“But here faith comes in,” he at once goes on, “for, to the eyes of the world and to reason, everything seems just the reverse.” [“And were the world all devils o’er,” sings the hymn on the “Safe stronghold.”]
The outside menace from the Papists and their princes, and the inward, “sudden, baneful attacks of the devil in our conscience,” Luther writes in his interpretation of John xviii. (v. 28), all “this is written to put to blush our high-priests and elders, viz. the bishops and princes who go about the world with noses in the air as though they were pious and holy, whereas they drive out of their land the pious, God-fearing Christians and preachers. Who in the devil’s name gave them power to pass judgment on the teaching of the Evangel?” But the devil, too, persecutes us with his machinations. “When he finds some poor conscience that would fain be pious, he attacks it with trifles.... Amongst us Evangelicals there is not one who has not great, big sins and difficulties, such as doubts, and waverings in the faith, and other awkward knots. But such big sins and great difficulties the devil is willing to discard while he attacks us about some paltry thing ... and torments and plagues our conscience.” But when thereby we are “upset and become troubled” we ought to “console ourselves and say: ‘If Our Lord God can have patience with me even though my faith in Him be not firm, but often wavering and doubtful, why then do you torment me, you devil, with other petty matters and sins? I can see through all your artfulness and wicked malice; you cloak over the great sins and big difficulties so that I may not heed them, or make any conscience of them, nor seek forgiveness for them....’ Therefore a Christian must learn not to allow himself to be too easily troubled with remorse of conscience; but if he believes in Christ, wishes to be pious, strives against sin as far as he is able and yet occasionally makes mistakes, stumbles and falters, he must not allow such stumbling to upset him in conscience, but rather he must say: Away with this error and this stumbling! Let it join my other faults and crimes and be included among the other sins of which the Creed teaches us the forgiveness.”[1385]
The further course of Luther’s inner history will show more clearly how far the article of the forgiveness of sins served its purpose in his own case and how he contrived to prop up a faith, which, during the years 1527 and 1528, was so distressingly inclined to “doubt and wavering.”
[5. The Ten Years from 1528-38. How to win back Peace of Conscience]
The Years Previous to 1537
During the time when the Diet of Augsburg was in preparation Luther’s complaints about his inward struggles recede somewhat into the background, outward events engrossing all his attention.
Matters changed, however, when the Diet actually began its sessions and he himself took up his residence in the fortress of Coburg. There he was a prey to overwhelming suffering both of body and of mind.
His nervous ailments, particularly the noises in his head, became much worse at that time, owing partly to his deep concern for his cause, partly to his too great literary output during his sojourn in the solitude. Against his inner anxieties he tried the weapon of humour.[1386] But all in vain. The “spiritual temptations” set in, and his loneliness made them even worse. It was at the beginning of May that he received Satan’s famous “embassy.” Because he had been left quite alone (in the absence of Veit Dietrich and Cyriacus Kaufmann), so he says, Satan had so far got the better of him that he had been obliged to flee from the room and to seek the society of men. When writing to Melanchthon about this he uses some strange-sounding words: “Hardly can I await the day when I shall at last behold the tremendous power of this spirit and his majesty, which, in its kind, is quite divine (‘planeque divinam maiestatem quandam’).”[1387] Here he is presumably alluding to the time of his death and of the judgment when he would behold Satan. He had, however, not to wait so long, for, in the following month and while still at the Coburg, he was vouchsafed a glimpse of the Enemy under a certain shape; at least such was his belief; the actual vision will be described later (vol. vi., xxxvi., 3).
He must have suffered grievously from his fears whilst in the castle; he compares himself to the parched country surrounding it, so greatly was he tried inwardly by storms and heat;[1388] but “our cause is safe if our Word is true, and that it is true is sufficiently demonstrated by the ferocity and frenzy of our foes.”[1389] He was visited by thoughts of death, and, during these, he sought, as he related later, the spot in the castle chapel where he would be laid to rest.[1390] Then, when his disquiet of mind began to abate, intense bodily weakness again made him think of death; this too, in his opinion, was Satan’s doing. When ultimately he left the Coburg he felt himself a broken man and began to sigh more and more over his burden of years, though, as a matter of fact, he was still comparatively young.