LUTHER AT ERFÜRT.
By permission of the executors of Sir Noël Paton, and Mr. R. H. Brechin, Glasgow
LUTHER AT ERFÜRT
I rejoice at Thy word, as one that findeth great spoil.—Ps. cxix. 162.
I wish to connect this text with a picture which is thought by many judges to be among the greatest of the late Sir Noël Paton's works. Its title is "Dawn," and its subject is a well-known incident in the life of the famous German Reformer, Martin Luther.
As we see Luther in this picture he is a young man between twenty and thirty years of age. He has had a brilliant career at the University of Erfürt, and has taken his degree with the highest honours, but he has disappointed all his friends by refusing to become a lawyer, and by choosing to become a monk instead. He has already entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfürt. Luther's reason for taking this unexpected step has been anxiety about his soul. He has begun to do his best to gain salvation by performing all the duties of a monk. He has fasted, and scourged himself, and done without sleep. He has once spent three whole days without eating or drinking. He has been found fainting on the floor of his cell. But with all this he does not feel that God has forgiven his sins. In this monastery, however, he has found something which he has never seen before, and that is a Bible. You would think it strange nowadays if a man were over twenty years old, and a Master of Arts, and yet had never seen a Bible; but that was quite common in Luther's time. Well, in this monastery there is a Bible, a great Latin book bound in red leather. The other monks have shown it to Luther, though they have not cared much about it themselves. He has begun to read it eagerly. The first thing he has read in it has been the story of Hannah and the little Samuel, and this has made him think of his own mother Margarethe and himself. Night and day he studies this precious book, but at first it only makes him more anxious. It seems to speak to him only of the righteous and jealous God, who hates and punishes sin. But he gets some advice from a wise friend, and begins to read the Epistle to the Romans over again. And at length the glad meaning of the gospel dawns upon him. His own account of it is, Straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I had found the door of Paradise thrown wide open. Now I saw the Scriptures altogether in a new light. That passage of Paul was to me the true door of Paradise.
Sir Noël Paton's picture represents Luther reading the Bible and finding his restlessness and anxiety giving place to gladness and peace of heart. He is sitting at a reading-table with the great leather-covered book open before him. He wears his monk's dark robe and cowl. His hands are thin and wasted. His cheeks are pale and hollow with fasting. His eyes are bloodshot and fevered with anxiety and sleeplessness. Near his left hand a richly carved crucifix stands on the table, and beside it are an hour-glass and a skull. An ink-pot with pens is at the other side. A lamp hangs from the roof above his head, but it is giving no light. Only a thin blue trail of smoke rises from the wick, showing that the oil has been burnt out. The fresh morning air is coming in at a half-opened window above the crucifix. The bright morning sun shines through the richly stained glass, and makes a strange blur of coloured light on the wooden shutter behind. The front of the reading-table is adorned by a picture of the Garden of Gethsemane, with Christ praying, and the disciples sleeping. On the wall behind Luther is a portrait of Pope Alexander VI., who died not long before this time, and was one of the worst of men. In a recess beyond a curtain we see on another stained-glass window, the figure of Augustine, one of the great teachers of the early Church, after whom the monastery at Erfürt was named. A number of old parchment-covered books are visible, and it is interesting to notice the titles of some of them, and the places where they lie. Away on a shelf are the works of Aristotle, a great philosopher of ancient heathen Greece. On the floor beside the reading-table is a book by a man called Thomas Aquinas, a famous Roman Catholic teacher of the thirteenth century. And on the table is a book by Augustine about the City of God. A rosary, that is, a string of black beads with a cross at the end, has been thrust between the leaves of this last book, as if to mark the page. We seem to see that Luther has come from the heathen philosopher to the Roman Catholic doctor, and then to the earlier Christian teacher, and last of all to the Bible itself. For the Bible is the only open book; and the pale, worn, young monk, who has been reading it all night, is still bending over it in the early morning, with a wonderful earnestness in his look. The sunrise outside is an emblem of the light that is beginning to dawn upon his soul.
Now what can this picture teach you? Two things, I think, at least.