Luther’s attitude towards the lawyers is of special importance from two points of view. It shows afresh the high opinion he entertained of himself, and, at the same time, it reveals his jealousy of any outside influence.
“Before my time there was not a lawyer,” he says for instance in an earlier outburst, “who knew what it meant to be righteous. They learnt it from me. In the Gospel there is nothing about the duty of worshipping jurists. Yes, before the world I will allow them to be in the right, but, before God, they shall be beneath me. If I can judge of Moses and bring him into subjection [i.e. criticise the Law in the light of the Gospel] what then of the lawyers?… If of the two one must perish, then let the law go and let Christ remain.”[1354] He was not learned in the law, but, as the proclaimer of the Evangel, he was “the supreme law in the field of conscience (‘ego sum ius iurium in re conscientiarum’).”[1355]
“When I give an opinion and have to break my head over it and a lawyer comes along and tries to dispute it, I say: ‘Do you look after the Government and leave us in peace. You men of the law seek to oppress us, but it is written: Thou art a priest for ever’” (Ps. cx. 4).[1356]—“The justice of the jurists is heathen justice,” he says; but, after all, even the justice [righteousness] of his own school of theology fell short of the mark. “Our justice is a relative justice; but if I am not pious yet Christ is pious; we are at least able to expound the commandments of God, and do so in the course of our calling. But, even if you distil a jurist five times over, he still cannot interpret even one of the Commandments.”[1357]
The other trait that comes out in his dealings with the lawyers is his distaste for any outside interference with his Church. He looked askance at the attempts of secular authorities, statesmen and Court-lawyers to have a say in Church matters, which, strictly, should have been submitted to him alone and his preachers. Yet it was he himself who had put the Church under State control; he had invited the sovereigns and magistrates to decide on the most vital questions, doing so partly owing to the needs of the time, partly as a logical result of the new system. He himself had legalised the sequestration of the Church’s lands and had helped to set up the State Consistories. So long as the secular authorities were of his way of thinking he left them a free hand, more or less. He was, however, forced to realise more and more, particularly in the evening of his days, that their arbitrary behaviour was ruining his influence and only making worse the evils that his work had laid bare to the world.
In his last utterances he is fond of calling “Centaurs” the officials and Court personages who, according to him, were stifling the Church in her growth by their wantonness, ambition and avarice. He bewails his inability to vanquish them; they are a necessary evil. “Make a Visitation of your Churches all the same,” he told his friend Amsdorf, early in January in the last year of his life; “the Lord will be with you, and even should one or other of the Centaurs forbid you, you are excused. Let them answer for it.”[1358]
We have also other utterances which testify to his deep distrust of the secular authorities, on account of their real or imaginary encroachments.
“The Princes seize upon all the lands of the Church and leave the poor students to starve, and thus the parishes become desolate, as is already the case.”[1359]—“The Princes and the towns do little for the support of our holy religion, leave everything in the lurch and do not punish wickedness. Highly dangerous times are to come.”[1360]—“The magistrates misuse their power against the Evangel; for this they will pay dearly.”[1361]—“The politicians show that they regard our words as those of men”; in this case we had better quit “Babylon” and leave them to themselves.[1362]
“I see what is coming,” he wrote in 1541, “unless the tyranny of the Turk assists us by frightening our [lower] nobles and humbling them, they will illtreat us worse than do the Turks. Their only thought is to put the sovereigns in leading-strings and to lay the burghers and peasants in irons. The slavery of the Pope will be followed by a new enslaving of the people under the nobles.”[1363]—In the same year he says: “If the nobles go on in this way,” i.e. neglecting their duty of “protecting the pious and punishing the wicked,” there will be “an end of Germany and we shall soon be worse than even the Spaniards and Turks; but they will catch it soon.”[1364]—In 1543 he indignantly told a councillor who opposed him and his followers: “You are not lords over the parishes and the preaching office; it was not you who founded it but the Son of God, nor have you ever given anything towards it, so that you have far less right to it than the devil has to the kingdom of heaven; it is not for you to find fault with it, or to teach, nor yet to forbid the administration of punishment.… There is no shepherd-lad so humble that he will take a harsh word from a strange master; it is the minister alone who must be the butt of everyone, and put up with everything from all, while they will suffer nothing from him, not even God’s own Word.”[1365]—In 1544 he even said of his own Elector: “After all, the Court is of no use, its rule is like that of the crab and snail. It either cannot get on or else is always wanting to go back. Christ did well by His Church in not confiding its government to the Courts. Otherwise the devil would have nothing to do but to devour the souls of Christians.”[1366]—“The rulers shut their eyes,” he had written shortly before, “they leave great wantonness unpunished, and now have nothing better to do than impose one tax after another on their poor underlings. Therefore will the Lord destroy them in His wrath.”[1367]
“What then is to become of the Church if the world does not shortly come to an end? I have lived my allotted span,” so he sighed in 1542, “the devil is sick of my life and I am sick of the devil’s hate.”[1368]
He often gives vent to his wounded feelings in unseemly words. A strange mixture of glowing fanaticism and coarse jocularity flows forth like a stream of molten lava from the furnace within him.