Now, although Luther uses powerful words to describe the dignity of the different worldly callings, on the other hand, he tends at times to depreciate whole classes, this being especially the case when he allows his disappointment to get the better of him. Nor is the contempt openly expressed here counterbalanced by any sufficient recognition of the good, such as might have mollified his hearers and made them forget the ungracious abuse he thundered from his pulpit.
He speaks bitterly of the common people, the proletariate of to-day, to which, according to him, belonged all the lower classes in the towns. Although himself of low extraction he displays very little sympathy for the people. “We must not pipe too much to the mob, for they are fond of raging.… They have no idea of self-restraint or how to exercise it, and each one’s skin conceals five tyrants.”[198] “A donkey must taste the stick and the mob must be ruled by force; of this God was well aware, hence in the hands of the authorities He placed, not a fox’s brush, but a sword.”[199]
He only too frequently accuses the artisan and merchant class, as a whole, of cheating, avarice and laziness. At Wittenberg they may possibly have been exceptionally bad, yet he does not speak sufficiently of their less blameworthy side.
For the soldiers, it is true, he has friendly words of appreciation of their calling; it was for them that he wrote in 1526 a special work, where he replied in the affirmative to the question contained in the title: “Can even men-at-arms be in a state of grace?” Yet even here he does not shrink from bringing forward charges against their calling: “A great part of the men-at-arms are the devil’s own and some of them are actually crammed with devils.… They imagine themselves fire-eaters because they swear shamefully, perpetrate atrocities, and curse and defy the God of Heaven.”[200]
Of the nobles he says in 1523, wishing to promote more frequent marriages between them and those of lower birth:[201] “Must all princes and nobles who are born princes and nobles remain for ever such? What harm is there if a prince takes a burgher’s daughter to wife and contents himself with a burgher’s modest dowry? Or, why should not a noble maid give her hand to a burgher? In the long run it will not do for the nobles always to intermarry with nobles. Although we are not all equal in the sight of the world yet before God we all are equal, all of us children of Adam, creatures of God, and one man as good as another.” These words certainly do not express any lively conviction of the importance of the existing distinctions of rank for society.
It is perfectly true, that, occasionally, Luther has words of praise and recognition for the good qualities of the “fine, pious nobles,” if only on account of those who were inclined to accept his teaching. But far more often he trounces them unmercifully because they either failed to respond or were set on thwarting him. The language in which he writes of them sometimes becomes unspeakably coarse. “They are called nobles and ‘von so-and-so.’ But merd also comes ‘von’ the nobles and might just as well boast of coming from their noble belly, though it stinks and is of no earthly use. Hence this too has a claim to nobility.” Then follows his favourite saying: “We Germans are Germans and Germans we shall remain, i.e. swine and senseless brutes.”[202]
The rulers and the great ones of the Empire were the first to win his favour. The writing “An den Adel,” the first of his so-called “reformation writings,” he addresses to the nobles in the hope of thus attaining his aims by storm. When, however, he was disappointed, and they refused to meet him half-way, he abused the princes and all the secular authorities in Germany and wrote: “God Almighty has made our princes mad”; “such men were formerly rated as knaves, now we are obliged to call them obedient, Christian princes.” To him they were “fools,” simply because they were against him and thus belonged to the multitude who “blasphemed” the Divine Majesty.[203]
After the defeat of the peasants in 1525 he supported those princes favourable to his teaching at the expense of the peasants, so that the latter were loud in their complaints of him. In this connection, looking back at the overthrow of the Peasant Revolt, he wrote to those in power: “Who opposed the peasants more vigorously by word and writing than I? … and, if it comes to boasting, I do not know who else was the first to vanquish the peasants, or to do so most effectually. But now those who did the least claim all the honour and glory of it.”[204]
After the Peasant War he was so filled with hatred of the peasant class and so conscious of their dislike for himself personally, as to be hardly able to speak of them without blame and reproach. “The peasants do not deserve,” he says, “the harvests and fruits that the earth brings forth and provides.”