1. From Religious Licence to Religious Constraint
Freedom as the Watchword
In the early days of his public protest against the olden Church, when Luther proclaimed the “universal priesthood of all Christians,” there could as yet be no question of any compulsion in matters of doctrine, seeing that he expressly conceded to the Christian congregations the right and power to weigh all doctrines and “to set up or send adrift their teachers and soul-herds.” Every Christian, so he wrote, who saw that a true teacher was lacking, was taught and consecrated by God as a priest and was also bound, “under pain of the loss of his soul and of incurring the Divine displeasure, to teach the Word of God.”[802] It is not necessary after all we have already said[803] to point out how impossible it is to square such far-reaching concessions to freedom with any idea of a positive body of doctrine. The concessions may, however, have appealed to him particularly because he himself was disposed to claim the utmost freedom in respect of the dogmas of Catholicism. In those days he was delighted to hear himself extolled as the champion of freedom and the right of private judgment. The interests of his party made such extravagant toleration commendable, for any attempt at compulsion in doctrinal matters, particularly at the beginning, would have lost him many friends. He was also anxious that it should be said of the new Church that it had spread of its own accord and only owing to the power of the Word.
In the sermon he preached at Erfurt in 1522 in support of the change of religion in that town he had declared, that every Christian, thanks to his kingly priesthood, was an “image of Christ” and a “cleric,” and “able to judge of all things”; to his decision, based on the Word of Christ, “the Pope and all his followers were subject”; “he judges all things and is judged of none.”[804]
Even two years later, in words proclaiming universal freedom of belief, he had dissuaded the Saxon Princes from taking violent measures against the fanatics: “Let the spirits fall upon each other and clash!” What cannot stand must in any case succumb in the fight, and only those who fight rightly are assured of the crown. “Just let them preach as they please!”[805]
In 1525 he told Carlstadt and the Sacramentarians that each one was free to follow his own conscience and to question the Sacrament or refuse to receive it.[806] This agrees with his statement of 1521: “No one must be forced into the faith, but the Gospel must be set before everyone and all be admonished to believe, yet left free to obey or not. All the Sacraments must be free to everyone.”[807]
Luther registered a formal protest against the ancient right of proceeding against heretics by means of temporal penalties, particularly that of death. “To burn heretics is against the will of the Holy Ghost,” so he declared in 1518 and again in 1520.[808] In 1520 he said: “Heretics must be overcome by argument, not by fire.”[809]
Most of what he was to say subsequently on the question of public toleration refers to the bearing of the authorities, especially towards the Anabaptists and Zwinglians. That he himself, however, and every follower of his Evangel, were bound to regard all opinions which diverged from his own as godless heresies and brand them as such, that he had never doubted from the moment he had discovered his new Evangel. In accordance with this he proceeds to demand more and more strongly of the “heretics” within the pale unconditional acceptance of all the articles of faith.[810]
What were the authorities to do faced by teachings so divergent? In 1523, in a writing indeed intended mainly for the Catholic rulers and opponents of his doctrine, Luther is decidedly quite against any interference on the part of the authorities: “To resist heretics, that is the bishops’ duty to whom this office is committed, not the princes’; for heresy can never be overborne by a strong hand.… Here God’s Word must fight.”[811] In April, 1525, in the midst of the Peasant War, in his “Ermanunge,” he enunciates, not without some thought of his personal ends, this general principle—“Yes, the authorities must not oppose what each one chooses to believe and teach, whether it be Gospel or lie; it is enough that they hinder the preaching of feud and lawlessness.”[812]
Boehmer justly points out, that Luther’s standpoint and doctrine as a whole, essentially spelt not only “unfettered freedom of teaching, but also entire freedom of worship.”
Meanwhile, however, Luther had already repeatedly urged those in power, especially his own sovereign, to do their supposed duty, and back up the new Evangel by their authority and by forbidding Catholic worship, the Mass and Catholic sermons.
In what follows we shall deal with Luther’s behaviour towards the Catholics, as distinguished from his attitude towards sectarians within his own camp.
Intolerance Towards Catholics in Theory and Practice
We should be making a serious mistake were we to judge of Luther’s tolerance towards the olden religion from his statements above on behalf of freedom. In Protestant literature, even to the present day, such a one-sided view has found a place, though it has long since been rejected by clear-sighted historians of that faith. In the course of the above narrative instances have been met with repeatedly of Luther’s intolerance in theory and practice with regard to those who thought differently. Here we shall refer concisely to various details already set on record and then draw some new facts and utterances from the abundant store bearing on the matter in hand.
It was “his duty to oppose false teachers,” Luther had written to his Elector on May 8, 1522, of the Canons of Altenburg.[813] In the same way, with much storming, he had insisted that the secular power should make an end of Catholic worship in the collegiate church of Wittenberg.
From the standpoint of his principles it is rather remarkable that, when the persecuted Canons of Wittenberg appealed to the Elector’s authority, Luther retorted: “What has the Elector to do with us in such things?”[814] and that, later, in one of his sermons, he boldly replied to their objections in law: “What care we about the Elector? He commands only in worldly matters.”[815] In making a stand against the celebration of Mass at Wittenberg he had frankly declared: “It is the duty of the authorities to resist and to punish such public blasphemy,” just as they are bound to punish the blasphemies uttered in the streets by godless men. The Elector and his Councillors were quite aware of the contradictions involved in Luther’s teaching. Hence, at the Prince’s instance, the Court pointed out to him on Nov. 24, 1524, that “he himself preached that the Word should be left to fight its own way, and that this it would do in its own good time, so God willed”; he ought himself to be the first “to practise what he taught and preached.”[816] In spite of this Luther, soon after, was successful in violently making a clean sweep of the Catholic Mass at Wittenberg.[817]
The theory that the Evangelical ruler must use force to root out Catholic worship was proclaimed by the Court chaplain Spalatin, a man “standing altogether under Luther’s influence, and who, as a rule, merely voiced his views”;[818] this he did in a letter of May 1, 1525, where he cites the prescriptions of the Mosaic law (Deut. vii.). According to this the secular authorities are bound “by the Law of God to abrogate idolatrous and blasphemous worship”; any further toleration on the part of the Elector of “idolatry” in his lands would be a great sin; on the other hand it would be a “great, consoling and Christian work” were he “to put the Christian bit in the mouth of all the clergy.” “Ah, that would indeed be a noble work!”[819] To the successor of the then Elector who died shortly after this, Spalatin wrote on Oct. 1, 1525: “Dr. Martin also says, that Your Electoral Highness ought in no way to suffer anyone to proceed any longer with the unchristian ceremonies, or to set them up again”;[820] on Jan. 10, 1526, he, together with two Altenburg preachers, backed up the petition to the Elector for the extirpation of “idolatry” by pointing to the example of the pious kings of the Jews.[821] At Altenburg and elsewhere such exhortations were crowned all too speedily with success.
“A secular ruler,” Luther himself wrote to the Elector Johann on Feb. 9, 1526, “must not permit his underlings to be led into strife and discord by contumacious preachers, for this may issue in uproar and sedition, but in each locality there must be but one kind of preaching.”[822]
On such grounds, however, Protestantism itself might just as well have been denied a hearing, seeing that it had come to disturb the peace, the “one kind of preaching” and the one faith. The princes, however, spurred on by their theologians, seized only too eagerly on this principle, using it in favour of the innovations. The Elector Johann declared as early as Feb. 31, 1526, that he had “graciously taken note of the Memorandum” and would, “for the future, conduct himself in such matters as beseemed a Christian”;[823] and he kept his word.
The intolerance shown to Catholics and their systematic oppression in Saxony stands in blatant contrast with the claim made, that Luther by his preaching had won religious freedom for the German lands. Banishment was the punishment incurred by those who chose to remain steadfast in their attachment to the Catholic faith. Thus, in 1527, it was expressly laid down in the regulations for the Saxon Visitation, that: “Whoever is suspected in the matter of the Sacraments, or of any other error in the faith” is to “be summoned and questioned, and, if necessary, witnesses against him are also to be called.” “Such an ‘inquisition’ is also to be instituted by the Visitors in the case of the laity.”[824] If they refuse to abjure their “errors” they are to be given a certain time to sell their possessions and to quit the land, with a “warning of the severe penalties” with which any ecclesiastic or layman will be visited who is again found in the country.[825] Bearing in mind the difficulty emigration presented at that time, particularly in the case of the people on the land, one can appreciate the injustice of the measure.
