CHAPTER VI.
LUTHER.—ERASMUS.—SIR T. MORE.—NEW TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.—DEMAND FOR IT.
Such was the condition of England in the fifteenth century: the minds of men generally alienated from the church of Rome by reason of its corruption; their religious knowledge improved, and improving daily, by the wider diffusion of the Scriptures in the mother-tongue, to which the art of printing now so effectually contributed; and a sect, neither few in numbers, nor wanting in activity or courage, in the heart of the kingdom, ready to profit by any occasion which might offer of opening the eyes of their countrymen. Providence, having now sufficiently prepared the world for the reception of such a character, raised up a great reformer, whose labours, though immediately confined to Germany, still made themselves felt throughout Europe, and more especially in this island.
Martin Luther, the son of a working miner in Saxony, was born at Isleben on the 10th of November, 1483, a day much to be remembered. He was a man for the times; qualified by the force of his character for giving them a wrench. In his early years he took on himself the vows of an Augustin monk, and, to use his own words, was a “most mad Papist.” Various circumstances concurred to disabuse him of his bigotry; they have been severally advanced with more or less emphasis according to the respective views of the writers who have treated this subject—the secular historian tracing his conversion to secondary causes, the devout, ascribing it wholly to the grace of God. Both may be right; it was probably the effect of accident, of reflection, and oftime, God working by means of such instruments. At the age of three and twenty the business of his monastery carried him to Rome. He saw there more than was expedient. He was surprised to find, on near inspection, that the image which he had been taught to believe fallen from Jupiter, wore many appearances of having been made by the craftsman. He was too sincere himself not to feel disgust at the symptoms of hollow faith which forced themselves upon his notice in the capital of Christendom and he returned to Saxony from his mission “with thoughts arising in his heart.” He betook himself to the study of the Scriptures, with Erasmus for his help; with whose system of interpretation, however, he does not seem to have been entirely satisfied. He felt an increasing dislike of the schoolmen and soon entertained a suspicion, which, by degrees, ripened into a conviction, of the truth of that doctrine which proved afterwards the burden of his preaching—justification by faith in Christ only.[182]Tetzel, a Dominican monk, was commissioned by the pope (Leo X.,) who wished to recruit histreasury, whether for the supply of his extravagance, or the erection of his church, or the prosecution of his war against the Turks, to put up his indulgences for sale in Germany. Tetzel executed his trust with the most shameless contempt of all decency. There was no sin, however monstrous (and some he named,) which he had not both the will and the power to remit. It was in vain for the German pastors to insist on penance; here was a papal missionary at hand ready to absolve from all pains and penalties. The indulgences were farmed; they were sold in the gross to the best bidders, and were by them dispersed amongst the retail pedlars of pardons, who resorted to the public houses, exhibited their wares, and picked the pockets of the credulous. Extravagance like this called up Luther, excited his honest indignation, and drove him to write. He had no notion where this first step was to lead him. In the simplicity of his heart he thought that the pope would be on his side, and condemn such flagrant excesses in his emissaries. Leo was as little aware as himself of the critical position of his affairs. “Brother Martin,” quoth he, “is a man of very fine genius;” and he regarded the whole matter as a battle of kites and crows. But Martin was in earnest, whatever Leo might be. Still he had little idea how much he would have to unlearn. He did not question, for instance, the pope’s supremacy, till Eckius, one of his indiscreet antagonists, provoked him to scrutinise the pretension, and then, like honest Latimer, he found himself hard to be persuaded that our Saviour said—“Peter, I do mean this by sitting in thy boat, that thou shalt go to Rome, and be bishop there five and twenty years after mine ascension, and all thy successors shall be rulers of the universal church after thee.”[183]On he went, feeling his way and light continued to break uponhim. Two years later than the time when he wrote against indulgences (which was in 1517) he tells Spalatinus, the secretary of the Elector of Saxony, and his own confidential correspondent that he had no intention to separate from the apostolic see.[184]He examines the decretals; and then he whispers in his friend’s ear that he begins to suspect the pope to be antichrist. He ponders somewhat longer, and he now acquaints him that he has not much doubt of the fact;[185]and shortly after this (in 1520) he publishes his “Tract against the Popedom,” in which he draws the sword; and then his “Babylonish Captivity,” in which he throws away the scabbard. Measures are no longer kept by either party. On the 15th June, 1520, Leo issued his damnatory bull excommunicating Luther, delivering him over to Satan, requiring the secular princes to apprehend him, and condemning his books to be burned.[186]Luther, nothing dismayed, on the 10th December of the same year returns measure for measure, and raising a huge pile of wood without the walls of Wittenberg, commits decretals, canon law, and bull to the flames together.