We would have lingered to parley further, but the heavy nailed doors were closed against us, we heard the massive bolts rattle as they were drawn, and all our assaults with fists or iron staffs on the convent gates, from that moment did not awaken another sound within.
"Dead to the world, indeed!" murmured one at length; "the grave could not be more silent."
Baffled, and hoarse with shouting, we wandered back again to Martin Luther's rooms. The old familiar rooms, where we had so lately spent hours with him in social converse; where I and many of us had spent so many an hour in intimate, affectionate intercourse,—his presence would be there no more; and the unaltered aspect of the mute, inanimate things only made the emptiness and change more painful by the contrast.
And yet, when we began to examine more closely, the aspect of many things was changed. His flute and lute, indeed, lay on the table, just as he had left them on the previous evening. But the books—scholastic, legal, and classical—were piled up carefully in one corner, and directed to the booksellers. In looking over the well-known volumes, I only missed two, Virgil and Plautus; I suppose he took these with him. Whilst we were looking at a parcel neatly rolled up in another place, the old man who kept his rooms in order came in, and said, "That is Master Martin's master's robe, his holiday attire, and his master's ring. They are to be sent to his parents at Mansfeld."
A choking sensation came over me as I thought of the father who had struggled so hard to maintain his son, and had hoped so much from him, receiving that packet. Not from the dead. Worse than from the dead, it seemed to me. Deliberately self-entombed; deliberately with his own hands building up a barrier between him and all who love him best. With the dead, if they are happy, we may hold communion—at least the Creed speaks of the communion of saints; we may pray to them; or, at the worst, we may pray for them. But between the son in the convent and the father at Mansfeld the barrier is not merely one of stone and earth. It is of the impenetrable iron of will and conscience. It would be a temptation now for Martin Luther to pour out his heart in affectionate words to father, mother, or friend.
And yet, if he is right,—if the flesh is only to be subdued, if God is only to be pleased, if heaven is only to be won in this way,—it is of little moment indeed what the suffering may be to us or any belonging to us in this fleeting life, down which the grim gates of death which close it, ever cast their long shadow.
May not Martin serve his family better in the cloister than at the emperor's court, for is not the cloister the court of a palace more imperial?—we may say, the very audience-chamber of the King of kings. Besides, if he had a vocation, what curse might not follow despising it? Happy for those whose vocation is so clear that they dare not disobey it; or whose hearts are so pure that they would not if they dared!
July 19.
These two days the university has been in a ferment at the disappearance of Martin Luther. Many are indignant with him, and more with the monks, who, they say, have taken advantage of a fervent impulse, and drawn him into their net. Some, however, especially those of the school of Mutianus—the Humanists—laugh, and say there are ways through the cloister to the court,—and even to the tiara. But those misunderstand Martin. We who know him are only too sure that he will be a true monk, and that for him there is no gate from the cloister back into the world.
It appears now that he had been meditating this step more than a fortnight.