MORAL CONDITIONS ACCOMPANYING THE REFORMATION PRINCELY PATRONS 1. Reports from various Lutheran Districts After Duke George of Saxony had been carried off by death on April 17, 1539, a sudden revulsion in favour of Lutheranism took place in his land. Duke Henry, his brother, who succeeded him, introduced the new teaching to which he had long been favourable. Luther came at once to Leipzig with Melanchthon, Jonas and Cruciger to render at least temporary assistance, by preaching and private counsel. In July of that same year an Evangelical Visitation was already arranged by Duke Henry on the lines of that in the Saxon Electorate; this was carried out by Luther’s preachers. Many abuses dating from Catholic times were prevalent amongst both people and parochial clergy. Concubinage in particular had increased greatly in the clerical ranks under the influence of the new ideas. Luther himself boasted of having advised “several parish-priests under Duke George to marry their cook secretly.”[625] But much greater disorders than had previously existed crept in everywhere at the commencement of the change. Luther himself was soon at a loss to discover any religious spirit or zeal for ecclesiastical affairs, either in the ruler or in his councillors. The Duke seemed to him “old, feeble and incapable.” He complained, on March 3, 1540, to his friend Anton Lauterbach, then minister at Pirna: “I see well enough, that, at the Dresden Court there is an extraordinary unwillingness to advance the cause of God or man; there pride and greed of gain reign supreme. The old Prince can’t do anything, the younger Princes dare not, and would not even had they the courage. May God keep the guidance of His Church in His own Hands until He finds suitable tools.”[626] On the moral conditions at the Ducal Court he passes a startling and hasty judgment when he says, writing to his Elector in 1540, that there the “scandals were ten times worse” than those caused by the Hessian bigamy. He was annoyed to find that, even after the introduction of the new teaching, the courtiers and nobles thought only of replenishing their purses. He speaks of them as the “aristocratic harpies of the land,” and exclaims: “These courtiers will end by eating themselves up by their own avarice.”[627] They refused to support the ministers of the Word and disputed amongst themselves as to whose duty it was to do so; they did not hide their old contempt for Wittenberg, i.e. for its theologians and theology, and yet they expected Wittenberg to carry out the Visitations free of cost. “Even should you get nothing for the Visitation,” he nevertheless instructs one of the preachers, “still you must hold it as well as you can, comfort souls to the best of your power and, in any case, expel the poisonous Papists.”[628] The unexpected and apparently so favourable change in the Duchy really did little to dispel his gloom, though he occasionally intones a hymn of gratitude and admiration for the working of Providence displayed in the change of rulers. About this time (1539), in Brandenburg, the Elector Joachim II. also ushered in the innovations. The rights and possessions of the ancient Church fell a prey to the spoilers. Luther praised the ruler for going forward so bravely “to the welfare and salvation of many souls.” He was, however, apprehensive lest the “roaring of the lion in high places” might influence the Elector; with the Divine assistance, however, he would not fear even this.[629] He showed himself strangely lenient in regard to the Elector’s prudent retention of much more of the Catholic ceremonial than had been preserved in any other German land. Even the Elevation of the Sacrament at Mass (or rather at the sham Mass still in use) was tolerated by Luther; he writes: “We had good reasons for doing away with the elevation [of the Sacrament] here at Wittenberg, but perhaps at Berlin you have not.”[630] In the Duchy of Prussia, formerly ecclesiastical property of the Teutonic Knights, the way had been paved for the apostasy of these Knights, all bound by the vow of chastity, by Luther’s alluring tract “An die Herrn Deutschs Ordens, das sic falsche Keuscheyt meyden und zur rechten ehlichen Keuscheyt greyffen.”[631] Albert, the Grand Master, who had visited Luther twice, as already narrated, seized upon the lands of the Order belonging to the Church and caused himself to be solemnly invested and proclaimed hereditary Duke of Prussia on April 10, 1525; thereupon Luther sent him his congratulations that God should have so graciously called him to this new Estate. The Grand Master, himself a married man, with the assistance of the two apostate Bishops of Samland and Pomerania, then established Lutheranism. As chief Bishop he assumed the position of head of the territorial Church, agreeably with the Protestant practice in the other German lands. The episcopal jurisdiction was transferred to the civil Consistorial Courts. Violent appropriation of alien property, as well as illegal assumption of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, also characterised the advent of the new faith in WÜrtemberg. Duke Ulrich, who had been raised to the throne in 1534 by a breach of the peace of the Empire and contrary to all law and justice, thanks to the successful raid of Philip of Hesse (above, p. 47; vol. iii., p. 67 f.), continued to labour under the stigma attaching to the manner in which he had obtained the Duchy, in spite of the peace he had patched up with the Emperor. The religious transformation of the country was however, soon accomplished, thanks to his pressure. The chief part in this, so far as Upper WÜrtemberg was concerned, devolved on the preacher, Ambrosius Blaurer (Blarer), who favoured the Zwinglian leanings of Bucer. Blaurer was openly accused of deception and hypocrisy in the matter of his profession of faith. Though he had formerly sided with Zwingli in the denial of the Sacrament, he vindicated his Lutheran orthodoxy to his patron, the Duke, by means of a formulary[632] tallying with Luther’s doctrine on the Supper. Subsequently, however, he issued an “Apology,” in which he declared he had not in the least altered his views. “Who does not see the deception?” wrote Luther’s friend, Veit Dietrich; “formerly he made a profession of faith in our own words, and now he attacks everybody who says he has retracted his previous opinion.”[633] Luther had been a prey to the greatest anxiety on learning that Blaurer had become the Duke’s favourite. “If this be true,” he wrote, “what hope is left for the whole of Upper Germany?”[634] Much as he had rejoiced at Blaurer’s apparent retractation in the matter of the Sacrament, he was very mistrustful of his bewildering “Apology.” “I only hope it be meant seriously,” he declared; “it scandalises many that Blaurer should be so anxious to make out that he never thought differently. People find this hard to believe.” “For the sake of unity I shall, however, put a favourable interpretation on everything. I am ready to forgive anyone who in his heart thinks aright, even though he may have been in error or hostile to me.”[635] Thus he practically pledged himself to silence regarding the work. Of “Blaurer’s” doings in WÜrtemberg, now won over to the new Evangel, the Bavarian agent, Hans Werner, a violent opponent of Duke Ulrich’s, wrote: “He preaches every day; yet none save the low classes and common people, etc., attend his sermons, for these readily accept the Evangel of mine being thine and thine mine. Item, Blaurer has full powers, writes hither and thither in the land, turns out here a provost, there a canon, vicar, rector or priest and banishes them from the country by order of Duke Ulrich; he appoints foreigners, Zwinglians or Lutheran scamps, of whom no one knows anything; all must have wife and child, and if there be still a priest found in the land, he is forced to take a wife.”[636] In the WÜrtemberg lowlands, north of Stuttgart, a zealous Lutheran, Erhard Schnepf, laboured for the destruction of the old Church system; Duke Ulrich also summoned Johann Brenz, the SchwÄbisch-Hall preacher, to his land for two years. At Christmas, 1535, Ulrich gave orders to all the prelates in his realm to dismiss the Catholic clergy in their districts and appoint men of the new faith, as the former “did nothing but blaspheme and abuse the Divine truth.”[637] Even the assisting at Mass in neighbouring districts was prohibited by the regulation issued in the summer of 1536, which at the same time prescribed the attendance of Catholics at least once every Sunday and Holiday at the preaching of the new ministers of the Word; under this intolerable system of compulsion Catholics were reduced to performing all their religious exercises in their own homes.[638] The violent suppression of the monasteries and the sequestration of monastic property went hand in hand with the above. In the convents of women, which still existed, the nuns were forced against their will to listen to the sermons of the preachers. Church property was everywhere confiscated so far as the ancient Austrian law did not prevent it. The public needs and the scarcity of money were alleged as pretexts for this robbery. The Mass vestments and church vessels were allotted to the so-called poor-boxes. At Stuttgart, for instance, the costly church vestments were sold for the benefit of the poor. In the troubles many noble works of art perished, for “all precious metal was melted down and minted, nor were cases of embezzlement altogether unknown.” “The Prince, with the approach of old age, manifested pitiable miserliness and cupidity.”