Let us see what those circumstances were. The enforcement of celibacy on the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, both iniquitous in itself, and productive of enormous immorality. The impurity of the religious orders had been the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Luther himself was impressed with profound pity for the poor men, who were cut off from the natural companionship which nature had provided for them—who were thus exposed to temptations which they ought not to have been called upon to resist.
The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously complicated the problem. Germany was covered with friendless and homeless men and women adrift upon the world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do; and advice was of little service without example.
The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such persons. They might have lived together in concubinage, and no one would have thought much about it. Their marriage was regarded with a superstitious terror as a kind of incest.
Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the natural and healthy state in which clergy as well as laity were intended to live. Immorality was hateful to him as a degradation of a sacrament—impious, loathsome, and dishonoured. Marriage was the condition in which humanity was at once purest, best, and happiest.
For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He had borne the injustice of his lot, when the burden had been really heavy. But time and custom had lightened the load; and had there been nothing at issue but his own personal happiness, he would not have given further occasion to the malice of his enemies.
But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to him to guide them—guide them by precept, or guide them by example. He had satisfied himself that the vow of celibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him and them—that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him—that it was no use to tell others that they might marry, unless he himself led the way, and married first. And it was characteristic of him that, having resolved to do the thing, he did it in the way most likely to show the world his full thought upon the matter.
That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt whatever.
'We may be able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'
He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the moderate respectable people—the people who thought like Erasmus—those who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the world's opinion—such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the whole world in my way.'
Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent. She was an ordinary, unimaginative body—plain in person and plain in mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance—but a decent, sensible, commonplace Haus Frau.