Luther and his followers frequently enough appealed to theological grounds in support of such measures, above all to the Old Testament enactments against blasphemers and contemners of religion. One-sidedly they simply applied to their own day and to their own controversial purposes, the exceptional regulations of the Mosaic dispensation which sought to preserve the religion of the chosen people in the midst of a heathen world. In this connection Luther appeals to Moses without the slightest hesitation though, as a rule, armed with the New Testament, he is ready enough to assail the Mosaic Law; he also set up the pious “Kings of Juda and Israel” as patterns. Wenceslaus Link did much the same when he summoned the Altenburg Town-Council to make a stand against Catholicism and abrogate the “lies and fond inventions of the idolaters”;[826] nor did Spalatin hesitate to point out to the Saxon Elector the commendation the pious rulers of the Jews had earned from God for their bloody repression of idolatry.[827]
Another ground for compulsion, to which Spalatin gives expression in a letter to the Elector, was, that: They must not forget how “many a poor man would more readily come to the Evangel, were that wretched system [of Popery and its idolatry] no longer in existence.” In other words, were Catholic worship rooted out, Catholics would more easily be won over to the Evangel.[828] It was on such a standpoint as this that the Augsburg declaration of 1530 made by the theologians of the Saxon Electorate was based. The Emperor had demanded from the Protesting Princes toleration of the Catholic worship for those of their subjects who chose to remain Catholic. The theologians thereupon expressed themselves against such an arrangement, and urged that, in this case, Lutheran proselytism would be hampered: “Were it to be said that the rulers were not to hinder it, though the preachers were to preach against it, it is clear of what [small] good would be all the teaching and preaching of the ministers.”[829]
In the Duchy of Saxony, as everybody knows, the introduction of Lutheranism was opposed by Duke George. His severity he justified by appealing to the thousand-year-old law of the one great world-wide Church, the Church of the Apostles, of the Fathers and martyrs and Œcumenical Councils and great missioners of all ages, a law, moreover, sanctioned by the Empire. When, in 1533, a number of Lutherans were banished from the Duchy[830] Luther seized upon this as a pretext for controversy. Roundly scolding the “Ducal tyrant,” he declared this sentence of banishment to be “a devilish and criminal thing.” The authority of the sovereign, so he now wrote, again contradicting himself, “only extends over life and property in secular matters.”[831] But, after George’s death in 1539 and the accession of his brother Henry, Luther’s tone changed, for Henry held Lutheran views. In a letter he sent about that time to the Elector Johann Frederick, he is angry because more than 500 of the Saxon clergy, all of them “venomous Papists,” had not yet been driven out. “For the sake of the poor souls, many thousands of whom live neglected under such parsons,” he urges the Elector to do his best “to help and promote a Visitation.”[832] He demands that Duke Henry, as the sovereign and protector of the bishopric of Meissen, should “put a damper on the blasphemous idolatry” as best he could, for “the Princes who are able to do so should at once abolish Baal and all idolatry.”[833] He also wished that the bishop of Meissen, though a Prince of the Empire, should “at once bow his head to the Evangel”; in this matter there is no need for “much disputing.”
It was but natural that such intolerance often led to scenes of brutality; such was the case in the cathedral of Meissen, where the splendid tomb of Benno, the saintly bishop of Meissen, was hewn in pieces, and the statue of the patron, which was an object of veneration to all the people, was set up headless at the church door as a laughing-stock for the Lutherans.[834]
Hand in hand with such legal coercion, which he both approved and furthered, went Luther’s declaration—which, though seeming to promote freedom, really constituted a new encroachment on the rights of conscience—viz. that: No one was to be forced to believe in his heart, but that “the people were to be driven to the sermons for the sake of the Ten Commandments, so that they might at least learn the outward works of obedience.”[835] “It would be grand,” so he told Margrave George of Brandenburg, “if your Serene Highness on the strength of your secular authority enjoined on both parsons and parishioners under pain of penalties the teaching and learning of the Catechism, in order, that, as they are Christians and wish to be called such, they may, please God, be compelled to learn and to know what a Christian ought to know, whether he believes it or not.”[836] At his instance attendance at the sermons was imposed on all people in the Saxon Electorate under pain of penalty, whatever they might think of the preaching.[837]
God Himself has abrogated “all authority and power where it is opposed to the Evangel,”[838] so, as early as 1522, ran one of the principles he used for the violent suppression of Catholic worship. Of the Catholic foundations he says in the same year: “If the preacher does not make men pious (i.e. does not preach according to Luther’s doctrine), the goods are no longer his.”[839] Violent interference with the Mass was, according to him, no revolt when it came from the established authorities.[840] “It is the duty of the sovereign, as ruler and brother Christian, to drive away the wolves,”[841] and those who do not preach the Evangel are “wolves”; it is “an urgent duty to drive away the wolf from the sheepfold.”[842] The Pope himself, however, deserves the worst fate, for he is the “werwolf who devours everything. Just as all seek to kill the werwolf, and very rightly, so is it a duty to suppress the Pope by force.”[843]
“Not only the spiritual but also the secular power must yield to the Evangel, whether cheerfully or otherwise.”[844]
Hence it follows that the salvation of his soul requires of a Christian prince the prohibition of the Popish worship.[845] If it is his duty to resist the Turk far more must he oppose the Pope: “What harm does the Turk do?” It is clear that, “as regards both body and soul the government of the Pope is ten times worse than that of the Turk.”[846]
“Whoever wishes to live amongst the burghers must keep the laws of the borough and not dishonour or abuse them, else he must pack and go.” The authorities are not to “allow themselves and their people to be forced into idolatry and falsehood.”[847] Hence “let the authorities step in and try the case and whichever party does not agree with Scripture, let him be ordered to hold his tongue.”[848] The Prince must behave like David, and hold that, as regards “God and the service of His Sovereignty everything must be equal and made to intermingle, whether it be termed spiritual or secular,” being “kneaded together into one cake.”[849] How many false teachers had David, his model, not been forced “to expel or in other ways stop their mouths.”[850]
It is not, however, enough to impose silence on them. They must—so Luther began to teach about 1530—be treated as public blasphemers and punished accordingly:[851] They “must not be suffered but must be banished as open blasphemers.” Thus must we act with those who “teach that Christ did not die for our sins but that each one must atone for them on his own; for this also is a public blasphemy against the Gospel.”[852] Hundreds of times does he charge the Catholics with thus robbing the saving death of Christ of all significance by their doctrine of good works.
These intolerant principles, which could not but lead to persecution, were made even worse by the abuse and invective which Luther publicly showered on the representatives of Catholicism. He taught the mob to call them “blasphemous ministers of the Babylonian whore,” knaves, bloodhounds, hypocrites and murderers. In the Articles of Schmalkalden which found a place among the Symbolic Books, he introduces the Pope as the “dragon” who leads astray the whole world, as the “real Antichrist” and as the “devil himself” whom it was impossible to “worship as Master or as God,” for which reason he would not suffer the Pope as “Head or Lord”; they must say to him: “May God rebuke thee, Satan!” (Zach. iii. 2).[853] Among his monstrous caricatures of the Pope he also included one depicting the “well-deserved reward of the Most Satanic Pope and his Cardinals,” as the inscription runs below. Here the Pope is seen on the gallows with three Cardinals; their tongues which have been torn out by the root are nailed to the gibbet and devils are scurrying off with their souls. The picture is embellished with the following doggerel:
“Did Pope and Card’nal here below
Their due reward receive,
Then would their tongues to gibbets cleave,
As our draughtsman’s lines do show.”[854]
Threats of Bloody Reprisals against Papists, Priestlings and Monks
At the right moment let us fall upon the Turks “and the priests and smite them dead!” Only then shall we be successful against the Turks! So runs one of Luther’s sayings in the Table-Talk.[855]
“Oh, that our Right Reverend Cardinals, Popes and Roman Legates had more kings of England to put them to death!”[856] This he wrote in 1535, after the execution of Thomas More and John Fisher by Henry VIII.
As early as 1520 he had exclaimed against Prierias: If thieves are punished by the rope, murderers by the sword and heretics by fire, why not proceed against “these noxious teachers of destruction—these Cardinals, Popes and the whole swarm of the Roman Sodom, who are ever ceaselessly destroying the Church of God—with every kind of weapon, and wash our hands in their blood?”[857]
Towards the end of his life, in 1545, he showed that he was still faithful to such views in spite of all the changes which had come over some of his other leading ideas. Let “the Pope, the Cardinals and the whole scoundrelly train of his idolatrous, Popish Holiness be seized,” so he declares in “Das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” and put to the death they deserve, either on the gallows to which their tongues may be nailed, or by drowning the “blasphemous knaves” in the Sea at Ostia.[858]
“It pleases me,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1536, to King Christian of Denmark, “that Your Majesty has extirpated the bishops who never cease to persecute God’s Word and to worry the secular power; I shall do my best to explain and vindicate your action.”[859] At Wittenberg, as we see from a letter of a Wittenberg theologian, the report was current that the Danish king had “struck off the heads of six bishops.”[860] This false account “seems to have been credited by Luther.”[861] If this be so, then it seems that he was perfectly ready to justify so cruel a deed. The truth is, that, King Christian, after having had the bishops arrested (Aug. 20, 1536), released them as soon as they had promised to resign their bishoprics.
In the summer of 1540 Luther had it that the Pope and the monks were to blame for the many fires in Northern and Central Germany. “If this turns out true, then there will be nothing left for us but to take up arms in common against all the monks and shavelings; I too shall join in, for it is right to slay the miscreants like mad dogs.”[862] The worst of the lot, according to him, were the Franciscans. “If I had all the Franciscan friars in one house,” he said a few days later, “I would set fire to it, for, in the monks the good seed is gone, and only the chaff is left. To the fire with them!”[863]
No one, in the least familiar with Luther’s writings, will be so foolish as to believe that it was really his intention to kill the Catholic clergy and monks. His bloodthirsty demands were but the violent outbursts of his own deep inward intolerance. They were called forth occasionally by other alleged misdeeds of Popery, of its advocates and friends, for instance, by the burdensome taxes imposed by the Church, by her use of excommunication, and by the action taken against the Lutherans, particularly by the resolutions of the Diets for the suppression of Protestantism. Nor must we forget that the religious dissensions grew into a sort of permanent warfare and that war tends to produce effusions such as would be unthinkable in times of peace; nor was the warlike feeling a monopoly of the Lutheran side.
But who was it who was responsible for having provoked the war?
Occasional counsels to patience and endurance, to self-restraint and consideration were indeed given by Luther from time to time[864] (they have been diligently collected by his modern supporters), but, generally speaking, they are drowned in the din of his controversial invective.
