In Luther’s works of edification, as pointed out above, we miss the school of virtue, the advance from one step of virtue and perfection to another, such as had grown up into a wise and recognised system, thanks to the experience of antiquity and the Middle Ages.[1896] With him everything begins with a rash breach with the past. Even the use made of the example of the Saints is painfully defective. An easy-going tendency hides the poverty of the aims and a shallow mediocrity lames the upward flight. Here, again, the fact that the author turns his back so rudely on the traditions of the earliest ages and the holy practices of his fathers, brings its own punishment. For a multitude of inspiring and perfectly legitimate acts of prayer and virtue in which the Christian heart had found strength and gladness are passed over by him in dead silence, or else scoffed at as mere “holiness-by-works.” While this is true of his practice, his theory, too, was wanting in that clear and solid justification and development which the theology of the older divines had enabled them to introduce into their teaching.
Lovers of Luther can, however, claim that in him two qualities were united which are rarely to be found combined, and possibly belong to no other popular religious writer of the age, viz. first, a wealth of ideas suggested by reminiscences, now of the Bible, now from the pages of human life; secondly, the writer’s wonderful imagination, which enables him to clothe all things in the best dress in order the more easily to win his way into the hearts of his readers.
In consequence of this his writings will always find approving friends, not only in Lutheran circles but also among those who for literary or historical reasons are interested in a form of literature bearing so individual a stamp, and know how to overlook their imperfections. The reasons, however, are sufficiently obvious why the Church by a general prohibition (though it does admit of exceptions) has set up a barrier against the study of any of Luther’s works by her children, and why she bids her faithful to seek spiritual food only in those books of instruction and edification which she sanctions.
The Catechism
The ignorance of the people in religious things, of which Luther was made aware during the Visitation in the Saxon Electorate in 1527, led him to compose a sort of Catechism, “which should be a short abstract and recapitulation of Holy Scripture.”[1897] He was desirous of providing in this way a manual for the “instruction of the children and the simple,” and more particularly of supplying fathers of families with an easy means “of questioning and catechising their children and dependents at least once a week (as was their duty), and seeing what they knew or had learnt of it.”[1898]
Thus, at the commencement of 1529, or possibly as early as 1528, he was at work, first, on the (Shorter) Catechism “for the rude country-folk,” as he writes to a friend,[1899] and also preparing mural tablets (“tabulæ”) which set out the matter “in the shortest and baldest way.”[1900] Of these tablets his pupil Rörer says, on Jan. 20, that some of them hung on his walls while the Catechism (“prædicatus pro rudibus et simplicibus”) was still in process of making.[1901] It was in this form that the “Shorter Catechism” first appeared, but, in the same year (1528) these tablets were collected into a booklet entitled the “Enchiridion.”[1902]
Luther was at the same time at work on a fuller German Catechism which was intended to supply the heads of families, and more particularly the preachers, with further matter for their instructions. This work, under the title of “Deudsch Catechismus,” was finished and printed in April, 1529,[1903] and in May appeared a Latin translation of the same. This was what was eventually termed the Larger Catechism.
In the preface to the Shorter Catechism Luther puts on the shoulders of the Catholic bishops the blame for the fact, that, the “common folk, particularly in the villages, knew nothing whatever of Christian doctrine.” He also admits, however, that, among the Evangelicals, there were “unfortunately many pastors who are quite unskilled and incapable of teaching.” Hence it came about that the people “knew neither the Our Father, the Creed nor the Ten Commandments,” and “lived like so many brute beasts and senseless swine.” “And how can it be otherwise,” he asks the pastor and preacher, “seeing that you snooze and hold your tongue?” He accordingly requires of the ministers, first, that, in their teaching, they should keep to one form of the “Ten Commandments, Creed, Our Father and Sacrament,” etc., and not “alter a syllable”; and “further, that, when they had taught the text thoroughly, they should see that the meaning of it is also understood”; finally, the pastor was to take the Larger Catechism and study it and then “explain things still more fully to his flock” according to their needs and their power of comprehension.
In spite of all this he has no wish that the particular method and form of his Catechism should be made obligatory; here again, according to his principle, everything must be spontaneous and voluntary. “Choose whatever form you please and then stick to it for ever.”
Nevertheless whoever refuses to “learn by heart” the text selected is to be treated as a denier of Christ, “shall be allowed not a shred of Christian freedom, but simply be handed over to the Pope and his officers, nay, to the devil himself. Parents and masters are also to refuse them food and drink and to warn them that the sovereigns will drive such rude clowns out of the land,” etc. This agrees with a letter Luther wrote to Joseph Levin Metzsch on August 26, 1529, in which he says that those who despise the Catechism and the Evangel are to be driven to church by force, that they may at least learn the outward work of the Law from the preaching of the Ten Commandments.[1904]