When speaking of his temptations, as a man of fifty-six, he bewailed the prevailing unbelief, at the same time including himself: “If only we could believe concerning the [Divine] promisesthat it was God Who spoke them! If only we paid heed to His Word we should esteem it highly. But when we hear it [God’s Word] from the lips of a man, we care no more for it than for the lowing of a cow.”[1455]—Shortly before this, again including all, he consoles himself as follows: Our weakness was ever disposed to doubt of God’s mercy, and even Paul felt his shortcomings. “I am comforted when I see that even Paul did not rise high enough. Away with the ambitious who pretend they have succeeded in everything! We have God’s words to strengthen us and yet even we do not believe.”[1456]“I have preached for five-and-twenty years,” so he said about that time, “and do not yet understand the text ‘The just man liveth by faith.’”[1457]Of his trusting belief in his personal salvation he admits, in 1543, that he did not feel it to be very steadfast, and that it still lagged behind that of ordinary believers. He speaks of a woman at Torgau who had told him that she looked upon herself as “lost,” and shut out from salvation, because she was unable to believe (i.e. trust). He had thereupon asked her whether she did not hold fast to the Creed, and when she assured him that she did he had said: “My good woman, go in God’s name! You believe more and better than I do.” “Yes, dear Dr. Jonas,” so he said, turning to his friend, “yes, if a man could verily believe it as it there stands, his heart would indeed jump for joy! That is certain.”[1458]So strongly did he express himself on this point on May 6, 1540, that, taking the words as they stand, he wouldseemto deny his belief in Christ’s miracles and work. “I cannot believe it and yet I teach others. I know it is true, but I am unable to believe it. I think sometimes: ‘Sure enough you teach aright, for you are in the sacred ministry and are called, you are helpful to many and glorify Christ; for we do not preach Aristotle or Cæsar, but Jesus Christ.’ But when I consider my weakness, how I eat, drink, joke and am a merry man about the town, then I begin to doubt. Oh, if only a man could believe it!”[1459]These words were spoken on Ascension-Day, after Luther had expressed his marvel at the strong faith of the Apostles in the Divinity of Him Who was ascending into heaven. “Wonderful; I cannot understand it nor can I believe it, and yet all the Apostles believed.”[1460]“I am fond of Jonas [who was seated near him] but if he were to ascendinto heaven here and now, and disappear out of our sight, what should I think?”“Oh, if only a man could believe it!”It is evident that he did not wish by such words to give himself out as an unbeliever or a sceptic in religious matters. What he was painfully aware of was the fact that that strong, clear faith in the ordinary truths of revelation and matters of faith, which he himself was wont to depict as essential, was absent in his own case. His former violent struggles of conscience seem in later years to have been replaced by this uncomfortable feeling.The depressing sense of the feebleness of his religious belief was not removed by the frequent references Luther was so fond of making in his old age to the coming of the Redeemer and Judge of the world, and to the nighness of the devil’s downfall, who is the Lord of this world.[1461]We know already the psychological reasons for the stress he lays on such expectations. Yet all the unnatural ardour he showed in voicing them could not disguise the fact that his faith lacked any real strength or fervour. Spiritual coldness could quite well co-exist with a virulent hatred of the devil and a longing desire for the end of the world.“The devil is an evil spirit ... as I do not fail to realise day after day; for a man waxes cold, and the more so the longer he lives.” Thus to Count Albert of Mansfeld in 1542.[1462]—He was “in pain and very morose,” he tells Jonas in 1541, “feeling disgusted with everything, especially with his illnesses.”.[1463]In 1544, and frequently about that time, he declares that he was quite tired of the devil and of his struggles with him; his only wish was to see the “end of his raging,” and to “die a good and wholesome death.”[1464]“God Himself may see to my soul’s lodging”; He loved souls, says Luther, and it was a good thing that his salvation was not in his own hands, otherwise he “would soon be gobbled up by Satan”; but God’s care and the “many mansions” in His gift were a sufficient consolation (1539).[1465]On one occasion, in 1542, he mentioned that, unless he had escaped from certain “thoughts and temptations,” he would have been drowned in them and would have long ago found himself in hell; for such “devilish thoughts” breed “desperate people,” and “contemners of God.”[1466]“Though, towards the end of life, such temptations are wont to cease,” he says, in 1540, yet other inward worries remain: “I am often angry with myself because I find so much in me that is unclean. But what can I do? I cannot strip off my nature. Meanwhile Christ looks upon us as righteous because we desire to be righteous, abhor our uncleanliness, and love, and confess the Word.”[1467]—Others, like Spalatin, in their old age, felt the bite ofconscience more strongly than did Luther; they had not been through the same violent struggles and mental gymnastics as Luther, nor had they learnt how to suppress the voice from within. It was to Spalatin, then sunk in melancholy, that, in 1544, Luther addressed the words already quoted: He (Spalatin) was “too timid a sinner” (“nimis tener peccator”). “Unite yourself with us great and hardened sinners, in a believing trust in Christ!”[1468]Earlier Undated StatementsMany utterances and confidences of Luther’s still exist, about the meaning of which there can be no doubt, though it is difficult correctly to place them. Some of these concern the subject now under discussion; several may well date from Luther’s later years, and thus throw light on his interior in his old age. We shall give first of all his statements concerning St. Paul in their bearing upon himself.Speaking once of a pet view of his in which he seems to have found great consolation, viz. that even Paul had not believed firmly (neque Paulum fortiter credidisse), Luther went so far as to question the apostle’s belief in the “crown of justice” which he professed to look for, as “laid up for him in heaven” (2 Tim. iv. 8). Jonas, who was present, had declared “he could not bestow any credence on this statement of Paul’s.” Luther replied: It is quite true that Paul did not believe it firmly, “for it was above him. I too am unable to believe as I preach, although they all think I believe these things firmly.” He goes on to allege the Divine Clemency, and jestingly says: Were we to fulfil the will of Godperfectlywe should be cheating God of His Godhead; and what would then become of the article of the forgiveness of sins?[1469]At any rate he would fain have believed his own doctrines more strongly and vividly.“Temptations against the faith,” says Luther, “are St. Paul’s goad and sting of the flesh [2 Cor. xii. 7], a great skewer and roasting-spit which pierces right through both spirit and flesh, both body and soul.”[1470]—And elsewhere: “At times I think: I really do not know where I stand, whether I preach aright or not. This was also St. Paul’s temptation and martyrdom, which, asI believe, he found it hard to speak of to many.” Yet, so Luther opines, Paul sufficiently hinted at it in the words “I die daily” (1 Cor. xv. 31).—The fact is, the Apostle is far from attributing to himself doubts on the faith either here or elsewhere. Luther, however, would gladly have us believe, that, with his doubts, he had been through precisely that experience to which St. Paul refers when he says, “I die daily”; he, too, has his agonies, he, too, has descended into hell.[1471]Not merely in this does he resemble Paul, but also in his inability to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel: “Paul and I have never been able to manage this.”[1472]He saw also another point of similarity between himself and the Apostle of the Gentiles. For, like him, St. Paul, too, “had been much bothered by the objection, that, one should listen to the Fathers (cp. Rom. ix. 5) and not oppose the whole world single-handed.”[1473]Not Paul alone, according to Luther, but all the other Apostles too had been assailed by doubts.He was always consoled to find new and illustrious companions in his misery. Christ, he declares, had foretold this to the Apostles; He had also spoken to them of this sort of persecution: “Your conscience will grow weak so that you will often think: ‘Who knows whether I have been right? Alas, have I not gone too far?’ Thus in the eyes of the world and to your own conscience you will seem to be in the wrong”; it had, however, been the duty of the Holy Ghost to comfort the Apostles in all such trials.[1474]And did not “even the man Christ have His momentary failing in the Garden?”[1475]Did not Christ then confess: “‘I know not how I stand with God, or whether I am doing right or not.’ This occurred even in the case of Christ.”[1476]“All who are tempted must set Christ, Who also was tempted in everything, as a model before their eyes; but it was much harder for Him than for us and for me.”[1477]Luther fails to take into account the world-wide difference between the sadness of Christ, Who could never waver in the Truth, and his own doubts and wavering in the faith.“O, my God,” he said on another occasion, “the article on faith won’t go home; hence so many sad moods arise. Often I have to take myself to task for failing to master such moods when they come, I who have so often taught in lectures, sermons and writings how such temptations are to be overcome.”[1478]His pupil Mathesius relates the following in his sermons on Luther, the preface to the printed edition of which he wrote in 1565: “Antony Musa, pastor of Rochlitz, told me that he once complained bitterly to the Doctor of being unable to believe himselfwhat he preached to others. ‘Praise and thanks be to God,’ replied the Doctor, ‘that this also happens to others. I fancied it was true only in my case.’ All his life Musa never forgot this consolation.”[1479]So full of admiration for Luther was Mathesius, and probably so well schooled by his master in the theory and practice of a faith which has ever to strive after firmness, that he saw in this statement nothing at all unfavourable to his hero. On the contrary, he includes the story in a list of “all manner of wise sayings” which had fallen from the lips of Luther. He even assures us at the beginning of these notes that, “The man was full of grace and of the Holy Ghost, hence all who went to him for advice as to a prophet of God found what they sought.”[1480]Judging by this Mathesius must have been very easily satisfied in the matter of firmness of faith. Perhaps had his faith been stronger it would have fared better with him in the melancholy which came upon him towards the end of his life.[1481]“Ah,” said Dr. Martin, so we read elsewhere in Notes made by his pupils, “I used to believe every single thing that the Pope and the monks chose to say, but now I actually cannot believe even what Christ says, Who assuredly does not lie. This is very sad and distressing. Never mind, we must and will keep it for that Day.”[1482]—“When the words of the prophet Hosea, ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ set to music by Josquinus, were sung at Dr. Martin Luther’s table, the Doctor said to Dr. Jonas: ‘As little as you believe this singing to be good, so little do I believe theology to be true.... I do indeed love Christ, but my faith ought to be much stronger and warmer.”[1483]—“Many boast of having at their fingers’ ends the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, and I, wretch that I am, find so little comfort in the passion, resurrection, and forgiveness of sins! One thing indeed I can do, viz. eat our Lord God’s bread and drink His beer; but to take that far more necessary treasure which is the free forgiveness of sins, this I cannot succeed in doing.”[1484]Not merely does he ascribe his own experiences to the first followers of Christ, viz. to Paul and the other Apostles, but again and again he seeks to make them out to be an evil common to all, an heritage of all Christians, nay, something actually involved in the idea of faith. Often he speaks of faith as of something altogether mystical and intangible of the presence of which no man can be conscious. Faith, he thinks, might well not be present at all just when a man fancies he possesses it; again, it might exist in the man who thought he lacked it; or “at any rate such is the case intimes of stress and temptation; for it often happens with faith that he who fancies he believes, believes nothing at all, while the man who thinks he believes nothing and lies in despair, really believes the most.... He who has it, has it. We must believe, but we neither must nor can know it for certain” [i.e. whether we really believe]. Thus in 1528.[1485]Needless to say this theory of his was far removed from the strong, simple and perfectly conscious faith of so many thousands even of the humblest followers of the olden religion.Some years before this, in a work intended for all, he had made a practical application to himself of this curious doctrine of the frequent impossibility of saying whether one really has the faith. Owing to his temptations he admitted that he was not qualified to be reckoned an authority on this question, nor “even a disciple, much less a master.”“Whoever boasts,” he says in his work on Psalm cxvii., “that he knows very well we must be saved without our works by the grace of God, does not know what he is saying”; “it is an art which keeps us ever schoolboys,” a scent after which we must “sniff and run.” “Let anyone who chooses take me as an example of this, which I admit myself to be. Several times, when I was not thinking of this cardinal doctrine, the devil has caught me and plagued me with texts from Scripture till heaven and earth seemed too tight to hold me. Then human works and laws would seem quite right and not an error would be noticed in the whole of Popery. In short, no one but Luther had ever erred; and all my best works, doctrines, sermons, books were condemned.... You hear now how I am confessing to you and admitting what the devil was able to do against Luther, who of all men ought surely to have been a very adept in this art. For he has preached, told, written, spoken, sung and read so much about it and yet remains a tyro in it, and is at times not even a disciple, much less a master.”[1486]What he is trying to impress on the reader is, that evenif you “can do all things,” take care that “your art does not fail you.”Thus he did not enjoy the happiness which, according to the testimony of Catholics both learned and unlearned, was shared by all the faithful so long as they paid attention to their religious duties. Guided from their youth by the hand of the Church they were acquainted with no fears and uncertainties, for, thanks to her divine commission and gift of infallibility, she could make up for the insufficiency of human knowledge. Catholics did not look for salvation in a blind and unattainable trust in an imputation of Christ’s righteousness.Their attitude indeed presents a striking contrast to Luther’s restless struggle after faith.Not only in the last cold, barren years of his life but even at an earlier period we notice in him a tendency to regard this clutching at faith as the one great matter. In some quite early statements he depicts himself as on the look-out for a believing trust, as violently striving to clasp it to his breast, and, generally, as making this the end of all religious effort.Even in 1517 in his unpublished Commentary on Hebrews we find a remarkable and oft-repeated admonition which bears on the subject in hand. He sees the troubled conscience “in fear and oppressed whichever way it turns”; hence it must learn to embrace faith in the power of Christ’s blood: “By faith conscience is cleansed and put to rest.” It is this faith in the blood of Christ which we must seek with all our powers to reach. It follows, “that the best of contemplating the sufferings of Christ is that it awakens in the soul this faith or believing trust.” “The oftener he dwells on the Passion, the more strongly will every man believe that the blood of Christ was shed for his own sins. This is ‘to eat and drink spiritually,’ i.e. to feed on Christ in faith and thus become one body with Him.”