In conclusion, he gives his open approval to the Wittenbergers, that “Mass is no longer said, that there is no more organ-playing,” and that “bleating and bellowing” has ceased in the Church, so that the Papists say: “They are all heretics and have gone crazy.”[226] It seems to him that Saxony is the happiest of lands, “because there the living truth of the Gospel has arisen”; surely the Elector Frederick must be the Prince, foretold by prophecy, who was to deliver the Holy Sepulchre; himself he compares to the “Angel at the Sepulchre,” or to Magdalene who announced the Resurrection.[227]
His self-confidence and arrogance had not been shaken by the many weary hours of lonely introspection in the Wartburg, but, on the contrary, had been nourished and inflamed. That was the period of his “spiritual baptism”; he felt volcanic forces surging up within him. He believed that a power from above had commanded him to teach as he was doing. Hence he called the Wartburg his Patmos; as the Apostle John had received his revelation on Patmos, so, as he thought, he also had been favoured in his seclusion with mysterious communications from above.
The idea of a divine commission now began to penetrate all his being with overwhelming force.
When the ecclesiastical troubles at Wittenberg necessitated his permanent return thither, he declared to the Elector, who had hitherto never heard such language from his lips, “Your Electoral Grace is already aware, or, if unaware, is hereby apprised of the fact, that I have not received the Gospel from man, but from heaven only, through Our Lord Jesus Christ, so that I might already have accounted myself and signed myself a servant and evangelist, and for the future shall do so.”[228] We must also refer to the days of his Saxon Patmos—which exercised so deep an influence on his interior life—the remarkable mystical utterance to which his pupils afterwards declared he had given vent at a later date, viz. that he had been “commanded,” nay, “enjoined under pain of eternal reprobation (‘interminaretur’) not to doubt in any way of these things [of the doctrines he was to teach].”[229]
Every road that led back to his duty to the Church and his Order was barred by the gloomy enthusiasm Luther kindled within himself, subsequently to his spiritual baptism in the Wartburg.
The time spent in the Wartburg brought him his final conviction in his calling as a prophet and his divine commission, but if we are to understand Luther aright we must not forget that this conviction was a matter of gradual growth (cp. vol. iii., xvi. 1).
We cannot doubt that even in the first years of his public career, certainly in 1519 and 1520, the belief in his own divine mission had begun to take firm root in his mind.
In order to explain the rise of this idea we must turn first of all to his confidential letters dating from this period; his public writings in this respect are of less importance. With their help it is possible to recognise to some extent the course of this remarkable psychological development. So soon as he had perceived that his discovery, of the worthlessness of good works, and of justification by faith alone, was in permanent contradiction to the teaching of the Roman Church, the presentiment necessarily began to awaken within him, that the whole body of the faithful had been led by Rome into the greatest darkness. He fancied himself fortified in this idea by the sight of the real abuses which had overspread the whole life of the Church in his time. He thought he descried a universal corruption which had penetrated down to the very root of ecclesiasticism, and he did not scruple to say so in his earliest sermons and lectures. He felt it his duty to bewail the falling away. In the hours in which he gave free play to his fancy, it even seemed to him that Christ and the Gospel had almost disappeared.
The applause which greeted the appearance of his first writings, and which he eagerly accepted, confirmed him in his belief that he had made a most far-reaching discovery. He lacked the sense and discrimination which might have enabled him to see the too great importance he was ascribing to his invention. He says in May, 1518, to an elderly friend who opposed his views: My followers, prelates of the Church and scholarly men of the world, all rightly admit, that “formerly they had heard nothing of Christ and the Gospel.” “To put it briefly, I am convinced that no reform of the Church is possible unless the ecclesiastical dogmas, the decisions of the Popes, the theology of the schools, philosophy and logic as they exist at present are completely altered.... I fear no man’s contradiction when defending such a thesis.”[230] In the same year, in March, he wrote to a friendly ecclesiastic, that the theologians who had hitherto occupied the professorial chairs, viz. the schoolmen, did not understand the Gospel and the Bible one bit. “To quibble about the meaning of words is not to interpret the Gospel. All the Professors, Universities and Doctors are nothing but shadows whom you have no cause to be afraid of.”[231]