He had even once declared that poisoning was a regular business with Satan: “He can bring death by means of a leaflet from off a tree; he has more poison phials and kinds of death at his beck and call than all the apothecaries in all the world; if one poison doesn’t work he uses another.”[858] He had long been convinced that the devil was able to carry through the air those who made themselves over to him; “we must not call in the devil, for he comes often enough uncalled, and loves to be by us, hardened foe of ours though he be.... He is indeed a great and mighty enemy.”[859] Towards the end of his life, in 1541, it came to his ears that the devil was more than usually busy with his poisons: “At Jena and elsewhere,” so he warns Melanchthon, “the devil has let loose his poisoners. It is a wonder to me why the great, knowing the fury of Satan, are not more watchful. Here it is impossible any longer to buy or to use anything with safety.” Melanchthon was therefore to be careful when invited out; at Erfurt the spices and aromatic drugs on sale in the shops had been found to be mixed with poison; at Altenburg as many as twelve people had died from poison taken in a single meal. Anxious as he was about his friend, his trust was nevertheless unshaken in the protection of God and the angels. I myself am still in the hands of my Moses (Katey), he adds, “suffering from a filthy discharge from my ear and meditating in turn on life and on death. God’s Will be done. Amen. May you be happy in the Lord now and for ever.”[860]
“A new art of killing us,” so he tells Melanchthon in the same year, had been invented by Satan, viz. of mixing poison with our wine and milk; at Jena twelve persons were said to have died of poisoned wine, “though more likely of too much drink”; at Magdeburg and Nordhausen, however, milk had been found in the possession of the sellers that seemed to have been poisoned. “At any rate, all things lie under Christ’s feet, and we shall suffer so long and as much as He pleases. For the nonce we are supreme and they [the Papist ‘monsters’] are hurrying to destruction.... So long as the Lord of Heaven is at the helm we are safe, live and reign and have our foes under our feet. Amen.” Casting all fear to the winds he goes on to comfort Melanchthon and his faint-hearted comrades in the tone of the mystic: “Fear not; you are angels, nay, great angels or archangels, working, not for us but for the Church, nay, for God, Whose cause it is that you uphold, as even the very gates of hell must admit; these, though they may indeed block our way, cannot overcome us, because at the very beginning of the world the hostile, snarling dragon was overthrown by the Lion of the tribe of Juda.”[861]
The hostility of the Papists to Lutheranism, had, so Luther thought, been manifestly punished by Heaven in the defeat of Henry of Brunswick; it had “already been foretold in the prophecies pronounced against him,” which had forecasted his destruction as the “son of perdition”; he was a “warning example set up by God for the tyrants of our days”; for every contemner of the Word is “plainly a tyrant.”[862]
Luther was very suspicious of Melanchthon, Bucer and others who leaned towards the Zwinglian doctrine on the Supper. So much had Magister Philippus, his one-time right-hand man, to feel his displeasure and irritability that the latter bewails his lot of having to dwell as it were “in the very den of the Cyclopes” and with a real “tyrant.” “There is much in one’s intercourse with Luther,” so Cruciger said confidentially, in 1545, in a letter to Veit Dietrich, “that repels those who have a will of their own and attach some importance to their own judgment; if only he would not, through listening to the gossip of outsiders, take fire so quickly, chiding those who are blameless and breaking out into fits of temper; this, often enough, does harm even in matters of great moment.”[863] Luther himself was by no means unwilling to admit his faults in this direction and endeavoured to make up for them by occasionally praising his fellow-workers in fulsome terms; Yet so deep-seated was his suspicion of Melanchthon’s orthodoxy, that he even thought for a while of embodying his doctrine on the Sacrament in a formulary, which should condemn all his opponents and which all his friends, particularly those whom he had reason to mistrust, should be compelled to sign. This, according to Bucer, would have involved the departure of Melanchthon into exile. Bucer expressed his indignation at this projected “abominable condemnation” and at the treatment meted out to Melanchthon by Luther.[864]
Bucer himself was several times the object of Luther’s wrath, for instance, for his part in the “Cologne Book of Reform”: “It is nothing but a lot of twaddle in which I clearly detect the influence of that chatterbox Bucer.”[865] When Jakob Schenk arrived at Wittenberg after a long absence Luther was so angry with him for not sharing his views as to refuse to receive him when he called; he did the same in the case of Agricola, in spite of the fact that the latter brought a letter of recommendation from the Margrave of Brandenburg; in one of his letters calls him: “the worst of hypocrites, an impenitent man!”[866] From such a monster, so he said, he would take nothing but a sentence of condemnation. As for his former friend Schenk, he ironically offers him to Bishop Amsdorf as a helper in the ministry. On both of them he persisted in bestowing his old favourite nicknames, Jeckel and Grickel (Jakob and Agricola).
Luther’s Single-handed Struggle with the Powers of Evil
Owing to the theological opinions reached by some of his one-time friends Luther, as may well be understood, began to be oppressed by a feeling of lonesomeness.
The devil, whom he at least suspected of being the cause of his bodily pains,[867] is now backing the Popish teachers, and making him to be slighted. But, by so doing, thanks to Luther’s perseverance and bold defiance, he will only succeed in magnifying Christ the more.
“He hopes to get the better of us or to make us downhearted. But, as the Germans say, cacabimus in os eius. Willy-nilly, he shall suffer until his head is crushed, much as he may, with horrible gnashing of teeth, threaten to devour us. We preach the Seed of the woman; Him do we confess and to Him would we assign the first place, wherefore He is with us.”[868] In his painful loneliness he praises “the heavenly Father Who has hidden these things [Luther’s views on religion] from the wise and prudent and has revealed them to babes and little ones who cannot talk, let alone preach, and are neither clever nor learned.”[869] This he says in a sermon. The clever doctors, he adds, “want to make God their pupil; everyone is anxious to be His schoolmaster and tutor. And so it has ever been among the heretics.... In the Christian churches one bishop nags at the other, and each pastor snaps at his neighbour.... These are the real wiselings of whom Christ speaks who know a lot about horses’ bowels, but who do not keep to the road which God Himself has traced for us, but must always go their own little way.” Indeed it is the fate of “everything that God has instituted to be perverted by the devil,” by “saucy folk and clever people.” “The devil has indeed smeared us well over with fools. But they are accounted wise and prudent simply because they rule and hold office in the Churches.”[870]
Let us leave them alone then and turn our backs on them, no matter how few we be, for “God will not bear in His Christian Churches men who twist His Divine Word, even though they be called Pope, Emperor, Kings, Princes or Doctors.... We ourselves have had much to do with such wiselings, who have taken it upon themselves to bring about unity or reform.”[871] “They fancy that because they are in power they have a deeper insight into Scripture than other people.”[872] “The devil drives such men so that they seek their own praise and glory in Holy Scripture.” But do you say: I will listen to a teacher “only so long as he leads me to the Son of God,” the true master and preceptor, i.e. in other words, so long as he teaches the truth.[873]