Hartmann Grisar

ORGANISATION AND PUBLIC POSITION OF THE NEW CHURCH

1. Luther’s Religious Situation. Was his Reaction a Break with Radicalism?

From the date of the presentation of the “Confession” at the Diet of Augsburg, Lutheranism began to take its place as a new form of religious belief.

Before this it had ostensibly been merely a question of reforming the universal Church, though, as a matter of fact, the proposed reform involved the entire reconstruction of the Church. Now, however, Lutherans admitted—at least indirectly, by putting forward this new profession of faith—that it was their intention to constitute themselves into a distinctive body, in order to impart a permanent character to the recent innovations in belief and practice. The Protestants were prepared to see in Germany two forms of faith existing side by side, unless indeed the Catholic Church should finally consent to accept the “evangelical” Profession of Faith.

It is true, that, in thus establishing a formula of faith which should be binding on their followers, the Lutherans were taking up a position in contradiction with the principle of private judgment in matters of faith, which, in the beginning, they had loudly advocated. This was, however, neither an isolated phenomenon, nor, considering the circumstances, at all difficult to understand. The principles which Luther had championed in the first part of his career, principles of which the trend was towards the complete emancipation of the individual from outward creeds and laws, he had over and again since his first encounters with the fanatics and Anabaptists honoured in the breach, and, if he had not altogether discarded them, he had at least come to explain them very differently.

Hence a certain reaction had taken place in the mind of the originator of the schism upon which in some sense the Confession of Augsburg set a seal.

The extent of this reaction has been very variously estimated. In modern times the contrast between the earlier and later Luther has been so strongly emphasised that we even hear it said that, in the first period of his career, what he stood for was a mere “religion of humanity,” that of a resolute “radical,” whereas in the second he returned to something more positive. Some have even ventured to speak of the earlier stage of Luther’s career, until, say, 1522, as “Lutheran,” and of the later as “Protestant.”

In order to appreciate the matter historically it will be necessary for us to take a survey of the circumstances as a whole which led to the change in Luther’s attitude, and then to determine the effect of these factors by a comparison between his earlier and later life.

Amongst the circumstances which influenced Luther one was his tardy recognition of the fact that the course he had first started on, with the noisy proclamation of freedom of thought and action in the sphere of religion, could lead to no other goal than that of universal anarchy and the destruction of both religion and morality. The Anabaptist rising served to point out to him the results of his inflammatory discourses in favour of freedom. He was determined that his work should not degenerate into social revolution, for one reason because he was anxious to retain the good-will of the mighty, above all of the Elector of Saxony. When the Peasant rising, thanks to the ideas he had himself put forth, began to grow formidable he found himself compelled to make a more determined stand against all forms of radicalism which threatened disintegration. This he did indeed more particularly in the political domain, though his changed attitude here naturally reacted also on his conception of matters religious.

He treated Andreas Carlstadt and Thomas MÜnzer as foes, not merely because they were turbulent and dangerous demagogues, but also because they were his rivals in the leadership of the movement. The “Spirit,” which he had formerly represented as the possession of all who opposed to the old Church their evangelical interpretation of Scripture, he was now obliged to reserve more and more to himself, in order to put a stop to the destructive effect of the multiplicity of opinions. Instead of the “inward word” he now insisted more and more on the “outward word,” viz. on the Bible preaching, as authorised by the authorities, i.e. according to his own interpretation. The mysticism, which had formerly lent a false, idealistic glamour to his advocacy of freedom, gradually evaporated as years went by. Having once secured a large following it was no longer necessary for him to excite the masses by playing to their love of innovation. After the first great burst of applause was over he became, in the second period of his life, rather more sober, the urgent task of establishing order in his party, particularly in the Saxon parishes which adhered to his cause, calling for prudent and energetic action on his side.

In this respect the Visitation in 1527 played a great part in modifying those ideas of his which tended to mere arbitrariness and revolution.

Now that the doctrines of the preachers had been made to conform more and more to the Wittenberg standard; now that the appointment of pastors had been taken out of the hands of the Congregations and left to the ruler of the land, it was only natural that when the new national Church called for a uniform faith, a binding confession of faith, such as that of Augsburg, should be proclaimed, however much such a step, such a “constriction and oppression” of freedom, might conflict with the right of private judgment displayed at the outset on the banner of the movement.

Such were, broadly stated, the causes which led to the remarkable change in Luther’s attitude.

On the other hand, those who opine that his ardour had been moderated by his stay at the Wartburg seem to be completely in the wrong. The solitude and quiet of the Wartburg neither taught Luther moderation, nor were responsible for the subsequent reaction. Quite otherwise; at the Wartburg he firmly believed that all that he had paved the way for and executed was mystically confirmed from above, and when, after receiving his “spiritual baptism” within those gloomy walls, he wrote, as one inspired, to the Elector concerning his mission, there was as yet in his language absolutely nothing to show the likelihood of his withdrawing any of the things he had formerly said. Upon his return to Wittenberg he at once took a vigorous part in the putting down of the revolt of the fanatics, not, however, because he disapproved of the changes in themselves—this he expressly disclaims—but because he considered it imprudent and compromising to proceed in so turbulent a manner.[1]

If, in order to estimate the actual extent of the reaction in Luther’s mind, we compare his earlier with his later years, we find in the period previous to 1522 a seething, contradictory mixture of radicalism and positive elements.

We say a mixture, for it is not in accordance with the historical sources to say that, in those first stormy years of Luther’s career, what he stood for was a mere religion of humanity, or that his mode of thought was quite unchristian. Had this been the case, then the contrast with his later period would indeed be glaring. As it is, however, Luther’s statements, as previously given, prove that, in spite of certain discordant voices, his intention had ever been to preserve everything in Christianity which he regarded as really positive, i.e. everything which in his then state of thought and feeling he regarded as essential.[2] Indeed, he was even disposed to exaggerate the importance of a positive faith in Christ and man’s dependence upon God at the expense of man’s natural power of reason. “In spite of all his calls for freedom and of his pronounced individualism” he preached an extravagant “dependence upon God.”[3] So far was he from the slightest tendency to embracing a religion of pure reason that he could not find terms sufficiently opprobrious to bestow on reason. We also know that he did not evolve his doctrine of Justification in the second or so-called reaction period, as has recently been stated in order to accentuate the contrast, but in the first period and in the quite early stage of his development.

His Latin Commentary on Galatians (1519), with the new doctrine of Justification,[4] expresses faith in the Redeemer and His Grace in terms of startling force; he requires of the children of God the fruits of Grace, and attention to every word of Scripture.

After that year and till 1521, the “Operationes in Psalmos” prove both his desire for a positive religion and his own earnestness in directing others to lead a Christian life;[5] the doctrine of Justification therein advocated was admitted by him, even in his old age, to have been “faithfully set forth.”[6]

As other examples which certainly do not go to prove any conscious tendency towards theological radicalism, we may mention his work on the Ten Commandments and the Our Father, which he published in 1520 for the unlearned and for children;[7] the sermons, which he continued the whole year through; various discourses which he published in 1519, such as that on the Twofold Justice,[8] in which he treats of the indwelling of Christ in man; that on Preparation for Death, where he inculcates the use of Confession, of the Supper and even of Extreme Unction, teaching that hope is to be placed in Christ alone, and that Saints are to be honoured as followers of Christ;[9] finally, many other writings, sermons, letters, already dealt with, dating from the time prior to the change.

In view of the statements of this sort with which Luther’s early works teem we cannot accept the assertion that the words “Christ, Gospel, Faith and Conscience” were merely intended by Luther to lend a “semblance of religion” to his negations, and were, on his lips, mere biblical phrases. Louis Saltet, a Catholic historian of the Church, is right in his opinion concerning this new theory: “A negative Lutheranism dominant from 1517 to 1521 is something not vouched for by history”; that the author of the new teaching “had arrived at something very much like theological nihilism is a supposition which there is nothing to prove.”[10]

As for Luther’s then attitude towards the Bible, he actually exaggerates its importance at the expense of reason by asserting that reason, whilst well aware of the contradictions and the foolishness of the truths of revelation, was nevertheless obliged to accept them. The incomprehensibility, ever taught by theologians, of many of the mysteries of the faith, for the understanding of which human reason alone does not suffice, Luther represents as an open contradiction with reason; reason and philosophy, owing to original sin, must necessarily be in opposition to God, and hence faith does actual violence to reason, forcing it to submit, contrary to its present nature and to that of man. Hence, in his estimate of Holy Scripture, far from being a rationalist, he was, as a modern Protestant theologian puts it, really an “irrationalist,” holding as he did that an “unreasonable obedience to Holy Scripture”[11] was required of us. According to this same theologian, Luther starts from “an irrational conception of God’s veracity,” indeed it is God, Who, according to Luther, “by the gift of faith, produces in man the irrational belief in the truth of the whole Divine Word.” Thus does Luther reach his “altogether irrational, cut-and-dry theology.”[12] If the Wittenberg Professor asserts later, that no religion is so foolish and contrary to reason as Christianity, and that nevertheless he believes “in one Jew, Who is called and is Jesus Christ,”[13] this belief, so singularly expressed, was already present to him in his first period, and the same may be said, so the authority above referred to declares, of his apparent adoption in later years of more positive views, “since Luther’s theological convictions never underwent any essential change.”[14]

If from the positive we pass to the negative side of Luther’s teaching, we do indeed find the latter more predominant during the first period of his career. An almost revolutionary assertion of religious freedom is found side by side with the above utterances on faith, so that Adolf Harnack could with some justice say that “Kant and Fichte both are concealed in this Luther.”[15]

“Neither Pope, nor bishop, nor any man,” according to what Luther then says, “has a right to dictate even a syllable to the Christian without his own consent.”[16] If you have grasped the Word in faith, then “you have fulfilled all the commandments and must be free from all things”; the believer becomes “spiritually lord of all,” and by virtue of his priestly dignity, “he has power over all things.”[17] “No laws can be imposed upon Christians by any authority whatsoever, neither by men, nor by angels, except with their own consent, for we are free of all things.”[18] “What is done otherwise is gross tyranny.... We may not become the servants of men.” “But few there are who know the joy of Christian liberty.”[19]

Applying this to faith and the interpretation of Scripture, he says, for instance, in 1522: “Formerly we were supposed to have no authority to decide,” but, by the Gospel which is now preached, “all the Councils have been overthrown and set aside”; no one on earth has a right to decree what is to be believed. “If I am to decide what is false doctrine, then I must have the right to judge.” Pope and Councils may enact what they will, “but I have my own right to judge, and I may accept it or not as I please.” At the hour of death, he continues, each one must see for himself how he stands; “you must be sharp enough to decide for yourself that this is right and that wrong, otherwise it is impossible for you to hold your own.” “Your head is in danger, your life is at stake; God must speak within your breast and say: ‘This is God’s Word,’ otherwise all is uncertain. Thus you must be convinced within yourself, independent of all men.”[20]

The individualistic standpoint could scarcely be expressed more strongly. The appeal to the voice of God “speaking in the heart” renders it all the more forcible by introducing a pseudo-mystic element. It is an individualism which might logically be made to justify every form of unbelief. In such devious paths as these did Luther lose himself when once he had set aside the doctrinal authority of the Church.

In his practical instructions and in what he says on the most important points of the doctrine of salvation, he ever arrogates to himself a liberty which is in reality mere waywardness.

If the Sacraments were committed to the Church by her Divine Founder, then she must put the faithful under the obligation of making use of them in the way Christ intended; she may not, for instance, leave her subjects free to bring their children to be baptised or not, to confess or not to do so, to receive the Sacrament of the Altar or to refrain from receiving it altogether. She may, indeed she must, exercise a certain compulsion in this respect by means of ecclesiastical penalties. Luther, however, refused to hear of the Church and her authority, or of any duty of obedience on the part of the faithful, the result being that the freedom which he proclaimed nullified every obligation with respect to the Sacraments.

In the booklet which he composed in the Wartburg, “Von der Beicht ob der Bapst Macht habe zu gepieten” (1521), wherein he sets aside the duty of Confession, he says of the use of the Sacraments, without troubling to exclude even Baptism: “He [man] is at liberty to make use of Confession if, as, and where he chooses. If he does not wish you may not compel him, for no one has a right to or ought to force any man against his will. Absolution is nevertheless a great gift of God. In the same way no man can, or ought to, be forced to believe, but everyone should be instructed in the Gospel and admonished to believe; though he is to be left free to obey or not to obey. All the Sacraments should be left optional to everyone. Whoever does not wish to be baptised, let him be. Whoever does not wish to receive the Sacrament, has a right not to receive; therefore, whoever does not wish to confess is free before God not to do so.”[21]

The receiving of Holy Communion, he declared then and on other occasions, was to remain optional, although in later years he was most severe in insisting upon it. Concerning this Sacrament, at the commencement of 1520 in his “Erklerung etlicher Artickel,” he said that Christ had not made the reception of the Sacrament compulsory; reception under one kind or under both was not prescribed, although “it would be a good thing to receive under both kinds.”[22]

May we, however, say that Luther made the reception of the Sacrament of Baptism entirely optional? Did he go so far as to consider Baptism as something not necessary? The passage just quoted, which does away so thoroughly with the duty of Confession and instances Baptism as a parallel case, is certainly somewhat surprising with regard to Baptism. Luther’s train of thought in the passage in question is, however, rather confused and obscure. Is he referring to the liberty of the unbaptised to receive or not receive the Sacrament of Baptism, or to the deferring of Baptism, whether in the case of the adult or in that of the children of Christian parents?

He certainly always held Baptism itself to be absolutely essential for salvation;[23] only where it could not be had, was faith able to produce its effects. Hence, in the above passage, stress must be laid on the words “no one can be forced,” Luther’s meaning being that constraint in the case of this Sacrament is as intolerable as in the case of the others. He, moreover, declares immediately afterwards that Christ demands “Baptism and the Sacrament.” Elsewhere, when again advocating freedom in the matter of Confession and defending the work above referred to, he says: “I will have no forcing and compelling. Faith and baptism I commend; no one, however, may be forced to accept it, but only admonished and then left free to choose.”[24] Nevertheless he had certainly not been sufficiently careful in his choice of words, and had allowed too great play to his boisterous desire for freedom, when, at the conclusion of the passage quoted from his booklet “On Confession,” he seemingly asserts man’s “freedom before God,” not only in the matter of Confession and Communion, but also in that of Baptism. Yet the object of the whole tract was to show what the result would be, more particularly in the matter of Confession and Excommunication, were Christ’s commandments in Holy Scripture put in practice, instead of attending only to the man-made ordinances of Popes and Councils.[25]

One modern school of Protestant unbelief professes to base itself on the earlier Luther, and, in almost every particular, justifies itself by appealing to him.

Such theologians are, however, overstepping the limits of what is right and fair when they make out the Luther of that earlier period to have been a true representative of that form of unbelief just tinged with religion which is their own ideal. As a matter of fact, Luther, had he been logical, should have arrived at this conclusion, but he preferred to turn aside, repudiate it, and embrace the profound contradiction involved in the union of that right of private judgment he had proclaimed, with the admission of binding dogmas. Freedom in the interpretation of the sense of Scripture, or more correctly the setting aside of all ecclesiastical and ostensibly human authority, has been termed the formal principle of Lutheranism; the doctrine of Justification, viz. the chief doctrine of Lutheranism, was called by the older theologians its material principle. Both principles were at variance with each other in Luther’s mind, just as there can be no composition between arbitrary judgment and formulÆ of faith. History has to take Luther as he really was; he demanded the fullest freedom to oppose the Church and her representatives who claimed the right to enact laws concerning faith and morals, but he most certainly was not disposed to hear of any such freedom where belief in revelation, or the acceptance of God’s commandments, was concerned. In the domain of the State, too, he had no intention of interfering with due subjection to the authorities, though his hasty, ill-considered utterances seemed to invite the people to pull down every barrier.

In the second period, from 1522 onwards, his tone has changed and he becomes, so to speak, more conservative and more “religious.”

The principle of freedom of interpretation he now proclaims rather more cautiously, and no longer appeals in so unqualified a manner to the universal priesthood and the sovereignty of the Congregation in matters of religion. Now that the State has come to assume the direction of the Church, Luther sees fit to make his own some of the conservative ideas usually dear to those in power. As a preservative against abuse of freedom he lays great stress on the “office,” and the call to the work of preaching given by superior authority. “Should a layman so far forget himself as to correct a preacher,” says Heinrich BÖhmer when dealing with Luther’s attitude at this period, “and speak publicly, even to a small circle, on the Word of God, it becomes the duty of the authorities, in the interests of public order, to proceed against him as a disturber of the peace. How contradictory this was with the great Reformer’s previous utterances is patent, though very likely he himself did not clearly perceive it. The change in his convictions on this point had taken place all unnoticed simultaneously with the change in the inward and outward situation of the evangelical party.... That his [earlier] view necessarily called not only for unrestricted freedom to teach, but also for complete freedom of worship, was indeed never fully perceived by the Reformer himself.”[26]

The two divergent tendencies, one positive and the other negative, are apparent throughout Luther’s career.

