As we have already shown, Landgrave Philip of Hesse was likewise disposed to be less intolerant than Luther, at least with regard to the Anabaptists. Relentlessly as he refused any public toleration to the Catholic faith and banished those Catholics who persisted in their religious practices, yet, in a letter of 1532, addressed to Elector Johann of Saxony, he declared himself against the execution of the Anabaptists; the actual words have been quoted above (p. 256). In another letter, in 1545, to the Elector Johann Frederick, he also points out, that: “If this sect be punished so severely by us, then we, by our example, give our foes, the Papists, reason to treat us in the same way, for they regard us as no better than the Anabaptists.”[987]
These and similar remonstrances were unavailing to change the views which had taken root at Wittenberg.
George Major, Professor of theology at Wittenberg University, was a learned and zealous disciple of Luther’s. He, like Melanchthon, on hearing of the execution of Servetus at Geneva, declared that Calvin was to be commended for having put to death the heretic, and, at a Disputation held in 1555, expressly defended the thesis, that it was the duty of the authorities to punish contumacious heretics with death. They must “get rid of blasphemers, perjurers and wizards. Amongst the blasphemers must, however, be reckoned those who persistently defend idolatrous worship, or heresies which clearly disagree with the articles of the faith.”[988]
Luther’s code of penalties for any deviation from the Wittenberg teaching fitted in well with Bugenhagen’s natural harshness, who showed himself only too ready to make his own the words of Moses concerning the slaying of unbelievers. We may recall how, in conversation, when Luther mentioned the difficulties he had with Carlstadt, Agricola and Schenk, Bugenhagen broke in with the remark: “Sir Doctor, we ought to do what is commanded in Deuteronomy where Moses says they should be put to death.”[989] Bugenhagen, in the many places into which he brought the new faith, was relentlessly severe in enforcing against the Catholics the principles he had carried with him from Wittenberg. Very characteristic is the tone in which he reported to Luther that the Mass had been forbidden in Denmark and the monks driven out of the land as “seditionmongers” and “blasphemers.”[990] Not only had the bishops been imprisoned, but, according to the account of Peter Palladius the superintendent, some of the monks “had been hanged.”[991]
Justus Jonas began his labours at Halle in 1542 by a written invitation to the Town-Council “completely to purge the town of false doctrine and every kind of idolatrous worship”; Luther and Melanchthon had sufficiently proved in their works that this “was incumbent on Christian magistrates.” He declared that the monks still living in the town were “obstinate and impenitent idolaters,” “adders and snakes” whom he “must reduce to silence with the use of the gag”; already, throughout the whole neighbourhood, “merely at the exhortations of the preachers, the monasteries, with their Masses and idolatrous worship, had crumbled into ruins.”[992] Later, in a memorandum addressed to the Town-Council in 1546, Jonas again inveighed against the remaining handful of well-disposed and zealous monks, and called to mind how “our beloved father, Dr. Martin, in the very last sermon he preached at Halle shortly before his decease, had exhorted the Town-Council and the whole Church with all his burning, stormy earnestness to rid themselves of the crawling things.”[993] Jonas appealed to his own “conscience” and threatened to report matters to the Elector of Saxony and “his Electoral Highness’s scholars at Wittenberg.”[994] With the outbreak of the Schmalkalden war, when the Electoral troops laid waste the monasteries his hopes at last found their fulfilment. He announced on March 3, 1547, that, at Halle, the “Papistic idolatry” had now been swept away;[995] when he wrote this he did not expect the change in the position of the Catholics in the town, for which the defeat of the Elector’s troops in the following month was responsible.
We are reminded how greatly Spalatin was imbued with Luther’s exclusivism and spirit of intolerance by his words concerning the “Christian bit” which he wished placed in the mouths of all the clergy.[996] He was at great pains to press upon the sovereign that he was not to permit “unchristian ceremonies” and “idolatry.”[997]
The Elector Johann was merely giving expression to the views with which Spalatin and Luther had inspired him when he declared that, “heretics and contemners of the Word” must in every instance be punished by the authorities.[998] His successor, Johann Frederick, likewise followed obediently the “Wittenberg theologians and lawyers,” as he terms his authorities.[999] He instructed Melanchthon in 1536 to write and have printed a popular “Answer to sundry unchristian articles” against the Anabaptists, which was to be read aloud from the pulpit every third Sunday, and which insisted that the secular authorities were bound to punish “all contempt of Scripture and the outward Word” as “blatant blasphemy.”[1000]
At the Religious Conference at Worms in 1557 quite a number of respected Lutheran theologians (J. Brenz, J. Marbach, M. Diller, J. Pistorius, J. Andreæ, G. Karg, P. Eber and G. Rungius) signed a lengthy statement by Melanchthon aimed at the Anabaptists. As one of the errors of the sect is instanced their teaching that God communicates Himself without the intermediary of the ministry, of preaching or the Sacrament. Those “heads and ringleaders” of the sect who persisted in their doctrines were “to be condemned as guilty of sedition and blasphemy and put to death by the sword”; the death penalty prescribed in Leviticus for blasphemers was asserted to be a “natural law, binding, by virtue of their office, on all in authority,” hence “the judges had done the right thing” when they condemned to death the heretic Servetus at Geneva.[1001]
Johann Brenz, who helped to promote Lutheranism in Würtemberg, had, in 1528, written and published a pamphlet in which he deprecated the Anabaptists’ being put to death “merely on account of heresy” when not guilty of sedition.[1002] He was for this reason regarded by Melanchthon as “too mild.”[1003] His later writings, however, show that the intolerant spirit of Wittenberg finally seized on him too. In his treatment of Catholics—both previous to 1528, and, even more so when the olden worship had been suppressed at Schwäbisch-Halle and he had been called to Stuttgart—he was in the forefront in advising violent measures against Catholic practices. When he reorganised the Church in Würtemberg, in 1536, after the victory of Duke Ulrich, attendance at the Protestant sermons was made obligatory on the Catholics of Stuttgart under pain of a fine, or of imprisonment in the tower on bread and water.[1004] Brenz, though widely extolled as tolerant and broadminded, in his quality of spiritual adviser to Duke Christopher, stooped to the meanest and most petty regulations in order to induce the nuns who still remained faithful to their religion—many of whom were of high birth and advanced in years—to accept the new faith; they were compelled to attend the sermons and religious colloquies, deprived of their books of devotion, their correspondence was supervised, they had to entertain Protestant guests at table and to be served by Lutheran maids, etc.[1005]