Nor assuredly would he have gone so far had he himself ever vividly realised the profoundly religious and morally stimulating character of the veneration of images, and its sympathetic and consoling side as exemplified at many of the regular places of pilgrimage at that time. Owing to the circumstances of his early years he had never enjoyed the opportunity of tasting the refreshment and the blessings to be found in those sacred resorts visited by thousands of the devout, where those suffering from any ill of soul or body were wont to seek solace from the cares and trials of life. Indeed it was particularly against such images as were the object of special devotion and to which the people “flocked” with a “false confidence” that his anger was directed.
His animosity to image-worship would also appear to have been psychologically bound up with two tendencies of his: first, with the desire to attack the hated Church of the Papists at those very spots where her influence with the people was most apparent; secondly, with his plan to bring everything down to a dead level, which led him on the specious pretext of serving the religion of the spirit to abolish, or to curtail, the most popular and cheering phenomena of outward worship.
It is a reprehensible thing, he says, even in his sermons against Carlstadt, to have an image set up in the church, because the believer fancies “he is doing God a service thereby and pleasing Him, and has thus performed a good work and gained merit in God’s sight, which is sheer idolatry.” In their zeal for their damnable good works the princes, bishops and big ones of the earth had “caused many costly images of silver and gold to be set up in the churches and cathedrals.” These were not indeed to be pulled down by force since many at least made a good use of them; but it was to be made clear to the people that if “they were not doing any service to God, or pleasing Him thereby,” then they would soon “tumble down of their own accord.”[747]
It was a mistake, so he declared in 1528 concerning the grounds of his verdict against the images, to “invoke them specially, as though I sought to give great honour or do a great service to God with the images, as has been the case hitherto.” The “trust” placed in the images has cost us the loss of our souls; the Christians whom he had instructed were now opposed to this “trust” and to the opinion “that they were thereby doing a special service to God.”[748] Amongst them memorial images might be permitted, i.e. such as “simply represent, as in a glass, past events and things” but “are not made into objects of devotion, trust or worship.”[749]—It is dreadful to make them a pretext for “idolatry” and to place our trust in anything but God. “Such images ought to be destroyed, just as we have already pulled down many images of the Saints; it were also to be wished,” he adds ironically, “that we had more such images of silver, for then we should know how to make a right Christian use of them.”[750]—“I will not pay court to such idols; the worship and adoration must cease.”[751] Whoever “with his whole heart has learnt to keep” the First Commandment would readily despise “all the idols of silver and gold.”[752]—Yet of the “adoration” of the images he had said in a letter of 1522 to Count Ludwig von Stolberg, that the motive of his opposition was not so much fear of adoration, because adoration of the Saints—so he hints—might well occur without any images; what urged him on was, on the contrary, the false confidence and the opinion of the Catholics that “they were thereby doing a good work and a service to God.”[753]
We have just quoted Luther’s reservation, viz. that he was willing to tolerate the use of images which “simply represent, as in a glass, past events and things.” Statements of this sort occur frequently in his writings. They go hand in hand with a radical insistence on inward disdain for image-worship, and a tendency to demand its entire suppression in the churches. It was on these lines that the Elector of Saxony acted when ordering the destruction of the images in the principal church of Wurzen (above, p. 202); images which represented “serious events” and those overlaid with gold were not to be hewn to pieces.
In the book “Against the Heavenly Prophets” Luther, in the same sense, writes: “Images used as a memorial or for a symbol, like the image of the Emperor” on the coins, were not objectionable; even in conversation images were employed by way of illustration; “memorial pictures or those which bear testimony to the faith, such as crucifixes and the images of the Saints,” are honest and praiseworthy, but the images venerated at places of pilgrimage are “utterly idolatrous and mere shelters of the devil.”[754] And in the “Vom Abendmal Christi Bekentnis” (1528) he says: “Images, bells, mass vestments, church ornaments, altars, lights and such like I leave optional; whoever wishes may discard them, although pictures from Scripture and representations of sacred subjects I consider very useful, though I leave each one free to do as he pleases; for with the iconoclasts I do not hold.”[755]
In one passage of his Church-postils he entirely approves the use of the crucifix; we ought to contemplate the cross as the Israelites looked upon the serpent raised on high by Moses; we should “see Christ in such an image and believe in Him.”[756] “If it be no sin,” he says elsewhere, “to have Christ in my heart, why should it be a sin to have it [His image] before my eyes?”[757]
But Catholics were saying much the same thing in defence of the veneration of images, though to this Luther paid no attention: If it be no sin to have in our hearts the saints who are Christ’s own friends or Mary who is His Mother, how then should it be sinful to have their images before our eyes and to honour them?
As years went by Luther became more and more liberal in recommending the use of historical and, in particular, biblical representations. In 1545, when he published his Passional with his little manual of prayers, he said in the preface, alluding to the woodcuts contained in the book: Such pictures ought to be in the hands of Christians, more particularly of children and of the simple, who can “better be moved by pictures and figures”; there was no harm “in painting such stories in rooms and apartments, together with the texts”; he was in favour of the “principal stories of the whole Bible” being pictorially shown, though he was opposed to all “abuse of and false confidence in” images.[758]
Such kindlier expressions did not, however, do full justice to the veneration of images as practised throughout the olden Church, nor did they counteract what he had said of the idols of silver and gold, of the uselessness and harmfulness of bestowing money on sacred pictures and religious works of art to be exposed for the devotion of the people. All was drowned in his incitement to “destroy,” “break in pieces,” “pull down” and “fall upon” the images, first by means of the Evangel, and, then through the action of the authorities. It is plain what fate was in store particularly for those religious works of art which served as symbols of, or to extol, those dogmas and institutions peculiarly odious to him, for instance, the sacrifice of the Mass, around which centred the ornaments of the altar, the fittings of the choir, and, more or less, all the decorations of the church. As for the sacred vessels, often of the most costly character, and all else that pertained to the dispensing of the sacraments, their destruction had already been decreed.