Neither did such motives or the motive of reward curtail the spirit of charity towards the close of the Middle Ages, as some Protestants have chosen to assert. On the contrary they served to animate it.
On the basis of the data furnished by German archives a modern historian remarks of those times: “The spirit of Christian charity showed itself most active in the foundation of benevolent institutions, in which respect hardly any age can compare with the 15th century.”[1701] “Towards the close of the Middle Ages the gifts to hospitals, pest-houses and hostels were simply innumerable”; such is the opinion of another researcher.[1702] Even G. Uhlhorn, in his “Geschichte der christlichen Liebestätigkeit,” had to admit: “No period did so much for the poor as the Middle Ages,” though, agreeably to the standard of his peculiar Lutheranism, this author would fain make out that good works then were done out of mere egotism.
Other Protestant authorities allow, that, even according to Luther’s own admission, the Catholic charity far exceeded that displayed by the new faith. “Here” (among the Catholics), says one historian, “Confraternities for the care of the poor and sick arose in the 16th and 17th centuries which far surpassed anything hitherto known in the purity of their aims and their extraordinary achievements.... Among the Catholics the reform in the nursing of the sick proceeded from Spain, which also produced the men who loomed largest in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, viz. the Jesuits and the Dominicans. From Spain came the model of the modern hospital with the nursing staff as we now know it.” “The Protestant communities during the two centuries which followed the Reformation showed a great lack of fruitfulness as regards works of charity.” “The hospitals in the Protestant districts, with few exceptions, were and remained bad, nor was anything done to improve them.”[1703]
Although Luther’s praiseworthy efforts to awaken charity were not altogether wasted, yet neither his success in some localities nor the supposed purer and higher spirit he introduced into deeds of love were so apparent as to bear comparison with the charity so sedulously cultivated on the Catholic side. On the contrary, his complaints confirm the suspicion that in Lutheran circles works of charity were as a rule lamed by the lack of that very spirit of piety which should have been so manifest. (More in vol. vi., xxxv., 4.)
In 1528 he told the inhabitants of Wittenberg: “This week your offerings will be solicited. I hear that people say they will give nothing to the collectors, but will turn them away. Well, thank God! You most ungrateful creatures, who are so grudging with your money, refuse to give anything, and, not satisfied with this, heap abuse on the ministers of the Church! I wish you a happy year. I am so horrified, that I do not know whether to continue preaching any longer to you, you rude brutes who cannot give even four half-pence ungrudgingly.” It was a disgrace, he says, that so far the fiscal authorities had been obliged to provide for the churches, the schools and the poor in the hospitals, whom it was the people’s duty as Christians to support. “Now that you are called upon to give four beggarly half-pence, you feel it a burden.” “Deceivers will come who will wax fat at your expense as happened formerly [in Catholic times]. I am sorry that you have arrived at such a glorious state of freedom, free from all tyrants and Papists, for, thankless brutes that you are, you don’t deserve this Evangelical treasure. Unless you mend your ways and act differently I shall cease to preach to you in order not to cast pearls before swine and to give what is holy to the dogs, and shall proclaim the Gospel to my real students who are the poor beggar-men. Formerly you gave so much to the wicked seducers [the Catholic clergy] and now ...!”[1704] Already, the year before, he had vigorously complained from the pulpit, though, as it would appear, all to no purpose: “Amongst those who hear the Word, faith is dull and charity has grown cold and hope is at an end, etc. There is no one who pities his brother’s distress. Once upon a time we gave a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand pieces of gold to the monks, canons or priests for the building of monasteries and churches. To-day no one can be found who will give a coin, let alone a piece of gold, for the poor. For this reason God sends His judgments on the world and curses the earth on account of the contempt for His Word and His Evangel; but we may look for yet worse things in the future.”[1705]
Amongst the reminiscences of his journey to Italy, Luther retained a kindly memory of the charity as practised by the Catholics, particularly at Florence. We read in Lauterbach’s Diary on Aug. 1, 1538: “Then Luther spoke of charity in Italy and how the hospitals there were cared for. They are located in princely buildings, are amply supplied with food and drink, the servants are most diligent and attentive, the physicians very skilled, the bedding and clothing are perfectly clean and the beds are even painted. When a patient is brought in, he has at once to strip, an inventory of his clothes is made in the presence of a notary and they are then kept carefully for him. Then he is dressed in a white shirt and put in a nice painted bed with clean sheets, and after a little while two physicians are at his bedside; servants come and bring him food and drink in perfectly clean glass goblets, which they do not touch even with a finger, carrying everything on a tray. Even the greatest ladies come there, muffled up completely so as to be unrecognisable, in order to serve the poor for some days, after which they return to their homes. At Florence I have seen what great care is bestowed on the hospitals. Also on the foundling homes where the children are admirably installed, fed and taught, are all dressed alike and in the same colour and treated in a right fatherly way.”[1706]
[5. Other Innovations in Religious Doctrine]
The absence of any logical system in Luther’s theological and moral views is so far from being denied by Protestants who know his theology that they even reproach Luther’s opponents for expecting to find logic in him. No system, but merely “the thought-world of a great religious man” is, so they say, all that we may look for in his works; it is true that he had a “general religious theory,” but it was “faulty, in its details not seldom contradictory, and devised for a practical and polemical object.” “Luther was no dogmatic theologian or man of system,” hence his individual sayings must not always be treated as though they were parts of a system.