “Rather than endure such troubles of conscience I would willingly go through the worst illnesses.”[1329]Luther tried his best to pacify him with the assurance that the devil was “a murderer,” and that “God’s Mercy endureth for ever and ever.”Yet Luther himself had admitted to his friend Wenceslaus Link, that “it is extremely difficult thoroughly to convince oneself that such thoughts of hopelessness emanate from Satan and are not our very own, but the best help is to be found in this conviction. One must by a supreme effort contrive to turn one’s mind to other things and chase such thoughts away.” “But you can guess how hard it is,” he continues, “when the thoughts refer to God and to our eternal salvation; they are of such a nature that our conscience can neither tear itself away from them nor yet despise them.”[1330]Simply to tear itself away from such disquieting thoughts was certainly not possible for a conscience in so luckless a position as Luther’s, oppressed as it was with the weight of a world catastrophe.Luther once, in 1532, says quite outspokenly and not without a certain reference to himself: “The spirit of sadness is conscience itself”; here, however, he probably only means that we are always conscious within ourselves of a painful antagonism to the Law, for he at once goes on: “This we must ever endure,” we must necessarily be ever in a state of woe because in this life we “lie amidst the throes of childbirth that precede the Last Day;” but the devil who condemns us inwardly “has not yet condemned”Christ. Those who are thus tempted “do not feel those carnal temptations, which are so petty compared with the spiritual.”[1331]At any rate, so he will have it, there was a call to struggle most earnestly against all the inward voices that make themselves heard against the new teaching and the apostasy, just as though they came from the devil.[1332]He was helped in this, on the one hand, by his terrible energy, and, on the other, by a theological fallacy: “God has commanded that we should look to Christ for forgiveness of our sins; hence whoever does not do so makes God a liar; I must therefore say to the devil: Even though I be a scamp, yet Christ is just.”[1333]Thus we find him declaring, for instance, in July, 1528: “to yield to such disquiet of conscience is to be overcome by Satan, nay, to set Satan on the throne!” “Such thoughts may appear to be quite heavenly and called for, but they are nevertheless Satanic and cannot but be so.” When they refuse to depart, even though spurned by us, and we endure them patiently, then do we indeed “present a sublime spectacle to God and the angels.”[1334]—“Away with the devil’s sadness!” so, at a later date, in 1544, he exhorts his old friend Spalatin; “conscience stands in the cruel service of the devil; a man must learn to find consolation even against his own conscience.”[1335]4. Progress of his Mental Sufferings until their Flood-tide in 1527-1528If we glance at the history of Luther’s so-called “temptations” throughout the whole course of his career, we shall find that they were very marked at the beginning of his enterprise. Before 1525 they had fallen off, but they became again more frequent during the terrors of the Peasant War and then reasserted themselves with great violence in 1527. After abating somewhat for the next twoyears they again assumed alarming proportions in 1530 in the solitude of the Coburg and thus continue, with occasional breaks, until 1538. From that time until the end of his life he seemed to enjoy greater peace, at least from doubts regarding his own salvation, though, on the other hand, gloomy depression undoubtedly darkened the twilight of his days, and he complains more than ever of the weakness of his own faith; we miss, however, those vivid accounts of his struggles of conscience which he had been wont to give.The Period Previous to 1527Let us listen first of all to Luther’s self-reproach in the early days of his public labours; we may recall those words of 1521 where he confesses, that, before he had grown so bold and confident, “his heart had often quaked with fear,” when he thought of the words of his foes: “Are you alone wise and are all others mistaken? Is it likely that so many centuries were all in the wrong? Supposing, on the contrary, you were in the wrong and were leading so many others with you into error and to eternal perdition!”[1336]He admits similarly that he had still to fight with his conscience even after having passed through the storm in which, “amidst excitement and confusion of conscience,” he had discovered the true doctrine of salvation.[1337]That discovery did not bring him into a haven of rest even though we have his word that, for a while, he was quite overcome with joy. “Oh, what great trouble and labour did it cost me, even though grounded on Holy Scripture, to convince my conscience that I had a right to stand up all alone against the Pope, and denounce him as Antichrist, the Bishops as his Apostles and the Universities as his brothels.”[1338]The days he spent in the Wartburg and the opportunity they afforded him to look back on his past, awakened anew these self-reproaches; whilst in the solitude, we hear him complaining, that his “distress of soul still persisted andthat his former weakness of spirit and of faith had not yet left him.”[1339]Later on he remembered having had to battle with every kind of despair (“omnibus desperationibus”) for three long years.[1340]At a much later date, in 1541, he reminds his friends of the many inward struggles (“tot agones”) the first proclamation of the Evangel and his crusade against the word of man had cost him.[1341]About 1521 he must have arrived at a pitch of “despair and temptation regarding the wrath of God” such as he never before had tasted; for he told one of his pupils, on Dec. 14, 1532, that it was “about ten years since he had felt this struggle so severely; after that better days had dawned, but later the difficulties began anew.”[1342]But, as he often admits, he was all too addicted to thoughts of despair, thanks to the devil who was ever lying in wait for him; as for the “better days” they might easily be counted. “When these thoughts come upon me I forget everything about Christ and God, and even begin to look upon God as a miscreant”; the “Laudate” stops, so he says, and the “Blasphemate” begins as soon as we begin to think of the fate to which from all eternity we are predestined.[1343]Subsequent to 1525 his new state of life with its domestic cares and distractions, added to his satisfaction with the growing damage inflicted on the Papacy, appear to have contributed to diminish his trouble of mind.Later, however, in 1527, it “began anew.”Atrocious suffering of mind and bitter anxiety concerning the abuses in the new Church—“a vinegar sourer than all other vinegars, as he calls it,”—immediately preceded his illness which began about July 7, 1527.[1344]Mental uneasiness and self-reproaches accompanied the fainting-fits which at that time seemed tothreaten his life. His inward struggles were so severe that Bugenhagen, who tried to comfort him, compares them with the darkness of the soul “so frequently mentioned in the Psalms as illustrative of the spiritual pangs of hell.” “Dr. Martin,” writes the latter, who was pastor at Wittenberg and Luther’s “confessor,” “had in all likelihood been through other such temptations, but none had ever been so severe; this he admitted on the following day to Dr. Jonas, to Dr. Christian [Schurf] and to me. He said they were worse and more dangerous than the bodily ailment which befell him on that same Saturday evening about five o’clock and which was so serious that we feared he would succumb under it.” Luther himself, in those critical days, declared “that he would not retract his doctrine,” and, after making his confession to Bugenhagen as the latter relates, “spoke at considerable length of the spiritual temptation he had been through the same morning, with such fear and trembling as could not be described in words.”[1345]It was then that the curious complaint was involuntarily wrung from him that those who saw his outward behaviour fancied he “lay on a bed of roses, though God knew how it stood with him.” Bugenhagen and Jonas have embellished their accounts of this illness of their friend with many pious utterances supposed to have been spoken by him then.[1346]The Height of the Storm, 1527-28The worst struggles, lasting over many months, followed upon Luther’s illness of 1527.Hardly had he recovered his normal health than we find his letters full of sad allusions to his abiding state of despair and to his fears concerning the faith, probably the most melancholy outpourings of his whole life.“For more than a week I have been tossed about between death and hell,” he writes to Melanchthon, “so that I still tremble in every limb and feel utterly broken. Waves and storms of despair and blasphemy against God broke over me and I lost Christ almost entirely. But, at the intercession of the saints [his friends] God has begun to take pity on me and has delivered my soul from the lowest hell.”[1347]—“This struggle,” hewrites to Justus Menius, “goes beyond my strength.... I am tried not only in body but still more, and worst of all, in soul. God allows Satan and his angels thus to torment me.”