[1487]On the other hand, the teaching of antiquity concerning meditation on Christ’s Passion and likewise the hints contained in the language of the Church’s liturgy, do not stop short at such an arousing of faith. Taking for granted the Christian’s faith, what they seek to awaken is a real love; meditation on the sufferings and death of our Lord was above all to stimulate the faithful to feelings of loving gratitude, holy compassion and self-sacrifice; in wholesome compunction people were wont, by dwelling on the sufferings of the innocent Lamb, to rouse themselves to a sense of shame, to a holy desire to imitate Christ by good works of self-conquest and by zeal for souls. The ancient hymn, the “Stabat Mater,” which is at the same time so profound and wonderful a prayer, says never a word of faith, precious as this grace is, but, taking it for granted as the groundwork, it teaches us to pray: “Fac ut tecum lugeam—fac ut ardeat cor meum in amando Christum Deum—passionis fac consortem,” etc. This is surely something higher than that mere appropriation of trusting faith in which Luther sums up all the heights and depths of our union with Christ.Luther, in his exaggerated language, declares that it was something “almost Gentile” for a man when contemplating the Passion of Christ to “strive after anything else but faith”; this statement, however, he refutes in practice by himself occasionally introducing other good and moral reflexions on the Passion, though he is always chiefly concerned with its bearing on his own peculiar view of faith.He was too ready to confuse the sentiment of faith with actual faith.Religious writers before Luther’s day, when dealing with distrust and unbelief, had been careful to distinguish between the involuntary acts of man’s lower nature which do not rise above the realm of feeling, and those which have the definite consent of the will and which alone they regarded as grievous sins against faith or the virtue of hope. With Luther everything is sin; he bewails the actual distrust, and real weakness of faith springing from a fault of the will; but, according to him, the involuntary movements of our corrupt nature also deserve God’s signal anger; original sin whereby we bring this upon ourselves must daily be cloaked over by means of the faith wrought by God. But since it is God alone Who works this faith Luther might well have excused himself even had he lost the faith completely. When he is upset and begins to reproach himself as he often does on account of the weakness of his faith, he is really saying good-bye to his own teaching and again reverting to the standpoint of the olden faith, for only the assumption of man’s free-will can justify self-reproaches.“Sin” and “the devil” are made to bear the blame for the deeds of man who lacks free-will.“The sin which still persists in us,” says Luther, in his last sermon at Eisleben,[1488]“compels us not to believe.” “Because we have it daily before our eyes and at our door, it goes in at one ear and out at the other.” “This is what the rude, savage folk do who care nought for God and place no trust in Him; we, the best of Christians, also do the same.” “We are too prone to obey original sin, the taint of evil which yet sticks to our flesh, and although we would willingly believe, and are fond of hearing and reading God’s Word, still we cannot rise as high as we ought.”[1489]Before this he had said: “If a man were to ask you: Good fellow, do you believe that the Son of God ... died for your sins? and that it is really true? You would have to say—did you wish to answer right and truthfully and as you really feel—and confess with dismay, that you cannot after all believe it so strongly and indubitably.... You would have to say.... Alas, I see and feel that I do not ... believe as I ought.”[1490]Later he returns to this thought which evidently was much before his mind: “Although we cannot now believe so strongly as we should, still God has patience with us.”[1491]Yet “we ought to go on and believe more firmly and be angered with ourselves and say: Heavenly Father, is it true that I must believe that Thou didst send Thine only-begotten Son into the world?... And when I hear that there is no doubt, then I shall go on to say: Well, for this shall I thank God all the days of my life and praise and extol Him.”[1492]In reality, according to him, we should “run and jump for joy” because by faith “we hear the Lord Christ speaking.” “The life of the Christian ought, by rights, to be all joy and delight, but there are few who really feel this joy.” The martyrs, with their glad, nay, even jubilant confession of faith amidst their torments, are to him an example of a sound, hardy, unshaken faith, for in them the Word was strong and the teaching of the Gospel all-powerful.[1493]But, as he had remarked in another of hisEisleben sermons, “We, owing to the weakness of our faith, feel doubts and fears, as by our very nature we cannot help doing”; yet we must “have wisdom enough again and again to run to Christ and cry aloud and awaken Him with our shouts and prayers.”[1494]Luther’s farewell address where these words occur furnishes at the same time an example of how, throughout his life, when assailed by doubts and fears, or when the Evangel was in danger, as it then was owing to the Emperor’s warlike preparations, he carried out his injunction of “running to Christ.” He seeks to pour into his faith a little of the strengthening cordial of defiance, and calls upon all his followers to do the same: “Christ says.... Obey me; if you have My Word, hold fast to it.... Leave Pope, Emperor, the mighty and learned to be as wise as ever they please, but do not you follow them.... Do not that which even the angels in heaven may not do.... The poor, wretched creatures, the Pope, Emperor, kings and all the sects fear not to presume this; but God has set His Son at His right hand and said, Thou art My Son, I have given Thee all the kings and the whole world for Thy possession, etc. To Him you kings and lords must hearken.” “I will give you courage,” Christ says, “to laugh when the Turk, Pope and Emperor rage and storm their very worst; come ye only to me. Though you be burdened, faced by death or martyrdom, though Pope and Turk and Emperor attack you, fear ye not.”[1495]It is, in fact, quite characteristic of his faith, that, when in difficulties, the more he becomes conscious of its lack of theological foundation and of its purely emotional character, the more he arms himself with the weapons of defiant violence. On the one hand he can say, as he does in the Table-Talk of Cordatus: “Had I such great faith as I ought to have, I should long ago have slain the Turk and curbed every tyrant.”[1496]“I have indeed tormented myself greatly about them. But my faith is wanting.” And yet on another occasion, with a sadness which does him credit, he expresses his envy of the “pure and simple faith” of the children, and laments: “We old fools torment ourselves and make our hearts heavy with our disputations on the Word, whether this be true, or whether that be possible.”[1497]Luther’s Pretended Condemnations of his whole Life-workCertain controversialists have alleged that Luther came outspokenly to disown his doctrine and his work; they tell us that he expressed his regret for ever having undertaken the religious innovation. Words are even quoted as hiswhich furnish “the tersest condemnation of the Reformation by the Reformer himself.”No genuine utterances of his to this effect exist.The first abjuration of the whole of his life’s work is supposed to be contained in the statement: “Well, since I have begun it I will carry it through, but, not for the whole world would I begin it again now.”[1498]But why was he disinclined to begin again anew? Not by a single word does Luther give us to understand the reason to be that he regarded what he had done as reprehensible; on the contrary, he explains that he would not begin it again “on account of the great and excessive cares and anxieties this office brings with it.” That he by no means regarded the office itself as blameworthy is plain from the words that immediately follow: “If I looked to Him Who called me to it, then I would not even wish not to have begun it; nor do I now desire to have any other God.” And before this, in the same passage, extolling his office, he had said: Moses had besought God as many as six times to excuse him from so arduous a mission. “Yet he had to go. And in the same way God led me into it. Had I known about it beforehand He would have had difficulty in inducing me to undertake it.” It was Luther’s wont thus to represent the beginning of his undertaking as having been entirely directed by God. He is fond of saying that he had foreseen neither its final aims nor its immense difficulties and then to proceed: My ignorance was a piece of luck and a dispensation of providence, for, otherwise, affrighted by the dangers, I should have drawn back from my labours. Here his idea is much the same, and is as far removed as possible from any self-condemnation. Of course the question, whether his idea that God alone was responsible for his work was based on truth, is quite another one.The second utterance of Luther’s which has been brought forward against him merely voices anew his disappointment with this wicked world and his complaint of the cold way in which people had received his Evangel though it is the Word of God: “Had I known when I first began to write what I have now seen and experienced, namely that people would be so hostile to the Word of God and would so violently oppose it, I would assuredly have held my tongue, for I should never have been so bold as to attack and anger the Pope and indeed all mankind.”[1499]Here, moreover, we have little more than a rhetorical exaggeration of the difficulties he had overcome.Nor is it hard to estimate at its true value a third utterance wrung from him: “I can never rid myself of the thought and wish, that I had better never have begun this business.”[1500]The feeling which prompted this deliverance is plainly expressed in what follows immediately: “Item, I would rather be dead than witness such contempt of God’s Word and of His faithfulservants.” Here again he is simply giving vent to his ill-temper, that his preaching of the divine truths should receive such scant attention; not in the least can this be read as an admission of the falsehood of his mission.Two other curious statements which have further been cited, besides having been spoken under the influence of the disappointment above referred to, also bear the stamp of his peculiar rhetoric which alone can explain their tenor. The context at any rate makes it impossible to find in them any repudiation of his previous conduct.One of these sayings of Luther’s does indeed ring strange: “The tyrants in the Papacy” “plagued the world with their violence”; but the people, now that they have been delivered from them, refuse to lend an ear to those who preach “at God’s command,” but prefer to run after seducers. “Hence I am going to help to set up again the Papacy and raise the monks on high, for the world cannot get along without such clowns and comedians.”—The truth is, however, that Luther never seriously contemplated carrying out such a threat or countenancing the rule of “Antichrist.” People simply misapprehended him when they read into this jest of his a real intention to re-establish “the Papal rule.”In the other saying brought up against him he states: “Had I now to begin to preach the Evangel, I would set about it otherwise.” Here he is referring to a preceding remark, viz. that a preacher must have great experience of the world. He then proceeds: “I would leave the great, rude masses under the dominion of the Pope, for they are no better off for the Evangel but only abuse its freedom. But I should preach the Evangel and its comfort to the troubled in spirit and the meek, to the despondent and the simple-minded.” A preacher, he declares, could not paint the world in colours bad enough, seeing that it belongs altogether to the devil; he must not be such a “simple sheep” as he himself (Luther) had been at the outset when he had expected all “at once to flock to the Evangel.”[1501]—Thus there is again no question of any repentant condemnation of the whole work of his lifetime. He clothes in his strange “rhetoric” an idea which is indeed peculiar to him, viz. the special value of his Evangel for those troubled in mind. It is his sad experiences, his personal embitterment and also a certain irritation with his own party that lead him here to lay such stress on the preference to be shown to troubled consciences, even to the abandonment of all others. Of his own exaggeration he himself was perfectly aware, for he also makes far too much of his simplicity and lack of prudence. The resemblance between what we have just heard him say and his theory of the Church Apart of the True Believers, can hardly escape the reader.[1502]The wish Luther is supposed to have expressed, viz. never to have been born, and some other strong things to which he gavevent, when in a state of depression, have likewise been quoted in support of the assertion that he himself branded his work “more cruelly than any foe dared to do.” If, however, we take the statements in their setting we find they have quite a different meaning. As an instance we may quote one passage from a tract of 1539 “Against the Antinomians”[1503]where, apparently, he curses the day of his birth and regrets that all his writings had not been destroyed. Alluding to Johann Agricola, an opponent within the camp, he writes: “I might in good sooth expect my own followers to leave me in peace, having quite enough to do with the Papists. One might well cry out with Job and Jeremias: ‘Would that I had never been born!’ and in the same way I am tempted to say: ‘Would I had never come with my books,’ I care nothing for them, I should not mind had they all been destroyed and did the works of such great minds [as Agricola] outsell them in all the booksellers’ shops—as they would like, being so desirous of being fed up with honour.”Here both his good wishes to his adversary and his repudiation of his own books are the merest irony, though, reading between the lines, we get a glimpse of his pain and annoyance at the hostility he encountered. In the same vein of mingled grief and sarcasm he continues: Christ too (like himself) had complained through the Prophet (Isaias xlix. 4): “I have laboured in vain”; but it was plain (so little does he condemn his own preaching), that “the devil is master of the world” since the Gospel of the “beloved master of the house,” which Luther taught, was so violently attacked. “We must and shall strive and suffer,” so he cries, “for it cannot fare better with us than with the dear prophets and apostles who also had to bear these things.” Seeing that, throughout the tract, he is inveighing against “devilish” deformations of his doctrine, is it likely that here he is cursing the day of his birth out of remorse for his teaching?[1504]An old story that has repeatedly found its way even in recent times into popular writings tells how Luther, in conversation, sadly admitted to Catherine that “heaven is not for us.”“One fine evening,” so the tale goes, “Luther was in the garden with Catherine and both were looking up at the starlit sky. ‘Oh, how beautiful heaven is,’ Catherine exclaimed. ‘Yes,’ said Luther ruefully, ‘but I fear it will not be ours.’ ‘Will not be ours?’ cried Catherine, ‘then in God’s name let us retrace our steps.’ ‘It is too late,’ replied Luther, and went back into his study with a heavy heart.”A recent work against Luther quotes in support of the legend a modern Danish writer, Pastor Stub. It would have been better to cite J. M. Audin, an uncritical French author of a “Vie de M. Luther,” who helped to spread the story.[1505]Audin, on his side,refers to George Iwanek, S. J.(† 1693), who relates it in his “Norma Vitæ”[1506]; also to Johannes Kraus, S. J., author of a rather credulous polemical work entitled “Ovicula ex lutheranismo redux.”[1507]Kraus certainly took it from Iwanek, but from what source the latter had it we do not know. He mentions no authority and probably took the legend on hearsay and gave it too ready credence. As Luther seems occasionally to have said his night prayers in the open air, and as he frequently enough admits his struggles of conscience, the two together may have given rise to the legend.Far from being sorry for the work he had undertaken Luther, on the contrary, is ever throwing on the devil the blame for all its drawbacks. He it is who has to bear the blame for Luther’s own wretchedness, for inward wavering no less than for the lack of order, faith and morals among the Evangelical preachers and laity. He so works upon me “that I sometimes believe, and sometimes do not.”[1508]He could not view Satan’s raging as of small account; it was far more to be dreaded than all the persecution of men. “You see from my books what scorn I have for those men who withstand me. I look upon them as fools”; even the lawyers I am ready to defy; “but when these fellows, the evil spirits, come, then the congregation must back me up in the fight,” for then the devil, the very “Lord of the world,” is entering the lists against me.[1509]A glance at what has gone before shows how these “combats” must be understood.The tone he adopts, though frequently humorous and satirical, does not conceal the deep depression which unquestionably underlies many of his utterances.Such depression would quite well explain passing fits of real sorrow for all he had done. But that he really felt such sorrow is not sufficiently attested, so that all one can say is, that the ground for such a feeling of remorse was there.A discouraging sense of the instability of his doctrine and “reformation” might well have aroused contrition, for Luther himself saw only too plainly, as Döllinger rightly remarks, that, though he was strong enough to bring about an apostasy from the ancient Church yet he was powerless to effect a moral regeneration, or even to preserve religious order.[1510]Döllinger adds very truly: The reasons for his doubts were, “first of all the recognition of the evil effects produced by his doctrine, then the consciousness of having cut himself adrift from the Church for the sake of a new doctrine previously unknown, and lastly the inward contradictions from which his doctrinal system suffered and the impossibility of squaring it with the many Bible passages which embody or presuppose a contrary doctrine.”[1511]The words “agonies” and “nocturnal combats” which Luther so often used to describe his struggles of conscience remain to testify to their severity.In the years immediately preceding Luther’s death, these seem to have become less violent. Remorse of conscience, as experience teaches, however great it may at one period have been, can in progress of time be lulled to rest. We may quote in this connection the words of one of the most highly esteemed of the older Catholic spiritual guides, without however applying them unconditionally to Luther, as it is always difficult to gauge the extent and working of inward prejudice in the various stages of a man’s mental growth, particularly in the case of such a man as Luther. “Sometimes God withdraws himself from the soul,” writes this author, “on account of secret grievous sins which have been committed from culpable ignorance, or from that ignorance which, at the instigation of the Evil One, seeks to hide itself beneath a mantle of virtue. God then departs from the man, though the latter is not aware of it, and may remain unaware for the rest of his life until the night of death comes. The deluded man fancies he possesses God, but, to his infinite pain and loss, ultimately finds that he has been all the while without Him. In the Book of Proverbs (xiv. 12) it is written: ‘There is a way which seemeth just to a man, but the ends thereof lead to death.’”[1512]Who would venture to determine in Luther’s case when exactly he first clearly realised his moral responsibility, and when exactly he succeeded in forming himself a false conscience? Though on the one hand it is certain to every Catholic that at first, and for a considerable while, his attack on the Church was extremely culpable, still one cannot close one’s eyes to the fact that Luther himself was convinced that he was in the right, and that this conviction grew with advancing years. (See vol. iv., p. 306 f.) It was, however, of his own free-will that he persisted in the unhappy attitude of apostasy and revolt which had become a habit with him and thus, in itself, his burden of moral responsibility remained.[1513]