What was to be expected when the people, who were already profoundly excited by the social conditions, were told: “Better were it that all bishops were put to death, and all foundations and convents rooted out than that one soul should be seduced” by Popish error.[865] “What better do they deserve than to be stamped out by a great revolt?”[866] If his reforms were rejected then it was to be wished that monasteries and foundations “were all reduced to one great heap of ashes.”[867] “A grand destruction of all the monasteries, etc., would be the best reformation!”[868] What wonder “were the Princes, the nobles and the laity to hit Pope, bishop, priest and monk on the head and drive them out of the land?”[869] The “Rhine would hardly suffice to drown” the many “bull-mongers,” Cardinals and “knaves.”[870]
The Death-Penalty Sectarians within the New Fold
In the above we have dealt with Luther’s intolerance in theory and practice towards the Catholic Church. It remains for us to look at his attitude towards the sects within his own camp.
The question, how far they were to be tolerated, or whether it would be better forcibly to suppress them was first brought home to Luther by the Anabaptist movement under Thomas Münzer. Sure of the upper hand, Luther decided, as we know, at the end of July, 1524, to advise the Saxon Princes to leave the Anabaptists in peace so far as their doctrines were concerned. “Let them preach as they please,” was his advice, for “there ‘must needs be heresies’” (1 Cor. xi. 19).[871] He explained to Lazarus Spengler of Nuremberg on Feb. 4, 1525, that the Anabaptists were not to be punished, particularly with “bodily penalties,” because, in his opinion, they were no real blasphemers, but merely “like the Turks or straying Christians.”[872] In May of the same year he showed himself disposed to universal toleration. “The authorities are not to hinder anyone from teaching and believing what he pleases”;[873] a principle which, as we have shown above (p. 239), he himself had contravened in practice as early as 1522, and was finally to set aside altogether.
As for the Anabaptists, in 1527 Luther was not yet in favour of the “putting to death” and bloody “rooting out” of these sectarians. In 1528 he even taught in his exposition of the Parable of the Good Seed and the Tares that “we are not to fight the fanatics with the sword.”[874] What made him hesitate to advise the putting to death of these heretics was, as he told his friend Wenceslaus Link of Nuremberg in 1528, the apprehension that this might lead to abuses; he feared lest, in the time to come, we might turn the sword against the best “among us.”[875] But without a doubt he approved of the Edict of the Elector Johann (Jan. 17, 1528) which proscribed the writings of the Anabaptists, Sacramentarians and fanatics throughout the land—if indeed the Edict itself may not be traced directly to Luther, as Zwingli suspected.[876] In 1528 it also seemed to him right to decree the penalty of banishment in the case of the Anabaptists.[877]
When, however, the danger had become more evident, which the Anabaptist heresy spelt both to the land-frith and the foundations of Christianity, not to speak of the Lutheran teaching, Luther adopted a sterner line of action.
His views altered in 1530. After a Mandate had been issued in the Saxon Electorate against the “secret preachers and conventicles, Anabaptists and other baneful novel teaching,” six Anabaptists were executed early in the year at Reinhardsbrunn in the duchy of Saxe-Gotha. The discussion which took place on this event gave Melanchthon occasion to declare in Feb., 1530, that, “even though the Anabaptists do not advocate anything seditious or openly blasphemous” it was, “in his opinion, the duty of the authorities to put them to death.”[878] In the spring of 1530, with the Anabaptists in his mind, Luther, in his commentary on Ps. lxxxii. dealt with the question whether the authorities “ought to forbid strange teachings or heresies and punish them, seeing that no one should or can force men into the Faith.”[879]
His detailed reply to the question which it was then impossible any longer to blink, centres round the distinction he makes of two kinds of heretics, viz. those who were seditious, and those who merely “teach the opposite of some clear article of faith.” Of the latter, i.e. the non-revolutionary, he says expressly: “These also must not be allowed but must be punished like public blasphemers.” Of those, who, though holding no office, force themselves in as preachers, and thus imperil the faith and lead to risings, he writes, that their oath of allegiance obliged the burghers not to listen to them but rather to report them either to their parson or to the authorities. If such a one will not desist “then let the authorities hand over knaves of that ilk to their proper master, to wit Master Hans” (i.e. the hangman).[880] As for those Anabaptists who preached open revolt, they had, in his opinion, by that very fact incurred the penalties of the law. At any rate it was not merely on account of their sedition that Luther wished to see the Anabaptists punished.
Another statement of his has come down to us from an outside source. Luther’s friend, Lazarus Spengler of Nuremberg, had a little before this, on March 17, 1530, sought to secure from Luther, through Veit Dietrich, some directions on how to deal with heretics. Dietrich verbally obtained from his master the desired instructions and promptly sent them to Spengler by letter.[881] They were to the effect that not merely the heretics who offend against public order were to be punished, but also those who merely do harm to religion, such as the Sacramentarians (Zwinglians) and Papists; as they are to be looked upon as blasphemers, they cannot be suffered. It is noteworthy, that, in Luther’s correspondence in 1530, in a letter from the Coburg to Justus Jonas, we find him congratulating himself on the report (a false one) of the execution of a certain heretic. On receiving the announcement that Johannes Campanus, the anti-Trinitarian, had suffered death as a heretic at Liége, Luther wrote: “I learnt this with joy” (“lætus audivi”).[882]
Early in October, 1531, agreeably with the Saxon Elector’s Mandate, a number of persons suspected of holding Anabaptist views were taken to Eisenach for punishment and were there put to the torture; it was now judged advisable to obtain a fresh memorandum from the Wittenberg theologians.
Accordingly, at the end of 1530, Melanchthon at the instance of the Electoral Court once more took the matter in hand. He drafted a memorandum on the duty of the secular authorities in the matter of religious differences, with particular reference to the Anabaptists. In it he set forth at length the grounds for a regular system of coercion by the sword. Luther, too, set his name to the document with the words: “It pleases me, Martin Luther.” In it the sectarians were reprobated as blasphemers because they reject “the public preaching office [the ministry] and teach that men can become holy without any preaching and ecclesiastical worship.” They ought to be visited with death by the public authorities whose duty it is to “befriend and uphold ecclesiastical order”; and in like manner should their adherents and those whom they have led astray be dealt with, who insist, “that our baptism and preaching is not Christian and therefore that ours is not the Church of Christ.”[883] Nevertheless, we can see from the words Luther adds after his signature that the decision, or at least its severity, aroused some misgivings in him. He says: “Though it may appear cruel to punish them by the sword, yet it is even more cruel of them to condemn the preaching office and not to teach any certain doctrine, to persecute the true doctrine, and, over and above all this, to seek to destroy the kingdoms of this world.”
It is quite true that Luther and Melanchthon had an eye on the seditious character of these sects, yet present-day Protestant theologians are not justified when they try to explain and excuse their severity on this ground. On the contrary, as we have already pointed out, the texts plainly show that they were chiefly concerned with the punishment of the sectarians’ offences against the faith. This was made the principal point, as we see in Melanchthon’s memorandum just referred to. He says, for instance: “Though many Anabaptists do not openly teach any seditious doctrines,” yet “it was both sedition and blasphemy for them to condemn the public ministry.” It was therefore the duty of the authorities, above all “on account of the second commandment of the Decalogue, to uphold the public ministry” and to take steps against them. If, to boot, they also taught seditious doctrines then it was “all the easier to judge them,” as we read in another memorandum of the Wittenberg theologians (1536) of which Melanchthon was also the draughtsman.[884]
To N. Paulus belongs the credit of having thrown light on the true state of affairs, for, even previous to the publication of his “Protestantismus und Toleranz im 16 Jahrhundert” (1911) he had discussed Luther’s attitude both in his shorter writing, “Luther und die Gewissensfreiheit” (1905) and in various articles in reviews. After him, the Protestant historian P. Wappler took up the same views, particularly in his “Die Stellung Kursachsens … zur Täuferbewegung” (1910). In the “Neues Archiv für sächsische Geschichte” (1911) O. A. Hecker also quite agrees in rejecting the opinion of certain recent Protestant theologians, who, as he says, “all try to exonerate Luther from any hand in the executions for heresy, though they can only do so by dint of forced interpretations, as Paulus pointed out.”[885]
Between 1530 and 1532 Luther’s intolerance comes yet more to the fore; it was indeed his way, when once he had made any view his own, to urge it in the strongest terms. Thus, at the end of 1531, he again alludes to Master Hans: “Those who force themselves in without any office or commission are not worthy of being called false prophets but are vagrants and knaves, who ought to be handed over to the tender mercies of Master Hans.”[886] “It is not allowed that each one should proceed according to his own ideas and set up his own doctrine and fancy himself a sage, and dictate to, and find fault with, others.” “This I call judging of doctrine, which is one of the greatest and most scatheful vices on earth, whence indeed all the fanatics have sprung.” The two last sentences occur in his sermons on St. Matthew’s Gospel.[887]
Still more striking is the demand he makes of Duke Albert of Prussia concerning the Zwinglians; here his zeal against these heretics seems to blind him, for his arguments recoil against himself, though apparently he does not notice it. Every Prince, he says in a psychologically remarkable passage, who does not wish “most gruesomely to burden his conscience” must cast out the Zwinglians from his land, because, by their denial of the presence of Christ in the Supper, they set up a doctrine “contrary to the traditional belief held everywhere and to the unanimous testimony of all.”
But how many doctrines had not Luther himself set up contrary to the ancient faith and to the unanimous testimony of all? It was, so he goes on, “both dangerous and terrible” to “believe anything contrary to the unanimous testimony, belief and teaching of the whole of the Holy Christian Church, which, from the beginning and for more than 1500 years, had been universally received throughout the world.” This was tantamount to “not believing in the Christian Church at all, and not merely to condemn the whole of the Holy Christian Church as a damned heretic, but also Christ Himself together with all the Apostles and Prophets, who had formulated the Article which we now recite, ‘I believe one Holy Christian Church,’ and borne such powerful witness to it.”[888]
“The worldly authorities bear the sword,” so Luther said in his Home-Postils, “with orders to prevent all scandal, so that it may not intrude and do harm. But the most dangerous and horrible scandal is where false doctrine and worship finds its way in.… For this reason the Christian authorities must be on the look-out for such scandal.… They must resist it stoutly and realise that nothing else will do save they make use of the sword and of the full extent of their power in order to preserve the doctrine pure and the worship clean and undefiled.”