[1348]In a letter of Aug. 21, addressed to Johann Agricola, then still his friend, he informed him that the fight was not yet at an end. “Satan rages against me with all his might. Like another Job (Job xvi. 12), God has set me up as a mark, and He tempts me with intolerable weakness of spirit. The prayers of holy men indeed save me from remaining in his hands, but the wounds I have received in my heart will be hard to heal. I trust that my strivings will turn to the salvation of many.” He concludes by saying that those in power (the Catholics) were unable to get at him, but that so much the more was he plagued in spirit “by the Prince of this world.”[1349]He writes in much the same vein on Aug. 26 to Nicholas Hausmann.Truly, so he again wrote to Johann Agricola, on Aug. 31, “neither world nor reason can understand how hard it is to realise that Christ is our righteousness, so deeply rooted in us is the doctrine of works, which has grown up with us and become part of us. That Christ may strengthen me I commend myself to your prayers.”[1350]Hence it was his chief dogma, the very rock of his Evangel, that “Satan” was then tampering with. The call for good works was, as he felt, beyond even his power to deny.“For wellnigh three months I have been feeling wretched,” he wrote on Oct. 8, “not so much in body as in soul, so that I have written little or nothing, so greatly has Satan tossed me in the sieve [Luke xxii. 31]”[1351]—“God has not yet completely restored me to health,” he announces on Oct. 19, “but in His wisdom leaves me a prey to Satan who assails me and buffets me; but God also sends help and protection.”[1352]He speaks of himself, on Oct. 27, as “a wretched and abject worm, harassed by the spirit of sadness,” “I seek and thirst for nought else than for a gracious God, for as such He reveals Himself even to His enemies and contemners.”[1353]Luther had claimed, that, through his new doctrine and through flinging aside his monkish frock he had found “a gracious God,” and proclaimed Him to men for their reconciliation; this has been extolled as the greatest gain achieved by the Lutheran schism; yet here we have his word for it that the solace of a Gracious God was still withheld from him.—“I have always been in the habit of comforting others,” he says in a letter to Amsdorf on Nov. 1; “and now I myself stand in desperate need of such consolation; only one thing, however, do I wish, viz. never to be the foe of Christ, although I have offended Him by many and great sins.Satan tries to make a Job of me; he would like to sift me like Peter and his brethren. Oh, that God would say to him: ‘Yet spare his life’ [Job ii. 6], and to me: ‘I am thy salvation’ [Ps. xxxiv. 3]. Even now I still hope that His anger at my sins will not last for ever.... Meanwhile fighting goes on outside and fears reign within, yea, very bitter ones indeed.”[1354]Thus in spite of everything he tries to buoy himself up with hope.Yet his lamentations continue. “Hardly can I breathe for storms and faintheartedness.... My Katey, however, is strong in faith and in good health.... As for me, my body is whole but I am tempted” (Nov. 4).[1355]—“From several sides at once fears rush in on me. My temptations torment me ... for months storms and faintness of spirit have never left me; pray that my faith may not fail” (Nov. 7).—“I have surely troubles enough already, please do not add to them by crucifying me with your dissensions” (Nov. 9).—“Erasmus and the Sacramentarians are now come to stamp me under foot, to persecute a man already utterly worn out in spirit!”[1356]—“I endure God’s wrath because I have sinned against Him. My sins, death, and Satan with his angels all rage against me without a break; and now Pope and Emperor, Princes, Bishops and the whole world too storms in upon me, making common cause with the crew who vex me”; everything would be endurable provided only Christ—for Whose sake he, the “most abject of all sinners,” was hated—did not desert one “whom God has smitten”[1357]and whom they persecute (Nov. 10).—“I believe that it is no mere fiend from the ranks of the devil’s hosts who fights with me, but the Prince of the demons himself; so powerful is he and so armed to the teeth with Bible-texts that my knowledge of the Bible is left stranded and I am obliged to have recourse to the words of others; from this you may get some idea of the devil’s height, as they say” (Nov. 17).“I am well in body, but as to how it stands with me in spirit I am not certain.... I seek only for a gracious Christ.... Satan wants to prevent me from writing and to drag me down with him to hell. May Christ tread him under foot, Amen!” (Nov. 22).[1358]His work and his doctrine must, according to him, be pleasing to heaven; the difficulties and the attacks from without and from within, all these he attributes to Satan’s raging and sees inthem proofs “that our word is the Word of God; this alone it is that makes him so furious against us” (Dec. 30).—It has been said that Luther held fast to this with a “bold faith”; it would, however, be more correct to say that he catches at such thoughts as a drowning man does at a straw, a phenomenon which of itself throws a lurid light on his delusions and the misty trend of his thoughts. He is determined to be sure of his cause—and at this very time, with the help of the State, he has a Coburg Zwinglian put to silence, because the latter “neither is nor can be sure of his cause.”[1359]“I myself am weak and in wretchedness,” he again confesses. “If only Christ does not forsake me.... Satan expends his fury on me because I have attacked him by deed, and word, and writing; but I feel consoled when I boldly believe (‘fortiter credo’) that what I did was pleasing to the Lord and to His Christ. I am tossed about between the two warring princes [Christ and Satan] till all my bones are sore. Many works of Satan have I done and still do, nevertheless I hope to please my Christ Who is merciful and inclined to forgive; but from Satan I desire no forgiveness for what I have done against him and for Christ. He is a murderer and the father of lies.... I feel in the depths of my soul how, with unbelievable wrath, he plots against me, assuming even the guise of Christ, to say nothing of that of the angel of light” (Nov. 27, 1527).—The “guise of Christ” and of the “angel of light,” to which he here alludes, are sufficient to show those who look below the surface that what was troubling him was something not very different from the inner voice of conscience.How far he could go in deluding himself the better to appease his conscience is plain from what he says in his letter “to the Christians at Erfurt”: During the whole time he had spent at Erfurt in his Catholic days he had longed in vain to hear “a Gospel or even a little Psalm”; there, as was everywhere the case in Popery, Holy Scripture lay buried deep, and “no one had even thought of preaching a really Christian sermon.”[1360]No less vain than this consolation from the past was that which he sought in the future. He clung wildly to his delusion that the end of all was at hand; “Satan,” he cries, “has but a short respite before being completely overthrown, therefore does he make such furious and incredible efforts” (Dec. 31).“Now that the Word is preached Satan plainly comes off second best; hence he persecutes me secretly; he is unchained, and, with all his engines he seeks to tear Christ from me.” Thus (on Nov. 28).—“I am the wretched ‘off-scourings of Christ’” (Nov. 29).—“I am to all intents and purposes dead, as the Apostle calls it, yet still I live” (Dec. 10).The long and terrible year was drawing to a close. He had almost grown accustomed to his inward troubles. “I have not yet shaken off my temptation, nor do I desire to be free if it is to God’s glory. The devil rages against me simply because Christ has vanquished him through me, his most wretched of vessels” (Dec. 14).—“Well in body, in soul I am as Christ wills, to Whom I am now bound only by a slender thread. The devil on the other hand is moored to me with mighty cords, nay, real cables; he drags me down into the depths, but the weak Christ has still the upper hand owing to your prayers, or at least He puts up a brave fight” (Dec. 29).The Trouble ContinuesEven his lectures on the 1st Epistle of St. John testify to Luther’s inward excitement during that unhappy year (1527). The Preface to the commentary as preserved in the Vatican MS. (Palat., 1825) is dated Aug. 19, and begins: “You know that we are so placed by God in this life as to be exposed to all the darts of Satan. And not Satan alone storms against us, but also the world, and our heart, and our flesh. Hence we must despair of peace so long as we remain here below. Against all these evils God has given us no other weapon than His Word which He commands us to preach, who live in the midst of wolves.... Thus, since we are exposed to all these dangers, to death, sin, heretics and the whole might of Satan, I have undertaken to expound this Epistle.”
A LIFE FULL OF STRUGGLES OF CONSCIENCE
Anaccount given by Luther himself in 1537 and taken down by his pupils from his own lips is the best introduction to the subject now to be considered.
