Luther quite candidly admitted the distressing state of things described above without in the least glossing it over, which indeed he could not well have done; in fact, his own statements give us an even clearer insight into the seamy side of life in his day. He speaks of the growing disorders with pain and vexation; the more so since he could not but see that they were being fomented by his doctrine of justification by faith alone.
“This preaching,” he says, “ought by rights to be accepted and listened to with great joy, and everyone ought to improve himself thereby and become more pious. But, unfortunately, the reverse is now the case and the longer it endures the worse the world becomes; this is [the work of] the devil himself, for now we see the people becoming more infamous, more avaricious, more unmerciful, more unchaste and in every way worse than they were under Popery.”[690]
The Evangelicals now are not merely worse, but “seven times worse than before,” so he complains as early as 1529. “For after having heard the Evangel we still continue to steal, lie, cheat, feed and swill and to practise every vice. Now that one devil [that of Popery] has been driven out seven others worse than it have entered into us, as may be seen from the way the Princes, lords, nobles, burghers and peasants behave, who have lost all sense of fear, and regard not God and His menaces.”[691]
From his writings a long, dreary list of sins might be compiled, of which each of the classes here mentioned had been guilty. In the last ten years of his life such lamentations give the tone to most of what he wrote.
“The nobles scrape money together, rob and plunder”; “like so many devils they grind the poor churches, the pastors and the preachers.” “The burghers and peasants do nothing but hoard, are usurers and cheats and behave defiantly and wantonly without any fear of punishment, so that it cries to heaven for vengeance and the earth can endure it no longer.” “On all hands and wherever we turn we see nothing in all classes but a deluge of dreadful ingratitude for the beloved Evangel.”[692]
“Nowadays the Gospel is preached, and whoever chooses can hear it ... but burghers, peasants and nobles all scorn their ministers and preachers.”[693]
“I have often said that a plague must fall upon Germany; the Princes and gentry deserve that our Lord God should play them a trick; there will be such bloodshed that no one will know his own home.”[694] “Now that all this [the Evangel] is preached rightly and plainly, people cannot despise it enough. In old days monasteries and churches were built with no regard for cost, now people won’t even repair a hole in the roof that the minister may lie dry; of their contempt I say nothing, it is enough to move one to tears to witness such scorn. Hence I say: Take care, you are young; it may be you will live to see and experience the coming misfortune that will break over Germany. For a storm will burst over Germany, and that without fail.... I do not mind so much the peasants’ avarice and the fornication and immorality now on the increase everywhere, as the contempt for the Evangel.... That peasants, burghers and nobles thus contemn the Word of God will be their undoing.”[695]
To the question whence the moral decline amongst the adherents of the new teaching came, Luther was wont to give various answers. Their difference and his occasional self-contradictions show how his consciousness of the disorders and the complaints they drew from every side drive him into a corner.
The most correct explanation was, of course, that the mischief was due to the nature of his teaching on faith and good works; to this, involuntarily, he comes back often enough.