“Pure devilry,” he says in this passionate and hurriedly composed pamphlet, is urging on the peasants; they “rob and rage and behave like mad dogs.” “Therefore let all who are able, hew them down, slaughter and stab them, openly or in secret, and remember that there is nothing more poisonous, noxious and utterly devilish than a rebel. You must kill him as you would a mad dog; if you do not fall upon him, he will fall upon you and the whole land.”[552]
He now will have it that they are not fighting for the Lutheran teaching, nor serving the evangel. “They serve the devil under the appearance of the evangel ... I believe that the devil feels the approach of the Last Day and therefore has recourse to such unheard-of trickery.... Behold what a powerful prince the devil is, how he holds the world in his hands and can knead it as he pleases.” “I believe that there are no devils left in hell, but all of them have entered into the peasants.”[553]
He therefore invites the authorities to intervene with all their strength. “Whatever peasants are killed in the fray, are lost body and soul and are the devil’s own for all eternity.” The authorities must resolve to “chastise and slay” so long as they can raise a finger: “Thou, O God, must judge and act. It may be that whoever is killed on the side of the authorities is really a martyr in God’s cause.”[554] A happier death no man could die. So strange are the times that a Prince may merit heaven more certainly by shedding blood than by saying prayers.
Luther does not forget to exhort the evangelically-minded rulers to remember to offer the “mad peasants,” even at the last, “terms, but where this is of no avail to have recourse at once to the sword.” Before this, however, he says: “I will not forbid such rulers as are able, to chastise and slay the peasants without previously offering them terms, even though the gospel does not permit it.”[555]
He is not opposed to indulgence being shown those who have been led astray. He recommends, that the many “pious folk” who, against their will, were compelled to join the diabolical league, should be spared. At the same time, however, he declares, that they like the others, are “going to the devil.... For a pious Christian ought to be willing to endure a hundred deaths rather than yield one hair’s breadth to the cause of the peasants.”[556]
It has been said it was for the purpose of liberating those who had been compelled to join the insurgents, that he admonished the Princes in such strong terms, even promising them heaven as the reward for their shedding of blood, and that the overthrow of the revolt by every possible means was, though in this sense only, “for Luther a real work of charity.” This, however, is incorrect, for he does not speak of saving and sparing those who had been led astray until after the passage where he says that the Princes might gain heaven by the shedding of blood; nor is there any inner connection between the passages; he simply says: “There is still one matter to which the authorities might well give attention.” “Even had they no other cause for whetting their sword against the peasants, this [the saving of those who had been led astray] would be a more than sufficient reason.” After the appeal for mercy towards those who had been forced to fight, there follows the cry: “Let whoever is able help in the slaughter; should you die in the struggle, you could not have a more blessed death.” He concludes with Romans xiii. 4; concerning the authorities: “who bear not the sword in vain, avengers to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.”[557]
While his indignant pen stormed over the paper, he had been thinking with terror of the consequences of the bloody contest, and of the likelihood of the peasants coming off victorious. He writes, “We know not whether God may not intend to prelude the Last Day, which cannot be far distant, by allowing the devil to destroy all order and government, and to reduce the world to a scene of desolation, so that Satan may obtain the ‘Kingdom of this world.’”[558]
The rebels, who had burnt the monasteries and demolished the strongholds and castles in Thuringia and in Luther’s own country, were soon to suffer a succession of great reverses. Münzer, the prophet, was defeated in the battle of Frankenhausen on May 15, 1525, and after being put to the torture, made his confession and was executed. Before his end he with great composure implored the Princes to have mercy on the poor, oppressed people. Luther said of his death, that his confession was “mere devilish stupidity” and that his torture should have been made much more severe; Melanchthon, in his history of Münzer, also regretted that he had not been forced to confess that he received his “Revelations” from the devil; he, too, did not think it enough that he should have been tortured only once. Luther, however, was not sorry to see the last of him. “Münzer, with some thousands of others, has unexpectedly been made to bite the dust.”[559]
The open supporters of the rising, on account of his second tract, called Luther a hypocrite and flatterer of the Princes.[560] Even some of his best friends could not understand his ferocity in inciting the lords against the peasants, more especially as it seemed to encourage the victors in their savage treatment of the prisoners, which in some places resembled a massacre.
Luther’s friend, Johann Rühel, the Mansfeld councillor, wrote to him, at the time when the pamphlet against the peasants was making the greatest sensation, expressing his misgivings. He reminded him of the words he made use of in the passage last quoted concerning the “scene of desolation” into which the world seemed about to be transformed. This prophecy might prove only too true. “I am sore afraid,” he says, “and really it seems as though you were playing the prophet to the gentry, for, indeed, they will leave nothing but a desolate land to their heirs; the people are being chastised so severely that I fear the land of Thuringia and the County [of Mansfeld] will recover from it but slowly.... Here they [the victorious party] give themselves up to nothing but robbery and murder.”[561] Five days later Rühel again wrote to Luther in tones of warning, saying that he meant well by him, but must nevertheless point out the effect his pamphlet “Against the Peasants” had had on the minds of some: “Be it as it may, it still appears strange to many who are favourably disposed towards you that you should allow the tyrants to slaughter without mercy and tell them that they may thus become martyrs; it is openly said at Leipzig that because the Elector has just died [May 5, 1525] you fear for your own skin and flatter Duke George by approving his undertaking [i.e. his energetic steps against the rising] out of fear for your own skin. I will not presume to judge, but commit it to your own spirit, for I know the saying: ‘qui accipit gladium gladio peribit,’ and, again, that the secular power ‘beareth not the sword in vain ... an avenger to execute wrath’ [Rom. xiii. 4].... I mean well, and beg you to remember me in your prayers.”[562] The writer tells Luther that “the result may well be that the victors in thus slaughtering without mercy will appeal to Luther, and that thus even the innocent will be condemned in Luther’s name.”[563] Rühel was a good Lutheran, and his words bear witness to a deep-seated devotion to Luther’s spirit and guidance. In his strange zeal for the evangel he urges Luther in this same letter to invite the Archbishop of Mayence and Magdeburg to secularise himself and take a wife.[564]