Life of Luther

by Julius Köstlin

CHAPTER I.

LUTHER AT THE WARTBURG, TO HIS VISIT TO WITTENBERG IN 1521.

Luther, after being brought to the fortress, had to live there as a knight-prisoner. He was called Squire George, he grew a stately beard, and doffed his monk's cowl for the dress of a knight, with a sword at his side. The governor of the castle, Herr von Berlepsch, entertained him with all honour, and he was liberally supplied with food and drink. He was free to go about as he pleased in the apartments of the castle, and was permitted, in the company of a trusty servant, to take rides and walks out of doors. Thus, as he writes to a friend, he sat up aloft, in the region of the birds, as a curious prisoner, nolens volens, whether he willed or no; willing, because God would have it so, not willing, because he would far rather have stood up for the Word of God in public, but of such an honour God had not yet found him worthy.

[Illustration: Fig 26—LUTHER as "Squire George." (From a woodcut by
Cranach.)]

Care was also taken at once that he should be able to correspond at least by letter with his friends, and especially with those at Wittenberg. These letters were sent by messengers of the Elector through the hands of Spalatin. When Luther afterwards heard that a rumour had got abroad as to his place of residence, he sent a letter to Spalatin, in which he said: 'A report, so I hear, is spread that Luther is staying at the Wartburg near Eisenach; the people suppose this to be the case, because I was taken prisoner in the wood below; but while they believe that, I sit here safely hidden. If the books that I publish betray me, then I shall change my abode; it is very strange that nobody thinks of Bohemia.' This letter, so Luther thought, Spalatin might let fall into the hands of some of his spying opponents, so as to lead them astray in their conjecture. Spalatin made no use of this naive attempt at trickery. He could hardly have done much in the matter, and would probably have directed those who saw through the meaning of the letter straight to the Wartburg. He succeeded, however, remarkably well in keeping the spot a secret, even after it was generally guessed and known that Luther was to be found somewhere in Saxony. As late as 1528, Luther's friend Agricola remarks that he had hitherto remained concealed, whilst some even sought to hear of him by questioning of the devil; and more than twenty years later Luther's opponent Cochlaeus declares that he was hidden at Alstedt in Thuringia.

There was no imperial power at that time which might have deemed it necessary or expedient to track out the man who had been condemned by the Edict of Worms. The Emperor had left Germany again, and was engaged in a war with France.

In his quiet solitude Luther threw himself again without delay into the work of his calling, so far as he could here perform it. This was the study of Scripture and the active exercise of his own pen in the service of God's Word. He had now more time than before to investigate the meaning of the Bible in its original languages. 'I sit here,' he writes to Spalatin ten days after his arrival, 'the whole day at leisure, and read the Greek and Hebrew Bible.'

His sojourn at the castle began in the festival time between Easter
and Whitsuntide. He wrote at once an exposition of the sixty-eighth
Psalm, with particular reference to the events of Ascension and
Whitsuntide.

For the liberation of the laity from the Papal yoke, he set at once further to work by composing a treatise 'On Confession, whether the Pope has power to order it.' He commends confession, when a man humbles himself and, receives forgiveness of God through the lips of a Christian brother, but he denounces any compulsion in the matter, and warns men against priests who pervert it into a means of increasing their own power. He now expressed his public thanks to Sickingen, and dedicated the book to him—'To the just and firm Francis von Sickingen, my especial lord and patron.' In this dedication he repeats the fears he had long expressed of the judgment that the clergy would bring upon themselves by their hatred of improvement and their obstinacy. 'I have,' he says, 'often offered peace, I have offered them an answer, I have disputed, but all has been of no avail: I have met with no justice, but only with vain malice and violence, nothing more. I have been simply called on to retract, and threatened with every evil if I refused.' Then speaking of the critical moment at which he was obliged to withdraw, 'I can do no more,' he says, 'I am now out of the game. They have now time to change that which cannot, and should not, and will not be tolerated from them any longer. If they refuse to make the change, another will make it for them, without their thanks, one who will not teach like Luther with letters and words, but with deeds. Thank God, the fear and awe of those rogues at Borne is now less than it was.' And again, speaking of Roman insolence: 'They push on blindly ahead—there is no listening or reasoning. Well, I have seen; more water-bubbles than even theirs, and once such an outrageous smoke that it managed to blot out the sun, but the smoke never lasted, and the sun still shines. I shall continue to keep the truth bright and expose it, and am as far from fearing my ungracious masters as they are ready to despise me.'

