In the other saying brought up against him he states: “Had I now to begin to preach the Evangel, I would set about it otherwise.” Here he is referring to a preceding remark, viz. that a preacher must have great experience of the world. He then proceeds: “I would leave the great, rude masses under the dominion of the Pope, for they are no better off for the Evangel but only abuse its freedom. But I should preach the Evangel and its comfort to the troubled in spirit and the meek, to the despondent and the simple-minded.” A preacher, he declares, could not paint the world in colours bad enough, seeing that it belongs altogether to the devil; he must not be such a “simple sheep” as he himself (Luther) had been at the outset when he had expected all “at once to flock to the Evangel.”[1501]—Thus there is again no question of any repentant condemnation of the whole work of his lifetime. He clothes in his strange “rhetoric” an idea which is indeed peculiar to him, viz. the special value of his Evangel for those troubled in mind. It is his sad experiences, his personal embitterment and also a certain irritation with his own party that lead him here to lay such stress on the preference to be shown to troubled consciences, even to the abandonment of all others. Of his own exaggeration he himself was perfectly aware, for he also makes far too much of his simplicity and lack of prudence. The resemblance between what we have just heard him say and his theory of the Church Apart of the True Believers, can hardly escape the reader.[1502]
The wish Luther is supposed to have expressed, viz. never to have been born, and some other strong things to which he gave vent, when in a state of depression, have likewise been quoted in support of the assertion that he himself branded his work “more cruelly than any foe dared to do.” If, however, we take the statements in their setting we find they have quite a different meaning. As an instance we may quote one passage from a tract of 1539 “Against the Antinomians”[1503] where, apparently, he curses the day of his birth and regrets that all his writings had not been destroyed. Alluding to Johann Agricola, an opponent within the camp, he writes: “I might in good sooth expect my own followers to leave me in peace, having quite enough to do with the Papists. One might well cry out with Job and Jeremias: ‘Would that I had never been born!’ and in the same way I am tempted to say: ‘Would I had never come with my books,’ I care nothing for them, I should not mind had they all been destroyed and did the works of such great minds [as Agricola] outsell them in all the booksellers’ shops—as they would like, being so desirous of being fed up with honour.”
Here both his good wishes to his adversary and his repudiation of his own books are the merest irony, though, reading between the lines, we get a glimpse of his pain and annoyance at the hostility he encountered. In the same vein of mingled grief and sarcasm he continues: Christ too (like himself) had complained through the Prophet (Isaias xlix. 4): “I have laboured in vain”; but it was plain (so little does he condemn his own preaching), that “the devil is master of the world” since the Gospel of the “beloved master of the house,” which Luther taught, was so violently attacked. “We must and shall strive and suffer,” so he cries, “for it cannot fare better with us than with the dear prophets and apostles who also had to bear these things.” Seeing that, throughout the tract, he is inveighing against “devilish” deformations of his doctrine, is it likely that here he is cursing the day of his birth out of remorse for his teaching?[1504]
An old story that has repeatedly found its way even in recent times into popular writings tells how Luther, in conversation, sadly admitted to Catherine that “heaven is not for us.”
“One fine evening,” so the tale goes, “Luther was in the garden with Catherine and both were looking up at the starlit sky. ‘Oh, how beautiful heaven is,’ Catherine exclaimed. ‘Yes,’ said Luther ruefully, ‘but I fear it will not be ours.’ ‘Will not be ours?’ cried Catherine, ‘then in God’s name let us retrace our steps.’ ‘It is too late,’ replied Luther, and went back into his study with a heavy heart.”
A recent work against Luther quotes in support of the legend a modern Danish writer, Pastor Stub. It would have been better to cite J. M. Audin, an uncritical French author of a “Vie de M. Luther,” who helped to spread the story.[1505] Audin, on his side, refers to George Iwanek, S. J.(† 1693), who relates it in his “Norma Vitæ”[1506]; also to Johannes Kraus, S. J., author of a rather credulous polemical work entitled “Ovicula ex lutheranismo redux.”[1507] Kraus certainly took it from Iwanek, but from what source the latter had it we do not know. He mentions no authority and probably took the legend on hearsay and gave it too ready credence. As Luther seems occasionally to have said his night prayers in the open air, and as he frequently enough admits his struggles of conscience, the two together may have given rise to the legend.
Far from being sorry for the work he had undertaken Luther, on the contrary, is ever throwing on the devil the blame for all its drawbacks. He it is who has to bear the blame for Luther’s own wretchedness, for inward wavering no less than for the lack of order, faith and morals among the Evangelical preachers and laity. He so works upon me “that I sometimes believe, and sometimes do not.”[1508] He could not view Satan’s raging as of small account; it was far more to be dreaded than all the persecution of men. “You see from my books what scorn I have for those men who withstand me. I look upon them as fools”; even the lawyers I am ready to defy; “but when these fellows, the evil spirits, come, then the congregation must back me up in the fight,” for then the devil, the very “Lord of the world,” is entering the lists against me.[1509] A glance at what has gone before shows how these “combats” must be understood.
The tone he adopts, though frequently humorous and satirical, does not conceal the deep depression which unquestionably underlies many of his utterances.
Such depression would quite well explain passing fits of real sorrow for all he had done. But that he really felt such sorrow is not sufficiently attested, so that all one can say is, that the ground for such a feeling of remorse was there. A discouraging sense of the instability of his doctrine and “reformation” might well have aroused contrition, for Luther himself saw only too plainly, as Döllinger rightly remarks, that, though he was strong enough to bring about an apostasy from the ancient Church yet he was powerless to effect a moral regeneration, or even to preserve religious order.[1510] Döllinger adds very truly: The reasons for his doubts were, “first of all the recognition of the evil effects produced by his doctrine, then the consciousness of having cut himself adrift from the Church for the sake of a new doctrine previously unknown, and lastly the inward contradictions from which his doctrinal system suffered and the impossibility of squaring it with the many Bible passages which embody or presuppose a contrary doctrine.”[1511]
The words “agonies” and “nocturnal combats” which Luther so often used to describe his struggles of conscience remain to testify to their severity.