Chapter 10

The remarks just quoted occur in an article by the theologian Julius Kaftan, Oberkonsistorialrat at Berlin, published in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche” in 1908 under the title, “Why does the Evangelical Church know no doctrine of the Redemption in the narrower sense, and how may this want be remedied?” We all the more gladly append some further remarks by a theologian, who, as a rule, is by no means favourably disposed to Catholicism.According to Kaftan, Luther indeed supplied “all the elements” for the upbuilding of a doctrine of “redemption from the world”; he gave “the stimulus” to the thought; it is “not as though we had no conception of it.”But he, and the Reformation as a whole, failed to furnish any “actual, detailed doctrine” on this subject because their attackwas directed, and had to be directed, against the ideal of piety as they found it in the Church’s monastic life; they destroyed it, so the author opines, because it was only under this distorted monkish shape that the “Christian idea of redemption from the world was then met.”[325]The Reformation omitted to replace it by a better system. It suffers from having fallen into the way of giving “too great prominence to the doctrine of Justification,” whereas the salvation “bestowed by Christ is not merely Justification and forgiveness of sins,” as the traditional Lutheran theology seems on the surface to assume even to-day, but rather the “everlasting possession” to be reached by a Christ-like life; Justification is but the road to this possession. Because people failed to keep this in view the doctrine of the real “work of salvation” has from the beginning been made far too little of.A further reason which explains the neglect is, according to Kaftan, the following: In Catholicism it is the Church which acts as the guide to piety and supplies all the spiritual aids required; she acts as intermediary between God and the faithful. But “the Evangelical teaching rejected the Church (in this connection) as a supernatural agency for the dispensation of the means of salvation. In her place it set the action of the Spirit working by means of the Word of God.” Since this same teaching stops short at the Incarnation and Satisfaction of Christ, it has “no room for any doctrine of redemption (from the world) as a work of God.”[326]Pietism, with all its irregularities, was merely an outcome of this deficiency; but even the Pietists never succeeded in formulating such a doctrine of redemption.It is to the credit of the author that he feels this want deeply and points out the way in which theology can remedy it.[327]He would fain see introduced a system of plain directions, though framed on lines different from those of the “ostensibly final doctrinal teaching” of the Formula of Concord,[328]i.e. instructions to the devout Christian how to manifest in his life in the world the death and resurrection of Christ which St. Paul experienced in himself. Much too much emphasis had been laid in Protestantism on Luther’s friendliness to the world and the joy of living, which he was the first to teach Christians in opposition to the doctrine of the Middle Ages; yet the other idea, of redemption from the world, must nevertheless retain a lasting significance in Christianity. Although, before Luther’s day, the Church had erroneously striven to attain to the latter solely in the monastic life, yet there is no doubt “that the most delicate blossoms of pre-Reformation piety sprang from this soil, and that the best forces in the Church owed their origin to this source.” Is it merely fortuitous, continues the author, “that the ‘Imitationof Christ,’ by Thomas à Kempis, should be so widely read throughout Christendom, even by Evangelicals? Are there not many Evangelical Christians who could witness that this book has been a great help to them in a crisis of their inner life? But whoever knows it knows what the idea of redemption from the world there signifies.” All this leads our author to the conclusion: “The history of Christianity and of the Church undoubtedly proves that here [in the case of the defect in the Lutheran theology he is instancing] it is really a question of a motive power and central thought of our religion.”[329]He points out to the world of our day, “that growing civilisation culminates in disgust with the world and with civilisation.” “Then,” he continues, “the soul again cries for God, for the God Who is above all the world and in Whom alone the heart finds rest. As it ever was, so is it still to-day.”[330]It is a satisfaction to hear this call which must rejoice the heart of every believer. The same, however, had been heard throughout the ancient Church and had met with a happy response. Not in the “Imitation” only, but in a hundred other writings of Catholics, mystic and ascetic, could our author have found the ideals of Christian perfection and of the rest in God which comes from inward severance from the world, all expressed with the utmost clearness and the warmest feeling. Nor was Christian perfection imprisoned within the walls of the monasteries; it also flourished in the breezy atmosphere of the world. The Church taught the universality of this ideal of perfect love of God, of the imitation of Christ and of detachment from the world, and she recommended it indiscriminately to all classes, inviting people to practise it under all conditions of life and expending liberally in all directions her supernatural powers in order to attain her aim. Among the best of those whose writings inaugurated a school of piety may be classed St. Bernard and Gerson, in whom Luther had found light and edification when still a zealous monk. With him, however, the case was very different. Of the works he bequeathed to posterity the Protestant theologian referred to above, says regretfully: They contain neither a “doctrine” nor a definite “scheme of instruction” on “that side of life which faces God.” “No clear, conclusive thoughts on this all-important matter are to be found.”On the other hand it must be added that there is no want of “clear, conclusive thoughts” to a quite opposite effect;not merely on enjoyment of the world, but on a kind of sovereignty over it which is scarcely consistent with the effort after self-betterment.The Means of Self-Reform and their Reverse SideSelf-denial as the most effective means of self-education in the good, and self-conquest in outward and inward things, receive comparatively small attention from Luther; rather he is set on delivering people from the “anxiety-breeding,” traditional prejudice in favour of spiritual renunciation, obedience to the Church and retrenchment in view of the evil. This deliverance, thanks to its alluring and attractive character, was welcomed, in spite of Luther’s repeated warnings against any excess of the spirit of the world. His abandonment of the path of perfection so strongly recommended by Christ and his depreciation of “peculiar” works and “singular” practices were more readily understood and also more engaging than his words in favour of real works of faith. He set up his own inward experiences of the difficulty and, as he thought, utter futility of the conflict with self, together with his hostility to all spiritual efforts exceeding the common bounds, as the standard for others, and, in fact, even for the Church; in the Catholic past, on the other hand, the faithful had been taught to recognise the standard of the Church, their teacher and guide, as the rule by which to judge of their own experiences.Here to prove what we have said, would necessitate the repetition of what has already been given elsewhere.Luther’s writings, particularly his letters, also contain certain instructions, which, fortunately, have not become the common property of Protestants, but which everybody must feel to be absolutely opposed to anything like self-betterment. We need only call to mind his teaching, that temptations to despondency and despair are best withstood by committing some sin in defiance of the devil, or by diverting the mind to sensual and carnal distractions.[331]The words: “What matters it if we commit a fresh sin?”[332]since through faith we have forgiveness, and the other similar utterance, “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe more boldly still,” are characteristic of him, though he would have been unwilling to see them pressed or taken too literally. By these and other statements he did, however, seriously endanger the ethical character of sin; in reality he diminished the abhorrence for sin, though no doubt he did not fully perceive the consequences of his act.[333]To the man who had become sensible of the ensnaring influence of the world and of its evil effects upon himself, or who on account of his mental build felt himself endangered by it, Catholic moralists advised retirement, recollection, self-examination and solitude. Luther was certainly not furthering the cause of perfection when he repeatedly insisted, with an emphasis that is barely credible, that solitude must be avoided as the deadly foe of the true life of the soul, and that what should be sought was rather company and distraction. Solitude was a temptation to sin. “I too find,” so he says, “that I never fall into sin more frequently than when I am alone.... Quietude calls forth the worst of thoughts. Whatever our trouble be, it then becomes much more dangerous,” etc.[334]Of course, in the case of persons of gloomy disposition Luther was quite right in recommending company, but it was just in doing so that he exceeded the bounds in his praise of sensual distractions;[335]of his own example, too, he makes far too much. On the other hand, all the great men in the Church had sought to find the guiding light of self-knowledge in solitude; this they regarded as a school for the subjugation of unruly emotions.Not only were self-control and self-restraint something strange to Luther,[336]but he often went so far as to adduce curious theoretical reasonings of his own to prove that they could have no place in his public life and controversies, and why he and his helpers were compelled to give the reins to anger, hatred and abuse. Thus the work of self-improvement was renounced in yet another essential point.Then again with regard to prayer. His exhortations thereto are numerous enough and he himself prayed frequently. But it is not necessary to be an ascetic to see that several things are wanting in his admonitions to prayer. The first is the salt of contrition and compunction. He was less alive to the wholesome underlying feeling of melancholy that characterises the soul which prays to God in the consciousness of having abused its free-will, than he was to the suggestions of self-confidence and assurance of salvation. The second thing wanting is the humility which should permeate prayer even when exalted to the highest limits of trusting confidence. If man, as Luther taught, is incapable of any work, then of course there can be no sense of shame at not having done more to please God and to merit greater grace from Him. Moreover, Luther indirectly encouraged people to pray in the bold consciousness of being justified and to look for the keeping of the law as a natural consequence of such “faith.” Lastly, and this sums up everything, we miss the spirit of love in his often so strongly worded and eloquent exhortations to prayer; the spirit which should have led him to resignation to God’s designs, and to commit his life’s work to the Will of God with a calm indifference as to its eventual success.[337]Hardly ever do we find any trace of that zeal for souls which embraces the whole of God’s broad kingdom even to the heathen, in short, the whole of the Church’s sphere.[338]On the other hand, however, he expressly exhorts his followers to increase the ardour of their prayers, after his own example, by interspersing them with curses on all whose views were different.[339]In place of the pleasing variety of the old exercises of prayer—from the Office recited by the clergy with its daily commemoration of the Saints down to the multifarious devotions of the people, to say nothing of the great Sacrifice of the Altar, the very heart’s pulse of the Church—he recommends as a rule only the Our Father, the Creed and the Psalms—prayers indeed rich beyond all others and which will ever hold the first place among Christian devotions. But had they not been brought closer to the heartformerly in the inner and outer life of prayer dealt with in the writings of the Catholic masters of the spiritual life, and exemplified in the churches and monasteries, and even in private houses and the very streets? But behind all this rich display Luther saw lurking the demon of “singular works.” The monk absorbed in contemplation was, in Luther’s eyes, an unhappy wretch sitting “in filth” up to his neck. Thus he restricts himself to recommending the old short formulas of prayer. In accordance with his doctrine that faith alone avails, he desires that sin, and the intention of sinning, should be withstood by the use of the Our Father: “That you diligently learn to say the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments.”[340]“Grant, O God (thus must you pray), that Thy Name be hallowed by me, Thy Kingdom come to me, and Thy Will be done in me”; in this wise they would come to scorn “devil, death and hell.”[341]He indeed kept in touch with the people by means of the olden prayers, but, even into them, he knew how to introduce his own new views; the Kingdom of God, which to him is forgiveness of sins,[342]“must come to us by faith,” and the chief article of the whole Creed with which to defy “death, devil and hell” was the “remissio peccatorum.” These remarks must not, however, be understood as detracting from the value of his fine, practical, and often sympathetic expositions of the Our Father, whether in his special work on it in 1518 or in the Larger Catechism.[343]Of the numerous “man-made laws” which he banished at one stroke by denying the Church’s authority there is no need to speak here. Without a doubt the overturning of all these barriers erected against human lusts and wilfulness was scarcely conducive to the progress of the individual.Nor does the absence of any higher standard of life in his own case[344]serve to recommend his system of ethics. Seeing that, as has been already pointed out,[345]he himself is disposed to admit his failings, the apparent confidence with which,in order to exalt his reform of ethics, he appeals to the biblical verity, that the truth of a doctrine is proved by its moral fruits, is all the more surprising.Of this confidence we have a remarkable example in a sermon devoted to the explanation of the 1st Epistle of St. John. At the same time the exceptional boldness of his language and the resolute testimony he bears in his own favour constitute striking proof of how the very firmness of his attitude impressed his followers and exercised over many a seductive spell. The weakness of the Reformer’s ethics seems all at once to vanish before his mighty eloquence.The discourse in question, where at the same time he vindicates his own conduct, belongs to 1532. About that time he preached frequently at Wittenberg on St. John’s sublime words concerning the love of God and our neighbour (1 Jo. iv. 16-21). His object was to cleanse and better the morals of Wittenberg, the low standard of which he deplores, that the results of justification by faith might shine forth more brightly. At that very time he was treating with the Elector and the Saxon Estates in view of a new visitation of all the parishes to be held the next year, which might promote the good of morality. The sermons were duly reported by his pupil Cruciger, whose notes were published at Wittenberg in 1533 under the general title of “A Sermon on Love.”[346]Dealing therein with ethical practice he starts by proclaiming that, according to the “pious Apostle” whose doctrines he was expounding, everything depends on Christians proving by their fruits whether they really “walk in love.” Of many, however, who not only declared themselves well acquainted with the principles of faith and ethics but even professed to be qualified to teach them, it was true that, “if we applied and manifested in our lives their ethics after their example, then we should be but poorly off.”[347]Such men must, nevertheless, be tested by their works. Nor does he exempt himself from this duty of putting ethics to a practical test.Nowhere else does he insist more boldly than in these sermons on proof by actual deeds, even in his own case. According to the words of John, so he says, a life of love would give them “confidence in the Day of Judgment” (iv. 17). Confidence, nay, a spirit of holy defiance, even in the presence of death and judgment, must fill the hearts of all who acted aright, owing to the very testimony of their fellow-men to the blamelessness of their lives. “We must be able to boast [with Christ, ‘the reconciliation for our sins’] not before God alone but before God and all Christendom, and against the whole world, that no onecan truthfully condemn or even accuse us.” “We must be able to assure ourselves that we have lived in such a way that no one can take scandal at us”; we must have this testimony, “that we have walked on earth in simplicity and godly piety, and that no one can charge us with having been given to ‘trickery.’” In this wise had Paul countered false doctrines by boasting, just as Moses and Samuel had already done under the Old Covenant.[348]Coming to his own person the speaker thinks he can honestly say the same of himself, though, like the rest, he too must confess to being still in need of the article of the forgiveness of sins. There were false teachers who could not appeal so confidently to the morality of their lives, “proud, puffed-up spirits who lay claim to a great and wonderful holiness, who want to reform the whole world and to do something singular in order that all may say that they alone are true Christians. This sort of thing lasts indeed for a while, during which they parade and strut, but, when the hour of death comes, that is the end of all such idle nonsense.”[349]He himself, with the faithful teachers and good Christians, is in a very different case: “If I must boast of how I have acted in my position towards everyone then I will say: I witness before you and all the world, and know that God too witnesses on my behalf together with all His angels, that I have not falsified God’s Word, His Baptism or the Sacrament but have preached and acted faithfully as much as was in me, and suffered all ill solely for God’s and His Word’s sake. Thus must all the Saints boast.”[350]He lays the greatest stress on the unanimous testimony which the preacher must receive from his fellow-men and from posterity. He must be able to say, “you shall be my witnesses,” he “must be able to call upon all men to bear him witness”; they must bear us witness on the Last Day that we have lived aright and shown by our deeds that we were Christians. If this is the case, if they can point to their practice of good works, then the preaching of good works can be insisted on with all the emphasis required.[351]It is natural, however, that towards the end Luther lays greater stress on his teaching than on his works.On his preaching of the value of good works he solemnly assures us: “We can testify before the whole world that we have preached much more grandly and forcefully on good works than even those who calumniate us.”