A further explanation of his cheerfulness is, however, to be found in the wish to prove against his own misgivings and his theological opponents how joyous and confident he was at heart concerning his cause.
He hints at this himself. I will answer for the “Word of Christ,” so he assures Alveld in his writing against him, “with a cheerful heart and fresh courage, regardless of anyone; for which purpose God too has given me a cheerful, fearless spirit, which I trust they will be unable to sadden to all eternity.”[1262] He often gives the impression of being anxious to show off his cheerfulness. He is fond of speaking of his “steadfast and undaunted spirit”; let Emser, he says, take note and bite his lips over the “glad courage which inspires him day by day.”
Seeking to display this confidence in face of his opponents he exclaims satirically in a writing of 1518: “Here I am.” If there be an inquisitor in the neighbourhood he had better hurry up.[1263]
His courage and entire confidence he expressed as early as 1522 to the Elector Frederick of Saxony who had urged him to fight shy of Duke George: “Even if things at Leipzig were indeed as bad as at Wittenberg [they think they are], I should nevertheless ride thither even though—I hope your Electoral Highness will excuse my foolish words—for nine days running it were to rain Duke Georges, each one nine times as furious as he. He actually looks upon my Lord Christ as a man of straw!”[1264] In such homely words did he speak, even to his own sovereign whose protection counted for so much, in order to make it yet clearer, that he was quite convinced of having received his Evangel, “not from man, but solely from heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ”; the Prince, his protector, should know, that God, “thanks to the Evangel, has made us happy lords over death and all the devils.” For this reason, according to his famous boast, he would still have ridden to Worms in defiance of the devils, even had they outnumbered the tiles on the roofs.[1265]
From the castle of Coburg, though himself a prey to all sorts of anxiety, he addressed the following ironical, though at the same time encouraging, admonition to faint-hearted Melanchthon: Why don’t you fight against your own self? “What more can the devil do than slay us? What then? You fight in every other field, why not then fight also against your own self, viz. your biggest enemy who puts so many weapons against you in Satan’s hands?”[1266] It was thus that Luther was wont to fight against himself and to rob the devil of his fancied weapons.
Often enough did he find salvation in humour alone, for instance, when he had to overcome serious danger, or to beat down difficulties or the censure of his friends and followers. The plague was threatening Wittenberg; hence he jokes away his own fears and those of others with a jest about his “trusty weathercock,” the governor Metzsch; the latter had a nose which could detect the plague while yet five ells below the ground; as he still remained in Wittenberg they had good reason to know that no danger existed. On the same occasion he laughs and cries in the same breath over the behaviour of the schoolboys, all the schools having been already closed as a measure of precaution; the plague had got into their pens and paper so that it would be impossible to make of them “either preachers, pastors,. or schoolmasters; in the end swine and dogs will be our best cattle, towards which end the Papists are busily working.”[1267]
Further instances of jests of this sort, made under untoward circumstances, are met with in connection with his marriage. His union with Catherine Bora, as the reader already knows, set tongues wagging, both in his own camp and outside. The resentment this aroused in him he attempted to banish by a sort of half-jesting, half-earnest defiance. “Since they are already cracked and crazy, I will drive them still madder and so have done with it!”[1268] He jests incidentally over the suddenness of his marriage, over the proof needed to convince even himself that he was really a married man, over his surprise at finding plaits of hair beside him when he awoke; he also makes merry over his not very seemly play on the words Bore and bier.[1269]
At a later date he found the arrangement of the new ritual very irksome, both on account of the difficulty of introducing any sort of uniformity and also owing to the petty outside interests which intruded themselves. Here again he tries to throw such questions to the winds by the use of humour: “Put on three copes instead of one, if that pleases you,” he wrote to Provost George Buchholzer of Berlin, who had sent him an anxious letter of inquiry; and if Joachim, the Brandenburg Elector, is not content with one procession “go around seven times as Josue did at Jericho, and, if your master the Margrave does not mind, His Electoral Highness is quite at liberty to leap and dance, with harps, kettledrums, cymbals and bells as David did before the ark of the Lord.”[1270]
During the whole of his career he felt the embarrassment of being called upon by the Catholics to produce proof of his higher mission. At times he sought to escape the difficulty, so far as miracles went, by arguing on, and straining for all they were worth, certain natural occurrences; on other occasions, however, he took refuge in jests. On one occasion he even whimsically promised to perform a manifest miracle. This was at a time when he was hard put to provide lodgings for the nuns who had fled to Wittenberg and when it was rumoured that he had undertaken a journey simply to escape the trouble. “‘I shall arm myself with prayer,’ he said, ‘and, if it is needful, I shall assuredly work a miracle.’ And at this he laughed,” so the notes of one present relate.[1271]
Luther frequently lays it down that merry talk and good spirits are a capital remedy against temptations to doubts on the faith and remorse of conscience.