Pollich of Mellerstadt, one of the most highly respected Professors of the Wittenberg University, said of Luther, when as yet the latter was scarcely known: “Keep an eye on that young monk, Master Martin Luther, he has a reason so fine and keen as I have not come across in all my life; he will certainly become a man of eminence.”[872] Jonas, his friend, assures us that others too, amongst them Lang and Staupitz, admitted they had never known a man of such extraordinary talent.[873] Urban Rhegius, who visited him in 1534, in the report he gives shows himself quite overpowered by Luther’s mind and talent: “He is a theologian such as we rarely meet. I have always thought much of Luther, but now I think of him more highly than ever. For now I have seen and heard what cannot be explained in writing to anyone not present.... I will tell you how I feel. It is true we all of us write occasionally and expound the Scriptures, but, compared with Luther, we are children and mere schoolboys.”[874]
His friends generally stood in a certain awe of his greatness, though, in their case, we can account otherwise for their admiration. Later writers too, even amongst the Catholics, felt in the imposing language of his writings the working of a powerful mind, much as they regretted his abuse of his gifts. “His mind was both sharp and active,” such was the opinion of Sforza Pallavicini, the Jesuit author of a famous history of the Council of Trent; “he was made for learned studies and pursued them without fatigue to either mind or body. His learning seemed his greatest possession, and this he was wont to display in his discourse. In him felicity of expression was united with a stormy energy. Thereby he won the applause of those who trust more to appearance than to reality. His talents filled him with a self-reliance which the respect shown him by the masses only intensified.”[875] “Luther’s mind was a fertile one,” he writes elsewhere, “but its fruits were more often sour than ripe, more often abortions of a giant than viable offspring.”[876] His alert and too-prolific fancy even endangered his other gifts by putting in the shade his real intellectual endowments. “His imagination,” Albert Weiss truly says, “was, next to his will, the most strongly developed of his inner faculties, and as powerful as it was clear. Herein chiefly lies the secret of his power of language.”[877]
To his temperamental and intellectual qualities, which undoubtedly stamped his works with the impress of a “giant,” we must add his obstinate strength of will and his extraordinary tenacity of purpose.
Were it possible to separate his will from his aims and means, and to appreciate it apart, then one could scarcely rate it high enough. Thousands, even of the bravest, would have quailed before the difficulties he had to face both without and within his camp. The secret of his success lay simply in his ability to rise superior to every difficulty, thanks to his defiance and power of will. Humanly it is hard to understand how all attacks and defeats only served to embolden him. Protestants have spoken of the “demoniacal greatness” manifest in Luther, have called him a man of “huge proportions and power” in whose “breast two worlds wrestled,” and, on account of his “heroic character,” have even claimed that history should overlook “the vices proper to heroes.”[878]
Among Catholic writers the earlier Döllinger, for all his aversion for Luther’s purpose and the weapons he employed, nevertheless says of him: “If such a one is justly to be styled a great man, who, thanks to his mighty gifts and powers, accomplishes great things and brings millions of minds under his sway—then the son of the peasant of Möhra must be reckoned among the great, yea, among the greatest of men.”[879] Upon the disputed definition of “greatness” we cannot enter here. (See vol. vi., xl., 1.) Yet, in view of the intellectual gifts lavished on Luther, Döllinger’s words are undoubtedly not far away from the mark, particularly when we consider his gigantic capacity for work and the amazing extent of his literary labours, distracted though he was by other cares.
We have already had occasion to give the long list of the works he penned in 1529 and 1530,[880] and we may add some further examples. In 1521, in which year he lost over five weeks in travelling, not to speak of the correspondence and other business which claimed his attention in that exciting period of his life, he still found time to write more than twenty works of varying length which in the Weimar edition cover 985 large octavo pages; he also translated a book by Melanchthon into German, commenced his translation of the Bible and his church Postils. In 1523 he produced no less than twenty-four books and pamphlets, and, besides this, his lectures on Deuteronomy (247 pages in the Weimar edition) and a German translation of the whole Pentateuch. He also preached about 150 sermons, planned other works and wrote the usual flood of letters, of which only a few, viz. 112, have been preserved, amongst them being some practically treatises in themselves and which duly appeared in print. Even in 1545, when already quite broken down in health and when two months were spent in travelling, he managed with a last effort, inspired by his deadly hate, to compose even so considerable a book as his “Wider das Bapstum zu Rom vom Teuffel gestifft,” as well as other smaller writings and the usual number of private letters, circulars, and memoranda.[881] At the very end he told his friend, the preacher Jacob Probst, that he meant to work without intermission though old and weary, with a failing eyesight and a body racked with pain.
These labours, of which the simple enumeration of his books gives us an inkling, even the most fertile mind could have performed only by utilising every moment of his time and by renouncing all the allurements to distraction and repose. The early hours of the morning found Luther regularly in his study, and, in the evening, after his conversation with his friends, he was wont to betake himself early to bed so as to be able to enjoy that good sleep, without which, he declared, he could not meet the demands made upon him.
That, however, behind all his fiery zeal for work, certain moral influences not of the highest also had a share is obvious from what has been said previously.