CHAPTER II.
LUTHER'S FURTHER SOJOURN AT THE WARTBURG, AND HIS RETURN TO WITTENBERG, 1522.
In secret, as he had first gone there, Luther returned to the Wartburg, and now set to work with his 'True Admonition for all Christians to abstain from turbulence and rebellion.' He had before his eyes the danger of an insurrection, involving the lives of all the priests and monks who opposed reform, and one in which the common people, in revenge for their many grievances, might fall to laying about them with clubs and flails, as the 'Karsthans' threatened. To the princes, magistrates, and nobles, he had already addressed a demand to put a stop to the corruption of the Church and the tyranny of the Pope. Of the civil authorities and the nobility, he says now that 'they ought to do this, in duty to their ordinary position and power, every prince and lord on his own territory; for what is brought about by the exercise of ordinary power is not to be accounted turbulence.' At the same time, to the masses and to individuals he plainly prohibits a rising by force. Turbulence was the usurpation of justice, and revenge, which God would not suffer, for He said, 'Revenge is Mine.' All turbulence, he said, was wrong, however good might be the cause, and only made bad worse. As for the magistrates, he would not have them kill the priests, as once Moses and Elias had done to the worshippers of idols; they were simply to forbid them from acting contrary to the gospel. Words would do more than was enough with them, so there was no need of hewing and stabbing. We have seen how emphatically Luther expressed himself to the same effect before he went to Worms. The Apostle's words that the Lord should consume the Antichrist with the Spirit of His Mouth, were to be fulfilled, according to Luther, in the words of gospel preaching. It was his own previous experience that had taught him to rely with such lofty confidence on the simple Word; he had done more injury with it alone to the Pope, and the priests and monks, than all the emperors and princes had ever done with all their power. He still looked forward steadfastly to the approach of the Last Day, when Christ by His coming should utterly destroy the Pope, whose iniquity the Word had exposed. As he had done formerly in his treatise on Christian liberty, and had now good reason to do with the Wittenbergers, he exhorts men to a loving and merciful regard to their weaker brethren, whose consciences were still ensnared by the old ordinances respecting fasting and masses. They ought not to be taken unawares, but instructed kindly and, if unable to agree at once, dealt with patiently. 'The wolves,' he says, 'cannot be treated too severely, nor the tender sheep too gently.'
Luther's works on the mass and monastic vows were now actually in print. Cardinal Albert, however, gave the answer demanded by Luther, in a short letter of December 21. He assured him that the subject of his complaint had been removed; that as to himself, he did not deny that he was a miserable sinner, the very filth of the earth, as bad as anyone. Christian chastisement he could well endure; he looked to God for grace and strength, to live according to His will. So abjectly did this magnate quail before the Word, with which Luther threatened to expose his doings. He must no doubt have been ashamed of his traffic in indulgences before all his Humanist friends, and especially Erasmus; and must have expected that the other scandals with which Luther charged him would be laid bare without mercy or regard. At the same time we see in all this, how perfectly free from reproach in this matter of morality must Luther have been, not only in his own conscience, but also in the eyes of Albert. Luther, on receiving this letter, doubted indeed the sincerity of its professions, and even abstained from acknowledging it. But he now finally abandoned, nevertheless, the publication of the pamphlet, intended to expose him, which had hitherto been hindered by the Elector.
