A long list of statements from respected Protestant contemporaries is given by Janssen, who concludes: “The whole system of poor relief was grievously affected by the seizure and squandering of Church goods and of innumerable charitable bequests intended not only for parochial and Church use but also for the hospitals, schools and poor-houses.”[173] The testimonies in question, the frankness of which can only be explained by the honourable desire to make an end of the crying evil, come, for instance, from Thomas Rorarius, Andreas Musculus, Johann Winistede, Erasmus Sarcerius, Ambrose Pape and the General Superintendent, Cunemann Flinsbach.[174] They tend to show that the new doctrine of faith alone had dried up the well-spring of self-sacrifice, as indeed Andreas Hyperius, the Marburg theologian, Christopher Fischer, the General Superintendent, Daniel Greser, the Superintendent, Sixtus Vischer and others state in so many words.
The incredible squandering of Church property is proved by official papers, was pilloried by the professors of the University of Rostock, also is clear from the minutes of the Visitations of Wesenberg in 1568 and of the Palatinate in 1556 which bewail “the sin against the property set aside for God and His Church.”[175] And again, “The present owners have dealt with the Church property a thousand times worse than the Papists,” they make no conscience of “selling it, mortgaging it and giving it away.” Princes belonging to the new faith also raised their voice in protest, for instance, Duke Barnim XI in 1540, Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg in 1540 and Elector Johann George, 1573. But the sovereigns were unable to restrain their rapacious nobles. “The great Lords,” the preacher Erasmus Sarcerius wrote of the Mansfeld district in 1555, “seek to appropriate to themselves the feudal rights and dues of the clergy and allow their officials and justices to take forcible action.… The revenues of the Church are spent in making roads and bridges and giving banquets, and are lent from hand to hand without hypothecary security.”[176] The Calvinist, Anton Prætorius, and many others not to mention Catholic contemporaries, speak in similar terms.
Of the falling off in the Church funds and poor-boxes in the 16th century in Hesse, in the Saxon Electorate, in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, in Hamburg and elsewhere abundant proof is met with in the official records, and this is the case even with regard to Würtemberg in the enactments of the Dukes from 1552 to 1562, though that country constituted in some respects an exception;[177] at a later date Duke Johann Frederick hazarded the opinion that the regulations regarding the fund “had fallen into oblivion.”
The growth of the proletariate, to remedy the impoverishment of which no means had as yet been discovered, was in no small measure promoted by Luther’s facilitation of marriage.
Luther himself had written, that “a boy ought to have recourse to matrimony as soon as he is twenty and a maid when she is from fifteen to eighteen years of age, and leave it to God to provide for their maintenance and that of their children.”[178] Other adherents of the new faith went even further, Eberlin of Günsburg simply declared: “As soon as a girl is fifteen, a boy eighteen, they should be given to each other in marriage.” There were others like the author of a “Predigt über Hunger- und Sterbejahre, von einem Diener am Wort” (1571), who raised strong objections against such a course. Dealing with the causes of the evident increase of “deterioration and ruin” in “lands, towns and villages,” he says, that “a by no means slight cause is the countless number of lightly contracted marriages, when people come together and beget children without knowing where they will get food for them, and so come down themselves in body and soul, and bring up their children to begging from their earliest years.” “And I cannot here approve of this sort of thing that Luther has written: A lad should marry when he is twenty, etc. [see above]. No, people should not think of marrying and the magistrates should not allow them to do so before they are sure of being able at least to provide their families with the necessaries of life, for else, as experience shows, a miserable, degenerate race is produced.”[179]
What this old writer says is borne out by modern sociologists. One of them, dealing with the 16th and 17th centuries, says: “These demands [of Luther and Eberlin] are obviously not practicable from the economic point of view, but from the ethical standpoint also they seem to us extremely doubtful. To rush into marriage without prospect of sufficient maintenance is not trusting God but tempting Him. Such marriages are extremely immoral actions and they deserve legal punishment on account of their danger to the community.” “Greater evil to the world can scarcely be caused in any way than by such marriages. Even in the most favourable cases such early marriages must have a deteriorating influence on the physical and intellectual culture of posterity.”[180]
Owing to the neglect of any proper care for the poor the plague of vagabondage continued on the increase. Luther’s zealous contemporary, Cyriacus Spangenberg, sought to counteract it by reprinting the Master’s edition of the “Liber vagatorum.” He says: “False begging and trickery has so gained the upper hand that scarcely anybody is safe from imposture.” The Superintendent, Nicholas Selnecker, again republished the writing with Luther’s preface in 1580, together with some lamentations of his own. He complains that “there are too many tramps and itinerant scholars who give themselves up to nothing but knavery,” etc.[181]
Adolf Harnack is only re-echoing the complaints of 16th century Protestants when he writes: “We may say briefly that, alas, nothing of importance was achieved, nay, we must go further: the Catholics are quite right when they assert that they, not we, lived to see a revival of charitable work in the 16th century, and, that, where Lutheranism was on the ascendant, social care of the poor was soon reduced to a worse plight than ever before.”[182] The revival in Catholic countries to which Harnack refers showed itself particularly in the 17th century in the activity of the new Orders, whereas at this time the retrograde movement was still in progress in the opposite camp. “For a long time the Protestant relief system produced only insignificant results.” It was not till the rise of Pietism and Rationalism, i.e. until the inauguration of the admirable Home Missions, that things began to improve. But Pietism and Rationalism are both far removed from the original Lutheran orthodoxy.[183]