The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

On that October day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest. Both she and his father were severe with the children, whipping them for slight faults until the blood came. Nevertheless, as the son himself recognized, they meant heartily well by it. But for the self-sacrifice and determination shown by the father, a worker in the newly opened mines, who by his own industry rose to modest comfort, the career of the son would have been impossible.

Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life was rendered unhappy by spiritual terrors. Demons lurked in the storms, and witches plagued his good mother and threatened to make her children cry themselves to death. God and Christ were conceived as stern and angry judges ready to thrust sinners into hell. "They painted Christ," says Luther—and such pictures can still be seen in old churches—"sitting on a rainbow with his Mother and John the Baptist on either side as intercessors against his frightful wrath."

At thirteen he was sent away to Magdeburg to a charitable school, and the next year to Eisenach, where he spent three years in study. He contributed to his support by the then recognized means of begging, and was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta. In 1501 he matriculated at the old and famous university of Erfurt. [Sidenote: Erfurt] The curriculum here consisted of logic, dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics. There was some natural science, studied not by the experimental method, but wholly from the books of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, and there were also a few courses in literature, both in the Latin classics and in their later imitators. Ranking among the better {64} scholars Luther took the degrees of bachelor in 1502 and of master of arts in 1505, and immediately began the study of jurisprudence. While his diligence and good conduct won golden words from his preceptors he mingled with his comrades as a man with men. He was generous, even prodigal, a musician and a "philosopher"; in disputations he was made "an honorary umpire" by his fellows and teachers. "Fair fortune and good health are mine," he wrote a friend on September 5, 1501, "I am settled at college as pleasantly as possible."

For the sudden change that came over his life at the age of twenty-one no adequate explanation has been offered. Pious and serious as he was, his thoughts do not seem to have turned towards the monastic life as a boy, nor are the old legends of the sudden death of a friend well substantiated. As he was returning to Erfurt from a visit home, he was overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, in which his excited imagination saw a devine warning to forsake the "world." In a fright he vowed to St. Ann to become a monk and, though he at once regretted the rash promise, on July 17, 1505, he discharged it by entering the Augustinian friary at Erfurt. After a year's novitiate he took the irrevocable vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In 1507 he was ordained priest. In the winter of 1510-1 he was sent to Rome on business of the order, and there saw much of the splendor and also of the corruption of the capital of Christendom. Having started, in 1508, to teach Aristotle at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, a year later he returned to Erfurt, but was again called to Wittenberg to lecture on the Bible, a position he held all his life. [Sidenote: 1511]

During his first ten years in the cloister he underwent a profound experience. He started with the horrible and torturing idea that he was doomed to hell. {65} "What can I do," he kept asking, "to win a gracious God?" The answer given him by his teachers was that a man must work out his own salvation, not entirely, but largely, by his own efforts. The sacraments of the church dispensed grace and life to the recipient, and beyond this he could merit forgiveness by the asceticism and privation of the monastic life. Luther took this all in and strove frantically by fasting, prayer, and scourging to fit himself for redemption. But though he won the reputation of a saint, he could not free himself from the desires of the flesh. He was helpless; he could do nothing. Then he read in Augustine that virtue without grace is but a specious vice; that God damns and saves utterly without regard to man's work. He read in Tauler and the other mystics that the only true salvation is union with God, and that if a man were willing to be damned for God's glory he would find heaven even in hell. He read in Lefèvre d'Étaples that a man is not saved by doing good, but by faith, like the thief on the cross.

In May, 1515, he began to lecture on Paul's Epistles to the Romans, and pondered the verse (i, 17) "The just shall live by his faith." [Sidenote: Justification by faith only] All at once, so forcibly that he believed it a revelation of the Holy Ghost, the thought dawned upon him that whereas man was impotent to do or be good, God was able freely to make him so. Pure passivity in God's hands, simple abandonment to his will was the only way of salvation; not by works but by faith in the Redeemer was man sanctified. The thought, though by no means new in Christianity, was, in the application he gave it, the germ of the religious revolution. In it was contained the total repudiation of the medieval ecclesiastical system of salvation by sacrament and by the good works of the cloister. To us nowadays the thought seems remote; the question which called it forth outworn. But to the {66} sixteenth century it was as intensely practical as social reform is now; the church was everywhere with her claim to rule over men's daily lives and over their souls. All progress was conditioned on breaking her claims, and probably nothing could have done it so thoroughly as this idea of justification by faith only.

