In the protocols of the first Visitation (1527-1529) we read: The greater number of those entrusted with a cure of souls, are “in an evil case”; reckless marriages are frequent amongst the preachers; complaints were lodged with the Electoral Visitors concerning the preacher at Lucka who “had three wives living.”[682] At a later Visitation a preacher was discovered to have had six children by two sisters. Many of the preachers had wives whom they had stolen from husbands still living. The account of the people whether in town or country was not much more reassuring; many localities had earned themselves a bad repute for blasphemy and general adultery. In many places the people were declared to be so wicked that only “the hangman and the jailer would be of any avail.” Besides this, the parsonages were in a wretched state. The foundations had fallen in, or, in many instances, had been seized by the nobles, the lands and meadows belonging to the parsonages had been sold by the parish-councils, and the money from the sale of chalices and monstrances spent on drink. The educational system was so completely ruined that in the Wittenberg district, for instance, in which there were 145 town and country livings with hundreds of chapels of ease, only 21 schools remained.
As early as 1527 Melanchthon had viewed with profound dismay the “serious ruin and decay that menaces everything good,” which, he says, was clearly perceived at Wittenberg. “You see,” he writes, “how greatly men hate one another, how great is the contempt for all uprightness, how great the ignorance of those who stand at the head of the churches, and above all how forgetful the rulers are of God.” And again, in 1528: “No one hates the Evangel more bitterly than those who like to be considered ours.” “We see,” he laments in the same year, “how greatly the people hate us.”[683]
His friend Justus Jonas, who was acquainted with the conditions in the Saxon Electorate from long personal experience, wrote in 1530: “Those who call themselves Evangelical are becoming utterly depraved, and not only is there no longer any fear of God among them but there is no respect for outward appearances either; they are weary of and disgusted with sermons, they despise their pastors and preachers and treat them like the dirt and dust of the streets.” “And, besides all this, the common people are becoming utterly shameless, insolent and ruffianly, as if the Evangel had only been sent to give lewd fellows liberty and scope for the practice of all their vices.”[684]
The next Visitation, held seven years later, only confirmed the growth of the evil. In the Wittenberg district in particular complaints were raised concerning “the increase in godless living, the prevailing contempt and blasphemy of the Word of God, the complete neglect of the Supper and the general flippant and irreverent behaviour during Divine service.”[685]
Of a later period, when the fruits of the change of religion had still further ripened, Melanchthon’s friend Camerarius says: “Mankind have now attained the goal of their desires—boundless liberty to think and act exactly as they please. Reason, moderation, law, morality and duty have lost all value, there is no reverence for contemporaries and no respect for posterity.”[686]
The Elector Augustus of Saxony goes more into particulars when he writes: “A disgraceful custom has become established in our villages. The peasants at the high festivals, such as Christmas and Whitsuntide, begin their drinking-bouts on the eve of the festival and prolong them throughout the night, and the next day they either sleep through the morning or else come drunk to church and snore and grunt like pigs during the whole service.” He reproves the custom of making use of the churches as wine-cellars, the contempt displayed for the preachers, the scoffing at sacred rites and the “frequent blasphemy and cursing.” “Murder and abominable lasciviousness” were the consequences of such contempt for religion. But any improvement was not to be looked for seeing that there were hardly any schools remaining, and the cure of souls was left principally in the charge of ministers such as the Elector proceeds to describe. The nobles and the other feudal lords, he says, “appoint everywhere to the ministry ignorant, destitute artisans, or else rig out their scribes, outriders or grooms as priests and set them in the livings so as to have them all the more under their thumb.”[687]
The state of things in Saxony provided the Landgrave with a serviceable weapon against Luther when the latter showed an inclination to repudiate the bigamy, or to say he had merely “acted the fool” in sanctioning it. The passage has been quoted above (p. 56), where the Landgrave exhorted him to pay less attention to the world’s opinion, but rather to set himself and all the preachers in the Saxon Electorate to the task of checking the “vices of adultery, usury and drunkenness which were no longer regarded as sins, and that, not merely by writings and sermons, but by earnest admonition and by means of the ban.”
It is true that the conditions which accompanied the introduction of his new system were a trial to Luther, which he sought to remedy. The Landgrave could not reproach him with actual indifference. Not merely by “writings and sermons,” but also by “earnest admonition” and even by re-introducing the “ban of the Church” he strove to check the rising tide of moral evil. But the evil was the stronger of the two, and the causes, for which he himself was responsible, lay too deep. We have an example of the way in which he frequently sought to curb the mischief, in his quarrel with Hans Metzsch, the depraved Commandant of Wittenberg, whom he excluded from the Supper.[688]
He sums up his grievances against the state of things in the Electorate and at Wittenberg in a letter to Johann Mantel, in which he calls Wittenberg a new Sodom. He writes to this preacher (Nov. 10, 1539): “Together with Lot (2 Peter ii. 8), you and other pious Christians, I, too, am tormented, plagued and martyred in this awful Sodom by shameful ingratitude and horrible contempt of the Divine Word of our beloved Saviour, when I see how Satan seizes upon and takes possession of the hearts of those who think themselves the first and most important in the kingdom of Christ and of God; beyond this I am tempted and plagued with interior anxiety and distress.” He then goes on to console his friend, who was also troubled with melancholy and the fear of death, by a sympathetic reference to the death of Christ. He then admits again of himself that he was “distressed and greatly plagued” and “compassed by more than one kind of death in this miserable, lamentable age, where there is nothing but ingratitude, and where every kind of wickedness gains the upper hand.... Wait for the Lord with patience, for He is now at hand and will not delay to come. Amen.”[689]