[187]Time was when this would have been frenzy; it was still perilous; but public opinion, which the art of printing had called into being, and which was now gathering strength, was with the reformer. The anathema was torn in pieces at Erfurt, and was ill received every where.[188]Politics again stood Luther’s friend. Frederick, the elector of Saxony, his cautious but constant protector, had laid the new emperor (Charles V.) under personal obligations, by declining the imperial crown for himself and transferring his interest to him;—here was a lion’s mouth stopped. Then Charles and Francis were rivalmonarchs, and in the midst of their rivalry, the Lutheran heresy (like the earthquake at Thrasymenæ, which rolled away unperceived by the combatants) did not rivet their exclusive attention amidst the intrigues of the cabinet, or the clashing of arms; and moreover the Lutheran party might be useful to either to turn a balance. Accordingly, Luther ventured to encounter the diet of Worms, and felt, what he exclaimed to the vast multitude who hailed him as he stepped out of his carriage, that “God was on his side.” He came out of that trial unharmed, however the smell of fire might have passed on him, and invested even with greater influence on public opinion than before. He found it necessary to submit to a friendly imprisonment in the castle of Wartburg, till the tyranny of the diet should be overpast; but he availed himself of this unacceptable leisure for the manufacture of his arms. On the one hand, he taught the people out of the Scriptures, giving them an admirable translation, first of the New, and then of the Old Testament, a translation which our own Cranmer kept ever by his side;[189]he laboured with still greater care his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, a work containing wholesome doctrine and most necessary for those times, when (as in the days of St. Paul) faith in Christ was overlaid by ritual observances, and merit was pleaded where mercy should have been craved. On the other hand, he did not scruple to wield more ignoble implements of war; if the sword was not at hand, he could smite with the ox-goad. Coarse and grotesque caricatures of his opponents in a frontispiece, often recommended his works to his plebeian readers; a cardinal decorated with a fox’s brush which he trailed through the mire, and with which he bespattered his neighbours; a pope seated astride upon a sow, or furnished witha pair of ass’s ears, whilst a legion of imps, busy like the Rosicrucian gnomes, on mischief, would be crowning him with a nauseous mitre, or lowering him into an infernal abyss or preparing faggots for his burning.[190]To these and the like weapons of warfare did this intrepid and unceremonious assailant descend, partly excused by the grosser taste of the times in which he lived, and partly by that disregard for petty proprieties, which is felt in a degree by most men of masculine minds, and which is felt by all men in moments of excitement and when the cause which they have at heart is at stake. Melancthon it is true, poured oil upon the waves, or, as Erasmus was pleased to express it walked after Luther, as Lite after Ate;[191]still the whole surface of society was troubled, and many who had once thought that a storm might clear the air, now heard the sound as of abundance of rain, with alarm, and girt up their mantles and ran before it. Erasmus, no doubt, was in this respect a type of many: he was in theory (at least in his earlier days) a reformer; he promoted the Reformation very essentially, and in a great variety of ways. The perspicuity and neatness of his style, the peculiar edge which he could put upon all his thoughts, the playfulness of his fancy, the copiousness of his knowledge, made him the most popular writer of the age. As a critic, he caused Scripture to be better known to scholars, by publishing the first printed edition of the Greek Testament: as a commentator he caused it to be better understood; though by some fatality, as Bishop Bull complains,[192]he is prone, like Grotius after him, to give certain important texts an Arian bias; the effect perhaps of a capricious temperament, since his writings in general furnish proof enough of his Trinitarian orthodoxy.Certainly we ourselves owe him a debt of gratitude for his paraphrase of the New Testament, a work which Cranmer introduced into all the parish churches in England, not indeed as faultless, but as the best he could find for that use, and done by “the most indifferent writer;”[193]and mutilated and moth-eaten copies of it are still occasionally to be seen chained to their desks. In his colloquies, too, of which the influence must have been very great, he lashes the abuses of the Roman Catholic church, and the monks, and friars above all, as the authors and abettors of those abuses, with a rod of nettles; and a system of things in which even the most sober thinker would see much to ridicule, found in Erasmus an assailant who could discover matter for merriment even in subjects the most grave. In truth, he had more wit than he could well manage; it is often ill-timed and ill-directed;[194]often he hits religion itself when he aims it at superstition only; and whilst he “shoots his random arrow o’er the house, he hurts a brother.”