“Then everything will go well.”[889]
We have also his exposition of Ps. ci. (1534), where there occurs the eulogy of David, the “scourge of heretics.”[890]
How he was in the habit of dealing with the Sacramentarians at a later date the following instance may serve to show, which at the same time reveals his coarseness and his reliance on the secular authorities. To Luther’s doctrine that Christ was bodily present, not only in the Host, but throughout the world, the Sacramentarians had rejoined: Good, then we shall partake of Him everywhere, in “spoon, plate and beer-can!”[891] To this Luther’s reply ran: See “what graceless swine we abandoned Germans for the most part are, lacking both manners and reason, who, when we hear of God, esteem it a fairy tale.… All seek to do their business into it and to wipe their back parts on it. The temporal authorities ought to punish such blasphemers.… God knows I write of such high things most unwillingly because they must needs be set before such dogs and swine.… Hearken you, you pig, dog, or fanatic, or whatever brainless donkey you may be: Though Christ’s body is everywhere, yet you will not be able to lay hold of it so easily.… Begone to your pigsty and wallow in your own muck! … there is a distinction between His Presence and your laying hold of Him; He is free and nowhere bound,” etc.—Luther himself was, however, very far from making clear what the distinction was. After much else not to the point he concludes: “Oh, how few there are, even among the highly learned, who have ever meditated so profoundly on this article concerning Christ!”[892]
The treatment of the sectarians in the Saxon Electorate was in keeping with the theories and counsels of Luther and his theologians.
Relentless measures were taken against them on account of their deviation from the faith even when no charge of sedition was forthcoming. On Jan. 15, 1532, the Elector Johann admitted the following as his guiding principle for interfering: “It is the duty of the authorities to punish such teachers and seducers, with God and with a good conscience.… For were heretics and contemners of the Word of God not punished we should be acting against the prescribed laws which we are in every way bound to observe.”[893]
As early as 1527 twelve men and one woman, who had received baptism at each other’s hands, were beheaded.[894] Similar executions took place in 1530, 1532 and 1538.[895]
In 1539 the members of the Wittenberg High Court wrote concerning three Anabaptists then in prison at Eisenach: “If they do not recant or allow themselves to be reduced to obedience, it will be right and proper that they be put to death by the sword, on account of such blasphemy and because they have allowed themselves to be baptised elsewhere.” Of any seditious teaching there was no question in these proceedings.[896]
One Anabaptist, Fritz Erbe, who had only gone astray in matters of faith, was kept in jail from 1530 to 1541, when death set him free.[897] Hans Sturm and Peter Pestel, both of Zwickau, were harmless sectarians without any seditious leanings; the first was put in prison in 1529 and died there; the latter was beheaded on June 16, 1536.[898] Hans Steinsdorf and Hans Hamster, were condemned to death in 1538 as “stubborn blasphemers.”[899] In the ’forties Duke Henry of Saxony caused an Anabaptist to be burnt as a heretic at Dresden.[900]
The Saxon lawyer, Matthias Coler (†1587), taught in his “Decisiones Germaniæ,” that, according to the laws of Saxony those were to be punished by death at the stake (“de iure saxonico cremandi veniunt”) who openly denied either the Divinity of Christ, or other important truths of faith; before being burnt they were, however, to be questioned under torture concerning their confederates in order that the land might be purged of such wicked men.[901]
In thus interfering the sovereigns were well aware that they had the warm official approval of Luther and his fellows. To this, for instance, the Elector Johann Frederick appealed in 1533 when milder measures were suggested. He referred to the memorandum which his father had obtained from the Wittenberg theologians and lawyers concerning the execution of the Anabaptists; their decision had been, “that His Highness might with a good conscience cause those charged with Anabaptism to be punished by death,” and, soon after, several of them were executed.[902] The person who had thought otherwise, and to whom this vindication was accordingly addressed, was no less a man than Landgrave Philip of Hesse.
Luther himself, too, had been obliged on various occasions to justify the severity of his opinions.
Luther’s Self-justification and Excuses
Philip of Hesse, though he treated Catholics with the utmost intolerance, refused to hear of punishing the Anabaptists with death unless indeed they were the cause of public disturbances. “We cannot find it in our conscience to put anyone to death by the sword on account of religion unless we have sufficient proof of other crimes as well.” Such was the declaration he made in 1532 to Elector Johann of Saxony, and which he emphasised in 1545 to the latter’s successor: “Were all those to be executed who are not of our faith what then should we do to the Papists, to say nothing of the Jews, who err even more greatly than the Anabaptists?”[903]
Luther was apparently far surer of his case. He is as confident, subsequent to 1530, in drawing from Scripture the principles for the treatment of the heretics as he is in defending them against the obvious objections so often brought against them.
Luther had it that the line of action for which he stood was not coercion to any definite religious practices. “Our Princes,” so he sought to reassure himself as early as 1525, “do not force people to the faith and to the Evangel but merely set a term to outward abominations.”[904]
The Elector, as was to be expected, expressed himself likewise: “Though it is not our intention to prescribe to anyone what he must hold or believe, yet, in order to guard against harmful uprisings and other disorders, we refuse to recognise or permit any sects or schisms within our Princedom.”[905]
Many a one amongst the new Doctors had begun, as a Protestant historian of Saxony points out,[906] “to claim for his conscience the same right” (as Luther), while “following other paths than Luther had trodden” (in his search after God). May not, indeed, must not, such a one, so ran the objection, follow his conscience, seeing that Luther himself tells us to consult our conscience? Yes, he may, is Luther’s reply, but, if he be truthful, then he will admit my plain interpretation of the Bible as the right one, for “I have floored and overcome all my foes on the sure groundwork of Holy Scripture.”[907]
Moreover, might not the Princes holding Popish views seize on the coercion taught by the Lutherans as a pretext for similar measures against the Lutherans in their territories?
No, replies Luther, they must not do so for they would be committing the same sin as the Kings of Israel when they “slew the true prophets”; but on account of the injustice of such slaughter, we are not to make nought of the law or refrain from stoning the false prophets. “Pious authorities will not punish anyone unless they see, hear, learn or know for certain that they are blasphemers.”[908]—Even should Kaiser Charles come and tell us, that he is convinced that “the doctrine of the Papists is true, and that he must therefore, in accordance with God’s command, use all his power to extirpate our heretical doctrines in his Empire,” we must answer, that: “We know he is not certain of this, and, in fact, cannot be certain.”[909]
But does this not come to much the same as imposing faith by some sort of compulsion?
No, is his answer. “The faith is not thereby forced on anyone, for he is free to believe what he pleases. He is only forbidden to indulge in that teaching and blaspheming whereby he seeks to rob God and Christians of their doctrine and Word, whilst all the while enjoying their protection and all temporal advantages. Let him go where there are no Christians and have things his way there.”[910]
The severity of his demands is hardly mitigated or excused by the right he gives people to leave the country. At any rate those who do not see eye to eye with him must get themselves gone, for, as he frequently remarks, whoever wishes to dwell among the burghers must not disregard the laws of the borough.[911]
“By all this, however,” so he says on another occasion, “no one is forced into the faith but the common man is merely set free from troublesome and obstinate spirits, and the knavery of the hole-and-corner preachers is checked.”[912] Thus, if the man who thinks otherwise wishes to lock up his convictions in his own breast, he is quite free to do so. Within, he may enjoy the most far-reaching freedom, since no earthly power extends to his thoughts. The reply of those concerned was, however, obvious; what right, they asked, had the new religious tribunal to prevent a man from revealing his convictions and openly living up to them, and was not the order to keep silence tantamount to a stifling of conscience and to forcing people to become hypocrites?
Hence, in the ensuing discussions, we find that Luther and his friends were ever making fresh efforts to meet the objections; in itself this was a sign of the weakness of the exclusivism adopted by the Lutherans, in spite of all they had formerly said, as soon as they had succeeded in winning the favour of the State.
“Some argue,” we read in the memorandum of the Wittenbergers published in 1536, “that the secular authorities have no concern whatever with ghostly matters. This is going much too far.… The rulers must not only protect the life and belongings of their underlings, but their highest duty is to promote the honour of God and to prevent blasphemy and idolatry,” etc.[913]
The memorandum was intended for Philip of Hesse. As Luther was aware that the Landgrave was loath to proceed to extremities with the Anabaptists, he added to the memorandum a note of his own. “Seeing that His Serene Highness the Landgrave reports that certain leaders and teachers of the Anabaptists … have not kept their promise (viz. to quit the land) Your Serene Highness may with a good conscience cause them to be punished with the sword, for this reason also, to wit, that they have not kept their oath or promise. Such is the rule. Yet Your Serene Highness, needless to say, may at all times allow justice to be tempered with mercy, according to the circumstances.”[914]
If meant in earnest the latter recommendation to mercy does the speaker credit and is the more noteworthy because, in his later years, we do not often hear him pleading for the heretics. As a rule he is all too intent on emphasising the wickedness of what he terms “blasphemy and idolatry,” i.e. of whatever was at variance with his own teaching.
