Luther expected great things from his ruthless attack and from the scene in which the devil appears. It would be, so he fancied, a “test of the wisdom and power of the Papacy.”[1832] His friend Jonas, in a letter of Oct. 26, 1533, speaking of the yet unpublished “Winckelmesse,” calls it a real “battering-ram” to be used against the Papacy; it was long since the Professor had been heard speaking in such a way of the Mass, the Pope and the priests.[1833] Those of the preachers who were fallen priests rejoiced at the advice they found in the book for the quieting of their consciences when tempted by the devil, and at its hint that they should rub their anointed hands with soap and lye the better to obliterate the mark of the Beast.
The writing was translated by Jonas into Latin, but his rendering was a very free and rhetorical one.
The interest it aroused was increased by the negative attitude which Luther seemed to assume towards the Real Presence. To many of his followers Luther seemed to come to an opinion not far removed from the Zwinglian denial of the Presence. Luther learned that Prince Johann of Anhalt and others had expressed their anxiety lest the booklet “should be understood as though I agreed with the fanatics and enemies of the Sacrament.” Hence he at once issued a fresh writing entitled: “A Letter of D. Mart. Luther to a good friend concerning his book on the Corner-Masses” (1534).[1834]
To attack the Sacrament and the Real Presence was, he there declared, far from his thoughts. I shall prove “that I do not hold, nor ever shall hold to all eternity, with the wrong doctrine of the foes of the Sacrament—or to speak quite plainly—with that of Carlstadt, Zwingli and their followers.”[1835] But by this he stood: “Whoever, like the Papists, did not celebrate the Sacrament according to the ordinance of Christ, had no right to say Christ was there”; “a counterfeit florin, struck contrary to the King’s order, can never be a good one.”[1836] “May God bestow on all pious Christians such a mind, that, when they hear the Mass spoken of, they quake with fear and cross themselves as they would at the sight of some abomination of the devil.”[1837]
Johann Cochlæus at once replied to the “Winckelmesse” with an appeal to the correctness of ecclesiastical tradition. In the same year he published Innocent the Third’s “De sacro altaris mysterio” and Isidore of Sevilla’s “De ecclesiasticis officiis.” These venerable witnesses of Christian antiquity had, he declared, “a better claim to be believed than Luther’s furies.” In addition to this he also wrote a popular theological defence in the vernacular “On the Holy Mass and Priestly ordination” (Leipzig, 1534). In this writing he begins by emphasising the claims of ecclesiastical tradition and the teaching office of the Church: “The Church understands Scripture far better and more surely, thanks to the Holy Spirit promised by Christ and duly sent her, than Luther does by his evil spirit.” He laid down the principle which he urged was the only true and reliable guide in the controversies of the age: Hold fast to the teaching of the Church rather than to the subjective interpretations of the Bible, which are often so divergent. He was not, however, altogether happy in his choice of expressions, for instance, when he exclaims: “Bible hither, Bible thither!” for this might well have given the impression, that, on his side, small account was made of the Bible. In reality this was merely his way of retorting on Luther’s: “Tradition hither, Tradition thither.” The theologian, who elsewhere is careful to set its true value on the Bible, seeks in this way to brand the tricks played with the Bible; similar phrases then in use were the one we already know, “Bible, Babble, Bubble,” and Luther’s own sarcastic saying: “The Bible is a heresy-book.”[1838]
Cochlæus not only brought forward, in support of the Mass, besides Holy Scripture, that tradition which Luther had treated so scornfully, but also replied to his opponent’s perversions and charges on all the other counts. Of the grievous disorders which Luther said had come under his notice during his stay in Rome, what Cochlæus says is much to the point: “It is quite possible, that, among so many thousands from all lands, there may have been some such desperate villains. But it is not seemly that Luther on that score should seek to calumniate pious and devout monks and priests and make the people distrustful of them.”[1839]
In his familiar conversations Luther repeatedly reveals the psychological side of his attack on the Mass.
He said in 1540: “From the earliest years [of the revolt against the Church] I was grievously tempted by the thought: ‘If the Mass is really the highest form of Divine worship, then, Good God, how wickedly have I behaved, towards God!’” He sought to stifle the voice of conscience, which he called a temptation, by insisting still more strongly on the worthlessness of the Mass.[1840] “But this is quite certain,” he says, “the Mass is Moasim.”[1841] Moasim, according to Dan. xi. 38, was the idol to be set up by Antichrist, in the letters of whose name, according to Luther, we find the word “Mass”; this idol, he says, was honoured with “silver, gold and precious stones,” because the Mass helps to bring in such great wealth.
“From the Mass,” he said in the same conversation, “came every sort of ungodliness, it was an ‘abominanda abominatio,’ and yet it was held in such honour.”—In another conversation in the same year we hear him say: “the Canon was looked upon as so sacred that to attack it was like attacking both heaven and earth. When first I wrote against the Mass and against the Canon I could hardly hope that people would agree with me.... But when my writing [the ‘Sermon on the New Testament, i.e. the Mass,’ 1520] was published, I found that many had shared my temptation; they thanked me for deliverance from their terror.”[1842]
In Luther’s efforts to deliver himself and others “from their terror” and to convince himself that “this is quite certain,” lies the sole explanation of his wild statements that his former saying of Mass—though undoubtedly done in good faith, and, at first, even with pleasure and devotion[1843]—was his worst sin,[1844] and that he would rather have “kept a bawdy house or been a robber than to have blasphemed and traduced Christ for fifteen years by the saying of Masses,”[1845] and, again, that “no tongue can tell the abomination of the Mass, nor can any heart believe its wickedness. It would not have been astonishing had God destroyed the world on account of the Mass, as He will without a doubt soon do by fire.”[1846] The Mass embodies a “pestilential mistake of the self-righteousness of the opus operatum.” In the Popish Mass an ignorant priest, who does not even know Latin, takes it on himself to blot out the sins of others.[1847]