A History of the Reformation (Vol. 1 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

Book II. The Reformation.

Chapter I. Luther to the Beginning of the Controversy About Indulgences.[130]

§ 1. Why Luther was successful as the Leader in a Reformation.

Reformation had been attempted in various ways. Learned ecclesiastical Jurists had sought to bring it about in the fifteenth century by what was called Conciliar Reform. [pg 190] The sincerity and ability of the leaders of the movement are unquestioned; but they had failed ignominiously, and the Papacy with all its abuses had never been so powerful ecclesiastically as when its superior diplomacy had vanquished the endeavour to hold it in tutelage to a council.

The Christian Humanists had made their attempt—preaching a moral renovation and the application of the existing laws of the Church to punish ecclesiastical wrong-doers. Colet eloquently assured the Anglican Convocation that the Church possessed laws which, if only enforced, contained provisions ample enough to curb and master the ills which all felt to be rampant. Erasmus had held up to scorn the debased religious life of the times, and had denounced its Judaism and Paganism. Both were men of scholarship and genius; but they had never been able to move society to its depths, and awaken a new religious life, which was the one thing needful.

History knows nothing of revivals of moral living apart from some new religious impulse. The motive power needed has always come through leaders who have had communion with the unseen. Humanism had supplied a superfluity of teachers; the times needed a prophet. They received one; a man of the people; bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh; one who had himself lived that popular religious life with all the thoroughness of a strong, earnest nature, who had sounded all its depths and tested its capacities, and gained in the end no relief for his [pg 191] burdened conscience; who had at last found his way into the presence of God, and who knew, by his own personal experience, that the living God was accessible to every Christian. He had won the freedom of a Christian man, and had reached through faith a joy in living far deeper than that which Humanism boasted. He became a leader of men, because his joyous faith made him a hero by delivering him from all fear of Church or of clergy—the fear which had weighed down the consciences of men for generations. Men could see what faith was when they looked at Luther.

It must never be forgotten that to his contemporaries Luther was the embodiment of personal piety. All spoke of his sensitiveness to religious impressions of all kinds in his early years. While he was inside the convent, whether before or after he had found deliverance for his troubles of soul, his fellows regarded him as a model of piety. In later days, when he stood forth as a Reformer, he became such a power in the hearts of men of all sorts and ranks, because he was seen to be a thoroughly pious man. Albert Dürer may be taken as a type. In the great painter's diary of the journey he made with his wife and her maid Susanna to the Netherlands (1520),—a mere summary of the places he visited and the persons he saw, of what he paid for food and lodging and travel, of the prices he got for his pictures, and what he paid for his purchases, literary and artistic,—he tells how he heard of Luther's condemnation at Worms, of the Reformer's disappearance, of his supposed murder by Popish emissaries (for so the report went through Germany), and the news compelled him to that pouring forth of prayers, of exclamations, of fervent appeals, and of bitter regrets, which fills three out of the whole forty-six pages. The Luther he almost worships is the “pious man,” the “follower of the Lord and of the true Christian faith,” the “man enlightened by the Holy Spirit,” the man who had been done to death by the Pope and the priests of his day, as the Son of God had been murdered by the priests of Jerusalem. The one [pg 192] thing which fills the great painter's mind is the personal religious life of the man Martin Luther.[131]

Another source of Luther's power was that he had been led step by step, and that his countrymen could follow him deliberately without being startled by any too sudden changes. He was one of themselves; he took them into his confidence at every stage of his public career; they knew him thoroughly. He had been a monk, and that was natural for a youth of his exemplary piety. He had lived a model monastic life; his companions and his superiors were unwearied in commending him. He had spoken openly what almost all good men had been feeling privately about Indulgences in plain language which all could understand; and he had gradually taught himself and his countrymen, who were following his career breathlessly, that the man who trusted in God did not need to fear the censures of Pope or of the clergy. He emancipated not merely the learned and cultivated classes, but the common people, from the fear of the Church; and this was the one thing needful for a true reformation. So long as the people of Europe believed that the priesthood had some mysterious powers, no matter how vague or indefinite, over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women, freedom of conscience and a renovation of the public and private moral life was impossible. The spiritual world will always have its anxieties and terrors for every Christian soul, and the greatest achievement of Luther was that by teaching and, above all, by example, he showed the common man that he was in God's hands, and not dependent on the blessing or banning of a clerical caste. For Luther's doctrine of Justification by Faith, as he himself showed in his tract on the Liberty of a Christian Man (1520), was simply that there was nothing in the indefinite claim which the mediæval Church had always made. From the moment the common people, simple men and women, knew and [pg 193] felt this, they were freed from the mysterious dread of Church and priesthood; they could look the clergy fairly in the face, and could care little for their threats. It was because Luther had freed himself from this dread, because the people, who knew him to be a deeply pious man, saw that he was free from it, and therefore that they need be in no concern about it, that he became the great reformer and the popular leader in an age which was compelled to revise its thoughts about spiritual things.

Hence it is that we may say without exaggeration that the Reformation was embodied in Martin Luther, that it lived in him as in no one else, and that its inner religious history may be best studied in the record of his spiritual experiences and in the growth of his religious convictions.

§ 2. Luther's Youth and Education.

Martin Luther was born in 1483 (Nov. 10th) at Eisleben, and spent his childhood in the small mining town of Mansfeld. His father, Hans Luther, had belonged to Möhra (Moortown), a small peasant township lying in the north-east corner of the Thuringian Wald, and his mother, Margarethe Ziegler, had come from a burgher family in Eisenach. It was a custom among these Thuringian peasants that only one son, and that usually the youngest, inherited the family house and the croft. The others were sent out one by one, furnished with a small store of money from the family strong-box, to make their way in the world. Hans Luther had determined to become a miner in the Mansfeld district, where the policy of the Counts of Mansfeld, of building and letting out on hire small smelting furnaces, enabled thrifty and skilled workmen to rise in the world. The father soon made his way. He leased one and then three of these furnaces. He won the respect of his neighbours, for he became, in 1491, one of the four members of the village council, and we are told that the Counts of Mansfeld held him in esteem.

In the earlier years, when Luther was a child, the [pg 194] family life was one of grinding poverty, and Luther often recalled the hard struggles of his parents. He had often seen his mother carrying the wood for the family fire from the forest on her poor shoulders. The child grew up among the hard, grimy, coarse surroundings of the German working-class life, protected from much that was evil by the wise severity of his parents. He imbibed its simple political and ecclesiastical ideas. He learned that the Emperor was God's ruler on earth, who would protect poor people against the Turk, and that the Church was the “Pope's House,” in which the Bishop of Rome was the house-father. He was taught the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer. He sang such simple evangelical hymns as “Ein Kindelein so lobelich,” “Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist,” and “Crist ist erstanden.” He was a dreamy, contemplative child; and the unseen world was never out of his thoughts. He knew that some of the miners practised sorcery in dark corners below the earth. He feared an old woman who lived near; she was a witch, and the priest himself was afraid of her. He was taught about Hell and Purgatory and the Judgment to come. He shivered whenever he looked at the stained-glass window in the parish church and saw the frowning face of Jesus, who, seated on a rainbow and with a flaming sword in His hand, was coming to judge him, he knew not when. He saw the crowds of pilgrims who streamed past Mansfeld, carrying their crucifixes high, and chanting their pilgrim songs, going to the Bruno Quertfort chapel or to the old church at Wimmelberg. He saw paralytics and maimed folk carried along the roads, going to embrace the wooden cross at Kyffhaüser, and find a miraculous cure; and sick people on their way to the cloister church at Wimmelberg to be cured by the sound of the blessed bells.

The boy Luther went to the village school in Mansfeld, and endured the cruelties of a merciless pedagogue. He was sent for a year, in 1497, to a school of the Brethren of the Common Lot in Magdeburg. Then he went to St. [pg 195] George's school in Eisenach, where he remained three years. He was a “poor scholar,” which meant a boy who received his lodging and education free, was obliged to sing in the church choir, and was allowed to sing in the streets, begging for food. The whole town was under the spell of St. Elizabeth, the pious landgravine, who had given up family life and all earthly comforts to earn a mediæval saintship. It contained nine monasteries and nunneries, many of them dating back to the days of St. Elizabeth; her good deeds were emblazoned on the windows of the church in which Luther sang as choir-boy; he had long conversations with the monks who belonged to her foundations. The boy was being almost insensibly attracted to that revival of the mediæval religious life which was the popular religious force of these days. He had glimpses of the old homely evangelical piety, this time accompanied by a refinement of manners Luther had hitherto been unacquainted with, in the house of a lady who is identified by biographers with a certain Frau Cotta. The boy enjoyed it intensely, and his naturally sunny nature expanded under its influence. But it did not touch him religiously. He has recorded that it was with incredulous surprise that he heard his hostess say that there was nothing on earth more lovely than the love of husband and wife, when it is in the fear of the Lord.

After three years' stay at Eisenach, Luther entered the University of Erfurt (1501), then the most famous in Germany. It had been founded in 1392 by the burghers of the town, who were intensely proud of their own University, and especially of the fact that it had far surpassed other seats of learning which owed their origin to princes. The academic and burgher life were allied at Erfurt as they were in no other University town. The days of graduation were always town holidays, and at the graduation processions the officials of the city walked with the University authorities. Luther tells us that when he first saw the newly made graduates marching in their new graduation robes in the middle of the procession, he thought that [pg 196] they had attained to the summit of earthly felicity. The University of Erfurt was also strictly allied to the Church. Different Popes had enriched it with privileges; the Primate of Germany, the Archbishop of Mainz, was its Chancellor: many of its professors held ecclesiastical prebends, or were monks; each faculty was under the protection of a tutelary saint; the teachers had to swear to teach nothing opposed to the doctrines of the Roman Church; and special pains were taken to prevent the rise and spread of heresy.

Its students were exposed to a greater variety of influences than those of any other seat of learning in Germany. Its theology represented the more modern type of scholastic, the Scotist; its philosophy was the nominalist teaching of William of Occam, whose great disciple, Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), had been one of its most celebrated professors; the system of biblical interpretation, first introduced by Nicholas de Lyra[132] (d. 1340), had been long taught at Erfurt by a succession of able masters; Humanism had won an early entrance, and in Luther's time the Erfurt circle of “Poets” was already famous. The strongly anti-clerical teaching of John of Wessel, who had lectured in Erfurt for fifteen years (1445-1460), had left its mark on the University, and was not forgotten. Hussite propagandists, Luther tells us, appeared from time to time, whispering among the students their strange, anti-clerical Christian socialism. While, as if by way of antidote, there came Papal Legates, whose magnificence bore witness to the might of the Roman Church.

Luther had been sent to Erfurt to learn Law, and the Faculty of Philosophy gave the preliminary training required. [pg 197] The young student worked hard at the prescribed tasks. The Scholastic Philosophy, he said, left him little time for classical studies, and he attended none of the Humanist lectures. He found time, however, to read a good many Latin authors privately, and also to learn something of Greek. Virgil and Plautus were his favourite authors; Cicero also charmed him; he read Livy, Terence, and Horace. He seems also to have read a volume of selections from Propertius, Persius, Lucretius, Tibullus, Silvius Italicus, Statius, and Claudian. But he was never a member of the Humanist circle; he was too much in earnest about religious questions, and of too practical a turn of mind.

The scanty accounts of Luther's student days show that he was a hardworking, bright, sociable youth, and musical to the core. His companions called him “the Philosopher,” “the Musician,” and spoke of his lute-playing, of his singing, and of his ready power in debate. He took his various degrees in unusually short time. He was Bachelor in 1502, and Master in 1505. His father, proud of his son's success, had sent him the costly present of a Corpus Juris. He may have begun to attend the lectures in the Faculty of Law, when he suddenly plunged into the Erfurt Convent of the Augustinian Eremites.

The action was so sudden and unexpected, that contemporaries felt bound to give all manner of explanations, and these have been woven together into accounts which are legendary.[133] Luther himself has told us that he entered the monastery because he doubted of himself; that in his [pg 198] case the proverb was true, “Doubt makes a monk.” He also said that his resolve was a sudden one, because he knew that his decision would grieve his father and his mother.

What was the doubting? We are tempted in these days to think of intellectual difficulties, and Luther's doubting is frequently attributed to the self-questioning which his contact with Humanism at Erfurt had engendered. But this idea, if not foreign to the age, was strange to Luther. His was a simple pious nature, practical rather than speculative, sensitive and imaginative. He could play with abstract questions; but it was pictures that compelled him to action. He has left on record a series of pictures which were making deeper and more permanent impression on him as the years passed; they go far to reveal the history of his struggles, and to tell us what the doubts were which drove him into the convent. The picture on the window in Mansfeld church of Jesus sitting on a rainbow, with frowning countenance and drawn sword in His hand, coming to judge the wicked; the altar-piece at Magdeburg representing a great ship sailing heavenwards, no one within the ship but priests or monks, and in the sea laymen drowning, or saved by ropes thrown to them by the priests and monks who were safe on board; the living picture of the prince of Anhalt, who to save his soul had become a friar, and carried the begging sack on his bent shoulders through the streets of Magdeburg; the history of St. Elizabeth blazoned on the windows of the church at Eisenach; the young Carthusian at Eisenach, who the boy thought was the holiest man he had ever talked to, and who had so mortified his body that he had come to look like a very old man; the terrible deathbed scene of the Erfurt ecclesiastical dignitary, a man who held twenty-two benefices, and whom Luther had often seen riding in state in the great processions, who was known to be an evil-liver, and who when he came to die filled the room with his frantic cries. Luther doubted whether he could ever do what he believed had to be done [pg 199] by him to save his soul if he remained in the world. That was what compelled him to become a monk, and bury himself in the convent. The lurid fires of Hell and the pale shades of Purgatory, which are the permanent background to Dante's Paradise, were present to Luther's mind from childhood. Could he escape the one and gain entrance to the other if he remained in the world? He doubted it, and entered the convent.

§ 3. Luther in the Erfurt Convent.

It was a convent of the Augustinian Eremites, perhaps the most highly esteemed of monastic orders by the common people of Germany during the earlier decades of the sixteenth century. They represented the very best type of that superstitious mediæval revival which has been already described.[134] It is a mistake to suppose that because they bore the name of Augustine, the evangelical theology of the great Western Father was known to them. Their leading theologians belonged to another and very different school. The two teachers of theology in the Erfurt convent, when Luther entered in 1505, were John Genser of Paltz, and John Nathin of Neuenkirchen. The former was widely known from his writings in favour of the strictest form of papal absolutism, of the doctrine of Attrition, and of the efficacy of papal Indulgences. It is not probable that Luther was one of his pupils; for he retired broken in health and burdened with old age in 1507.[135] The latter, though unknown beyond the walls of the convent, was an able and severe master. He was an ardent admirer of Gabriel Biel, of Peter d'Ailly, and of William of Occam their common master. He thought little of any independent [pg 200] study of the Holy Scriptures. “Brother Martin,” he once said to Luther, “let the Bible alone; read the old teachers; they give you the whole marrow of the Bible; reading the Bible simply breeds unrest.”[136] Afterwards he commanded Luther on his canonical obedience to refrain from Bible study.[137] It was he who made Luther read and re-read the writings of Biel, d'Ailly, and Occam, until he had committed to memory long passages; and who taught the Reformer to consider Occam “his dear Master.” Nathin was a determined opponent of the Reformation until his death in 1529; but Luther always spoke of him with respect, and said that he was “a Christian man in spite of his monk's cowl.”

Luther had not come to the convent to study theology; he had entered it to save his soul. These studies were part of the convent discipline; to engage in them, part of his vow of obedience. He worked hard at them, and pleased his superiors greatly; worked because he was a submissive monk. They left a deeper impress on him than most of his biographers have cared to acknowledge. He had more of the Schoolman in him and less of the Humanist than any other of the men who stood in the first line of leaders in the Reformation movement. Some of his later doctrines, and especially his theory of the Sacrament of the Supper, came to him from these convent studies in d'Ailly and Occam. But in his one great quest—how to save his soul, how to win the sense of God's pardon—they were more a hindrance than a help. His teachers might be Augustinian Eremites, but they had not the faintest knowledge of Augustinian experimental theology. They belonged to the most pelagianising school of mediæval Scholastic; and their last word always was that man must work out his own salvation. Luther tried to work it out [pg 201] in the most approved later mediæval fashion, by the strictest asceticism. He fasted and scourged himself; he practised all the ordinary forms of maceration, and invented new ones; but all to no purpose. For when an awakened soul, as he said long afterwards, seeks to find rest in work-righteousness, it stands on a foundation of loose sand which it feels running and travelling beneath it; and it must go from one good work to another and to another, and so on without end. Luther was undergoing all unconsciously the experience of Augustine, and what tortured and terrified the great African was torturing him. He had learned that man's goodness is not to be measured by his neighbour's but by God's, and that man's sin is not to be weighed against the sins of his neighbours, but against the righteousness of God. His theological studies told him that God's pardon could be had through the Sacrament of Penance, and that the first part of that sacrament was sorrow for sin. But then came a difficulty. The older, and surely the better theology, explained that this godly sorrow (contritio) must be based on love to God. Had he this love? God always appeared to him as an implacable Judge, inexorably threatening punishment for the breaking of a law which it seemed impossible to keep. He had to confess to himself that he sometimes almost hated this arbitrary Will which the nominalist Schoolmen called God. The more modern theology, that taught by the chief convent theologian, John of Paltz, asserted that the sorrow might be based on meaner motives (attritio), and that this attrition was changed into contrition in the Sacrament of Penance itself. So Luther wearied his superiors by his continual use of this sacrament. The slightest breach of the most trifling conventual regulation was looked on as a sin, and had to be confessed at once and absolution for it received, until the perplexed lad was ordered to cease confession until he had committed some sin worth confessing. His brethren believed him to be a miracle of piety. They boasted about him in their monkish fashion, and in all the monasteries around, and as far away as Grimma, the monks [pg 202] and nuns talked about the young saint in the Erfurt convent. Meanwhile the “young saint” himself lived a life of mental anguish, whispering to himself that he was “gallows-ripe.” Writing in 1518, years after the conflict was over, Luther tells us that no pen could describe the mental anguish he endured.[138] Gleams of comfort came to him, but they were transient. The Master of the Novices gave him salutary advice; an aged brother gave him momentary comfort. John Staupitz, the Vicar-General of the Congregation, during his visits to the convent was attracted by the traces of hidden conflicts and sincere endeavour of the young monk, with his high cheek-bones, emaciated frame, gleaming eyes, and looks of settled despair. He tried to find out his difficulties. He revoked Nathin's order that Luther should not read the Scriptures. He encouraged him to read the Bible; he gave him a Glossa Ordinaria or conventual ecclesiastical commentary, where passages were explained by quotations from eminent Church Fathers, and difficulties were got over by much pious allegorising; above all, he urged him to become a good localis and textualis in the Bible, i.e. one who, when he met with difficulties, did not content himself with commentaries, but made collections of parallel passages for himself, and found explanations of one in the others. Still this brought at first little help. At last Staupitz saw the young man's real difficulty, and gave him real and lasting assistance. He showed Luther that he had been rightly enough contrasting man's sin and God's holiness, and measuring the depth of the one by the height of the other; that he had been following the truest instincts of the deepest piety when he had set over-against each other the righteousness of God and the sin and helplessness of man; but that he had gone wrong when he kept these two [pg 203] thoughts in a permanent opposition. He then explained that, according to God's promise, the righteousness of God might become man's own possession in and through Christ Jesus. God had promised that man could have fellowship with Him; all fellowship is founded on personal trust; and trust, the personal trust of the believing man on a personal God who has promised, gives man that fellowship with God through which all things that belong to God can become his. Without this personal trust or faith, all divine things, the Incarnation and Passion of the Saviour, the Word and the Sacraments, however true as matters of fact, are outside man and cannot be truly possessed. But when man trusts God and His promises, and when the fellowship, which trust or faith always creates, is once established, then they can be truly possessed by the man who trusts. The just live by their faith. These thoughts, acted upon, helped Luther gradually to win his way to peace, and he told Staupitz long afterwards that it was he who had made him see the rays of light which dispelled the darkness of his soul.[139] In the end, the vision of the true relation of the believing man to God came to him suddenly with all the force of a personal revelation, and the storm-tossed soul was at rest. The sudden enlightenment, the personal revelation which was to change his whole life, came to him when he was reading the Epistle to the Romans in his cell. It came to Paul when he was riding on the road to Damascus; to Augustine as he was lying under a fig-tree in the Milan garden; to Francis as he paced anxiously the flag-stones of the Portiuncula chapel on the plain beneath Assisi; to Suso as he sat at table in the morning. It spoke through different words:—to Paul, “Why persecutest thou Me?”;[140] to Augustine, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh”;[141] to Francis, “Get you no gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, no wallet for your journey, neither two coats, nor shoes, nor staff”;[142] to Suso, “My son, if [pg 204] thou wilt hear My words.”[143] But though the words were different, the personal revelation, which mastered the men, was the same: That trust in the All-merciful God, who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, creates companionship with God, and that all other things are nothing in comparison with this fellowship. It was this contact with the Unseen which fitted Luther for his task as the leader of men in an age which was longing for a revival of moral living inspired by a fresh religious impulse.[144]

It is not certain how long Luther's protracted struggle lasted. There are indications that it went on for two years, and that he did not attain to inward peace until shortly before he was sent to Wittenberg in 1508. The intensity and sincerity of the conflict marked him for life. The conviction that he, weak and sinful as he was, nevertheless lived in personal fellowship with the God whose love he was experiencing, became the one fundamental fact of life on which he, a human personality, could take his stand as on a foundation of rock; and standing on it, feeling his own strength, he could also be a source of strength to others. Everything else, however venerable and sacred it might once have seemed, might prove untrustworthy without hereafter disturbing Luther's religious life, provided only this one thing remained to him. For the moment, however, nothing seemed questionable. The inward change [pg 205] altered nothing external. He still believed that the Church was the “Pope's House”; he accepted all its usages and institutions—its Masses and its relics, its indulgences and its pilgrimages, its hierarchy and its monastic life. He was still a monk and believed in his vocation.

Luther's theological studies were continued. He devoted himself especially to Bernard, in whose sermons on the Song of Solomon he found the same thoughts of the relation of the believing soul to God which had given him comfort. He began to show himself a good man of business with an eye to the heart of things. Staupitz and his chiefs entrusted him with some delicate commissions on behalf of the Order, and made quiet preparations for his advancement. In 1508 he, with a few other monks, was sent from Erfurt to the smaller convent at Wittenberg, to assist the small University there.

§ 4. Luther's early Life in Wittenberg.

About the beginning of the century, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony and head of the Ernestine branch of his family, had resolved to establish a University for his dominions. Frederick had maintained close relations with the Augustinian Eremites ever since he had made acquaintance with them when a schoolboy at Grimma, and the Vicar-General, John Staupitz, along with Dr. Pollich of Mellerstadt, were his chief advisers. It might almost be said that the new University was, from the beginning, an educational establishment belonging to the Order of monks which Luther had joined. Staupitz himself was one of the professors, and Dean of the Faculty of Theology; another Augustinian Eremite was Dean of the Faculty of Arts; the Patron Saints of the Order of the Blessed Virgin and St. Augustine were the Patron Saints of the University; St. Paul was the Patron Saint of the Faculty of Theology, and on the day of his conversion there was a special celebration of the Mass with a sermon, at which the Rector (Dr. Pollich) and the whole teaching staff were present.

The University was poorly endowed. Electoral Saxony was not a rich principality; some mining industry did exist in the south end, and Zwickau was the centre of a great weaving trade; but the great proportion of the inhabitants, whether of villages or towns, subsisted on agriculture of a poor kind. There was not much money at the Electoral court. A sum got from the sale of Indulgences some years before, which Frederick had not allowed to leave the country, served to make a beginning. The prebends attached to the Church of All Saints (the Castle Church) supplied the salaries of some professors; the others were Augustinian Eremites, who gave their services gratuitously.

The town of Wittenberg was more like a large village than the capital of a principality. In 1513 it only contained 3000 inhabitants and 356 rateable houses. The houses were for the most part mean wooden dwellings, roughly plastered with clay. The town lay in the very centre of Germany, but it was far from any of the great trade routes; the inhabitants had a good deal of Wendish blood in their veins, and were inclined to be sluggish and intemperate. The environs were not picturesque, and the surrounding country had a poor soil. Altogether it was scarcely the place for a University. Imperial privileges were obtained from the Emperor Maximilian, and the University was opened on the 18th of October 1502.

One or two eminent teachers had been induced to come to the new University. Staupitz collected promising young monks from many convents of his Order and enrolled them as students, and the University entered 416 names on its books during its first year. This success seems to have been somewhat artificial, for the numbers gradually declined to 56 in the summer session of 1505. Staupitz, however, encouraged Frederick to persevere.

It was in the interests of the young University that Luther and a band of brother monks were sent from Erfurt to the Wittenberg convent. There he was set to teach the Dialectic and Physics of Aristotle,—a hateful task,—but whether to the monks in the convent or in the University [pg 207] it is impossible to say. All the while Staupitz urged him to study theology in order to teach it. It was then that Luther began his systematic study of Augustine. He also began to preach. His first sermons were delivered in an old chapel, 30 feet long and 20 feet wide, built of wood plastered over with clay. He preached to the monks. Dr. Pollich, the Rector, went sometimes to hear him, and spoke to the Elector of the young monk with piercing eyes and strange fancies in his head.

His work was interrupted by a command to go to Rome on business of his Order (autumn 1511). His selection was a great honour, and Luther felt it to be so; but it may be questioned whether he did not think more of the fact that he would visit the Holy City as a devout pilgrim, and be able to avail himself of the spiritual privileges which he believed were to be found there. When he got to the end of his journey and first caught a glimpse of the city, he raised his hands in an ecstasy, exclaiming, “I greet thee, thou Holy Rome, thrice holy from the blood of the martyrs.”

When his official work was done he set about seeing the Holy City with the devotion of a pilgrim. He visited all the famous shrines, especially those to which Indulgences were attached. He listened reverently to all the accounts given of the relics which were exhibited to the pilgrims, and believed in all the tales told him. He thought that if his parents had been dead he could have assured them against Purgatory by saying Masses in certain chapels. Only once, it is said, his soul showed revolt. He was slowly climbing on his knees the Scala Santa (really a mediæval staircase), said to have been the stone steps leading up to Pilate's house in Jerusalem, once trodden by the feet of our Lord; when half-way up the thought came into his mind, The just shall live by his faith; he stood upright and walked slowly down. He saw, as thousands of pious German pilgrims had done before his time, the moral corruptions which disgraced the Holy City—infidel priests who scoffed at the sacred mysteries they performed, [pg 208] and princes of the Church who lived in open sin. He saw and loathed the moral degradation, and the scenes imprinted themselves on his memory; but his home and cloister training enabled him, for the time being, in spite of the loathing, to revel in the memorials of the old heroic martyrs, and to look on their relics as storehouses of divine grace. In later days it was the memories of the vices of the Roman Court that helped him to harden his heart against the sentiment which surrounded the Holy City.

When Luther returned to Wittenberg in the early summer of 1512, his Vicar-General sent him to Erfurt to complete his training for the doctorate in theology. He graduated as Doctor of the Holy Scripture, took the Wittenberg Doctor's oath to defend the evangelical truth vigorously (viriliter), was made a member of the Wittenberg Senate, and three weeks later succeeded Staupitz as Professor of Theology.

Luther was still a genuine monk, with no doubt of his vocation. He became sub-prior of the Wittenberg convent in 1512, and was made the District Vicar over the eleven convents in Meissen and Thuringia in 1515. But that side of his life may be passed over. It is his theological work as professor in Wittenberg University that is important for his career as a reformer.

§ 5. Luther's early Lectures in Theology.

From the beginning his lectures on theology differed from those ordinarily given, but not because he had any theological opinions at variance with those of his old teachers at Erfurt. No one attributed any sort of heretical views to the young Wittenberg professor. His mind was intensely practical, and he believed that theology might be made useful to guide men to find the grace of God and to tell them how, having acquired through trust a sense of fellowship with God, they could persevere in a life of joyous obedience to God and His commandments. The Scholastic theologians of Erfurt and elsewhere did not [pg 209] look on theology as a practical discipline of this kind. Luther thought that theology ought to discuss such matters, and he knew that his main interest in theology lay on this practical side. Besides, as he has told us, he regarded himself as specially set apart to lecture on the Holy Scriptures. So, like John Colet, he began by expounding the Epistles of St. Paul and the Psalms.

Luther never knew much Hebrew, and he used the Vulgate in his prelections. He had a huge widely printed volume on his desk, and wrote out the heads of his lectures between the printed lines. Some of the pages still survive in the Wolfenbüttel Library, and can be studied.[145]

He made some use of the commentaries of Nicholas de Lyra, but got most assistance from passages in Augustine, Bernard, and Gerson,[146] which dealt with practical religion,[147] [pg 210] His lectures were experimental. He started with the fact of man's sin, the possibility of reaching a sense of pardon and of fellowship with God through trust in His promises. From the beginning we find in the germ what grew to be the main thoughts in the later Lutheran theology. Men are redeemed apart from any merits of their own; God's grace is really His mercy revealed in the mission and work of Christ; it has to do with the forgiveness of sins, and is the fulfilment of His promises; man's faith is trust in the historical work of Christ and in the verity of God. These thoughts were for the most part all expressed in the formal language of the Scholastic Theology of the day. They grew in clearness, and took shape in a series of propositions which formed the common basis of his teaching: man wins pardon through the free grace of God: when man lays hold on God's promise of pardon he becomes a new creature; this sense of pardon is the beginning of a new life of sanctification; the life of faith is Christianity on its inward side; the contrast between the law and the gospel is something fundamental: there is a real distinction between the outward and visible Church and the ideal Church, which latter is to be described by its spiritual and moral relations to God after the manner of Augustine. All these thoughts simply pushed aside the ordinary theology as taught in the schools without staying to criticise it.

In the years 1515 and 1516, which bear traces of a more thoroughgoing study of Augustine and of the German mediæval Mystics, Luther began to find that he could not express the thoughts he desired to convey in the ordinary language of Scholastic Theology, and that its phrases suggested ideas other than those he wished to set forth. He tried to find another set of expressions. It is characteristic of Luther's conservatism, that in theological phraseology, as afterwards in ecclesiastical institutions and ceremonies, he preferred to retain what had been in use provided only he could put his own evangelical meaning into it in a not too arbitrary [pg 211] way.[148] Having found that the Scholastic phraseology did not always suit his purpose, he turned to the popular mystical authors, and discovered there a rich store of phrases in which he could express his ideas of the imperfection of man towards what is good. Along with this change in language, and related to it, we find evidence that Luther was beginning to think less highly of the monastic life with its external renunciations. The thought of predestination, meaning by that not an abstract metaphysical category, but the conception that the whole believer's life, and what it involved, depended in the last resort on God and not on man, came more and more into the foreground. Still there does not seem any disposition to criticise or to repudiate the current theology of the day.

The earliest traces of conscious opposition appeared about the middle of 1516, and characteristically on the practical and not on the speculative side of theology. They began in a sermon on Indulgences, preached in July 1516. Once begun, the breach widened until Luther could contrast “our theology”[149] (the theology taught by Luther and his colleagues at Wittenberg) with what was taught elsewhere, and notably at Erfurt. The former represented Augustine and the Holy Scriptures, and the latter was founded on Aristotle. In September 1517 he raised the standard of theological revolt, and wrote directly against the “Scholastic Theology”; he declared that it was Pelagian at heart, and buried out of sight the Augustinian doctrines of grace; he lamented the fact that it neglected to teach the supreme value of faith and of inward righteousness; that it encouraged [pg 212] men to seek escape from what was due for sin by means of Indulgences, instead of exhorting them to practise the inward repentance which belongs to every genuine Christian life.

It was at this interesting stage of his own religious development that Luther felt himself forced to oppose publicly the sale of Indulgences in Germany.

By the year 1517, Luther had become a power in Wittenberg both as a preacher and as a teacher. He had become the preacher in the town church, from whose pulpit he delivered many sermons every week, taking infinite pains to make himself understood by the “raw Saxons.” He became a great preacher, and, like all great preachers, he denounced prevalent sins, and bewailed the low standard of morals set before the people by the higher ecclesiastical authorities; he said that religion was not an easy thing; that it did not consist in the decent performance of external ceremonies; that the sense of sin, the experience of the grace of God, and the fear of God and the overcoming of that fear through the love of God, were all continuous experiences.

His exegetical lectures seemed like a rediscovery of the Holy Scriptures. Grave burghers of Wittenberg matriculated as students in order to hear them. The fame of the lecturer spread, and students from all parts of Germany crowded to the small remote University, until the Elector became proud of his seat of learning and of the man who had made it prosper.

Such a man could not keep silent when he saw what he believed to be a grave source of moral evil approaching the people whose souls God had given him in charge; and this is how Luther came to be a Reformer.

Up to this time he had been an obedient monk, doing diligently the work given him, highly esteemed by his superiors, fulfilling the expectations of his Vicar-General, and recognised by all as a quiet and eminently pious man. He had a strong, simple character, with nothing of the quixotic about him. Of course he saw the degradation of [pg 213] much of the religious life of the times, and had attended at least one meeting where those present discussed plans of reformation. He had then (at Leitzkau in 1512) declared that every true reformation must begin with individual men, that it must reveal itself in a regenerate heart aflame with faith kindled by the preaching of a pure gospel.

§ 6. The Indulgence-seller.

What drew Luther from his retirement was an Indulgence proclaimed by Pope Leo x., farmed by Albert of Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Mainz, and preached by John Tetzel, a Dominican monk, who had been commissioned by Albert to sell for him the Papal Letters, as the Indulgence tickets were called. It had been announced that the money raised by the sales would be used to build the Basilica of St. Peter to be a tomb worthy of the great Apostle, who rested, it was said, in a Roman grave.

The Indulgence-seller had usually a magnificent reception when he entered a German town. Frederick Mecum (Myconius), who was an eye-witness, thus describes the entrance of Tetzel into the town of Annaberg in Ducal Saxony:

“When the Commissary or Indulgence-seller approached the town, the Bull (proclaiming the Indulgence) was carried before him on a cloth of velvet and gold, and all the priests and monks, the town council, the schoolmasters and their scholars, and all the men and women went out to meet him with banners and candles and songs, forming a great procession; then all the bells ringing and all the organs playing, they accompanied him to the principal church; a red cross was set up in the midst of the church, and the Pope's banner was displayed; in short, one might think they were receiving God Himself.”

The Commissary then preached a sermon extolling the Indulgence, declaring that “the gate of heaven was open,” and that the sales would begin.

Many German princes had no great love for the Indulgence-sellers, and Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, [pg 214] had prohibited Tetzel from entering his territories. But the lands of Ernestine (Electoral) and Albertine (Ducal) Saxony were so mixed up that it was easy for the Commissary to command the whole population of Electoral Saxony without actually crossing the frontier. The “Red Cross” had been set up in Zerbst in Ducal Saxony a few miles to the west, and at Jüterbogk in the territory of Magdeburg a few miles to the east of Wittenberg, and people had gone from the town to buy the Indulgence. Luther believed that the sales were injurious to the moral and religious life of his townsmen; the reports of the sermons and addresses of the Indulgence-seller which reached him appeared to contain what he believed to be both lies and blasphemies. He secured a copy of the letter of recommendation given by the Archbishop to his Commissary, and his indignation grew stronger. Still it was only after much hesitation, after many of his friends had urged him to interfere, and in deep distress of mind, that he resolved to protest. When he had determined to do something he went about the matter with a mixture of caution and courage which were characteristic of the man.

The Church of All Saints (the Castle Church) in Wittenberg had always been intimately connected with the University; its prebendaries were professors; its doors were used as a board on which to publish important academic documents; and notices of public academic “disputations,” common enough at the time, had frequently appeared there. The day of the year which drew the largest concourse of townsmen and strangers to the church was All Saints' Day, the first of November. It was the anniversary of the consecration of the building, and was commemorated by a prolonged series of services. The Elector Frederick was a great collector of relics, and had stored his collection in the church.[150] He had also procured an [pg 215] Indulgence to benefit all who came to attend the anniversary services and look at the relics.

On All Saints' Day, Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church. It was a strictly academic proceeding. The Professor of Theology in Wittenberg, wishing to elucidate the truth, offered to discuss, either by speech or by writing, the matter of Indulgences.[151] He put forth ninety-five propositions or heads of discussion which he proposed to maintain. Academic etiquette was strictly preserved; the subject, judged by the numberless books which had been written on it, and the variety of opinions expressed, was eminently suitable for debate; the Theses were offered as subjects of debate; and the author, according to the usage of the time in such cases, was not supposed to be definitely committed to the opinions expressed.

The Theses, however, differed from most programmes of academic discussions in this, that everyone wanted to read them. A duplicate was made in German. Copies of the Latin original and the translation were sent to the University printing-house, and the presses could not throw them off fast enough to meet the demand which came from all parts of Germany.

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Chapter II. From The Beginning of the Indulgence Controversy to the Diet of Worms.[152]

§ 1. The Theory and Practice of Indulgences in the Sixteenth Century.

The practice of Indulgences pervaded the whole penitential system of the later mediæval Church, and had done so from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Its beginnings go back a thousand years before Luther's time.

In the ancient Church, lapse into serious sin involved separation from the Christian fellowship, and readmission to communion was only to be had by public confession made in presence of the whole congregation, and by the manifestation of a true repentance in performing certain satisfactions,[153] [pg 217] such as the manumission of slaves, prolonged fasting, extensive almsgiving, etc. These satisfactions were the open signs of heartfelt sorrow, and were regarded as at once well-pleasing to God and evidence to the Christian community that the penitent had true repentance, and might be received back again into their midst. The confession was made to the whole congregation; the amount of satisfaction deemed necessary was estimated by the congregation, and readmission was also dependent on the will of the whole congregation. It often happened that these satisfactions were mitigated or exchanged for others. The penitent might fall sick, and the fasting which had been prescribed could not be insisted upon without danger of death; in such a case the external sign of sorrow which had been demanded might be exchanged for another. Or it might happen that the community became convinced of the sincerity of the repentance without insisting that the whole of the prescribed satisfaction need be performed.[154] These exchanges and mitigations of satisfactions were the small beginnings of the later system of Indulgences.

In course of time the public confession of sins made to the whole congregation was exchanged for a private confession made to the priest, and instead of the public satisfaction imposed by the whole congregation, it was left to the priest to enjoin a satisfaction or external sign of [pg 218] sorrow which he believed was appropriate to the sin committed and confessed. The substitution of a private confession to the priest for a public confession made to the whole congregation, enlarged the circle of sins confessed. The secret sins of the heart whose presence could be elicited by the questions of the confessor were added to the open sins seen of men. The circle of satisfactions was also widened in a corresponding fashion.

When the imposition of satisfactions was left in the hands of the priest, it was felt necessary to provide some check against the arbitrariness which could not fail to result. So books were published containing lists of sins with the corresponding appropriate satisfactions which ought to be demanded from the penitents. If it be remembered that some of the sins mentioned were very heinous (murders, incests, outrages of all kinds), it is not surprising that the appropriate satisfactions or penances, as they came to be called, were very severe in some cases, and extended over a course of years. From the seventh century there arose a practice of commuting satisfactions or penances. A penance of several years' practice of fasting might be commuted into saying so many prayers or psalms, into giving a definite amount of alms, or even into a money fine—and in this last case the analogy of the Wehrgeld of the Germanic tribal codes was frequently followed.[155] These customary commutations were frequently inserted in the Penitentiaries or books of discipline. This new custom commonly took the form that the penitent, who visited a certain church on a prescribed day and gave a contribution to its funds, had the penance, which had been imposed upon him by the priest in the ordinary course of discipline, shortened by one-seventh, one-third, one-half, as the case might be. This was in every case the commutation or relaxation of the penance or outward sign of sorrow which [pg 219] had been imposed according to the regulations of the Church, laid down in the Penitentiaries (relaxatio de injuncta pœnitentia). This was the real origin of Indulgences, and these earliest examples were invariably a relaxation of ecclesiastical penalties which had been imposed according to the regular custom in cases of discipline. It will be seen that Luther expressly excluded this kind of Indulgence from his attack. He declared that what the Church had a right to impose, it had a right to relax. It was at first believed that this right to relax or commute imposed penances was in the hands of the priests who had charge of the discipline of the members of the Church; but the abuses of the system by the priests ended by placing the power to grant Indulgences in the hands of the bishops, and they used the money procured in building many of the great mediæval cathedrals. Episcopal abuse of Indulgences led to their being reserved for the Popes.

Three conceptions, all of which belong to the beginning of the thirteenth century, combined to effect a great change on this old and simple idea of Indulgences. These were—(1) the formulation of the thought of a treasury of merits (thesaurus meritorum); (2) the change of the institution into the Sacrament of Penance; and (3) the distinction between attrition and contrition in the thought of the kind of sorrow God demands from a real penitent.

The conception of a storehouse of merits (thesaurus meritorum or indulgentiarum) was first formulated by Alexander of Hales[156] in the thirteenth century, and his ideas were accepted, enlarged, and made more precise by succeeding theologians.[157] Starting with the existing practice in the Church that some penances (such as pilgrimages) might be vicariously performed, and bringing together the several thoughts that the faithful are members of one body, that the good deeds of each of the members are the common property of all, and therefore that the more [pg 220] sinful can benefit by the good deeds of their more saintly brethren, and that the sacrifice of Christ was sufficient to wipe out the sins of all, theologians gradually formulated the doctrine that there was a common storehouse which contained the good deeds of living men and women, of the saints in heaven and the inexhaustible merits of Christ, and that all these merits accumulated there had been placed under the charge of the Pope, and could be dispensed by him to the faithful. The doctrine was not very precisely defined by the beginning of the sixteenth century, but it was generally believed in, taught, and accepted. It went to increase the vague sense of supernatural, spiritual powers attached to the person of the Bishop of Rome. It had one important consequence on the doctrine of Indulgences. They might be the payment out of this treasury of an absolute equivalent for the satisfaction due by the penitent for his sins; they were no longer merely the substitution of one form of penance for another, or the relaxation of a penance enjoined.

The institution of Penance contained within it the four practices of Sorrow for the sins committed (contritio); the Confession of these sins to the priest; Satisfaction, or the due manifestation of sorrow in the ways prescribed by the Church through the command of the confessor; and the Pardon (absolutio) pronounced by the priest in God's name. The pardon followed the satisfaction. But when the institution became the Sacrament of Penance, the order was changed: absolution followed confession and came before satisfaction, which it had formerly followed. Satisfaction lost its old meaning. It was no longer the outward sign of sorrow and the necessary precedent of pardon or absolution. According to the new theory, the absolution which immediately followed confession had the effect of removing the whole guilt of the sins confessed, and with the guilt the whole of the eternal punishment due. This cancelling of guilt and of eternal punishment did not, however, forthwith open the gates of heaven to the pardoned sinner. It was felt that the justice of God could [pg 221] not permit the baptized sinner to escape from all punishment whatever. Hence it was said that although eternal punishment had disappeared with the absolution, there remained temporal punishment due for the sins, and that heaven could not be entered until this temporal punishment had been endured.[158] Temporal punishments might be of two kinds—those endured in this life, or those suffered in a place of punishment after death. The penance imposed by the priest, the satisfaction, now became the temporal punishment due for sins committed. If the priest had imposed the due amount, and if the penitent was able to perform all that had been imposed, the sins were expiated. But if the priest had imposed less than the justice of God actually demanded, then these temporal pains had to be completed in Purgatory. This gave rise to great uncertainty; for who could feel assured that the priest had calculated rightly, and had imposed satisfactions or temporal penalties which were of the precise amount demanded by the justice of God? Hence the pains of Purgatory threatened every man. It was here that the new idea of Indulgences came in to aid the faithful by securing him against the pains of Purgatory, which were not included in the absolution obtained in the Sacrament of Penance. Indulgences in the sense of relaxations of imposed penances went into the background, and the really valuable Indulgence was one which, because of the merits transferred from the storehouse of merits, was an equivalent in God's sight for the temporal punishments due for sins. Thus, in the opinion of Alexander of Hales, of Bonaventura,[159] and, above all, of Thomas Aquinas, the real [pg 222] value of Indulgences was that they procured the remission of penalties due after absolution, whether these penalties were penances imposed by the priest or not; and when the uncertainty of the imposed penalties is remembered, the most valuable of all Indulgences were those which had regard to the unimposed penalties; the priest might make a mistake, but God did not blunder.

While Indulgences were always connected with satisfactions, and changed with the changes in the meaning of the latter term, they were not the less influenced by a distinction which came to be drawn between attrition and contrition, and by the application of the distinction to the theory of the Sacrament of Penance. During the earlier Middle Ages and down to the thirteenth century, it was always held that contrition (sorrow prompted by love) was the one thing taken into account by God in pardoning the sinner. The theologians of the thirteenth century, however, began to draw a distinction between this godly sorrow and a certain amount of sorrow which might arise from a variety of causes of a less worthy nature, and especially from servile fear. This was called attrition; and it was held that this attrition, though of itself too imperfect to win the pardon of God, might become perfected through the confession heard by the priest, and in the sacramental absolution pronounced by him. Very naturally, though perhaps illogically, it was believed that an imperfect sorrow, though sufficient to procure absolution, and, therefore, the blotting out of eternal punishment, merited more temporal punishment than if it had been sorrow of a godly sort. But it was these temporal penalties (including the pains of Purgatory) that Indulgences provided for. Hence, Indulgences appealed more strongly to the indifferent Christian, who knew that he had sinned, and at the same time felt that his sorrow was not the effect of his love to God. He knew that his sins deserved some punishment. His conscience, however weak, told him that he could not sin with perfect impunity, and that something more was needed than his perfunctory confession to a priest. He [pg 223] felt that he must do something—fast, or go on a pilgrimage, or purchase an Indulgence. It was at this point that the Church intervened to show him how his poor performance could be transformed by the power of the Church and its treasury of merits into something so great that the penalties of Purgatory could be actually evaded. His cheap sorrow, his careless confession, need not trouble him. Hence, for the ordinary indifferent Christian, Attrition, Confession, and Indulgence became the three heads of the scheme of the Church for his salvation. The one thing that satisfied his conscience was the burdensome thing he had to do, and that was to procure an Indulgence—a matter made increasingly easy for him as time went on.

It must not be supposed that this doctrine of Attrition, and its evident effect in deadening the conscience and in lowering the standard of morality, had the undivided support of the theologians of the later Middle Ages, but it was the doctrine taught by most of the Scotist theologians, who took the lead in theological thinking during these times. It was set forth in its most extravagant form by such a representative man as John of Paltz in Erfurt; it was preached by the pardon-sellers; it was eagerly welcomed by indifferent Christians, who desired to escape the penalties of sin without abandoning its enjoyments; it exalted the power of the priesthood; and it was specially valuable in securing good sales of Indulgences, and therefore in increasing the papal revenues. It lay at the basis of the whole theory and practice of Indulgences, which confronted Luther when he issued his Theses.

History shows us that gross abuses had always gathered round the practice of Indulgences, even in their earlier and simpler forms. The priests had abused the system, and the power of issuing Indulgences had been taken from them and confined to the bishops. The bishops, in turn, had abused the privilege, and the Popes had gradually assumed that the power to grant an Indulgence belonged [pg 224] to the Bishop of Rome exclusively, or to those to whom he might delegate it; and this assumption seemed both reasonable and salutary. The power was at first sparingly used. It is true that Pope Urban ii., in 1095, promised to the Crusaders an Indulgence such as had never before been heard of—a complete remission of all imposed canonical penances; but it was not until the thirteenth and fourteen centuries that Indulgences, now doubly dangerous to the moral life from the new theories which had arisen, were lavished even more unsparingly than in the days when any bishop had power to grant them. From the beginning of the fourteenth century they were given to raise recruits for papal wars. They were lavished on the religious Orders, either for the benefit of the members or for the purpose of attracting strangers and their gifts to their churches. They were bestowed on cathedrals and other churches, or on individual altars in churches, and had the effect of endowments. They were joined to special collections of relics, to be earned by the faithful who visited the shrines. They were given to hospitals, and for the upkeep of bridges and of roads. Wherever they are met with in the later Middle Ages, and it would be difficult to say where they are not to be found, they are seen to be associated with sordid money-getting, and, as Luther remarked in an early sermon on the subject, they were a very grievous instrument placed in the hand of avarice.

The practice of granting Indulgences was universally prevalent and was universally accepted; but it was not easy to give an explanation of the system, in the sense of showing that it was an essential element in Christian discipline. No mediæval theologian attempted to do any such thing. Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas, the two great Schoolmen who did more than any others to provide a theological basis for the system, tell us quite frankly that it is their business to accept the fact that Indulgences do exist as part of the penitentiary discipline of the Church, and, accepting it, they thought themselves bound to construct a [pg 225] reasonable theory.[160] The practice altered, and new theories were needed to explain the variations. It is needless to say that these explanations did not always agree; and that there were very great differences of opinion about what an Indulgence really effected for the man who bought it.

Of all these disputed questions the most important was: Did an Indulgence give remission for the guilt of sin, or only for certain penalties which followed the sinful deed? This is a question about which modern Romanists are extremely sensitive.

The universal answer given by all defenders of Indulgences who have written on the subject since the Council of Trent, is that guilt (culpa) and eternal punishment (pœnæ eternæ) are dealt with in the Sacrament of Penance, and that Indulgences relate only to temporal punishments, including under that designation the pains of Purgatory. This modern opinion is confirmed by the most eminent authorities of the mediæval Church. It has been accepted in the description of the theory of Indulgences given above, since it has been said that the principal use of Indulgences was to secure against Purgatory. But these statements do not exhaust the question. Mediæval theology did not create Indulgences, it only followed and tried to justify the practices of the Pope and of the Roman Curia,—a rather difficult task. The question still remains whether some of the Papal Bulls promulgating Indulgences did not promise the removal of guilt as well as security against temporal punishments. If these be examined, spurious Bulls being set aside, it will be found that many of them make no mention of the need of previous confession and of priestly absolution; that one or two expressly make mention of a remission of guilt as well as of penalty; and that many (especially those which proclaim [pg 226] a Jubilee Indulgence) use language which inevitably led intelligent laymen like Dante to believe that the Popes did proclaim the remission of guilt as well as of penalty. Of course, it may be said that in those days the distinction between guilt (culpa) and penalty (pœna) had not been very exactly defined, and that the phrase remission of sins was used to denote both remission of guilt and remission of penalty; still it is difficult to withstand the conclusion that, even in theory, Indulgences had been declared to be efficacious for the removal of the guilt of sin in the presence of God.

These questions of the theological meaning of an Indulgence, though necessary to understand the whole situation, had after all little to do with Luther's action. He approached the whole matter from the side of the practical effect of the proclamation of an Indulgence on the minds of common men who knew nothing of refined theological distinctions; and the evidence that the common people did generally believe that an Indulgence did remove the guilt of sin is overwhelming. Contemporary chroniclers are to be found who declare that Indulgences given to Crusaders remit the guilt as well as the punishment; contemporary preachers assert that plenary Indulgences remit guilt, and justify their opinion by declaring that such Indulgences were supposed to contain within them the Sacrament of Penance. The popular guide-books written for pilgrims to Rome and Compostella spread the popular idea that Indulgences acquired by such pilgrimages do remit guilt as well as penalty. The popular belief was so thoroughly acknowledged, that even Councils had to throw the blame for it on the pardon-sellers, or, like the Council of Constance, impeached the Pope and compelled him to confess that he had granted Indulgences for the remission of guilt as well as of penalty. This widespread popular belief of itself justified Luther in calling attention to this side of the matter.

Moreover, it is well to see what the theory of the most respected theologians actually meant when looked at [pg 227] practically. Since the formulation of the Sacrament of Penance, the theory had been that all guilt of sin and all eternal punishment were remitted in the priestly absolution which followed the confession of the penitent. The Sacrament of Penance had abolished guilt and Hell. But there remained the actual sins to be punished, because the justice of God demanded it, and this was done in the temporal pains of Purgatory. The “common man,” if he thought at all about it, may be excused if he considered that guilt and Hell, taken away by the one hand, were restored by the other. There remained for him the sense that God's justice demanded some punishment for the sins he had committed; and if this was not guilt according to theological definition, it was probably all that he could attain to. He was taught and believed that punishment awaited him for these actual sins of his; and a punishment which might last thousands of years in Purgatory was not very different from an eternal punishment in his eyes. The Indulgence came to him filled as he was with these vague thoughts, and offered him a sure way of easing his conscience and avoiding the punishment he knew he deserved. He had only to pay the price of a Papal Ticket, perform the canonical good deed required, whatever it might be, and he was assured that his punishment was remitted, and God's justice satisfied. This may not involve the thought of the remission of guilt in the theological sense of the word, but it certainly misled the moral instincts of the “common man” about as much as if it did. It is not surprising that the common people made the theological mistake, if mistake it was, and saw in every plenary Indulgence the promise of the remission of guilt as well as of penalty,[161] for with them remission of guilt and quieting of conscience were one and the same thing. It was this practical moral effect of Indulgences, and not the theological explanation of the theory, which stirred Luther to make his protest.

§ 2. Luther's Theses.[162]

Luther's Theses are singularly unlike what might have been expected from a Professor of Theology. They lack theological definition, and contain many repetitions which might have been easily avoided. They are simply ninety-five sturdy strokes struck at a great ecclesiastical abuse which was searing the consciences of many. They look like the utterances of a man who was in close touch with the people; who had been greatly shocked at reports brought to him of what the pardon-sellers had said; who had read a good many of the theological explanations of the practice of Indulgence, and had noted down a few things which he desired to contradict. They read as if they were meant for laymen, and were addressed to their common sense of spiritual things. They are plain and easily understood, and keep within the field of simple religion and plain moral truths.