When speaking of his temptations, as a man of fifty-six, he bewailed the prevailing unbelief, at the same time including himself: “If only we could believe concerning the [Divine] promisesthat it was God Who spoke them! If only we paid heed to His Word we should esteem it highly. But when we hear it [God’s Word] from the lips of a man, we care no more for it than for the lowing of a cow.”[1455]—Shortly before this, again including all, he consoles himself as follows: Our weakness was ever disposed to doubt of God’s mercy, and even Paul felt his shortcomings. “I am comforted when I see that even Paul did not rise high enough. Away with the ambitious who pretend they have succeeded in everything! We have God’s words to strengthen us and yet even we do not believe.”[1456]“I have preached for five-and-twenty years,” so he said about that time, “and do not yet understand the text ‘The just man liveth by faith.’”[1457]Of his trusting belief in his personal salvation he admits, in 1543, that he did not feel it to be very steadfast, and that it still lagged behind that of ordinary believers. He speaks of a woman at Torgau who had told him that she looked upon herself as “lost,” and shut out from salvation, because she was unable to believe (i.e. trust). He had thereupon asked her whether she did not hold fast to the Creed, and when she assured him that she did he had said: “My good woman, go in God’s name! You believe more and better than I do.” “Yes, dear Dr. Jonas,” so he said, turning to his friend, “yes, if a man could verily believe it as it there stands, his heart would indeed jump for joy! That is certain.”[1458]So strongly did he express himself on this point on May 6, 1540, that, taking the words as they stand, he wouldseemto deny his belief in Christ’s miracles and work. “I cannot believe it and yet I teach others. I know it is true, but I am unable to believe it. I think sometimes: ‘Sure enough you teach aright, for you are in the sacred ministry and are called, you are helpful to many and glorify Christ; for we do not preach Aristotle or Cæsar, but Jesus Christ.’ But when I consider my weakness, how I eat, drink, joke and am a merry man about the town, then I begin to doubt. Oh, if only a man could believe it!”[1459]These words were spoken on Ascension-Day, after Luther had expressed his marvel at the strong faith of the Apostles in the Divinity of Him Who was ascending into heaven. “Wonderful; I cannot understand it nor can I believe it, and yet all the Apostles believed.”[1460]“I am fond of Jonas [who was seated near him] but if he were to ascendinto heaven here and now, and disappear out of our sight, what should I think?”“Oh, if only a man could believe it!”It is evident that he did not wish by such words to give himself out as an unbeliever or a sceptic in religious matters. What he was painfully aware of was the fact that that strong, clear faith in the ordinary truths of revelation and matters of faith, which he himself was wont to depict as essential, was absent in his own case. His former violent struggles of conscience seem in later years to have been replaced by this uncomfortable feeling.The depressing sense of the feebleness of his religious belief was not removed by the frequent references Luther was so fond of making in his old age to the coming of the Redeemer and Judge of the world, and to the nighness of the devil’s downfall, who is the Lord of this world.[1461]We know already the psychological reasons for the stress he lays on such expectations. Yet all the unnatural ardour he showed in voicing them could not disguise the fact that his faith lacked any real strength or fervour. Spiritual coldness could quite well co-exist with a virulent hatred of the devil and a longing desire for the end of the world.“The devil is an evil spirit ... as I do not fail to realise day after day; for a man waxes cold, and the more so the longer he lives.” Thus to Count Albert of Mansfeld in 1542.[1462]—He was “in pain and very morose,” he tells Jonas in 1541, “feeling disgusted with everything, especially with his illnesses.”.[1463]In 1544, and frequently about that time, he declares that he was quite tired of the devil and of his struggles with him; his only wish was to see the “end of his raging,” and to “die a good and wholesome death.”[1464]“God Himself may see to my soul’s lodging”; He loved souls, says Luther, and it was a good thing that his salvation was not in his own hands, otherwise he “would soon be gobbled up by Satan”; but God’s care and the “many mansions” in His gift were a sufficient consolation (1539).[1465]On one occasion, in 1542, he mentioned that, unless he had escaped from certain “thoughts and temptations,” he would have been drowned in them and would have long ago found himself in hell; for such “devilish thoughts” breed “desperate people,” and “contemners of God.”[1466]“Though, towards the end of life, such temptations are wont to cease,” he says, in 1540, yet other inward worries remain: “I am often angry with myself because I find so much in me that is unclean. But what can I do? I cannot strip off my nature. Meanwhile Christ looks upon us as righteous because we desire to be righteous, abhor our uncleanliness, and love, and confess the Word.”[1467]—Others, like Spalatin, in their old age, felt the bite ofconscience more strongly than did Luther; they had not been through the same violent struggles and mental gymnastics as Luther, nor had they learnt how to suppress the voice from within. It was to Spalatin, then sunk in melancholy, that, in 1544, Luther addressed the words already quoted: He (Spalatin) was “too timid a sinner” (“nimis tener peccator”). “Unite yourself with us great and hardened sinners, in a believing trust in Christ!”[1468]Earlier Undated StatementsMany utterances and confidences of Luther’s still exist, about the meaning of which there can be no doubt, though it is difficult correctly to place them. Some of these concern the subject now under discussion; several may well date from Luther’s later years, and thus throw light on his interior in his old age. We shall give first of all his statements concerning St. Paul in their bearing upon himself.Speaking once of a pet view of his in which he seems to have found great consolation, viz. that even Paul had not believed firmly (neque Paulum fortiter credidisse), Luther went so far as to question the apostle’s belief in the “crown of justice” which he professed to look for, as “laid up for him in heaven” (2 Tim. iv. 8). Jonas, who was present, had declared “he could not bestow any credence on this statement of Paul’s.” Luther replied: It is quite true that Paul did not believe it firmly, “for it was above him. I too am unable to believe as I preach, although they all think I believe these things firmly.” He goes on to allege the Divine Clemency, and jestingly says: Were we to fulfil the will of Godperfectlywe should be cheating God of His Godhead; and what would then become of the article of the forgiveness of sins?[1469]At any rate he would fain have believed his own doctrines more strongly and vividly.“Temptations against the faith,” says Luther, “are St. Paul’s goad and sting of the flesh [2 Cor. xii. 7], a great skewer and roasting-spit which pierces right through both spirit and flesh, both body and soul.”[1470]—And elsewhere: “At times I think: I really do not know where I stand, whether I preach aright or not. This was also St. Paul’s temptation and martyrdom, which, asI believe, he found it hard to speak of to many.” Yet, so Luther opines, Paul sufficiently hinted at it in the words “I die daily” (1 Cor. xv. 31).—The fact is, the Apostle is far from attributing to himself doubts on the faith either here or elsewhere. Luther, however, would gladly have us believe, that, with his doubts, he had been through precisely that experience to which St. Paul refers when he says, “I die daily”; he, too, has his agonies, he, too, has descended into hell.[1471]Not merely in this does he resemble Paul, but also in his inability to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel: “Paul and I have never been able to manage this.”[1472]He saw also another point of similarity between himself and the Apostle of the Gentiles. For, like him, St. Paul, too, “had been much bothered by the objection, that, one should listen to the Fathers (cp. Rom. ix. 5) and not oppose the whole world single-handed.”[1473]Not Paul alone, according to Luther, but all the other Apostles too had been assailed by doubts.He was always consoled to find new and illustrious companions in his misery. Christ, he declares, had foretold this to the Apostles; He had also spoken to them of this sort of persecution: “Your conscience will grow weak so that you will often think: ‘Who knows whether I have been right? Alas, have I not gone too far?’ Thus in the eyes of the world and to your own conscience you will seem to be in the wrong”; it had, however, been the duty of the Holy Ghost to comfort the Apostles in all such trials.[1474]And did not “even the man Christ have His momentary failing in the Garden?”[1475]Did not Christ then confess: “‘I know not how I stand with God, or whether I am doing right or not.’ This occurred even in the case of Christ.”[1476]“All who are tempted must set Christ, Who also was tempted in everything, as a model before their eyes; but it was much harder for Him than for us and for me.”[1477]Luther fails to take into account the world-wide difference between the sadness of Christ, Who could never waver in the Truth, and his own doubts and wavering in the faith.“O, my God,” he said on another occasion, “the article on faith won’t go home; hence so many sad moods arise. Often I have to take myself to task for failing to master such moods when they come, I who have so often taught in lectures, sermons and writings how such temptations are to be overcome.”[1478]His pupil Mathesius relates the following in his sermons on Luther, the preface to the printed edition of which he wrote in 1565: “Antony Musa, pastor of Rochlitz, told me that he once complained bitterly to the Doctor of being unable to believe himselfwhat he preached to others. ‘Praise and thanks be to God,’ replied the Doctor, ‘that this also happens to others. I fancied it was true only in my case.’ All his life Musa never forgot this consolation.”[1479]So full of admiration for Luther was Mathesius, and probably so well schooled by his master in the theory and practice of a faith which has ever to strive after firmness, that he saw in this statement nothing at all unfavourable to his hero. On the contrary, he includes the story in a list of “all manner of wise sayings” which had fallen from the lips of Luther. He even assures us at the beginning of these notes that, “The man was full of grace and of the Holy Ghost, hence all who went to him for advice as to a prophet of God found what they sought.”[1480]Judging by this Mathesius must have been very easily satisfied in the matter of firmness of faith. Perhaps had his faith been stronger it would have fared better with him in the melancholy which came upon him towards the end of his life.[1481]“Ah,” said Dr. Martin, so we read elsewhere in Notes made by his pupils, “I used to believe every single thing that the Pope and the monks chose to say, but now I actually cannot believe even what Christ says, Who assuredly does not lie. This is very sad and distressing. Never mind, we must and will keep it for that Day.”[1482]—“When the words of the prophet Hosea, ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ set to music by Josquinus, were sung at Dr. Martin Luther’s table, the Doctor said to Dr. Jonas: ‘As little as you believe this singing to be good, so little do I believe theology to be true.... I do indeed love Christ, but my faith ought to be much stronger and warmer.”[1483]—“Many boast of having at their fingers’ ends the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, and I, wretch that I am, find so little comfort in the passion, resurrection, and forgiveness of sins! One thing indeed I can do, viz. eat our Lord God’s bread and drink His beer; but to take that far more necessary treasure which is the free forgiveness of sins, this I cannot succeed in doing.”[1484]Not merely does he ascribe his own experiences to the first followers of Christ, viz. to Paul and the other Apostles, but again and again he seeks to make them out to be an evil common to all, an heritage of all Christians, nay, something actually involved in the idea of faith. Often he speaks of faith as of something altogether mystical and intangible of the presence of which no man can be conscious. Faith, he thinks, might well not be present at all just when a man fancies he possesses it; again, it might exist in the man who thought he lacked it; or “at any rate such is the case intimes of stress and temptation; for it often happens with faith that he who fancies he believes, believes nothing at all, while the man who thinks he believes nothing and lies in despair, really believes the most.... He who has it, has it. We must believe, but we neither must nor can know it for certain” [i.e. whether we really believe]. Thus in 1528.[1485]Needless to say this theory of his was far removed from the strong, simple and perfectly conscious faith of so many thousands even of the humblest followers of the olden religion.Some years before this, in a work intended for all, he had made a practical application to himself of this curious doctrine of the frequent impossibility of saying whether one really has the faith. Owing to his temptations he admitted that he was not qualified to be reckoned an authority on this question, nor “even a disciple, much less a master.”“Whoever boasts,” he says in his work on Psalm cxvii., “that he knows very well we must be saved without our works by the grace of God, does not know what he is saying”; “it is an art which keeps us ever schoolboys,” a scent after which we must “sniff and run.” “Let anyone who chooses take me as an example of this, which I admit myself to be. Several times, when I was not thinking of this cardinal doctrine, the devil has caught me and plagued me with texts from Scripture till heaven and earth seemed too tight to hold me. Then human works and laws would seem quite right and not an error would be noticed in the whole of Popery. In short, no one but Luther had ever erred; and all my best works, doctrines, sermons, books were condemned.... You hear now how I am confessing to you and admitting what the devil was able to do against Luther, who of all men ought surely to have been a very adept in this art. For he has preached, told, written, spoken, sung and read so much about it and yet remains a tyro in it, and is at times not even a disciple, much less a master.”