The positive tendency is, however, more strongly emphasised in the second period. We shall hear him giving vent to the most bitter complaints concerning those who interpret Holy Scripture according to their own ideas and introduce their own notions into the holy and unchanging Word of God. As exemplifying his own adherence to the truths of Christianity, the great and solemn profession of faith contained in the work he wrote in 1528 on the Supper, has been rightly instanced. As P. Albert Weiss remarks, he makes this “fine profession with an energy which goes straight to the heart” and “in words which bear honourable testimony to the depth of his conviction”; it is true that here, too, the contrast to the Catholic Church, whose belief he so passionately depreciates, forces itself like a spectre before his mind.[27] “This is my belief,” he says at the end of the list of Christian dogmas which he accepts, “for this is what all true Christians believe and what Holy Scripture teaches. Whatever I may have left unsaid here will be found in my booklets, more particularly in those published during the last four or five years.”[28]

Hence when it is asserted by Protestants of rationalist leanings that Luther recognised only one form of faith, viz. trust in Christ, and that he reduced all religion to this, it should be pointed out that he required at the same time a belief in all revealed truths, and that his doctrine of confident faith in one’s personal salvation and of trust in a Gracious God and Saviour, was ultimately based on a general act of faith; “Faith,” he says, in a sermon which was later embodied in his Church-postils, “really means accepting as true from the bottom of our heart what the Gospel says concerning Christ, and also all the articles of faith.”[29] It is true that Luther ever insisted on awakening of confidence, yet the “fides fiducialis” as explained by him always presupposes the existence of the “fides historica.”

With Luther faith in the whole of Divine revelation comes first, then the trusting faith which “trusts all to God.”[30]

“His whole manner of life,” Otto Ritschl says, “so far as it was directed to the attainment of practical aims, was fundamentally religious, in the same way as his most important doctrines concerning God, Christ, the Law, Sin, Justification, the Forgiveness of Sins and Christian Freedom all breathe the spirit of faith, which, as such, was confidence.” The Protestant theologian from whom we quote these words thinks it necessary to say of the contradictions in Luther which have been instanced by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, that “at least in Luther’s own way of thinking,” they were not such, for he based his faith on the “revelation given by God’s Word in Holy Scripture.”[31]

In the polemical writings directed against Luther, it was pointed out, concerning his faith, that he himself had described faith as a mere “fancy and supposition” (opinio). We would, however, suggest the advisability of considerable caution, for according to other passages and from the context, it is plain that what he intends by the word “opinio” is rather a belief, and, besides, he adds the adjective “firma” to the word incriminated. It is of course a different question whether the absolute certainty of faith can be attributed to that faith on which he lays such great stress, viz. the purely personal fides fiducialis in one’s salvation through Christ, and, further, whether this certainty can be found in the articles, which, according to Luther’s teaching, the Christian deduces from the Word of God in Scripture by a subjective examination in which he has only his own private judgment to depend on.

However this may be, we find Luther till the very end insisting strongly on the submission of reason to the Word of God, so that E. Troeltsch, the Heidelberg theologian, could well describe his attitude as mediÆval on account of the subjection he demands to dogma. For this very reason he questions the view, that Luther really “paved the way for the modern world.” Troeltsch, nevertheless, is not disinclined to see in Luther’s independence of thought a considerable affinity with the spirit of modern days.[32] This brings us to the other side of the subject.

Let us follow up the other, the negative, tendency in Luther, from 1522 onwards, which makes for complete religious independence.

Of one doctrine in which it is manifest Harnack says, and his statement is equally applicable to others: “The universal priesthood of all the faithful was never relinquished by Luther, but he became much more cautious in applying it to the congregations actually in existence.”[33] Luther, according to him, expresses himself “very variably” concerning the “competency of the individual congregations, of the congregations as actually existing or as representing the true Church.”

The author of the schism, in spite of all the positive elements he retained during the whole of this period of reaction and till the very end, had no settled conception of the Church, and the subjective element, and with it the negative, disintegrating tendency therefore necessarily predominated in his mind. It is not only Catholics, from their standpoint, who assert that his whole life’s work was above all of a destructive character, for many Protestant writers who look below the surface agree with them, notwithstanding all their appreciation for Luther.

“Wittenberg,” says Friedrich Paulsen, “was the birthplace of the revolutionary movement in Germany.... Revolution is the fittest name by which to describe it.” The term “Reformation,” is, he declares, inexact; a “reformation,” according to Paulsen, was what “the great Councils of the fifteenth century sought to bring about.” “Luther’s work was not a ‘reformation,’ a re-shaping of the existing Church by her own means, but a destruction of the old form; indeed, we may say, a thorough-going denial of the Church.” Paulsen points out that, in his work addressed to the knights of the Teutonic Order, Luther advocates “ecclesiastical anarchy” in seeking to lead them to despise all spiritual authority and to break their vow of chastity. The tract in question was repeatedly published as a broadside, and passed into the Wittenberg and other early collections of his works.[34]

From the Catholic standpoint, says Gustav Kawerau, “Paulsen was quite right in branding Luther as a revolutionary”; Luther’s new wine could not, however, so he says, do otherwise than burst the old bottles.[35]

The “wine” which Luther had to offer was certainly in a state of fermentation, which, with his rejection of all ecclesiastical authority, made it savour strongly of nihilism. According to Luther religious truth had been altogether disfigured even in Apostolic times, owing to the rise of the doctrine of free-will. “For at least a thousand years,” he repeatedly asserts, truth had been set aside because, owing to the illegal introduction of external authority in the Church, “we have been deprived of the right of judging and have been unjustly forced to accept what the Pope and the Councils decreed”; yet no one can “determine or decide for others what faith is,” and, since Christ has warned us against false prophets, “it clearly follows that I have a right to judge of doctrine.”[36]

One person only has the right—of this he is ever sure—to proclaim doctrines as undeniable truths come down from heaven. “I am certain that I have my dogmas from heaven.”[37] “I am enlightened by the Spirit, He is my teacher.”[38] “We have seen him raised up by God,” so his friends declared immediately after his death,[39] and, so far as they were in agreement with him, they claimed a heavenly authority on his behalf. In spite of all this Luther never saw fit to restrict in principle the freedom of determining and judging doctrine; the meaning of Scripture he permits every man to search out, the one indispensable condition being, that Scripture should be interpreted under the inspiration of the Spirit from on high, in which case he presumed that the interpretation would agree with his own. The numerous “clear and plain” passages from Scripture which were to guide the interpreter, were to him a guarantee of this; he himself had followed nothing else. The misfortune is that he never attempted to enumerate or define these passages, and that many of those very passages which appeared to him so clear and plain were actually urged against him; for instance, the words of institution by the Zwinglians and the texts on Justification by certain of his followers and by the Catholics.

The fact that freedom in the interpretation of the Bible produced, and must necessarily produce, anarchy of opinion, has, by the representatives of the Rationalistic school of Protestant theology, been urged against the positive elements which Luther chose to retain. The tendency which, had he not set himself resolutely against it, would have brought Luther even in later years face to face with a purely naturalistic view of life, has been clearly and accurately pointed out. Paul Wernle, a theologian whose ideal of a renewed Christianity is a natural religion clad in religious dress, points to the anarchy resulting from the multitude of interpretations, and attacks Luther’s Bible faith for the contradictions it involves. “The appeal to ‘Bible Christianity,’ and ‘Primitive New Testament Christianity,’ produced a whole crop of divergent views of Christianity”; “the limitations of this Renascence of Christianity,” which was no real Renascence at all, are, he says, very evident; Luther had summed up “the theology of Paul in a one-sided fashion, purely from the point of view of fear of, and consolation in, sin”; his comprehension of Paul was “one-sided, repellent and narrow,” and, in favour of Paul, “he depreciated most unjustly the first three Gospels”; the new theology “rested exclusively on Romans and Galatians,” and, root and branch, is full of contradictions.[40]

Luther himself invited such criticism by his constant advocacy of individualism in his later no less than in his earlier years. “If individualism be introduced even into religious life,” writes E. Troeltsch, “then the Church loses her significance as an absolute and objective authority.” And concerning the “whole crop of views on Christianity” which sprang from such individualism, he says with equal justice: “A truth which can and must live in so many embodiments, can of its very nature never be expressed in one simple and definable form. It is in its nature to undergo historical variations and to take on different forms at one and the same time.”[41] But this is the renunciation of stable truth, in other words: scepticism.

Denifle put it clearly and concisely when he said: “Luther planted the seed of present-day Protestant incredulity.”[42]

“The tendency of the Reformation,” declares W. Herrmann, a representative of ultra-liberal Protestant theology, was in the direction of the views he holds, viz. towards a rationalistic Christianity, not at all towards “the view of religion dear to orthodox theology.” He is convinced, that “it is high time for us to resume the work of the Reformers and of Schleiermacher, and to consider what we are really to understand by religion.” Religion is not an “unreasoning” faith in dogmas, nor a “non-moral” assent to alien ideas, “but a personal experience” such as the great Reformation doctrine of Justification rightly assumed. Yet, even now, theologians still lack that “comprehension of religion common to all.” All that is needed is to take Luther’s ideas in real earnest, for, according to Herrmann, the “true Christian understanding of what faith, i.e. religion [in the above, modern sense], is, was recovered at the Reformation. Thus only,” he concludes, “can we escape from the hindrances to belief presented by the present development of science.”[43]

It is with a similar appeal to Luther that another theologian, P. Martin Rade, the editor of the “Christliche Welt,” spreads his sails to the blast of modern infidelity. According to him Luther was “one of the fathers of subjectivism and of modern ways”; Luther, by his doctrine of Justification by faith, gave to subjective piety “its first clumsy expression”; the faith which Luther taught the world was an “individual staking” of all on God’s mercy. Yet, he complains, there are people within the Evangelical Church who are still afraid of subjectivism. “This fear torments the best, and raises a mighty barrier in front of those who struggle onwards.” The barrier is composed of the articles of the creed which have remained upstanding since Luther’s day. And yet “each scholar can, and may, only represent Christianity as it appears to him.” “For us Protestants there is in these circumstances only one way. We recognise no external authority which could cut the knot for us. Hence we must take our position seriously, and embrace and further the cause of subjectivism.” Thanks to Luther “religion has been made something subjective; too subjective it can never be ... all precautions adopted to guard against religious subjectivism are really unevangelical.” We must, on the contrary, say with Luther: “God will always prevail and His Word remains for all eternity, and His truth for ever and ever.” “Let the Bible speak for itself and work of itself” without any “human dogma,” and then you have the true spirit of Luther’s Reformation, “the very spirit which breathed through it from the day when it first began to play its part in the history of the world.” This writer is well acquainted with the two great objections to that principle of Luther, which he praises, yet he makes no attempt to answer them any more than Luther himself did. The first is: “Where is all this to end? Where shall we find anything stable and certain?” He simply consoles the questioner by stating that “Science provides its own remedy.” The second objection is: “But the masses require to be governed, and educated,” in other words, religion must be an assured, heaven-sent gift to all men, whereas only the few are capable of proving things for themselves and following the profession of the learned. “Herein lies the problem,” is the resigned answer, “which we do not fail to recognise, and with it Protestantism has hitherto proved itself sadly incapable of grappling”; “entirely new forces are required” for this purpose. Whence these forces are to come, we are not told.[44]

That all are not determined to follow the course which Luther had entered upon is but natural. To many the Wittenberg Professor remains simply a guardian of the faith, a bulwark of conservatism, and even the safety-valve he opened many would fain see closed again. Characteristic of this group is the complaint recently brought forward by the Evangelical “Monatskorrespondenz” against Friedrich Nietzsche, for having described Luther’s reformation, with scant respect, as the “Peasant Revolt of the mind,” and spoken of the “destruction of throne and altar” which he had brought about.[45]

If, from the above, we attempt to judge of the range of Luther’s so-called “reaction” in his second period, we find that it can no more be regarded as a return to positive beliefs than his first period can be described as almost wholly Rationalistic. In both cases we should be guilty of exaggeration; in the one stage as well as in the other there is a seething mixture of radical principles and tendencies on the one hand, and of Christian faith and more positive ones on the other. In his earlier years, however, Luther allows the former, and, in the second, the latter to predominate. Formerly, at the outset of the struggle, he had been anxious to emphasise his discovery which was to be the loosing of imaginary bonds, while the old beliefs he still shared naturally retreated more or less into the background; now, owing partly to his calmer mode of thought, partly to insure greater stability to his work and in order to shake off the troublesome extremists, Luther was more disposed to display the obverse of the medal with the symbols of faith and order, without however repudiating the reverse with the cap of liberty. How he contrived to reconcile these contradictions in his own mind belongs to the difficult study of his psychology. On account of these contradictions he must not, however, be termed a theological nihilist, since he made the warmest profession of faith in the principles of Christianity; neither may he be called a hero of positive faith, seeing that he bases everything on his private acceptance. To describe him rightly we should have to call him the man of contradictions, for he was in contradiction not merely with the Church, but even with himself. The only result of the so-called reaction in Luther during the ‘twenties, and later, was the bringing into greater prominence of this inner spirit of contradiction.

The startling antagonism between negation and belief within his mind found expression in his whole action. Though his character, his vivacity, imaginativeness and rashness concealed to some extent the rift, his incessant public struggles also doing their part in preventing him from becoming wholly alive to the contradictions in his soul, yet in his general behaviour, in his speech, writings and actions we find that instability, restlessness and inconstancy which were the results at once of this contrast and of the fierce struggle going on within him. The vehemence which so frequently carries him away was a product of this state of ferment. Often we find him attempting to smother his consciousness of it by recourse to jesting. His conviviality and his splendid gift of sympathy concealed from his friends the antagonism he bore within him. All that the public, and most of his readers, perceived was the mighty force of his eloquence and personality and the wealth and freshness of his imagery. They sufficed to hide from the common herd the discrepancies and flaws inherent in his standpoint.

Wealth and versatility, such are the terms sometimes applied by Protestants to the frequent contradictions met with in his statements. In the same way the ambiguity of Kant’s philosophy has been accounted one of its special advantages, whereas ambiguity really denotes a lack of sequence and coherence, or at the very least a lack of clearness. Truth undefiled displays both wealth and beauty without admixture of obscurity or of ambiguity.

Luther’s “wealth” was thus described by Adolf Hausrath: “Every word Luther utters plays in a hundred lights and every eye meets with a different radiance, which it would gladly fix. His personality also presents a hundred problems. Of all great men Luther was the most paradoxical. The very union, so characteristic of him, of mother-wit and melancholy is quite peculiar. His wanton humour seems at times to make a plaything of the whole world, yet the next moment this seemingly incurable humorist is oppressed with the deepest melancholy, so that he knows not what to do with himself.... In one corner of his heart lurks a demon of defiance who, when roused, carries away the submissive monk to outbursts which he himself recognises as the work of some alien force, stronger than his firmest resolutions. He was the greatest revolutionary of the age and yet he was a conservative theologian, yea, conservative to obstinacy.... He insisted at times upon the letter as though the salvation of the entire Church depended upon it, and yet we find him rejecting whole books of the Bible and denying their Apostolic spirit. Reason appears to him as a temptress from the regions of enchantment, intellect as a mere rogue, who proves to his own satisfaction just what he is desirous of seeing proved, and yet, armed with this same reason and intellect, Luther went out boldly into the battle-fields of the prolonged religious war.”[46]

2. From the Congregational to the State Church Secularisations

In the first stage of his revolt against the Church, Luther had imagined that the new order of things could be brought about amongst his followers merely by his declaiming against outward forms; repeatedly he asserted that the Christian life consisted wholly in faith and charity, that faith would display its power spontaneously in good works, and that thus everything would arrange itself; a new and better Church would spring up within the old one, though minus a hierarchy, minus all false doctrine and holiness-by-works.

Up to the commencement of the ‘twenties his efforts had, in fact, been directed not to the setting up of new congregations but to the reconstruction of the existing Church system. Previous to his drafting of the plan comprised in the writing he sent to Prague, on the appointment of ecclesiastical ministers (vol. ii., p. 111 f.), in which we find the congregational organisation proposed as a model for the German Church, he was as yet merely desirous of paving the way for what he looked on as a reformation within the already existing Church, and this by means of the rulers and nobles.