The Theses appealed irresistibly to all those who had been brought up in the simple evangelical faith which distinguished the quiet home life of so many German families, and who had not forsaken it. They also appealed to all who had begun to adopt that secular or non-ecclesiastical piety which, we have seen, had been spreading quietly but rapidly throughout Germany at the close of the Middle Ages. These two forces, both religious, gathered round Luther. The effect of the Theses was almost immediate: [pg 229] the desire to purchase Indulgences cooled, and the sales almost stopped.

The Ninety-five Theses made six different assertions about Indulgences and their efficacy:

i. An Indulgence is and can only be the remission of a merely ecclesiastical penalty; the Church can remit what the Church has imposed; it cannot remit what God has imposed.

ii. An Indulgence can never remit guilt; the Pope himself cannot do such a thing; God has kept that in His own hand.

iii. It cannot remit the divine punishment for sin; that also is in the hands of God alone.

iv. It can have no efficacy for souls in Purgatory; penalties imposed by the Church can only refer to the living; death dissolves them; what the Pope can do for souls in Purgatory is by prayer, not by jurisdiction or the power of the keys.

v. The Christian who has true repentance has already received pardon from God altogether apart from an Indulgence, and does not need one; Christ demands this true repentance from every one.

vi. The Treasury of Merits has never been properly defined, it is hard to say what it is, and it is not properly understood by the people; it cannot be the merits of Christ and of His saints, because these act of themselves and quite apart from the intervention of the Pope; it can mean nothing more than that the Pope, having the power of the keys, can remit ecclesiastical penalties imposed by the Church; the true Treasure-house of merits is the Holy Gospel of the grace and glory of God.

The Archbishop of Mainz, finding that the publication of the Theses interfered with the sale of the Indulgences, sent a copy to Rome. Pope Leo, thinking that the whole thing was a monkish quarrel, contented himself with asking the General of the Augustinian Eremites to keep his monks quiet. Tetzel, in conjunction with a friend, Conrad Wimpina, published a set of counter-theses. John Mayr [pg 230] of Eck, professor at Ingolstadt, by far the ablest opponent Luther ever had, wrote an answer to the Theses which he entitled Obelisks;[163] and Luther replied in a tract with the title Asterisks. At Rome, Silvester Mazzolini (1460-?) of Prierio, a Dominican monk, papal censor for the Roman Province and an Inquisitor, was profoundly dissatisfied with the Ninety-five Theses, and proceeded to criticise them severely in a Dialogue about the Power of the Pope; against the Presumptuous Conclusions of Martin Luther. The book reached Germany by the middle of January 1518. The Augustinian Eremites held their usual annual chapter at Heidelberg in April 1518, and Luther heard his Theses temperately discussed by his brother monks. He found the opposition to his views much stronger than he had expected; but the discussion was fair and honest, and Luther enjoyed it after the ominous silence kept by most of his friends, who had thought his action rash. When he returned from Heidelberg he began a general answer to his opponents. The book, Resolutiones, was probably the most carefully written of all Luther's writings. He thought long over it, weighed every statement carefully, and rewrote portions several times. The preface, addressed to his Vicar-General, Staupitz, contains some interesting autobiographical material; it was addressed to the Pope; it was a detailed defence of his Theses.[164]

The Ninety-five Theses had a circulation which was, for the time, unprecedented. They were known throughout Germany in a little over a fortnight; they were read over Western Europe within four weeks “as if they had been circulated by angelic messengers,” says Myconius enthusiastically. Luther was staggered at the way they were [pg 231] received; he said that he had not meant to determine, but to debate. The controversy they awakened increased their popularity. In the Theses, and especially in the Resolutiones, Luther had practically discarded all the practices which the Pope and the Roman Curia had introduced in the matter of Indulgences from the beginning of the thirteenth century, and all the ingenious explanations Scholastic theologians had brought forward to justify these practices. The readiest way to refute him was to assert the power of the Roman Bishop; and this was the line taken by his critics. Their arguments amount to this: the power to issue an Indulgence is simply a particular instance of the power of papal jurisdiction, and Indulgences are simply what the Pope proclaims them to be. Therefore, to attack Indulgences is to attack the power of the Pope, and that cannot be tolerated. The Roman Church is virtually the Universal Church, and the Pope is practically the Roman Church. Hence, as the representative of the Roman Church, which in turn represents the Church Universal, the Pope, when he acts officially, cannot err. Official decisions are given in actions as well as in words, custom has the force of law. Therefore, whoever objects to such a long-established system as Indulgences is a heretic, and does not deserve to be heard.[165]

But the argument which appealed most powerfully to the Roman Curia was the fact that the sales of the Papal Tickets had been declining since the publication of the Theses. Indulgences were the source of an enormous revenue, and anything which checked their sale would cause financial embarrassment. Pope Leo x. in his “enjoyment of the Papacy” lived lavishly. He had a huge income, much greater than that of any European monarch, but he lived beyond it. His income amounted to between four and five hundred thousand ducats; but he had spent seven hundred thousand on his war about the Duchy of Urbino; the magnificent reception of his brother Julian [pg 232] and his bride in Rome (1514) had cost him fifty thousand ducats; and he had spent over three hundred thousand on the marriage of his nephew Lorenzo (1518). Voices had been heard in Rome as well as in Germany protesting against this extravagance. The Pope was in desperate need of money. It is scarcely to be wondered that Luther was summoned to Rome (summons dated July 1518, and received by Luther on August 7th) to answer for his attack on the Indulgence system. To have obeyed would have meant death.

The peremptory summons could be construed as an affront to the University of Wittenberg, on whose boards the Ninety-five Theses had been posted. Luther wrote to his friend Spalatin (George Burkhardt of Spalt, 1484-1545), who was chaplain and private secretary to the Elector Frederick, suggesting that the prince ought to defend the rights of his University. Spalatin wrote at once to the Elector and also to the Emperor Maximilian, and the result was that the summons to Rome was cancelled, and it was arranged that the matter was to be left in the hands of the Papal Legate in Germany, Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan[166] (1470-1553), and Luther was ordered to present himself before that official at Augsburg. The interview (October 1518) was not very satisfactory. The cardinal demanded that Luther should recant his heresies without any argument. When pressed to say what the heresies were, he named the statement in the 58th Thesis that the merits of Christ work effectually without the intervention of the Pope, and that in the Resolutiones which said that the sacraments are not efficacious apart from faith in the recipient. There was some discussion notwithstanding the Legate's declaration; but in the end Luther was ordered to recant or [pg 233] depart. He wrote out an appeal from the Pope ill-informed to the Pope well-informed, also an appeal to a General Council, and returned to Wittenberg.

When Luther had posted his Theses on the doors of the Church of All Saints, he had been a solitary monk with nothing but his manhood to back him; but nine months had made a wonderful difference in the situation. He now knew that he was a representative man, with supporters to be numbered by the thousand. His colleagues at Wittenberg were with him; his students demonstratively loyal (they had been burning the Wimpina-Tetzel counter-theses); his theology was spreading among all the cloisters of his Order in Germany, and even in the Netherlands; and the rapid circulation of his Theses had shown him that he had the ear of Germany. His first task, on his return to Wittenberg, was to prepare for the press an account of his interview with Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, and this was published under the title, Acta Augustana.

Luther was at pains to take the people of Germany into his confidence; he published an account of every important interview he had; the people were able to follow him step by step, and he was never so far in advance that they were unable to see his footprints. The immediate effect of the Acta Augustana was an immense amount of public sympathy for Luther. The people, even the Humanists who had cared little for the controversy, saw that an eminently pious man, an esteemed teacher who was making his obscure University famous, who had done nothing but propose a discussion on the notoriously intricate question of Indulgences, was peremptorily ordered to recant and remain silent. They could only infer that the Italians treated the Germans contemptuously, and wished simply to drain the country of money to be spent in the luxuries of the papal court. The Elector Frederick shared the common opinion, and was, besides, keenly alive to anything which touched his University and its prosperity. There is no evidence to show that he had much [pg 234] sympathy with Luther's views. But the University of Wittenberg, the seat of learning he had founded, so long languishing with a very precarious life and now flourishing, was the apple of his eye; and he resolved to defend it, and to protect the teacher who had won renown for it.

The political situation in Germany was too delicate, and the personal political influence of Frederick too great, for the Pope to act rashly in any matter in which that prince took a deep interest. The country was on the eve of an election of a King of the Romans; Maximilian was old, and an imperial election might occur at any time; and Frederick was one of the most important factors in either case. So the Pope resolved to act cautiously. The condemnation of Luther by the Cardinal-Legate was held over, and a special papal delegate was sent down to Germany to make inquiries. Every care was taken to select a man who would be likely to be acceptable to the Elector. Charles von Miltitz, a Saxon nobleman belonging to the Meisen district, a canon of Mainz, Trier, and Meissen, a papal chamberlain, an acquaintance of Spalatin's, the Elector's own agent at the Court of Rome, was sent to Germany. He took with him the “Golden Rose” as a token of the Pope's personal admiration for the Elector. He was furnished with numerous letters from His Holiness to the Elector, to some of the Saxon councillors, to the magistrates of Wittenberg, in all of which Luther figured as a child of the Devil. The phrase was probably forgotten when Leo wrote to Luther some time afterwards and called him his dear son.

When Miltitz got among German speaking people he found that the state of matters was undreamt of at the papal court. He was a German, and knew the Germans. He could see, what the Cardinal-Legate had never perceived, that he had to deal not with the stubbornness of a recalcitrant monk, but with the slow movement of a nation. When he visited his friends and relations in Augsburg and Nürnberg, he found that three out of five were on Luther's side. He came to the wise resolution that he would see [pg 235] both Luther and Tetzel privately before producing his credentials. Tetzel he could not see. The unhappy man wrote to Miltitz that he dared not stir from his convent, so greatly was he in danger from the violence of the people. Miltitz met Luther in the house of Spalatin; he at once disowned the speeches of the pardon-sellers; he let it be seen that he did not think much of the Cardinal-Legate's methods of action; he so prevailed on Luther that the latter promised to write a submissive letter to the Pope, to advise people to reverence the Roman See, to say that Indulgences were useful in the remission of canonical penances. Luther did all this; and if the Roman Curia had supported Miltitz there is no saying how far the reconciliation would have gone. But the Roman Curia did not support the papal chamberlain, and Miltitz had also to reckon with John Eck, who was burning to extinguish Luther in a public discussion.

The months between his interview at Augsburg (October 1518) and the Disputation with John Eck at Leipzig (June 1519) had been spent by Luther in hard and disquieting studies. His opponents had confronted him with the Pope's absolute supremacy in all ecclesiastical matters. This was one of Luther's oldest inherited beliefs. The Church had been for him “the Pope's House,” in which the Pope was the house-father, to whom all obedience was due. It was hard for him to think otherwise. He had been re-examining his convictions about justifying faith and attempting to trace clearly their consequences, and whether they did lead to his declarations about the efficacy of Indulgences. He could come to no other conclusion. It became necessary to investigate the evidence for the papal claim to absolute authority. He began to study the Decretals, and found, to his amazement and indignation, that they were full of frauds; and that the papal supremacy had been forced on Germany on the strength of a collection of Decretals many of which were plainly forgeries. It is difficult to say whether the discovery brought more joy or more grief to Luther. Under the combined [pg 236] influences of historical study, of the opinions of the early Church Fathers, and of the Holy Scriptures, one of his oldest landmarks was crumbling to pieces. His mind was in a whirl of doubt. He was half-exultant and half-terrified at the result of his studies; and his correspondence reveals how his mood of mind changed from week to week. It was while he was thus “on the swither,” tremulously on the balance, that John Eck challenged him to dispute at Leipzig on the primacy and supremacy of the Roman Pontiff. The discussion might clear the air, might make himself see where he stood. He accepted the challenge almost feverishly.

§ 3. The Leipzig Disputation.[167]

Leipzig was an enemies' country, and his Wittenberg friends would not allow Luther to go there unaccompanied. The young Duke Barnim, who was Rector of the University of Wittenberg, accompanied Carlstadt and Luther, to give them the protection of his presence. Melanchthon, who had been a member of the teaching staff of Wittenberg since August 1518, Justus Jonas, and Nicholas Amsdorf went along with them. Two hundred Wittenberg students in helmets and halberts formed a guard, and walked beside the two country carts which carried their professors. An eye-witness of the scenes at Leipzig has left us sketches of what he saw:

“In the inns where the Wittenberg students lodged, the landlord kept a man standing with a halbert near the table to keep the peace while the Leipzig and the Wittenberg students disputed with each other. I have seen the same myself in the house of Herbipolis, a bookseller, where I went to dine ... for there was at table a Master Baumgarten ... who was so hot against the Wittenbergers that the host had to restrain him with a halbert to make him keep the peace so long as the Wittenbergers were in the house and sat and ate at the table with him.”

The University buildings at Leipzig did not contain any hall large enough for the audience, and Duke George lent the use of his great banqueting-room for the occasion. The discussions were preceded by a service in the church.

“When we got to the church ... they sang a Mass with twelve voices which had never been heard before. After Mass we went to the Castle, where we found a great guard of burghers in their armour with their best weapons and their banners; they were ordered to be there twice a day, from seven to nine in the morning and from two to five in the afternoon, to keep the peace while the Disputation lasted.”[168]

First, there was a Disputation between Carlstadt and Eck, and then, on the fourth of July, Eck and Luther faced each other—both sons of peasants, met to protect the old or cleave a way for the new.

It was the first time that Luther had ever met a controversialist of European fame. John Eck came to Leipzig fresh from his triumphs at the great debates in Vienna and Bologna, and was and felt himself to be the hero of the occasion.

“He had a huge square body, a full strong voice coming from his chest, fit for a tragic actor or a town crier, more harsh than distinct; his mouth, eyes, and whole aspect gave one the idea of a butcher or a soldier rather than of a theologian. He gave one the idea of a man striving to overcome his opponent rather than of one striving to win a victory for the truth. There was as much sophistry as good reasoning in his arguments; he was continually misquoting his opponents' words or trying to give them a meaning they were not intended to convey.”

“Martin,” says the same eye-witness,

“is of middle height; his body is slender, emaciated by study and by cares; one can count almost all the bones; he stands in the prime of his age; his voice sounds clear and distinct ... however hard his opponent pressed him he maintained his calmness and his good nature, though in debate he sometimes used bitter words.... He carried a [pg 238]bunch of flowers in his hand, and when the discussion became hot he looked at it and smelt it.”[169]

Eck's intention was to force his opponent to make some declaration which would justify him in charging Luther with being a partisan of the mediæval heretics, and especially of the Hussites. He continually led the debate away to the Waldensians, the followers of Wiclif, and the Bohemians. The audience swayed with a wave of excitement when Luther was gradually forced to admit that there might be some truth in some of the Hussite opinions:

“One thing I must tell which I myself heard in the Disputation, and which took place in the presence of Duke George, who came often to the Disputation and listened most attentively; once Dr. Martin spoke these words to Dr. Eck when hard pressed about John Huss: ‘Dear Doctor, the Hussite opinions are not all wrong.’ Thereupon said Duke George, so loudly that the whole audience heard, ‘God help us, the pestilence!’ (Das walt, die Sucht), and he wagged his head and placed his arms akimbo. That I myself heard and saw, for I sat almost between his feet and those of Duke Barnim of Pomerania, who was then the Rector of Wittenberg.”[170]

So far as the dialectic battle was concerned, Eck had been victorious. He had done what he had meant to do. He had made Luther declare himself. All that was now needed was a Papal Bull against Luther, and the world would be rid of another pestilent heretic. He had done what the more politic Miltitz had wished to avoid. He had concentrated the attention of Germany on Luther, and had made him the central figure round which all the smouldering discontent could gather. As for Luther, he returned to Wittenberg full of melancholy forebodings. They did not prevent him preparing and publishing for the German people an account of the Disputation, which [pg 239] was eagerly read. His arguments had been historical rather than theological. He tried to show that the acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome was barely four hundred years old in Western Europe, and that it did not exist in the East. The Greek Church, he said, was part of the Church of Christ, and it would have nothing to do with the Pope; the great Councils of the Early Christian centuries knew nothing about papal supremacy. Athanasius, Basil, the Gregories, Cyprian himself, had all taken Luther's own position, and were heretics, according to Eck. Luther's speeches at Leipzig laid the foundation of that modern historical criticism of institutions which has gone so far in our own days.

In some respects the Leipzig Disputation was the most important point in the career of Luther. It made him see for the first time what lay in his opposition to Indulgences. It made the people see it also. His attack was no criticism, as he had at first thought, of a mere excrescence on the mediæval ecclesiastical system. He had struck at its centre; at its ideas of a priestly mediation which denied the right of every believer to immediate entrance into the very presence of God. It was after the Disputation at Leipzig that the younger German Humanists rallied round Luther to a man; that the burghers saw that religion and opposition to priestly tyranny were not opposite things; and that there was room for an honest attempt to create a Germany for the Germans independent of Rome. Luther found himself a new man after Leipzig, with a new freedom and wider sympathies. His depression fled. Sermons, pamphlets, letters from his tireless pen flooded the land, and were read eagerly by all classes of the population.

§ 4. The Three Treatises.[171]

Three of these writings stand forth so pre-eminently that they deserve special notice: The Liberty of a Christian Man, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, and [pg 240] On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. These three books are commonly called in Germany the Three Great Reformation Treatises, and the title befits them well. They were all written during the year 1520, after three years spent in controversy, at a time when Luther felt that he had completely broken from Rome, and when he knew that he had nothing to expect from Rome but a sentence of excommunication. His teaching may have varied in details afterwards, but in all essential positions it remained what is to be found in these books.

The tract on The Liberty of a Christian Man, “a very small book so far as the paper is concerned,” said Luther, “but one containing the whole sum of the Christian life,” had a somewhat pathetic history. Miltitz, hoping against hope that the Pope would not push things to extremities, had asked Luther to write out a short summary of his inmost beliefs and send it to His Holiness. Luther consented, and this little volume was the result. It has for preface Luther's letter to Pope Leo x., which concludes thus: “I, in my poverty, have no other present to make you, nor do you need to be enriched by anything but a spiritual gift.” It was probably the last of the three published (Oct. 1520), but it contains the principles which underlie the other two.

The booklet is a brief statement, free from all theological subtleties, of the priesthood of all believers which is a consequence of the fact of justification by faith alone. Its note of warning to Rome, and its educational value for pious people in the sixteenth century, consisted in its showing that the man who fears God and trusts in Him need not fear the priests nor the Church. The first part proves that every spiritual possession which a man has or can have must be traced back to his faith; if he has faith, he has all; if he has not faith, he has nothing. It is the possession of faith which gives liberty to a Christian man; God is with him, who can be against him?

“Here you will ask, ‘If all who are in the Church are priests, by what character are those whom we now call [pg 241]priests to be distinguished from the laity?’ I reply, By the use of those words priests, clergy, spiritual person, ecclesiastic, an injustice has been done, since they have been transferred from the remaining body of Christians to those few who are now, by a hurtful custom, called ecclesiastics. For the Holy Scripture makes no distinction between them, except that those who are now boastfully called Popes, Bishops, and Lords, it calls ministers, servants, and stewards, who are to serve the rest in the ministry of the Word, for teaching the faith of Christ and the liberty of believers. For though it is true that we are all equally priests, yet cannot we, nor ought we if we could, all to minister and teach publicly.”

The second part shows that everything that a Christian man does must come from his faith. It may be necessary to use all the ceremonies of divine service which past generations have found useful to promote the religious life; perhaps to fast and practise mortifications of the flesh; but if such things are to be really profitable, they must be kept in their proper place. They are good deeds not in the sense of making a man good, but as the signs of his faith; they are to be practised with joy because they are done for the sake of the God who has united Himself with man through Jesus Christ.

Nothing that Luther has written more clearly manifests that combination of revolutionary daring and wise conservatism which was characteristic of the man. There is no attempt to sweep away any ecclesiastical machinery, provided only it be kept in its proper place as a means to an end. But religious ceremonies are not an end in themselves; and if through human corruption and neglect of the plain precepts of God's word they hinder instead of help the true growth of the soul, they ought to be swept away; and the fact that the soul of man needs absolutely nothing in the last resort but the word of God dwelling in him, gives men courage and calmness in demanding their reformation.

Luther applied those principles to the reformation of the Church in his book on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Sept.-Oct. 1520). He subjected the elaborate [pg 242] sacramental system of the Church to a searching criticism, and concluded that there are only two, or perhaps three, scriptural sacraments—the Eucharist, Baptism, and Penance. He denounced the doctrine of Transubstantiation as a “monstrous phantom” which the Church of the first twelve centuries knew nothing about, and said that any endeavour to define the precise manner of Christ's Presence in the sacrament is simply indecent curiosity. Perhaps the most important practical portion of the book deals with the topic of Christian marriage. In no sphere of human life has the Roman Church done more harm by interfering with simple scriptural directions:

“What shall we say of those impious human laws by which this divinely appointed manner of life has been entangled and tossed up and down? Good God! it is horrible to look upon the temerity of the tyrants of Rome, who thus, according to their caprices, at one time annul marriages and at another time enforce them. Is the human race given over to their caprice for nothing but to be mocked and abused in every way, that these men may do what they please with it for the sake of their own fatal gains? ... And what do they sell? The shame of men and women, a merchandise worthy of these traffickers, who surpass all that is most sordid and most disgusting in their avarice and impiety.”

Luther points out that there is a clear scriptural law on the degrees within which marriage is unlawful, and says that no human regulations ought to forbid marriages outside these degrees or permit them within. He also comes to the conclusion that divorce a mensa et thoro is clearly permitted in Scripture; though he says that personally he hates divorce, and “prefers bigamy to it.”

The appeal To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation made the greatest immediate impression. It was written in haste, but must have been long thought over. Luther began the introduction on June 23rd (1520); the book was ready by the middle of August; and by the 18th, four thousand copies were in circulation throughout Germany, and the presses could not print fast enough for the [pg 243] demand. It was a call to all Germany to unite against Rome.

It was nobly comprehensive: it grasped the whole situation, and summed up with vigour and clearness all the German grievances which had hitherto been stated separately and weakly; it brought forward every partial proposal of reform, however incomplete, and quickened it by setting it in its proper place in one combined scheme. All the parts were welded together by a simple and courageous faith, and made living by the moral earnestness which pervaded the whole.

Luther struck directly at the imaginary mysterious semi-supernatural power supposed to belong to the Church and the priesthood which had held Europe in awed submission for so many centuries. Reform had been impossible, the appeal said, because the walls behind which Rome lay entrenched had been left standing—walls of straw and paper, but in appearance formidable. These sham fortifications are: the Spiritual Power which is believed to be superior to the temporal power of kings and princes, the conception that no one can interpret Scripture but the Pope, the idea that no one can summon a General Council but the Bishop of Rome. These are the threefold lines of fortification behind which the Roman Curia has entrenched itself, and the German people has long believed that they are impregnable. Luther sets to work to demolish them.

The Romanists assert that the Pope, bishops, priests, and monks belong to and constitute the spiritual estate, while princes, lords, artisans, and peasants are the temporal estate, which is subject to the spiritual. But this spiritual estate is a mere delusion. The real spiritual estate is the whole body of believers in Jesus Christ, and they are spiritual because Jesus has made all His followers priests to God and to His Christ. A cobbler belongs to the spiritual estate as truly as a bishop. The clergy are distinguished from the laity not by an indelible character imposed upon them in a divine mystery called ordination, but because they have been set apart to do a particular [pg 244] kind of work in the commonwealth. If a Pope, bishop, priest, or monk neglects to do the work he is there to do, he deserves to be punished as much as a careless mason or tailor, and is as accountable to the civil authorities. The spiritual priesthood of all believers, the gift of the faith which justifies, has shattered the first and most formidable of these papal fortifications.

It is foolish to say that the Pope alone can interpret Scripture. If that were true, where is the need of Holy Scriptures at all?

“Let us burn them, and content ourselves with the unlearned gentlemen at Rome, in whom the Holy Ghost alone dwells, who, however, can dwell in pious souls only. If I had not read it, I could never have believed that the devil should have put forth such follies at Rome and find a following.”

The Holy Scripture is open to all, and can be interpreted by all true believers who have the mind of Christ and approach the word of God humbly seeking enlightenment.

The third wall falls with the other two. It is nonsense to say that the Pope alone can call a Council. We are plainly taught in Scripture that if our brother offends we are to tell it to the Church; and if the Pope offends, and he often does, we can only obey Scripture by calling a Council. Every individual Christian has a right to do his best to have it summoned; the temporal powers are there to enforce his wishes; Emperors called General Councils in the earlier ages of the Church.

The straw and paper walls having been thus cleared away, Luther proceeds to state his indictment. There is in Rome one who calls himself the Vicar of Christ, and who lives in a state of singular resemblance to our Lord and to St. Peter, His apostle. For this man wears a triple crown (a single one does not content him), and keeps up such a state that he needs a larger personal revenue than the Emperor. He has surrounding him a number of men, called cardinals, whose only apparent use is that they serve to draw to themselves the revenues of the richest [pg 245] convents, endowments, and benefices in Europe, and spend the money thus obtained in keeping up the state of a great monarch in Rome. When it is impossible to seize the whole revenue of an ecclesiastical benefice, the Curia joins some ten or twenty together, and mulcts each in a good round sum for the benefit of the cardinal. Thus the priory of Würzburg gives one thousand gulden yearly, and Bamberg, Mainz, and Trier pay their quotas. The papal court is enormous,—three thousand papal secretaries, and hangers-on innumerable; and all are waiting for German benefices, whose duties they never fulfil, as wolves wait for a flock of sheep. Germany pays more to the Curia than it gives to its own Emperor. Then look at the way Rome robs the whole German land. Long ago the Emperor permitted the Pope to take the half of the first year's income from every benefice—the Annates—to provide for a war against the Turks. The money was never spent for the purpose destined; yet it has been regularly paid for a hundred years, and the Pope demands it as a regular and legitimate tax, and uses it to pay posts and offices at Rome.

“Whenever there is any pretence of fighting the Turk, they send out commissions for collecting money, and often proclaim Indulgences under the same pretext.... They think that we, Germans, will always remain such great fools, and that we will go on giving money to satisfy their unspeakable greed, though we see plainly that neither Annates nor Indulgence-money nor anything—not one farthing—goes against the Turks, but all goes into their bottomless sack, ... and all this is done in the name of Christ and of St. Peter.”

The chicanery used to get possession of German benefices for officials of the Curia, the exactions on the bestowal of the pallium, the trafficking in exemptions and permissions to evade laws ecclesiastical and moral, are all trenchantly described. The most shameless are those connected with marriage. The Curial Court is described as a place

“where vows are annulled; where a monk gets leave to quit his cloister; where priests can enter the married life [pg 246]for money; where bastards can become legitimate, and dishonour and shame may arrive at high honours, and all evil repute and disgrace is knighted and ennobled; where a marriage is suffered that is in a forbidden degree, or has some other defect.... There is a buying and selling, a changing, blustering, and bargaining, cheating and lying, robbing and stealing, debauchery and villainy, and all kinds of contempt of God, that Antichrist himself could not reign worse.”

The plan of reform sketched includes—the complete abolition of the power of the Pope over the State; the creation of a national German Church, with an ecclesiastical Council of its own to be the final court of appeal for Germany, and to represent the German Church as the Diet did the German State; some internal religious reforms, such as the limitation of the number of pilgrimages, which were destroying morality and creating a distaste for honest work; reductions in the mendicant orders and in the number of vagrants who thronged the roads, and were a scandal in the towns.

“It is of much more importance to consider what is necessary for the salvation of the common people than what St. Francis, or St. Dominic, or St. Augustine, or any other man laid down, especially as things have not turned out as they expected.”

He proposes the inspection of all convents and nunneries, and permission given to those who are dissatisfied with their monastic lives to return to the world; the limitation of ecclesiastical holy days, which are too often nothing but scenes of drunkenness, gluttony, and debauchery; a married priesthood, and an end put to the degrading concubinage of the German priests.

“We see how the priesthood is fallen, and how many a poor priest is encumbered with a woman and children, and burdened in his conscience, and no one does anything to help him, though he might very well be helped.... I will not conceal my honest counsel, nor withhold comfort from that unhappy crowd who now live in trouble with wife and children, and remain in shame with a heavy conscience, [pg 247]hearing their wife called a priest's harlot, and their children bastards.... I say that these two (who are minded in their hearts to live together in conjugal fidelity) are surely married before God.”

The appeal concludes with some solemn words addressed to the luxury and licensed immorality of the German towns.

None of Luther's writings produced such an instantaneous effect as this. It was not the first programme urging common action in the interests of a united Germany, but it was the most complete, and was recognised to be so by all who were working for a Germany for the Germans.

The three “Reformation treatises” were the statement of Luther's case laid before the people of the Fatherland, and were a very effectual antidote to the Papal Bull excommunicating him, which was ready for publication in Germany.

§ 5. The Papal Bull.

The Bull, Exurge Domine, was scarcely worthy of the occasion. The Pope seems to have left its construction in the hands of Prierias, Cajetan, and Eck, and the contents seem to show that Eck had the largest share in framing it. Much of it reads like an echo of Eck's statements at Leipzig a year before. It began pathetically: “Arise, O Lord, plead Thine own cause; remember how the foolish man reproacheth Thee daily; the foxes are wasting Thy vineyard, which Thou hast given to Thy Vicar Peter; the boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it.” St. Peter is invoked, and the Pope's distress at the news of Luther's misdeeds is described at length. The most disturbing thing is that the errors of the Greeks and of the Bohemians were being revived, and that in Germany, which had hitherto been so faithful to the Holy See. Then came forty-one propositions, said to be Luther's, which are condemned as “heretical or scandalous, or false or offensive to pious ears, or seducing to simple minds, and standing in the way of the Catholic [pg 248] faith.”[172] All faithful people were ordered to burn Luther's books wherever they could find them. Luther himself had refused to come to Rome and submit to instruction; he had even appealed to a General Council, contrary to the decrees of Julius ii. and Pius ii.; he was therefore inhibited from preaching; he and all who followed him were ordered to make public recantation within sixty days; if they did not, they were to be treated as heretics, were to be seized and imprisoned by the magistrates, and all towns or districts which sheltered them were to be placed under an interdict.

Among the forty-one propositions condemned was one—that the burning of heretics was a sin against the Spirit of Christ—to which the Pope seemed to attach special significance, so often did he repeat it in letters to the Elector Frederick and other authorities in Germany. The others may be arranged in four classes—against Luther's opinions about Indulgences; his statements about Purgatory; his declarations that the efficacy of the sacraments depended upon the spiritual condition of those who received them; that penance was an outward sign of sorrow, and that good works (ecclesiastical and moral) were to be regarded as the signs of faith rather than as making men actually righteous; his denial of the later curial assertions of the nature of the papal monarchy over the Church. Luther's opinions on all these points could be supported by abundant testimony from the earlier ages of the Church, and most of his criticisms were directed against theories which had not been introduced before the middle of the thirteenth century. The Bull made no attempt to argue about the truth of the positions taken in its sentences. There was nothing done to show that Luther's opinions were wrong. The one dominant note running all through the papal deliverance was the simple assertion of the Pope's right to order any discussion to cease at his command.

This did not help to commend the Bull to the people of Germany, and was specially unsuited to an age of restless [pg 249] mental activity. The method adopted for publishing it in Germany was still less calculated to win respect for its decisions. The publication was entrusted to John Eck of Ingolstadt, who was universally recognised as Luther's personal enemy; and the hitherto unheard of liberty was granted to him to insert at his pleasure the names of a certain number of persons, and to summon them to appear before the Roman Curia. He showed how unfit he was for this responsible task by inserting the names of men who had criticised or satirised him—Adelmann, Pirkheimer, Carlstadt, and three others.[173]

Eck discovered that it was an easier matter to get permission from the Roman Curia to frame a Bull against the man who had stopped the sale of Indulgences, and was drying up a great source of revenue, than to publish the Bull in Germany. It was thought at Rome that no man had more influence among the bishops and Universities, but the Curia soon learnt that it had made a mistake. The Universities stood upon their privileges, and would have nothing to do with John Eck. The bishops made all manner of technical objections. Many persons affected to believe that the Bull was not authentic; and Luther himself did not disdain to take this line in his tract, Against the Execrable Bull of Antichrist. Eck, who had come down to Germany inflated with vanity, found himself mocked and scorned. Pirkheimer dubbed him gehobelter Eck, Eck with the swelled head, and the epithet stuck. Nor was the publication any easier when the pretence of unauthenticity could be maintained no longer. The University of Wittenberg refused to publish the Bull, [pg 250] on the ground that the Pope would not have permitted its issue had he known the true state of matters, and they blamed Eck for misinforming His Holiness: the Council of Electoral Saxony agreed with the Senate; and their action was generally commended. Spalatin said that he had seen at least thirty letters from great princes and learned men of all districts in Germany, from Pomerania to Switzerland, and from the Breisgau to Bohemia, encouraging Luther to stand firm. Eck implored the bishops of the dioceses surrounding Wittenberg—Merseburg, Meissen, and Brandenburg—to publish the Bull. They were either unwilling or powerless.

Luther had been expecting a Bull against him ever since the Leipzig Disputation. His correspondence reveals that he met it undismayed. What harm could a papal Bull do to a man whose faith had given him fellowship with God? What truth could there be in a Bull which clearly contradicted the Holy Scriptures? St. Paul has warned us against believing an angel from heaven if he uttered words different from the Scriptures, which are our strength and our consolation; why should we pin our faith to a Pope or a Council? The Bull had done one thing for him, it had made him an excommunicated man, and therefore had freed him from his monastic vows. He could leave the convent when he liked, only he did not choose to do so. When he heard that his writings had been burnt as heretical by order of the Papal Legates, he resolved to retaliate. It was no sudden decision. Eleven months previously he had assured Spalatin (January 1520) that if Rome condemned and burnt his writings he would condemn and burn the papal Decretal Laws. On December 10th (1520) he posted a notice inviting the Wittenberg students to witness the burning of the papal Constitutions and the books of Scholastic Theology at nine o'clock in the morning.[174] A multitude of students, [pg 251] burghers, and professors met in the open space outside the Elster Gate between the walls and the river Elbe. A great bonfire had been built. An oak tree planted long ago still marks the spot. One of the professors kindled the pile; Luther laid the books of the Decretals on the glowing mass, and they caught the flames; then amid solemn silence he placed a copy of the Bull on the fire, saying in Latin: As thou hast wasted with anxiety the Holy One of God, so may the eternal flames waste thee (Quia tu conturbasti Sanctum Domini, ideoque te conturbet ignis eternus). He waited till the paper was consumed, and then with his friends and fellow-professors he went back to the town. Some hundreds of students remained standing round the fire. For a while they were sobered by the solemnity of the occasion and sang the Te Deum. Then a spirit of mischief seized them, and they began singing funeral dirges in honour of the burnt Decretals. They got a peasant's cart, fixed in it a pole on which they hung a six-foot-long banner emblazoned with the Bull, piled the small cart with the books of Eck, Emser, and other Romish controversialists, hauled it along the streets and out through the Elster Gate, and, throwing books and Bull on the glowing embers of the bonfire, they burnt them. Sobered again, they sang the Te Deum and finally dispersed.

It is scarcely possible for us in the twentieth century to imagine the thrill that went through Germany, and indeed through all Europe, when the news sped that a poor monk had burnt the Pope's Bull. Papal Bulls had been burnt before Luther's days, but the burners had been for the most part powerful monarchs. This tune it was done by a monk, with nothing but his courageous faith to back him. It meant that the individual soul had discovered its [pg 252] true value. If eras can be dated, modern history began on December 10th, 1520.

§ 6. Luther the Representative of Germany.

Hitherto we have followed Luther's personal career exclusively. It may be well to turn aside for a little to see how the sympathy of many classes of the people was gathering round him.

The representatives of foreign States who were present at the Diet of Worms, of England, Spain, and Venice, all wrote home to their respective governments about the extraordinary popularity which Luther enjoyed among almost every class of his fellow-countrymen; and, as we shall see, the despatches of Aleander, the papal nuncio at the Diet, are full of statements and complaints which confirm these reports. This popularity had been growing since 1517, and there are traces that many thoughtful men had been attracted to Luther some years earlier. The accounts of Luther's interview with Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, and his attitude at the Leipzig Disputation, had given a great impulse to the veneration with which people regarded him; but the veneration itself had been quietly growing, apart from any striking incidents in his career. The evidence for what follows has been collected chiefly from such private correspondence as has descended to us; and most stress has been laid on letters which were not addressed to Luther, and which were never meant to be seen by him. Men wrote to each other about him, and described the impression he was making on themselves and on the immediate circle of their acquaintances. We learn from such letters not merely the fact of the esteem, but what were the characteristics in the man which called it forth.[175]

A large part of the evidence comes from the correspondence of educated men, who, if they were not all [pg 253] Humanists strictly so called, belonged to that increasing class on whom the New Learning had made a great impression, and had produced the characteristic habit of mind which belonged to its possessors. The attitude and work of Erasmus had prepared them to appreciate Luther. The monkish opponents of the great Humanist had been thoroughly in the right when they feared the effects of his revolutionary ways of thinking, however they might be accompanied with appeals against all revolutionary action. He had exhibited his idea of what a life of personal religion ought to be in his Enchiridion; he had exposed the mingled Judaism and paganism of a great part of the popular religion; he had poured scorn on the trifling subtleties of scholastic theology, and had asked men to return to a simple “Christian Philosophy”; above all, he had insisted that Christianity could only renew its youth by going back to the study of the Holy Scriptures, and especially of the New Testament; and he had aided his contemporaries to make this return by his edition of the New Testament, and by his efforts to bring within their reach the writings of the earlier Church Fathers. His Humanist followers in Germany believed that they saw in Luther a man who was doing what their leader urged all men to do. They saw in Luther an Erasmus, who was going to the root of things. He was rejecting with increasing determination the bewildering sophistries of Scholasticism, and, what was more, he was showing how many of these had arisen by exalting the authority of the pagan Aristotle over that of St. Paul and St. Augustine. He had painfully studied these Schoolmen, and could speak with an authority on this matter; for he was a learned theologian. The reports of his lectures, which were spreading throughout Germany, informed them that he based his teaching on a simple exposition of the Holy Scriptures in the Vulgate version, which was sanctioned by the mediæval Church. He had revolted, and was increasingly in revolt, against those abuses in the ordinary religious life which were encouraged from sordid motives by the Roman Curia,—abuses which [pg 254] Erasmus had pierced through and through with the light darts of his sarcasm; and Luther knew, as Erasmus did not, what he was speaking about, for he had surrendered himself to that popular religion, and had sought in it desperately for a means of reconciliation with God without succeeding in his quest. They saw him insisting, with a strenuousness no Humanist had exhibited, on the Humanist demand that every man had a right to stand true to his own personal conscientious convictions. If some of them, like Erasmus, in spite of their scorn of monkery, still believed that the highest type of the religious life was a sincere self-sacrificing Franciscan monk, they saw their ideal in the Augustinian Eremite, whose life had never been stained by any monkish scandal, and who had been proclaimed by his brother monks to be a model of personal holiness. They were sure that when he pled heroically for the freedom of the religious life, his courage, which they could not emulate, rested on a depth and strength of personal piety which they sadly confessed they themselves did not possess. If they complained at times that Luther spoke too strongly against the Pope, they admitted that he was going to the root of things in his attack. All clear-sighted men perceived that the one obstacle to reform was the theory of the papal monarchy, which had been laboriously constructed by Italian canonists after the failure of Conciliar reform,—a theory which defied the old mediæval ecclesiastical tradition, and contradicted the solemn decisions of the great German Councils of Constance and Basel. Luther's attacks on the Papacy were not stronger than those of Gerson and d'Ailly, and his language was not more unmeasured than that of their common master, William of Occam. There was nothing in these early days to prevent men who were genuinely attached to the mediæval Church, its older theology and its ancient rites, from rallying round Luther. When the marches began to be redd, and the beginnings of a Protestant Church confronted the mediæval, the situation was changed. Many who had enthusiastically supported Luther left him.

Conrad Mutianus, canon of Gotha, and the veteran leader of the Erfurt circle of Humanists, wrote admiringly of the originality of Luther's sermons as early as 1515. He applauded the stand he took at Leipzig, and spoke of him as Martinum, Deo devotissimum doctorem. His followers were no longer contented with a study of the classical authors. Eobanus Hessus, crowned “poet-king” of Germany, abandoned his Horace for the Enchiridion of Erasmus and the Holy Scriptures. Justus Jonas (Jodocus Koch of Nordlingen) forsook classical Greek to busy himself with the Epistles to the Corinthians. The wicked satirist, Curicius Cordus, betook himself to the New Testament. They did this out of admiration for Erasmus, “their father in Christ.” But when Luther appeared, when they read his pamphlets circulating through Germany, when they followed, step by step, his career, they came under the influence of a new spell. The Erasmici, to use the phrases of the times, diminished, and the Martiniani increased in numbers. One of the old Erfurt circle, Johannes Crotus Rubeanus, was in Rome. His letters, passed round among his friends, made no small impression upon them. He told them that he was living in the centre of the plague-spot of Europe. He reviled the Curia as devoid of all moral conscience. “The Pope and his carrion-crows” were sitting content, gorged on the miseries of the Church. When Crotus received from Germany copies of Luther's writings, he distributed them secretly to his Italian friends, and collected their opinions to transmit to Germany. They were all sympathetically impressed with what Luther said, but they pitied him as a man travelling along a very dangerous road; no real reform was possible without the destruction of the whole curial system, and that was too powerful for any man to combat. Yet Luther was a hero; he was the Pater Patriæ of Germany; his countrymen ought to erect a golden statue in his honour; they wished him God-speed. When Crotus returned to Germany and got more in touch with Luther's work, he felt more drawn to the Reformer, and wrote enthusiastically to his friends [pg 256] that Luther was the personal revelation of Christ in modern times. So we find these Humanists declaring that Luther was the St. Paul of the age, the modern Hercules, the Achilles of the sixteenth century.

No Humanist circle gave Luther more enthusiastic support than that of Nürnberg. The soil had been prepared by a few ardent admirers of Staupitz, at the head of whom was Wenceslas Link, prior of the Augustinian-Eremites in Nürnberg, and a celebrated preacher. They had learned from Staupitz that blending of the theology of Augustine with the later German mysticism which was characteristic of the man, and it prepared them to appreciate the deeper experimental teaching of Luther. Among these Nürnberg Humanists was Christopher Scheurl, a jurist, personally acquainted with Luther and with Eck. The shortlived friendship between the two antagonists had been brought about by Scheurl, whose correspondence with Luther began in 1516. Scheurl was convinced that Luther's cause was the “cause of God.” He told Eck this. He wrote to him (February 18th, 1519) that all the most spiritually minded clergymen that he knew were devoted to Luther; that “they flew to him in dense troops, like starlings”; that their deepest sympathies were with him; and that they confessed that their holiest desires were prompted by his writings. Albert Dürer expressed his admiration by painting Luther as St. John, the beloved disciple of the Lord. Caspar Nützel, one of the most dignified officials of the town, thought it an honour to translate Luther's Ninety-five Theses into German. Lazarus Sprengel delighted to tell his friends how Luther's tracts and sermons were bringing back to a living Christianity numbers of his acquaintances who had been perplexed and driven from the faith by the trivialities common in ordinary sermons. Similar enthusiasm showed itself in Augsburg and other towns. After the Leipzig Disputation, the great printer of Basel, Frobenius, became an ardent admirer of Luther; reprinted most of his writings, and despatched them to Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Italy, [pg 257] England, and Spain. He delighted to tell of the favourable reception they met with in these foreign countries,—how they had been welcomed by Lefèvre in France, and how the Swiss Cardinal von Sitten had said that Luther deserved all honour, for he spoke the truth, which no special pleading of an Eck could overthrow. The distinguished jurist Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg said that Luther was an “angel incarnate,” and while he deprecated his strong language against the Pope, he called him the “Phœnix among Christian theologians,” the “flower of the Christian world,” and the “instrument of God.” Zasius was a man whose whole religious sympathies belonged to the mediæval conception of the Church, yet he spoke of Luther in this way.

It is perhaps difficult for us now to comprehend the state of mind which longed for the new and yet clung to the old, which made the two Nürnberg families, the Ebners and the Nützlers, season the ceremonies at their family gathering to celebrate their daughters taking the veil with speeches in praise of Luther and of his writings. Yet this was the dominant note in the vast majority of the supporters of Luther in these earlier years.

Men who had no great admiration for Luther personally had no wish to see him crushed by the Roman Curia by mere weight of authority. Even Duke George of Saxony, who had called Luther a pestilent fellow at the Leipzig Disputation, had been stirred into momentary admiration by the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, and had no great desire to publish the Bull within his dominions; and his private secretary and chaplain, Jerome Emser, although a personal enemy who never lost an opportunity of controverting Luther, nevertheless hoped that he might be the instrument of effecting a reformation in the Church. Jacob Wimpheling of Strassburg, a thoroughgoing mediævalist who had manifested no sympathy for Reuchlin, and his friend Christopher of Utenheim, Bishop of Basel, hoped that the movement begun by Luther might lead to that reformation of the Church on mediæval lines which they both earnestly desired.

Perhaps no one represented better the attitude of the large majority of Luther's supporters, in the years between 1517 and 1521, than did the Prince, who is rightly called Luther's protector, Frederick the Elector of Saxony. It is a great though common mistake to suppose that Frederick shared those opinions of Luther which afterwards grew to be the Lutheran theology. His brother John, and in a still higher degree his nephew John Frederick, were devoted Lutherans in the theological sense; but there is no evidence to show that Frederick ever was.

Frederick never had any intimate personal relations with Luther. At Spalatin's request, he had paid the expenses of Luther's promotion to the degree of Doctor of the Holy Scriptures; he had, of course, acquiesced in his appointment to succeed Spalatin as Professor of Theology; and he must have appreciated keenly the way in which Luther's work had gradually raised the small and declining University to the position it held in 1517. A few letters were exchanged between Luther and Frederick, but there is no evidence that they ever met in conversation; nor is there any that Frederick had ever heard Luther preach. When he lay dying he asked Luther to come and see him; but the Reformer was far distant, trying to dissuade the peasants from rising in rebellion, and when he reached the palace his old protector had breathed his last.

The Elector was a pious man according to mediæval standards. He had received his earliest lasting religious impressions from intercourse with Augustinian Eremite monks when he was a boy at school at Grimma, and he maintained the closest relations with the Order all his life. He valued highly all the external aids to a religious life which the mediæval Church had provided. He believed in the virtue of pilgrimages and relics. He had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and had brought back a great many relics, which he had placed in the Church of All Saints in Wittenberg, and he had agents at Venice and other Mediterranean ports commissioned to secure other relics for his collection. He continued to purchase [pg 259] them as late as the year 1523. He believed in Indulgences of the older type,—Indulgences which remitted in whole or in part ecclesiastically imposed satisfactions,—and he had procured two for use in Saxony. One served as an endowment for the upkeep of his bridge at Torgau, and he had once commissioned Tetzel to preach its virtues; the other was to benefit pilgrims who visited and venerated his collection of relics on All Saints' Day. But it is clear that he disliked Indulgences of the kind Luther had challenged, and had small belief in the good faith of the Roman Curia. He had prevented money collected for one plenary Indulgence leaving the country, and he had forbidden Tetzel to preach the last Indulgence within his territories. His sympathies were all with Luther on this question. He was an esteemed patron of the pious society called St. Ursula's Schifflein. He went to Mass regularly, and his attendances became frequent when he was in a state of hesitation or perplexity. When he was at Köln (November 1520), besieged by the papal nuncios to induce him to permit the publication of the Bull against Luther within his lands, Spalatin noted that he went to Mass three times in one day. His reverence for the Holy Scriptures must have created a bond of sympathy between Luther and himself. He talked with his private secretary about the incomparable majesty and power of the word of God, and contrasted its sublimities with the sophistries and trivialities of the theology of the day. He maintained firmly the traditional policy of his House to make the decisions of the Councils of Constance and of Basel effective within Electoral Saxony, in spite of protests from the Curia and the higher ecclesiastics, and was accustomed to consider himself responsible for the ecclesiastical as well as for the civil good government of his lands. Aleander had considered it a master-stroke of policy to procure the burning of Luther's books at Köln while the Elector was in the city. Frederick only regarded the deed as a petty insult to himself. He was a staunch upholder of the rights and liberties of the German nation, and remembered [pg 260] that by an old concordat, which every Emperor had sworn to maintain, every German had the right to appeal to a General Council, and could not be condemned without a fair trial; and this Bull had made Luther's appeal to a Council one of the reasons for his condemnation. So, in spite of the “golden rose” and other blandishments, in spite of threats that he might be included in the excommunication of his subject and that the privileges of his University might be taken away, he stood firm, and would not withdraw his protection from Luther. He was a pious German prince of the old-fashioned type, with no great love for Italians, and was not going to be browbeaten by papal nuncios. His attitude towards Luther represents very fairly that of the great mass of the German people on the eve of the Diet of Worms.

[pg 261]

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Chapter III. The Diet Of Worms.[176]

§ 1. The Roman Nuncio Aleander.

Rome had done its utmost to get rid of Luther by ecclesiastical measures, and had failed. If he was to be overthrown, if the new religious movement and the national uprising which enclosed it were to be stifled, this could only be done by the aid of the supreme secular authority. The Curia turned to the Emperor.

Maximilian had died suddenly on the 12th of January 1519. After some mouths of intriguing, the papal diplomacy [pg 262] being very tortuous, his grandson Charles, the young King of Spain, was unanimously chosen to be his successor (June 28th, 1519). Troubles in Spain prevented him leaving that country at once to take possession of his new dignities. He was crowned at Aachen on the 23rd of October 1520, and opened his first German Diet on January 22nd, 1521, at Worms.

The Pope had selected two envoys to wait on the young Emperor, the Protonotary Marino Caraccioli (1469-1530), who was charged with the ordinary diplomatic business, and Jerome Aleander, the Director of the Vatican Library, who was appointed to secure the outlawry of Luther.

The Roman Curia had in Aleander one of the most clear-sighted, courageous, and indefatigable of diplomatists. He was an Italian, born of a burgher family in the little Venetian town of Motta (1480-1542), educated at Padua and Venice; he had begun life as a Humanist, had lectured on Greek with distinction in Paris, and had been personally acquainted with many of the German Humanists, who could not forgive the “traitor” who had deserted their ranks to serve an obscurantist party. His graphic letters, full of minute details, throb with the hopes and fears of the papal diplomacy. The reader has his fingers on the pulse of those momentous mouths. The Legate was in a land where “every stone and every tree cried out, ‘Luther.’ ” Landlords refused him lodging. He had to shiver during these winter months in an attic without a stove. The stench and dirt of the house were worse than the cold. When he appeared on the streets he saw scowling faces, hands suddenly carried to the hilts of swords, heard curses shrieked after him. He was struck on the breast by a Lutheran doorkeeper when he tried to get audience of the Elector of Saxony, and no one in the crowd interfered to protect him. He saw caricatures of himself hanging head downwards from a gibbet. He received the old deadly German feud-letters from Ulrich von Hutten, safe in the neighbouring castle of Ebernberg, about a day's ride [pg 263] distant.[177] The imperial Councillors to whom he complained had neither the men nor the means to protect him. When he tried to publish answers to the attacks on the Papacy which the Lutheran presses poured forth, he could scarcely find a printer; and when he did, syndicates bought up his pamphlets and destroyed them. As the weeks passed he came to understand that there was only one man on whom he could rely—the young Emperor, believed by all but himself to be a puppet in the hands of his Councillors, whom Pope Leo had called a “good child,” but whom Aleander from his first interview at Antwerp had felt to be endowed with “a prudence far beyond his years,” and to “have much more at the back of his head than he carried on his face.” He also came to believe that the one man to be feared was the old Elector of Saxony, “that basilisk,” that “German fox,” that “marmot with the eyes of a dog, who glanced obliquely at his questioners.”

Aleander was a pure worldling, a man of indifferent morals, showing traces of cold-blooded cruelty (as when he slew five peasants for the loss of one of his dogs, or tried to get Erasmus poisoned). He believed that every man had his price, and that low and selfish motives were alone to be reckoned with. But he did the work of the Curia at Worms with a thoroughness which merited the rewards he obtained afterwards.[178] He had spies everywhere—in the households of the Emperor and of the leading princes, and among the population of Worms. He had no hesitation in lying when he thought it useful for the “faith,” as he frankly relates.[179] The Curia had laid a difficult task upon him. He was to see that Luther was put under the ban of the Empire at once and unheard. The Bull had condemned him: the secular power had nothing to do but execute the sentence. Aleander had little difficulty in persuading the Emperor to this course within his hereditary [pg 264] dominions. An edict was issued ordering Luther's books to be burnt, and the Legate had the satisfaction of presiding at several literary auto-da-fés in Antwerp and elsewhere. He was also successful with some of the ecclesiastical princes of Germany.[180] But it was impossible to get this done at Worms. Failing this, it was Aleander's business to see that Luther's case was kept separate from the question of German national grievances against the Papacy, and that, if it proved to be impossible to prevent Luther appearing before the Diet, he was to be summoned there simply for the purpose of making public recantation. With the assistance of the Emperor he was largely successful.[181]

§ 2. The Emperor Charles v.