[639] Unfortunately he was left a free hand in the use of the great wealth that poured into his coffers. But, not even in the interests of the new worship, would he expend what was necessary, so that the vicarages fell into a deplorable state. In other matters, too, the new Church of the country suffered in consequence of the way in which Church property was handled. The inevitable consequence was the rise of many quarrels, complaints were heard on all sides and even the Schmalkalden League was moved to remonstrate with Ulrich.[640] Terrible details concerning the alienation of church and monastic property are reported from WÜrtemberg by contemporaries. The preacher Erhard Schnepf, the Duke’s chief tool, was also his right hand in the seizure of property. Loud complaints concerning Schnepf’s doings, and demands that he should be made to render an account, were raised even by such Protestants as Bucer and Myconius, and by the speakers at the religious conference at Worms. He found means, however, to evade this duty. One of those voices of the past bewails the treatment meted out to the unfortunate religious: “Even were the WÜrtemberg monks and nuns all devils incarnate and no men, still Duke Ulrich ought not to proceed against them in so un-Christian, inhuman and tyrannical a fashion.”[641] The relentless work of religious subversion bore everywhere a political stamp. The leaders were simply tools of the Court. Frequently they were at variance amongst themselves in matters of theology, and their people, too, were dragged into the controversy. To the magistrates it was left to decide such differences unless indeed some dictatorial official forestalled them, as was the case when the Vogt of Herrenberg took it into his own hands to settle a matter of faith. In the struggles between Lutherans and Zwinglians, the highest court of appeal above the town-Councillors and the officials was the Ducal Chancery. Ulrich himself did not explicitly side either with the Confession of Augsburg or with the “Confessio Tetrapolitana,” viz. with the more Zwinglian form of faith agreed upon at the Diet of Augsburg by the four South-German townships of Strasburg, Constance, Memmingen and Lindau. The preachers who assembled in 1537 at the so-called Idols-meeting of Urach, to discuss the question of the veneration of images which had given rise to serious dissensions amongst them, appealed to Ulrich. Blaurer inveighed against the use of images as idolatrous. Brenz declared that their removal in WÜrtemberg would be tantamount to a condemnation of the Lutheran Church in Saxony and elsewhere where they were permitted. The Court, to which the majority of the theologians appealed, ordered the removal of all images on Jan. 20, 1540. Distressing scenes were witnessed in many places when the images and pictures in the churches, which were not only prized by the people, but were also, many of them, of great artistic value,[642] were broken and torn to pieces in spite of the warning issued by the authorities against their violent destruction. The “Tetrapolitana” had already forcibly denounced the use of images. At Ulm, which so far had refused to accept the “Tetrapolitana,” the magistrates in 1544 decided to adhere to the Confession of Augsburg and the “Apologia.” Blaurer, some years before (1541), had justifiably complained of the arbitrary action of the civic authorities and said that every town acted according to its own ideas. But the preachers were frequently so exorbitant in the material demands they made on behalf of themselves and their families that the Town Council of Ulm declared, they behaved as though “each one had the right to receive a full saucepan every day.”[643] In place of any amendment of the many moral disorders already prevailing, still greater moral corruption became the rule among the people of WÜrtemberg, as is attested by Myconius the Zwinglian in 1539, and thirty years later by the Chancellor of the University of TÜbingen, Jacob AndreÆ. The former declared that the “people are full of impudence and godlessness; of blasphemy, drunkenness, sins of the flesh and wild licentiousness there is no end.”[644] AndreÆ directly connects with the new faith this growing demoralisation: “A dissolute, Epicurean, bestial life, feeding, swilling, avarice, pride and blasphemy.” “We have learnt,” so the people said, according to him, “that only through faith in Jesus Christ are we saved, Who by His death has atoned for all our sins; ... that all the world may see they are not Papists and rely not at all on good works, they perform none. Instead of fasting they gorge and swill day and night, instead of giving alms, they flay the poor.” “Everyone admits this cannot go on longer, for things have come to a crisis. Amongst the people there is little fear of God and little or no veracity or faith; all forms of injustice have increased and we have reached the limit.”[645] A General Rescript had to be issued on May 22, 1542, for the whole of WÜrtemberg, to check “the drunkenness, blasphemy, swearing, gluttony, coarseness and quarrelsomeness rampant in the parishes.”[646] Few bright spots are to be seen in the accounts of the early days of the Reformation in WÜrtemberg, if we except the lives of one or two blameless ministers. It is no fault of the historian’s that there is nothing better to chronicle. Even the Protestant historians of WÜrtemberg, albeit predisposed to paint the change of religion in bright colours, have to admit this. They seek to explain the facts on the score that the period was one of restless and seething transition, and to throw the blame on earlier times and on the questionable elements among the Catholic clergy from whose ranks most of the preachers were recruited.[647] But though grave responsibility may rest on earlier times, not only here but in the other districts which fell away from the Church, and though those of the clergy who forgot their duty and the honour of their calling may have contributed even more than usual to damage the fair reputation of Protestantism, yet the increase of immorality which has been proved to have endured for a long course of years, brings the historian face to face with a question not lightly to be dismissed: Why did the preaching of the new Evangel, with its supposedly higher standard of religion and morality, especially at the springtide of its existence and in its full vigour, not bring about an improvement, but rather the reverse? This question applies, however, equally to other countries which were then torn from the Church, and to the persons principally instrumental in the work. In Hesse the religious upheaval, as even Protestant contemporaries conceded, also promoted a great decline of morals. The bad example given by Landgrave Philip tended to increase the evil.[648] A harmful influence was exercised not only by the Landgrave’s Court but also by certain preachers, such as Johann Lening,[649] who enjoyed Philip’s favour. Elisabeth, Duchess of Rochlitz, the Landgrave’s sister, and a zealous patron of the Evangel, like the Prince himself, cherished rather lax views on morality. At first she was indignant at the bigamy, though not on purely moral grounds. The sovereign met her anger with a threat of telling the world what she herself had done during her widowhood. The result was that the Duchess said no more.[650] The Landgrave’s Court-preacher, Dionysius Melander, who performed the marriage ceremony with the second wife, had, five years before, laid down his office as preacher and leader of the innovations at Frankfort on the Maine, “having fallen out with his fellows and personally compromised himself by carrying on with his housekeeper.” He was a “violent, despotic and, at times, coarse and obscene, popular orator whose personal record was not unblemished.”[651] A Hessian church ordinance of 1539 complains of the moral retrogression: Satan has estranged men from the communion of Christ “not only by means of factions and sects, but also by carnal wantonness and dissolute living.”[652] The old Hessian historian Wigand Lauze writes, in his “Life and deeds of Philip the Magnanimous, Landgrave of Hesse,” that, the people have become very savage and uncouth, “as though God had given us His precious Word, and thereby delivered us from the innumerable abominations of Popery and its palpable idolatry, simply that each one might be free to do or leave undone whatever he pleased”; “many evil deeds were beginning to be looked upon by many as no longer sinful or vicious.” He accuses “the magistrates, ministers and governors” of corrupting the people by themselves transgressing the “good, Christian regulations” which had been set up, and charges both preachers and hearers with serving Mammon, and with “barefaced extortion,” “not to mention other sins and vices.”[653] The Hessian theologians and preachers transferred the responsibility for the abolition of “law and order,” for the increase of the “freedom of the flesh within the Evangel” and for the falling away into a “state like that of Sodom and Gomorrha” to the shoulders of the “magistrates and officials.”