But what—and this is the main objection—entitles Luther’s doctrine to be regarded as the standard of belief? This point Luther usually evaded. He says: Those heretics are to be punished “whose teaching is at variance with the public articles of the faith which are plainly grounded on Scripture and believed throughout the world by the whole of Christendom.”[915] “Such articles, common to the whole of Christendom, have already been sufficiently tested, examined, proved and determined by Scripture and by the confession of the whole of Christendom, confirmed by many miracles, sealed by the blood of the holy Martyrs, witnessed to and defended by the books of all the Doctors and are not now to become the prey of faultfinders or cavillers.”[916] A sharp answer, one very much to the point, was given by Bullinger of Zürich, who spoke of it as “truly laughable” that his opponent should suddenly appeal to the fact “of the Church having so long held this.” “If Luther’s argument, based on longstanding usage, be admitted, then is Popery quite in the right when it harps on the Church and her age. But then the whole of Luther’s own doctrine tumbles over, for his teaching is not that which the Roman Church has held for so long.”[917]—Nor is it easy to tell which points of doctrine Luther, in his elastic fashion, included among the articles “clearly founded on Scripture” and held unquestioningly by the whole of Christendom. His words occasionally presuppose that all divergent doctrines, not only those of the Sacramentarians and Anabaptists, but even those of the Papists, were to be punished by the authorities. If everyone is to be punished who teaches “that Christ has not died for our sins but that each one must himself make satisfaction for them,”[918] (a doctrine unjustly foisted on the Papists by Luther), or who “condemns the public ministry and draws the people away from it,” or who “insists that our baptism and preaching are not Christian and therefore that our Church is not the Church of Christ,”[919] etc.,—then many Catholics could not but fall victims to the sword of the authorities. How often did not Luther designate every specifically Catholic doctrine as rank “blasphemy,” and stigmatise every Catholic practice as idolatry? Blasphemy and idolatry were, however, according to him, to be rooted out by violence. Truly his words gave promise of an abundant harvest of persecution.
As a reason of his animus against heretics within his own fold Luther finally brings forward those personal considerations which are familiar to all who have followed his controversies.
His natural foes are those who in their “peculiar wisdom” “seek to teach something besides Christ and beyond our preaching.”[920] Hence he was fond of insisting that Christ was slaying the Papacy through him, and of rejecting all who “make a great pother” and “claim to know something new.” They come, and, like Carlstadt, want to “seize upon the prize and poach upon my preserves.” Had not Carlstadt come along “with the fanatics, Münzer and the Anabaptists, all would have gone well with my undertaking.”[921] These men want to “darken the sun of the Evangel” so that the world “may forget all that has hitherto been taught by us.”[922]
“They want to have nothing to do with me,” he complains of the fanatics, “and I want to have nothing to do with them. They boast that they have nothing from me, for which I heartily thank God; I have borrowed even less from them, for which, too, God be praised.”[923] The rupture with the Swiss came about because they “wished to be first.”[924]
In all these dissensions he finds many a one saying to the Christians: “I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin.” And yet he alone had the right to call himself the “great Doctor” “to whom God first revealed His Word to preach.”[925]
But did not his very self-reliance finally broaden the ideas of the preacher of coercion? Did not Luther in a sermon preached at Eisleben on Feb. 7, 1546, as good as repudiate his former exclusivism?
It is true that this has been confidently asserted by Protestants, but the text of this sermon, known only through Aurifaber’s Notes, does not justify such an inference.[926] In it the preacher is not treating of the attitude of the Christian authorities towards heresy, but is only showing how the faithful and the preachers must behave, surrounded as they are by wicked folk, by Anabaptists and sectarians. The occasion for speaking of this was supplied by the Sunday Gospel of the Tares, Matt. xiii. 24-30, which grow up together with the wheat in God’s field, and which the Lord wishes to be left undisturbed until the Day of Judgment. Hence he explains how this must be understood, the local conditions probably supplying him with a particular reason for doing so, seeing that, in the County of Mansfeld, there must still have been some Catholics and that the Jews stood in favour. The greater part of the Sermon on the Tares is devoted to describing the passions and lusts which Christians must fight against in their own hearts with patience and perseverance. It is only towards the end that he speaks of the wickedness rampant in the world. He refutes the opinion of those, who “would have a Church in which there is no evil but where all are prudent and pious, and pure and holy”; thus “the Anabaptists, Münzer and such like, wish to root out and put to death everything that is not holy.” Hence “how are we to suffer the heretics and yet not to suffer them? How am I to act? If I tear up or root out the tares in one place then I spoil the wheat [according to the Parable], and the weeds will still grow up again elsewhere. Thus if I root out one heretic, yet the same devil-sown seed springs up again in ten other places.” Hence we must look to it that we do not make matters worse by violence and suppression. “Papists and Jews will ever be with us.” “You will not succeed in this world in entirely separating the heretics and false Christians from the just.” “Look to it that you remain master in your own household; see to it, you preachers, parsons and hearers [it is only to these that he is addressing himself, not to the State authorities], that heretics and seditious men, such as Münzer was, do not rule or dominate; grumble in a corner, that indeed they may do, but that they should mount the rostrum, get into the pulpit or go up to the altar, that, so far as in you lies, you must not allow.” Care must be taken that the “pulpit and the Sacrament are kept undefiled.” “By human might and power we cannot root them out, or make them different. For, in this point, they are often far superior to us, can get themselves a following, draw the masses to them, and, on the top of it all, they have on their side the prince of this world, viz. the devil.”
The main thing therefore is that the heretics “should not rule in our Churches.”
But what are we to do against the tares, against the Papists and Sophists, against Cologne, Louvain and the devil’s other thistles? Of boils it holds good: “Let them swell until they burst. So too it is in secular and domestic government: Where [whether in the Town Council or among the servants] we cannot get rid of the wicked without harm or detriment, there we must put up with them until the time is ripe.”
In this much-discussed Sermon on the Tares Luther is very far from wishing to give the authorities directions as to how to treat the sectarians. On the contrary he makes it plain that some other line of action than that described by him must be followed even by the faithful and the preachers, and much more so by the Christian authorities, whenever the heretics come out of their “corner” and try to climb into the pulpit or mount the altar. What was to be done that the pulpit and the Sacrament might remain undefiled, he had already sufficiently explained elsewhere. Naturally, a sermon on the Gospel which tells us to leave the Tares until the harvest was scarcely the place for Luther to expound his severer theories on the treatment to be meted out to unbelievers and misbelievers, so that his silence here cannot be taken as a repudiation of the measures for which he so long had stood. At the close of the next sermon, the last he was ever to preach, addressing himself to the nobility, he speaks very harshly of the Jews. “If they refuse to be converted, then, as blasphemers, they deserve that we should not suffer or endure them among us.” “You Lords ought not to tolerate but rather expel them.” This duty he bases on his usual principle: “Were I to tolerate the man who dishonours, blasphemes and curses Christ my Master, I should be making myself a partaker in the sins of others.”
His system of coercing and punishing heretics he certainly never repudiated.
Compulsory Attendance at Church
“Facts have shown,” Luther wrote to Spalatin in 1527 of the conditions in his new churches, “that men despise the Evangel and insist on being compelled by the law and the sword.”[927] He was very anxious to make attendance at the Lutheran preaching a matter of obligation.
According to his earlier statements, attendance at the preaching had been voluntary, for the matter of the sermons was to be judged by the hearers, in order that they might avoid what was harmful; his subsequent practice of driving all to the preaching made an end of this freedom, or rather duty. Through the authorities, so far as his influence went, he insisted on this principle: “Even though they do not believe they must nevertheless, for the sake of the Ten Commandments, be driven to the preaching, so that they may at least learn the outward work of obedience.” He wrote this at a time when he had already justified such coercion at Wittenberg, viz. on Aug. 26, 1529, in a letter to the “strict and steadfast” Joseph Levin Metzsch of Mila, who was shortly after appointed by the Elector to take part in the Visitation.[928] Instructions sent by Luther on the same day to Thomas Löscher, pastor of the same locality, are to the same effect (“cogendi sunt ad conciones … audiant etiam inviti”).[929] The orders of the authorities concerning public worship were represented in the Visitation Rules for the pastors (1528) as universally binding: “All secular authority is to be obeyed because the secular powers are not ordering a new worship but enforcing peace and charity.”[930] The Preface of the Smaller Catechism (1531) was on the same lines. “Although we neither can nor should force anyone into the faith, yet the masses must be held and driven to it in order that they may know what is right or wrong in those among whom they live.”[931]
In the same year Luther advised Margrave George of Brandenburg to compel the people to attend the Catechism “at the behest of the secular authority,” for, since they “are Christians and wish to be so called,” it was only fitting “they should be obliged to learn what a Christian ought to know.” The Ansbach preachers embodied this requirement in the same year in the alterations they proposed in the church-regulations.[932]
Wittenberg served as the pattern. It was to Wittenberg that Leonard Beyer addressed himself when he succeeded Luther’s friend, Nicholas Hausmann, as pastor of Zwickau. Luther answered his letter by describing the system of coercion practised in Wittenberg and the neighbourhood when people persistently neglected to attend the sermons: “With the authority and in the name of our Most Noble Prince it is our custom to affright those who disregard all piety and fail to attend the preaching, and to threaten them with banishment and the law. This is the first step. Then, if they do not amend, the pastors are enjoined by us to ply them for a month or more with instructions and representations, and, finally, in the event of their still proving contumacious, to excommunicate them, and to break off all intercourse with them as though they were heathen.” He concludes: “The words of the Bible [Matt. xviii. 17; 2 Thes. iii. 6] concerning the avoidance of heretics are quite clear.”[933]—He, however, forgets to add that neither he nor the pastors had ever been quite successful in their attempts at excommunication.