Aleander was not the real antagonist of Luther at Worms; he was not worthy of the name. The German Diet was the scene of a fight of faiths; and the man of faith on the mediæval side was the young Emperor. He represented the believing past as Luther represented the believing future.[182] “What my forefathers established at [pg 265] Constance and other Councils,” he said, “it is my privilege to uphold. A single monk, led astray by private judgment, has set himself against the faith held by all Christians for a thousand years and more, and impudently concludes that all Christians up till now have erred. I have therefore resolved to stake upon this cause all my dominions, my friends, my body and my blood, my life and soul.”[183] The crisis had not come suddenly on him. As early as May 12th, 1520, Juan Manuel, his ambassador at Rome, had written to him asking him to pay some attention to “a certain Martin Luther, who belongs to the following of the Elector of Saxony,” and whose preaching was causing some discontent at the Roman Curia. Manuel thought that Luther might prove useful in a diplomatic dispute with the Curia.[184] Charles had had time to think over the matter in his serious, reserved way; and this was the decision he had come to. The declaration was all the more memorable when it is remembered that Charles owed his election to that rising feeling of nationality which supported Luther,[185] and that he had to make sure of German assistance in his coming struggle with Francis i. A certain grim reality lurked in the words, that he was ready to stake his dominions on the cause he adopted. There is much to be said for the opinion that “the Lutheran question made a man of the boy-ruler.”[186]

On the other hand, it is well to remember that the young Emperor did not take the side of the Pope nor commit himself to the Curial ideas of the absolute character of papal supremacy. He laid stress on the unity of the Catholic (mediæval) Church, on the continuity of its rites, and on the need of maintaining its authority; but the seat of that authority was for him a General Council. The declaration in no way conflicts with the changes in imperial [pg 266] policy which may be traced during the opening weeks of the Diet, nor with that future action which led to the Sack of Rome and to the Augsburg Interim (1548). It is possible that the young ruler had read and admired Luther's earlier writings, and that he had counted on him as an aid in bringing the Church to a better condition. It is more than probable that he already believed that it was his duty to free the Church from the abuses which abounded;[187] but Luther's fierce attack on the Pope disgusted him, and a reformation which came from the people threatened secular as well as ecclesiastical authority. He had made up his mind that Luther must be condemned, and told the German princes that he would not change one iota of his determination. But this did not prevent him making use of Luther to further his diplomatic dealings with the Pope and wring concessions from the Curia. For one thing, the Pope had been interfering with the Inquisition in Spain, [pg 267] trying to mitigate its severity; and Charles, like his maternal grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon, believed that the Holy Office was a help in curbing the freedom-loving people of Spain, and had no wish to see his instrument of punishment made less effectual. For another, it was evident that Francis i. was about to invade Italy, and Charles wished the Pope to take his side. If the Pope gave way to him on both of these points, he was ready to carry out his wishes about Luther as far as that was possible.[188]

§ 3. In the City of Worms.

The city of Worms was crowded with men of diverse opinions and of many different nationalities. The first Diet of the youthful Emperor (Charles was barely one and twenty), from whom men of all parties expected so much, had attracted much larger numbers than usually attended these assemblies. Weighty matters affecting all Germany were down on the agenda. There was the old constitutional [pg 268] question of monarchy or oligarchy bequeathed from the Diets of Maximilian; curiosity to see whether the new ruler would place before the Estates a truly imperial policy, or whether, like his predecessors, he would subordinate national to dynastic considerations; the deputies from the cities were eager to get some sure provisions made for ending the private wars which disturbed trade; all classes were anxious to provide for an effective central government when the Emperor was absent from Germany; local statesmen felt the need of putting an end to the constant disputes between the ecclesiastical and secular powers within Germany; but the hardest problem of all, and the one which every man was thinking, talking, disputing about, was: “To take notice of the books and descriptions made by Friar Martin Luther against the Court of Rome.”[189] Other exciting questions were stirring the crowds met at Worms besides those mentioned on the agenda of the Diet. Men were talking about the need of making an end of the papal exactions which were draining Germany of money, and the air was full of rumours of what Sickingen and the knights might attempt, and whether there was going to be another peasant revolt. These questions were instinctively felt to hang together, and each had an importance because of the way in which it was connected with the religious and social problems of the day. For the people of Germany and for the foreign representatives who were gathered together at Worms, it is unquestionable that the Lutheran movement, and how it was to be dealt with, was the supreme problem of the moment. All these various things combined to bring together at Worms a larger concourse of people than had been collected in any German town since the meeting of the General Council at Constance in 1414.

Worms was one of the oldest towns in Germany. Its people were turbulent, asserting their rights as the inhabitants of a free imperial city, and in constant feud with [pg 269] their bishop. They had endured many an interdict, were fiercely anti-clerical, and were to a man on Luther's side. The crowded streets were thronged with princes, their councillors and their retinues; with high ecclesiastical dignitaries and their attendant clergy; with nobles and their “riders”; with landsknechts, artisans, and peasants. Spanish, French, and Italian merchants, on their way home-wards from the Frankfurt fair, could be seen discussing the last phase of the Lutheran question, and Spanish nobles and Spanish merchants more than once came to blows in the narrow thoroughfares. The foreign merchants, especially the Spaniards, all appeared to take the Lutheran side; not because they took much interest in doctrines, but because they felt bound to stand up for the man who had dared to say that no one should be burned for his opinions. These Spanish merchants made themselves very prominent. They joined in syndicates with the more fervent German partisans of Luther to buy up and destroy papal pamphlets; they bought Luther's writings to carry home. Aleander curses these marrani,[190] as he calls them, and relates that they are getting Luther's works translated into Spanish. It is probable that many of them had Moorish blood in them, and knew the horrors of the Inquisition. Aleander's spies told him that caricatures of himself and other prominent papalists were hawked about, and that pictures of Luther with the Dove hovering over his head, Luther with his head crowned with a halo of rays, Luther and Hutten,[191] the one with a Bible and the other with a sword, were eagerly bought in the streets. These pictures were actually sold in the courts and rooms of the episcopal palace where the Emperor was lodged. On the steps of the churches, at the doors of public buildings, colporteurs offered to eager [pg 270] buyers the tracts of Luther against the Pope, and the satires of Ulrich von Hutten in Latin and in German. On the streets and in open spaces like the Market, crowds of keen disputants argued about the teaching of Luther, and praised him in the most exaggerated ways.

Inside the Electoral College opinion was divided. The Archbishop of Köln, the Elector of Brandenburg, and his brother the Archbishop of Mainz, were for Luther's condemnation, while the Elector of Saxony had great influence over the Archbishop of Trier and the Count Palatine of the Rhine. The latter, says Aleander, scarcely opened his mouth during the year, but now “roared like ten bulls” on Luther's behalf. Aleander had his first opportunity of addressing the Diet on February 13th. He spoke for three hours, and made a strong impression. He dwelt on Luther's doctrinal errors, which he said were those of the Waldenses, of Wiclif, and of the Hussites. He said that Luther denied the Presence of Christ in the Holy Supper, and that he was a second Arius.[192] During the days that followed the members of the Diet came to a common understanding. They presented a memorial in German (February 19th) to the Emperor, in which they reminded him that no imperial edict could be published against Luther without their consent, and that to do so before Luther had a hearing would lead to bloodshed; they proposed that Luther should be invited to come to Worms under a safe conduct, and in the presence of the Diet be asked whether he was the author of the books that were attributed to him, and whether he could clear himself of the accusation of denying fundamental articles of the faith; that he should also be heard upon the papal claims, and the Diet would judge upon them; and, finally, they prayed the Emperor to deliver Germany from the papal tyranny.[193] The Emperor agreed that Luther should be summoned under a safe conduct and interrogated about his books, and whether he had denied any fundamental doctrines. But he utterly refused to permit any discussion on the authority of the [pg 271] Pope, and declared that he would himself communicate with His Holiness about the complaints of Germany.[194]

The documents in the Reichstagsakten reveal not only that there was a decided difference of opinion between the Emperor and the majority of the Estates about the way in which Luther ought to be treated, but that the policy of the Emperor and his advisers had changed between November 1520 and February 1521. Aleander had found no difficulty in persuading Charles and his Flemish councillors that, so far as the Emperor's hereditary dominions were concerned, the only thing that the civil power had to do was to issue an edict homologating the Papal Bull banning Luther and his adherents, and ordering his books to be burnt. This had been done in the Netherlands. They had made difficulties, however, about such summary action within the German Empire. Aleander was told that the Emperor could do nothing until after the coronation at Aachen (October 1520);[195] and in November, much to the nuncio's disgust, the Emperor had written to the Elector of Saxony (November 28th, 1520) from Oppenheim asking him to bring Luther with him to the Diet.[196] At that time Luther had no great wish to go to the Diet, unless it was clearly understood that he was summoned not for the purpose of merely making a recantation, but in order that he might defend his views with full liberty of speech. He was not going to recant, and he could say so as easily and clearly at Wittenberg as at Worms. The situation had changed at Worms. The Emperor had come over to the nuncio's side completely. He now saw no need for Luther's appearance. The Diet had nothing to do but to place Luther under the ban of the Empire, because he had been declared to be a heretic by the Roman Pontiff. Aleander claimed all the credit for this change; but it is more than [pg 272] probable that the explanation lies in the shifting imperial and papal policy. In the end of 1520 the policy of the Roman Curia was strongly anti-imperialist. The Emperor's ambassador at Rome, Don Manuel, had been warning his master of the papal intrigues against him, and suggesting that Charles might show some favour to a “certain Martin Luther”; and this advice might easily have inspired the letter of the 28th of November. At all events the papal policy had been changing, and showing signs of becoming less hostile to the Emperor. However the matter be accounted for, Aleander found that after the Emperor's presence within Worms it was much more easy for him to press the papal view about Luther upon Charles and his advisers.[197]

On the other hand, the Germans in the Diet held stoutly to the opinion that no countryman of theirs should be placed under the ban of the Empire without being heard in his defence, and that they and not the Bishop of Rome were to be the judges in the matter.

The two months before Luther's appearance saw open opposition between the Emperor and the Diet, and abundant secret intrigue—an edict proposed against Luther,[198] which the Diet refused to accept;[199] an edict proposed to order the burning of Luther's books, which the Diet also objected to;[200] this edict revised and limited to the seizure of Luther's writings, which was also found fault with by the Diet; and, finally, the Emperor issuing this revised edict on his own authority and without the consent of the Diet.[201]

The command to appear before the Diet on April 16th, 1521, and the imperial safe conduct were entrusted to the imperial herald, Caspar Strum, who delivered them at Wittenberg on the 26th of March.[202] Luther calmly finished some literary work, and left for the Diet on April 2nd. He believed that he was going to his death. “My dear brother,” he said to Melanchthon at parting, “if I do not come back, if my enemies put me to death, you will go on teaching and standing fast in the truth; if you live, my death will matter little.” The journey seemed to the indignant Papists like a royal progress; crowds came to bless the man who had stood up for Germany against the Pope, and who was going to his death for his courage; they pressed into the inns where he rested, and often found him solacing himself with music. His lute was always comforting to him in times of excitement. Justus Jonas, the famous German Humanist, who had turned theologian much to Erasmus' disgust, joined him at Erfurt. The nearer he came to Worms, the sharper became the disputes there. Friends and foes feared that his presence would prove oil thrown on the flames. The Emperor began to wish he had not sent the summons. Messengers were despatched secretly to Sickingen, and a pension promised to Hutten to see whether they could not prevent Luther's appearance.[203] Might he not take refuge in the Ebernberg, scarcely a day's journey from Worms? Was it not possible to arrange matters in a private conference with Glapion, the Emperor's confessor? Bucer was sent to persuade him. The herald significantly called his attention to the imperial edict ordering magistrates to seize his writings. But nothing daunted Luther. He would not go to the Ebernberg; he could see Glapion at Worms, if the confessor wished an interview; [pg 274] what he had to say would be said publicly at Worms.

Luther had reached Oppenheim, a town on the Rhine about fifteen miles north from Worms, and about twenty east from the Ebernberg, on April 14th. There he for the last time rejected the insidious temptations of his enemies and the distracted counsels of his friends, that he should turn aside and seek shelter with Francis von Sickingen. There he penned his famous letter to Spalatin, that he would come to Worms if there were as many devils as tiles on the house roofs to prevent him, and at the same time asked where he was to lodge.[204]

The question was important. The Romanists had wished that Luther should be placed under the Emperor's charge as a prisoner of State, or else lodged in the Convent of the Augustinian Eremites, where he could be under ecclesiastical surveillance. But the Saxon nobles and their Elector had resolved to trust no one with the custody of their countryman. The Elector Frederick and part of his suite had found accommodation at an inn called The Swan, and the rest of his following were in the House of the Knights of St. John. Both houses were full; but it was arranged that Luther was to share the room of two Saxon gentlemen, v. Hirschfeld and v. Schott, in the latter building.[205] Next morning, Justus Jonas, who had reached Worms before Luther, after consultation with Luther's friends, left the town early on Tuesday morning (April 16th) to meet the Reformer, and tell him the arrangements made. With him went the two gentlemen with whom Luther was to lodge.[206] A large number of Saxon noblemen with their attendants accompanied them. When it was known that they had set out to meet Luther, a great crowd of people (nearly two thousand, says Secretary Vogler), some on horseback and some on foot, followed to welcome Luther, and did meet him about two and a half miles from the town.[207]

§ 4. Luther in Worms.

A little before eleven o'clock the watcher on tower by the Mainz Gate blew his horn to announce that the procession was in sight, and soon afterwards Luther entered the town. The people of Worms were at their Morgenimbiss or Frühmahl, but all rushed to the windows or out into the streets to see the arrival.[208] Caspar Sturm, the herald, rode first, accompanied by his attendant, the square yellow banner, emblazoned with the black two-headed eagle, attached to his bridle arm. Then came the cart,—a genuine Saxon Rollwegelin,—Luther and three companions sitting in the straw which half filled it. The waggon had been provided by the good town of Wittenberg, which had also hired Christian Goldschmidt and his three horses at three gulden a day.[209] Luther's companions were his socius itinerarius, Brother Petzensteiner of Nürnberg;[210] his colleague Nicholas Amsdorf; and a student of Wittenberg, a young Pomeranian noble, Peter Swaven, who had been one of the Wittenberg students who had accompanied Luther with halbert and helmet to the Leipzig Disputation (July 1519). Justus Jonas rode immediately behind the waggon, and then followed the crowd of nobles and people who had gone out to meet the Reformer.

Aleander in his attic room heard the shouts and the trampling in the streets, and sent out one of his people to find out the cause, guessing that it was occasioned by Luther's arrival. The messenger reported that the procession had made its way through dense crowds of people, and that the waggon had stopped at the door of the House of the Knights of St. John. He also informed the nuncio that Luther had got out, saying, as he looked round with his piercing eyes, Deus erit pro me, and that a priest had [pg 276] stepped forward, received him in his arms, then touched or kissed his robe thrice with as much reverence as if he were handling the relics of a saint. “They will say next,” says Aleander in his wrath, “that the scoundrel works miracles.”[211]

After travel-stains were removed, Luther dined with ten or twelve friends. The early afternoon brought crowds of visitors, some of whom had come great distances to see him. Then came long discussions about how he was to act on the morrow before the Diet. The Saxon councillors v. Feilitzsch and v. Thun were in the same house with him: the Saxon Chancellor, v. Brück, and Luther's friend Spalatin, were at The Swan, a few doors away. Jerome Schurf, the Professor of Law in Wittenberg, had been summoned to Worms by the Elector to act as Luther's legal adviser, and had reached the town some days before the Reformer.

How much Luther knew of the secret intrigues that had been going on at Worms about his affairs it is impossible to say. He probably was aware that the Estates had demanded that he should have a hearing, and should be confronted by impartial theologians, and that the complaints of the German nation against Rome should be taken up at the same time; also that the Emperor had refused to allow any theological discussion, or that the grievances against Rome should be part of the proceedings. All that was public property. The imperial summons and safe conduct had not treated him as a condemned heretic.[212] He had been addressed in it as Ehrsamer, lieber, andächtiger—terms which would not have been used to a heretic, and which were ostentatiously omitted from the safe conduct sent him by Duke George of Saxony.[213] He knew also that the Emperor had nevertheless published an edict ordering the civil authorities to seize his [pg 277] books, and to prevent more from being printed, published, or sold, and that such an edict threw doubts upon the value of the safe conduct.[214] But he probably did not know that this edict was a third draft issued by the Emperor without consulting the Diet. Nor is it likely that he knew how Aleander had been working day and night to prevent his appearance at the Diet from being more than a mere formality, nor how far the nuncio had prevailed with the Emperor and with his councillors. His friends could tell him all this—though even they were not aware until next morning how resolved the Emperor was that Luther should not be permitted to make a speech.[215] They knew enough, however, to be able to impress on Luther that he must restrain himself, and act in such a way as to force the hands of his opponents, and gain permission to speak at length in a second audience. The Estates wished to hear him if the Emperor and his entourage had resolved to prevent him from speaking. These consultations probably settled the tactics which Luther followed on his first appearance before the Diet.[216]

Next morning (Wednesday, April 17th), Ulrich von Pappenheim, the marshal of ceremonies, came to Luther's room before ten o'clock, and, greeting him courteously and with all respect, informed him that he was to appear before the Emperor and the Diet that day at four o'clock, when he would be informed why he had been summoned.[217] Immediately after the marshal had left, there came an urgent summons from a Saxon noble, Hans von Minkwitz, who was dying in his lodgings, that Luther would come to hear his confession and administer the sacrament to him. Luther instantly went to soothe and comfort the dying man, notwithstanding his own troubles.[218] We have no [pg 278] information how the hours between twelve and four were spent. It is almost certain that there must have been another consultation. Spalatin and Brück had discovered that the conduct of the audience was not to be in the hands of Glapion, the confessor of the Emperor, as they had up to that time supposed, but in those of John Eck, the Orator or Official of the Archbishop of Trier.[219] This looked badly for Luther. Eck had been officiously busy in burning Luther's books at Trier; he lodged in the same house and in the room next to the papal nuncio.[220] Aleander, indeed, boasts that Eck was entirely devoted to him, and that he had been able to draft the question which Eck put to Luther during the first audience.[221]

§ 5. Luther's first Appearance before the Diet of Worms.[222]

A little before four o'clock, the marshal and Caspar Sturm, the herald, came to Luther's lodging to escort him to the audience hall. They led the Reformer into the street to conduct him to the Bishop's Palace, where the Emperor was living along with his younger brother Ferdinand, afterwards King of the Romans and Emperor, and where the Diet met.[223] The streets were thronged; faces looked down from every window; men and women had crowded the roofs to catch a glimpse of Luther as he passed. It was difficult to force a way through the crowd, and, besides, Sturm, who was responsible for Luther's safety, feared that some Spaniard might deal the [pg 279] Reformer a blow with a dagger in the crowd. So the three turned into the court of the Swan Hotel; from it they got into the garden of the House of the Knights of St. John; and, as most of the courts and gardens of the houses communicated with each other, they were able to get into the court of the Bishop's Palace without again appearing on the street.[224]

The court of the Palace was full of people eager to see Luther, most of them evidently friendly. It was here that old General Frundsberg, the most illustrious soldier in Germany, who was to be the conqueror in the famous fight at Pavia, clapped Luther kindly on the shoulder, and said words which have been variously reported. “My poor monk! my little monk! thou art on thy way to make a stand as I and many of my knights have never done in our toughest battles. If thou art sure of the justice of thy cause, then forward in the name of God, and be of good courage: God will not forsake thee.” From out the crowd, “here and there and from every corner, came voices saying, ‘Play the man! Fear not death; it can but slay the body: there is a life beyond.’ ”[225] They went up the stair and entered the audience hall, which was crammed. While the marshal and the herald forced a way for Luther, he passed an old acquaintance, the deputy from Augsburg. “Ah, Doctor Peutinger,” said Luther, “are you here too?”[226] Then he was led to where he was to stand before the Emperor; and these two lifelong opponents saw each other for the first time. “The fool entered smiling,” says Aleander (perhaps the lingering of the smile with which he had just greeted Dr. Peutinger): “he looked slowly round, and his face sobered.” “When he faced the Emperor,” Aleander goes on to say, “he could not hold his head still, but moved it up and down and from side to side.”[227] All eyes were fixed on Luther, and many an account was written describing his appearance. “A man of middle height,” says an unsigned Spanish paper preserved [pg 280] in the British Museum, “with a strong face, a sturdy build of body, with eyes that scintillated and were never still. He was clad in the robe of the Augustinian Order, but with a belt of hide, with a large tonsure, newly shaven, and a coronal of short thick hair.”[228] All noticed his gleaming eyes; and it was remarked that when his glance fell on an Italian, the man moved uneasily in his seat, as if “the evil eye was upon him.” Meanwhile, in the seconds before the silence was broken, Luther was making his observations. He noticed the swarthy Jewish-looking face of Aleander, with its gleam of hateful triumph. “So the Jews must have looked at Christ,” he thought.[229] He saw the young Emperor, and near him the papal nuncios and the great ecclesiastics of the Empire. A wave of pity passed through him as he looked. “He seemed to me,” he said, “like some poor lamb among swine and hounds.”[230] There was a table or bench with some books upon it. When Luther's glance fell on them, he saw that they were his own writings, and could not help wondering how they had got there.[231] He did not know that Aleander had been collecting them for some weeks, and that, at command of the Emperor, he had handed them over to John Eck, the Official of Trier, for the purposes of the audience.[232] Jerome Schurf made his way to Luther's side, and stood ready to assist in legal difficulties.

The past and the future faced each other—the young Emperor in his rich robes of State, with his pale, vacant-looking face, but “carrying more at the back of his head than his countenance showed,” the descendant of long lines of kings, determined to maintain the beliefs, rites, and rules of that Mediæval Church which his ancestors had upheld; and the monk, with his wan face seamed with the traces of spiritual conflict and victory, in the poor dress of his [pg 281] Order, a peasant's son, resolute to cleave a way for the new faith of evangelical freedom, the spiritual birthright of all men.

The strained silence[233] was broken by the Official of Trier, a man of lofty presence, saying, in a clear, ringing voice so that all could hear distinctly, first in Latin and then in German:

“ ‘Martin Luther, His Imperial Majesty, Sacred and Victorious (sacra et invicta), on the advice of all the Estates of the Holy Roman Empire, has ordered you to be summoned here to the throne of His Majesty, in order that you may recant and recall, according to the force, form, and meaning of the citation-mandate decreed against you by His Majesty and communicated legally to you, the books, both in Latin and in German, published by you and spread abroad, along with their contents: Wherefore I, in the name of His Imperial Majesty and of the Princes of the Empire, ask you: First, Do you confess that these books exhibited in your presence (I show him a bundle of books written in Latin and in German) and now named one by one, which have been circulated with your name on the title-page, are yours, and do you acknowledge them to be yours? Secondly, Do you wish to retract and recall them and their contents, or do you mean to adhere to them and to reassert them?’ ”[234]

The books were not named; so Jerome Schurf called out, “Let the titles be read.”[235] Then the notary, Maximilian Siebenberger (called Transilvanus),[236] stepped forward and, taking up the books one by one, read their titles and briefly described their contents.[237] Then Luther, having briefly and precisely repeated the two questions put to him, said:

“ ‘To which I answer as shortly and correctly as I am able. I cannot deny that the books named are mine, and I will never deny any of them:[238] they are all my offspring; and I have written some others which have not been named.[239]But as to what follows, whether I shall reaffirm in the same terms all, or shall retract what I may have uttered beyond the authority of Scripture,—because the matter involves a question of faith and of the salvation of souls, and because it concerns the Word of God, which is the greatest thing in heaven and on earth, and which we all must reverence,—it would be dangerous and rash in me to make any unpremeditated declaration, because in unpremeditated speech I might say something less than the fact and something more than the truth; besides, I remember the saying of Christ when He declared, “Whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven, and before His angels.” For these reasons I beg, with all respect, that your Imperial Majesty give me time to deliberate, that I may answer the question without injury to the Word of God and without peril to my own soul.’ ”[240]

Luther made his answer in a low voice—so low that the deputies from Strassburg, who were sitting not far from him, said that they could not hear him distinctly.[241] Many present inferred from the low voice that Luther's spirit was broken, and that he was beginning to be afraid. But from what followed it is evident that Luther's whole procedure on this first appearance before the Diet was intended to defeat the intrigues of Aleander, which had for [pg 283] their aim to prevent the Reformer addressing the Diet in a long speech; and in this he succeeded, as Brück and Spalatin hoped he would.

The Estates then proceeded to deliberate on Luther's request. Aleander says that the Emperor called his councillors about him; that the Electors talked with each other; and that the separate Estates deliberated separately.[242] We are informed by the report of the Venetian ambassadors that there was some difficulty among some of them in acceding to Luther's request. But at length the Official of Trier again addressed Luther:

“ ‘Martin, you were able to know from the imperial mandate why you were summoned here, and therefore you do not really require any time for further deliberation, nor is there any reason why it should be granted. Yet His Imperial Majesty, moved by his natural clemency, grants you one day for deliberation, and you will appear here tomorrow at the same hour,—but on the understanding that you do not give your answer in writing, but by word of mouth.’ ”[243]

The sitting, which, so far as Luther was concerned, had occupied about an hour, was then declared to be ended, and he was conducted back to his room by the herald. There he sat down and wrote to his friend Cuspinian in Vienna “from the midst of the tumult”:

“This hour I have been before the Emperor and his brother, and have been asked whether I would recant my books. I have said that the books were really mine, and [pg 284]have asked for some delay about recantation. They have given me no longer space and time than till to-morrow for deliberation. Christ helping me, I do not mean to recant one jot or tittle.”[244]

§ 6. Luther's Second Appearance before the Diet.

The next day, Thursday, April 18th, did not afford much time for deliberation. Luther was besieged by visitors. Familiar friends came to see him in the morning; German nobles thronged his hostel at midday; Bucer rode over from the Ebernberg in the afternoon with congratulations on the way that the first audience had been got through, and bringing letters from Ulrich von Hutten. His friends were almost astonished at his cheerfulness. “He greeted me and others,” said Dr. Peutinger, who was an early caller, “quite cheerfully—‘Dear Doctor,’ he said, ‘how is your wife and child?’ I have never found or seen him other than the right good fellow he is.”[245] George Vogler and others had “much pious conversation” with him, and wrote, praising his thorough heroism.[246] The German nobles greeted Luther with a bluff heartiness—“Herr Doctor, How are you? People say you are to be burnt; that will never do; that would ruin everything.”[247]

The marshal and the herald came for Luther a little after four o'clock, and led him by the same private devious ways to the Bishop's Palace. The crowds on the streets were even larger than on the day before. It was said that more than five thousand people, Germans and foreigners, were crushed together in the street before the Palace. The throng was so dense that some of the delegates, like Oelhafen from Nürnberg, could not get through it.[248] It was six o'clock before the Emperor, accompanied [pg 285] by the Electors and princes, entered the hall. Luther and the herald had been kept waiting in the court of the Palace for more than an hour and a half, bruised by the dense moving crowd. In the hall the throng was so great that the princes had some difficulty in getting to their seats, and found themselves uncomfortably crowded when they reached them.[249] Two notable men were absent. The papal nuncios refused to be present when a heretic was permitted to speak. Such proceedings were the merest tomfoolery (ribaldaria), Aleander said. When Luther reached the door, he had still to wait; the princes were occupied in reaching their places, and it was not etiquette for him to appear until they were seated.[250] The day was darkening, and the gloomy hall flamed with torches.[251] Observers remarked Luther's wonderful cheerful countenance as he made his way to his place.[252]

The Emperor had intrusted the procedure to Aleander, to his confessor Glapion, and to John Eck, who had conducted the audience on the previous day.[253] The Official was again to have the conduct of matters in his hands. As soon as Luther was in his place, Eck “rushed into words” (prorupit in verba)[254] He began by recapitulating what had taken place at the first audience; and in saying that Luther had asked time for consideration, he insinuated that every Christian ought to be ready at all times to give a reason for the faith that is in him, much more a learned theologian like Luther. He declared that it was now time for Luther to answer plainly whether he adhered to the contents of the books he had acknowledged to be his, or whether he was prepared to recant them. He spoke first in Latin and then in German, and it was noticed that his speech in Latin was very bitter.[255]

Then Luther delivered his famous speech before the Diet. He had freed himself from the web of intrigue that [pg 286] Aleander had been at such pains to weave round him to compel him to silence, and stood forth a free German to plead his cause before the most illustrious audience the Fatherland could offer to any of its sons.

Before him was the Emperor and his brother Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, destined to be King of the Romans and Emperor in days to come, and beside them, seated, all the Electors and the great Princes of the Empire, lay and ecclesiastical, among them four Cardinals. All round him standing, for there was no space for seats, the Counts, Free Nobles and Knights of the Empire, and the delegates of the great cities, were closely packed together.[256] Ambassadors and the political agents of almost all the countries in Europe were there to swell the crowd—ready to report the issue of this momentous day. For all believed that whatever weighty business for Germany was discussed at this Diet, the question raised by Luther was one of European importance, and affected the countries which they represented. The rumour had gone about, founded mainly on the serene appearance of Luther, that the monk was about to recant;[257] and most of the political agents earnestly hoped it might be true. That and that only would end, they believed, the symptoms of disquiet which the governments of every land were anxiously watching.

The diligence of Wrede has collected and printed in the Reichstagsakten[258] several papers, all of which profess to give Luther's speech; but they are mere summaries, some longer and some shorter, and give no indication of the power which thrilled the audience. Its effect must be sought for in the descriptions of the hearers.

The specimens of his books which had been collected by Aleander were so representative that Luther could speak of all his writings. He divided them into three classes. He had written books for edification which he could truly say had been approved by all men, friends and foes alike, [pg 287] and it was scarcely to be expected that he, the author, should be the only man to recant the contents of such writings as even the Papal Bull had commended. In a second class of writings he had attacked the papal tyranny which all Germany was groaning under; to recant the contents of these books would be to make stronger and less endurable the monstrous evil he had protested against; he therefore refused to recall such writings; no loyal German could do so. He had also written against individual persons who had supported the Papacy; it was possible that he had written too strongly in some places and against some men; he was only a man and not God, and was liable to make mistakes; he remembered how Christ, who could not err, had acted when He was accused, and imitating Him, he was quite ready, if shown to be wrong, by evangelical or prophetic witnesses, to renounce his errors, and if he were convinced, he assured the Emperor and princes assembled that he would be the first to throw his books into the fire. He dwelt upon the power of the word of God which must prevail over everything, and showed that many calamities in times past had fallen upon nations who had neglected its teachings and warnings. He concluded as follows:

“I do not say that there is any need for my teaching or warning the many princes before me, but the duty I owe to my Germany will not allow me to recant. With these words I commend myself to your most serene Majesty and to your principalities, and humbly beg that you will not permit my accusers to triumph over me causelessly. I have spoken (Dixi).”

Luther had spoken in Latin; he was asked to repeat what he had said in German. The Hall had been packed; the torches gave forth warmth as well as light. Luther steamed with perspiration, and looked wan and overpowered; the heat was intense. Friends thought that the further effort would be too much for his strength. The Saxon councillor, Frederick von Thun, regardless of etiquette, called out loudly, “If you cannot do it you have done [pg 288] enough, Herr Doctor.”[259] But Luther went on and finished his address in German. His last words were. “Here I stand (Hic bin Ich).”

Aleander, the papal nuncio, who was not present, relates that while Luther was speaking of the books in which he had attacked the Papacy, and was proceeding “with great venom” to denounce the Pope,[260] the Emperor ordered him to pass from that subject and to proceed with his other matters. The Emperor had certainly told the Estates that he would not allow the question of Luther's orthodoxy and complaints against the Holy See to be discussed together; and that lends some support to Aleander's statement.[261] But when it is seen that not one of the dozen deputies present who write accounts of the scene mentions the interruption; when it is not found in the official report; when it is remembered that Charles could not understand either German or Latin, the story of the interruption is a very unlikely one. Aleander was not remarkable for his veracity—“a man, to say the least, not bigotedly truthful (non superstitiose verax)” says Erasmus;[262] and the nuncio on one occasion boasted to his masters in Rome that he could lie well when occasion required it.[263]

Several letters descriptive of the scene, written by men who were present in the Diet, reveal the intense interest taken by the great majority of the audience in the appearance and speech of Luther. His looks, his language, the attitude in which he stood, are all described. When artists portray the scene, either on canvas or in bronze, Luther is invariably represented standing upright, his shoulders squared, and his head thrown back. That was not how he stood before Charles and the Diet. He was a monk, [pg 289] trained in the conventional habits of monkish humility. He stood with a stoop of the head and shoulders, with the knees slightly bent, and without gestures. The only trace of bodily emotion was betrayed by bending and straightening his knees.[264] He addressed the Emperor and the Estates with all respect,—“Most serene Lord and Emperor, most illustrious Princes, most clement Lords,”—and apologised for any lack of etiquette on the ground that he was convent-bred and knew nothing of the ways of Courts; but it was noticed by more than one observer that he did not address the spiritual princes present.[265] Many a witness describes the charm of his cheerful, modest, but undaunted bearing.[266] The Saxon official account says, “Luther spoke simply, quietly, modestly, yet not without Christian courage and fidelity—in such a way, too, that his enemies would have doubtless preferred a more abject spirit and speech”; and it goes on to relate that his adversaries had confidently counted on a recantation, and that they were correspondingly disappointed.[267] Many expected that, as he had never before been in such presence, the strange audience would have disconcerted him; but, to their surprise and delight, he spoke “confidently, reasonably, and prudently, as if he were in his own lecture-room.”[268] Luther himself was surprised that the unaccustomed surroundings affected him so little. “When it came to my turn,” he says, “I just went on.”[269] The beauty of his diction pleased his audience—“many fair and happy words,” say Dr. Peutinger and others.[270]

When Luther had finished, the Official, mindful that it was his duty to extract from Luther a distinct recantation, addressed him in a threatening manner (increpabundo similis), and told him that his answer had not been to the point. The question was that Luther, in some of his books, denied decisions of Councils: Would he reaffirm or recant what he had said about these decisions? the Emperor [pg 290] demanded a plain (non cornutum) answer. “If His Imperial Majesty desires a plain answer,” said Luther, “I will give it to him, neque cornutum neque dentatum, and it is this: It is impossible for me to recant unless I am proved to be in the wrong by the testimony of Scripture or by evident reasoning; I cannot trust either the decisions of Councils or of Popes, for it is plain that they have not only erred, but have contradicted each other. My conscience is thirled to the word of God, and it is neither safe nor honest to act against one's conscience. God help me! Amen!”[271]

When he had finished, the Emperor and the princes consulted together; then at a sign from Charles,[272] the Official addressed Luther at some length. He told him that in his speech he had abused the clemency of the Emperor, and had added to his evil deeds by attacking the Pope and Papists (papistæ) before the Diet. He briefly recapitulated Luther's speech, and said that he had not sufficiently distinguished between his books and his opinions; there might be room for discussion had Luther brought forward anything new, but his errors were old—the errors of the Poor Men of Lyons, Wiclif, of John and Jerome Huss (the learned Official gave Huss a brother unknown to history),[273] which were decided upon at the Council of Constance, where the whole German nation had been gathered together; he again asked him to retract such opinions. To this Luther replied as before, that General Councils had erred, and that his conscience did not allow him to retract. By this time the torches had burnt to their sockets, and the hall was growing dark.[274] Wearied with the crowd and the heat, numbers were preparing to leave. The Official, making a last effort, called out loudly, “Martin, let your conscience alone; recant your errors and you will be safe and sound; you can never show that a Council has erred.” Luther declared that Councils had erred, and that he could prove it.[275] Upon this the Emperor [pg 291] made a sign to end the matter.[276] The last words Luther was heard to say were, “God come to my help” (Got kum mir zu hilf).[277]

It is evident from almost all the reports that from the time that Luther had finished his great speech there was a good deal of confusion, and probably of conversation, among the audience. All that the greater portion of those present heard was an altercation between Luther and the Official, due, most of the Germans thought, to the overbearing conduct of Eck, and which the Italians and Spaniards attributed to the pertinacity of Luther.[278] “Luther asserted that Councils had erred several times, and had given decisions against the law of God. The Official said No; Luther said Yes, and that he could prove it. So the matter came to an end for that time.”[279] But all understood that there was a good deal said about the Council of Constance.

The Emperor left his throne to go to his private rooms; the Electors and the princes sought their hotels. A number of Spaniards, perceiving that Luther turned to leave the tribunal, broke out into hootings, and followed “the man of God with prolonged howlings.”[280] Then the Germans, nobles and delegates from the towns, ringed him [pg 292] round to protect him, and as they passed from the hall they all at once, and Luther in the midst of them, thrust forward arms and raised hands high above their heads, in the way that a German knight was accustomed to do when he had unhorsed his antagonist in the tourney, or that a German landsknecht did when he had struck a victorious blow. The Spaniards rushed to the door shouting after Luther, “To the fire with him, to the fire!”[281] The crowd on the street thought that Luther was being sent to prison, and thought of a rescue.[282] Luther calmed them by saying that the company were escorting him home. Thus, with hands held high in stern challenge to Holy Roman Empire and mediæval Church, they accompanied Luther to his lodging.

Friends had got there before him—Spalatin, ever faithful; Oelhafen, who had not been able to reach his place in the Diet because of the throng. Luther, with beaming face, stretched out both his hands, exclaiming, “I am through, I am through!”[283] In a few minutes Spalatin was called away. He soon returned. The old Elector had summoned him only to say, “How well, father, Dr. Luther spoke this day before the Emperor and the Estates; but he is too bold for me.” The sturdy old German prince wrote to his brother John, “From what I have heard this day, I will never believe that Luther is a heretic”; and a few days later, “At this Diet, not only Annas and Caiaphas, but also Pilate and Herod, have conspired against Luther.” Frederick of Saxony was no Lutheran, like his brother John and his nephew John Frederick; and he was the better able to express what most German princes were thinking about Luther and his appearance before the [pg 293] Diet. Even Duke George was stirred to a momentary admiration; and Duke Eric of Brunswick, who had taken the papal side, could not sit down to supper without sending Luther a can of Einbecker beer from his own table.[284] As for the commonalty, there was a wild uproar in the streets of Worms that night—men cursing the Spaniards and Italians, and praising Luther, who had compelled the Emperor and the prelates to hear what he had to say, and who had voiced the complaints of the Fatherland against the Roman Curia at the risk of his life. The voice of the people found utterance in a placard, which next morning was seen posted up on the street corners of the town, “Woe to the land whose king is a child.” It was the beginning of the disillusion of Germany. The people had believed that they were securing a German Emperor when, in a fit of enthusiasm, they had called upon the Electors to choose the grandson of Maximilian. They were beginning to find that they had selected a Spaniard.

§ 7. The Conferences.

Next day (April 19th) the Emperor proposed that Luther should be placed under the ban of the Empire. The Estates were not satisfied, and insisted that something should be done to effect a compromise. Luther had not been treated as they had proposed in their memorandum of the 19th February. He had been peremptorily ordered to retract. The Emperor had permitted Aleander to regulate the order of procedure on the day previous (April 18th), and the result had not been satisfactory. Even the Elector of Brandenburg and his brother, the hesitating Archbishop of Mainz, did not wish matters to remain as they were. They knew the feelings of the German people, if they were ignorant of the Emperor's diplomatic dealings with the Pope. The Emperor gave way, but told them that he would let them hear his own view of the matter. He produced a sheet of paper, and read a short statement prepared by [pg 294] himself in the French tongue—the language with which Charles was most familiar. It was the memorable declaration of his own religious position, which has been referred to already.[285] Aleander reports that several of the princes became pale as death when they heard it.[286] In later discussions the Emperor asserted with warmth that he would never change one iota of his declaration.

Nevertheless, the Diet appointed a Commission (April 22nd) to confer with Luther, and at its head was placed the Archbishop of Trier, who was perhaps the only one among the higher ecclesiastics of Germany whom Luther thoroughly trusted. They had several meetings with the Reformer, the first being on the 24th of April. All the members of the Commission were sincerely anxious to arrange a compromise; but after the Emperor's declaration that was impossible, as Luther himself clearly saw. No set of resolutions, however skilfully framed, could reconcile the Emperor's belief that a General Council was infallible and Luther's phrase, “a conscience bound to the Holy Scriptures.” No proposals to leave the final decision to the Emperor and the Pope, to the Emperor alone, to the Emperor and the Estates, to a future General Council (all of which were made), could patch up a compromise between two such contradictory standpoints. Compromise must fail in a fight of faiths, and that was the nature of the opposition between Charles v. and Luther throughout their lives. What divided them was no subordinate question about doctrine or ritual; it was fundamental, amounting to an entirely different conception of the whole round of religion. The moral authority of the individual conscience confronted the legal authority of an ecclesiastical assembly. In after days the monk regretted that he had not spoken out more boldly before the Diet. Shortly before his death, [pg 295] the Emperor expressed his regret that he had not burned the obstinate heretic. When the Commission had failed, Luther asked leave to reveal his whole innermost thoughts to the Archbishop of Trier, under the seal of confession, and the two had a memorable private interview. Aleander fiercely attacked the Archbishop for refusing to disclose what passed between them; but the prelate was a German bishop with a conscience, and not an unscrupulous dependant on a shameless Curia. No one knew what Luther's confession was. The Commission had to report that its efforts had proved useless. Luther was ordered to leave Worms and return to Wittenberg, without preaching on the journey; his safe conduct was to expire in twenty-one days after the 26th of April. At their expiry he was liable to be seized and put to death as a pestilent heretic. There remained only to draft and publish the edict containing the ban. The days passed, and it did not appear.

Suddenly the startling news reached Worms that Luther had disappeared, no one knew where. Aleander, as usual, had the most exact information, and gives the fullest account of the rumours which were flying about. Cochlæus, who was at Frankfurt, sent him a man who had been at Eisenach, had seen Luther's uncle, and had been told by him about the capture. Five horsemen had dashed at the travelling waggon, had seized Luther, and had ridden off with him. Who the captors were or by whose authority they had acted, no one could tell. “Some blame me,” says Aleander, “others the Archbishop of Mainz: would God it were true!” Some thought that Sickingen had carried him off to protect him; others, the Elector of Saxony; others, the Count of Mansfeld. One persistent rumour declared that a personal enemy of the Elector of Saxony, one Hans Beheim, had been the captor; and the Emperor rather believed it. On May 14th a letter reached Worms saying that Luther's body had been found in a silver-mine pierced with a dagger. The news flew over Germany and beyond it that Luther had been done to death by emissaries of the Roman Curia; and so persistent was the belief, that [pg 296] Aleander prepared to justify the deed by alleging that the Reformer had broken the imperial safe conduct by preaching at Eisenach and by addressing a concourse of people at Frankfurt.[287] Albert Dürer, in Ghent, noted down in his private diary that Luther, “the God-inspired man,” had been slain by the Pope and his priests as our Lord had been put to death by the priests in Jerusalem. “O God, if Luther is dead, who else can expound the Holy Gospel to us!”[288] Friends wrote distracted letters to Wittenberg imploring Luther to tell them whether he was alive or imprisoned.[289] The news created the greatest consternation and indignation in Worms. The Emperor's decision had been little liked even by the princes most incensed against Luther. Aleander could not get even the Archbishop of Mainz to promise that he would publish it. When the Commission of the Diet had failed to effect a compromise, the doors of the Rathhaus and of other public buildings in Worms had been placarded with an intimation that four hundred knights had sworn that they would not leave Luther unavenged, and the ominous words Bundschuh, Bundschuh, Bundschuh had appeared on it. The Emperor had treated the matter lightly; but the German Romanist princes had been greatly alarmed.[290] They knew, if he did not, that the union of peasants with the lower nobility had been a possible source of danger to Germany for nearly a century; they remembered that it was this combination which had made the great Bohemian rising successful. Months after the Diet had risen, Romanist partisans in Germany sent anxious communications to the Pope about [pg 297] the dangers of a combination of the lesser nobility with the peasants.[291] The condition of Worms had been bad enough before, and when the news of Luther's murder reached the town the excitement passed all bounds. The whole of the Imperial Court was in an uproar. When Aleander was in the royal apartments the highest nobles in Germany pressed round him, telling him that he would be murdered even if he were “clinging to the Emperor's bosom.” Men crowded his room to give him information of conspiracies to slay both himself and the senior Legate Caraccioli.[292] The excitement abated somewhat, but the wiser German princes recognised the abiding gravity of the situation, and how little the Emperor's decision had done to end the Lutheran movement. The true story of Luther's disappearance was not known until long afterwards. After the failure of the conferences, the Elector of Saxony summoned two of his councillors and his chaplain and private secretary, Spalatin, and asked them to see that Luther was safely hidden until the immediate danger was past. They were to do what they pleased and inform him of nothing. Many weeks passed before the Elector and his brother John knew that Luther was safe, living in their own castle on the Wartburg. This was his “Patmos,” where he doffed his monkish robes, let the hair grow over his tonsure, was clad as a knight, and went by the name of Junker Georg. His disappearance did not mean that he ceased to be a great leader of men; but it dates the beginning of the national opposition to Rome.

§ 8. The Ban.

After long delay, the imperial mandate against Luther was prepared. It was presented (May 25th) to an informal meeting of some members of the Diet after the Elector of Saxony and many of Luther's staunchest supporters had [pg 298] left Worms.[293] Aleander, who had a large share in drafting it, brought two copies, one in Latin and the other in German, and presented them to Charles on a Sunday (May 26th) after service. The Emperor signed them before leaving the church. “Are you contented now?” said Charles, with a smile to the Legate; and Aleander overflowed with thanks. Few State documents, won by so much struggling and scheming, have proved so futile. The uproar in Germany at the report of Luther's death had warned the German princes to be chary of putting the edict into execution.

The imperial edict against Luther threatened all his sympathisers with extermination. It practically proclaimed an Albigensian war in Germany. Charles had handed it to Aleander with a smile. Aleander despatched the document to Rome with an exultation which could only find due expression in a quotation from Ovid's Art of Love. Pope Leo celebrated the arrival of the news by comedies and musical entertainments. But calm observers, foreigners in Germany, saw little cause for congratulation and less for mirth. Henry viii. wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz congratulating him on the overthrow of the “rebel against Christ”; but Wolsey's agent at the Diet informed his master that he believed there were one hundred thousand Germans who were still ready to lay down their lives in Luther's defence.[294] Velasco, who had struck down the Spanish rebels in the battle of Villalar, wrote to the Emperor that the victory was God's gratitude for his dealings with the heretic monk; but Alfonso de Valdès, the Emperor's secretary, said in a letter to a Spanish correspondent:

“Here you have, as some imagine, the end of this tragedy; but I am persuaded it is not the end, but the [pg 299]beginning of it. For I see that the minds of the Germans are greatly exasperated against the Roman See, and they do not seem to attach great importance to the Emperor's edicts; for since their publication, Luther's books are sold with impunity at every step and corner of the streets and market-places. From this you will easily guess what will happen when the Emperor leaves. This evil might have been cured with the greatest advantage to the Christian commonwealth, had not the Pope refused a General Council, had he preferred the public weal to his own private interests. But while he insists that Luther shall be condemned and burnt, I see the whole Christian commonwealth hurried to destruction unless God Himself help us.”

Valdès, like Gattinara and other councillors of Charles, was a follower of Erasmus. He lays the blame of all on the Pope. But what a disillusion this Diet of Worms ought to have been to the Erasmians! The Humanist young sovereigns and the Humanist Pope, from whom so much had been expected, congratulating each other on Luther's condemnation to the stake!

The foreboding of Alfonso de Valdès was amply justified. Luther's books became more popular than ever, and the imperial edict did nothing to prevent their sale either within Germany or beyond it. Aleander was soon to learn this. He had retired to the Netherlands, and busied himself with auto-da-fés of the prohibited writings; but he had to confess that they were powerless to prevent the spread of Luther's opinions, and he declared that the only remedy would be if the Emperor seized and burnt half a dozen Lutherans, and confiscated all their property.[295] The edict had been published or repeated in lands outside Germany and in the family possessions of the House of Hapsburg. Henry viii. ordered Luther's books to be burnt in England;[296] the Estates of Scotland prohibited their introduction into the realm under the severest penalties in 1525.[297] But such [pg 300] edicts were easily evaded, and the prohibited writings found their way into Spain, Italy, France, Flanders, and elsewhere, concealed in bales of merchandise. In Germany there was no need for concealment; the imperial edict was not merely disregarded, but was openly scouted. The great Strassburg publisher, Gruniger, apologised to his customers, not for publishing Luther's books, but for sending forth a book against him; and Cochlæus declared that printers gladly accepted any MS. against the Papacy, printed it gratis, and spent pains in issuing it with taste, while every defender of the established order had to pay heavily to get his book printed, and sometimes could not secure a printer at any cost.

§ 9. Popular Literature.

The Reformation movement may almost be said to have created the German book trade. The earliest German printed books or rather booklets were few in number, and of no great importance—little books of private devotion, of popular medicine, herbals, almanacs, travels, or public proclamations. Up to 1518 they barely exceeded fifty a year. But in the years 1518-1523 they increased enormously, and four-fifths of the increase were controversial writings prompted by the national antagonism to the Roman Curia. This increase was at first due to Luther alone;[298] but from 1521 onwards he had disciples, fellow-workers, [pg 301] opponents, all using in a popular way the German language, the effective literary power of which had been discovered by the Reformer.[299] These writers spread the new ideas among the people, high and low, throughout Germany.[300]

There are few traces of combined action in the anti-Romanist writings in the earlier stages of the controversy; it needed literary opposition to give them a semblance of unity. Each writer looks at the general question from his own individual point of view. Luther is the hero with nearly all, and is spoken about in almost extravagant terms. He is the prophet of Germany, the Elias that was to come, the Angel of the Revelation “flying through the mid-heaven with the everlasting Gospel in his hands,” the national champion who was brought to Worms to be silenced, and yet was heard by Emperor, princes, and papal nuncios. Some of the authors were still inclined to make Erasmus their leader, and declared that they were fighting under the banner of that “Knight of Christ”; others looked on Erasmus and Luther as fellow-workers, and one homely pamphlet compares Erasmus to the miller who grinds the flour, and Luther to the baker who bakes it into bread to feed the people. Perhaps the most striking feature of [pg 302] the times was the appearance of numberless anonymous pamphlets, purporting to be written by the unlearned for the unlearned. They are mostly in the form of dialogues, and the scene of the conversations recorded was often the village alehouse, where burghers, peasants, weavers, tailors, and shoemakers attack and vanquish in argument priests, monks, and even bishops. One striking feature of this new popular literature is the glorification of the German peasant. He is always represented as an upright, simple-minded, reflective, and intelligent person skilled in Bible lore, and even in Church history, and knowing as much of Christian doctrine “as three priests and more.” He may be compared with the idealised peasant of the pre-revolution literature in France, although he lacks the refinement, and knows nothing of high-flown moral sentiment; but he is much liker the Jak Upland or Piers Plowman of the days of the English Lollards. Jak Upland and Hans Mattock (Karsthans), both hate the clergy and abominate the monks and the begging friars, but the German exhibits much more ferocity than the Englishman. The Lollard describes the fat friar of the earlier English days with his swollen dewlap wagging under his chin “like a great goose-egg,” and contrasts him with the pale, poverty-stricken peasant and his wife, going shoeless to work over ice-bound roads, their steps marked with the blood which oozed from the cut feet; the German pamphleteer pours out an endless variety of savage nicknames—cheese-hunters, sausage-villains, begging-sacks, sourmilk crocks, the devil's fat pigs, etc. etc. It is interesting to note that most of this coarse controversial literature, which appeared between 1518 and 1523, came from those regions in South Germany where the social revolution had found an almost permanent establishment from the year 1503. It was the sign that the old spirit of communist and religious enthusiasm, which had shown itself spasmodically since the movement under Hans Böhm, had never been extinguished, and it was a symptom that a peasants' war might not be far off. Very little was needed to [pg 303] kindle afresh the smouldering hatred of the peasant against the priests. When German patriots declaimed against the exactions of the Roman Curia, the peasant thought of the great and lesser tithes, of the marriage, baptismal, and burial fees demanded from him by his own parish priest. When Reformers and popular preachers denounced the scandals and corruptions in the Church, the peasant applied them to some drunken, evil-living, careless priest whom he knew. It should be remembered that the character Karsthans was invented in 1520, not by a Lutheran sympathiser, but by Thomas Murner, one of Luther's most determined opponents,[301] when he was still engaged in writing against the clerical disorders of the times. This virulent attack on priests and monks had other sources than the sympathy for Luther.[302] It was the awakening of old memories, prompted partly by an underground ceaseless Hussite propaganda, and partly, no doubt, by the new ideas so universally prevalent.

