Chapter XXVIII: The New Dogmas in an Historical and Psychological Light (6)

It should also be borne in mind that the printers started on the book just before the Diet of Worms, and that it was intended to attract and secure the support of the future rulers of the Saxon Electorate. Luther was also engaged at that time on his exceedingly violent screed against Catharinus, in which he attempts to reveal the Pope in his true character as Antichrist. When, after the Diet of Worms, he continued his work on the Magnificat he was certainly in no mood to compose a book of piety on Mary. The result was that the book became to all intents and purposes a controversial tract, which cannot be quoted as a proof of his piety or serenity of mind during those struggles. Luther’s Magnificat is as little a serious work of edification and piety as his exposition of certain of the Psalms, which appeared almost simultaneously and was also directed “against the Pope and the doctrine of men.”

In the “Prayer-book” which Luther prepared for the press he retained the “Hail Mary” together with the “Our Father” and the “I believe,” but he cut it down to the angel’s greeting, as contained in the Bible, and taught that thereby honour was merely to be given God for the grace announced to Mary.[1768] He frequently preached, e.g. in 1523, on the wrong use of this prayer.[1769]

In the Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon, when rejecting the invocation of the Saints, made no exception in favour of Mary. Yet in the “_Apologia_” of the Confession also composed by him, he says, that “Mary prays for the Church,” that she is “most worthy of the greatest honour” (“_dignissima amplissimis honoribus_”), but is not to be made equal to Christ, as the Catholics fancied.[1770]

Luther did not merely reproach the Catholics for making a goddess of Mary; he even ventured some remarks scarcely to the credit of the Mother of God; for a while, so he says, she had possessed only a small measure of faith and God had sometimes allowed her to waver; such statements were due to his idea that all Christians, in order to preserve a firm faith in their hearts, must ever be waging battle. On these statements, Eck, in his Homilies, was very severe.[1771]

An attitude hostile to all the Catholic veneration for Mary is expressed by Luther in a sermon in 1522 on the Feast of our Lady’s Nativity, included in his church-postils. It is true that we “owe honour to Mary,” he says, rather frigidly, at the very beginning, “but we must take care that we honour her aright.” He proceeds to explain that “we have gone too far in honouring her and esteem her more highly than we should.” For in the first place we have thereby “disparaged” Christ, the Redeemer, and “by the profound honour paid to the Mother of God derogated from the honour and knowledge of Christ”; secondly, the honour due to our fellow-men and the love of the poor has thereby been forgotten. If it is a question of honouring anyone on account of his holiness, “then we are just as holy as Mary and the other Saints, however great, provided we believe in Christ.” That she “has a greater grace,” viz. a higher dignity as the Mother of God, “is not due to any merit of hers, but simply because we cannot all be Mothers of God; otherwise she is on the same level with us.”[1772]

Of the anthem “_Salve Regina_,” which is “sung throughout the world to the ringing of great bells,” he says, that it was a “great blasphemy against God,” for it terms Mary, the mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. “The ‘_Regina Caeli_’ is not much better, since it calls her Queen of Heaven.” Why should her prayers have so much value, he asks, as though unaware of the explanations given by so many ecclesiastical writers, particularly by St. Bernard. “Your prayers, O Christian, are as dear to me as hers. And why? Because if you believe that Christ lives in you as much as in her then you can help me as much as she.”[1773]

In this discourse again he ventures on the calumny on the Catholic veneration of Mary, of which he was to make such frequent use later; it is equivalent to adoration; “To seek to make of Mary an idol, that we cannot and may not do. We will not have her as a mediator, but as an advocate [to this Luther always clung] we will gladly accept her, like the other Saints. But people have put her above all the choirs of angels.”[1774] Neither here nor elsewhere does he attempt to prove her alleged adoration or the idolatry of the Catholics; when, a little further on, he launches forth against the pilgrimages made by common folk to churches and chapels of our Lady, he is straying from the subject and dealing with a practice of the faithful, quite harmless and wholesome in itself, whatever abuses it may then have involved.

The veneration for the holy Mother of the Redeemer, that high ideal of humility and purity of heart, so devoid of the slightest trace of sensuality, springs from the soil of humility, chastity and pure, unselfish love. Luther’s whole mental outlook was not too favourable to such necessary dispositions. His moral character, as exhibited more particularly during the period after his stay at the Wartburg and previous to his marriage, scarcely harmonised with the delicate blossoms of this cultus, nor can we be surprised, looking at it psychologically, that the chief alteration in his views took place just at this time.

That hostile instinct, shared by so many heretics in their attitude towards the most holy of women, outweighed in his soul the vestiges of Catholic feeling he still retained. Malice impelled him to blacken the honour which the people loved to pay to Mary; this he strove to paint as mere idolatry, seeking unceasingly to affix this stigma on Catholicism. Controversy stifled in him the impulse to that pious veneration which he himself had admitted to be so well-founded and so natural.

