In 1522, after having explained his new views on divorce, he puts himself the question, whether this “would not make it easy for wicked men and women to desert each other, and betake themselves to foreign parts”? His reply is: “How can I help it? It is the fault of the authorities. Why do they not strangle adulterers?”[539]
Certain preachers of Lutheranism made matters worse by the fanaticism with which they preached the freedom of the Evangel. So compromising was their support, that other of Luther’s followers found fault with it, for instance, the preacher Urbanus Rhegius[540] It was, however, impossible for these more cautious preachers to prevent Luther’s principles being carried to their consequences, in spite of all the care they took to emphasise his reserves and his stricter admonitions.
The Protestant Rector, J. Rivius, complained in 1547: “If you are an adulterer or lewdster, preachers say ... only believe and you will be saved. There is no need for you to fear the law, for Christ has fulfilled it and made satisfaction for all men.” “Such words seduce people into a godless life.”[541]
E. Sarcerius, the Superintendent of the county of Mansfeld, also bewailed, in a writing of 1555, the growing desecration of the married state: Men took more than one wife; this they did by “fleeing to foreign parts and seeking other wives. Some women do the same. Thus there is no end to the desertions on the part of both husbands and wives.” “In many places horrible adultery and fornication prevail, and these vices have become so common, that people no longer regard them as sinful.” “Thus there is everywhere confusion and scandal both in match-making and in celebrating the marriages, so that holy matrimony is completely dishonoured and trodden under foot.” “Of adultery, lewdness and incest there is no end.”[542]—These complaints were called forth by the state of things in the very county where Luther was born and died.
The convert George Wicel, who resided for a considerable time at Mansfeld, had an opportunity of observing the effects of Luther’s matrimonial teaching and of his preaching generally on a population almost entirely Protestant. He writes, in 1536: “It is enough to break a Christian’s heart to see so many false prophets and heretics flourishing in Germany, whose comforting and frivolous teaching fills the land not merely with adulterers but with regular heathen.”[543] In an earlier work he had said: “Oh, you people, what a fine manner of life according to the Gospel have you introduced by your preaching on Grace! Yes, they cry, you would make of Christ a Moses and a taskmaster; they, however, make of Him a procurer and an Epicurean by their sensual life and knavish example.”[544]
Luther, it is true, had an excuse ready. He pleaded that the freedom of the Gospel was not yet rightly understood. “The masses,” he wrote to Margrave George of Brandenburg, on Sep. 14, 1531, “have now fallen under the freedom of the flesh, and there we must leave them for a while until they have satisfied their lust. Things will be different when the Visitation is in working order [the first Visitation in the Margrave’s lands had taken place as early as 1528]. It is quick work pulling down an old house, but building a new one takes longer.... Jerusalem, too, was built very slowly and with difficulty.... Under the Pope we could not endure the constraint, and the lack of the Word; now we cannot endure the freedom and the superabundant treasure of the Gospel.”[545]
Amidst all these disorders Luther found great consolation in contemplating the anti-Christian character of the Popish Church and Daniel’s supposed prophecy of Antichrist’s enmity for woman.[546] His preachers only too eagerly followed in his footsteps.
George Wicel speaks of the preachers, who, while themselves leading loose lives, used Daniel’s prophecy against the Catholic view of marriage.[547] “They mock at those who wish to remain single or who content themselves with one wife, and quote the words of Daniel: ‘He shall not follow the lust of women nor regard any gods,’ so that anyone belonging to this sect who is not addicted to the pursuit of women, is hardly safe from being taken for Antichrist. The words of St. Paul in Cor. vii., of Our Lord in Mat. xix., concerning the third sex of the eunuchs, and of St. John in Apoc. xiv., on those who have not defiled themselves with women, and, again, of St. Paul when speaking of the ‘vidua digama’ in 1 Tim. v., don’t count a farthing in this Jovinian school[548].... It is an Epicurean school and an Epicurean life and nothing else.” With biting satire, in part the result of the controversy thrust upon him, in part the outcome of his temper, he had declared shortly before, that Lutheranism was all “love of women,” was “full of senseless lust for women”; he uses “gynecophiles” as an adjective to qualify it, and speaks of its “gynecomania”; by this means men were to become better Christians, and be more secure of salvation than all the Saints of God ever were in the ancient apostolic Church. “See there what Satan is seeking by means of this exalted respect for the love of women, and by his glib, feminist preachers in Saxony. Hence his and his followers’ concern for women, to whom they cling so closely that they can hardly get into their pulpits without them, and, rather than live a celibate life, the Evangelist would prefer to be the husband, not of one wife, but of three or four.”[549]
An intimate friend of Luther’s, Johann Brenz, wrote, in 1532, in a book to which Luther supplied the Preface: “The youngsters are barely out of the cradle before they want wives, and girls, not yet marriageable, already dream of husbands.”[550]—After the immoral atmosphere has brought about their fall, writes Fr. Staphylus, “they grow so impudent as to assert that a chaste and continent life is impossible and the gratification of the sexual appetite as essential as eating and drinking.”[551]—The same author, who returned to the Catholic Church, also wrote, in 1562: “So long as matrimony was looked upon as a Sacrament, modesty and an honourable married life was loved and prized, but since the people have read in Luther’s books that matrimony is a human invention ... his advice has been put in practice in such a way, that marriage is observed more chastely and honourably in Turkey than amongst our German Evangelicals.”[552]
The list of testimonies such as these might be considerably lengthened.[553]