2. Last Troubles and Cares
Theological Disruption
“The sad controversies of the last few years had made Luther recognise that a race of theological fighting-cocks, gamesters and idle rioters had arisen, and that dissensions of the worst sort might be anticipated in the future. The nation in which each one obstinately followed his own way was beyond help.… The Swiss refused to have anything to do with the German Reformation; the Bucerites held themselves aloof from both Lutherans and Swiss, the Brandenburgers wanted to belong neither to the Church of Rome nor to that of Wittenberg; at Wittenberg itself the Martinians and the Philippists (so-called after Luther and Melanchthon) were hostile to each other, and finally the Princes and magistrates all went their own way. ‘Things will fare badly when I am dead,’ such was Luther’s repeated prediction. Whether he looked at this Prince of the Church, at that Landgrave, or that other Duke Maurice, there was not one in whom he could entirely trust. More than one Mene Tekel was written on the wall, yet none perceived it save the old man at Wittenberg at whom they all shrugged their shoulders.”[1326]
Such is the description by Luther’s latest Protestant biographer of the “sad decline of the Evangelical party.”
The Zwinglians had received a severe blow from Luther in his “Kurtz Bekentnis” of Sep., 1544;[1327] but the Swiss, who were hardy and independent fellows, soon prepared a furious counter-reply.[1328] The “old man at Wittenberg” was not deceived as to the profound and irremediable breach, yet he succeeded, at least outwardly, in driving away his annoyance and cares by the use of ridicule. Early in 1546, to one of his confidants who had bewailed the new step taken by the Swiss, he wrote the following, which forms his last utterance against the Zwinglians: “If they condemn me, it is a joy to me. For by my writing I wished to do nothing else than force them to declare themselves my open foes. I have succeeded in this, hence so much the better. To adapt the words of the Psalmist: ‘Blessed is the man who hath not sat in the council of the Sacramentarians, nor stood in the way of the Zwinglians, nor sat in the chair of the men of Zürich.’”[1329] To another intimate, Amsdorf, the “Bishop” of Naumburg, who was allowed a deeper insight into his soul than others, Luther confided that one of the principal reasons of his hatred of his competitors in Switzerland and South-West Germany was that “they are proud, fanatical men, and also idlers. At the beginning of our enterprise, when I was fighting all alone in fear and dread against the fury of the Pope, they were bravely silent and waited to see how things would go. Later on they suddenly posed as victors, and as though, forsooth, they alone had done it all. So it ever is: one does the work and another seeks to enjoy his labour. Now they even go so far as to attack me, who won their freedom for them.… But they will find their judge. If I answer them at all it will be nothing more than a brief recapitulation of the sentence of condemnation irrevocably passed upon them.”[1330]—No such answer was, however, to be forthcoming.
Against Melanchthon Luther’s ardent followers, the Martinians, were, as we know, highly incensed for attempting to modify the doctrines of the Master. Melanchthon’s sufferings on this account have already been described (vol. v., p. 252 ff.). With a grudging silence Luther bore with his friend’s Zwinglian leanings on the doctrine of the Supper, and with their other differences.
Both, moreover, were surrounded by an atmosphere of theological bickerings, “where individuals, who, had it not been for these squabbles, would never have achieved notoriety, gave themselves great airs.”[1331]
We may recall how Melanchthon had even thought of leaving Saxony, where, as he wrote to Camerarius, he was bound down by undignified fetters; such was his weakness, however, that he could not bring himself to do even this. Luther’s coarseness, lack of consideration and dictatorial bearing it was that led Melanchthon to say that he who ruled at Wittenberg was not a Pericles, but a new Cleon and an unsufferable tyrant.[1332]
On the question of the veneration of the Sacrament differences at last sprung up even between Bugenhagen and Luther; the former, usually his pliant instrument, took upon himself during Luther’s absence to abolish at Wittenberg the elevation of the elements during the celebration. Apparently this was in the second half of Jan., 1542. Luther expressed his disapproval of this action and declared he would revive the rite.[1333] In 1544, when the three Princes of Anhalt were at Wittenberg and asked him whether it would be right to abolish the Elevation, he replied: “On no account; such abrogation detracts from the dignity of the Sacrament.” There is no doubt that it was his antagonism to the Zwinglians that was here the determining factor; moreover, as he admitted Christ to be present in the Sacrament during reception in the wider sense, i.e. during the liturgical action, he had no theological grounds for doing away with the elevation and adoration of the elements. In his own justification he went so far as to say: “Christ is in the bread, why then should He not be treated with the greatest respect and also be adored?”[1334]
The Lutheran preacher Wolferinus of Eisleben was in the habit of pouring back into the barrel what remained of the consecrated Wine after communion. Luther called him sharply to account, as he found that his conduct was tainted with Zwinglianism; in order to evade the difficulty he ordered that, in future, preachers and communicants should see that nothing was left over after communion.[1335]
Luther, towards the end of his life, had to taste a good deal of that “theological ire” of which Melanchthon frequently speaks, and not only from the Swiss. We need only call to mind Johann Agricola, and his “antinomian sow-theology,” as Melanchthon termed it. His inferences from Luther’s doctrine of the inability of man to fulfil the Law he never really withdrew even when he had betaken himself to Brandenburg. In the Table-Talk dating from the latest period and published by Kroker, Luther’s frequent bitter references to Agricola show the speaker was well aware that his Berlin opponent still hated and distrusted him as much as ever. After Luther’s death it became evident that Agricola “was capable of everything,” and that Luther was not so far wrong, when, on another occasion, he declared that he was not a man to be taken seriously.[1336] Agricola finally died, loaded with worldly honours, in 1566.