Luther now finished his exposition of the Magnificat, which, with loving devotion to the subject, he had intended for Prince John Frederick. He resumed also his work on the Sunday Gospels and Epistles. The first part of it he had already published in Latin. But he gave it now a new, and for the Christian people of Germany, a most important character, by writing in German his comments on these passages of Scripture, including those already dealt with in Latin, which formed the text of the sermon for the day. Thus arose his first collection of sermons, the 'Church-Postills.' By November he had already sent the first part to the press, though the work progressed but slowly. In a simple exposition of the words of the Bible, without any artificial and rhetorical additions or ornament, but with a constant and cheerful regard to practical life, with an unceasing attention to the primary questions of salvation, and in pithy, clear, and thoroughly popular language, he began to lay before his readers the sum total of Christian truth, and impress it on their hearts. The work served as much for the instruction and support of other preachers of the gospel now newly proclaimed, as for the direct teaching and edifying of the members of their flocks. It advanced, however, only by degrees, and Luther after many years was obliged to have it finished by friends, who collected together printed or written copies of his various sermons.

For the special comfort and advice of his Wittenberg congregation Luther wrote an exposition of the thirty-seventh Psalm. Nor with less energy and force did he wield his pen during June, in a vigorous and learned polemical reply in Latin to the Louvain theologian, Latomus.

And yet Luther all this while continued to lament that he had to sit there so idly in his Patmos: he would rather be burnt in the service of God's Word than stagnate there alone. The bodily rest which took the place of his former unwearied activity in the pulpit and the lecturer's chair, together with the sumptuous fare now substituted for the simple diet of the convent, were no doubt the cause of the physical suffering which for a long time had grievously distressed him and put his patience to the test, and which must have weighed upon his spirits. In his distress he once thought of going to Erfurt to consult physicians. Some strong remedies, however, which Spalatin got for him, gave him temporary relief.

He took exercise in the beautiful woods around the castle, and there, as he related afterwards, he used to look for strawberries. In August he had news to give Spalatin of a hunt, at which he had been present two days. He wished to look on at 'this bitter-sweet pleasure of heroes.' 'We have,' he says, 'hunted two hares and a few poor little partridges; truly a worthy occupation for idle people!' But among the nets and hounds he managed, as he says, to pursue theology. He saw in it all a picture of the devil, who by cunning and godless doctrines ensnares poor innocent creatures. Graver thoughts still were suggested to his mind by the fate of a little hare, which he had helped to save, and had rolled up in the long sleeve of his cloak, but which, on his putting it down afterwards and going away, the dogs caught and killed. 'Thus,' he says, 'do the Pope and Satan rage together, to destroy, despite my efforts, souls already saved.'

At that time too he fancied he heard and saw all kinds of devil's noises and sights, which long afterwards he frequently described to his friends, but which he took at the time with great calmness. Such, for instance, were a strange continual rumbling in a chest in which he kept hazel nuts, nightly noises of falling on the stairs, and the unaccountable appearance of a black dog in his bed.

Of the well-known ink-stain at the Wartburg we hear nothing either from those or after-times; and a similar spot was shown in the last century at the Castle of Coburg, where Luther stayed in 1530.

In the outer world, meanwhile, the great movement that emanated from Luther continued to advance and grow, in spite of his disappearance. It was apparent how powerless was his enforced absence to suppress it. Soon too it was to be seen how much on the other hand it depended on him that the movement should not bring real danger and destruction.

At Wittenberg his friends continued labouring faithfully and undisturbed. Much as Melancthon troubled himself about Luther and longed for his return, Luther relied with confidence upon him and his efforts, as rendering his own presence unnecessary. With joyful congratulations to his friend he acknowledged his receipt at the Wartburg of the sheets of his work—the Loci Communes—wherein Melancthon, whilst intending at first only to proclaim the fundamental principles and doctrines of the Bible, and especially of the Epistle to the Romans, actually laid the foundation for the dogma of the Evangelical Church.

