More relates an anecdote.
‘Are there only a few, think you, who would deem it a crime to be expiated with many tears, if they were to omit a line in their hourly prayers, and yet have no fearful scruple at all, when they profane themselves by the worst and most infamous lies?... Indeed, I once knew a man devoted to the religious life—one of that class who would nowadays be thought “most religious.” This man, by no means a novice, but one who had passed many years in what they call regular observances, and had advanced so far in them that he was even set over a convent—but, nevertheless, more careless of the precepts of God than of monastic rites—slid down from one crime to another, till at length he went so far as to meditate the most atrocious of all crimes—a crime execrable beyond belief—and what is more, not a simple crime, but one pregnant with manifold guilt, for he even purposed to add sacrilege to murders and parricide. When this man thought himself insufficient without accomplices for the perpetration of so many crimes, he associated with himself some ruffians and cutpurses. They committed the most horrible crimes which I ever heard of. They were all of them thrown together into prison. I do not wish to give the details, and I abstain from the names of the criminals, lest I should renew anything of past hatred to an innocent order.
‘But to proceed to narrate the circumstances on account of which I have mentioned this affair. I heard from those wicked assassins that, when they came to that religious man in his chamber, they had not spoken of the crime; but being introduced into his private chapel, they appeased the sacred Virgin by a salutation on their bent knees according to custom. This being properly accomplished, they at length rose purely and piously to perpetrate their crime!...
‘Now, I have not mentioned this with the view either to defame the religion of the monks with these crimes, since the same soil may bring forth useful herbs and pestiferous weeds, or to condemn the rites of those who occasionally salute the sacred Virgin, than which nothing is more beneficial; but because people trust so much in such things that under the very security which they thus feel they give themselves up to crime.
‘From reflections such as these you may learn the lesson which the occasion suggests. That you should not grow too proud of your own sect—nothing could be more fatal. Nor trust in private observances. That you should place your hopes rather in the Christian faith than in your own; and not trust in those things which you can do for yourself, but in those which you cannot do without God’s help. You can fast by yourself, you can keep vigils by yourself, you can say prayers by yourself—and you can do these things by the devil! But, verily, Christian faith, which Christ Jesus truly said to be in spirit; Christian hope, which, despairing of its own merits, confides only in the mercy of God; Christian charity, which is not puffed up, is not made angry, does not seek its own glory,—none, indeed, can attain these except by the grace and gracious help of God alone.
‘By how much the more you place your trust in those virtues which are common to Christendom, by so much the less will you have faith in private ceremonies, whether those of your order or your own; and by how much the less you trust in them by so much the more will they be useful. For then at last God will esteem you a faithful servant, when you shall count yourself good for nothing.’
That these passages prove that More and his friends had not set aside monasticism, or even Mariolatry, as altogether wrong, cannot be too clearly recognised. In an age of transition it is the direction of the thoughts and aims of men which constitutes the radical difference or agreement between them, rather than the exact distance that each may have travelled on the same road. Luther himself had not yet in his hatred of ceremonies travelled so far as the Oxford Reformers, though in after years he went farther, because he travelled faster than they did. Upon these questions they were very much practically at one. And if here and there the three friends observed in Luther an impetuosity which carried him into extremes, much as they might differ from some of his statements, and the tone he sometimes adopted, their respect for his moral earnestness, and their perception of the amount of exasperation to which his hot nature was exposed, made them readily pardon what they could not approve. They had as yet little idea—though More’s letter showed that they had some—much less than Luther himself had—how practically important was the difference between them. For the moment their two orbits seemed almost to coincide. They seemed even to be approaching each other. They seemed to meet in their common hatred of the formalism of the monks, in their common attempt to grasp at the spirit—the reality—of religion through its forms and shadows. They had little idea that they were crossing each other’s path, and that ere long, as each pursued his course, the divergence would become wider and wider.
V. ERASMUS AND THE REFORMERS OF WITTEMBERG (1519).
Luther protected by the Elector of Saxony.
In the summer of 1518 Melanchthon had joined Luther at Wittemberg. During the remainder of that year the controversy on Indulgences was going on. Rome had taken the matter up. Luther had appeared before the Papal legate Cajetan, and from his harsh demand of simple recantation, had shrunk with horror and fled back into Saxony. The legate had threatened that Rome would never let the matter drop, and urged the Elector of Saxony to send Luther to Rome. But he had made common cause with the poor monk, and refused to banish him. Leo X. was afraid to quarrel with Frederic of Saxony, and under the auspices of Miltitz, aided by the moderation of Luther and the firmness of his protector, a little oil was thrown on the troubled waters. But in the spring of 1519, when the Papal tenths came to be exacted, murmurs were heard again on all sides. Hutten commenced his series of satirical pamphlets, and it became evident that the storm was not permanently laid, the lull might last for a while, but fresh tempests were ahead.[740]