A more serious critic of Luther, at any rate on the question of the Sacrament, was Martin Bucer. The latter’s friendship with the Swiss and the too independent spirit in which he planned the reformation of Cologne, caused Luther great anxiety towards the end of his life. In his plan Luther, so he says, was unable to find any clear confession of faith in the Sacrament, but merely “much idle talk of its profit, fruit and dignity,” all carefully “wrapped up that no one might know what he really thought of it, just as is the way with the fanatics.” In all this talk he could “readily discern the chatterbox Bucer.”[1337] Bucer, on his side, was dissatisfied with the progress of Luther’s work in Germany. Owing to the Interim he was no longer able to remain at Strasburg and accordingly accepted a post at the English University of Cambridge and died in England in 1551.
The Controversy on Clandestine Marriages
It was, however, annoyances and disagreements of a different sort that kept Luther to the end of his days in a state of extreme indignation against the lawyers and politicians of the Court.
A letter of Luther’s to the Elector Johann Frederick dated Jan. 18, 1545, on the controversy with the Saxon lawyers about Luther’s denunciation of clandestine marriages (those entered upon without the knowledge of the parents) as illegal, carries us into the thick of these disagreements.[1338] His sovereign, he says, had ordered him to confer with the lawyers and come to an arrangement with them; Luther, however, after summoning them before him, had declared categorically that, “I had no intention of holding a disputation with them; I had a divine command to preach the 4th commandment[1339] in these matters.” Thus, in the questions under discussion, he is determined not to submit either to the secular or the canon law but only to the Divine. “Otherwise I should have to give up the Gospel and creep back into the cowl [become a monk again] in the devil’s name, by the strength and virtue of both the spiritual and the imperial law. And, besides this, your Electoral Highness would have to cut off my head, doing likewise with all those who have wedded nuns, as the Emperor Jovian commanded more than a thousand years back.” As a result of his arguments, “the lawyers of the Consistory and Courts agreed to give up and reject altogether the clandestine espousals [i.e. marriages ‘sponsalia de præsenti’].” In these words he announces his final apparent victory in this long-drawn controversy.
In the same letter he touches on the deeper side of the quarrel.
The lawyers at the High Court have always stuck to many points of “the Pope’s laws” which “we of the clergy” don’t want. “Some, too, made out [in accordance with Canon Law then still in force] that, on our death, our wives and children could not inherit our goods and wished to adjudicate them to our friends, etc.” They had paid no attention to the writings of the new theologians; and yet the latter, “few in number and insignificant maybe, have done more good in the Churches than all the Popes and jurists in a lump.” Hence the preachers had simply disregarded the lawyers, viz. in respect of the clandestine marriages; this had brought about peace. When, however, the “Consistory had been set up” (1539), the whole business had begun anew. “The jurists fancied they had found a loophole through which to raise a disturbance in my Churches with their damnable procedure, which, to-day and to all eternity, I want to have condemned and execrated in my Churches.” “Spoon-fed jurists” thrust themselves forward; but these “merry customers” are not going to make “of my Churches, for which I have to answer before God,” “such dens of murderers.”
In order to understand the victory over the lawyers of which he speaks it will be necessary to cast a glance back on the whole struggle.