“He spoke of his spiritual sickness (‘morbus spiritualis’). For a fortnight he had tasted neither food nor drink and had had no sleep. ‘During this time,’ so he said, ‘I wrestled frequently with God and impatiently upbraided Him with His promises.’” While in this state he had been forced to complain, with the sick and troubled Job, that God was killing him and hiding His countenance from him; like Job, however, he had learnt to wait for His assistance, for here too his case was like that of the “man crushed, and delivered over to the gates of death” and on whom the devil had poured forth his wrath. How many, he adds, have to wrestle like he and Job until they are able to say “I know, O God, that Thou art gracious.”[1287]
Other statements of Luther’s at a later period supply us with further information. Lauterbach notes, on Oct. 7, 1538, the complaint already quoted: “I have my mortal combats daily. We have to struggle and wrangle with the devil who has very hard bones, till we learn how to crack them. Paul and Christ had hard work enough with the devil.”[1288]On Aug. 16 of the same year Lauterbach takes down the statement: “Had anyone else had to undergo such temptations as I, he would long since have expired. I should not of my own have been able to endure the blows of Satan, just as Paul could not endure the all-too-great temptations of Christ. In short, sadness is a death in itself.”[1289]With the spiritual sickness above mentioned was combined, ashas been already pointed out (above, p. 226 f.), a growing state of depression: “I have lived long enough,” he said in 1542; “the devil is weary of my life and I am sick of hating the devil.”[1290]Terrible thoughts of the “Judgment of God” repeatedly rose up before him and caused him great fear.[1291]Before this, according to other notes, he had said to his table companions, that he was daily “at grips with Satan”;[1292]that during the attacks of the devil he had often not known whether he were “dead or alive.”[1293]“The devil,” so he assures them, “brought me to such a pitch of despair that I did not even know if there was a God.”[1294]“When the devil finds me idle, unmindful of God’s Word, and thus unarmed, he assails my conscience with the thought that I have taught what is false, that I have rent asunder the churches which were so peaceful and content under the Papacy, and caused many scandals, dissensions and factions by my teaching, etc. Well, I can’t deny that I am often anxious and uneasy about this, but, as soon as I lay hold on the Word, I again get the best.”[1295]To the people he said, in a sermon in 1531: “The devil is closer to us than we dream. I myself often feel the devil raging within me. Sometimes I believe and sometimes I don’t, sometimes I am cheerful and sometimes sad.”[1296]—A year later he describes in a sermon how the devil, who “attacks the pious,” had often made him “sweat much and his heart to beat,” before he could withstand him with the right weapon, viz. with God’s Word, namely, the office committed to him and the service he had rendered to the world, “which it was not his to belie!”[1297]Some ten years before this he had spoken still more plainly to his hearers at Wittenberg, telling them, strange to say, of his experience in early days of the good effects of confession: “I would not for all the treasures of the world give up private confession, for I know what strength and comfort it has been to me. No one knows what it can do unless he has fought often and much with the devil. Indeed, the devil would long ago have done for me, had not confession saved me.” In fact whoever tells his troubles to his brother, receives from him, as from God, comfort “for his simple conscience and faint heart”; seldom indeed did one find a “strong, firm faith” which did not stand in need ofthis; hardly anyone could boast of possessing it. “You do not know yet,” he concludes, “what labour and trouble it costs to fight with and conquer the devil. But I know it well, for I have eaten a mouthful or two of salt with him. I know him well, and so does he know me.”[1298]
Other statements of Luther’s at a later period supply us with further information. Lauterbach notes, on Oct. 7, 1538, the complaint already quoted: “I have my mortal combats daily. We have to struggle and wrangle with the devil who has very hard bones, till we learn how to crack them. Paul and Christ had hard work enough with the devil.”[1288]On Aug. 16 of the same year Lauterbach takes down the statement: “Had anyone else had to undergo such temptations as I, he would long since have expired. I should not of my own have been able to endure the blows of Satan, just as Paul could not endure the all-too-great temptations of Christ. In short, sadness is a death in itself.”[1289]
With the spiritual sickness above mentioned was combined, ashas been already pointed out (above, p. 226 f.), a growing state of depression: “I have lived long enough,” he said in 1542; “the devil is weary of my life and I am sick of hating the devil.”[1290]Terrible thoughts of the “Judgment of God” repeatedly rose up before him and caused him great fear.[1291]
Before this, according to other notes, he had said to his table companions, that he was daily “at grips with Satan”;[1292]that during the attacks of the devil he had often not known whether he were “dead or alive.”[1293]“The devil,” so he assures them, “brought me to such a pitch of despair that I did not even know if there was a God.”[1294]“When the devil finds me idle, unmindful of God’s Word, and thus unarmed, he assails my conscience with the thought that I have taught what is false, that I have rent asunder the churches which were so peaceful and content under the Papacy, and caused many scandals, dissensions and factions by my teaching, etc. Well, I can’t deny that I am often anxious and uneasy about this, but, as soon as I lay hold on the Word, I again get the best.”[1295]
To the people he said, in a sermon in 1531: “The devil is closer to us than we dream. I myself often feel the devil raging within me. Sometimes I believe and sometimes I don’t, sometimes I am cheerful and sometimes sad.”[1296]—A year later he describes in a sermon how the devil, who “attacks the pious,” had often made him “sweat much and his heart to beat,” before he could withstand him with the right weapon, viz. with God’s Word, namely, the office committed to him and the service he had rendered to the world, “which it was not his to belie!”[1297]Some ten years before this he had spoken still more plainly to his hearers at Wittenberg, telling them, strange to say, of his experience in early days of the good effects of confession: “I would not for all the treasures of the world give up private confession, for I know what strength and comfort it has been to me. No one knows what it can do unless he has fought often and much with the devil. Indeed, the devil would long ago have done for me, had not confession saved me.” In fact whoever tells his troubles to his brother, receives from him, as from God, comfort “for his simple conscience and faint heart”; seldom indeed did one find a “strong, firm faith” which did not stand in need ofthis; hardly anyone could boast of possessing it. “You do not know yet,” he concludes, “what labour and trouble it costs to fight with and conquer the devil. But I know it well, for I have eaten a mouthful or two of salt with him. I know him well, and so does he know me.”[1298]
After all these remarkably frank admissions there can remain no doubt that a heavy mist of doubts and anxieties overshadowed Luther’s inner life.
A closer examination of this darker side of his soul seems to promise further information concerning his inner life. Here, too, it is advisable to sum up the phenomena, retracing them back to their very starting-point. Though much of what is to be said has already been mentioned, still, it is only now, towards the end of his life, that the various traits can in any sense be combined so as to form something as near a complete picture as possible. We have to thank Luther’s communicativeness, talkativeness and general openness to his friends, that a tragic side of his inner life has been to some extent revealed, which otherwise might for ever have been buried in oblivion.
It is true that, to forestall what follows, few nowadays will be disposed to follow Luther and to look on the devil as the originator of his doubts and qualms of conscience. His fantastic ideas of the “diabolical combats” he had to wage, form, as we shall see (below, p. 329 ff.), part of his devil-mania. Nevertheless his many references to his ordinary, nay, almost daily, inward combats or “temptations,” as he is accustomed to style them, are not mere fabrications, but really seem to come from a profoundly troubled soul. In what follows many such utterances will be quoted, because only thus can one reach a faithful picture of his changing moods which otherwise would seem barely credible. These utterances, though usually much alike, at times strike a different note and thus depict his inner life from a new and sometimes surprising side.
The spiritual warfare Luther had to wage concerned primarily his calling and his work as a whole.
“You have preached the Evangel,” so the inner voice,which he describes as the devil’s tempting, says to him; “But who commanded you to do so, ‘quis iussit?’ Who called upon you to do things such as no man ever did before? How if this were displeasing to God and you had to answer for all the souls that perish?”[1299]
“Satan has often said to me: How if your own doctrine were false which charges the Pope, monks and Mass-priests with such errors? Often he so overwhelmed me that the sweat has poured off me, until I said to him, go and carry your complaints to my God Who has commanded me to obey this Christ.”[1300]—“The devil would often have laid me low with his argument: ‘Thou art not called,’ had I not been a Doctor.”[1301]—“I have had no greater temptation,” he said after dinner on Dec. 14, 1531, “and none more grievous than that about my preaching; for I have said to myself: You alone are at the bottom of this; if it’s all wrong you have to answer for all the many souls which it brings down to hell. In this temptation I have often myself descended into hell till God recalled me and strengthened me, telling me that it was indeed the Word of God and true doctrine; but it costs much until one reaches this comfort.”[1302]—“Now the devil troubles me with other thoughts [than in the Papacy], for he accuses me thus: Oh, what a vast multitude have you led astray by your teaching! Sometimes amidst such temptation one single word consoles me and gives me fresh courage.”[1303]Not merely does he say this in the Table-Talk but even writes it in his Bible Commentaries. In his exposition of Psalm xlv. he speaks of an “argumentation and objection” which the devil urges against him: “Lo, you stand all alone and are seeking to overthrow the good order [of the Church] established with so much wisdom. For even though the Papacy be not without its sins and errors, what aboutyou? Areyouinfallible? Areyouwithout sin? Why raise the standard of revolt against the house of the Lord when you yourself can only teach them what you yourself are full of, viz. error and sin? These thoughts,” he continues, “upset one very much.... Hence we must learn that all our strength lies in hearing God’s Word and laying hold on it, in seeing God’s works and believing in them. Whoever does not do this will be taken captive by the devil and overthrown.” He is fully cognisant of the strength of the objection which dogs his footsteps: Though sins and faults are to be met with in individual members of the hierarchy, still we must honour their “office and authority.”[1304]
“Satan has often said to me: How if your own doctrine were false which charges the Pope, monks and Mass-priests with such errors? Often he so overwhelmed me that the sweat has poured off me, until I said to him, go and carry your complaints to my God Who has commanded me to obey this Christ.”[1300]—“The devil would often have laid me low with his argument: ‘Thou art not called,’ had I not been a Doctor.”[1301]—“I have had no greater temptation,” he said after dinner on Dec. 14, 1531, “and none more grievous than that about my preaching; for I have said to myself: You alone are at the bottom of this; if it’s all wrong you have to answer for all the many souls which it brings down to hell. In this temptation I have often myself descended into hell till God recalled me and strengthened me, telling me that it was indeed the Word of God and true doctrine; but it costs much until one reaches this comfort.”[1302]—“Now the devil troubles me with other thoughts [than in the Papacy], for he accuses me thus: Oh, what a vast multitude have you led astray by your teaching! Sometimes amidst such temptation one single word consoles me and gives me fresh courage.”[1303]
Not merely does he say this in the Table-Talk but even writes it in his Bible Commentaries. In his exposition of Psalm xlv. he speaks of an “argumentation and objection” which the devil urges against him: “Lo, you stand all alone and are seeking to overthrow the good order [of the Church] established with so much wisdom. For even though the Papacy be not without its sins and errors, what aboutyou? Areyouinfallible? Areyouwithout sin? Why raise the standard of revolt against the house of the Lord when you yourself can only teach them what you yourself are full of, viz. error and sin? These thoughts,” he continues, “upset one very much.... Hence we must learn that all our strength lies in hearing God’s Word and laying hold on it, in seeing God’s works and believing in them. Whoever does not do this will be taken captive by the devil and overthrown.” He is fully cognisant of the strength of the objection which dogs his footsteps: Though sins and faults are to be met with in individual members of the hierarchy, still we must honour their “office and authority.”[1304]
Among Luther’s peculiar doctrines the principal ones which became the butt of “temptations” were his fundamental theses on Justification, on the Law and on good works.
