Luther, nevertheless, continued to complain of the Wittenbergers. The indignation he expresses at the lack of all charitable endeavours throughout the domain of the new Evangel serves as a suitable background for these complaints.
Want of charity and of neighbourly love was the primary and most important cause of the failure of Luther’s efforts.
“Formerly, when people served the devil and outraged the Blood of Christ,” he says in 1530 in “Das man die Kinder zur Schulen halten solle” (see above, p. 6), “all purses were open and there was no end to the giving, for churches, schools and every kind of abomination; but now that it is a question of founding true schools and churches every purse is closed with iron chains and no one is able to give.” So pitiful a sight made him beg of God a happy death so that he might not live to see Germany’s punishment: “Did my conscience allow of it I would even give my help and advice so as to bring back the Pope with all his abominations to rule over us once more.”[156]
What leads him to such admissions as, that, the Christians, “under the plea of freedom are now seven times worse than they were under the Pope’s tyranny,” is, in the first place, his bitter experience of the drying up of charity, which now ceases to care even for the parsonages and churches. Under the Papacy people had been eager to build churches and to make offerings to be distributed in alms among the poor, but, now that the true religion is taught, it is a wonder how everyone has grown so cold.—Yet the people were told and admonished that it was well pleasing to God and all the angels, but even so they would not respond.—Now a pastor could not even get a hole in his roof mended to enable him to lie dry, whereas in former days people could erect churches and monasteries regardless of cost.—“Now there is not a single town ready to support a preacher and there is nothing but robbery and pilfering amongst the people and no one hinders them. Whence comes this shameful plague? ‘From the doctrine,’ say the bawlers, ‘which you teach, viz. that we must not reckon on works or place our trust in them.’ This is, however, the work of the tiresome devil who falsely attributes such things to the pure and wholesome teaching,” etc.[157]
He is so far from laying the blame on his teaching that he exclaims: What would our forefathers, who were noted for their charity, not have done “had they had the light of the Evangel which is now given to us”? Again and again he comes back to the contrast between his and older times: “Our parents and forefathers put us to shame for they gave so generously and charitably, nay even to excess, to the churches, parsonages and schools, foundations, hospitals,” etc.[158]—“Indeed had we not already the means, thanks to the charitable alms and foundations of our forefathers, the Gospel itself would long since have been wiped out by the burghers in the towns, and the nobles and peasants in the country, so that not one poor preacher would have enough to eat and drink; for we refuse to supply them, and, instead, rob and lay violent hands on what others have given and founded for the purpose.”[159]
To sum up briefly other characteristic complaints which belong here, he says: Now that in accordance with the true Evangel we are admonished “to give without seeking for honour or merit, no one can spare a farthing.”[160]—No one now will give, and, “unless we had the lands we stole from the Pope, the preachers would have but scant fare”; they even try “to snatch the morsels out of the parson’s mouth.” The way in which the “nobles and officials” now treat what was formerly Church property amounts to “a devouring of all beggars, strangers and poor widows; we may indeed bewail this, for they eat up the very marrow of the bones. Since they raise a hue and cry against the Papists let them also not forget us.… Woe to you peasants, burghers and nobles who grab everything, hoard and scrape, and pretend all the time to be good Evangelicals.”[161]
He is only too well acquainted with the evils of mendicancy and idleness, and knows that they have not diminished but rather increased. Even towards the end of his life he alludes to the “innumerable wicked rogues who pretend to be poor, needy beggars and deceive the people”; they deserve the gallows as much as the “idlers,” of whom there are “even many more” than before, who are well able to work, take service and support themselves, but prefer to ask for alms, and, “when these are not esteemed enough, to supplement them by pilfering or even by open, bare-faced stealing in the courtyards, the streets and in the very houses, so that I do not know whether there has ever been a time when robbery and thieving were so common.”[162]
Finally he recalls the enactments against begging by which the “authorities forbade foreign beggars and vagabonds and also idlers.” This brings us back to the attempts made, with the consent of the authorities in the Lutheran districts, to obviate the social evils by means similar to those adopted at Leisnig.