“As long as I remained a Papist I should have blushed with shame to speak of Christ; Jesus is a womanish name; we preferred to speak of Aristotle or Bonaventure.”[654] He also says: “Often have I trembled at the name of Jesus; when I saw Him on the cross it was like a thunderbolt and when His Name was mentioned I would rather have heard the devil invoked, for I raved that I had to go on doing good works until I had thereby made Christ friendly and gracious to me.”[655]
They used to say: “Scourge yourself until you have yourself blotted out your sin. Such is the Pope’s doctrine and belief.”[656] Thus, in the monastery, I had “long since lost Christ and His baptism. I was of all men the most wretched, day and night there was nothing but howling and despair which no one was able to calm. Thus I was bathed and baptised in my monkery and went through the real sweating sickness. Praise be to God that I did not sweat myself to death.”[657]
Those Protestants who take Luther’s statements too readily, without probing them to the bottom and eliminating the rhetorical and fabulous element, are apt to urge that Luther’s descriptions of the monastic state show that nothing but mental derangement could result from such a life.
Dr. Kirchhoff, a medical man, basing his remarks on Luther’s accounts, is inclined to assume the existence of some severe temperamental malady. He even goes so far as to say that, at any rate, countless numbers of monks lost their reason. “In the course of time,” he adds, Luther “acquired a greater power of resisting the temptations, and, possibly, in his quieter after-life the physical causes may have diminished; it would appear that the accompanying conditions disquieted him greatly.”[658]
The fact is that Protestant authors as a rule fight shy of undertaking any criticism of Luther’s account of himself. They accord it far too ready credence and usually see in it a capital pretext for attacking the olden Church.
If Luther is to be taken literally and is right in his generalisations, then we should have to go even further than such writers and argue that, one and all, those who sought to be pious in the religious life were mad, or at least on the verge of insanity; the Church, by her doctrine of works, of satisfaction and of man’s co-operation with Grace, infects all who address themselves zealously to the performance of good works with the poison of a subtle insanity.
We need waste no further words here on the falsehood of Luther’s objections against the Catholic doctrine of works.[659]
We may pass over the countless clear and authentic proofs furnished by Luther’s elders and contemporaries, and even by Luther himself previous to his apostasy, which place the Catholic doctrine on works in a very different light. The Church, in point of fact, always refused to hear of works done solely by man’s strength being efficacious for salvation, and regarded only those works performed by the aid of God’s supernatural Grace as of any value—and that through the merits of Christ—whether for the purpose of preparing for justification or for winning an everlasting reward; she always recognised faith, hope and charity as conditions for forgiveness and justification, and as the threefold spring whereby good works are rendered fruitful.
There can be no question that Luther’s picture of his holiness-by-works in Popery is meant to include all his earnest brother monks and their mistaken way of life, and the doctrine and religious practices of Popery as such. The fiction serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, as its author gives us to understand quite openly, it was his excuse for having shaken off the yoke of the religious life, on the other, it was to be used as a weapon against the olden doctrine of the importance of works for personal salvation. To be true to history, one must judge of his account of his Catholic life from these two standpoints. How extremely unreliable it is will then be more apparent. The following observations on the contrast his account presents with historical truth, particularly with the well-authenticated incidents of his development, and even with the elements of truth which he introduces into the legend, will place the grave shortcomings of the latter in an even clearer light.