His work “An den christlichen Adel,” to which we must now return in order to consider it from this particular standpoint, was composed with this object. By it he sought to rouse the rulers and those in power who had opened their hearts to the “Christian” faith, i.e. to the new Evangel, to take in hand the moral and religious reformation on the lines indicated by himself. Thus he appealed, as almost all sectarians had instinctively done from the very first, to the secular authorities and the power of the Princes in order to attain his special ecclesiastical ends. The secular Estates, already covetous of increased power and independence, were invited in these fiery pages to take their stand against the Papacy and the hierarchy, just as they would against “a destroyer of Christendom,”[47] and “to punish them severely” on account of divers disorders and “for their abuse of excommunication and their shocking blasphemies against the name of God,”[48] in short, “to put an end to the whole affair.”[49] The last words, found in the writing “On good works,” were addressed to the “King, the Princes, Nobles, Townships and people generally.”

Thus to force the two powers, secular and ecclesiastical, out of their spheres, handing over the supervision of the Church to the secular authorities[50] can only be characterised as an attack upon the whole Christian and moral order of things, on the whole previous development of the Church and on the highest principles of religion. It is true that the Catholic States had already appropriated many of the rights really appertaining to the Church, but to carry their interference so far as Luther advised, had never yet occurred to them. Indeed, the subversion of order planned by Luther was so great, that the impossibility of carrying out his project must have speedily become apparent to him. As a matter of fact, the actual number of those whose hearts had been awakened by the Evangel to the extent of sharing Luther’s extreme views was not at all considerable.

When anxious friends pointed out to Luther how revolutionary his undertaking was, his excuse was merely this: “I am blameless, seeing that my only object is to induce the nobles of Germany to set a limit to the encroachments of the Romanists by passing resolutions and edicts, not by means of the sword; for to fight against an unwarlike clergy would be like fighting against women and children.”[51] Hence, so long as no blood was shed, the overthrow of the legal status of the Church met with his full approval.

The torrents of angry abuse which Luther soon afterwards poured forth upon those in power because they would not follow his call and allow themselves to be “awakened,” were simply proofs of the futility of his plan.

Thus his ideal of the future was now shattered, viz. the spiritual society and new Christendom which he had planned to establish with the help of the Princes. “This dream passed rapidly away. All that remained was a deep-seated pessimism.... From that time the persuasion grew on him that the world will always remain the same, that it can never be governed according to the Evangel and can never be rendered really Christian; likewise, that true Christians will always be but few in number.”[56]

Hence these few Christians must become the object of his solicitude. He is more and more inspired by the fantastic notion that Popery is to be speedily overthrown by God Himself, by His Word and by the breath of His Mouth. In the meantime he expects the new Church to develop spontaneously from the congregations by the power of God, even though at first it should consist of only a small number of faithful souls.

The congregational ideal, as a passing stage in his theory of Church formation, absorbed him, as we have already seen, more particularly from the year 1523. The congregations were to be self-supporting after once the new teaching had been introduced amongst them. In accordance with the Evangel, they were to be quite independent and to choose their own spiritual overseers. From among these, superintendents were to be selected, to be at the head of the congregations of the country, and as it were general-bishops, assisted by visitors, of course all laymen, no less than those from whom they derived their authority and by whom, for instance for bad doctrine, they might be removed. The above-mentioned letter sent to Prague, on the appointment of ministers in the Church (1523), contained further details. Other statements made by Luther about that same time, and already quoted, supply what is here lacking; for instance, his ascribing to each member of the congregation the right of judging of doctrine and of humbly correcting the preacher, should he err, even before the whole assembly, according to the Spirit of God which inspires him.[57]

Thus he had relinquished the idea of proceeding by means of the assistance of the Princes and nobles, and had come to place all his hopes in the fruitfulness and productive power of the congregational life.

But here again he met with nothing but disappointment. It was not encouraging to find, that, on the introduction of the new teaching and in the struggle against alleged formalism and holiness-by-works, what Christian spirit previously existed was inclined to take to flight, whilst an unevangelical spirit obtruded itself everywhere. Hence his enlargement of his earlier congregational theory by the scheme for singling out the faithful, i.e. the true Christians, and forming of them a special community.

Just as his belief in the spontaneous formation of a new state of things testified to his abnormal idealism, so this new idea of an assembly within the congregation displays his utter lack of any practical spirit of organisation. As to how far this perfecting of his congregational Churches tended to produce a sort of esoteric Church, will be discussed elsewhere (vol. v., xxix., 8).

More particularly at Wittenberg he was desirous of seeing this segregation of the “Christians” carried out, quietly and little by little. He prudently abstained from exerting his own influence for its realisation, and preferred to wait for it to develop spontaneously “under the Spirit of God.” The idea was, as a matter of fact, far too vague. He also felt that neither he nor the others possessed the necessary spiritual authority for guiding hearts towards this goal, for preserving peace within the newly founded communities, or for defending them against the hostile elements outside. As for his favourite comparison of his theory of the congregation with that in vogue in Apostolic times, it was one which could not stand examination. His congregations lacked everything—the moral foundation, the Spirit from above, independent spiritual authority and able, God-enlightened superiors to act as their organs and centres.

At Leisnig in the Saxon Electorate (cf. vol. ii., p. 113) an attempt to call an ideal evangelical community into existence was made in 1523, the Church property being illegally confiscated by the magistrates and members of the parish, and the ancient right of the neighbouring Cistercian house to appoint the parish-priest being set at nought by the congregation choosing its own pastor; here the inevitable dissensions at once broke out within the community and the whole thing was a failure. The internal confusion to which the congregation would be exposed through the doctrine of private illumination and “apostolic” rights, is clear from the very title of the work which Luther composed for Leisnig: “That a Christian assembly or parish has the right and power to judge of doctrine and to give the call to, and appoint and remove, its pastors,” etc.[60]

In spite of the evident impracticability of the scheme, the phantom of the congregational Church engrossed the author of the ecclesiastical schism for about ten years. Nor did he ever cease to cherish the idea of the Church apart. It was this idea which inspired the attacks contained in his sermons upon the multitude of lazy, indolent and unbelieving souls to whom it was useless to preach and who, even after death, were only fit for the flaying-ground because during life they had infected the invisible, living community. He is heedless of what must result, in the towns, villages and families, from any division into Christians and non-Christians, nor does he seem to notice that the system of the Church apart could only produce spiritual pride, hypocrisy and all the errors of subjectivism in those singled out by the Spirit, to say nothing of the obstinacy and wantonness engendered in those who were excluded.

The popular Church, of which it was necessary to make the best, owing to the impracticability of the Church apart, apparently embraced all, yet, within it, according to Luther, the true believers formed an invisible Church, and this in a twofold manner, first, because they were themselves not to be recognised, and, secondly, because the Word and the Sacrament, from which they derived their religious life, concealed a whole treasure of invisible forces.

With such imperfect elements it was, however, impossible to establish a new Church system. A new phase was imminent, towards which everything was gravitating of its own accord; this was the State Church, i.e. the national Church as a State institution, with the sovereign at its head. The various congregational churches formed a visible body frequently impinging on the outward, civil government, and largely dependent on the support of the authorities; hence their gradual evolution into a State Church. The local and national character of the new system paved the way for this development. Luther, whilst at the bottom of his heart anxious to check it—for his ideal was an independent Church—came, under pressure of circumstances, to champion it as the best and only thing. A popular Church or State Church had never been his object, yet he ultimately welcomed the State Church as the best way to meet difficulties; this we shall see more clearly further on. In his efforts to overcome the apathy of the masses he even had recourse to compulsion by the State, inviting the authorities to force resisters to attend Divine Worship.[61]

Luther should have asked himself whether the moral grandeur and strength which, in spite of its favourable appearance, the congregational Church lacked, would be found in the compulsory State Church. This question he should have been able to answer in the negative. It was a radical misfortune that in all the attempts made to infuse life into the branch torn away by Luther from the universal Catholic Church the secular power never failed to interfere. The State had stood sponsor to the new faith on its first appearance and, whether in Luther’s interest or in its own, the State continued to intervene in matters pertaining to the Church. This interweaving of politics with religion failed to insure to the new Church the friendly assistance of the State, but soon brought it into a position of entire subservience—in spite of the protests of the originator of the innovation.

The jurisdiction of the State within the “Church,” in the case of the early Lutheran congregations, did not amount to any actual government of the Church by the sovereign. This, in the appalling form it was to assume, was a result of the later Consistories. What, with Luther’s consent, first passed into the hands of the secular authorities was the jurisdiction in certain external matters which, according to the earlier Canon Law, really belonged to the Bishop’s court. When episcopal authority was abolished the Elector of Saxony assumed this jurisdiction as a sort of bishop faute-de-mieux, or, to use Melanchthon’s expression, as the principal member of the Church (“membrum prÆcipuum ecclesiÆ”).[62] The jurisdiction in question concerned, above all, matrimonial cases which, according to Luther, belonged altogether to the secular courts, matters of tithes, certain offences against ecclesiastical or secular law and points of Church discipline affecting public order. Luther had declared that the Church possessed no power to govern, that the only object for which it existed was to make men pious by means of the Word, that the secular authority was the only one able to make laws and formally to claim obedience “whether it does right or wrong.”[63] Hence the State in assuming jurisdiction in the above matters was doing nobody any injustice, was merely exercising its right, whilst the authority of which it made use was not “ecclesiastical,” but merely the common law exercised for the purpose of preserving “sound doctrine” and the “true Church.”[64]

The next step was the appointment of ecclesiastical superintendents by the sovereign and, either through these or without them, the nomination of pastors by the State, the removal of unqualified teachers, the convening of ecclesiastical synods or “consultations,” the carrying out of Visitations and the drawing up of Church regulations. Here again no objection on the point of principle was raised by Luther, partly because the power of the keys, according to him, included no coercive authority, partly because the idea of the “membrum prÆcipuum ecclesiÆ” was elastic enough to permit of such encroachments on the part of the ruler.[65] In the Protestant Canon Law, compiled by R. Sohm, all the above is described, under appeal to Luther, as coming under the jurisdiction of the State, the Church being “without jurisdiction in the legal sense” and its business being “merely the ministry of the Word.”[66]

The introduction of the Consistories in 1539 was a result of the idea expressed by Justus Jonas in his memorandum, viz. that if the Church possesses no legal power of coercion for the maintenance of order, she is fatally doomed to perish. To many the growing corruption made an imitation of “episcopal jurisdiction in the Catholic style,” such as Melanchthon desiderated, appear a real need.[67] In the event the advice of Jonas was followed, jurisdiction being conferred on the Consistories directly by the ruler of the land. After a little hesitation Luther gave his sanction to the new institution, seeing that, though appointed by the sovereign, it was a mere spiritual tribunal of the Church. The Consistories, more particularly after his death, though retaining the name of ecclesiastical courts gradually became a department of the civil judicature, a good expression of the complete subservience of Church to State.

Confiscation of Church Property.

In the Saxon Electorate, the home of the religious innovation, it had become imperatively necessary that the parishes which sided with Luther should be set in order by a strong hand, first, and principally, in the matter of the use to which the Church lands were to be put. In these territories, where the civil government of the Church first obtained, it arose through the robbing and plundering of the churches.

“The parsonages all over the country lie desolate,” Luther wrote to the Elector Johann of Saxony on October 31, 1525, “no one gives anything, or pays anything.... The common people pay no attention to either preacher or parson, so that unless some bold step be taken and the pastors and preachers receive State aid from your Electoral Highness, there will shortly be neither parsonages, nor schools, nor scholars, so that the Word of God and His worship will perish. Your Electoral Highness must therefore continue to devote yourself to God’s service and act as His faithful tool.”[79]

Not long afterwards Luther strongly advises the Elector not only to see to the material condition of the parsonages, but also to examine by means of visitors the fitness of the parsons for their office, “in order that the people may be well served in the Evangel and may contribute to his [the parson’s] support.”[80]

The Order for Visitations (1527), which Luther looked over and which practically had his approval, was intended in the first place to better financially the condition of the parishes. Hand in hand with this, however, went supervision of the preaching by the State and the repression by force of whatever Catholic elements still survived.[81] The Electoral Visitors here and there found the utmost indifference towards the new faith prevailing among the people, whose interests were all material. They finally proposed that the Elector should provide for the support of the parsons and assume the right of appointing and removing all the clergy.

Luther was wide-awake to the fact, and reckoned upon it, that the gain to be derived from the rich ecclesiastical property would act as a powerful incentive with those in power to induce them to open their lands to the innovations. What ruler would not be tempted by the prospect of coming so easily into possession of the Church’s wealth, that fabulous patrimony accumulated from the gifts previous ages had made on behalf of the poor, of the service of the altar, of the clergy and the churches? They heard Luther declare that he was going to tear Catholic hearts away from “monasteries and clerical mummery”; they also heard him add: “When they are gone and the churches and convents lie desolate and forsaken, then the rulers of the land may do with them what they please. What care we for wood and stone if once we have captured the hearts?”[89] The taking over of the Church property by the rulers was, according to him, simply the just and natural result of the preaching of the Evangel. This was the light in which he wished the very unspiritual procedure of confiscation to be regarded.

He frequently insisted very urgently that the nobles and unauthorised laymen were not to seize upon the church buildings, revenues and real property. He was aware of the danger of countenancing private interference, and preferred to see the expropriation carried out by the power of the State and according to law. In this wise he hoped that the property seized might still, to some extent, be employed in accordance with its original purpose, though, as was inevitable, he was greatly disappointed in this hope. It is spiritual property, he repeats frequently, bestowed for a spiritual purpose, and therefore, even after the departure of its former occupant, it must be used for the salvation of souls in accordance with the Evangel. To the Elector Johann, for instance, he writes: The parsonages must be repaired out of the revenues of the monasteries, “because such property cannot profit your Electoral Highness’s Exchequer, for it was dedicated to God’s service and therefore must be devoted primarily to this object. Whatever is left after this, your Electoral Highness may make use of for the needs of the land, or for the poor.”[90]

His demands were, however, very inadequately complied with. If Luther really anticipated their fulfilment, he was certainly very ignorant of the ways of the world. Who was to prevent the Princes from seizing upon the Church lands with greedy hands so soon as they stood vacant, and employing them for their own purposes, or to enrich the nobles? Even where everything was done in an orderly manner, who could prevent ever-impecunious Sovereigns from making use of the revenues for State purposes and from allotting the first place among the “needs of the land” of which we just heard Luther speak, to their own everyday requirements?

A few days after the letter to Spalatin, quoted above, in another letter to him, he gives vent to his thoughts on the marriage questions arising within the domain of the new faith.

Secularisation of the Matrimonial Courts.
Against the Lawyers.

The secularisation of the marriage courts appears as a very characteristic subject amongst the questions of jurisdiction arising between State and Church, side by side with the secularisation of Church property. The secularising of these courts was the logical consequence of Luther’s secularising of matrimony, which he regarded—to forestall his later statements[93]—“as an outward, secular matter, subject to the authorities, like food and clothing, house and land.”[94] According to the Confession of Augsburg at the very most it was a sacrament only in the same way that the authority of the magistrates appointed by God was a sacrament.[95] The codicil to the Articles of Schmalkalden required, that the “magistrates shall establish special marriage courts,” because Canon Law “contains pitfalls for conscience.”[96]

As the Church had formerly been the sole authority on questions relating to marriage, and as the custom of referring such matters to her was deeply rooted in the life of the German people, Luther at the outset consented to take this into account and to leave the decision to his preachers; the result of this was, however, that he found himself overwhelmed amidst his other labours by a mass of unpleasant and uncongenial work and was accordingly soon moved to throw the whole burden on the State and the secular lawyers, though here again he met with distressing experiences.