[352]Self-Reform and Hatred of the FoeIn speaking of Luther, his staunch friends are wont to boast of his lifelong struggle against the fetters of the Papacy and of the overwhelming power of his assault on the olden Church; this, so they imply, redounded to his glory and showed his moral superiority.In what follows we shall therefore consider some of the main ethical features of this struggle of Luther’s and of the attitude he adopted in his conflict with Popery. His very defence of himself and of the moral effects of his preaching, which we have just heard him pronounce subsequent to the Diet of Augsburg, invites us to consider in the light of ethics his public line of action, as traced in his writings of that period. These years represent a turning-point in his life, and here, if anywhere, we should be able to detect his higher moral standard and the power of his new principles to effect a change first of all in himself. In the sermon of 1532 (above, p. 96) he had said: The new Gospel which he had “preached rightly and faithfully” made those who accepted it “to walk in simplicity and godly piety” according to the law of love, and to stand forth “blameless before all the world.” Could he truthfully, he, the champion of this Gospel, really lay any claim to these qualities as here he seems to do, at least indirectly?His controversial tracts dating from that time display anything but “simplicity and godly piety.” His hate was without bounds, and his fury blazed forth in thunderbolts which slew all who dared to attempt to bridge the chasm between him and the Catholic Church. Reproaching voices, about him and within him, seemed to him to come from so many devils. The Coburg, where he stayed, was assuredly “full of devils,” so he wrote.[353]There, in spite of his previous attempts to jest and be cheerful,[354]and notwithstanding the violent and distracting labours in which he was engaged, the devil had actually established an “embassy,” troubling him with many anxieties and temptations.[355]The devil he withstood by paroxysms of that hate and rage which he had always in store for his enemies. “The Castle may be crammed with devils, yet Christ reigneth there inthe midst of His foes!”[356]He includes in the same category the Papists, and the Turks who then were threatening Europe: Both are “monsters,” both have been “let loose by the fury of the devil,” both represent a common “woe doomed to overwhelm the world in these last days of Christendom.”[357]These “stout jackasses” (of the Diet of Augsburg), so he cried from the ramparts of his stronghold, “want to meddle in the business of the Church. Let them try!”[358]“The very frenzy and madness of our foes of itself alone proves that we are in the right.”[359]“Their blasphemy, their murders, their contempt of the Gospel, and other enormities against it, increase day by day and must bring the Turk into the field against us.”[360]“I am a preacher of Christ,” so he assures us, “and Christ is the truth.”—But is hatred a mark of a disciple of Christ, or of a higher mission for the reformation of doctrine and worship?Elsewhere Luther himself describes hate as a “true image of the devil; in fact, it is neither human nor diabolical but the devil himself whose whole being is nothing but an everlasting burning,” etc. “The devil is always acting contrary to love.” “Such is his way; God works nothing but benefits and deeds of charity, while he on the contrary performs nothing but works of hate.”[361]On other occasions in his sermons he speaks in familiar and at the same time inspiring words of the beauty of Christian love. “Love is a great and rich treasure, worth many hundred thousand gulden, or a great kingdom. Who is there who would not esteem it highly and pursue it to the limit of his power, nay, pour out sweat and blood for it if he only hoped or knew how to obtain it!... What is sun, moon, heavens or all creation, all the angels, all the saints compared with it? Love is nothing but the one, unspeakable, eternal good and the highest treasure, which is God Himself.”[362]But his “Vermanũg an die geistlichen versammelt auff dem Reichstag zu Augsburg” (which he wrote from the Coburg) was the fruit, not of love, but of the most glowing hate.[363]In a private letter he calls it quite rightly, not an “exhortation” (Vermanũg), but “an invective” against the clergy,[364]and, in another letter, admits the “violent spirit” in which he had written it; when composing it the abusive thoughts had rushed in on him like an “uninvited band of moss-troopers.”[365]But, that he drove them back as he declares he did, is not discernible from the work in question.In the booklet under discussion he several times uses what would seem to be words of peace, and, in one passage, even sketches a scheme for reunion; but, as a Protestant critic of the latter says, not altogether incorrectly, the “idea was of its very nature impossible of execution.”[366]Indeed, we may say that Luther himself could see well enough that the idea was a mere deception; the best motto for the writing would be: Enmity and hatred until death!The Catholic members of the Diet are there represented as “obstinate and stiff-necked,” and as “bloodhounds raging wantonly”; they had hitherto, but all to no purpose, “tried fraud and trickery, force and anger, murder and penalties.” To the bishops he cries: “May the devil who drives them dog their footsteps, and all our misfortunes fall on their head!”He puts them on a level with “procurers and whoremongers,” and trounces them as “the biggest robbers of benefices, bawds and procurers to be found in all the world.”[367]—There had been many cases of infringement of the law of celibacy among both lower and higher clergy previous to Luther’s advent, while the Wittenberg spirit of freedom set free in the German lands helped considerably to increase the evil amongst the ranks of the Catholic clergy; but to what unheard-of exaggerations, all steeped in hate, did not Luther have recourse the better to inflame the people and to defend the illicit marriages of those of the clergy who now were the preachers of the new religion? He was about “to sweep out of the house the harlots and abducted spouses” of the bishops, and not merely to show up the bishops as real “lechers and brothel-keepers” (a favourite expression of his), but to drag them still deeper in the mire. It was his unclean fancy, which delighted to collect the worst to be found in corrupt localities abroad, that led him to say: “And, moreover, we shall do clean away with your Roman Sodom, your Italian weddings, your Venetian and Turkish brides, and your Florentine bridegrooms!”[368]The pious founders of the bishoprics and monasteries, he cries, “never intended to found bawdy-houses or Roman robber-churches,” nor yet to endow with their money “strumpets and rascals, or Roman thieves and robbers.” The bishops, however, are set on “hiding, concealing and burying in silence the whole pot-broth of their abominations and corrupt, unepiscopal abuses, shame, vice and noxious perversion of Christendom, and on seeing them lauded and praised,” whereas it is high time that they “spat upon their very selves”; their auxiliary bishops “smear the unschooled donkeys with chrism” (ordain priests) and these in turn seek “to rise to power”; yet revolt against them and against all authority is brewing in the distance; if the bloody deeds of Münzer’s time were repeated, then, he, Luther, would not be to blame; “men’s minds are prepared and greatly embittered and, that, not without due cause”; if you “go to bits” then “your blood be upon your own head!” Meanwhile it is too bad that the bishops “should go about in mitres and great pomp,” as though we were “old fools”; but still worse is it that they should make of all this pomp “articles of faith and a matter of conscience, so that people must commit sin if they refuse to worship such child’s play; surely this is the devil’s own work.” Of such hateful misrepresentations, put forward quite seriously, a dozen other instances might be cited from this writing. “But that wemustlook upon such child’s play as articles of faith, and befool ourselves with bishops’ mitres, from that we cannot get away, no matter how much we may storm or jeer.”[369]The writing culminates in the following outburst: “In short we and you alike know that you are living withoutGod’s Word, but that, on our side, we have God’s Word.”“If I live I shall be your bane; if I die I shall be your death! For God Himself has driven me to attack you! I must, as Hosea says, be to you as a bear and a lion in the way of Assur. You shall have no peace from me until you amend or rush to your own destruction.”[370]At a later date, of the saying “If I live,” etc., Luther made the Latin couplet: “Pestis eram vivus moriens ero mors tua papa.” In life, O Pope, I was thy plague, in dying I shall be thy death. He first produced this verse at Spalatin’s home at Altenburg on his return journey from the Coburg; afterwards he frequently repeated it, for instance, at Schmalkalden in 1537, when he declared, that he would bequeath his hatred of the Papacy as an heirloom to his disciples.[371]As early as 1522 he had also made use of the Bible passage concerning the lion and the bear in his “Wyder den falsch genantten geystlichen Standt” with the like assurance of the Divine character of his undertaking, and in a form which shows how obsessed he was by the spirit of hate: He was sure of his doctrine and by it would judge even the angels; without it no one could be saved, for it was God’s and not his, for which reason his sentence too was God’s and not his: “Let this be my conclusion. If I live you shall have no peace from me, if you kill me, you shall have ten times less peace; and I shall be to you as Oseas says, xiii. 8, a bear in the path and a lion in the road. However you may treat me you shall not have your will, until your brazen front and iron neck are broken either unwillingly or by grace. Unless you amend, as I would gladly wish, then we may persist, you in your anger and hostility and I in paying no heed.”[372]On another occasion he tells us how he would gladly have left Wittenberg with Melanchthon and the others who were going by way of Nuremberg to the Diet of Augsburg, but a friend had said to him: “Hold your tongue! Your tongue is an evil one!”[373]After the publication of the “Vermanũg an die Geistlichen,” or possibly even before, Melanchthon seems to have written to him, re-echoing the observations of startled and anxious friends, and saying that the writing had been “variously” appreciated, in itself a significant remark; Luther himself at that time certainly dreaded the censure of his adherents. Still, he insists as defiantly as ever on his “invective”: “Let not your heart be troubled,” he admonishes Melanchthon, “My God is a God of fools, Who is wont to laugh at the wise. Whence I trouble myself about them not the least bit.”[374]On the contrary, he even came near regarding his writing as a special work of God.As we have already pointed out, the defiant and violent steps he took, only too often became in his eyes special works of God. His notorious, boundless sense of his own greatness, to which this gave rise, is the first of the phenomena which accompanied his hate; these it will now be our duty briefly to examine in order better to appreciate the real strength of his ethical principles in his own case.Companion-Phenomena of his HateAs a matter of fact Luther’s sense of his superiority was so great that the opponents he attacked had to listen to language such as no mortal had ever before dreamed of making use of against the Church.The Church is being reformed “in my age” in “a Divine way, not after human ways.” “Were we to fall, then Christ would fall with us.”[375]Whenever he meets with contradiction, whenever he hears even the hint of a reproach or accusation, he at once ranges himself—as he does, for instance, in the “Vermanũg”—on the side of the persecuted “prophets and apostles,” nay, he even likens himself to Christ.[376]He stood alone, without miracles, and devoid of holiness, as he himself candidly informed Henry VIII. of England; nevertheless he pits himself against the heads of both Church and Empire assembled at the Diet.All he could appeal to was his degree of Doctor of Theology: “Had I not been a Doctor, the devil would havegiven me much trouble, for it is no small matter to attack the whole Papacy and to charge it” (with error).[377]In the last instance, however, his self-confidence recalls him to the proud consciousness of his entire certainty. “Thus our cause stands firm, because we know how we believe and how we live.”[378]With these words from his “Vermanũg” he defies the whole of the present and of the past, the Pope and all his Councils.He knows—and that suffices—that what he has and proclaims is God’s Word; “and if you have God’s Word you may say: Now that I have the Word what need have I to ask what the Councils say?”[379]“Among all the Councils I have never found one where the Holy Spirit rules.... There will never be no Council [sic], according to the Holy Spirit, where the people have to agree. God allows this because He Himself wills to be the Judge and suffers not men to judge. Hence He commands every man to know what he believes.”[380]Luther only, and those who follow him, know what they believe; he takes the place of all the councils, Doctors of the Church, Popes and bishops, in short, of all the ecclesiastical sources of theology.“The end of the world may now come,” he said, in 1540, “for all that pertains to the knowledge of God has now been supplied” (by me).[381]With this contempt for the olden Church he combines a most imperious exclusiveness in his treatment even of those who like him were opposed to the Pope, whether they were individuals or formed schools of thought. They must follow his lead, otherwise there awaits them the sentence he launched at the Zwinglians from the Coburg: “These Sacramentarians are not merely liars but the very embodiment of lying, deceit and hypocrisy; this both Carlstadt and Zwingli prove by word and deed.” Their books, he says, contain pestilential stuff; they refused to retract even when confuted by him, but simply because they stood in fear of their own following; he would continue to put them to shame by those words, which so angered them: “You have a spirit different from ours.” He could not look upon them as brothers; this was duly expressed in the article in which he went so far as to promise them that love which was due even toenemies. On his own authority he curtly dubs them “heretics,” and is resolved in this way to tread unharmed with Christ through Satan’s kingdom and all his lying artifices.[382]Luther’s aggravating exclusiveness went hand-in-hand with his overweening self-confidence.In consequence of this treatment the Swiss, through the agency of Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor, complained to Bucer, “Beware of not believing Luther readily or of not yielding to him! He is a scorpion; no matter how carefully he is handled he will sting, even though to begin with he seems to caress your hand.”[383]To this Bucer, who had also ventured to differ from Luther, wrote in his reply: “He has flung another scathing book at us.... He speaks, and means to speak, much more harshly than heretofore.” “He will not now endure even the smallest contradiction, and I am sure that, were I to go any further, I should cause such a tragedy that all the churches would once more be convulsed.”[384]Another Protestant voice we hear exclaiming with a fine irony: “Luther rages, thunders and lightens as though he were a Jupiter and had all the bolts of heaven at his command to launch against us.... Has he then become an emperor of the Christian army on the model of the Pope, so as to be able to issue every pronouncement that his brain suggests?”[385]“He confuses the two Natures in Christ and brings forward foolish, nay godless, statements. If we may not condemn this, then what, pray, may be condemned?”[386]His natural lack of charity, of which we shall have later on to add many fresh and appalling examples to those already enumerated, aggravated his hatred, his sense of his own greatness and his exclusiveness. What malicious hatred is there not apparent in his advice that Zwingli and Œcolampadius should be condemned, “even though this led to violence being offered them.”[387]It is with reluctance that one gazes on Luther’s abuse of the splendid gifts of mind and heart with which he had been endowed.A recent Protestant biographer of Carlstadt’s laments the “frightful harshness of his (Luther’s) polemics.” “How deep the traces left by his mode of controversy were, ought not to be overlooked,” so he writes. “From that time forward this sort of thing took the place of any real discussion of differences of opinion between members of the Lutheran camp, nor did people even seem aware of how far they were thus drifting from the kindliness and dignity of Christian modes of thought.”[388]What is here said of the treatment of opponents within the camp applies even more strongly to Luther’s behaviour towards Catholics.The following episode of his habitual persecution of Albert, Archbishop and Elector of Mayence, illustrates this very well.On June 21, 1535, the Archbishop in accordance with the then law and with the sentence duly pronounced by the judge, had caused Hans von Schönitz, once his trusted steward, to be executed; the charge of which he had been proved guilty was embezzlement on a gigantic scale. The details of the case, which was dealt with rather hurriedly, have not yet been adequately cleared up, but even Protestant researchers agree that Schönitz deserved to be dealt with as a “public thief,”[389]seeing that “in the pecuniary transactions which he undertook for Albert he was not unmindful of his own advantage”;[390]“there is no doubt that he was rightly accused of all manner of peculation and cheating.”[391]Luther, however, furiously entered the lists on behalf of the executed man and against the detested Archbishop who, in spite of his private faults, remained faithful to the Church and was a hindrance to the spread of Lutheranism in Germany. Luther implicitly believed all that was told him, of Hans’s innocence and of Albert’s supposed abominable motives, by Schönitz’s brother and his friend Ludwig Rabe—who himself was implicated in the matter—and both of whom came to Wittenberg. “Both naturally related the case from their own point of view.”[392]Luther sent two letters to the Cardinal, one more violent than the other.[393]The second would seem to have been intended for publication and was sent to the press, though at present no copy of it can be discovered. In it in words of frightful violence he lays at the door of the Prince of the Church the blood of the man done to death. The Archbishop was a “thorough-paced Epicurean who does not believe that Abel lives in God and that his blood still cries more loudly than Cain, his brother’s murderer, fancies.” He, Luther, like another Elias, must call down woes “upon Achab and Isabel.” He had indeed heard of many evil deeds done by Cardinals, “but I had not taken your Cardinalitial Holiness for such an insolent, wicked dragon.... Your Electoral Highness may if he likes commit a nuisance in the Emperor’s Court of Justice, infringe the freedom of the city of Halle, usurp the sword of Justice belonging to Saxony, and, over and above this, look on the world and on all reason as rags fit only for the closet”—such is a fair sample of the language—and, moreover, treat everything in a Popish, Roman, Cardinalitialway, but, please God, our Lord God will by our prayers one day compel your Electoral Highness to sweep out all the filth yourself.In the first letter he had threatened fiercely the hated Cardinal with publishing what he knew (or possibly only feigned to know) of his faults; he would not “advise him to stir up the filth any further”; here in the second letter he charges him in a general way with robbery, petty theft and fraud in the matter of Church property, also with having cheated a woman of the town whom he used to keep; he deserved to be “hanged on a gallows three times as high as the Giebichstein,” where Schönitz had been executed. Incidentally he promises him a new work that shall reveal all his doings. The threatened work was, however, never published, Albert’s family, the Brandenburgs, having raised objections at the Electoral Court of Saxony. Albert, however, offered quite frankly to submit the Schönitz case and the grievances raised by his relatives to the judgment of George of Anhalt, one of the princes who had gone over to Lutheranism, who was perfectly at liberty to take the advice of Jonas, nay, even of Luther himself. “In this we may surely see a proof that he was not conscious of being in the least blameworthy.”[394]At any rate he seems to have been quite willing to lay his case even before his most bitter foe.[395]Such was Luther’s irritability and quickness of temper, even in private concerns, that, at times, even in his letters, he would pour forth the most incredible threats.