[654] The latter, on the other hand, boldly asserted that the preachers themselves were the cause of the evil, since they led a “wicked, scandalous life, drinking, gambling, practising usury and so forth, and were, some of them, guilty of still worse things, brawling, fighting and wrangling with the people in the taverns and behaving improperly with the women.”[655] Bucer himself, Philip’s adviser in ecclesiastical matters, wrote sadly to the Landgrave, in 1539, from Marburg: “The people are becoming demoralised and immorality is gaining the upper hand.” “Where such contempt prevails for God and the authorities there the devil is omnipotent.”[656] 2. At the Centre of the New Faith If we glance at the Saxon Electorate we shall find the deep despondency frequently displayed by Luther concerning the deplorable moral decadence prevailing there only too well justified. The downward trend appeared to have set in in earnest and all hope of remedying affairs seemed lost.[657] The Court and those in authority not only did little to check the evil but, by their example, even tended to promote many disorders. The Elector, Johann Frederick “the Magnanimous” (1532-1547), was addicted to drink. The banquets which he gave to his friends—in which wine was indulged in to an extent unusual even in those days when men were accustomed to heavy drinking—became a byword. Luther himself came to speak strongly on his excessive drinking. “His only faults,” he laments in the Table-Talk, “are his drinking and routing too much with his companions.”[658] “He has all the virtues—but just fancy him swilling like that!”[659] Yet Luther has an excuse ready: “He is a stout man and can stand a deep draught; what he must needs drink would make another man dead drunk.”[660] “Unfortunately not only our Court here but the whole of Germany is plagued with this vice of drunkenness. It is a bad old custom in the German lands which has gone on growing and will continue to grow. Henry, Duke of [Brunswick] WolfenbÜttel calls our Elector a drunkard and very Nabal with whom Abigail could not speak until he had slept off his carouse.”[661] We have the Elector’s own comment on this in a letter to Chancellor BrÜck: “If the Brunswick fellow writes that we are a drunken Nabal and Benadad, we cannot entirely deny that we sometimes follow the German custom”; at any rate the Brunswicker was not the man to find fault, for he was an even harder drinker.[662] Johann Frederick was accused by Philip of Hesse of the grossest immorality. This happened when the former refused to defend Philip’s bigamy and when his Superintendent, Justus Menius, who was given to lauding the Elector’s virtues, showed an inclination to protest publicly against the Landgrave’s bigamy. This led Philip to write this warning to his theologian Bucer: “If those saintly folk, Justus Menius and his crew, amuse themselves by writing against us, they shall have their answer. And we shall not leave hidden under a bushel how this most august and quite sinless Elector, once, under our roof at Cassel, and again, at the time of the first Diet of Spires, committed the crime of sodomy.”[663] A. Hausrath remarks concerning this in his “Luthers Leben”: That Philip was lying “can hardly be taken for granted”;[664] G. Mentz, likewise, in his recent work, “Joh. Friedrich der GrossmÜtige,”[665] says: “It is difficult simply to ignore the Landgrave’s statement, but we do not know whether the allusion may not be to some sin committed in youth.” Here belongs also the passage in Philip of Hesse’s letter to Luther of July 27, 1540 (above, p. 60), where he calls the Elector to bear witness that he (the Landgrave) had done “the worst.” The Biblical expression “peccatum pessimum” stood for sodomy. Further charges of a similar nature were even more explicitly laid at the door of Johann Frederick. A Catholic, relating the proceedings in Brunswick at the close of the conquest of that country by the Protestant troops in 1542, speaks of “vices and outrages against nature then indulged in by the Elector at the Castle as is commonly reported and concerning which there is much talk among the Court people.”[666] Duke Henry of Brunswick in a tract of 1544 referred not only to the Elector’s sanction of the Landgrave’s bigamy, in return for which he was spared by the latter, but also to the “many other pranks which might be circumstantially proved against them and which deserved more severe punishment” than that of the sword.[667] The “more severe punishment” means burning at the stake, which was the penalty decreed by the laws of the Empire for sodomy, whereas polygamy and adultery were simply punished by decapitation. Both sovereigns in their reply flatly denied the charge, but, evidently, they clearly understood its nature; they had never been guilty, they said, of “shameful, dishonourable pranks deserving of death by fire.”[668] Whatever the truth may be concerning this particular charge which involves them both,[669] both Landgrave and Elector certainly left behind them so bad a record that Adolf Hausrath could say: The pair (but the Landgrave even more than the Elector) did their best “to make mockery of the claim of the Evangelicals that their Evangel would revive the morality of the German nation.” He instances in particular the bigamy, “which put any belief in the reality of their piety to a severe test and prepared the way for a great moral defeat of Luther’s cause.”[670] In the matter of the bigamy attempts were made to exculpate the Elector Johann Frederick by alleging, that he regarded the Landgrave’s step not as a real new marriage but as mere concubinage. The fact is, however, he was sufficiently well informed by Bucer in Dec. 1539, i.e. from the very beginning, learnt further details two months later from the Landgrave’s own lips, and declared himself “satisfied with everything.” When, later, the Elector began to take an unfavourable view of the business, Philip wrote to Bucer (July 24, 1540), pointing out that he had nevertheless sent his representative to the wedding. It is, however, true that the Elector had all along been against any making public of so compromising an affair and had backed up his theologians when they urged the Landgrave to deny it.[671] There is no more ground for crediting Johann Frederick with “strictness of morals” than for saying that the Elector Frederick the Wise (1486-1525), under whose reign Lutheranism took root in the land, was upright and truthful in his dealings with the Pope and the Empire. The diplomatic artifices by which the latter protected Luther whilst pretending not to do so, the dissembling and double-dealing of his policy throws a slur on the memory of one who was a powerful patron of Lutheranism. Even in KÖstlin-Kawerau[672] we find his behaviour characterised as “one long subterfuge, seeing, that, whilst giving Luther a free hand, he persisted in making out that Luther’s cause was not his”; his declaration, that “it did not become him as a layman to decide in such a controversy,” is rightly branded as misleading. The Protestant Pietists were loudest in their complaints. In his “Kirchenhistorie,” Gottfried Arnold, who was one of them, blamed, in 1699, this Elector for the “cunning and the political intrigues” of which he was suspected; he is angry that this so undevout promoter of Lutheranism should have written to Duke George, his cousin, “that he never undertook nor ever would undertake to defend Luther’s sermons or his controversial writings,” and that he should have sent to his minister at Rome the following instructions, simply to pacify the Pope: “It did not become him as a secular Prince to judge of these matters, and he left Luther to answer for everything at his own risk.”[673] The same historian also points out with dissatisfaction that the Elector Frederick, “though always unmarried, had, by a certain female, two sons called Frederick and Sebastian. How he explained this to his spiritual directors is nowhere recorded.”[674] The “female” in question was Anna Weller, by whom he had, besides these two sons, also a daughter.[675] Against his brother and successor, Johann, surnamed the Constant (1525-1532), Luther’s friends brought forward no such complaints, but merely reproached him with letting things take their course. Arnold instances a statement of Melanchthon’s according to which this good Lutheran Prince “had been very negligent in examining this thing and that,” so that grave disorders now called for a remedy. Luther, too, whilst praising the Elector’s good qualities, declares, that “he was far too indulgent.”[676] “I interfere with no one,” was his favourite saying, “but merely trust more in God’s Word than in man.” The protests of the Emperor and the representations of the Catholics, politics and threats of war left him quite unmoved, whence his title of “the Constant”; “he was just the right man for Luther,” says Hausrath,[677] “for the latter did not like to see the gentlemen of the Saxon Chancery, BrÜck, Beyer, Planitz and the rest, interfering and urging considerations of European politics. ‘Our dear old father, the Elector,’ Luther said of him in 1530, ‘has broad shoulders, and must now bear everything.’” The favour of these Princes caused Luther frequently to overstep the bounds of courtesy in his behaviour towards them. Julius Boehmer, who is sorry for this, in the Introduction to his selection of Luther’s works remarks, that he was guilty of “want of respect, nay, of rudeness, towards the Elector Frederick and his successor Johann.”