Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

As Luther’s personality could not replace the outward rule of faith, viz. the authoritative voice of the teaching Church, his dreary prognostications were only too soon to be fulfilled. Hence in the appendix to another Wittenberg edition of Luther’s last sermon these words, as early as 1558, are represented as “the late Dr. Martin Luther’s excellent prophecies about the impending corruption and falling away of the chief teachers in our churches, particularly at Wittenberg.”[1381]

It is curious that, towards the close of his life, the Wittenberg Professor should have come again to insist so strongly on those points in his teaching for which he had fought at the outset, in spite of all the difficulties and contradictions they had been shown to involve, with the Bible, tradition and reason. He could at least claim that he had not abandoned his olden theses of the blindness of reason, of the unfreedom of the will, of the sinfulness of that concupiscence, from which none can get away, of the saving power of faith alone and the worthlessness of good works for the gaining of a heavenly reward, of the Bible as the sole source of faith and each man’s right of interpreting it, and, last, but not least, that of his own mission and call received from God Himself.

The decline of morals, now so obvious, was another phantom that haunted the evening of his days.

In the beginning of 1546 he confided to Amsdorf his anxiety regarding Meissen, Leipzig and other places where licence prevailed, together with contempt of the Gospel and its ministers. “This much is certain: Satan and his whole kingdom is terribly wroth with our Elector. To this kingdom your men of Meissen belong; they are the most dissolute folk on earth. Leipzig is pride and avarice personified, worse than any Sodom could be.… A new evil that Satan is hatching for us may be seen in the spread of the spirit of the Münster Dippers. After laying hold of the common people this spirit of revolt against all authority has also infected the great, and many Counts and Princes. May God prevent and overreach it!”[1382]

He tells “Bishop” George of Merseburg, in Feb., 1546, that “steps must be taken against the scandals into which the people are plunging head over heels, as though all law were at an end.” It seems to him that a new Deluge is coming. “Let us beware lest what Moses wrote of the days before the flood repeats itself, how ‘they took to wife whomsoever they pleased, even their own sisters and mothers and those they had carried off from their husbands.’ Instances of the sort have reached my ear privately. May God prevent such doings from becoming public as in the case of Herod and the kings of Egypt!”[1383] “The world is full of Satan and Satanic men,” so he groans even in an otherwise cheerful letter.[1384]

Up to the day of his death he was concerned for the welfare of the students at Wittenberg University. Among the 2000 young men at the University (for such was their number in Luther’s last years) there were many who were in bitter want. Luther sought to alleviate this by attacking, even in his sermons, those who were bent on fleecing the young; he not only gave readily out of his own slender means but also wrote to others asking them to be mindful of the students; of this we have an instance in a note he wrote in his later years, in which he asks certain “dear gentlemen” (possibly of the University or the magistracy) for help for a “pious and learned fellow” who would have to leave Wittenberg “for very hunger”; he declares that he himself was ready to contribute a share, though he was no longer able to afford the gifts he was daily called upon to bestow.[1385]

We know how grieved he was at the downfall of the schools and how loud his complaints were of the lawlessness of youth; how it distressed him to see the schools looked down upon though their contribution to the maintenance of the Churches was “entirely out of question.”[1386]

For his University of Wittenberg he requests the prayers of others against those who were undermining its reputation. He sees the small effect of his earnest exhortations to the students against immorality.[1387] The excellent statutes he had laid down for the town and the University were nullified by the bad example of men in high places. “Ah, how bitterly hostile the devil is to our Churches and schools.… Tyranny and sects are everywhere gaining the upper hand by dint of violence.… I believe there are many wicked knaves and spies here on the watch for us, who rejoice when scandals and dissensions arise. Hence we must watch and pray diligently. Unless God preserves us all is up. And so it looks. Pray, therefore, pray! This school [of Wittenberg] is as it were the foundation and stronghold of pure religion.”[1388] He once declared sadly that, among all the students in the town there were scarcely two from whom something might be hoped as future pastors of souls. “If out of all the young men present here two or three honest theologians grow up then we should have reason to thank God! Good theologians are indeed rare birds on this earth. Among a thousand you will seldom find two, or even one. And indeed the world no longer deserves such good teachers, nor does it want them; things will go ill when I, and you and some few others are gone.”[1389]

“The world was like this before the flood, before the destruction of Sodom, before the Babylonian captivity, before the destruction of Jerusalem—and so again it is before the fall of Germany.… Should you, however, ask what good has come of our teaching, answer me first, what good came of Lot’s preaching in Sodom?”[1390]