Just at this time new forces had stepped in to further the work and the battle. Shortly before Luther's departure to Worms, John Bugenhagen of Pomerania had appeared at Wittenberg,—a man only two years younger than Luther, well trained in theology and humanistic learning, and already won over to Luther's doctrines by his writings, and more especially by his work on the Babylonish Captivity. He had made friends with Luther and Melancthon, and soon began to teach with them at the university. John Agricola from Eisleben had already taken part in the biblical lectures at the university, which was then the chief place for the exposition of evangelical doctrine. This man, born in 1494, had lived at Wittenberg since 1516. He had from the first been an adherent of Luther, and had won his confidence, as also that of Melancthon. He was now their fellow-lecturer at the university, and since the spring of 1521 had been appointed by the town as catechist at the parish church, charged with the duty of teaching children religion. Wittenberg had also gained the services of the learned Justus Jonas, so conspicuous for his high culture, and a staunch and open friend of Luther. Shortly after his journey with Luther from Erfurt to the Diet of Worms, he obtained, by grant of the Elector, the office of provost to the church of All Saints at Wittenberg, and became a member also of the theological faculty at the university. The excommunication under which Melancthon had fallen with Luther did not deter the mass of students from their cause. The academical youth who had assembled here from the whole of Germany, and from Switzerland, Poland, and other countries, were renowned for the exemplary unity in which, unlike their brethren in most of the universities in those days, they lived together and devoted themselves to the purest and most elevating studies. Everywhere students might be seen with Bibles in their hands; the young nobles and sons of burghers applied themselves diligently to self-discipline; and the drinking-bouts practised elsewhere, and so destructive to the muses, were unknown among them.

Luther, by his behaviour at Worms in particular, had fastened upon himself the eyes of all Germany. The proceedings before the Diet, made known, as they would be nowadays, by the newspapers, were then published abroad by means of fugitive pamphlets of a longer or shorter kind. Luther's speech in particular was circulated from notes made partly by himself, partly by others. Day after day, and especially during the sittings of the Diet, a number of other short tracts and fly-sheets set forth, mainly in the form of a dialogue, a popular discussion and explanation of his cause. His fate at Worms was immediately proclaimed in a book called 'The Passion of Dr. Martin Luther,' the title of which sufficiently indicated the analogy suggested. Then came the stirring and disquieting news of his sudden kidnapping by the powers of darkness; rumours which only served to stimulate him further in his concealment to speak out and march forwards with undaunted courage and assurance.

As writers who now began to labour for the cause in a similar spirit to Luther's and in a similarly popular style and manner, we must not omit to name the following. First and foremost was Eberlin of Günzburg, formerly a Franciscan at Tübingen; next, the Augustine monk Michael Stifel of Esslingen, who came himself to Wittenberg and joined there the circle of friends; and lastly, the Franciscan Henry von Kettenbach at Ulm. The authors of some other influential works, such as the dialogue 'Neu Karsthans' (Karsthans being a name for peasants), are not known with certainty. In these men and their writings, ideas and thoughts already made their appearance, going beyond the intentions of Luther, and into a territory which, from his standpoint of religion, he would rather have seen more exactly defined, and taking up weapons which he had rejected. Thus 'Karsthans' contains the advice to break off, after the example of the Hussites in Bohemia, from most of the Churches, as being tainted with avarice and superstition; and a rising against the clergy is contemplated, in which the nobles and peasants should combine. Eberlin, with his extraordinary energy, not content with the most comprehensive and far-reaching schemes of ecclesiastical reform, plunged into questions affecting the wants of municipal, social, and political life, which Luther, in his Address to the German Nobility, had only briefly alluded to, and had carefully distinguished from his own particular work in hand. To the dealings of the great merchants he showed himself more hostile even than Luther; and put forward such proposals as the establishment by the civil authorities of a cheaper tariff of prices for provisions, the appointment to magisterial offices by election, for which peasants also should be qualified, and free rights of hunting and fishing.

