Chapter XXIX: Ethical Results of the New Teaching (5)

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

_The Means of Self-Reform and their Reverse Side_

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Self-Reform and Hatred of the Foe_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writing culminates in the following outburst: “In short we and you alike know that you are living without God’s Word, but that, on our side, we have God’s Word.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Companion-Phenomena of his Hate_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

On one occasion, in 1542, when a messenger sent by Justus Jonas happened to offend him, he at once wrote an “angry letter” to Jonas and on the next day followed it up with another in which he says, that his anger has not yet been put to rest; never is Jonas to send such people into his house again or else he will order them to be gagged and put under restraint. “Remember this, for I have said it. This man may scold and do the grand elsewhere, but not in Luther’s house, unless indeed he wants to have his tongue torn out. Are we going to allow such caitiffs as these to play the emperor?”[396]—He had, as we already know, a sad experience with a certain girl named Rosina, whom he had engaged as a servant, but who turned out to be a person of loose morals and brought his house into disrepute. “She shall never again have the chance of deceiving anyone so long as there is water enough in the Elbe,” so he writes of her to a judge. In letters to other persons he accuses her of “villainy and fornication”; she had “shamed all the inmates of his house with the [assumed] name of Truchsess”; he could only think that she had been “foisted on him by the Papists as an arch-prostitute—the god-forsaken minx and lying bag of trouble, who has damaged my household from garret to cellar ... accursed harridan and perjured, thieving drab that she is!” Away with her “for the honour of the Evangel.”[397]

Even in younger days he had been too much accustomed to give the reins to his excitement, as his two indignant letters (his own description of them) to his brother monks at Erfurt show.[398] Even his upbringing of his own children, highly lauded as it has been, suffered from this same lack of self-control. “The mere disobedience of a boy would stir him to his very depths. For instance, he admits of a nephew he had living with him—a son of his brother James—that once ‘he angered me so greatly as almost to be the death of me, so that for a while I lost the use of my bodily powers.’”[399]—So exasperated was he with the lawyers who treacherously deceived the people that he went so far as to demand that their tongues should be torn out. At times he confesses his hot temper, owning and acknowledging that it was “sinful”; to such fits of passion he was still subject, but, as a rule, his anger was at least both right and called for, for he could not avoid being angry where it was “a question of the soul and of hell.” Anger, he also says, refreshed his inner man, sharpened his wits and chased away his temptations; he had to be angry in order to write, preach or pray well.[400]

Repeatedly he seemed on the point of quitting Wittenberg for ever in revenge for all the neglect he met with there; “I can no longer contain my anger and disappointment.”[401] It was to this depression of spirits that he was referring when he said, that, often, in his indignation, he had “flung down the keys on Our Lord God’s threshold.”[402] He sees his inability to change his surroundings and how Popery refuses to be overthrown; yet, as he told us, he is determined to “rain abuse and curses on the miscreants [the Papists] till he is carried to the grave,” and to provide the “thunder and lightning for the funeral” of the foe.[403]

A gloomy, uncanny passion often glows in his words and serves to fire the fanatism of the misguided masses.

“Lo and behold how my blood boils and how I long to see the Papacy punished!” And what was the punishment he looked for? Just before he had said that the Pope, his Cardinals and all his court should have “the skins of their bodies drawn off over their heads; the hides might then be flung into the healing bath [the sea] at Ostia, or into the fire,” unless indeed they found means to pay back all the alien property that the Pope, the “Robber of the Churches, had stolen only to waste, lose and squander it, and to spend it on whores and their ilk.” Yet even this punishment fell short of the crime, for “my spirit knows well that no temporal penalty can avail to make amends even for one Bull or Decree.”[404]

Side by side with language so astonishing we must put other sayings which paint his habitual frame of mind in a light anything but favourable: “It is God’s Word! Let what cannot stand fall ... no matter what!”[405] “The Word is true, or everything crumbles into ruin!”[406] “Even if _you_ will not follow”—such were his words to Staupitz as early as 1521, “at least suffer _me_ to go on and be carried away [’_ire et rapi_’].” “I have put on my horns against the Roman Antichrists”;[407] in these words Luther compares himself to a raving bull.

