In his replies to such arguments against the truth of his Church Luther was loath to attempt the difficult task of proving the existence of holiness in the domain of the Evangel. On the contrary, with surprising candour, he usually meets his opponents half-way as regards the facts. Thus, in his “Wider Hans Worst,” in 1541, he admits that things are just as bad as they had been in Jerusalem in the days of the prophets, “with us too there is flesh and blood, nay, the devil among the sons of Job. The peasants are savage, the burghers avaricious and the nobles grasping. We shout and storm our best, helped by the Word of God, and resist as far as we can.… Willingly we confess and frankly that we are not as holy as we should be.”[1236]
Such admissions are followed by astonishing attempts to evade the force of the objection and by coarse attacks on the immorality of the Papacy which he exaggerates beyond all measure.
The few, he declares, who are good and virtuous suffice to prove the Church’s holiness. “Some do more than their part; that they are few in number does not matter. God can help a whole nation for the sake of one man as he did by Naaman, the Syrian (4 Kings v.). In short, one’s life cannot be made a subject of debate.”—On another occasion he replies shrewdly that the mark of holiness was not nearly so safe as other marks, for distinguishing the true Church; for pious works were also practised at times by the heathen.… As regards its importance as a mark, holiness must be subordinated to the true preaching of the Word and to pure doctrine, which in the end will always bring amendment of life; whereas corrupt doctrine poisoned the whole mass, a scandalous life was damaging chiefly to the man who lived it; but corruption of doctrine had penetrated Popery through and through.[1237] “We do not laugh when wickedness is committed amongst us as they [the Papists] do in their Churches; as Solomon says (Prov. ii. 14): ‘Who are glad when they have done evil and rejoice in most wicked things,’ and also seek to defend them by fire and sword.”[1238]
We have here an instance of the tactics by which he turns on his adversaries and abuses them. In his anxiety to turn the reproach of his foes against themselves he selects by preference the celibacy of the clergy and the religious vows; nor does he attack merely the blemishes which the Church herself bewailed and countered, but the very institution itself.
In his “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen” he exclaims: “The Pope condemns the married life of the bishops and priests, this is plain enough now”; “if a man has been married twice he is declared by the Papists incapable of being promoted to the higher Orders.[1239] But if he has soiled himself by abominable behaviour he is nevertheless tolerated in these offices.”[1240] “Why,” he asks, most unjustly misrepresenting the Catholic view of the sacrament of marriage, “why do they look upon it as the lowest of the sacraments, nay, as an impure thing and a sin in which it is impossible to serve God?”[1241]
To what monstrous and repulsive images he can have recourse when painting the “whore Church” of the Papacy, the following from “Wider Hans Worst” will serve to show: You are, so he there writes in 1541 of the Catholics, “the runaway, apostate, strumpet-Church as the prophets term it”; “you whoremongers preach in your own brothels and devil’s Churches”; it is with you as though the bride of a loving bridegroom “were to allow every man to abuse her at his will. This whore—once a pure virgin and beloved bride—is now an apostate, vagrant whore, a house-whore,” etc. “You become the diligent pupils and whorelings of the Lenæ, the arch-whores, as the comedies say, till you old whores bear in your turn young whores, and so increase and multiply the Pope’s Church, which is the devil’s own, and make many of Christ’s chaste virgins who were born by baptism, arch-whores like yourselves. This, I take it, is to talk plain German, understandable to you and everybody else.”[1242]
Without following him through all he says we shall merely draw the reader’s attention to a proverb and a picture Luther here uses. The proverb runs: “The sow has been washed in the pond and now wallows again in the filth. Such are you, and such was I once.”[1243] In the picture “the Pope’s Church,” i.e. hell, is represented as a “great dragon’s head” with gaping jaws, as it is depicted in the old paintings of the Last Judgment; “there, in the midst of the flames, are the Pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, emperors, kings, princes and men and women of all sorts (but no children). Verily I know not how one could better paint and describe the Church of the Pope,”[1244] etc.
After such rude abuse he comes back in the same writing to his usual apology. There was, he says, no object in alluding to the moral evils in the Lutheran Churches because of the Church being of its very nature invisible.[1245] Everything depends on the doctrine “which must be pure and undefiled, i.e. the one, dear, saving, holy Word of God without anything thrown in. But the life that ought to be ruled, cleansed and hallowed daily by such teaching is not yet altogether pure and holy because our carrion of flesh and blood still lives.” Yet “for the sake of the Word whereby he is healed and cleansed all this is overlooked, pardoned and forgiven him, and he must be termed clean.”[1246]
The Papists have a beam in their own eye, i.e. their false doctrine, but they see the mote in the eye of others “as regards the life.”[1247] If it is a question with whom the true Church is to be found he assures us: “We who teach God’s Word with such certainty are indeed weak, and, by reason of our great humility, so foolish that we do not like to boast of being God’s Churches, witnesses, ministers and preachers or that God speaks through us, though this we certainly are because without a doubt we have His Word and teach it”; it is only the Papists “who venture boldly to proclaim out of their great holiness: Here is God and we are God’s Church.”[1248]
It was not, however, bold presumption and lack of humility that led Luther’s literary opponents among the Catholics to appeal to the promises Christ had made to His Church; rather it was their conviction that these solemn assurances excluded the possibility of the Church’s having ever erred in the way Luther maintained that she had done.