_Purgatory._

In the Schmalkalden Articles the olden doctrine of Purgatory was rejected by Luther as follows: Purgatory, “with all its pomp, worship and traffic, must be held to be nothing more than a mere phantom of the devil,” born of “that dragon’s tail” the Mass.[1775]

Although in this condemnation Luther’s customary polemical exaggeration of abuses clearly plays a part, yet from his Indulgence Theses and “Resolutions” down to the sentence in the Articles of Schmalkalden the working of his mind can clearly be traced, expressed as it is, now in rejection on principle, and on theological or biblical grounds, now in opportunist and cynical attacks on the Church’s ancient doctrine of Purgatory. The temporal penalties which, according to the teaching of the Church, must be paid by the suffering souls notwithstanding their state of grace, found no place in Luther’s new theory of a faith which covered over everything. According to the usual view venial sins also are forgiven in the next world, thanks to the purifying pains of Purgatory. But of venial sins as distinct from grievous sins Luther refused to hear. He had nothing but evasive replies to the objection which presented itself of its own accord, viz. that mortals when they die often seem ripe neither for heaven nor for hell.[1776]

At first Luther was content to modify merely the doctrine of Purgatory which is so deeply implanted in the consciousness of the Christian, by denying that it was capable of making satisfaction while nevertheless asserting his belief in the existence of a place of purgation (“_mihi certissimum est, purgatorium esse_”);[1777] then he devoted himself to countering the many legends and popular tales of the appearance of ghosts, a comparatively easy task.[1778] The Pope, he went on to say, had merely made Purgatory an article of faith in order to enrich himself and his followers by Masses for the Dead, though in fact “it may be that only very few souls go there.”

Later he preferred to think, that God had in reality told us practically nothing about the existence or non-existence of Purgatory, or of the condition of the Saints in heaven; the preachers would do well, he says, gradually to wean the people from their practices in this regard; they had merely to decline to discuss the question of the dead and of the Saints in heaven. He was indeed unwilling to sever the close ties, so dear to the Catholic, binding the faithful to the deceased members of his family and to the beloved patterns and heroes of former days, yet his writings do tend in that direction.

From 1522 onward he inclined strongly to the idea that those who passed away fell into a deep sleep, from which they would awaken only on the day of Judgment; those who had breathed their last in the faith of Christ would all, so he fancies, sleep as in Abraham’s bosom; but since this depended on the “good pleasure of God,” it was not forbidden “to pray for the dead”; the petition must, however, be cautiously worded, for instance, as follows: “I beseech Thee for this soul which may be sleeping or suffering; if it be suffering, I implore Thee, if it be Thy Divine Will, to deliver it.” After praying thus once or twice, then “let it be.”[1779] In 1528 we still meet, in his writings, with similar concessions to the olden teaching and practice.[1780]

In 1530, however, his writing “Widderruff vom Fegefeur,”[1781] made an end of all concessions; here he is compelled to combat the “shouting and boasting of the Papists,” for the “lies and abominations of the sophists with regard to Purgatory” had passed all endurance. He now wants the sleep of the soul to be understood as a state of happy peace, and when it becomes a question of answering the Bible passage alleged by the Catholics, viz. 2 Machabees xii. 45 f., where it is said of the offering made for the fallen, that it is “a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from sins,” Luther simply strikes out this book from the Canon of Scripture, as indeed he had done even previously; the Church, so his curious argument ran, could not bestow more authority and force on a book than it possessed of itself, because the sacred books must themselves bear witness to their inspiration.

* * * * *

It would be superfluous to enumerate in detail the other points of theology on which he set himself to oppose the Catholic teaching he had himself in earlier days advocated, sometimes on excellent grounds. We know his exclamation: Were I to teach to-day everything that I formerly taught, particularly in the beginning, then “I should be obliged to worship the Pope.” Moreover, not only were there contradictions due to his falling away from doctrines of the Church which he had formerly vindicated, but also many others resulting from his modification of his own views, or implied in his new opinions.

His views on indulgences, satisfaction, penance and contrition, original sin and predestination, on marriage, priestly ordination, spiritual jurisdiction and secular authority, on Councils and the Roman Primacy, have already been dealt with historically in what has gone before. Other points of doctrine will have to be discussed elsewhere in a different connection; for instance, the far-reaching question of the Church and her visibility and invisibility, and--what is of no less importance for a due appreciation of the man--the end of all and the devil.

One only point, on which indeed Luther opposed the doctrine and practice of the Church with all his heart and soul, must here be considered more closely.

6. Luther’s Attack on the Sacrifice of the Mass

All Luther’s new doctrines referred to above might be regarded in the light of attacks on the Church’s teaching and practice. None of his theological views were put forward by him merely to be discussed in the calm domain of thought. They are always quickened by his hatred of the Church and the antichristian Papacy. This holds good in particular of his antagonism to the sacrificial character of the Mass.

By his violent assault on the Mass he robbed the churches and public worship of the Holy Sacrifice,[1782] and removed the very focus of Divine service in the Church.

Whereas to the Catholic Church the celebration of the Sacrament of the Altar was always a true sacrifice of praise, thanksgiving and atonement, which Christ, as the High Priest, offers to the Eternal Father through the instrumentality of a priest, according to Luther it is merely a memorial on the part of the congregation, which stimulates faith and gives a public testimony to God’s glory.[1783] In 1538 he characterised the struggle against the Mass as one vital to the new faith;[1784] he was very well aware how closely allied it was with the worship to which he himself had once been devoted: “Had any man twenty years ago tried to rob me of the Mass, I should have come to blows with him.”[1785]

Sacrifice is the supreme and at the same time the most popular expression of the worship of God. “From the rising of the sun even to the going down,” the Prophet Malachias had prophesied (i. 11), “my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation,” viz. the Eucharist. The common oblation throughout Christendom formed a sublime bond uniting all the Christian nations of the earth in one holy family. The words of Christ concerning the “Body that is given for you,” and “Blood that is shed for you” were rightly regarded as proving both the institution of the common sacrifice and its atoning power.