With regard to his doctrine of Justification, on Dec. 14, 1531, he gave his pupil Schlaginhaufen, who also failed to find comfort in it, some advice as to how he was to help himself. The devil was wont “to come to him” [Luther] with righteousness and to “insist on our being actively righteous,” and since none of us are, “no one can venture to stand up to him”; what one should do was, however, resolutely to fall back on passive righteousness and to say to Satan: Not by my own righteousness am I justified, but by the righteousness of the man Christ. “Do you know Him?” In this way we vanquish him by “the Word.” Another method, also a favourite one of his,[1305]so he instructs his anxious pupil, was to rid oneself of such ideas by “thinking of dancing, or of a pretty girl; that also is good, eating and drinking are likewise helpful; for one who is tempted, fasting is a hundred times worse than eating and drinking.”[1306]—“This is the great art,” he repeats at the beginning of the following year, looking back upon his own bitter experiences, “to pass from my sin to Christ’s righteousness to know that Christ’s righteousness is mine as surely as I know that this body is mine.... What astonishes me is that I cannot learn this doctrine, and yet all my pupils believe they have it at their finger-tips.”[1307]The doctrine of the Law in its relation to the Gospel, a point which he was never able to make quite clear to himself, constituted in his case an obstacle to peace of mind.[1308]In consequence of his own experience he warns others from the outset against giving way to any anxious thoughts about this: “Whoever, Law in hand, begins to dispute with the devil is already a beaten man and a prisoner.... Hence let no one dare to dispute with him about the Law, or about sin, but let him rather desist in good time.”[1309]“When Satan reproaches me and says: ‘The Law is also the Word of God,’ I reply: ‘God’s Word is only the promise of God whereby He says: Let me be Thy God. In addition to this, however, He also gives the Law, but for another purpose, not that we may be saved thereby.”[1310]But God, as Luther was well aware, will, as He threatens, judge people by their fulfilment of the Law and only grant salvation to those who keep it.The stern and clear exhortations of Scripture on fidelity to theLaw and on penance for its transgression often filled his soul with the utmost terror, and so did the text: “Unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Luke xiii. 3). Even in one of his sermons he confessed to the people in this connection, that he was acquainted from experience “with the cunning of the devil and his malicious tricks, how he is wont to upbraid us with the Law ... to make a real hell for us so that the wide world seems all too narrow to hold us”; the devil depicts Christ “as though He were angry with sinners”; “he grabs a text of Holy Scripture, or one of Christ’s warnings, and suddenly stabs us so hard in the heart ... that we actually believe it, nay, our conscience would swear to it a thousand times,” that “it was indeed Christ Who inspired such thoughts, whereas all the while it was the devil himself.” “Of what I say I have had some experience myself.”[1311]He then goes on to quote the above exhortation to penance as an instance of the sort of warning on which the devil seizes, though these words have ever been regarded by God-fearing Christians as a powerful incentive to religion and not at all as productive of excessive fear, at least in those who put their trust in grace. Luther, however, thinks it right to add: “By fear the devil fouls and poisons with his venom the pure and true knowledge of Christ.”Hence it is useless, or at best but a temporary expedient, to refrain from disputing with Satan on the Law. Nor is Luther’s invitation much better: “When a man is tempted, or is with those who are tempted, let him slay Moses and throw every stone at him on which he can lay hands.”[1312]His doctrine of good works was no less a source of disquietude to Luther. He declared that Satan was sure of an “easy victory” “once he gets a man to think of what he has done or left undone.” What one had to do was to retort to the devil, strong in one’s fiducial faith: “Though I may not have done this or that good work, still I am saved by the forgiveness of sins, as baptised and redeemed by the flesh and blood of Christ”; beyond this he should not go: “Faith ranks above deeds”; still, so he adds, before a man reaches this point, all may be over for him. “It is hard in the time of temptation to get so far; even Christ found it difficult”; “it is hard to escape from the idea of works,” i.e. from believing that they as much as faith are required for salvation and that they are meritorious.[1313]
With regard to his doctrine of Justification, on Dec. 14, 1531, he gave his pupil Schlaginhaufen, who also failed to find comfort in it, some advice as to how he was to help himself. The devil was wont “to come to him” [Luther] with righteousness and to “insist on our being actively righteous,” and since none of us are, “no one can venture to stand up to him”; what one should do was, however, resolutely to fall back on passive righteousness and to say to Satan: Not by my own righteousness am I justified, but by the righteousness of the man Christ. “Do you know Him?” In this way we vanquish him by “the Word.” Another method, also a favourite one of his,[1305]so he instructs his anxious pupil, was to rid oneself of such ideas by “thinking of dancing, or of a pretty girl; that also is good, eating and drinking are likewise helpful; for one who is tempted, fasting is a hundred times worse than eating and drinking.”[1306]—“This is the great art,” he repeats at the beginning of the following year, looking back upon his own bitter experiences, “to pass from my sin to Christ’s righteousness to know that Christ’s righteousness is mine as surely as I know that this body is mine.... What astonishes me is that I cannot learn this doctrine, and yet all my pupils believe they have it at their finger-tips.”[1307]
The doctrine of the Law in its relation to the Gospel, a point which he was never able to make quite clear to himself, constituted in his case an obstacle to peace of mind.[1308]In consequence of his own experience he warns others from the outset against giving way to any anxious thoughts about this: “Whoever, Law in hand, begins to dispute with the devil is already a beaten man and a prisoner.... Hence let no one dare to dispute with him about the Law, or about sin, but let him rather desist in good time.”[1309]“When Satan reproaches me and says: ‘The Law is also the Word of God,’ I reply: ‘God’s Word is only the promise of God whereby He says: Let me be Thy God. In addition to this, however, He also gives the Law, but for another purpose, not that we may be saved thereby.”[1310]
But God, as Luther was well aware, will, as He threatens, judge people by their fulfilment of the Law and only grant salvation to those who keep it.
The stern and clear exhortations of Scripture on fidelity to theLaw and on penance for its transgression often filled his soul with the utmost terror, and so did the text: “Unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Luke xiii. 3). Even in one of his sermons he confessed to the people in this connection, that he was acquainted from experience “with the cunning of the devil and his malicious tricks, how he is wont to upbraid us with the Law ... to make a real hell for us so that the wide world seems all too narrow to hold us”; the devil depicts Christ “as though He were angry with sinners”; “he grabs a text of Holy Scripture, or one of Christ’s warnings, and suddenly stabs us so hard in the heart ... that we actually believe it, nay, our conscience would swear to it a thousand times,” that “it was indeed Christ Who inspired such thoughts, whereas all the while it was the devil himself.” “Of what I say I have had some experience myself.”[1311]He then goes on to quote the above exhortation to penance as an instance of the sort of warning on which the devil seizes, though these words have ever been regarded by God-fearing Christians as a powerful incentive to religion and not at all as productive of excessive fear, at least in those who put their trust in grace. Luther, however, thinks it right to add: “By fear the devil fouls and poisons with his venom the pure and true knowledge of Christ.”
Hence it is useless, or at best but a temporary expedient, to refrain from disputing with Satan on the Law. Nor is Luther’s invitation much better: “When a man is tempted, or is with those who are tempted, let him slay Moses and throw every stone at him on which he can lay hands.”[1312]
His doctrine of good works was no less a source of disquietude to Luther. He declared that Satan was sure of an “easy victory” “once he gets a man to think of what he has done or left undone.” What one had to do was to retort to the devil, strong in one’s fiducial faith: “Though I may not have done this or that good work, still I am saved by the forgiveness of sins, as baptised and redeemed by the flesh and blood of Christ”; beyond this he should not go: “Faith ranks above deeds”; still, so he adds, before a man reaches this point, all may be over for him. “It is hard in the time of temptation to get so far; even Christ found it difficult”; “it is hard to escape from the idea of works,” i.e. from believing that they as much as faith are required for salvation and that they are meritorious.[1313]
The “devil” also frequently twitted Luther, so he declares, with the consequences of his doctrines.