The Edict of Worms, intended to proscribe and suppress throughout Germany the heretic and his writings, was published in the different states and towns by the princes and magistrates; but the power, and partly also the will, was wanting to enforce its execution. At Erfurt, shortly after Luther's passage through the town upon his way to Worms, the interference of the clergy against a member of a religious institution which had taken part in the ovation accorded to the Reformer, gave the first occasion to violent and repeated tumults. Students and townspeople attacked upwards of sixty houses of the priests, and demolished them. Luther told his friends at once, that he saw in this the work of Satan, who sought by this means to bring contempt and legitimate reproach upon the gospel.

Elsewhere, and above all at Wittenberg, his followers busied themselves in his absence with putting into practice what he had defended with his words. Calmly and with mature deliberation and courage, Luther took part in their labours from the solitude of his watch-tower. He had a very lively and, as he himself confesses, often painful consciousness of his own responsibility, as the one who had put the first match to the great fire, and whose first duties lay with his Wittenberg brethren, as their teacher and pastor.

Shortly after his arrival at the Wartburg, he received the news that Bartholomew Bernhardi of Feldkirchen, provost in the little town of Kemberg near Wittenberg, had publicly, and with the consent of his congregation, taken a wife. He was not the first priest who had ventured to break the unchristian prohibition of marriage by the Romish Church. But he was the most distinguished of such offenders hitherto, besides being a particular disciple of Luther and a man of unimpeachable integrity. Luther wrote about it to Melancthon, saying: 'I admire the newly married man, who in these stormy times has no fears, and has lost no time about it. May God guide him.'

At Wittenberg it was now demanded, not without violence, that monasticism should be abolished, and that the mass and the Lord's Supper should be changed in conformity with the institution of Christ. It seemed as if here, in the place of Luther, who had gone before with the simple testimony of the Word and doctrine, two other men were now to step in as practical and energetic Reformers. One of them was Luther's old colleague, Carlstadt, who had returned in July from a short visit to Copenhagen, whither the King of Denmark had invited him to promote the new evangelical theology at the university, but had soon again dismissed him, and who now assumed the lead at Wittenberg with a passionate and ambitious, but undeterminate zeal. The other was the Augustine monk, Gabriel Zwilling, who had introduced himself to notice as a fiery preacher in the convent church, and in spite of his unattractive appearance and weak voice had drawn together a large congregation from the town and university, and fascinated them with his eloquence. A young Silesian wrote home from the university of Wittenberg about him, saying: 'God has raised up for us another prophet; many call him a second Luther. Melancthon is never absent when he preaches.'

For the clergy Carlstadt sought, by a perverse interpretation of Scripture, to make the married state into a law. Only married men were to be appointed to offices in the Church. For monks and nuns he claimed the liberty of renouncing their cloistered and celibate life, if they found its moral requirements insupportable; but the biblical evidence that he adduced in support of this doctrine was unhappily chosen; and he still declared the renunciation of vows to be a sin, though justified by the avoidance thereby of a still greater sin, that of unchastity in monastic life. Luther had required that at the Lord's Supper the cup, in accordance with the original institution of Christ, should be given to the laity. Carlstadt and Zwilling, however, wished to make it a sin for a person to partake of the Communion without the cup being given to the communicants. Other changes also were now demanded in the mode of administering the elements, conformably with the Holy Supper held by Jesus Himself with His twelve disciples. Zwilling would have twelve communicants at a time partake of the bread and wine. It was further insisted that, like as at ordinary meals, the elements should be given into the hand of each individual to partake of, and not put into his mouth by the priest. The sacrifice of the mass Zwilling would abolish altogether, but Carlstadt thought it necessary, in dealing with so important a feature of the old form of worship, to proceed with caution.

