The Diet of Spires, in 1544, it is true brought the Protestants an extension of that peace which was so favourable to their interests, but the campaign which Charles V thereupon undertook against François I—whom Philip of Hesse and the Schmalkaldeners were compelled by the above-mentioned compact to leave on the lurch—led to the humiliation of the Frenchman, who was compelled to make peace at Crespy on Sep. 14, 1544. There the King of France promised the Emperor never again to side with the German Protestants.
Luther was also troubled by the dissensions within the League of Schmalkalden, by the refusal of Joachim II of Brandenburg, of Louis, Elector of the Palatinate, and especially of Duke Maurice of Saxony to join the League; the last sovereign’s intimate relations with the Emperor were also a source of anxiety. At Wittenberg it was clearly seen what danger threatened Lutheranism should the Imperial power gather strength and intervene on behalf of the Roman Church.
The Roman Church, so Luther exclaims fretfully in his “Kurtz Bekentnis” (1545), is made up of “nothing but Epicureans and scoffers at the Christian faith.” The Pope, “the greatest foe of Christ and the real Antichrist, has made himself head of Christendom, nay, the very hind-piece and bottom-hole of the devil through which so many abominations of Masses, monkery and immorality are cacked into the world.”[1582]
The Zwinglian “Sacramentarians”
One controversy which greatly excited Luther at this time was that with the Swiss Sacramentarians. Once more his old feud with Zwinglianism was to break out and embitter his days. When, in 1542, the elevation was abolished in the parish church of Wittenberg (to some extent out of deference to the wishes of the Landgrave of Hesse who objected to this rite), some people too hastily concluded that Luther was renouncing his own doctrine in favour of that of the Swiss; hence he deemed it necessary once more to deny, in language too clear to be mistaken, any intention to make common cause with a company, which, as he puts it, had been “infected and intoxicated with an alien spirit.”
Moreover, Caspar Schwenckfeld, with the object of moving the feelings of Luther’s opponents, made known to them Luther’s rude and so discreditable letter.[1583] The animosity of the Swiss and of their South German sympathisers now assumed serious dimensions. Luther accordingly determined to address the reply which he had been planning for some time to the Sacramentarians as a body, declaring that that “slanderer” Schwenckfeld was not worth a single line.
He was also very desirous of once more before his death giving vigorous and lasting expression to the positive faith which he still shared and to which he was wont eagerly to fly when hard pressed by the devil. The spectre of scepticism of which, as many of his statements show, he dreaded the advent among his followers as soon as he himself had been taken away, was to be exorcised beforehand.
The writing against the Swiss is the work just alluded to, which appeared at the end of Sep., 1544, under the title “Kurtz Bekentnis vom heiligen Sacrament.”[1584]
After briefly disposing of their arguments, with which he had already sufficiently dealt, the work culminates in a most outspoken condemnation of the errors and arbitrary opinions of the Swiss, the most striking sentence of all being the following: “Hence, in a word, either believe everything fully or else nothing at all.”[1585] This was practically what the Catholic Church had said to him at his own apostasy: The principle of faith permits of no picking and choosing between the truths revealed by God and guaranteed by the Church’s teaching authority; one must choose between either accepting the whole body of the Church’s doctrines, or leaving her.[1586]
For the rest the writing was another bad example of the boundless fury and offensiveness of his mode of controversy. In the first lines he declares: “It is quite the same to me ... when the accursed mob of fanatics, Zwinglians and the like praise or abuse me, as when Jews, Turks, Pope or all the devils in unison scold or laud me. For I, who am now about to go down into the grave, am determined to bring this testimony and this boasting with me to the Judgment-seat of my dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, that I have with the utmost earnestness condemned and shunned the fanatics and Sacramentarians, Carlstadt, Zwingli, Œcolampadius, Stinkfield and their disciples, whether at Zürich or wherever else they were, according to His command, Titus iii. 10: ‘A man that is a heretic avoid.’”[1587]—He goes on to call the Zwinglian Sacramentarians “devourers and murderers of souls, who have an endevilled, perdevilled, supradevilled and blasphemous heart and a lying jaw.” “Hence no Christian can or ought to pray for the fanatics or to assist them. They are reprobates.... They want to have nothing to do with me, and I want to have nothing to do with them. They boast that they have nothing from me, for which I heartily thank God: I have borrowed even less from them, for which, too, God be praised.”[1588]