As we have already pointed out in the words of a Protestant biographer of Luther the legal status of Lutheranism threatened to give rise to dire complications, while any downright abrogation of Canon Law, such as Luther wished for, was out of the question.[1340] The sober view of the situation taken by the lawyers did not deserve Luther’s offensive treatment. Moreover, under the leadership of Schurf, the lay professors of jurisprudence at the Wittenberg University had many objections to raise against Luther’s demands. They not only upheld clandestine marriages as valid, but, at the same time, defended the indissolubility of marriage, even in the case of adultery, in accordance with the laws of the olden Church; they also held that second marriages were not lawful to the clergy. Schurf likewise wanted the “Evangelical bishops” to be consecrated by papal bishops. A further cause of constant friction lay in the fact that the professors of law were obliged to base their lectures on the books of Canon Law in the absence of any others; whence it came that Luther had to listen to many disagreeable references to the questions of Church property, of the right of inheriting of the children of former monks, of the marriage of nuns, of the legal status of the monasteries, etc. Schurf was otherwise a good Lutheran and had assisted Luther with advice at the Diet of Worms. Melchior Kling, his pupil and colleague at Wittenberg, agreed with him in following the Canon Law on the question of clandestine marriages, according to which (before the Council of Trent had required for the validity of marriage, that it should be performed publicly in the presence of the parish-priest), they were regarded as valid, albeit wrong and forbidden, so that no new marriage could be entered into so long as the parties lived.
Luther hoped, by opposing such marriages, to bring about some improvement in the sad state of morals which the Visitations of 1528 and 1529 had disclosed in the Saxon Electorate. The facility with which such marriages were contracted by the Wittenberg students, and the bad effect they had on the peace of the burghers seemed to him a real blot on the New Evangel. He insisted very strongly that the consent of the parents was required as a condition for marriage; without the parents’ consent the marriages were in his eyes neither public nor valid; it was only where the parents refused their consent on insufficient grounds that he would admit that the bride had any right to enter into a real marriage contract. The decision as to whether the parents’ objections held good was, however, one on which opinions were bound to differ.
Shortly after the Visitations referred to above, in 1529, he wrote his “Von Ehesachen,” published early in 1530; in it he declared: “A secret betrothal simply constitutes no marriage whatsoever,” whilst, as a secret betrothal (i.e. invalid marriage) he regards “any betrothal which takes place without the knowledge and consent of those in authority, and who have the right and power to settle the marriage, viz. the father, mother or whoever stands in their stead.”[1341]
In 1532 he also proclaimed his views against the lawyers from the pulpit without, however, being able to alter thereby either their practice or their teaching. He lamented in 1538 the blindness of Schurf, who paid more attention to man-made laws than to God’s Word and authority.[1342]
After some new disputes he delivered a sermon on Feb. 23, 1539, in which he threatened to put on his horns. In it he called his opponents blockheads; they ought “to reverence our doctrine as the Word of God, coming from the mouth of the Holy Ghost.”[1343] He was not going to worship the Pope’s ordure for the sake of the jurists; “let them let our Church be”; but “now the lawyers are seeking to corrupt our young students of theology with their Papal filth.”[1344]
Schurf seems to have yielded so far as no longer to attempt to make his opinions public or official.
The greatest tussle, however, ensued on the establishment of the Consistories in 1539, as the lawyers who were entrusted with the matrimonial cases, treated the clandestine marriages as valid, and, in other ways, also took Schurf’s side.
Luther asserted that by countenancing the “espousals,” which were “an institution of the devil and the Pope,” the good name and the morals of Wittenberg were being undermined. “Many of the parents say that, when they send their boys to us to study, we hang wives round their necks and rob them of their children.” Not only the burghers and students but even the girls themselves “who have waxed bold” use their freedom most wantonly.[1345] In Jan., 1544, in the pulpit, he poured out his wrath in most unmeasured language, particularly on the second Sunday after the Epiphany; in his tragic delivery he said, for instance: “I, Martin Luther, preacher in this Church of Christ, take thee, secret promise and the paternal consent that follows, together with the Pope and the devil who instituted thee, I bind you all together and fling you into the abyss of hell, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.”[1346]
His anger and annoyance had been aroused by certain concrete cases.