Luther not only burst asunder the bond of unity, but also overthrew the altar of sacrifice. It is against the correct idea of Divine worship to deprive it of all sacrifice, and to make its principal object consist in the edification and instruction of the congregation, as Luther decreed. Here again we see Luther’s individualism and the stress he laid on the subjective side, even to the extent of robbing religion of the sacrifice of the Lamb, which had the misfortune to be independent of fortuitous piety. The very walls of his temples seemed to utter a chill protest against being given over to a worship so entirely at the mercy of the feelings of the visitor. Luther was against the abuses connected with the Mass, and so were all well-instructed Catholics. But the latter argued, that, in spite of the abuses, the Mass must be honoured as the sacrifice on which the spiritual life rests. To the many contradictions of which he was guilty Luther added a further one, viz. of advocating as a purer and higher worship, one that does not even come up to the true standard of worship. (See vol. v., xxix., 9).

Luther’s deep-seated and almost instinctive antipathy to the Sacrifice of the Mass affords us, in its various phases, a good insight into his plan of campaign. On no other point does his hate flame forth so luridly, nowhere else is he so defiant, so contemptuous and so noisy--save perhaps when attacking Popery--as when assailing the Sacrifice of the Mass, that main bulwark of the Papacy. One thing is certain; of all the religious practices sacred to Catholics none was branded by him with such hideous and common abuse as this, the sublimest mystery of faith and of Divine Love.

_First Attacks. “On the Abomination of the Silent Mass.”_

In spite of Luther’s assurance given above of his former high regard for the Mass, he must quite early have grown averse to it, probably at the time when his zeal in the religious life first began to flag.

Even in 1516 we learn from his correspondence that he rarely found time for its celebration or for the recitation of the Canonical Hours.[1786] At a much later date he lets fall the remark, that he had never liked saying Mass.[1787] In view of his disturbed state of soul we can readily credit what he says, viz. that, in the monastery Gabriel Biel’s book on the Mass, in which the dignity of the Holy Sacrifice is extolled with the voices of antiquity, had often made his heart bleed.[1788] It is rather curious, that, according to his own account, it was on the occasion of his first Mass after ordination that his morbid state of fear showed itself strongly for the first time.[1789] No less remarkable is it that his most extravagant self-reproaches for his past life had reference to his saying Mass. He tells us how, even long after his apostasy, he had often been brought to the verge of despair by the recollection of the terrible sin of saying Mass whereby he had at one time openly defied and offended God. He morbidly persuades himself that he had been guilty of the most frightful idolatry; that, as a priest and monk, he had performed the most criminal of actions, one subversive of all religion, in spite of his having done so in ignorance and in perfect good faith.[1790]

In his sermons on the Commandments, published in 1518, we still find a tribute to the Sacrifice of the Mass as Catholics understood it.[1791] But in his “Sermon von dem hochwirdigen Sacrament des heyligen waren Leychnams Christi” of 1519 he is curiously reticent concerning the nature of the Mass, whilst expressly recommending and praising the communion of the congregation--under both kinds--as the work of that faith “wherein strength lies.”[1792]

The first open attack on the Holy Sacrifice was made in his “Sermon von dem newen Testament das ist von der heyligen Messe” (1520). The latter appeared almost simultaneously with his “An den christlichen Adel” and prepared the way for his subversive treatment of the Mass in his “_De captivitate babylonica_.” In the Sermon he declared that it was “almost the worst abuse,” that in the older Church the Eucharistic celebration had been turned into a sacrifice to be offered to God.[1793] Statements such as these predominate in the virulent chapter devoted to the Mass in the “_De captivitate babylonica_”: Christ’s sacrifice on the cross had been made out to be insufficient and the Sacrifice of the Mass set up in its place; the Supper was the Lord’s work for us, but, by ascribing a sacrificial value to the Mass, it becomes a work of man for God, whereby man hopes to please God.

The close ties connecting the Sacrifice of the Mass with both the Church’s ancient traditions and the institution of Christ are here ruthlessly torn asunder. A lurid and grossly exaggerated account of the abuses which had arisen in connection with the money-offerings for Masses served to stimulate the struggle, essentials faring as badly as what was merely accidental.

At the Wartburg the “Spirit” of the place further excited Luther’s hatred of the Mass. He poked fun at the “Mass-priest” who served the stronghold and wrote to Melanchthon: “Never to all eternity shall I say another Low Mass.”[1794] This he says in the same letter which witnesses to his inner contest with the monastic vows, and in which we find the sentence: “Be a sinner and sin boldly but believe more boldly still.”[1795] At the time of his spiritual baptism in the Wartburg he also wrote both his “_De abroganda missa_” and his “_De votis monasticis_.” The former he published in 1522, also in a German version entitled “Vom Missbrauch der Messen.”