The above regulations of the authorities were to remain in force. In 1533 the Prince once more insisted that: No one is to be permitted to absent himself from the “common church-going,” everyone must be “earnestly reminded of this.”[934] In the General Articles of 1557 it was determined by the Elector August, that, whoever absented himself without permission from the sermon on Sundays and festivals, whether in the morning or afternoon, “more particularly in the villages” was to be fined, or, if he was poor, “to be punished with the pillory, either at the church or at some prison.”[935] The parsons, however, were to notify the authorities of any who contemned the preaching and the sacraments, or who obstinately persisted in their false opinion. Even the practice of auricular confession was, at a later date, made a strict law; whoever evaded confession and the Supper was liable to banishment.[936] The Saxon lawyer, Benedict Carpzov (1595-1666) in his “Iurisprudentia ecclesiastica” defended as self-evident the legal principle based on the practice of Luther’s own country: “Those, who, after repeated admonitions, maliciously absent themselves from the Supper, are to be expelled from the land; they are to be compelled to sell their goods and emigrate.”[937] The same scholarly lawyer elsewhere alludes to the Saxon custom of condemning seditious and blasphemous heretics to die at the stake.[938]
At Wittenberg strong ramparts were set up for the protection of the Lutheran doctrine and to prevent divergent opinions finding their way in.
The Statutes of the Theological Faculty, probably drawn up in 1533 by Melanchthon with Luther’s approval,[939] made it strictly incumbent on the teachers to preach the pure doctrine in accordance with the Confession of Augsburg; in the event of any difference of opinion a commission of judges was to decide; “after that the false opinion shall no longer be defended; if anyone obstinately persists in so doing, he is to be punished with such severity as to prevent him any more spreading abroad his wicked views.”[940] “The same Luther,” says Paulsen of this, “who, twelve years before, had declared that his conscience would not allow of his conceding to Christendom assembled in Council the right to determine the formula of faith, now claimed for the Wittenberg faculty—for this is what it amounts to—the unquestionable right to decide on faith. From 1535 to the day of his death Luther was without a break Dean of this Faculty.”[941]
Again, subsequent to 1535, the preachers and pastors sent out or officially recommended by Wittenberg had to take the so-called “Ordination Oath” which had been suggested by the Elector in order to exclude false preachers. The ministers to be appointed within the Electorate, and likewise those destined to take up appointments elsewhere, had to submit at Wittenberg to a searching examination on doctrine; only after passing it and taking an oath as to the future could they receive their commission. The examination is referred to in the Certificate of Ordination. Thus, in the Certificate of Heinrich Bock (who was sent to Reval in Livonia) which is dated May 17, 1540, and signed by Luther, Bugenhagen, Jonas and Melanchthon, it is set forth that he had undertaken to “preach to the people steadfastly and faithfully the pure doctrine of the Gospel which our Church confesses.” It is also stated that he adheres to the “consensus” of the “Catholic Church of Christ,” and, for this reason, is recommended to the Church of Reval.[942] A similar Certificate for the schoolmaster Johann Fischer, who had received a call to Rudolstadt “to the ministry of the Gospel,” is dated a month earlier. His doctrine, so it declares, had been found on examination to be pure and in accordance with the Catholic doctrine of the Gospel as professed by the Wittenbergers; a promise had also been received from him to teach the same faithfully to the people; for this reason “his call has been confirmed by public ordination.”[943] Fischer had received the “diaconate.”
As early as 1535 we read of the solemn ordination of a certain Johann (Golhart?), “examined by us and publicly ordained in the presence of our Church with prayers and hymns.” He was “ordained and confirmed by order of our sovereign,” having been called and chosen as “assistant minister” at Gotha by the local congregation headed by their pastor Myconius.[944]
The doctrine of the punishment of heretics was afterwards incorporated by Melanchthon in 1552, in the Wittenberg instructions composed by him and entitled: “The Examination of Ordinands.”[945]
Opinions of Protestant Historians
The above account of Luther’s intolerance is very much at variance with the Protestant view still current to some extent in erudite circles, but more particularly in popular literature. Luther, for all the harshness of his disposition, is yet regarded as having in principle advocated leniency, as having been a champion of personal religious freedom, and having only sanctioned severity towards the Anabaptists because of the danger of revolt. Below we shall, however, quote a series of statements from Protestant writers who have risen superior to such party prejudice.
Walther Köhler, in his “Reformation und Ketzerprozess” (1901), wrote:
“In Luther’s case it is impossible to speak of liberty of conscience or religious freedom.” “The death-penalty for heresy rested on the highest Lutheran authority.”[946] According to Köhler there can be no doubt that prosecution for heresy among the Protestants was practically Luther’s doing. “The views of the other reformers on the persecution and bringing to justice of heretics were merely the outgrowth of Luther’s plan, they contributed nothing fresh.”[947] The same writer is of opinion that the question, whether Luther would have approved of the execution of Servetus “must undoubtedly be answered in the affirmative.”[948] “It is certain that Luther would have agreed to the execution of Servetus; heresy as heresy is according to him deserving of death.”[949] One observation made by Köhler is significant enough, viz. “that, when the preaching of the Word proved ineffectual against the heretics,” Luther had recourse to the intervention of the secular authorities.[950]
The matter has been examined with equal frankness by P. Wappler in various studies in which he utilises new data taken from the archives.[951]
“That Luther in principle regarded the death penalty in the case of heretics as just, even where there was no harm done to the ‘regna mundi,’” says Wappler, “is plain from the advice given by him on Oct. 20, 1534, to Prince Johann of Anhalt in reply to his inquiry concerning the attitude to be adopted towards the Anabaptists at Zerbst.” “The fact is, that from the commencement of 1530 the reformers cease to make any real distinction between the two classes of heretics [the seditious ones and those who merely taught false doctrines]. Heretics who merely ‘blasphemed’ were always regarded by them, at least where they remained obdurate, as practically guilty of sedition, and, consequently, as deserving the death penalty.” “The principal part in this was played by Luther, Melanchthon being merely the draughtsman of the memoranda in which Luther’s ideas on the question of heretics were reduced to a certain system.”[952] “The many executions, even of Anabaptists who are known to have not been revolutionaries and who were put to death on the strength of the declarations of the Wittenberg theologians, refute only too plainly all attempts to deny the clear fact, viz. that Luther himself approved of the death penalty even in the case of such as were merely heretics.”[953]
Wappler, after showing how Luther’s wish was, that everyone who preached without orders should be handed over to “Master Hans,” adds: “And what he said, was undoubtedly meant in earnest; shortly before this, on Jan. 18, 1530, as Luther had doubtless learned from Melanchthon, at Reinhardsbrunn near Gotha, six such persons had been handed over to Master Hans, i.e. to the executioner, and duly executed.” Wappler regards it as futile to urge that: “Luther could not prevent executions taking place in the Saxon Electorate”; it is wrong to put the blame on Melanchthon rather than on Luther for the putting to death of heretics.[954]
Speaking of the execution of Peter Pestel at Zwickau, the same author[955] declares that it was “a sad sign of the unfortunate direction so early [1536] taken by the Lutheran reformation that its representatives should allow this man, who had neither disseminated his doctrine in his native land nor rebaptised … to die a felon’s death.” “Even contempt of the outward Word,” he says, “carelessness about going to church and contempt of Scripture—in this instance contempt for the Bible as interpreted by Luther—was now regarded as ‘rank blasphemy,’ which it was the duty of the authorities to punish as such. To such lengths had the vaunted freedom of the Gospel now gone.”[956] The introduction of the Saxon Inquisition (See above, vol. v., 593) leads him to remark: “The principle of evangelical freedom of belief and liberty of conscience, which Luther had championed barely two years earlier, was here most shamefully repudiated, particularly by this lay inquisition, and yet Luther said never a word in protest.”[957]
In 1874 W. Maurenbrecher expressed it as his opinion that “Luther’s tolerance in theory as well as in practice amounted to this: The Church and her ministers were to denounce such as went astray in the faith, whereupon it became the duty of the secular authorities to chastise them as open heretics.”[958] In 1885 L. Keller declared: “It merely displays ignorance of the actual happenings of that epoch, when many people, even to-day, take it for granted that such executions and the wholesale persecution of the Anabaptists were only on account of sedition, and that the reformers had no hand in these things.”[959] “Luther indeed demands toleration,” says K. Rieker, “but only for the Evangelicals; he demands freedom, but merely for the preaching of the Evangel.”[960] According to Adolf Harnack “one of the Reformer’s most noticeable limitations was his inability either fully to absorb the cultural elements of his time, or to recognise the right and duty of unfettered research.”[961]
In Saxony, so H. Barge, Carlstadt’s biographer, complains, “the police-force was mobilised for the defence of pure doctrine”; “and Luther played the part of prompter” to the intolerant Saxon government.[962] “Luther’s harsh, violent and impatient ways” and their “unfortunate” outcome are admitted unreservedly by P. Kalkhoff, another Luther researcher.[963] G. Lœsche calls Paulus’s studies on Strasburg a “Warning against the edifying sentimentality of Protestant make-believe.”[964] Luther “demanded freedom for himself alone and for his doctrine,” remarks E. Friedberg, “not for those doctrines, which he regarded as erroneous.”[965] Neander, the Protestant Church-historian, speaking of Luther’s views in general as given by Dietrich, says they “would justify all sorts of oppression on the part of the State, and all kinds of intellectual tyranny, and were in fact the same as those on which the Roman Emperors acted when they persecuted Christianity.”[966]
Two quotations from Catholic authors may be added. The above passage from Köhler reads curiously like the following statement of C. Ulenburg, an olden Catholic polemic; writing in 1589 he said: “When Luther saw that his disciples were gradually falling away from him and, acting on the principle of freedom of conscience, were treating him as he had previously treated the olden Church, he came to think of having recourse to coercion against such folk.”[967]
“Historically nothing is more incorrect,” wrote Döllinger in his Catholic days, “than the assertion that the Reformation was a movement in favour of intellectual freedom. The exact contrary is the truth. For themselves it is true, Lutherans and Calvinists claimed liberty of conscience as all men have done in every age, but to grant it to others never occurred to them so long as they were the stronger side. The complete suppression and extirpation of the Catholic Church, and in fact of everything that stood in their way, was regarded by the reformers as something entirely natural.”[968]—Luther’s principles, aided by the arbitrary interference of the secular power in matters of faith, especially where Catholics were concerned, led both in his age and in the following, “to a despotism” “the like of which,” as Döllinger expresses it, “had not hitherto been known; the new system as worked out by the theologians and lawyers was even worse than the Byzantine practice.”[969]
Luther’s Spirit in his Fellows
The question concerning Melanchthon raised by Protestant historians, viz. whether it was he who converted Luther to his intolerance, or, whether, on the other hand, he himself was influenced by Luther, cannot, on the strength of the documents, be answered either affirmatively or negatively. In some respects Melanchthon struck out his own paths, in others he merely followed in Luther’s wake.[970] He was by no means loath to making use of coercion in the case of doctrines differing from his own. His able pen had the doubtful merit of expressing in fluent language what Luther thought and said in private, as we see from the Memoranda still extant. His ill-will with the Papacy and the hostile sects within the new fold, was, it is true, as a rule not so blatant as Luther’s; he was fond of displaying in his style that moderation dear to the humanist; yet we have spontaneous outbursts of his which sound a very harsh note and which doubtless were due to his old and intimate spiritual kinship with Luther.