One of Melanchthon’s sons had contracted such a marriage as he was denouncing. In his own family circle the same thing happened, probably in the case of his nephew, Fabian Kaufmann. A student, Caspar Beier, who was on intimate terms with Luther’s household, wished to marry at Wittenberg, but was prevented by the lawyers of the Consistory on account of a previous clandestine marriage which, however, he denied; he appealed from the Consistory to the sovereign, and was supported by a letter from Luther. This quarrel kindled a conflagration at Luther’s home. Cruciger, a friend of the house, was against Beier and described his cause as “none of the best”; Catherine Bora, on the other hand, the “fax domestica” as Cruciger called her,[1347] seems to have fanned the flames of Luther’s wrath, in the interests of Beier who was a relative of hers.
To a friend Luther admitted in Jan. that he “was so indignant with the lawyers as he had never before been in all his life during all the struggle on behalf of the Evangel.”[1348]
When the controversy was at its height, viz. in Jan., 1544, the Elector arranged for an interview between Luther and the Consistory. Later, in Dec., those negotiations were followed by others, in which the members of the Wittenberg High Court took part; at last Luther’s obstinacy and violence won the day: All marriages without the knowledge or approval of the parents were to be invalid until the latter consented, or the Consistory had pronounced their opposition groundless. To the Elector, who from the first had agreed with Luther’s view, the latter then addressed the letter referred to above (p. 355) where, appealing to his “Divine mission” to preach the 4th commandment, he announces his final triumph over the lawyers and their edicts.
His triumph he owed to his strong will and, also, possibly, to the fact that the Elector was on his side. The victory also affected the case of Beier, whom Luther hastened to acquaint of his freedom;[1349] it further decided to some extent, the yet more important question whether or not the lawyers were to yield to Luther in ecclesiastical matters. They accepted their humiliation with the best grace possible, but we shall not be far wrong in assuming that they were not over-pleased with Luther’s irregular and illogical handling of questions of law.
Difficulties with the State Church
The far-reaching encroachments of the secular authorities in his Church became for Luther in his later years a source of keen vexation.
Much of his Table-Talk, which turns on the lawyers, voices nothing more than his indignation at the unwarranted interference of the State in his new Church which he was powerless to prevent. Thus, according to notes made at this time by Hieronymus Besold of Nuremberg who was a guest at Luther’s table in 1545, the Master on one occasion gave free rein to his anger with the lawyers in the matter of the sequestration of Church lands: “The lawyers shriek, ‘They are Church lands.’ Give them back ‘their monasteries that they may become monks and nuns and celebrate Mass, and then they too will allow you to preach.’ [In other words their proposal was that the new faith should make its way peacefully. To this Luther’s answer is]: ‘Yes, but then where are we to get our bread and butter?’ ‘We leave that to you,’ they say. Yes, and take the devil’s thanks! We theologians have no worse enemies than the lawyers. If they are asked, ‘What is the Church?’ they reply, ‘The assembly of the Bishops, Abbots, etc. And these lands are the lands of the Church, hence they belong to the bishops.’ That is their dialectics. But we have another dialectics at the right hand of the Father and it tells us, ‘They are tyrants, wolves and robbers’ [and must accordingly be deprived of the lands]. Therefore we here condemn all lawyers, even the pious ones, for they know not what the Church is. If they search through all their books they will not discover what the Church is. Hence we are not going to take any reforms from them. Every lawyer is either a miscreant or an ignoramus (”Omnis iurista est nequista aut ignorista“).… They shall not teach us what ‘Church’ is. There is an old proverb, ‘A good lawyer makes a bad Christian,’ and it is a true one.”[1350]
It is somewhat astonishing to hear Luther in his “Table-Talk on the lawyers”[1351] declaring that it was he who had whitewashed these “bad Christians” and made them to be respected, and that consequently he also could bring them again into disrepute, in other words, that his tongue was powerful enough to do and to undo. “Do not tempt me. If you are too well off I can soon make things warm for you. If you don’t like being whitewashed, well and good, I can soon paint you black again. May the devil make you blush!”[1352]—In one of his very last letters (Feb., 1546), owing to new friction with the lawyers about the Mansfeld revenues, he overwhelms them all with the following general charges: “The lawyers have taught the whole world such a mass of artifices, deceptions and calumnies that their very language has become an utter Babel. At Babel no one could understand his neighbour, but here nobody wants to understand what the other means. Out upon you, you sycophants, sophists and plague-boils of the human race! I write in anger, whether, were I calm, I should give a better report I know not. But the wrath of God is upon our sins. The Lord will judge His people; may He be gracious to His servants. Amen. If this is all the wisdom that the jurists can show then there is really no need for them to be so proud as they all are.”[1353]
Luther’s attitude towards the lawyers is of special importance from two points of view. It shows afresh the high opinion he entertained of himself, and, at the same time, it reveals his jealousy of any outside influence.
