Luther himself uses the saying, for instance, when claiming credit in his Commentary on the Prophet Zacharias (chap, viii.) with having rendered the greatest possible service to Scripture. He says: “They [the Papists] are still angry and refuse to listen when people say, that, with them, Scripture lay under the bench, and that their mad delusions alone prevailed.” In this connection the Weimar editor of the Commentary refers to a work of the former Dominican, Petrus Sylvius, aimed at Luther and entitled “Von den vier Evangelein, so eine lange Zeit unter der Bank sein gelegen.”[2105]—Popery, Luther says in another passage, “kicked Scripture under the bench.”[2106] He speaks repeatedly in the Table-Talk[2107] of the “Bible under the bench,” which, since “it lay forgotten in the dust,” he had been obliged to drag again into the light of day.[2108]
Elsewhere he describes in detail the trouble he had in pulling the Bible from “under the bench,” particularly owing to his theological rivals and the sectarians within the camp; on this occasion his black outlook as to the future of the Bible he had thus set free scarcely redounds to the credit of his achievement. He says in his tract against Zwingli (“That the words of Christ, ‘This is My Body,’ still stand fast,” 1527): “When in our own day we saw how Scripture lay under the bench, and how the devil was deluding us and taking us captive with the hay and straw of men-made prayers, we tried, by the Grace of God, to mend matters, and have indeed with great and bitter pains brought Scripture back to light once more, and, sending human ordinances to the winds, set ourselves free and escaped from the devil.” But then, so he goes on, others [on his own side] fell upon him, raised up an uproar and raged against him; Zwingli, in particular, had riddled a single line of Scripture “with ten holes,” “so that I have never read of a more disgraceful heresy”; which, even in the beginning, “comprised as many factions and divisions as it had heads.” There would, however, in future “be such a turmoil in Scripture, such dissensions and so many factions, that we might well say with St. Paul ‘the mystery of ungodliness is already at work’” (2 Thess. ii. 7). “He [the devil] will bring about factions and dissensions in Scripture so that you will not know what is Scripture, or faith, or Christ, or even where you stand.”[2109]
Words of Luther’s such as these, which we meet with repeatedly under various shapes, point indirectly to the reason why the Church preferred to see, in the hands of people unversed in theology, only those extracts from Holy Scripture approved by herself, in particular the Postils and Plenaries; for the dangers of misunderstanding and disagreement were very real, especially in an age so prone to sectarianism.
“To put into the people’s hands the complete Bible,” says Franz Falk bluntly enough, “was to give them something both dangerous and superfluous. The Postils were amply sufficient for the Christian people. Even in Protestant circles to-day people are deciding in favour of an expurgated Bible for use in the school and the home.”[2110] W. Walther in his “Deutsche Bibelübersetzungen des Mittelalters” gives a favourable account of the Catholic practice: “According to what we have stated the attitude of the mediæval Church to the German Bible appears to have been quite definite. Janssen seems perfectly right when he says, ‘The Church opposed no resistance to its spread so long as strifes and divisions within her own body brought no pet abuses to light.’”[2111] “Men of insight,” continues Janssen, “such as Geiler von Kaysersberg and Sebastian Brant doubted from the beginning the advisability of putting the entire Scriptures in the hands of the people. They feared, and rightly feared, that the Bible would be grossly and wilfully perverted by the ignorant and the light-minded, and be made to uphold all sorts of doctrinal and moral teaching. God Himself had not placed His Divine Word indiscriminately in the hands of all, for He had not made the reading of it a condition of salvation. All errors had sprung out of false interpretation of Holy Scripture. Even to learned commentators the Scriptures presented difficulties enough, how much more to the ignorant masses?”
No one to whom it might prove of use was debarred access to the complete German translation or to the Sacred Text in the original languages; in their case restrictions were waived. The large number of complete editions would in fact be inexplicable except on the assumption of a certain freedom in this respect. Numerous instances might also be cited where educated people during the Middle Ages made use of the complete Bible.[2112]
Sebastian Brant says in the “Narrenschiff”: “Every country is now filled with Holy Scripture.” “The rapidity with which the different editions followed each other,” wrote Janssen,[2113] “and the testimony of contemporary writers point to a wide distribution of German Bibles among the people.”
As regards other countries, too, there is no lack of sufficient data for arriving at a like conclusion, viz. that the Bible was already widely disseminated before the religious revulsion came. We may instance the recent works of A. C. Paues and A. Gasquet on England and those of the Dominican Mandonnet on his own Order’s relations with the Bible during the Middle Ages, from which we may see how familiar the Bible must have been in certain circles.[2114]
The honest admission made by a Protestant, viz. “that, so far as outward acquaintance with the Bible went, it would be untrue to say that it lay under the bench before the Reformation,”[2115] does not, however, sufficiently counter what Luther says, for his grievance in reality was, that, among the Papists, it was rather the true meaning of the Bible that “lay under the bench.”
It is plain that they “abuse and revile Scripture, thrust it under the bench, pretend that it is shrouded in thick fog, that the interpretation of the Fathers is needed and that light must be sought in the darkness.” Thus did he write against Emser in 1521.[2116] A recent champion of Luther has also thought it worth while to write: “The Bible before Luther’s day was not regarded as in Luther’s opinion it should have been regarded, or treated as it should have been treated; it was indeed studied by the learned but only in the same way as people studied Augustine, Jerome and Thomas Aquinas—and, moreover, not with the same zeal or to the same extent.”
Did one wish to deal adequately with the standing thus taken up by Luther and his defenders there would be a whole book to be written full of interesting facts; for what Luther presupposes in such repeated statements is that his theology was right and that of the Church all wrong. Sufficient light has, however, already been thrown in this work on the value of this assertion of Luther’s.