Upon these questions and proceedings Luther expressed his opinion early in August to Melancthon, who was keenly excited about them, but on many points was unsettled in his mind. The project of restoring at Wittenberg the celebration of the Lord's Supper, as originally instituted, with the cup, met with Luther's full approval; for the tyranny which the Christian congregations had hitherto endured in this respect had been acknowledged there, and there was a general wish to resist it. He declared further, with regard to private masses, that he was resolved never to say any more while he lived. But compulsion he would not dream of: if any who still suffered from this tyranny partook of the Communion without the cup, no man durst account it to him as a sin. As for the troubles of the monks and nuns, under their self-imposed vows, his sympathy for them was no less acute than that of his friends at Wittenberg, but the arguments by which they sought to help them to liberty he did not consider sound. He gave now this subject a more searching and deeper consideration, and shortly addressed a series of theses on celibacy to the bishops and deacons of the church at Wittenberg. He attacked vows in general, and assailed them at the very root. Inasmuch, moreover, as the vows of chastity, he said, and of other monastic observances were commonly made to God with the intent and purpose of working out one's own salvation by one's own works and righteousness, these were not vows in accordance with the will of God, but denials of the faith. And even though a man should have made a vow in a spirit of piety, he placed himself at all events, by his own will and act, under a restraint and yoke at variance with the gospel and the liberty which faith in Christ bestows. Luther went still farther, and declared that the chastity enjoined upon the monk was only possible if he possessed the special gift of continence spoken of by St. Paul. How dare a man make a vow to God, which God must first endue him with the power to keep? A man, therefore, in vowing chastity, makes a vow which it is not really possible for him to keep, whilst true chastity is made possible for him by God in the married life which he condemns. These vows, accordingly, are radically vicious and displeasing to God, and cease to be binding on a Christian who has been made free in faith, and has recognised the true will of God.

Personally concerned as Luther was, as an Augustine monk himself, in these questions which he discussed, he treated the liberty, which inwardly he knew himself to possess, as quietly and coolly as possible. On receiving the news from Wittenberg, he wrote to Spalatin, 'Good Heaven! our Wittenbergers will allow even the monks to have wives, but they shall not force me to take one.' And he asks Melancthon jokingly, if he was going to revenge himself upon him for having helped him to get a wife; he would know well enough how to guard against that.

At Wittenberg there was great excitement, particularly on account of the mass. In the Augustinian convent there, the majority of the monks held with Zwilling; they wished to celebrate the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in strict accordance with the institution of Christ. Their prior, Conrad Held, took the opposite side, and adhered to the ancient usage. Justus Jonas, the provost, expressed his views with equal ardour in the convent church attached to the university, and met with violent opposition from other members of the foundation. A committee, composed of deputies from the university and chapter of canons, from whom the Elector in October demanded a formal opinion on the subject, expressed by their majority the same view, and requested the Elector himself to abolish the abuse of the mass. But Frederick utterly rejected the idea of decreeing on his own authority innovations which would constitute a deviation from the great Christian Catholic Church, more especially as opinions were not agreed on them even at Wittenberg. He would do no more than give free scope and protection to the new testimony of biblical truth, until it should be properly sifted by the Church. In the church of the Augustinian convent, the mass and the Lord's Supper were now both suspended.

Men set to work now in earnest to give effect to the new principles applied to monachism. Thirteen Augustine monks, about a third of the then inmates of the convent at Wittenberg, quitted that convent early in November, and cast away their cowls. Some of them took up at once a civil trade or handicraft. This step increased the growing feeling of hostility to the monks among the students and inhabitants of the town. All kinds of enormities ensued: monks were mocked at in the streets; the convents were threatened; and even the service of the mass was disturbed by rioters who forced their way into the parish church.

Meanwhile Luther went on, in the quietness of his seclusion, to teach the Christian truth about vows and masses, to explain and establish his newly-acquired knowledge and convictions, and to prepare by that means the way of ultimate reform. He composed a tract, in Latin and German, 'On the Abuse of Masses,' and another, in Latin, 'On Monastic Vows.' The latter he dedicated to his father, taking note of his protest against his entering the convent, and telling him with joy that he was now a free man, a monk, and yet no longer a monk. As for his brethren's desertion of the convent, however, he disapproved the manner of it. They could, and should, have parted in peace and amity, not as they did, in a tumult. These two works he completed in November, and sent them to Spalatin, to have them printed at Wittenberg.

