Life of Luther

by Julius Köstlin

On April 17, in the midst of these transactions, Duke George of Saxony died after a short illness. His country passed to his brother Henry, who in his own smaller territory of Freiburg had for some years, much to the grief of George, established the Evangelical form of worship, and given shelter to the heretics banished by his brother. The latter had left no male issue to succeed him. He had lost two sons in boyhood; and his son John, who held the same opinions as himself, had died two years ago, when quite a young man, without leaving any children. His last remaining son Frederick was of weak intellect, but had nevertheless been married after his brother's death, and died a few weeks later. He was soon followed by his unhappy father and sovereign. Luther said of him that he had gone to everlasting fire, though he would have wished him life and conversion. To us his end appears the more tragic because we cannot but acknowledge the honest zeal with which, from his own point of view, he endeavoured to serve God, and would willingly even have effected a reform in the Church; whilst, in spite of all his severity against heretics, he never suffered himself to be hurried into deeds of coarse violence and cruelty. There are extant prayers and religious discourses, composed and written down by himself. He read the Bible, and expressed a wish, when Luther's translation appeared, that 'the monk would put the whole Bible into German, and then go about his business.'

Thus the old and constantly revived quarrel between Luther and the Duke came at length to an end. The Reformation was immediately introduced throughout the duchy by the appointment of Evangelical clergy, by changes in public worship, and by a visitation of churches after the example of the one in Electoral Saxony. When Henry was solemnly acknowledged sovereign at Leipzig, he invited Luther and Jonas to be present. On the afternoon of Whitsunday, May 24, 1539, Luther preached a sermon in the court chapel of that Castle of Pleissenburg, where he had once disputed before George with Eck, and on the following afternoon he preached in one of the churches of the town, not venturing to do so in the morning on account of his weak state of health. He now proclaimed aloud, in his sermon on the Gospel for Whitsunday, that the Church of Christ was not there, where men were madly crying 'Church! Church!' without the Word of God, nor was it with the Pope, the cardinals, and the bishops; but there, and there only, where Christ was loved and His Word was kept, and where accordingly He dwelt in the souls of men. He refrained from any special reference to the state of things hitherto existing at Leipzig and in the duchy, or to the change brought about by God. But we call to mind the words he had spoken in 1532, 'Who knows what God will do before ten years are over?' Very soon, indeed, the magnates of the Saxon court and the nobility, though accepting the reformed faith of their new sovereign, gave occasion to Luther for bitter complaints of their rapacity, their indifference to religion, and their improper and tyrannical usurpations on the territory of the Church.

In addition to the Saxon duchy, the Electorate of Brandenburg was also about to go over to Protestantism. The Elector Joachim I. adhered so strictly to the ancient Church, that his wife Elizabeth, who was evangelically inclined, had fled to Saxony, where she became an intimate friend of Luther's household. But on his death in 1535, his younger son John, together with his territory, the 'Neumark,' joined at once the Schmalkaldic allies. And now, after longer consideration, his elder brother also, Joachim II.—a man of quieter disposition and more attached to ancient ways—took the decisive step, after an agreement with his Estates and the territorial bishop, Jagow. On November 1, 1539, he received from the latter publicly the Sacrament in both kinds.

Under these circumstances the Emperor resolved to give effect to the essential part of the Frankfort agreement. He summoned a meeting at Spire 'for the purpose of so arranging matters that the wearisome dissension in religion might be reconciled in a Christian manner.' In consequence of a pestilence which appeared at Spire, the assembly was removed to Hagenau. Here it was actually held in June 1540.