This frame of mind tended to promote his natural tendency to violence, hitherto repressed. His proposal to flay all the members of the Roman Curia was not by any means his first hint at deeds of blood; such allusions occur in other shapes in earlier discourses, particularly in his predictions of the judgments to come. The Princes, nobility and towns, so he declared, must put their foot down and prevent the shameful abuses of Rome: “If we mean to fight against the Turks let us begin at home where they are worst; if we do right in hanging thieves and beheading robbers, why then do we let Roman avarice go scot free, when all the time it is the biggest thief and robber there ever has been or will ever be upon the earth.” Whoever comes from Rome bringing in his pocket a collation to a benefice ought to be warned either “to desist, or else to jump into the Rhine or the nearest pond, and give the Roman Brief—letter, seals and all, a cold bath.”[408] Not without a shudder can one read the description in his “Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” written in his last days, of the kinds of death best suited to the Pope and his Curia, of which the flaying and the “bath” at Ostia is only one example. (Cp. below, xxx., 2.) True enough he is careful to point out that such a death will be theirs only should they refuse to amend their ways and accept the Lutheran Evangel!

Ten years previously, in 1535, he had written to Melanchthon, who shrank from acts of violence with what appeared to Luther too great timidity: “Oh, that our most venerable Cardinals, Popes and Roman Legates had more Kings of England to put them to death!”[409] These words he penned soon after Henry VIII of England had sacrificed the lives of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and his Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, to his sensual passions and his thirst for blood. Luther adds, of the Pope and the Curia, with the object of vindicating the sentence of death he had passed on them, “They are traitors, thieves, robbers and regular devils.... They are out and out miscreants to the very bottom of their hearts. May God only grant you too to see this.”[410]

Fury had stood by the cradle of Luther’s undertaking and under its gloomy auspices his cause continued to progress. Without repeating what has already been said, it may suffice to point out how his excitement frequently led him to take even momentous steps which he would otherwise have boggled at. Only too frankly he admitted to his friend Lang in 1519 and soon after to Spalatin, that Eck had so exasperated him that he would now shake himself loose and write and do things from which he would otherwise have refrained. His early “jest” at Rome’s expense would now become a real warfare against her[411]—as though Rome was to be made to suffer for Eck and his violence. In 1521, from apprehension of his violence and out of consideration for the Court, Spalatin had kept back two of Luther’s writings which the latter wished to be printed. “I shall get into a towering rage,” so the author wrote to him, “and bring out much worse things on this subject afterwards if my manuscripts are lost, or you refuse to surrender them. You cannot destroy the spirit even though you destroy the lifeless paper.”[412]—This incident at so early a date shows how deeply seated in him was his tendency to violence; even at the outset it was to some extent personal animus which led him to shape his action as he did. Self-esteem and the plaudits of the mob had even then begun to dim his mental vision.

The part played by the first person is great indeed in Luther’s writings.

“We should all have fallen back into the state of the brute!” “Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great graces on any bishop as on me.” “I, wonderful monk that I am,” have, by God’s grace, overthrown the devil of Rome; “I have stamped off the heads of more than twenty factions, as though they had been worms.” Countless other such utterances are to be found in what has gone before.[413] “He,” so he declares, “was surely far too learned to allow himself to be taught by the Swiss theologians”; this was one of the sayings that led the friends of the latter to speak of his “tyrannical pride.”[414]

Here come the fractious Sacramentarians, he says, and want a share in my fame; they want to celebrate a “glorious victory” as though it was not from me that they got everything. This is how things turn out, “one labours and some other man takes the fruit.”[415] Carlstadt comes forward and seeks to become a new doctor; “he is anxious to detract from my importance and to introduce among the people his own regulations.”[416]

A character where the first person asserted itself so imperiously could not but be a disputatious one. Down to his very last years Luther’s whole life was filled with strife: quarrels with the jurists; with his own theologians; with the Jews; with the Princes and rapacious nobility; with the Popish foemen and with his own colleagues and followers, even with the preachers and writers dearest to him.

Luther sought to safeguard his cause on every side, even at the cost of concessions at variance with his duty, or by grovelling subserviency to the Princes, whether he actually granted their desire,[417] or, as in the case of the bigamy of Henry VIII of England, merely threw out a suggestion.[418]

His new ethical principles should surely have been attested in his own person, above all by truthfulness. In this connection we must, however, recall to mind the observations made elsewhere. (Above, vol. iv., p. 80 ff.)