This was the bugle-call to the struggle he immediately commenced at Wittenberg against the continued celebration of Mass by the Catholic clergy in the Castle and Collegiate churches of the town. We have already treated of the phases of that campaign in which his impetuosity and intolerance manifested itself in all its nakedness.[1796] From the inglorious combat, thanks to the help of the mob, he was to come forth victorious. On Christmas Day, 1524, for the first time, there was no Mass, and in the following year Justus Jonas wrote of the completion of the work: “On the Saturday after the Feast of St. Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist, the whole Pope ... was flung out of All Saints’ church at Wittenberg, together with the stoles, albs, etc.; the olden ceremonies were replaced by pious ones such as accord with Scripture.”[1797]

Luther was convinced that the “whole Pope” could not be destroyed throughout the world save by the abolition everywhere of the Mass. “When once the Mass has been put away,” he declares in 1522, in his screed against Henry VIII., “then I shall think I have overthrown the Pope completely.”[1798]

In this writing his consciousness of his mission and his defiant insistence on the new teaching were largely directed against that palladium of the old Church: “Through me Christ has begun to reveal the abomination standing in the Holy Place” (Dn. ix. 27). It is in denying the sacrificial character of the Mass that he uses those odd words of bravado: “Here I stand, here I sit, here I remain, here I defy with contempt the whole assembly of the Papists,” etc.[1799]

The last act in his warfare on the Mass at the Collegiate church of Wittenberg had been anticipated by Luther’s stormy sermon against the Canon of the Mass (Nov. 27, 1524).[1800] This identical sermon, taken down by his pupil George Rörer, formed the groundwork of the writing he published in 1525, “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse so man den Canon nennet.”[1801]

Here he proceeds on the curious assumption, only to be explained by his perverted enthusiasm, that the mere bringing to light of the Canon (i.e. of the principal part of the Mass, which includes the Consecration and which the priest reads in silence) will suffice to bring about the fall of the whole Eucharistic ritual. The passionate, cynical commentary which he appended to the translation, was, however, far more effective.

The author seems not in the least to realise that the Canon of the Mass is one of the most ancient and most authentic echoes of the early Western Church. It contains sublime religious ideas couched in the simple yet impressive language of the remotest ages of the Church when she was still in touch with classical culture.[1802] Yet Luther’s opinion is that: “It must have been composed by some unlettered monk.”[1803]

He concludes the booklet with a specimen of his usual language: “See, there you have heard the holy, silent Mass and now know what it is, that you may stand aghast at it and cross yourself as though you saw the devil as large as life.” He exhorts the reader to thank God, that “such an abomination has been brought to light,” and “that the great whore of Babylon has been exposed.”

At the same time he tells the secular authorities that it is their bounden duty to interfere “by means of the law” against such defamation of the name of God; “for when an impudent rascal openly blasphemes God in the street, or curses and swears, and the authorities permit it, they become in the sight of God partners in his wickedness. And if in some regions it is forbidden to curse or swear, much more just were it that the secular lords should here do something to prevent and to punish, because such blaspheming and defaming in the Mass is quite as public and as open as when a knave blasphemes in the street. If one is punishable, the other is surely no less so.”[1804]

Thus Luther’s attacks on the Mass in a fatal way became one of the quicksands on which the theory of freedom of conscience and worship which he had put forth at the commencement suffered shipwreck.[1805] Even in the question of the Mass at Wittenberg he had formerly insisted, in opposition to Carlstadt’s violent proceedings, that no religious compulsion should be exercised; this he did, for instance, in the sermons he preached against Carlstadt’s undertaking and particularly in that on Low Masses,[1806] where he declared that faith cannot he held captive or bound, that each one must see for himself what is right or wrong and is not simply to fall in with the “general opinion or to yield to compulsion.” His words were an honourable declaration in favour of freedom of conscience. And now, in his warfare against his fantastic caricature of the Mass, not theoretically only but in practice too (for besides Wittenberg, there was also Altenburg and Erfurt)[1807] he placed the Mass, the most sacred centre of the Church’s worship, on a level with criminal deeds and invited the magistrates to treat it as a sacrilege, since it was the duty of authority “to check all outbreaks of wickedness.”[1808]

When Johann Eck took up his pen to refute Luther’s “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse” he felt it almost superfluous to prove how unfounded the latter’s assertions were, that, by the sacrifice of the Mass, Catholics “denied in deed and in their heart that Christ had blotted out sin”[1809] by His Sacrifice on Golgotha, or that they maintained, that, not the merits of Christ, but rather “our works, must effect this.”[1810] He enters at greater length into the theological proofs of the truly sacrificial character of the consecration and of the correctness and value of the Canon, supplementing the biblical passages on the Sacrifice of the New Covenant by the clear and definite witness of tradition.[1811]

He and his Catholic readers were, however, quite prepared to find Luther refusing even to listen to such proofs taken from tradition. “Ah, bah, tradition this way, tradition that!” he had already cried, with regard to this very question, when striving to shake himself free of the fetters of the Church’s doctrine.

Eck, however, also attacked Luther from another point. Luther had placed in the very forefront of his writing the assertion, that he had never advised the people to have recourse to violent measures, whether with regard to the Mass or the Catholic worship generally, or invited them to revolt; in the preface Eck accordingly promises to take him to task both concerning the Canon and for his responsibility in the rising. “I shall, please God, prove Luther a liar on both counts.” He convicts him of inciting to revolt on the strength of “five proofs” taken from various works of his.

The pecuniary aspect of the Mass supplied Luther and the preachers with an effective means of exciting the people which they were not slow to seize. The abuses, real or apparent, of the system of Mass-stipends, were worked to their utmost by the demagogues.