In this manner Luther occupied himself from the summer to the winter, continuing all the while his biblical studies and the composition of his Church-Postills. But he was also preparing to deal a heavy blow at the Cardinal Albert. This prelate had abstained as yet, with great caution, from taking any stringent measures to prevent the spread of Lutheran preaching in his diocese. But he was in want of money. To supply this want, he published a work, giving news of a precious relic, which he had placed for view at Halle, his town, and inviting pilgrimages to see it. A multitude of other rich and wondrous relics had been collected there; not only heaps of bones and entire corpses of saints, with a portion of the body of the patriarch Isaac, but also pieces of the manna, as it had fallen from heaven in the desert, little bits of the burning bush of Moses, jars from the wedding at Cana, and some of the wine into which Jesus there had changed the water, thorns from the Saviour's crown, one of the stones with which Stephen was stoned, and a multitude of other, in all nearly 9,000, relics. Whoever should attend with devotion at the exhibition of these sacred treasures in the Collegiate Church at Halle, and should give a pious alms to the institution, was to receive a 'surpassing' indulgence. The first exhibition of this kind took place about the beginning of September. Albert also had not scrupled to cause one of the priests who wished to marry to be imprisoned, though it was notorious how he himself made up for his celibacy by his loose living.

Luther now, as he wrote to Spalatin on October 7, 1521, could not restrain himself any longer from breaking out, in private and in public, against his 'Idol of indulgences' and his scandalous whoredoms. He took no thought of the fact that his own pious Elector, only a few years before, had arranged a similar, though less showy exhibition of relics at the convent church at Wittenberg, and was thus indirectly assailed by reproaches now no longer deserved. By the end of the month Luther had a pamphlet ready for publication. But an attack of such a kind on a magnate like Albert, the great prince of the Empire, Elector of Mayence, and brother of the Elector of Brandenburg, was not to Frederick's taste, and he informed Luther, through Spalatin that he forbade it. He would not sanction anything, he said, which might disturb the public peace. Luther told Spalatin, in his reply, that he had never read a more disagreeable letter than Frederick's. 'I will not put up with it,' he indignantly broke out; 'I will rather lose you and the prince himself, and every living being. If I have stood up against the Pope, why should I yield to his creature?' He wished only to show his pamphlet first to Melancthon, and submit a few alterations in it to the judgment of his friend. For this purpose he sent it to Spalatin, requesting him to forward it. Then, on December 1, he wrote a letter to Albert himself. Its tone and contents indicate pretty plainly what the pamphlet itself contained. In clear vigorous German, and without any circumlocution, he submits to the Cardinal his 'humble request,' to abstain from corrupting the poor people, and not to show himself a wolf in bishop's clothing. He must surely know by this time that indulgences were sheer knavery and trickery. He was not to imagine that Luther was dead: Luther would trust cheerfully in God, and carry on a game with the Cardinal of Mayence, of which not many people were yet aware. As for the priests who had wished to marry, he warned the Archbishop that a cry would be raised from the gospel about it; and the bishops would learn that they had better first pluck out the beam from their own eyes, and drive their own mistresses away. Luther concluded by giving him fourteen days for a 'proper' answer; otherwise, when that time expired, he would immediately publish his pamphlet on 'The Idol at Halle.' All this while, the news from Wittenberg kept Luther in a state of constant anxiety. The distance and the difficulty of correspondence had become quite insupportable. A few days after his letter of December 1, he suddenly re-appeared there among his friends. In secret, and accompanied only by a servant, he had gone thither on horseback in his knight's dress. He stayed there for three days with Amsdorf. Only his most intimate friends were allowed to know of his arrival. His meeting with them again gave him, as he wrote to Spalatin, the keenest pleasure and enjoyment. But it was a bitter sorrow to hear that Spalatin would not look at, or listen to, his pamphlet against Albert, nor his tracts on masses and monastic vows, but had kept them back. What his friends now told him of their efforts and labours he approved of, and he wished them strength from above to persevere. But he had heard already, when on his way, of fresh outrages committed by some of the townspeople and students against the priests and monks, and henceforth he deemed it his nearest duty to warn them publicly against such acts of violence and disorder.