Who is the lover of truth who does not regret the advice Luther gave from the Coburg to his followers at the Diet of Augsburg, viz. to make use of cunning when the cause seemed endangered? Where does self-betterment come in if “tricks and lapses” are to form a part of his life’s task, even though “with God’s help” they were afterwards to be amended;[419] if, when treating of the most important church matters, “reservation and subterfuge (‘_insidiæ_’)” are not only to be used but even to be represented as the work of Christ? Wherever the principle holds: Against the malice of our opponents everything is lawful,[420] there, undoubtedly, the least honest will always have the upper hand. As to how far Luther thought himself justified in going in order to conceal his real intentions we may see from his letters to the Pope, particularly from the last letter he addressed to him, where the public assertion of his devotion to the Roman Church coincides with his private admission to friends that the Pope was Antichrist and that he had sworn to attack him.[421]

* * * * *

In his relentless polemics against the Church—where he does not hesitate to bring the most baseless of charges against both her dignitaries and her institutions—we might dismiss as not uncommon his tendency to see only what was evil, eagerly setting this in the foreground while passing over all that was good; his eyes also served to magnify and distort the dark spots into all manner of grotesque shapes. But what tells more heavily against him is his having evolved out of his own mind a mountain of false doctrines which he foists on the Church as hers, though in reality not one of them but the very opposite was taught in and by the Church.

The Pope, he writes, for instance, in his “Vermanũg” from the Coburg, wants to “forbid marriage” and teaches that the “love of woman” is to be despised; this is one of the abominations and plagues of Antichrist, for God created woman for the honour and help of man.[422] The state of celibacy, willingly embraced by many under the Papacy, Luther decried in the same violent writing as a “state befitting whores and knaves,”[423] and he even connects with it unmentionable abominations.

He had declared “contempt of God” to be the mark of the Papal Antichrist, but, in the booklet in question, and elsewhere, we find him tirelessly charging with utter forgetfulness of God, hatred of religion, nay, complete absence of Christian faith not only the Pope and his advisers—who, none of them rose above an Epicurean faith—but all his opponents, particularly those who by their pen had damaged his doctrine. “Willingly enough would I obey the Pope and all the bishops, but they require me to deny Christ and His Gospel and to take of God a liar, therefore I prefer to attack them.”[424] When, in addition to this, he tries in all seriousness to make the people believe that at Rome the Gospel and all it contained was scoffed at; that the Papists were all sceptics; that their Doctors did not even know the Ten Commandments; that their priests were quite unable to quiet any man’s conscience; that the popish doctrine spelt nothing but murder, and that indeed every Papist must be a murderer, etc.,[425] one is tempted to seek for a pathological explanation of so strange a phenomenon. Such explanations will, it is true, be forthcoming in due course and will furnish grounds for a more lenient judgment. Here it may suffice to instance the terrific strength of will which dominated Luther’s fiery warfare, and which at times made him see things that others, even his own followers, were absolutely unable to see. Fortunately his mad statements concerning the Papists’ love of murder found little credence, any more than his repeated assurance that the Papists were at heart on his side, at any rate their leaders, writers and educated men.

He seems, however, also to believe many other monstrous things: it was his discovery, that, “in the Papacy, men sought to find salvation in Aristotle”; this belief he attempted to instil into the people in a sermon of 1528.[426] In 1542 he assured his friends in tones no less confident that the Papists had succeeded in teaching nothing but idolatry, “for every work [as taught by them] is idolatry. What they learnt was nothing but holiness-by-works.... Man was to perform this or that; to put on a cowl or get his head shaved; whoever did not do or believe this was damned. Yet, on the other hand, even if a man did all this they were unable to say with certainty whether thereby he would be saved. Fie, devil, what sort of doctrine was this!”[427]

The cowl and tonsure of the monks were particularly obnoxious to him. He cherished the view that he had for ever extirpated monkery; he declared that even the heads of Catholicism would not in future endure these hateful guests. To have been instrumental in preparing such a fate for the sons of the most noble-minded men, of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic, and for all the monks generally, who had been the trustiest supports of the faith, of the missions and of civilisation, this appears to him a triumph, which he proceeds to magnify out of all proportion the better to gloat over it.

“No greater service has ever been rendered to the bishops and pastors,” so he writes in his “Vermanũg,” “than that they should thus be rid of the monks; and I venture to surmise that there is hardly anyone now at Augsburg who would take the part of the monks and beg for their reinstatement. Indeed the bishops will not permit such bugs and lice again to fasten on their fur [their cappas], but are right glad that I have washed the fur so clean for them.”[428]—The untruth of this is self-evident. If some few short-sighted or tepid bishops among them were willing to dispense with the monks, still this was not the general feeling towards those auxiliaries of the Church, whom Luther himself on the same page dubs the “Pope’s right-hand men.” But the lie was calculated to impress those who possessed influence.