He wrote to Spalatin in 1527: “We have been plagued by so many questions concerning marriage, owing to the connivance of the devil, that we have decided to leave this profane business to the profane courts. Formerly I was stupid enough to expect from mankind something more than mere humanity, and to fancy that they could be directed by the Evangel. Now, facts have shown that they despise the Evangel and insist on being compelled by the law and the sword.” He shows himself very much annoyed in this letter at the position taken up by the jurists with their “law” concerning those marriages which took place contrary to the will of the parents. The lawyers of the Wittenberg Faculty agreed with the older Church in recognising the validity of such unions. Luther, on the other hand, ostensibly on biblical grounds, wished them to be held as null, because duty to the public and the respect due to parents required it. In practice, however, he soon became aware how precarious was this position. “The Gospel teaches,” he explains to Spalatin, “that the father must be ready to give his consent when his son asks what is lawful, and that the son must obey his father; on both sides there must be good-will; this holds good with the pious. But when godless parents hear that the Gospel confirms their authority, they become tyrannical [and refuse to consent to their children’s marriage]. The children, on the other hand, learn that, according to the law of Pope and Emperor, they have the necessary permission, and so they abuse this liberty and despise their parents. Both sides are in the wrong and numerous examples of the same abound.”[97]

In the case of such dissensions between parents and children, he says in an instruction to Spalatin which was printed later, the son “must be sent to the profane, i.e. Imperial Courts of Justice, under which we live in the flesh, and thus you will be relieved of the burden.” Preachers, according to him, as “evangelists,” have nothing to do with legal questions, but merely with peaceable matters; “where there is strife and dissension the Kaiser’s tribunal [the secular courts] must decide.... Should the son get no redress from the secular court, then there is nothing for him but to submit to his father’s tyranny.”[98]

Naturally neither Luther nor the parties concerned found much satisfaction in such expedients. The handing over of the marriage questions to the State was to prove a source of endless and increasing trouble and vexation to Luther in the ensuing years, particularly in connection with the “secret” marriages just referred to. Luther even appealed from the then practice of the lawyers to the law of the old Roman Empire, which exaggerated the paternal rights to the extent of making the children’s marriages altogether dependent on the will of the parents. In the letter to Spalatin, printed in the Wittenberg edition of Luther’s German works, we find the following marginal note which expresses Luther’s opinion: “The old Imperial and Christian laws decree and ordain that children shall marry with the knowledge, consent and advice of their parents, and this the natural law also teaches. But the Pope, like the tyrant and Antichrist he is, has determined to be the only judge in questions of marriage and has abolished the obedience due by children to their parents.”[99] The truth is, that Canon Law, whilst strongly urging both sons and daughters to obey and respect their parents, nevertheless recognised as valid a marriage contract when concluded under conditions otherwise lawful, and this because it saw no reason for depriving the contracting parties of the freedom which was theirs by the natural law.

Luther, greatly incensed by the opposition of the lawyers, at length, in a sermon preached in 1544, launched forth the most solemn condemnation possible of the so-called secret unions contracted without the paternal consent. He declared: “I, Dr. Martinus, command in the name of the Lord our God, that no one shall enter into a secret engagement and then, after the event, seek the parents’ ratification ... and, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I condemn to the abyss of hell all those who assist in furthering such devil’s work as secret engagements. Amen.”[100]

In the same way he boasted to the Elector, that the jurists had “wanted to play havoc” with his churches “with their annoying, damnable suits which, however, I have resolved to expel from my churches as damnable and accursed to-day and for all eternity.” The principal motive for his action was the “Divine command” he had received “to preach the observance of the Fourth Commandment in these matters.”[101]

What Luther, however, was most sensitive to was that some of the Wittenberg lawyers, conformably with the traditional code, declared the marriages of priests, and consequently his own, to be invalid in law, and the children of such unions to be incapable of inheriting. He keenly felt the blow which was thus directed against himself and his children. His displeasure he gave vent to in some drastic utterances. If what the lawyers say is correct, he continues in the writing above referred to addressed to the Elector, “then I should also be obliged to forsake the Evangel and crawl back into the frock [the religious habit] in the devil’s name, by power and virtue of both ecclesiastical and secular law. Then Your Electoral Highness would have to have my head chopped off, dealing likewise with all those who have married nuns, as the Emperor Jovian decreed more than a thousand years ago” [and as the law still stood in the codes then in use].

Thoughts such as these, on the reprobation of his union with Bora by the law of the Church and of the Christian Roman Empire, stood in glaring contrast to the pleasant moods of domestic life to which he so gladly gave himself up. He sought to find solace from his public cares and conflicts in his family circle, and some compensation for the troubles which the great ones of the earth caused him in the domestic delights in which he would have wished all other fallen priests to share. He succeeded, to an extent which appeared by no means enviable to those who followed a different ideal, in forgetting his priestly state and its demands. In one of the letters just mentioned he writes as a father to Spalatin, who also had had recourse to marriage: “May you live happily in the Lord with your rib [i.e. your wife]. My little Hans sends you greetings; he is now in the month of teething and is beginning to lisp; it is delightful to see how he will leave no one in peace about him. My Katey also sends you her best wishes, above all for a little Spalatin, to teach you what she boasts of having learnt from her little Hans, i.e. the crown and joy of wedded life, which the Pope and his world were not worthy of.”[102]

What Canon Law said of the high calling of the priest and religious and of the depth of the fall of those who proved untrue to it, no longer made the slightest impression on him. It would have been in vain had a St. Jerome of olden days, a mediÆval St. Bernard or a Geiler of Kaysersberg championed the cause of Canon Law against Luther and his nun in the glowing language they knew so well how to use. Luther’s own words quoted above concerning the death penalty decreed by Jovian the Christian Emperor against anyone sacrilegiously violating a nun, illuminate as with a lightning flash the antagonism between antiquity and Luther’s doings.

He asserts himself proudly because he considers his heavenly calling to expound the new Evangel, and his Divine mission, had been questioned by the lawyers who represented the authority of the State. When, in defiance of their objections against the legitimacy of his family, he drafted his celebrated will, he was careful to inform them that, for its validity, he has no need of them or of a notary; he was “Dr. Martinus Luther, God’s Notary and Witness to His Gospel,” and was “well known in heaven, on earth and in hell”; that “God had entrusted him with the Gospel of His Dear Son and had made him faithful and true to it,” for which reason, “in spite of the fury of all the devils,” many “in the world regarded him as a teacher of truth.”[103]

3. The Question of the Religious War; Luther’s Vacillating Attitude. The League of Schmalkalden, 1531

After the Diet of Augsburg, Luther, as we have shown (vol. ii., pp. 391, 395 f.), proclaimed the war of religion much more openly than ever before. His writings, “Auff das vermeint Keiserlich Edict” and “Widder den Meuchler zu Dresen,” bear witness to this. The proceedings taken by the Empire on the ground of the resolutions of Worms, and the attitude of the Catholic Princes and Estates, appeared to him merely a plot, a shameful artifice on the part of the “bloodhounds” who opposed him.

In his writing against the Assassin, i.e. Duke George of Saxony, he expounds his politico-religious standpoint in a way which became his rule for the future. Cain and Abel, the devil and the righteous, stand face to face. “The world belongs either to the devil or to the Children of God. The devil’s realm conceals a murderer and bloodhound, Abel, a pious and peaceable heart.” Abel stands for the Lutherans, Cain and the devil for the Papists. It is a “veracious opinion, founded on Scripture and proved by the fruits of the Papists, that they are ever on the watch and lie in wait day and night to destroy us and root us out.”[104] “If the Emperor or the authorities purpose to make war on God [i.e. Luther’s Evangel], then no one must obey them.” In this case everyone must resist, for it is no “disobedience, rebellion or contumacy to refuse to obey and assist in shedding innocent blood.”[105]

Opposition and violent resistance to the lawful authority of the empire and its legitimate action is here justified by the argument that to fight for the Evangel is no revolt.

The defiant resolve to proceed to any extreme regardless of others or of the public weal, finds its strongest expression in Luther’s words during and after the Diet of Augsburg: “Not one hair’s breadth will I yield to the foe,” he wrote from the fortress of Coburg, with a hint at the wavering attitude of Melanchthon and Jonas. This it was which led up to the statement already quoted: “If war is to come, let it come.” “God has delivered them up to be slaughtered.”[106]

Luther on Armed Resistance, until 1530.

If we glance at Luther’s former attitude towards open resistance, we find that it would be unjust to say that he preferred religious war to peaceful propaganda. He perceived the danger which it involved. At an earlier period he several times had occasion to intervene when warring elements threatened to estrange the German Princes. We find statements of his where he speaks against armed resistance and points out (to use his later words) what a “blot upon our teaching” a “breach or disturbance of the peace of the land would be.”[107] There is no question that such utterances preponderate with him until 1530. From the very first years of his public career he was anxious to impress on all, particularly on his own Sovereign, that the Word alone must work all; he eliminates as far as possible every prospect of a struggle with the Emperor or the other rulers, which was what the Elector really dreaded. He also frequently expounds theoretically, more particularly in his booklet “Von welltlicher Uberkeytt” (1523), the duty of Christians not to resist the authorities, because the Kingdom of God means yielding, humility and submission; every true believer must even allow himself to be “fleeced and oppressed”; he must indeed confess the evangelical faith, but be willing to “suffer” under an authority hostile to the faith (cp. vol. ii., p. 229 f.). When occasion offered he was ready to quote numerous passages from Holy Scripture in order to show that violent revolt and armed intervention on behalf of the Gospel are forbidden, and that the German Princes had nothing to fear from him in this regard.

None the less, his enterprise was visibly drifting towards the employment of force and towards war.

How deeply he felt the premonition of civil war is plain, for instance, from the following:

“There will be no lack of breaches of the peace, and of war only too much,” he wrote in 1528 to the Elector Johann.[108] He and Melanchthon together also wrote in the same strain to the Crown-Prince of Saxony, Johann Frederick, in 1528; “Time will bring enough fighting with it which it will be impossible to avoid, so that we should be grateful to accept peace where we are able.”[109] As early as 1522 he had given to the Elector Frederick one of his reasons for leaving the Wartburg and returning to Wittenberg: “I am much afraid and troubled because I am, alas, convinced that there will be a great revolt in the German lands, by which God will chastise the nation.” The Evangel was well received by the common people, but some were desirous of extinguishing the light by force. And yet “not only the spiritual, but also the secular power, must yield to the Evangel, whether cheerfully or otherwise, as all the accounts contained in the Bible sufficiently show.... I am only concerned lest the revolt should begin with the Lords, and, like a national calamity, engulf the priesthood.”[110]

Nevertheless he is determined to be of good cheer; even should the war ensue, his conscience is “pure, guiltless and untroubled, whereas the consciences of the Papists are guilty, anxious and unclean.” “Therefore let things take their course and do their worst, whether it be war or rebellion according as God’s anger decrees.”[111]

This gives redoubled weight to his determination to press forward relentlessly. “Let justice prevail even though the whole world should be reduced to ruin. For I say throw peace into the nethermost hell if it is to be purchased at the price of harm to the Evangel and to the faith.”[112]

It has been admitted on the Protestant side that “Luther adhered to this view throughout his life, viz.: that his doctrine must be preached even though it should lead to the destruction of all.”[113] In confirmation of this, another passage taken from Luther’s writings is quoted: “It has been said that if the Pope falls Germany will perish, be utterly wrecked and ruined; but how can I help that? I cannot save it; whose fault is it? Ah, they say, if Luther had not come and preached, the Papacy would still be on its legs and we should be at peace. I cannot help that.”[114]

When the same author urges in Luther’s defence that, “he was not really indifferent to the evil consequences of his actions in ecclesiastical and political matters,”[115] we naturally ask whether the author of the schism did not at times feel bitterly his heavy responsibility for these results, and whether he should not have exerted himself in every possible way to ward off the “evil consequences.” His own admissions, to be given elsewhere (see vol. v., xxxii.), concerning his inward struggles, disclose how frequently he was troubled with such reproaches and what difficulty he had in ridding himself of them.

To the inflammatory invitations already given we may subjoin a few others.

“It were better,” Luther says in his Church-postils, “that all the churches and foundations throughout the land were uprooted and burnt to powder—and the sin would be less even though done out of mere wantonness—than that a single soul should be seduced and corrupted by this [Papistical] error.”[116] And, further on: “Here you see why the lightning commonly strikes the churches rather than any other buildings, viz.: because God is more hostile to them than to any others, because in no den of robbers, no house of ill-fame is there such sin, such blasphemy against God, such murder of the soul and destruction of the Church committed as in these houses” [i.e. in the churches where the Catholic worship obtained].[117] Elsewhere, at an earlier date he had said: “Would it be astonishing if the Princes, the nobles and the laity were to hit Pope, bishop, priest and monk on the head and drive them out of the land? It has never before been heard of in Christendom, and it is abominable to hear now, that the Christian people should openly be commanded to deny the truth.”[118]—Besides these, we have the fiery words he flung among the people: “Where the ecclesiastical Estate does not proceed in the way of faith and charity [according to the Evangel], my wish is not merely that my doctrine should interfere with the monasteries and foundations, but that they were reduced to one great heap of ashes.”[119]—In fine: “A grand destruction of all the monasteries and foundations would be the best reformation, for they are of no earthly use to Christendom and might well be spared.... What is useless and unnecessary and yet does such untold mischief, and to boot is beyond reformation, had much better be exterminated.”[120] The word here rendered as “destruction” is one of which Luther frequently makes use to denote violent annihilation, for instance, of the devastation of Jerusalem and its Temple, nor can we well explain it away in the above connection; he certainly never pictured to himself the “grand destruction of all the monasteries and foundations” otherwise than as a general reduction to ruins. The excuse brought forward in modern times in extenuation of Luther is a very strange one, viz.: that, when giving vent to such expressions, he frequently added the qualifying clause “if the Catholics do not change their opinions,” then violence will befall them; hence only in the event of their final refusal to accept the new teaching was the destruction so vividly described to overtake them! Presumably his contemporaries should have shown themselves grateful for this saving clause. The mitigation conveyed by the clause in question in reality amounted to this: Only if the whole world becomes Lutheran will it be saved from destruction.[121]

It is psychologically worth noticing that Luther, in his zeal, seems never to have perceived that the argument might just as well be turned against himself. The Emperor and the Catholic powers of the Empire, with at least as much show of reason, might have urged as he did, that no power, without being doomed to “destruction” and to being “burnt to ashes,” could stand against the Gospel. The Gospel which they defended was that handed down by the Church, whereas Luther’s Evangel, to mention only one point, was novel and hitherto unheard of by theologians and faithful laity alike. On the one occasion when this thought occurred to him, he had the following excuse ready: We are sure of our faith, hence we may and must demand that everything yield to it; the Emperor and his party on the other hand have no such assurance and can never reach it. “We know that the Emperor is not and cannot be certain of it, because we know that he errs and seeks to oppose the Evangel. We are not obliged to believe that he is certain because he does not act in accordance with God’s Word, whereas we on the other hand do; for it is his bounden duty to recognise God’s Word!” Otherwise, Luther adds, “every murderer and adulterer might also plead: ‘I am right, therefore you must approve my act because I am certain I am in the right.’”[122]—“It was with arguments like these that the Protestant Estates were to justify their overthrow of the ancient faith and worship, and to demonstrate the wickedness of the Emperor’s efforts to preserve the faith and worship of his fathers.”[123]

Of the various memoranda which Luther had to draw up for his Sovereign on the question of armed resistance, that of February 8, 1523, prepared for the Elector Frederick, must be mentioned first.[124] In this the Prince’s attention is drawn to the fact, that publicly he had hitherto preserved an attitude of neutrality concerning religious questions, and had merely given out that, as a layman, he was waiting for the triumph of the truth. Hence it was necessary that he should declare himself for the justice of Luther’s cause if he intended to abandon his attitude of submission to the Imperial authority. In that case he might have recourse to arms in the character of a stranger who comes to the rescue, but not as a sovereign of the Empire. Further, “he must do this only at the call of a singular spirit and faith, short of which he must give way to the sword of the higher power and die with his Christians.”[125] Should he, however, be attacked, not by the Emperor, but by the Catholic Princes, then, after first attempting to bring about peace, he must repel force by force.

When, in 1528, the false reports were circulated, of which we hear in the history of the Pack negotiation, to wit, that the Catholic Princes of the Empire were on the point of falling upon the Protesters, Luther sent a letter to Johann, his Elector, regarding the question of law. What was to be done if the Catholic powers, without the authorisation of the Emperor, attacked the Lutheran party? Luther’s verdict was that such an act on the part of “scoundrel-princes” must be resisted by force of arms “as a real revolt and conspiracy against the Empire and His Imperial Majesty,” but that “to take the offensive and anticipate such an action on the part of the Princes was in no wise to be counselled.”[126]

On this occasion he manifested serious apprehension of the mischief which might be caused by a precipitate armed attack on the part of his princely patrons. It was a very different matter to look forward to a mere possibility of war and to find himself directly confronted with an outbreak of hostilities. “May God preserve us from such a horror! This would indeed be to fish with a draw-net and to take might for right. No greater blame could attach to the Evangel, for this would be no Peasant Rising but a Rising of the Princes, which would destroy Germany utterly to the joy of Satan.”[127]

The above memorandum had dealt with the question of an attack by the Princes of the Empire. But what was to be done if the Emperor himself intervened?