Some of this coarse popular literature had a more direct connection with the Lutheran movement. A booklet which appeared in 1521, entitled The New and the Old God, and which had an immense circulation, may be taken as an example. Like many of its kind, it had an illustrated title-page, which was a graphic summary of its contents. There appeared as the representatives of the New God, the Pope, some Church Fathers, and beneath them, Cajetan, Silvester Prierias, Eck, and Faber; over-against them were the Old God as the Trinity, the four Evangelists, St. Paul with a sword, and behind him Luther. It attacked the ceremonies, the elaborate services, the obscure doctrines which had been thrust on the Church by bloody persecutions, and had [pg 304] changed Christianity into Judaism, and contrasted them with the unchanging Word of the Old God, with its simple story of salvation and its simple doctrines of faith, hope, and love. To the same class belong the writings of the voluminous controversialist, John Eberlin of Günzburg, whom his opponents accused of seducing whole provinces, so effective were his appeals to the “common” man. He began by a pamphlet addressed to the young Emperor, and published, either immediately before or during the earlier sitting of the Diet of Worms in 1521, a daring appeal, in which Luther and Ulrich von Hutten are called the messengers of God to their generation. It was the first of a series of fifteen, all of which were in circulation before the beginning of November of the same year.[303] They were called the “Confederates” (Bundsgenossen). The contents of these and other pamphlets by Eberlin may be guessed from their titles—Of the forty days' fast before Easter and others which pitifully oppress Christian folk. An exhortation to all Christians that they take pity on Nuns. How very dangerous it is that priests have not wives (the frontispiece represents the marriage of a priest by a bishop, in the background the marriage of two monks, and two musicians on a raised seat). Why there is no money in the country. Against the false clergy, bare-footed monks, and Franciscans, etc., etc. He exposes as trenchantly as Luther did the systematic robbery of Germany to benefit the Roman Curia—300,000 gulden sent out of the country every year, and a million more given to the begging friars. He wrote fiercely against the monks who take to this life, because they were too lazy to work like honest people, and called them all sorts of nicknames—cloister swine, the Devil's landsknechts, etc., twenty-four thousand of them sponge on Germany and four hundred thousand on the rest of Europe. He tells of a parish priest who thought that he must really begin to read the Scriptures: his [pg 305] parishioners are reading it, the mothers to the children and the house-fathers to the household; they trouble him with questions taken from it, and he is often at his wit's end to answer; he asked a friend where he ought to begin, and was told that there was a good deal about priests and their duties in the Epistles to Timothy and Titus; he read, and was horrified to find that bishops and priests ought to be “husbands of one wife,” etc. Eberlin had been a Franciscan monk, and was true to the revolutionary traditions of his Order. He preached a social as well as an evangelical reformation. The Franciscan Order sent forth a good many Reformers: men like Stephen Kampen, who had come to adopt views like those of Eberlin without any teaching but the leadings of his heart; or John Brissmann, a learned student of the Scholastic Theology, who like Luther had found that it did not satisfy the yearnings of his soul; or like Frederick Mecum (Myconius), whose whole spiritual development was very similar to that of Luther. Pamphlets like those of Eberlin, and preaching like that of Kampen, had doubtless some influence in causing popular risings against the priests that were not uncommon throughout Germany in 1521, after the Diet of Worms had ended its sittings—the Erfurt tumult, which lasted during the months of April, May, June, and July, may be instanced as an example.

§ 10. The Spread of Luther's Teaching.

It may be said that the very year in which the imperial edict against Luther was published (1521) gave evidence that a silent movement towards the adoption of the principles for which Luther was testifying had begun among monks of almost all the different Orders. The Augustinian Eremites, Luther's own Order, had been largely influenced by him. Whole communities, with the prior at their head, had declared for the Reformation both in Germany and in the Low Countries. No other monastic Order was so decidedly upon the side of the [pg 306] Reformer, but monks of all kinds joined in preaching and teaching the new doctrines. Martin Bucer had been a Dominican, Otto Braunfells a Carthusian, Ambrose Blauer a Benedictine. The case of Oecolampadius (John Hussgen (?) Hausschein) was peculiar. He had been a distinguished Humanist, had come under serious religious impressions, and had entered the Order of St. Bridget; but he was not long there when he joined the ranks of the Reformers, and was sheltered by Franz von Sickingen in his castle at Ebernberg.[304] Urban Rhegius, John Eck's most trusted and most talented student at Ingolstadt, had become a Carmelite, and had quitted his monastery to preach the doctrines of Luther. John Bugenhagen belonged to the Order of the Præmonstratenses. He was a learned theologian. Luther's struggle against Indulgences had displeased him. He got hold of The Babylonian Captivity of the Christian Church, and studied it for the purpose of refuting it. The study so changed him that he felt that “the whole world may be wrong, but Luther is right”; he won over his prior and most of his companions, and became the Reformer of Pomerania.

Secular priests all over Germany declared for the new evangelical doctrines. The Bishop of Samlund in East Prussia boldly avowed himself to be on Luther's side, and was careful to have the Lutheran doctrines preached throughout his diocese; and other bishops showed themselves favourable to the new evangelical faith. Many of the most influential parish priests did the like, and their congregations followed them. Sometimes the superior clergy forbade the use of the church, and the people followed their pastor while he preached to them in the fields. Sometimes (as in the case of Hermann Tast) the priest preached under the lime trees in the churchyard, and [pg 307] his parishioners came armed to protect him. If priests were lacking to preach the Lutheran doctrines, laymen came forward. If they could not preach, they could sing hymns. Witness the poor weaver of Magdeburg, who took his stand near the statue of Kaiser Otto in the market-place, and sang two of Luther's hymns, “Aus tiefer Not schrei Ich zu dir,” and “Es woll' uns Gott gnädig sein,” while the people crowded round him on the morning of May 6th, 1524. The Burgermeister coming from early Mass heard him, and ordered him to be imprisoned, but the crowd rescued him. Such was the beginning of the Reformation in Magdeburg.[305] When men dared not, women took their place. Argula Grunbach, a student of the Scriptures and of Luther's writings, challenged the University of Ingolstadt, under the eyes of the great Dr. Eck himself, to a public disputation upon the truth of Luther's position.

Artists lent their aid to spread the new ideas, and many cartoons made the doctrines and the aims of the Reformers plain to the common people. These pictures were sometimes used to illustrate the title-pages of the controversial literature, and were sometimes published as separate broadsides. In one, Christ is portrayed standing at the door of a house, which represents His Church. He invites the people to enter by the door; and Popes, cardinals, and monks are shown climbing the walls to get entrance in a clandestine fashion.[306] In another, entitled the Triumph of Truth, the common folk of a German town are represented singing songs of welcome to honour an approaching procession. Moses, the patriarchs, the prophets, and the apostles, carry on their shoulders the Ark of the Holy Scriptures. Hutten comes riding on his warhorse, and to [pg 308] the tail of the horse is attached a chain which encloses a crowd of ecclesiastics—an archbishop with his mitre fallen off, the Pope with his tiara in the act of tumbling and his pontifical staff broken; after them, cardinals, then monks figured with the heads of cats, pigs, calves, etc. Then comes a triumphal car drawn by the four living creatures, who represent the four evangelists, on one of which rides an angel. Carlstadt stands upright in the front of the car; Luther strides alongside. In the car, Jesus sits saying, I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. Holy martyrs follow, singing songs of praise. German burghers are spreading their garments on the road, and boys and girls are strewing the path with flowers.[307] Perhaps the most important work of this kind was the Passional Christi et Antichristi.[308] Luther planned the book, Luke Cranach designed the pictures, and Melanchthon furnished the texts from Scripture and the quotations from Canon Law. It is a series of pairs of engravings representing the lives of our Lord and of the Pope, so arranged that wherever the book opened two contrasting pictures could be seen at the same time. The contrasts were such as these:—Jesus washing the disciples' feet; the Pope holding out his toe to be kissed: Jesus healing the wounded and the sick; the Pope presiding at a tournament: Jesus bending under His Cross; the Pope carried in state on men's shoulders: Jesus driving the money-changers out of the Temple; the Pope and his servants turning a church into a market for Indulgences, and sitting surrounded with strong boxes and piles of coin. It was a “good book for the laity,” Luther said.

One of the signs of the times was the enthusiasm displayed in the imperial cities for the cause of Luther. The way had been prepared. Burgher songs had for long described the ecclesiastical abuses, and had borne witness [pg 309] to the widespread hatred of the clergy shared in by the townsfolk. Wolfgang Capito and Frederick Mecum (Myconius), both sons of burghers, inform us that their fathers taught them when they were boys that Indulgences were nothing but a speculation on the part of cunning priests to get their hands into the pockets of simple-minded laity. Keen observers of the trend of public feeling like Wimpheling and Pirkheimer had noticed with some alarm the gradual spread of the Hussite propaganda in the towns, and had made the fact one of their reasons for desiring and insisting on a reformation of the Church. The growing sympathy for the Hussite opinions in the cities is abundantly apparent. Some leading Reformers, Capito for instance, told their contemporaries that they had frequently listened to Hussite discourses when they were boys; and the libraries of burghers not infrequently contained Hussite pamphlets. Men in the towns had been reading, thinking, and speaking in private to their familiar friends about the disorders in the life and doctrine of the Church of their days, and were eager to welcome the first symptoms of a genuine attempt at reform.

The number of editions of the German Vulgate, rude as many of these versions were, shows what a Bible-reading people the German burghers had become, enables us to wonder less at the way in which the controversial writers assume that the laity knew as much of the Scriptures as the clergy, and lends credibility to contemporary assertions that women and artisans knew their Bibles better than learned men at the Universities.

These things make us understand how the townsmen were prepared to welcome Luther's simple scriptural teaching, how his writings found such a sale all over Germany, how they could say that he taught what all men had been thinking, and said out boldly what all men had been whispering in private. They explain how the burghers of Strassburg nailed Luther's Ninety-five Theses to the doors of every church and parsonage in the city in 1518; how the citizens of Constance drove away with [pg 310] threats the imperial messenger who came to publish the Edict of Worms in their town; how the people of Basel applauded their pastor when he carried a copy of the Scriptures instead of the Host in the procession on Corpus Christi Day; how the higher clergy of Strassburg could not expel the nephew and successor of the famed Geiler of Keysersberg although he was accused of being a follower of Luther; and how his friend Matthew Zell, when he was prohibited from preaching in the pulpit from which Geiler had thundered, was able to get carpenters to erect another in a corner of the great cathedral, from which he spoke to the people who crowded to hear him. When the clergy persuaded the authorities in many towns (Goslar, Danzig, Worms, etc.) to close the churches against the evangelical preachers, the townspeople listened to their sermons in the open air; but generally from the first the civic authorities sided with the people in welcoming a powerful evangelical preacher. Matthew Zell and, after him, Martin Bucer became the Reformers of Strassburg; Kettenbach and Eberlin, of Ulm; Oecolampadius and Urbanus Rhegius, of Augsburg; Andrew Osiander, of Nürnberg; John Brenz, of Hall, in Swabia; Theobald Pellicanus (Pellicanus, i.e. of Villigheim), of Nördlingen; Matthew Alber, of Reutlingen; John Lachmann, of Heilbron; John Wanner, of Constance; and so on. The gilds of Mastersingers welcomed the Reformation. The greatest of the civic poets, Hans Sachs of Nürnberg, was a diligent collector and reader of Luther's books. He published in 1523 his famous poem, “The Wittenberg Nightingale” (Die Wittembergisch Nachtigall, Die man jetz höret überall). The nightingale was Luther, and its song told that the moonlight with its pale deceptive gleams and its deep shadows was passing away, and the glorious sun was rising. The author praises the utter simplicity of Luther's scriptural teaching, and contrasts it with the quirks and subtleties of Romish doctrine. Even a peasant, he says, can understand and know that Luther's teaching is good and sound. In a later short poem he contrasts [pg 311] evangelical and Romish preaching. The original edition was illustrated by a woodcut showing two preachers addressing their respective audiences. The one is saying, Thus saith the Lord; and the other, Thus saith the Pope.

§ 11. Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt.[309]

Every great movement for reform bears within it the seeds of revolution, of the “tumult,” as Erasmus called it, and Luther's was no exception to the general rule. Every Reformer who would carry through his reforming ideas successfully has to struggle against men and circumstances making for the “tumult,” almost as strenuously as against the abuses he seeks to overcome. We have already seen how these germs of revolution abounded in Germany, and how the revolutionists naturally allied themselves with the Reformer, and the cause he sought to promote.

While Luther was hidden away in the Wartburg, the revolution seized on Wittenberg. At first his absence did not seem to make any difference. The number of students had increased until it was over a thousand, and the town itself surprised eye-witnesses who were acquainted with other University towns in Germany. The students went about unarmed; they mostly carried Bibles under their arms; they saluted each other as “brothers at one in Christ.” No rift had yet appeared among the band of leaders, although his disappointment in not obtaining the Provostship of All Saints had begun to isolate Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt. Unanimity did not mean dulness; Wittenberg was seething with intellectual life. Since its foundation the University had been distinguished for weekly Public Disputations in which students and professors took part. In the earlier years of its existence the theses discussed had been suggested by the Scholastic Theology and Philosophy in vogue; but since 1518 the new questions which were stirring Germany had been the subjects of debate, and this had given a life and eagerness to the [pg 312] University exercises. When Justus Jonas came to Wittenberg from Erfurt, he wrote enthusiastically to a friend about the “unbelievable wealth of spiritual interests in the little town of Wittenberg.” None of the professors took a keener interest in these Public Discussions than Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt. He had been a very successful teacher; had come under Luther's magnetic influence; and had accepted the main ideas of the new doctrines. He had not the full-blooded humanity of Luther, nor his sympathetic tact, nor his practical insight into how things would work. He lacked altogether Luther's solid basis of conservative feeling, which made him know by instinct that new ideas and new things could only flourish and grow if they were securely rooted in what was old. It was enough for Carlstadt that his own ideas, however hastily evolved, were clear, and his aims beneficent, to make him eager to see them at once reduced to practice. He had the temperament of a revolutionary rather than that of a Reformer.

He was strongly impressed with the fundamental contradictions which he believed to exist between the new evangelical doctrines preached by Luther and the theories and practices of the mediæval religious life and worship. This led him to attack earnestly and bitterly monastic vows, celibacy, a distinctive dress for the clergy, the idea of a propitiatory sacrifice in the Mass, and the presence and use of images and pictures in the churches. He introduced all these questions of practical interest into the University weekly Public Discussions; he published theses upon them; he printed two books—one on monastic vows and the other on the Mass—which had an extensive circulation both in German and in Latin (four editions were speedily exhausted). The prevailing idea in all these publications, perhaps implied rather than expressed, was that the new evangelical liberty could only be exercised when everything which suggested the ceremonies and usages of the mediæval religious life was swept away. His strongest denunciations were reserved for the practice of celibacy; he dwelt on the [pg 313] divine institution of marriage, its moral and spiritual necessity, and taught that the compulsory marriage of the clergy was better than the enforced celibacy of the mediæval Church. Zwilling, a young Augustinian Eremite, whose preaching gifts had been praised by Luther, went even further than Carlstadt in his fiery denunciation of the Mass as an idolatrous practice.

The movement to put these exhortations in practice began first among the clergy. Two priests in parishes near Wittenberg married; several monks left their cloisters and donned lay garments; Melanchthon and several of his students, in semi-public fashion, communicated in both kinds in the parish church on Michaelmas Day (Sept. 29th), 1521, and his example seems to have been followed by other companies.

Zwilling's fiery denunciations of the idolatry of the Mass stirred the commonalty of the town. On Christmas Eve (Dec. 24-25), 1521, a turbulent crowd invaded the parish church and the Church of All Saints. In the former they broke the lamps, threatened the priests, and in mockery of the worship of praise they sang folk-songs, one of which began: “There was a maid who lost a shoe”—so the indignant clergy complained to the Elector.[310]

Next day, Christmas, Carlstadt, who was archdeacon, conducted the service in All Saints' Church. He had doffed his clerical robes, and wore the ordinary dress of a layman. He preached and then dispensed the Lord's Supper in an “evangelical fashion.” He read the usual service, but omitted everything which taught a propitiatory sacrifice; he did not elevate the Host; and he placed the Bread in the hands of every communicant, and gave the Cup into their hands. On the following Sundays and festival days the Sacrament of the Supper was dispensed in the same manner, and we are told that “hic pæne urbs et cuncta civitas communicavit sub utraque specie.”

During the closing days of the year 1521, so full of excitement for the people of Wittenberg, three men, known in history as the Zwickau Prophets, came to the town (Dec. 27th). Zwickau, lying about sixty-four miles south of Wittenberg, was the centre of the weaving trade of Saxony, and contained a large artisan population. We have seen that movements of a religious-communistic kind had from time to time appeared among the German artisans and peasants since 1476. Nicolaus Storch, a weaver in Zwickau, proclaimed that he had visions of the Angel Gabriel, who had revealed to him: “Thou shalt sit with me on my throne.” He began to preach. Thomas Münzer, who had been appointed by the magistrates to be town preacher in St. Mary's, the principal church in Zwickau, praised his discourses, declaring that Storch expounded the Scriptures better than any priest. Some writers have traced the origin of this Zwickau movement to Hussite teachings. Münzer allied himself with the extreme Hussites after the movement had begun, and paid a visit to Bohemia, taking with him some of his intimates; but our sources of information, which are scanty, do not warrant any decided opinion about the origin of the outbreak in Zwickau. After some time Storch and others were forced to leave the town. Three of them went to Wittenberg—Storch himself, the seer of heavenly visions, another weaver, and Marcus Thomä Stubner, who had once been a pupil of Melanchthon, and was therefore able to introduce his companions to the Wittenberg circle of Reformers. Their arrival and addresses increased the excitement both in the town and in the University. Melanchthon welcomed his old pupil, and was impressed by the presence of a certain spiritual power in Stubner and in his companions. Some of their doctrines, however, especially their rejection of infant baptism, repelled him, and he gradually withdrew from their companionship.

Carlstadt took advantage of the strong excitement in Wittenberg to press on the townspeople and on the magistrates his scheme of reformation; and on Jan. 24th, 1522, [pg 315] the authorities of the town of Wittenberg published their famous ordinance.

This document, the first of numerous civic and territorial attempts to express the new evangelical ideas in legislation, deserves careful study.[311] It concerns itself almost exclusively with the reform of social life and of public worship. It enjoins the institution of a common chest to be under the charge of two of the magistrates, two of the townsmen, and a public notary. Into this the revenues from ecclesiastical foundations were to be placed, the annual revenues of the guilds of workmen, and other specified monies. Definite salaries were to be paid to the priests, and support for the poor and for the monks was to be taken from this common fund. Begging, whether by ordinary beggars, monks, or poor students, was strictly prohibited. If the common chest was not able to afford sufficient for the support of the helpless and orphans, the townsfolk had to provide what was needed. No houses of ill-fame were allowed within the town. Churches were places for preaching; the town contained enough for the population; and the building of small chapels was prohibited. The service of the Mass was shortened, and made to express the evangelical meaning of the sacrament, and the elements were to be placed in the hands of the communicants. All this was made law within the town of Wittenberg; and the reformation was to be enforced. Not content with these regulations, Carlstadt engaged in a crusade against the use of pictures and images in the churches (the regulations had permitted three altars in every church and one picture for each altar). Everything which recalled the older religious usages was to be done away with, and flesh was to be eaten on fast days.

This excitement bred fanaticism. Voices were raised [pg 316] declaring that, as all true Christians were taught by the Spirit of God, there was no need either for civil rulers or for carnal learning. It is believed by many that Carlstadt shared these fancies, and it has been said that in his desire to “simplify” himself, he dressed as a peasant and worked as a labourer (he had married) on his father-in-law's farm. It is more probable that he found himself unable to rule the storm his hasty measures had raised, and that he saw many things proposed with which he had no sympathy.

§ 12. Luther back in Wittenberg.

Melanchthon felt himself helpless in presence of the “tumult,” declared that no one save Luther himself could quell the excitement, and eagerly pressed his return. The revolutionary movement was extending beyond Wittenberg, in other towns in Electoral Saxony such as Grimma and Altenberg. Duke George of Saxony, the strenuous defender of the old faith, had been watching the proceedings from the beginning. As early as Nov. 21st, 1521, he had written to John Duke of Saxony, the brother of the Elector, warning him that, against ecclesiastical usage, the Sacrament of the Supper was being dispensed in both kinds in Wittenberg; he had informed him (Dec. 26th) that priests were threatened while saying the Mass; he had brought the “tumultuous deeds” in Electoral Saxony before the Reichsregiment in January, with the result that imperial mandates were sent to the Elector Frederick and to the Bishops of Meissen, Merseburg, and Naumburg, requiring them to take measures to end the disturbances. The Elector was seriously disquieted. His anxieties were increased by a letter from Duke George (Feb. 2nd, 1522), declaring that Carlstadt and Zwilling were the instigators of all the riotous proceedings. He had commissioned one of his councillors, Hugold of Einsiedel, to try to put matters right; but the result had been small. It was probably in these circumstances that he wrote his Instruction to Oswald, a burgher of Eisenach, with the intention that the contents should be communicated [pg 317] to Luther in the Wartburg. The Instruction may have been the reason why Luther suddenly left the asylum where he had remained since his appearance at Worms by the command and under the protection of his prince.[312]

If this Instruction did finally determine him, it was only one of many things urging Luther to leave his solitude. He cared little for the influence of the Zwickau Prophets,[313] estimating them at their true value, but the weakness of Melanchthon, the destructive and dangerous impetuosity of Carlstadt, the spread of the tumult beyond Wittenberg, the determination of Duke George to make use of these outbursts to destroy the whole movement for reformation, and the interference of the Reichsregiment with its mandates, made him feel that the decisive moment had come when he must be again among his own people.

He started on his lonely journey, most of it through an enemy's country, going by Erfurt, Jena, Borna, and Leipzig. He was dressed as “Junker Georg,” with beard on his chin and sword by his side. At Erfurt he had a good-humoured discussion with a priest in the inn; and Kessler, the Swiss student, tells how he met a stranger sitting in the parlour of the “Bear” at Jena with his hand on the hilt of his sword, and reading a small Hebrew Psalter. He got to Wittenberg on Friday, March 7th; spent that afternoon and the next day in discussing the situation with his friends Amsdorf, Melanchthon, and Jerome Schurf.[314]

On Sunday he appeared in the pulpit, and for eight successive days he preached to the people, and the plague was stayed. Many things in the movement set agoing by Carlstadt met with his approval. He had come to believe in the marriage of the clergy; he disapproved strongly of [pg 318] private Masses; he had grave doubts on the subject of monastic vows; but he disapproved of the violence, of the importance attached to outward details, and of the use of force to advance the Reformation movement:

“The Word created heaven and earth and all things; the same Word will also create now, and not we poor sinners. Summa summarum, I will preach it, I will talk about it, I will write about it, but I will not use force or compulsion with anyone; for faith must be of freewill and unconstrained, and must be accepted without compulsion. To marry, to do away with images, to become monks or nuns, or for monks and nuns to leave their convents, to eat meat on Friday or not to eat it, and other like things—all these are open questions, and should not be forbidden by any man. If I employ force, what do I gain? Changes in demeanour, outward shows, grimaces, shams, hypocrisies. But what becomes of the sincerity of the heart, of faith, of Christian love? All is wanting where these are lacking; and for the rest I would not give the stalk of a pear. What we want is the heart, and to win that we must preach the gospel. Then the word will drop into one heart to-day, and to-morrow into another, and so will work that each will forsake the Mass.”

He made no personal references; he blamed no individuals; and in the end he was master of the situation.

When he had won back Wittenberg he made a tour of those places in Electoral Saxony where the Wittenberg example had been followed. He went to Zwickau, to Altenberg, and to Grimma—preaching to thousands of people, calming them, and bringing them back to a conservative reformation.

[pg 319]

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Chapter IV. From The Diet of Worms to the Close Of the Peasants' War.

§ 1. The continued spread of Lutheran Teaching.

The imperial edict issued against Luther at the Diet of Worms could scarcely have been stronger than it was,[315] and yet, like many another edict of Emperor and Diet, it was wholly ineffective. It could only be enforced by the individual Estates, who for the most part showed great reluctance to put it into operation. It was published in the territories of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, of the Elector of Brandenburg, of Duke George of Saxony, and of the Dukes of Bavaria; but none of these princes, except the Archduke and Duke George, seemed to care much for the old religion. In most of the ecclesiastical States the authorities were afraid of riots following the publication, [pg 320] and did nothing. Thus, in Bremen, we are told that as late as December 1522 the people had never seen the edict. The cities treated it as carelessly. The authorities in Nürnberg, Ulm, Augsburg, and Strassburg posted it up publicly as an official document, and took no further trouble. In Strassburg the printers went on issuing Luther's books and tracts as fast as their printing-presses could produce them; and at Constance the populace drove the imperial commissioners from the town when they came to publish the edict.

The action of the newly constituted Reichsregiment was as indecisive. When the disturbances broke out at Wittenberg, under Carlstadt and the Zwickau Prophets, Duke George, by playing on the fears of a spread of Hussitism, could get mandates issued to the Elector of Saxony and neighbouring bishops to inquire into and crush the disorders; but after Luther's return and the restoration of tranquillity his pleadings were ineffectual. It was in vain that he insisted that Luther's presence in Wittenberg was an insult to the Empire. He was told that the Reichsregiment was able to judge for itself what were insults, and that when they saw them they would punish. Archduke Ferdinand, the President, doubtless sympathised with Duke George, but he was powerless; the Elector of Saxony had the greatest influence, and it was always exerted on the side of Luther.

In January 1522 a new Pope had been chosen, who took the title of Adrian vi. His election was a triumph for the party that confessed the urgent need of reforms, and thought that they ought to be effected by the hierarchy and from within the Church. Adrian was a pious man according to his lights, one who felt deeply the corruption which was degrading the Church. He believed that the revolt of Luther was a punishment sent by God for the sins of the generation. He had been the tutor of Charles v., and ascended the papal throne with the determination to reform corruptions, and to begin his reforms by attacking the source of all—the Roman Curia. But he [pg 321] was a Dominican monk, and had all the Dominican ideas about the need of maintaining mediæval theology intact, and about the strict maintenance of ecclesiastical discipline. He was as ignorant as his predecessor of the state of matters in Germany, and regarded Luther as another Mahomet, who was seducing men from the higher Christian life by pandering to their fleshly appetites.

The Reichsregiment met with the Diet at Nürnberg in 1522-1523, and to this Diet the Pope sent, as nuncio, Francesco Chieregati, Bishop of Terramo, in the kingdom of Naples. The nuncio was given lengthy instructions, which set forth the Pope's opinion of the corruptions in the Church and his intention to cure them, but which demanded the delivery of Luther into the hands of the Roman Curia, and the punishment of priests, monks, and nuns who had broken their vows of celibacy.[316] Chieregati was no sooner in Germany than he understood that it would be impossible for him to get the Pope's demand carried out, and he informed his master of the state of matters. When he met the Diet and presented the papal requests, he was practically answered that Germany had grievances against Rome, and that they would need to be set right ere the Curia could expect to get its behests fulfilled. They intimated that since the Pope had admitted the corruptions in the Church, it was scarcely to be expected that they should blame Luther for having pointed them out. They presented the nuncio with a list of one hundred German grievances against the Roman Curia;[317] and suggested that the most convenient way of settling them would be for the Pope to make over immediately, for the public use of Germany, the German annates,[318] and that a German Council should be held on German soil, and within one of the larger German cities.

The practical result of this fencing at the Diet of 1522, repeated in 1523, was that the progress of the Lutheran movement was not checked. How deeply the people of Germany had drunk in the teaching of Luther may be learnt from the letters of the nuncio to the Curia, and from those of the Archduke Ferdinand to the Emperor. Both use the same expression, that “among a thousand men scarcely one could be found untainted by Lutheran teaching.”

Adrian vi. died suddenly after a few months' reign, and the next Pope, Clement vii., a Medici and completely under the influence of the French king, belonged to the old unreforming party, whose only desire was to maintain all the corrupting privileges of the Roman Curia. He selected and sent to Germany, as his nuncio, Lorenzo Campeggio, one of the ablest of Italian diplomatists, to negotiate with the Reichsregiment and the Diet which met at Speyer in 1524.

Campeggio, like his predecessor, found that the German Nation was determinedly hostile to Rome. When he made his official entry into Augsburg, and raised his hands to give the usual benediction to the crowds of people, they received the blessing with open derision. He was so impressed with their attitude, that when he reached Nürnberg he doffed his official robes and entered the town as quietly as possible; indeed he received a message from the authorities asking him “to avoid making the sign of the cross, or using the benediction, seeing how matters then stood.” The presence of the Legate seemed to increase the anti-papal zeal of the people. The Pope was openly spoken of as Antichrist. Planitz, the energetic commissary of the Elector of Saxony, reckoned that nearly four thousand people in the city partook of the Sacrament of the Supper in both kinds, and informs us that among them were members of the Reichsregiment, and Isabella, Queen of Sweden, the sister of the Emperor.

Yet the experienced Italian diplomatist thought that he could discern signs more favourable to his master than [pg 323] the previous Diet had exhibited. The Reichsregiment, which had hitherto shielded the Lutheran movement, had lost the confidence of many classes of people, and was tottering to its fall. It had showed itself unable to enforce the Lands-Peace. It was the princes who had defeated the rising of the Free Nobles under Franz von Sickingen; it was the Swabian League, an association always devoted to the House of Austria, that had crushed the Franconian robber nobles; and both princes and League were irritated at the attempts of the Reichsregiment, which had endeavoured to rob them of the fruits of their successes. The cities had been made to bear all the taxation needed to support the central government, and the system of monopolies arising from combinations among the great commercial houses had been threatened. The cities and the capitalists had made a secret agreement with the Emperor, and von Hannart had been sent by the Emperor from Spain to the Diet of 1524 to work along with the towns for the overthrow of the central government. The Diet itself had passed a vote of no confidence in the government. In these troubled waters a crafty fisher might win some success.

His success was more apparent than real. The Diet of 1524 did not absolutely refuse to enforce the Edict of Worms against Luther and his followers; they promised to execute it “as well as they were able, and as far as was possible,” and the cities had made it plain that the enforcement was impossible. They renewed their demand for a General Council to meet in a suitable German town to settle the affairs of the Church in Germany, and again declared that meanwhile nothing should be preached contrary to the Word of God and the Holy Gospel. They went further, and practically resolved that a National Council, to deliberate on the condition of the Church in Germany, should meet at Speyer in November and make an interim settlement of its ecclesiastical affairs, to last until the meeting of a General Council. It is true that, owing to the exertions of the nuncio and of von Hannart, the phrase National Synod was omitted, and the meeting [pg 324] was to be one of the Estates of Germany at which the councillors and learned divines of the various princes were to formulate all the disputed points, and to consider anew the grievances of the German nation against the Papacy; but neither the nuncio nor von Hannart deceived themselves as to the real meaning of the resolution. “It will be a National Council for Germany,” said Hannart in his report. Nothing could be more alarming to the Pope. There was always a possibility of managing a General Council; but a German National Synod, including a large number of lay representatives, meeting in a German town, foreshadowed an independent National German Church which would insist on separation from the Roman See. The Pope wrote to Henry viii. of England asking him to harass the German merchants; he induced the Emperor to forbid the proposed meeting of the German States; and, what was more important, he instructed his nuncio to take steps secretly to form a league of German princes who were still favourable to maintaining the mediæval Church with its doctrines, ceremonies, and usages. This inaugurated the religious divisions of Germany.

§ 2. The beginnings of Division in Germany.

The Diet of Speyer (1524) may perhaps be taken as the beginning of the separation of Germany into two opposite camps of Protestant and Roman Catholic, although the real parting of the ways actually occurred after the Peasants' War. The overthrow, or at least discrediting of the Reichsregiment, placed the management of everything, including the settlement of the religious question, in the hands of the princes, none of whom, with the exception of the Elector of Saxony, cared much for the idea of nationality; while some of them, however anxious they were, or once had been, for ecclesiastical reforms, were genuinely afraid of the “tumult” which they believed might lurk behind any conspicuous changes in religious usages. Duke George of Saxony, who was keenly alive to [pg 325] the corruptions in the Church, dreaded above all things the beginnings of a Hussite movement in Germany. He knew that an assiduous, penetrating, secret Hussite, or rather Taborite propaganda had been going on in Germany for long. As early as the Leipzig Disputation (1519), when John Eck had skilfully forced Luther into the avowal that he approved of some things in the Hussite revolt, Duke George was seen to put his arms akimbo, to wag his long beard, and was heard to ejaculate, “God help us! The plague!” A fear of Hussite revolution displays itself in his correspondence, and very notably in his letters to Duke John of Saxony and to the Elector about the disturbances in Wittenberg. It was a triumph for the Roman Curia when its partisans, from Eck onwards, were able to fix the stigma of Hussitism on the Lutheran movement; and the career of the Zwickau Prophets, notwithstanding their suppression by Luther, was, to many, an indication of what might lie behind the new preaching. When the Peasants' War came in 1525, many of the earlier sympathisers with Luther saw in it an indication of the dangers into which they fancied that Luther was leading Germany. It is also to be noticed that many of the Humanists now began to desert the Lutheran cause; his Augustinian theology made them think that he was bent on creating a new Scholastic which seemed to them almost as bad as the old, which they had been delighted to see him attack.

The Roman Curia was quick to take advantage of all these alarms. Its efforts were so successful, that it was soon able to create a Roman Catholic Party among the South German princes, and to secure its steadfastness by promising a few concessions, and by permitting the authorities to retain for the secular uses of their States about one-fifth of the ecclesiastical revenues in each State. The leading States in this Roman Catholic federation were Austria and Bavaria, and so long as Duke George lived, Ducal Saxony in middle Germany. This naturally called forth a distinctly Lutheran party, no longer national, which included the Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, the Margraf [pg 326] of Brandenburg, his brother Albert, and many others. Albert was at the head of the Teutonic Order in East Prussia. He secularised his semi-ecclesiastical principality, became the first Duke of Prussia, and his State from the beginning adopted the evangelical faith.

It was not until the Peasants' War was over that this division was clearly manifested. The Reformation had spread in simple natural fashion, without any attempt at concerted action, or any design to impose a new and uniform order of public worship, or to make changes in ecclesiastical government. Luther himself was not without hopes that the great ecclesiastical principalities might become secular lordships, that the bishops would assume the lead in ecclesiastical reform, and that there would be a great National Church in Germany, with little external change—enough only to permit the evangelical preaching and teaching. It is true that the Emperor had shown clearly his position by sending martyrs to the stake in the Netherlands, and that symptoms of division had begun to manifest themselves during 1524, as we have seen. Still these things did not prevent such an experienced statesman as the Elector of Saxony from confidently expecting a peaceful and, so far as Germany was concerned, a unanimous and hearty solution of the religious difficulties. The storm burst suddenly which was to shatter these optimistic expectations, and to change fundamentally the whole course of the Lutheran Reformation. This was the Peasants' War.

§ 3. The Peasants' War.[319]

From one point of view this insurrection was simply the last, the most extensive, and the most disastrous of [pg 327] those revolts which, we have already seen, had been almost chronic in Germany during the later decades of the fifteenth and in the beginning of the sixteenth century. All the social and economic causes which produced them[320] were increasingly active in 1524-1525. It is easy to show, as many Lutheran Church historians have done with elaborate care, that the Reformation under Luther had nothing in common with the sudden and unexpected revolt,—as easy as to prove that there was little in common between the “Spiritual Poverty” of Francis of Assisi and the vulgar communism of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, between the doctrines of Wiclif and the gigantic labour strike headed by Wat Tyler and Priest Ball, between the teaching of Huss and the extreme Taborite fanatics. But the fact remains that the voice of Luther awoke echoes whereof he never dreamt, and that its effects cannot be measured by some changes in doctrine, or by a reformation in ecclesiastical organisation. The times of the Reformation were ripe for revolution, and the words of the bold preacher, coming when all men were restless and most men were oppressed, appealing especially to those who felt the burden heavy and the yoke galling, were followed by far-resounding reverberations. Besides, Luther's message was democratic. It destroyed the aristocracy of the saints, it levelled the barriers between the layman and the priest, it taught the equality of all men before God, and the right of every man of faith to stand in God's presence whatever be his rank and condition of life. He had not confined himself to preaching a new theology. His message was eminently practical. In his Appeal to [pg 328]the Nobility of the German Nation, Luther had voiced all the grievances of Germany, had touched upon almost all the open sores of the time, and had foretold disasters not very far off.

Nor must it be forgotten that no great leader ever flung about wild words in such a reckless way. Luther had the gift of strong smiting phrases, of words which seemed to cleave to the very heart of things, of images which lit up a subject with the vividness of a flash of lightning. He launched tracts and pamphlets from the press about almost everything,—written for the most part on the spur of the moment, and when the fire burned. His words fell into souls full of the fermenting passions of the times. They drank in with eagerness the thoughts that all men were equal before God, and that there are divine commands about the brotherhood of mankind of more importance than all human legislation. They refused to believe that such golden ideas belonged to the realm of spiritual life alone, or that the only prescriptions which denied the rights of the common man were the decrees of the Roman Curia. The successful revolts of the Swiss peasants, the wonderful victories of Zisca, the people's leader, in the near Bohemian lands, were illustrations, they thought, of how Luther's sledge-hammer words could be translated into corresponding deeds.

Other teachings besides Luther's were listened to. Many of the Humanists, professed disciples of Plato, expounded to friends or in their class-rooms the communistic dreams of the Republic, and published Utopias like the brilliant sketch of the ideal commonwealth which came from the pen of Thomas More. These speculations “of the Chair” were listened to by the “wandering students,” and were retailed, with forcible illustrations, in a way undreamt of by their scholarly authors, to audiences of artisans and peasants who were more than ready to give them unexpected applications.[321]

The influence of popular astrology must not be forgotten; for the astrologists were powerful among all classes of society, in the palaces of the princes, in the houses of the burghers, and at the peasant market gatherings and church ales. In these days they were busy pointing out heavenly portents, and foretelling calamities and popular risings.[322]

The missionaries of the movement belonged to all sorts and conditions of men—poor priests sympathising with the grievances of their parishioners; wandering monks who had deserted their convents, especially those belonging to the Franciscan Order; poor students on their way from University to University; artisans, travelling in German fashion from one centre of their trade to another. They found their audiences on the village greens under the lime trees, or in the public-houses in the lower parts of the towns. They talked the rude language of the people, and garnished their discourse with many a scriptural quotation. They read to excited audiences small pamphlets and broadsides, printed in thick letters on coarse paper, which discussed the burning questions of the day.

The revolt began unexpectedly, and without any pre-concerted preparation or formulation of demands, in June 1524, when a thousand peasants belonging to the estate of Count Sigismund of Lupfen rose in rebellion against their lord at Stühlingen, a few miles to the north-west of Schaffhausen, and put themselves under the leadership of Hans Müller, an old landsknecht. Müller led his peasants, one of them carrying a flag blazoned with the imperial colours of red, black, and yellow, to the little town of Waldshut, about half-way between Schaffhausen and Basel. The people of the town fraternised with the peasants, and the formidable “Evangelical Brotherhood” was either formed then or the roots of it were planted. The news spread fast, east and west. The peasants of the districts round about the Lake of Constance—in the Allgau, the [pg 330] Klettgau, the Hegau, and Villingen—rose in rebellion. The revolt spread northwards into Lower Swabia, and the peasants of Leiphen, led by Jacob Wehe, were joined by some of the troops of Truchsess, the general of the Swabian League. The peasants of Salzburg, Styria, and the Tyrol rose. These three eastern risings had most staying power in them. The Salzburg peasants besieged the Cardinal Archbishop in his castle; they were not reduced till the spring of 1526, and only after having extorted concessions from their over-lords. The Tyrolese peasants, under their wise leader, Michael Gaismeyer, shut up Archduke Ferdinand in Innsbruck, and in the end gained substantial concessions. The rising in Styria was a very strong one; it lasted till 1526, and was eventually put down by bringing Bohemian troops into the country. From Swabia the flames of insurrection spread into Franconia, where a portion of the insurgents were led by an escaped criminal, the notorious Jäklein Rohrbach. It was this band which perpetrated the wanton massacre of Weinsberg, the one outstanding atrocity of the insurrection. The band and the deed were repudiated by the rest of the insurgents. Thomas Münzer, who, banished from Zwickau and then from Alstedt, had settled in Mühlhausen, his heart aflame with the wrongs of the commonalty, preached insurrection to the peasants in Thüringen. He issued fiery proclamations:

“Arise! Fight the battle of the Lord! On! On! On! The wicked tremble when they hear of you. On! On! On! Be pitiless although Esau gives you fair words (Gen. xxxiii.). Heed not the groans of the godless; they will beg, weep, and entreat you for pity like children. Show them no mercy, as God commanded to Moses (Deut. vii.), and as He has revealed the same to us. Rouse up the towns and the villages; above all, rouse the miners.... On! On! On! while the fire is burning let not the blood cool on your swords! Smite pinke-pank on the anvil of Nimrod! Overturn their towers to the foundation: while one of them lives you will not be free from the fear of man. While they reign over you it is of no use to speak of the fear of God. On! while it is day! God is with you.”

The words were meant to rouse the miners of Mansfeld. They failed in their original intention, but they sent bands of armed insurgents through Thüringen and the Harz, and within fourteen days about forty convents and monasteries were destroyed, and the inmates (many of them poor women with no homes to return to) were sent adrift.

The revolt spread like a conflagration, one province catching fire from another, until in the early spring months of 1525 almost all Germany was in uproar. The only districts which escaped were Bavaria in the south, Hesse, and the north and north-east provinces. The insurgents were not peasants only. The poorer population of many of the towns fraternised with the insurgents, and compelled the civic authorities to admit them within their walls.

§ 4. The Twelve Articles.

Statements of grievances were published which, naturally, bore a strong resemblance to those issued in the earlier social uprisings. The countrymen complained of the continuous appropriation of the woodlands by the proprietors, and that they were not allowed to fish in the streams or to kill game in their fields. They denounced the proprietors' practice of compelling his peasants to do all manner of unstipulated service for him without payment—to repair his roads, to assist at his hunts, to draw his fish-ponds. They said that their crops were ruined by game which they were not allowed to kill, and by hunters in pursuit of game; that the landlord led his streams across their meadow land, and deprived them of water for irrigation. They protested against arbitrary punishments, unknown to the old consuetudinary village law-courts (Haingerichte).

They formulated their demands for justice in various series of articles, all of which had common features, but contained some striking differences. Some dwelt more on the grievances of the peasants, others voiced the demands of the working classes of the towns, others again contained [pg 332] traces of the political aspirations of the more educated leaders of the movement. Almost all protest that they ask for nothing contrary to the requirements of just authority, whether civil or ecclesiastical, nor to the gospel of Christ. The peasants declared that each village community should be at liberty to choose its own pastor, and to dismiss him if he proved to be unsatisfactory; that while they were willing to pay the great tithes (i.e. a tenth of the produce of the crops), the lesser tithes (i.e. a tenth of the eggs, lambs, foals, etc.) should no longer be exacted; that these great tithes should be reserved to pay the village priest's stipend, and that what remained over should go to support the poor; that, since God had made all men free, serfdom should be abolished; and that, while they were willing to obey lawful authority, peasants ought not to be called on to submit to the arbitrary commands of their landlords. They insisted that they had a right to fish in the streams (not in fish-ponds), to kill game and wild birds, for these were public property. They demanded that the woodlands, meadows, and ploughlands which had once belonged to the village community, but which had been appropriated by the landlords, should be restored. They insisted that arbitrary services of every kind should be abolished, and that whatever services, beyond the old feudal dues, were demanded, should be paid for in wages. They called for the abolition of the usage whereby the landlord was permitted, in the name of death-duty, to seize on the most valuable chattel of the deceased tenant; and for the creation of impartial courts of justice in the country districts. They concluded by asking that all their demands should be tested by the word of God, and that if any of them should be found to be opposed to its teaching, it should be rejected.[323]

The townspeople asked that all class privileges should be abolished in civic and ecclesiastical appointments; that [pg 333] the administration of justice in the town's courts should be improved; that the local taxation should be readjusted; that all the inhabitants should be permitted to vote for the election of the councillors; and that better provision should be made for the care of the poor. Some of the more ambitious manifestoes contained demands for a thorough reconstruction of the entire administration of the Empire, on a scheme which involved the overthrow of all feudal courts of justice, and contemplated a series of imperial judicatories, rising from revived Communal Courts to a central Imperial Court of Appeal for the whole Empire. Some manifestoes demanded a unification of the coinage, weights, and measures throughout the Empire; a confiscation of ecclesiastical endowments for the purpose of lessening taxation, and for the redemption of feudal dues; a uniform rate of taxes and customs duties; restraint to be placed on the operations of the great capitalists; the regulation of commerce and trade by law; and the admission of representatives from all classes in the community into the public administration. In every case the Emperor was regarded as the Lord Paramount. There were also declarations of the sovereignty of the people, made in such a way as to suggest that the writings of Marsilius of Padua had been studied by some of the leaders among the insurgents. The most famous of all these declarations was the Twelve Articles. The document was adopted by delegates from several of the insurrectionary bands, which met at Memmingen in Upper Swabia, to unite upon a common basis of action. If not actually drafted by Schappeler, a friend of Zwingli, the articles were probably inspired by him. These Twelve Articles gave something like unity to the movement; although it must be remembered that documents bearing the title do not always agree. The main thought with the peasant was to secure a fair share of the land, security of tenure, and diminution of feudal servitudes; and the idea of the artisan was to obtain full civic privileges and an adequate representation of his class on the city council.

§ 5. The Suppression of the Revolt.

During the earlier months of 1525 the rising carried everything before it. Many of the smaller towns made common cause with the peasants; indeed, it was feared that all the towns of Swabia might unite in supporting the movement. Prominent nobles were forced to join the “Evangelical Brotherhood” which had been formally constituted at Memmingen (March 7th). Princes, like the Cardinal Elector of Mainz and the Bishop of Würzburg, had to come to terms with the insurgents. Germany had been denuded of soldiers, drafted to take part in the Italian wars of Charles v. The ruling powers engaged the insurgents in negotiations simply for the purpose of gaining time, as was afterwards seen. But the rising had no solidity in it, nor did it produce, save in the Tyrol, any leader capable of effectually controlling his followers and of giving practical result to their efforts. The insurgents became demoralised after their first successes, and the whole movement had begun to show signs of dissolution before the princes had recovered from their terror. Philip of Hesse aided the Elector of Saxony (John, for Frederick had died during the insurrection) to crush Münzer at Frankenhausen (May 15th, 1525), the town of Mühlhausen was taken, and deprived of its privileges as an imperial city, and the revolt was crushed in North Germany.

George Truchsess, the general of the Swabian League, his army strengthened by mercenaries returning to Germany after the battle of Pavia, mastered the bands in Swabia and in Franconia. The Elsass revolt was suppressed with great ferocity by Duke Anthony of Lorraine. None of the German princes showed any consideration or mercy to their revolting subjects save the old Elector Frederick and Philip of Hesse. The former, on his death-bed, besought his brother to deal leniently with the misguided people; Philip's peasantry had fewer matters to complain of than had those of any other province, [pg 335] the Landgrave discussed their grievances with them, and made concessions which effectually prevented any revolt. Everywhere else, save in the Tyrol, the revolt was crushed with merciless severity, and between 100,000 and 150,000 of the insurgents perished on the field or elsewhere. The insurrection maintained itself in the Tyrol, in Salzburg, and in Styria until the spring of 1526; in all other districts of Germany the insurgents were crushed before the close of 1525. No attempt was made to cure the ills which led to the rising. The oppression of the peasantry was intensified. The last vestiges of local self-government were destroyed, and the unfortunate people were doomed for generations to exist in the lowest degradation. The year 1525 was one of the saddest in the annals of the German Fatherland.

The Peasants' War had a profound, lasting, and disastrous effect on the Reformation movement in Germany. It affected Luther personally, and that in a way which could not fail to react upon the cause which he conspicuously led. It checked the spread of the Reformation throughout the whole of Germany. It threw the guidance of the movement into the hands of the evangelical princes, and destroyed the hope that it might give birth to a reformed National German Church.

§ 6. Luther and the Peasants' War.

The effect of the rising upon Luther's own character and future conduct was too important for us to entirely pass over his personal relations to the peasants and their revolt. He was a peasant's son. “My father, my grandfather, my forebears, were all genuine peasants,” he was accustomed to say. He had seen and pitied the oppression of the peasant class, and had denounced it in his own trenchant fashion. He had reproved the greed of the landlords, when he said that if the peasant's land produced as many coins as ears of corn, the profit would go to the landlord only. He had publicly expressed his approval of [pg 336] many of the proposals in the Twelve Articles long before they had been formulated and adopted at Memmingen in March 1525, and had advocated a return to the old communal laws or usages of Germany. He formally declared his agreement with the substance of the Twelve Articles after they had become the “charter” of the revolt. But Luther, rightly or wrongly, held that no real good could come from armed insurrection. He believed with all the tenacity of his nature, that while there might be two roads to reform, the way of peace, and the way of war, the pathway of peace was the only one which would lead to lasting benefit. After the storm burst he risked his life over and over again in visits he paid to the disaffected districts, to warn the people of the dangers they were running. After Münzer's attempt to rouse the miners of Mansfeld, and carry fire and sword into the district where his parents were living, Luther made one last attempt to bring the misguided people to a more reasonable course. He made a preaching tour through the disaffected districts. He went west from Eisleben to Stolberg (April 21st, 1525); thence to Nordhausen, where Münzer's sympathisers rang the bells to drown his voice; south to Erfurt (April 28th); north again to the fertile valley of the Golden Aue and to Wallhausen (May 1st); south again to Weimar (May 3rd), where news reached him that his Elector was dying, and that he had expressed the wish to see him,—a message which reached him too late. It was on this journey, or shortly after his return to Wittenberg (May 6th), that Luther wrote his vehement tract, Against the murdering, thieving hordes of Peasants. He wrote it while his mind was full of Münzer's calls to slaughter, when the danger was at its height, with all the sights and sounds of destruction and turmoil in eye and ear, while it still hung in the balance whether the insurgent bands might not carry all before them. In this terrible pamphlet Luther hounded on the princes to crush the rising. It is this pamphlet, all extenuating circumstances being taken into account, which must [pg 337] ever remain an ineffaceable stain on his noble life and career.[324]

As for himself, the Peasants' War imprinted in him a deep distrust of all who had any connection with the rising. He had not forgotten Carlstadt's action at Wittenberg in 1521-1522, and when Carlstadt was found attempting to preach the insurrection in Franconia and Swabia, Luther never forgave him. His deep-rooted and unquenchable suspicion of Zwingli may be traced back to his discovery that friends of the Zurich Reformer had been at Memmingen, had aided the revolutionary delegates to draft the Twelve Articles, and had induced them to shelter themselves under the shield of a religious Reformation. What is perhaps more important, the Peasants' War gave to Luther a deep and abiding distrust of the “common man” which was altogether lacking in the earlier stages of his career, which made him prevent every effort to give anything like a democratic ecclesiastical organisation to the Evangelical Church, and which led him to bind his Reformation in the chains of secular control to the extent of regarding the secular authority as possessing a quasi-episcopal function.[325] It is probably true that he saved the Reformation in Germany by cutting it loose from the revolutionary movement; but the wrench left marks on his own character as well as on that of the movement he headed. Luther's enemies were quick to make capital out of his relations with the peasants, and Einser compared him to Pilate, who washed his hands after betraying Jesus to the Jews.

§ 7. Germany divided into two separate Camps.

The insurrection, altogether apart from its personal effects on Luther, had a profound influence on the whole of the German Reformation. Some princes who had hitherto favoured the Romanist side were confirmed in their opposition; others who had hesitated, definitely abandoned the cause of Reform. For both, it seemed that a social revolution of a desperate kind lay behind the Protestant Reformation. Many an innocent preacher of the new faith perished in the disturbances—sought out and slain by the princes as an instigator of the rebellion. Duke Anthony of Lorraine, for example, in his suppression of the revolt in Elsass, made no concealment of his belief that evangelical preachers were the cause of the rising, and butchered them without mercy when he could discover them. The Curia found that the Peasants' War was an admirable text to preach from when they insisted that Luther was another Huss, and that the movement which he led was a revival of the ecclesiastical and social communism of the extreme Hussites (Taborites); that all who attacked the Church of Rome were engaged in attempting to destroy the bases of society. It was after the Peasants' War that the Roman Catholic League of princes grew strong in numbers and in cohesion.

The result of the war also showed that the one strong political element in Germany was the princedom. The Reichsregiment, which still preserved a precarious existence, had shown that it had no power to cope with the disturbances, and its attempts at mediation had been treated with contempt. From this year, 1525, the political destiny of the land was distinctly seen to be definitely shaping for territorial centralisation round the greater princes and nobles. It was inevitable that the conservative religious Reformation should follow the lines of political growth, with the result that there could not be a National Evangelical Church of Germany. It could only find outcome in territorial Churches under the rule and protection of those princes who from motives of religion [pg 339] and conscience had adopted the principles which Luther preached.

The more radical religious movement broke up into fragments, and reappeared in the guise of the maligned and persecuted Anabaptists,—a name which embraced a very wide variety of religious opinions,—some of whom appropriated to themselves the aspirations of the social revolution which had been crushed by the princes. The conservative and Lutheran Reformation found its main elements of strength in the middle classes of Germany; while the Anabaptists had their largest following among the artisans and working men of the towns.

The terrors of the time separated Germany into two hostile camps—the one accepting and the other rejecting the ecclesiastical Reformation, which ceased to be a national movement in any real sense of the word.

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Chapter V. From The Diet Of Speyer, 1526, To The Religious Peace Of Augsburg, 1555.

§ 1. The Diet of Speyer, 1526.[326]

When Germany emerged from the social revolution in the end of 1525, it soon became apparent that the religious question remained unsettled, and was dividing the country into two parties whose differences had become visibly accentuated, and that both held as strongly as ever to their distinctive principles. Perhaps one of the reasons for the increased strain was the conduct of many of the Romanist princes in suppressing the rebellion. The victories of the Swabian League in South Germany were everywhere followed by religious persecution. Men were condemned to confiscation of goods or to death, not for rebellion, for they had never taken part in the rising, but for their confessed attachment to Lutheran teaching. The Lutheran preachers were special objects of attack. Aichili, who acted as a provost-marshal to the Swabian League, made himself conspicuous by plundering, mulcting, and [pg 341] putting them to death. It is said that he hung forty Lutheran pastors on the trees by the roadside in one small district. The Roman Catholic princes had banded themselves together for mutual defence as early as July 1525. The more influential members of this league were Duke George of Saxony, the Electors of Brandenburg and Mainz, and Duke Henry of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Duke Henry was selected to inform the Emperor of what they had done, and to secure his sympathy and support. He told Charles v. that the league had been formed “against the Lutherans in case they should attempt by force or cunning to gain them over to their unbelief.”