Meanwhile, the most vigorous champion of Protestantism, the Landgrave Philip, took a step which was calculated to damage the position of the Evangelical Church and to embarrass its adherents more than anything which their enemies could possibly attempt. Philip, in his youth (1523) had taken to wife a daughter of Duke George of Saxony, but soon repented of his ill-considered resolve, on the ground that she was of an unamiable disposition and was afflicted with bodily infirmities, and accordingly proceeded to look elsewhere for a mistress, after the fashion only too common at that time with emperors and princes, but scarcely commented upon in their case. The earnest remonstrances made to him on religious grounds against this step had the effect of causing him certain prickings of conscience; he had not ventured on that account, as he now complained, to present himself at the Lord's table, with one single exception, since the Peasants' War. But his conscience was not strong enough to make him give up his evil ways. At last the Bible, which he read industriously, seemed to him to provide a means of outlet from his difficulty. He sheltered himself, as the Anabaptist fanatics had done before him, behind the Old Testament precedent of Abraham and other godly men, to whom it had been permitted to have more than one wife, and pleaded, moreover, that the New Testament contained no prohibition of polygamy. With all the energy and stubbornness of his nature, he fastened on these notions and clung to them, when, at the house of his sister, the Duchess Elizabeth, at Rochlitz, he chanced to meet and fall in love with a lady named Margaret von der Saal. She refused to be his except by marriage. Her mother even demanded of him that Luther, Butzer, and Melancthon, or at least two of them, together with an envoy of the Elector and the Duke of Saxony, should be present as witnesses at the marriage. Philip himself found the consent of these divines and of his most distinguished ally, John Frederick, indispensable. He succeeded first of all in gaining over the versatile Butzer, and sent him in December 1539, on this errand, to Wittenberg.

He appealed to the strait that he was in, no longer able with a good conscience to go to war or to punish crime, and also to the testimony of Scripture, adding, very truly, that the Emperor and the world were quite willing to permit both him and anyone else to live in open immorality. Thus, he said, they were forbidding what God allowed, and winking at what He prohibited. In other respects, indeed, a double marriage was not a thing unheard of even by the Christendom of those days. It was said, for instance, of the Christian Emperor of Rome, Valentinian II., to whose case Philip himself appealed, that he had been permitted to contract a marriage of that kind. To the Pope was ascribed the power to grant the necessary dispensation.

On December 10 Butzer brought back to the Landgrave from Wittenberg an opinion of Luther and Melancthon. They told him in decided terms that it was in accordance with creation itself, and recognised as such by Jesus, 'that a man was not to have more than one wife;' and they, the preachers of God's Word, were commanded to regulate marriage and all human things 'in accordance with their original and Divine institution, and to adhere thereto as closely as possible, while at the same time avoiding to their utmost all cause of pain or annoyance.' They urgently exhorted him not to regard incontinence, as did the world, in the light of a trifling offence, and represented to him plainly that if he refused to resist his evil inclinations, he would not mend matters by taking a second wife. But with all this exhortation and warning, they confessed themselves bound to admit that 'what was allowed in respect of marriage by the law of Moses was not actually forbidden in the gospel;' thereby maintaining, in point of fact, that an original ordinance in the Church must be adhered to as the rule, but nevertheless admitting the possibility of a dispensation under very strong and exceptional circumstances. They did not say that such a dispensation was applicable to the case of Philip; they only wished him earnestly to reconsider the matter with his own conscience. In the event, however, of his keeping to his resolve, they would not refuse him the benefit of a dispensation, and only required that the matter should be kept private, on account of the scandal and possible abuse it would occasion if generally known.

Luther himself abandoned afterwards the conclusions he drew from the Old Testament in this respect, and, as a consequence, rejected the admissibility of a double marriage for Christians. Friends of the evangelical and Lutheran belief can only lament the decision he pronounced in this matter. With that belief itself it has nothing whatever to do. Instead of drawing his conclusions from the moral aspect of marriage, as amply attested by the spirit of the New Testament, though not indeed exactly expressed, Luther on this occasion clung to the letter, and failed, of course, to find any written declaration on the point. At the same time he mistook, in common with all the theologians of his time, the difference, in point of matured morality and knowledge, between the New Covenant and the standpoint of the Old, which was that also of his best adherents.

The simple Christian common sense of the Elector John Frederick, and his practical view of the position, preserved him this time from the error into which the theologians had fallen. He lamented that they should have given an answer, and would have nothing to do with the business.

Philip, however, rejoiced at the decision, and obtained, moreover, his wife's consent to take a second one.