“Before my time there was not a lawyer,” he says for instance in an earlier outburst, “who knew what it meant to be righteous. They learnt it from me. In the Gospel there is nothing about the duty of worshipping jurists. Yes, before the world I will allow them to be in the right, but, before God, they shall be beneath me. If I can judge of Moses and bring him into subjection [i.e. criticise the Law in the light of the Gospel] what then of the lawyers?… If of the two one must perish, then let the law go and let Christ remain.”[1354] He was not learned in the law, but, as the proclaimer of the Evangel, he was “the supreme law in the field of conscience (‘ego sum ius iurium in re conscientiarum’).”[1355]
“When I give an opinion and have to break my head over it and a lawyer comes along and tries to dispute it, I say: ‘Do you look after the Government and leave us in peace. You men of the law seek to oppress us, but it is written: Thou art a priest for ever’” (Ps. cx. 4).[1356]—“The justice of the jurists is heathen justice,” he says; but, after all, even the justice [righteousness] of his own school of theology fell short of the mark. “Our justice is a relative justice; but if I am not pious yet Christ is pious; we are at least able to expound the commandments of God, and do so in the course of our calling. But, even if you distil a jurist five times over, he still cannot interpret even one of the Commandments.”[1357]
The other trait that comes out in his dealings with the lawyers is his distaste for any outside interference with his Church. He looked askance at the attempts of secular authorities, statesmen and Court-lawyers to have a say in Church matters, which, strictly, should have been submitted to him alone and his preachers. Yet it was he himself who had put the Church under State control; he had invited the sovereigns and magistrates to decide on the most vital questions, doing so partly owing to the needs of the time, partly as a logical result of the new system. He himself had legalised the sequestration of the Church’s lands and had helped to set up the State Consistories. So long as the secular authorities were of his way of thinking he left them a free hand, more or less. He was, however, forced to realise more and more, particularly in the evening of his days, that their arbitrary behaviour was ruining his influence and only making worse the evils that his work had laid bare to the world.
In his last utterances he is fond of calling “Centaurs” the officials and Court personages who, according to him, were stifling the Church in her growth by their wantonness, ambition and avarice. He bewails his inability to vanquish them; they are a necessary evil. “Make a Visitation of your Churches all the same,” he told his friend Amsdorf, early in January in the last year of his life; “the Lord will be with you, and even should one or other of the Centaurs forbid you, you are excused. Let them answer for it.”[1358]
We have also other utterances which testify to his deep distrust of the secular authorities, on account of their real or imaginary encroachments.
“The Princes seize upon all the lands of the Church and leave the poor students to starve, and thus the parishes become desolate, as is already the case.”[1359]—“The Princes and the towns do little for the support of our holy religion, leave everything in the lurch and do not punish wickedness. Highly dangerous times are to come.”[1360]—“The magistrates misuse their power against the Evangel; for this they will pay dearly.”[1361]—“The politicians show that they regard our words as those of men”; in this case we had better quit “Babylon” and leave them to themselves.[1362]
“I see what is coming,” he wrote in 1541, “unless the tyranny of the Turk assists us by frightening our [lower] nobles and humbling them, they will illtreat us worse than do the Turks. Their only thought is to put the sovereigns in leading-strings and to lay the burghers and peasants in irons. The slavery of the Pope will be followed by a new enslaving of the people under the nobles.”[1363]—In the same year he says: “If the nobles go on in this way,” i.e. neglecting their duty of “protecting the pious and punishing the wicked,” there will be “an end of Germany and we shall soon be worse than even the Spaniards and Turks; but they will catch it soon.”[1364]—In 1543 he indignantly told a councillor who opposed him and his followers: “You are not lords over the parishes and the preaching office; it was not you who founded it but the Son of God, nor have you ever given anything towards it, so that you have far less right to it than the devil has to the kingdom of heaven; it is not for you to find fault with it, or to teach, nor yet to forbid the administration of punishment.… There is no shepherd-lad so humble that he will take a harsh word from a strange master; it is the minister alone who must be the butt of everyone, and put up with everything from all, while they will suffer nothing from him, not even God’s own Word.”[1365]—In 1544 he even said of his own Elector: “After all, the Court is of no use, its rule is like that of the crab and snail. It either cannot get on or else is always wanting to go back. Christ did well by His Church in not confiding its government to the Courts. Otherwise the devil would have nothing to do but to devour the souls of Christians.”[1366]—“The rulers shut their eyes,” he had written shortly before, “they leave great wantonness unpunished, and now have nothing better to do than impose one tax after another on their poor underlings. Therefore will the Lord destroy them in His wrath.”[1367]
“What then is to become of the Church if the world does not shortly come to an end? I have lived my allotted span,” so he sighed in 1542, “the devil is sick of my life and I am sick of the devil’s hate.”[1368]
He often gives vent to his wounded feelings in unseemly words. A strange mixture of glowing fanaticism and coarse jocularity flows forth like a stream of molten lava from the furnace within him.