The remarks just quoted occur in an article by the theologian Julius Kaftan, Oberkonsistorialrat at Berlin, published in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche” in 1908 under the title, “Why does the Evangelical Church know no doctrine of the Redemption in the narrower sense, and how may this want be remedied?” We all the more gladly append some further remarks by a theologian, who, as a rule, is by no means favourably disposed to Catholicism.According to Kaftan, Luther indeed supplied “all the elements” for the upbuilding of a doctrine of “redemption from the world”; he gave “the stimulus” to the thought; it is “not as though we had no conception of it.”But he, and the Reformation as a whole, failed to furnish any “actual, detailed doctrine” on this subject because their attackwas directed, and had to be directed, against the ideal of piety as they found it in the Church’s monastic life; they destroyed it, so the author opines, because it was only under this distorted monkish shape that the “Christian idea of redemption from the world was then met.”[325]The Reformation omitted to replace it by a better system. It suffers from having fallen into the way of giving “too great prominence to the doctrine of Justification,” whereas the salvation “bestowed by Christ is not merely Justification and forgiveness of sins,” as the traditional Lutheran theology seems on the surface to assume even to-day, but rather the “everlasting possession” to be reached by a Christ-like life; Justification is but the road to this possession. Because people failed to keep this in view the doctrine of the real “work of salvation” has from the beginning been made far too little of.A further reason which explains the neglect is, according to Kaftan, the following: In Catholicism it is the Church which acts as the guide to piety and supplies all the spiritual aids required; she acts as intermediary between God and the faithful. But “the Evangelical teaching rejected the Church (in this connection) as a supernatural agency for the dispensation of the means of salvation. In her place it set the action of the Spirit working by means of the Word of God.” Since this same teaching stops short at the Incarnation and Satisfaction of Christ, it has “no room for any doctrine of redemption (from the world) as a work of God.”[326]Pietism, with all its irregularities, was merely an outcome of this deficiency; but even the Pietists never succeeded in formulating such a doctrine of redemption.It is to the credit of the author that he feels this want deeply and points out the way in which theology can remedy it.[327]He would fain see introduced a system of plain directions, though framed on lines different from those of the “ostensibly final doctrinal teaching” of the Formula of Concord,[328]i.e. instructions to the devout Christian how to manifest in his life in the world the death and resurrection of Christ which St. Paul experienced in himself. Much too much emphasis had been laid in Protestantism on Luther’s friendliness to the world and the joy of living, which he was the first to teach Christians in opposition to the doctrine of the Middle Ages; yet the other idea, of redemption from the world, must nevertheless retain a lasting significance in Christianity. Although, before Luther’s day, the Church had erroneously striven to attain to the latter solely in the monastic life, yet there is no doubt “that the most delicate blossoms of pre-Reformation piety sprang from this soil, and that the best forces in the Church owed their origin to this source.” Is it merely fortuitous, continues the author, “that the ‘Imitationof Christ,’ by Thomas à Kempis, should be so widely read throughout Christendom, even by Evangelicals? Are there not many Evangelical Christians who could witness that this book has been a great help to them in a crisis of their inner life? But whoever knows it knows what the idea of redemption from the world there signifies.” All this leads our author to the conclusion: “The history of Christianity and of the Church undoubtedly proves that here [in the case of the defect in the Lutheran theology he is instancing] it is really a question of a motive power and central thought of our religion.”[329]He points out to the world of our day, “that growing civilisation culminates in disgust with the world and with civilisation.” “Then,” he continues, “the soul again cries for God, for the God Who is above all the world and in Whom alone the heart finds rest. As it ever was, so is it still to-day.”[330]It is a satisfaction to hear this call which must rejoice the heart of every believer. The same, however, had been heard throughout the ancient Church and had met with a happy response. Not in the “Imitation” only, but in a hundred other writings of Catholics, mystic and ascetic, could our author have found the ideals of Christian perfection and of the rest in God which comes from inward severance from the world, all expressed with the utmost clearness and the warmest feeling. Nor was Christian perfection imprisoned within the walls of the monasteries; it also flourished in the breezy atmosphere of the world. The Church taught the universality of this ideal of perfect love of God, of the imitation of Christ and of detachment from the world, and she recommended it indiscriminately to all classes, inviting people to practise it under all conditions of life and expending liberally in all directions her supernatural powers in order to attain her aim. Among the best of those whose writings inaugurated a school of piety may be classed St. Bernard and Gerson, in whom Luther had found light and edification when still a zealous monk. With him, however, the case was very different. Of the works he bequeathed to posterity the Protestant theologian referred to above, says regretfully: They contain neither a “doctrine” nor a definite “scheme of instruction” on “that side of life which faces God.” “No clear, conclusive thoughts on this all-important matter are to be found.”On the other hand it must be added that there is no want of “clear, conclusive thoughts” to a quite opposite effect;not merely on enjoyment of the world, but on a kind of sovereignty over it which is scarcely consistent with the effort after self-betterment.The Means of Self-Reform and their Reverse SideSelf-denial as the most effective means of self-education in the good, and self-conquest in outward and inward things, receive comparatively small attention from Luther; rather he is set on delivering people from the “anxiety-breeding,” traditional prejudice in favour of spiritual renunciation, obedience to the Church and retrenchment in view of the evil. This deliverance, thanks to its alluring and attractive character, was welcomed, in spite of Luther’s repeated warnings against any excess of the spirit of the world. His abandonment of the path of perfection so strongly recommended by Christ and his depreciation of “peculiar” works and “singular” practices were more readily understood and also more engaging than his words in favour of real works of faith. He set up his own inward experiences of the difficulty and, as he thought, utter futility of the conflict with self, together with his hostility to all spiritual efforts exceeding the common bounds, as the standard for others, and, in fact, even for the Church; in the Catholic past, on the other hand, the faithful had been taught to recognise the standard of the Church, their teacher and guide, as the rule by which to judge of their own experiences.Here to prove what we have said, would necessitate the repetition of what has already been given elsewhere.Luther’s writings, particularly his letters, also contain certain instructions, which, fortunately, have not become the common property of Protestants, but which everybody must feel to be absolutely opposed to anything like self-betterment. We need only call to mind his teaching, that temptations to despondency and despair are best withstood by committing some sin in defiance of the devil, or by diverting the mind to sensual and carnal distractions.[331]The words: “What matters it if we commit a fresh sin?”[332]since through faith we have forgiveness, and the other similar utterance, “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe more boldly still,” are characteristic of him, though he would have been unwilling to see them pressed or taken too literally. By these and other statements he did, however, seriously endanger the ethical character of sin; in reality he diminished the abhorrence for sin, though no doubt he did not fully perceive the consequences of his act.[333]To the man who had become sensible of the ensnaring influence of the world and of its evil effects upon himself, or who on account of his mental build felt himself endangered by it, Catholic moralists advised retirement, recollection, self-examination and solitude. Luther was certainly not furthering the cause of perfection when he repeatedly insisted, with an emphasis that is barely credible, that solitude must be avoided as the deadly foe of the true life of the soul, and that what should be sought was rather company and distraction. Solitude was a temptation to sin. “I too find,” so he says, “that I never fall into sin more frequently than when I am alone.... Quietude calls forth the worst of thoughts. Whatever our trouble be, it then becomes much more dangerous,” etc.[334]Of course, in the case of persons of gloomy disposition Luther was quite right in recommending company, but it was just in doing so that he exceeded the bounds in his praise of sensual distractions;[335]of his own example, too, he makes far too much. On the other hand, all the great men in the Church had sought to find the guiding light of self-knowledge in solitude; this they regarded as a school for the subjugation of unruly emotions.Not only were self-control and self-restraint something strange to Luther,[336]but he often went so far as to adduce curious theoretical reasonings of his own to prove that they could have no place in his public life and controversies, and why he and his helpers were compelled to give the reins to anger, hatred and abuse. Thus the work of self-improvement was renounced in yet another essential point.Then again with regard to prayer. His exhortations thereto are numerous enough and he himself prayed frequently. But it is not necessary to be an ascetic to see that several things are wanting in his admonitions to prayer. The first is the salt of contrition and compunction. He was less alive to the wholesome underlying feeling of melancholy that characterises the soul which prays to God in the consciousness of having abused its free-will, than he was to the suggestions of self-confidence and assurance of salvation. The second thing wanting is the humility which should permeate prayer even when exalted to the highest limits of trusting confidence. If man, as Luther taught, is incapable of any work, then of course there can be no sense of shame at not having done more to please God and to merit greater grace from Him. Moreover, Luther indirectly encouraged people to pray in the bold consciousness of being justified and to look for the keeping of the law as a natural consequence of such “faith.” Lastly, and this sums up everything, we miss the spirit of love in his often so strongly worded and eloquent exhortations to prayer; the spirit which should have led him to resignation to God’s designs, and to commit his life’s work to the Will of God with a calm indifference as to its eventual success.[337]Hardly ever do we find any trace of that zeal for souls which embraces the whole of God’s broad kingdom even to the heathen, in short, the whole of the Church’s sphere.[338]On the other hand, however, he expressly exhorts his followers to increase the ardour of their prayers, after his own example, by interspersing them with curses on all whose views were different.[339]In place of the pleasing variety of the old exercises of prayer—from the Office recited by the clergy with its daily commemoration of the Saints down to the multifarious devotions of the people, to say nothing of the great Sacrifice of the Altar, the very heart’s pulse of the Church—he recommends as a rule only the Our Father, the Creed and the Psalms—prayers indeed rich beyond all others and which will ever hold the first place among Christian devotions. But had they not been brought closer to the heartformerly in the inner and outer life of prayer dealt with in the writings of the Catholic masters of the spiritual life, and exemplified in the churches and monasteries, and even in private houses and the very streets? But behind all this rich display Luther saw lurking the demon of “singular works.” The monk absorbed in contemplation was, in Luther’s eyes, an unhappy wretch sitting “in filth” up to his neck. Thus he restricts himself to recommending the old short formulas of prayer. In accordance with his doctrine that faith alone avails, he desires that sin, and the intention of sinning, should be withstood by the use of the Our Father: “That you diligently learn to say the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments.”[340]“Grant, O God (thus must you pray), that Thy Name be hallowed by me, Thy Kingdom come to me, and Thy Will be done in me”; in this wise they would come to scorn “devil, death and hell.”[341]He indeed kept in touch with the people by means of the olden prayers, but, even into them, he knew how to introduce his own new views; the Kingdom of God, which to him is forgiveness of sins,[342]“must come to us by faith,” and the chief article of the whole Creed with which to defy “death, devil and hell” was the “remissio peccatorum.” These remarks must not, however, be understood as detracting from the value of his fine, practical, and often sympathetic expositions of the Our Father, whether in his special work on it in 1518 or in the Larger Catechism.[343]Of the numerous “man-made laws” which he banished at one stroke by denying the Church’s authority there is no need to speak here. Without a doubt the overturning of all these barriers erected against human lusts and wilfulness was scarcely conducive to the progress of the individual.Nor does the absence of any higher standard of life in his own case[344]serve to recommend his system of ethics. Seeing that, as has been already pointed out,[345]he himself is disposed to admit his failings, the apparent confidence with which,in order to exalt his reform of ethics, he appeals to the biblical verity, that the truth of a doctrine is proved by its moral fruits, is all the more surprising.Of this confidence we have a remarkable example in a sermon devoted to the explanation of the 1st Epistle of St. John. At the same time the exceptional boldness of his language and the resolute testimony he bears in his own favour constitute striking proof of how the very firmness of his attitude impressed his followers and exercised over many a seductive spell. The weakness of the Reformer’s ethics seems all at once to vanish before his mighty eloquence.The discourse in question, where at the same time he vindicates his own conduct, belongs to 1532. About that time he preached frequently at Wittenberg on St. John’s sublime words concerning the love of God and our neighbour (1 Jo. iv. 16-21). His object was to cleanse and better the morals of Wittenberg, the low standard of which he deplores, that the results of justification by faith might shine forth more brightly. At that very time he was treating with the Elector and the Saxon Estates in view of a new visitation of all the parishes to be held the next year, which might promote the good of morality. The sermons were duly reported by his pupil Cruciger, whose notes were published at Wittenberg in 1533 under the general title of “A Sermon on Love.”[346]Dealing therein with ethical practice he starts by proclaiming that, according to the “pious Apostle” whose doctrines he was expounding, everything depends on Christians proving by their fruits whether they really “walk in love.” Of many, however, who not only declared themselves well acquainted with the principles of faith and ethics but even professed to be qualified to teach them, it was true that, “if we applied and manifested in our lives their ethics after their example, then we should be but poorly off.”[347]Such men must, nevertheless, be tested by their works. Nor does he exempt himself from this duty of putting ethics to a practical test.Nowhere else does he insist more boldly than in these sermons on proof by actual deeds, even in his own case. According to the words of John, so he says, a life of love would give them “confidence in the Day of Judgment” (iv. 17). Confidence, nay, a spirit of holy defiance, even in the presence of death and judgment, must fill the hearts of all who acted aright, owing to the very testimony of their fellow-men to the blamelessness of their lives. “We must be able to boast [with Christ, ‘the reconciliation for our sins’] not before God alone but before God and all Christendom, and against the whole world, that no onecan truthfully condemn or even accuse us.” “We must be able to assure ourselves that we have lived in such a way that no one can take scandal at us”; we must have this testimony, “that we have walked on earth in simplicity and godly piety, and that no one can charge us with having been given to ‘trickery.’” In this wise had Paul countered false doctrines by boasting, just as Moses and Samuel had already done under the Old Covenant.[348]Coming to his own person the speaker thinks he can honestly say the same of himself, though, like the rest, he too must confess to being still in need of the article of the forgiveness of sins. There were false teachers who could not appeal so confidently to the morality of their lives, “proud, puffed-up spirits who lay claim to a great and wonderful holiness, who want to reform the whole world and to do something singular in order that all may say that they alone are true Christians. This sort of thing lasts indeed for a while, during which they parade and strut, but, when the hour of death comes, that is the end of all such idle nonsense.”[349]He himself, with the faithful teachers and good Christians, is in a very different case: “If I must boast of how I have acted in my position towards everyone then I will say: I witness before you and all the world, and know that God too witnesses on my behalf together with all His angels, that I have not falsified God’s Word, His Baptism or the Sacrament but have preached and acted faithfully as much as was in me, and suffered all ill solely for God’s and His Word’s sake. Thus must all the Saints boast.”[350]He lays the greatest stress on the unanimous testimony which the preacher must receive from his fellow-men and from posterity. He must be able to say, “you shall be my witnesses,” he “must be able to call upon all men to bear him witness”; they must bear us witness on the Last Day that we have lived aright and shown by our deeds that we were Christians. If this is the case, if they can point to their practice of good works, then the preaching of good works can be insisted on with all the emphasis required.[351]It is natural, however, that towards the end Luther lays greater stress on his teaching than on his works.On his preaching of the value of good works he solemnly assures us: “We can testify before the whole world that we have preached much more grandly and forcefully on good works than even those who calumniate us.”[352]Self-Reform and Hatred of the FoeIn speaking of Luther, his staunch friends are wont to boast of his lifelong struggle against the fetters of the Papacy and of the overwhelming power of his assault on the olden Church; this, so they imply, redounded to his glory and showed his moral superiority.In what follows we shall therefore consider some of the main ethical features of this struggle of Luther’s and of the attitude he adopted in his conflict with Popery. His very defence of himself and of the moral effects of his preaching, which we have just heard him pronounce subsequent to the Diet of Augsburg, invites us to consider in the light of ethics his public line of action, as traced in his writings of that period. These years represent a turning-point in his life, and here, if anywhere, we should be able to detect his higher moral standard and the power of his new principles to effect a change first of all in himself. In the sermon of 1532 (above, p. 96) he had said: The new Gospel which he had “preached rightly and faithfully” made those who accepted it “to walk in simplicity and godly piety” according to the law of love, and to stand forth “blameless before all the world.” Could he truthfully, he, the champion of this Gospel, really lay any claim to these qualities as here he seems to do, at least indirectly?His controversial tracts dating from that time display anything but “simplicity and godly piety.” His hate was without bounds, and his fury blazed forth in thunderbolts which slew all who dared to attempt to bridge the chasm between him and the Catholic Church. Reproaching voices, about him and within him, seemed to him to come from so many devils. The Coburg, where he stayed, was assuredly “full of devils,” so he wrote.[353]There, in spite of his previous attempts to jest and be cheerful,[354]and notwithstanding the violent and distracting labours in which he was engaged, the devil had actually established an “embassy,” troubling him with many anxieties and temptations.[355]The devil he withstood by paroxysms of that hate and rage which he had always in store for his enemies. “The Castle may be crammed with devils, yet Christ reigneth there inthe midst of His foes!”[356]He includes in the same category the Papists, and the Turks who then were threatening Europe: Both are “monsters,” both have been “let loose by the fury of the devil,” both represent a common “woe doomed to overwhelm the world in these last days of Christendom.”[357]These “stout jackasses” (of the Diet of Augsburg), so he cried from the ramparts of his stronghold, “want to meddle in the business of the Church. Let them try!”[358]“The very frenzy and madness of our foes of itself alone proves that we are in the right.”[359]“Their blasphemy, their murders, their contempt of the Gospel, and other enormities against it, increase day by day and must bring the Turk into the field against us.”[360]“I am a preacher of Christ,” so he assures us, “and Christ is the truth.”—But is hatred a mark of a disciple of Christ, or of a higher mission for the reformation of doctrine and worship?Elsewhere Luther himself describes hate as a “true image of the devil; in fact, it is neither human nor diabolical but the devil himself whose whole being is nothing but an everlasting burning,” etc. “The devil is always acting contrary to love.” “Such is his way; God works nothing but benefits and deeds of charity, while he on the contrary performs nothing but works of hate.”[361]On other occasions in his sermons he speaks in familiar and at the same time inspiring words of the beauty of Christian love. “Love is a great and rich treasure, worth many hundred thousand gulden, or a great kingdom. Who is there who would not esteem it highly and pursue it to the limit of his power, nay, pour out sweat and blood for it if he only hoped or knew how to obtain it!... What is sun, moon, heavens or all creation, all the angels, all the saints compared with it? Love is nothing but the one, unspeakable, eternal good and the highest treasure, which is God Himself.”[362]But his “Vermanũg an die geistlichen versammelt auff dem Reichstag zu Augsburg” (which he wrote from the Coburg) was the fruit, not of love, but of the most glowing hate.[363]In a private letter he calls it quite rightly, not an “exhortation” (Vermanũg), but “an invective” against the clergy,[364]and, in another letter, admits the “violent spirit” in which he had written it; when composing it the abusive thoughts had rushed in on him like an “uninvited band of moss-troopers.”[365]But, that he drove them back as he declares he did, is not discernible from the work in question.In the booklet under discussion he several times uses what would seem to be words of peace, and, in one passage, even sketches a scheme for reunion; but, as a Protestant critic of the latter says, not altogether incorrectly, the “idea was of its very nature impossible of execution.”[366]Indeed, we may say that Luther himself could see well enough that the idea was a mere deception; the best motto for the writing would be: Enmity and hatred until death!The Catholic members of the Diet are there represented as “obstinate and stiff-necked,” and as “bloodhounds raging wantonly”; they had hitherto, but all to no purpose, “tried fraud and trickery, force and anger, murder and penalties.” To the bishops he cries: “May the devil who drives them dog their footsteps, and all our misfortunes fall on their head!”He puts them on a level with “procurers and whoremongers,” and trounces them as “the biggest robbers of benefices, bawds and procurers to be found in all the world.”[367]—There had been many cases of infringement of the law of celibacy among both lower and higher clergy previous to Luther’s advent, while the Wittenberg spirit of freedom set free in the German lands helped considerably to increase the evil amongst the ranks of the Catholic clergy; but to what unheard-of exaggerations, all steeped in hate, did not Luther have recourse the better to inflame the people and to defend the illicit marriages of those of the clergy who now were the preachers of the new religion? He was about “to sweep out of the house the harlots and abducted spouses” of the bishops, and not merely to show up the bishops as real “lechers and brothel-keepers” (a favourite expression of his), but to drag them still deeper in the mire. It was his unclean fancy, which delighted to collect the worst to be found in corrupt localities abroad, that led him to say: “And, moreover, we shall do clean away with your Roman Sodom, your Italian weddings, your Venetian and Turkish brides, and your Florentine bridegrooms!”[368]The pious founders of the bishoprics and monasteries, he cries, “never intended to found bawdy-houses or Roman robber-churches,” nor yet to endow with their money “strumpets and rascals, or Roman thieves and robbers.” The bishops, however, are set on “hiding, concealing and burying in silence the whole pot-broth of their abominations and corrupt, unepiscopal abuses, shame, vice and noxious perversion of Christendom, and on seeing them lauded and praised,” whereas it is high time that they “spat upon their very selves”; their auxiliary bishops “smear the unschooled donkeys with chrism” (ordain priests) and these in turn seek “to rise to power”; yet revolt against them and against all authority is brewing in the distance; if the bloody deeds of Münzer’s time were repeated, then, he, Luther, would not be to blame; “men’s minds are prepared and greatly embittered and, that, not without due cause”; if you “go to bits” then “your blood be upon your own head!” Meanwhile it is too bad that the bishops “should go about in mitres and great pomp,” as though we were “old fools”; but still worse is it that they should make of all this pomp “articles of faith and a matter of conscience, so that people must commit sin if they refuse to worship such child’s play; surely this is the devil’s own work.” Of such hateful misrepresentations, put forward quite seriously, a dozen other instances might be cited from this writing. “But that wemustlook upon such child’s play as articles of faith, and befool ourselves with bishops’ mitres, from that we cannot get away, no matter how much we may storm or jeer.”[369]The writing culminates in the following outburst: “In short we and you alike know that you are living withoutGod’s Word, but that, on our side, we have God’s Word.”“If I live I shall be your bane; if I die I shall be your death! For God Himself has driven me to attack you! I must, as Hosea says, be to you as a bear and a lion in the way of Assur. You shall have no peace from me until you amend or rush to your own destruction.”[370]At a later date, of the saying “If I live,” etc., Luther made the Latin couplet: “Pestis eram vivus moriens ero mors tua papa.” In life, O Pope, I was thy plague, in dying I shall be thy death. He first produced this verse at Spalatin’s home at Altenburg on his return journey from the Coburg; afterwards he frequently repeated it, for instance, at Schmalkalden in 1537, when he declared, that he would bequeath his hatred of the Papacy as an heirloom to his disciples.[371]As early as 1522 he had also made use of the Bible passage concerning the lion and the bear in his “Wyder den falsch genantten geystlichen Standt” with the like assurance of the Divine character of his undertaking, and in a form which shows how obsessed he was by the spirit of hate: He was sure of his doctrine and by it would judge even the angels; without it no one could be saved, for it was God’s and not his, for which reason his sentence too was God’s and not his: “Let this be my conclusion. If I live you shall have no peace from me, if you kill me, you shall have ten times less peace; and I shall be to you as Oseas says, xiii. 8, a bear in the path and a lion in the road. However you may treat me you shall not have your will, until your brazen front and iron neck are broken either unwillingly or by grace. Unless you amend, as I would gladly wish, then we may persist, you in your anger and hostility and I in paying no heed.”[372]On another occasion he tells us how he would gladly have left Wittenberg with Melanchthon and the others who were going by way of Nuremberg to the Diet of Augsburg, but a friend had said to him: “Hold your tongue! Your tongue is an evil one!”[373]After the publication of the “Vermanũg an die Geistlichen,” or possibly even before, Melanchthon seems to have written to him, re-echoing the observations of startled and anxious friends, and saying that the writing had been “variously” appreciated, in itself a significant remark; Luther himself at that time certainly dreaded the censure of his adherents. Still, he insists as defiantly as ever on his “invective”: “Let not your heart be troubled,” he admonishes Melanchthon, “My God is a God of fools, Who is wont to laugh at the wise. Whence I trouble myself about them not the least bit.”[374]On the contrary, he even came near regarding his writing as a special work of God.As we have already pointed out, the defiant and violent steps he took, only too often became in his eyes special works of God. His notorious, boundless sense of his own greatness, to which this gave rise, is the first of the phenomena which accompanied his hate; these it will now be our duty briefly to examine in order better to appreciate the real strength of his ethical principles in his own case.Companion-Phenomena of his HateAs a matter of fact Luther’s sense of his superiority was so great that the opponents he attacked had to listen to language such as no mortal had ever before dreamed of making use of against the Church.The Church is being reformed “in my age” in “a Divine way, not after human ways.” “Were we to fall, then Christ would fall with us.”[375]Whenever he meets with contradiction, whenever he hears even the hint of a reproach or accusation, he at once ranges himself—as he does, for instance, in the “Vermanũg”—on the side of the persecuted “prophets and apostles,” nay, he even likens himself to Christ.[376]He stood alone, without miracles, and devoid of holiness, as he himself candidly informed Henry VIII. of England; nevertheless he pits himself against the heads of both Church and Empire assembled at the Diet.All he could appeal to was his degree of Doctor of Theology: “Had I not been a Doctor, the devil would havegiven me much trouble, for it is no small matter to attack the whole Papacy and to charge it” (with error).[377]In the last instance, however, his self-confidence recalls him to the proud consciousness of his entire certainty. “Thus our cause stands firm, because we know how we believe and how we live.”[378]With these words from his “Vermanũg” he defies the whole of the present and of the past, the Pope and all his Councils.He knows—and that suffices—that what he has and proclaims is God’s Word; “and if you have God’s Word you may say: Now that I have the Word what need have I to ask what the Councils say?”[379]“Among all the Councils I have never found one where the Holy Spirit rules.... There will never be no Council [sic], according to the Holy Spirit, where the people have to agree. God allows this because He Himself wills to be the Judge and suffers not men to judge. Hence He commands every man to know what he believes.”[380]Luther only, and those who follow him, know what they believe; he takes the place of all the councils, Doctors of the Church, Popes and bishops, in short, of all the ecclesiastical sources of theology.“The end of the world may now come,” he said, in 1540, “for all that pertains to the knowledge of God has now been supplied” (by me).[381]With this contempt for the olden Church he combines a most imperious exclusiveness in his treatment even of those who like him were opposed to the Pope, whether they were individuals or formed schools of thought. They must follow his lead, otherwise there awaits them the sentence he launched at the Zwinglians from the Coburg: “These Sacramentarians are not merely liars but the very embodiment of lying, deceit and hypocrisy; this both Carlstadt and Zwingli prove by word and deed.” Their books, he says, contain pestilential stuff; they refused to retract even when confuted by him, but simply because they stood in fear of their own following; he would continue to put them to shame by those words, which so angered them: “You have a spirit different from ours.” He could not look upon them as brothers; this was duly expressed in the article in which he went so far as to promise them that love which was due even toenemies. On his own authority he curtly dubs them “heretics,” and is resolved in this way to tread unharmed with Christ through Satan’s kingdom and all his lying artifices.[382]Luther’s aggravating exclusiveness went hand-in-hand with his overweening self-confidence.In consequence of this treatment the Swiss, through the agency of Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor, complained to Bucer, “Beware of not believing Luther readily or of not yielding to him! He is a scorpion; no matter how carefully he is handled he will sting, even though to begin with he seems to caress your hand.”[383]To this Bucer, who had also ventured to differ from Luther, wrote in his reply: “He has flung another scathing book at us.... He speaks, and means to speak, much more harshly than heretofore.” “He will not now endure even the smallest contradiction, and I am sure that, were I to go any further, I should cause such a tragedy that all the churches would once more be convulsed.”[384]Another Protestant voice we hear exclaiming with a fine irony: “Luther rages, thunders and lightens as though he were a Jupiter and had all the bolts of heaven at his command to launch against us.... Has he then become an emperor of the Christian army on the model of the Pope, so as to be able to issue every pronouncement that his brain suggests?”[385]“He confuses the two Natures in Christ and brings forward foolish, nay godless, statements. If we may not condemn this, then what, pray, may be condemned?”[386]His natural lack of charity, of which we shall have later on to add many fresh and appalling examples to those already enumerated, aggravated his hatred, his sense of his own greatness and his exclusiveness. What malicious hatred is there not apparent in his advice that Zwingli and Œcolampadius should be condemned, “even though this led to violence being offered them.”[387]It is with reluctance that one gazes on Luther’s abuse of the splendid gifts of mind and heart with which he had been endowed.A recent Protestant biographer of Carlstadt’s laments the “frightful harshness of his (Luther’s) polemics.” “How deep the traces left by his mode of controversy were, ought not to be overlooked,” so he writes. “From that time forward this sort of thing took the place of any real discussion of differences of opinion between members of the Lutheran camp, nor did people even seem aware of how far they were thus drifting from the kindliness and dignity of Christian modes of thought.”[388]What is here said of the treatment of opponents within the camp applies even more strongly to Luther’s behaviour towards Catholics.The following episode of his habitual persecution of Albert, Archbishop and Elector of Mayence, illustrates this very well.On June 21, 1535, the Archbishop in accordance with the then law and with the sentence duly pronounced by the judge, had caused Hans von Schönitz, once his trusted steward, to be executed; the charge of which he had been proved guilty was embezzlement on a gigantic scale. The details of the case, which was dealt with rather hurriedly, have not yet been adequately cleared up, but even Protestant researchers agree that Schönitz deserved to be dealt with as a “public thief,”[389]seeing that “in the pecuniary transactions which he undertook for Albert he was not unmindful of his own advantage”;[390]“there is no doubt that he was rightly accused of all manner of peculation and cheating.”[391]Luther, however, furiously entered the lists on behalf of the executed man and against the detested Archbishop who, in spite of his private faults, remained faithful to the Church and was a hindrance to the spread of Lutheranism in Germany. Luther implicitly believed all that was told him, of Hans’s innocence and of Albert’s supposed abominable motives, by Schönitz’s brother and his friend Ludwig Rabe—who himself was implicated in the matter—and both of whom came to Wittenberg. “Both naturally related the case from their own point of view.”[392]Luther sent two letters to the Cardinal, one more violent than the other.[393]The second would seem to have been intended for publication and was sent to the press, though at present no copy of it can be discovered. In it in words of frightful violence he lays at the door of the Prince of the Church the blood of the man done to death. The Archbishop was a “thorough-paced Epicurean who does not believe that Abel lives in God and that his blood still cries more loudly than Cain, his brother’s murderer, fancies.” He, Luther, like another Elias, must call down woes “upon Achab and Isabel.” He had indeed heard of many evil deeds done by Cardinals, “but I had not taken your Cardinalitial Holiness for such an insolent, wicked dragon.... Your Electoral Highness may if he likes commit a nuisance in the Emperor’s Court of Justice, infringe the freedom of the city of Halle, usurp the sword of Justice belonging to Saxony, and, over and above this, look on the world and on all reason as rags fit only for the closet”—such is a fair sample of the language—and, moreover, treat everything in a Popish, Roman, Cardinalitialway, but, please God, our Lord God will by our prayers one day compel your Electoral Highness to sweep out all the filth yourself.In the first letter he had threatened fiercely the hated Cardinal with publishing what he knew (or possibly only feigned to know) of his faults; he would not “advise him to stir up the filth any further”; here in the second letter he charges him in a general way with robbery, petty theft and fraud in the matter of Church property, also with having cheated a woman of the town whom he used to keep; he deserved to be “hanged on a gallows three times as high as the Giebichstein,” where Schönitz had been executed. Incidentally he promises him a new work that shall reveal all his doings. The threatened work was, however, never published, Albert’s family, the Brandenburgs, having raised objections at the Electoral Court of Saxony. Albert, however, offered quite frankly to submit the Schönitz case and the grievances raised by his relatives to the judgment of George of Anhalt, one of the princes who had gone over to Lutheranism, who was perfectly at liberty to take the advice of Jonas, nay, even of Luther himself. “In this we may surely see a proof that he was not conscious of being in the least blameworthy.”[394]At any rate he seems to have been quite willing to lay his case even before his most bitter foe.[395]Such was Luther’s irritability and quickness of temper, even in private concerns, that, at times, even in his letters, he would pour forth the most incredible threats.

