“What holiness, devotion and heroic virtue do we not find among non-Catholics. God’s Grace is not confined within the four walls of the Catholic Church, but breathes even in the hearts of outsiders, working in them, when opportunity affords, the miracle of justification and adoption, and thus ensuring the eternal salvation of countless multitudes who are either entirely ignorant of the true Church, as are the upright heathen, or mistake her true form and nature as do countless Protestants, brought up amidst the crassest prejudice. To all such as these the Church does not close the gates of Heaven” (J. Pohle).
It would be superfluous to enumerate amongst Luther’s favourable traits the respect he always paid to Holy Scripture as the Word of God, demanding for its infallible revelations a willing faith and the sacrifice of one’s own whims.
Greatly as he erred in wilfully applying his new, subjective principle of interpretation and in excluding certain of the Sacred Books, still the Bible itself he always declared to be an object of the highest reverence. Thanks to a retentive memory he made his own the words of Scripture, and even adopted its style. His “enthusiasm for the inexhaustible riches and Divine character of Holy Scripture,” of which the earlier Döllinger speaks,[818] has, and with some reason, been held up by Luther’s followers as the model, nay, the palladium of Lutheranism as a whole; on the other hand, however, Döllinger’s accompanying censure on Luther’s “arbitrary misuse” of the Bible-text must also commend itself not only to Catholics but to every serious student of the Bible. High praise for Luther’s acquaintance with Scripture combined with severe blame for his deviation from tradition are forthcoming from a contemporary of the early years of Luther’s public career. In a short, unprinted and anonymous work entitled “Urteil über Luther,” now in the Munich State Library, we read: “In the fine art of the written Word of God, i.e. the Bible, I hold Martin Luther to be the most learned of men, whether of those now living on earth or of those who have departed long since; he is, moreover, well versed in the two languages, both Latin and German. I do not, however, regard him as a Christian—for to be learned and eloquent is not to be a Christian—but as a heretic and schismatic”; he was, it adds, “the scourge of an angry God.”[819]
In the field of scriptural activity his German translation of the whole Bible has procured for him enduring fame. Since the birth of Humanism not a few scholars had drawn attention to the languages in which the Bible was originally written; Luther, however, was the first who ventured to make a serious attempt to produce a complete translation of all the Sacred Books on the basis of the original text.
Thanks to his German version, from the linguistic point of view so excellent, Protestants down to our own day have been familiar with the Bible. His rendering of the Bible stories and doctrines, at once so able and so natural, was a gain not only to the language of religion but even to profane literature, just as his writings generally have without question largely contributed to the furtherance of the German tongue.
The scholarly Caspar Ulenberg, writing on this subject from the Catholic side in the 16th century, expresses himself most favourably. “What Luther,” he says, “after consulting the recognised opinion of Hebrew and Greek experts, took to be the true meaning of the text under discussion, that he clothed in pure and elegant German, on the cultivation of which he had all his life bestowed great care. He had made such progress in the art of writing, teaching and expounding, that, if we take into consideration the beauty and the brilliance of his language, so free from artifice, as well as the originality of his expression, we must allow that he excelled all in the use of the German tongue so that none can compare with him. Thus it was that he gained so uncanny an influence over the hearts of his Germans, that, by caressing and flattering and using the allurements of the Divine Word, he could make them believe whatever he pleased. In this translation of the Bible he was, above all, at pains, by means of a certain elegance and charm of speech, to entice all to become his readers, and thus to win men’s hearts.”[820]
Luther cannot indeed be called the creator of New-High-German, either by reason of his translation of the Bible or of his other German writings. Yet, using as he did the already existing treasure of the language with such ability, his influence on the German language was necessarily very great, especially as, owing to the great spread of his writings in those early days of printing, his works were practically the first in the literary field, and, indeed, in many places excluded all others. “Luther’s importance as regards the language,” declares one of the most recent students of this matter, “is less apparent in the details of grammar, in which he is sometimes rather backward, than in the general effect of his exertions on behalf of New-High-German.” It is of small importance, the same writer remarks, “if in the mere wealth of common idioms one or other of the towns even within the confines of his native Saxon land—Grimma, Leipzig, Dresden—were in advance of the language employed by Luther.”[821]
Luther’s translation of the Bible will be treated of more in detail elsewhere (vol. v., xxxiv., 3). Here, however, mention may be made of the fine quality of the German used in his sermons, his theological and polemical writings, as well as in his popular works of devotion.
The figures and comparisons in which his sparkling fancy delights, particularly in the devotional booklets intended for the common people, his popular, sympathetic and often thoughtful adaptation of his language to the subject and to the personality of the reader, the truly German stamp of his phraseology, lending to the most difficult as well as to the most ordinary subjects just the clothing they require—all this no one can observe and enjoy without paying tribute to his gift of description and language.