Thus we have the famous utterances recorded above (vol. iii., p. 233 and vol. v., p. 229) called forth by the decline of his Church, the carelessness of the rulers and the remissness of the preachers.
“Our Lord God sees,” he declares, “how the dogs [the princes who were against him] soil the pavements, wet every corner and smash the basins and platters; but when He begins to visit them, His anger will be terrible.”[1369]
“To these swine,” so he wrote to Anton Lauterbach of the politicians in the Duchy of Saxony, “we will leave their muck and hell-fire to boot, if they wish. But they shall leave us our Lord, the Son of God, and the kingdom of heaven as well!… With a good conscience we regard them as reprobate servants of the devil; … be brave and cheerfully despise the devil in these devil’s sons, and devil’s progeny until they drive you away. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof’ (Ps xxiii. 1).… By your joy you will crucify them and, with them, Satan, who seeks to destroy us. To speak plain German, we shall s⸺ into his mouth. Whether he likes it or not he must submit to having his head trodden under foot, however much he may seek to snap at us with his dreadful fangs. The seed of the woman is with us, whom also we teach and confess and Whom we shall help to the mastery. Fare you well in Him and pray for me.”[1370]
The minor State-officials he also handled roughly enough. These “Junkers” take it upon them “to sing the praises of the papal filth.” “They stick to the Pope’s behind like clotted manure.” “I know better what ‘Ius canonicum’ is than you all will ever know or understand. It is donkey’s dung, and, if you want it, I will readily give you it to eat!” “If donkey’s dung be so much to your taste, go and eat it elsewhere and do not make a stench in our churches.”[1371]
The Present and the To-come
On his last birthday, which he kept on Martinmas-Eve, 1545, Luther assembled about him Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, Cruciger, George Major and other guests, and to them opened his mind. According to the account left by his friend Ratzeberger he spoke of the coming dissensions: “As soon as he was gone the best of our men would fall away. I do not fear the Papists, he remarked; they are for the most part rude, ignorant asses and Epicureans; but our own brethren will injure the Evangel because they have gone forth from us but were not of us. This will do more harm to the Evangel than the Papists can.” The sad political outlook of Germany led him to add: “Our children will have to take up the spear, for things will fare ill in Germany.” Of the Catholics he said: “The Council of Trent is very angry and means mischief; hence be careful to pray diligently, for there will be great need of prayer when I am gone.” All, he exhorted “to stand fast by the Evangel.”[1372]
“For it is the command of our stern Lord [the Elector],” he says elsewhere, “that we should maintain undefiled the government of the Church, dispense aright the Word, the Absolution and the Sacraments according to the institution of Christ, and also comfort consciences.”[1373]
Towards his end, according to Ratzeberger, he frequently told the faithful at Wittenberg that, in order to fight shy of false doctrines, they must hate reason as their greatest foe. “As soon as he was dead they would preach and teach at Wittenberg a very different doctrine”; hence they must “pray diligently and learn to prove the spirits aright”; they were to keep their eyes open to see whether what was preached agreed with Holy Scripture (here again the right of judging falling on the simple faithful). But if it was “outside of and apart from God’s Word, sweet and agreeable to reason and easy of comprehension, then they were to avoid such doctrine and say: No, thou hateful reason, thou art a whore, thee I will not follow.”[1374]
In a sermon on the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, 1546, published three years later after Luther’s death by Stephen Tucher under the title “The last Sermon of Dr. Martin Luther of blessed memory,”[1375] Luther again speaks at length of the “heresiarchs” who had already arisen and whom more would follow; what the devil had been unable to do by means of the Kaiser and Pope, that he “would do through those who are still at one with us in doctrine”; “there will be a dreadful time. Ah, the lawyers and the wise men at Court will say: ‘You are proud, a revolt will ensue, etc., hence let us give way.’” But, in matters of faith, there must be no talk of giving way, “pride may well please us if it be not against the faith.”[1376]
The picture of reason as a mere prostitute was now once more vividly before him. He hoped to dispose of the variant doctrines of others, who, like himself, interpreted the Bible in their own fashion, simply by urging contempt for reason. The faith in his own teaching, so he declared, “in the doctrine which I have, not from them but from the Grace of God,”[1377] must be preserved by means of a deadly warfare against “reason, the devil’s bride and beautiful prostitute”; “for she is the greatest seductress the devil has. The other gross sins can be seen, but reason no one is able to judge; it goes its way and leads to fanaticism.” The evil that is inherent in the flesh had not yet been completely driven out; “I am speaking of concupiscence which is a gross sin and of which everyone is sensible.” “But what I say of concupiscence, which is a gross sin, is also to be understood of reason, for the latter dishonours and insults God in His spiritual gifts and indeed is far more whorish a sin than whoredom.”[1378] When a Christian hears a Sacramentarian fanatic putting forward his reasonable grounds he ought to say to that reason, which is speaking: “Dear me, has the devil such a learned bride?—Away to the privy with you and your bride; cease, accursed whore,” etc.[1379] Hence some restriction was to be placed on private judgment; it was to be used in moderation and only in so far as it tallied with faith (“secundum analogiam fidei”).[1380] This “faith,” however, was in many instances simply Luther’s own.