“Often he tormented me,” he says, “with words such as these: ‘Look at the cloisters; formerly they enjoyed a delightful peace,of which you have made an end; who told you to do such a thing?’” On one occasion, when making some such admissions concerning the effect of his teaching on the religious vows, one interrupted him and tried to show that he had merely insisted that God was not to be worshipped by the doctrines and commandments of men (Mt. xv. 9), and that the dissolution of the monasteries was not so much his work as a consequence ordained by God; Luther replied frankly: “My friend, before such a thought would have occurred to me during such temptations I should indeed have been in a fine sweat.”[1314]“When Satan finds me idle and not armed with the Word,” so we read in the notes made of one of his sermons,[1315]“he puts it into my conscience that I am a disturber of the public order, a preacher of false doctrines and a herald of revolt. This he often does. But as soon as I make use of the Word as a weapon I get the best, for I answer him.... It is written you must hear this man [the Son of God] or everything falls. God heeds not the world, even were there ten rebellious worlds. It was thus that Paul, too, had to console himself when accused of preaching sedition against God and the Emperor.”[1316]In this wise does Luther seek to fall back on Christ and on his divine commission.He frequently, indeed usually, appeals to this source of consolation, and it is therefore due to him to quote a few more such statements. He struggles, in spite of all his fears, not to relinquish his peculiar trust in Christ.Yet, as he often complains in this connection, “the devil knows well how to get me away.”[1317]“He says to me: See how much evil arises from your doctrine. To which I reply: Much good has also come of it. Oh, says he, that is a mere nothing! He is a fine talker and can make a great beam of a little splinter, and destroy what is good and dissolve it into thin air. He has never been so angry in his life.... I must hold fast to Christ and to the Evangel. He frequently begins to dispute with me about this, and well knows how to get me away. He is very wroth, I feel it and understand it well.”[1318]—The moral consequences of the religious innovations, and the disunion so rife undoubtedly weighed heavily on Luther. “We, who boast of being Evangelical,” so he is impelled to exclaim in 1538, “fling the most holy Gospel to the winds as though it were but a quotation from Terence.” “Alas, Good God, how bitter the devil must be against us, to incite the very ministers of the Word against each other and to inspire them with mutual hatred!”[1319]
“Often he tormented me,” he says, “with words such as these: ‘Look at the cloisters; formerly they enjoyed a delightful peace,of which you have made an end; who told you to do such a thing?’” On one occasion, when making some such admissions concerning the effect of his teaching on the religious vows, one interrupted him and tried to show that he had merely insisted that God was not to be worshipped by the doctrines and commandments of men (Mt. xv. 9), and that the dissolution of the monasteries was not so much his work as a consequence ordained by God; Luther replied frankly: “My friend, before such a thought would have occurred to me during such temptations I should indeed have been in a fine sweat.”[1314]
“When Satan finds me idle and not armed with the Word,” so we read in the notes made of one of his sermons,[1315]“he puts it into my conscience that I am a disturber of the public order, a preacher of false doctrines and a herald of revolt. This he often does. But as soon as I make use of the Word as a weapon I get the best, for I answer him.... It is written you must hear this man [the Son of God] or everything falls. God heeds not the world, even were there ten rebellious worlds. It was thus that Paul, too, had to console himself when accused of preaching sedition against God and the Emperor.”[1316]In this wise does Luther seek to fall back on Christ and on his divine commission.
He frequently, indeed usually, appeals to this source of consolation, and it is therefore due to him to quote a few more such statements. He struggles, in spite of all his fears, not to relinquish his peculiar trust in Christ.
Yet, as he often complains in this connection, “the devil knows well how to get me away.”[1317]
“He says to me: See how much evil arises from your doctrine. To which I reply: Much good has also come of it. Oh, says he, that is a mere nothing! He is a fine talker and can make a great beam of a little splinter, and destroy what is good and dissolve it into thin air. He has never been so angry in his life.... I must hold fast to Christ and to the Evangel. He frequently begins to dispute with me about this, and well knows how to get me away. He is very wroth, I feel it and understand it well.”[1318]—The moral consequences of the religious innovations, and the disunion so rife undoubtedly weighed heavily on Luther. “We, who boast of being Evangelical,” so he is impelled to exclaim in 1538, “fling the most holy Gospel to the winds as though it were but a quotation from Terence.” “Alas, Good God, how bitter the devil must be against us, to incite the very ministers of the Word against each other and to inspire them with mutual hatred!”[1319]
Misgivings as to his own salvation also constituted a source of profound anxiety for Luther.
So repeatedly did he hear in fancy the devil announcing to him in a voice of thunder his eternal damnation, that he was, as he confesses, almost reduced to despair and to blasphemy.
“When we are thus tempted to blasphemy on account of God’s judgment,” so he said on June 18, 1540, “we fail to see either that it is a sin, or how to avoid it,” “such abominable thoughts does the prince of this world suggest to the mind: Hatred of God, blasphemy, despair; these are the devil’s own fiery darts; St. Paul understood them to some extent when he felt the sting of the devil in his flesh [2 Cor. xii. 7]. These are the high temptations [which, as he explains elsewhere, were reserved for himself and for his preachers]. No Pope has known them. These stupid donkeys were familiar with no other temptations than those of carnal passion.... To such they capitulated, and so did ‘Jeronimus.’ Yet such temptations are easily to be remedied while virgins and women remain with us.”[1320]—But in that other sort of temptation it is hard to “keep cheerful” and to tell the devil boldly: “God is not angry as you say.”[1321]
On one occasion Melanchthon watched him during such a struggle, when he was battling against despair and the appalling thought that he had been delivered over to the “wrath of God and the punishment of sin.” Luther, he says, was in “such sore terror that he almost lost consciousness,” and sighed much as he wrestled with a text of Paul on unbelief and grace.[1322]
Several incidents and many utterances noted down from Luther’s own lips give us an even better insight into the varying character of his “temptations” and into their nature as a whole.
Johann Schlaginhaufen, the pupil of Luther whom we have had so frequent occasion to mention, complained to hismaster in the winter of 1531 of the deep anxiety from which he could not shake himself free, which led him to fear for the salvation of his soul. Luther sought in vain to comfort the troubled man by pointing to his own case.[1323]The fact that the master attributed the whole matter to the devil only added to the confusion of his unfortunate pupil. So much was Schlaginhaufen upset, that on one occasion, on New Year’s Eve, 1531, he actually swooned whilst on a visit to Luther’s house. Luther, nothing abashed, promptly exorcised the devil who had brought on the fainting-fit, using thereto the Bible words: “The Lord rebuke thee, Satan” (Zach. iii. 2: “Increpet te Dominus”); he added: “He [the devil], who should be an angel of life, is an angel of death. He tries us with lying and with murder.”
Schlaginhaufen, after having been put to bed, began to come to, whereupon Luther consoled him thus: “David suffered such temptations; I too have often experienced similar ones, though to-day I have been free from them and have had nothing to complain of save only a natural weakness of the head. Let the godless, Cochlæus, Faber and the Margrave [Joachim I of Brandenburg] be afraid and tremble. This is a temptation of the spirit; it is not meant for us, for we are ministers and vicars of God.” Here Schlaginhaufen groaned: “Oh, my sins!” Luther now tried to make him understand that he must turn to the thought of grace and forget all about the Law. “Oh, my God,” replied the young man, echoing his master’s own thoughts, “the tiniest devil is stronger than the whole world!” But Luther pointed out that there were even stronger good angels present for the Christian’s protection. He went on, “Satan is as hostile as can be to us. Were we only to agree to worship the Pope, we should be his dear children, enjoy perfect peace and probably become cardinals. It is not you alone who endure such temptations; I am inured to them, and Peter too and Paul were acquainted with them.... We must not be afraid of the miscreant.” When Schlaginhaufen had sufficiently recovered to return to his lodgings close by, Luther paternally admonished him to mix more freely with others and, for the rest, to trust entirely in his teacher. His own waverings did not prevent him from giving the latter piece of advice.[1324]Of the temptations by which he himself was visited, “to despair, and to dread the wrath of God,” he had already said to Schlaginhaufen, on Dec. 14, 1531: Had it not been for them he would never have been able to do so much harm to the devil, or to preserve his own humility; now, however, he knew to his shame that “when the temptation comes I am unable to get thebetter of a single venial sin. Thanks to these temptations I have attained to such knowledge and to such gifts, that, with the help of God, I won that glorious victory (‘illam præclaram victoriam’), vanquishing my monkish state, the vows, the Mass and all those abominations.” “After that I had peace,” he says, speaking of those earlier years, “so that I even took a wife, such good days had I.”[1325]—Yet his own contemporary statements show that inward peace was not his at the time when he took a wife.[1326]An incident related of Luther by Schlaginhaufen shows how a single text of Scripture, and the train of ideas it awakened, could reduce him, and Bugenhagen too, to a state verging on distraction. “The devil on one occasion,” so Luther said to him, “tormented and almost slew me with Paul’s words to Timothy [1 Tim. v. 11-12], so that my heart melted in my bosom; the reason was the abandoning by so many monks and nuns of the religious state in which they had vowed to God to live.” (Paul, in the passage cited, has strong things to say of widows who prove unfaithful to the widowhood in which they had promised to live.) “The devil,” he continues concerning his attitude towards the devil at that time, “hid from my sight the doctrine of Justification so that I never even thought of it, and obtruded on me the text; he led me away from the doctrine of grace to dispute on the Law, and then he had me at his mercy. Bugenhagen happened to be near at the time. I submitted it to him and went with him into the corridor. But he too began to doubt, for he did not know that I was so hard put about it. Thereupon I was at first much upset and passed the night with a heavy heart. Next day Bugenhagen came to me. ‘I am downright angry,’ he said, ‘I have now looked into that text more closely, and, right enough, the argument is ridiculous!’ Thus he [the devil] is always on the watch for us. But nevertheless we have Christ!”[1327]—We are not told why the argument from this Bible-passage, which insists so solemnly on the sacred character of vows, was regarded as “ridiculous.”