[1486]What he is trying to impress on the reader is, that evenif you “can do all things,” take care that “your art does not fail you.”Thus he did not enjoy the happiness which, according to the testimony of Catholics both learned and unlearned, was shared by all the faithful so long as they paid attention to their religious duties. Guided from their youth by the hand of the Church they were acquainted with no fears and uncertainties, for, thanks to her divine commission and gift of infallibility, she could make up for the insufficiency of human knowledge. Catholics did not look for salvation in a blind and unattainable trust in an imputation of Christ’s righteousness.Their attitude indeed presents a striking contrast to Luther’s restless struggle after faith.Not only in the last cold, barren years of his life but even at an earlier period we notice in him a tendency to regard this clutching at faith as the one great matter. In some quite early statements he depicts himself as on the look-out for a believing trust, as violently striving to clasp it to his breast, and, generally, as making this the end of all religious effort.Even in 1517 in his unpublished Commentary on Hebrews we find a remarkable and oft-repeated admonition which bears on the subject in hand. He sees the troubled conscience “in fear and oppressed whichever way it turns”; hence it must learn to embrace faith in the power of Christ’s blood: “By faith conscience is cleansed and put to rest.” It is this faith in the blood of Christ which we must seek with all our powers to reach. It follows, “that the best of contemplating the sufferings of Christ is that it awakens in the soul this faith or believing trust.” “The oftener he dwells on the Passion, the more strongly will every man believe that the blood of Christ was shed for his own sins. This is ‘to eat and drink spiritually,’ i.e. to feed on Christ in faith and thus become one body with Him.”[1487]On the other hand, the teaching of antiquity concerning meditation on Christ’s Passion and likewise the hints contained in the language of the Church’s liturgy, do not stop short at such an arousing of faith. Taking for granted the Christian’s faith, what they seek to awaken is a real love; meditation on the sufferings and death of our Lord was above all to stimulate the faithful to feelings of loving gratitude, holy compassion and self-sacrifice; in wholesome compunction people were wont, by dwelling on the sufferings of the innocent Lamb, to rouse themselves to a sense of shame, to a holy desire to imitate Christ by good works of self-conquest and by zeal for souls. The ancient hymn, the “Stabat Mater,” which is at the same time so profound and wonderful a prayer, says never a word of faith, precious as this grace is, but, taking it for granted as the groundwork, it teaches us to pray: “Fac ut tecum lugeam—fac ut ardeat cor meum in amando Christum Deum—passionis fac consortem,” etc. This is surely something higher than that mere appropriation of trusting faith in which Luther sums up all the heights and depths of our union with Christ.Luther, in his exaggerated language, declares that it was something “almost Gentile” for a man when contemplating the Passion of Christ to “strive after anything else but faith”; this statement, however, he refutes in practice by himself occasionally introducing other good and moral reflexions on the Passion, though he is always chiefly concerned with its bearing on his own peculiar view of faith.He was too ready to confuse the sentiment of faith with actual faith.Religious writers before Luther’s day, when dealing with distrust and unbelief, had been careful to distinguish between the involuntary acts of man’s lower nature which do not rise above the realm of feeling, and those which have the definite consent of the will and which alone they regarded as grievous sins against faith or the virtue of hope. With Luther everything is sin; he bewails the actual distrust, and real weakness of faith springing from a fault of the will; but, according to him, the involuntary movements of our corrupt nature also deserve God’s signal anger; original sin whereby we bring this upon ourselves must daily be cloaked over by means of the faith wrought by God. But since it is God alone Who works this faith Luther might well have excused himself even had he lost the faith completely. When he is upset and begins to reproach himself as he often does on account of the weakness of his faith, he is really saying good-bye to his own teaching and again reverting to the standpoint of the olden faith, for only the assumption of man’s free-will can justify self-reproaches.“Sin” and “the devil” are made to bear the blame for the deeds of man who lacks free-will.“The sin which still persists in us,” says Luther, in his last sermon at Eisleben,[1488]“compels us not to believe.” “Because we have it daily before our eyes and at our door, it goes in at one ear and out at the other.” “This is what the rude, savage folk do who care nought for God and place no trust in Him; we, the best of Christians, also do the same.” “We are too prone to obey original sin, the taint of evil which yet sticks to our flesh, and although we would willingly believe, and are fond of hearing and reading God’s Word, still we cannot rise as high as we ought.”[1489]Before this he had said: “If a man were to ask you: Good fellow, do you believe that the Son of God ... died for your sins? and that it is really true? You would have to say—did you wish to answer right and truthfully and as you really feel—and confess with dismay, that you cannot after all believe it so strongly and indubitably.... You would have to say.... Alas, I see and feel that I do not ... believe as I ought.”[1490]Later he returns to this thought which evidently was much before his mind: “Although we cannot now believe so strongly as we should, still God has patience with us.”[1491]Yet “we ought to go on and believe more firmly and be angered with ourselves and say: Heavenly Father, is it true that I must believe that Thou didst send Thine only-begotten Son into the world?... And when I hear that there is no doubt, then I shall go on to say: Well, for this shall I thank God all the days of my life and praise and extol Him.”[1492]In reality, according to him, we should “run and jump for joy” because by faith “we hear the Lord Christ speaking.” “The life of the Christian ought, by rights, to be all joy and delight, but there are few who really feel this joy.” The martyrs, with their glad, nay, even jubilant confession of faith amidst their torments, are to him an example of a sound, hardy, unshaken faith, for in them the Word was strong and the teaching of the Gospel all-powerful.[1493]But, as he had remarked in another of hisEisleben sermons, “We, owing to the weakness of our faith, feel doubts and fears, as by our very nature we cannot help doing”; yet we must “have wisdom enough again and again to run to Christ and cry aloud and awaken Him with our shouts and prayers.”[1494]Luther’s farewell address where these words occur furnishes at the same time an example of how, throughout his life, when assailed by doubts and fears, or when the Evangel was in danger, as it then was owing to the Emperor’s warlike preparations, he carried out his injunction of “running to Christ.” He seeks to pour into his faith a little of the strengthening cordial of defiance, and calls upon all his followers to do the same: “Christ says.... Obey me; if you have My Word, hold fast to it.... Leave Pope, Emperor, the mighty and learned to be as wise as ever they please, but do not you follow them.... Do not that which even the angels in heaven may not do.... The poor, wretched creatures, the Pope, Emperor, kings and all the sects fear not to presume this; but God has set His Son at His right hand and said, Thou art My Son, I have given Thee all the kings and the whole world for Thy possession, etc. To Him you kings and lords must hearken.” “I will give you courage,” Christ says, “to laugh when the Turk, Pope and Emperor rage and storm their very worst; come ye only to me. Though you be burdened, faced by death or martyrdom, though Pope and Turk and Emperor attack you, fear ye not.”[1495]It is, in fact, quite characteristic of his faith, that, when in difficulties, the more he becomes conscious of its lack of theological foundation and of its purely emotional character, the more he arms himself with the weapons of defiant violence. On the one hand he can say, as he does in the Table-Talk of Cordatus: “Had I such great faith as I ought to have, I should long ago have slain the Turk and curbed every tyrant.”[1496]“I have indeed tormented myself greatly about them. But my faith is wanting.” And yet on another occasion, with a sadness which does him credit, he expresses his envy of the “pure and simple faith” of the children, and laments: “We old fools torment ourselves and make our hearts heavy with our disputations on the Word, whether this be true, or whether that be possible.”[1497]Luther’s Pretended Condemnations of his whole Life-workCertain controversialists have alleged that Luther came outspokenly to disown his doctrine and his work; they tell us that he expressed his regret for ever having undertaken the religious innovation. Words are even quoted as hiswhich furnish “the tersest condemnation of the Reformation by the Reformer himself.”No genuine utterances of his to this effect exist.The first abjuration of the whole of his life’s work is supposed to be contained in the statement: “Well, since I have begun it I will carry it through, but, not for the whole world would I begin it again now.”[1498]But why was he disinclined to begin again anew? Not by a single word does Luther give us to understand the reason to be that he regarded what he had done as reprehensible; on the contrary, he explains that he would not begin it again “on account of the great and excessive cares and anxieties this office brings with it.” That he by no means regarded the office itself as blameworthy is plain from the words that immediately follow: “If I looked to Him Who called me to it, then I would not even wish not to have begun it; nor do I now desire to have any other God.” And before this, in the same passage, extolling his office, he had said: Moses had besought God as many as six times to excuse him from so arduous a mission. “Yet he had to go. And in the same way God led me into it. Had I known about it beforehand He would have had difficulty in inducing me to undertake it.” It was Luther’s wont thus to represent the beginning of his undertaking as having been entirely directed by God. He is fond of saying that he had foreseen neither its final aims nor its immense difficulties and then to proceed: My ignorance was a piece of luck and a dispensation of providence, for, otherwise, affrighted by the dangers, I should have drawn back from my labours. Here his idea is much the same, and is as far removed as possible from any self-condemnation. Of course the question, whether his idea that God alone was responsible for his work was based on truth, is quite another one.The second utterance of Luther’s which has been brought forward against him merely voices anew his disappointment with this wicked world and his complaint of the cold way in which people had received his Evangel though it is the Word of God: “Had I known when I first began to write what I have now seen and experienced, namely that people would be so hostile to the Word of God and would so violently oppose it, I would assuredly have held my tongue, for I should never have been so bold as to attack and anger the Pope and indeed all mankind.”[1499]Here, moreover, we have little more than a rhetorical exaggeration of the difficulties he had overcome.Nor is it hard to estimate at its true value a third utterance wrung from him: “I can never rid myself of the thought and wish, that I had better never have begun this business.”[1500]The feeling which prompted this deliverance is plainly expressed in what follows immediately: “Item, I would rather be dead than witness such contempt of God’s Word and of His faithfulservants.” Here again he is simply giving vent to his ill-temper, that his preaching of the divine truths should receive such scant attention; not in the least can this be read as an admission of the falsehood of his mission.Two other curious statements which have further been cited, besides having been spoken under the influence of the disappointment above referred to, also bear the stamp of his peculiar rhetoric which alone can explain their tenor. The context at any rate makes it impossible to find in them any repudiation of his previous conduct.One of these sayings of Luther’s does indeed ring strange: “The tyrants in the Papacy” “plagued the world with their violence”; but the people, now that they have been delivered from them, refuse to lend an ear to those who preach “at God’s command,” but prefer to run after seducers. “Hence I am going to help to set up again the Papacy and raise the monks on high, for the world cannot get along without such clowns and comedians.”—The truth is, however, that Luther never seriously contemplated carrying out such a threat or countenancing the rule of “Antichrist.” People simply misapprehended him when they read into this jest of his a real intention to re-establish “the Papal rule.”In the other saying brought up against him he states: “Had I now to begin to preach the Evangel, I would set about it otherwise.” Here he is referring to a preceding remark, viz. that a preacher must have great experience of the world. He then proceeds: “I would leave the great, rude masses under the dominion of the Pope, for they are no better off for the Evangel but only abuse its freedom. But I should preach the Evangel and its comfort to the troubled in spirit and the meek, to the despondent and the simple-minded.” A preacher, he declares, could not paint the world in colours bad enough, seeing that it belongs altogether to the devil; he must not be such a “simple sheep” as he himself (Luther) had been at the outset when he had expected all “at once to flock to the Evangel.”[1501]—Thus there is again no question of any repentant condemnation of the whole work of his lifetime. He clothes in his strange “rhetoric” an idea which is indeed peculiar to him, viz. the special value of his Evangel for those troubled in mind. It is his sad experiences, his personal embitterment and also a certain irritation with his own party that lead him here to lay such stress on the preference to be shown to troubled consciences, even to the abandonment of all others. Of his own exaggeration he himself was perfectly aware, for he also makes far too much of his simplicity and lack of prudence. The resemblance between what we have just heard him say and his theory of the Church Apart of the True Believers, can hardly escape the reader.[1502]The wish Luther is supposed to have expressed, viz. never to have been born, and some other strong things to which he gavevent, when in a state of depression, have likewise been quoted in support of the assertion that he himself branded his work “more cruelly than any foe dared to do.” If, however, we take the statements in their setting we find they have quite a different meaning. As an instance we may quote one passage from a tract of 1539 “Against the Antinomians”[1503]where, apparently, he curses the day of his birth and regrets that all his writings had not been destroyed. Alluding to Johann Agricola, an opponent within the camp, he writes: “I might in good sooth expect my own followers to leave me in peace, having quite enough to do with the Papists. One might well cry out with Job and Jeremias: ‘Would that I had never been born!’ and in the same way I am tempted to say: ‘Would I had never come with my books,’ I care nothing for them, I should not mind had they all been destroyed and did the works of such great minds [as Agricola] outsell them in all the booksellers’ shops—as they would like, being so desirous of being fed up with honour.”Here both his good wishes to his adversary and his repudiation of his own books are the merest irony, though, reading between the lines, we get a glimpse of his pain and annoyance at the hostility he encountered. In the same vein of mingled grief and sarcasm he continues: Christ too (like himself) had complained through the Prophet (Isaias xlix. 4): “I have laboured in vain”; but it was plain (so little does he condemn his own preaching), that “the devil is master of the world” since the Gospel of the “beloved master of the house,” which Luther taught, was so violently attacked. “We must and shall strive and suffer,” so he cries, “for it cannot fare better with us than with the dear prophets and apostles who also had to bear these things.” Seeing that, throughout the tract, he is inveighing against “devilish” deformations of his doctrine, is it likely that here he is cursing the day of his birth out of remorse for his teaching?[1504]An old story that has repeatedly found its way even in recent times into popular writings tells how Luther, in conversation, sadly admitted to Catherine that “heaven is not for us.”“One fine evening,” so the tale goes, “Luther was in the garden with Catherine and both were looking up at the starlit sky. ‘Oh, how beautiful heaven is,’ Catherine exclaimed. ‘Yes,’ said Luther ruefully, ‘but I fear it will not be ours.’ ‘Will not be ours?’ cried Catherine, ‘then in God’s name let us retrace our steps.’ ‘It is too late,’ replied Luther, and went back into his study with a heavy heart.”A recent work against Luther quotes in support of the legend a modern Danish writer, Pastor Stub. It would have been better to cite J. M. Audin, an uncritical French author of a “Vie de M. Luther,” who helped to spread the story.[1505]Audin, on his side,refers to George Iwanek, S. J.