As Luther says, “If you are to be saved you must be so sure within yourself of the Word of grace, that even were all men to say the contrary, yea all the angels to deny it, you could yet stand alone and say: I know this Word is true.”[1579]
In practice, nevertheless, Luther was content with very little in the matter of this strength of certitude: “If I have Him [Christ], I am sure that I have everything.... What is still wanting in me is, that I cannot yet grasp it or believe it perfectly. So far as I am able now to grasp it and believe it, so far do I possess it, and if I stick to it this will go on increasing.” But “still there remains an outward feeling of death, of hell, of the devil, of sin and of the law. Even though you feel this, it is merely a warfare that seeks to hinder you from attaining to life everlasting.... We should say: I believe in Christ Jesus, He is mine, and so far as I have Him and believe in Him, thus far am I pious.”[1580]—“Yet believe it I cannot.”[1581]
Luther, according to the legend which he evolved later when defending his doctrine of faith alone and Justification, had started from the intense inward need he felt of certainty of salvation, and with the object, as he says, of “finding a Gracious God.” By his discovery regarding Justification, so his admirers say, he at last found and retained for the rest of his life the sense of a merciful God. The strange thing is, however, that in his severe and protracted struggles of conscience he should, at a later date, have again arrived at this very question: “How can I find a Gracious God?”
He writes in 1527 to Melanchthon: “Like a wretched, reprobate worm I am molested by the spirit of sadness.... I desire nothing and thirst after nothing but a Gracious God.” So greatly was he involved in inward contests that he says: “I am scarce able to drag on my existence; of working or writing I dare not think.”[1582] “Satan is busy,” he exclaims to his friend Wenceslaus Link during these storms, “and would fain make it impossible for me to write; he wants to drag me down to him in hell. May God tread him under foot. Amen!”[1583]
With very many of his followers the assurance of salvation failed to hold good in the presence of death. “We not only do not feel it [this assurance],” so he makes them say, “but rather the contrary.” He admits the phenomenon and seeks to account for it; nay, in his usual way, he makes capital out of it. “In God’s sight,” he says, “the matter is indeed so [i.e. as promised by his doctrine of Justification], but not yet in our eyes and in those of the world; hence our fears still persist until we are released by death.”[1584] “Whoever feels weak let him console himself with this, that no one succeeds perfectly in this [in the attainment of certainty].” “That is one of the advantages enjoyed by heretics,” he cries, “to lull themselves in security.... Nothing is more pestilential than security. Hence, when you feel weak in the faith you must rouse yourself; it is a sign of a good disposition and of the fear of God.”[1585]—Readers of Luther must be prepared for surprising statements.
It is true that he laments bitterly the increase of the fear of death among the new believers. In the case of epidemics he sees to his regret that everybody is “scared and takes to flight.” Far greater than ever under Popery, so he says, “is now, under the strong light of the Evangel, men’s fear of losing their life.”[1586] For this again he has an explanation to hand. When, for instance, the plague spread to Wittenberg in 1538 he wrote: Whence comes all this fear? “Formerly, under Popery, the people were not so much afraid. The reason is this: In Popery we trusted in the merits of the monks and of others, but now each one has to trust to and depend on himself.”[1587] Elsewhere, with the same object of reassuring himself and others, he says: The Evangel with its clear light of truth causes the holiness of God to be better perceived and thus leaves more room for the sense of fear. This he here reckons as an advantage over Popery, though, as a rule, his grievance against Catholicism had been that it excited fearsomeness by the gloomy legal spirit which prevailed in it and by its ignoring of God’s mercy.—We shall not be far wrong if we regard such statements as dictated more by psychological than by theological considerations.
“It is a great thing,” says Luther, referring to his doctrine of faith alone, “to lay claim to righteousness; then man dares to say: I am a son of God; whereas the state of grace affrights him.... Without practice (‘sine practica’) no one is able to repudiate righteousness-by-works and to preach faith alone.”[1588] He bewails “that we are too blind to be able to seize upon the treasure of grace.... We refuse to call ourselves holy,” in spite of the certainty which faith brings us. Here our opponents, the Papists and the Sacramentarians, are not nearly so well off; at least they could not “quiet their conscience” as he could do by his method, because, owing to their works, they were always in doubt as to their own salvation. (At any rate, they were in no state of “pestilential security.”) “They are always in doubt and wondering: Who knows whether it is really pleasing to God?” Yet they cling to works and “say Anathema to Jesus.”[1589]
“I have to labour daily,” he says, “before I can lay hold on Christ”; he adds: “That is due to force of habit, because for so many years [in Popery] I looked upon Christ as a mere judge. It is an old, rotten tree that is rooted in me.... We have, however, now again reached the light; in my case this occurred when I was made a Doctor.... But know this, that Christ is not sent to judge and to punish, not to bite and to slay sinners as I used to fancy and as some still think.”[1590]
His extraordinary esteem for the new doctrine of the power of faith alone and the assurance of salvation, would furnish quite a riddle to one not aware of the constitution of his mind.
So greatly did he prize this doctrine, that, according to the testimony of Melanchthon, he referred to it all other articles of faith, even that of creation. “The article of the forgiveness of sins,” he says, “is the foundation on which the article of the creation of the world rests.”[1591] “If we drop this article then we may well despair. The reason why heretics and fanatics [Papists and sectarians] go astray is simply their ignorance of this doctrine. Without it it is impossible to contend with Satan and with Popery, still less to be victorious.”[1592]—Thanks to such statements as these Luther’s article of Justification came to be termed the article on which the Church stands or falls.