The remarks just quoted occur in an article by the theologian Julius Kaftan, Oberkonsistorialrat at Berlin, published in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche” in 1908 under the title, “Why does the Evangelical Church know no doctrine of the Redemption in the narrower sense, and how may this want be remedied?” We all the more gladly append some further remarks by a theologian, who, as a rule, is by no means favourably disposed to Catholicism.According to Kaftan, Luther indeed supplied “all the elements” for the upbuilding of a doctrine of “redemption from the world”; he gave “the stimulus” to the thought; it is “not as though we had no conception of it.”But he, and the Reformation as a whole, failed to furnish any “actual, detailed doctrine” on this subject because their attackwas directed, and had to be directed, against the ideal of piety as they found it in the Church’s monastic life; they destroyed it, so the author opines, because it was only under this distorted monkish shape that the “Christian idea of redemption from the world was then met.”[325]The Reformation omitted to replace it by a better system. It suffers from having fallen into the way of giving “too great prominence to the doctrine of Justification,” whereas the salvation “bestowed by Christ is not merely Justification and forgiveness of sins,” as the traditional Lutheran theology seems on the surface to assume even to-day, but rather the “everlasting possession” to be reached by a Christ-like life; Justification is but the road to this possession. Because people failed to keep this in view the doctrine of the real “work of salvation” has from the beginning been made far too little of.A further reason which explains the neglect is, according to Kaftan, the following: In Catholicism it is the Church which acts as the guide to piety and supplies all the spiritual aids required; she acts as intermediary between God and the faithful. But “the Evangelical teaching rejected the Church (in this connection) as a supernatural agency for the dispensation of the means of salvation. In her place it set the action of the Spirit working by means of the Word of God.” Since this same teaching stops short at the Incarnation and Satisfaction of Christ, it has “no room for any doctrine of redemption (from the world) as a work of God.”[326]Pietism, with all its irregularities, was merely an outcome of this deficiency; but even the Pietists never succeeded in formulating such a doctrine of redemption.It is to the credit of the author that he feels this want deeply and points out the way in which theology can remedy it.[327]He would fain see introduced a system of plain directions, though framed on lines different from those of the “ostensibly final doctrinal teaching” of the Formula of Concord,[328]i.e. instructions to the devout Christian how to manifest in his life in the world the death and resurrection of Christ which St. Paul experienced in himself. Much too much emphasis had been laid in Protestantism on Luther’s friendliness to the world and the joy of living, which he was the first to teach Christians in opposition to the doctrine of the Middle Ages; yet the other idea, of redemption from the world, must nevertheless retain a lasting significance in Christianity. Although, before Luther’s day, the Church had erroneously striven to attain to the latter solely in the monastic life, yet there is no doubt “that the most delicate blossoms of pre-Reformation piety sprang from this soil, and that the best forces in the Church owed their origin to this source.” Is it merely fortuitous, continues the author, “that the ‘Imitationof Christ,’ by Thomas à Kempis, should be so widely read throughout Christendom, even by Evangelicals? Are there not many Evangelical Christians who could witness that this book has been a great help to them in a crisis of their inner life? But whoever knows it knows what the idea of redemption from the world there signifies.” All this leads our author to the conclusion: “The history of Christianity and of the Church undoubtedly proves that here [in the case of the defect in the Lutheran theology he is instancing] it is really a question of a motive power and central thought of our religion.”[329]He points out to the world of our day, “that growing civilisation culminates in disgust with the world and with civilisation.” “Then,” he continues, “the soul again cries for God, for the God Who is above all the world and in Whom alone the heart finds rest. As it ever was, so is it still to-day.”[330]