(† 1693), who relates it in his “Norma Vitæ”[1506]; also to Johannes Kraus, S. J., author of a rather credulous polemical work entitled “Ovicula ex lutheranismo redux.”[1507]Kraus certainly took it from Iwanek, but from what source the latter had it we do not know. He mentions no authority and probably took the legend on hearsay and gave it too ready credence. As Luther seems occasionally to have said his night prayers in the open air, and as he frequently enough admits his struggles of conscience, the two together may have given rise to the legend.Far from being sorry for the work he had undertaken Luther, on the contrary, is ever throwing on the devil the blame for all its drawbacks. He it is who has to bear the blame for Luther’s own wretchedness, for inward wavering no less than for the lack of order, faith and morals among the Evangelical preachers and laity. He so works upon me “that I sometimes believe, and sometimes do not.”[1508]He could not view Satan’s raging as of small account; it was far more to be dreaded than all the persecution of men. “You see from my books what scorn I have for those men who withstand me. I look upon them as fools”; even the lawyers I am ready to defy; “but when these fellows, the evil spirits, come, then the congregation must back me up in the fight,” for then the devil, the very “Lord of the world,” is entering the lists against me.[1509]A glance at what has gone before shows how these “combats” must be understood.The tone he adopts, though frequently humorous and satirical, does not conceal the deep depression which unquestionably underlies many of his utterances.Such depression would quite well explain passing fits of real sorrow for all he had done. But that he really felt such sorrow is not sufficiently attested, so that all one can say is, that the ground for such a feeling of remorse was there.A discouraging sense of the instability of his doctrine and “reformation” might well have aroused contrition, for Luther himself saw only too plainly, as Döllinger rightly remarks, that, though he was strong enough to bring about an apostasy from the ancient Church yet he was powerless to effect a moral regeneration, or even to preserve religious order.[1510]Döllinger adds very truly: The reasons for his doubts were, “first of all the recognition of the evil effects produced by his doctrine, then the consciousness of having cut himself adrift from the Church for the sake of a new doctrine previously unknown, and lastly the inward contradictions from which his doctrinal system suffered and the impossibility of squaring it with the many Bible passages which embody or presuppose a contrary doctrine.”[1511]The words “agonies” and “nocturnal combats” which Luther so often used to describe his struggles of conscience remain to testify to their severity.In the years immediately preceding Luther’s death, these seem to have become less violent. Remorse of conscience, as experience teaches, however great it may at one period have been, can in progress of time be lulled to rest. We may quote in this connection the words of one of the most highly esteemed of the older Catholic spiritual guides, without however applying them unconditionally to Luther, as it is always difficult to gauge the extent and working of inward prejudice in the various stages of a man’s mental growth, particularly in the case of such a man as Luther. “Sometimes God withdraws himself from the soul,” writes this author, “on account of secret grievous sins which have been committed from culpable ignorance, or from that ignorance which, at the instigation of the Evil One, seeks to hide itself beneath a mantle of virtue. God then departs from the man, though the latter is not aware of it, and may remain unaware for the rest of his life until the night of death comes. The deluded man fancies he possesses God, but, to his infinite pain and loss, ultimately finds that he has been all the while without Him. In the Book of Proverbs (xiv. 12) it is written: ‘There is a way which seemeth just to a man, but the ends thereof lead to death.’”[1512]Who would venture to determine in Luther’s case when exactly he first clearly realised his moral responsibility, and when exactly he succeeded in forming himself a false conscience? Though on the one hand it is certain to every Catholic that at first, and for a considerable while, his attack on the Church was extremely culpable, still one cannot close one’s eyes to the fact that Luther himself was convinced that he was in the right, and that this conviction grew with advancing years. (See vol. iv., p. 306 f.) It was, however, of his own free-will that he persisted in the unhappy attitude of apostasy and revolt which had become a habit with him and thus, in itself, his burden of moral responsibility remained.[1513]
When speaking of his temptations, as a man of fifty-six, he bewailed the prevailing unbelief, at the same time including himself: “If only we could believe concerning the [Divine] promisesthat it was God Who spoke them! If only we paid heed to His Word we should esteem it highly. But when we hear it [God’s Word] from the lips of a man, we care no more for it than for the lowing of a cow.”[1455]—Shortly before this, again including all, he consoles himself as follows: Our weakness was ever disposed to doubt of God’s mercy, and even Paul felt his shortcomings. “I am comforted when I see that even Paul did not rise high enough. Away with the ambitious who pretend they have succeeded in everything! We have God’s words to strengthen us and yet even we do not believe.”[1456]“I have preached for five-and-twenty years,” so he said about that time, “and do not yet understand the text ‘The just man liveth by faith.’”[1457]Of his trusting belief in his personal salvation he admits, in 1543, that he did not feel it to be very steadfast, and that it still lagged behind that of ordinary believers. He speaks of a woman at Torgau who had told him that she looked upon herself as “lost,” and shut out from salvation, because she was unable to believe (i.e. trust). He had thereupon asked her whether she did not hold fast to the Creed, and when she assured him that she did he had said: “My good woman, go in God’s name! You believe more and better than I do.” “Yes, dear Dr. Jonas,” so he said, turning to his friend, “yes, if a man could verily believe it as it there stands, his heart would indeed jump for joy! That is certain.”[1458]So strongly did he express himself on this point on May 6, 1540, that, taking the words as they stand, he wouldseemto deny his belief in Christ’s miracles and work. “I cannot believe it and yet I teach others. I know it is true, but I am unable to believe it. I think sometimes: ‘Sure enough you teach aright, for you are in the sacred ministry and are called, you are helpful to many and glorify Christ; for we do not preach Aristotle or Cæsar, but Jesus Christ.’ But when I consider my weakness, how I eat, drink, joke and am a merry man about the town, then I begin to doubt. Oh, if only a man could believe it!”[1459]These words were spoken on Ascension-Day, after Luther had expressed his marvel at the strong faith of the Apostles in the Divinity of Him Who was ascending into heaven. “Wonderful; I cannot understand it nor can I believe it, and yet all the Apostles believed.”[1460]“I am fond of Jonas [who was seated near him] but if he were to ascendinto heaven here and now, and disappear out of our sight, what should I think?”“Oh, if only a man could believe it!”It is evident that he did not wish by such words to give himself out as an unbeliever or a sceptic in religious matters. What he was painfully aware of was the fact that that strong, clear faith in the ordinary truths of revelation and matters of faith, which he himself was wont to depict as essential, was absent in his own case. His former violent struggles of conscience seem in later years to have been replaced by this uncomfortable feeling.The depressing sense of the feebleness of his religious belief was not removed by the frequent references Luther was so fond of making in his old age to the coming of the Redeemer and Judge of the world, and to the nighness of the devil’s downfall, who is the Lord of this world.[1461]We know already the psychological reasons for the stress he lays on such expectations. Yet all the unnatural ardour he showed in voicing them could not disguise the fact that his faith lacked any real strength or fervour. Spiritual coldness could quite well co-exist with a virulent hatred of the devil and a longing desire for the end of the world.“The devil is an evil spirit ... as I do not fail to realise day after day; for a man waxes cold, and the more so the longer he lives.” Thus to Count Albert of Mansfeld in 1542.[1462]—He was “in pain and very morose,” he tells Jonas in 1541, “feeling disgusted with everything, especially with his illnesses.”.[1463]In 1544, and frequently about that time, he declares that he was quite tired of the devil and of his struggles with him; his only wish was to see the “end of his raging,” and to “die a good and wholesome death.”[1464]“God Himself may see to my soul’s lodging”; He loved souls, says Luther, and it was a good thing that his salvation was not in his own hands, otherwise he “would soon be gobbled up by Satan”; but God’s care and the “many mansions” in His gift were a sufficient consolation (1539).[1465]On one occasion, in 1542, he mentioned that, unless he had escaped from certain “thoughts and temptations,” he would have been drowned in them and would have long ago found himself in hell; for such “devilish thoughts” breed “desperate people,” and “contemners of God.”[1466]“Though, towards the end of life, such temptations are wont to cease,” he says, in 1540, yet other inward worries remain: “I am often angry with myself because I find so much in me that is unclean. But what can I do? I cannot strip off my nature. Meanwhile Christ looks upon us as righteous because we desire to be righteous, abhor our uncleanliness, and love, and confess the Word.”[1467]—Others, like Spalatin, in their old age, felt the bite ofconscience more strongly than did Luther; they had not been through the same violent struggles and mental gymnastics as Luther, nor had they learnt how to suppress the voice from within. It was to Spalatin, then sunk in melancholy, that, in 1544, Luther addressed the words already quoted: He (Spalatin) was “too timid a sinner” (“nimis tener peccator”). “Unite yourself with us great and hardened sinners, in a believing trust in Christ!”[1468]
When speaking of his temptations, as a man of fifty-six, he bewailed the prevailing unbelief, at the same time including himself: “If only we could believe concerning the [Divine] promisesthat it was God Who spoke them! If only we paid heed to His Word we should esteem it highly. But when we hear it [God’s Word] from the lips of a man, we care no more for it than for the lowing of a cow.”[1455]—Shortly before this, again including all, he consoles himself as follows: Our weakness was ever disposed to doubt of God’s mercy, and even Paul felt his shortcomings. “I am comforted when I see that even Paul did not rise high enough. Away with the ambitious who pretend they have succeeded in everything! We have God’s words to strengthen us and yet even we do not believe.”[1456]“I have preached for five-and-twenty years,” so he said about that time, “and do not yet understand the text ‘The just man liveth by faith.’”[1457]
Of his trusting belief in his personal salvation he admits, in 1543, that he did not feel it to be very steadfast, and that it still lagged behind that of ordinary believers. He speaks of a woman at Torgau who had told him that she looked upon herself as “lost,” and shut out from salvation, because she was unable to believe (i.e. trust). He had thereupon asked her whether she did not hold fast to the Creed, and when she assured him that she did he had said: “My good woman, go in God’s name! You believe more and better than I do.” “Yes, dear Dr. Jonas,” so he said, turning to his friend, “yes, if a man could verily believe it as it there stands, his heart would indeed jump for joy! That is certain.”[1458]
So strongly did he express himself on this point on May 6, 1540, that, taking the words as they stand, he wouldseemto deny his belief in Christ’s miracles and work. “I cannot believe it and yet I teach others. I know it is true, but I am unable to believe it. I think sometimes: ‘Sure enough you teach aright, for you are in the sacred ministry and are called, you are helpful to many and glorify Christ; for we do not preach Aristotle or Cæsar, but Jesus Christ.’ But when I consider my weakness, how I eat, drink, joke and am a merry man about the town, then I begin to doubt. Oh, if only a man could believe it!”[1459]These words were spoken on Ascension-Day, after Luther had expressed his marvel at the strong faith of the Apostles in the Divinity of Him Who was ascending into heaven. “Wonderful; I cannot understand it nor can I believe it, and yet all the Apostles believed.”[1460]“I am fond of Jonas [who was seated near him] but if he were to ascendinto heaven here and now, and disappear out of our sight, what should I think?”
“Oh, if only a man could believe it!”
It is evident that he did not wish by such words to give himself out as an unbeliever or a sceptic in religious matters. What he was painfully aware of was the fact that that strong, clear faith in the ordinary truths of revelation and matters of faith, which he himself was wont to depict as essential, was absent in his own case. His former violent struggles of conscience seem in later years to have been replaced by this uncomfortable feeling.
The depressing sense of the feebleness of his religious belief was not removed by the frequent references Luther was so fond of making in his old age to the coming of the Redeemer and Judge of the world, and to the nighness of the devil’s downfall, who is the Lord of this world.[1461]We know already the psychological reasons for the stress he lays on such expectations. Yet all the unnatural ardour he showed in voicing them could not disguise the fact that his faith lacked any real strength or fervour. Spiritual coldness could quite well co-exist with a virulent hatred of the devil and a longing desire for the end of the world.
“The devil is an evil spirit ... as I do not fail to realise day after day; for a man waxes cold, and the more so the longer he lives.” Thus to Count Albert of Mansfeld in 1542.[1462]—He was “in pain and very morose,” he tells Jonas in 1541, “feeling disgusted with everything, especially with his illnesses.”.[1463]In 1544, and frequently about that time, he declares that he was quite tired of the devil and of his struggles with him; his only wish was to see the “end of his raging,” and to “die a good and wholesome death.”[1464]“God Himself may see to my soul’s lodging”; He loved souls, says Luther, and it was a good thing that his salvation was not in his own hands, otherwise he “would soon be gobbled up by Satan”; but God’s care and the “many mansions” in His gift were a sufficient consolation (1539).[1465]
On one occasion, in 1542, he mentioned that, unless he had escaped from certain “thoughts and temptations,” he would have been drowned in them and would have long ago found himself in hell; for such “devilish thoughts” breed “desperate people,” and “contemners of God.”[1466]
“Though, towards the end of life, such temptations are wont to cease,” he says, in 1540, yet other inward worries remain: “I am often angry with myself because I find so much in me that is unclean. But what can I do? I cannot strip off my nature. Meanwhile Christ looks upon us as righteous because we desire to be righteous, abhor our uncleanliness, and love, and confess the Word.”[1467]—Others, like Spalatin, in their old age, felt the bite ofconscience more strongly than did Luther; they had not been through the same violent struggles and mental gymnastics as Luther, nor had they learnt how to suppress the voice from within. It was to Spalatin, then sunk in melancholy, that, in 1544, Luther addressed the words already quoted: He (Spalatin) was “too timid a sinner” (“nimis tener peccator”). “Unite yourself with us great and hardened sinners, in a believing trust in Christ!”[1468]
Many utterances and confidences of Luther’s still exist, about the meaning of which there can be no doubt, though it is difficult correctly to place them. Some of these concern the subject now under discussion; several may well date from Luther’s later years, and thus throw light on his interior in his old age. We shall give first of all his statements concerning St. Paul in their bearing upon himself.
Speaking once of a pet view of his in which he seems to have found great consolation, viz. that even Paul had not believed firmly (neque Paulum fortiter credidisse), Luther went so far as to question the apostle’s belief in the “crown of justice” which he professed to look for, as “laid up for him in heaven” (2 Tim. iv. 8). Jonas, who was present, had declared “he could not bestow any credence on this statement of Paul’s.” Luther replied: It is quite true that Paul did not believe it firmly, “for it was above him. I too am unable to believe as I preach, although they all think I believe these things firmly.” He goes on to allege the Divine Clemency, and jestingly says: Were we to fulfil the will of Godperfectlywe should be cheating God of His Godhead; and what would then become of the article of the forgiveness of sins?[1469]At any rate he would fain have believed his own doctrines more strongly and vividly.