As Luther’s personality could not replace the outward rule of faith, viz. the authoritative voice of the teaching Church, his dreary prognostications were only too soon to be fulfilled. Hence in the appendix to another Wittenberg edition of Luther’s last sermon these words, as early as 1558, are represented as “the late Dr. Martin Luther’s excellent prophecies about the impending corruption and falling away of the chief teachers in our churches, particularly at Wittenberg.”[1381]
It is curious that, towards the close of his life, the Wittenberg Professor should have come again to insist so strongly on those points in his teaching for which he had fought at the outset, in spite of all the difficulties and contradictions they had been shown to involve, with the Bible, tradition and reason. He could at least claim that he had not abandoned his olden theses of the blindness of reason, of the unfreedom of the will, of the sinfulness of that concupiscence, from which none can get away, of the saving power of faith alone and the worthlessness of good works for the gaining of a heavenly reward, of the Bible as the sole source of faith and each man’s right of interpreting it, and, last, but not least, that of his own mission and call received from God Himself.
The decline of morals, now so obvious, was another phantom that haunted the evening of his days.
In the beginning of 1546 he confided to Amsdorf his anxiety regarding Meissen, Leipzig and other places where licence prevailed, together with contempt of the Gospel and its ministers. “This much is certain: Satan and his whole kingdom is terribly wroth with our Elector. To this kingdom your men of Meissen belong; they are the most dissolute folk on earth. Leipzig is pride and avarice personified, worse than any Sodom could be.… A new evil that Satan is hatching for us may be seen in the spread of the spirit of the Münster Dippers. After laying hold of the common people this spirit of revolt against all authority has also infected the great, and many Counts and Princes. May God prevent and overreach it!”[1382]
He tells “Bishop” George of Merseburg, in Feb., 1546, that “steps must be taken against the scandals into which the people are plunging head over heels, as though all law were at an end.” It seems to him that a new Deluge is coming. “Let us beware lest what Moses wrote of the days before the flood repeats itself, how ‘they took to wife whomsoever they pleased, even their own sisters and mothers and those they had carried off from their husbands.’ Instances of the sort have reached my ear privately. May God prevent such doings from becoming public as in the case of Herod and the kings of Egypt!”[1383] “The world is full of Satan and Satanic men,” so he groans even in an otherwise cheerful letter.[1384]
Up to the day of his death he was concerned for the welfare of the students at Wittenberg University. Among the 2000 young men at the University (for such was their number in Luther’s last years) there were many who were in bitter want. Luther sought to alleviate this by attacking, even in his sermons, those who were bent on fleecing the young; he not only gave readily out of his own slender means but also wrote to others asking them to be mindful of the students; of this we have an instance in a note he wrote in his later years, in which he asks certain “dear gentlemen” (possibly of the University or the magistracy) for help for a “pious and learned fellow” who would have to leave Wittenberg “for very hunger”; he declares that he himself was ready to contribute a share, though he was no longer able to afford the gifts he was daily called upon to bestow.[1385]
We know how grieved he was at the downfall of the schools and how loud his complaints were of the lawlessness of youth; how it distressed him to see the schools looked down upon though their contribution to the maintenance of the Churches was “entirely out of question.”[1386]
For his University of Wittenberg he requests the prayers of others against those who were undermining its reputation. He sees the small effect of his earnest exhortations to the students against immorality.[1387] The excellent statutes he had laid down for the town and the University were nullified by the bad example of men in high places. “Ah, how bitterly hostile the devil is to our Churches and schools.… Tyranny and sects are everywhere gaining the upper hand by dint of violence.… I believe there are many wicked knaves and spies here on the watch for us, who rejoice when scandals and dissensions arise. Hence we must watch and pray diligently. Unless God preserves us all is up. And so it looks. Pray, therefore, pray! This school [of Wittenberg] is as it were the foundation and stronghold of pure religion.”[1388] He once declared sadly that, among all the students in the town there were scarcely two from whom something might be hoped as future pastors of souls. “If out of all the young men present here two or three honest theologians grow up then we should have reason to thank God! Good theologians are indeed rare birds on this earth. Among a thousand you will seldom find two, or even one. And indeed the world no longer deserves such good teachers, nor does it want them; things will go ill when I, and you and some few others are gone.”[1389]