In Luther’s extravagant language the Sacrifice of the Mass is simply made to appear a rich field for vulgar greed of gain, discovered and exploited by the Papists because it filled their pockets. The amount brought in by Masses for the Dead was chiefly to blame for the spread of the Mass. “This invention [Masses for the Dead] has been worth money to them,” he cries, “so that they need not say Mass for nothing.”[1812] “At All Saints’, here at Wittenberg, the money is godlessly thrown away [by foundation-Masses, annual commemorations, etc.]; the three Mass-priests there, ‘three pigs or paunches,’” celebrate it “in the house of infamy simply because they worship money.”[1813]

Many of the apostles of the new faith preached in the same strain as Luther. Others, as Stephen Agricola for instance states he did, were content to scourge “the great superstition and hindrance to the true honour of God,” i.e. the abuses. Agricola, if we may trust him, “was loath to see Masses for the dead said for money, as this should be done out of pure charity.”[1814] When, later, Flacius Illyricus made similar charges against the Catholics on the pretext of the alms given for Masses, the Dominican, Johann Fabri, replied: “What do you sectarians do gratis? People can never give enough for your preaching, your psalm-singing, your Supper, etc., so that yearly a very large sum has to be spent on your support.... Why then do you abuse the poor priests who take payment for their work and unkindly twit them for saying Mass solely for money? What answer would you make were I to say: You too, Illyricus, preach for the sake of money?”[1815]

The charges of self-seeking and avarice had, however, in some places so strong an effect as to lead to popular risings against the celebration of Mass. This recalls the account given by Erasmus of the ready success he had noticed attended the addresses of the preachers: “The Mass has been abolished,” he writes, “but what more holy thing has been set in its place?... Their churches I have never entered. I have occasionally seen those who listened to their sermons come out like men possessed, with anger and fury writ large upon their faces.... They walked like warriors who have just been harangued by their general. When have their sermons ever produced penance and contrition? Do they not devote most of their time to abuse of the clergy and their lives?... Are risings rare amongst these evangelicals? And do they not resort to violence on the slightest provocation?”[1816]

The peaceable union of Christians before the Altar of Sacrifice in the “Mystery of Faith” had made way for warfare. The absence of the sacrifice avenged itself, however, in the Churches given over to the new religion by the dreariness and utter desolation of the sacred buildings once so full of life; not to mention the dreadful controversies, the bare “ministry of the Word” and the one-sided effort to make of the Supper simply a source of edification and increase of faith, could not suffice to attract the multitude to the Eucharistic celebration. The great sacrifice, which by its own infinite worth and quite independently of its power to edify, glorifies God in His Temple, and so powerfully stimulates the faithful to unite their offering with the sacramental oblation, had been torn from the midst of the congregation.

* * * * *

If we seek here for the connecting link between Luther’s bitter hostility to the Mass and his system as a whole, we shall find, that, granted the doctrine of the imputation of the merits of Christ by faith alone, the Eucharistic Sacrifice had no real place left. Luther said in 1540: “Where the ‘_locus_’ [’_iustificationis_’] is rightly taught and stands, there can be nothing evil; for the _antecedens_, ‘faith alone justifies,’ spells the fall of the Mass,” etc.[1817]

In the new faith everything turned on the saving and the pacification of the sinner by virtue of a sort of amnesty furnished by the merits of Christ’s death on the cross. Faith alone secures all the fulness of the Redeemer’s work of satisfaction; no ordinance of Christ, sacrament, sacrifice or priesthood can assist in the work of clothing the soul with the mantle of these Divine merits; anything of the sort would only diminish the dignity and the efficacy of the confidence of faith. Only what promotes the personal faith which saves--that master-key to the forgiveness, or better, to the cloaking of sin--is here admitted, but no work, no “_opus operatum_” of Christ’s institution, which, through sacrament and sacrifice, imparts grace to the faithful Christian who is duly prepared to seek salvation; on the contrary, according to Luther, such institutions, which the ancient Church looked upon as sacred, only detract from the merits of Christ.

And since, in his view, every Christian by his faith is a priest, the hierarchy falls, and thus sacrifice too, at least as the prerogative of a special sacerdotal class, also ceases to exist.

Hence the warfare on behalf of the Evangel of faith alone and against sacerdotalism, naturally, and of necessity, led to the warfare against the Mass. This particular combat, in which (as in the attack on the Church’s visible head, viz. the Pope) Luther’s animosity against the Catholics reached its culminating point, necessarily occupied a place in the forefront, because the Mass, which united the congregation before the altar, was the most public and most tangible expression of Catholic life and the one most frequently seen.

Luther’s theological perversions of the Church’s doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass, in the above works and elsewhere, are all the more astonishing, seeing that Gabriel Biel, the theologian, with whom he was so well acquainted and whose “_Sacri canonis missæ expositio_” he had studied with keen interest, had, in his exposition of the ancient doctrine of the Mass, forestalled these very misrepresentations, almost as though he had actually foreseen them.[1818] The respected Tübingen University-Professor, in this explanation of the Mass, which appeared in 1488, was frequently reprinted, and was much used by both parish clergy and preachers, insists, in close unison with the past, that there was but one great and atoning sacrifice of the cross, and that the sacrifice of the Mass did not in the least detract from it but rather applied it to the individual believer. He points out with great emphasis the uniquely sublime character of the sacrifice on Calvary (“_unica oblatio et perfectissimum sacrificium_”), in its fourfold aspect as a sacrifice of praise, thanksgiving, petition and atonement. In support of this he quotes a number of passages from the Bible: “By it [the sacrifice on the cross] our sins are blotted out (Romans iv.). Through it we have found grace whereby we are saved (Hebrews v.): for, being consummated by suffering, He (Christ) became to all who obey Him the cause of eternal life. By the one oblation of the cross He hath for ever perfected them that are sanctified (Hebrews x.),” etc. “If you seek the blotting out of sins, behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; if you seek thanksgiving, Christ gives thanks to the Father; if you seek for deliverance from evil, He heals and sets us free.”[1819] In several passages he dwells in detail on the idea of the saving Lamb of God, once in connection with the thrice-repeated _Agnus Dei_ of the Mass.