“Temptations against the faith,” says Luther, “are St. Paul’s goad and sting of the flesh [2 Cor. xii. 7], a great skewer and roasting-spit which pierces right through both spirit and flesh, both body and soul.”[1470]—And elsewhere: “At times I think: I really do not know where I stand, whether I preach aright or not. This was also St. Paul’s temptation and martyrdom, which, asI believe, he found it hard to speak of to many.” Yet, so Luther opines, Paul sufficiently hinted at it in the words “I die daily” (1 Cor. xv. 31).—The fact is, the Apostle is far from attributing to himself doubts on the faith either here or elsewhere. Luther, however, would gladly have us believe, that, with his doubts, he had been through precisely that experience to which St. Paul refers when he says, “I die daily”; he, too, has his agonies, he, too, has descended into hell.[1471]Not merely in this does he resemble Paul, but also in his inability to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel: “Paul and I have never been able to manage this.”[1472]He saw also another point of similarity between himself and the Apostle of the Gentiles. For, like him, St. Paul, too, “had been much bothered by the objection, that, one should listen to the Fathers (cp. Rom. ix. 5) and not oppose the whole world single-handed.”[1473]Not Paul alone, according to Luther, but all the other Apostles too had been assailed by doubts.He was always consoled to find new and illustrious companions in his misery. Christ, he declares, had foretold this to the Apostles; He had also spoken to them of this sort of persecution: “Your conscience will grow weak so that you will often think: ‘Who knows whether I have been right? Alas, have I not gone too far?’ Thus in the eyes of the world and to your own conscience you will seem to be in the wrong”; it had, however, been the duty of the Holy Ghost to comfort the Apostles in all such trials.[1474]And did not “even the man Christ have His momentary failing in the Garden?”[1475]Did not Christ then confess: “‘I know not how I stand with God, or whether I am doing right or not.’ This occurred even in the case of Christ.”[1476]“All who are tempted must set Christ, Who also was tempted in everything, as a model before their eyes; but it was much harder for Him than for us and for me.”[1477]Luther fails to take into account the world-wide difference between the sadness of Christ, Who could never waver in the Truth, and his own doubts and wavering in the faith.“O, my God,” he said on another occasion, “the article on faith won’t go home; hence so many sad moods arise. Often I have to take myself to task for failing to master such moods when they come, I who have so often taught in lectures, sermons and writings how such temptations are to be overcome.”[1478]His pupil Mathesius relates the following in his sermons on Luther, the preface to the printed edition of which he wrote in 1565: “Antony Musa, pastor of Rochlitz, told me that he once complained bitterly to the Doctor of being unable to believe himselfwhat he preached to others. ‘Praise and thanks be to God,’ replied the Doctor, ‘that this also happens to others. I fancied it was true only in my case.’ All his life Musa never forgot this consolation.”[1479]So full of admiration for Luther was Mathesius, and probably so well schooled by his master in the theory and practice of a faith which has ever to strive after firmness, that he saw in this statement nothing at all unfavourable to his hero. On the contrary, he includes the story in a list of “all manner of wise sayings” which had fallen from the lips of Luther. He even assures us at the beginning of these notes that, “The man was full of grace and of the Holy Ghost, hence all who went to him for advice as to a prophet of God found what they sought.”[1480]Judging by this Mathesius must have been very easily satisfied in the matter of firmness of faith. Perhaps had his faith been stronger it would have fared better with him in the melancholy which came upon him towards the end of his life.[1481]“Ah,” said Dr. Martin, so we read elsewhere in Notes made by his pupils, “I used to believe every single thing that the Pope and the monks chose to say, but now I actually cannot believe even what Christ says, Who assuredly does not lie. This is very sad and distressing. Never mind, we must and will keep it for that Day.”[1482]—“When the words of the prophet Hosea, ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ set to music by Josquinus, were sung at Dr. Martin Luther’s table, the Doctor said to Dr. Jonas: ‘As little as you believe this singing to be good, so little do I believe theology to be true.... I do indeed love Christ, but my faith ought to be much stronger and warmer.”[1483]—“Many boast of having at their fingers’ ends the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, and I, wretch that I am, find so little comfort in the passion, resurrection, and forgiveness of sins! One thing indeed I can do, viz. eat our Lord God’s bread and drink His beer; but to take that far more necessary treasure which is the free forgiveness of sins, this I cannot succeed in doing.”[1484]
“Temptations against the faith,” says Luther, “are St. Paul’s goad and sting of the flesh [2 Cor. xii. 7], a great skewer and roasting-spit which pierces right through both spirit and flesh, both body and soul.”[1470]—And elsewhere: “At times I think: I really do not know where I stand, whether I preach aright or not. This was also St. Paul’s temptation and martyrdom, which, asI believe, he found it hard to speak of to many.” Yet, so Luther opines, Paul sufficiently hinted at it in the words “I die daily” (1 Cor. xv. 31).—The fact is, the Apostle is far from attributing to himself doubts on the faith either here or elsewhere. Luther, however, would gladly have us believe, that, with his doubts, he had been through precisely that experience to which St. Paul refers when he says, “I die daily”; he, too, has his agonies, he, too, has descended into hell.[1471]Not merely in this does he resemble Paul, but also in his inability to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel: “Paul and I have never been able to manage this.”[1472]He saw also another point of similarity between himself and the Apostle of the Gentiles. For, like him, St. Paul, too, “had been much bothered by the objection, that, one should listen to the Fathers (cp. Rom. ix. 5) and not oppose the whole world single-handed.”[1473]
Not Paul alone, according to Luther, but all the other Apostles too had been assailed by doubts.
He was always consoled to find new and illustrious companions in his misery. Christ, he declares, had foretold this to the Apostles; He had also spoken to them of this sort of persecution: “Your conscience will grow weak so that you will often think: ‘Who knows whether I have been right? Alas, have I not gone too far?’ Thus in the eyes of the world and to your own conscience you will seem to be in the wrong”; it had, however, been the duty of the Holy Ghost to comfort the Apostles in all such trials.[1474]
And did not “even the man Christ have His momentary failing in the Garden?”[1475]Did not Christ then confess: “‘I know not how I stand with God, or whether I am doing right or not.’ This occurred even in the case of Christ.”[1476]“All who are tempted must set Christ, Who also was tempted in everything, as a model before their eyes; but it was much harder for Him than for us and for me.”[1477]Luther fails to take into account the world-wide difference between the sadness of Christ, Who could never waver in the Truth, and his own doubts and wavering in the faith.
“O, my God,” he said on another occasion, “the article on faith won’t go home; hence so many sad moods arise. Often I have to take myself to task for failing to master such moods when they come, I who have so often taught in lectures, sermons and writings how such temptations are to be overcome.”[1478]
His pupil Mathesius relates the following in his sermons on Luther, the preface to the printed edition of which he wrote in 1565: “Antony Musa, pastor of Rochlitz, told me that he once complained bitterly to the Doctor of being unable to believe himselfwhat he preached to others. ‘Praise and thanks be to God,’ replied the Doctor, ‘that this also happens to others. I fancied it was true only in my case.’ All his life Musa never forgot this consolation.”[1479]So full of admiration for Luther was Mathesius, and probably so well schooled by his master in the theory and practice of a faith which has ever to strive after firmness, that he saw in this statement nothing at all unfavourable to his hero. On the contrary, he includes the story in a list of “all manner of wise sayings” which had fallen from the lips of Luther. He even assures us at the beginning of these notes that, “The man was full of grace and of the Holy Ghost, hence all who went to him for advice as to a prophet of God found what they sought.”[1480]Judging by this Mathesius must have been very easily satisfied in the matter of firmness of faith. Perhaps had his faith been stronger it would have fared better with him in the melancholy which came upon him towards the end of his life.[1481]
“Ah,” said Dr. Martin, so we read elsewhere in Notes made by his pupils, “I used to believe every single thing that the Pope and the monks chose to say, but now I actually cannot believe even what Christ says, Who assuredly does not lie. This is very sad and distressing. Never mind, we must and will keep it for that Day.”[1482]—“When the words of the prophet Hosea, ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ set to music by Josquinus, were sung at Dr. Martin Luther’s table, the Doctor said to Dr. Jonas: ‘As little as you believe this singing to be good, so little do I believe theology to be true.... I do indeed love Christ, but my faith ought to be much stronger and warmer.”[1483]—“Many boast of having at their fingers’ ends the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, and I, wretch that I am, find so little comfort in the passion, resurrection, and forgiveness of sins! One thing indeed I can do, viz. eat our Lord God’s bread and drink His beer; but to take that far more necessary treasure which is the free forgiveness of sins, this I cannot succeed in doing.”[1484]
Not merely does he ascribe his own experiences to the first followers of Christ, viz. to Paul and the other Apostles, but again and again he seeks to make them out to be an evil common to all, an heritage of all Christians, nay, something actually involved in the idea of faith. Often he speaks of faith as of something altogether mystical and intangible of the presence of which no man can be conscious. Faith, he thinks, might well not be present at all just when a man fancies he possesses it; again, it might exist in the man who thought he lacked it; or “at any rate such is the case intimes of stress and temptation; for it often happens with faith that he who fancies he believes, believes nothing at all, while the man who thinks he believes nothing and lies in despair, really believes the most.... He who has it, has it. We must believe, but we neither must nor can know it for certain” [i.e. whether we really believe]. Thus in 1528.[1485]Needless to say this theory of his was far removed from the strong, simple and perfectly conscious faith of so many thousands even of the humblest followers of the olden religion.
Some years before this, in a work intended for all, he had made a practical application to himself of this curious doctrine of the frequent impossibility of saying whether one really has the faith. Owing to his temptations he admitted that he was not qualified to be reckoned an authority on this question, nor “even a disciple, much less a master.”
“Whoever boasts,” he says in his work on Psalm cxvii., “that he knows very well we must be saved without our works by the grace of God, does not know what he is saying”; “it is an art which keeps us ever schoolboys,” a scent after which we must “sniff and run.” “Let anyone who chooses take me as an example of this, which I admit myself to be. Several times, when I was not thinking of this cardinal doctrine, the devil has caught me and plagued me with texts from Scripture till heaven and earth seemed too tight to hold me. Then human works and laws would seem quite right and not an error would be noticed in the whole of Popery. In short, no one but Luther had ever erred; and all my best works, doctrines, sermons, books were condemned.... You hear now how I am confessing to you and admitting what the devil was able to do against Luther, who of all men ought surely to have been a very adept in this art. For he has preached, told, written, spoken, sung and read so much about it and yet remains a tyro in it, and is at times not even a disciple, much less a master.”[1486]
What he is trying to impress on the reader is, that evenif you “can do all things,” take care that “your art does not fail you.”
Thus he did not enjoy the happiness which, according to the testimony of Catholics both learned and unlearned, was shared by all the faithful so long as they paid attention to their religious duties. Guided from their youth by the hand of the Church they were acquainted with no fears and uncertainties, for, thanks to her divine commission and gift of infallibility, she could make up for the insufficiency of human knowledge. Catholics did not look for salvation in a blind and unattainable trust in an imputation of Christ’s righteousness.
Their attitude indeed presents a striking contrast to Luther’s restless struggle after faith.
Not only in the last cold, barren years of his life but even at an earlier period we notice in him a tendency to regard this clutching at faith as the one great matter. In some quite early statements he depicts himself as on the look-out for a believing trust, as violently striving to clasp it to his breast, and, generally, as making this the end of all religious effort.