The Lutheran Princes and Estates were anxious to exercise the utmost caution and restraint with regard to the Emperor personally, and in this Luther agreed with them. At Spires, in 1526, they had decided to behave “in such a way as to be able to answer for it before God and the Emperor,” which, however, did not prevent them from establishing the “evangelical” worship in contravention of the decrees of Worms. It was hoped that the Emperor, hampered by his foreign policy, would not take up arms. When, accordingly, the protesting Princes, at the time of the Pack business, commenced warlike preparations against the Catholic party in the Empire, they solemnly declared at Rotach, in June, 1528, that they “excepted” the Emperor. In the same way they desired that their action at Spires in 1529, where they “protested” against the Emperor, should be looked upon as an appeal to the Emperor “better instructed.” When the Emperor, on account of the protest, began to take a serious view of the matter, any scruples which the sovereigns of Hesse and the Saxon Electorate may have felt concerning the employment of armed resistance against him soon evaporated. In Saxony it was held that a closer alliance of the Princes favourable to the innovations ought not to be “shorn of its meaning and value” by this “exemption of the Emperor”; the exemption, it was argued, was only of the person of the Emperor, not of his mandataries. A Saxon memorandum at the end of July, 1529, practically made an end of the exemption; “resistance, even to the Emperor, the most dangerous of our foes, belongs to the natural law of humanity.”[128] This was the opinion of the Margrave of Brandenburg, and even more so of the Landgrave of Hesse. At Nuremberg, however, Lazarus Spengler sought to persuade the Council to negative this resolution; he was still entirely under the influence of Luther’s earlier teaching, that the spirit must be ready to endure and suffer under the secular authorities.

Luther, in spite of his frequent threats and urgings, was not immediately to be induced to make common cause with the politicians. In January, 1530, Johann Brenz penned a memorandum in which, in terms of the utmost decision, he denies the lawfulness of resisting the Emperor, whereas on Christmas Day, 1529, in a similar memorandum requested of him by the Elector, Luther expresses himself most ambiguously. He, indeed, just hints at the unlawfulness of such resistance, but qualifies this admission by such words as the following: “There must be no resistance unless actual violence is done, or dire necessity compels”; “without a Council and without a hearing” there must be no war against the Emperor; before this, however, much water is likely to flow under the bridge, and God may easily find means of establishing peace; “hence my opinion is that the project of taking the field should be abandoned for the nonce, unless further cause or necessity should arise.”[129]

In a letter to George, Margrave of Brandenburg, written on March 6, 1530, with the object of winning him over to the war party, Philip of Hesse declared that he had seen “in Luther’s own writings to the Elector, that he sanctioned the latter’s resisting the Emperor.” This probably refers to the above memorandum which lies to-day in the Hessian archives at Marburg, the original of which seems to have been submitted to Philip; it may, however, have been some other letter since lost, or possibly the 1528 memorandum in which Luther speaks of the lawfulness of repelling the anticipated attack of the Catholic Princes.[130]

To take up arms in the cause of the Evangel was certainly not in accordance with Luther’s previous teaching, however much he may himself have occasionally disregarded it. Owing to a certain mystical confidence in his cause, he could not bring himself to believe that things would ever come to be settled by force of arms. The Elector Johann, unlike Philip of Hesse, again began to hesitate. On January 27, 1530, he instructed the Wittenberg Faculty to let him have, within three weeks, the views of its lawyers. These counsellors declared in favour of the lawfulness of such a war against the Emperor, basing their view on two considerations, viz. that as an appeal had been made to a Council the Emperor could not in the meantime insist upon submission in matters of religion, and that, on his election at Frankfurt, it had been agreed that all the Princes and Estates should retain their customary rights. In spite of this, the lawyers consulted were not in favour of having forthwith recourse to open resistance, but suggested the exercise of patience and restraint.[131] Luther and Melanchthon replied only on March 6, 1530. What strikes one in Luther’s reply is that “he has nothing personal to say on the relations between Emperor and Prince; this was a serious omission. All he sees is the individual Christian—in this case the sovereign—and his fidelity to the faith.... He is still unable to believe in a coming disaster, for this his God will surely not permit.”[132]

His categorical declaration, in the memorandum of March 30, 1530, against the lawfulness of resistance, is of greater importance, for it is the last of the kind. After this the change already foreseen was to take place.

With an express appeal to his three advisers, Jonas, Bugenhagen and Melanchthon, Luther explains to the Elector,[133] that armed resistance “can in no way be reconciled with Scripture.” Quite candidly he lays stress on the unfavourable prospects of resistance and the evil consequences which must attend success. Having taken the step, we should, he says, “be forced to go further, to drive away the Emperor and make ourselves Emperor.” “In the confusion and tumult which would ensue everyone would want to be Emperor, and what horrible bloodshed and misery would that not cause.”[134]

In principle, it will be observed, the letter left open a loophole in the event of a more favourable condition of the Protestant cause supervening, i.e. should it be possible to arrive at the desired result by some quieter and safer means, and without deposing the Emperor. None the less noteworthy are, however, the biblical utterances to which Luther again returns: “A Christian ought to be ready to suffer violence and injustice, more particularly from his own ruler,” otherwise “there would be no authority or obedience left in the world.” He would fain uphold, against all law, “whether secular or Popish,” the truth, that “authority is of Divine institution.” Hence the Princes must quietly submit to all the Emperor does; “Each one must answer for himself and maintain his belief at the risk of life and limb, and not drag the Princes with him into danger.” “The matter must be committed to God.” Hence the memorandum culminates in the exhortation to sacrifice “life and limb,” i.e. to endure martyrdom.[135] This memorandum of Luther’s was kept secret. At any rate the apparently heroic renunciation of all recourse to arms, together with the reference—reminiscent of his earlier mysticism—to the Christian’s vocation to suffer violence and injustice, make of this memorandum a remarkable document not to be matched by any other writing of Luther at that time. Though there is little doubt that the sight of the comparatively helpless and critical position of the new party had its effect here, yet, beyond this, there is a psychological connection between the standpoint voiced in the memorandum and Luther’s attitude after the inward change which occurred in him whilst yet a monk. His perfectly just injunction not to withstand the Emperor, he rests partly on the mystic theories he had imbibed at that time, partly on his early erroneous views concerning the rights of the authorities as guardians of outward, public order. In his enthusiasm for his cause he clings to that presumptuous confidence in a special Divine guidance, which had inspired him from the beginning of his career. “The call of a singular spirit and faith,” which he considered necessary in the case of the Elector Frederick (see above, p. 48), he hears quite clearly within himself, though as yet this call does not urge him to advocate armed resistance to the Emperor, but merely inspires him blindly to confide in his cause and to exhort others to “martyrdom.”

Simultaneously Melanchthon sent to the Elector a memorandum of his own, which, apart from being clearer in language and thought, closely resembles Luther’s and betrays the same deficiencies.[136]

The Change of 1530; Influence of the Courts.

In that same year, 1530, after his return to Wittenberg from the Coburg on the termination of the Diet of Augsburg, a notable change took place in Luther’s public attitude towards the question of the employment of force. This change we can follow step by step.

The fact that the lawyers attached to the Court had, in view of the circumstances, altered their minds, weighed strongly with Luther. Confronted with the measures of retaliation announced by the Diet, and more hopeful regarding the prospects of resistance now that the Protesters were joining forces, the councillors of the Saxon Electorate, with Chancellor BrÜck at their head, were inclined to the opinion that whatever sentences the Reichsgericht might pronounce in virtue of the Imperial edict of Augsburg might safely be disregarded, which, of course, was tantamount to a commencement of resistance. They were very anxious concerning the consequences of the decrees of Augsburg, as these involved the restitution of all the property and rights of the Church, which had been appropriated by the secular power in the name of religion. Johann, Elector of Saxony, for a while continued to regard resistance as unlawful. On reaching Nuremberg, on his return journey from Augsburg, he said to Luther’s friend there, Wenceslaus Link: “Should one of my neighbours, or anyone else, attack me on account of the Evangel, I should resist him with all the force at my command, but should the Emperor come and attack me, he is my liege lord and I must yield to him, and what were more honourable than to be exterminated on account of the Word of God?”[137] Gradually, however, he was brought over to the new standpoint of his councillors. The example of the Landgrave of Hesse, who belonged to the war party and was very hopeful of the results of a league, had great weight with him, and likewise his determination not to surrender to the executors of the Imperial edict the Church property which had been confiscated. The innovations which, in the beginning, had seemed a work of high-minded idealists, were now pushed forward by many of the Princes, for motives of the very lowest, viz. to avoid making restitution of property which had been unlawfully distrained. On unevangelical motives such as these it was that the theory of submission to the secular power, in particular to the Emperor, announced by Luther in such grandiloquent language, was to suffer shipwreck.

Philip of Hesse, who was aware of the weak points in Luther’s previous declarations on the subject, was the first to attempt to bring about a change in his views.

He was at first unwilling to declare his views at Torgau. Not to contradict what he had previously said, he protested that the question did not concern him, since, as a theologian, his business was to teach Christ only. As regards secular matters, he could only counsel compliance with the law and, on the matter of forcible resistance to the Emperor, that any action taken should be conformable to the “written laws.” “But what these laws were he neither knew nor cared.”[143]

The assembled lawyers were, however, loath to leave Torgau without having reached an understanding, and submitted another statement to Luther and his colleagues, requesting their opinion on it. In this document they had sought to prove, from sources almost exclusively canonical, that it was lawful to resist the Emperor by force, because “he proceeds and acts contrary to law,” not being a judge in matters of religion, and that, even if he were such a judge, he had no right to do anything on account of the appeal to a Council. They urged that it was necessary to “obey God and evangelical truth rather than men,” and that the Emperor was “no more than a private individual so far as the ‘cognition’ and ‘statution’ of this matter went ... nor does the ‘execution’ come within his province.” For the sake of the salvation of souls the Emperor was not to be regarded as “judge in the matter of our faith,” for his “injustice is undeniable, manifest, patent and notorious, yea, more than notorious.”[144]

The councillors chose to deal with the matter chiefly from the point of view of canon law, as is shown by their misquotations from such well-known canonists as Panormitanus, Innocent IV., Felinus, Baldus de Ubaldis and the Archidiaconus (Baisius).[145] In spite of this they calmly assumed the truth of the proposition, condemned in canon law, of the subordination of Pope to Council and of the right of appealing from Pope to Council. They took it for granted that Luther’s doctrines had not yet been finally rejected by the Church, and, in contradiction with actual fact, declared that the Augsburg Reichstagsabschied “admitted and allowed” that Luther’s doctrines, seeing that they were supposed to have been condemned by previous Councils, should come up for discussion at the next. As a matter of fact the Reichstagsabschied contained nothing of the sort “concerning doctrines of faith.”[146]

This document was submitted to the theologians before they left Torgau, and their embarrassment was reflected in their written reply. Luther agreed with his friends that the only way out of the difficulty was to put the whole thing on the shoulders of the lawyers. He and his party declared that they stood altogether outside the question, since the councillors had already decided independently of them in favour of armed resistance, on the ground of the secular, Imperial laws. As for the reasons alleged from canon law, he refused to take them into consideration. Later on he was glad to be able to appeal to this subterfuge, and declared that he “had given no counsel.”[147]

At this time, however, Luther, Melanchthon and Jonas put their signatures to a memorandum in which they sought to protect themselves by certain assurances which make a painful impression on the reader.

Instead, it was for November 13 that a summons, dispatched by Saxony on October 31, invited a conference to meet at Nuremberg to discuss the matter, and take the steps which eventually led to the formation of the defensive League of Schmalkalden. At first it was proposed, that, after the Nuremberg conference, another should be held at Schmalkalden on November 28, though as a matter of fact the only meeting held commenced at Schmalkalden on December 22.

Only now did it become apparent that Luther and his theologians had, at least in the opinion of the Saxon politicians, expressed themselves privately much more openly in favour of resistance than would appear from the above memorandum. The envoys from the Saxon Electorate appealed with great emphasis to the opinion of the Wittenberg divines, in order to show the lawfulness of the plan of armed resistance and the expediency of the proposed League. Armed with this authority they openly “defied our ministers,” wrote Lazarus Spengler of Nuremberg, to Veit Dietrich on February 20, 1531. Spengler, like the Nuremberg Councillors and those of Brandenburg, was opposed to resistance and to the League. He was surprised that “Dr. Martin should so contradict himself.”[151] The fact is that he was the only person to whom Luther’s previous memorandum of March, 1530, had been communicated.[152]

The Nuremberg magistrates appealed, among other reasons, to the clear testimony of Scripture which did not sanction such proceedings against the supreme secular authority. They feared the consequences of a religious war for Germany, just as Luther himself had formerly done, but, in spite of their adherence to the new faith, they were more frank and courageous in their effort to avert it than he on whose shoulders the chief responsibility in the war was to rest.

One sentence of Melanchthon’s, written in those eventful days, singularly misrepresents the true position of affairs. To his friend Camerarius, on January 1, 1531, he says: “We discountenance all arming.”[153]

Melanchthon also writes: “We are now consulted less frequently than heretofore as to the lawfulness of resistance,” and he repeats much the same thing on February 15, 1531: “On the matter of the League no one now questions either Luther or myself.”[154] If we can here detect a faint note of wonder and regret, we may assuredly ask whether the very behaviour of the theologians at Torgau was not the reason of their advice being at a discount; their dissimulation and ambiguity were not of a nature to inspire the lawyers and statesmen with much respect.

It was some time before this vacillation in official, written statements came to an end. Some more instances of it are to be met with in the epistolary communications between Luther and the town of Nuremberg, which was opposed to the Schmalkalden tendencies.

Prior to November 20, 1530, the Elector of Saxony had addressed himself to the magistrates of Nuremberg with the request that “they would make preparations for resisting the unjust and violent measures of the Emperor.” Of this Veit Dietrich informed Luther from Nuremberg on that day, adding that the Elector had made a reference to an approval of the measures of defence secured from his “Councillors and Doctors,” but had said nothing of the theologians.[155] News was, however, subsequently received in Nuremberg that the Saxon envoys present at Schmalkalden had boasted of the support of Luther and his friends.

It was in consequence of this that the Nuremberg preacher, Wenceslaus Link, enquired of Luther in the beginning of January, 1531, or possibly earlier, whether the news which had reached Nuremberg by letter was true, viz. that “they had expressed the opinion that resistance might be employed against the Emperor.”

Without delay, on January 15, Luther assured him: “We have by no means given such a counsel” (“nullo modo consuluimus”).[156]

The citizens of Nuremberg had, in the meantime, on February 19, sent to the Saxon envoys their written refusal to join the League of Schmalkalden. The magistrates therein declared that they were still convinced (as Luther had been formerly) that resistance to the Emperor was forbidden by Holy Writ, and that the reasons to the contrary advanced by the learned men of Saxony were insufficient.[160] George, Elector of the Franconian part of Brandenburg, who was otherwise one of the most zealous supporters of the innovations, also refused to join the League.

The memorandum in which Luther, Jonas, Bugenhagen and Melanchthon had declared, in March, 1530, that the employment of force in defence of the Gospel “could not in any way be reconciled with Scripture” (above, p. 51 f.) was kept a secret. Not even Melanchthon himself was permitted to send it to his friend Camerarius, though he promised to show it him on a visit.[161] Myconius, however, sent it from Gotha confidentially to Lang at Erfurt, on September 19, 1530, and wrote at the same time: “I am sending you the opinion of Luther and Philip, but on condition that you show it to no one. For it is not good that Satan’s cohorts should be informed of all the secrets of Christ; besides, there are some amongst us too weak to be able to relish such solid food.”[162]

In spite of these precautions copies of the “counsel” came into circulation. The text reached CochlÆus, who forthwith, in 1531, had it printed as a document throwing a timely light on the belligerent League entered into at Schmalkalden in that year. He subjoined a severe, running criticism, a reply by Paul Bachmann, Abbot of the monastery of Altenzell, and other writings.[163]

CochlÆus pointed out, that it was not the Emperor but Luther, who had been a persecutor of the Gospel for more than twelve years. Should, however, the Emperor persecute the true Gospel of Christ, then the exhortation contained in Luther’s memorandum patiently to allow things to take their course and even to suffer martyrdom, would be altogether inadmissible, because there existed plenty means of obtaining redress; in such a case God was certainly more to be obeyed than the Emperor; any Prince who should assist the Emperor in such an event must be looked upon as a tyrant and ravening wolf; it was, on the contrary, the duty of the Princes to risk life and limb should the Gospel and true faith of their subjects be menaced; and in the same way the towns and all their burghers must offer resistance; this would be no revolt, seeing that the Imperial authority would be tyrannously destroying the historic ecclesiastical order as handed down, in fact, the Divine order. Luther’s desire, CochlÆus writes, that each one should answer for himself to the Emperor, was unreasonable and quite impossible for the unlearned. Finally, he warmly invites the doctors of the new faith to return to Mother Church.[164]

The author of the other reply to Luther’s secret memorandum dealt more severely with it. Abbot Bachmann declares, that it was not inspired by charity but by the cunning and malice of the old serpent. “As long as Luther had a free hand to carry on his heresies unopposed, he raged like a madman, called the Pope Antichrist, the Emperor a bogey, the Princes fools, tyrants and jackanapes, worse even than the Turks; but, now that he foresees opposition, the old serpent turns round and faces his tail, simulating a false humility, patience and reverence for the authorities, and says: ‘A Christian must be ready to endure violence from his rulers!’ Yet even this assertion is not true always and everywhere....” Should a ruler really persecute the Divine teaching, then it would be necessary to defend oneself against him. “I should have had to write quite a big book,” he concludes, “had I wished to reply one by one to all the sophistries which Luther accumulates in this his counsel.”[165]

The League of Schmalkalden and the Religious Peace of Nuremberg.

