The “great work of the Reformation,” i.e. of real reform, to which Luther appeals—unless he was prepared to regard it as consisting solely in the damage done to the Roman Church—surely demanded that, at least at Wittenberg and in Luther’s immediate sphere, some definite fruits in the shape of real moral amelioration should be apparent. Yet it was precisely of Wittenberg and his own surroundings that Luther complained so loudly. The increase of every kind of disorder caused him to write to George of Anhalt: “We live in Sodom and Babylon, or rather must die there; the good men, our Lots and Daniels, whom we so urgently need now that things are daily becoming worse, are snatched from us by death.”[704] So bad were matters that Luther was at last driven to flee from Wittenberg. The sight of the immorality, the vexation and the complaints to which he was exposed became too much for him; perhaps Wittenberg would catch the “Beggars’ dance, or Beelzebub’s dance,” he wrote; “at any rate get us gone from this Sodom.”[705]
According to his letters, the Wittenberg authorities did not interfere even in the case of the gravest disorders, but allowed themselves to be “playthings of the devils”; they looked on whilst the students “were ruined by bad women,” and “though half the town is guilty of adultery, usury, theft and cheating, no one tries to put the law in force. They all simply smile, wink at it and do the same themselves. The world is a troublesome thing.”[706] “The hoiden-folk have grown bold,” he writes to the Elector, “they pursue the young fellows into their very rooms and chambers, freely offering them their love; and I hear that many parents are recalling their children home because, they say, when they send their children to us to study we hang women about their necks.”[707] He is aghast at the thought that the “town and the school” should have heard God’s Word so often and so long and yet, “instead of growing better, become worse as time goes on.” He fears that at his end he may hear, “that things were never worse than now,” and sees Wittenberg threatened with the curse of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capharnaum.[708]
In point of fact he did preach a sermon to the Wittenbergers in which, like a prophet, he predicts the judgments of heaven.[709]
In another sermon he angrily acquaints them with his determination: “What am I to do with you Wittenbergers? I am not going to preach to you any longer of Christ’s Kingdom, seeing that you will not accept it. You are thieves, robbers and men of no mercy. I shall have to preach you the ‘Sachsenspiegel.’” They refuse, he says, to give anything to clergy, church or schools. “Are you still ignorant, you unthankful beasts (‘ingratæ bestiæ’) of what they do for you?” He concludes: They must make up their minds to provide the needful, “otherwise I shall abandon the pulpit.”[710]
“Later you will find my prophecy fulfilled,” he cried on one occasion after having foretold “woes”; “then you will long for one of those exhortations of Martin Luther.”[711]
His Table-Talk bears, if possible, even stronger witness than his letters and sermons to the conditions at Wittenberg, for there he freely lets himself go. Some of the things he says of the town and neighbourhood, found in the authentic notes of docile pupils, such as Mathesius, Lauterbach and Schlaginhaufen, are worth consideration.
We hear from Lauterbach not only that Hans Metzsch, the town Commandant whom Luther had “excommunicated,” continued to persecute the good at Wittenberg “with satanic malice” and to “boast of his wickedness,”[712] but that in the same year Luther had to complain of other men of influence and standing in the town who injured the Evangel by their example. “So great is the godlessness of those of rank that one was not ashamed to boast of having begotten forty-three children in a single year; another asked whether he might not take 40 per cent interest per annum.” In the same year Luther was obliged to exclude from the Sacrament another notorious, highly-placed usurer.[713]
“The soil of Wittenberg is bad,” he declared, speaking from sad experience; “even were good, honest people sown here the crop would be one of coarse Saxons.”[714]
“The Gospel at Wittenberg,” he once said poetically, if we may trust Mathesius, “is like rain that falls on water, i.e. it has no effect. The good catch the law and the wicked the Gospel.”[715]