For instance, we have the wish he expressed, that God would send King Henry VIII a “valiant murderer to make an end of him,”[971] and, again, his warm approval of Calvin’s execution of the heretic Michael Servetus in 1554 (a “pious and memorable example for all posterity”)[972]. He himself wrote about that time a special treatise in defence of the use of the sword against those who spread erroneous doctrines.[973]
With regard to Melanchthon A. Hänel says: To Protestantism “religious freedom was denied at every point.” When Melanchthon wrote to Calvin in praise of the execution of Servetus, his letter, according to Hänel, “was not, as has been imagined, dictated by the mere passion of the moment, but was the harsh consequence of a harsh doctrine.”[974] It must be admitted, remarks the Protestant theologian A. Hunzinger, “that Melanchthon was wont to lose no time in having recourse to fire and sword. This forms a dark blot on his life. Many a man fell a victim to his memorandum, who certainly had no wish to destroy the ‘regna mundi.’”[975]
In consequence of the precipitate and often brutal intervention of the authorities against real or alleged heretics Melanchthon had afterwards abundant reason to regret his appeal to the secular power. He himself, as early as Aug. 31, 1530, had foretold, “that, later, a far more insufferable tyranny would arise than had ever before been known,” viz. the tyranny due to the interference of the Princes in whose hands the power of persecution had been laid. Hence his exclamation: “If only I could revive the jurisdiction of the bishops! For I see what sort of Church we shall have if the ecclesiastical constitution is destroyed.”[976] As we know, he was anxious gradually to graft the old ecclesiastical constitution on Luther’s congregations.
Coming from Luther and fostered by Melanchthon, these intolerant ideas profoundly influenced all their friends.
Not as though there was ever any lack of opponents of the theory of coercion among the Protestants, or even in Luther’s own flock. On the contrary there were some who had the sense of justice and the courage to resist the current of intolerance coming from Wittenberg. Indeed it was the protests which Luther encountered at Nuremberg which led him to emphasise his harsh demands.
Already in 1530 Luther’s follower Lazarus Spengler wrote from Nuremberg to Veit Dietrich begging him to seek advice of Luther and to request his literary help; in the town there were some who opposed any measures of coercion against the divergent doctrines, “some of ours, who are not fanatics but are regarded as good Christians,” desire that neither the “Sacramentarians nor the Anabaptists” should be prosecuted so long as they do not “stir up revolt,” nor yet the errors prohibited of “the preachers of the godless Mass and other idolatries”; “they appeal on behalf of this to Dr. Luther’s booklet, which he some while ago addressed to Duke Frederick the Elector of Saxony against the fanatic Thomas Münzer, in which he approves this view and admits it to be quite sound.”[977]
At Augsburg (1533) the Lutheran lawyer, Conrad Hel, siding with his Catholic-minded confrères Conrad Peutinger and Johann Rehlinger[978] openly and courageously denied the Town-Councils any rights in the matter. In 1534 Christoph Ehem, a patrician of Augsburg, who also held Lutheran views, wrote a little work in which he demanded universal and unconditional toleration and invited the Council to place some “bridle and restraint” on the new preachers.[979] At that time (1536) the Lutheran preacher Johann Forster protested very strongly against Bucer, and refused to hear of the forcible suppression of Catholic worship in Cathedral churches outside the jurisdiction of the civic authorities; he appealed in this matter to Luther. Bucer just then was bent on suppressing the Catholic worship with the help of the magistrates. Forster was finally silenced by dint of “ranting, raging and shouting” and was indignantly asked: “Whether he wished to tolerate Popery and submit to such idolatry?”[980]
At Strasburg in 1528 the Protestant Town-Clerk, Peter Butz, set a brave example by openly and severely condemning in the Council the system of coercion planned by some of the preachers. Against the intolerance towards sectarians advocated by Bucer, preachers and scholars like Anton Engelbrecht, Wolfgang Schultheiss, Johann Sapidus and Jacob Ziegler were not slow to protest,[981] though they had nothing to say against the violent abolition of Catholic worship.
At Coire the preacher Johann Gantner came into conflict with Bullinger on account of the coercive measures favoured by the latter; he reproached the inhabitants of Zürich and Berne with having fallen away from the freedom of the Evangel into the Mosaic bondage. Gantner and others, in support of their protest, usually appealed against the prevailing tendency to Sebastian Franck’s “Chronica,” published at Strasburg in 1531.[982]
Sebastian Franck, the witty and learned opponent of Luther, “after Luther himself, the best and most popular German prose writer of the day,” took the line of pushing to its bitter end Luther’s subjectivism. He declared that the new preachers had made of Holy Scripture a paper idol for the benefit of their private views, and that the Lutheran Church was the invisible kingdom of Christ and as such numbered among its members men of every sect; hence he argued that what was termed false doctrine and false worship should not be interfered with.[983] As Kawerau points out, Franck found in the 16th century “not a few readers wherever dissatisfaction prevailed with the Papacy of the theologians”;[984] nevertheless, in 1531, he was expelled from Strasburg on account of his liberal views; later on, when he had taken up his residence at Ulm, Melanchthon wrote thither, in 1535, that he should be “dealt with severely” (“severe coercendum”) no less than Schwenckfeld.[985] Driven from Ulm he went to Basle in 1539, but even there the echo of the verdict of the Wittenbergers reached him; in March, 1540, the theologians assembled at Schmalkalden, condemned him and charged him with “inducing people to seek the spirit while neglecting the ‘Word’”; they themselves, they added, had broken with the Churches of the Pope because of their idolatry, but there was “no reason whatever for throwing over the ministry in our own Churches.”[986]
As we have already shown, Landgrave Philip of Hesse was likewise disposed to be less intolerant than Luther, at least with regard to the Anabaptists. Relentlessly as he refused any public toleration to the Catholic faith and banished those Catholics who persisted in their religious practices, yet, in a letter of 1532, addressed to Elector Johann of Saxony, he declared himself against the execution of the Anabaptists; the actual words have been quoted above (p. 256). In another letter, in 1545, to the Elector Johann Frederick, he also points out, that: “If this sect be punished so severely by us, then we, by our example, give our foes, the Papists, reason to treat us in the same way, for they regard us as no better than the Anabaptists.”[987]
These and similar remonstrances were unavailing to change the views which had taken root at Wittenberg.
George Major, Professor of theology at Wittenberg University, was a learned and zealous disciple of Luther’s. He, like Melanchthon, on hearing of the execution of Servetus at Geneva, declared that Calvin was to be commended for having put to death the heretic, and, at a Disputation held in 1555, expressly defended the thesis, that it was the duty of the authorities to punish contumacious heretics with death. They must “get rid of blasphemers, perjurers and wizards. Amongst the blasphemers must, however, be reckoned those who persistently defend idolatrous worship, or heresies which clearly disagree with the articles of the faith.”[988]
Luther’s code of penalties for any deviation from the Wittenberg teaching fitted in well with Bugenhagen’s natural harshness, who showed himself only too ready to make his own the words of Moses concerning the slaying of unbelievers. We may recall how, in conversation, when Luther mentioned the difficulties he had with Carlstadt, Agricola and Schenk, Bugenhagen broke in with the remark: “Sir Doctor, we ought to do what is commanded in Deuteronomy where Moses says they should be put to death.”[989] Bugenhagen, in the many places into which he brought the new faith, was relentlessly severe in enforcing against the Catholics the principles he had carried with him from Wittenberg. Very characteristic is the tone in which he reported to Luther that the Mass had been forbidden in Denmark and the monks driven out of the land as “seditionmongers” and “blasphemers.”[990] Not only had the bishops been imprisoned, but, according to the account of Peter Palladius the superintendent, some of the monks “had been hanged.”[991]
Justus Jonas began his labours at Halle in 1542 by a written invitation to the Town-Council “completely to purge the town of false doctrine and every kind of idolatrous worship”; Luther and Melanchthon had sufficiently proved in their works that this “was incumbent on Christian magistrates.” He declared that the monks still living in the town were “obstinate and impenitent idolaters,” “adders and snakes” whom he “must reduce to silence with the use of the gag”; already, throughout the whole neighbourhood, “merely at the exhortations of the preachers, the monasteries, with their Masses and idolatrous worship, had crumbled into ruins.”[992] Later, in a memorandum addressed to the Town-Council in 1546, Jonas again inveighed against the remaining handful of well-disposed and zealous monks, and called to mind how “our beloved father, Dr. Martin, in the very last sermon he preached at Halle shortly before his decease, had exhorted the Town-Council and the whole Church with all his burning, stormy earnestness to rid themselves of the crawling things.”[993] Jonas appealed to his own “conscience” and threatened to report matters to the Elector of Saxony and “his Electoral Highness’s scholars at Wittenberg.”[994] With the outbreak of the Schmalkalden war, when the Electoral troops laid waste the monasteries his hopes at last found their fulfilment. He announced on March 3, 1547, that, at Halle, the “Papistic idolatry” had now been swept away;[995] when he wrote this he did not expect the change in the position of the Catholics in the town, for which the defeat of the Elector’s troops in the following month was responsible.