The League of Schmalkalden was first drawn up and subscribed to by Johann, Elector of Saxony, and Ernest, Duke of Brunswick, on February 27, 1531. The other members affixed their signatures to the document at Schmalkalden on March 29. The League comprised, in addition to the Electorate of Saxony and the Duchy of Brunswick-LÜneburg, the Landgraviate of Hesse under Philip, the prime mover of the undertaking, and was also subscribed to by Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt, Counts Gebhard and Albert of Mansfeld, and the townships of Strasburg, Ulm, Constance, Reutlingen, Memmingen, Lindau, Biberach, Isny, LÜbeck, Magdeburg and Bremen.

A wedge had been driven into the unity of Germany at the expense of her internal strength and external development. What had been initiated at Gotha in 1526 by the armed coalition between Landgrave Philip of Hesse and the Elector of Saxony, in the interests of the religious innovations, was now consummated.

The obligation to which the members of the League of Schmalkalden pledged themselves by oath was as follows: “That where one party is attacked or suffers violence for the Word of God or for causes arising from it, or on any other pretext, each one shall treat the matter in no other way than as though he himself were attacked, and shall therefore, without even waiting for the others, come to the assistance of the party suffering violence, and succour him to the utmost of his power.” The alliance, which was first concluded for six years, was repeatedly renewed later and strengthened by the accession of new members.

Luther, for his part, had now arrived at the goal whither his steps had been tending and towards which so many of the statements contained in his letters and writings had pointed, inspired as they were by a fiery prepossession in favour of his cause. It suited him admirably, that, when the iron which had so long been heating came upon the anvil, he should remain in the background, leaving to the lawyers the first place and the duty of tendering opinions. In his eyes, however, the future success of the League, in view of its then weakness, was still very doubtful. Should the Schmalkalden conference turn out to be the commencement of a period of misfortune for the innovations, still, thanks to the restraint which Luther had imposed on himself, in spite of his being the moving spirit and the religious link between the allies, his preaching of the Evangel would be less compromised. The miseries of the Peasant War, which had been laid to his account, the excesses of the Anabaptists against public order, the unpopularity which he had earned for himself everywhere on account of the revolts and disturbance of the peace, were all of a nature to make him more cautious. There are many things to show, that, instead of promoting the outbreak of hostilities in the days immediately subsequent to the Diet of Augsburg, he would very gladly have contented himself with the assurance, that, for the present, the Reichstagsabschied not being capable of execution, things might as well take their course. By this policy he would gain time; he was also anxious for the new faith quietly to win new ground, so as to demonstrate to the Emperor by positive proofs the futility of any proceedings against himself.

The wavering attitude of many of the Catholic Estates at Augsburg had inspired him with great hopes of securing new allies. It there became apparent that either much had been rotten for a long time past in that party of the Diet which hitherto had been faithful to the Pope, or that the example of the Protesters had proved infectious.

Wider prospects were also opening out for Lutheranism. In WÜrtemberg Catholicism was menaced by the machinations of the Landgrave of Hesse. There seemed a chance of the towns of Southern Germany being won back from Zwinglian influences and making common cause with Wittenberg. Henry the Eighth’s failure in his divorce proceedings also raised the hopes of the friends of the new worship that England, too, might be torn away from the Papal cause. At the conclusion of the Diet, Bugenhagen had been summoned by the magistrates of LÜbeck in order to introduce the new Church system in that city.

In Bavaria there was danger lest the jealousy of the Dukes at the growth of the house of Habsburg, and their opposition to the expected election of Ferdinand as King, should help in the spread of schism.

It is noteworthy that Luther’s letter to Ludwig Senfl, the eminent and not unfriendly musician and composer, bandmaster to Duke William and a great favourite at the Court of Bavaria, should have been sent just at this time. To him Luther was high in his praise of the Court: Since the Dukes of Bavaria were so devoted to music, he must extol them, and give them the preference over all other Princes, for friends of music must necessarily possess a good seed of virtue in their soul. This connection with Senfl he continued in an indirect fashion.[166]

The best answer to the resolutions passed at Augsburg seemed to the first leader of the movement to lie in expansion, i.e. in great conquests, to be achieved in spite of all threats of violence.

Instead of having recourse to violence, the Empire, however, entered into those negotiations which were ultimately to lead, in 1532, to the so-called Religious Peace of Nuremberg. At about this time Luther sent a missive to his Elector in which his readiness for a religious war is perfectly plain.

The religious peace of Nuremberg was in the end more favourable to him than he could have anticipated. To his dudgeon, however, he had to remain idle while the guidance of the movement was assumed almost entirely by the League of Schmalkalden, the fact that the League was a military one supplying a pretext for dispossessing him more and more of its direction. Already, in 1530, he had been forced to look on while Philip made advances to the sectaries of ZÜrich and the other Zwinglian towns of Switzerland, and concluded a treaty with them on November 16 for mutual armed assistance in the event of an attack on account of the faith. “This will lead to a great war,” he wrote to the Elector, “and, as your Electoral Highness well knows, in such a war we shall be defending the error concerning the Sacrament, which will thus become our own; from this may Christ, my Lord, preserve your Electoral Highness.”[168]

His apprehensions, lest the good repute of his cause should be damaged by unjust bloodshed, grew, when, in 1534, the warlike Landgrave set out for WÜrtemberg.

It was a crying piece of injustice and violence when Philip of Hesse, after having allied himself with France, by means of a lucky campaign, robbed King Ferdinand of WÜrtemberg and established the new faith in that country by reinstating the Lutheran Duke Ulrich.[169]

Before the campaign Luther had declared that it was “contrary to the Gospel,” and would “bring a stain upon our teaching,” and that “it was wrong to disturb or violate the peace of the commonwealth.”[170] He hinted at the same time that he did not believe in a successful issue: “No wise man,” he said subsequently, “would have risked it.”[171]—Yet, when the whole country was in the hands of the conqueror, when a treaty of peace had been signed in which the articles on religion were purposely framed in obscure and ambiguous terms, while the prospects of the new faith, in view of Ulrich’s character, seemed excellent, Luther expressed his joy and congratulations to the Hessian Court through Justus Menius, a preacher of influence: “We rejoice that the Landgrave has returned happily after having secured peace. It is plain that this is God’s work; contrary to the general expectation He has set our fears to rest! He Who has begun the work will also bring it to a close. Amen.”[172]

Luther himself tells us later what foreign power it was that had rendered this civil war in the very heart of Germany possible. “Before he [the Landgrave] reinstated the Duke of WÜrtemberg he was in France with the King, who lent him 200,000 coronati to carry on the war.”[173]

The fear of an impending great war between the religious parties in Germany was gradually dispelled. The object of the members of the League of Schmalkalden in seeking assistance from France and England was to strengthen their position against a possible attack on the part of the Emperor; at the same time, by refusing to lend any assistance against the Turks, they rendered him powerless.

Luther now ventured to prophesy an era of peace. We shall have peace, he said, and there is no need to fear a war on account of religion. “But questions will arise concerning the bishoprics and the foundations,” as the Emperor is trying to get the rich bishoprics into his hands, and the other Princes likewise; “this will lead to quarrels and blows, for others also want their share.”[174] This confirms the observation made above: In place of a religious struggle the Princes preferred to wrangle over ecclesiastical property and rights, of which they were jealous. Thus Luther’s prediction concerning the character of the struggle in the years previous to the Schmalkalden and Thirty Years’ War was not so far wrong.

Luther and the Religious War in Later Years.

Luther was never afterwards to revert to his original disapproval of armed resistance to the Emperor.

Even in official memoranda Luther soon threw all discretion to the winds, and ventured to speak most strongly in favour of armed resistance.

Such was the memorandum, of January, 1539, addressed to the Elector Johann Frederick and signed at Weimar by Jonas, Bucer and Melanchthon, as well as Luther. The Elector had asked for it owing to the dangerous position of the League of Schmalkalden, now that peace had been concluded between the Emperor and Francis I. of France. He had also enquired how far the allies might take advantage of the war with the Turks; and whether they might make their assistance against the Turks contingent upon certain concessions being granted to the new worship. The second question will be dealt with later;[184] as to the first, whether resistance to the Emperor was allowed, the signatories replied affirmatively in words which go further than any previous admission.[185]

Such was the advice of Luther and those mentioned above to the Elector, when he was about to attend a meeting of the League of Schmalkalden at Frankfurt, where another attempt was to be made to prevent the outbreak of hostilities by negotiations with the Emperor’s ministers. Luther was apprehensive of war as likely to lead to endless misfortunes, yet his notion that “idolatry” must be rooted out would allow of no yielding on his part. “It is almost certain that this memorandum was made use of at the negotiations preliminary to the Frankfurt conference, seeing that the Elector in the final opinion he addressed to his councillors repeats it almost word for word.”[186] The memorandum was probably drawn up by Melanchthon.

At that very time Luther seems also to have received news from Brandenburg that Joachim II., the Elector, was about to Protestantise his lands. Such tidings would naturally make him all the more defiant.

Joachim, in spite of his sympathies for Lutheranism, had hitherto refrained from formally embracing it, not wishing to come into conflict with the Emperor. In 1539, however, he publicly apostatised, casting to the winds all his earlier promises. As Calvin wrote to Farel, in November, 1539, Joachim had informed the Landgrave Philip of Hesse, his chief tempter, that he had now made up his mind to “accept the Gospel and to exterminate Popery,”[187] and this he did with the best will, though he took no part in the Schmalkalden War against the Emperor. In his case politics and a disinclination to make war on the Emperor were the determining factors.

While Joachim was still quietly pursuing his subversive plans in the March of Brandenburg, the ever-recurring question was already being discussed anew amongst the Lutherans in that quarter, viz. whether Luther had not previously, and with greater justice, declared himself against resistance, and whether he was not therefore hostile to the spirit of the League of Schmalkalden.

Luther had already several times come into contact with Joachim II. The Elector’s mother was friendly with him and came frequently to Wittenberg. Concerning her foes Luther once wrote to Jonas: “May the Lord Jesus give me insight and eloquence against the darts of Satan.”[191] In his letter of congratulation to the Elector on his apostasy he hints more plainly at the opponents to whom he had referred darkly in his letter to Ludicke: “I am less concerned about the subtlety of the serpents than about the growl of the lion, which perchance, coming from those in high places, may disquiet your Electoral Highness.”[192]

When the religious war of Schmalkalden at last broke out, the foes of Wittenberg recalled Luther’s biblical admonitions in 1530 against the use of arms in the cause of the Gospel, which CochlÆus had already collected and published. These they caused to be several times reprinted (1546), with the object of showing the injustice of the protesters’ attitude by the very words of the Reformer, who had died just before. The Wittenberg theologians replied (1547), but their answer only added to the tangle of the network of evasions. As a counter-blast they printed Luther’s later memoranda, or “Conclusions,” in favour of the use of force, adding prefaces by Melanchthon and Bugenhagen; where the prefaces come to deal with the awkward statement made by Luther in 1530, the writers have recourse to the device of questioning its authenticity; this Melanchthon does merely incidentally, Bugenhagen of set purpose.[193] According to Bugenhagen, who, as a matter of fact, had himself assisted in drawing up the statement, it deserved to be relegated to the domain of fiction; Luther’s enemies, he says, had fabricated the document in order to injure the Evangel. He even asserted that he could quote Luther’s own assurances in this matter; according to Caspar Cruciger, Luther had declared in his presence that the memorandum of 1530 had not “emanated” from him, though “carried the rounds by his enemies.” Bugenhagen was unable to understand, so he says, how his own name came to be there, and repeatedly he speaks of the document as the “alleged” letter. He also tells us that he had repudiated it as early as 1531, immediately after its publication by CochlÆus; if this be true, then it is difficult to explain away his denial as due to mere forgetfulness. His statements are altogether at variance with what we are told by the physician, Matth. Ratzeberger, Luther’s friend, who was always opposed to the war, and who, in his tract of 1552, “A Warning against Unrighteous Ways,” etc., blames Bugenhagen for his repudiation of Luther’s authority.[194] From the above it is evident that we have no right to praise Bugenhagen, as has been done in modern days, “for the fire with which he was wont to advocate the truth.” Regarding Melanchthon’s love of truth we shall have more to say later.

On looking back over the various statements made by Luther concerning armed resistance, we cannot fail to be struck by their diversity; the testimony they afford is the reverse of favourable to their author’s consistency and honesty.

By his very nature Luther felt himself drawn to proclaim the right of armed resistance in the cause of the Evangel. Of this feeling we have indications even at an early date in certain unguarded outbursts which were repeated at intervals in such a way as to leave no doubt as to his real views. Yet, until 1530, his official and public statements, particularly to the Princes, speak quite a different language. The divergence was there and it was impossible to get rid of it either by explanation or by denial. As soon as things seemed about to lead inevitably to war, Luther saw that the time had come to cast moderation to the winds. He was unwilling to sacrifice his whole life-work, and the protesting Estates had no intention of relinquishing their new rights and privileges. Formerly it had seemed advisable and serviceable to the spread of the Evangel to clothe it in the garb of submissiveness to the supreme authority of the Empire and of patient endurance for the sake of truth, but, after the Diet of Augsburg such considerations no longer held good. Overcoming whatever hesitation he still felt, Luther yielded to the urgings of the secular politicians.

From that time his memoranda assumed a different character. At the commencement of the change their wording betrays the difficulties with which Luther found himself faced when called upon to reconcile his later with his earlier views. It was, however, not long before his combative temper completely got the better of his scruples in Luther’s writings and letters.

Nothing is more unhistorical than to imagine that his guiding idea was “By the Word only,” in the sense of deprecating all recourse to earthly weapons and desiring that the Word should prevail simply by its own inherent strength. He had spoken out his real mind when he said, in 1522: “Every power must yield to the Evangel, whether willingly or unwillingly,” and again, in 1530, “Let things take their course ... even though it come to war or revolt.” Only on these lines can we explain his action. His firm conviction of his own Divine mission (below, xvi.) confirms this assumption.

4. The Turks Without and the Turks [Papists] Within the Empire

The stupendous task of repelling the onslaught of the Turkish power, which had cost Western Christendom such great sacrifices in the past, was, at the commencement of the third decade of the sixteenth century, the most pressing one for both Hungary and the German Empire.

Sultan Suleiman the Second’s lust for conquest had, since 1520, become a subject of the gravest misgivings in the West. With the help of his countless warlike hordes he had, in 1521, taken Belgrad, the strong outpost of the Christian powers, and, after a terrible struggle, on December 25 of the following year, captured from the Knights of St. John the strategically so important island of Rhodes. There now seemed every likelihood of these victories being followed up. The Kingdom of Hungary, which so long and gloriously had stemmed the inroads of the infidel into Christendom, now felt itself unable to cope single-handed with the enemy and accordingly appealed to the Emperor for help.

At the Diet of Nuremberg, in 1524, the Imperial Abschied of April 18 held out a promise of assistance in the near future, and even instanced tentatively the means to be adopted by the Empire. In the meantime appeals were to be made to the other Christian powers for help, so that the final resolutions concerning the plan of defence might be discussed and settled at the Spires Convention on November 11 of the same year.

Luther thought it his duty to interfere in these preparations.

Against Assistance for the Turkish War.

The Diet of Nuremberg had re-enacted the Edict of Worms against Luther. It had requested the Pope to summon a “free, general Council” in some suitable spot in Germany[195] “in order that good may not be overborne by evil, and that true believers and subjects of Christ may be brought to a firm belief in a common faith.” Incensed by the renewal of the Edict of Worms against his doctrine and person, Luther at once published an angry work, “Zwey keyserliche uneynige und wydderwertige Gepott” (1524),[196] in which he declared himself against the granting of any help whatever against the Turks.

Even in the midst of the storm caused by his Indulgence Theses, Luther had already opposed the lending of any assistance against the Turks. A sermon preached in the winter of 1518, in which he took this line, was circulated[199] by his friends. When Spalatin enquired of him in the Elector’s name whether the Turkish War—for which Cardinal Cajetan was just then asking for help—could be justified by Holy Scripture, Luther replied, that the contrary could be proved from many passages; that the Bible was full of the unhappy results of wars undertaken in reliance on human means; that those wars alone were successful where heaven fought for the people; that now it was impossible to count upon victory in view of the corruption of Christendom and the tyranny and the hostility to Christ displayed by the Roman Church; on the contrary, God was fighting against them;[200] He must first be propitiated by tears, prayer, amendment of life and a pure faith. In the Resolutions on the Indulgence Theses we find the same antipathy to the war, again justified on similar mystical and polemical grounds.