On the other hand, the Protestant princes had a mutual understanding—it does not seem to have been a definite league—to defend one another against any attack upon their faith. The leaders were John of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, Dukes Otto, Ernest, and Francis of Brunswick-Lüneberg, and the Counts of Mansfeld. Philip of Hesse was the soul of the union. They could count on the support of many of the imperial cities, some of them, such as Nürnberg, being in districts where the country lying around was ruled by Romanist princes.

The Diet, which met at Augsburg in 1525, was very thinly attended, and both parties waited for the Diet which was to be held at Speyer in the following year.

There never had been any doubt about the position and opinions of the Emperor on the religious question. He had stated them emphatically at the Diet of Worms. He had been educated in the beliefs of mediæval Catholicism: he valued the ceremonies and usages of the mediæval worship; he understood no other ecclesiastical polity; he believed that the Bishop of Rome was the head of the Church on earth; he had consistently persecuted Protestants in his hereditary dominions from the beginning; he desired the execution of the Edict of Worms against Luther. If he had remained in Germany, all his personal and official influence would have been thrown into the scale against the evangelical faith. Troubles in Spain, and the prosecution [pg 342] of the war against Francis of France had prevented his presence in Germany after his first brief visit. He had now conquered and taken Francis prisoner at the battle of Pavia. The terms of the Treaty of Madrid bound Francis to assist Charles in suppressing Lutheranism and other pernicious sects in Germany, and when it was signed the Emperor seemed free to crush the German Protestants. But his very success was against him; papal diplomacy wove another web around him; he was still unable to visit the Fatherland, and the religious question had to be discussed at Speyer in his absence.

When the Diet met, the national hostility to Rome showed no signs of abatement. The subject of German grievances against the Curia was again revived, and it was alleged that the chief causes of the Peasants' War were the merciless exactions of clerical landholders. Perhaps this opinion was justified by the fact that the condition of the peasantry on the lands of monasteries and of bishops was notoriously worse than that of those under secular proprietors; and that, while the clerical landholders had done little to subdue the rebels, they had been merciless after the insurgents had been subdued. There was truth enough in the charge to make it a sufficient answer to the accusation that the social revolution had been the outcome of Luther's teaching.

Ferdinand of Austria presided in his brother's absence, and, acting on the Emperor's instructions, he demanded the enforcement of the Edict of Worms and a decree of the Diet to forbid all innovations in worship and in doctrine. He promised that if these imperial demands were granted, the Emperor would induce the Pope to call a General Council for the definite settlement of the religious difficulties. But the Diet was not inclined to adopt the suggestions. The Emperor was at war with the Pope. Many of the clerical members felt themselves to be in a delicate position, and did not attend. The Lutheran sympathisers were in a majority, and the delegates from the cities insisted that it was impossible to enforce the Edict [pg 343] of Worms. The Committee of Princes[327] proposed to settle the religious question by a compromise which was almost wholly favourable to the Reformation. They suggested that the marriage of priests, giving the cup to the laity, the use of German as well as Latin in the baptismal and communion services, should be recognised; that all private Masses should be abolished; that the number of ecclesiastical holy days should be largely reduced; and that in the exposition of Holy Writ the rule ought to be that scripture should be interpreted by scripture. After a good deal of fencing, the Diet finally resolved on a deliverance which provided that the word of God should be preached without disturbance, that indemnity should be granted for past offences against the Edict of Worms, and that, until the meeting of a General Council to be held in a German city, each State should so live as it hoped to answer for its conduct to God and to the Emperor.

The decision was a triumph for the territorial system as well as for the Reformation, and foreshadowed the permanent religious peace of Augsburg (1555). It is difficult to see how either Charles or Ferdinand could have accepted it. Their acquiescence was probably due to the fact that the Emperor was then at war with the Pope (the sack of Rome under the Constable Bourbon took place on May 6th, 1527), and that the threat of a German ecclesiastical revolt was a good weapon to use against His Holiness. Ferdinand was negotiating for election to the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, and dared not offend his German subjects. Both brothers looked on any concessions to the German Lutherans as temporary compromises to be withdrawn as soon as they were able to enforce their own views.

The Protestant States and cities at once interpreted this decision of the Diet to mean that they had the legal right to organise territorial Churches and to introduce such [pg 344] changes into public worship as would bring it into harmony with their evangelical beliefs.[328] The latent evangelical feeling at once manifested itself. Almost all North Germany, except Brandenburg, Ducal Saxony, and Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, became Lutheran within three years. Still it has to be noticed that the legal recognition was accorded to the secular authorities, and that a ruling prince, who had no very settled religious convictions, might change the religion of his principality from political or selfish motives. It became evident in 1529 that political feeling or fear of the Emperor was much stronger than resolutions to support the evangelical Reformation.

Soon after the Diet, Philip of Hesse committed a political blunder which, in the opinion of many of his evangelical friends, involved disloyalty to the Fatherland, made them chary of associating themselves with him, and greatly weakened the Protestant party. For most of these North German princes, in spite of their clinging to the disruptive territorial principle, had a rugged conscientious patriotism which made them feel that no good German should seek the aid of France or make alliance with a Czech. Many of the Roman Catholic princes, irritated at the spread and organisation of Lutheranism which followed the decision of the Diet of 1526, had been persecuting by confiscation of goods and by death their Lutheran subjects. The Landgrave had married the daughter of Duke George of Saxony, and he knew that his father-in-law was continually uttering threats against the Elector of Saxony. Brooding over these things, Philip became gradually convinced that the Romanist princes were planning a deadly assault on the Lutherans, and that first the Elector and then he himself would be attacked and their territories partitioned among the conquerors. He had no proof, but his suspicions were strong. Chance brought him in contact with Otto von Pack, the steward of the Chancery of Ducal Saxony, who, on being questioned, admitted that the suspicions [pg 345] of Philip were correct, and promised to procure a copy of the treaty. Pack was a scoundrel. No such treaty existed. He forged a document which he declared to be a copy of a genuine treaty, and got 4000 gulden for his pains. Philip took the forgery to the Elector of Saxony and to Luther, both of whom had no doubt of its genuine character. They both, however, refused to agree to Philip's plan of seeking assistance outside the Empire. The Landgrave believed the situation too dangerous to be faced passively. He tried to secure the assistance of Francis of France and of Zapolya, the determined opponent of the House of Austria in Bohemia. It was not until he had fully committed himself that the discovery was made that the document he had trusted in was nothing but a forgery. His hasty action in appealing to France and Bohemia to interfere in the domestic concerns of the Empire was resented by his co-religionists. When the Diet met at Speyer, the Lutherans were divided and discredited. On the other hand, the Pope and the Emperor were no longer at war, and the clerical members flocked to the Diet in large numbers.

At this memorable Diet of Speyer (1529), a compact Roman Catholic majority faced a weak Lutheran minority. The Emperor, through his commissioners, declared at the outset that he abolished, “by his imperial and absolute authority (Machtvollkommenheit),” the clause in the ordinance of 1526 on which the Lutherans had relied when they founded their territorial Churches; it had been the cause, he said, “of much ill counsel and misunderstanding.” The majority of the Diet upheld the Emperor's decision, and the practical effect of the ordinance which was voted was to rescind that of 1526. It declared that the German States which had accepted the Edict of Worms should continue to do so; which meant that there was to be no toleration for Lutherans in Romanist districts. It said that in districts which had departed from the Edict no further innovations were to be made, save that no one was to be prevented from hearing Mass; that sects which denied the sacrament [pg 346] of the true Body and Blood of Christ (Zwinglians) should no more be tolerated than Anabaptists. What was most important, it declared that no ecclesiastical body should be deprived of its authority or revenues. It was this last clause which destroyed all possibility of creating Lutheran Churches; for it meant that the mediæval ecclesiastical rule was everywhere to be restored, and with it the right of bishops to deal with all preachers within their dioceses.

§ 2. The Protest.[329]

It was this ordinance which called forth the celebrated Protest, from which comes the name Protestant. The Protest was read in the Diet on the day (April 19th, 1529) when all concessions to the Lutherans had been refused. Ferdinand and the other imperial commissioners would not permit its publication in the “recess,” and the protesters had a legal instrument drafted and published, in which they embodied the Protest, with all the necessary documents annexed. The legal position taken was that the unanimous decision of one Diet (1526) could not be rescinded by a majority in a second Diet (1529). The Protesters declared that they meant to abide by the “recess” of 1526; that the “recess” of 1529 was not to be held binding on them, because they were not consenting parties. When forced to make their choice between obedience to God and obedience to the Emperor, they were compelled to choose the former; and they appealed, from the wrongs done to them at the Diet, to the Emperor, to the next free General Council of Holy Christendom, or to an ecclesiastical congress of the German nation. The document was signed by the Elector John of Saxony, Margrave George of Brandenburg, Dukes Ernest and Francis of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Landgrave Philip of Hesse, and Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt. The fourteen cities which adhered were Strassburg, Nürnberg, Ulm, Constance, Lindau, Memmingen, [pg 347] Kempten, Nördlingen, Heilbronn, Reutlingen, Isny, St. Gallen, Wissenberg, and Windsheim. Many of these cities were Zwinglian rather than Lutheran; but all united in face of the common danger.

The Protest at Speyer embodied the principle, not a new one, that a minority of German States, when they felt themselves oppressed by a majority, could entrench themselves behind the laws of the Empire; and the idea is seen at work onward to the Diet of 1555, when it was definitely recognised. Such a minority, to maintain a successful defence, had to be united and able to protect itself by force if necessary. This was at once felt; and three days after the Protest had been read in the Diet (April, 22nd), Electoral Saxony, Hesse, and the cities of Strassburg, Ulm, and Nürnberg had concluded a “secret and particular treaty.” They pledged themselves to mutual defence if attacked on account of God's word, whether the onslaught came from the Swabian League, from the Reichsregiment, or from the Emperor himself. Soon after the Diet, proposals were brought forward to make the compact effective and extensive,—one drafted by representatives of the cities and the other by the Elector of Saxony,—which provided very thoroughly for mutual support; but neither took into account the differences which lay behind the Protest. These divergences were strong enough to wreck the union.

The differences which separated the German Protestants were not wholly theological, although their doctrinal disputes were most in evidence.

§ 3. Luther and Zwingli.

A movement for reformation, which owed little or nothing to Wittenberg, had been making rapid progress in Switzerland, and two of the strongest cantons, Zurich and Bern, had revolted from the Roman Church. Its leader, Huldreich Zwingli, was utterly unlike Luther in temperament, training, and environment.

He had never gone through the terrible spiritual conflicts which had marked Luther for life, and had made him the man that he was. No deep sense of personal sin had ever haunted him, to make his early manhood a burden to him. Long after he had become known as a Reformer, he was able to combine a strong sense of moral responsibility with some laxity in private life. Unlike both Luther and Calvin, he was not the type of man to be leader in a deeply spiritual revival.

He had been subjected to the influences of Humanism from his childhood. His uncle, Bartholomew Zwingli, parish priest at Wildhaus, and the dean of Wesen, under whose charge the boy was placed, had a strong sympathy for the New Learning, and the boy imbibed it. His young intellect was fed on Homer and Pindar and Cicero; and all his life he esteemed the great pagans of antiquity as highly as he did any Christian saint. If it can be said that he bent before the dominating influence of any one man, it was Erasmus and not Luther who compelled him to admiration. He had for a teacher Thomas Wyttenbach, who was half Reformer and half disciple of Erasmus; and learned from him to study the Scriptures and the writings of such earlier Church Fathers as Origen, Jerome, and Chrysostom. Like many another Humanist north of the Alps, the mystical Christian Platonism of Pico della Mirandola had some influence on him. He had never studied the Scholastic Theology, and knew nothing of the spell it cast over men who had been trained in it. Of all the Reformers, Luther was the least removed from the mediæval way of looking at religion, and Zwingli had wandered farthest from it.

His earliest ecclesiastical surroundings were also different from Luther's. He had never been taught in childhood to consider the Church to be the Pope's House, in which the Bishop of Rome was entitled to the reverence and obedience due to the house-father. In his land the people had been long accustomed to manage their own ecclesiastical affairs. The greater portion of Switzerland had known but little [pg 349] either of the benefits or disadvantages of mediæval episcopal rule. Church property paid its share of the communal taxes, and even the monasteries and convents were liable to civil inspection. If a stray tourist at the present day wanders into the church which is called the Cathedral in that survival of ancient mediæval republics, San Marino, he will find that the seats of the “consuls” of the little republic occupy the place where he expects to find the bishop's chair. The civil power asserted its supremacy over the ecclesiastical in most things in these small mediæval republics. The Popes needed San Marino to be a thorn in the side of the Malatesta of Rimini, they hired most of their soldiers from the Swiss cantons, and therefore tolerated many things which they would not have permitted elsewhere.

The social environment of the Swiss Reformer was very different from that of Luther. He was a free Swiss who had listened in childhood to tales of the heroic fights of Morgarten, Sempach, Morat, and Nancy, and had imbibed the hereditary hatred of the House of Hapsburg. He had no fear of the “common man,” Luther's bugbear after the Peasants' War. Orderly democratic life was the air he breathed, and what reverence Luther had for the Emperor “who protected poor people against the Turk,” and for the lords of the soil, Zwingli paid to the civic fathers elected by a popular vote. When the German Reformer thought of Zwingli he was always muttering what Archbishop Parker said of John Knox—“God keep us from such visitations as Knockes hath attempted in Scotland; the people to be orderers of things!”[330]

Owing doubtless to this republican training, Zwingli had none of that aloofness from political affairs which was a marked characteristic of Luther. He believed that his mission had as much to do with politics as with religion, and that religious reformation was to be worked out by political forces, whether in the more limited sphere of [pg 350] Switzerland or in larger Germany. He had never taken a step forward until he had carried along with him the civic authorities of Zurich. His advance had always been calculated. Luther's Theses (November 1517) had been the volcanic outburst of a conscience troubled by the sight of a great religious scandal, and their author had no intention of doing more than protesting against the one great evil; he had no idea at the time where his protest was leading him. Zwingli's Theses (January 1523) were the carefully drafted programme of a Reformation which he meant to accomplish by degrees, and through the assistance of the Council of Zurich. His mind was full of political combinations for the purpose of carrying out his plans of reformation. As early as 1524 he was in correspondence with Pirkheimer about the possibility of a league between Nürnberg and Zurich—two powerful Protestant towns. This league did not take shape. But in 1527 a religious and political league (das christliche Bürgerrecht) was concluded between Zurich and Constance, an imperial German town; St. Gallen joined in 1528; Biel, Mühlhausen, and Basel in 1529; even Strassburg, afraid of the growing power of the House of Hapsburg, was included in 1530. The feverish political activity of Zwingli commended him to Philip of Hesse almost as strongly as it made him disliked, and even feared, by Ferdinand of Austria. The Elector of Saxony and Luther dreaded his influence over “the young man of Hesse.”

Melanchthon was the first to insist on the evil influences of Zwingli's activity for the peace of the Empire. He persuaded himself that had the Lutherans stood alone at Speyer, the Romanists would have been prepared to make concessions which would have made the Protest needless. He returned to Wittenberg full of misgivings. The Protest might lead to a defiance of the Emperor, and to a subversion of the Empire. Was it right for subjects to defend themselves by war against the civil power which was ordained of God? “My conscience,” he wrote, “is disquieted because of this thing; I am half dead with thinking about it.”

He found Luther only too sympathetic; resolute to maintain that if the prince commanded anything which was contrary to the word of God, it was the duty of the subject to offer what passive resistance he was able, but that it was never right to oppose him actively by force of arms. Still less was it the duty of a Christian man to ally himself for such resistance with those who did not hold “the whole truth of God.” Luther would therefore have nothing to do with an alliance offensive and defensive against the Emperor with cities who shared in what he believed to be the errors of Zwingli.

This meant a great deal more than a break with the Swiss. The south German towns of Strassburg, Memmingen, Constance, Lindau, and others were more Zwinglian than Lutheran. It was not only that they were inclined to the more radical theology of the Swiss Reformer; they found that his method of organising a reformed Church, drafted for the needs of Zurich, suited their municipal institutions better than the territorial organisations being adopted by the Lutheran Churches of North Germany. To Luther, whose views of the place of the “common man” in the Church had been changed by the Peasants' War, this was of itself a danger which threatened the welfare of the infant Churches. It made ecclesiastical government too democratic; and it did this in the very centres where the democracy was most dangerous. He could not forget that the mob of these German towns had taken part in the recently suppressed social revolution, that their working-class population was still the recruiting ground of the Anabaptist sectaries, and that at Memmingen itself Zwinglian partisans had helped to organise the revolution, and to link it on to the religious awakening. Besides, the attraction which drew these German cities to the Swiss might lead to larger political consequences which seemed to threaten what unity remained to the German Empire. It might result in the detachment of towns from the German Fatherland, and in the formation of new cantons cut adrift from Germany to increase the strength of the Swiss Confederation.

§ 4. The Marburg Colloquy.[331]

All these thoughts were in the minds of Luther and of his fellow theologians, and had their weight with the Elector of Saxony, when their refusal to join rendered the proposed defensive league impossible. No one was more disappointed than the Landgrave of Hesse, the ablest political leader whom the German Reformation produced. He knew more about Zwingli than his fellow princes in North Germany; he had a keen interest in theological questions; he sympathised to some extent with the special opinions of Zwingli; and he had not the dread of democracy which possessed Luther and his Elector. He believed, rightly as events showed, that differences or suspected differences in theology were the strongest causes of separation; he was correct in supposing that the Lutheran divines through ignorance magnified those points of difference; and he hoped that if the Lutherans and the Swiss could be brought together, they would learn to know each other better. So he tried to arrange for a religious conference in his castle at Marburg. He had many a difficulty to overcome so far as the Lutherans were concerned. Neither Luther nor Melanchthon desired to meet Zwingli. Melanchthon thought that if a conference was to be held, it would be much better to meet Oecolampadius and perhaps some learned Romanists. Zwingli, on the other hand, was eager to meet Luther. He responded at once. [pg 353] He came, without waiting for leave to be given by the Zurich Council, across a country full of enemies. The conference met from October 30th to November 5th, 1529. Luther was accompanied by Melanchthon, Justus Jonas, and Cruciger, Frederick Mecum from Gotha, Osiander from Nürnberg, Brenz from Hall, Stephan Agricola from Augsburg, and others. With Zwingli came Oecolampadius, Bucer, and Hedio from Strassburg, Rudolph Collin (who has left the fullest account of the discussion), two councillors from Basel and from Zurich, and Jacob Sturm from Strassburg. After a preliminary conference between Zwingli and Melanchthon on the one hand, and Luther and Oecolampadius on the other, the real discussion took place in the great hall of the Castle. The tourist is still shown the exact spot where the table which separated the disputants was placed.

This Marburg Colloquy, as the conference was called, had important results for good, although it was unsuccessful in fulfilling the expectations of the Landgrave. It showed a real and substantial harmony between the two sets of theologians on all points save one. Fifteen theological articles (The Marburg Articles) stated the chief heads of the Christian faith, and fourteen were signed by Luther and by Zwingli. The one subject on which they could not come to an agreement was the relation of the Body of Christ to the elements Bread and Wine in the Sacrament of the Supper. It was scarcely to be expected that there could be harmony on a doctrinal matter on which there had been such a long and embittered controversy.

Both theologians found in the mediæval doctrine of the Sacrament of the Supper what they believed to be an overwhelming error destructive to the spiritual life. It presupposed that a priest, in virtue of mysterious powers conferred in ordination, could give or withhold from the Christian people the benefits conveyed in the Sacrament. It asserted that the priest could change the elements Bread and Wine into the very Body and Blood of Christ, and that unless this change was made there was no presence [pg 354] of Christ in the sacrament, and no possibility of sacramental grace for the communicant. Luther attacked the problem as a mediæval Christian, content, if he was able to purge the ordinance of this one fault, to leave all else as he found it. Zwingli came as a Humanist, whose fundamental rule was to get beyond the mediæval theology altogether, and attempt to discover how the earlier Church Fathers could aid him to solve the problem. This difference in mental attitude led them to approach the subject from separate sides; and the mediæval way of looking at the whole subject rendered difference of approach very easy. The mediæval Church had divided the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper into two distinct parts—the Mass and the Eucharist.[332] The Mass was inseparably connected with the thought of the great Sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross, and the Eucharist with the thought of the believer's communion with the Risen Living Christ. Zwingli attacked the Romanist doctrine of the Mass, and Luther sought to give an evangelical meaning to the mediæval conception of the Eucharist. Hence the two Protestant antagonists were never exactly facing each other.

Luther's convent studies in D'Ailly, Biel, and their common master, William of Occam, enabled him to show that there might be the presence of the Glorified Body of Christ, extended in space, in the elements Bread and Wine in a natural way, and without any priestly miracle: and that satisfied him; it enabled him to deny the priestly miracle and keep true in the most literal way to the words of the institution, “This is My Body.”

Zwingli, on the other hand, insisted that the primary reference in the Lord's Supper was to the death of Christ, and that it was above all things a commemorative rite. He transformed the mediæval Mass into an evangelical sacrament, by placing the idea of commemoration where the mediæval theologian had put that of repetition, and held that the means of appropriation was faith and not [pg 355] eating with the mouth. This he held to be a return to the belief of the early centuries, before the conception of the sacrament had been corrupted by pagan ideas.

Like Luther, he served himself heir to the work of earlier theologians; but he did not go to Occam, Biel, or D'Ailly, as the German Reformer had done. Erasmus, who had no liking for the priestly miracle in the Mass, and cared little for a rigid literal interpretation of the words of the institution, had declared that the Sacrament of the Supper was the symbol of commemoration, of a covenant with God, and of the fellowship of all believers in Christ, and this commended itself to Zwingli's conception of the social character of Christianity; but he was too much a Christian theologian to be contented with such a vague idea of the rite. Many theologians of the later Middle Ages, when speculation was more free than it could be after the stricter definitions of the Council of Trent, had tried to purify and spiritualise the beliefs of the Church about the meaning of the central Christian rite. Foremost among them was John Wessel (c. 1420-1489), with his long and elaborate treatise, De Sacramento Eucharistiæ. He had taught that the Lord's Supper is the rite in which the death of Christ is presented to and appropriated by the believer; that it is above all things a commemoration of that death and a communion or participation in the benefits which followed; that communion with the spiritual presence of Jesus is of far more importance than any corporeal contact with the Body of Christ; and that this communion is shared in through faith. These thoughts had been taken over by Christopher Honius, a divine of the Netherlands, who had enforced them by insisting that our Lord's discourse in the 6th chapter of St. John's Gospel had reproved any materialistic conception of the Lord's Supper; and that therefore the words of the institution must not be taken in their rigid literal meaning. He had been the first to suggest that the word is in “This is My Body” must mean signifies. Wessel and Honius were the predecessors of Zwingli, and [pg 356] he wove their thoughts into his doctrine of the Lord's Supper. It should be remembered that Luther had also been acquainted with the labours of Wessel and of Honius, and that so far from attracting they had repelled him, simply because he thought they failed to give the respect due to the literal meaning of the words of the institution.

It must not be forgotten that Luther knew Zwingli only as in some way connected with Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt. Carlstadt had professed to accept the theory of Honius about the nature of the relation of the Presence of Christ to the elements of Bread and Wine—saying that the latter were signs, and nothing more, of the former. A controversy soon raged in Wittenberg to the scandal of German Protestantism. Luther insisted more and more on the necessity of the Presence in the elements of the Body of Christ “corporeally extended in space”; while Carlstadt denied that Presence in any sense whatsoever. Luther insisted with all the strength of language at his command that the literal sense of the words of the institution must be preserved, and that the words “This is My Body” must refer to the Bread and to the Wine; while Carlstadt thought it was more likely that while using the words our Lord pointed to His own Body, or if not, that religious conviction compelled another interpretation than the one on which Luther insisted.

The dust of all this controversy was in the eyes of the theologians when they met at Marburg, and prevented them carefully examining each other's doctrinal position. In all essential matters Luther and Zwingli were not so far apart as each supposed the other to be. Their respective theories, put very shortly, may be thus summed up.

Zwingli, looking mainly at the mediæval doctrine of the Mass, taught: (1) The Lord's Supper is not a repetition of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, but a commemoration of that sacrifice once offered up; and the elements are not a newly offered Christ, but the signs of the Body and Blood of the Christ who was once for all offered on Calvary. (2) That forgiveness for sin is not won by partaking [pg 357] in a newly offered Christ, but by believing in a Christ once offered up. (3) That the benefits of the work of Christ are always appropriated by faith, and that the atonement is so appropriated in the sacrament, whereby Christ becomes our food; but the food, being neither carnal nor corporeal, is not appropriated by the mouth, but by faith indwelling in the soul. Therefore there is a Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament, but it is a spiritual Presence, not a corporeal one. A real and living faith always involves the union of the believer with Christ, and therefore the Real Presence of Christ; and the Presence of Christ, which is in every act of faith, is in the sacrament to the faithful partaker. (4) That while the Lord's Supper primarily refers to the sacrifice of Christ, and while the elements, Bread and Wine, are the symbols of the crucified Body of Christ, the partaking of the elements is also a symbol and pledge of an ever-renewed living union with the Risen Christ. (5) That as our Lord Himself has specially warned His followers against thinking of feeding on Him in any corporeal or carnal manner (John vi.), the words of the institution cannot be taken in a strictly literal fashion, and the phrase “This is My Body” means “This signifies My Body.” The fourth position had been rather implicitly held than explicitly stated.

Luther, looking mainly at the mediæval doctrine of the Eucharist, taught: (1) That the primary use of the sacrament was to bring believing communicants into direct touch with the Living Risen Christ. (2) That to this end there must be in the Bread and Wine the local Presence of the Glorified Body of Christ, which he always conceived as “body extended in space”; the communicants, coming into touch with this Body of Christ, have communion with Him, such as His disciples had on earth and as His saints now have in heaven. (3) That this local Presence of Christ does not presuppose any special priestly miracle, for, in virtue of its ubiquity, the Glorified Body of Christ is everywhere naturally, and therefore is in the Bread and in the Wine: this natural Presence becomes a sacramental [pg 358] Presence because of the promise of God attached to the reverent and believing partaking of the sacrament. (4) That communion with the Living Risen Christ implies the appropriation of the Death of Christ, and of the Atonement won by this death; but this last thought of Luther's, which is Zwingli's first thought, lies implicitly in his teaching without being dwelt upon.

The two theories, so far as doctrinal teaching goes, are supplementary to each other rather than antagonists. Each has a weak point. Luther's depends on a questionable mediæval idea of ubiquity, and Zwingli's on a somewhat shallow exegesis. It was unfortunate, but only natural, that when the two theological leaders were brought together at Marburg, instead of seeking the mutual points of agreement, each should attack the weak point in the other's theory. Luther began by chalking the words Hoc est Corpus Meum on the table before him, and by saying, “I take these words literally; if anyone does not, I shall not argue but contradict”; and Zwingli spent all his argumentative powers in disputing the doctrine of ubiquity. The long debate went circling round these two points and could never be got away from them. Zwingli maintained that the Body of Christ was at the Right Hand of God, and could not be present, extended in space, in the elements, which were signs representing what was absent. Luther argued that the Body of Christ was in the elements, as, to use his own illustration, the sword is present in the sheath. As a soldier could present his sheathed sword and say, truly and literally, This is my sword, although nothing but the sheath was visible; so, although nothing could be seen or felt but Bread and Wine, these elements in the Holy Supper could be literally and truly called the Body and Blood of Christ.

The substantial harmony revealed in the fourteen articles which they all could sign showed that the Germans and the Swiss had one faith. But Luther insisted that their difference on the Sacrament of the Supper prevented them becoming one visible brotherhood, and the [pg 359] immediate purpose of the Landgrave of Hesse was not fulfilled.

Undaunted by his defeat, Philip next attempted a less comprehensive union. If Luther and Zwingli could not be included within the one brotherhood, might not the German cities of the south and the Lutheran princes be brought together? Another conference was arranged at Schwabach (October 1529), when a series of theological articles were to be presented for agreement. Luther prepared seventeen articles to be set before the conference. They were based on the Marburg Articles; but as Luther had stated his own doctrine of the Holy Supper in its most uncompromising form, it is not to be wondered at that the delegates from the southern cities hesitated to sign. They said that the confession (for the articles took that form) was not in conformity with the doctrines preached among them, and that they would need to consult their fellow-citizens before committing them to it. Thus Philip's attempts to unite the Protestants of Germany failed a second time, and a divided Protestantism awaited the coming of the Emperor, who had resolved to solve the religious difficulty in person.

§ 5. The Emperor in Germany.

Charles v. was at the zenith of his power. The sickly looking youth of Worms had become a grave man of thirty, whose nine years of unbroken success had made him the most commanding figure in Europe. He had quelled the turbulent Spaniards; he had crushed his brilliant rival of France at the battle of Pavia; he had humbled the Pope, and had taught His Holiness in the Sack of Rome the danger of defying the Head of the Holy Roman Empire; and he had compelled the reluctant Pontiff to invest him with the imperial crown. He had added to and consolidated the family possessions of the House of Hapsburg, and but lately his brother Ferdinand had won, in name at least, the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary. He was now determined to visit Germany, and by his personal presence [pg 360] and influence to end the religious difficulty which was distracting that portion of his vast dominions. He also meant to secure the succession to the Empire for his brother Ferdinand, by procuring his election as King of the Romans.

Charles came from Italy over the Brenner Pass in the spring time, and was magnificently received by the Tyrolese, eager to do all honour to the grandson of their beloved Kaiser Max. His letters to his brother, written on the stages of the journey, reveal as fully as that reserved soul could unbosom itself, his plans for the pacification of Germany. He meant to use every persuasion possible, to make what compromises his conscience permitted (for Catholicism was a faith with Charles), to effect a peaceful settlement. But if these failed, he was determined to crush the Reformation by force. He never seems to have doubted that he would succeed. Never a thought crossed his mind that he was about to encounter a great spiritual force whose depth and intensity he was unable to measure, and which was slowly creating a new world unknown to himself and to his contemporaries. While at Innsbruck he invited the Elector of Saxony to visit him, and was somewhat disappointed that the Lutheran prince did not accept; but this foretaste of trouble did not give him any uneasiness.

The summons to the Diet, commanding the Electors, princes, and all the Estates of the Empire to meet at Augsburg on the 8th of April 1530, had been issued when Charles was at Bologna. No threats marred the invitation. The Emperor announced that he meant to leave all past errors to the judgment of the Saviour; that he wished to give a charitable hearing to every man's opinions, thoughts, and ideas; and that his only desire was to secure that all might live under the one Christ, in one Commonwealth, one Church, and one Unity.[333] He left Innsbruck on the 6th of June, and, travelling slowly, reached the bridge on [pg 361] the Lech, a little distance from Augsburg, on the evening of the 15th. There he found the great princes of the Empire, who had been waiting his arrival from two o'clock in the afternoon. They alighted to do him reverence, and he graciously dismounted also, and greeted them with all courtesy. Charles had brought the papal nuncio, Cardinal Campeggio, in his train. Most of the Electors knelt to receive the cardinal's blessing; but John of Saxony stood bolt upright, and refused the proffered benediction.

The procession—one of the most gorgeous Germany had ever seen—was marshalled for the ceremonial entry into the town. The retinues of the Electors were all in their appropriate colours and arms—Saxony, by ancient prescriptive right, leading the van. Then came the Emperor alone, a baldachino carried over his head. He had wished the nuncio and his brother to ride beside him under the canopy; but the Germans would not suffer it; no Pope's representative was to be permitted to ride shoulder to shoulder with the head of the German Empire entering the most important of his imperial cities.[334]

Augsburg was then at the height of its prosperity. It was the great trading centre between Italy and the Levant and the towns of Northern Europe. It was the home of the Welsers and of the Fuggers, the great capitalists of the later mediæval Europe. It boasted that its citizens were the equals of princes, and that its daughters, in that age of deeply rooted class distinctions, had married into princely houses. To this day the name of one of its streets—Philippine Welser Strasse—commemorates the wedding of an heiress of the Welsers with an archduke of Austria; and the wall decorations of the old houses attest the ancient magnificence of the city.[335]

At the gates of the town, the clergy, singing Advenisti [pg 362]desiderabilis, met the procession. All, Emperor, clergy, princes, and their retinues, entered the cathedral. The Te Deum was sung, and the Emperor received the benediction. Then the procession was re-formed, and accompanied Charles to his lodgings in the Bishop's Palace.

There the Emperor made his first attempt on his Lutheran subjects. He invited the Elector of Saxony, George of Brandenburg, Philip of Hesse, and Francis of Lüneburg to accompany him to his private apartments. He told them that he had been informed that they had brought their Lutheran preachers with them to Augsburg, and that he would expect them to keep them silent during the sittings of the Diet. They refused. Then Charles asked them to prohibit controversial sermons. This request was also refused. In the end Charles reminded them that his demand was strictly within the decision of 1526; that the Emperor was lord over the imperial cities; and he promised them that he would appoint the preachers himself, and that there would be no sermons—only the reading of Scripture without comment. This was agreed to. He next asked them to join him in the Corpus Christi procession on the following day. They refused—Philip of Hesse with arguments listened to by Ferdinand with indignation, and by Charles with indifference, probably because he did not understand German. The Emperor insisted. Then old George of Brandenburg stood forth, and told His Majesty that he could not, and would not obey. It was a short, rugged speech, though eminently respectful, and ended with these words, which flew over Germany, kindling hearts as fire lights flax: “Before I would deny my God and His Evangel, I would rather kneel down here before your Majesty and have my head struck off,”—and the old man hit the side of his neck with the edge of his hand. Charles did not need to know German to understand. “Not head off, dear prince, not head off,” he said kindly in his Flemish-German (Nit Kop ab, löver Först, nit Kop ab). Charles walked in procession through the streets of Augsburg on a blazing hot day, stooping under a heavy purple [pg 363] mantle, with a superfluous candle sputtering in his hand; but the evangelical princes remained in their lodgings.[336]

§ 6. The Diet of Augsburg 1530.[337]

The Diet was formally opened on June 20th (1530), and in the Proposition or Speech from the Throne it was announced that the Assembly would be invited to discuss armament against the Turk, and that His Majesty was anxious, “by fair and gentle means,” to end the religious differences which were distracting Germany. The Protestants were again invited to give the Emperor in writing their opinions and difficulties. It was resolved to take the religious question first. On June 24th the Lutherans were ready with their “statement of their grievances and opinions relating to the faith.” Next day (June 25th) the Diet met in the hall of the Episcopal Palace, and what is known as the Augsburg Confession was read by the Saxon Chancellor, Dr. Christian Bayer, in such a clear resonant voice that it was heard not only by the audience within the chamber, but also by the crowd which thronged the court outside.[338] When the reading was ended, Chancellor Brück handed the document and a duplicate in Latin to the Emperor. They were signed by the Elector of Saxony and his son John Frederick, by George, Margrave of Brandenburg, the Dukes Ernest and Francis of Lüneburg, the Landgrave of Hesse, Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt, and the delegates of the cities of Nürnberg and Reutlingen. These princes knew the danger which threatened them in putting their names to the Confession. The theologians of Saxony besought their Elector to permit their names [pg 364] to stand alone; but he answered calmly, I, too, will confess my Christ. He was not a brilliant man like Philip of Hesse. He was unpretentious, peace-loving, and retiring by nature—John the Steadfast, his people called him. Recent historians have dwelt on the conciliatory attitude and judicial spirit manifested by the Emperor at this Diet, and they are justified in doing so; but the mailed hand sometimes showed itself. Charles refused to invest John with his Electoral dignities in the usual feudal fashion, and his entourage whispered that if the Elector was not amenable to the Emperor's arguments, he might find the electorate taken from him and bestowed on the kindred House of Ducal Saxony, which in the person of Duke George so stoutly supported the old religion.[339] While possessing that “laudable, if crabbed constitutionalism which was the hereditary quality of the Ernestine line of Saxony,”[340] he had a genuine affection for the Emperor. Both recognised that this Diet of Augsburg had separated them irrevocably. “Uncle, Uncle,” said Charles to Elector John at their parting interview, “I did not expect this from you.” The Elector's eyes filled with tears; he could not speak; he turned away in silence and left the city soon afterwards.[341]

§ 7. The Augsburg Confession.[342]

The Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana) was what it claimed to be, a statement of “opinion and grievances,” and does not pretend to be a full exposition of doctrinal tenets. The men who wrote it (Melanchthon was responsible for the phraseology) and presented it to [pg 365] the Diet, claimed to belong to the ancient and visible Catholic Church, and to believe in all the articles of faith set forth by the Universal Church, and particularly in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds; but they maintained that abuses had crept in which obscured the ancient doctrines. The Confession showed why they could not remain in connection with an unreformed Church. Their position is exactly defined in the opening sentence of the second part of the Confession. “Inasmuch as the Churches among us dissent in no articles of faith from the Holy Scriptures nor the Church Catholic, and only omit a few of certain abuses, which are novel, and have crept in with time partly and in part have been introduced by violence, and contrary to the purport of the canons, we beg that your Imperial Majesty would clemently hear both what ought to be changed, and what are the reasons why people ought not to be forced against their conscience to observe these abuses.”

The Confession is often represented as an attempt to minimise the differences between Lutherans and Romanists and exaggerate those between Lutherans and Zwinglians, and there are some grounds for the statement. Melanchthon had come back from the Diet of Speyer (1529) convinced that if the Lutherans had separated themselves more thoroughly from the cities of South Germany there would have been more chance of a working compromise, and it is only natural to expect that the idea should colour his sketch of the Lutheran position at Augsburg. Yet in the main the assertion is wrong. The distinctively Protestant conception of the spiritual priesthood of all believers inspires the whole document; and this can never be brought into real harmony with the Romanist position and claims. It is not difficult to state Romanist and Protestant doctrine in almost identical phrases, provided this one great dogmatic difference be for the moment set on one side. The conferences at Regensburg in 1541 (April 27-May 22) proved as much. No one will believe that Calvin would be inclined to minimise the differences between Protestants and Romanists, yet he voluntarily signed the Augsburg Confession, [pg 366] and did so, he says, in the sense in which the author (Melanchthon) understood it. This Augsburg Confession and Luther's Short Catechism are the symbolical books still in use in all Lutheran churches.

The Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana) is divided into two parts, the first expressing the views held by those who signed it, and the second stating the errors they protested against. The form and language alike show that the authors had no intention of framing an exhaustive syllabus of theological opinions or of imposing its articles as a changeless system of dogmatic truth. They simply meant to express what they united in believing. Such phrases as our Churches teach, it is taught, such and such opinions are falsely attributed to us, make that plain. In the first part the authors show how much they hold in common with the mediæval Church; how they abide by the teaching of St. Augustine, the great theologian of the West; how they differ from more radical Protestants like the Zwinglians, and repudiate the teachings of the Anabaptists. The Lutheran doctrine of Justification by Faith is given very clearly and briefly in a section by itself, but it is continually referred to and shown to be the basis of many portions of their common system of belief. In the second part they state what things compel them to dissent from the views and practices of the mediæval Church—the enforced celibacy of the clergy, the sacrificial character of the Mass, the necessity of auricular confession, monastic vows, and the confusion of spiritual and secular authority exhibited in the German episcopate.

The origin of the document was this. When the Emperor's proclamation summoning the Diet reached Saxony, Chancellor Gregory Brück suggested that the Saxon theologians should prepare a statement of their opinions which might be presented to the Emperor if called for.[343] This was done. The theologians went to the [pg 367] Schwabach Articles, and Melanchthon revised them, restated them, and made them as inoffensive as he could. The document was meant to give the minimum for which the Protestants contended, and Melanchthon's conciliatory spirit shows itself throughout. It embalms at the same time some of Luther's trenchant phrases: “Christian perfection is this, to fear God sincerely; and again, to conceive great faith, and to trust assuredly that God is pacified towards us for Christ's sake; to ask, and certainly to look for, help from God in all our affairs according to our calling; and outwardly to do good works diligently, and to attend to our vocation. In these things doth true perfection and the true worship of God consist: it doth not consist in being unmarried, in going about begging, nor in wearing dirty clothes.” His indifference to forms of Church government and his readiness to conserve the old appears in the sentence: “Now our meaning is not to have rule taken from the bishops; but this one thing only is requested at their hands, that they would suffer the gospel to be purely taught, and that they would relax a few observances, which cannot be observed without sin.”

When the Romanist theologians presented their Confutation of this Confession to the Emperor, it was again left to Melanchthon to draft an answer—the Apology of the Augsburg Confession. The Apology is about seven times longer than the Confession, and is a noble and learned document. The Emperor refused to receive it, and Melanchthon spent a long time over it before it was allowed to be seen.

After taking counsel with the Romanist princes (die Chur und Fursten so bepstisch gewesen),[344] it was resolved to hand the Confession to a committee of Romanist theologians whom the cardinal nuncio[345] undertook to bring together, [pg 368] to examine and answer it. Among them were John Eck of Ingolstadt, Faber, and Cochlæus. There was little hope of arriving at a compromise with such champions on the papal side; and Charles was soon to discover that his strongest opponents in effecting a peaceful solution were the nuncio and his committee of theologians. Five times they produced a confutation, and five times the Emperor and the Diet returned their work, asking them to redraft it in milder and in less uncompromising terms.[346] The sixth draft went far beyond the wishes of Charles, but the Emperor had to accept it and let it appear as the statement of his beliefs. It made reconciliation hopeless.

§ 8. The Reformation to be crushed.

The religious difficulty had not been removed by compromise. There remained force—the other alternative foreshadowed by the Emperor. The time seemed to be opportune. Protestantism was divided, and had flaunted its differences in the Emperor's presence. Philip of Hesse had signed the Augsburg Confession with hesitation, not because he did not believe its statements, but because it seemed to shut the door on a complete union among all the parties who had joined in the Protest of 1529. The four cities of Strassburg, Constance, Lindau, and Memmingen had submitted a separate Confession (the Confessio Tetrapolitana) to the Emperor; and the Romanist theologians had written a confutation of it also. Zwingli had sent a third.

Luther was not among the theologians present at the [pg 369] Diet of Augsburg. Technically he was still an outlaw, for the ban of the Diet of Worms had never been legally removed. The Elector had asked him to stay at his Castle of Coburg. There he remained, worried and anxious, chafing like a caged eagle. He feared that Melanchthon's conciliatory spirit might make him barter away some indispensable parts of evangelical truth; he feared the impetuosity of the Landgrave of Hesse and his known Zwinglian sympathies. His secretary wrote to Wittenberg that he was fretting himself ill; he was longing to get back to Wittenberg, where he could at least teach his students. It was then that Catharine got their friend Lucas Cranach to paint their little daughter Magdalena, just twelve months old, and sent it to her husband that he might have a small bit of home to cheer him. Luther hung the picture up where he could always see it from his chair, and he tells us that the sweet little face looking down upon him gave him courage during his dreary months of waiting. Posts brought him news from the Diet: that the Confession had been read to the Estates; that the Romanists were preparing a Confutation; that their reply was ready on August 3rd; that Philip of Hesse had left the Diet abruptly on the 6th, to raise troops to fight the Emperor, it was reported; that Melanchthon was being entangled in conferences, and was giving up everything. His strong ardent nature pours itself forth in his letters from Coburg (April 18th-Oct. 4th)—urging his friends to tell him how matters are going; warning Melanchthon to stand firm; taking comfort in the text, “Be ye angry, and sin not”; comparing the Diet to the rooks and the rookery in the trees below his window.[347] It was from Coburg that he wrote his charming letter to his small son.[348] It was there that he penned the letter of encouragement to the tried and loyal Chancellor Brück:

“I have lately seen two wonders: the first as I was looking out of my window and saw the stars in heaven and all that beautiful vault of God, and yet I saw no pillars on [pg 370]which the Master-Builder had fixed this vault; yet the heavens fell not, and the great vault stood fast. Now there are some who search for the pillars, and want to touch and to grasp them; and when they cannot, they wonder and tremble as if the heaven must certainly fall, just because they cannot grasp its pillars. If they could only lay their hands on them, they think that the heaven would stand firm!

“The second wonder was: I saw great clouds rolling over us with such a ponderous weight that they seemed like a great ocean, and yet I saw no foundation on which they rested or were based, and no shore which bounded them; yet they fell not, but frowned on us and flowed on. But when they had passed by, then there shone forth both their floor and our roof, which had kept them back—a rainbow! A frail, thin floor and roof which soon melted into the clouds, and was more like a shadowy prism, such as we see through coloured glass, than a strong, firm foundation, and we might well distrust the feeble rampart which kept back that fearful weight of waters. Yet we found that this unsubstantial prism was able to bear up the weight of waters, and that it guarded us safely! But there are some who look more to the thickness and massive weight of the waters and the clouds than at this thin, light, narrow bow of promise. They would like to feel the strength of that shadowy vanishing arch, and because they cannot do this, they are always fearing that the clouds will bring back the flood.”[349]

The Protestants never seemed to be in a worse plight; but, as Luther wrote, the threatened troubles passed away—for this time at least.

Campeggio was keen to crush the Reformation at once. His letters to the Curia insist that the policy of the strong arm is the only effectual way of dealing with the Lutheran princes. But Charles found that some of the South German princes who were eager that no compromise should be made with the Lutherans, were very unwilling to coerce them by force of arms. They had no wish to see the Emperor all-powerful in Germany. The Romanist Dukes of Bavaria (the Wittelsbachs) were as strongly anti-Hapsburg as Philip of [pg 371] Hesse himself; and Charles had no desire to stir the anti-Hapsburg feeling. Instead, conferences[350] were proposed to see whether some mutual understanding might not after all be reached; and the Diet was careful to introduce laymen, in the hope that they would be less uncompromising than the Romanist theologians. The meetings ended without any definite result. The Protestant princes refused to make the needful concessions, and Charles found his plans thwarted on every side. Whereupon the Romanist majority of the Diet framed a “recess,” which declared that the Protestants were to be allowed to exist unmolested until April 15th, 1531; and were then to be put down by force. Meanwhile they were ordered to make no more innovations in worship or in doctrine; they were to refrain from molesting the Romanists within their territories; and they were to aid the Emperor and the Romanist princes in stamping out the partisans of Zwingli and the Anabaptists. This resolution gave rise to a second Protest, signed by the Lutheran princes and by the fourteen cities.

Nothing had stirred the wrath of Charles so much as the determined stand taken by the cities. He conceived that he, the Emperor, was the supreme Lord within an imperial city; and he employed persuasion and threats to make their delegates accept the “recess.” Even Augsburg refused.

Having made their Protest, the Lutheran princes and the delegates from the protesting towns left the Diet, careless of what the Romanist majority might further do. In their absence an important ordinance was passed. The Diet decided that the Edict of Worms was to be executed; that the ecclesiastical jurisdictions were to be preserved, [pg 372] and all Church property to be restored; and, what was most important, that the Imperial Court of Appeals for all disputed legal cases within the Empire (the Reichskammersgericht) should be restored. The last provision indicated a new way of fighting the extending Protestantism by harassing legal prosecutions, which, from the nature of the court, were always to be decided against the dissenters from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the mediæval Empire.[351] All instances of seizure of ecclesiastical benefices, all defiances of episcopal decisions, could be appealed against to this central court; and as the legal principles on which it gave its decisions and the controlling authorities which it recognised were mediæval, the Protestants could never hope for a decision in their favour. The Lutheran Church in Saxony, for example, with its pastors and schoolmasters, was supported by moneys taken from the old ecclesiastical foundations. According to this decision of the Diet, every case of such transfer of property could be appealed to this central court, which from its constitution was bound to decide against the transfer. If the Protestant princes disregarded the decisions of the central court, the Emperor was within his rights in treating them as men who had outraged the constitution of the Empire.[352]

Charles met at Augsburg the first great check in his hitherto successful career, but he was tenacious of purpose, and never cared to hurry matters to an irrevocable conclusion. He carefully studied the problem, and three ways of dealing with the religious difficulty shaped themselves in his mind at Augsburg—by compromise, by letting the Protestants alone for a period longer or shorter, and by a General Council which would be free. It would seem [pg 373] that at Augsburg he first seriously resolved that the condition of Europe was such that the Pope must be compelled to summon a Council, and to allow it freedom of debate and action. Charles tried all three plans in Germany during the fifteen years that followed.

§ 9. The Schmalkald League.[353]

The Emperor published the decision of the Diet on the 19th of November, and the Protestants had to arrange some common plan of facing the situation. They met, princes and delegates of cities, in the little upland town of Schmalkalden, lying on the south-west frontier of Electoral Saxony, circled by low hills which were white with snow (December 22-31). They had to face at once harassing litigation, and, after the 15th of April, the threat that they would be stamped out by force of arms. Were they still to maintain their doctrine of passive resistance? The question was earnestly debated. Think of these earnest German princes and burghers, their lives and property at stake, debating this abstract question day after day, resolute to set their own consciences right before coming to any resolution to defend themselves! The lawyers were all on the side of active defence. The terms of the bond were drafted. The Emperor's name was carefully omitted; and the causes which compelled them to take action were rather alluded to vaguely than stated with precision. The Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, the Duke of Lüneburg, the Prince of Anhalt, the two Counts of Mansfeld, and the delegates from Magdeburg and Bremen signed. Pious old George of Brandenburg was not convinced that it was lawful to resist the Emperor; the deputies of Nürnberg had grave doubts also. Many others who were present felt that they must have time to make up their minds. But the league was started, and was soon to assume huge proportions.

The confederates had confessed the new doctrines, and had published their Confession. They now resolved that they would defend themselves if attacked by litigation or otherwise. There was no attempt to exclude the South German cities; and Charles' expectations that theological differences would prevent Protestant union within Germany were frustrated. Zwingli's heroic death at Cappel (October 11th, 1531) softened all Protestant hearts towards his followers. The South German cities followed the lead of Bucer, who was anxious for union. Many of these towns now joined the Schmalkald League. Brunswick joined. Hamburg and Rostock in the far north, Goslar and Göttingen in the centre, joined. Almost all North Germany and the more important imperial towns in the South were united in one strong confederacy by this Schmalkald League. It became one of the European Powers. Denmark wished to join. Thomas Cromwell was anxious that England should join. The league was necessarily anti-Hapsburg, and the Emperor had to reckon with it.

Its power appeared at the Diet of Nürnberg in 1532. The dreaded day (April 15th, 1531) on which the Protestants were to be reduced by fire and sword passed quietly by. Charles was surrounded with difficulties which made it impossible for him to carry out the threats he had published on November 19th, 1530. The Turks were menacing Vienna and the Duchy of Austria; the Pope was ready to take advantage of any signs of imperial weakness; France was irreconcilable; England was hostile; and the Bavarian dukes were doing what they could to lessen the Hapsburg power in Germany.

When the Diet met at Nürnberg in 1532, the Emperor knew that he was unable to coerce the Lutherans, and returned to his earlier courteous way of treating them. They were more patriotic than the German Romanists for whom he had done so much. Luther declared roundly that the Turks must be met and driven back, and that all Germans must support the Emperor in repelling the invasion. At the Diet a “recess” was proposed, in which the [pg 375] religious truce was indefinitely extended; the processes against the Protestants in the Reichskammersgericht were to be quashed, and no State was to be proceeded against in matters arising out of religious differences. The Romanist members refused to accept it; the “recess” was never published. But the Protestant States declared that they would trust in the imperial word of honour, and furnished the Emperor with troops for the defence of Vienna, and the invasion was repelled.

The history of the struggle in Germany between the Diet of 1532 and the outbreak of war in 1546 is very intricate, and cannot be told as a simple contest between Reformation and anti-Reformation.

In the sixteenth century, almost all thoughtful and earnest-minded men desired a Reformation of the Church. The Roman Curia was the only opponent to all reforms of any kind. But two different ideas of what Reformation ought to be, divided the men who longed for reforms. The one desired to see the benumbed and formalist mediæval Church filled with a new religious life, while it retained its notable characteristics of a sacerdotal ministry and a visible external unity under a uniform hierarchy culminating in the Papacy. The other wished to free the human spirit from the fetters of a merely ecclesiastical authority, and to rebuild the Church on the principle of the spiritual priesthood of all believing men and women. In the struggle in Germany the Emperor Charles may be taken as the embodiment of the first, as Luther represented the second. To the one it seemed essential to maintain the external unity and authority of the Church according to the mediæval ideal; the other could content himself with seeing the Church of the Middle Ages broken up into territorial Churches, each of which he contended was a portion of the one visible Catholic Church. Charles had no difficulty in accepting many changes in doctrine and usages, provided a genuine and lasting compromise could be arrived at which would retain all within the one ecclesiastical organisation. He consented [pg 376] once and again to suspend the struggle; but he would never have made himself responsible for a permanent religious settlement which recognised the Lutheran Churches. He had no objection to a truce, but would never accept a lasting peace. If the Lutherans could not be brought back within the mediæval Church by compromise, then he was prepared to go to all extremes to compel them to return. Of course, he was the ruler over many lands; he was keen to extend and consolidate the family possessions of his House,—as keen as the most grasping of the petty territorial princes,—and he had to be an opportunist. But he never deviated in the main from his idea of how the religious difficulty should be solved.

