Yet, on the very next page, the same subject crops up again. A lay figure serves to introduce it. To him Luther says: “There you come again dragging in your Pope with you, though I wanted to have no more to do with you. Well, as you insist on annoying me with your unwelcome presence I shall give you a thoroughly Lutheran reception.” He then proceeds to enlarge in “Lutheran” fashion on the fact, that the Pope “condemns the wedded life of the bishops and priests.” “If a man has seduced a hundred maidens, violated a hundred honourable widows and has besides a hundred prostitutes behind him, he is allowed to be not merely a preacher or parson but even a bishop or Pope, and though he keeps on in his evil ways he would still be tolerated in such an office.” “Are you not mad and foolish? Out on you, you rude fools and donkeys!… Truly Popes and bishops are fine fellows to be the bridegrooms of the Churches. Better suited were they to be the bridegrooms of female keepers of bawdy houses, or of the devil’s own daughter in hell! True bishops are the servants of this bride and she is their wife and mistress.” According to you “matrimony is unclean, and a merdiferous sacrament which cannot please God”; at the same time it is supposed to be right and a sacrament. “See how the devil cheats and befools you when he teaches you such twaddle!” Further on he begins anew: “To violate virgins, widows and married women, to keep many prostitutes and to commit all sorts of hidden sins, this he is free to do, and thereby becomes worthy of the priestly calling; but this is the sum total of it all: The Pope, the devil and his Church are enemies to the married state as Dan. (xi. 37) says, and are determined to abuse it in this way so that the priestly office may not thrive. This amounts to saying that the state of matrimony is adulterous, sinful, impure and abominated of God.”
Bidding farewell to Popery, Luther gives it a truly “Lutheran” send off: “So for the present let us be done with the Ass-Pope and the Pope-Ass, and all his asinine lawyers. We will now get back to our own affairs.”
This, however, he only partially succeeds in doing. After discussing the 6th and 7th mark of the Church the “spirit” once more seizes him. The caricature of Popery with which he is wont to pacify his conscience here again figures with the whole of the inevitable paraphernalia: “[Holy] water, salt, herbs, tapers, bells, images, Agnus Dei, pallia, altar, chasubles, tonsures, fingers, hands. Who can enumerate them all? Finally the monks’ cowls,” etc. A page further we again read: “Holy water, Agnus Dei, bulls, briefs, Masses and monks’ cowls.… The devil has decked himself out in them all.”
Weary as he is at the end of the lengthy work, he is still anxious to “tread under foot the Pope, as Psalm xci. [xc., verse 13] says: ‘Thou shalt walk upon the asp and the basilisk, and shalt trample under foot the lion and the dragon’; this we will do with the help and strength of the Seed of the woman that has crushed and still crushes the serpent’s head, albeit we know that he will turn and bite our heel. To the same blessed Seed of the woman be all praise and glory together with the Father and the Holy Ghost, One True God and Lord for ever and ever. Amen.”
Here, in the few pages we have selected for quotation, the whole psychological Luther-problem unrolls itself.
In the pictures his imagination conjures up, the sacrifice of the Mass—the most sacred mystery of Catholic worship—occupies a special place. It is the idolatrous abomination foretold by the prophet, or rather the idol Moasim itself (above, vol. iv., p. 524). One wonders whether he really succeeded in persuading himself that his greatest sin, a sin that cried to heaven for vengeance and deserved eternal damnation (above, p. 136; cp. vol. iv., p. 509), was his having—as a monk and at a time when he knew no better—celebrated the sacrifice of the Mass? It is true that, in the solemn profession he makes of his belief in the Sacrament (1528), when resolved to confess his faith “before God and the whole world,” he says: “These were my greatest sins, that I was such a holy monk and for over fifteen years angered, plagued and martyred my dear Master so gruesomely by my many Masses.” The words occur at the close of his “Vom Abendmal Christi Bekentnis,” with the asseveration, that he would stand firm in this faith to the very end; “and were I, which God forbid, under stress of temptation or in the hour of death to say otherwise, then [what I might say] must be accounted as nought and I hereby openly proclaim it to be false and to come from the devil. So help me My Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Who is blessed for ever and ever. Amen.”[507]
According to what he once remarked in 1531 (above, p. 136 f.) it was, however, not the devil who was prompting him to despair by calling up his crying sin of having said Mass. If Luther is indeed telling the truth, and if his doings as a zealous monk really seemed to him to be his worse sins, then we can only marvel at his confusion of mind having gone so far. From other admissions we should rather gather that what disquieted his conscience was more the subversion of the olden worship, the ruin of the religious life and, in fact, the whole working of the innovations. And yet, here, we have a solemn assurance that the very contrary was the case.
It is in itself a problem how he contrives to make such frightful sins of his monastic life—into which, on his own showing, he had entered in ignorance—and of the Masses which he had said all unaware of their wickedness.
But, in his polemics, such is the force with which he is swept along, that he does not pause to consider his blatant self-contradictions, or how much he is putting himself at the mercy of his opponents, or how inadequately his rhetoric and all his playing to the gallery hides the lack of valid proofs and the deficiencies of his reading of Scripture.
As for his foes, in his mind’s eye he sees them wavering and falling, blown over, as it were, by the strength of his reasoning, even when they are not overtaken and slain by the righteous judgment of God. When need arises he has ready a list of deaths, particularly of sudden ones, by which opponents had been snatched away.[508] The “blessed upheaval,” however, which is one day to carry them all off together, is, so at least his morbid fancy tells him, still delayed by his prayers.