Schlaginhaufen, after having been put to bed, began to come to, whereupon Luther consoled him thus: “David suffered such temptations; I too have often experienced similar ones, though to-day I have been free from them and have had nothing to complain of save only a natural weakness of the head. Let the godless, Cochlæus, Faber and the Margrave [Joachim I of Brandenburg] be afraid and tremble. This is a temptation of the spirit; it is not meant for us, for we are ministers and vicars of God.” Here Schlaginhaufen groaned: “Oh, my sins!” Luther now tried to make him understand that he must turn to the thought of grace and forget all about the Law. “Oh, my God,” replied the young man, echoing his master’s own thoughts, “the tiniest devil is stronger than the whole world!” But Luther pointed out that there were even stronger good angels present for the Christian’s protection. He went on, “Satan is as hostile as can be to us. Were we only to agree to worship the Pope, we should be his dear children, enjoy perfect peace and probably become cardinals. It is not you alone who endure such temptations; I am inured to them, and Peter too and Paul were acquainted with them.... We must not be afraid of the miscreant.” When Schlaginhaufen had sufficiently recovered to return to his lodgings close by, Luther paternally admonished him to mix more freely with others and, for the rest, to trust entirely in his teacher. His own waverings did not prevent him from giving the latter piece of advice.[1324]
Of the temptations by which he himself was visited, “to despair, and to dread the wrath of God,” he had already said to Schlaginhaufen, on Dec. 14, 1531: Had it not been for them he would never have been able to do so much harm to the devil, or to preserve his own humility; now, however, he knew to his shame that “when the temptation comes I am unable to get thebetter of a single venial sin. Thanks to these temptations I have attained to such knowledge and to such gifts, that, with the help of God, I won that glorious victory (‘illam præclaram victoriam’), vanquishing my monkish state, the vows, the Mass and all those abominations.” “After that I had peace,” he says, speaking of those earlier years, “so that I even took a wife, such good days had I.”[1325]—Yet his own contemporary statements show that inward peace was not his at the time when he took a wife.[1326]
An incident related of Luther by Schlaginhaufen shows how a single text of Scripture, and the train of ideas it awakened, could reduce him, and Bugenhagen too, to a state verging on distraction. “The devil on one occasion,” so Luther said to him, “tormented and almost slew me with Paul’s words to Timothy [1 Tim. v. 11-12], so that my heart melted in my bosom; the reason was the abandoning by so many monks and nuns of the religious state in which they had vowed to God to live.” (Paul, in the passage cited, has strong things to say of widows who prove unfaithful to the widowhood in which they had promised to live.) “The devil,” he continues concerning his attitude towards the devil at that time, “hid from my sight the doctrine of Justification so that I never even thought of it, and obtruded on me the text; he led me away from the doctrine of grace to dispute on the Law, and then he had me at his mercy. Bugenhagen happened to be near at the time. I submitted it to him and went with him into the corridor. But he too began to doubt, for he did not know that I was so hard put about it. Thereupon I was at first much upset and passed the night with a heavy heart. Next day Bugenhagen came to me. ‘I am downright angry,’ he said, ‘I have now looked into that text more closely, and, right enough, the argument is ridiculous!’ Thus he [the devil] is always on the watch for us. But nevertheless we have Christ!”[1327]—We are not told why the argument from this Bible-passage, which insists so solemnly on the sacred character of vows, was regarded as “ridiculous.”
The last incident reminds us of the scene between Luther and Bugenhagen on June, 1540, narrated in the Table-Talk; there Luther declares: “No sooner am I assailed by temptation than the flesh begins to rebel even though I understand the spirit.... Gladly would I be formally just, but I do not find it in me.” And Bugenhagen chimed in: “Herr Doctor, neither do I.”[1328]
The actual cause of Luther’s anxiety, as is plain from the above, was a certain quite intelligible disquiet of conscience. Yet, he chose to regard all reproaches from within as merely the sting of the Evil One. As time went on this became more and more his habit; it is always the evil spirit who is at his heels, at whose person and doings, Luther, following his bent, pokes his jokes.
Hieronymus Weller, another pupil tormented with inner pangs, once, without any beating about the bush, put down all his sadness to his conscience; he declared in Luther’s presence in the spring of 1532: “Rather than endure such troubles of conscience I would willingly go through the worst illnesses.”[1329]Luther tried his best to pacify him with the assurance that the devil was “a murderer,” and that “God’s Mercy endureth for ever and ever.”
Yet Luther himself had admitted to his friend Wenceslaus Link, that “it is extremely difficult thoroughly to convince oneself that such thoughts of hopelessness emanate from Satan and are not our very own, but the best help is to be found in this conviction. One must by a supreme effort contrive to turn one’s mind to other things and chase such thoughts away.” “But you can guess how hard it is,” he continues, “when the thoughts refer to God and to our eternal salvation; they are of such a nature that our conscience can neither tear itself away from them nor yet despise them.”[1330]Simply to tear itself away from such disquieting thoughts was certainly not possible for a conscience in so luckless a position as Luther’s, oppressed as it was with the weight of a world catastrophe.
Luther once, in 1532, says quite outspokenly and not without a certain reference to himself: “The spirit of sadness is conscience itself”; here, however, he probably only means that we are always conscious within ourselves of a painful antagonism to the Law, for he at once goes on: “This we must ever endure,” we must necessarily be ever in a state of woe because in this life we “lie amidst the throes of childbirth that precede the Last Day;” but the devil who condemns us inwardly “has not yet condemned”Christ. Those who are thus tempted “do not feel those carnal temptations, which are so petty compared with the spiritual.”[1331]
At any rate, so he will have it, there was a call to struggle most earnestly against all the inward voices that make themselves heard against the new teaching and the apostasy, just as though they came from the devil.[1332]
He was helped in this, on the one hand, by his terrible energy, and, on the other, by a theological fallacy: “God has commanded that we should look to Christ for forgiveness of our sins; hence whoever does not do so makes God a liar; I must therefore say to the devil: Even though I be a scamp, yet Christ is just.”[1333]
Thus we find him declaring, for instance, in July, 1528: “to yield to such disquiet of conscience is to be overcome by Satan, nay, to set Satan on the throne!” “Such thoughts may appear to be quite heavenly and called for, but they are nevertheless Satanic and cannot but be so.” When they refuse to depart, even though spurned by us, and we endure them patiently, then do we indeed “present a sublime spectacle to God and the angels.”[1334]—“Away with the devil’s sadness!” so, at a later date, in 1544, he exhorts his old friend Spalatin; “conscience stands in the cruel service of the devil; a man must learn to find consolation even against his own conscience.”[1335]
If we glance at the history of Luther’s so-called “temptations” throughout the whole course of his career, we shall find that they were very marked at the beginning of his enterprise. Before 1525 they had fallen off, but they became again more frequent during the terrors of the Peasant War and then reasserted themselves with great violence in 1527. After abating somewhat for the next twoyears they again assumed alarming proportions in 1530 in the solitude of the Coburg and thus continue, with occasional breaks, until 1538. From that time until the end of his life he seemed to enjoy greater peace, at least from doubts regarding his own salvation, though, on the other hand, gloomy depression undoubtedly darkened the twilight of his days, and he complains more than ever of the weakness of his own faith; we miss, however, those vivid accounts of his struggles of conscience which he had been wont to give.
Let us listen first of all to Luther’s self-reproach in the early days of his public labours; we may recall those words of 1521 where he confesses, that, before he had grown so bold and confident, “his heart had often quaked with fear,” when he thought of the words of his foes: “Are you alone wise and are all others mistaken? Is it likely that so many centuries were all in the wrong? Supposing, on the contrary, you were in the wrong and were leading so many others with you into error and to eternal perdition!”[1336]He admits similarly that he had still to fight with his conscience even after having passed through the storm in which, “amidst excitement and confusion of conscience,” he had discovered the true doctrine of salvation.[1337]That discovery did not bring him into a haven of rest even though we have his word that, for a while, he was quite overcome with joy. “Oh, what great trouble and labour did it cost me, even though grounded on Holy Scripture, to convince my conscience that I had a right to stand up all alone against the Pope, and denounce him as Antichrist, the Bishops as his Apostles and the Universities as his brothels.”[1338]
The days he spent in the Wartburg and the opportunity they afforded him to look back on his past, awakened anew these self-reproaches; whilst in the solitude, we hear him complaining, that his “distress of soul still persisted andthat his former weakness of spirit and of faith had not yet left him.”[1339]Later on he remembered having had to battle with every kind of despair (“omnibus desperationibus”) for three long years.[1340]At a much later date, in 1541, he reminds his friends of the many inward struggles (“tot agones”) the first proclamation of the Evangel and his crusade against the word of man had cost him.[1341]
About 1521 he must have arrived at a pitch of “despair and temptation regarding the wrath of God” such as he never before had tasted; for he told one of his pupils, on Dec. 14, 1532, that it was “about ten years since he had felt this struggle so severely; after that better days had dawned, but later the difficulties began anew.”[1342]
But, as he often admits, he was all too addicted to thoughts of despair, thanks to the devil who was ever lying in wait for him; as for the “better days” they might easily be counted. “When these thoughts come upon me I forget everything about Christ and God, and even begin to look upon God as a miscreant”; the “Laudate” stops, so he says, and the “Blasphemate” begins as soon as we begin to think of the fate to which from all eternity we are predestined.[1343]
Subsequent to 1525 his new state of life with its domestic cares and distractions, added to his satisfaction with the growing damage inflicted on the Papacy, appear to have contributed to diminish his trouble of mind.
Later, however, in 1527, it “began anew.”
