Chapter V: Introduction (3)

I shall add but one thing. There are many who set perilous snares for married folk, especially in case of incest; and when any one (for these things can happen, nay, alas! they do happen) has defiled the sister of his wife, or his mother-in-law, or one related to him in any degree of consanguinity, they at once deprive him of the right to pay the debt of matrimony, and nevertheless they suffer him not, nay, they forbid him, to desert his wife's bed. What monstrous thing is this? What new remedy for sin? What sort of satisfaction for sin? Does it not show how these tyrants make laws for other men's infirmity and indulge their own? Show me the law-giver, however penitent and chaste, who would allow such a law to be made for himself. They put dry wood on the fire and say, Do not burn; they put a man in a woman's arms and forbid him to touch her or know her; and they do this on their own authority and without the command of God. What madness! My advice is that the confessor beware of tyrannical decrees or laws, and confidently sentence a sinner to some other penance, or totally abstain from punishing, leaving free to him the right of matrimony which has been given him not by man, but by God. For no angel in heaven, still less any man on earth, has the power to enjoin this penance, which is the burning occasion of continual sin. Wherefore they are not to be heeded who wish such things to be done, and the penitent is to be freed from this scruple and peril.

But who may recount all the tyrannies with which the troubled consciences of penitent and confessing Christians are daily disturbed, by means of death-bringing "constitutions" and customs, administered by silly manikins, who only know how to bind and place on the shoulders of men burdens grievous and heavy to be borne, which they themselves are not willing to move with a finger? [Matt. 23:4] So this most salutary sacrament of penance has become nothing else than a mere tyranny of the great, then a disease, and a means to the increase of sins. Thus in the end it signifies one thing and works another thing for miserable sinners, because priestlings, impious and unlearned in the law of the Lord, administer the Church of God, which they have filled with their laws and their dreams.

_Here follows, in the original, a paraphrase of the apocryphal Prayer of Manasseh._

FOOTNOTES

[1] Luther quotes from the Vulgate and frequently from memory, a fact which should always be remembered in comparing his quotations from the text of Scripture.

[2] Vulgate, _Justus prior est accusator_.

[3] The apocryphal Prayer of Manasseh was included by Luther as an appendix to this treatise.

[4] _Augustine Conf._, X, 29.

[5] i. e., Forced to confess hidden sins.

[6] The so-called "science of casuistry," by which the moral value of an act is determined and the exact degree of guilt attaching to a given sin is estinated.

[7] Cf. _Small Catechism_, "Of Confession," Ques. "What sins ought we to confess?"

[8] The decrees of the Popes collected in the Canon Law. The decretal here referred to is _C. Omnis Utriusque, X. de poententiis et remissionibus_.

[9] Anecdotes illustrating the doctrines of the Church were favorite contents of the sermons in Luther's day. Various collections of these edifying legends are still extant. Cf. p. 224, and note.

[10] i. e., By thinking of the nature of confession.

[11] The reader of this minute classification of sins, which could be duplicated out of almost any manual of casuistry, may judge for himself whether Luther was correct in calling it a "riot of distinctions."

[12] Luther steadily maintained that the Ten Commandments were a complete guide to holy living and that every possible sin his prohibited somewhere in the Decalogue. See, beside the various smaller treatises (_Kurze Unterweisung wie man beichten soll_ (1518), _Kurze Form des zehn Gobte_ (1520), etc.), the large Discourse on Good Works, below, pp. 184 ff.

[13] The writings mentioned are found in the _Weimar Ed._, Vol I, pp. 250 ff, 258 ff, 398 ff. See above, p. 75, note 1.

[14] The _Sentences_ of Peter the Lombard was the standard text-book of Medieval theology.

[15] "On True and False Penitence," now universally admitted not to have been written by St. Augustine, but passing under his name till after the Reformation.

[16] That part of the liturgy of the Mass in which the miraculous transformation of the elements into the Body and Blood of Christ is believed to take place.

[17] i. e., Of the sacrament of confession.

[18] The fixed hours of daily prayer observed in the monasteries, afterward applied to the liturgy for these services, viz., the Breviary. The daily reading of this breviary at the appointed hours is required of all clergy.

[19] An Italian saint, d. 482, noted for the strictness and severity of his ascetic practices.

[20] Professor of the University of Paris; one of the most popular and famous of the later Scholastics. He died 1429.

[21] Vulgate, "_Cor ejus paratus est_."

[22] We would say, "the whole thing in a nutshell."

[23] i. e., Sins for which the confessor was not allowed to grant absolution without reference to some higher Church authority, to whose absolution they were "reserved." See Introduction, p. 79.

[24] The power to "bind and loose" (Matt. 16:19), i. e., to forgive and to retain sins (John 20:23).

[25] The Roman Church distinguished between the "guilt" and the "penalty" of sin. It was thought possible to forgive the former and retain the latter. Submission to the penalty is "satisfaction." See Introduction to XCV. Theses, p. 19.

[26] _Votum satisfactionis_. It was and is the teaching of the Roman Church that, where the actual reception of any sacrament is impossible, the earnest desire to receive it suffices for salvation. The desire is known as the _votum sacramenti_.

[27] In Spain. The shrine of St. James at that place was a famous resort for pilgrims. Cf. below, p. 191, and note.

[28] See the _Treatise on the Sacrament of Baptism_, above, pp. 68 ff.

[29] Luther doubtless refers to the decrees of the popes by which special rewards were attached to worship at certain shrines.

[30] The oath of office and the oath of allegiance.

[31] The story is repeated by Melanchthon in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Ch. XIII, Art. xxvii, 38 (_Book of Concord_, Eng. Trans., p. 288). The "Alexander Coriarius" of text is misleading.

THE FOURTEEN OF CONSOLATION

FOR SUCH AS LABOR AND ARE HEAVY LADEN

(TESSARADECAS CONSOLATORIA)

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