Even in 1517 in his unpublished Commentary on Hebrews we find a remarkable and oft-repeated admonition which bears on the subject in hand. He sees the troubled conscience “in fear and oppressed whichever way it turns”; hence it must learn to embrace faith in the power of Christ’s blood: “By faith conscience is cleansed and put to rest.” It is this faith in the blood of Christ which we must seek with all our powers to reach. It follows, “that the best of contemplating the sufferings of Christ is that it awakens in the soul this faith or believing trust.” “The oftener he dwells on the Passion, the more strongly will every man believe that the blood of Christ was shed for his own sins. This is ‘to eat and drink spiritually,’ i.e. to feed on Christ in faith and thus become one body with Him.”[1487]On the other hand, the teaching of antiquity concerning meditation on Christ’s Passion and likewise the hints contained in the language of the Church’s liturgy, do not stop short at such an arousing of faith. Taking for granted the Christian’s faith, what they seek to awaken is a real love; meditation on the sufferings and death of our Lord was above all to stimulate the faithful to feelings of loving gratitude, holy compassion and self-sacrifice; in wholesome compunction people were wont, by dwelling on the sufferings of the innocent Lamb, to rouse themselves to a sense of shame, to a holy desire to imitate Christ by good works of self-conquest and by zeal for souls. The ancient hymn, the “Stabat Mater,” which is at the same time so profound and wonderful a prayer, says never a word of faith, precious as this grace is, but, taking it for granted as the groundwork, it teaches us to pray: “Fac ut tecum lugeam—fac ut ardeat cor meum in amando Christum Deum—passionis fac consortem,” etc. This is surely something higher than that mere appropriation of trusting faith in which Luther sums up all the heights and depths of our union with Christ.Luther, in his exaggerated language, declares that it was something “almost Gentile” for a man when contemplating the Passion of Christ to “strive after anything else but faith”; this statement, however, he refutes in practice by himself occasionally introducing other good and moral reflexions on the Passion, though he is always chiefly concerned with its bearing on his own peculiar view of faith.He was too ready to confuse the sentiment of faith with actual faith.Religious writers before Luther’s day, when dealing with distrust and unbelief, had been careful to distinguish between the involuntary acts of man’s lower nature which do not rise above the realm of feeling, and those which have the definite consent of the will and which alone they regarded as grievous sins against faith or the virtue of hope. With Luther everything is sin; he bewails the actual distrust, and real weakness of faith springing from a fault of the will; but, according to him, the involuntary movements of our corrupt nature also deserve God’s signal anger; original sin whereby we bring this upon ourselves must daily be cloaked over by means of the faith wrought by God. But since it is God alone Who works this faith Luther might well have excused himself even had he lost the faith completely. When he is upset and begins to reproach himself as he often does on account of the weakness of his faith, he is really saying good-bye to his own teaching and again reverting to the standpoint of the olden faith, for only the assumption of man’s free-will can justify self-reproaches.“Sin” and “the devil” are made to bear the blame for the deeds of man who lacks free-will.“The sin which still persists in us,” says Luther, in his last sermon at Eisleben,[1488]“compels us not to believe.” “Because we have it daily before our eyes and at our door, it goes in at one ear and out at the other.” “This is what the rude, savage folk do who care nought for God and place no trust in Him; we, the best of Christians, also do the same.” “We are too prone to obey original sin, the taint of evil which yet sticks to our flesh, and although we would willingly believe, and are fond of hearing and reading God’s Word, still we cannot rise as high as we ought.”[1489]Before this he had said: “If a man were to ask you: Good fellow, do you believe that the Son of God ... died for your sins? and that it is really true? You would have to say—did you wish to answer right and truthfully and as you really feel—and confess with dismay, that you cannot after all believe it so strongly and indubitably.... You would have to say.... Alas, I see and feel that I do not ... believe as I ought.”[1490]Later he returns to this thought which evidently was much before his mind: “Although we cannot now believe so strongly as we should, still God has patience with us.”[1491]Yet “we ought to go on and believe more firmly and be angered with ourselves and say: Heavenly Father, is it true that I must believe that Thou didst send Thine only-begotten Son into the world?... And when I hear that there is no doubt, then I shall go on to say: Well, for this shall I thank God all the days of my life and praise and extol Him.”[1492]In reality, according to him, we should “run and jump for joy” because by faith “we hear the Lord Christ speaking.” “The life of the Christian ought, by rights, to be all joy and delight, but there are few who really feel this joy.” The martyrs, with their glad, nay, even jubilant confession of faith amidst their torments, are to him an example of a sound, hardy, unshaken faith, for in them the Word was strong and the teaching of the Gospel all-powerful.[1493]But, as he had remarked in another of hisEisleben sermons, “We, owing to the weakness of our faith, feel doubts and fears, as by our very nature we cannot help doing”; yet we must “have wisdom enough again and again to run to Christ and cry aloud and awaken Him with our shouts and prayers.”[1494]Luther’s farewell address where these words occur furnishes at the same time an example of how, throughout his life, when assailed by doubts and fears, or when the Evangel was in danger, as it then was owing to the Emperor’s warlike preparations, he carried out his injunction of “running to Christ.” He seeks to pour into his faith a little of the strengthening cordial of defiance, and calls upon all his followers to do the same: “Christ says.... Obey me; if you have My Word, hold fast to it.... Leave Pope, Emperor, the mighty and learned to be as wise as ever they please, but do not you follow them.... Do not that which even the angels in heaven may not do.... The poor, wretched creatures, the Pope, Emperor, kings and all the sects fear not to presume this; but God has set His Son at His right hand and said, Thou art My Son, I have given Thee all the kings and the whole world for Thy possession, etc. To Him you kings and lords must hearken.” “I will give you courage,” Christ says, “to laugh when the Turk, Pope and Emperor rage and storm their very worst; come ye only to me. Though you be burdened, faced by death or martyrdom, though Pope and Turk and Emperor attack you, fear ye not.”[1495]It is, in fact, quite characteristic of his faith, that, when in difficulties, the more he becomes conscious of its lack of theological foundation and of its purely emotional character, the more he arms himself with the weapons of defiant violence. On the one hand he can say, as he does in the Table-Talk of Cordatus: “Had I such great faith as I ought to have, I should long ago have slain the Turk and curbed every tyrant.”[1496]“I have indeed tormented myself greatly about them. But my faith is wanting.” And yet on another occasion, with a sadness which does him credit, he expresses his envy of the “pure and simple faith” of the children, and laments: “We old fools torment ourselves and make our hearts heavy with our disputations on the Word, whether this be true, or whether that be possible.”[1497]
Even in 1517 in his unpublished Commentary on Hebrews we find a remarkable and oft-repeated admonition which bears on the subject in hand. He sees the troubled conscience “in fear and oppressed whichever way it turns”; hence it must learn to embrace faith in the power of Christ’s blood: “By faith conscience is cleansed and put to rest.” It is this faith in the blood of Christ which we must seek with all our powers to reach. It follows, “that the best of contemplating the sufferings of Christ is that it awakens in the soul this faith or believing trust.” “The oftener he dwells on the Passion, the more strongly will every man believe that the blood of Christ was shed for his own sins. This is ‘to eat and drink spiritually,’ i.e. to feed on Christ in faith and thus become one body with Him.”[1487]
On the other hand, the teaching of antiquity concerning meditation on Christ’s Passion and likewise the hints contained in the language of the Church’s liturgy, do not stop short at such an arousing of faith. Taking for granted the Christian’s faith, what they seek to awaken is a real love; meditation on the sufferings and death of our Lord was above all to stimulate the faithful to feelings of loving gratitude, holy compassion and self-sacrifice; in wholesome compunction people were wont, by dwelling on the sufferings of the innocent Lamb, to rouse themselves to a sense of shame, to a holy desire to imitate Christ by good works of self-conquest and by zeal for souls. The ancient hymn, the “Stabat Mater,” which is at the same time so profound and wonderful a prayer, says never a word of faith, precious as this grace is, but, taking it for granted as the groundwork, it teaches us to pray: “Fac ut tecum lugeam—fac ut ardeat cor meum in amando Christum Deum—passionis fac consortem,” etc. This is surely something higher than that mere appropriation of trusting faith in which Luther sums up all the heights and depths of our union with Christ.
Luther, in his exaggerated language, declares that it was something “almost Gentile” for a man when contemplating the Passion of Christ to “strive after anything else but faith”; this statement, however, he refutes in practice by himself occasionally introducing other good and moral reflexions on the Passion, though he is always chiefly concerned with its bearing on his own peculiar view of faith.
He was too ready to confuse the sentiment of faith with actual faith.
Religious writers before Luther’s day, when dealing with distrust and unbelief, had been careful to distinguish between the involuntary acts of man’s lower nature which do not rise above the realm of feeling, and those which have the definite consent of the will and which alone they regarded as grievous sins against faith or the virtue of hope. With Luther everything is sin; he bewails the actual distrust, and real weakness of faith springing from a fault of the will; but, according to him, the involuntary movements of our corrupt nature also deserve God’s signal anger; original sin whereby we bring this upon ourselves must daily be cloaked over by means of the faith wrought by God. But since it is God alone Who works this faith Luther might well have excused himself even had he lost the faith completely. When he is upset and begins to reproach himself as he often does on account of the weakness of his faith, he is really saying good-bye to his own teaching and again reverting to the standpoint of the olden faith, for only the assumption of man’s free-will can justify self-reproaches.
“Sin” and “the devil” are made to bear the blame for the deeds of man who lacks free-will.
“The sin which still persists in us,” says Luther, in his last sermon at Eisleben,[1488]“compels us not to believe.” “Because we have it daily before our eyes and at our door, it goes in at one ear and out at the other.” “This is what the rude, savage folk do who care nought for God and place no trust in Him; we, the best of Christians, also do the same.” “We are too prone to obey original sin, the taint of evil which yet sticks to our flesh, and although we would willingly believe, and are fond of hearing and reading God’s Word, still we cannot rise as high as we ought.”[1489]Before this he had said: “If a man were to ask you: Good fellow, do you believe that the Son of God ... died for your sins? and that it is really true? You would have to say—did you wish to answer right and truthfully and as you really feel—and confess with dismay, that you cannot after all believe it so strongly and indubitably.... You would have to say.... Alas, I see and feel that I do not ... believe as I ought.”[1490]Later he returns to this thought which evidently was much before his mind: “Although we cannot now believe so strongly as we should, still God has patience with us.”[1491]Yet “we ought to go on and believe more firmly and be angered with ourselves and say: Heavenly Father, is it true that I must believe that Thou didst send Thine only-begotten Son into the world?... And when I hear that there is no doubt, then I shall go on to say: Well, for this shall I thank God all the days of my life and praise and extol Him.”[1492]
In reality, according to him, we should “run and jump for joy” because by faith “we hear the Lord Christ speaking.” “The life of the Christian ought, by rights, to be all joy and delight, but there are few who really feel this joy.” The martyrs, with their glad, nay, even jubilant confession of faith amidst their torments, are to him an example of a sound, hardy, unshaken faith, for in them the Word was strong and the teaching of the Gospel all-powerful.[1493]But, as he had remarked in another of hisEisleben sermons, “We, owing to the weakness of our faith, feel doubts and fears, as by our very nature we cannot help doing”; yet we must “have wisdom enough again and again to run to Christ and cry aloud and awaken Him with our shouts and prayers.”[1494]
Luther’s farewell address where these words occur furnishes at the same time an example of how, throughout his life, when assailed by doubts and fears, or when the Evangel was in danger, as it then was owing to the Emperor’s warlike preparations, he carried out his injunction of “running to Christ.” He seeks to pour into his faith a little of the strengthening cordial of defiance, and calls upon all his followers to do the same: “Christ says.... Obey me; if you have My Word, hold fast to it.... Leave Pope, Emperor, the mighty and learned to be as wise as ever they please, but do not you follow them.... Do not that which even the angels in heaven may not do.... The poor, wretched creatures, the Pope, Emperor, kings and all the sects fear not to presume this; but God has set His Son at His right hand and said, Thou art My Son, I have given Thee all the kings and the whole world for Thy possession, etc. To Him you kings and lords must hearken.” “I will give you courage,” Christ says, “to laugh when the Turk, Pope and Emperor rage and storm their very worst; come ye only to me. Though you be burdened, faced by death or martyrdom, though Pope and Turk and Emperor attack you, fear ye not.”[1495]
It is, in fact, quite characteristic of his faith, that, when in difficulties, the more he becomes conscious of its lack of theological foundation and of its purely emotional character, the more he arms himself with the weapons of defiant violence. On the one hand he can say, as he does in the Table-Talk of Cordatus: “Had I such great faith as I ought to have, I should long ago have slain the Turk and curbed every tyrant.”[1496]“I have indeed tormented myself greatly about them. But my faith is wanting.” And yet on another occasion, with a sadness which does him credit, he expresses his envy of the “pure and simple faith” of the children, and laments: “We old fools torment ourselves and make our hearts heavy with our disputations on the Word, whether this be true, or whether that be possible.”[1497]
Certain controversialists have alleged that Luther came outspokenly to disown his doctrine and his work; they tell us that he expressed his regret for ever having undertaken the religious innovation. Words are even quoted as hiswhich furnish “the tersest condemnation of the Reformation by the Reformer himself.”
No genuine utterances of his to this effect exist.