Atrocious suffering of mind and bitter anxiety concerning the abuses in the new Church—“a vinegar sourer than all other vinegars, as he calls it,”—immediately preceded his illness which began about July 7, 1527.[1344]Mental uneasiness and self-reproaches accompanied the fainting-fits which at that time seemed tothreaten his life. His inward struggles were so severe that Bugenhagen, who tried to comfort him, compares them with the darkness of the soul “so frequently mentioned in the Psalms as illustrative of the spiritual pangs of hell.” “Dr. Martin,” writes the latter, who was pastor at Wittenberg and Luther’s “confessor,” “had in all likelihood been through other such temptations, but none had ever been so severe; this he admitted on the following day to Dr. Jonas, to Dr. Christian [Schurf] and to me. He said they were worse and more dangerous than the bodily ailment which befell him on that same Saturday evening about five o’clock and which was so serious that we feared he would succumb under it.” Luther himself, in those critical days, declared “that he would not retract his doctrine,” and, after making his confession to Bugenhagen as the latter relates, “spoke at considerable length of the spiritual temptation he had been through the same morning, with such fear and trembling as could not be described in words.”[1345]It was then that the curious complaint was involuntarily wrung from him that those who saw his outward behaviour fancied he “lay on a bed of roses, though God knew how it stood with him.” Bugenhagen and Jonas have embellished their accounts of this illness of their friend with many pious utterances supposed to have been spoken by him then.[1346]
Atrocious suffering of mind and bitter anxiety concerning the abuses in the new Church—“a vinegar sourer than all other vinegars, as he calls it,”—immediately preceded his illness which began about July 7, 1527.[1344]Mental uneasiness and self-reproaches accompanied the fainting-fits which at that time seemed tothreaten his life. His inward struggles were so severe that Bugenhagen, who tried to comfort him, compares them with the darkness of the soul “so frequently mentioned in the Psalms as illustrative of the spiritual pangs of hell.” “Dr. Martin,” writes the latter, who was pastor at Wittenberg and Luther’s “confessor,” “had in all likelihood been through other such temptations, but none had ever been so severe; this he admitted on the following day to Dr. Jonas, to Dr. Christian [Schurf] and to me. He said they were worse and more dangerous than the bodily ailment which befell him on that same Saturday evening about five o’clock and which was so serious that we feared he would succumb under it.” Luther himself, in those critical days, declared “that he would not retract his doctrine,” and, after making his confession to Bugenhagen as the latter relates, “spoke at considerable length of the spiritual temptation he had been through the same morning, with such fear and trembling as could not be described in words.”[1345]It was then that the curious complaint was involuntarily wrung from him that those who saw his outward behaviour fancied he “lay on a bed of roses, though God knew how it stood with him.” Bugenhagen and Jonas have embellished their accounts of this illness of their friend with many pious utterances supposed to have been spoken by him then.[1346]
The worst struggles, lasting over many months, followed upon Luther’s illness of 1527.
Hardly had he recovered his normal health than we find his letters full of sad allusions to his abiding state of despair and to his fears concerning the faith, probably the most melancholy outpourings of his whole life.
“For more than a week I have been tossed about between death and hell,” he writes to Melanchthon, “so that I still tremble in every limb and feel utterly broken. Waves and storms of despair and blasphemy against God broke over me and I lost Christ almost entirely. But, at the intercession of the saints [his friends] God has begun to take pity on me and has delivered my soul from the lowest hell.”[1347]—“This struggle,” hewrites to Justus Menius, “goes beyond my strength.... I am tried not only in body but still more, and worst of all, in soul. God allows Satan and his angels thus to torment me.”[1348]In a letter of Aug. 21, addressed to Johann Agricola, then still his friend, he informed him that the fight was not yet at an end. “Satan rages against me with all his might. Like another Job (Job xvi. 12), God has set me up as a mark, and He tempts me with intolerable weakness of spirit. The prayers of holy men indeed save me from remaining in his hands, but the wounds I have received in my heart will be hard to heal. I trust that my strivings will turn to the salvation of many.” He concludes by saying that those in power (the Catholics) were unable to get at him, but that so much the more was he plagued in spirit “by the Prince of this world.”[1349]He writes in much the same vein on Aug. 26 to Nicholas Hausmann.Truly, so he again wrote to Johann Agricola, on Aug. 31, “neither world nor reason can understand how hard it is to realise that Christ is our righteousness, so deeply rooted in us is the doctrine of works, which has grown up with us and become part of us. That Christ may strengthen me I commend myself to your prayers.”[1350]Hence it was his chief dogma, the very rock of his Evangel, that “Satan” was then tampering with. The call for good works was, as he felt, beyond even his power to deny.“For wellnigh three months I have been feeling wretched,” he wrote on Oct. 8, “not so much in body as in soul, so that I have written little or nothing, so greatly has Satan tossed me in the sieve [Luke xxii. 31]”[1351]—“God has not yet completely restored me to health,” he announces on Oct. 19, “but in His wisdom leaves me a prey to Satan who assails me and buffets me; but God also sends help and protection.”[1352]He speaks of himself, on Oct. 27, as “a wretched and abject worm, harassed by the spirit of sadness,” “I seek and thirst for nought else than for a gracious God, for as such He reveals Himself even to His enemies and contemners.”[1353]Luther had claimed, that, through his new doctrine and through flinging aside his monkish frock he had found “a gracious God,” and proclaimed Him to men for their reconciliation; this has been extolled as the greatest gain achieved by the Lutheran schism; yet here we have his word for it that the solace of a Gracious God was still withheld from him.—“I have always been in the habit of comforting others,” he says in a letter to Amsdorf on Nov. 1; “and now I myself stand in desperate need of such consolation; only one thing, however, do I wish, viz. never to be the foe of Christ, although I have offended Him by many and great sins.Satan tries to make a Job of me; he would like to sift me like Peter and his brethren. Oh, that God would say to him: ‘Yet spare his life’ [Job ii. 6], and to me: ‘I am thy salvation’ [Ps. xxxiv. 3]. Even now I still hope that His anger at my sins will not last for ever.... Meanwhile fighting goes on outside and fears reign within, yea, very bitter ones indeed.”[1354]Thus in spite of everything he tries to buoy himself up with hope.Yet his lamentations continue. “Hardly can I breathe for storms and faintheartedness.... My Katey, however, is strong in faith and in good health.... As for me, my body is whole but I am tempted” (Nov. 4).[1355]—“From several sides at once fears rush in on me. My temptations torment me ... for months storms and faintness of spirit have never left me; pray that my faith may not fail” (Nov. 7).—“I have surely troubles enough already, please do not add to them by crucifying me with your dissensions” (Nov. 9).—“Erasmus and the Sacramentarians are now come to stamp me under foot, to persecute a man already utterly worn out in spirit!”[1356]—“I endure God’s wrath because I have sinned against Him. My sins, death, and Satan with his angels all rage against me without a break; and now Pope and Emperor, Princes, Bishops and the whole world too storms in upon me, making common cause with the crew who vex me”; everything would be endurable provided only Christ—for Whose sake he, the “most abject of all sinners,” was hated—did not desert one “whom God has smitten”[1357]and whom they persecute (Nov. 10).—“I believe that it is no mere fiend from the ranks of the devil’s hosts who fights with me, but the Prince of the demons himself; so powerful is he and so armed to the teeth with Bible-texts that my knowledge of the Bible is left stranded and I am obliged to have recourse to the words of others; from this you may get some idea of the devil’s height, as they say” (Nov. 17).“I am well in body, but as to how it stands with me in spirit I am not certain.... I seek only for a gracious Christ.... Satan wants to prevent me from writing and to drag me down with him to hell. May Christ tread him under foot, Amen!” (Nov. 22).[1358]His work and his doctrine must, according to him, be pleasing to heaven; the difficulties and the attacks from without and from within, all these he attributes to Satan’s raging and sees inthem proofs “that our word is the Word of God; this alone it is that makes him so furious against us” (Dec. 30).—It has been said that Luther held fast to this with a “bold faith”; it would, however, be more correct to say that he catches at such thoughts as a drowning man does at a straw, a phenomenon which of itself throws a lurid light on his delusions and the misty trend of his thoughts. He is determined to be sure of his cause—and at this very time, with the help of the State, he has a Coburg Zwinglian put to silence, because the latter “neither is nor can be sure of his cause.”[1359]“I myself am weak and in wretchedness,” he again confesses. “If only Christ does not forsake me.... Satan expends his fury on me because I have attacked him by deed, and word, and writing; but I feel consoled when I boldly believe (‘fortiter credo’) that what I did was pleasing to the Lord and to His Christ. I am tossed about between the two warring princes [Christ and Satan] till all my bones are sore. Many works of Satan have I done and still do, nevertheless I hope to please my Christ Who is merciful and inclined to forgive; but from Satan I desire no forgiveness for what I have done against him and for Christ. He is a murderer and the father of lies.... I feel in the depths of my soul how, with unbelievable wrath, he plots against me, assuming even the guise of Christ, to say nothing of that of the angel of light” (Nov. 27, 1527).—The “guise of Christ” and of the “angel of light,” to which he here alludes, are sufficient to show those who look below the surface that what was troubling him was something not very different from the inner voice of conscience.How far he could go in deluding himself the better to appease his conscience is plain from what he says in his letter “to the Christians at Erfurt”: During the whole time he had spent at Erfurt in his Catholic days he had longed in vain to hear “a Gospel or even a little Psalm”; there, as was everywhere the case in Popery, Holy Scripture lay buried deep, and “no one had even thought of preaching a really Christian sermon.”[1360]No less vain than this consolation from the past was that which he sought in the future. He clung wildly to his delusion that the end of all was at hand; “Satan,” he cries, “has but a short respite before being completely overthrown, therefore does he make such furious and incredible efforts” (Dec. 31).“Now that the Word is preached Satan plainly comes off second best; hence he persecutes me secretly; he is unchained, and, with all his engines he seeks to tear Christ from me.” Thus (on Nov. 28).—“I am the wretched ‘off-scourings of Christ’” (Nov. 29).—“I am to all intents and purposes dead, as the Apostle calls it, yet still I live” (Dec. 10).