[678] Of Luther’s relations with Johann Frederick, Hausrath says: “It is by no means certain that the Duke’s [Henry of Brunswick’s] opinion [viz. that Luther used to speak of his own Elector as Hans Wurst (i.e. Jack Pudding)] was without foundation; in any case, it was not far from the mark. With his eternal plans and his narrow-minded obstinacy, Luther’s corpulent master was a thorn in the side of the aged Reformer.... ‘He works like a donkey,’ Luther once said of him, and, unfortunately, this was perfectly true.”[679] In his will, dated 1537, Luther addressed the following words of consolation to the princely patrons and promoters of his work, the Landgrave and the Elector Johann Frederick: It was true they were not quite stainless, but the Papists were even worse; they had indeed trespassed on the rights and possessions of others, but this was of no great consequence; they must continue to work for the Evangel, though in what way he would not presume to dictate to them.[680]—Melanchthon, who was so often distressed at the way the Princes behaved on the pretext of defending the Evangel, complains that “the sophistry and wickedness of our Princes are bringing the Empire to ruin,” in which “bitter cry,” writes a Protestant historian, “he sums up the result of his own unhappy experiences.”[681] From the accounts of the Visitations in the Electorate we learn more details of the condition of morality, law and order in this the focus of the new Evangel. The proximity and influence of Luther and of his best and most faithful preachers did not constitute any bulwark against the growing corruption of morals, which clear-sighted men indeed attributed mainly to the new doctrines on good works, on faith alone and on Evangelical freedom. In the protocols of the first Visitation (1527-1529) we read: The greater number of those entrusted with a cure of souls, are “in an evil case”; reckless marriages are frequent amongst the preachers; complaints were lodged with the Electoral Visitors concerning the preacher at Lucka who “had three wives living.”[682] At a later Visitation a preacher was discovered to have had six children by two sisters. Many of the preachers had wives whom they had stolen from husbands still living. The account of the people whether in town or country was not much more reassuring; many localities had earned themselves a bad repute for blasphemy and general adultery. In many places the people were declared to be so wicked that only “the hangman and the jailer would be of any avail.” Besides this, the parsonages were in a wretched state. The foundations had fallen in, or, in many instances, had been seized by the nobles, the lands and meadows belonging to the parsonages had been sold by the parish-councils, and the money from the sale of chalices and monstrances spent on drink. The educational system was so completely ruined that in the Wittenberg district, for instance, in which there were 145 town and country livings with hundreds of chapels of ease, only 21 schools remained. As early as 1527 Melanchthon had viewed with profound dismay the “serious ruin and decay that menaces everything good,” which, he says, was clearly perceived at Wittenberg. “You see,” he writes, “how greatly men hate one another, how great is the contempt for all uprightness, how great the ignorance of those who stand at the head of the churches, and above all how forgetful the rulers are of God.” And again, in 1528: “No one hates the Evangel more bitterly than those who like to be considered ours.” “We see,” he laments in the same year, “how greatly the people hate us.”[683] His friend Justus Jonas, who was acquainted with the conditions in the Saxon Electorate from long personal experience, wrote in 1530: “Those who call themselves Evangelical are becoming utterly depraved, and not only is there no longer any fear of God among them but there is no respect for outward appearances either; they are weary of and disgusted with sermons, they despise their pastors and preachers and treat them like the dirt and dust of the streets.” “And, besides all this, the common people are becoming utterly shameless, insolent and ruffianly, as if the Evangel had only been sent to give lewd fellows liberty and scope for the practice of all their vices.”[684] The next Visitation, held seven years later, only confirmed the growth of the evil. In the Wittenberg district in particular complaints were raised concerning “the increase in godless living, the prevailing contempt and blasphemy of the Word of God, the complete neglect of the Supper and the general flippant and irreverent behaviour during Divine service.”[685] Of a later period, when the fruits of the change of religion had still further ripened, Melanchthon’s friend Camerarius says: “Mankind have now attained the goal of their desires—boundless liberty to think and act exactly as they please. Reason, moderation, law, morality and duty have lost all value, there is no reverence for contemporaries and no respect for posterity.”[686] The Elector Augustus of Saxony goes more into particulars when he writes: “A disgraceful custom has become established in our villages. The peasants at the high festivals, such as Christmas and Whitsuntide, begin their drinking-bouts on the eve of the festival and prolong them throughout the night, and the next day they either sleep through the morning or else come drunk to church and snore and grunt like pigs during the whole service.” He reproves the custom of making use of the churches as wine-cellars, the contempt displayed for the preachers, the scoffing at sacred rites and the “frequent blasphemy and cursing.” “Murder and abominable lasciviousness” were the consequences of such contempt for religion. But any improvement was not to be looked for seeing that there were hardly any schools remaining, and the cure of souls was left principally in the charge of ministers such as the Elector proceeds to describe. The nobles and the other feudal lords, he says, “appoint everywhere to the ministry ignorant, destitute artisans, or else rig out their scribes, outriders or grooms as priests and set them in the livings so as to have them all the more under their thumb.”[687] The state of things in Saxony provided the Landgrave with a serviceable weapon against Luther when the latter showed an inclination to repudiate the bigamy, or to say he had merely “acted the fool” in sanctioning it. The passage has been quoted above (p. 56), where the Landgrave exhorted him to pay less attention to the world’s opinion, but rather to set himself and all the preachers in the Saxon Electorate to the task of checking the “vices of adultery, usury and drunkenness which were no longer regarded as sins, and that, not merely by writings and sermons, but by earnest admonition and by means of the ban.” It is true that the conditions which accompanied the introduction of his new system were a trial to Luther, which he sought to remedy. The Landgrave could not reproach him with actual indifference. Not merely by “writings and sermons,” but also by “earnest admonition” and even by re-introducing the “ban of the Church” he strove to check the rising tide of moral evil. But the evil was the stronger of the two, and the causes, for which he himself was responsible, lay too deep. We have an example of the way in which he frequently sought to curb the mischief, in his quarrel with Hans Metzsch, the depraved Commandant of Wittenberg, whom he excluded from the Supper.[688] He sums up his grievances against the state of things in the Electorate and at Wittenberg in a letter to Johann Mantel, in which he calls Wittenberg a new Sodom. He writes to this preacher (Nov. 10, 1539): “Together with Lot (2 Peter ii. 8), you and other pious Christians, I, too, am tormented, plagued and martyred in this awful Sodom by shameful ingratitude and horrible contempt of the Divine Word of our beloved Saviour, when I see how Satan seizes upon and takes possession of the hearts of those who think themselves the first and most important in the kingdom of Christ and of God; beyond this I am tempted and plagued with interior anxiety and distress.” He then goes on to console his friend, who was also troubled with melancholy and the fear of death, by a sympathetic reference to the death of Christ. He then admits again of himself that he was “distressed and greatly plagued” and “compassed by more than one kind of death in this miserable, lamentable age, where there is nothing but ingratitude, and where every kind of wickedness gains the upper hand.... Wait for the Lord with patience, for He is now at hand and will not delay to come. Amen.”[689] 3. Luther’s Attempts to Explain the Decline in Morals Luther quite candidly admitted the distressing state of things described above without in the least glossing it over, which indeed he could not well have done; in fact, his own statements give us an even clearer insight into the seamy side of life in his day. He speaks of the growing disorders with pain and vexation; the more so since he could not but see that they were being fomented by his doctrine of justification by faith alone. “This preaching,” he says, “ought by rights to be accepted and listened to with great joy, and everyone ought to improve himself thereby and become more pious. But, unfortunately, the reverse is now the case and the longer it endures the worse the world becomes; this is [the work of] the devil himself, for now we see the people becoming more infamous, more avaricious, more unmerciful, more unchaste and in every way worse than they were under Popery.”