But, a comparatively short time after, another was to come, who would assert that the world had long ago lost the Lamb of God, and who presumed to take upon himself the task of pointing Him out anew to all men and of making Him profitable to souls.

In unison with Fathers and theologians, Biel sums up the mutual relations between the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacrifice on the Cross in the words: “Although Christ was once only offered visibly in the flesh, yet He is daily offered concealed under the appearances of bread and wine, though painlessly, for the Sacrifice of the Mass is the representation and memorial of the sacrifice consummated on the Cross and produces the same effects.”[1820]

When describing more minutely its efficacy for the obtaining of grace and forgiveness of sins he dwells on the thought, that it has no quasi-magical effect, but acts “according to man’s preparation and capacity,” so that the Holy Sacrifice does not by any means blot out sin if man’s heart is still turned away from God: to souls that show themselves well-disposed it brings contrition and sorrow for sin and finally forgiveness.[1821] Unlike Baptism and Penance, it does not reconcile the soul with God directly, but only indirectly, by arousing the spirit of penance which leads to the wholesome use of the sacraments and appeases the anger of the Heavenly Father by the offering of His Son, and prevents Him withdrawing the help of His grace. Biel elucidates the idea of sacrifice, deals with the figurative sacrifices of the Old Testament, which found their fulfilment in the clean oblation (Mal. i. 10 f.) to be offered from the rising of the sun even to the going down, with the twofold efficacy of the Mass (“_ex opere operato_” and “_ex opere operante_”)[1822] and many other points which Luther unjustly attacks; with the lawfulness of private Masses, with or without any Communion of the faithful, with the advantage of Masses for the souls of the faithful departed, with Mass-stipends[1823] which he defends against the charge of simony, and with the practice of repeating silently certain portions of the Mass, an ancient usage for which he gives the reasons.[1824]

_“On the Corner-Mass.” Continuation of the Conflict._

In his war against the Mass Luther was never to yield an inch. His “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse” was followed by fresh pronouncements and writings which bear witness to the intensity of his hatred.

The occasion for another lengthy writing against the Mass and the hierarchy seems to have been furnished in 1533 by the religious conditions in the province of Anhalt, where the Princes, under pressure from their Catholic neighbours, had begun to tolerate the former worship and the saying of Mass. In Dec. of that year Luther published his booklet “Von der Winckelmesse und Pfaffen Weihe.”[1825]

It was designed primarily as a protest against “the ecclesiastical jurisdiction and Ordination,” i.e. against the hierarchy and priesthood, and broadly hinted to the “bishops and priests” that their Order was doomed to destruction. At the Diet of Augsburg he declared his followers had “very humbly informed the Pope and the bishops, that we had no wish forcibly to infringe on their rights and authority in ecclesiastical matters, but that, so long as they did not compel us to any unchristian doctrines, we were quite ready to be ordained and governed by them, and even to assist them in their administration,” but his overtures having been rejected, nothing remained for him but to await the end of the priesthood when God should “in good time” so dispose. “God is wonderful”; He had “overthrown by His word” so much “papistical Mammon-service and idolatry”; “He would also be able to wipe away the rancid Chresam,” i.e. to make an end of the bishops and priests in whose ordination Chrism was used.[1826] Towards the end of the tract he returns to the attack on priestly ordination. He is determined “again to adjudge and commit to the Churches the call, or true ordination and consecration to the office of pastor.” The members of the Church must have the “right and authority to appoint people to the office,” and to entrust it to simple believers of blameless lives, even “without Chrism or butter, grease or lard.”[1827]

The greater portion of the writing is, however, devoted to the “Corner-Mass,” i.e. the Mass generally, which according to the Catholic doctrine is equally valid whether celebrated by the priest alone in a lonely chapel or amid a concourse of faithful who unite their prayers with his and communicate. For reasons readily understood, Luther prefers to use the contemptuous term “Corner-Mass.”

Towards the end he himself sums up the thoughts on the Mass which he has just submitted:[1828]

He had the best grounds for “being affrighted,” that he and others “had once said the Corner-Mass so devoutly.” After the reasons he had advanced, everyone, particularly the Papists to-day, must be driven to despair at the frightful idolatry of the Mass; yet they “wantonly persist in their abomination.” “They pervert Christ’s ordinance, say their Mass not merely in disobedience to God, but also blasphemously and without any command, give the sacrament to no one but keep it for themselves alone, and, to make matters worse, are not even certain whether they are receiving merely bread and wine or the Body and Blood of Christ, because they do not follow Christ’s ordinance.”

Here he plainly enough questions the presence of Christ under the consecrated elements in the “Corner-Mass” and has thus made a notable stride forward in his hostility.