But the most important task that Luther now undertook, and in which he persevered with steadfast devotion during his further stay at the Wartburg, was one of a peaceful character, the most beautiful fruit of his seclusion, the noblest gift that he has bequeathed to his countrymen. This was his translation of the Bible—first of the New Testament. 'Our brethren demand it of me,' he wrote to Lange shortly after his return from Wittenberg. And in these words the wish was evidently expressed, or else laid to heart anew. The Bible, it is true, had been translated into German before Luther's time, but in a clumsy idiom that sounded foreign to the people, and not, like Luther's version, from the original text, but from the Latin translation used in the churches. Luther declared that no one could speak German of this outlandish kind, 'but,' he said, 'one has to ask the mother in her home, the children in the street, the common man in the market-place, and look at their mouths to see how they speak, and thence interpret it to oneself, and so make them understand. I have often laboured to do this, but have not always succeeded or hit the meaning.' None the less strictly and faithfully did he seek to adhere to the spirit of the text, and, where necessary, even to the letter. Such an interpretation, he said, required a 'truly devout, faithful, diligent, fearful, Christian, learned, experienced, and practised heart.' Penetrated himself with the substance and spirit of the Scriptures, he understood how to combine in his language, as if by intuition, a dignified tone and a national character. So hard did he work, that he finished the New Testament at the Wartburg in a few months; he then wished to revise it with the help of Melancthon.
Meanwhile, affairs at Wittenberg were assuming so serious an aspect as to make Luther's apprehensions increase from day to day. The question of monastic vows indeed was settled peaceably, and in a manner such as Luther would have desired, by some resolutions (so far as resolutions could settle it), passed by the Augustinian brethren at a chapter held at Wittenberg by Link, the Vicar of the Order. It was there resolved that free permission should be given to leave the convent, but that those who preferred to adhere to the monastic life should remain there in voluntary but strict subordination to their superiors and to the established rules; some of them should be employed in preaching the Word of God, others should contribute by manual labour to the support of the institution. Outside, however, among the people of Wittenberg, Carlstadt, who had shortly before restrained even his own partisans in regard to the question of the mass, and who was neither a regular preacher in the town nor in the possession of any other office, now pressed forward, by his sermons and writings, impetuously in the van, and made hasty strides towards the furtherance of his misty projects of reform. Anticipating a prohibition from the Elector, he celebrated the Lord's Supper at Christmas in the new manner. Even the usual vestments were discarded as idolatrous: Zwilling performed the service in a student's gown. The people were enjoined to eat meat and eggs on fast days; and confession was no longer held before the Communion. Carlstadt went further, and denounced the pictures and images in the churches; it was not enough to desist from worshipping them, nor durst it be hinted that they served as books for the instruction of laymen. God had plainly forbidden them; their proper place was in the fire and not in God's house. Whilst the town-council, at his instance, resolved to have the images removed from the parish church, some of the populace stormed in, tore them down, hewed them to pieces, and burned them.
Luther himself, even with regard to rites and ordinances which he rejected altogether, always counselled moderation and patience towards the weak. He could not believe that the great body of his Wittenberg congregation were already ripe for such changes, or that many conscientious but weaker brethren among them were not in need of tender consideration. People might say that it was only a question of time; well, he did not wish to delay genuine reform for ever, merely to humour the minority. But it was precisely that those members should have proper time allowed them, and every means taken for their instruction and edification, that was to Luther a matter of conscience. External matters, of which the other Reformers made so much, such as eating on fast days, the taking with one's own hands the bread and wine at the Communion, and so forth, he regarded as trifles, the performance or non-performance of which in no way affected the true liberty of the faithful, while grievous wrong was done to the souls of the weaker brethren, if they were compelled to do anything therein against their consciences. 'By acting thus,' he says, 'you have made many consciences miserable; if they had to give an account on their death-beds, or when troubled with temptation, they would not for the life of them know why or how they had offended.' Nay, he accuses a man of corrupting souls, who 'plunges' them carelessly into practices that offend their consciences. 'You wish,' he says, 'to serve God, and you don't know that you are the forerunners of the devil. He has begun by attempting to dishonour the Word; he has set you to work at that bit of folly, so that meanwhile you may forget faith and love.' Thus Luther wrote in a work intended for the Wittenbergers. Even the innovations with regard to pictures and images he numbers among the 'trivial matters which are not worth the sacrifice of faith and love.' Those which represented truly Christian subjects he would preserve at all times, and he valued them highly.