[195]It is possible to imagine that had an infidel age, instead of an age of sound religious inquiry, immediately succeeded the times of Erasmus, his levity would have frequently proved mischievous, and the blows which he had intended should tell against the church of Rome only, and which under Luther’s management did there spend themselves, would have been found misplaced, and apt to recoil. He was, perhaps, even more ambitious of reviving learning than religion; it was popish ignorance as much as popish heterodoxy that called him out. Literature was what he lived for. He could havewished that such a scholar as Melancthon, so splendidly endowed with talents for serving the cause of letters, had devoted himself to letters alone;[196]and when at last he was moved to take an active part against the Gospellers, as they were called, it seems to have been in some measure from a notion that the Reformation was absorbing every other question, and that in consequence of it the study of profane authors was unreasonably neglected.[197]Erasmus, however, as we have already hinted, was alarmed at the commotions which Luther’s innovations threatened. When the tug of war came, he showed that he had only been for a reformation on paper; he would detect abuses, but not correct them; he was desirous of the end, but afraid of the means; he was for the excision of the pound of flesh, but then it must be done without shedding one drop of blood. Sir Thomas More, though a person of much greater courage, both moral and physical, than Erasmus, herein partook of his feelings; he saw the evil, but could not see his way through it. His Utopia, written about the year 1513, when he was yet young, is the work of a man alive to the corruptions of a church of which he lived to be the champion, the inquisitor, and the martyr. He could then, through the medium of his ideal republic, and by the mouth of an imaginary speaker, pass censure upon the monks as the drones of society[198]—reduce the number of the priests to the number of the churches[199]—removeimages[200]—advocate the right of private judgment[201]—exhort that the work of conversion should be done by persuasion, but not coercion, holding the faith of a man to be not always an affair of volition;[202]he could banish from his imaginary kingdom those who condemned all heretics to eternal torments as bigots,[203]and extend his principles of concession even far beyond those afterwards adopted by the author of the Liberty of Prophesying, and to a degree incompatible with the existence of any religious establishment whatever.[204]It is true, that a salvo is added in conclusion[205](just as Erasmus would have added it under similar circumstances), that Sir Thomas More, for his part, thought much of this visionary; but if so, why agitate such questions and unsettle the minds of men to no purpose? Their author might indeed be disposed to shut his eyes when he pulled the trigger, but it is pretty clear that he aimed his piece at the church. But when that work was published, More little thought what he should live to witness, or that a Luther was nigh, even at the door—five years later, and probably Utopia would never have seen the light; for the chancellor was one of the first to take alarm at the progress of the Lutheran heresy, and to prophesy no smooth things concerning it.[206]He wrote against it, attacking Luther, Tindall, and Frith, with great acrimony, and opposing his “Supplication of the Souls in Purgatory,” to a very popular pamphlet by one Fish, published at that time, entitled “The Supplication of Beggars,” in which the latter complained that they were robbed of their rightful property in the people’s alms by the friars; and that whereas the Pope had it in his power to release souls from purgatory for nothing, he would only do it for money; nay, thatwhen he might extinguish it altogether, by a general gaol-delivery of the spirits in prison, he still persisted in tolerating its continuance.[207]A memorable instance it is of the force of religious prejudice, that Sir T. More, placid and gentle as was his natural temper, and averse as he had once shown himself to persecution for matters of opinion, should, nevertheless, have hardened his heart against the reformers, and been more than consenting to the death of Bilney and of Bainham.[208]In this last case, indeed, he seems to have known no touch of pity; for in the hope of making his victim discover his books and impeach his acquaintance who were members of the Temple, he whipped him at a tree in his garden at Chelsea, called the “tree of troth,” and afterwards stood by when he was racked in the Tower. This is a sad falling off from the tolerant principles of his youth; but meanwhile many feverish years had passed over the head of Sir Thomas More, and inspired him with a dread of those who were given to change—the crisis which he had helped in a degree to call up, had come at the call, and the magician stood aghast at the potency of his own spell. We are unfair judges of the sentiments and conduct of men who lived upon the verge of the Reformation. We are born when order has arisen out of confusion, and a pure faith come forth from the refiner’s fire; but it must be confessed, that before the event it was impossible to calculate its probable consequences. This only was certain, that in number they must be very many, in magnitude very great; and well might a wise and thoughtful man, who stood upon the edge of that heaving sea of troubles, contemplate the scene before him with an eye of anxiety, of jealousy, and of fear for the issue. Indeed theReformation was, as one might expect, the cause of theyoung; a circumstance of which Sir Thomas More does not fail to take advantage, when, in his controversy with Frith on the corporal presence, he always contemptuously speaks of him as “thisyoungman.”[209]And in a curious interlude entitled “Lusty Juventus,” written on the side of the Reformation, we read (loquitur Diabolus)—[210]
“The old people would beleve stil in my lawes,But the yonger sort lead them a contrary way;They wyll not beleve, they playnly say,In old traditions as made by men,But they wyll ’leve as the Scripture teacheth them.”