“Nor can anyone be certain,” so he continues his summing up, “whether they [the priests, in the Canon of the Mass] pronounce the Words [of institution] or not; hence no one is bound to believe their secret antics. Neither do they preach to anyone, though Christ commanded it.” In his opinion it was essential both that the words of institution should be spoken aloud, in order to stimulate faith, and that the service should include the preaching of the Word--minor matters, which, however, became of the greatest importance to him when once he had reduced it all to the status of a mere ceremonial of edification.

He boldly concludes. “It is also impossible that they [the Popish sayers of Masses] can be right in their faith.” For, as already demonstrated, “one and the same man could not believe aright and yet knowingly rage against the Word of God. Hence they can neither pray, nor offer thanks in such a way as to be acceptable to God. And, finally, over and above these abominations and crimes, they actually dare to offer to God this sacrament (if what is disgraced by so much blasphemy and abomination can be called a sacrament) and to barter and sell it to other Christians for money.”

The book on the “Winckelmesse” is celebrated for the disputation between Luther and the devil which it describes. The devil sets forth the proofs against the Mass with marvellous skill, and, by his reproaches, drives the quondam monk into desperate straits. Here Luther is describing the deep remorse of conscience which he will have it he had to endure on account of his Masses. He is, however, merely using a literary artifice when he introduces the devil as the speaker; of this there will be more to say later.[1829] Here, in addition to a letter, which so far has received but little attention, in which he himself furnishes the key to the form in which he casts his argument,[1830] we may mention the fact that Luther’s first draft of his writing on the “Winckelmesse,” which has recently been examined, gives a portion of the devil’s arguments against the Mass and without any reference to the devil, as the author’s own; only later on was the devil made the spokesman for Luther’s ideas.[1831] We can see that it was only as the work proceeded that there occurred to Luther the happy thought of making the devil himself speak, not so much to reveal to the world the worthlessness of the Mass, as to cast if possible poor Luther into despair, because of his former Mass-sayings, and to reveal the utter perversity of the Papists, who, far from being in despair, actually boasted of the Mass.

Luther expected great things from his ruthless attack and from the scene in which the devil appears. It would be, so he fancied, a “test of the wisdom and power of the Papacy.”[1832] His friend Jonas, in a letter of Oct. 26, 1533, speaking of the yet unpublished “Winckelmesse,” calls it a real “battering-ram” to be used against the Papacy; it was long since the Professor had been heard speaking in such a way of the Mass, the Pope and the priests.[1833] Those of the preachers who were fallen priests rejoiced at the advice they found in the book for the quieting of their consciences when tempted by the devil, and at its hint that they should rub their anointed hands with soap and lye the better to obliterate the mark of the Beast.

The writing was translated by Jonas into Latin, but his rendering was a very free and rhetorical one.

The interest it aroused was increased by the negative attitude which Luther seemed to assume towards the Real Presence. To many of his followers Luther seemed to come to an opinion not far removed from the Zwinglian denial of the Presence. Luther learned that Prince Johann of Anhalt and others had expressed their anxiety lest the booklet “should be understood as though I agreed with the fanatics and enemies of the Sacrament.” Hence he at once issued a fresh writing entitled: “A Letter of D. Mart. Luther to a good friend concerning his book on the Corner-Masses” (1534).[1834]

To attack the Sacrament and the Real Presence was, he there declared, far from his thoughts. I shall prove “that I do not hold, nor ever shall hold to all eternity, with the wrong doctrine of the foes of the Sacrament--or to speak quite plainly--with that of Carlstadt, Zwingli and their followers.”[1835] But by this he stood: “Whoever, like the Papists, did not celebrate the Sacrament according to the ordinance of Christ, had no right to say Christ was there”; “a counterfeit florin, struck contrary to the King’s order, can never be a good one.”[1836] “May God bestow on all pious Christians such a mind, that, when they hear the Mass spoken of, they quake with fear and cross themselves as they would at the sight of some abomination of the devil.”[1837]

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Johann Cochlæus at once replied to the “Winckelmesse” with an appeal to the correctness of ecclesiastical tradition. In the same year he published Innocent the Third’s “_De sacro altaris mysterio_” and Isidore of Sevilla’s “_De ecclesiasticis officiis_.” These venerable witnesses of Christian antiquity had, he declared, “a better claim to be believed than Luther’s furies.” In addition to this he also wrote a popular theological defence in the vernacular “On the Holy Mass and Priestly ordination” (Leipzig, 1534). In this writing he begins by emphasising the claims of ecclesiastical tradition and the teaching office of the Church: “The Church understands Scripture far better and more surely, thanks to the Holy Spirit promised by Christ and duly sent her, than Luther does by his evil spirit.” He laid down the principle which he urged was the only true and reliable guide in the controversies of the age: Hold fast to the teaching of the Church rather than to the subjective interpretations of the Bible, which are often so divergent. He was not, however, altogether happy in his choice of expressions, for instance, when he exclaims: “Bible hither, Bible thither!” for this might well have given the impression, that, on his side, small account was made of the Bible. In reality this was merely his way of retorting on Luther’s: “Tradition hither, Tradition thither.” The theologian, who elsewhere is careful to set its true value on the Bible, seeks in this way to brand the tricks played with the Bible; similar phrases then in use were the one we already know, “Bible, Babble, Bubble,” and Luther’s own sarcastic saying: “The Bible is a heresy-book.”[1838]

Cochlæus not only brought forward, in support of the Mass, besides Holy Scripture, that tradition which Luther had treated so scornfully, but also replied to his opponent’s perversions and charges on all the other counts. Of the grievous disorders which Luther said had come under his notice during his stay in Rome, what Cochlæus says is much to the point: “It is quite possible, that, among so many thousands from all lands, there may have been some such desperate villains. But it is not seemly that Luther on that score should seek to calumniate pious and devout monks and priests and make the people distrustful of them.”[1839]

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In his familiar conversations Luther repeatedly reveals the psychological side of his attack on the Mass.