The remarks just quoted occur in an article by the theologian Julius Kaftan, Oberkonsistorialrat at Berlin, published in the “Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche” in 1908 under the title, “Why does the Evangelical Church know no doctrine of the Redemption in the narrower sense, and how may this want be remedied?” We all the more gladly append some further remarks by a theologian, who, as a rule, is by no means favourably disposed to Catholicism.

According to Kaftan, Luther indeed supplied “all the elements” for the upbuilding of a doctrine of “redemption from the world”; he gave “the stimulus” to the thought; it is “not as though we had no conception of it.”

But he, and the Reformation as a whole, failed to furnish any “actual, detailed doctrine” on this subject because their attackwas directed, and had to be directed, against the ideal of piety as they found it in the Church’s monastic life; they destroyed it, so the author opines, because it was only under this distorted monkish shape that the “Christian idea of redemption from the world was then met.”[325]The Reformation omitted to replace it by a better system. It suffers from having fallen into the way of giving “too great prominence to the doctrine of Justification,” whereas the salvation “bestowed by Christ is not merely Justification and forgiveness of sins,” as the traditional Lutheran theology seems on the surface to assume even to-day, but rather the “everlasting possession” to be reached by a Christ-like life; Justification is but the road to this possession. Because people failed to keep this in view the doctrine of the real “work of salvation” has from the beginning been made far too little of.

A further reason which explains the neglect is, according to Kaftan, the following: In Catholicism it is the Church which acts as the guide to piety and supplies all the spiritual aids required; she acts as intermediary between God and the faithful. But “the Evangelical teaching rejected the Church (in this connection) as a supernatural agency for the dispensation of the means of salvation. In her place it set the action of the Spirit working by means of the Word of God.” Since this same teaching stops short at the Incarnation and Satisfaction of Christ, it has “no room for any doctrine of redemption (from the world) as a work of God.”[326]Pietism, with all its irregularities, was merely an outcome of this deficiency; but even the Pietists never succeeded in formulating such a doctrine of redemption.

