It was Luther's indignation and zeal on such an occasion that caused now his irremediable rupture with the Archbishop, Cardinal Albert, and induced him to attack that magnate as recklessly as he did; for the Cardinal had hitherto been always disposed to treat him with a certain respect; and Luther, on his side, had refrained at least from any open exhibition of hostility. The immediate cause of this rupture was a judicial murder, perpetrated against one John Schönitz (or Schanz) of Halle, on the river Saale. This man had for years had the charge, as the confidential servant of the Archbishop, of the public and even the private funds which his master required for his stately palaces, his luxury, and his sensual enjoyments, refined or coarse, legitimate or illegitimate; and had actually lent him large sums. The Estates of the Archbishopric complained of the demands made on them for money, and rightly suspected that the funds supplied were improperly and dishonestly misappropriated. Schönitz grew alarmed on account of the clandestine 'practices' which he was carrying on for his master. The latter, however, assured him of his protection. But when the Estates refused to grant any more subsidies until a proper account was laid before them, he basely sacrificed his servant in order to extricate himself from his embarrassment. For deceptions alleged to have been practised against himself, he had Schönitz arrested, and confined, in September 1534, in the Castle of Giebichenstein. In vain Schönitz demanded a public trial by impartial judges; in vain did the Imperial Court of Justice give judgment in his favour. A second judgment of the court was answered by Albert's directing the prisoner, who was a citizen of Halle and sprung from an old local family, to be tried on June 21, 1535, at Giebichenstein, by a peasant tribunal hastily summoned from the surrounding villages, for the trial merely, as the rumour ran in Halle, of a horse-stealer. The unhappy prisoner was allowed no regular defence, and no counsel. An admission of guilt was extorted from him by the rack, and he was summarily sentenced to death. Time was only allowed him to say to the bystanders that he confessed himself a sinner in the sight of God, but that he had not deserved this fate. He was quickly strung up on the gallows, where his corpse remained hanging till the wind blew it down in February 1537. Albert took possession of his property. And this was done by the supreme prince of the Roman Church in Germany, who played the part of a modern Mæcenas with regard to art and science.
Whilst now the justices of the town of Halle were protesting against this treatment of their fellow-townsman to the Archbishop, who turned a deaf ear to their remonstrance, and Antony, the brother of the murdered man, exerted himself in vain to vindicate his honour and the rights of their family, Luther was drawn into the affair by the fact that one of his guests, Ludwig Rabe, was threatened with punishment by Albert, for expressions he let fall soon after the deed was committed. Luther thereupon wrote several times to Albert himself, and told him openly he was a murderer, and, for his squandering of Church property, deserved a gallows ten times higher than the Castle of Giebichenstein. He was restrained, however, from taking further steps by the Elector of Brandenburg and other of Albert's influential relatives, who appealed to John Frederick on his behalf, whilst Albert sought to make a cheap compensation to the family of the murdered man, or at least pretended to do so.
When, however, a young Humanist poetaster at Wittenberg, named Lemnius—properly Lemchen—actually glorified the Archbishop in verse, or, as Luther put it, 'made a saint of the devil,' and at the same time vilified some men and women at Wittenberg, Luther read aloud from the pulpit, in 1538, a short indictment, couched in the plainest possible terms, against the shameless libeller, as also against the Archbishop whom he glorified; and this indictment soon appeared in print. And now he no longer refrained from taking up the cause of Schönitz in a pamphlet of some length. When the Duke of Prussia endeavoured once more in a friendly way to dissuade him from his purpose, for the honour of the house of Brandenburg, he replied, 'Wicked sons have sprung from the noble race of David, and princes ought not to disgrace themselves by unprincely vices.' In the pamphlet to his opening he declared that a stone was lying upon his heart which was called 'Deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain' (Prov. xxiv. 11). He denounced the contempt and denial of justice of which the Archbishop was guilty, and at the same time boldly exposed the real objects of those private expenses which the Archbishop, together with his servant, had incurred, and of which the latter was naturally unable to give an account—least of all, those that ministered to his carnal appetites, such as his establishment at Morizburg in Halle. He himself, says Luther, does not judge the Cardinal; he is simply the bearer of the sentence pronounced by the great Judge in heaven. To those who might perhaps have taken exception to his words he says, 'I sit here at Wittenberg, and ask my most gracious lord the Elector for no further favour or protection than what is given to all alike.' Albert found it more prudent to keep silent.
But what disturbed and grieved Luther more than anything else during this, the closing chapter of his life, was the bitter experience he had yet to make in his own religious community, nay, amidst his most intimate companions and friends.
