In this much-discussed Sermon on the Tares Luther is very far from wishing to give the authorities directions as to how to treat the sectarians. On the contrary he makes it plain that some other line of action than that described by him must be followed even by the faithful and the preachers, and much more so by the Christian authorities, whenever the heretics come out of their “corner” and try to climb into the pulpit or mount the altar. What was to be done that the pulpit and the Sacrament might remain undefiled, he had already sufficiently explained elsewhere. Naturally, a sermon on the Gospel which tells us to leave the Tares until the harvest was scarcely the place for Luther to expound his severer theories on the treatment to be meted out to unbelievers and misbelievers, so that his silence here cannot be taken as a repudiation of the measures for which he so long had stood. At the close of the next sermon, the last he was ever to preach, addressing himself to the nobility, he speaks very harshly of the Jews. “If they refuse to be converted, then, as blasphemers, they deserve that we should not suffer or endure them among us.” “You Lords ought not to tolerate but rather expel them.” This duty he bases on his usual principle: “Were I to tolerate the man who dishonours, blasphemes and curses Christ my Master, I should be making myself a partaker in the sins of others.”
His system of coercing and punishing heretics he certainly never repudiated.
Compulsory Attendance at Church
“Facts have shown,” Luther wrote to Spalatin in 1527 of the conditions in his new churches, “that men despise the Evangel and insist on being compelled by the law and the sword.”[927] He was very anxious to make attendance at the Lutheran preaching a matter of obligation.
According to his earlier statements, attendance at the preaching had been voluntary, for the matter of the sermons was to be judged by the hearers, in order that they might avoid what was harmful; his subsequent practice of driving all to the preaching made an end of this freedom, or rather duty. Through the authorities, so far as his influence went, he insisted on this principle: “Even though they do not believe they must nevertheless, for the sake of the Ten Commandments, be driven to the preaching, so that they may at least learn the outward work of obedience.” He wrote this at a time when he had already justified such coercion at Wittenberg, viz. on Aug. 26, 1529, in a letter to the “strict and steadfast” Joseph Levin Metzsch of Mila, who was shortly after appointed by the Elector to take part in the Visitation.[928] Instructions sent by Luther on the same day to Thomas Löscher, pastor of the same locality, are to the same effect (“cogendi sunt ad conciones … audiant etiam inviti”).[929] The orders of the authorities concerning public worship were represented in the Visitation Rules for the pastors (1528) as universally binding: “All secular authority is to be obeyed because the secular powers are not ordering a new worship but enforcing peace and charity.”[930] The Preface of the Smaller Catechism (1531) was on the same lines. “Although we neither can nor should force anyone into the faith, yet the masses must be held and driven to it in order that they may know what is right or wrong in those among whom they live.”[931]
In the same year Luther advised Margrave George of Brandenburg to compel the people to attend the Catechism “at the behest of the secular authority,” for, since they “are Christians and wish to be so called,” it was only fitting “they should be obliged to learn what a Christian ought to know.” The Ansbach preachers embodied this requirement in the same year in the alterations they proposed in the church-regulations.[932]
Wittenberg served as the pattern. It was to Wittenberg that Leonard Beyer addressed himself when he succeeded Luther’s friend, Nicholas Hausmann, as pastor of Zwickau. Luther answered his letter by describing the system of coercion practised in Wittenberg and the neighbourhood when people persistently neglected to attend the sermons: “With the authority and in the name of our Most Noble Prince it is our custom to affright those who disregard all piety and fail to attend the preaching, and to threaten them with banishment and the law. This is the first step. Then, if they do not amend, the pastors are enjoined by us to ply them for a month or more with instructions and representations, and, finally, in the event of their still proving contumacious, to excommunicate them, and to break off all intercourse with them as though they were heathen.” He concludes: “The words of the Bible [Matt. xviii. 17; 2 Thes. iii. 6] concerning the avoidance of heretics are quite clear.”[933]—He, however, forgets to add that neither he nor the pastors had ever been quite successful in their attempts at excommunication.
The above regulations of the authorities were to remain in force. In 1533 the Prince once more insisted that: No one is to be permitted to absent himself from the “common church-going,” everyone must be “earnestly reminded of this.”[934] In the General Articles of 1557 it was determined by the Elector August, that, whoever absented himself without permission from the sermon on Sundays and festivals, whether in the morning or afternoon, “more particularly in the villages” was to be fined, or, if he was poor, “to be punished with the pillory, either at the church or at some prison.”[935] The parsons, however, were to notify the authorities of any who contemned the preaching and the sacraments, or who obstinately persisted in their false opinion. Even the practice of auricular confession was, at a later date, made a strict law; whoever evaded confession and the Supper was liable to banishment.[936] The Saxon lawyer, Benedict Carpzov (1595-1666) in his “Iurisprudentia ecclesiastica” defended as self-evident the legal principle based on the practice of Luther’s own country: “Those, who, after repeated admonitions, maliciously absent themselves from the Supper, are to be expelled from the land; they are to be compelled to sell their goods and emigrate.”[937] The same scholarly lawyer elsewhere alludes to the Saxon custom of condemning seditious and blasphemous heretics to die at the stake.[938]
At Wittenberg strong ramparts were set up for the protection of the Lutheran doctrine and to prevent divergent opinions finding their way in.