But all manner of political and personal motives were at work on both sides in Germany (as elsewhere). Philip of Hesse combined a strenuous acceptance of the principles of the Lutheran Reformation with as thorough a hatred of the House of Hapsburg and of its supremacy in Germany. The Dukes of Bavaria, who were the strongest partisans of the Romanist Church in Germany, were the hereditary enemies of the House of Austria. The religious pacification of the Fatherland was made impossible to Charles, not merely by his insistence on maintaining the conceptions of the mediæval Church, but also by open and secret reluctance to see the imperial authority increased, and by jealousies aroused by the territorial aggrandisement of the House of Hapsburg. The incompatibility between the aims of the Emperor and those of his indispensable ally, the Pope, added to the difficulties of the situation.

In 1534, Philip of Hesse persuaded the Schmalkald League to espouse the cause of the banished Duke of Würtemberg. His territories had been incorporated into the family possessions of the Hapsburgs, and the people groaned under the imperial administration. The Swabian League, which had been the mainstay of the Imperialist and Romanist cause in South Germany, was persuaded to remain neutral by the Dukes of Bavaria, and Philip had [pg 377] little difficulty in defeating Ferdinand, and driving the Imperialists out of the Duchy. Ulrich was restored, declared in favour of the Lutheran Reformation, and Würtemberg was added to the list of Protestant States. By the terms of the Peace of Cadan (June 1534), Ferdinand publicly engaged to carry out Charles' private assurance that no Protestant was to be dragged before the Reichskammersgericht for anything connected with religion.[354] Another important consequence followed. The Swabian League was dissolved in 1536. This left the Schmalkald League of Protestant States and cities the only formidable confederation in Germany.

The political union among the Protestants suggested a closer approximation. The South German pastors asked to meet Luther and discuss their theological differences. They met at Wittenberg, and after prolonged discussion it was found that all were agreed save on one small point—the presence, extended in space, of the Body of Christ in the elements in the Holy Supper. It was agreed that this might be left an open question; and what was called the Wittenberg Concord was signed, which united all German Protestants (May and June 1536).[355]

Three years later (1539), Duke George of Saxony died, the most honest and disinterested of the Romanist princes. His brother Henry, who succeeded him, with the joyful consent of his subjects, pronounced for the Evangelical faith. Nothing would content him but that Luther should come to Leipzig to preside clerically on so auspicious an occasion. Luther preached in the great hall of the Castle, where twenty years earlier he had confronted Eck, and had heard Duke George declare that his opinions were pestilential.

In the same year the new Elector of Brandenburg also came over to the Evangelical side amid the rejoicings of his people; and the two great Romanist States of North [pg 378] Germany, Electoral Brandenburg and Ducal Saxony, became Protestant.

The tide flowed so strongly that the three clerical Electors, the Archbishops of Mainz, Köln, and Trier, and some of the bishops, contemplated secularising their principalities, and becoming Protestants. This alarmed Charles thoroughly. If the proposed secularisation took place, there would be a large Protestant majority in the Electoral College, and the next Emperor would be a Protestant.

Charles had been anxiously watching the gradual decadence of the power of the Romanist princes in Germany; and reports convinced him that the advance of the Reformation among the people was still more marked. The Roman Catholic Church seemed to be in the agonies of dissolution even in places where it had hitherto been strong. Breslau, once strongly Romanist, was now almost fanatically Lutheran; in Vienna, Bishop Faber wrote, the population was entirely Lutheran, save himself and the Archduke. The Romanist Universities were almost devoid of students. In Bavaria, it was said that there were more monasteries than monks. Candidates for the priesthood had diminished in a very startling way: the nuncio Vergerio reported that he could find none in Bohemia except a few paupers who could not pay their ordination fees.

The policy of the Pope (Paul iii., 1534-1549) had disgusted the German Romanist princes. He subordinated the welfare of the Church in their dominions to his anti-Hapsburg Italian schemes, and had actually allied himself with Francis of France, who was intriguing with the Turks, in order to thwart the Emperor! The action and speeches of Henry viii. had been watched and studied by the German Romanist leaders. Could they not imitate him in Germany, and create a Nationalist Church true to mediæval doctrine, hierarchy, and ritual, and yet independent of the Pope, who cared so little for them?

All these things made Charles and Ferdinand revise [pg 379] their policy. The Emperor began to consider seriously whether the way out of the religious difficulty might not be, either to grant a prolonged truce to the Lutherans (which might, though he hoped not, become permanent), or to work energetically for the creation of a German National Church, which, by means of some working compromise in doctrines and ceremonies, might be called into existence by a German National Council assembled in defiance of the Pope.

It was with these thoughts in his mind that he sent his Chancellor Held into Germany to strengthen the Romanist cause there. His agent soon abandoned the larger ideas of his master, if he ever comprehended them, and contented himself with announcing publicly that the private promise given by Charles at Nürnberg, and confirmed by Ferdinand at the Peace of Cadan, was withdrawn. The lawsuits brought against the Protestants in the Reichskammersgericht were not to be quashed, but were to be prosecuted to the bitter end. He also contrived at Nürnberg (June 1538) to form a league of Romanist princes, ostensibly for defence, but really to force the Protestants to submit to the decisions of the Reichskammersgericht. These measures did not make for peace; they almost produced a civil war, which was only avoided by the direct interposition of the Emperor.

Chancellor Held was recalled, and the Emperor sent the Archbishop of Lund to find out what terms the Protestants would accept. These proved larger than the Emperor could grant, but the result of the intercourse was that the Protestants were granted a truce which was to last for ten years.

The proposed secularisation of the ecclesiastical Electorates made Charles see that he dared not wait for the conclusion of this truce. He set himself earnestly to discover whether compromises in doctrine and ceremonies were not possible. Conferences were held between Lutheran and Romanist theologians and laymen, at Hagenau (June 1540), at Worms (November 1540), and at Regensburg [pg 380] (Ratisbon, April 1541).[356] The last was the most important. The discussions showed that it was possible to state Romanist and Lutheran doctrine in ambiguous propositions which could be accepted by the theologians of both Confessions; but that there was a great gulf between them which the Evangelicals would never re-cross. The spiritual priesthood of all believers could never be reconciled with the special priesthood of the mediæval clergy. This was Charles' last attempt at a compromise which would unite of their own free will the German Lutherans with the German Romanists. He saw that the Lutherans would never return to the mediæval Church unless compelled by force, and it was impossible to use force unless the Schmalkald League was broken up altogether or seamed with divisions.

§ 10. The Bigamy of Philip of Hesse.[357]

The opportunity arrived. The triumphant Protestantism received its severest blow in the bigamy of Philip of Hesse, which involved the reputations of Bucer, Luther, and Melanchthon, as well as of the Landgrave.

Philip had married when barely nineteen a daughter of Duke George of Saxony. Latterly, he declared that it was impossible to maintain conjugal relations with her; that continence was impossible for him; that the condition in which he found himself harassed his whole life, and prevented him coming to the Lord's Table. In a case like his, Pope Clement vii. only a few years previously had permitted the husband to take a second wife, and why should not the Protestant divines permit him? He [pg 381] prepared a case for himself which he submitted to the theologians, and got a reply signed by Bucer, Melanchthon, and Luther, which may be thus summarised:—

According to the original commandment of God, marriage is between one man and one woman, and the twain shall become one flesh, and this original precept has been confirmed by our Lord; but sin brought it about that first Lamech, then the heathen, and then Abraham, took more than one wife, and this was permitted by the law. We are now living under the gospel, which does not give prescribed rules for the regulation of the external life, and it has not expressly prohibited bigamy. The existing law of the land has gone back to the original requirement of God, and the plain duty of the pastorate is to insist on that original requirement of God, and to denounce bigamy in every way. Nevertheless the pastorate, in individual cases of the direst need, and to prevent worse, may sanction bigamy in a purely exceptional way; such a bigamous marriage is a true marriage (the necessity being proved) in the sight of God and of conscience; but it is not a true marriage with reference to public law or custom. Therefore such a marriage ought to be kept secret, and the dispensation which is given for it ought to be kept under the seal of confession. If it be made known, the dispensation becomes eo ipso invalid, and the marriage becomes mere concubinage.

Such was the strange and scandalous document to which Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer appended their names.

Of course the thing could not be kept secret, and the moral effect of the revelation was disastrous among friends and foes. The Evangelical princes were especially aggrieved; and it was proposed that the Landgrave should be tried for bigamy and punished according to the laws of the Empire. When the matter was brought before the Emperor, he decided that no marriage had taken place, and the sole effect of the decision of the theologians was to deceive a poor maiden.[358]

Philip, humiliated and sore, isolated from his friends, was an instrument ready to the Emperor's hand in his plan to weaken and, if possible, destroy the Schmalkald League. The opportunity soon arrived. The father of William Duke of Cleves Juliers and Berg had been elected by the Estates of Guelders to be their sovereign, in defiance of a treaty which had secured the succession to Charles. The father died, and the son succeeded almost immediately after the treaty had been signed. This created a powerful anti-Hapsburg State in close proximity to the Emperor's possessions in the Netherlands. William of Cleves had married his sister Sibylla to John Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, and naturally gravitated towards the Schmalkald League. In 1541 an arrangement was come to between the Emperor and Philip, according to which Philip guaranteed to prevent the Duke of Cleves from joining the League, or at least from being supported by it against the Emperor, and in return Philip was promised indemnity for all past deeds, and advancement in the Emperor's service. Young Maurice of Ducal Saxony, who had succeeded his father in the Duchy (August 18th, 1541), and had married Philip's daughter, also joined in this bargain. The Emperor had thus divided the great Protestant League; for the Elector of Saxony refused to desert his brother-in-law. In 1543 the Emperor fell upon the unbefriended Duke, totally defeated him, and took Guelders from him, while the German Protestants, [pg 383] hindered by Philip, saw one of their most important allies overthrown. This gave rise to recriminations, which effectually weakened the Protestant cause.

In 1544, Charles concluded a peace with France (the Peace of Crépy, November 19th), and was free to turn his attention to affairs in Germany. He forced the Pope in the same month to give way about a General Council, which was fixed to meet in March 1545. The Emperor meant this Council to be an instrument in his hands to subdue both the Protestants and the Pope. He meant it to reform the Church in the sense of freeing it from many of the corruptions which had found their way into it, and especially in diminishing the power of the Roman Curia; and in this he was supported by the Spanish bishops and by the greater part of Latin Christendom. But the Pope was the more skilful diplomatist, and out-generalled the Emperor. The Council was summoned to meet at Trent, a purely Italian town, though nominally within Germany. It was arranged that all its members must be present personally and not by deputies, which meant that the Italian bishops had a permanent majority; and the choice of Dominicans and Jesuits as the leading theologians made it plain that no doctrinal concessions would be made to the Protestants. From the first the Protestants refused to be bound in any way by its decisions, and Charles soon perceived that the instrument he had counted on had broken in his hands. If ecclesiastical unity was to be maintained in Germany, it could only be by the use of force. There is no doubt that the Emperor was loath to proceed to this last extremity; but his correspondence with his sister Mary and with his brother Ferdinand shows that he had come to regard it as a necessity by the middle of 1545.

His first endeavour was to break up the Protestant League, which was once more united. He attempted again to detach Philip of Hesse, but without success. He was able, however, to induce the Elector of Brandenburg and the Margrave of Brandenburg-Culmbach and some others to remain neutral—the Elector by promising in any event [pg 384] that the religious settlement which had been effected in Brandenburg (1541) should remain unaltered; and, what served him best, he persuaded young Maurice of Ducal Saxony to become his active ally.

§ 11. Maurice of Saxony.

Maurice of Saxony was one of the most interesting, because one of the most perplexing personalities of his time, which was rich in interesting personalities. He was a Protestant from conviction, and never wavered from his faith; yet in the conflict between the Romanist Emperor and the Protestant princes he took the Emperor's side, and contributed more than any one else to the overthrow of his fellow Protestants. His bargain with Charles was that the Electorate should be transferred from the Ernestine Saxon family to his own, the Albertine, that he should get Magdeburg and Halberstadt, and that neither he nor his people should be subject to the decrees of the Council of Trent. Then, when he had despoiled the rival family of the Electorate, he planned and carried through the successful revolt of the Protestant princes against the Emperor, and was mainly instrumental in securing the public recognition of Lutheranism in Germany and in gaining the permanent Religious Peace of 1555.[359]

§ 12. Luther's Death.

It was in these months, while the alarms of war were threatening Germany, that Luther passed away. He had [pg 385] been growing weaker year by year, and had never spared himself for the cause he had at heart. One last bit of work he thought he must do. The Counts of Mansfeld had quarrelled over some trifling things in the division of their property, and had consented to accept Luther's mediation. This obliged him to journey to Eisleben in bitterly cold weather (January 1546). “I would cheerfully lay down my bones in the grave if I could only reconcile my dear Lords,” he said; and that was what was required from him. He finished the arbitration to the satisfaction of both brothers, and received by way of fee endowments for village schools in the Mansfeld region. The deeds were all signed by the 17th of February (1546), and Luther's work was done at Mansfeld—and for his generation. He became alarmingly ill that night, and died on the following morning, long before dawn. “Reverend Father,” said Justus Jonas, who was with him, “wilt thou stand by Christ and the doctrine thou hast preached?” The dying man roused himself to say “Yes.” It was his last word. Twenty minutes later he passed away with a deep sigh.

Luther died in his sixty-third year—twenty-eight and a half years after he had, greatly daring, nailed his Theses to the door of All Saints' in Wittenberg, twenty-seven after he had discovered the meaning of his Theses during the memorable days when he faced Eck at Leipzig, and twenty-five after he had stood before the Emperor and Diet at Worms, while all Germany had hailed him as its champion against the Pope and the Spaniard. The years between 1519 and 1524 were, from an external point of view, the most glorious of Luther's life. He dominated and led his nation, and gave a unity to that distracted and divided country which it had never enjoyed until then. He spoke and felt like a prophet. “I have the gospel, not from men, but from heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ, so that I might have described myself and have glorified in being a minister and an evangelist.” The position had come to him in no sudden visionary way. He had been led into it step by step, forced forward slowly [pg 386] by a power stronger than his own; and the knowledge had kept him humble before his God. During these years it seemed as if his dream—an expectation shared by his wise Elector, the most experienced statesman in Germany—of a Germany united under one National Church, separated from the bondage of Rome, repudiating her blasphemies, rejecting her traditions which had corrupted the religion of the ancient and purer days, and disowning her presumptuous encroachments on the domain of the civil power ordained of God, was about to come true.

Then came the disillusionment of the Peasants' War, when the dragon's teeth were sown broadcast over Germany, and produced their crop of gloomy suspicions and black fears. After the insurrection had spent itself, and in spite of the almost irretrievable damage which it, and the use made of it by papal diplomatists, did to the Reformation movement, Luther regained his serene courage, and recovered much of the ground which had been lost. But the crushing blow had left its mark upon him. He had the same trust in God, but much more distrust of man, fearing the “tumult,” resolute to have nothing to do with anyone who had any connection, however slight, with those who had instigated the misguided peasants. He rallied the forces of the Reformation, and brought them back to discipline by the faith they had in himself as their leader. His personality dominated those kinglets of Germany, possessed with as strong a sense of their dignity and autocratic rights as any Tudor or Valois, and they submitted to be led by him. Electoral Saxony, Hesse, Lüneburg, Anhalt, East Prussia, and Mansfeld, and some score of imperial cities, had followed him loyally from the first; and as the years passed, Ducal Saxony and Würtemberg in the centre and south, and Brandenburg in the north, had declared themselves Protestant States. These larger principalities brought in their train all the smaller satellite States which clustered round them. It may be said that before Luther's death the much larger portion of the German Empire had been won for evangelical religion,—a territory [pg 387] to be roughly described as a great triangle, whose base was the shores of the Baltic Sea from the Netherlands on the west to the eastern limits of East Prussia, and whose apex was Switzerland. Part of this land was occupied by ecclesiastical principalities which had remained Roman Catholic,—the districts surrounding Köln on the west, and the territories of Paderborn, Fulda, and many others in the centre,—but, on the other hand, many stoutly Protestant cities, like Nürnberg, Constance, and Augsburg, were planted on territories which were outside these limits. The extent and power of this Protestant Germany was sufficient to resist any attempt on the part of the Emperor and the Catholic princes to overcome it by force of arms, provided only its rulers remained true to each other.

Over this wide extent of country Evangelical Churches had been established, and provisions had been made for the education of children and for the support of the poor in ordinances issued by the supreme secular authorities who ruled over its multitudinous divisions. The Mass, with its supposed substitutionary sacrifice and a mediatorial priesthood, had been abolished. The German tongue had displaced mediæval Latin in public worship, and the worshippers could take part in the services with full understanding of the solemn acts in which they were engaged. A German Bible lay on every pulpit, and the people had their copies in the pews. Translations of the Psalms and German evangelical hymns were sung, and sermons in German were preached. Pains were taken to provide an educated evangelical ministry who would preach the gospel faithfully, and conscientiously fulfil all the duties connected with the “cure of souls.” The ecclesiastical property of the mediæval Church was largely used for evangelical purposes. There was no mechanical uniformity in these new arrangements. Luther refused to act the part of an ecclesiastical autocrat: he advised when called upon to give advice, he never commanded. No Wittenberg “use” was to confront the Roman “use” and be the only mode of service and ecclesiastical organisation.

The movement Luther had inaugurated had gone far beyond Germany before 1546. Every country in Europe had felt its pulsations. As early as 1519 (April), learned men in Paris had been almost feverishly studying his writings.[360] They were eagerly read in England before 1521.[361] Aleander, writing from Worms to the Curia, complains that Spanish merchants were getting translations of Luther's books made for circulation in Spain.[362] They were being studied with admiration in Italy even earlier. The Scottish Parliament was vainly endeavouring to prevent their entrance into that country by 1525.[363] The Lutheran Reformation had been legally established in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden long before Luther passed away.

Luther was the one great man of his generation, standing head and shoulders above everyone else. This does not mean that he absorbed in his individual personality everything that the age produced for the furtherance of humanity. Many impulses for good existed in that sixteenth century which Luther never recognised; for an age is always richer than any one man belonging to it. He stood outside the great artistic movement. He might have learned much from Erasmus on the one hand, and from the leaders of the Peasants' War on the other, which remained hidden from him. He is greatest in the one sphere of religion only—in the greatest of all spheres. His conduct towards Zwingli and the strong language he used in speaking of opponents make our generation discover a strain of intolerance we would fain not see in so great a man; but his contemporaries did not and could not pass the same judgment upon him. In such a divided Germany none but a man of the widest tolerance could have held together the Protestant forces as Luther did; [pg 389] and we can see what he was when we remember the sad effects of the petty orthodoxies of the Amsdorfs and the Osianders who came after him.

It is the fate of most authors of revolutions to be devoured by the movement which they have called into being. Luther occasioned the greatest revolution which Western Europe has ever seen, and he ruled it till his death. History shows no kinglier man than this Thuringian miner's son.

§ 13. The Religious War.[364]

The war began soon after Luther's death. The Emperor brought into Germany his Spanish infantry, the beginning of what was to be a curse to that country for many generations, and various manœuvrings and skirmishes took place, the most important of which was Maurice of Saxony's invasion of the Electorate. At last the Emperor met the Elector in battle at Mühlberg (April 24th, 1547), where John Frederick was completely defeated and taken prisoner. Wittenberg, stoutly defended by Sibylla, soon after surrendered. This was the end. Philip was induced to surrender on promise of favourable treatment, made by the Electors who had remained on the Emperor's side. Charles refused to be bound by the promise made in his name, and the Landgrave was also held captive. All Germany, save Constance in the south and some of the Baltic lands, lay prostrate at the Emperor's feet. It remained to be seen what use he would make of his victory.

In due time he set himself to bring about what he conceived to be a reasonable compromise which would enable all Germany to remain within one National Church. He tried at first to induce the separate parties to work [pg 390] it out among themselves; and, when this was found to be hopeless, he, like a second Justinian, resolved to construct a creed and to impose it by force upon all, especially upon the Lutherans. To begin with, he had to defy the Pope and slight the General Council for which he had been mainly responsible. He formally demanded that the Council should return to German soil (it had been transferred to Bologna), and, when this was refused, he protested against its existence and, like the German Protestants he was coercing, declared that he would not submit to its decrees. He next selected three theologians, Michael Helding, Julius von Pflug, and Agricola,—a mediævalist, an Erasmian, and a very conservative Lutheran—to construct what was called the Augsburg Interim.

§ 14. The Augsburg Interim.[365]

This document taught the dogma of Transubstantiation, the seven Sacraments, adoration of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, retained most of the mediæval ceremonies and usages, and declared the Pope to be the Head of the Church. This was to please the Romanists. It appealed to the Lutherans by adopting the doctrine of Justification by Faith in a modified form, the marriage of priests with some reservations, the use of the Cup by the laity in the Holy Supper, and by considerably modifying the doctrine of the sacrificial character of the Mass. Of course all its propositions were ambiguous, and could be read in two ways. This was probably the intention of the framers; if so, they were highly successful.

Nothing that Charles ever undertook proved such a dismal failure as this patchwork creed made from snippets from two Confessions. However lifeless creeds may become, they all—real ones—have grown out of the living Christian [pg 391] experience of their framers, and have contained the very life-blood of their hearts as well as of their brains. It is a hopeless task to construct creeds as a tailor shapes and stitches coats.

Charles, however, was proud of his creed, and did his best to enforce it. The Diet of 1548 showed him his difficulties. The Interim was accepted and proclaimed as an edict by this Diet (May 15), but only after the Emperor, very unwillingly, declared practically that it was meant for the Protestants alone. “The Emperor,” said a member of the Diet, “is fighting for religion against the Pope, whom he acknowledges to be its head, and against the two parts of Christendom in Germany—the mass of the Protestants and the ecclesiastical princes.” Thus from the beginning what was to be an instrument to unite German Christendom was transformed into a “strait-waistcoat for the Lutherans”; and this did not make it more palatable for them. At first the strong measures taken by the Emperor compelled its nominal acceptance by many of the Protestant princes.[366] The cities which seemed to be most refractory had their Councils purged of their democratic members, and their Lutheran preachers sent into banishment—Matthew Alber from Reutlingen, Wolfgang Musculus from Augsburg, Brenz from Hall, Osiander from Nürnberg, Schnepf from Tübingen. Bucer and Fagius had to flee from Strassburg and take refuge in England. The city of Constance was besieged and fell after a heroic defence; it was deprived of its privileges as an imperial city, and was added to the family possessions of the House of Austria. Its pastor, Blarer, was sent into banishment. Four hundred Lutheran divines were driven from their homes.

If Charles, backed by his Spanish and Italian troops, could secure a nominal submission to his Interim, he could not coerce the people into accepting it. The churches stood empty in Augsburg, in Ulm, and in other cities. The [pg 392] people met it by an almost universal passive resistance—if singing doggerel verses in mockery of the Interim may be called passive. When the Emperor ordered Duke Christopher of Würtemberg to drive Brenz out of his refuge in his State, the Duke answered him that he could not banish his whole population. The popular feeling, as is usual in such cases, found vent in all manner of satirical songs, pamphlets, and even catechisms. As in the times before the Peasants' War, this coarse popular literature had an immense circulation. Much of it took the form of rude broadsides with a picture, generally satirical, at the top, and the song, sometimes with the music score, printed below.[367] Wandering preachers, whom no amount of police supervision could check, went inveighing against the Interim, distributing the rude literature through the villages and among the democracy in the towns. Soon the creed and the edict which enforced it became practically a dead letter throughout the greater part of Germany.

The presence of the Emperor's Spanish troops on the soil of the Fatherland irritated the feelings of Germans, whether Romanists or Protestants; the insolence and excesses of these soldiers stung the common people; and their employment to enforce the hated Interim on the Protestants was an additional insult. The citizens of one imperial city were told that if they did not accept the Interim they must be taught theology by Spanish troops, and of another that they would yet learn to speak the language of Spain. While the popular odium against Charles was slowly growing in intensity, he contrived to increase it by a proposal that his son Philip should have the imperial crown after his brother Ferdinand. Charles' own election had been caused by a patriotic sentiment. The people thought that a German was better than a Frenchman, and they had found out too late that they had not got a German but a Spaniard. Ferdinand had lived in Germany long enough to know its wants, and his son [pg 393] Maximilian had shown that he possessed many qualities which appealed to the German character. The proposal to substitute Philip, however natural from Charles' point of view, and consistent with his earlier idea that the House of Hapsburg should have one head, meant to the Germans to still further “hispaniolate” Germany. This unpopularity of Charles among all ranks and classes of Germans grew rapidly between 1548 and 1552; and during the same years his foreign prestige was fast waning. He remained in Germany, with the exception of a short visit to the Netherlands; but in spite of his presence the anarchy grew worse and worse. The revolt which came might have arisen much sooner had the Protestants been able to overcome their hatred and suspicion of Maurice of Saxony, whose co-operation was almost essential. It is unnecessary to describe the intrigues which went on around the Emperor, careless though not unforewarned.

Maurice had completed his arrangements with his German allies and with France early in 1552. The Emperor had retired from Augsburg to Innsbruck. Maurice seized the Pass of Ehrenberg on the nights of May 18th, 19th, and pressed on to Innsbruck, hoping to “run the old fox to earth.” Charles escaped by a few hours, and, accompanied by his brother Ferdinand, fled over the Brenner Pass amid a storm of snow and rain. It was the road by which he had entered Germany in fair spring weather when he came in 1530, in the zenith of his power, to settle, as he had confidently expected, the religious difficulties in Germany. He reached Villach in Carinthia in safety, and there waited the issue of events.

The German princes gathered in great numbers at Passau (Aug. 1552) to discuss the position and arrive at a settlement. Maurice was ostensibly the master of the situation, for his troops and those of his wild ally Albert Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Culmbach were in the town, and many a prince felt “as if they had a hare in their breast.” His demands for the public good were moderate and statesmanlike. He asked for the immediate release of [pg 394] his father-in-law the Landgrave of Hesse; for a settlement of the religious question on a basis that would be permanent, at a meeting of German princes fairly representative of the two parties—no Council summoned and directed by the Pope would ever give fair-play to the Protestants, he said, nor could they expect to get it from the Diet where the large number of ecclesiastical members gave an undue preponderance to the Romanist side; and for a settlement of some constitutional questions. The princes present, and with them Ferdinand, King of the Romans, were inclined to accept these demands. But when they were referred to Charles at Villach, he absolutely refused to permit the religious or the constitutional question to be settled by any assembly but the Diet of the Empire. Nothing would move him from his opinion, neither the entreaties of his brother nor his own personal danger. He still counted on the divisions among the Protestants, and believed that he had only to support the “born Elector” of Saxony against the one of his own creation to deprive Maurice of his strength. It may be that Maurice had his own fears, it may be that he was glad to have the opportunity of showing that the “Spaniard” was the one enemy to a lasting peace in Germany. He contented himself with the acquiescence of John Frederick in the permanent loss of the Electorate as arranged at the Peace of Wittenberg (1547).

Charles was then free to come back to Augsburg, where he had the petty satisfaction of threatening the Lutheran preachers who had returned, and of again overthrowing the democratic government of the city. He then went to assume the command of the German army which was opposing the French. His failure to take the city of Metz was followed by his practical abandonment of the direction of the affairs of Germany, which were left in the hands of Ferdinand. The disorders of the time delayed the meeting of the Diet until 1555 (opened Feb. 5th). The Elector and the “born Elector” of Saxony were both dead—John Frederick, worn out by misfortune and imprisonment (March 3rd, 1554), and sympathised with by [pg 395] friends and foes alike; and Maurice, only thirty-two years of age, killed in the moment of victory at Sievershausen (July 9th, 1553).

It was in the summer of 1554 that the Emperor had handed over, in a carefully limited manner, the management of German affairs to his brother Ferdinand, the King of the Romans. The terms of devolution of authority imply that this was done by Charles to avoid the humiliation of being personally responsible for acquiescence in what was to him a hateful necessity, and the confession of failure in his management of Germany from 1530. Everyone recognised that peace was necessary at almost any price, but Ferdinand and the higher ecclesiastical princes shrunk from facing the inevitable. The King of the Romans still cherished some vague hopes of a compromise which would preserve the unity of the mediæval German Church, and the selfish policy of many of the Protestant princes encouraged him. Elector Joachim of Brandenburg wished the archbishopric of Magdeburg and the bishopric of Halberstadt for his son Sigismund, and declared that he would be content with the Interim! Christopher of Würtemberg cherished similar designs on ecclesiastical properties. Augustus of Saxony, Maurice's brother and successor, wished the bishopric of Meissen. All these designs could be more easily fulfilled if the external unity of the mediæval Church remained unbroken.

§ 15. Religious Peace of Augsburg.[368]

The Diet had been summoned for Nov. 13th (1554), but when Ferdinand reached Augsburg about the end of the year, the Estates had not gathered. He was able to open the Diet formally on Feb. 5th (1555), but none of the Electors, and only two of the great ecclesiastical princes, the Cardinal Bishop of Augsburg and the Bishop [pg 396] of Eichstadt, were present in person. While the Diet dragged on aimlessly, the Protestant princes gathered to a great Council of their own at Naumburg (March 3rd, 1555) to concert a common policy. Among those present were the Electors of Brandenburg and Saxony, the sons of John Frederick, the ill-fated “born Elector,” and the Landgrave of Hesse—sixteen princes and a great number of magnates. After long debates, the assembly decided (March 13th) that they would stand by the Augsburg Confession of 1530, and that the minority would unite with the majority in carrying out one common policy. Even “fat old Interim,” as Elector Joachim of Brandenburg had been nicknamed, was compelled to submit; and the Protestants stood on a firm basis with a definite programme, and pledged to support each other.

This memorable meeting at Naumburg forced the hands of the members of the Diet. Every member, save the Cardinal Bishop of Augsburg, desired a permanent settlement of the religious question, and their zeal appeared in the multiplicity of adjectives used to express the predominant thought—“beständiger, beharrlicher, unbedingter, für und für ewig währender” was the phrase. The meeting at Naumburg showed them that this could not be secured without the recognition of Lutheranism as a legal religion within the German Empire.

When the Protestant demands were formally placed before the Diet, they were found to include—security under the Public Law of the Empire for all who professed the Augsburg Confession, and for all who in future might make the same profession; liberty to hold legally all the ecclesiastical property which had been or might in the future be secularised; complete toleration for all Lutherans who were resident in Romanist States without corresponding toleration for Romanists in Lutheran States. These demands went much further than any which Luther himself had formulated, and really applied to Romanists some of the provisions of the “recess” of Speyer (1529) which, when applied to Lutherans, had called forth the Protest. [pg 397] They were vehemently objected to by the Romanist members of the Diet; and, as both parties seemed unwilling to yield anything to the other, there was some danger of the religious war breaking out again. The mediation of Ferdinand for the Romanists and Frederick of Saxony for the Protestants brought a compromise after months of debate. It was agreed that the Lutheran religion should be legalised within the Empire, and that all Lutheran princes should have full security for the practice of their faith; that the mediæval episcopal jurisdiction should cease within their lands; and that they were to retain all ecclesiastical possessions which had been secularised before the passing of the Treaty of Passau (1552). Future changes of faith were to be determined by the principle cujus regio ejus religio. The secular territorial ruler might choose between the Romanist or the Lutheran faith, and his decision was to bind all his subjects. If a subject professed another religion from his prince, he was to be allowed to emigrate without molestation. These provisions were agreed upon by all, and embodied in the “recess.” Two very important matters remained unsettled. The Romanists demanded that any ecclesiastical prince who changed his faith should thereby forfeit lands and dignities—the “ecclesiastical reservation.” This was embodied in the “recess,” but the Protestants declared that they would not be bound by it. On the other hand, the Protestants demanded toleration for all Lutherans living within the territories of Romanist princes. This was not embodied in the “recess,” though Ferdinand promised that he would see it carried out in practice.[369] Such was the famous Peace of Augsburg. There was no reason why it should not have come years earlier and without the wild war-storm which preceded it, save the fact that, in an unfortunate fit of enthusiasm, the Germans had elected the young King of Spain to be their Emperor. They had chosen the grandson of the genial Maxmilian, believing him to be a real German, and they got a man [pg 398] whose attitude to religion “was half-way between the genial orthodoxy of his grandfather Maxmilian and the gloomy fanaticism of his son Philip ii.,” and whose “mind was always travelling away from the former and towards the latter position.”[370] The longer he lived the more Spanish he became, and the less capable of understanding Germany, either on its secular or religious side. His whole public life, so far as that country was concerned, was one disastrous failure. He succeeded only when he used his imperial position to increase and consolidate the territorial possessions of the House of Hapsburg; for the charge of dismembering the Empire can be brought home to Charles as effectually as to the most selfish of the princes of Germany.

The Religious Peace of Augsburg was contained in the decisions of Speyer in 1526, and it was repeated in every one of the truces which the Emperor made with his Lutheran subjects from 1530 to 1544.[371] Had any one of these been made permanent, the religious war, with its [pg 399] outcome in wild anarchy, in embittered religious antagonisms, and its seed of internecine strife, to be reaped in the Thirty Years' War, would never have occurred. But Charles, whose mission, he fancied, was to preserve the unity “of the seamless robe of Christ,” as he phrased it, could only make the attempt by drenching the fields of Germany with blood, and perpetuating and accentuating the religious antagonisms of the country which had chosen him for its Protector.

This Religious Peace of Augsburg has been claimed, and rightly, as a victory for religious liberty.

From one point of view the victory was not a great one. The only Confession tolerated was the Augsburg. The Swiss Reformation and its adherents were outside the scope of the religious peace. What grew to be the Reformed or Calvinistic Church was also outside. It was limited solely to the Lutheran, or, as it was called, the Evangelical creed. Nor was there much gain to the personal liberty of conscience. It may be said with truth that there was less freedom of conscience under the Lutheran territorial system of Churches, and also under the Roman Catholic Church reorganised under the canons and decrees of Trent, than there was in the mediæval Church.

The victory lay in this, that the first blow had been struck to free mankind from the fetters of Romanist absolutism; that the first faltering step had been taken on the road to religious liberty; and the first is valuable not for what it is in itself, but for what it represents and for what comes after it. The Religious Peace of Augsburg did not concede much according to modern standards; but it contained the potency and promise of the future. It is always the first step which counts.

[pg 400]

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Chapter VI. The Organisation Of Lutheran Churches.[372]

Two conceptions, the second being derived from the first, lay at the basis of everything which Luther said or did about the organisation of the Christian fellowship into churches.

The primary and cardinal doctrine, which was the foundation of everything, was the spiritual priesthood of all believers. This, he believed, implied that preaching, dispensing the sacraments, ecclesiastical discipline, and so forth were not the exclusive possession of a special caste of men to whom they had been committed by God, and who therefore were mediators between God and man. These divine duties belonged to the whole community as a fellowship of believing men and women; but as a division of labour was necessary, and as each individual Christian cannot undertake such duties without disorder ensuing, the community must seek out and set apart certain of its members to perform them in its name.

The second conception was that secular government is an ordinance ordained of God, and that the special rule claimed by the Roman Pontiff over things secular and sacred was a usurpation of the powers committed by God to the secular authority. This Luther understood to mean that the Christian magistracy might well represent the Christian community of believers, and, in its name or associated with it, undertake the organisation and superintendence of the Church civic or territorial.

In his earlier writings, penned before the outbreak of the Peasants' War, Luther dwells most on the thought of the community of believers, their rights and powers; in the later ones, when the fear of the common man had taken possession of him, the secular authority occupies his whole field of thought. But although, before the Peasants' War, Luther does not give such a fixed place to the secular magistracy as the one source of authority or supervision over the Church, the conception was in his mind from the first.

Among the various duties which belong to the company of believers, Luther selected three as the most outstanding,—those connected with the pastorate, including preaching, dispensing the sacraments, and so forth; the service of Christian charity; and the duty of seeing that the children belonging to the community, and especially “poor, miserable, and deserted children,” were properly educated and trained to become useful members of the commonwealth.

In the few instances of attempts made before the Peasants' War to formulate those conceptions into regulations for communities organised according to evangelical principles, we find the community and the magistracy combining to look after the public worship, the poor, and education. Illustrations may be seen in the Wittenberg ordinance of 1522 (Carlstadt), and the ordinances of Leisnig (1523) and Magdeburg (1524).[373] All three are examples of the [pg 402] local authority within a small community endeavouring, at the prompting of preachers and people, to express in definite regulations some of the demands of the new evangelical life.

Luther himself thought these earlier regulations premature, and insisted that the Wittenberg ordinance should be cancelled. He knew that changes must come; but he hoped to see them make their way gradually, almost imperceptibly, commending themselves to everyone without special enactment prescribed by external authority. He published suggestions for the dispensation of the Lord's Supper and of Baptism in the churches in Wittenberg as early as 1523; he collected and issued a small selection of evangelical hymns which might be sung in Public Worship (1524); during the same year he addressed the burgomasters and councillors of all German towns on the erection and maintenance of Christian schools; and he congratulated more than one municipality on provisions made for the care of the poor.[374] Above all, he had, while in Wartburg, completed a translation of the New Testament which, after revision by Melanchthon and other friends, was published in 1522 (Sept. 21st), and went through sixteen revised editions and more than fifty reimpressions before 1534. The translation of the Old Testament was made by a band of scholars at Wittenberg, published in instalments, and finally in complete form in 1534.

He always cherished the hope that the evangelical faith would spread quietly all over his dear Fatherland if only room were made for the preaching of the gospel. [pg 403] This of itself, he thought, would in due time effect a peaceful transformation of the ecclesiastical life and worship. The Diets of Nürnberg and Speyer had provided a field, always growing wider, for this quiet transformation. Luther was as indifferent to forms of Church government as John Wesley, and, like Wesley, every step he took in providing for a separate organisation was forced upon him as a practical necessity. To the very last he cherished the hope that there might be no need for any great change in the external government of the Church. The Augsburg Confession itself (1530) concludes with the words. “Our meaning is not to have rule taken from the bishops; but this one thing only is requested at their hands, that they would suffer the gospel to be purely taught, and that they would relax a few observances, which cannot be held without sin. But if they will remit none, let them look how they will give account to God for this, that by their obstinacy they afford cause of division and schism, which it were yet fit they should aid in avoiding.”[375] It was not that he believed that the existence of the visible Catholic Church depended on what has been ambiguously called an apostolic succession of bishops, who, through gifts conferred in ordination, create priests, who in turn make Christians out of natural heathen by the sacraments. He did not believe that ordination needed a bishop to confer it; he made his position clear upon this point as early as 1525, and ordination was practised without bishops from that date. But he had no desire to make changes for the sake of change. The Danish Church is at once episcopal and Lutheran to this day.

It ought also to be remembered that Luther and all the Reformers believed and held firmly the doctrine of a visible Catholic Church of Christ, and that the evangelical movement which they headed was the outcome of the centuries of saintly life within that visible Catholic Church. They never for a moment supposed that in withdrawing themselves from the authority of the Bishop [pg 404] of Rome they were separating themselves from the visible Church. Nor did they imagine that in making provision, temporary or permanent, for preaching the word, the dispensation of the sacraments, the exercise of discipline, and so forth, they were founding a new Church, or severing themselves from that visible Church within which they had been baptized. They refused to concede the term Catholic to their opponents, and in the various conferences which they had with them, the Roman Catholics were always officially designated “the adherents of the old religion,” while they were termed “the associates of the Augsburg Confession.”

Luther cherished the hope, as late as 1545, that there might not need to be a permanent change in the external form of the Church in Germany; and this gives all the earlier schemes for the organisation of communities professing the evangelical faith somewhat of a makeshift and temporary appearance, which they in truth possessed.

The Diet of Speyer of 1526 gave the evangelical princes and towns the right, they believed, to reorganise public worship and ecclesiastical organisation within their dominions, and this right was largely taken advantage of. Correspondents from all quarters asked Luther's advice and co-operation, and we can learn from his answers that he was anxious there should be as much local freedom as possible,—that communities should try to find out what suited them best, and that the “use” of Wittenberg should not be held to regulate the custom of all other places.

It was less difficult for the authorities in the towns to take over the charge of the ecclesiastical arrangements. They had during mediæval times some experience in the matter; and city life was so compact that it was easy to regulate the ecclesiastical portion. The prevailing type exhibited in the number of “ordinances” which have come down to us, collected by Richter and Sehling, is that a superintendent, one of the city clergy, was placed over the city churches, and that he was more or less responsible to the city fathers [pg 405] for the ecclesiastical life and rule within the domains of the city.

The ecclesiastical organisation of the territories of the princes was a much more difficult task. Luther proposed to the Elector of Saxony that a careful visitation of his principality should be made, district by district, in order to find out the state of matters and what required to be done.

The correspondence of Luther during the years 1525-1527 shows how urgent the need of such a visitation appeared to him. He had been through the country several times. Parish priests had laid their difficulties before him and had asked his advice. His letters describe graphically their abounding poverty, a poverty increased by the fact that the only application of the new evangelical liberty made by many of the people was to refuse to pay all clerical dues. He came to the conclusion that the “common man” respected neither priest nor preacher, that there was no ecclesiastical supervision in the country districts, and no exercise of authority to maintain even the necessary ecclesiastical buildings. He expressed the fear that if things were allowed to go on as they were doing, there would be soon neither priest's house nor schools nor scholars in many a parish. The reports of the first Saxon Visitation showed that Luther had not exaggerated matters.[376] The district about Wittenberg was in much better order than the others; but in the outlying portions a very bad state of things was disclosed. In a village near Torgau the Visitors discovered an old priest who was hardly able to repeat the Creed or the Lord's Prayer,[377] but who was [pg 406] held in high esteem as an exorcist, and who derived a good income from the exercise of his skill in combating the evil influences of witches. Priests had to be evicted for gross immoralities. Some were tavern-keepers or practised other worldly callings. Village schools were rarely to be found. Some of the peasants complained that the Lord's Prayer was so long that they could not learn it; and in one place the Visitors found that not a single peasant knew any prayer whatsoever.

This Saxon Visitation was the model for similar ones made in almost every evangelical principality, and its reports serve to show what need there was for inquiry and reorganisation. The lands of Electoral Saxony were divided into four “circles,” and a commission of theologians and lawyers was appointed to undertake the duties in each circle. The Visitation of the one “circle” of Wittenberg, with its thirty-eight parishes, may be taken as an example of how the work was done, and what kinds of alterations were suggested. The commissioners or Visitors were Martin Luther and Justus Jonas, theologians, with Hans Metzsch, Benedict Pauli, and Johann v. Taubenheim, jurists. They began in October 1528, and spent two months over their task. It was a strictly business proceeding. There is no account of either Luther or Jonas preaching while on tour. The Visitors went about their work with great energy, holding conferences with the parish priests and with the representatives of the community. They questioned the priests about the religious condition of the people—whether there was any gross and open immorality, whether the people were regular in their attendance at church and in coining to the communion. They asked the people how the priests did their work among them—in the towns their conferences were with the Rath, and in the country districts [pg 407] and villages with the male heads of families. Their common work was to find out what was being done for the “cure of souls,” the instruction of the youth, and the care of the poor. By “cure of souls” (Seelsorge) they meant preaching, dispensation of the sacraments, catechetical instruction, and the pastoral visitation of the sick. It belonged to the theologians to estimate the capacities of the pastors, and to the jurists to estimate the available income, to look into all legal difficulties that might arise, and especially to clear the entanglements caused by the supposed jurisdiction of convents over many of the parishes.

This small district was made up of three outlying portions of the three dioceses of Brandenburg, Magdeburg, and Meissen. It had not been inspected within the memory of man, and the results of episcopal negligence were manifest. At Klebitz the peasants had driven away the parish clerk and put the village herd in his house. At Bülzig there was neither parsonage nor house for parish clerk, and the priest was non-resident. So at Danna; where the priest held a benefice at Coswig, and was, besides, a chaplain at Wittenberg, while the clerk lived at Zahna. The parsonages were all in a bad state of repair, and the local authorities could not be got to do anything. Roofs were leaking, walls were crumbling, it was believed that the next winter's frost would bring some down bodily. At Pratau the priest had built all himself—parsonage, out-houses, stable, and byre. All these things were duly noted to be reported upon. As for the priests, the complaints made against them were very few indeed. In one case the people said that their priest drank, and was continually seen in the public-house. Generally, however, the complaints, when there were any, were that the priest was too old for his work, or was so utterly uneducated that he could do little more than mumble the Mass. There was scanty evidence that the people understood very clearly the evangelical theology. Partaking the Lord's Supper in both “kinds,” or in one only, was the distinction recognised and appreciated between the new and the old teaching; [pg 408] and when they had the choice the people universally preferred the new. In one case the parishioners complained that their priest insisted on saying the Mass in Latin and not in German. In one case only did the Visitors find any objection taken to the evangelical service. This was at Meure, where the parish clerk's wife was reported to be an enemy of the new pastor because he recited the service in German. It turned out, however, that her real objection was that the pastor had displaced her husband. At Bleddin the peasants told the Visitors that their pastor, Christopher Richter, was a learned and pious man, who preached regularly on all the Sundays and festival days, and generally four times a week in various parts of the parish. It appeared, however, that their admiration for him did not compel them to attend his ministrations with very great regularity. The energetic pastors were all young men trained at Wittenberg. The older men, peasants' sons all of them, were scarcely better educated than their parishioners, and were quite unable to preach to them. The Visitors found very few parishes indeed where three, four, five or more persons were not named to them who never attended church or came to the Lord's Table; in some parishes men came regularly to the preaching who never would come to the Sacrament. What impressed the Visitors most was the ignorance, the besotted ignorance, of the people. They questioned them directly; found out whether they knew the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer; and then questioned them about the meanings of the words; and the answers were disappointing.

Luther came back from the Visitation in greatly depressed spirits, and expressed his feelings in his usual energetic language. He says in his introduction to his Small Catechism, a work he began as soon as he returned from the Visitation:

“In setting forth this Catechism or Christian doctrine in such a simple, concise, and easy form, I have been compelled and driven by the wretched and lamentable state of [pg 409]affairs which I discovered lately when I acted as a Visitor. Merciful God, what misery have I seen, the common people knowing nothing at all of Christian doctrine, especially in the villages! and unfortunately many pastors are well-nigh unskilled and incapable of teaching; and although all are called Christians and partake of the Holy Sacrament, they know neither the Lord's Prayer, nor the Creed, nor the Ten Commandments, but live like poor cattle and senseless swine, though, now that the gospel is come, they have learnt well enough how they may abuse their liberty. Oh, ye bishops, how will ye ever answer for it to Christ that ye have so shamefully neglected the people, and have not attended for an instant to your office? May all evil be averted from you! (Das euch alles unglück fliche). Ye forbid the taking of the Sacrament in one kind, and insist on your human laws, but never inquire whether they know the Lord's Prayer, the Belief, the Ten Commandments, or any of the words of God. Oh, woe be upon you for evermore!”

The Visitors found that few books were to be seen in the parsonages. They record one notable exception, the parsonage of Schmiedeberg, where the priest had a library of twelve volumes. It could not be expected that such uneducated men could preach to much edification; and one of the recommendations of the Visitors was that copies of Luther's Postils or short sermons on the Lessons for the Day should be sent to all the parishes, with orders that they should be read by the pastors to their congregations.

They did not find a trace anywhere of systematic pastoral visitation or catechising.

In their practical suggestions for ending the priestly inefficiency, the Visitors made simple and homely arrangements. To take one example,—at Liessnitz, the aged pastor Conrad was quite unable from age and ignorance to perform his duties; but he was a good, inoffensive old man. It was arranged that he was to have a coadjutor, who was to be boarded by the rich man of the parish and get the fees, while the old pastor kept the parsonage and the stipend, out of which he was to pay fourteen gulden annually to his coadjutor.

The Visitors found that schools did not exist in most of the villages, and they were disappointed with the condition [pg 410] of the schools they found in the smaller towns. It was proposed to make the parish clerks the village schoolmasters; but they were wholly incompetent, and the Visitors saw nothing for it but to suggest that the pastors must become the village schoolmasters. The parish clerks were ordered to teach the children to repeat the Small Catechism by rote, and the pastors to test them at a catechising on Sunday afternoons. In the towns, where the churches usually had a cantor or precentor, this official was asked to train the children to sing evangelical hymns.

In their inquiries about the care of the poor, the Visitors found that there was not much need for anything to be done in the villages; but the case was different in the towns. They found that in most of them there existed old foundations meant to benefit the poor, and they discovered all manner of misuses and misappropriations of the funds. Suggestions were made for the restoration of these funds to their destined uses.

This very condensed account of what took place in the Wittenberg “circle” shows how the work of the Visitors was done; a second and a third Visitation were needed in Electoral Saxony ere things were properly arranged; but in the end good work was accomplished. The Elector refused to take any of the confiscated convent lands and possessions for civil purposes, and these, together with the Church endowments, provided stipends for the pastors, salaries for the schoolmasters, and a settled provision for the poor.

When the Visitation was completed and the reports presented, the Visitors were asked to draft and issue an Instruction or lengthy advice to the clergy and people of the “circle” they had inspected. This Instruction was not considered a regular legal document, but its contents were expected to be acted upon.

These Visitations and Instructions were the earliest attempts at the reorganisation of the evangelical Church in Electoral Saxony. The Visitors remained as a “primitive evangelical consistory” to supervise their “circles.”

The Saxon Visitations became a model for most of the [pg 411] North German evangelical territorial Churches, and the Instructions form the earliest collection of requirements set forth for the guidance of pastors and Christian people. The directions are very minute. The pastors are told how to preach, how to conduct pastoral visitations, what sins they must specially warn their people against, and what example they must show them. The care of schools and of the poor was not forgotten.[378]

The fact that matrimonial cases were during the Middle Ages almost invariably tried in ecclesiastical courts, made it necessary to provide some legal authority to adjudicate upon such cases when the mediæval episcopal courts had either temporarily or permanently lost their authority. This led to a provisional arrangement for the government of the Church in Electoral Saxony, which took a regular legal form. A pastor, called a superintendent, was appointed in each of the four “circles” into which the territory had been divided for the purpose of Visitation, to act along with the ordinary magistracy in all ecclesiastical matters, including the judging in matrimonial cases.[379] This Saxon arrangement also spread largely through the northern German evangelical States.

A third Visitation of Electoral Saxony was made in 1532, and led to important ecclesiastical changes which formed the basis of all that came afterwards. As a result of the reports of the Visitors, of whom Justus Jonas seems to have been the most energetic, the parishes were rearranged, the incomes of parish priests readjusted, and the whole ecclesiastical revenues of the mediæval Church within Electoral Saxony appropriated for the threefold evangelical uses of supporting the ministry, providing for schools, and caring for the poor. The doctrine, ceremonies, and worship of the evangelical Church were also settled on a definite basis.[380]

The Visitors pointed out that hitherto no arrangement had been made to give the whole ecclesiastical administration one central authority. The Electoral Prince had always been regarded as the supreme ruler of the Church within his dominions, but as he could not personally superintend everything, there was needed some supreme court which could act in all ecclesiastical cases as his representative or instrument. The Visitors suggested the revival of the mediæval episcopal consistorial courts modified to suit the new circumstances. Bishops in the mediæval sense of the word might be and were believed to be superfluous, but their true function, the jus episcopale, the right of oversight, was indispensable. According to Luther's ideas—ideas which had been gaining ground in Germany from the last quarter of the fifteenth century—this jus episcopale belonged to the supreme secular authority. The mediæval bishop had exercised his right of oversight through a consistorial court composed of theologians and canon lawyers appointed by himself. These mediæval courts, it was suggested, might be transformed into Lutheran ecclesiastical courts if the prince formed a permanent council composed of lawyers and divines to act for him and in his name in all ecclesiastical matters, including matrimonial cases. The Visitors sketched their plan; it was submitted for revision to Luther and to Chancellor Brück, and the result was the Wittenberg Ecclesiastical Consistory established in 1542.[381] That the arrangement was still somewhat provisional appears from the fact that the court had not jurisdiction over the whole of the Electoral dominions, and that other two Consistories, one at Zeitz and the other at Zwickau, were established with similar powers. But the thing to be observed is that these courts were modelled on the old mediæval consistorial episcopal courts, and that, [pg 413] like them, they were composed of lawyers and of theologians. The essential difference was that these Lutheran courts were appointed by and acted in the name of the supreme secular authority. In Electoral Saxony their local bounds of jurisdiction did not correspond to those of the mediæval courts. It was impossible that they should. Electoral Saxony, the ordinance erecting the Consistory itself says, consisted of portions of “ten or twelve” mediæval dioceses. The courts had different districts assigned to them; but in all other things they reproduced the mediæval consistorial courts.

The constitutions of these courts provided for the assembling and holding of Synods to deliberate on the affairs of the Church. The General Synod consisted of the Consistory and the superintendents of the various “circles”; and particular Synods, which had to do with the Church affairs of the “circle,” of the superintendent, and of all the clergy of the “circle.”

Such were the beginnings of the consistorial system of Church government, which is a distinctive mark of the Lutheran Church, and which exhibits some of the individual traits of Luther's personality. We can see in it his desire to make full use of whatever portions of the mediæval Church usages could be pressed into the service of his evangelical Church; his conception that the one supreme authority on earth was that of the secular government; his suspicion of the “common” man, and his resolve to prevent the people exercising any control over the arrangements of the Church.

