Under the influence of the adverse wind blowing from Wittenberg many of the Humanists had given up their at one time enthusiastic friendship and turned against him. Catholic scholars who had once been disposed to favour the reform but had been disappointed in their hopes withdrew from him in increasing numbers. In other districts which had been recently Protestantised the country clergy remained faithful to the olden Church, as we see, for instance, from a letter of Luther’s dated Sep. 19, 1539, where he speaks of “over five hundred parsons, poisonous Papists,” who had “been left unexamined and now are raising their horns in defiance”—but who, he hopes, will soon be forcibly sent about their business.[212] In his own camp, again, there were Anabaptists and other sectarians; there were also theologians who refused to fall into line and either failed to preach on faith and works as harshly as he wished, or, running to the opposite extreme like the Antinomians, went much further than he himself. In the Saxon Electorate Luther felt grievously the decease of those Councillors, like Pfeffinger and Feilitzsch, who had been well disposed towards him, whose places were now taken by “greedy Junkers and skinflints, who looked upon the ecclesiastical revolution as a good opportunity for increasing their family estates and for running riot at others’ expense.”[213] Among the princes who had apostatised from the Church he also detected to his bitter vexation an ever-growing tendency to separate themselves from Wittenberg, partly owing to the influence of Zwinglianism, partly in consequence of their independent Church regulations. Such was, for instance, the action of Berlin, where the Protestant Elector, Joachim II of Brandenburg, declared in an address to his clergy: “As little as I mean to be bound to the Roman Church, so little do I mean to be bound to the Church of Wittenberg. I do not say: ‘credo sanctam Romanam’ or ‘Wittenbergensem,’ but ‘catholicam ecclesiam,’ and my Church here at Berlin or at Cöllen is just as much a true Christian Church as that of the Wittenbergers.”[214]
In the sermon Luther preached at Wittenberg on June 18, 1531, he pours forth the vials of his wrath on the nobles and peasants of the new faith. He was then doing duty for Bugenhagen, the absent pastor, and devoting himself to preaching, though he describes himself in a letter as “old, sickly and tired of life,” and elsewhere, alluding to his many employments, says: “I am not only Luther, but Pomeranus, Vicar-General, Moses, Jethro and I know not who else besides.”[215]
In this sermon the Gospel of Dives and Lazarus recalls to his mind the fact that, in the Saxon Electorate, he and his preachers were being treated very much as Lazarus, whom the rich man left lying at his gate and who had to get his fill of the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. “When we complain to the great, we get only kicks,” he exclaims indignantly; “our foes would gladly put a stop to the Evangel with the sword, whilst our own people would no less gladly cut off our head, like John the Baptist, only that the sword they use is want, misery and hunger.” If we preach against their wickedness they say we are trying to defy and contradict them! Let the devil defy them. They declare we want to set ourselves up against them, and to rule, and to bring them under our feet. For preaching against the rebellious peasants we are thanked by being called the Pope of Germany, as though we were playing the master. Not indeed that they mean this in earnest, but they are anxious to bring us to preach as they wish, otherwise they punish us with starvation. “The poor preachers they tread under foot, take the bread out of their mouths and abuse them most shamefully.” “This ingratitude is worse than any tyranny!” He tells them finally that their fate will be that of Dives, viz. hell-fire; then they will long in vain even for a drop of water.[216]
The world hates me, we read in another sermon, for it ever “hates the good.” “They refuse to have anything to do with the ministers [of religion], there is hardly a place where they suffer the preacher, much less support him. My opponents declare that: Did I preach the truth, the people would become pious.” This is the Anabaptists’ way of concealing their own errors. “But do not wonder,” so he consoles his hearers, for “the purer the Word, the worse almost all become; only a few become good. This is a sure sign that the doctrine is true; … for Satan, who is stung by the truth, tries to wreck it by corruption of morals.… He it is who sets himself up in defiance of it.” “But there are some few who are faithful and in earnest.” Nevertheless, the world must heap ingratitude and bitterness upon us otherwise it would not be the world. “By my preaching I have helped several, but what can I do? If you wait till the world honours you, then you wait a long time and only prepare a cross for yourself.”[217]
In a sermon on Jan. 22 of the same year he had quoted a saying current at that time about Rome, applying it to Wittenberg: “The nearer to Rome, the worse the Christians.” “For wherever the Evangel is, there it is despised.” “The Lord Himself says in to-day’s Gospel: ‘I have not found such faith as this in Israel.’ The chosen people do not believe, though some few do.… In other regions Christ may find adherents with a stronger faith than any in our principalities.” “At Court and elsewhere things go ill.… We tread the pearls under foot.” “So great is their shamelessness, ingratitude and hate that it is a sign that God is getting ready to show us something; the persecution of the Evangel in our principality is worse than ever. I am already sick of preaching (‘iam tædet me prædicatio’).” “Those who refuse the offered kingdom may go to the devil, etc.”[218] The faults of the government and the increase in the prices of necessaries drew from him bitter words in a sermon of April 23 of the same year: “There is no government, the biggest criminals (‘pessimi nebulones’) rule; this we have deserved by our sins.” “When things become cheaper then war and pestilence will come upon us.”[219]
Thus the ill will gathering within him was poured forth, as occasion offered, on the various classes indiscriminately.
It seemed to him as though little by little the whole world was becoming a hostel of which the devil was the landlord and where wickedness and lust reigned supreme—above all because it was so slow to receive his preaching.[220] Even the supreme Court of Justice of the Empire became in 1541 a “devil’s whore,”[221] because the judges and imperial authorities were against him and stood for the old order of things. It was also at this time that his pent-up anger broke out against the Jews.[222] Here it will be sufficient to give a few new quotations.
He put himself in the place of a ruler in whose lands the Jews blasphemed Christianity and exclaimed: “I would summon all the Jews and ask them,” whether they could prove their insulting assertions. “If they could, I would give them a thousand florins; if not I would have their tongues torn out by the root. In short, we ought not to suffer Jews to live amongst us, nor eat or drink with them.”[223]—“They are a shameful people,” he says on another occasion, “they swallow up everything with their usury; where they give a gentleman a thousand florins, they suck twenty thousand out of his poor underlings.”[224] The demands with which his anger against the Jews inspires him found only too strong an echo amongst his followers. “It would be well,” wrote the Lutheran preacher Jodokus Ehrhardt in 1558, after complaining of the usury of the Jews, “if in all places they were proceeded with as Father Luther advised and enjoined when, amongst other things, he wrote: ‘Let their synagogues and schools be set on fire … and let who can throw brimstone.… Refuse them safe conduct and all freedom to travel. Let all their ready money and treasures of gold and silver, etc., be taken from them,’ etc. Such faithful counsels and regulations were given by our divinely enlightened Luther.”[225]
After all that has been said it would be very rash to apply to Luther’s attitude towards the different callings and professions the words which St. Paul wrote of himself when considering humanity as a whole, i.e. of the power of God by which he had striven with endless patience and charity to bring home the Gospel to both Jew and Greek: “To the Greeks and to the barbarians, to the wise and to the foolish I am a debtor.” “I have become all things to all men in order to save all.”