[690] The Evangelicals now are not merely worse, but “seven times worse than before,” so he complains as early as 1529. “For after having heard the Evangel we still continue to steal, lie, cheat, feed and swill and to practise every vice. Now that one devil [that of Popery] has been driven out seven others worse than it have entered into us, as may be seen from the way the Princes, lords, nobles, burghers and peasants behave, who have lost all sense of fear, and regard not God and His menaces.”[691] From his writings a long, dreary list of sins might be compiled, of which each of the classes here mentioned had been guilty. In the last ten years of his life such lamentations give the tone to most of what he wrote. “The nobles scrape money together, rob and plunder”; “like so many devils they grind the poor churches, the pastors and the preachers.” “The burghers and peasants do nothing but hoard, are usurers and cheats and behave defiantly and wantonly without any fear of punishment, so that it cries to heaven for vengeance and the earth can endure it no longer.” “On all hands and wherever we turn we see nothing in all classes but a deluge of dreadful ingratitude for the beloved Evangel.”[692] “Nowadays the Gospel is preached, and whoever chooses can hear it ... but burghers, peasants and nobles all scorn their ministers and preachers.”[693] “I have often said that a plague must fall upon Germany; the Princes and gentry deserve that our Lord God should play them a trick; there will be such bloodshed that no one will know his own home.”[694] “Now that all this [the Evangel] is preached rightly and plainly, people cannot despise it enough. In old days monasteries and churches were built with no regard for cost, now people won’t even repair a hole in the roof that the minister may lie dry; of their contempt I say nothing, it is enough to move one to tears to witness such scorn. Hence I say: Take care, you are young; it may be you will live to see and experience the coming misfortune that will break over Germany. For a storm will burst over Germany, and that without fail.... I do not mind so much the peasants’ avarice and the fornication and immorality now on the increase everywhere, as the contempt for the Evangel.... That peasants, burghers and nobles thus contemn the Word of God will be their undoing.”[695] To the question whence the moral decline amongst the adherents of the new teaching came, Luther was wont to give various answers. Their difference and his occasional self-contradictions show how his consciousness of the disorders and the complaints they drew from every side drive him into a corner. The most correct explanation was, of course, that the mischief was due to the nature of his teaching on faith and good works; to this, involuntarily, he comes back often enough. “That we are now so lazy and cold in the performance of good works,” he says, in a recently published sermon of 1528, “is due to our no longer regarding them as a means of justification. For when we still hoped to be justified by our works our zeal for doing good was a marvel. One sought to excel the other in uprightness and piety. Were the old teaching to be revived to-day and our works made contributory to righteousness, we should be readier and more willing to do what is good. Of this there is, however, no prospect and thus, when it is a question of serving our neighbour and praising God by means of good works, we are sluggish and not disposed to do anything.”[696] “The surer we are of the righteousness which Christ has won for us, the colder and idler we are in teaching the Word, in prayer, in good works and in enduring misfortune.”[697] “We teach,” he continues, “that we attain to God’s grace without any work on our part. Hence it comes that we are so listless in doing good. When, once upon a time, we believed that God rewarded our works, I ran to the monastery, and you gave ten gulden towards building a church. Men then were glad to do something through their works and to be their own ‘Justus et Salvator’ (Zach. ix., 9).” Now, when asked to give, everybody protests he is poor and a beggar, and says there is no obligation of giving or of performing good works. “We have become worse than formerly and are losing our old righteousness. Moreover, avarice is increasing everywhere.”[698] Though here Luther finds the reason of the neglect of good works so clearly in his own teaching, yet on other occasions, for instance, in a sermon of 1532, he grows angry when his doctrine is made responsible for the mischief. Only “clamourers,” so he says, could press such a charge. Yet, at the same time, he fully admits the decline: “I own, and others doubtless do the same, that there is not now such earnestness in the Gospel as formerly under the monks and priests when so many foundations were made, when there was so much building and no one was so poor as not to be able to give. But now there is not a town willing to support a preacher, there is nothing but plundering and thieving among the people and no one can prevent it. Whence comes this shameful plague? The clamourers answer, ‘from the teaching that we must not build upon or trust in works.’ But it is the devil himself who sets down such an effect to pure and wholesome doctrine, whereas it is in reality due to his own and the people’s malice who ill-use such doctrines, and to our old Adam.... We are, all unawares, becoming lazy, careless and remiss.”[699] “The devil’s malice!” This is another explanation to which Luther and others not unfrequently had recourse. The devil could do such extraordinary and apparently contradictory things! He could even teach men to “pray fervently.” In the Table-Talk, for instance, when asked by his wife why it was, that, whereas in Popery “we prayed so diligently and frequently, we are now so cold and pray so seldom,” Luther put it down to the devil. “The devil made us fervent,” he says; “he ever urges on his servants, but the Holy Ghost teaches and exhorts us how to pray aright; yet we are so tepid and slothful in prayer that nothing comes of it.”[700] Thus it might well be the devil who was answerable for the misuse of the Evangel. On another occasion, in order to counteract the bad impression made on his contemporaries by the fruits of his preaching, he says: “Our morals only look so bad on account of the sanctity of the Evangel; in Catholic times they stood very low and many vices prevailed, but all this was unperceived amidst the general darkness which shrouded doctrine and the moral standards which then held; now, on the other hand, our eyes have been opened by a purer faith and even small abuses are seen in their true colours.” His words on this subject will be given below. It even seemed to Luther that the decay of almsgiving and the parsimony displayed towards the churches and the preachers proved the truth of the Evangel (“signum est, verum esse evangelium nostrum”), for, so he teaches in a sermon preached at Wittenberg in 1527, “the devil is the Prince of this world and all its riches, as we learn from the story of Christ’s Temptation. He is now defending his kingdom from the Evangel which has risen up against him. He does not now allow us so many possessions and gifts as he formerly did to those who served him (i.e. the Papists), for their Masses, Vigils, etc.; nay, he robs us of everything and spends it on himself. Formerly we supported many hundred monks and now we cannot raise the needful for one Evangelical preacher, a sign that our Evangel is the true one and that the Pope’s empire was the devil’s own, where he bestowed gifts on his followers with open hands and incited them to luxury, avarice, fornication and gluttony. And their teaching was in conformity therewith, for they urged those works which pleased them.”[701] The observer may well marvel at such strange trains of thought. Luther’s doctrine has become to him like a pole-star around which the whole firmament must revolve. Experience and logic alike must perforce be moulded at his pleasure to suit the idea which dominates him. It was impossible to suppress the inexorable question put by his opponents, and the faint-hearted doubts of many of his own followers: Since our Saviour taught: “By their fruits shall you know them,” how can you be a Divinely sent teacher if these are the moral effects of your new Evangel? And yet Luther, to the very close of his career, in tones ever more confident, insists on his higher, nay, Divine, calling, and on his election to “reveal” hidden doctrines of faith, strange to say, those very doctrines to which he, like others too, attributed the decline. Concerning his Divine mission he had not hesitated to say in so many words: Unless God calls a man to do a work no one who does not wish to be a fool may venture to undertake it; “for a certain Divine call and not a mere whim” is essential to every good work.