We already are acquainted with some of his admissions of his own weakness and acknowledgments of the greater gifts and achievements of others—confessions which have been extolled as a proof of his real humility.
“I have no such foolish humility,” so he says, “as to wish to deny the gifts God has bestowed on me. In myself I have indeed enough and more than enough to humble me and teach me that I am nothing. In God, however, we may well pride ourselves, and rejoice and glory in His gifts and extol them, as I myself do on account of my German Psalter; for I studied the Psalter, thanks be to God, with great fruit; but all to the honour and glory of God to Whom be praise for ever and ever.” This he wrote to Eobanus Hessus, the poet, in a high-flown letter thanking him for translating the German Psalter into excellent Latin.[916] Of his own virtues or sinfulness he preferred to speak humorously, as his manner was. Thus, he says, for instance, in 1526, in his suppressed “Widder den Radschlag der Meintzischen Pfafferey,” that “he had not defiled any man’s wife or child,” “had not robbed anyone of his goods ... nor murdered or assaulted anyone or given help or counsel thereto”; his sin consisted in “not pulling a long face but in insisting on being merry”; also in eating meat on forbidden days. People might defame his life, but he was not going to heed “the dirty hogsnouts.”[917]
His statements belittling his own powers and achievements, coming from a man whose apparently overmastering self-confidence had, from the beginning, prepossessed so many of his followers in his favour, afford a subject for psychological study. He seems the more ready to give full play to his confidence the more he feels his weakness face to face with the menace of danger, and the more he experiences in the depths of his soul the raging of doubts which he attributes to the devil.
In the humble admissions he makes he never conceals how much he stands in need of assistance. He does not hide from himself the fact that he dreads outward troubles, and is deficient in strong and exalted virtue. But side by side with his faults, he is fond of gazing on and extolling God’s gifts in his person. His peculiar form of humility, his prayer and his trust in God find expression in certain utterances and experiences, on which no judgment can be passed until we have before us a larger selection of them, particularly of such as seem to be less premeditated.
Prayer and Confidence in God.
Luther’s strangely undaunted confidence and the personal nature of his reliance on God’s help form part of his mental physiognomy.
He sees around him much distress and corruption and exclaims: “Alas, we are living outwardly under the empire of the devil, hence we can neither see nor hear anything good from without.” And yet, he proceeds in his usual forced tone, “inwardly we are living in the kingdom of Christ, where we behold God’s glory and His grace! For of Christ it is said: ‘Rule Thou in the midst of Thine enemies.’” “Hatred is our reward in this world.” “Our reward is excessive considering the insignificance of the service we render Christ. But what is the world, its anger, or its prince? A smoke that vanishes, a bubble that bursts, such is everything that is opposed to the Lord Whom we serve and Who works in us.” With these words, so expressive of his determination, he directs his trusted pupil, Conrad Cordatus, to enter courageously upon the office of preacher at Stendal in the March.[918]
Again and again he seeks to reanimate his faith and confidence by calling to mind not merely God’s faithfulness to His promises, but also his own personal “sufferings” and “temptations,” the only escape from which, as he believed, lay in the most obstinate and presumptuous belief in his cause, and in the conviction that God was constantly intervening in his favour.
“Not only from Holy Scripture,” he said in a conversation in 1540, “but also from my violent inner combats and temptations have I learnt that Christ is God incarnate, and that there is a Trinity. I now know it even better from experience than by faith that these articles are true. For in our greatest temptations nothing can help us but the assurance that Christ became man and is now our intercessor at the right hand of the Father. There is nothing that excites our confidence to such a degree.... God, too, has championed this article from the beginning of the world against countless heretics, and even to-day defends it against Turk and Pope; He incessantly confirms it by miracles and permits us to call His Son, the Son of God and true God, and grants all that we ask in Christ’s name. For what else has saved us even till the present day in so many perils but prayer to Christ? Whoever says it is Master Philip’s and my doing, lies. It is God Who does it for Christ’s sake.... Therefore we hold fast to these articles in spite of the objections of reason. They have remained and will continue.”[919]