Later, however, in 1527, it “began anew.”
Atrocious suffering of mind and bitter anxiety concerning the abuses in the new Church—“a vinegar sourer than all other vinegars, as he calls it,”—immediately preceded his illness which began about July 7, 1527.[1344] Mental uneasiness and self-reproaches accompanied the fainting-fits which at that time seemed to threaten his life. His inward struggles were so severe that Bugenhagen, who tried to comfort him, compares them with the darkness of the soul “so frequently mentioned in the Psalms as illustrative of the spiritual pangs of hell.” “Dr. Martin,” writes the latter, who was pastor at Wittenberg and Luther’s “confessor,” “had in all likelihood been through other such temptations, but none had ever been so severe; this he admitted on the following day to Dr. Jonas, to Dr. Christian [Schurf] and to me. He said they were worse and more dangerous than the bodily ailment which befell him on that same Saturday evening about five o’clock and which was so serious that we feared he would succumb under it.” Luther himself, in those critical days, declared “that he would not retract his doctrine,” and, after making his confession to Bugenhagen as the latter relates, “spoke at considerable length of the spiritual temptation he had been through the same morning, with such fear and trembling as could not be described in words.”[1345] It was then that the curious complaint was involuntarily wrung from him that those who saw his outward behaviour fancied he “lay on a bed of roses, though God knew how it stood with him.” Bugenhagen and Jonas have embellished their accounts of this illness of their friend with many pious utterances supposed to have been spoken by him then.[1346]
The Height of the Storm, 1527-28
The worst struggles, lasting over many months, followed upon Luther’s illness of 1527.
Hardly had he recovered his normal health than we find his letters full of sad allusions to his abiding state of despair and to his fears concerning the faith, probably the most melancholy outpourings of his whole life.
“For more than a week I have been tossed about between death and hell,” he writes to Melanchthon, “so that I still tremble in every limb and feel utterly broken. Waves and storms of despair and blasphemy against God broke over me and I lost Christ almost entirely. But, at the intercession of the saints [his friends] God has begun to take pity on me and has delivered my soul from the lowest hell.”[1347]—“This struggle,” he writes to Justus Menius, “goes beyond my strength.... I am tried not only in body but still more, and worst of all, in soul. God allows Satan and his angels thus to torment me.”[1348]
In a letter of Aug. 21, addressed to Johann Agricola, then still his friend, he informed him that the fight was not yet at an end. “Satan rages against me with all his might. Like another Job (Job xvi. 12), God has set me up as a mark, and He tempts me with intolerable weakness of spirit. The prayers of holy men indeed save me from remaining in his hands, but the wounds I have received in my heart will be hard to heal. I trust that my strivings will turn to the salvation of many.” He concludes by saying that those in power (the Catholics) were unable to get at him, but that so much the more was he plagued in spirit “by the Prince of this world.”[1349] He writes in much the same vein on Aug. 26 to Nicholas Hausmann.
Truly, so he again wrote to Johann Agricola, on Aug. 31, “neither world nor reason can understand how hard it is to realise that Christ is our righteousness, so deeply rooted in us is the doctrine of works, which has grown up with us and become part of us. That Christ may strengthen me I commend myself to your prayers.”[1350] Hence it was his chief dogma, the very rock of his Evangel, that “Satan” was then tampering with. The call for good works was, as he felt, beyond even his power to deny.
“For wellnigh three months I have been feeling wretched,” he wrote on Oct. 8, “not so much in body as in soul, so that I have written little or nothing, so greatly has Satan tossed me in the sieve [Luke xxii. 31]”[1351]—“God has not yet completely restored me to health,” he announces on Oct. 19, “but in His wisdom leaves me a prey to Satan who assails me and buffets me; but God also sends help and protection.”[1352]
He speaks of himself, on Oct. 27, as “a wretched and abject worm, harassed by the spirit of sadness,” “I seek and thirst for nought else than for a gracious God, for as such He reveals Himself even to His enemies and contemners.”[1353] Luther had claimed, that, through his new doctrine and through flinging aside his monkish frock he had found “a gracious God,” and proclaimed Him to men for their reconciliation; this has been extolled as the greatest gain achieved by the Lutheran schism; yet here we have his word for it that the solace of a Gracious God was still withheld from him.—“I have always been in the habit of comforting others,” he says in a letter to Amsdorf on Nov. 1; “and now I myself stand in desperate need of such consolation; only one thing, however, do I wish, viz. never to be the foe of Christ, although I have offended Him by many and great sins. Satan tries to make a Job of me; he would like to sift me like Peter and his brethren. Oh, that God would say to him: ‘Yet spare his life’ [Job ii. 6], and to me: ‘I am thy salvation’ [Ps. xxxiv. 3]. Even now I still hope that His anger at my sins will not last for ever.... Meanwhile fighting goes on outside and fears reign within, yea, very bitter ones indeed.”[1354]