[702] Hence he frequently sees in success the best test of a good work. In his own case, however, he could point only to one great result, and that a negative one, viz. the harm done to Popery; the Papacy had been no match for him and had failed to check the apostasy. The Papists’ undertaking, such is his proof, is not a success; it goes sideways “after the fashion of the crab.” “Even for those who had a sure Divine vocation it was difficult to undertake and carry through anything good, though God was with them and assisted them; what then could those silly fools, who wished to undertake it without being called, expect to do?” “But I, Dr. Martin, was called and compelled to become a Doctor.... Thus I was obliged to accept the office of a Doctor. Hence, owing to my work, this which you see has befallen the Papacy, and worse things are yet in store for it.” To those who still refused to acknowledge Luther’s call to teach he addresses a sort of command: St. Paul, 1 Cor. xiv., 30, commanded all, even superiors, to be silent and obey “when some other than the chief teacher receives a revelation.” “The work that Luther undertakes,” “the great work of the Reformation,” he assures all, was given not to the other side, but to him alone.[703]—It is no wonder that his gainsayers and the doubters on his own side refused to be convinced by such arguments and appeals to the work of destruction accomplished, but continued to harp on the words: “By their fruits you shall know them,” which text they took literally, viz. as referring to actual fruits of moral improvement. The “great work of the Reformation,” i.e. of real reform, to which Luther appeals—unless he was prepared to regard it as consisting solely in the damage done to the Roman Church—surely demanded that, at least at Wittenberg and in Luther’s immediate sphere, some definite fruits in the shape of real moral amelioration should be apparent. Yet it was precisely of Wittenberg and his own surroundings that Luther complained so loudly. The increase of every kind of disorder caused him to write to George of Anhalt: “We live in Sodom and Babylon, or rather must die there; the good men, our Lots and Daniels, whom we so urgently need now that things are daily becoming worse, are snatched from us by death.”[704] So bad were matters that Luther was at last driven to flee from Wittenberg. The sight of the immorality, the vexation and the complaints to which he was exposed became too much for him; perhaps Wittenberg would catch the “Beggars’ dance, or Beelzebub’s dance,” he wrote; “at any rate get us gone from this Sodom.”[705] According to his letters, the Wittenberg authorities did not interfere even in the case of the gravest disorders, but allowed themselves to be “playthings of the devils”; they looked on whilst the students “were ruined by bad women,” and “though half the town is guilty of adultery, usury, theft and cheating, no one tries to put the law in force. They all simply smile, wink at it and do the same themselves. The world is a troublesome thing.”[706] “The hoiden-folk have grown bold,” he writes to the Elector, “they pursue the young fellows into their very rooms and chambers, freely offering them their love; and I hear that many parents are recalling their children home because, they say, when they send their children to us to study we hang women about their necks.”[707] He is aghast at the thought that the “town and the school” should have heard God’s Word so often and so long and yet, “instead of growing better, become worse as time goes on.” He fears that at his end he may hear, “that things were never worse than now,” and sees Wittenberg threatened with the curse of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capharnaum.[708] In point of fact he did preach a sermon to the Wittenbergers in which, like a prophet, he predicts the judgments of heaven.[709] In another sermon he angrily acquaints them with his determination: “What am I to do with you Wittenbergers? I am not going to preach to you any longer of Christ’s Kingdom, seeing that you will not accept it. You are thieves, robbers and men of no mercy. I shall have to preach you the ‘Sachsenspiegel.’” They refuse, he says, to give anything to clergy, church or schools. “Are you still ignorant, you unthankful beasts (‘ingratÆ bestiÆ’) of what they do for you?” He concludes: They must make up their minds to provide the needful, “otherwise I shall abandon the pulpit.”[710] “Later you will find my prophecy fulfilled,” he cried on one occasion after having foretold “woes”; “then you will long for one of those exhortations of Martin Luther.”[711] His Table-Talk bears, if possible, even stronger witness than his letters and sermons to the conditions at Wittenberg, for there he freely lets himself go. Some of the things he says of the town and neighbourhood, found in the authentic notes of docile pupils, such as Mathesius, Lauterbach and Schlaginhaufen, are worth consideration. We hear from Lauterbach not only that Hans Metzsch, the town Commandant whom Luther had “excommunicated,” continued to persecute the good at Wittenberg “with satanic malice” and to “boast of his wickedness,”[712] but that in the same year Luther had to complain of other men of influence and standing in the town who injured the Evangel by their example. “So great is the godlessness of those of rank that one was not ashamed to boast of having begotten forty-three children in a single year; another asked whether he might not take 40 per cent interest per annum.” In the same year Luther was obliged to exclude from the Sacrament another notorious, highly-placed usurer.[713] “The soil of Wittenberg is bad,” he declared, speaking from sad experience; “even were good, honest people sown here the crop would be one of coarse Saxons.”[714] “The Gospel at Wittenberg,” he once said poetically, if we may trust Mathesius, “is like rain that falls on water, i.e. it has no effect. The good catch the law and the wicked the Gospel.”[715] “I have often wondered,” he said in 1532, according to Schlaginhaufen, “why Our Lord God sent His Word to this unfaithful world of Wittenberg: I believe that He sent it to Jerusalem, Wittenberg and such-like places that He might, at the Last Day, be able to reprove their ingratitude.” And again, “My opinion is that God will punish severely the ingratitude shown to His Word; for there is not a man of position or a peasant who does not stamp on the ministers; but the service of the Word must remain; even the Turk has his ministers, otherwise he could not maintain his rule.”[716] Luther’s Evangel had made “law and command” to retreat into the background as compared with the liberty of the children of God; the penalties he devised, e.g. his exclusion of persons from the reception of the Sacrament, proved ineffectual. He would willingly have made use of excommunication if only “there had been people who would let themselves be excommunicated.” “The Pope’s ban which kept the people in check,” he says, “has been abolished, and it would be a difficult task to re-establish law and command.”[717] “No, I should not like to endure this life for another forty years,” so he told his friends on June 11, 1539, “even were God to turn it into a Paradise for me. I would rather hire an executioner to chop off my head; the world is so bad that all are turning into devils, so that they could wish one nothing better than a happy death-bed, and then away!”[718] “The dear, holy Evangel of Christ, that great and precious treasure, we account as insignificant, as if it were a verse from Terence or Virgil.”[719] He found such disdain of his teaching even in his own household and family. This it was which caused him, in 1532, to preach a course of sermons to his family circle on Sundays. No head of a family, least of all here, could connive at any “contempt of the Word.” To the question of Dr. Jonas as to the wherefore of these private addresses, he replied: “I see and know that the Word of God is as much neglected in my house as in the Church.”[720] There was no more hope for the world; nothing remains “unspoiled and incorrupt” although, “now, God’s Word is revealed,” yet “it is despised, spurned, corrupted, mocked at and persecuted,” even by the adherents of his teaching.[721] Luther made Mathesius the recipient of some of his confidences, as the latter relates in his sermons; on account of the scandals among the preachers of the neighbourhood he was forced and urged by his own people to appeal to the Elector to erect a jail “into which such wild and turbulent folk might be clapped.” “Satan causes great scandals amongst the patrons and hearers of the new doctrine,” says Mathesius. The common people have become rough and self-confident and have begun to regard the ministers as worthless. “Verily,” he exclaims, “the soul of this pious old gentleman was sadly tormented day by day by the unrighteous deeds he was obliged to witness, like pious Lot in Sodom.”[722] With a deep sigh, as we read in Lauterbach’s Notes, Luther pointed to the calamities which were about to overtake the world; it was so perverse and incorrigible that discipline or admonition would be of no avail. Already there was the greatest consternation throughout the world on account of the revelation of the Word. “It is cracking and I hope it will soon burst,” and the Last Day arrive for which we are waiting. For all vices have now become habitual and people will not bear reproof. His only comfort was the progress made by studies at Wittenberg, and in some other places now thrown open to the Evangel.