The way of life—in other words, the way of saving faith—was now rediscovered and clearly brought to light; and, as Luther said, a truly moral life should be the consequence. And great pains were taken to stamp this new truth clearly and distinctly on doctrine, and to guard against new errors and perversions. Differences, however, now arose among those who had hitherto worked so loyally together for the establishment of the faith—a beginning of those doctrinal disputes which after Luther's death became so disastrous to his Church. Again and again Luther bitterly complained of the moral wrongs and scandals which proved that the faith, however widely its confession had spread through Germany, was far from living in its purity and strength in the hearts of men, and bearing the expected fruit. Only his own conviction, his own faith was never shaken by this result. It must needs be, as Christ Himself had said, that offences must come; and, in the words of St. Paul (1 Cor. xi. 19), 'there must be also heresies,' and false teachers and deceivers must arise.
[Illustration: Fig. 44.—AGRICOLA. (From a miniature portrait by
Cranach, in the University Album at Wittenberg, 1531.)]
We have seen above how cordially Luther welcomed Agricola back at Wittenberg after throwing up his appointment at Eisleben. He obtained for him from the Elector in 1537 an ample salary, to enable him to fill the long-coveted office of teacher at the university, and be a preacher as well. It soon became known that Agricola persisted in maintaining that doctrine of repentance in defence of which he had attacked Melancthon at the first visitation of churches in the Saxon Electorate. He had been accused of this at Eisleben, and Count Albert of Mansfeld, whose service he had quitted with rudeness and discontent, denounced him as a restless and dangerous fellow. And now at Wittenberg also Agricola had some sermons printed, and some theses circulated, embodying a statement of his peculiar doctrine. Luther considered it his duty to refute these, and he did so from the pulpit, but without naming their author.
The proclamation of God's law, so Agricola now taught, was no necessary part of Christianity, as such, nor of the way of salvation prepared and revealed by Christ. The Gospel of the Son of God, our Saviour, this alone should be proclaimed, and operate in touching the hearts of men and exposing the true character of their sins as sinfulness against the Son of God. In this way he sought to give full effect to the fundamental evangelical doctrine, that the grace of God alone had power to save through the joyful message of Christ. The personal vanity, however, which was the chief weakness of this gifted, intellectual, and fairly eloquent man, and which was now increased by the dissatisfaction it had caused at Eisleben, displayed itself further in the assertion of his eccentricities of dogma. Moreover, he was far from clear in his first principles, and while maintaining his tenets he was unwilling to stake too much on his own account, and yet refused actually to abandon them.
He came at first to an understanding with Luther by offering an explanation which the latter deemed satisfactory, but he then proceeded to revert to his peculiar tenets in a new publication. Luther now launched a sharp reply against these antinomian theses, as well as against others, which went much further, and whose origin is unknown. He found wanting in Agricola that earnest moral appreciation of the law, and of the moral demands made of us by God, whereby the heart of the sinner, as he himself had experienced, must first be bruised and broken, and thus opened to receive the word of grace, before that word can truly renew, revive, and sanctify it. But together with Agricola's tenets he then placed the others, betraying an equally frivolous estimate of the real nature of those demands and of the duties they entailed, as evidence of one tendency and one character, since Agricola, indeed, taught like them, that the good willed by God in His Commandments was fulfilled in Christians by the simple fact of their belief in Christ, and as the fruit of His word of grace. Thus it came about that this tendency which Luther found represented in Agricola, stood out before him in all its compass and with its extremest and most alarming consequences, and called forth the boldest exercise of his zeal. It grieved him sorely, nevertheless, to have to enter into this dispute with his old friend. 'God knows,' he said, 'what trials this business has prepared for me; I shall have died of sheer anxiety before I have brought my theses against him (Agricola) to the light.'
At the instance, however, of the Elector, who valued Agricola, another reconciliation was brought about. Agricola humbled himself; he even authorised his great opponent to draw up a retractation in his name, and Luther did this in a manner very damaging to Agricola, in a letter to his former colleague and opponent at Eisleben, Caspar Güttel. Agricola thereupon received a place in the newly-formed consistory. But even now he could not refrain from fresh utterances which betrayed his old opinions. Luther's confidence in him was thus destroyed for ever: he spoke with indignation, pain, and scorn of 'Grikel (Agricola), the false man.' The latter at length complained to the Elector against Luther for having unjustly aspersed him. The Elector testified to him his displeasure; Luther gave a sharp answer to the charge, and his prince made further inquiries into the matter of complaint. Agricola finally snatched at a means of escape offered by his summons to Berlin, whither he had been called as a preacher of distinction by the Elector Joachim II., who was a convert to the Reformation. In August 1540 he left Wittenberg. He sent thither from Berlin another and fully satisfactory retractation in order to retain his official appointment. But Luther's friendship with him was broken for ever.