The first abjuration of the whole of his life’s work is supposed to be contained in the statement: “Well, since I have begun it I will carry it through, but, not for the whole world would I begin it again now.”[1498]But why was he disinclined to begin again anew? Not by a single word does Luther give us to understand the reason to be that he regarded what he had done as reprehensible; on the contrary, he explains that he would not begin it again “on account of the great and excessive cares and anxieties this office brings with it.” That he by no means regarded the office itself as blameworthy is plain from the words that immediately follow: “If I looked to Him Who called me to it, then I would not even wish not to have begun it; nor do I now desire to have any other God.” And before this, in the same passage, extolling his office, he had said: Moses had besought God as many as six times to excuse him from so arduous a mission. “Yet he had to go. And in the same way God led me into it. Had I known about it beforehand He would have had difficulty in inducing me to undertake it.” It was Luther’s wont thus to represent the beginning of his undertaking as having been entirely directed by God. He is fond of saying that he had foreseen neither its final aims nor its immense difficulties and then to proceed: My ignorance was a piece of luck and a dispensation of providence, for, otherwise, affrighted by the dangers, I should have drawn back from my labours. Here his idea is much the same, and is as far removed as possible from any self-condemnation. Of course the question, whether his idea that God alone was responsible for his work was based on truth, is quite another one.The second utterance of Luther’s which has been brought forward against him merely voices anew his disappointment with this wicked world and his complaint of the cold way in which people had received his Evangel though it is the Word of God: “Had I known when I first began to write what I have now seen and experienced, namely that people would be so hostile to the Word of God and would so violently oppose it, I would assuredly have held my tongue, for I should never have been so bold as to attack and anger the Pope and indeed all mankind.”[1499]Here, moreover, we have little more than a rhetorical exaggeration of the difficulties he had overcome.Nor is it hard to estimate at its true value a third utterance wrung from him: “I can never rid myself of the thought and wish, that I had better never have begun this business.”[1500]The feeling which prompted this deliverance is plainly expressed in what follows immediately: “Item, I would rather be dead than witness such contempt of God’s Word and of His faithfulservants.” Here again he is simply giving vent to his ill-temper, that his preaching of the divine truths should receive such scant attention; not in the least can this be read as an admission of the falsehood of his mission.Two other curious statements which have further been cited, besides having been spoken under the influence of the disappointment above referred to, also bear the stamp of his peculiar rhetoric which alone can explain their tenor. The context at any rate makes it impossible to find in them any repudiation of his previous conduct.One of these sayings of Luther’s does indeed ring strange: “The tyrants in the Papacy” “plagued the world with their violence”; but the people, now that they have been delivered from them, refuse to lend an ear to those who preach “at God’s command,” but prefer to run after seducers. “Hence I am going to help to set up again the Papacy and raise the monks on high, for the world cannot get along without such clowns and comedians.”—The truth is, however, that Luther never seriously contemplated carrying out such a threat or countenancing the rule of “Antichrist.” People simply misapprehended him when they read into this jest of his a real intention to re-establish “the Papal rule.”In the other saying brought up against him he states: “Had I now to begin to preach the Evangel, I would set about it otherwise.” Here he is referring to a preceding remark, viz. that a preacher must have great experience of the world. He then proceeds: “I would leave the great, rude masses under the dominion of the Pope, for they are no better off for the Evangel but only abuse its freedom. But I should preach the Evangel and its comfort to the troubled in spirit and the meek, to the despondent and the simple-minded.” A preacher, he declares, could not paint the world in colours bad enough, seeing that it belongs altogether to the devil; he must not be such a “simple sheep” as he himself (Luther) had been at the outset when he had expected all “at once to flock to the Evangel.”[1501]—Thus there is again no question of any repentant condemnation of the whole work of his lifetime. He clothes in his strange “rhetoric” an idea which is indeed peculiar to him, viz. the special value of his Evangel for those troubled in mind. It is his sad experiences, his personal embitterment and also a certain irritation with his own party that lead him here to lay such stress on the preference to be shown to troubled consciences, even to the abandonment of all others. Of his own exaggeration he himself was perfectly aware, for he also makes far too much of his simplicity and lack of prudence. The resemblance between what we have just heard him say and his theory of the Church Apart of the True Believers, can hardly escape the reader.[1502]The wish Luther is supposed to have expressed, viz. never to have been born, and some other strong things to which he gavevent, when in a state of depression, have likewise been quoted in support of the assertion that he himself branded his work “more cruelly than any foe dared to do.” If, however, we take the statements in their setting we find they have quite a different meaning. As an instance we may quote one passage from a tract of 1539 “Against the Antinomians”[1503]where, apparently, he curses the day of his birth and regrets that all his writings had not been destroyed. Alluding to Johann Agricola, an opponent within the camp, he writes: “I might in good sooth expect my own followers to leave me in peace, having quite enough to do with the Papists. One might well cry out with Job and Jeremias: ‘Would that I had never been born!’ and in the same way I am tempted to say: ‘Would I had never come with my books,’ I care nothing for them, I should not mind had they all been destroyed and did the works of such great minds [as Agricola] outsell them in all the booksellers’ shops—as they would like, being so desirous of being fed up with honour.”Here both his good wishes to his adversary and his repudiation of his own books are the merest irony, though, reading between the lines, we get a glimpse of his pain and annoyance at the hostility he encountered. In the same vein of mingled grief and sarcasm he continues: Christ too (like himself) had complained through the Prophet (Isaias xlix. 4): “I have laboured in vain”; but it was plain (so little does he condemn his own preaching), that “the devil is master of the world” since the Gospel of the “beloved master of the house,” which Luther taught, was so violently attacked. “We must and shall strive and suffer,” so he cries, “for it cannot fare better with us than with the dear prophets and apostles who also had to bear these things.” Seeing that, throughout the tract, he is inveighing against “devilish” deformations of his doctrine, is it likely that here he is cursing the day of his birth out of remorse for his teaching?[1504]An old story that has repeatedly found its way even in recent times into popular writings tells how Luther, in conversation, sadly admitted to Catherine that “heaven is not for us.”“One fine evening,” so the tale goes, “Luther was in the garden with Catherine and both were looking up at the starlit sky. ‘Oh, how beautiful heaven is,’ Catherine exclaimed. ‘Yes,’ said Luther ruefully, ‘but I fear it will not be ours.’ ‘Will not be ours?’ cried Catherine, ‘then in God’s name let us retrace our steps.’ ‘It is too late,’ replied Luther, and went back into his study with a heavy heart.”A recent work against Luther quotes in support of the legend a modern Danish writer, Pastor Stub. It would have been better to cite J. M. Audin, an uncritical French author of a “Vie de M. Luther,” who helped to spread the story.[1505]Audin, on his side,refers to George Iwanek, S. J.(† 1693), who relates it in his “Norma Vitæ”[1506]; also to Johannes Kraus, S. J., author of a rather credulous polemical work entitled “Ovicula ex lutheranismo redux.”[1507]Kraus certainly took it from Iwanek, but from what source the latter had it we do not know. He mentions no authority and probably took the legend on hearsay and gave it too ready credence. As Luther seems occasionally to have said his night prayers in the open air, and as he frequently enough admits his struggles of conscience, the two together may have given rise to the legend.
The first abjuration of the whole of his life’s work is supposed to be contained in the statement: “Well, since I have begun it I will carry it through, but, not for the whole world would I begin it again now.”[1498]But why was he disinclined to begin again anew? Not by a single word does Luther give us to understand the reason to be that he regarded what he had done as reprehensible; on the contrary, he explains that he would not begin it again “on account of the great and excessive cares and anxieties this office brings with it.” That he by no means regarded the office itself as blameworthy is plain from the words that immediately follow: “If I looked to Him Who called me to it, then I would not even wish not to have begun it; nor do I now desire to have any other God.” And before this, in the same passage, extolling his office, he had said: Moses had besought God as many as six times to excuse him from so arduous a mission. “Yet he had to go. And in the same way God led me into it. Had I known about it beforehand He would have had difficulty in inducing me to undertake it.” It was Luther’s wont thus to represent the beginning of his undertaking as having been entirely directed by God. He is fond of saying that he had foreseen neither its final aims nor its immense difficulties and then to proceed: My ignorance was a piece of luck and a dispensation of providence, for, otherwise, affrighted by the dangers, I should have drawn back from my labours. Here his idea is much the same, and is as far removed as possible from any self-condemnation. Of course the question, whether his idea that God alone was responsible for his work was based on truth, is quite another one.
The second utterance of Luther’s which has been brought forward against him merely voices anew his disappointment with this wicked world and his complaint of the cold way in which people had received his Evangel though it is the Word of God: “Had I known when I first began to write what I have now seen and experienced, namely that people would be so hostile to the Word of God and would so violently oppose it, I would assuredly have held my tongue, for I should never have been so bold as to attack and anger the Pope and indeed all mankind.”[1499]Here, moreover, we have little more than a rhetorical exaggeration of the difficulties he had overcome.
Nor is it hard to estimate at its true value a third utterance wrung from him: “I can never rid myself of the thought and wish, that I had better never have begun this business.”[1500]The feeling which prompted this deliverance is plainly expressed in what follows immediately: “Item, I would rather be dead than witness such contempt of God’s Word and of His faithfulservants.” Here again he is simply giving vent to his ill-temper, that his preaching of the divine truths should receive such scant attention; not in the least can this be read as an admission of the falsehood of his mission.
Two other curious statements which have further been cited, besides having been spoken under the influence of the disappointment above referred to, also bear the stamp of his peculiar rhetoric which alone can explain their tenor. The context at any rate makes it impossible to find in them any repudiation of his previous conduct.
One of these sayings of Luther’s does indeed ring strange: “The tyrants in the Papacy” “plagued the world with their violence”; but the people, now that they have been delivered from them, refuse to lend an ear to those who preach “at God’s command,” but prefer to run after seducers. “Hence I am going to help to set up again the Papacy and raise the monks on high, for the world cannot get along without such clowns and comedians.”—The truth is, however, that Luther never seriously contemplated carrying out such a threat or countenancing the rule of “Antichrist.” People simply misapprehended him when they read into this jest of his a real intention to re-establish “the Papal rule.”
In the other saying brought up against him he states: “Had I now to begin to preach the Evangel, I would set about it otherwise.” Here he is referring to a preceding remark, viz. that a preacher must have great experience of the world. He then proceeds: “I would leave the great, rude masses under the dominion of the Pope, for they are no better off for the Evangel but only abuse its freedom. But I should preach the Evangel and its comfort to the troubled in spirit and the meek, to the despondent and the simple-minded.” A preacher, he declares, could not paint the world in colours bad enough, seeing that it belongs altogether to the devil; he must not be such a “simple sheep” as he himself (Luther) had been at the outset when he had expected all “at once to flock to the Evangel.”[1501]—Thus there is again no question of any repentant condemnation of the whole work of his lifetime. He clothes in his strange “rhetoric” an idea which is indeed peculiar to him, viz. the special value of his Evangel for those troubled in mind. It is his sad experiences, his personal embitterment and also a certain irritation with his own party that lead him here to lay such stress on the preference to be shown to troubled consciences, even to the abandonment of all others. Of his own exaggeration he himself was perfectly aware, for he also makes far too much of his simplicity and lack of prudence. The resemblance between what we have just heard him say and his theory of the Church Apart of the True Believers, can hardly escape the reader.[1502]
The wish Luther is supposed to have expressed, viz. never to have been born, and some other strong things to which he gavevent, when in a state of depression, have likewise been quoted in support of the assertion that he himself branded his work “more cruelly than any foe dared to do.” If, however, we take the statements in their setting we find they have quite a different meaning. As an instance we may quote one passage from a tract of 1539 “Against the Antinomians”[1503]where, apparently, he curses the day of his birth and regrets that all his writings had not been destroyed. Alluding to Johann Agricola, an opponent within the camp, he writes: “I might in good sooth expect my own followers to leave me in peace, having quite enough to do with the Papists. One might well cry out with Job and Jeremias: ‘Would that I had never been born!’ and in the same way I am tempted to say: ‘Would I had never come with my books,’ I care nothing for them, I should not mind had they all been destroyed and did the works of such great minds [as Agricola] outsell them in all the booksellers’ shops—as they would like, being so desirous of being fed up with honour.”
Here both his good wishes to his adversary and his repudiation of his own books are the merest irony, though, reading between the lines, we get a glimpse of his pain and annoyance at the hostility he encountered. In the same vein of mingled grief and sarcasm he continues: Christ too (like himself) had complained through the Prophet (Isaias xlix. 4): “I have laboured in vain”; but it was plain (so little does he condemn his own preaching), that “the devil is master of the world” since the Gospel of the “beloved master of the house,” which Luther taught, was so violently attacked. “We must and shall strive and suffer,” so he cries, “for it cannot fare better with us than with the dear prophets and apostles who also had to bear these things.” Seeing that, throughout the tract, he is inveighing against “devilish” deformations of his doctrine, is it likely that here he is cursing the day of his birth out of remorse for his teaching?[1504]
An old story that has repeatedly found its way even in recent times into popular writings tells how Luther, in conversation, sadly admitted to Catherine that “heaven is not for us.”
“One fine evening,” so the tale goes, “Luther was in the garden with Catherine and both were looking up at the starlit sky. ‘Oh, how beautiful heaven is,’ Catherine exclaimed. ‘Yes,’ said Luther ruefully, ‘but I fear it will not be ours.’ ‘Will not be ours?’ cried Catherine, ‘then in God’s name let us retrace our steps.’ ‘It is too late,’ replied Luther, and went back into his study with a heavy heart.”
A recent work against Luther quotes in support of the legend a modern Danish writer, Pastor Stub. It would have been better to cite J. M. Audin, an uncritical French author of a “Vie de M. Luther,” who helped to spread the story.[1505]Audin, on his side,refers to George Iwanek, S. J.(† 1693), who relates it in his “Norma Vitæ”[1506]; also to Johannes Kraus, S. J., author of a rather credulous polemical work entitled “Ovicula ex lutheranismo redux.”[1507]Kraus certainly took it from Iwanek, but from what source the latter had it we do not know. He mentions no authority and probably took the legend on hearsay and gave it too ready credence. As Luther seems occasionally to have said his night prayers in the open air, and as he frequently enough admits his struggles of conscience, the two together may have given rise to the legend.
Far from being sorry for the work he had undertaken Luther, on the contrary, is ever throwing on the devil the blame for all its drawbacks. He it is who has to bear the blame for Luther’s own wretchedness, for inward wavering no less than for the lack of order, faith and morals among the Evangelical preachers and laity. He so works upon me “that I sometimes believe, and sometimes do not.”[1508]He could not view Satan’s raging as of small account; it was far more to be dreaded than all the persecution of men. “You see from my books what scorn I have for those men who withstand me. I look upon them as fools”; even the lawyers I am ready to defy; “but when these fellows, the evil spirits, come, then the congregation must back me up in the fight,” for then the devil, the very “Lord of the world,” is entering the lists against me.[1509]A glance at what has gone before shows how these “combats” must be understood.
The tone he adopts, though frequently humorous and satirical, does not conceal the deep depression which unquestionably underlies many of his utterances.
Such depression would quite well explain passing fits of real sorrow for all he had done. But that he really felt such sorrow is not sufficiently attested, so that all one can say is, that the ground for such a feeling of remorse was there.A discouraging sense of the instability of his doctrine and “reformation” might well have aroused contrition, for Luther himself saw only too plainly, as Döllinger rightly remarks, that, though he was strong enough to bring about an apostasy from the ancient Church yet he was powerless to effect a moral regeneration, or even to preserve religious order.[1510]Döllinger adds very truly: The reasons for his doubts were, “first of all the recognition of the evil effects produced by his doctrine, then the consciousness of having cut himself adrift from the Church for the sake of a new doctrine previously unknown, and lastly the inward contradictions from which his doctrinal system suffered and the impossibility of squaring it with the many Bible passages which embody or presuppose a contrary doctrine.”[1511]
The words “agonies” and “nocturnal combats” which Luther so often used to describe his struggles of conscience remain to testify to their severity.
In the years immediately preceding Luther’s death, these seem to have become less violent. Remorse of conscience, as experience teaches, however great it may at one period have been, can in progress of time be lulled to rest. We may quote in this connection the words of one of the most highly esteemed of the older Catholic spiritual guides, without however applying them unconditionally to Luther, as it is always difficult to gauge the extent and working of inward prejudice in the various stages of a man’s mental growth, particularly in the case of such a man as Luther. “Sometimes God withdraws himself from the soul,” writes this author, “on account of secret grievous sins which have been committed from culpable ignorance, or from that ignorance which, at the instigation of the Evil One, seeks to hide itself beneath a mantle of virtue. God then departs from the man, though the latter is not aware of it, and may remain unaware for the rest of his life until the night of death comes. The deluded man fancies he possesses God, but, to his infinite pain and loss, ultimately finds that he has been all the while without Him. In the Book of Proverbs (xiv. 12) it is written: ‘There is a way which seemeth just to a man, but the ends thereof lead to death.’”[1512]
Who would venture to determine in Luther’s case when exactly he first clearly realised his moral responsibility, and when exactly he succeeded in forming himself a false conscience? Though on the one hand it is certain to every Catholic that at first, and for a considerable while, his attack on the Church was extremely culpable, still one cannot close one’s eyes to the fact that Luther himself was convinced that he was in the right, and that this conviction grew with advancing years. (See vol. iv., p. 306 f.) It was, however, of his own free-will that he persisted in the unhappy attitude of apostasy and revolt which had become a habit with him and thus, in itself, his burden of moral responsibility remained.[1513]