Gradually all the Lutheran Churches have adopted, in general outline at least, this consistorial system; but it would be a mistake to think that the Wittenberg “use” was adopted in all its details. Luther himself, as has been said, had no desire for anything like uniformity, and there was none in the beginning. All the schemes of ecclesiastical government proceed on the idea that the jus episcopale or right of ecclesiastical oversight belongs to the supreme territorial secular authority. All of them [pg 414] include within the one set of ordinances, provisions for the support of the ministry, for the maintenance of schools, and for the care of the poor—the last generally expressed by regulations about the “common chest.” The great variety of forms of ecclesiastical government drafted and adopted may be studied in Richter's collection, which includes one hundred and seventy-two separate ecclesiastical constitutions, and which is confessedly very imperfect. The gradual growth of the organisation finally adopted in each city and State can be traced for a portion of Germany in Sehling's unfinished work.[382]

The number of these ecclesiastical ordinances is enormous, and the quantity is to be accounted for partly by the way in which Germany was split up into numerous small States in the sixteenth century, and also partly by the fact that Luther pled strongly for diversity.

The ordinances were promulgated in many different ways. Most frequently, perhaps, the prince published and enacted them on his own authority like any other piece of territorial legislation. Sometimes he commissioned a committee acting in his name to frame and publish. In other cases they resulted from a consultation between the prince and the magistrates of one of the towns within his dominions. Sometimes they came from the councils and the pastors of the towns to which they applied. In other instances they were issued by an evangelical bishop. And in a few cases they are simply the regulations issued by a single pastor for his own parish, which the secular authorities did not think of altering.

Although they are independent one from another, they may be grouped in families which resemble each other closely.[383]

Some of the territories reached the consistorial system [pg 415] much sooner than others. If a principality consisted in whole or in part of a secularised ecclesiastical State, the machinery of the consistorial court lay ready to the hand of the prince, and was at once adapted to the use of the evangelical Church. The system was naturally slowest to develop in the imperial cities, most of which at first preferred an organisation whose outlines were borrowed from the constitution drafted by Zwingli for Zurich.

Once only do we find an attempt to give an evangelical Church occupying a large territory a democratic constitution. It was made by Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, who was never afraid of the democracy. No German prince had so thoroughly won the confidence of his commonalty. The Peasants' War never devastated his dominions. He did not join in the virulent persecution of the Anabaptists which disgraced the Lutheran as well as the Roman Catholic States during the latter half of the sixteenth century. It was natural that Luther's earlier ideas about the rights of the Christian community (Gemeinde) should appeal to him. In 1526 (Oct. 6th), when the Diet of Speyer had permitted the organisation of evangelical Churches, Philip summoned a Synod at Homberg, and invited not merely pastors and ecclesiastical lawyers, but representatives from the nobles and from the towns. A scheme for ecclesiastical government, which had been drafted by Francis Lambert, formerly a Franciscan monk, was laid before the assembly and adopted. It was based on the idea that the word of God is the only supreme rule to guide and govern His Church, and that Canon Law has no place whatsoever within an evangelical Church. Scripture teaches, the document explains, that it belongs to the Christian community itself to select and dismiss pastors and to exercise discipline by means of excommunication. The latter right ought to be used in a weekly meeting (on Sundays) of the congregation and pastor. For the purposes of orderly rule the Church must have office-bearers, who ought to conform as nearly as possible to those mentioned in the New Testament Scriptures. They are bishops (pastors), elders, and [pg 416] deacons; and the deacons are the guardians of the poor as well as ecclesiastical officials. All these office-bearers must remember that their function is that of servants, and in no sense lordly or magisterial. They ought to be chosen by the congregation, and set apart by the laying on of hands according to apostolic practice. A bishop (pastor) must be ordained by at least three pastors, and a deacon by the pastor or by two elders. The government of the whole Church ought to be in the hands of a Synod, to consist of all the pastors and a delegate from every parish. Such in outline was the democratic ecclesiastical government proposed for the territory of Hesse and accepted by the Landgrave.[384] He was persuaded, however, by Luther's strong remonstrances to abandon it. There is no place for the democratic or representative element in the organisation of the Lutheran Churches.

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Chapter VII. The Lutheran Reformation Outside Germany.[385]

The influence of Luther went far beyond Germany. It was felt in England, France, Scotland, Holland, Poland, and Scandinavia. England went her own peculiar way; France, Holland, and Scotland, in the end, accepted the leadership of Calvin; the Lutheran Reformation, outside Germany, was really confined to Scandinavia alone.

In these Scandinavian lands the religious awakening was bound up with political and social movements more than in any other countries. The reformation in the Church was, indeed, begun by men who had studied under Luther at Wittenberg, or who had received their first promptings from his writings; but it was carried on and brought to a successful issue by statesmen who saw in it the means to deliver their land from political anarchy, caused by the overweening independence and turbulence of the great ecclesiastical lords, and who were almost compelled to look to the large possessions of the Church as a means to replenish their exhausted treasuries without ruining the overburdened taxpayers.

When Eric was crowned King of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in 1397, the assembled nobles, representative [pg 418] of the three kingdoms, agreed to the celebrated Union of Kalmar, which declared that the three lands were to be for ever united under one sovereign. The treaty was purely dynastic, its terms were vague, and it was never very effective. Without going into details, it may be said that the king lived in Denmark, and ruled in the interests of that country; that he also may be said to have ruled in Norway; but that in Sweden his authority was merely nominal, and sometimes not even that. In Denmark itself, monarchical government was difficult. The Scandinavian kingship was elective, and every election was an opportunity for reducing the privileges, authority, and wealth of the sovereign, and for increasing those of the nobles and of the great ecclesiastics, who, being privileged classes, were freed from contributing to the taxation.

In 1513, Christian ii., the nephew of the Elector of Saxony, and the brother-in-law of the Emperor Charles v. (1515), came to the throne, and his accession marks the beginning of the new era which was to end with the triumph of the Reformation in all three countries. Christian was a man of great natural abilities, with a profound sense of the miserable condition of the common people within his realms, caused by the petty tyrannies of the nobles, ecclesiastical and secular. No reigning prince, save perhaps George, Duke of Saxony, could compete with him in learning; but he was cruel, partly from nature and partly from policy. He had determined to establish his rule over the three kingdoms whose nominal king he was, and to free the commonalty from their oppression by breaking the power of the nobles and of the great Churchmen. The task was one of extreme difficulty, and he was personally unsuccessful; but his efforts laid the foundation on which successors were able to build securely.

He began by conquering rebellious Sweden, and disgraced his victory by a treacherous massacre of Swedish notables at Stockholm (1520),—a deed which, in the end, led to the complete separation of Sweden from Denmark. [pg 419] After having thus, as he imagined, consolidated his power, he pressed forward his schemes for reform. He took pains to encourage the trade and agriculture of Denmark; he patronised learning. He wrote to his uncle (1519), Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, to send him preachers trained by Luther; and, in response to his appeal, received first Martin Reinhard, and then Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt. These foreigners, who could only address the people through interpreters, did not make much impression; but reformation was pushed forward by the king. He published, on his own authority, two sets of laws dealing with the nobles and the Church, and subjecting both to the sovereign. He enacted that all convents were to be under episcopal inspection. Non-resident and unlettered clergy were legally abolished. A species of kingly consistorial court was set up in Copenhagen, and declared to be the supreme ecclesiastical judicature for the country; and appeals to Rome were forbidden. It can scarcely be said that these laws were ever in operation. A revolt by the Jutlanders gave a rallying point to the disaffection caused by the proposed reforms. Christian fled from Denmark (1523), and spent the rest of his life in exile or in prison. His law-books were burnt.

The Jutlanders had called Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, Christian's uncle, to the throne, and he was recognised King of Denmark and of Norway in 1523. He had come to the kingdom owing to the reaction against the reforms of his nephew, but in his heart he knew that they were necessary. He promised to protect the interests of the nobles, and to defend the Church against the advance of Lutheran opinions; but he soon endeavoured to find a means of evading his pledges. He found it when he pitted the nobles against the higher clergy, and announced that he had never promised to support the errors of the Church of Rome. At the National Assembly (Herredag) at Odense he was able to get the marriage of priests permitted, and a decree that bishops were in the future to apply to the king and not to the Pope for their Pallium. The Reformation [pg 420] had now native preachers to support it, especially Hans Tausen, who was called the Danish Luther, and they were encouraged by the king. At the Herredag at Copenhagen in 1530, twenty-one of these Lutheran preachers were summoned, at the instigation of the bishops, and formal accusations were made against them for preaching heresy. Tausen and his fellows produced a confession of faith in forty-three articles, all of which he and his companions offered to defend. A public disputation was proposed, which did not take place because the Romanist party refused to plead in the Danish language. This refusal was interpreted by the people to mean that they were afraid to discuss in a language which everyone understood. Lutheranism made rapid progress among all classes of the population.

On Frederick's death there was a disputed succession, which resulted in civil war. In the end Frederick's son ascended the throne as Christian iii., King of Denmark and Norway (1536). The king, who had been present at the Diet of Worms, and who had learned there to esteem Luther highly, was a strong Lutheran, and determined to end the authority of the Romish bishops. He proposed to his council that bishops should no longer have any share in the government, and that their possessions should be forfeited to the Crown. This was approved of not merely by the council, but also at a National Assembly which met at Copenhagen (Oct. 30th, 1536), where it was further declared that the people desired the holy gospel to be preached, and the whole episcopal authority done away with. The king asked Luther to send him some one to guide his people in their ecclesiastical matters. Bugenhagen was despatched, came to Copenhagen (1537), and took the chief ecclesiastical part in crowning the king. Seven superintendents (who afterwards took the title of bishops) were appointed and consecrated. The Reformation was carried out on conservative Lutheran lines, and the old ritual was largely preserved. Tausen's Confession was set aside in favour of the Augsburg Confession and Luther's [pg 421] Small Catechism, and the Lutheran Reformation was thoroughly and legally established.

The Reformation also became an accomplished fact in Norway and Iceland, but its introduction into these lands was much more an act of kingly authority.

After the massacre of Swedish notables in Stockholm (Nov. 1520), young Gustaf Ericsson, commonly known as Gustaf Vasa, from the vasa or sheaf which was on his coat of arms, raised the standard of revolt against Denmark. He was gradually able to rally the whole of the people around him, and the Danes were expelled from the kingdom. In 1521, Gustaf had been declared regent of Sweden, and in 1523 he was called by the voice of the people to the throne. He found himself surrounded by almost insuperable difficulties. There had been practically no settled government in Sweden for nearly a century, and every great landholder was virtually an independent sovereign. The country had been impoverished by long wars. Two-thirds of the land was owned by the Church, and the remaining third was almost entirely in the hands of the secular nobles. Both Church and nobles claimed exemption from taxation. The trade of the country was in the hands of foreigners—of the Danes or of the Hanse Towns. Gustaf had borrowed money from the town of Lübeck for his work of liberation. The city was pressing for repayment, and its commissioners followed the embarrassed monarch wherever he went. It was hopeless to expect to raise money by further taxation of the already depressed and impoverished peasants.

In these circumstances the king turned to the Church. He compelled the bishops to give him more than one subsidy (1522, 1523); but this was inadequate for his needs. The Church property was large, and the king planned to overthrow the ecclesiastical aristocracy by the help of the Lutheran Reformation.

Lutheranism had been making progress in Sweden. Two brothers, Olaus and Laurentius Petri, sons of a blacksmith at Orebro, had been sent by their father to study [pg 422] in Germany. They had meant to attend the University of Leipzig; but, attracted by the growing fame of Luther, they had gone to Wittenberg, and had become enthusiastic disciples of the Reformer. On their return to Sweden (1519) they had preached Lutheran doctrine, and had made many converts—among others, Laurentius Andreæ, Archdeacon at Strengnäs. In spite of protests from the bishops, these three men were protected by the king. Olaus Petri was especially active, and made long preaching tours, declaring that he taught the pure gospel which “Ansgar, the apostle of the North, had preached seven hundred years before in Sweden.”

Gustaf brought Olaus to Stockholm (1524), and made him town-clerk of the city; his brother Laurentius was appointed professor of theology at Upsala; Laurentius Andrew was made Archdeacon of Upsala and Chancellor of Sweden. When the bishops demanded that the Reformers should be silenced, Olaus challenged them to a public disputation. The challenge was refused; but in 1524 a disputation was arranged in the king's palace in Stockholm between Olaus and Dr. Galle, who supported the old religion. The conference, which included discussion of the doctrines of Justification by Faith, Indulgences, the Mass, Purgatory, and the Temporal Power of the Pope, had the effect of strengthening the cause of the Reformation. In 1525, Olaus defied the rules of the mediæval Church by publicly marrying a wife. The same year the king called for a translation of the Scriptures into Swedish, and in 1526 Laurentius Petri published his New Testament. A translation of the whole Bible was edited by the same scholar, and published 1540-1541. These translations, especially that of the New Testament, became very popular, and the people with the Scripture in their hands were able to see whether the teaching of the preachers or of the bishops was most in accordance with the Holy Scriptures.

There is no reason to believe that the king did not take the side of the Lutheran Reformation from genuine [pg 423] conviction. He had made the acquaintance of the brothers Petri before he was called to be the deliverer of his country. But it is unquestionable that his financial embarrassment whetted his zeal for the reformation of the Church in Sweden. Matters were coming to a crisis, which was reached in 1527. At the Diet in that year, the Chancellor, in the name of the king, explained the need for an increased revenue, and suggested that ecclesiastical property was the only source from which it could be obtained. The bishops, Johan Brask, Bishop of Linkoeping, at their head, replied that they had the Pope's orders to defend the property of the Church. The nobles supported them. Then Gustaf presented his ultimatum. He told the Diet plainly that they must submit to the proposals of the Chancellor or accept his resignation, pay him for his property, return him the money he had spent in defence of the kingdom, and permit him to leave the country never to return. The Diet spent three days in wrangling, and then submitted to his wishes. The whole of the ecclesiastical property—episcopal, capitular, and monastic—which was not absolutely needed for the support of the Church was to be placed in the hands of the king. Preachers were meanwhile to set forth the pure gospel, until a conference held in presence of the Diet would enable that assembly to come to a decision concerning matters of religion. The Diet went on, without waiting for the conference, to pass the twenty-four regulations which made the famous Ordinances of Vesteräs, and embodied the legal Reformation. They contained provisions for secularising the ecclesiastical property in accordance with the previous decision of the Diet; declared that the king had the right of vetoing the decisions of the higher ecclesiastics; that the appointment of the parish clergy was in the hands of the bishops, but that the king could remove them for inefficiency; that the pure gospel was to be taught in every school; and that auricular confession was no longer compulsory.

While the Ordinances stripped the Swedish Church of a large amount of its property and made it subject to the [pg 424] king, they did not destroy its episcopal organisation, nor entirely impoverish it. Most of the monasteries were deserted when their property was taken away. The king knew that the peasantry scarcely understood the Reformed doctrines, and had no wish to press them unduly on his people. For the same reason the old ceremonies and usages which did not flagrantly contradict the new doctrines were suffered to remain, and given an evangelical meaning. The first evangelical Hymn-book was published in 1530, and the Swedish “Mass” in 1531, both drafted on Lutheran models. Laurentius Andreæ was made Archbishop of Upsala (1527), and a National Synod was held under his presidency at Orebro (1528), which guided the Reformation according to strictly conservative Lutheran ideals. Thus before the death of Gustaf Vasa, Sweden had joined the circle of Lutheran Churches, and its people were slowly coming to understand the principles of the Reformation. The Reformation was a very peaceful one. No one suffered death for his religious opinions.

The fortunes of the Swedish Church were somewhat varied under the immediate successors of Gustavus. His ill-fated son showed signs of preferring Calvinism, and insisted on the suppression of some of the ecclesiastical festivals and some of the old rites which had been retained; but these attempts ended with his reign. His brother and successor, Johan iii., took the opposite extreme, and coquetted long with Rome, and with proposals for reunion,—proposals which had no serious result. When Johan died in 1592, his son and successor, who had been elected King of Poland, and had become a Roman Catholic, aroused the fears of his Swedish subjects that he might go much further than his father. The people resolved to make sure of their Protestantism before their new sovereign arrived in the country. A Synod was convened at which both lay and ecclesiastical deputies were present. The members first laid down the general rule that the Holy Scriptures were their supreme doctrinal standard, and then selected the Augsburg Confession as the Confession of the Swedish [pg 425] Church. Luther's Small Catechism, which had been removed from the schools by King Johan iii., was restored. This meeting at Upsala settled for the future the ecclesiastical polity of Sweden. The country showed its attachment to the stricter Lutheranism by adopting the Formula of Concord in 1664.

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Chapter VIII. The Religious Principles Inspiring The Reformation.[386]

§ 1. The Reformation did not take its rise from a Criticism of Doctrines.

The whole of Luther's religious history, from his entrance into the convent at Erfurt to the publication of the Augsburg Confession, shows that the movement of which he was the soul and centre did not arise from any merely intellectual criticism of the doctrines of the mediæval church, and that it resulted in a great deal more than a revision or reconstruction of a system of doctrinal conceptions.[387] There is no trace of any intellectual difficulties about doctrines or statement of doctrines in Luther's mind during the supreme crisis of his history. He was driven out of the world of human life and hope, where he was well fitted to do a man's work, by the overwhelming pressure of a great practical religious need—anxiety to save his soul. He has himself said that the proverb that doubt makes a monk was true in his case. He doubted [pg 427] whether he could save his soul in the world, and was therefore forced to leave it and enter the convent.

He had lost whatever evangelical teaching he had learnt in childhood or in Frau Cotta's household at Eisenach. He had surrendered himself to the popular belief, fostered by the whole penitential system of the mediæval Church, that man could and must make himself fit to receive the grace of God which procures salvation. The self-torturing cry, “Oh, when wilt thou become holy and fit to obtain the grace of God?” (O wenn will tu einmal fromm werden und genug thun du einen gnädigen Gott kriegest?), drove him into the convent. He believed, and the almost unanimous opinion of his age agreed with him, that there, if anywhere, he could find the peace he was seeking with such desperation.

Inside the convent he applied himself with all the force of a strong nature, using every means that the complicated penitential system of the Church had provided to help him, to make himself pious and fit to be the receptacle of the grace of God. He submitted to the orders of his superiors with the blind obedience which the most rigorous ecclesiastical statutes demanded; he sought the comforting consolations which confession was declared to give; he underwent every part of the complex system of expiations which the mediæval Church recommended; he made full use of the sacraments, and waited in vain for the mysterious, inexplicable experience of the grace which was said to accompany and flow from them. He persevered in spite of the feeling of continuous failure. “If a monk ever reached heaven by monkery,” he has said, “I would have found my way there also; all my convent comrades will bear witness to that.”[388] He gave a still stronger proof of his loyalty to the mediæval Church and its advice to men in his mood of mind; he persevered in spite of the knowledge that his comrades and his religious superiors believed him to be a young saint, while he knew that he was far otherwise, [pg 428] and that he was no nearer God than he had been before he entered the monastery, or had begun his quest after the sense of pardon of sin. The contrast between what his brethren thought he must be and what his own experience told him that he was, must have added bitterness to the cup he had to drink during these terrible months in the Erfurt convent. He says himself:

“After I had made the profession, I was congratulated by the prior, the convent, and the father-confessor, because I was now an innocent child coming pure from baptism. Assuredly, I would willingly have delighted in the glorious fact that I was such a good man, who by his own deeds and without the merits of Christ's blood had made himself so fair and holy, and so easily too, and in so short a time. But although I listened readily to the sweet praise and glowing language about myself and my doings, and allowed myself to be described as a wonder-worker, who could make himself holy in such an easy way, and could swallow up death, and the devil also, yet there was no power in it all to maintain me. When even a small temptation came from sin or death I fell at once, and found that neither baptism nor monkery could assist me; I felt that I had long lost Christ and His baptism. I was the most miserable man on earth; day and night there was only wailing and despair, and no one could restrain me.”[389]

He adds that all he knew of Christ at this time was that He was “a stern judge from whom I would fain have fled and yet could not escape.”

During these two years of anguish, Luther believed that he was battling with himself and with his sin; he was really struggling with the religion of his times and Church. He was probing it, testing it, examining all its depths, wrestling with all its means of grace, and finding that what were meant to be sources of comfort and consolation were simply additional springs of terror. He was too clear-sighted, his spiritual senses were too acute, he was too much in deadly earnest, not to see that none of these aids were leading him to a solid ground of certainty on [pg 429] which he could base his hopes for time and for eternity; and he was too honest with himself to be persuaded that he was otherwise than his despair told him.[390]

At length, guided in very faltering fashion by the Scriptures, especially by the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans, by the Apostles' Creed, and by fellow monks, he (to use his own words) came to see that the righteousness of God (Rom. i. 17) is not the righteousness by which a righteous God punishes the unrighteous and sinners, but that by which a merciful God justifies us through faith (not justitia, qua dens justus est et peccatores injustosque punit, but that qua nos deus misericors justificat per fidem).[391] By faith, he says. What, then, did he mean by “faith”?

He replies:

“There are two kinds of believing: first, a believing about God which means that I believe that what is said of God is true. This faith is rather a form of knowledge than a faith. There is, secondly, a believing in God which means that I put my trust in Him, give myself up to thinking that I can have dealings with Him, and believe without any doubt that He will be and do to me according to the things said of Him. Such faith, which throws itself upon God, whether in life or in death, alone makes a Christian man.”[392]

The faith which he prized is that religious faculty which “throws itself upon God”; and from the first Luther recognised that faith of this kind was a direct gift from God. Having it we have everything; without it we have nothing. Here we find something entirely new, or at least hitherto unexpressed, so far as mediæval theology was concerned. Mediæval theologians had recognised faith in the sense of what Luther called frigida opinio, and it is difficult to conceive that they did not also indirectly [pg 430] acknowledge that there must be something like trust or fiducia; but faith with them was simply one among many human efforts all equally necessary in order to see and know God. Luther recognised that there was this kind of faith, which a man begets and brings to pass in himself by assent to doctrines of some sort. But he did not think much of it. He calls it worthless because it gives us nothing.

“They think that faith is a thing which they may have or not have at will, like any other natural human thing; so when they arrive at a conclusion and say, ‘Truly the doctrine is correct, and therefore I believe it,’ then they think that this is faith. Now, when they see and feel that no change has been wrought in themselves and in others, and that works do not follow, and they remain as before in the old nature, then they think that the faith is not good enough, but that there must be something more and greater.”[393]

The real faith, the faith which is trust, the divine gift which impels us to throw ourselves upon God, gives us the living assurance of a living God, who has revealed Himself, made us see His loving Fatherly heart in Christ Jesus; and that is the Christian religion in its very core and centre. The sum of Christianity is—(1) God manifest in Christ, the God of grace, accessible by every Christian man and woman; and (2) unwavering trust in Him who has given Himself to us in Christ Jesus,—unwavering, because Christ with His work has undertaken our cause and made it His.

The God we have access to and Whom we can trust because we have thrown ourselves upon Him and have found that He sustains us, is no philosophical abstraction, to be described in definitions and argued about in syllogisms. He is seen and known, because we see and know Christ Jesus. “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” For with Luther and all the Reformers, Christ fills the whole sphere of God; and they do not recognise any theology which is not a Christology.

The faith which makes us throw ourselves upon God is no mood of mere mystical abandonment. It is our very life, as Luther was never tired of saying. It is God within us, and wells forth in all kinds of activities.

“It is a living, busy, active, powerful thing, faith; it is impossible for it not to do us good continually. It never asks whether good works are to be done; it has done them before there is time to ask the question, and it is always doing them.”[394]

Christianity is therefore an interwoven tissue of promises and prayers of faith. On the one side there is the Father, revealing Himself, sending down to us His promises which are yea and amen in Christ Jesus; and on the other side there are the hearts of men ascending in faith to God, receiving, accepting, and resting on the promises of God, and on God who always gives Himself in His promises.

This is what came to Luther and ended his long and terrible struggle. He is unwearied in describing it. The descriptions are very varied, so far as external form and expression go,—now texts from the Psalms, the Prophets, or the New Testament most aptly quoted; now phrases borrowed from the picturesque language of the mediæval mystics; now sentences of striking, even rugged, originality; sometimes propositions taken from the mediæval scholastic. But whatever the words, the meaning is always the same.

This conception of what is meant by Christianity is the religious soul of the Reformation. It contains within it all the distinctively religious principles which inspired it. It can scarcely be called a dogma. It is an experience, and the phrases which set it forth are the descriptions of an experience which a human soul has gone through. The thing itself is beyond exact definition—as all deep experiences are. It must be felt and gone through to be known. The Reformation started from this personal [pg 432] experience of the believing Christian, which it declared to be the one elemental fact in Christianity which could never be proved by argument and could never be dissolved away by speculation. It proclaimed the great truth, which had been universally neglected throughout the whole period of mediæval theology by everyone except the Mystics, that in order to know God man must be in living touch with God Himself. Therein lay its originality and its power. Luther rediscovered religion when he declared that the truly Christian man must cling directly and with a living faith to the God Who speaks to him in Christ, saying, “I am thy salvation.” The earlier Reformers never forgot this. Luther proclaimed his discovery, he never attempted to prove it by argument; it was something self-evident—seen and known when experienced.

This is always the way with great religious pioneers and leaders. They have all had the prophetic gift of spiritual vision, and the magnetic speech to proclaim what they have seen, felt, and known. They have all had, in a far-off way, the insight and manner of Jesus.

When our Lord appeared among men claiming to be more than a wise man or a prophet, declaring that He was the Messiah, the Son of Man and the Son of God, when He announced that all men had need of Him, and that He alone could save and redeem, He set forth His claims in a manner unique among founders of religions. He made them calmly and as a matter of course. He never explained elaborately why He assumed the titles He took. He never reasoned about His position as the only Saviour. He simply announced it, letting the conviction of the truth steal almost insensibly into the minds and hearts of His followers as they saw His deeds and heard His words. He assumed that they must interpret His death in one way only. This was always His manner. It was not His way to explain mysteries our curiosity would fain penetrate. He quietly took for granted many things we would like to argue about. His sayings came from One who lived in perpetual communion with the Unseen Father, and He uttered them [pg 433] quietly and assuredly, confident that they carried with them their own self-evidencing power.

So it was with St. Paul. His letters and sermons are full of arguments, no doubt, full of pleadings and persuasion, but they all start from and rest upon his vision of the living, risen Saviour. His last word is always, “When it pleased God to reveal His Son in me”; that was the elemental fact which he proclaimed and which summed up everything, the personal experience from which he started on his career as an apostle. The place of Athanasius as a great religious leader has been obscured by his position as a theologian; but when we turn to his writings, where do we find less of what is commonly called dogmatic theology? There is argument, reasoning, searching for proofs and their statement; but all that belongs to the outworks in his teaching. The central citadel is a spiritual intuition—I know that my Saviour is the God Who made heaven and earth. He took his stand firmly and unflinchingly on that personal experience, and all else mattered little compared with the fundamental spiritual fact. It was not his arguments, but his unflinching faith that convinced his generation.

So it was with Augustine, Bernard,[395] Francis—so it has been with every great religious leader of the Christian people. His strength, whether of knowledge, or conviction, or sympathy,—his driving power, if the phrase may be used,—has always come from direct communion with the unseen, and rests upon the fact, felt and known by himself and communicated to others by a mysterious sympathy, that it has pleased God to reveal Christ in him in some way or other.

So it was with Luther and the Reformation in which he was the leader. Its driving power was a great religious experience, old, for it has come to the people of God in all generations, and yet new and fresh as it is the nature of all such experiences to be. He knew that his life was hid with Christ in God in spite of all evil, in spite of sin and sense of guilt. His old dread of God had vanished, and instead of it there had arisen in his heart a love to God in answer to the love which came from the vision of the Father revealing Himself. He had experienced this, and he had proclaimed what he had gone through; and the experience and its proclamation were the foundation on which the Reformation was built. Its beginnings were not doctrinal but experimental.

Doctrines, indeed, are not the beginnings of things; they are, at the best, storehouses of past and blessed experiences. This is true of most knowledge in all departments of research. We may recognise that there is some practical use in the rules of logic, ancient and modern, but we know that they are but the uncouth and inadequate symbols of the ways in which an indefinable mental tact, whose delicacy varies with the mind that uses it, perceives divergences and affinities, and weaves its web of knowledge in ways that are past finding out. We know that logical argument is a good shield but a bad sword, and that while syllogisms may silence, they seldom convince; that persuasion arises from a subtle sympathy of soul with soul, which is as indefinable as the personalities which exhale it. There is always at the basis of knowledge of men and things this delicate contact of personality with personality, whether we think of the gathering, or assorting, or exchanging the wisdom we possess. If this be true of our knowledge of common things, it is overwhelmingly so of all knowledge of God and of things divine. We must be in touch with God to know Him in the true sense of knowledge. At the basis of every real advance in religion there must be an intimate vision of God impressed upon us as a religious experience which we know to be true because we have felt [pg 435] it; and what one has, another receives by a species of spiritual contagion. The revival under Francis of Assisi spread as it did because the fire flaming in the heart of the preacher was also kindled in the hearts of his hearers. Luther headed a Reformation because men felt and knew that he had, as he said, found a gracious God by trusting in the grace of God revealed to him in Christ Jesus. It was not the Augsburg Confession that made the Reformation; it was the expansion of that religious experience which finds very inadequate description in that or in any other statement of doctrines.

§ 2. The universal Priesthood of Believers.

Luther's religious experience, that he, a sinner, received forgiveness by simply throwing himself on God revealed in Christ Jesus the Saviour, came to him as an astounding revelation which was almost too great to be put into words. He tried to express it in varying ways, all of which he felt too utterly inadequate to describe it. We can see how he laboured at it from 1512 to 1517. It lay hidden in his discourse to the assembly of clergy in the episcopal palace at Ziesar (June 5th, 1512), when he declared that all reform must begin in the hearts of individual men. We can see it growing more and more articulate in his annotations, notes, and heads of lectures on the Psalms, delivered in the years 1513-1516, struggling to free itself from the phrases of the Scholastic Theology which could not really express it. His private letters, in which he was less hampered by the phraseology which he still believed appropriate to theology, are full of happier expressions.[396] Justificatio is vivificatio, and means to redeem from sins without any merit in the person redeemed; it takes place when sin is not imputed, but the penitents are reputed [pg 436] righteous. Grace is the pity (misericordia) of God; it manifests itself in the remission of sins; it is the truth of God seen in the fulfilment of His promises in the historical work of Christ; Jesus Christ Himself is grace, is the way, is life and salvation. Faith is trust in the truth of God as manifested in the life and work of Jesus Christ; it is to believe in God; it is a knowledge of the Cross of Christ; it is to understand that the Son of God became incarnate, was crucified, and raised again for our salvation. The three central thoughts—justification, grace, faith—expressed in these inadequate phrases, are always looked upon and used to regulate that estimate of ourselves which forms the basis of piety. It is needless to trace the growing adequacy of the description. Luther at last found words to say that the central thought in Christianity is that the believer in possession of faith, which is itself the gift of God, is able to throw himself on God in Christ Who is his salvation and Who has mirrored Himself for us in Christ Jesus. He had trod the weary round that Augustine had gone before him; he had tried to help himself in every possible way; he had found that with all his striving he could do nothing. Then, strange and mysterious as it was, the discovery had not brought despair, but rejoicing and comfort; for since there was no help whatever in man, his soul had been forced to find all—not part, but all—help in God. When he was able to express his experience he could say that the faith which throws itself on God, which is God's own gift, is the certainty of the forgiveness of sins. It was no adherence to doctrines more or less clearly comprehended; it was no act of initiation to be followed by a nearer approach to God and a larger measure of His grace; it was the power which gives life, certainty, peace, continuous self-surrender to God as the Father, and which transforms and renews the whole man. It was the life of the soul; it was Christianity within the believer—as Jesus Christ and His work is Christianity outside the believer.

It is manifest that as soon as this experience attained [pg 437] articulate statement, it was bound to discredit much that was in mediæval theology and religious usage. Yet the striking thing about Luther was that he never sought to employ it in this way until one great abuse forced itself upon him and compelled him to test it by this touchstone of what true Christianity was. This reserve not only shows that there was nothing revolutionary in the character of Luther, nothing romantic or quixotic, it also manifests the quiet greatness of the man. Nor was there anything in the fundamental religious experience of Luther which necessarily conflicted with the contents of the old ecclesiastical doctrines, or even with the common usages of the religious life. There was a change in the attitude towards both, and an entirely new estimate of their religious value, but nothing which called for their immediate criticism, still less for their destruction. Faith, which was the Christian life, could no longer be based upon them; they were not the essential things that they had been supposed to be; but they might have their uses if kept in their proper places—aids to all holy living, but not that from which the life sprang. The thought that the entire sum of religion consists in “unwavering trust of the heart in Him Who has given Himself to us in Christ as our Father, personal assurance of faith, because Christ with His work undertakes our cause,” simplified religion marvellously, and made many things which had been regarded as essential mere outside auxiliaries. But it did not necessarily sweep them away. Though the acceptance of certain forms of doctrine, auricular confession, the monastic life, communion by the laity in one “kind” only in the Sacrament of the Supper, a celibate priesthood, fasting, going on pilgrimages, not to eat meat on Friday, had nothing to do with the essentials of the Christian life; still it was not necessary to insist on eating meat on Friday, on abstaining from fasting, and so on. The great matter was the spirit in which such things were performed or left undone. What the fundamental religious experience had done was to show the liberty of the Christian man to trust courageously in [pg 438] God and count all things of little moment compared with this which was the one thing needful.

“Out of a complex system of expiations, good deeds, and comfortings, of strict statutes and uncertain apportionments of grace, out of magic and blind obedience, Luther led religion forth and gave it a strenuously concentrated form. The Christian religion is the living assurance of the living God Who has revealed Himself and opened His heart in Christ—nothing more.”[397]

It was a vital part of this fundamental experience that the living God Who had manifested Himself in Christ was accessible to every Christian. To quote Harnack again:

“Rising above all anxieties and terrors, above all ascetic devices, above all directions of theology, above all interventions of hierarchy and Sacraments, Luther ventured to lay hold of God Himself in Christ, and in this act of faith, which he recognised as God's work, his whole being obtained stability and firmness, nay, even a personal joy and certainty, which no mediæval Christian had ever possessed.”[398]

God Himself gave the believer the power to throw himself directly on God. But this contradicted one of the most widely diffused and most strongly held religious beliefs of the mediæval Church, and was bound to come in collision with it whenever the two were confronted with each other. It was the universal conception of mediæval piety that the mediation of a priest was essential to salvation. Mediæval Christians believed with more or less distinctness that the supernatural life of the soul was created, nourished, and perfected through the sacraments, and that the priests administering them possessed, in virtue of their ordination, miraculous powers whereby they daily offered the true sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the altar, forgave the sins of men, and taught the truths of salvation with divine authority. It was this universally accepted power of a mediatorial priesthood which had enslaved Europe, and which had rendered the liberty of a Christian [pg 439] man an impossible thing. Everywhere the priesthood barred, or was supposed to be able to bar, the way to God. The Church, which ought to have shown how God Who had revealed Himself in Christ was accessible to every believer, had surrounded the inner shrine of the sanctuary of His Presence with a triple wall of defence which prevented entrance. When man or woman felt sorrow for sin, they were instructed to go, not to God, but to a man, often of immoral life, and confess their sins to him because he was a priest. When they wished to hear the comforting words of pardon spoken, it was not from God, but from a priest that the assurance was supposed to come. God's grace, to help to holy living and to bring comfort in dying, was given, it was said, only through a series of sacraments which fenced man's life round, and priests could give or withhold these sacraments. Man was born again in baptism; he came of age spiritually in confirmation; his marriage was cleansed from the sin of lust in the sacrament of matrimony; penance brought back his spiritual life slain by deadly sin; the Eucharist gave him with his voyage victual as he journeyed through life; and deathbed grace was imparted in extreme unction. These ceremonies were not the signs and promises of the free grace of God, under whose wide canopy, as under that of heaven, man lived his spiritual life. They were jealously guarded doors from out of which grudgingly, and commonly not without fees, the priests dispensed the free grace of God.

During the later Middle Ages a gross abuse made the evils of this conception of a mediating priesthood emphatic. The practical evil lying in the whole thought was not so very apparent when the matter was regarded from the side of giving out the grace of God; but when it came to withholding it, then it was seen what the whole conception meant. The Bishops of Rome gave the peoples of Europe many an object lesson on this. If a town, or a district, or a whole country had offended the Pope and the Curia, it was placed under an interdict, and the priests were commanded to refuse the sacraments to the people. They [pg 440] stood between the newborn babe and the initial grace supposed to be bestowed in baptism, and to be absolutely withheld if baptism was not administered; between the dying man and the deathbed grace which was received in extreme unction; between young men and women and legal marriage blessed by God; between the people and daily worship and the bestowal of grace in the Eucharist. The God of grace could not be approached, the blessings of pardon and strength for holy living could not be procured, because the magistrates of a town or the king and councillors of a nation had offended the Bishop of Rome on an affair of worldly policy. The Church, i.e. the clergy, who were by the theory enabled to refuse to communicate the grace of God, barred all access to the God who had revealed Himself in Christ Jesus. The Pope by a stroke of the pen could prevent a whole nation, so it was believed, from approaching God, because he could prohibit priests from performing the usual sacramental acts which alone brought Him near. An interdict meant spiritual death to the district on which it fell, and on the mediæval theory it was more deadly to the spiritual life than the worst of plagues, the Black Death itself, was to the body. An interdict made the plainest intellect see, understand, and shudder at the awful and mysterious powers which a mediatorial priesthood was said to possess.

The fundamental religious experience of Luther had made him know that the Father, who has revealed Himself in His Son, is accessible to every humble penitent and faithful seeker after God. He proclaimed aloud the spiritual priesthood of all believers. He stated it with his usual graphic emphasis in that tract of his, which he always said contained the marrow of his message—Concerning Christian Liberty. He begins by an antithesis: “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none: a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone”; or, as St. Paul puts it, “Though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant of all.” He expounds this by showing that no [pg 441] outward things have any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty; neither eating, drinking, nor anything of the kind, neither hunger nor thirst have to do with the liberty or the slavery of the soul. It does not profit the soul to wear sacred vestments or to dwell in sacred places; nor does it harm the soul to be clothed in worldly raiment, and to eat and drink in the ordinary fashion. The soul can do without everything except the word of God, and this word of God is the gospel of God concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and glorified through the Spirit the Sanctifier. “To preach Christ is to feed the soul, to justify it, to set it free, to save it, if it believes the preaching; for faith alone and the efficacious use of the word of God bring salvation.” It is faith that incorporates Christ with the believer, and in this way “the soul through faith alone, without works, is, from the word of God, justified, sanctified, endued with truth, peace, liberty, and filled full with every good thing, and is truly made the child of God.” For faith brings the soul and the word together, and the soul is acted upon by the word, as iron exposed to fire glows like fire because of its union with the fire. Faith honours and reveres Him in Whom it trusts, and cleaves to His promises, never doubting but that He overrules all for the best. Faith unites the soul to Christ, so that “Christ and the soul become one flesh.” “Thus the believing soul, by the pledge of its faith in Christ, becomes free from all sin, fearless of death, safe from hell, and endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of its husband Christ.” This gives the liberty of the Christian man; no dangers can really harm him, no sorrows utterly overwhelm him: for he is always accompanied by the Christ to whom he is united by his faith.

“Here you will ask,” says Luther, “ ‘If all who are in the Church are priests, by what character are those whom we now call priests to be distinguished from the laity?’ I reply, By the use of these words ‘priest,’ ‘clergy,’ ‘spiritual person,’ ‘ecclesiastic,’ an injustice has been done, since they have been transferred from the remaining body [pg 442] of Christians to those few who are now, by a hurtful custom, called ecclesiastics. For Holy Scripture makes no distinction between them, except that those who are now boastfully called Popes, bishops, and lords, it calls ministers, servants, and stewards, who are to serve the rest in the ministry of the word, for teaching the faith of Christ and the liberty of believers. For though it is true that we are all equally priests, yet we cannot, nor ought we if we could, all to minister and teach publicly.”

The first part of the treatise shows that everything which a Christian man has goes back in the end to his faith; if he has this he has all; if he has it not, nothing else suffices him. In the same way the second part shows that everything that a Christian man does must come from his faith. It may be necessary to fast and keep the body under; it will be necessary to make use of all the ceremonies of divine service which have been found effectual for the spiritual education of man. The thing to remember is that these are not good works in themselves in the sense of making a man good; they are all rather the signs of his faith, and are to be done with joy, because they are done to the God to whom faith unites us. So ecclesiastical ceremonies, or what may be called the machinery of Church life, are valuable, and indeed indispensable to the life of the soul, provided only they are regarded in the proper way and kept in their proper place; but they may become harmful and most destructive of the true religious life if they are considered in any other light than that of means to an end. “We do not condemn works,” says Luther, “nay we attach the highest value to them. We only condemn that opinion of works which regards them as constituting true righteousness.” They are, he explains, like the scaffolding of a building, eminently useful so long as they assist the builder; harmful if they obstruct; and at the best of temporary value. They are destructive to the spiritual life when they come between the soul and God. It follows, therefore, that if through human corruption and neglect of the plain precepts [pg 443] of the word of God these ecclesiastical usages hinder instead of aid the true growth of the soul, they ought to be changed or done away with; and the fact that the soul of man, in the last resort, needs absolutely nothing but the word of God dwelling within it, gives men courage and tranquillity in demanding their reformation.

In the same way fellow-men are not to be allowed to come between God and the human soul; and there is no need that they should. So far as spiritual position and privileges go, the laity are on the very same level as the clergy, for laity and clergy alike have immediate access to God through faith, and both are obliged to do what lies in them to further the advance of the kingdom of God among their fellow-men. All believing laymen “are worthy to appear before God, to pray for others, to teach each other mutually the things that are of God ... and as our heavenly Father has freely helped us in Christ, so we ought freely to help our neighbours by our body and our works, and each should become to the other a sort of Christ, so that we may be mutually Christs, and that the same Christ may be in all of us; that we may be truly Christians.” Luther asserted that men and women living their lives in the family, in the workshop, in the civic world, held their position there, not by a kind of indirect permission wrung from God out of His compassion for human frailties, but by as direct a vocation as called a man to what by mistake had been deemed the only “religious life.” The difference between clergy and laity did not consist in the supposed fact that the former were a spiritual order of a superior rank in the religious life, while the latter belonged to a lower condition. The clergy differed from the laity simply in this, that they had been selected to perform certain definite duties; but the function did not make him who performed it a holier man intrinsically. If the clergy misused their position and did not do the work they were set apart to perform, there was no reason why they should not be compelled by the laity to amend their ways. Even in the celebration of the [pg 444] holiest rites there was no distinction between clergy and laity save that to prevent disorder the former presided over the rites in which all engaged. At the Eucharist

“our priest or minister stands before the altar, having been publicly called to his priestly function; he repeats publicly and distinctly Christ's words of the institution; he takes the Bread and the Wine, and distributes it according to Christ's words; and we all kneel beside him and around him, men and women, young and old, master and servant, mistress and maid, all holy priests together, sanctified by the blood of Christ. We are there in our priestly dignity.... We do not let the priest proclaim for himself the ordinance of Christ; but he is the mouthpiece of us all, and we all say it with him in our hearts with true faith in the Lamb of God Who feeds us with His Body and Blood.”

It was this principle of the Priesthood of all Believers which delivered men from the vague fear of the clergy, and which was a spur to incite them to undertake the reformation of the Church which was so much needed. It is the one great religious principle which lies at the basis of the whole Reformation movement. It was the rock on which all attempts at reunion with an unreformed Christendom were wrecked. It is the one outstanding difference between the followers of the reformed and the mediæval religion.

Almost all the distinctive principles of the Reformation group themselves round this one thought of the Priesthood of all Believers. It is sufficient for our purpose to look at Justification by Faith, the conceptions of the Holy Scriptures, of the Person of Christ, and of the Church.

§ 3. Justification by Faith.

When Luther, oppressed with a sense of sin, entered the convent, he was burdened by the ideas of traditional religion, that the penitent must prepare himself in some way so as to render himself fit to experience that sense of the grace of God which gives the certainty of pardon. It was not until he had thoroughly freed himself from [pg 445] that weight that he experienced the sense of pardon he sought. This practical experience of his must always be kept in view when we try to conceive what he meant by Justification by Faith.

As has been already said, Luther recognised that there were two kinds of faith,—one which man himself begot and through which he was able to give assent to doctrines of some sort; and another which Luther vehemently asserted was the pure gift of God. The first he thought comparatively unimportant; the latter was all in all to him. Faith is always used in the latter sense when the Reformers speak about Justification by Faith; and the sharp distinction which Luther draws between the two is a very important element in determining what he meant when he said that we are justified by faith alone.

This faith of the highest kind, the true faith, has its beginning by God working on us and in us. It is continually fed and kept strong by the word of God. The promise of God on God's side and faith on man's side are two correlative things; “for where there is no promise, there is no faith.” Luther brings out what this true faith is by contrasting it with the other kind of faith in two very instructive and trenchant passages:

“When faith is of the kind that God awakens and creates in the heart, then a man trusts in Christ. He is then so securely founded on Christ that he can hurl defiance at sin, death, hell, the devil, and all God's enemies. He fears no ill, however hard and cruel it may prove to be. Such is the nature of true faith, which is utterly different from the faith of the sophists (the Schoolmen), Jews, and Turks. Their faith, produced by their thoughts, simply lights upon a thing, accepts it, believes that it is this or that. God has no dealings with such delusion; it is the work of man, and comes from nature, from the free will of man; and men possessing it can say, repeating what others have said: I believe that there is a God. I believe that Christ was born, died, rose again for me. But what the real faith is, and how powerful a thing it is, of this they know nothing.”[399]

He says again:

“Wherefore, beware of that faith which is manufactured or imagined; for the true faith is not the work of man, and therefore the faith which is manufactured or imagined will not avail in death, but will be overcome and utterly overthrown by sin, by the devil, and by the pains of hell. The true faith is the heart's utter trust in Christ, and God alone awakens this in us. He who has it is blessed, he who has it not is cursed.”[400]

This faith has an outside fact to rest upon—the historical Christ. It is neither helped nor hindered by a doctrine of the Person of Christ, nor by a minute and elaborate knowledge of the details of our Lord's earthly ministry. The man who has the faith may know a great deal about the doctrine of the Person of Christ: that will do his faith no harm but good, provided only he does not make the mistake of thinking that doctrines about Christ, ways by which the human understanding tries to conceive the fact, are either the fact itself or something better than the fact. He may know a great deal about the history of Jesus, and it is well to know as much as possible; but the amount of knowledge scarcely affects the faith. Wayfaring men, though fools, need not err in the pathway of faith.

The faith which is the gift of God makes us see the practical meaning in the fact of the historic Christ—this, namely, that Jesus Christ is there before us the manifestation of the Fatherly love of God, revealing to us our own forgiveness, and with it the possibilities of the Kingdom of God and of our place therein. The fact of the historic Christ is there, seen by men in a natural way; but it is the power of God lying in the faith which He has given us that makes us see with full certainty the meaning of the fact of the historic Christ for us and for our salvation. Moreover, this vision of God in the historic Christ, which is the deepest of all personal things, always involves something social. It brings us within the family of the faithful, within the Christian fellowship [pg 447] with its confirming evidences of faith and love. The power of faith comes to us singly, but seldom solitarily; the trust we have in God in Christ is faintly mirrored in the faith we learn to have in the members of the household of faith, and in their manifestations of faith and the love which faith begets.

What has been called the doctrine of Justification by Faith is therefore rather the description of a religious experience within the believer; and the meaning of the experience is simply this. The believer, who because he has faith—the faith which is the gift of God, which is our life and which regenerates—is regenerate and a member of the Christian fellowship, and is able to do good works and actually does them, does not find his standing as a person justified in the sight of God, his righteousness, his assurance of pardon and salvation, in those good works which he really can do, but only in the mediatorial and perfectly righteous work of Christ which he has learned to appropriate in faith. His good works, however really good, are necessarily imperfect, and in this experience which we call Justification by Faith the believer compares his own imperfect good works with the perfect work of Christ, and recognises that his pardon and salvation depends on that alone. This comparison quiets souls anxious about their salvation, and soothes pious consciences; and the sense of forgiveness which comes in this way is always experienced as a revelation of wonderful love. This justification is called an act, and is contrasted with a work; but the contrast, though true, is apt to mislead through human analogies which will intrude. It is an act, but an act of God; and divine acts are never done and done with, they are always continuous. Luther rings the changes upon this. He warns us against thinking that the act of forgiveness is all done in a single moment. The priestly absolution was the work of a moment, and had to be done over and over again; but the divine pronouncement of pardon is continuous simply because it is God who makes it. He says:

“For just as the sun shines and enlightens none the less brightly when I close my eyes, so this throne of grace, this forgiveness of sins, is always there, even though I fall. Just as I see the sun again when I open my eyes, so I have forgiveness and the sense of it once more when I look up and return to Christ. We are not to measure forgiveness as narrowly as fools dream.”[401]

In the Protestant polemic with Roman Catholic doctrine, the conception of Justification by Faith is contrasted with that of Justification by Works; but the contrast is somewhat misleading. For the word justification is used in different meanings in the two phrases. The direct counterpart in Roman Catholic usage to the Reformation thought of Justification by Faith is the absolution pronounced by a priest; and here as always the Reformer appeals from man to God. The two conceptions belong to separate spheres of thought.

“The justification of which the mediæval Christian had experience was the descending of an outward stream of forces upon him from the supersensible world, through the Incarnation, in the channels of ecclesiastical institutions, priestly consecration, sacraments, confession, and good works; it was something which came from his connection with a supersensible organisation which surrounded him. The justification by faith which Luther experienced within his soul was the personal experience of the believer standing in the continuous line of the Christian fellowship, who receives the assurance of the grace of God in his exercise of a personal faith,—an experience which comes from appropriating the work of Christ which he is able to do by that faith which is the gift of God.”[402]

In the one case, the Protestant, justification is a personal experience which is complete in itself, and does not depend on any external machinery; in the other, the Mediæval, it is a prolonged action of usages, sacraments, external machinery of all kinds, which by their combined effect are supposed to change a sinner gradually into a saint, [pg 449] righteous in the eyes of God. With the former, it is a continuous experience; with the latter, it cannot fail to be intermittent as the external means are actually employed or for a time laid aside.

The meaning of the Reformation doctrine of Justification by Faith may be further brought out by contrasting it with the theory which was taught by that later school of Scholastic theology which was all-powerful at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The more evangelical theory of Thomas Aquinas was largely neglected, and the Nominalist Schoolmen based their expositions of the doctrine on the teaching of John Duns Scotus.

It must be remembered that mediæval theology never repudiated the theology of Augustine, and admitted in theory at least that man's salvation, and justification as part of it, always depended in the last resort on the prevenient grace of God; in their reverence for the teaching of Aristotle, they believed that they had also to make room for the action of the free will of man which they always looked on as the pure capacity of choice between two alternatives. John Duns Scotus got rid of a certain confusion which existed between the gratia operans and gratia co-operans of Augustine by speaking of the grace of God, which lay at the basis of man's justification, as a gratia habitualis, or an operation of the grace of God which gave to the will of man an habitual tendency to love towards God and man. He alleged that when conduct is considered, an act of the will is more important than any habitual tendency, for it is the act which makes use of the habit, and apart from the act, the habit is a mere inert passivity. Therefore, he held that the chief thing in meritorious conduct is not so much the habit which has been created by God's grace, as the act of will which makes use of the habit. In this way the grace of God is looked upon as simply the general basis of meritorious conduct, or a mere conditio sine qua non, and the important thing is the act of will which can make use of the otherwise passive habit. The process of justification—and [pg 450] it is to be remembered that the Schoolmen invariably looked upon justification as a process by which a sinner was gradually made into a righteous man and thoroughly and substantially changed—may therefore be described as an infusion of divine grace which creates a habit of the will towards love to God and to man; this is laid hold on by acts of the will, and there result positive acts of love towards God and man which are meritorious, and which gradually change a sinner into a righteous person. This is the theory; but the theory is changed into practice by being exhibited in the framework of the Church provided to aid men to appropriate the grace of God which is the basis for all. The obvious and easiest way to obtain that initial grace which is the starting-point is by the sacraments, which are said to infuse grace—the grace which is needed to make the start on the process of justification. Grace is infused to begin with in Baptism; and it is also infused from time to tune in the Eucharist. If a man has been baptized, he has the initial grace to start with; and he can get additions in the Eucharist. That, according to the theory, is all that is needed to start the will on its path of meritorious conduct. But while this exhibits the ideal process of justification according to mediæval theology, it must be remembered that there is mortal sin—sin which slays the new life begun in baptism—and the sacrament which renews the life slain will be practically more important than the sacrament which first creates it. Hence practically the whole process of the mediæval justification is best seen in the sacrament which renews the life slain by deadly sins. That sacrament is Penance; and the theory and practice of justification is best exhibited in the Sacrament of Penance. The good disposition of the will towards God is seen in confession; this movement towards God is complete when confession stimulated by the priest is finished; the performance of the meritorious good works is seen in the penitent performing the “satisfactions,” or tasks imposed by the priest, of prayer, of almsgiving, of maceration; while the absolution [pg 451] announces that the process is complete, and that the sinner has become a righteous man and is in “a state of grace.”