These Wittenberg Reformers, however, with all their desire to assert the higher spiritual character of evangelical Christianity, still remained devotees, in their peculiar 'spirit,' to the externals of worship and, in regard to images, to the letter of the Old Testament law. And yet their conception of the Christian spirit and of Christian revelation produced results of another and still stranger kind. Not only did they repudiate all titles and dignities conferred by the university, on the plea that, in the words of Christ, no man durst call himself Rabbi or master, but Carlstadt and Zwilling now openly expressed their contempt of all human theology and biblical learning. God, they said, has hid these things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes; the Spirit from above must enlighten a man. Carlstadt went to simple burghers in their houses, to have passages in the Bible explained to him. He and Zwilling won over to their side the master of the boys' school in the town, and the school was broken up. A new municipal constitution, supported by the magistracy, made strange inroads on the rights of the citizens and the domain of social life; a common chest, containing the revenues of the Church, was utilised for advancing money without interest to needy handicraftsmen, and making loans to other townsmen at a low rate of interest. Meantime the spiritual wants of the community were neglected, and in the hospitals and prisons entirely overlooked.
Such was the direction here taken by the reform for which Luther's preaching had prepared the way. And just at this time, at Christmas, three fanatics came to Wittenberg from Zwickau, with the object of taking part in the movement and furthering the work of God. These were Nicholas Storch, a weaver, Mark Stübner, a former student at Wittenberg, and another weaver, who were now zealously joined by the theologian Martin Cellarius. They boasted of a direct revelation from God, of prophetic visions, dreams, and familiar conversations with the Deity. Compared with these pretensions, Scripture was a thing of small importance in their eyes. They rejected infant baptism, as incapable of imparting the Spirit. For communion and intercourse with God they looked not to faith, which, as Luther taught, accepts submissively what the Word of God reveals to the conscience and the heart, but to a mystic process of self-abstraction from everything external, sensual, and finite, until the soul becomes immovably centred in the one Divine Being. This spirit, seemingly so elevated and pure, broke out nevertheless into fanaticism of the wildest kind, by proclaiming and demanding a general revolution, in which all the priests were to be killed, all godless men destroyed, and the kingdom of God established.
These fanatical displays had begun at Zwickau, no doubt under Bohemian influence, and were characterised by the ravings common to the middle ages. Thomas Münzer, from Stolberg in the Harz country, who was a preacher at one of the churches, took the lead; and he was certainly the most important and most dangerous personage among them. He accounted the civil authorities, with their rights, no more as Christians than he did the clergy and the hierarchy; and began already to prate of universal equality and communism. This novel and exciting doctrine soon won adherents, and propagated the 'spirit of revelation.' Already disturbances were brewing. But the magistrates took vigorous and timely measures. Storch, Stübner, and Cellarius fled to Wittenberg, while Münzer roamed about elsewhere in Germany.
Carlstadt went on with his innovations without allying himself outwardly with these refugees. But the connection of his aims with theirs could not be mistaken, and as time went on, became more and more apparent. Melancthon, with all his refinement and purity of soul, had not sufficient energy and independence to bridle the passions and forces that had been aroused by Carlstadt. The Zwickau prophets, with their visions and revelations, haunted him; he seemed incapable of forming any settled or sober judgment on this strange and sudden phenomenon.
Luther, on the contrary, received the news with calmness and composure. He marvelled at the anxiety of his friend, who in intellect and learning was his superior. He found no difficulty in testing these enthusiasts by the standard of the New Testament. There was nothing, he said, in their words and acts, so far as he had heard anything of them, which the devil might not do or mimic. As for their so-called ecstasies of devotion, there was nothing in all that, even though they boasted of being rapt into the third heaven. The Majesty of God was not wont to hold such familiar converse with men in old time. The creature must first perish before his Creator, as before a consuming fire: when God speaks, he must feel the meaning of the words of Isaiah, 'As a lion, so will he break all my bones.' And yet Luther would not have them imprisoned or dealt with by violence; they could be disposed of without bloodshed and the sword, and be laughed out of their folly.