[723] But how were the future preachers now growing up there to improve matters? This he must well have asked himself when declaring, “with sobs,” as Lauterbach relates, that “preachers were treated in most godless and ungrateful fashion. The churches will soon be left without preachers and ministers; we shall shortly experience this misfortune in the churches; there will be a dearth not only of learned men but even of men of the commonest sort. Oh, that our young men would study more diligently and devote themselves to theology.”[724] In view of the above it cannot surprise us that Luther gradually became a victim to habitual discouragement and melancholy, particularly towards the end of his life. Proofs of the depression from which he suffered during the latter years of his life will be brought forward in a later volume. Such fits of depression were, however, in those days more than usually common everywhere. 4. A Malady of the Age: Doubts and Melancholy One of the phenomena which accompanied the religious revulsion and which it is impossible to pass over, was, as contemporary writers relate, the sadness, discontent and depression, in a word “melancholy,” so widespread under the new Evangel even amongst its zealous promoters. Melanchthon, one of Luther’s most intimate friends, furnished on many occasions of his life a sad spectacle of interior dejection. Of a weaker and more timid mental build than Luther, he appeared at times ready to succumb under the weight of faint-heartedness and scruples, doubts and self-reproaches. (Cp. vol. iii., p. 363 ff.) We may recall how his anxieties, caused by the scandal subsequent on his sanctioning of Philip’s bigamy, almost cost him his life. So many are the records he left behind of discouragement and despondency that his death must appear in the light of a welcome deliverance. Luther sought again and again to revive in him the waning consciousness of the Divine character of their work. It is just in these letters of Luther to Melanchthon that we find him most emphatic in his assertion that their common mission is from God. It was to Melanchthon, that, next to himself, Luther applied the words already quoted, spoken to comfort a dejected pupil: “There must be some in the Church as ready to slap Satan as we three; but not all are able or willing to endure this.”[725] Spalatin, who has so frequently been referred to as Luther’s go-between at the Electoral Court, and who afterwards became pastor of Altenburg, towards the end of his life fell into incurable despondency.[726] Justus Jonas, likewise, was for a considerable time a prey to melancholy.[727] Hieronymus Weller, one of Luther’s best friends, confessed to having suffered at times such violent doubts and fears as would have driven a heathen to commit suicide.[728] The preachers George Mohr[729] and Nicholas Hausmann (a very intimate friend of Luther’s[730]) had to endure dreadful pangs of soul; the same was the case with Johann Beltzius, Pastor at Allerstedt in Thuringia,[731] and with Simon MusÆus, who died at Mansfeld in 1576 as Superintendent and who composed two works against the devil of melancholy.[732] Nicholas Selnecker, who died Superintendent at Leipzig, was responsible for the rearranged edition of Luther’s Table-Talk; according to the title his hope was to produce a work “which it might console all Christians to read, especially in these wretched last days.” Elsewhere he confirms the need of such consolation when he says: “We experience in our own selves” that sadness is of frequent occurrence.[733] Wolfgang Capito, the Strasburg preacher, wrote in 1536 to Luther that his experience of the want of agreement in doctrine had caused him such distress of mind that he was on the verge of the “malady of melancholia”; he trusted he would succeed in reaching a better frame of mind; the burden of gloom, so he comforts himself, was, after all, not without its purpose in God’s plan in the case of many under the Evangel. With Capito, too, melancholy was a “frequent guest.”[734] Bucer wrote in 1532 to A. Blaurer that Capito had often bemoaned “his rejection by God.”[735] Joachim Camerarius, the celebrated Humanist and writer, confessed in a letter to Luther, that he was oppressed and reduced to despair by the sight of the decline in morals “in people of every age and sex, in every condition and grade of life”; everything, in both public and private life, was so corrupt that he felt all piety and virtue was done for. Of the Schools in particular he woefully exclaimed that it would perhaps be better to have none than to have “such haunts of godlessness and vice.” At the same time, however, he makes admissions concerning faults of his own which may have served to increase his dejection: He himself, in his young days, had, like others, disgraced himself by a very vicious life (“turpissime in adolescentia deformatum”).[736] The Nuremberg preacher, George Besler, fell into a state of melancholia, declared “in his ravings that things were not going right in the Church,” began to see hidden enemies everywhere and finally committed suicide with a “hogspear” in 1536.[737] William Bidembach, preacher at Stuttgart, and his brother Balthasar, Abbot of Bebenhausen, both became a prey to melancholia towards the end of their life.[738] It would, of course, be foolish to think that many good souls, in the simplicity of their heart, found no consolation in the new teaching and in working for its furtherance. Of the preachers, for instance, Beltzius, who has just been mentioned, declares, that, amidst his sadness Luther’s consolations had “saved him from the abyss of hell.”[739] Amongst those who adhered in good faith to the innovations there were some who highly lauded the solace of the Evangel. But, notwithstanding all that may be alleged to the contrary, we cannot get over such testimonies as the following. Felix, son of the above-mentioned William Bidembach, and Court preacher in WÜrtemberg, declared in a “Handbook for young church ministers”: “It happens more and more frequently that many pious people fall into distressing sadness and real melancholia, to such an extent that they constantly experience in their hearts fear, apprehension, dread and despair”; in the course of his ministry he had met with both persons of position and common folk who were oppressed with such melancholia.[740] Nicholas Selnecker (above, p. 220) assures us that not only were theologians perplexed with many “melancholy and anxious souls and consciences whom nothing could console,” but physicians, too, “never remembered such prevalence of evil melancholia, depression and sadness, even in the young, and of other maladies arising therefrom, as during these few years, and such misfortune continues still to grow and increase.”[741] The Leipzig Pastor, Erasmus Sarcerius, speaks in a similar strain of the “general faint-heartedness prevalent in every class,” who are acquainted with nothing but “fear and apprehension”;[742] Victorinus Strigel, Professor at the University of Leipzig, of the “many persons who in our day have died simply and solely of grief”;[743] Michael Sachse, preacher at Wechmar, of people generally as being “timid and anxious, trembling and despairing from fear.”[744] When the preacher Leonard Beyer related to Luther how in his great “temptations” the devil had tried to induce him to stab himself, Luther consoled him by telling him that the same had happened in his own case.[745] We are told that in latter life Luther’s pupil Mathesius was a prey to a “hellish fear” which lasted almost three months; “he could not even look at a knife because the sight tempted him to suicide.”[746] Later, his condition improved. The same Mathesius relates how Pastor Musa found consolation in his gloomy doubts on faith in Luther’s account of his own similar storms of doubt.[747] In the 16th century we hear many lamentations in Protestant circles concerning the unheard-of increase in the number of suicides. “There is such an outcry amongst the people,” wrote the Lausitz Superintendent, Zacharias Rivander, “that it deafens one’s ears and makes one’s hair stand on end. The people are so heavy-hearted and yet know not why. Amidst such lowness of spirit many are unable to find consolation, and, so, cut their throats and slay themselves.”[748]—In 1554 the Nuremberg Councillor, Hieronymus BaumgÄrtner, lamented at a meeting attended by the clergy of the town: “We hear, alas, how daily and more than ever before, people, whether in good health or not, fall into mortal fear and despair, lose their minds and kill themselves.”[749] In 1569, within three weeks, fourteen suicides occurred at Nuremberg.[750]—“You will readily recall,” Lucas Osiander said in a sermon about the end of the century, “how in the years gone by many otherwise good people became so timorous, faint-hearted and full of despair that they could not be consoled; and how of these not a few put an end to their own lives; this is a sign of the Last Day.”