His words in the Resolutions were even embodied by Rome in one of the propositions condemned on the proclamation of the ban: “To fight against the Turks is to withstand God, Who is using them for the punishment of our sins.”[201]

Previous to writing his “Von welltlicher Uberkeytt,” referred to above, he had again publicly expressed himself as opposed to the efforts of the Empire on behalf of the Turkish War; though no longer because the authorities lacked a right sense of their office, or because Christ’s counsel made submission a duty, but for quite another reason: Before taking any steps against the Turks it was necessary to resist the impious dominion of the Pope, compared with which the danger from the Turks paled into insignificance. “To what purpose is it,” he wrote in 1522, “to oppose the Turk? What harm does the Turk do? He invades a country and becomes its secular ruler.... The Turk also leaves each one free to believe as he pleases.” In both respects the Pope is worse; his invasions are more extensive, and, at the same time, he slays the souls, so that “as regards both body and soul the government of the Pope is ten times worse than that of the Turk.... If ever the Turks were to be exterminated it would be necessary first to begin with the Pope.” The Christian method of withstanding the Turks would be to “preach the Gospel to them.”[204] This paved the way for his warning, in 1524, against complying with the Emperor’s call for assistance in fighting the Turks (above, p. 77).

Such exhortations not to wage war against the Turks naturally tended to confuse the multitude to the last degree.

Incautious Lutheran preachers also did their share in stirring up high and low against the burden of taxes imposed by the wars. Hence it was quite commonly alleged against the instigator of the religious innovations that, mainly owing to his action after the Diet of Spires, there was a general reluctance to grant the necessary supplies, though the clouds on the eastern horizon of the Empire were growing ever blacker. After the horrible disaster at Mohacz, in 1526, Luther therefore found it necessary to exculpate himself before the public.

In Favour of Assistance for the Turkish War.

Luther gradually arrived at the decision that it was his duty to put his pen at the service of the war against the Turks.

A change took place in his attitude similar to that which had occurred in 1525 at the time of the Peasant Rising, which his words, and those of the Reformed preachers, had done not a little to further.

In February, 1528, Suleiman II. was in a position to demand that King Ferdinand should evacuate Buda-Pesth, the capital; it was already feared that his threat of visiting Ferdinand in Austria might be all too speedily fulfilled. The Sultan actually commenced, in the spring of 1529, his great campaign, which brought him to the very walls of Vienna. The city, however, defended itself with such heroism that the enemy was at last compelled to withdraw.

In April, 1529, when the reports of the danger which menaced Austria had penetrated throughout the length and breadth of Germany, Luther at last published the writing above referred to, viz. “On the Turkish War.”

The booklet he dedicated to that zealous patron of the Reformation, Landgrave Philip of Hesse. In it his intention is to teach “how to fight with a good conscience.” He points out how the Emperor, as a secular ruler, must, agreeably with the office conferred on him by God, protect his subjects against the Turks, as against murderers and robbers, with the secular sword, which, however, has nothing to do with the faith. There were two who must wage the war, Christian and Charles; but Christian’s duty was merely that of the faithful everywhere who would pray for the success of the campaign; this was all that the believers, as such, had to do; Charles would fight, because the example of Charles the Great would encourage him to bear the sword bravely, but only against the Turks as robbers and disturbers of the peace; it would be no Crusade, such as had been undertaken against the infidel in the foolish days of old. Amongst the most powerful pages of the work are those in which, regardless of flattery, he impresses on the German Princes the need of union, of sacrifice of private interests and of obedience to the guidance of the Emperor, without which it was useless to hope for anything in the present critical condition of the Empire. He scourges with a like severity certain faults into which Germans were prone to fall when engaged in warfare, viz. to under-estimate the strength of the enemy, and to neglect following up their victories; instead of this, they would sit down and tipple until they again found themselves in straits.[206]

It does not, however, seem that these words of Luther’s on behalf of the war against the Turks raised any great enthusiasm among the people.

He again took up his pen, and this time more open-heartedly, when, on October 14, the hour of Vienna’s deliverance came and the last assault had been happily repulsed. The result was his “Heer-Predigt widder den TÜrcken” addressed to all the Germans. Here he sought to instruct them from Scripture concerning the Turks and the approaching Last Day. In stirring, homely words he exhorted them to rise and lend their assistance, pointing out that whoever fell in the struggle died a martyr. He fired the enthusiasm of his readers by even quoting the examples of the women and maidens in olden Germany. He also dwelt on the need of preserving the faith in captivity should it be the lot of any of the combatants to be taken prisoner, and even exhorted those who might be sold as slaves not to prove unfaithful by running away from their lawful masters. He consoled his readers at the same time with the thought, to which he ever attached such importance, that, after all, in Turkey the devil did not rage nearly so furiously against Christians as the devil at home, i.e. the Pope, who was forcing them to deny Christ.[207]

We likewise find attacks on the Catholic fraction of the German nation, mingled with exhortations to resist the Turks, in a Preface he composed in 1530, on the occasion of the republication of an older work dating from Catholic times, “On the Morals and Religion of the Turks.”[208]

The struggle raging in the heart of Germany, and the opposition of the Protestant Princes and Estates to the Emperor as head of the Realm, constituted the greatest obstacle to any scheme for united and vigorous action against the Turks. Hence to some extent Luther was indirectly responsible for the growth of the Ottoman Empire. On one occasion Luther gave vent to the following outburst: “Would that we Germans stood shoulder to shoulder, then it would be easy for us to resist the Turk. If we had 50,000 foot and 10,000 horse constantly in the field ... we could well withstand them and defend ourselves.”[209] The Sultan had, long before, taken into his calculations the dissensions created by Luther in the Empire.[210] On one occasion, about 1532, as we know from Luther’s “Talk Table,” Suleiman made enquiries of a German named Schmaltz, who was attached to an embassy, concerning Luther’s circumstances, and asked how old he was. To the answer that he was forty-eight years of age he replied: “I would he were still younger, for he would find a gracious master in me.” Luther, when this was reported to him, made the sign of the cross and said: “May God preserve me from such a gracious master.”[211]

Luther, as we shall see below, had occasion to write against the Turks even at a later date. His writings had, however, no widespread influence; they were read only by one portion of the German nation, being avoided by the rest as works of an arch-heretic. Many marvelled at his audacity in presuming to teach the whole nation, and at his speaking as though he had been the leader of the people. Catholics were inclined, as Luther himself complains, to regard the growth of the Turkish power as God’s chastisement for the apostasy of a part of Germany and for the Emperor’s remissness in the matter of heresy.

Even in his very tracts against the Turks, Luther did much to weaken the force of his call to arms. His aim should have been to inspire the people with enthusiasm and a readiness to sacrifice themselves, which might, in turn, have encouraged and fired the nobles; but, as the experience of earlier ages had already proved, religion alone was able to produce such a change in the temper of a nation. Protection for the common, spiritual heritage, defence of the religion and civilisation of the West, such was the only appeal which could have fired people’s minds. And it was this banner which the Church unfurled, both before and after Luther’s day, which had led to victory at the battle of Lepanto and again at the raising of the siege of Vienna. Luther, on the contrary, in his writing of 1529, repels so vehemently any idea of turning the contest with the infidel into a crusade, that he even has it that, “were I a soldier and descried on the field of battle a priestly banner, or one bearing a cross, or even a crucifix, I would turn and run as though the devil were at my heels; and, if, by God’s Providence, they nevertheless gained the victory, still I should take no share in the booty or the triumph.”[212]

To insure a favourable issue to the campaign it was also necessary that the position of the Emperor as head of Christendom should be recognised, and the feeling of common interest between the sovereigns and nations be kindled anew. Yet the progress of the innovations, and Luther’s own menacing attitude towards the Empire and the Catholic sovereigns, was contributing largely to shatter both the authority of the Empire and the old European unity, not to speak of the injury done to the Papal authority, to whose guidance the common welfare of Christendom had formerly been confided.

Luther allowed his polemics to blunt entirely the effect of his summons. As, however, what he says affords us an insight into the working of his mind, it is of interest to the psychologist.

Luther personally acted wisely, for it was of the utmost importance to him to destroy the impression that he stood in the way of united action against the Turks. This the Princes and Estates who protested at the Diet of Spires were far less willing to do. They cast aside all scruple and openly refused to lend their assistance against the Turks unless the enactment against the religious innovations were rescinded. It is true that Vienna was then not yet in any pressing danger, though, on the other hand, news had been received at Spires that the Turkish fleet was cruising off the coasts of Sicily. It was only later on in the year, when the danger of Austria and for the German Princes began to increase, that the Protesters showed signs of relenting. They also saw that, just then, their refusal to co-operate would be of no advantage to the new Church. Landgrave Philip of Hesse nevertheless persisted in his obstinate refusal to take any part in the defence of the Empire.

Philip made several attempts to induce BrÜck, the Chancellor of the Saxon Electorate, and Luther, to bring their influence to bear on the Elector Johann Frederick so that he might take a similar line. BrÜck was sufficiently astute to avoid making any promise. Luther did not venture openly to refuse, though his position as principal theological adviser would have qualified him to explain to the Landgrave the error of his way. In his reply he merely finds fault with the “Priesthood,” who “are so obstinate and defiant and trust in the Emperor and in human aid.” God’s assistance against the Turks may be reckoned on, but if it came to the point, and he were obliged to speak to the Elector, he would “advise for the best,” and, may God’s Will be done.[223]

When the Turks, in order to avenge the defeat they had suffered before the walls of Vienna, prepared for further attacks upon the West, frightful rumours began to spread throughout Germany, adding greatly to Luther’s trouble of mind. At the Coburg, where he then was, gloomy forebodings of the coming destruction of Germany at the hand of the Turk associated themselves with other disquieting considerations.

Everywhere anxiety reigned supreme, for there were lacking both preparedness and unanimity. The Catholic Princes of the Empire were not much better than the rest. Petty interests and jealousies outweighed in many instances a sense of the common needs. At Spires, for instance, Duke George of Saxony stipulated, as a condition of any promise of assistance, that he should be given precedence over both the Dukes of Bavaria. While the Catholic Estates agreed, at the Diet of Augsburg, to the grants for the war against the Turks, the Protestant Estates were not to be induced to give a favourable decision until the Emperor had sanctioned the so-called religious Peace of Nuremberg in 1532.[227]

In the summer of that same year Suleiman passed Buda-Pesth with 300,000 men. Thence he continued his march along the Danube with the intention of taking Vienna, this time at any cost. The Emperor Charles V. hurried in person to command the great army which was collecting near Vienna; the Sultan was to be encountered and a decisive battle fought. Throughout the Empire the greatest enthusiasm for the cause prevailed. The Electoral Prince, Joachim of Brandenburg, was nominated by the Emperor to the command of the troops of the Saxon lowlands, since this country had not been unanimous in the choice of a Captain, probably owing to the religious dissensions.

The Protestant Prince Joachim requested a pious letter from Luther. This Luther sent him, promising him his prayers, and saying that “he would take the field in spirit with his dear Emperor Carol [as he now calls him], and fight under his banner against Satan and his members.” He prayed God to bestow on them all “a glad spirit,” granting them not to trust in their own strength, but to fight with the “fear of God, trusting in His Grace alone,” and to ascribe the honour to heaven only; hitherto there had been too much of the “spirit of defiance on both sides,” and each party had gone into the field “without God,” “which on every occasion had been worse for the people of God than for the enemy.” Luther was evidently quite incapable of writing on the subject without his polemical ideas casting their shadow over his field of vision.

The Turks did not venture to give battle, but, to the joy of the Christian army, retreated, laying waste Styria on their march. The Imperial troops were disbanded and an armistice was concluded between King Ferdinand and Suleiman. But in 1536 the hostilities were renewed by the Turks; Hungary was as good as lost, and in 1537 Ferdinand’s army suffered in Slavonia the worst reverse, so at least Luther was informed, since the battle of Mohacz in 1526. On the strength of a rumour he attributed the misfortune to the treason of the Christian generals. In his conversations he set down the defeat to the account of Ferdinand, his zealous Catholic opponent; he had permitted “such a great and powerful army to be led miserably into the jaws of the Turks.”[228] Ferdinand, the Emperor’s brother, was, of course, to blame for the unfortunate issue of the affair; “hitherto the Turk has been provoked by Ferdinand and has been victorious; when he comes unprovoked, then he will succumb and be defeated; if the Papists commence the war they will be beaten.”[229] “Luther saw in the misfortune of King Ferdinand a just punishment on him and his friends who angered God and worshipped lies.”[230] He believed the cause of the success of the Turks to be the “great blasphemy of the Papists against God and the abominable sin against one and the other Table of the Commandments of God”; also “the great contempt of God’s Word amongst our own people.”[231]

While the Protestant Princes and cities again showed a tendency to exploit the Turkish peril to the advantage of the religious innovations, Luther, in view of the needs of the time, pulled himself together and, when consulted, openly advised the Elector Johann Frederick to give his assistance against the Turks should this be asked of him. (May 29, 1538.[232])

This letter, which has frequently been appealed to by Protestants as a proof of Luther’s pure, unselfish patriotism, is a strange mixture of contradictory thoughts and emotions, the product of a mind not entirely sure of its ground and influenced by all sorts of political considerations. Of one thing alone was the writer certain, viz. that the Turk at Rome must be fought against relentlessly.

Luther’s “Table-Talk” and occasional letters supply various traits to complete the above picture of his attitude towards the Turkish War. There we find polemical outbursts interspersed with excellent admonitions to prayer,[234] confutations of the errors of the Turks, and lamentations on the judgment of God as displayed in these wars.

Luther on Turks and Papists.

“Against such might and power [the Turkish] we Germans behave like pot-bellied pigs, we idle about, gorge, tipple and gamble, and commit all kinds of wantonness and roguery, heedless of all the great and pitiful slaughters and defeats which our poor German soldiery have suffered.”[245] “And, because our German people are a wild and unruly race, half diabolical and half human, some even desire the advent and rule of the Turk.”[246]

So scathing a description of the German people leads us to enquire into his attitude to German nationalism.

5. Luther’s Nationalism and Patriotism

In spite of his outspoken criticism of their faults, Luther recognised and honoured the good qualities of the Germans. His denunciations at times were certainly rather severe: “We Germans,” he says, “remain Germans, i.e. pigs and brutes”;[247] and again, “We vile Germans are horrid swine”; “for the most part such shocking pigs are we hopeless Germans that neither modesty, discipline nor reason is to be found in us”;[248] we are a “nation of barbarians,” etc. Germans, according to him, abuse the gifts of God “worse than would hogs.”[249] He is fond of using such language when censuring the corruption of morals which had arisen owing to abuse and disregard of the Evangel which he preached. Even where he attempts to explain his manner of proceeding, where, for instance, he tries to justify the delay in forming the “Assembly of true Christians,” he knows how to display to the worst advantage the unpleasing side of the German character. “We Germans are a wild, savage, blustering people with whom it is not easy to do anything except in case of dire necessity.”[250]

By the side of such spiteful explosions must be set the many kindlier and not unmerited testimonies Luther gives to the good qualities peculiar to the nation.[251] In various passages, more particularly in his “Table-Talk,” he credits the Germans with perseverance and steadfastness in their undertakings, also with industry, contentment and disinterestedness; they had not indeed the grace of the Italians, nor the eloquence of the French, but they were more honest and straightforward, and had more homely affection for their good old customs. He also believes that they had formerly been distinguished for great fidelity, “particularly in marriage,” though unfortunately this was no longer the case.[252]

Much more instructive than any such expressions of opinion, favourable or unfavourable, is the attitude Luther adopted towards the political questions which concerned the existence, the unity and the greatness of his country.

Here his religious standpoint induced him to take steps which a true German could only regret. We have already shown how the defence against the Turks was hampered by his action. He also appreciably degraded the Empire in the eyes of the Christian nations.[253] He not merely attacked the authority of the Emperor and thereby the power which held together the Empire, by his criticism of the edicts of the Diets, by the spirit of discord and party feeling he aroused amongst those who shared his opinions, and by his unmeasured and incessant abuse of the authorities, but, as years went by, he also came even to approve, as we have seen above (p. 53 ff.), of armed resistance to the Emperor and the Empire as something lawful, nay, praiseworthy, if undertaken on behalf of the new Evangel.