He said in 1540: “From the earliest years [of the revolt against the Church] I was grievously tempted by the thought: ‘If the Mass is really the highest form of Divine worship, then, Good God, how wickedly have I behaved, towards God!’” He sought to stifle the voice of conscience, which he called a temptation, by insisting still more strongly on the worthlessness of the Mass.[1840] “But this is quite certain,” he says, “the Mass is Moasim.”[1841] Moasim, according to Dan. xi. 38, was the idol to be set up by Antichrist, in the letters of whose name, according to Luther, we find the word “Mass”; this idol, he says, was honoured with “silver, gold and precious stones,” because the Mass helps to bring in such great wealth.

“From the Mass,” he said in the same conversation, “came every sort of ungodliness, it was an ‘_abominanda abominatio_,’ and yet it was held in such honour.”--In another conversation in the same year we hear him say: “the Canon was looked upon as so sacred that to attack it was like attacking both heaven and earth. When first I wrote against the Mass and against the Canon I could hardly hope that people would agree with me.... But when my writing [the ‘Sermon on the New Testament, i.e. the Mass,’ 1520] was published, I found that many had shared my temptation; they thanked me for deliverance from their terror.”[1842]

In Luther’s efforts to deliver himself and others “from their terror” and to convince himself that “this is quite certain,” lies the sole explanation of his wild statements that his former saying of Mass--though undoubtedly done in good faith, and, at first, even with pleasure and devotion[1843]--was his worst sin,[1844] and that he would rather have “kept a bawdy house or been a robber than to have blasphemed and traduced Christ for fifteen years by the saying of Masses,”[1845] and, again, that “no tongue can tell the abomination of the Mass, nor can any heart believe its wickedness. It would not have been astonishing had God destroyed the world on account of the Mass, as He will without a doubt soon do by fire.”[1846] The Mass embodies a “pestilential mistake of the self-righteousness of the _opus operatum_.” In the Popish Mass an ignorant priest, who does not even know Latin, takes it on himself to blot out the sins of others.[1847]

Equally evident, according to the Table-Talk, was the pestilent side of the Mass as a pecuniary concern. It is on this account that Luther is fond of calling it the foundation of Popery, as though the Papacy were erected on wealth.[1848] His historical knowledge of the actual facts is as great here as it is when, in his Table-Talk, he makes private Masses originate in the time of Pope Gregory I († 604).[1849]

Incidentally he describes quite frankly one way in which he had endeavoured to overthrow the Mass: At first it had seemed to him impossible to achieve its fall because its roots were so deeply imbedded in the human heart. “But when once the Sacrament is received under both kinds, the Mass will not stand much longer.”[1850]--We have already had occasion to describe the underhand measures he recommended in the warfare against the Mass (Vol. ii., p. 321 f.).

In part at least, he could congratulate himself on the success of his unholy efforts. “If our Lord God allows me to die a natural death, He will be playing a nasty trick on the Papists, because they will have failed to burn the man who has thus brought the Mass to nought.”[1851]

Denunciation of the Mass naturally occupies a place in Luther’s Articles of Schmalkalden.[1852] Since the latter were incorporated in the “Symbolic Books” of the Lutheran Evangelical Church and figure in the Book of Concord with the three oldest Œcumenical Creeds, the Confession of Augsburg, etc., as writings “recognised and accepted as godly truths by our blessed forefathers and by us,” condemnation of the Mass became as much a traditional canon within the Protestant fold as Luther himself could have desired.

In the Schmalkalden Articles we find, after the first article on Justification by Faith alone, a second article on the office and work of Jesus Christ which declares: “That the Mass among the Papists must be the greatest and most frightful abomination” because it is “in direct and violent opposition” to the first article, according to which the Lamb of God alone delivers man from sin, not “a wicked or pious minister of the Mass by his work.” The Mass is a “work of men, yea, of wicked knaves,” a source “of unspeakable abuses by the buying and selling of Masses,” defended by the Papists only because they “know very well, that if the Mass falls, the Papacy too must perish.” Over and above all this, that dragon’s tail, which is the Mass, has produced much filth and vermin and many forms of idolatry: First of all Purgatory; for the execrable market of Masses for the dead produced that “devilish spectre” of Purgatory. Secondly, “on account of it evil spirits have performed much trickery by appearing as the souls of men”; the devils “with unspeakable roguery” demanded Masses, etc. “Thirdly, pilgrimages, whereby people ran after Masses, forgiveness of sins, and the Grace of God, for the Mass ruled everything” and caused men to run after “hurtful, devilish will-o’-the-wisps.” “Fourthly, the brotherhoods” with their Masses, etc., are also “contrary to the first article of the Atonement.” “Fifthly, the holy things” (relics) were also “supposed to effect forgiveness of sin as being a good work and worship of God like the Mass.” “Sixthly, here belong also the beloved Indulgence” in which “Judas incarnate, i.e. the Pope, sells the merits of Christ.”--Hence even Indulgences are made out to be one of the unhappy consequences of the Mass!

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