He goes on to apply this to Luther: “Luther and those who follow him prefer to rise up in their foolish daring rather than bow to the rule of faith; they open their offensive mouth against the holy Fathers and the whole Church; they exalt their own judgment with momentous and arrogant blindness above that of the most august representatives of the teaching office.” True enough Luther had begun softly by merely publishing some theses against the system of indulgences with which many might still agree; but then he had gone on step by step and had increased his partisans by proclaiming a Christian freedom which in reality savoured more of Mohammed. It is our sins, Eck admits, that are the cause of the unhappy success of his work. “From the poisoned root new and corrupt shoots are constantly springing up, and of their new sects we see no end. In our unhappy days we have experienced the fury of the iconoclasts; Capharnaites have arisen to whom Christ’s presence in the Sacrament is a hard saying; Anabaptists, who refuse baptism to children but bestow it on adults, and, amongst these teachers, every day fresh divisions arise so that the heretics are even more prolific than rabbits. Yes, God is angry with us and allows this because we do not turn to Him with powerful and fervent prayer.”
He then goes on to encourage the Bishop of Würzburg to offer vigorous resistance and points modestly to his own self-sacrificing labours.
“However much heresy may gain the upper hand, the watchmen of Sion must not keep silence; their voice must ring out like a clarion against the Philistines who scoff at the hosts of the Lord. We must oppose them with all the powers of our mind and defend the Tower of David, guarded, as Scripture says, with a thousand shields. This, zealous men, equipped with holy learning, have already done. I myself, as the least of all, have also entered the arena and exposed myself to the teeth of the wild beasts. At Leipzig I stood up and disputed for twenty days with Luther, the Prince of Dragons, and with Carlstadt; at Baden [in Switzerland, in 1526] too, I had to sustain a combat for several days with Œcolampadius the Capharnaite, and his comrades. I have also wrestled with them from a distance in several little works which I published in Germany and Italy.”
Again, in 1541, in the evening of his days († 1543), in an eighth edition of the “Enchiridion” dedicated to Cardinal Alexander Farnese, while urging him to increased efforts for the bringing about of a Council, he could point to his own three-and-twenty years of incessant conflict with heresy. “O God,” he cries at the sight of the extent to which the evil had grown, “what times are ours!” “Every bulwark against arbitrary private judgment has been torn down; Luther has taught all how to dare all things. Since he has overthrown the authority of the Councils, the Popes, the Holy Fathers and all the Christian Universities, every man, no matter how mad or hair-brained he may be, is free to teach his new fancies to mankind.”[1353]
Yet the author seeks to revive hope and confidence in his own mind and in that of his Catholic readers, and, to this end, quotes on the last page the saying of St. Jerome, which he applies to the misfortunes of his own day: “During the years of persecution the priests of the Church must tell the faithful boldly and confidently: Your churches will be rebuilt; have no fear, peace and unity will once more enter in.—Yes truly, by God’s Mercy there will come an end to the heresies of Luther, Zwingli, Œcolampadius, Blaurer, Osiander, Schnepf and all their ilk, and the olden truth of faith will flourish again. Grant this, Good Jesus, and grant it speedily!” Invocations such as these accord well with the exhortations to pray for the erring which Eck was fond of introducing in this as well as in his other books.
Eck’s writings in defence of the faith include learned as well as popular works, and he was also indefatigable in his labours in the ministry.[1354]
Johann Cochlæus, who like Eck was one of the more famous of Luther’s opponents, had a keen and versatile mind († 1552). He first made Luther’s personal acquaintance at Worms,[1355] and entered the lists against him in 1522 with his “De gratia sacramentorum”; from that time forward he kept a watch on all that Luther wrote, so as to be in readiness to reply to or refute it as occasion arose. He himself gives us the long list of his publications against Luther, in his “Commentaria de actis ... Lutheri,” the work in which he sums up his recollections of the struggles of his time.
From these “Commentaria” of Cochlæus, despite the disparaging treatment accorded them by Sleidanus, “more is to be gleaned concerning the history of the Reformation than from many bungling Protestant eulogies.” Such, at least, is the opinion of C. Krafft, himself a Protestant.[1356]
The writer sought after the truth and wrote with honest indignation. In spite of disappointments, and even privations, he remained faithful to the Church, making during his career many a sacrifice for his cherished convictions; he himself relates how he could not find a printer for his works against Luther and was forced himself to defray a part of the expense of publication, whereas every press was eager to print Luther’s books owing to the demand anticipated.
If, in Cochlæus’s writings, too great passion is often apparent, this may well have been due to that depraved humanism and neo-classicism under the influence of which, more perhaps than any other Catholic man of letters, he stood. We have an instance of this in his “Seven-headed Luther,” which he composed in 1529 at Dresden, whither he had been summoned on Emser’s death.[1357] This book, like his later “Commentaries,” denotes the climax of his polemics. In the dedication he says that the seven-headed monster could not have been born either of God or of Nature, since neither God nor Nature was capable of such an abortion; rather, it must be an offspring of the evil one, who had deceived man and worked him harm, in Paradise under the guise of a serpent, and, often later, under the form of fauns, satyrs, Sileni and various enchantments. In Africa, according to the ancients, there had been a dragon with three or four heads, and Geryon, whom Hercules slew, had also had three heads. But a monster with seven heads, such as was Luther with his sevenfold doctrine, had never been ushered into the world by any country, but must be a creation of the devil. The wicked, perverse, insane apostate monk, long since destined to damnation, had no scruple in deceiving and assailing every upright man with lies, mockery, blasphemy and every kind of nastiness, or in pouring forth seditious falsehoods and insults like an infuriated lioness. The seven-headed hoodman, or hooded dragon, was causing all too much confusion in Germany with his seven heads and was polluting it all with his deadly poison. King Saul, he continues, had sinned in not rooting out the people of Amalek. But to whom did the name of Amalek apply more aptly than to the Lutherans? For Amalek’s was a bestial nation, living bestially according to the flesh, just as the Lutherans—particularly their idol, viz. this monk with his nun—were now doing. In this mad devil’s minister not one crumb of any kind of virtue remained, etc.[1358]