3. And were this world all Devils o’er
And watching to devour us,
We lay it not to heart so sore
Not they can overpower us.
And let the Prince of Ill
Look grim, as e’er he will,
He harms us not a whit,
For why? His doom is writ,
A word shall quickly slay him.
4. God’s Word, for all their craft and force,
One moment shall not linger,
But, spite of Hell, shall have its course,
’Tis written by His finger.
And though they take our life,
Goods, honour, children, wife,
Yet is their profit small.
These things shall vanish all,
The City of God remaineth.
Though Protestants are fond of extolling the sincere faith expressed in Luther’s hymns (nay even speak of the “overwhelming fervour of his faith”[2142]) we must not forget, that in some of them bitter polemics strike a harsh and very unpoetic note, quite out of harmony with the otherwise good and pious thoughts. The “Children’s Hymn” to be sung against the two arch-enemies of Christ and His holy Church, viz. the Pope and the Turk, dating from 1541 at the latest, begins with the verse:
Lord, by Thy Word deliverance work
And stay the hand of Pope and Turk
Who Jesus Christ Thy Son
Would hurl down from His throne.[2143]
This hymn became ultimately “One of the principal hymns of the Evangelical flock.”[2144]
No less noticeable is Luther’s anti-Catholic prejudice in his “Song of the Two Martyrs of Christ at Brussels” and in the hymn “To new strains we raise our voices.” But even when the words do not sound directly controversial the substance often serves as a weapon against the old faith and was thus understood by his followers; this was the case, for instance, with the hymn just referred to on the Church. The hymns, in fact, were intended, as he says in his preface to Johann Walther’s collection, “to advance and further the Holy Gospel which by the grace of God has once more dawned.” To this end he would gladly see “all the arts, more particularly that of music, employed in the service of Him Who created them and bestowed them on us.”[2145] The more he was animated by the fighting instinct, the better he fancies he can compose. “If I am to compose, write, pray or preach well, I must be angry.” “Then my blood boils and my understanding grows keener.”[2146] His opponents complained that his popular hymns against the Church excited the people and that they “sang themselves into” the new faith.
Just as the polemics of their author detracts from the real poetic value of some of the hymns, so, in spite of all his good-will, there are other defects to decrease the value of his work. Owing to hasty workmanship his poesy has suffered. His roughness explains how “much in his work sounds harsh and clumsy.”[2147] Nevertheless the very fact that they were Luther’s own made them praiseworthy in the eyes of his olden admirers.[2148]
Owing to their hearty reception in Protestant circles, to their use both in public worship and elsewhere, and also because they served as a model and exerted a powerful influence on later Protestant efforts to promote hymnology, they won for their author the proud title of the Father of Protestant psalmody. The earliest Protestants, in their ignorance of what obtained in Catholicism previous to his day, even pushed their esteem for his labours so far as to call him simply the Father of Hymnology. “What made him the great poet of our nation,” a modern Protestant historian declares, “was his individuality and the boldness of his expression. He was not, nor did he wish to be, the Father of German psalmody, but he was in very truth the Father of Evangelical psalmody.”[2149]