The thought made Luther a reformer at once. He started to purge his order of Pharisaism, and the university of the dross of Aristotle. Soon he was called upon to protest against one of the most obtrusive of the "good works" recommended by the church, the purchase of indulgences. Albert of Hohenzollern was elected, through political influence and at an early age, to the archiepiscopal sees of Magdeburg and Mayence, this last carrying with it an electorate and the primacy of Germany. For confirmation from the pope in the uncanonical occupation of these offices, Albert paid a huge sum, the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars today. Mayence was already in debt and the young archbishop knew not where to turn for money. To help him, and to raise money for Rome, Leo X declared an indulgence. In order to get a large a profit as possible Albert employed as his chief agent an unscrupulous Dominican named John Tetzel. [Sidenote: Tetzel] This man went around the country proclaiming that as soon as the money clinked in the chest the soul of some dead relative flew from purgatory, and that by buying a papal pardon the purchaser secured plenary remission of sins and the grace of God.

The indulgence-sellers were forbidden to enter Saxony, but they came very near it, and many of the people of Wittenberg went out to buy heaven at a bargain. Luther was sickened by seeing what he believed to be the deception of the poor people in being taught to rely on these wretched papers instead of on real, lively faith. He accordingly called their value in question, {67} in Ninety-five Theses, or heads for a scholastic debate, which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church on October 31, 1517. [Sidenote: The Ninety-five Theses, 1517] He pointed out that the doctrine of the church was very uncertain, especially in regard to the freeing of souls from purgatory; that contrition was the only gate to God's pardon; that works of charity were better than buying of indulgences, and that the practices of the indulgence-sellers were extremely scandalous and likely to foment heresy among the simple. In all this he did not directly deny the whole value of indulgences, but he pared it down to a minimum.

The Theses were printed by Luther and sent around to friends in other cities. They were at once put into German, and applauded to the echo by the whole nation. Everybody had been resentful of the extortion of greedy ecclesiastics and disgusted with their hypocrisy. All welcomed the attack on the "holy trade," as its supporters called it. Tetzel was mobbed and had to withdraw in haste. The pardons no longer had any sale. The authorities took alarm at once. Leo X directed the general of the Augustinians to make his presumptuous brother recant. [Sidenote: February 3, 1518] The matter was accordingly brought up at the general chapter of the Order held at Heidelberg in May. Luther was present, was asked to retract, and refused. On the contrary he published a Sermon on Indulgence and Grace and a defence of the theses stating his points more strongly than before.

The whole of Germany was now in commotion. The Diet which met at Augsburg in the summer of 1518 was extremely hostile to the pope and to his legate, Cardinal Cajetan. At the instance of this theologian, who had written a reply to the Theses, and of the Dominicans, wounded in the person of Tetzel, Luther was summoned to Rome to be tried. On August 5 the {68} Emperor Maximilian promised his aid to the pope, and in order to expedite matters, the latter changed the summons to Rome to a citation before Cajetan at Augsburg, at the same time instructing the legate to seize the heretic if he did not recant. At this juncture Luther was not left in the lurch by his own sovereign, Frederic the Wise, Elector of Saxony, through whom an imperial safe-conduct was procured. Armed with this, the Wittenberg professor appeared before Cajetan at Augsburg, was asked to recant two of his statements on indulgences, and refused. [Sidenote: October 12-14, 1518] A few days later Luther drew up an appeal "from the pope badly informed to the pope to be better informed," and in the following month appealed again from the pope to a future oecumenical council. In the meantime Leo X, in the bull Cum postquam, authoritatively defined the doctrine of indulgences in a sense contrary to the position of Luther.