Given his achievements, Luther was not going too far when he spoke of himself repeatedly as a “great doctor.”[1081] He also showed himself extremely sensitive, as we shall soon see, to the attempts of the sectarians and fanatics to deprive him of the honour of the first place, to discredit his discovery of the Gospel, and either to crown themselves with his laurels and possess themselves of the fruits of his struggles, or, at his expense, to invent novelties and launch them on the world. Seeing that Christ is “destroying the Papacy” through him and is bringing it to its “exspiravit,” i.e. to the last gasp, he is naturally annoyed to learn that there are other spokesmen of the new faith who refuse to follow him without question, and who cause “a great falling away from his preaching and much slanderous talk. There are some, who after having read a page or two or listened to a sermon, without further ado take it on themselves to be overbearing and to reproach others, telling them that their conduct is not that of the followers of the Gospel.” This, he declares, he himself had “never taught anyone,” rather, as St. Paul also had done, he had “strictly forbidden it. They merely act in this way because they are desirous of novelties.... They misapply Holy Scripture to their own conceits.”[1082]
All this he says when actually declaring that he has no wish to set himself above anyone, or to be “any man’s master.”
There was scarcely one among the many teachers of the innovations who dared to differ from him whom Luther did not liken to the devil. “I have had more than thirty doctors of the fanatics opposing me,” he said on one occasion, “all anxious to be my instructors”; all these he had driven before him like chaff and vanquished the “devil” in them.[1083]
“Münzer, Carlstadt, Campanus and such fellows, together with the factious spirits and sects, are merely devils incarnate, for all their efforts are directed to doing harm and avenging themselves.”[1084]
Himself he looks upon as the champion of God against the devil, raised, as it were, to the pinnacle of the temple. It is the devil whom by heavenly power he repels and shames in the fanatics who arise in his camp. “Satan,” he says to them, “cannot conceal himself.”[1085] “Such fellows are beguiled by the devil.”[1086] Johann Agricola, a comrade of his, he delivers over to Satan, because he differed from him in some points of doctrine: “He goes on his way, all devoted to Satan as he is, sowing seeds of enmity against us.”[1087] Luther warns him that he may become a martyr, but like Arius and Satan, whom Christ punishes. “Good God, what utter malice! These heretics say of me what the Manichæans said of Christ, viz. that Christ had indeed the Holy Spirit but only in an imperfect degree, whereas they themselves possessed it in its perfection.”[1088]
Caspar Schwenckfeld, like Agricola, he esteemed an heretical theologian desirous of innovations, “a mad fool possessed by the devil”; “it is the devil who spews and excretes his works.” Luther’s malediction on this heretical devil runs, “May God’s curse light on thee, Satan, thy spirit which called thee forth, be with thee to thy destruction.”[1089] Michael Stiefel, the Lutheran preacher and fanatic, is also no less possessed of the devil. “It is soon over with a man,” Luther laments over this old friend, “when the devil possesses him in this way.”[1090] Even Zwingli and the Zwinglians are also possessed through and through by the devil and are the servants of Satan.[1091] All who do not agree with him, but set up their own ideas, merely show that the devil is at work in the world. “This is how the work of the devil goes on. In twenty years I have met more than fifty sectarians desirous of teaching me, but God has preserved me, He Who said of St. Paul, ‘I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake’” (Acts ix. 16).[1092]
It is these men whom the devil [of pride] carries high up “in the air and sets on the pinnacle of the temple.”[1093]
We must cut short this string of Luther’s utterances and quote some of the words of his opponents. What Thomas Münzer said in reply is the reverse of feeble, but at least it gives us a good idea of the way in which controversies were conducted in those days. Thomas Münzer, in his printed reply to Luther referred to above,[1094] is manifestly angry that Luther should stamp all who contradict him as devils.
“That most ambitious, lying scribe Dr. Luther,” he says, becomes, “the longer he lives, more of an arrogant fool, shields himself behind Holy Scripture and utilises it to his advantage in the most deceitful manner.”[1095]
The greatest of all crimes is that “no attention is paid to the commands of the Pope of Wittenberg,” Münzer remarks sarcastically; Luther was putting himself up “in place of the Pope,” while at the same time “he curried favour with the Princes”; “you, you new Pope, make them presents of convents and churches.” “You have distracted all Christendom with a false religion and now, when it is necessary, are unable to control it” except with the help of the rulers. He was introducing “a new system of logic-chopping with the Word of God”; he is desirous of “managing everything by the Word” and exalts himself as though he had not come into the world in the ordinary way but had “sprung from the brain.” He speaks of “our safeguard and protection” as though he himself were a Prince; with his “fantastic reason” he was working mischief, while making a great display of humility; he makes much of his own “simplicity,” but this resembled that of the fox, or of an onion which has nine skins. All his adversaries he labelled as “devils,” but he himself raved and ranted like a hound of hell, and if he did not raise an open revolt this was merely because, like the serpent, he glided over the rocks.[1096]