Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

He invites the authorities on this occasion to “lay hands on” such property and to apply to the common fund all that remained over after the obligations attaching to the property had been complied with, and restitution made to such heirs of the donors as demanded it on account of their poverty. In giving this advice he was anxious, as he says, to disclaim any responsibility in the event of “such property as had fallen vacant being plundered owing to the estates changing hands and each one laying hold on whatever he could seize.” “Should avarice find an entry what then can be done? It must not indeed be given up in despair. It is better that avarice should take too much in a legal way than that there should be such plundering as occurred in Bohemia. Let each one [i.e. of the heirs of the donors] examine his own conscience and see what he ought to take for his own needs and what he should leave for the common fund!”[148]

The setting up of such a “common fund” was also suggested in other Lutheran towns as a means of introducing some sort of order into the confiscation of the Church’s property. The direct object of the funds was not the relief of the poor. This was merely included as a measure for palliating and justifying the bold stroke which the innovators were about to take in secularising the whole of the Church’s vast properties.

This, however, makes some of Luther’s admonitions in his preface to the regulations for the Leisnig common fund sound somewhat strange, for instance, his injunction that everything be carried out according to the law of love. “Christian charity must here act and decide; laws and enactments cannot settle the difficulties. Indeed I write this counsel only out of Christian charity for the Christians.” Whoever refuses to accept his advice, he says at the conclusion, may go his own way; only a few would accept it, but one or two were quite enough for him. “The world must remain the world and Satan its Prince. I have done what I could and what it was my duty to do.” He was half conscious of the unpractical character of his proposals, yet any failure he was determined to attribute to the devil’s doing.

His premonition of failure was only too soon realised at Leisnig. The new scheme could not be made to work. The magistrates refused to resign the rights they claimed of disposing of the foundations and similar charitable sources of revenue or to hand over the incomings to the coffer-masters, for the latter, they argued, were representatives, not of the congregation but of the Church. Hence the fund had to go begging. Luther came to words with the town-council, but was unable to have his own way, even though he appealed to the Elector.[149] He lamented in 1524 that the example of Leisnig had been a very sad one, though, as the first of its kind,[150] it should have served as a model. Of Tileman Schnabel, an ex-Augustinian and college friend of Luther’s at Erfurt, who had been working at Leisnig as preacher and “deacon,” Luther wrote, that he would soon find himself obliged to leave if he did not wish to die of hunger. “Incidents such as these deprive the parsonages of their best managers. Maybe they want to drive them back to their old monasteries.”[151]

Thus the parochial fund of Leisnig, which some writers have extolled so highly, really never came into existence. It lives only in the directions given by Luther.

So ill were parson and schoolmaster cared for at Leisnig, in spite of all the Church property that had been sequestered, that, according to the Visitation of 1529, the preacher there had been obliged to ply a trade and gain a living by selling beer. In 1534, so the records of the Visitations of that date declare, the schoolmaster had for five years been paid no salary.

Link, the Altenburg preacher, was also unsuccessful in his efforts to carry out a similar scheme. He complained as early as 1523, in a writing entitled “Von Arbeyt und Betteln,” that this Christian undertaking had so far “not only not been furthered but had actually gone backward” in spite of all his efforts from the pulpit. He, too, addresses himself to the “rulers” and reminds them that it is their duty “to the best of their ability to provide for the poverty of the masses.”[152]

To Luther’s bitter grief and disappointment Wittenberg (see above, p. 49) also furnished anything but an encouraging example. Here the incentive to the introduction of the common fund by Carlstadt had been the resolve of the town council “to seize on the revenues of the Church, the brotherhoods and guilds and divert them into the common fund, to be employed for general purposes, and for paying the Church officials.… No less than twenty-one pious guilds were to be mulcted.”[153] Yet the Wittenberg measures were so little a success, in spite of all Luther’s efforts, that in his sermons he could not sufficiently deplore the absence of charity and prevalence of avarice and greed amongst both burghers and councillors.[154] The Beutelordnung continued indeed in existence, but merely as an administrative department of the town council.

It is not surprising therefore that Luther gave up for the while any attempt at putting into practice the Leisnig project elsewhere; his scheme for assembling the true Christians into a community had also perforce to betake itself unto the land of dreams. Only in his “Deudsche Messe” of 1526 does the old idea again force itself to the front: “Here a general collection for the poor might be made among the congregation; it should be given willingly and distributed amongst the needy after the example of St. Paul, 2 Cor. ix.… If only we had people earnestly desirous of being Christians, the manner and order would soon be settled.”[155]

Subsequent to 1526, however, Bugenhagen drafted better regulations and poor laws for Wittenberg and other Protestant towns, founded this time on a more practical basis. (See below, p. 57 f.)