Failing to reach a permanent solution by this method, Charles was again forced to negotiate. The {122} Treaty of Frankfort agreed to a truce varying in length from six to fifteen months according to circumstances. This was followed by a series of religious conferences with the purpose of finding some means of reconciling the two confessions. [Sidenote: Religious Colloquies] Among the first of these were the meetings at Worms and Hagenau. Campeggio and Eck were the Catholic leaders, Melanchthon the spokesman for the Lutherans. [Sidenote: 1540-1] Each side had eleven members on the commission, but their joint efforts were wrecked on the plan for limiting the papal power and on the doctrine of original sin. When the Diet of Ratisbon was opened in the spring of 1541 a further conference was held at which the two parties came closer to each other than they had done since Augsburg. The Book of Ratisbon was drawn up, emphasizing the points of agreement and slurring over the differences. Contarini made wide concessions, later condemned by the Catholics, on the doctrine of justification. Discussion of the nature of the church, the power of the pope, the invocation of saints, the mass, and sacerdotal celibacy seemed likely to result in some modus vivendi. What finally shattered the hopes of union was the discussion of transubstantiation and the adoration of the host. As Contarini had found in the statements of the Augsburg Confession no insuperable obstacle to an understanding he was astonished at the stress laid on them by the Protestants now.
[Sidenote: 1542]
It is not remarkable that with such results the Diet of Spires should have avoided the religious question and have devoted itself to more secular matters, among them the grant to the emperor of soldiers to fight the Turk. Of this Diet Bucer wrote "The Estates act under the wrath of God. Religion is relegated to an agreement between cities. . . . The cause of our evils is that few seek the Lord earnestly, but {123} most fight against him, both among those who have rejected, and of those who still bear, the papal yoke." At the Diet of Spires two years later the emperor promised the Protestants, in return for help against France, recognition until a German National Council should be called. For this concession he was sharply rebuked by the pope. [Sidenote: 1545] The Diet of Worms contented itself with expressing its general hope for a "Christian reformation."
[Sidenote: 1545]
During his later years Luther's polemic never flagged. His last book, Against the Papacy of Rome, founded by the Devil, surpassed Cicero and the humanists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of its invective against "the most hellish father, St. Paul, or Paula III" and his "hellish Roman church." "One would like to curse them," he wrote, "so that thunder and lightning would strike them, hell fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them"—and so on for page after page. Of course such lack of restraint largely defeated its own ends. The Swiss Reformer Bullinger called it "amazingly violent," and a book than which he "had never read anything more savage or imprudent." Our judgment of it must be tempered by the consideration that Luther suffered in his last years from a nervous malady and from other painful diseases, due partly to overwork and lack of exercise, partly to the quantities of alcohol he imbibed, though he never became intoxicated.
Nevertheless, the last twenty years of his life were his happiest ones. His wife, Catherine von Bora, an ex-nun, and his children, brought him much happiness. Though the wedding gave his enemies plenty of openings for reviling him as an apostate, [Sidenote: June 13, 1525] and though it drew from Erasmus the scoffing jest that what had begun as a tragedy ended as a comedy, it {124} crowned his career, symbolizing the return from medieval asceticism to modern joy in living. Dwelling in the fine old friary, entertaining with lavish prodigality many poor relatives, famous strangers, and students, notwithstanding unremitting toil and not a little bodily suffering, he expanded in his whole nature, mellowing in the warmth of a happy fireside climate. His daily routine is known to us intimately through the adoring assiduity of his disciples, who noted down whole volumes of his Table Talk.
[Sidenote: Death and character of Luther]
On February 18, 1546, he died. Measured by the work that he accomplished and by the impression that his personality made both on contemporaries and on posterity, there are few men like him in history. Dogmatic, superstitious, intolerant, overbearing, and violent as he was, he yet had that inscrutable prerogative of genius of transforming what he touched into new values. His contemporaries bore his invective because of his earnestness; they bowed to "the almost disgraceful servitude" which, says Melanchthon, he imposed upon his followers, because they knew that he was leading them to victory in a great and worthy cause. Even so, now, many men overlook his narrowness and bigotry because of his genius and bravery.
His grandest quality was sincerity. Priest and public man as he was, there was not a line of hypocrisy or cant in his whole being. A sham was to him intolerable, the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Reckless of consequences, of danger, of his popularity, and of his life, he blurted out the whole truth, as he saw it, "despite all cardinals, popes, kings and emperors, together with all devils and hell." Whether his ideal is ours or not, his courage in daring and his strength to labor for it must command our respect.
Next to his earnestness he owed his success to a {125} wonderful gift of language that made him the tongue, as well as the spear-point, of his people. [Sidenote: His eloquence] In love of nature, in wonder, in the power to voice some secret truth in a phrase or a metaphor, he was a poet. He looked out on the stars and considered the "good master-workman" that made them, on the violets "for which neither the Grand Turk nor the emperor could pay," on the yearly growth of corn and wine, "as great a miracle as the manna in the wilderness," on the "pious, honorable birds" alert to escape the fowler's net, or holding a Diet "in a hall roofed with the vault of heaven, carpeted with the grass, and with walls as far as the ends of the earth." Or he wrote to his son a charming fairy-tale of a pleasant garden where good children eat apples and pears and cherries and plums, and where they ride on pretty ponies with golden reins and silver saddles and dance all day and play with whistles and fifes and little cross-bows.