But his cares for his Wittenberg congregation and the trouble which Carlstadt's doings there were giving him, left him no peace. He could not justify those acts before God and the world: they lay upon his own shoulders, and above all, they brought discredit on the gospel. In January he went back to Wittenberg. He was entreated to do so by the magistrates. In vain did the Elector attempt to detain him, and so prevent his risking an appearance in public. Moreover, the Council of Regency at Nüremberg, which represented the Emperor in his absence, had just demanded of Frederick a strict suppression of the innovations at Wittenberg.
Luther quitted the Wartburg, without leave, on March 1. About his journey thence we only know that he passed through Jena and the town of Borna, lying south of Leipzig. A young Swiss, John Kessler from St. Gallen, who was then on his way with a companion to the university at Wittenberg, has left us an interesting account of their meeting with Luther at the inn of the 'Black Bear,' just outside Jena. They found there a solitary horseman sitting at the table, 'dressed after the fashion of the country in a red schlepli (or slouched hat), plain hose and doublet—he had thrown aside his tabard—with a sword at his side, his right hand resting on the pommel, and the other grasping the hilt.' Before him lay a little book. He invited them in a friendly manner, bashful as they were, to take a seat by him, and spoke to them about the Wittenberg studies, about Melancthon and other men of learning, and as to what people thought of Luther in Switzerland. Discoursing thus, he made them feel so much at ease, that Kessler's companion took up the little book lying before him, and opened it: it was a Hebrew Psalter. At supper, where they were joined by two merchants, he paid for Kessler and his friend, and fascinated them all by his 'agreeable and godly discourse.' Afterwards he drank with his young friends 'one more friendly glass for a blessing,' gave them his hand at parting, and charged them to greet the jurist Schurf at Wittenberg, who was a fellow-countryman of theirs by birth, with the words 'He who is coming, salutes you.' The host had recognised Luther, and told his guests who he was. Early next morning the merchants found him in the stable: he mounted his horse, and rode forward on his way.
At Borna, where he lodged with an official of the Elector, he wrote in haste a long answer to the warning instructions of his prince, conveyed to him by the governor of Eisenach on the eve of his departure. He did not seek to excuse himself, or to beg forgiveness, but to quiet his 'most gracious Highness,' and confirm him in the faith. He had never spoken with greater certainty about what he had to do, nor with a calmer and more joyful, bold, and proud assurance, in view of what lay before him, than now, when he had to encounter, on two contrary sides, opposition and danger. In his resolve and his hopes he threw himself entirely on his God. 'I go to Wittenberg,' he writes to Frederick, 'under a far higher protection than yours. Nay, I hold that I can offer your Highness more protection than your Highness can offer me…. God alone must be the worker here, without any human care or help; therefore, he who has the most faith will be able to give the most protection.' To the question what the Elector should do in his cause, he answered, 'nothing at all.' The Elector must allow the Imperial authorities to exercise their powers in his territory without let or hindrance, even if they chose to seize him or put him to death. The Elector would surely not be called on to be his executioner. Should he leave the door open and give safe-conduct to those who sought to capture him, he would have done his duty quite enough.
Luther rode on undaunted, even through the territory of Duke George, who was now violently exasperated with him and the people of Wittenberg; and on the evening of March 6 he reached his destination and his friends, safe in body and happy in his mind.
On the morning of the following Saturday, Kessler and his companion, on visiting Schurf, found Luther sitting at his house with Melancthon, Jonas, and Amsdorf, and telling them about his doings. Kessler thus describes his appearance. 'When I saw Martin in 1522, he was somewhat stout, but upright, bending backwards rather than stooping; with a face upturned to heaven; with deep, dark eyes and eyebrows, twinkling and sparkling like stars, so that one could hardly look steadily at them.'