“The world was like this before the flood, before the destruction of Sodom, before the Babylonian captivity, before the destruction of Jerusalem—and so again it is before the fall of Germany.… Should you, however, ask what good has come of our teaching, answer me first, what good came of Lot’s preaching in Sodom?”[1390]
To divert his thoughts from these saddening cares he often turned to Æsop. It is of interest to note how highly he always prized Æsop’s Fables, not merely as a means of education for the young in the elementary schools, but even as furnishing a stimulating topic for conversation with his friends.
He is very fond of adducing morals from these fables both in his Table-Talk and in his writings.
Æsop’s tale of the fight between the wounded snake and the crab he dictated to his son Hans as a Latin exercise,[1391] and, in 1540, when a Mandate of the Kaiser aroused his suspicions owing to its kindly wording, the old man at once related to his guests the fable of the wolf who seeks to lead the sheep to a good pasture, and declared that he could easily see through this “Lycophilia.”[1392]
For a long time he had a work on hand which he was destined never to complete; he was anxious to provide a new and better edition of Æsop for the schools, which, so he hoped, should replace the, in some respects unseemly, fables of Steinhöwel’s edition then in use which had been corrupted by additions from Poggio’s Facetiæ. A series of amusing and at the same time instructive fables which he translated with this object in view is still extant. That he found time for such a work in the midst of all his other pressing labours is sufficient evidence that he had it much at heart. The Preface to his unfinished little work, which he read aloud to a friend in 1538, pointed out, that writings of this kind were intended for “children and the simple,” whose mental development he wished to keep in view, carefully excluding anything that was offensive. The collection of Fables then in circulation, “though written professedly for the young,” unfortunately contained tales with narratives of “shameful and unchaste knavery such as no chaste or pious man, let alone any youth, could hear or read without injury to himself; it was as though the book had been written in a common house of ill fame or among dissolute scamps.”[1393]
He was very determined in putting down scandals when they occurred in his own home. A young relative, who was addicted to drunkenness, he took severely to task, pointing out the good example, which in the interests of the Evangel his household was strictly bound to give; when the maidservant, Rosina, whom he had taken into his house, turned out a person of bad life, he could not sufficiently express his indignation and dismissed her from the family. A similar case also occurred at the time of his flight from Wittenberg in July, 1545; he writes to Catherine in the letter in which he tells her of his intention of not returning: “If Leck’s ‘Bachscheisse,’ our second Rosina and deceiver, has not yet been laid by the heels, do what you can that the miscreant may feel ashamed of herself.”[1394]
Catherine Bora was a good helper in matters of this sort. In fact she performed with zeal and assiduity the duties that fell to her lot in tending the aged and infirm man, and looking after the house and the small property. Amidst his many and great difficulties he often confessed that she was a comfort to him, and gratefully acknowledges her work. In his letters to her during his later years he writes in so religious a strain, and in such heartfelt language, that the reader might be forgiven for thinking that Luther had entirely succeeded in forgetting the irreligious nature of the union between a monk and a nun. “Grace and peace in the Lord,” he writes in a letter from Eisleben of Feb. 7, 1546, to his “housewife.” “Read, you dear Katey, John and the Smaller Catechism, of which you once said: All that is told in this book applies to me. For you try to care for your God just as though He were not Almighty and could not make ten Dr. Martins should the old one be drowned in the Saale, etc. Leave me in peace with your cares, I have a better guardian than even you and all the angels.”[1395]