“The old people would beleve stil in my lawes,But the yonger sort lead them a contrary way;They wyll not beleve, they playnly say,In old traditions as made by men,But they wyll ’leve as the Scripture teacheth them.”
“The old people would beleve stil in my lawes,But the yonger sort lead them a contrary way;They wyll not beleve, they playnly say,In old traditions as made by men,But they wyll ’leve as the Scripture teacheth them.”
“The old people would beleve stil in my lawes,
But the yonger sort lead them a contrary way;
They wyll not beleve, they playnly say,
In old traditions as made by men,
But they wyll ’leve as the Scripture teacheth them.”
There was too much hazard in it, and the sacrifice of too many early associations, principles, and prejudices, for gray hairs. Time, however, that gentle innovator, settled these differences. At the period when the papal power was put down in England, nearly twenty years had elapsed since Luther first took up his parable against papal abuses. In this interval, a generation of aged defenders of the ancient faith had been gathered to their fathers, and had given place to such as had grown up under the influence of a better star. The press had been active, of which the wonderful influence was first made known upon this great question. The pure doctrines and heroic deeds of the German reformers circulated throughout England. Luther was in every mouth—ballads sung of him. His writings, together with those of Huss, of Zuingle, and of many anonymous authors whom the times evoked, were clandestinely dispersed. Tracts, with popular titles, such as “A booke of the Olde God and New,” “The burying of the Masse;” “A, B, C, againstthe Clergy,” made their appeals to the people. The confessions of some of the more eminent Lollards, and expositions of particular chapters of Scripture, which were thought to militate the most strongly against the errors of Rome, were industriously scattered abroad. Above all, Tindall’s translation of the New Testament was now in the hands of many; for the price, as compared with that of Wickliffe’s a century before, was just forty-fold less[211]; and by means of it, the multitude were enabled to compare what the Gospel actually was, with what Rome had made it by traditions.[212]The art of printing in this age of the revival of the Gospel, answered in some measure to the miraculous gift of tongues in the age of its first publication. It was soon perceived, that if the pope did not put an end to the press, the press would put an end to the pope. Awkward attempts were made to defeat its labours. It was a new principle introduced into the social system, which in its application, after the experience of three centuries, is found to involve many difficulties, and with which, at that time of day, neither its friends nor its foes knew how to deal. Tonstall, bishop of London, a man of a very different spirit from his brutal successor Bonner, bought up all the copies of Tindall’s Translation, and burnt them up at Paul’s Cross:[213]a humane but useless measure; for it soon appeared, that unless he could buy up ink, paper, and types, he was only making himself Tindall’s best customer. Accordingly, a new edition speedily issued from the Antwerp press, in which former errors were corrected; and though one golden branch had been torn away, another, not of the same but of a better metal, succeeded it. The importation of these foreign wares was strictly forbidden; but there was a demand for them in thecountry, and they were smuggled notwithstanding. Proclamations were uttered against the possessors of all heretical writings, but they were set at nought.[214]Spies were encouraged; the husband tempted to betray the wife, the parent the child, and a man’s foes became literally those of his own household.[215]Nay, more, by a refinement in cruelty, the strongest instincts of nature were outraged, and a daughter was compelled to fire the fagots with her own hands, by which her father was to be burned.[216]But measures like these were only calculated to defeat the object which they were intended to promote.
Strong public feeling, when matured in its growth and righteous in its principle, cannot be effectually suppressed—check it, and it rages impatiently; whilst, if its fair course be not hindered, it may only make sweet music.