This Evangel came upon Germany at a time when the Church’s life was in a state of decay, when the adequate religious instruction of the young was neglected by the Church, and when the dioceses were for the most part governed by younger sons of princely or noble houses, who were quite unfitted for their spiritual work. It is noteworthy that the defenders of the Church had very little good to say of the bishops.[1504]
Of the new preachers and promoters of Luther’s Reformation a large number was composed of apostate clergy and escaped monks and nuns whom Luther had won over. It was plain enough that it was no such “great and immortal” work as he claimed, to have attracted such people to his party thanks to theories which, while seeming to calm the conscience, really flattered the senses, for instance, by what he said on celibacy, vows and priestly ordination. “Do not seek to deny that you are a man, with flesh and blood; hence leave God to judge between the valiant angel-like heroes [those religious who were faithful to the Church] and the sickly, despised sinners [whom they upbraided as apostates].[1505]… Chastity is beyond healthy nature, let alone sinful nature.… There is no enticement so bad as these commands [of celibacy] and vows, forged by the devil himself.” Youthful religious were to be dragged out of their monasteries as quickly as possible, and priests were to learn that theirs was but a “Carnival ordination.” “Holy Orders are all jugglery and in God’s sight they have no value.”[1506]
Hence contemporaries, considering events from the standpoint just described, must needs have told themselves that Luther’s success, unexpected and astounding as it was, could not after all be laid down to the “greatness” of any one single man.[1507]
What, moreover, must have been the thoughts of the observer regarding the permanence of Luther’s work who lived to see the master’s own Lutheranism falling to pieces, according to the statements of his most zealous admirers,[1508] as soon as he was dead? Luther himself almost seemed ready to ring down the curtain on the premature termination of the great tragedy of which he could not but despair.[1509]
In the very year of Luther’s death Cochlæus passed in review the havoc wrought in the Church, embodying his observations in the work he had just finished and was to publish three years later, viz. his “De Actis et Scriptis Lutheri.”
These pages seem still to tremble with the excitement of the terrible period they describe. It is impressive to hear this voice of the Catholic spokesman coming as it were from Luther’s tomb and telling of the devastation of the storm raised by the Wittenberg professor. As Kawerau says, Cochlæus himself could point to a life “which, year after year, ever since 1521 had been devoted feverishly to the ecclesiastical debates of the day in which he was so keenly concerned and consumed in ceaseless controversy [with Lutheranism].”[1510] The grey-headed scholar, “illuminated and inspired as he was by the truest spirit of Christianity,”[1511] had once in 1533 declared: “Whatever I write now or at any time against Luther, I write for the glory of God, the service of the truth and the good of my neighbour. For I believe firmly that Luther is a malicious liar, heretic and rebel and I can find nothing but this in his books and in my own conscience.… I am not, however, bitter or hostile to Luther personally, but merely to his wickedness and vices. Were he to desist I would gladly go and fetch back so learned a man from Rome or Compostella and give him my love and my service.”[1512]
Cochlæus calls to mind first of all the course of public events in Germany. At Ratisbon, where he was staying, the Diet of 1546 was opened with great pomp by Charles V at the very time Cochlæus was penning the Preface to his work. He relates how the same Kaiser had declared at the Diet of Worms in 1521 in the edict against Luther that “his writings contain hardly anything but food for dissensions, schism, war, murder, robbery, conflagrations, and a great apostasy of the Christians.”[1513] “The times are grave and perilous,” so his warning had run: “Oh, that they may not mean the disgrace of our country!”[1514] Now, however, Cochlæus sees with grief that “Luther has brought nearly all Germany into shame and confusion.” “Our fatherland has lost all its former beauty,” he exclaims, “and its Imperial power is shattered.” He trembles at the sight of the dangers within and without.[1515]
“The mischief caused by Luther’s revolt is so great that it is out of comparison worse than the effects of even the most unhappy war. Never indeed in the whole of history have the miseries of war caused such injury to Christendom as the blows dealt us by this heresy.” In its consequences it was worse than the triumphal progress of Arianism in early Christian times. He instances the Peasant Rebellion and the frightful destruction that followed in its wake; also the machinations of political alliances, hostile alike to the Church and the State, the loosening of the common bonds that unite the Christian peoples, and the decline of the authority of the rulers, which was “attacked and dragged in the mire by Luther and thus rendered contemptible in the eyes of the masses.”[1516]