[751] Luther himself confirms the increase in the number of suicides which took place owing to troubles of conscience. In a sermon of 1532 he bemoans, that “so many people are so disquieted and distressed that they give way to despair”; this was chiefly induced by the “spirits,” for there “have been, and still are, many who are driven by the devil and plagued with temptations and despair till they hang themselves, or destroy themselves in some other way out of very fear.”[752] He is quite convinced that the devil “drives” all suicides and makes them helpless tools of his plans against human life.—It was to this idea that the Lutheran preacher Hamelmann clung when he wrote, in 1568, that many trusted “that those who had been overtaken and destroyed by the devil would not be lost irretrievably.”[753] Andreas Celichius, Superintendent in the Mark of Brandenburg, was of opinion that such suicides, such “very sudden and heartrending murders,” “gave a bad name to the Evangel in the world”; one sees and hears “that some in our very midst are quite unable to find comfort in the Evangelical sanctuary.... This makes men distrustful of the preaching of Jesus Christ and even causes it to be hated.”[754] Michael Helding, Bishop-auxiliary of Mayence, found a special reason for the increase in the number of suicides amongst those who had broken with the Church, in their rejection of the Catholic means of grace. In a sermon which he delivered towards the end of 1547 at the Diet of Augsburg he pointed out that, ever since the use of the Sacraments had been scorned, people were more exposed to the strength of the evil one and to discouragement. “When has the devil ever driven so many to desperation, so that they lose all hope and kill themselves? Whose fault is it? Ah, we deprive ourselves of God’s grace and refuse to accept the Divine strength which is offered us in the Holy Sacraments.”[755]
Among the Lutheran preachers the expected end of the world was made to play a part and to explain the increase of faint-heartedness and despair. Mathesius says in his Postils: “Many pine away and lose hope; there is no more joy or courage left among the people; therefore let us look for the end of the world, and prepare, and be ready at any moment for our departure home!” “For the end is approaching; heaven and earth and all government now begin to crack and break.”[756] Luther’s example proved catching, and the end of the world became a favourite topic both in the pulpit and in books, one on which the preachers’ own gloom could aptly find vent. The end of all was thought to be imminent. Such forebodings are voiced, for instance, in the following: “No consolation is of any help to consciences”;[757] “many pine away in dejection and die of grief”;[758] “in these latter days the wicked one by his tyranny drives men into fear and fright”;[759] “many despair for very dejection and sadness”;[760] “many pious hearts wax cowardly, seeing their sins and the wickedness of the world”;[761] “the people hang their heads as though they were walking corpses and live in a constant dread”;[762] “all joy is dead and all consolation from God’s Word has become as weak as water”;[763] the number of those “possessed of the devil body and soul” is growing beyond all measure.[764] Though the special advantage claimed for the new Evangel lay in the sure comfort it afforded troubled consciences, many found themselves unable to arouse within them the necessary faith in the forgiveness of their sins. Luther’s own experience, viz. that “faith won’t come,”[765] was also that of many of the preachers in the case of their own uneasy and tortured parishioners; their complaints of the fruitlessness of their labours sound almost like an echo of some of Luther’s own utterances. “There are many pious souls in our churches,” says Simon Pauli, of Rostock, “who are much troubled because they cannot really believe what they say they do, viz. that God will be gracious to them and will justify and save them.”[766] The widespread melancholy existing among the parishioners quite as much and sometimes more so than among the pastors, explains the quantity of consolatory booklets which appeared on the market during the second half of the 16th century, many of which were expressly designed to check the progress of this morbid melancholy.[767] Selnecker’s work, mentioned above, is a specimen of this sort of literature. The Hamburg preacher, J. Magdeburgius, wrote: “Never has there been such need of encouragement as at this time.”[768] The Superintendent, Andreas Celichius, laments that people “are quite unable to find comfort in the sanctuary of the Evangel, but, like the heathen who knew not God, are becoming melancholy and desperate,” and this too at a time when “God, by means of the evangelical preaching, is daily dispensing abundantly all manner of right excellent and efficacious consolation, by the shovelful and not merely by the spoonful.”[769]—It was, however, a vastly more difficult matter to find comfort in the bare “Sola Fides” than it had been for the ancestors of these Evangelicals to find it in the Church’s way. Thanks to their co-operation, it was given to them to experience the vivifying and saving strength of the Sacraments and of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, to find example and encouragement in the veneration of the Saints and in the ritual, to be led to display their faith by the performance of good works in the hope of an eternal reward, and to enjoy in all the guidance and help of pastors duly called and ordained. In spite of all the abuses which existed, their Catholic forebears had never been deprived of these helps. Many Protestants were driven by such considerations to return to the Church. Of this Nicholas Amsdorf complained. Many, he says, “have fallen away from Christ to Antichrist in consequence of such despair and doubts,” and the uncertainty in matters of faith is nourished by the want of any unity in teaching, so that the people “do not know whom or what to believe”;[770] this was also one of the reasons alleged by Simon Pauli why “many in the Netherlands and in Austria are now relapsing into Popery.”[771] “We find numerous instances in our day,” Laurence Albertus said in 1574, “of how, in many places where Catholics and sectarians live together, no one was able to help a poor, deluded sectarian in spiritual or temporal distress, save the Catholic Christians, and especially their priests; such persons who have been helped admit that they first found real comfort among the Catholics, and now refuse to be disobedient to the Church any longer.” Albertus wrote a “Defence” of such converts.[772] Johann Schlaginhaufen, Luther’s pupil, with the statements he makes concerning his own sad interior experiences, brings us back to his master.[773] Schlaginhaufen himself, even more than the rest, fell a prey to sadness, fear and thoughts of despair on account of his sins. Luther, to whom he freely confided this, told him it was “false that God hated sinners, otherwise He would not have sent His Son”; God hated only the self-righteous “who didn’t want to be sinners.” If Satan had not tried and persecuted me so much, “I should not now be so hostile to him.” Schlaginhaufen, however, was unable to convince himself so readily that all his trouble came from the devil and not from his conscience. He said to Luther: “Doctor, I can’t believe that it is only the devil who causes sadness, for the Law [the consciousness of having infringed it] makes the conscience sad; but the Law is good, for it comes from God, consequently neither is the sadness from Satan.” Luther was only able to give an evasive answer and fell back on the proximity of the Last Day as a source of consolation: “In short, why we are so plagued, vexed and troubled is due to the Last Day.... The devil feels his kingdom is coming to an end, hence the fuss he makes. Therefore, my dear Turbicida [i.e. Schlaginhaufen], be comforted, hold fast to the Word of God, let us pray.” Such words, however, did not suffice to calm the troubled man, who only became ever more dejected; his inference appeared to him only too well founded: “The Law with its obligations and its terrifying menaces is just as much God’s as the Gospel.” “How doleful you look,” Luther said to him some weeks later. “I replied,” so Schlaginhaufen relates: “‘Ah, dear Doctor, I was brooding; my thoughts worry me and yet I can do nothing. I am unable to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel.’ The Doctor replied: ‘Yes, dear Master Hans, if you could do that then you would be indeed a Doctor yourself,’ saying which he stood up and doffed his cap.... ‘Paul and I have never been able to get so far ... the best thing to do is to hold fast to the man Who is called Christ.’” In answer to a new objection Luther referred the young man to the secret counsels of God, for, according to him, there was a hidden God Who had not revealed Himself and of Whom men “were unable to know what He secretly planned,”[774] and a revealed God Who indeed speaks of a Divine Will that all should be saved; how, however, this was to afford any consolation it is not easy to see.[775] On other occasions Luther simply ordered Schlaginhaufen to rely on his authority; God Himself was speaking through him words of command and consolation. “You are to believe without doubting what God Himself has spoken to you, for I have God’s authority and commission to speak to and to comfort you.”[776]
|
