Even Luther’s very monument re-echoed the menaces pronounced by Luther upon Catholicism when he desecrated what was most sacred for so many thousands, and laid rough hands on the one consolation of their sorrowful lives.
The fierce announcement to Popery: “My death will be your plague” fell from his lips not once but often. “Only after my death will they feel the real Luther.” “My life shall be their hangman, my death shall be their devil!”[1472] “When I die I shall become a spirit to plague the bishops, the priestlings and the godless monks so greatly that a dead Luther will spell to them more trouble than a thousand living ones.”[1473]
With the oft-repeated words: “Pestis eram vivus, moriens ero mors tua Papa,”[1474] which are also engraved on his death mask in the Luther-Halle at Wittenberg, he proclaimed that his death would do more harm to the Papacy than his life; as long as he lived the Papists would benefit to some extent from his labours, but, when he died, they would be deprived even of this. The threat, though grotesque, is quite in keeping with his belief in himself. He says that it is he alone who is still holding back the storm that is threatening to engulf all the Papists. He asks the Catholics of Germany: “How if Luther’s life were of so much value in God’s sight that, did he not live, not one of you would be sure of your life or existence here below, so that his death would be a misfortune to you all?”[1475] He even goes so far as to prophesy: “One day they will cry: Oh, that Luther were still living!”[1476] He parades before the Catholics the services he had rendered by resisting the fanatics and those who denied the Sacrament; the Catholics, so he says, would never have been able to do so much. “They are ungrateful, of this will I speak to them when I am dead. I have inveighed against them enough in the ‘Vermanũg,’ but it is all of no use.”[1477] “After my death the Papists will see all the good I have done them, and in me the saying will be fulfilled: ‘He died justified of his sin.’”[1478]
Thus in his half jesting, half serious fashion he proclaimed himself a sort of defender and pillar of the Papacy. The idea did not seem too strange to his friend Jonas to prevent him introducing it into his funeral oration on Luther: “The Papists,” he says, “Canons, priestlings, monks and nuns would in years to come wish that Dr. Luther still lived; they would gladly obey him, and, if they could, call him from the grave; but their chance is now gone.”[1479]
These great expectations and bold prophecies were as little realised as that of the impending fall of the Papacy.
On the contrary the Papacy gathered strength, renewed its youth from one decade to another and, though the apostasy also grew, yet a gradual revival of the ancient faith set in throughout the Catholic world. On the minds of the faithful Catholics there remained, however, indelibly stamped the gloomy recollection of the towering defiance with which the Wittenberg professor and his secular allies had sought to introduce an alien teaching and reform.
The inflexible will on which Luther so prided himself is the sign manual of his personality. Nothing is so characteristic of Luther as his obstinate determination which yielded to nothing, and the appalling pertinacity that ever drove him on and never allowed him to retreat.
“No one, please God, shall awe me so long as I live!”[1480] To no other principle was he more faithful throughout his life. Thus we hear him declaring:
“Good, then let us bid defiance in God’s name; whoever feels compunction let him draw back; whoever is afraid let him flee!… I have brought Holy Scripture and the Word of God to light as no other has done for a thousand years. I have done my part. Your blood be upon your own heads and not on mine.”[1481]
“When we see and feel the world’s wantonness, anger and hate, let us learn to defy it,” “to the disgust and annoyance of the world.” “This is an exalted defiance and an excellent consolation.” “Defiantly we boast: The Gospel that we preach is not ours but our Lord Christ’s.”[1482]