“For more than a week I have been tossed about between death and hell,” he writes to Melanchthon, “so that I still tremble in every limb and feel utterly broken. Waves and storms of despair and blasphemy against God broke over me and I lost Christ almost entirely. But, at the intercession of the saints [his friends] God has begun to take pity on me and has delivered my soul from the lowest hell.”[1347]—“This struggle,” hewrites to Justus Menius, “goes beyond my strength.... I am tried not only in body but still more, and worst of all, in soul. God allows Satan and his angels thus to torment me.”[1348]
In a letter of Aug. 21, addressed to Johann Agricola, then still his friend, he informed him that the fight was not yet at an end. “Satan rages against me with all his might. Like another Job (Job xvi. 12), God has set me up as a mark, and He tempts me with intolerable weakness of spirit. The prayers of holy men indeed save me from remaining in his hands, but the wounds I have received in my heart will be hard to heal. I trust that my strivings will turn to the salvation of many.” He concludes by saying that those in power (the Catholics) were unable to get at him, but that so much the more was he plagued in spirit “by the Prince of this world.”[1349]He writes in much the same vein on Aug. 26 to Nicholas Hausmann.
Truly, so he again wrote to Johann Agricola, on Aug. 31, “neither world nor reason can understand how hard it is to realise that Christ is our righteousness, so deeply rooted in us is the doctrine of works, which has grown up with us and become part of us. That Christ may strengthen me I commend myself to your prayers.”[1350]Hence it was his chief dogma, the very rock of his Evangel, that “Satan” was then tampering with. The call for good works was, as he felt, beyond even his power to deny.
“For wellnigh three months I have been feeling wretched,” he wrote on Oct. 8, “not so much in body as in soul, so that I have written little or nothing, so greatly has Satan tossed me in the sieve [Luke xxii. 31]”[1351]—“God has not yet completely restored me to health,” he announces on Oct. 19, “but in His wisdom leaves me a prey to Satan who assails me and buffets me; but God also sends help and protection.”[1352]
He speaks of himself, on Oct. 27, as “a wretched and abject worm, harassed by the spirit of sadness,” “I seek and thirst for nought else than for a gracious God, for as such He reveals Himself even to His enemies and contemners.”[1353]Luther had claimed, that, through his new doctrine and through flinging aside his monkish frock he had found “a gracious God,” and proclaimed Him to men for their reconciliation; this has been extolled as the greatest gain achieved by the Lutheran schism; yet here we have his word for it that the solace of a Gracious God was still withheld from him.—“I have always been in the habit of comforting others,” he says in a letter to Amsdorf on Nov. 1; “and now I myself stand in desperate need of such consolation; only one thing, however, do I wish, viz. never to be the foe of Christ, although I have offended Him by many and great sins.Satan tries to make a Job of me; he would like to sift me like Peter and his brethren. Oh, that God would say to him: ‘Yet spare his life’ [Job ii. 6], and to me: ‘I am thy salvation’ [Ps. xxxiv. 3]. Even now I still hope that His anger at my sins will not last for ever.... Meanwhile fighting goes on outside and fears reign within, yea, very bitter ones indeed.”[1354]
Thus in spite of everything he tries to buoy himself up with hope.
Yet his lamentations continue. “Hardly can I breathe for storms and faintheartedness.... My Katey, however, is strong in faith and in good health.... As for me, my body is whole but I am tempted” (Nov. 4).[1355]—“From several sides at once fears rush in on me. My temptations torment me ... for months storms and faintness of spirit have never left me; pray that my faith may not fail” (Nov. 7).—“I have surely troubles enough already, please do not add to them by crucifying me with your dissensions” (Nov. 9).—“Erasmus and the Sacramentarians are now come to stamp me under foot, to persecute a man already utterly worn out in spirit!”[1356]—“I endure God’s wrath because I have sinned against Him. My sins, death, and Satan with his angels all rage against me without a break; and now Pope and Emperor, Princes, Bishops and the whole world too storms in upon me, making common cause with the crew who vex me”; everything would be endurable provided only Christ—for Whose sake he, the “most abject of all sinners,” was hated—did not desert one “whom God has smitten”[1357]and whom they persecute (Nov. 10).—“I believe that it is no mere fiend from the ranks of the devil’s hosts who fights with me, but the Prince of the demons himself; so powerful is he and so armed to the teeth with Bible-texts that my knowledge of the Bible is left stranded and I am obliged to have recourse to the words of others; from this you may get some idea of the devil’s height, as they say” (Nov. 17).
“I am well in body, but as to how it stands with me in spirit I am not certain.... I seek only for a gracious Christ.... Satan wants to prevent me from writing and to drag me down with him to hell. May Christ tread him under foot, Amen!” (Nov. 22).[1358]
His work and his doctrine must, according to him, be pleasing to heaven; the difficulties and the attacks from without and from within, all these he attributes to Satan’s raging and sees inthem proofs “that our word is the Word of God; this alone it is that makes him so furious against us” (Dec. 30).—It has been said that Luther held fast to this with a “bold faith”; it would, however, be more correct to say that he catches at such thoughts as a drowning man does at a straw, a phenomenon which of itself throws a lurid light on his delusions and the misty trend of his thoughts. He is determined to be sure of his cause—and at this very time, with the help of the State, he has a Coburg Zwinglian put to silence, because the latter “neither is nor can be sure of his cause.”[1359]
“I myself am weak and in wretchedness,” he again confesses. “If only Christ does not forsake me.... Satan expends his fury on me because I have attacked him by deed, and word, and writing; but I feel consoled when I boldly believe (‘fortiter credo’) that what I did was pleasing to the Lord and to His Christ. I am tossed about between the two warring princes [Christ and Satan] till all my bones are sore. Many works of Satan have I done and still do, nevertheless I hope to please my Christ Who is merciful and inclined to forgive; but from Satan I desire no forgiveness for what I have done against him and for Christ. He is a murderer and the father of lies.... I feel in the depths of my soul how, with unbelievable wrath, he plots against me, assuming even the guise of Christ, to say nothing of that of the angel of light” (Nov. 27, 1527).—The “guise of Christ” and of the “angel of light,” to which he here alludes, are sufficient to show those who look below the surface that what was troubling him was something not very different from the inner voice of conscience.
How far he could go in deluding himself the better to appease his conscience is plain from what he says in his letter “to the Christians at Erfurt”: During the whole time he had spent at Erfurt in his Catholic days he had longed in vain to hear “a Gospel or even a little Psalm”; there, as was everywhere the case in Popery, Holy Scripture lay buried deep, and “no one had even thought of preaching a really Christian sermon.”[1360]
No less vain than this consolation from the past was that which he sought in the future. He clung wildly to his delusion that the end of all was at hand; “Satan,” he cries, “has but a short respite before being completely overthrown, therefore does he make such furious and incredible efforts” (Dec. 31).
“Now that the Word is preached Satan plainly comes off second best; hence he persecutes me secretly; he is unchained, and, with all his engines he seeks to tear Christ from me.” Thus (on Nov. 28).—“I am the wretched ‘off-scourings of Christ’” (Nov. 29).—“I am to all intents and purposes dead, as the Apostle calls it, yet still I live” (Dec. 10).
The long and terrible year was drawing to a close. He had almost grown accustomed to his inward troubles. “I have not yet shaken off my temptation, nor do I desire to be free if it is to God’s glory. The devil rages against me simply because Christ has vanquished him through me, his most wretched of vessels” (Dec. 14).—“Well in body, in soul I am as Christ wills, to Whom I am now bound only by a slender thread. The devil on the other hand is moored to me with mighty cords, nay, real cables; he drags me down into the depths, but the weak Christ has still the upper hand owing to your prayers, or at least He puts up a brave fight” (Dec. 29).
Even his lectures on the 1st Epistle of St. John testify to Luther’s inward excitement during that unhappy year (1527). The Preface to the commentary as preserved in the Vatican MS. (Palat., 1825) is dated Aug. 19, and begins: “You know that we are so placed by God in this life as to be exposed to all the darts of Satan. And not Satan alone storms against us, but also the world, and our heart, and our flesh. Hence we must despair of peace so long as we remain here below. Against all these evils God has given us no other weapon than His Word which He commands us to preach, who live in the midst of wolves.... Thus, since we are exposed to all these dangers, to death, sin, heretics and the whole might of Satan, I have undertaken to expound this Epistle.”