Oldecop, the Catholic chronicler and Luther’s former pupil, who, as a youth and before the apostasy, had listened to him at Wittenberg, remembered in his old age how Luther, without setting himself in opposition to their youthful jollifications had known how to restrain them; just as he “reproved sin fearlessly from the pulpit,”[779] so he earnestly sought to banish temptation from the pleasures of the students.
We may here recall, that, as early as 1520, Luther had urged that all bordels should be done away with, those “public, heathenish haunts of sin,” as he termed them, at the same time using their existence as a weapon against the Catholic past.[780] The fact that many such houses were closed down at that time was, however, to some extent due to fear of the prevalent “French disease.”
When, in his old age, in 1543, the arrival of certain light women threatened new danger to the morals of the Wittenberg students, already exposed to the ordinary temptations of the town, Luther decided to interfere and make a public onslaught at the University. This attack supplies us with a striking example of his forcefulness, whilst also showing us what curious ideas and expressions he was wont to intermingle with his well-meant admonitions.
“The devil,” so he begins, “has, by means of the gainsayers of our faith and our chief foes [presumably the Catholics], sent here certain prostitutes to seduce and ruin our young men. Hence I, as an old and tried preacher, would paternally implore you, my dear children, to believe that the Wicked One has sent these prostitutes hither, who are itchy, shabby, stinking and infected with the French disease as, alas, experience daily proves. Let one good comrade warn the other, for one such infected strumpet can ruin 10, 20, 30, or even 100 sons of good parents and is therefore to be reckoned a murderess and much worse than a poisoner. Let one help the other in this poisonous mess, with faithful advice and warning, as each one would himself wish to be done by!”
He then threatens them with the penalties of the Ruler, which dissolute students had to fear, “in order that they may take themselves off, and the sooner the better”; “here [at Wittenberg] there is a Christian Church and University to which people resort to learn the Word of God, virtue and discipline. Whoever wants to drab had better go elsewhere.”
Were he able, he would have such women “bled and broken on the wheel.” Young people ought, however, to resist concupiscence and fight against “their heat”; it was not to no purpose that the Holy Ghost had said: “Go not after thy lusts” (Eccl. xviii. 30). He concludes: “Pray God He may send you a pious child [in marriage], there will in any case be trouble enough.”[781]
Some polemics have characterised such exhortations of Luther’s as mere “hypocrisy.” Whoever knows his Luther, knows, however, how unfounded is this charge. Nor was there any hypocrisy about the other very urgent exhortation which Luther caused to be read from the pulpit at Wittenberg in 1542, when himself unable to preach, and which is addressed to both burghers and students. He there implores “the town and the University for God’s sake not to allow it to be said of them, that, after having heard God’s Word so abundantly and for so long, they had grown worse instead of better.” “Ah, brother Studium,” he says, “spare me and let it not come to this that I be obliged like Polycarp to exclaim, ‘O my God, why hast Thou let me live to see this?’” He points to his “grizzly head” which at least should inspire respect.[782]
The Preacher and Catechist.
As a preacher Luther was hard-working, nay, indefatigable; in this department his readiness of speech, his familiarity with Holy Scripture and above all his popular ways stood him in good stead. At first he preached in the church attached to the monastery; later on his sermons were frequently preached in the parish church, and, so long as his health stood the strain, he sometimes even delivered several sermons a day.[783] Even when not feeling well he took advantage of every opportunity to mount the pulpit. In 1528 he took over the parochial sermons during Bugenhagen’s absence from Wittenberg,[784] in spite of being already overworked and ill in body.