He and his Catholic readers were, however, quite prepared to find Luther refusing even to listen to such proofs taken from tradition. “Ah, bah, tradition this way, tradition that!” he had already cried, with regard to this very question, when striving to shake himself free of the fetters of the Church’s doctrine.
Eck, however, also attacked Luther from another point. Luther had placed in the very forefront of his writing the assertion, that he had never advised the people to have recourse to violent measures, whether with regard to the Mass or the Catholic worship generally, or invited them to revolt; in the preface Eck accordingly promises to take him to task both concerning the Canon and for his responsibility in the rising. “I shall, please God, prove Luther a liar on both counts.” He convicts him of inciting to revolt on the strength of “five proofs” taken from various works of his.
The pecuniary aspect of the Mass supplied Luther and the preachers with an effective means of exciting the people which they were not slow to seize. The abuses, real or apparent, of the system of Mass-stipends, were worked to their utmost by the demagogues.
In Luther’s extravagant language the Sacrifice of the Mass is simply made to appear a rich field for vulgar greed of gain, discovered and exploited by the Papists because it filled their pockets. The amount brought in by Masses for the Dead was chiefly to blame for the spread of the Mass. “This invention [Masses for the Dead] has been worth money to them,” he cries, “so that they need not say Mass for nothing.”[1812] “At All Saints’, here at Wittenberg, the money is godlessly thrown away [by foundation-Masses, annual commemorations, etc.]; the three Mass-priests there, ‘three pigs or paunches,’” celebrate it “in the house of infamy simply because they worship money.”[1813]
Many of the apostles of the new faith preached in the same strain as Luther. Others, as Stephen Agricola for instance states he did, were content to scourge “the great superstition and hindrance to the true honour of God,” i.e. the abuses. Agricola, if we may trust him, “was loath to see Masses for the dead said for money, as this should be done out of pure charity.”[1814] When, later, Flacius Illyricus made similar charges against the Catholics on the pretext of the alms given for Masses, the Dominican, Johann Fabri, replied: “What do you sectarians do gratis? People can never give enough for your preaching, your psalm-singing, your Supper, etc., so that yearly a very large sum has to be spent on your support.... Why then do you abuse the poor priests who take payment for their work and unkindly twit them for saying Mass solely for money? What answer would you make were I to say: You too, Illyricus, preach for the sake of money?”[1815]
The charges of self-seeking and avarice had, however, in some places so strong an effect as to lead to popular risings against the celebration of Mass. This recalls the account given by Erasmus of the ready success he had noticed attended the addresses of the preachers: “The Mass has been abolished,” he writes, “but what more holy thing has been set in its place?... Their churches I have never entered. I have occasionally seen those who listened to their sermons come out like men possessed, with anger and fury writ large upon their faces.... They walked like warriors who have just been harangued by their general. When have their sermons ever produced penance and contrition? Do they not devote most of their time to abuse of the clergy and their lives?... Are risings rare amongst these evangelicals? And do they not resort to violence on the slightest provocation?”[1816]
The peaceable union of Christians before the Altar of Sacrifice in the “Mystery of Faith” had made way for warfare. The absence of the sacrifice avenged itself, however, in the Churches given over to the new religion by the dreariness and utter desolation of the sacred buildings once so full of life; not to mention the dreadful controversies, the bare “ministry of the Word” and the one-sided effort to make of the Supper simply a source of edification and increase of faith, could not suffice to attract the multitude to the Eucharistic celebration. The great sacrifice, which by its own infinite worth and quite independently of its power to edify, glorifies God in His Temple, and so powerfully stimulates the faithful to unite their offering with the sacramental oblation, had been torn from the midst of the congregation.
If we seek here for the connecting link between Luther’s bitter hostility to the Mass and his system as a whole, we shall find, that, granted the doctrine of the imputation of the merits of Christ by faith alone, the Eucharistic Sacrifice had no real place left. Luther said in 1540: “Where the ‘locus’ [’iustificationis’] is rightly taught and stands, there can be nothing evil; for the antecedens, ‘faith alone justifies,’ spells the fall of the Mass,” etc.[1817]