It is to the credit of the author that he feels this want deeply and points out the way in which theology can remedy it.[327]He would fain see introduced a system of plain directions, though framed on lines different from those of the “ostensibly final doctrinal teaching” of the Formula of Concord,[328]i.e. instructions to the devout Christian how to manifest in his life in the world the death and resurrection of Christ which St. Paul experienced in himself. Much too much emphasis had been laid in Protestantism on Luther’s friendliness to the world and the joy of living, which he was the first to teach Christians in opposition to the doctrine of the Middle Ages; yet the other idea, of redemption from the world, must nevertheless retain a lasting significance in Christianity. Although, before Luther’s day, the Church had erroneously striven to attain to the latter solely in the monastic life, yet there is no doubt “that the most delicate blossoms of pre-Reformation piety sprang from this soil, and that the best forces in the Church owed their origin to this source.” Is it merely fortuitous, continues the author, “that the ‘Imitationof Christ,’ by Thomas à Kempis, should be so widely read throughout Christendom, even by Evangelicals? Are there not many Evangelical Christians who could witness that this book has been a great help to them in a crisis of their inner life? But whoever knows it knows what the idea of redemption from the world there signifies.” All this leads our author to the conclusion: “The history of Christianity and of the Church undoubtedly proves that here [in the case of the defect in the Lutheran theology he is instancing] it is really a question of a motive power and central thought of our religion.”[329]He points out to the world of our day, “that growing civilisation culminates in disgust with the world and with civilisation.” “Then,” he continues, “the soul again cries for God, for the God Who is above all the world and in Whom alone the heart finds rest. As it ever was, so is it still to-day.”[330]

It is a satisfaction to hear this call which must rejoice the heart of every believer. The same, however, had been heard throughout the ancient Church and had met with a happy response. Not in the “Imitation” only, but in a hundred other writings of Catholics, mystic and ascetic, could our author have found the ideals of Christian perfection and of the rest in God which comes from inward severance from the world, all expressed with the utmost clearness and the warmest feeling. Nor was Christian perfection imprisoned within the walls of the monasteries; it also flourished in the breezy atmosphere of the world. The Church taught the universality of this ideal of perfect love of God, of the imitation of Christ and of detachment from the world, and she recommended it indiscriminately to all classes, inviting people to practise it under all conditions of life and expending liberally in all directions her supernatural powers in order to attain her aim. Among the best of those whose writings inaugurated a school of piety may be classed St. Bernard and Gerson, in whom Luther had found light and edification when still a zealous monk. With him, however, the case was very different. Of the works he bequeathed to posterity the Protestant theologian referred to above, says regretfully: They contain neither a “doctrine” nor a definite “scheme of instruction” on “that side of life which faces God.” “No clear, conclusive thoughts on this all-important matter are to be found.”

On the other hand it must be added that there is no want of “clear, conclusive thoughts” to a quite opposite effect;not merely on enjoyment of the world, but on a kind of sovereignty over it which is scarcely consistent with the effort after self-betterment.

Self-denial as the most effective means of self-education in the good, and self-conquest in outward and inward things, receive comparatively small attention from Luther; rather he is set on delivering people from the “anxiety-breeding,” traditional prejudice in favour of spiritual renunciation, obedience to the Church and retrenchment in view of the evil. This deliverance, thanks to its alluring and attractive character, was welcomed, in spite of Luther’s repeated warnings against any excess of the spirit of the world. His abandonment of the path of perfection so strongly recommended by Christ and his depreciation of “peculiar” works and “singular” practices were more readily understood and also more engaging than his words in favour of real works of faith. He set up his own inward experiences of the difficulty and, as he thought, utter futility of the conflict with self, together with his hostility to all spiritual efforts exceeding the common bounds, as the standard for others, and, in fact, even for the Church; in the Catholic past, on the other hand, the faithful had been taught to recognise the standard of the Church, their teacher and guide, as the rule by which to judge of their own experiences.

Here to prove what we have said, would necessitate the repetition of what has already been given elsewhere.

Luther’s writings, particularly his letters, also contain certain instructions, which, fortunately, have not become the common property of Protestants, but which everybody must feel to be absolutely opposed to anything like self-betterment. We need only call to mind his teaching, that temptations to despondency and despair are best withstood by committing some sin in defiance of the devil, or by diverting the mind to sensual and carnal distractions.[331]The words: “What matters it if we commit a fresh sin?”[332]since through faith we have forgiveness, and the other similar utterance, “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe more boldly still,” are characteristic of him, though he would have been unwilling to see them pressed or taken too literally. By these and other statements he did, however, seriously endanger the ethical character of sin; in reality he diminished the abhorrence for sin, though no doubt he did not fully perceive the consequences of his act.[333]

To the man who had become sensible of the ensnaring influence of the world and of its evil effects upon himself, or who on account of his mental build felt himself endangered by it, Catholic moralists advised retirement, recollection, self-examination and solitude. Luther was certainly not furthering the cause of perfection when he repeatedly insisted, with an emphasis that is barely credible, that solitude must be avoided as the deadly foe of the true life of the soul, and that what should be sought was rather company and distraction. Solitude was a temptation to sin. “I too find,” so he says, “that I never fall into sin more frequently than when I am alone.... Quietude calls forth the worst of thoughts. Whatever our trouble be, it then becomes much more dangerous,” etc.[334]Of course, in the case of persons of gloomy disposition Luther was quite right in recommending company, but it was just in doing so that he exceeded the bounds in his praise of sensual distractions;[335]of his own example, too, he makes far too much. On the other hand, all the great men in the Church had sought to find the guiding light of self-knowledge in solitude; this they regarded as a school for the subjugation of unruly emotions.

Not only were self-control and self-restraint something strange to Luther,[336]but he often went so far as to adduce curious theoretical reasonings of his own to prove that they could have no place in his public life and controversies, and why he and his helpers were compelled to give the reins to anger, hatred and abuse. Thus the work of self-improvement was renounced in yet another essential point.

Then again with regard to prayer. His exhortations thereto are numerous enough and he himself prayed frequently. But it is not necessary to be an ascetic to see that several things are wanting in his admonitions to prayer. The first is the salt of contrition and compunction. He was less alive to the wholesome underlying feeling of melancholy that characterises the soul which prays to God in the consciousness of having abused its free-will, than he was to the suggestions of self-confidence and assurance of salvation. The second thing wanting is the humility which should permeate prayer even when exalted to the highest limits of trusting confidence. If man, as Luther taught, is incapable of any work, then of course there can be no sense of shame at not having done more to please God and to merit greater grace from Him. Moreover, Luther indirectly encouraged people to pray in the bold consciousness of being justified and to look for the keeping of the law as a natural consequence of such “faith.” Lastly, and this sums up everything, we miss the spirit of love in his often so strongly worded and eloquent exhortations to prayer; the spirit which should have led him to resignation to God’s designs, and to commit his life’s work to the Will of God with a calm indifference as to its eventual success.[337]Hardly ever do we find any trace of that zeal for souls which embraces the whole of God’s broad kingdom even to the heathen, in short, the whole of the Church’s sphere.[338]On the other hand, however, he expressly exhorts his followers to increase the ardour of their prayers, after his own example, by interspersing them with curses on all whose views were different.[339]

In place of the pleasing variety of the old exercises of prayer—from the Office recited by the clergy with its daily commemoration of the Saints down to the multifarious devotions of the people, to say nothing of the great Sacrifice of the Altar, the very heart’s pulse of the Church—he recommends as a rule only the Our Father, the Creed and the Psalms—prayers indeed rich beyond all others and which will ever hold the first place among Christian devotions. But had they not been brought closer to the heartformerly in the inner and outer life of prayer dealt with in the writings of the Catholic masters of the spiritual life, and exemplified in the churches and monasteries, and even in private houses and the very streets? But behind all this rich display Luther saw lurking the demon of “singular works.” The monk absorbed in contemplation was, in Luther’s eyes, an unhappy wretch sitting “in filth” up to his neck. Thus he restricts himself to recommending the old short formulas of prayer. In accordance with his doctrine that faith alone avails, he desires that sin, and the intention of sinning, should be withstood by the use of the Our Father: “That you diligently learn to say the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments.”[340]“Grant, O God (thus must you pray), that Thy Name be hallowed by me, Thy Kingdom come to me, and Thy Will be done in me”; in this wise they would come to scorn “devil, death and hell.”[341]He indeed kept in touch with the people by means of the olden prayers, but, even into them, he knew how to introduce his own new views; the Kingdom of God, which to him is forgiveness of sins,[342]“must come to us by faith,” and the chief article of the whole Creed with which to defy “death, devil and hell” was the “remissio peccatorum.” These remarks must not, however, be understood as detracting from the value of his fine, practical, and often sympathetic expositions of the Our Father, whether in his special work on it in 1518 or in the Larger Catechism.[343]

Of the numerous “man-made laws” which he banished at one stroke by denying the Church’s authority there is no need to speak here. Without a doubt the overturning of all these barriers erected against human lusts and wilfulness was scarcely conducive to the progress of the individual.

Nor does the absence of any higher standard of life in his own case[344]serve to recommend his system of ethics. Seeing that, as has been already pointed out,[345]he himself is disposed to admit his failings, the apparent confidence with which,in order to exalt his reform of ethics, he appeals to the biblical verity, that the truth of a doctrine is proved by its moral fruits, is all the more surprising.

Of this confidence we have a remarkable example in a sermon devoted to the explanation of the 1st Epistle of St. John. At the same time the exceptional boldness of his language and the resolute testimony he bears in his own favour constitute striking proof of how the very firmness of his attitude impressed his followers and exercised over many a seductive spell. The weakness of the Reformer’s ethics seems all at once to vanish before his mighty eloquence.

The discourse in question, where at the same time he vindicates his own conduct, belongs to 1532. About that time he preached frequently at Wittenberg on St. John’s sublime words concerning the love of God and our neighbour (1 Jo. iv. 16-21). His object was to cleanse and better the morals of Wittenberg, the low standard of which he deplores, that the results of justification by faith might shine forth more brightly. At that very time he was treating with the Elector and the Saxon Estates in view of a new visitation of all the parishes to be held the next year, which might promote the good of morality. The sermons were duly reported by his pupil Cruciger, whose notes were published at Wittenberg in 1533 under the general title of “A Sermon on Love.”[346]Dealing therein with ethical practice he starts by proclaiming that, according to the “pious Apostle” whose doctrines he was expounding, everything depends on Christians proving by their fruits whether they really “walk in love.” Of many, however, who not only declared themselves well acquainted with the principles of faith and ethics but even professed to be qualified to teach them, it was true that, “if we applied and manifested in our lives their ethics after their example, then we should be but poorly off.”[347]Such men must, nevertheless, be tested by their works. Nor does he exempt himself from this duty of putting ethics to a practical test.Nowhere else does he insist more boldly than in these sermons on proof by actual deeds, even in his own case. According to the words of John, so he says, a life of love would give them “confidence in the Day of Judgment” (iv. 17). Confidence, nay, a spirit of holy defiance, even in the presence of death and judgment, must fill the hearts of all who acted aright, owing to the very testimony of their fellow-men to the blamelessness of their lives. “We must be able to boast [with Christ, ‘the reconciliation for our sins’] not before God alone but before God and all Christendom, and against the whole world, that no onecan truthfully condemn or even accuse us.” “We must be able to assure ourselves that we have lived in such a way that no one can take scandal at us”; we must have this testimony, “that we have walked on earth in simplicity and godly piety, and that no one can charge us with having been given to ‘trickery.’” In this wise had Paul countered false doctrines by boasting, just as Moses and Samuel had already done under the Old Covenant.[348]Coming to his own person the speaker thinks he can honestly say the same of himself, though, like the rest, he too must confess to being still in need of the article of the forgiveness of sins. There were false teachers who could not appeal so confidently to the morality of their lives, “proud, puffed-up spirits who lay claim to a great and wonderful holiness, who want to reform the whole world and to do something singular in order that all may say that they alone are true Christians. This sort of thing lasts indeed for a while, during which they parade and strut, but, when the hour of death comes, that is the end of all such idle nonsense.”[349]He himself, with the faithful teachers and good Christians, is in a very different case: “If I must boast of how I have acted in my position towards everyone then I will say: I witness before you and all the world, and know that God too witnesses on my behalf together with all His angels, that I have not falsified God’s Word, His Baptism or the Sacrament but have preached and acted faithfully as much as was in me, and suffered all ill solely for God’s and His Word’s sake. Thus must all the Saints boast.”[350]He lays the greatest stress on the unanimous testimony which the preacher must receive from his fellow-men and from posterity. He must be able to say, “you shall be my witnesses,” he “must be able to call upon all men to bear him witness”; they must bear us witness on the Last Day that we have lived aright and shown by our deeds that we were Christians. If this is the case, if they can point to their practice of good works, then the preaching of good works can be insisted on with all the emphasis required.[351]It is natural, however, that towards the end Luther lays greater stress on his teaching than on his works.On his preaching of the value of good works he solemnly assures us: “We can testify before the whole world that we have preached much more grandly and forcefully on good works than even those who calumniate us.”[352]

The discourse in question, where at the same time he vindicates his own conduct, belongs to 1532. About that time he preached frequently at Wittenberg on St. John’s sublime words concerning the love of God and our neighbour (1 Jo. iv. 16-21). His object was to cleanse and better the morals of Wittenberg, the low standard of which he deplores, that the results of justification by faith might shine forth more brightly. At that very time he was treating with the Elector and the Saxon Estates in view of a new visitation of all the parishes to be held the next year, which might promote the good of morality. The sermons were duly reported by his pupil Cruciger, whose notes were published at Wittenberg in 1533 under the general title of “A Sermon on Love.”[346]

Dealing therein with ethical practice he starts by proclaiming that, according to the “pious Apostle” whose doctrines he was expounding, everything depends on Christians proving by their fruits whether they really “walk in love.” Of many, however, who not only declared themselves well acquainted with the principles of faith and ethics but even professed to be qualified to teach them, it was true that, “if we applied and manifested in our lives their ethics after their example, then we should be but poorly off.”[347]Such men must, nevertheless, be tested by their works. Nor does he exempt himself from this duty of putting ethics to a practical test.