“If it is lawful to defend ourselves against the Turk,” he writes, “then it is still more lawful to do so against the Pope, who is even worse. Since the Emperor has associated himself with the defenders of the Pope, he must expect to be treated as his wickedness deserves.” “Formerly I advised that we should yield to the Emperor [i.e. not undertake anything against him]; even now I still say that we should yield to these heathen tyrants when they—Pope, Cardinals, Bishops, Emperor, etc.—cease to appeal to the name of Christ, but acknowledge themselves to be what they really are, viz. slaves of Satan; but if, in the name of Christ, they wish to stone Christians, then their stones will recoil on their own heads and they will incur the penalty attached to the Second Commandment.”[254]

He saw “no difference between an assassin and the Emperor,” should the latter proceed against his party—a course which, as a matter of fact, was imposed on the Emperor by the very laws of the Empire. How, he asks, “can a man sacrifice his body and this poor life in a higher and more praiseworthy cause” “than in such worship [resistance by violence] for the saving of God’s honour and the protection of poor Christendom, as David, Ezechias and other holy kings and princes did?”[255]

Countless examples from the Old Testament such as the above were always at his command for the purpose of illustrating his arguments.

In the “Warnunge an seine lieben Deudschen,” in 1531, he warns the Imperial power that God, “even though He Himself sit still, may well raise up a Judas Machabeus” should the Imperial forces have recourse to arms against the “Evangelicals”; their enemies would learn what their ancestors had learned in the war with Ziska and the Husites. Resistance to “bloodhounds” is, after all, mere self-defence. Whoever followed the Emperor against him and his party became guilty of all the Emperor’s own “godless abominations.” To instruct “his German people” on this matter was the object of the writing above referred to.[256]

“As I am the Prophet of the Germans—this high-sounding title I am obliged to assume to please my asinine Papists—I will act as a faithful teacher and warn my staunch Germans of the danger in which they stand.”[257]

By thus coming forward as the divinely commissioned spokesman of the Germans, as the representative and prophet of the nation, he implicitly denied to those who did not follow his banner the right of being styled Germans. He was fond of professing, in his war on Pope and Church, to be the champion of the Germans against Rome’s oppression. This enabled him to stir up the national feeling amongst those who followed him as his allies, and to win over the vacillating by means of the delusive watchword: “Germany against Italian tyranny.” But, apart from the absolute want of justification for any such appeal to national prejudices, the assumption that Germany was wholly on his side was entirely wrong. He spoke merely in the name of a fraction of the German nation. To those who remained faithful to the Church and who, often at great costs to themselves, defended the heritage of their pious German forefathers, it was a grievous insult that German nationalism should thus be identified with the new faith and Church.

Even at the present time in the German-speaking world Catholics stand to Protestants in the relation of two-fifths to three-fifths, and, if it would be a mistake to-day to regard Teutonism and Protestantism as synonymous—a mistake only to be met with where deepest prejudice prevails—still better founded were the complaints of Catholics in Luther’s own time, that he should identify the new Saxon doctrines with the German name and the interests of Germany as a whole.[258]

Even in the first years of his public career he appealed to his readers’ patriotism as against Rome. In 1518, before he had even thought of his aggressive pamphlet “To the German Nobility,” he commended the German Princes for coming forward to protect the German people against the extortions of the Roman Curia; “Prierias, Cajetan and Co. call us blockheads, simpletons, beasts and barbarians, and scoff at the patience with which we allow ourselves to be deceived.”[259] In the following year, when this charge had already become one of his stock complaints, he summed it up thus: “We Germans, through our emperors, bestowed power and prestige on the Popes in olden days and, now, in return, we are forced to submit to being fleeced and plundered.”[260] In the writing against Alveld, “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome,” a year later, he declared in words calculated to excite the ire of every Teuton, that in Rome they were determined to suck the last farthing out of the “tipsy Germans,” as they termed them; unless Princes and nobles defended themselves to the utmost the Italians would make of Germany a wilderness. “At Rome they even have a saying about us, viz. ‘We must milk the German fools of their cash the best way we can.’”[261]

That Luther should have conducted his attacks on the Papacy on these lines was due in part to Ulrich von Hutten’s influence. Theodore Kolde has rightly pointed out, that his acquaintance with Hutten’s writings largely accounts for the utter virulence of Luther’s assault on “Romanism.”[262] There is no doubt that the sparks of hate which emanated from this frivolous and revolutionary humanist contributed to kindle the somewhat peculiar patriotism of the Wittenberg professor. All the good that Rome had brought to Germany in the shape of Christian culture was lost to sight in the whirlwind of revolt heralded by Hutten; the financial oppression exercised by the Curia, and the opposition between German and Italian, were grossly exaggerated by the knights.

Specifically German elements played, however, their part in Luther’s movement. The famous Gravamina Nationis GermanicÆ had been formulated before Luther began to exploit them. Another German element was the peculiar mysticism, viz. that of Tauler and the “Theologia Deutsch,” on which, though he misapprehended much of it, Luther at the outset based his theories. German frankness and love of freedom also appeared to find their utterance in the plain and vigorous denunciations which the Monk of Wittenberg addressed to high and low alike; even his uncouth boldness found a strong echo in the national character. And yet it was not so much “national fellow-feeling,”[263] to quote the expression of a Protestant author, which insured him such success, but other far more deeply seated causes, some of which will be touched upon later, while others have already been discussed.

It is, however, noteworthy that this “Prophet of the Germans,” when speaking to the nation he was so fond of calling his own, did not scruple to predict for it the gloomiest future.

A dark pessimism broods over Luther’s spirit almost constantly whenever he speaks of the years awaiting Germany; he sees the people, owing to his innovations, confronted with disastrous civil wars, split up into endless and perpetually increasing sects and thus brought face to face with hopeless moral degradation. His cry is, Let the Empire dissolve, “Let Germany perish.” “Let the world fall into ruins.”[264] He consoles himself with the reflection that Christ, when founding His Church, had foreseen and sanctioned the inevitable destruction of all hostile powers, of Judaism and even of the Roman Empire. It was in the nature of the Gospel to triumph by the destruction of all that withstood it. It was certainly a misfortune, Luther admits, that the wickedness of the Germans, every day growing worse, should be the cause of this ruin. “I am very hopeless about Germany now that she has harboured within her walls those real Turks and devils, viz. avarice, usury, tyranny, dissensions and this Lernean serpent of envy and malice which has entangled the nobles, the Court, every Rathaus, town and village, to say nothing of the contempt for the Divine Word and unprecedented ingratitude [towards the new Evangel].” This is how he wrote to Lauterbach.[265] Writing to Jonas, he declared: “No improvement need be looked for in Germany whether the realm be in the hands of the Turk or in our own, for the only aim of the nobility and Princes is how they can enslave Germany and suck the people dry and make everything their very own.”[266]

The lack of any real national feeling among the Princes was another element which caused him anxiety. Yet he himself had done as much as any to further the spread of that “particularism” which to a great extent had replaced the national German ideal; he had unduly exalted the rights of the petty sovereigns by giving them the spiritual privileges and property of the Church, and he had confirmed them in their efforts to render themselves entirely independent of the Emperor and to establish themselves as despots within their own territories. Since the unhappy war of 1525 the peasantry and lower classes were convinced that no remedy was to be found in religion for the amelioration of their social condition, and had come to hate both Luther and the lords, because they believed both to have been instrumental in increasing their burdens. The other classes, instead of thanking him for furthering the German cause, also complained of having had to suffer on his account. In this connection we may mention the grievance of the mercantile community, Luther having deemed it necessary to denounce as morally dangerous any oversea trade.[267] It was also a grievous blow to education and learning in Germany, when, owing to the storm which Luther let loose, the Universities were condemned to a long period of enforced inactivity.[268] He himself professed that his particular mission was to awaken interest in the Bible, not to promote learning; yet Germans owe him small thanks for opposing as he did the discoveries of the famous German Canon of Frauenburg, Niklas Koppernigk (Copernicus), and for describing the founder of modern astronomy as a fool who wished to upset all the previous science of the heavens.[269]

Whilst showing himself ultra-conservative where good and useful progress in secular matters was concerned, he, on the other hand, scrupled not to sacrifice the real and vital interests of his nation in the question of public ecclesiastical conditions by his want of conservatism and his revolutionary innovations. True conservatism would have endeavoured to protect the German commonwealth and to preserve it from disaster by a strict guard over the good and tried elements on which it rested, more particularly over unchangeable dogma. The wilful destruction of the heritage, social, religious and learned, contributed to by countless generations of devout forebears ever since the time of St. Boniface, at the expense of untold toil and self-sacrifice, can certainly not be described as patriotic on the part of a German. At any rate, it can never have occurred to anyone seriously to expect that those Germans whose views on religion were not those of Luther should have taken his view of the duty of a patriot.

The main fact remains that Luther’s action drove a wedge into the unity of the German nation. Wherever his spirit prevailed—which was by no means the case in every place which to some extent came under his influence—there also prevailed prejudice, suspicion and mistrust against all non-Lutherans, rendering difficult any co-operation for the welfare of the fatherland.

In discussing a recent work which extols Luther as a “true German” a learned Protestant gives it as his opinion, that, however much one may be inclined to exalt his patriotism, it must, nevertheless, be allowed that Luther cherished a sort of indifference to the vital interests of his nation; his “religious concentration” made him less mindful of true patriotism; this our author excuses by the remark: “Justice and truth were more to him than home and people.” Luther, it is also said, “did not clearly point out the independent, ethical value of a national feeling, just as he omitted to insist at all clearly on the reaction of the ethical upon the religious.”[270]

On the other hand, however, his ways and feelings are often represented as the “very type and model of the true German.”[271] Nor is this view to be found among Protestants only, for Ignatius von DÖllinger adopted it in later life, when he saw fit to abandon his previous position.

Before this, in 1851, in his Sketch of Luther, he had indeed said, concerning his patriotism, that, in his handling of the language and the use he made of the peculiarities of his countrymen, “he possessed a wonderful gift of charming his hearers, and that his power as a popular orator was based on an accurate knowledge and appreciation of the foibles of the German national character.”[272] In 1861, he wrote in another work: “Luther is the most powerful demagogue and the most popular character that Germany has ever possessed.” “From the mind of this man, the greatest German of his day, sprang the Protestant faith. Before the ascendency and creative energy of this mind, the more aspiring and vigorous portion of the nation humbly and trustfully bent the knee. In him, who so well united in himself intellect and force, they recognised their master; in his ideas they lived; to them he seemed the hero in whom the nation with all its peculiarities was embodied. They admired him, they surrendered themselves to him because they believed they had found in him their ideal, and because they found in his writings their own most intimate feelings, only expressed more clearly, more eloquently and more powerfully than they themselves were capable of doing. Thus Luther’s name is to Germany not merely that of a distinguished man, but the very embodiment of a pregnant period in national life, the centre of a new circle of ideas and the most concise expression of those religious and ethical views amidst which the German spirit moved, and the powerful influence of which not even those who were averse to them could altogether escape.”[273]

Here special stress is laid on Luther’s power over “the more aspiring Germans” who followed him, i.e. over the Protestant portion of the nation. Elsewhere, however, in 1872, DÖllinger brings under Luther’s irresistible spell “his time and his people,” i.e. the whole of Germany, quite regardless of the fact that the larger portion still remained Catholic. “Luther’s overpowering mind and extraordinary versatility made him the man of his time and of his people; there never was a German who understood his people so well, or who in turn was so thoroughly understood, yea, drunk in, by the people, as this Monk of Wittenberg. The mind and spirit of the German people were in his hands like a harp in the hands of the musician. For had he not bestowed upon them more than ever one man had given to his people since the dawn of Christianity? A new language, popular handbooks, a German Bible, and his hymns. He alone impressed upon the German language and the German spirit alike his own imperishable seal, so that even those amongst us who abhor him from the bottom of our hearts as the mighty heresiarch who seduced the German nation cannot help speaking with his words and thinking with his thoughts. Yet, even more powerful than this Titan of the intellectual sphere, was the longing of the German nation for freedom from the bonds of a corrupt ecclesiasticism.”[274]

The change in DÖllinger’s conception of Luther which is here apparent was not simply due to his personal antagonism to the Vatican Council; it is closely connected with his then efforts, proclaimed even in the very title of the Lectures in question: “Reunion of the Christian Churches”; for this reunion DÖllinger hoped to be able to pave the way without the assistance of, and even in opposition to, the Roman Catholic Church. The fact is, however, that in the above passages the domination which Luther exercised over those who had fallen away with him has been made far too much of, otherwise how can we explain Luther’s own incessant complaints regarding the small response to the preaching of his new Evangel? The production of a schism by his vehement and forceful oratory was one thing; vigorous direction and leadership in the task of religious reconstruction was quite a different matter.

It is not our intention here to embark upon a controversy on such an opinion concerning Luther’s German influence as that here advanced by DÖllinger. The present work will, in due course, treat of Luther’s posthumous influence on German culture and the German language, of his famous German Bible, and of his hymnological work (see vol. v., xxxiv., xxxv.), when we shall have occasion to show the true value to be accorded to such statements. As they stand, our last quotations from DÖllinger merely constitute a part of the legend which grew up long since around the memory of the Wittenberg professor.

It must certainly be admitted, that Luther’s powerful language is grounded on a lively and clear comprehension of German ways of thought and German modes of expression; his command of language and his power for trenchant description, which were the result of his character, of his intercourse with the common people and his talent for noting their familiar ways of speech, were rare qualities. He left in his writings much that served as a model to later Germans. Of his translation of the Bible in particular we may say, with Janssen, that, although Luther cannot be termed the actual founder of the new High-German, yet “his deserts as regards the development of the German language are great,” especially in the matter of “syntax and style. In the last respect no one of any insight will wish to dispute the service which Luther rendered.” “The force and expression of the popular speech was hit off by Luther in a masterly manner in his Bible translations.”[275]

Those Germans, who had been won over to the new faith and had become Luther’s faithful followers, found in the instructions written in his own popular vein, particularly in those on the Bible, enlightenment and edification, in many cases, no doubt, much to their advantage. Writing for the benefit of this circle, the versatile author, in his ethical works—his controversial ones are not here under consideration—deals with countless other subjects outside the range of biblical teaching; here his manner owes its power to the fact that he speaks in tones caught from the lips of the people themselves. Thus, for instance, when he discovers the blots which sully the nation: luxury in dress, the avarice of the rich, the “miserliness and hoarding” of the peasants. Or when he tells unpleasant truths to the “great fops,” the nobles, concerning their despotic and arrogant behaviour. Or, again, when he raises his voice in condemnation of the neglect of education, or to reprove excessive drinking, or when, to mention a special case, he paints in lurid and amusing colours the slothfulness and utter carelessness of the Germans after having achieved any success in war against the Turks. His gift of humour always stood him in good stead, and his love of extravagant phraseology and imagery and of incisive rhetoric was of the greatest service to him in his dealings with the people, for both appealed strongly to German taste. Nor must we forget his proficiency in the effective application of German proverbs—a collection of proverbs in his own handwriting is still extant and has recently been published—nor his familiarity with German folk-lore and ballads, nor finally the wonderful gift which served to tranquillise many who were still undecided and wavering, viz. the boundless assurance and unshakable confidence with which he could advance even the most novel and startling opinions. The Germans of that day loved weight and power, and a strong man could not fail to impress them, hence, for those who were not restrained by obedience to the Church, Luther undoubtedly seemed a real chip off the old German block.

Finally, there are some who select certain traits of Luther’s character in order to represent him as the type of a true German. Such specifically German characteristics were certainly not lacking in Luther; it would be strange, indeed, were this not the case in a man of German stock, hailing from the lower class and who was always in close touch with his compatriots. Luther was inured to fatigue, simple in his appearance and habits, persevering and enduring; in intercourse with his friends he was frank, hearty and unaffected; with them he was sympathetic, amiable and fond of a joke; he did not, however, shrink from telling them the truth even when thereby offence might be given; towards the Princes who were well-disposed to him and his party he behaved with an easy freedom of manner, not cringingly or with any exaggerated deference. In a sense all these are German traits.[283] But many of these qualities, albeit good in themselves, owing to his public controversy, assumed a very unpleasant character. His perseverance degenerated into obstinacy and defiance, his laborious endurance into a passionate activity which overtaxed his powers, and he became combative and quarrelsome and found his greatest pleasure in the discomfiture of his opponents; his frankness made way for the coarsest criticism. The anger against the Church which carried him along found expression in the worst sorts of insults, and, when his violence had aroused bitter feelings, he believed, or at least alleged, he was merely acting in the interests of uprightness and love of truth. Had he preserved his heritage of good German qualities, perfected them and devoted them to the service of a better cause, he might have become the acknowledged spokesman of all Germans everywhere. He could have branded vice and instilled into the hearts of his countrymen the love of virtue more strongly and effectively than even Geiler of Kaysersberg; in seasoned and effective satire on matters of morals he would have far excelled Sebastian Brant and Thomas Murner; in depth of feeling and sympathetic expression he could have rivalled Bertold of Ratisbon, and his homely ways would have qualified him to enforce the Christian precepts amongst all the grades and conditions of German life even more effectively than any previous preacher.