“With me, however, he certainly does not jest; I believe that I am pleasing to God and displeasing to Satan.”[1400]
He overlooks the fact that the Anabaptists, too, fancied they were pleasing Christ, nay, were passionately convinced that they were living for Christ and not for Satan; they even exposed themselves of their own accord to the worst torments of the executioner before they passed out of life, obstinately declaring that it was impossible for them to recant. The words in which Luther complains of their obstinacy are a two-edged sword.
He is fond of bewailing the stubbornness of the heretics; it was a subject of wholesome fear for all; it penetrated “like water into their inward parts and like oil into their bones”: so far do they go that they see “salvation and blessing” in their own doctrine alone; few are they who “come right again,” “the others remain under their own curse.” “Neither have I ever read,” he assures us, “of any teacher who originated a heresy being converted”; “the true Evangel which teaches the contrary of their doctrine is and always will be to them a devil’s thing.”[1401]—“No heretic,” he cries, “will let himself be talked over.... A man is soon done for when the devil thus lays hold of him.”[1402] Such a one boasts that, “he is quite certain of things”; “No Christian ever held so fast to his Christ as a Jew or a fanatic does to his pet doctrine.”[1403] He also believes his opponent to be a liar “as surely as God is God.”[1404] And yet, so Luther argues, the sectarian or fanatic can never be certain at all; not one of his gainsayers is sure of his cause; not one has “felt the struggle and been at grips with the devil” like himself.[1405]
But I, “I am certain that my word is not mine but the word of Christ,” and “every man who speaks the word of Christ is free to boast that his mouth is the mouth of Christ.”[1406]—“Had not the devil attacked us with such power and cunning during all these years,” he says in his second exposition of the 1st Epistle of Peter (published in 1539), “we should never have acquired this certainty on doctrine.”[1407] It is to his awful “temptations,” that, as we have heard him repeatedly assure us, he owes the strength of his faith.[1408] Unceasingly did he strive to acquire a feeling of strong certainty in defiance of the devil, as indeed his theology demanded: We must by fiducial faith have made our position secure against the devil, otherwise we have no stay at all.[1409]
“Even though I stumble yet I am resolved to stand by what I have taught.” And, as though to falter in this way was inevitable, he continues: “for although a Christian holds fast until death to his doctrine, yet he often stumbles and begins to doubt; but it is not so with the fanatics, they stand firm.”[1410] And yet, according to Luther, everyone must “stand firm,” for in theology there is no room for “fears and doubts. And we must have certainty concerning God. But in conversing with other men we must be modest and say, ‘If anyone knows better let him say so.’”[1411]
The “Struggles by Day and by Night” gradually Wane
Hardly had Luther recovered from his second bout of illness than the gloomy thoughts once more emerged from their hiding-place and began again to dog his footsteps, though perhaps not quite so persistently as after his recovery from his previous sickness ten years earlier. It is as though on both occasions the sight of the gaping jaws of death had set free the troubled spirits within, and as though the spell which momentarily restrained his terrors of soul had been loosed as soon as his bodily powers returned. This was the last great attack he had to endure, or at least from this time onward definite allusions to his struggles of conscience are not forthcoming as before.
In 1537 he lay for a fortnight under the stress of that “spiritual malady” (above, p. 319), during which he “disputed with God,” was scarcely able to take food, to sleep or to preach, in spite of his “understanding a little” “the Psalter and its consolation,” viz. that one must be patient.[1412]—On Oct. 7, 1538, he bewails his “daily agony.”[1413] In the same year he wrings some comfort out of Paul, who also had been unable to “lay hold of” what was right;[1414] he also has a poke at the devil: “Why arraign us so sternly before God as though you were quite holy, and the highest judge!”[1415]
He then realised in his own person how one thus oppressed with terrors of soul could be tempted, like Job (iii. 1 ff.), to curse the day of his birth. After having, during the night of Aug. 1, 1538, suffered severe pains in the joints of the arm, he said next day, that such pains were tolerable in comparison with others: “The flesh can get used to this sort of thing. But when the spiritual temptations come and the ‘Cursed be the day I was born’ follows, that is a harder matter. Christ was tried in a similar way in the Garden of Olives.... He, on account of His temptations, is our best advocate in all temptations.... Let us but cling fast to hope!”[1416]
It cannot be established that he was speaking seriously or was prompted by despair when he wished that “he had died as a child,” nay, “had never been born,” and stated that he would gladly see “all his books perish.” We must beware of laying too great stress on occasional deliverances spoken in moments of irritation, or on little tricks of speech such as his depreciatory remarks concerning his books.[1417]