We are reminded how greatly Spalatin was imbued with Luther’s exclusivism and spirit of intolerance by his words concerning the “Christian bit” which he wished placed in the mouths of all the clergy.[996] He was at great pains to press upon the sovereign that he was not to permit “unchristian ceremonies” and “idolatry.”[997]
The Elector Johann was merely giving expression to the views with which Spalatin and Luther had inspired him when he declared that, “heretics and contemners of the Word” must in every instance be punished by the authorities.[998] His successor, Johann Frederick, likewise followed obediently the “Wittenberg theologians and lawyers,” as he terms his authorities.[999] He instructed Melanchthon in 1536 to write and have printed a popular “Answer to sundry unchristian articles” against the Anabaptists, which was to be read aloud from the pulpit every third Sunday, and which insisted that the secular authorities were bound to punish “all contempt of Scripture and the outward Word” as “blatant blasphemy.”[1000]
At the Religious Conference at Worms in 1557 quite a number of respected Lutheran theologians (J. Brenz, J. Marbach, M. Diller, J. Pistorius, J. Andreæ, G. Karg, P. Eber and G. Rungius) signed a lengthy statement by Melanchthon aimed at the Anabaptists. As one of the errors of the sect is instanced their teaching that God communicates Himself without the intermediary of the ministry, of preaching or the Sacrament. Those “heads and ringleaders” of the sect who persisted in their doctrines were “to be condemned as guilty of sedition and blasphemy and put to death by the sword”; the death penalty prescribed in Leviticus for blasphemers was asserted to be a “natural law, binding, by virtue of their office, on all in authority,” hence “the judges had done the right thing” when they condemned to death the heretic Servetus at Geneva.[1001]
Johann Brenz, who helped to promote Lutheranism in Würtemberg, had, in 1528, written and published a pamphlet in which he deprecated the Anabaptists’ being put to death “merely on account of heresy” when not guilty of sedition.[1002] He was for this reason regarded by Melanchthon as “too mild.”[1003] His later writings, however, show that the intolerant spirit of Wittenberg finally seized on him too. In his treatment of Catholics—both previous to 1528, and, even more so when the olden worship had been suppressed at Schwäbisch-Halle and he had been called to Stuttgart—he was in the forefront in advising violent measures against Catholic practices. When he reorganised the Church in Würtemberg, in 1536, after the victory of Duke Ulrich, attendance at the Protestant sermons was made obligatory on the Catholics of Stuttgart under pain of a fine, or of imprisonment in the tower on bread and water.[1004] Brenz, though widely extolled as tolerant and broadminded, in his quality of spiritual adviser to Duke Christopher, stooped to the meanest and most petty regulations in order to induce the nuns who still remained faithful to their religion—many of whom were of high birth and advanced in years—to accept the new faith; they were compelled to attend the sermons and religious colloquies, deprived of their books of devotion, their correspondence was supervised, they had to entertain Protestant guests at table and to be served by Lutheran maids, etc.[1005]
The unenviable distinction of having most thoroughly assimilated Luther’s intolerant views was enjoyed by two men in close mental kinship with him, viz. Justus Menius and Johann Spangenberg.
Johann Spangenberg, an enthusiastic pupil of Luther’s, and, later, Superintendent at Eisleben, when preacher at Nordhausen declared in a tract that “fear of God’s wrath and His extreme displeasure” had rightly led the Town-Council to forbid Catholics to attend Catholic sermons, because, there, souls were “horribly murdered”; even Nabuchodonosor and Darius had set the authorities an example of how “blasphemy against religion” was to be treated.[1006]
Justus Menius, Luther’s friend, who worked as superintendent at Eisenach and Gotha, followed Luther in qualifying the Anabaptists as the emissaries of the devil, as “rebels and murderers,” who had fallen under the ban of the authorities because they did not “profess the true faith according to the Word of God” and live a “godly life.” Of the authorities who were negligent in punishing them he exclaims: “The devil rides such rulers so that they sin and do what is unrighteous.” Luther himself wrote laudatory prefaces to his works on the subject. In 1552 Menius demanded from Duke Albert of Prussia a severe prohibition against the new believers’ teaching or writing anything that was at variance with the Confession of Augsburg. When, however, his opponents secured the ear of the Court he had himself to suffer; the ruler pointed out to him that, in accordance with his own theories of the supremacy of the sovereign, it was the duty of the authorities, by virtue of their princely office, to withstand false doctrine and, consequently, he himself must either submit or go to prison; upon this Menius made his escape to Leipzig (†1558).[1007]
Urban Rhegius, appointed General Superintendent by Duke Ernest of Brunswick-Lüneburg after the Diet of Augsburg, not only defended in his writings a relentless system of compulsion whereby Catholic parents were no longer permitted even in their homes to instruct their children in the Catholic faith, but also allowed “Zwinglians and Papists to be beaten with rods and banished from the town.” The authorities he invited to appropriate the property of the clergy. The inglorious war he waged against the nuns of Lüneburg, who, in spite of every kind of persecution, stood true to their religion, has recently been brought to light, and that, thanks to Protestant research; it forms one of the blackest pages in the history of Lutheran intolerance.[1008]
A memorial of the Strasburg preachers dating from 1535 (printed in 1537) which might be termed the fullest and most complete exposition of the Royal Supremacy in church affairs drafted in that period, is the work of Wolfgang Capito, a preacher often extolled for his moderation and prudence.[1009] In it we have the picture of a Government-Church with a “Caliph” (Döllinger’s expression) at its head, who combines in himself the highest secular and spiritual authority.
Martin Bucer though differing from Luther in much else was yet at one with him in asserting that it was the duty of the secular authority to abolish “false doctrine and perverted ceremonials,” and that, as the sole authority, it was to be obeyed by “all the bishops and clergy.” Though anxious to be regarded as considerate and peaceable, he defended the prohibition against Catholic sermons issued at Augsburg by the City-Council in 1534, and even incited it to still more stringent measures against the Catholics. He advocated quite openly “the power of the authorities over consciences.”[1010] “Among us Christians,” he asks, “is injury and slaughter of souls by false worship of less importance than the ravishing of wives and daughters?”[1011] He never rested until, in 1537, with the help of such hot-heads as Wolfgang Musculus, he brought about the entire suppression of the Mass at Augsburg. At his instigation “many fine paintings, monuments and ancient works of art in the churches were wantonly torn, broken and smashed.”[1012] Whoever refused to submit and attend public worship was obliged within eight days to quit the city-boundaries. Catholic citizens were forbidden under severe penalties to attend Catholic worship elsewhere, and special guards were stationed at the gates to prevent any such attempt.[1013]
In other of the Imperial cities Bucer acted with no less violence and intolerance, for instance, at Ulm, where he supported Œcolampadius and Ambrose Blaurer in 1531, and at Strasburg where he acted in concert with Capito, Caspar Hedio, Matthæus Zell and others. Here, in 1529, after the Town-Council had prohibited Catholic worship, the Councillors were requested by the preachers to help to fill the empty churches by issuing regulations prescribing attendance at the sermons. Bucer adhered till his death (1551), as his work “De Regno Christi” (1550) proves, to the principle of the rights and duties of authorities towards the new religion.[1014]
In the above survey of those who preached religious intolerance only Luther’s own pupils and followers have been considered; the result would be even less cheering were the leaders of the other Protestant sects added to the list.
At Zürich, Zwingli’s State-Church grew up much as Luther’s did in Germany; Œcolampadius at Basle and Zwingli’s successor, Bullinger, were strong compulsionists. Calvin’s name is even more closely bound up with the idea of religious absolutism, while the task of handing down to posterity his harsh doctrine of religious compulsion was undertaken by Beza in his notorious work “De hæreticis a civili magistratu puniendis.” The annals of the Established Church of England were likewise at the outset written in blood.
The sufferings endured by the Catholics in Germany owing to the wave of intolerance which spread from Wittenberg are reflected in the countless complaints we hear at that time. Many writings still tell to-day of the injustice under which they groaned. In a “Manual of Complaint and Consolation for all oppressed Christians” we read as follows: “Oh, what a mockery it is that these tyrants and abusers of power should exclaim everywhere that their gospel is Christian freedom, that they have no wish to tyrannise over consciences when there could never have been worse tyrants than those men who do not scruple to go on unceasingly tormenting the consciences of the people, robbing them of the consolation of the holy sacraments of the religious ministrations of consecrated priests, of all their prayer-books and devotional works, and, even on their death-beds, in spite of their piteous entreaties refusing them the Holy Viaticum!”[1015] This touching complaint is made more particularly in the name of those most defenceless members of society, who were devoid of legal protection and whose very poverty made emigration impossible. “All the iniquities committed in German lands and cities are attested at the Judgment-Seat of God by the souls of thousands of consecrated nuns, who never did wrong to anyone and who asked for nothing more than permission to live and die in their ancient faith, even though their worldly goods should be taken away from them and they shut up within closed walls.”[1016]