Nowhere else does he insist more boldly than in these sermons on proof by actual deeds, even in his own case. According to the words of John, so he says, a life of love would give them “confidence in the Day of Judgment” (iv. 17). Confidence, nay, a spirit of holy defiance, even in the presence of death and judgment, must fill the hearts of all who acted aright, owing to the very testimony of their fellow-men to the blamelessness of their lives. “We must be able to boast [with Christ, ‘the reconciliation for our sins’] not before God alone but before God and all Christendom, and against the whole world, that no onecan truthfully condemn or even accuse us.” “We must be able to assure ourselves that we have lived in such a way that no one can take scandal at us”; we must have this testimony, “that we have walked on earth in simplicity and godly piety, and that no one can charge us with having been given to ‘trickery.’” In this wise had Paul countered false doctrines by boasting, just as Moses and Samuel had already done under the Old Covenant.[348]

Coming to his own person the speaker thinks he can honestly say the same of himself, though, like the rest, he too must confess to being still in need of the article of the forgiveness of sins. There were false teachers who could not appeal so confidently to the morality of their lives, “proud, puffed-up spirits who lay claim to a great and wonderful holiness, who want to reform the whole world and to do something singular in order that all may say that they alone are true Christians. This sort of thing lasts indeed for a while, during which they parade and strut, but, when the hour of death comes, that is the end of all such idle nonsense.”[349]He himself, with the faithful teachers and good Christians, is in a very different case: “If I must boast of how I have acted in my position towards everyone then I will say: I witness before you and all the world, and know that God too witnesses on my behalf together with all His angels, that I have not falsified God’s Word, His Baptism or the Sacrament but have preached and acted faithfully as much as was in me, and suffered all ill solely for God’s and His Word’s sake. Thus must all the Saints boast.”[350]

He lays the greatest stress on the unanimous testimony which the preacher must receive from his fellow-men and from posterity. He must be able to say, “you shall be my witnesses,” he “must be able to call upon all men to bear him witness”; they must bear us witness on the Last Day that we have lived aright and shown by our deeds that we were Christians. If this is the case, if they can point to their practice of good works, then the preaching of good works can be insisted on with all the emphasis required.[351]It is natural, however, that towards the end Luther lays greater stress on his teaching than on his works.

On his preaching of the value of good works he solemnly assures us: “We can testify before the whole world that we have preached much more grandly and forcefully on good works than even those who calumniate us.”[352]

In speaking of Luther, his staunch friends are wont to boast of his lifelong struggle against the fetters of the Papacy and of the overwhelming power of his assault on the olden Church; this, so they imply, redounded to his glory and showed his moral superiority.

In what follows we shall therefore consider some of the main ethical features of this struggle of Luther’s and of the attitude he adopted in his conflict with Popery. His very defence of himself and of the moral effects of his preaching, which we have just heard him pronounce subsequent to the Diet of Augsburg, invites us to consider in the light of ethics his public line of action, as traced in his writings of that period. These years represent a turning-point in his life, and here, if anywhere, we should be able to detect his higher moral standard and the power of his new principles to effect a change first of all in himself. In the sermon of 1532 (above, p. 96) he had said: The new Gospel which he had “preached rightly and faithfully” made those who accepted it “to walk in simplicity and godly piety” according to the law of love, and to stand forth “blameless before all the world.” Could he truthfully, he, the champion of this Gospel, really lay any claim to these qualities as here he seems to do, at least indirectly?

His controversial tracts dating from that time display anything but “simplicity and godly piety.” His hate was without bounds, and his fury blazed forth in thunderbolts which slew all who dared to attempt to bridge the chasm between him and the Catholic Church. Reproaching voices, about him and within him, seemed to him to come from so many devils. The Coburg, where he stayed, was assuredly “full of devils,” so he wrote.[353]There, in spite of his previous attempts to jest and be cheerful,[354]and notwithstanding the violent and distracting labours in which he was engaged, the devil had actually established an “embassy,” troubling him with many anxieties and temptations.[355]

The devil he withstood by paroxysms of that hate and rage which he had always in store for his enemies. “The Castle may be crammed with devils, yet Christ reigneth there inthe midst of His foes!”[356]He includes in the same category the Papists, and the Turks who then were threatening Europe: Both are “monsters,” both have been “let loose by the fury of the devil,” both represent a common “woe doomed to overwhelm the world in these last days of Christendom.”[357]These “stout jackasses” (of the Diet of Augsburg), so he cried from the ramparts of his stronghold, “want to meddle in the business of the Church. Let them try!”[358]“The very frenzy and madness of our foes of itself alone proves that we are in the right.”[359]“Their blasphemy, their murders, their contempt of the Gospel, and other enormities against it, increase day by day and must bring the Turk into the field against us.”[360]“I am a preacher of Christ,” so he assures us, “and Christ is the truth.”—But is hatred a mark of a disciple of Christ, or of a higher mission for the reformation of doctrine and worship?

Elsewhere Luther himself describes hate as a “true image of the devil; in fact, it is neither human nor diabolical but the devil himself whose whole being is nothing but an everlasting burning,” etc. “The devil is always acting contrary to love.” “Such is his way; God works nothing but benefits and deeds of charity, while he on the contrary performs nothing but works of hate.”[361]On other occasions in his sermons he speaks in familiar and at the same time inspiring words of the beauty of Christian love. “Love is a great and rich treasure, worth many hundred thousand gulden, or a great kingdom. Who is there who would not esteem it highly and pursue it to the limit of his power, nay, pour out sweat and blood for it if he only hoped or knew how to obtain it!... What is sun, moon, heavens or all creation, all the angels, all the saints compared with it? Love is nothing but the one, unspeakable, eternal good and the highest treasure, which is God Himself.”[362]

But his “Vermanũg an die geistlichen versammelt auff dem Reichstag zu Augsburg” (which he wrote from the Coburg) was the fruit, not of love, but of the most glowing hate.[363]In a private letter he calls it quite rightly, not an “exhortation” (Vermanũg), but “an invective” against the clergy,[364]and, in another letter, admits the “violent spirit” in which he had written it; when composing it the abusive thoughts had rushed in on him like an “uninvited band of moss-troopers.”[365]But, that he drove them back as he declares he did, is not discernible from the work in question.

In the booklet under discussion he several times uses what would seem to be words of peace, and, in one passage, even sketches a scheme for reunion; but, as a Protestant critic of the latter says, not altogether incorrectly, the “idea was of its very nature impossible of execution.”[366]Indeed, we may say that Luther himself could see well enough that the idea was a mere deception; the best motto for the writing would be: Enmity and hatred until death!The Catholic members of the Diet are there represented as “obstinate and stiff-necked,” and as “bloodhounds raging wantonly”; they had hitherto, but all to no purpose, “tried fraud and trickery, force and anger, murder and penalties.” To the bishops he cries: “May the devil who drives them dog their footsteps, and all our misfortunes fall on their head!”He puts them on a level with “procurers and whoremongers,” and trounces them as “the biggest robbers of benefices, bawds and procurers to be found in all the world.”[367]—There had been many cases of infringement of the law of celibacy among both lower and higher clergy previous to Luther’s advent, while the Wittenberg spirit of freedom set free in the German lands helped considerably to increase the evil amongst the ranks of the Catholic clergy; but to what unheard-of exaggerations, all steeped in hate, did not Luther have recourse the better to inflame the people and to defend the illicit marriages of those of the clergy who now were the preachers of the new religion? He was about “to sweep out of the house the harlots and abducted spouses” of the bishops, and not merely to show up the bishops as real “lechers and brothel-keepers” (a favourite expression of his), but to drag them still deeper in the mire. It was his unclean fancy, which delighted to collect the worst to be found in corrupt localities abroad, that led him to say: “And, moreover, we shall do clean away with your Roman Sodom, your Italian weddings, your Venetian and Turkish brides, and your Florentine bridegrooms!”[368]The pious founders of the bishoprics and monasteries, he cries, “never intended to found bawdy-houses or Roman robber-churches,” nor yet to endow with their money “strumpets and rascals, or Roman thieves and robbers.” The bishops, however, are set on “hiding, concealing and burying in silence the whole pot-broth of their abominations and corrupt, unepiscopal abuses, shame, vice and noxious perversion of Christendom, and on seeing them lauded and praised,” whereas it is high time that they “spat upon their very selves”; their auxiliary bishops “smear the unschooled donkeys with chrism” (ordain priests) and these in turn seek “to rise to power”; yet revolt against them and against all authority is brewing in the distance; if the bloody deeds of Münzer’s time were repeated, then, he, Luther, would not be to blame; “men’s minds are prepared and greatly embittered and, that, not without due cause”; if you “go to bits” then “your blood be upon your own head!” Meanwhile it is too bad that the bishops “should go about in mitres and great pomp,” as though we were “old fools”; but still worse is it that they should make of all this pomp “articles of faith and a matter of conscience, so that people must commit sin if they refuse to worship such child’s play; surely this is the devil’s own work.” Of such hateful misrepresentations, put forward quite seriously, a dozen other instances might be cited from this writing. “But that wemustlook upon such child’s play as articles of faith, and befool ourselves with bishops’ mitres, from that we cannot get away, no matter how much we may storm or jeer.”[369]

In the booklet under discussion he several times uses what would seem to be words of peace, and, in one passage, even sketches a scheme for reunion; but, as a Protestant critic of the latter says, not altogether incorrectly, the “idea was of its very nature impossible of execution.”[366]Indeed, we may say that Luther himself could see well enough that the idea was a mere deception; the best motto for the writing would be: Enmity and hatred until death!

The Catholic members of the Diet are there represented as “obstinate and stiff-necked,” and as “bloodhounds raging wantonly”; they had hitherto, but all to no purpose, “tried fraud and trickery, force and anger, murder and penalties.” To the bishops he cries: “May the devil who drives them dog their footsteps, and all our misfortunes fall on their head!”He puts them on a level with “procurers and whoremongers,” and trounces them as “the biggest robbers of benefices, bawds and procurers to be found in all the world.”[367]—There had been many cases of infringement of the law of celibacy among both lower and higher clergy previous to Luther’s advent, while the Wittenberg spirit of freedom set free in the German lands helped considerably to increase the evil amongst the ranks of the Catholic clergy; but to what unheard-of exaggerations, all steeped in hate, did not Luther have recourse the better to inflame the people and to defend the illicit marriages of those of the clergy who now were the preachers of the new religion? He was about “to sweep out of the house the harlots and abducted spouses” of the bishops, and not merely to show up the bishops as real “lechers and brothel-keepers” (a favourite expression of his), but to drag them still deeper in the mire. It was his unclean fancy, which delighted to collect the worst to be found in corrupt localities abroad, that led him to say: “And, moreover, we shall do clean away with your Roman Sodom, your Italian weddings, your Venetian and Turkish brides, and your Florentine bridegrooms!”[368]

The pious founders of the bishoprics and monasteries, he cries, “never intended to found bawdy-houses or Roman robber-churches,” nor yet to endow with their money “strumpets and rascals, or Roman thieves and robbers.” The bishops, however, are set on “hiding, concealing and burying in silence the whole pot-broth of their abominations and corrupt, unepiscopal abuses, shame, vice and noxious perversion of Christendom, and on seeing them lauded and praised,” whereas it is high time that they “spat upon their very selves”; their auxiliary bishops “smear the unschooled donkeys with chrism” (ordain priests) and these in turn seek “to rise to power”; yet revolt against them and against all authority is brewing in the distance; if the bloody deeds of Münzer’s time were repeated, then, he, Luther, would not be to blame; “men’s minds are prepared and greatly embittered and, that, not without due cause”; if you “go to bits” then “your blood be upon your own head!” Meanwhile it is too bad that the bishops “should go about in mitres and great pomp,” as though we were “old fools”; but still worse is it that they should make of all this pomp “articles of faith and a matter of conscience, so that people must commit sin if they refuse to worship such child’s play; surely this is the devil’s own work.” Of such hateful misrepresentations, put forward quite seriously, a dozen other instances might be cited from this writing. “But that wemustlook upon such child’s play as articles of faith, and befool ourselves with bishops’ mitres, from that we cannot get away, no matter how much we may storm or jeer.”[369]

The writing culminates in the following outburst: “In short we and you alike know that you are living withoutGod’s Word, but that, on our side, we have God’s Word.”

“If I live I shall be your bane; if I die I shall be your death! For God Himself has driven me to attack you! I must, as Hosea says, be to you as a bear and a lion in the way of Assur. You shall have no peace from me until you amend or rush to your own destruction.”[370]

At a later date, of the saying “If I live,” etc., Luther made the Latin couplet: “Pestis eram vivus moriens ero mors tua papa.” In life, O Pope, I was thy plague, in dying I shall be thy death. He first produced this verse at Spalatin’s home at Altenburg on his return journey from the Coburg; afterwards he frequently repeated it, for instance, at Schmalkalden in 1537, when he declared, that he would bequeath his hatred of the Papacy as an heirloom to his disciples.[371]

As early as 1522 he had also made use of the Bible passage concerning the lion and the bear in his “Wyder den falsch genantten geystlichen Standt” with the like assurance of the Divine character of his undertaking, and in a form which shows how obsessed he was by the spirit of hate: He was sure of his doctrine and by it would judge even the angels; without it no one could be saved, for it was God’s and not his, for which reason his sentence too was God’s and not his: “Let this be my conclusion. If I live you shall have no peace from me, if you kill me, you shall have ten times less peace; and I shall be to you as Oseas says, xiii. 8, a bear in the path and a lion in the road. However you may treat me you shall not have your will, until your brazen front and iron neck are broken either unwillingly or by grace. Unless you amend, as I would gladly wish, then we may persist, you in your anger and hostility and I in paying no heed.”[372]

As early as 1522 he had also made use of the Bible passage concerning the lion and the bear in his “Wyder den falsch genantten geystlichen Standt” with the like assurance of the Divine character of his undertaking, and in a form which shows how obsessed he was by the spirit of hate: He was sure of his doctrine and by it would judge even the angels; without it no one could be saved, for it was God’s and not his, for which reason his sentence too was God’s and not his: “Let this be my conclusion. If I live you shall have no peace from me, if you kill me, you shall have ten times less peace; and I shall be to you as Oseas says, xiii. 8, a bear in the path and a lion in the road. However you may treat me you shall not have your will, until your brazen front and iron neck are broken either unwillingly or by grace. Unless you amend, as I would gladly wish, then we may persist, you in your anger and hostility and I in paying no heed.”[372]

On another occasion he tells us how he would gladly have left Wittenberg with Melanchthon and the others who were going by way of Nuremberg to the Diet of Augsburg, but a friend had said to him: “Hold your tongue! Your tongue is an evil one!”[373]

After the publication of the “Vermanũg an die Geistlichen,” or possibly even before, Melanchthon seems to have written to him, re-echoing the observations of startled and anxious friends, and saying that the writing had been “variously” appreciated, in itself a significant remark; Luther himself at that time certainly dreaded the censure of his adherents. Still, he insists as defiantly as ever on his “invective”: “Let not your heart be troubled,” he admonishes Melanchthon, “My God is a God of fools, Who is wont to laugh at the wise. Whence I trouble myself about them not the least bit.”[374]On the contrary, he even came near regarding his writing as a special work of God.

