We can understand after such expressions descriptive of his state of mind, the assurance with which, for all his confidence of victory, he frequently seems to forecast the certain downfall of his cause. In the German Table-Talk, for instance, we read: “So long as those who are now living and who teach the Word of God diligently are still with us, those who have seen and heard me, Philip, Pomeranus and other pious, faithful and honest teachers, all may be well; but when they all are gone and this age is over, there will be a falling away.”[626] He also sees how two great and widely differing parties will arise among his followers: unbelievers on the one hand and Pietists and fanatics on the other; we have a characteristic prophecy of the sort where he says of the one party, that, like the Epicureans, they would acknowledge “no God or other life after this,” and of the other, that many people would come out of the school of enthusiasm, “following their own ideas and speculations and boasting of the Spirit”; “drunk with their own virtues and having their understanding darkened,” they would “obstinately insist on their own fancies and yield to no one.”[627]
And again he says sadly: “God will sweep His threshing-floor. I pray that after my death my wife and children may not long survive me; very dangerous times are at hand.”[628] “I pray God,” he frequently said, “to take away this our generation with us, for, when once we are gone, the worst of times will follow.”[629] The preacher, “M. Antonius Musa once said,” so he recalls: “We old preachers only vex the world, but on you young ones the world will pour out its wrath; therefore take heed to yourselves.”[630]
This is not the place to investigate historically the fulfilment of these predictions. We shall content ourselves with quoting, in connection with Musa, the words of another slightly later preacher. Cyriacus Spangenberg saw in Luther a prophet, for one reason because his gloomiest predictions were being fulfilled before the eyes of all. In the third sermon of his book, “Luther the Man of God,” he shows to what frightful contempt the preachers of Luther’s unadulterated doctrine were everywhere exposed, just as he himself (Spangenberg) was hated and persecuted for being over-zealous for the true faith of the “Saint” of Wittenberg. “Ah,” he says in a sermon in 1563 couched in Luther’s style, “Shame on thy heart, thy neck, thy tongue, thou filthy and accursed world. Thy blasphemy, fornication, unchastity, gluttony and drunkenness ... are not thought too much; but that such should be scolded is too much.... If this be not the devil himself, then it is something very like him and is assuredly his mother.”[631]
[3. Provisions for the Future]
Luther failed to make the effectual and systematic efforts called for in order to stave off the fate to which he foresaw his work would be exposed. He was not the man to put matters in order, quite apart from the unsurmountable difficulties this would have involved, seeing he possessed little talent for organisation. He was very well aware that one expedient would be to surrender church government almost entirely into the hands of the secular authorities.
A Protestant Council?
The negotiations which preceded the Œcumenical Council of the Catholic Church, had for one result not only to impress the innovators with a sense of their own unsettled state, but to lead them to discuss the advisability of holding a great Protestant council of their own. Luther himself, however, wisely held aloof from such a plan, nay his opposition to it was one of the main obstacles which prevented its fulfilment.
When the idea was first mooted in 1533 it was rejected by Luther and his theologians Jonas, Bugenhagen and Melanchthon in a joint memorandum. “Because it is plain,” so they declare, “that we ourselves are not at one, and must first of all consider how we are to arrive at unity amongst ourselves. In short, though an opposition council might be good and useful it is needless to speak of such a thing just now.”[632]
In 1537 the Landgrave of Hesse, and more particularly the Elector of Saxony, again proposed at Schmalkalden that Luther, following the example of the Greeks and the Bohemians, should summon a council of his own, a national Evangelical council, to counteract the Papal Council.[633] The Elector proposed that it should be assembled at Augsburg and comprise at least 250 preachers and men of the law; the Emperor might be invited to attend and a considerable army was also to be drafted to Augsburg for the protection of the assembly. At that time Luther’s serious illness saved him from an embarrassing situation.
Bucer and Melanchthon were now the sole supporters of the plan of a council. Both were men who believed in mediation and Melanchthon may really have hoped for a while, that the “philosophy of dissimulation,” for which he stood,[634] might, even in a council, palliate the inward differences and issue in something tolerably satisfactory. Luther himself was never again to refer to the Evangelical Council.