Besides his penances another main feature of his later picture is his extraordinary, albeit misguided, piety and virtue.
It is not enough for Luther to say that he had been a pious monk, “an earnest monk,” who “would not have taken a farthing without the Prior’s permission,” and who “prayed diligently day and night”;[633] he will have, that “if ever a monk got to heaven by monkery then I should have got there; of this all my brother monks will bear me witness.”[634]
He had been more diligent in his monastic exercises of piety than any of the Papists who took the field against him.[635]
Nay, “he had been one of the very best.”[636] He “confessed daily” [Is this a reference to the Confession made in the Mass?] and “tried hard” to find peace, but did not succeed.[637] Daily, he tells us, he “said Mass and imposed on himself the severest hardships,” in order, “by his own works, to attain to righteousness.”[638] It was because the devil had remarked his righteousness, that he tempted him when engaged in prayer in his cell by appearing to him in the shape of Christ, as already narrated.[639] God, however, tried him by temptations just as He tries those of the elect through whom He intends to do great things for the salvation of mankind.[640] He, like the other cloistral Saints, had been so penetrated with his sanctity, that, after Mass, he “did not thank God for the Sacrament but rather God had to thank him.”[641] He fancied himself in “the angel-choirs,” but had all the while been “among the devils.”[642] Cloistral life was indeed “a latrine and the devil’s own sweet Empire.”[643]
Other characteristic lines of the picture are, first, the dreadful way in which his mind was torn by doubts concerning his own salvation, doubts arising simply from his works of piety, and, secondly, his speedy deliverance from such sufferings and attainment of peace and tranquillity as soon as he had discovered the Evangel of faith. He cannot find colours sombre enough in which to paint his former state of misery, which is also the inevitable experience of all pious Papists.
“In the convent I had no thought of goods, wealth or wife, but my soul shuddered and quaked at the thought of how to make God gracious to me, for I had fallen away from the faith and my one idea was that I had angered God and had to soothe Him once more by my good works.”[644] “As a young Master at Erfurt I always went about oppressed with sadness.”[645] But, after his discovery he had felt himself “born anew,” as though “through an open door he had passed into Paradise.” The words Justice of God suddenly became “very sweet” to him and the Bible doctrine in question a “very gate of heaven.” “Holy Scripture now appeared to me in quite a new light.”[646]
He had, indeed, studied the Bible diligently in his early monkish years, but he had, nevertheless, been greatly tempted and plagued by the “real difficulties”; his confessors had not understood him. “I said to myself: No one but you suffers from this temptation.” And he had become “like a corpse,” so that his comrades asked him why he was “so mournful and downhearted.”[647]
Particularly the doctrine of penance had, he says, so borne him down that “it was hardly possible for him, at the price of great toil and thanks to God’s grace, to come to that hearing that gives joy [Ps. 1. 10].” For “if you have to wait until you have the requisite contrition then you will never come to that hearing of joy, as, in the cloister, I often found to my cost; for I clung to this doctrine of contrition, but the more I strove after rue, the more I smarted and the more did the bite of conscience eat into me. The absolution and other consolations given me by my confessors I was unable to take because I thought: Who knows if such consolations are to be trusted.”[648] On one occasion, however, the master of novices strengthened and encouraged him amidst his tears by asking him: Have you forgotten that the Lord Himself commanded us to hope?[649]
Nevertheless, according to the strange description given by Luther in a sermon in 1531, his keen anxiety about his confessions lasted until after his ordination. “I, Martin Luther,” so he told the people, “when I went up to the altar after confession and contrition felt myself so weighed down by fear that I had to beckon to me another priest. After the Mass, again, I was no more reassured than before.” His trouble—which was possibly caused, or at any rate heightened, by the spirit of obstinacy and scepticism he describes—was, however (and it is on this that he lays stress), common to all Papists whose consciences could never be at rest. “They became its victims chiefly at the hour of death. How much did we dread the Last Judgment!… That was our reward for our works.”[650] The truth is, that, on his own showing, he scarcely knew what inward contrition was, and that he remained too much a stranger to the motive of holy fear.[651]
To the period subsequent to his ordination must be assigned assurances such as the following, the tone of which becomes more and more crude the older he grows. “From that time [of his first Mass] I said Mass with great horror, and thank God that He has delivered me from it.”[652] “When I looked on [653]