As we have already pointed out, the defiant and violent steps he took, only too often became in his eyes special works of God. His notorious, boundless sense of his own greatness, to which this gave rise, is the first of the phenomena which accompanied his hate; these it will now be our duty briefly to examine in order better to appreciate the real strength of his ethical principles in his own case.

As a matter of fact Luther’s sense of his superiority was so great that the opponents he attacked had to listen to language such as no mortal had ever before dreamed of making use of against the Church.

The Church is being reformed “in my age” in “a Divine way, not after human ways.” “Were we to fall, then Christ would fall with us.”[375]

Whenever he meets with contradiction, whenever he hears even the hint of a reproach or accusation, he at once ranges himself—as he does, for instance, in the “Vermanũg”—on the side of the persecuted “prophets and apostles,” nay, he even likens himself to Christ.[376]He stood alone, without miracles, and devoid of holiness, as he himself candidly informed Henry VIII. of England; nevertheless he pits himself against the heads of both Church and Empire assembled at the Diet.

All he could appeal to was his degree of Doctor of Theology: “Had I not been a Doctor, the devil would havegiven me much trouble, for it is no small matter to attack the whole Papacy and to charge it” (with error).[377]In the last instance, however, his self-confidence recalls him to the proud consciousness of his entire certainty. “Thus our cause stands firm, because we know how we believe and how we live.”[378]

With these words from his “Vermanũg” he defies the whole of the present and of the past, the Pope and all his Councils.

He knows—and that suffices—that what he has and proclaims is God’s Word; “and if you have God’s Word you may say: Now that I have the Word what need have I to ask what the Councils say?”[379]“Among all the Councils I have never found one where the Holy Spirit rules.... There will never be no Council [sic], according to the Holy Spirit, where the people have to agree. God allows this because He Himself wills to be the Judge and suffers not men to judge. Hence He commands every man to know what he believes.”[380]Luther only, and those who follow him, know what they believe; he takes the place of all the councils, Doctors of the Church, Popes and bishops, in short, of all the ecclesiastical sources of theology.

“The end of the world may now come,” he said, in 1540, “for all that pertains to the knowledge of God has now been supplied” (by me).[381]

With this contempt for the olden Church he combines a most imperious exclusiveness in his treatment even of those who like him were opposed to the Pope, whether they were individuals or formed schools of thought. They must follow his lead, otherwise there awaits them the sentence he launched at the Zwinglians from the Coburg: “These Sacramentarians are not merely liars but the very embodiment of lying, deceit and hypocrisy; this both Carlstadt and Zwingli prove by word and deed.” Their books, he says, contain pestilential stuff; they refused to retract even when confuted by him, but simply because they stood in fear of their own following; he would continue to put them to shame by those words, which so angered them: “You have a spirit different from ours.” He could not look upon them as brothers; this was duly expressed in the article in which he went so far as to promise them that love which was due even toenemies. On his own authority he curtly dubs them “heretics,” and is resolved in this way to tread unharmed with Christ through Satan’s kingdom and all his lying artifices.[382]Luther’s aggravating exclusiveness went hand-in-hand with his overweening self-confidence.In consequence of this treatment the Swiss, through the agency of Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor, complained to Bucer, “Beware of not believing Luther readily or of not yielding to him! He is a scorpion; no matter how carefully he is handled he will sting, even though to begin with he seems to caress your hand.”[383]To this Bucer, who had also ventured to differ from Luther, wrote in his reply: “He has flung another scathing book at us.... He speaks, and means to speak, much more harshly than heretofore.” “He will not now endure even the smallest contradiction, and I am sure that, were I to go any further, I should cause such a tragedy that all the churches would once more be convulsed.”[384]Another Protestant voice we hear exclaiming with a fine irony: “Luther rages, thunders and lightens as though he were a Jupiter and had all the bolts of heaven at his command to launch against us.... Has he then become an emperor of the Christian army on the model of the Pope, so as to be able to issue every pronouncement that his brain suggests?”[385]“He confuses the two Natures in Christ and brings forward foolish, nay godless, statements. If we may not condemn this, then what, pray, may be condemned?”[386]

With this contempt for the olden Church he combines a most imperious exclusiveness in his treatment even of those who like him were opposed to the Pope, whether they were individuals or formed schools of thought. They must follow his lead, otherwise there awaits them the sentence he launched at the Zwinglians from the Coburg: “These Sacramentarians are not merely liars but the very embodiment of lying, deceit and hypocrisy; this both Carlstadt and Zwingli prove by word and deed.” Their books, he says, contain pestilential stuff; they refused to retract even when confuted by him, but simply because they stood in fear of their own following; he would continue to put them to shame by those words, which so angered them: “You have a spirit different from ours.” He could not look upon them as brothers; this was duly expressed in the article in which he went so far as to promise them that love which was due even toenemies. On his own authority he curtly dubs them “heretics,” and is resolved in this way to tread unharmed with Christ through Satan’s kingdom and all his lying artifices.[382]Luther’s aggravating exclusiveness went hand-in-hand with his overweening self-confidence.

In consequence of this treatment the Swiss, through the agency of Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor, complained to Bucer, “Beware of not believing Luther readily or of not yielding to him! He is a scorpion; no matter how carefully he is handled he will sting, even though to begin with he seems to caress your hand.”[383]To this Bucer, who had also ventured to differ from Luther, wrote in his reply: “He has flung another scathing book at us.... He speaks, and means to speak, much more harshly than heretofore.” “He will not now endure even the smallest contradiction, and I am sure that, were I to go any further, I should cause such a tragedy that all the churches would once more be convulsed.”[384]Another Protestant voice we hear exclaiming with a fine irony: “Luther rages, thunders and lightens as though he were a Jupiter and had all the bolts of heaven at his command to launch against us.... Has he then become an emperor of the Christian army on the model of the Pope, so as to be able to issue every pronouncement that his brain suggests?”[385]“He confuses the two Natures in Christ and brings forward foolish, nay godless, statements. If we may not condemn this, then what, pray, may be condemned?”[386]

His natural lack of charity, of which we shall have later on to add many fresh and appalling examples to those already enumerated, aggravated his hatred, his sense of his own greatness and his exclusiveness. What malicious hatred is there not apparent in his advice that Zwingli and Œcolampadius should be condemned, “even though this led to violence being offered them.”[387]It is with reluctance that one gazes on Luther’s abuse of the splendid gifts of mind and heart with which he had been endowed.

A recent Protestant biographer of Carlstadt’s laments the “frightful harshness of his (Luther’s) polemics.” “How deep the traces left by his mode of controversy were, ought not to be overlooked,” so he writes. “From that time forward this sort of thing took the place of any real discussion of differences of opinion between members of the Lutheran camp, nor did people even seem aware of how far they were thus drifting from the kindliness and dignity of Christian modes of thought.”[388]What is here said of the treatment of opponents within the camp applies even more strongly to Luther’s behaviour towards Catholics.The following episode of his habitual persecution of Albert, Archbishop and Elector of Mayence, illustrates this very well.On June 21, 1535, the Archbishop in accordance with the then law and with the sentence duly pronounced by the judge, had caused Hans von Schönitz, once his trusted steward, to be executed; the charge of which he had been proved guilty was embezzlement on a gigantic scale. The details of the case, which was dealt with rather hurriedly, have not yet been adequately cleared up, but even Protestant researchers agree that Schönitz deserved to be dealt with as a “public thief,”[389]seeing that “in the pecuniary transactions which he undertook for Albert he was not unmindful of his own advantage”;[390]“there is no doubt that he was rightly accused of all manner of peculation and cheating.”[391]Luther, however, furiously entered the lists on behalf of the executed man and against the detested Archbishop who, in spite of his private faults, remained faithful to the Church and was a hindrance to the spread of Lutheranism in Germany. Luther implicitly believed all that was told him, of Hans’s innocence and of Albert’s supposed abominable motives, by Schönitz’s brother and his friend Ludwig Rabe—who himself was implicated in the matter—and both of whom came to Wittenberg. “Both naturally related the case from their own point of view.”[392]Luther sent two letters to the Cardinal, one more violent than the other.[393]The second would seem to have been intended for publication and was sent to the press, though at present no copy of it can be discovered. In it in words of frightful violence he lays at the door of the Prince of the Church the blood of the man done to death. The Archbishop was a “thorough-paced Epicurean who does not believe that Abel lives in God and that his blood still cries more loudly than Cain, his brother’s murderer, fancies.” He, Luther, like another Elias, must call down woes “upon Achab and Isabel.” He had indeed heard of many evil deeds done by Cardinals, “but I had not taken your Cardinalitial Holiness for such an insolent, wicked dragon.... Your Electoral Highness may if he likes commit a nuisance in the Emperor’s Court of Justice, infringe the freedom of the city of Halle, usurp the sword of Justice belonging to Saxony, and, over and above this, look on the world and on all reason as rags fit only for the closet”—such is a fair sample of the language—and, moreover, treat everything in a Popish, Roman, Cardinalitialway, but, please God, our Lord God will by our prayers one day compel your Electoral Highness to sweep out all the filth yourself.In the first letter he had threatened fiercely the hated Cardinal with publishing what he knew (or possibly only feigned to know) of his faults; he would not “advise him to stir up the filth any further”; here in the second letter he charges him in a general way with robbery, petty theft and fraud in the matter of Church property, also with having cheated a woman of the town whom he used to keep; he deserved to be “hanged on a gallows three times as high as the Giebichstein,” where Schönitz had been executed. Incidentally he promises him a new work that shall reveal all his doings. The threatened work was, however, never published, Albert’s family, the Brandenburgs, having raised objections at the Electoral Court of Saxony. Albert, however, offered quite frankly to submit the Schönitz case and the grievances raised by his relatives to the judgment of George of Anhalt, one of the princes who had gone over to Lutheranism, who was perfectly at liberty to take the advice of Jonas, nay, even of Luther himself. “In this we may surely see a proof that he was not conscious of being in the least blameworthy.”[394]At any rate he seems to have been quite willing to lay his case even before his most bitter foe.[395]

A recent Protestant biographer of Carlstadt’s laments the “frightful harshness of his (Luther’s) polemics.” “How deep the traces left by his mode of controversy were, ought not to be overlooked,” so he writes. “From that time forward this sort of thing took the place of any real discussion of differences of opinion between members of the Lutheran camp, nor did people even seem aware of how far they were thus drifting from the kindliness and dignity of Christian modes of thought.”[388]What is here said of the treatment of opponents within the camp applies even more strongly to Luther’s behaviour towards Catholics.

The following episode of his habitual persecution of Albert, Archbishop and Elector of Mayence, illustrates this very well.

On June 21, 1535, the Archbishop in accordance with the then law and with the sentence duly pronounced by the judge, had caused Hans von Schönitz, once his trusted steward, to be executed; the charge of which he had been proved guilty was embezzlement on a gigantic scale. The details of the case, which was dealt with rather hurriedly, have not yet been adequately cleared up, but even Protestant researchers agree that Schönitz deserved to be dealt with as a “public thief,”[389]seeing that “in the pecuniary transactions which he undertook for Albert he was not unmindful of his own advantage”;[390]“there is no doubt that he was rightly accused of all manner of peculation and cheating.”[391]Luther, however, furiously entered the lists on behalf of the executed man and against the detested Archbishop who, in spite of his private faults, remained faithful to the Church and was a hindrance to the spread of Lutheranism in Germany. Luther implicitly believed all that was told him, of Hans’s innocence and of Albert’s supposed abominable motives, by Schönitz’s brother and his friend Ludwig Rabe—who himself was implicated in the matter—and both of whom came to Wittenberg. “Both naturally related the case from their own point of view.”[392]Luther sent two letters to the Cardinal, one more violent than the other.[393]The second would seem to have been intended for publication and was sent to the press, though at present no copy of it can be discovered. In it in words of frightful violence he lays at the door of the Prince of the Church the blood of the man done to death. The Archbishop was a “thorough-paced Epicurean who does not believe that Abel lives in God and that his blood still cries more loudly than Cain, his brother’s murderer, fancies.” He, Luther, like another Elias, must call down woes “upon Achab and Isabel.” He had indeed heard of many evil deeds done by Cardinals, “but I had not taken your Cardinalitial Holiness for such an insolent, wicked dragon.... Your Electoral Highness may if he likes commit a nuisance in the Emperor’s Court of Justice, infringe the freedom of the city of Halle, usurp the sword of Justice belonging to Saxony, and, over and above this, look on the world and on all reason as rags fit only for the closet”—such is a fair sample of the language—and, moreover, treat everything in a Popish, Roman, Cardinalitialway, but, please God, our Lord God will by our prayers one day compel your Electoral Highness to sweep out all the filth yourself.

In the first letter he had threatened fiercely the hated Cardinal with publishing what he knew (or possibly only feigned to know) of his faults; he would not “advise him to stir up the filth any further”; here in the second letter he charges him in a general way with robbery, petty theft and fraud in the matter of Church property, also with having cheated a woman of the town whom he used to keep; he deserved to be “hanged on a gallows three times as high as the Giebichstein,” where Schönitz had been executed. Incidentally he promises him a new work that shall reveal all his doings. The threatened work was, however, never published, Albert’s family, the Brandenburgs, having raised objections at the Electoral Court of Saxony. Albert, however, offered quite frankly to submit the Schönitz case and the grievances raised by his relatives to the judgment of George of Anhalt, one of the princes who had gone over to Lutheranism, who was perfectly at liberty to take the advice of Jonas, nay, even of Luther himself. “In this we may surely see a proof that he was not conscious of being in the least blameworthy.”[394]At any rate he seems to have been quite willing to lay his case even before his most bitter foe.[395]

Such was Luther’s irritability and quickness of temper, even in private concerns, that, at times, even in his letters, he would pour forth the most incredible threats.

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