Hieronymus Dungersheim, the opponent to whom we owe Nathin’s remark, given above, upbraids Luther, the “child of Belial,” for his “devilish writings” “whereby he, and Satan through him, blasphemes Christ.”[1267]
Aleander the Nuncio reported on April 17, 1521, from the Diet of Worms, that some regarded Luther as mad, others as “possessed”; he also mentions on the testimony of others how Luther, on his arrival, “had gazed about him with the eyes of a demon.”[1268]
The Reichstagsabschied of Worms speaks of Luther as “led by the evil spirit,” nay, “as the wicked enemy himself clad in human form.”[1269]
In the tract against a pamphlet of Luther’s published by Duke George of Saxony, in 1531 under Franz Arnoldi’s name, we read at the very commencement, that Luther was losing many of his adherents because he showed his hand “so clearly and plainly in his writings, that, as they said, Luther must certainly be possessed of the devil, indeed of the whole legion that Christ drove out of the man possessed and into the herd of swine who forthwith went raving mad and ran headlong into the sea”: “By the fruits [of his words] we may recognise the spirit.”[1270]
Johann Dietenberger, as early as 1524, in his “Against the unchristian book of Martin Luther on the abuse of the Mass,” says: “There is no doubt whatever that the horrid, damnable Lutheran doctrine has been brought into the world by the devil, otherwise it would not be so utterly beastly and contentious, quarrelsome and fickle, and so fitted for everything evil.” “These are all manifest lies, nothing but abuse, slander and blasphemy, devilish lies and works by which Luther the arch-liar has driven the world to the devil.” He calls Luther “the devil’s hired messenger” and says of his manner of writing: “Here everything reeks of devils; nothing that the devilish man writes can stand without the devil who endevils all his products.”[1271]
The Ratisbon Benedictine, Christopher Hoffmann († 1534), in his sermons to the Chapter preached before 1525 represents Luther as an apostate and as “dæmone plenus.”[1272]
The anonymous “Iudicium de Luthero” included in a German codex at Munich and dating from the early years of the controversy, also deserves to be mentioned. The author indeed praises Luther’s learning all too generously, but then goes on to say, that he looked on him as “no Christian,” and to speak of the “devil’s brood” by whom Martin Luther is possessed.[1273]
Berthold of Chiemsee in his “Tewtsche Theologey” considers that in his day false teaching has been spread abroad “by a horrid devil,” who makes use of wicked men; the “devil, with his wicked company, has stirred up heresy.”[1274]
Petrus Sylvius, in 1534, after a lengthy discourse on Luther’s “seductive and damnable” manner of “slandering and blaspheming,” says, that he was “in very truth a possessed and devilish man.”[1275]
In order the better to explain how these and many other of Luther’s contemporaries came to see a diabolical influence in his work, we may quote a few words from Johann Adam Möhler’s lectures on Church History (published posthumously): “We find Luther in 1520 and 1521 displaying a feverish literary activity that arouses in the reader a horrible misgiving. An uneasy sense of discomfort oppresses us, and a secret shudder runs through our frame when we think of the boundless selfishness and presumption which holds sway in this man; we seem to be standing within the inner circle where that sinister power rules, which, from the beginning of the world, has ever been seeking to taint the history of our race.”[1276]