In opposition to all this, Luther asserted that it was possible to go through all that process prescribed by the mediæval Church, embodying the Scholastic theory of justification, without ever having the real sense of pardon, or ever being comforted by the sense of the love of God. The faith, however, which is the gift of God makes the believer see in the Christ Who is there before him a revelation of God's Fatherly love which gives him the sense of pardon, and at the same time excites in him the desire to do all manner of loving service. He is like the forgiven child who is met with tenderness when punishment was expected, and in glad wonder resolves never to be naughty again—so natural and simple is the Reformation thought. That thought, however, can be put much more formally. Chemnitz expresses it thus:

“The main point of controversy at present agitated between us and the Papists relates to the good works or new obedience of the regenerate. They hold that the regenerate are justified through that renewal which the Holy Spirit works in them, and by means of the good works which proceedfrom that renewal. They hold that the good works of the regenerate are the things on which they can trust, when the hard question comes to be answered, whether we be children of God and have been accepted to everlasting life. We hold, on the other hand, that in true repentance faith lays hold on and appropriates to itself Christ's satisfaction, and in so doing has something which it can oppose to the law's accusations at the bar of God, and thus bring it to pass that we should be declared righteous.... It is indeed true that believers have actual righteousness through their renewal by the Holy Spirit, but inasmuch as that righteousness is imperfect and still impure by reason of the flesh, all men cannot stand in God's judgment with it, nor on its account does God pronounce us righteous.”[403]

Hence we may say that the difference in the two ways of looking at the matter may be exhibited in the answer to the [pg 452] question, What does faith lay hold on in true repentance? The Reformation answer is—(1) not on a mechanically complete confession made to a priest, nor on a due performance of what the priest enjoins by way of satisfaction; but (2) only on what God in Christ has done for us, which is seen in the life, death, and rising again of the Saviour.

The most striking differences between the Reformation and the mediæval conception of justification are:

(1) The Reformation thought always looks at the comparative imperfection of the works of believers, while admitting that they are good works; the mediæval theologian, even when bidding men disregard the intrinsic value of their good works, always looks at the relative perfection of these works.

(2) The Reformer had a much more concrete idea of God's grace—it was something special, particular, unique—because he invariably regarded the really good works which men can do from their relative imperfection; the mediæval theologian looked at the relative perfection of good works, and so could represent them as something congruous to the grace of God which was not sharply distinguished from them.

(3) These views led Luther and the Reformers to represent faith as not merely the receptive organ for the reception and appropriation of justification through Christ, but, and in addition, as the active instrument in all Christian life and work—faith is our life; while the mediæval theologians never attained this view of faith.

(4) The Reformer believes that the act of faith in his justification through Christ is the basis of the believer's assurance of his pardon and salvation in spite of the painful and abiding sense of sin; while the mediæval theologian held that the divine sentence of acquittal which restored a sinner to a state of grace resulted from the joint action of the priest and the penitent in the Sacrament of Penance, and had to be repeated intermittently.

§ 4. Holy Scripture.

All the Reformers of the sixteenth century, whether Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin, believed that in the Scriptures God spoke to them in the same way as He had done in earlier days to His prophets and Apostles. They believed that if the common people had the Scriptures in a language which they could understand, they could hear God speaking to them directly, and could go to Him for comfort, warning, or instruction; and their description of what they meant by the Holy Scriptures is simply another way of saying that all believers can have access to the very presence of God. The Scriptures were therefore for them a personal rather than a dogmatic revelation. They record the experience of a fellowship with God enjoyed by His saints in past ages, which may still be shared in by the faithful. In Bible history as the Reformers conceived it, we hear two voices—the voice of God speaking love to man, and the voice of the renewed man answering in faith to God. This communion is no dead thing belonging to a bygone past; it may be shared here and now.

But the Reformation conception of Scripture is continually stated in such a way as to deprive it of the eminently religious aspect that it had for men of the sixteenth century. It is continually said that the Reformers placed the Bible, an infallible Book, over-against an infallible Church; and transferred the same kind of infallibility which had been supposed to belong to the Church to this book. In mediæval times, men accepted the decisions of Popes and Councils as the last decisive utterance on all matters of controversy in doctrine and morals; at the Reformation, the Reformers, it is said, placed the Bible where these Popes and Councils had been, and declared that the last and final appeal was to be made to its pages. This mode of stating the question has found its most concise expression in the saying of Chillingworth, that “the Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants.” It is quite true that the Reformers did set the authority of the Scriptures over [pg 454] against that of Popes and Councils, and that Luther declared that “the common man,” “miller's maid,” or “boy of nine” with the Bible knew more about divine truth than the Pope without the Bible; but this is not the whole truth, and is therefore misleading. For Romanists and Protestants do not mean the same thing by Scripture, nor do they mean the same thing by Infallibility, and their different use of the words is a most important part of the Reformation conception of Scripture.

This difference in the meaning of Scripture is partly external and partly internal; and the latter is the more important of the two.

The Scriptures to which the Romanist appeals include the Apocryphal Books of the Old Testament; and the Scriptures which are authoritative are not the books of the Old and New Testament in the original tongues, but a translation into Latin known as the Vulgate of Pope Sixtus v. They are therefore a book to a large extent different from the one to which Protestants appeal.

However important this external difference may be, it is nothing in comparison with the internal difference; and yet the latter is continually forgotten by Protestants as well as by Roman Catholics in their arguments.

To understand it, one must remember that every mediæval theologian declared that the whole doctrinal system of his Church was based upon the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. The Reformers did nothing unusual, nothing which was in opposition to the common practice of the mediæval Church in which they had been born, educated, and lived, when they appealed to Scripture. Luther made his appeal with the same serene unconsciousness that anyone could gainsay him, as he did when he set the believer's spiritual experience of the fact that he rested on Christ alone for salvation against the proposal to sell pardon for money. His opponents never attempted to challenge his right to make this appeal to Scripture—at least at first. They made the same appeal themselves; they believed that they were able to meet Scripture with [pg 455] Scripture. They were confident that the authority appealed to—Scripture—would decide against Luther. It soon became apparent, however, that Luther had an unexpectedly firmer grasp of Scripture than they had. This did not mean that he had a better memory for texts. It was seen that Luther somehow was able to look at and use Scripture as one transparent whole; while they looked on it as a collection of fragmentary texts. This gave him and other Reformers a skill in the use of Scripture which their opponents began to feel that they were deficient in. They felt that if they were to meet their opponents on equal terms they too must recognise a unity in Scripture. They did so by creating an external and arbitrary unity by means of the dogmatic tradition of the mediæval Church. Hence the decree of the Council of Trent, which manufactured an artificial unity for Scripture by placing the dogmatic tradition of the Church alongside Scripture as an equal source of authority. The reason why the Reformers found a natural unity in the Bible, and why the Romanists had to construct an artificial one, lay, as we shall see, in their different conceptions of what was meant by saving faith.

Mediæval theologians looked at the Bible as a sort of spiritual law-book, a storehouse of divinely communicated knowledge of doctrinal truths and rules for moral conduct—and nothing more.

The Reformers saw in it a new home for a new life within which they could have intimate fellowship with God Himself—not merely knowledge about God, but actual communion with Him.

There is one great difficulty attending the mediæval conception of the Scriptures, that it does not seem applicable to a large part of them. There is abundant material provided for the construction of doctrines and moral rules; but that is only a portion of what is contained in the Scriptures. The Bible contains long lists of genealogies, chapters which contain little else than a description of temple furniture, stories of simple human [pg 456] life, and details of national history. The mediæval theologian had either to discard altogether a large part of the Bible or to transform it somehow into doctrinal and moral teaching. The latter alternative was chosen, and the instrument of transformation was the thought of the various senses in Scripture which plays such a prominent part in every mediæval statement of the nature and uses of the revelation of God contained in the Bible.[404] No one can deny that a book, where instruction is frequently given in parables, or by means of aphorisms and proverbial sayings, must contain many passages which have different senses. It may be admitted, to use Origen's illustrations, that the grain of mustard seed is, literally, an actual seed; morally, faith in the individual believer; and, allegorically, the kingdom of God;[405] or, though this is more doubtful, that the little foxes are, literally, cubs; morally, sins in the individual heart; and, allegorically, heresies which distract and spoil the Church.[406] But to say that every detail of personal or national life in the Old Testament or New is merely dead history, of no spiritual value until it has been transformed into a doctrinal truth or a moral rule by the application of the theory of the fourfold sense in Scripture, is to destroy the historical character of revelation altogether, and, besides, to introduce complete uncertainty about what any passage was really meant to declare. The use of a fourfold sense—literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogic—enables the reader to draw any meaning he pleases from any portion of Scripture.

While mediæval theologians, by their bewildering fourfold sense, made it almost hopeless to know precisely what the Bible actually taught, another idea of theirs made it essential to salvation that men should attain to an absolutely [pg 457] correct statement of what the Scriptures did reveal about God and man and the relation between them. They held that faith—the faith which saves—was not trust in a person, but assent to correct propositions about God, the universe, and the soul of man; and the saving character of the assent depended on the correctness of the propositions assented to. It is the submission of the intellect to certain propositional statements which are either seen to be correct or are accepted as being so because guaranteed in some supernatural way. Infallibility is looked upon as that which can guarantee the perfect correctness of propositions about God and man in their relations to each other.

If it be necessary to employ the fourfold sense to confuse the plain meaning of the greater portion of Scripture, and if salvation depends on arriving at a perfectly correct intellectual apprehension of abstract truths contained somewhere in the Bible, then Lacordaire's sarcastic reference to the Protestant conception of Scripture is not out of place. He says: “What kind of a religion is that which saves men by aid of a book? God has given the book, but He has not guaranteed your private interpretation of it. What guarantee have you that your thoughts do not shove aside God's ideas? The heathen carves himself a god out of wood or marble; the Protestant carves his out of the Bible. If there be a true religion on earth, it must be of the most serene and unmistakable authority.”[407] We need not wonder at John Nathin saying to his perplexed pupil in the Erfurt Convent: “Brother Martin, let the Bible alone; read the old teachers; reading the Bible simply breeds unrest.”[408] We can sympathise with some of the earlier printers of the German Vulgate when they inserted in their prefaces that readers must be careful to understand the contents of the volume in the way declared by the Church.[409] Men who went to the Bible might go wrong, and it was spiritual death to make any mistake; but all who simply assented to the interpretation of the Bible given in the [pg 458] Church's theology were kept right and had the true or saving faith. Such was the mediæval idea.

But all this made it impossible to find in the Bible a means of communion with God. Between the God Who had revealed Himself there and man, the mediæval theologian, perhaps unconsciously at first, had placed what he called the “Church,” but what really was the opinions of accredited theologians confirmed by decisions of Councils or Popes. The “Church” had barred the way of access to the mind and heart of God in the Scriptures by interposing its authoritative method of interpretation between the believer and the Bible, as it had interposed the priesthood between the sinner and the redeeming Saviour.

Just as the Reformers had opposed their personal experience of pardon won by throwing themselves on the mercy of God revealed in Christ to the intervention of the Church between them and God, so they controverted this idea of the Scriptures by the personal experience of what the Bible had been to them. They had felt and known that the personal God, Who had made them and redeemed them, was speaking to them in this Book, and was there making manifest familiarly His power and His willingness to save. The speech was sometimes obscure, but they read on and lighted on other passages which were plainer, and they made the easier explain the more difficult. The “common” man perhaps could not understand it all, nor fit all the sayings of Scripture into a connected whole of intellectual truth; but all, plain men and theologians alike, could hear their Father's voice, learn their Redeemer's purpose, and have faith in their Lord's promises. It was a good thing to put text to text and build a system of Protestant divinity to which their intellects could assent; but it was not essential. Saving faith was not intellectual assent at all. It was simple trust—the trust of a child—in their Father's promises, which were Yea and Amen in Christ Jesus. The one essential thing was to hear and obey the personal God speaking to them as He had spoken all down through the ages to His people, promising His salvation now in [pg 459] direct words, now in pictures of His dealings with a favoured man or a chosen people. No detail of life was dead history; for it helped to fill the picture of communion between God and His people. The picture was itself a promise that what had been in the past would be renewed in their own experience of fellowship with a gracious God, if only they had the same faith which these saints of the Old and New Testaments enjoyed.

With these thoughts burning in their hearts, the Bible could not be to the Reformers what it had been to the mediæval theologians. God was speaking to them in it as a man speaks to his fellows. The simple historical sense was the important one in the great majority of passages. The Scripture was more than a storehouse of doctrines and moral rules. It was over and above the record and picture of the blessed experience which God's saints have had in fellowship with their covenant God since the first revelation of the Promise. So they made haste to translate the Bible into all languages in order to place it in the hands of every man, and said that the “common man” with the Bible in his hands (with God speaking to him) could know more about the way of salvation than Pope or Councils without the Scriptures.

The change of view which separated the Reformers from mediæval theologians almost amounted to a rediscovery of Scripture; and it was effected by their conception of faith. Saving faith was for them personal trust in a personal Saviour Who had manifested in His life and work the Fatherly mercy of God. This was not a mere theological definition; it was a description of an experience which they knew that they had lived. It made them see that the word of God was a personal and not a dogmatic revelation; that the real meaning in it was that God Himself was there behind every word of it,—not an abstract truth, but a personal Father. On the one side, on the divine, there was God pouring out His whole heart and revealing the inmost treasures of His righteousness and love in Christ the Incarnate Word; on the other side, on the human, there was the [pg 460] believing soul looking straight through all works and all symbols and all words to Christ Himself, united to Him by faith in the closest personal union. Such a blessed experience—the feeling of direct fellowship between the believer and God Incarnate, of a communion such as exists between two loving human souls, brought about by the twofold stream of God's personal word coming down, and man's personal faith going up to God—could not fail to give an entirely new conception of Scripture. The mediæval Church looked on the Jesus Christ revealed in Scripture as a Teacher sent from God; and revelation was for them above all things an imparting of speculative truth. To the Reformers the chief function of Scripture was to bring Jesus Christ near us; and as Jesus always fills the full sphere of God to them, the chief end of Scripture is to bring God near me. It is the direct message of God's love to me,—not doctrine, but promise (for apart from promise, as Luther said unweariedly, faith does not exist); not display of God's thoughts, but of God Himself as my God. This manifestation of God, which is recorded for us in the Scriptures, took place in an historical process coming to its fullest and highest in the incarnation and historical work of Christ, and the record of the manifestation has been framed so as to include everything necessary to enable us to understand the declaration of God's will in its historical context and in its historical manifestation. “Let no pious Christian,” says Luther, “stumble at the simple word and story that meet him so often in Scripture.” These are never the dead histories of the mediæval theologian,—events which have simply taken place and concern men no more. They tell how God dealt with His faithful people in ages past, and they are promises of how He will act towards us now. “Abraham's history is precious,” he says, “because it is filled so full of God's Word, with which all that befell him is so adorned and so fair, and because God goes everywhere before him with His Word, promising, commanding, comforting, warning, that we may verily see that Abraham was God's special trusty friend. Let us mirror ourselves, then, in this holy father Abraham, [pg 461] who walks not in gold and velvet, but girded, crowned, and clothed with divine light, that is, with God's Word.” The simplest Bible stories, even geographical and architectural details, may and do give us the sidelights necessary to complete the manifestation of God to His people.

The question now arises, Where and in what are we to recognise the infallibility and authoritative character of Scripture? It is manifest that the ideas attaching to these words must change with the changed conception of the essential character of that Scripture to which they belong. Nor can the question be discussed apart from the Reformation idea of saving faith; for the two thoughts of Scripture and saving faith always correspond. In mediæval theology they are always primarily intellectual and prepositional; in Reformation thinking, they are always in the first instance experimental and personal. In describing the authoritative character of Scripture, the Reformers always insisted that its recognition was awakened in believers by that operation which they called the witness of the Holy Spirit (Testimonium Spiritus Sancti). Just as God Himself makes us know and feel the sense of pardon in an inward experience by a faith which is His own work, so they believed that by an operation of the same Spirit, believers were enabled to recognise that God Himself is speaking to us authoritatively in and through the words of Scripture.

Their view of what is meant by the authority and infallibility of Scripture cannot be seen apart from what they taught about the relation between Scripture and the word of God. They have all the same general conception, however they may differ in details in their statement. If Luther, as his wont was, speaks more trenchantly, and Calvin writes with a clearer vision of the consequences which must follow from his assertions, both have the same great thought before them.

The Reformers drew a distinction between the word of God and the Scripture which contains or presents that word. This distinction was real and not merely formal; it was more than the difference between the word of God [pg 462] and the word of God written; and important consequences were founded upon it. If the use of metaphor be allowed, the word of God is to the Scripture as the soul is to the body. Luther believed that while the word of God was presented in every part of Scripture, some portions make it much more evident. He instances the Gospel and First Epistle of St. John, the Epistles of St. Paul, especially those to the Romans, to the Galatians, and to the Ephesians, and the First Epistle of St. Peter.[410] He declares that if Christians possessed no other books besides those, the way of salvation would be perfectly clear. He adds elsewhere that the word of God shines forth with special clearness in the Psalms, which he called the Bible within the Bible.

Luther says that the word of God may be described in the phrase of St. Paul, “the Gospel of God, which He promised afore by His Prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead.”[411] Calvin calls it “the spiritual teaching, the gate, as it were, by which we enter into His heavenly kingdom,” “a mirror in which faith beholds God,” and “that wherein He utters unto us His mercy in Christ, and assureth us of His love toward us.”[412] The Scots Confession calls it the revelation of the Promise “quhilk [pg 463] as it was repeated and made mair clear from time to time; so was it imbraced with joy, and maist constantlie received of al the faithful.”[413] And Zwingli declares it to be “that our Lord Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, has revealed to us the will of the Heavenly Father, and, with His innocence, has redeemed us from death.”[414] It is the sum of God's commands, threatenings, and promises, addressed to our faith, and above all the gospel offer of Christ to us. This word of God need not take the form of direct exhortation; it may be recognised in the simple histories of men or of nations recorded in the Scripture.

This true and real distinction between the word of God and Scripture may easily be perverted to something which all the Reformers would have repudiated. It must not be explained by the common mystical illustration of kernel and husk, which husk (the record) may be thrown away when the kernel (the word) has been once reached and laid hold of. Nor can it be used to mean that one part of the Bible is the word of God and that another is not. The Reformers uniformly teach that the substance of all Scripture is the word of God, and that what is no part of the record of the word of God is not Scripture. Finally, the distinction between the two need not prevent us saying that the Scripture is the word of God. Luther is very peremptory about this. He says that he is ready to discuss differences with any opponent who admits that the evangelical writings are the word of God; but that if this be denied he will refuse to argue; for where is the good of reasoning with anyone who denies first principles? (prima principia)[415] Only it must be clearly understood that the copula is does not express logical identity, but some such relation as can be more exactly rendered by contains, presents, conveys, records,—all of which phrases are used in the writings of Reformers or in the creeds of the Reformation Churches. The main thing to [pg 464] remember is that the distinction is not to be made use of to deny to the substance of Scripture those attributes of authority and infallibility which belong to the word of God.

On the other hand, there is a vital religious interest in the distinction. In the first place it indicates what is meant by the infallibility of Scripture, and in the second it enables us to distinguish between the divine and the human elements in the Bible.

The authoritative character and infallibility belong really and primarily to the word of God, and only secondarily to the Scriptures,—to Scripture only because it is the record which contains, presents, or conveys the word of God. It is this word of God, this personal manifestation to us for our salvation of God in His promises, which is authoritative and infallible; and Scripture shares these attributes only in so far as it is a vehicle of spiritual truth. It is the unanimous declaration of the Reformers that Scripture is Scripture because it gives us that knowledge of God and of His will which is necessary for salvation; because it presents to the eye of faith God Himself personally manifesting Himself in Christ. It is this presentation of God Himself and of His will for our salvation which is infallible and authoritative. But this manifestation of God Himself is something spiritual, and is to be apprehended by a spiritual faculty which is faith, and the Reformers and the Confessions of the Reformation do not recognise any infallibility or divine authority which is otherwise apprehended than by faith. If this be so, the infallibility is of quite another kind from that described by mediæval theologians or modern Roman Catholics, and it is also very different from what many modern Protestants attribute to the Scriptures when they do not distinguish them from the word of God. With the mediæval theologian infallibility was something which guaranteed the perfect correctness of abstract propositions; with some modern Protestants it consists in the conception that the record contains not even the smallest error in word or description of fact—in [pg 465] its inerrancy. But neither inerrancy nor the correctness of abstract propositions is apprehended by faith in the Reformers' sense of that word; they are matters of fact, to be accepted or rejected by the ordinary faculties of man. The infallibility and authority which need faith to perceive them are, and must be, something very different; they produce the conviction that in the manifestation of God in His word there lies infallible power to save. This is given, all the Reformers say, by the Witness of the Spirit; “the true kirk alwaies heares and obeyis the voice of her awin spouse and pastor.”[416] Calvin discusses the authority and credibility of Scripture in his Institutio, and says: “Let it be considered, then, as an undeniable truth that they who have been inwardly taught of the Spirit feel an entire acquiescence in the Scripture, and that it is self-authenticated, carrying with it its own evidence, and ought not to be made the subject of demonstration and arguments from reason; but that it obtains the credit which it deserves with us by the testimony of the Spirit.”[417] This is a religious conception of infallibility very different from the mediæval or the modern Romanist.

The distinction between the word of God and Scripture also serves to distinguish between the divine and the human elements in Scripture, and to give each its proper place.

Infallibility and divine authority belong to the sphere of faith and of the witness of the Spirit, and, therefore, to that personal manifestation of God and of His will toward us which is conveyed or presented to us in every part of Scripture. But this manifestation is given in a course of events which are part of human history, in lives of men and peoples, in a record which in outward form is like other human writings. If every part of Scripture is divine, every part of it is also human. The supernatural reality is incased in human realities. To apprehend the former, faith illumined by the Holy Spirit is necessary; [pg 466] but it is sufficient to use the ordinary methods of research to learn the credibility of the history in Scripture. When the Reformers distinguished between the word of God and Scripture which conveys or presents it, and when they declared that the authority and infallibility of that word belonged to the region of faith, they made that authority and infallibility altogether independent of questions that might be raised about the human agencies through which the book came into its present shape. It is not a matter belonging to the region of faith when the books which record the word of God were written, or by whom, or in what style, or how often they were edited or re-edited. It is not a matter for faith whether incidents happened in one country or in another; whether the account of Job be literal history, or a poem based on old traditions in which the author has used the faculty of imagination to illustrate the problems of God's providence and man's probation; whether genealogical tables give the names of men or of countries and peoples. All these and the like matters belong to the human side of the record. No special illumination of faith is needed to apprehend and understand them. They are matters for the ordinary faculties of man, and subject to ordinary human investigation. Luther availed himself freely of the liberty thus given. He never felt himself bound to accept the traditional ideas about the extent of the canon, the authorship of the books of the Bible, or even about the credibility of some of the things recorded. He said, speaking about Genesis, “What though Moses never wrote it?”[418] It was enough for him that the book was there and that he could read it. He thought that the Books of Kings were more worthy of credit than the Books of Chronicles;[419] and he believed that the prophets had not always given the kings of Israel the best political advice.[420]

But while the Bible is human literature, and as such may be and must be subjected to the same tests which are [pg 467] applied to ordinary literature, it is the record of the revelation of God, and has been carefully guarded and protected by God. This thought always enters into the conception which the Reformers had of Scripture. They speak of the singular care and providence of God which has preserved the Scriptures in such a way that His people always have a full and unmistakable declaration in them of His mind and will for their salvation. This idea for ever forbids a careless or irreverent biblical criticism, sheltering itself under the liberty of dealing with the records of revelation. No one can say beforehand how much or how little of the historic record is essential to preserve the faith of the Church; but every devout Christian desires to have it in large abundance. No one can plead the liberty which the principles of the Reformers secure for dealing with the record of Scripture as a justification in taking a delight in reducing to a minimum the historical basis of the Christian faith. Careless or irreverent handling of the text of Holy Scripture is what all the Reformers abhorred.[421]

§ 5. The Person of Christ.

“No one can deny,” said Luther, “that we hold, believe, sing, and confess all things in correspondence with the Apostles' Creed, the faith of the old Church, that we make nothing new therein nor add anything thereto, and in this way we belong to the old Church and are one with it.” Both the Augsburg Confession and the Schmalkald Articles begin with restating the doctrines of the old Catholic Church as these are given in the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, the two latter being always regarded by Luther as explanatory of the Apostles' Creed. His criticism of theological doctrines was always confined to the theories introduced by the Schoolmen, and to the perversion of the old doctrines of the Church introduced in mediæval times mainly to bring these doctrines into conformity with the principles of the philosophy of Aristotle. He brought two charges against the Scholastic Theology. [pg 469] It was, he insisted, committed to the idea of work-righteousness; whatever occasional protest might be made against the conception, he maintained that this thought of work-righteousness was so interwoven with its warp and woof that the whole must be swept away ere the old and true Christian Theology could be rediscovered. He also declared it was sophistry; and by that he meant that it played with the outsides of doctrine, asked and solved questions which had nothing to do with real Christian theology, that the imposing intellectual edifice was hollow within, that its deity was not the God and Father revealed in Jesus Christ, but the unknown God, the God who could never be revealed by metaphysics larded with detached texts of Scripture, the abstract entity of pagan philosophy. With an unerring instinct he fastened on the Scholastic devotion to Aristotle as the reason why what professed to be Christian theology had been changed into something else. Scholastic Philosophy or Theology (for the two are practically the same) defined itself as the attempt to reconcile faith and reason, and the definition has been generally accepted. Verbally it is correct; really it is very misleading from the meanings attached to the words faith and reason. With the Schoolmen, faith in this contrast between faith and reason meant the sum of patristic teaching about the verities of the Christian religion extracted by the Fathers from the Holy Scriptures; and reason meant the sum of philosophical principles extracted from the writings of ancient philosophers, and especially from Aristotle. The great Schoolmen conceived it to be their task to construct a system of Christian Philosophy by combining patristic doctrinal conclusions with the conclusions of human reasoning which they believed to be given in their highest form in the writings of the ancient Grecian sages. They actually used the conceptions of the Fathers as material to give body to the forms of thought found ready made for them in the speculations of Aristotle and Plato. The Christian material was moulded to fit the pagan forms, and in consequence lost its most [pg 470] essentially Christian characteristics. One can see how the most evangelical of the Schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, tries in vain to break through the meshes of the Aristotelian net in his discussions on merit and satisfaction in his Summa Theologiæ.[422] He had to start from the thought of God as (1) the Absolute, and (2) as the Primum Movens, the Causa efficiens prima, the Intelligens a quo omnes res naturales ordinantur in finem—conceptions which can never imprison without practically destroying the vision of the Father who has revealed Himself in the Saviour Jesus Christ. His other starting-point, that man is to be described as the possessor of free will in the Aristotelian sense of the term, will never contain the Christian doctrine of man's complete dependence on God in his salvation. It inevitably led to work-righteousness. This was the “sophistry” Luther protested against and which he swept away.

He then claimed that he stood where the old Catholic Church had taken stand, that his theology like its was rooted in the faith of God as Trinity and in the belief in the Person of Christ, the Revealer of God. The old theology had nothing to do with Mariolatry or saint worship; it revered the triune God, and Jesus Christ His Son and man's Saviour. Luther could join hands with Athanasius across twelve centuries. He had done a work not unlike that of the great Alexandrian. His rejection of the Scholastic Aristotelianism may be compared with Athanasius' refusal to allow the Logos theology any longer to confuse the Christian doctrines of God and the Person of Christ. Both believed that in all thinking about God they ought to keep their eyes fixed upon His redemptive work manifested in the historical Christ. Athanasius, like Luther, brought theology back to religion from “sophistry,” and had for his starting-point an inward religious experience that his Redeemer was the God who made heaven and earth. The great leaders in the ancient Church, Luther [pg 471] believed, held as he did that to have conceptions about God, to construct a real Christian theology, it was necessary first of all to know God Himself, and that He was only to be known through the Lord Jesus Christ. He had gone through the same experience as they had done; he could fully sympathise with them, and could appropriate the expressions in which they had described and crystallised what they had felt and known, and that without paying much attention to the niceties of technical language. These doctrines had not been dead formulas to them, but the expression of a living faith. He could therefore take the old dogmas and make them live again in an age in which it seemed as if they had lost all their vitality.

“From the time of Athanasius,” says Harnack, “there had been no theologian who had given so much living power for faith to the doctrine of the Godhead of Christ as Luther did; since the time of Cyril, no teacher had arisen in the Church for whom the mystery of the union of the two natures in Christ was so full of comfort as for Luther—‘I have a better provider than all angels are: he lies in the cradle and hangs on the breast of a virgin, but sits, nevertheless, at the right hand of the almighty father’; no mystic philosopher of antiquity spoke with greater conviction and delight of the sacred nourishment in the Eucharist. The German reformer restored life to the formulas of Greek Christianity: he gave them back to faith.”[423]

But if Luther accepted the old formulas describing the Nature of God and the Person of Christ, he did so in a thoroughly characteristic way. He had no liking for theological technical terms, though he confessed that it was necessary to use them. He disliked the old term homoousios to describe the relation between the Persons in the Trinity, and preferred the word “oneness”;[424] he even disliked the term Trinity, or at least its German equivalents, Dreifaltigkeit [pg 472] or Dreiheit—they were not good German words, he said;[425] he called the technical terms used in the old creeds vocabula mathematica;[426] he was careful to avoid using them in his Short and even in his Long Catechism. But Jesus Christ was for him the mirror of the Fatherly heart of God, and therefore was God; God Himself was the only Comforter to bring rest to the human soul, and the Holy Spirit was God; and the old creeds confessed One God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the confession contented him whatever words were used. Besides, he rejoiced to place himself side by side with the Christians of ancient days, who trusted God in Christ and were free from the “sophistries” of the Schoolmen.

Although Luther accepted, honestly and joyfully, the old theology about God and the Person of Christ, he put a new and richer meaning into it. Luther lets us see over and over again that he believed that the only thing worth considering in theology was the divine work of Christ and the experience that we have of it through faith. He did not believe that we have any real knowledge of God outside these limits. Beyond them there is the unknown God of philosophical paganism, the God whom Jews, Turks, pagans, and nominal Christians ignorantly worship. In order to know God it is necessary to know Him through the Jesus Christ of history. Hence with Luther, Christ fills the whole sphere of God: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,” and conversely: “He that hath not seen Me hath not seen the Father.” The historical Jesus Christ is for Luther the revealer and the only revealer of the Father. The revelation is given in the wonderful experience of faith in which Jesus compels us to see God in Him—the whole of God, Who has kept nothing back which He could have given us. It is very doubtful whether the [pg 473] framers of the old creeds ever grasped this thought. The great expounder of the old theology, Augustine, certainly did not. The failure to enter into it showed itself not merely in the doctrine of God, but also in the theories of grace. With Luther all theology is really Christology; he knew no other God than the God Who had manifested Himself in the historical Christ, and made us see in the miracle of faith that He is our salvation. This at once simplifies all Christian theology and cuts it clearly away from that Scholastic which Luther called “sophistry.” Why need Christians puzzle themselves over the Eternal Something which is not the world when they have the Father? On the old theology the work of Christ was practically limited to procuring the forgiveness of sins. There it ended and other gracious operations of God began—operations of grace. So there grew the complex system of expiations, and satisfactions, of magical sacraments and saints' intercessions. These were all at once swept away when the whole God was seen revealed in Christ in the vision of faith and nowhere else.

Like Athanasius, Luther found his salvation in the Deity of Christ.

“We must have a Saviour Who is more than a saint or an angel; for if He were no more, better and greater than these, there were no helping us. But if he be God, then the treasure is so ponderous that it outweighs and lifts away sin and death; and not only so, but also gives eternal life. This is our Christian faith, and therefore we rightly confess: ‘I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord, Who was born of Mary, suffered and died.’ By this faith hold fast, and though heathen and heretic are ever so wise thou shalt be blessed.”[427]

He repeats this over and over again. If we cannot say God died for us, if it was only a man who suffered on the cross, then we are lost, was Luther's firmest conviction; and the thought of the Divinity of Christ meant more to Luther than it did to previous theologians. The old theology [pg 474] had described the two Natures in the One Person of the God-man in such a way as to suggest that the only function of the Divine was to give to the human work of Christ the importance necessary to effect salvation. Luther always refused to adopt this limited way of regarding the Divinity of the Saviour. He did not refuse to adopt and use the phraseology of his predecessors. Like them, he spoke of the two Natures in the One Person of Christ. But it is plain from his expositions of the Creed, and from his criticisms of the current theological terminology, that he did not like the expression. He thought that it suggested an idea that was wrong, and that had to be guarded against. He says that we must beware of thinking as if the deity and humanity in Christ are so externally united that we may look at the one apart from the other.

“This is the first principle and most excellent article how Christ is the Father: that we are not to doubt that whatsoever the man says and does is reckoned and must be reckoned as said and done in heaven for all angels; in the world for all rulers; in hell for all devils; in the heart for every evil conscience and all secret thoughts. For if we are certain of this: that what Jesus thinks, speaks, and wills the Father also wills, then I defy all that may fight against me. For here in Christ have I the Father's heart and will.”[428]

He brings the thought of the Person of Christ into the closest relation to our personal experience. It is not simply a doctrine—an intellectual something outside us. It is part of that blessed experience which is called Justification by Faith. It is inseparably connected with the recognition that we are not saved by means of the good deeds which we can do, but solely by the work of Christ. It is what makes us cease all work-righteousness and trust in God alone as He has revealed Himself in Christ. When we know and feel that it is God who is working for us, then we instinctively cease trying to think that we can work [pg 475] out our own salvation.[429] Hence the Person of Christ can never be a mere doctrine for the true Christian to be inquired about by the intellect. It is something which we carry about with us as part of our lives.

“To know Christ in the true way means to know that He died for us, that He piled our sins upon Himself, so that we hold all our own affairs as nothing and let them all go, and cling only to the faith that Christ has given Himself for us, and that His sufferings and piety and virtues are all mine. When I know this I must hold Him dear in return, for I must be loving to such a man.”

He insists on the human interest that the Man Jesus Christ has for us, and declares that we must take as much interest in His whole life on earth as in that of our closest friend.

Perhaps it ought to be added, although what has been said implies it, that Luther always approached the Person of Christ from his mediatorial work, and not from any previously thought out ideas of what Godhead must be, and what manhood must be, and how they can be united. He begins with the mediatorial and saving work of Christ as that is revealed in the blessed experience which faith, the gift of God, creates. He rises from, the office to the Person, and does not descend from the Person to the office. “Christ is not called Christ because He has the two Natures. What does that matter to me? He bears this glorious and comforting name because of His Office and Work which He has undertaken.”[430] It is in this way that He becomes the Saviour and the Redeemer.

It can scarcely be said that all the Reformers worked out the conception of the Person of Christ in the same way as Luther, although almost all these thoughts can be found in Calvin, but the overshadowing conception is always present to their mind—Christ fills the full sphere of God. That is the characteristic of Reformation thought and of Reformation piety, and appears everywhere in the writings of the Reformers and in the worship and rites of the [pg 476] Reformed Church. To go into the matter exhaustively would necessitate more space than can be given; but the following instances may be taken as indicating the universal thought.

1. The Reformers swept away every contemplation of intercessors who were supposed to share with our Lord the procuring of pardon and salvation, and they declared against all attempts to distinguish between various kinds of worship which could only lead pious souls astray from the one worship due to God in Christ. Such subtle distinctions, says Calvin, as latria, doulia, and hyperdoulia are neither known nor present to the minds of those who prostrate themselves before images until the world has become full of idolatry as crude and plain as that of the ancient Egyptians, which all the prophets continuously denounced: they can only mislead, and ought to be discarded. They actually suggest to worshippers to pass by Jesus Christ, the only Mediator, and betake themselves to some patron who has struck their fancy. They bring it about that the Divine Offices are distributed among the saints as if they had been appointed colleagues to our Lord Jesus Christ; and they are made to do His work, while He Himself is kept in the background like some ordinary person in a crowd. They are responsible for the fact that hymns are sung in public worship in which the saints are lauded with every blessing just as if they were colleagues of God.[431]

In conformity with these thoughts, the Confessions of the Reformation all agree in reprobating prayers to the saints. The Augsburg Confession says:

“The Scripture teacheth not to invoke saints, nor to ask the help of saints, because it propoundeth to us one Christ, the Mediator, Propitiatory, High Priest, and Intercessor. This Christ is to be invocated, and He hath promised that He will hear our prayers, and liketh this worship, to wit, that He be invocated in all afflictions. ‘If any man sin, we have an advocate with God, Jesus Christ the righteous’(1 John ii. 1).”[432]

The Second Helvetic Confession, in its fifth chapter, entitled, Regarding the adoration, worship, and invocation of God through the One Mediator, Jesus Christ, lays down the rule that prayer is to be through Christ alone, and the saints and relics are not to be worshipped. And no prayer-book or liturgy in any branch of the Reformed Church contains prayers addressed to any of the saints or to the Blessed Virgin.

2. The Reformers insist on the necessity of Christ and of Christ alone for all believers. Their Confessions abound in expressions which are meant to magnify the Person and Work of Christ, and to show that He fills the whole field of believing thought and worship. The brief Netherlands Confession of 1566 has no less than three separate sections on Christ the only Mediator and Reconciler, on Christ the only Teacher, and on Christ the only High Priest and Sacrifice.[433] The Heidelberg or Palatine Catechism calls Christ my faithful Saviour, and says that we can call ourselves Christians “because by faith we are members of Jesus Christ and partakers of His anointing, so that we both confess His Holy Name and present ourselves unto Him a lively offering of thanksgiving, and in this life may with free conscience fight against sin and Satan, and afterwards possess with Christ an everlasting kingdom over all creatures.” The Scots Confession abounds in phrases intended to honour our Lord Jesus Christ. It calls Him Messiah, Eternal Wisdom, Emmanuel, our Head, Our Brother, our Pastor and great Bishop of our souls, the Author of Life, the Lamb of God, the Advocate and Mediator, and the Only High Priest. All the Confessions of the Churches of the Reformation contain the same or similar expressions. The liturgies of the Churches also abound in similar terms of adoration.

3. The Reformers declare that Christ is the only Revealer of God. “We would never recognise the Father's grace and mercy,” says Luther in his Large Catechism, “were it not for our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the mirror [pg 478] of the Father's heart.” “We are not affrayed to cal God our Father,” says the Scots Confession, “not sa meikle because He has created us, quhilk we have in common with the reprobate, as for that He has given us His onely Son.” The instructions issued by the Synod which met at Bern in 1532 are very emphatic upon this thought, as may be seen from the headings of the various articles: (Art. 2) That the whole doctrine is the unique Christ (Das die gantze leer der eynig Christus sye); (Art. 3) That God is revealed to the people in Christ alone; (Art. 5) That the gracious God is perceived through Christ alone without any mediation; (Art. 6) A Christian sermon is entirely about and from Christ. It is said under the third article: “His Son in Whom we see the work of God and His Fatherly heart toward us ... which is not the case where the preacher talks much about God in the heathen manner, and does not exhibit the same God in the face of Christ.”[434] The Confessions also unite in declaring that the gift of the Holy Spirit comes from Christ.

4. The conception that Christ filled the whole sphere of God, which was for the Reformers a fundamental and experimental fact, enabled them to construct a spiritual doctrine of the sacraments which they opposed to that held in the mediæval Church. Of course, it was various theories about the sacraments which caused the chief differences among the Reformers themselves; but apart from all varying ideas—consubstantiation, ubiquity, signs exhibiting and signs representing—the Reformers united on the thoughts that the efficacy in the sacraments depended entirely on the promises of Christ contained in His word, and that the virtue in the sacraments consisted in the presence of Christ to the believing communicant. What was received in the sacraments was not a vague, mysterious, not to say magical, grace, but Christ Jesus Himself. He gave Himself in the sacraments in whatever way His presence might be explained.

They all taught that the efficacy of the sacraments depends upon the promise of Christ contained in their [pg 479] institution, and they insisted that word and sacrament must always be taken together. Thus Luther points out in the Babylonish Captivity of the Church that one objection to the Roman practice is that the recipients “never hear the words of the promise which are secretly mumbled by the priest,” and exhorts his readers never to lose sight of the all-important connection between the word of promise and the sacraments; and in his Large Catechism he declares that the sacraments include the Word. “I exhort you,” he says, “never to sunder the Word and the water, or to separate them. For where the Word is withheld we have only such water as the maid uses to cook with.” Non-Lutheran Confessions are equally decided on the necessity of connecting the promise and the words of Christ with the sacraments. The Thirty-nine Articles declare that the sacraments are effectual because of “Christ's institution and promise.” The Heidelberg or Palatine Catechism (1563) says that the sacraments “are holy and visible signs ordained of God, to the end that He might thereby the more fully declare and seal unto us the promise of the Holy Gospel.”

Similarly the Reformers unanimously declared that the virtue in the sacraments consisted in no mysterious grace, but in the fact that in them believing partakers met and received Christ Himself. In the articles of the Bern Synod (1532) we are told that the sacraments are mysteries of God, “through which from without Christ is proffered to believers.” The First Helvetic Confession (1536) says, concerning the Holy Supper, “we hold that in the same the Lord truly offers His Body and His Blood, that is, Himself, to His own.” The Second Helvetic Confession (1562) declares that “the Body of Christ is in heaven at the right hand of the Father,” and enjoins communicants “to lift up their hearts and not to direct them downwards to the bread. For as the sun, though absent from us in the heaven, is none the less efficaciously present ... so much more the Sun of righteousness absent from us in the heavens in His Body, is present to us not indeed corporeally, but spiritually by a life-giving activity.” The French Confession of 1557 says that [pg 480] the sacraments are pledges and seals, and adds, “Yet we hold that their substance and truth is in Jesus Christ.” So the Scots Confession of 1560 declares that “we assuredlie beleeve that be Baptisme we ar ingrafted in Christ Jesus to be made partakers of His justice, be quhilk our sinnes ar covered and remitted. And alswa, that in the Supper richtlie used, Christ Jesus is so joined with us, that Hee becummis very nurishment and fude of our saules.” In the Manner of the Administration of the Lord's Supper the Scottish Reformation Church directed the minister in his exhortation to say to the people: “The end of our coming to the Lord's Table ... is to seek our life and perfection in Jesus Christ, acknowledging ourselves at the same time to be children of wrath and condemnation. Let us consider then that this sacrament is a singular medicine for all poor sick creatures, a comfortable help to weak souls, and that our Lord requireth no other worthiness on our part, but that we unfeignedly acknowledge our naughtiness and imperfection.”

Everywhere in prayer, worship, and teaching the Reformers see Christ filling the whole sphere of God. Jesus was God appearing in history and addressing man.

§ 6. The Church.

In the Epistles of St. Paul, the Church of Christ stands forth as a fellowship which is both divine and human. On the side of the divine it is a fellowship with Jesus, its crucified, risen, and ascended Lord; on the human, it is a fellowship among men who stand in the same relation to Jesus. This fellowship with Jesus and with the brethren is the secret of the Church—what expresses it, what makes it different from all other fellowships. Every other characteristic which belongs to it must be coloured by this thought of a double fellowship. It is the double relation which makes it difficult to construct a conception of the Church. It is easy to feel it as an experience, but it has always been found hard to express it in propositions.

It does not require much elaborate thinking to construct a theory of the Church which will be true to all that is said about the fellowship on its divine side; nor is it very difficult to think of a great visible and historical organisation which in some external aspects represents the Christian fellowship, provided the hidden union with Christ, so prominent in St. Paul's descriptions, be either entirely neglected or explained in external and material ways. The difficulty arises when both the divine and the human sides of the fellowship are persistently and earnestly kept in view.

It is always hard to explain the unseen by the seen, the eternal by the temporal, and the divine by the human; and the task is almost greater than usual when the union of these two elements in the Church of Christ is the theme of discussion. It need not surprise us, therefore, that all down through the Middle Ages there appear, not one, but two conceptions of the Christian Church which never harmonised. On the one side, the Church was thought of as a fellowship of God with man, depending on the inscrutable purpose of God, and independent of all visible outward organisation; on the other, it was a great society which existed in the world of history, and was held together by visible political ties like other societies. Augustine had both conceptions, and the dialectical skill of the great theologian of the West was unable to fuse them into one harmonious whole.

These two separate, almost mutually exclusive, ideas of what the Church of Christ was, lived side by side during the Middle Ages in the same unconnected fashion. The former, the spiritual Church with its real but unseen fellowship with Christ, was the pre-eminently religious thought. It was the ground on which the most conspicuous mediæval piety rested. It was the garden in which bloomed the flowers of mediæval mystical devotion. The latter was built up by the juristic dialectic of Roman canonists into the conception that the Church was a visible hierarchical State having a strictly monarchical constitution—its king being the Bishop of Rome, who was the visible representative of Christ. This conception became [pg 482] almost purely political. It was the active force in all ecclesiastical struggles with princes and peoples, with Reformers, and with so-called heretics and schismatics. It reduced the Church to the level of the State, and contained little to stimulate to piety or to holy living.

The labours of the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century did try to transform this political Church into what might represent the double fellowship with Christ and with fellow-believers which is so prominent a thought in the New Testament. They did so by attempting to show that the great political Church was an enclosure containing certain indefinite mysterious powers of redemption which saved men who willingly placed themselves within the sphere of their operation. They maintained that the core of the hierarchical constitution of the Church was the priesthood, and that this priesthood was a species of plastic medium through which, and through which alone, God worked in dispensing, by means of the sacraments entrusted to the priesthood, His saving grace. It may be questioned whether the thought of the Church as an institution, possessing within itself certain mysterious redemptive powers which are to be found nowhere else, was ever thoroughly harmonised with that which regarded it as a mass of legal statutes embodied in canon law and dominated by papal absolutism. The two conceptions remained distinct, mutually aiding each other, but never exactly coalescing. Thus in the sixteenth century no less than three separate ideas of the Church of Christ were present to fill the minds and imaginations of men; but the dominant idea for the practical religious life was certainly that which represented the Church as an institution which, because it possessed the priesthood, was the society within which salvation was to be found.

Luther had enjoyed to the full the benefits of this society, and had with ardour and earnestness sought to make use of all its redemptive powers. He had felt, simply because he was so honest with himself, that it had [pg 483] not made him a real Christian, and that its mysterious powers had worked on him in vain. His living Christian experience made him know and feel that whatever the Church of Christ was, it was not a society within which priests exercised their secret science of redemption. It was and must be a fellowship of holy and Christlike people; but he felt it very difficult to express his experience in phrases that could satisfy him. It was hard to get rid of thoughts which he had cherished from childhood, and none of these inherited beliefs had more power over him than the idea that the Church, however described, was the Pope's House in which the Bishop of Rome ruled, and ought to rule, as house-father. It is interesting to study by what devious paths he arrived at a clear view of what the Church of Christ really is;[435] to notice how shreds of the old opinions which had lain dormant in his mind every now and then start afresh into life; and how, while he had learnt to know the uselessness of many institutions of the mediæval Church, he could not easily divest his mind of the thought that they naturally belonged to a Church Visible. Monastic vows, the celibacy of the clergy, fasting, the hierarchy, the supremacy of the Pope, the power of excommunication with all its dreaded consequences, were all the natural accompaniments of a Visible Church according to mediæval ideas, and Luther relinquished them with difficulty. From the first, Augustine's thought of the Church, which consists of the elect, helped him; he found that Huss held the same idea, and he wrote to a friend that “we have been all Hussites without knowing it.”[436] But while Luther and all the Reformers held strongly by this conception of Augustine, it was not of very much service in determining the conception of the Visible Church which was the more important practically; and although the definition of the Catholic Church Invisible has found its way into most [pg 484] Protestant Confessions, and has been used by Protestants polemically, it has always remained something of a background, making clearer the conception of the Church in general, but has been of little service in giving clear views of what the Church Visible is. From the very first, however, Luther saw in a certain indefinite way that there was a real connection between the conception of the Visible Church and the proclamation of the Word of God—a thought which was destined to grow more and more definite till it completely possessed him. As early as October 1518, he could inform Cajetan that the Pope must be under the rule of the Word of God and not superior to it.[437] His discovery that the communion of the saints (communio sanctorum) was not necessarily a hierarchy (ecclesia prælatorum),[438] was made soon afterwards. After the Leipzig Disputation his views became clearer, and by 1520 they stood revealed in the three great Reformation treatises.

Luther's doctrine of the Church is extremely simple. The Church is, as the Creed defines it to be, the Communion of the Saints, which has come into existence through the proclamation of the Word of God heard and received by faith. He simplified this fundamental Christian conception in a wonderful way. The Church rests on the sure and stable foundation of the Word of God; and this Word of God is not a weary round of statutes issued blasphemously by the Bishops of Rome in God's name. It is not the invitations of a priesthood to come and share mysterious and indefinite powers of salvation given to them in their command over the sacraments. It is not a lengthy doctrinal system constructed out of detached texts of Holy Scripture by the application of a fourfold sense used under the guidance of a dogmatic tradition or a rule of faith. It is the substance of the Scriptures. It is the “gospel according to a pure understanding.” It is the “promises of God”; “the testimony of Jesus, Who is the Saviour of souls”; it is the “consolations offered in Christ.” It is, as Calvin said, [pg 485] “the spiritual gate whereby we enter into God's heavenly kingdom”; the “mirror in which faith beholds God.” It is, according to the Westminster Confession, the sum of God's commands, threatenings, promises, and, above all, the offer of Christ Jesus. All these things are apprehended by faith. The Church comes into existence by faith responding to the proclamation of the Word of God. This is the sure and stable thing upon which the Church of Christ is founded.

The Church of Christ, therefore, is a body of which the Spirit of Jesus is the soul. It is a company of Christlike men and women, whom the Holy Spirit has called, enlightened, and sanctified through the preaching of the word; who are encouraged to look forward to a glorious future prepared for the people of God; and who, meanwhile, manifest their faith in all manner of loving services done to their fellow-believers.

The Church is therefore in some sense invisible. Its secret is its hidden fellowship with Jesus. Its roots penetrate the unseen, and draw from thence the nourishment needed to sustain its life. But it is a visible society, and can be seen wherever the Word of God is faithfully proclaimed, and wherever faith is manifested in testimony and in bringing forth the fruits of the Spirit.

This is the essential mode of describing the Church which has found place in the Reformation creeds. Some vary in the ways in which they express the thought; some do not sufficiently distinguish, in words at least, between what the Church is and what it has, between what makes its being and what is included in its well-being. But in all there are the two thoughts that the Church is made visible by the two fundamental things—the proclamation of the word and the manifestation of faith.

This mode of describing the Church of Christ defines it by that element which separates it from all other forms of human association—its special relation to the divine; and it is shown to be visible at the place where that divine element can and does manifest itself. It defines the [pg 486] Church by its most essential element, and sets aside all that is accidental. It concerns itself with what the Church is, and does not include what the Church has. It therefore provides room for all things which belong to the well-being of the Church—only it relegates them to their proper place.[439]

If the proclamation of the Word of God, and the manifestation of the faith which answers, be the essence of the Church, all that tends to aid both is to be included in the thought. There must be a ministry of some sort in word and sacrament instituted within the Church of Christ in order to lead the individual to faith. God has created this ministry, and all the Reformed Churches were careful to declare that no one should seek entrance into office unless he was assured that he had been called of God thereto; and as his function is to be a minister of the Church and a servant of the faithful, no one “should publicly teach or administer the sacraments unless he be duly called (nisi rite vocatus).” Such a ministry has its field simply in ministering the means of grace. “The Church of Christ,” says Luther, “requires an honest ministry diligently and loyally instructed in the holy Word of God after a pure Christian understanding, and without the addition of any false traditions. In and through such a ministry it will be made plain what are Christ and His Evangel, how to attain to the forgiveness of sins, and the properties and power of the keys in the Church.”

All this is matter of administration. Some societies of believers may have different ideas about the precise form that this ministry ought to take; but such differences, while they may lead to separate administrations, do not imply any separation from the one Catholic Church of Christ to which they all belong. However outwardly they differ, all retain the essential things—the preaching and teaching of the Word of God and the due administration of the sacraments. Some may prefer to set forth a creed of one kind and others may prefer another. The French, [pg 487] the Scottish, and the Dutch Churches had all their own creeds, and all believed each other to be parts of the same One Catholic Church of Christ.

“When we affirm,” says Calvin, “the pure ministry of the Word, and our order in the celebration of the Sacraments, to be a sufficient pledge and earnest that we may safely embrace the society in which both these are found as a true Church, we carry the observation to this point, that such a society should never be rejected as long as it continues in these things, although it may be chargeable in other respects with many errors.”[440]

Within this Christian fellowship, which is the Church of Christ, the sense by which we see God is awakened and our faith is nourished and quickened. The Word of God speaks to us not merely in the public worship of the faithful, but in and through the lives of the brethren; their deeds act on us as the simple stories of experience and providence which the Scriptures contain. God's Word speaks to us in a thousand ways in the lives and sympathies of the brethren. The Christian “receives the revelation of God in the living relationships of the Christian brotherhood, and its essential contents are that personal life of Jesus which is visible in the gospel and which is expounded by the lives of the redeemed.”[441]

“The Christian Church,” says Luther, “keeps all words of God in its heart, and turns them round and round, and keeps their connection with one another and with Scripture! Therefore, anyone who is to find Christ must first find the Church. How could anyone know where Christ is and faith in Him is, unless he knew where His believers are? Whoever wishes to know something about Christ must not trust to himself, nor by the help of his own reason build a bridge of his own to heaven, but must go to the Church, must visit it and make inquiry. Now the Church is not wood and stone, but the company of people who believe in Christ. With these he must unite and see how they believe, live, and teach, who assuredly have Christ among [pg 488]them. For outside the Christian Church there is no truth, no Christ, no blessedness.”[442]

For these reasons the Church deserves to be called, and is, the Mother of all Christians.

[pg 513]

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