When Luther comes with his doctrine of justification by faith, and his announcement that the Scriptures are the sufficient standard of Christian truth, a great change takes place. Mystics of the more thoughtful, rightly earnest sort, are among the first to embrace the new doctrines. Here they have the guide they longed for—here they find what mysticism could never give. They are, some of them, like Justin Martyr, who waited long among the schools of the Platonists for their promised immediate intuition of Deity, and then discovered among Christians that God was to be known in another way far better—through the medium of his written Word, by the teaching of his Spirit. But those who when a fuller light came, refused to quit for its lustre that isolated and flickering torch, about which men had gathered for lack of anything brighter, such were given over to the veriest absurdity, or speedily consigned to utter forgetfulness. By the mystic of the fourteenth century, the way of the Reformation was in great part prepared. By the mystic of the sixteenth century it was hindered and imperilled. In that huge ship of the state ecclesiastic, which all true hearts and hands in those troublous times were concerned to work to their very best, a new code of regulations had been issued. Such rule came in with Luther. Now some of those who would have been among the very best sailors under the old management, proved useless, or worse than useless under the new. One set of them were insolent and mutinous—had a way of reviling the captain in strange gibberish—and a most insane tendency to look into the powder-room with a light. Another class lay about useless, till having been tumbled over many times by their more active comrades, they got kicked into corners, whence they were never more to emerge. So fared it with mysticism, attempting to persist in existence when its work for that time was done. The mystic so situated was either a caricature of reform or a cipher, either a fanatical firebrand or an unheeded negation.
We need not go far for examples. Dr. Bodenstein of Carlstadt (best known as simple Carlstadt) is professor at Wittenberg, and a thorough reformer. He is a little, swarthy, sunburnt man, crotchety to the last degree. He follows his intuitions—now this whim, now that—right to-day, wrong to-morrow—a man whom you never know where to find. He must spring to his conclusion at once; he will not first pause for satisfying reasons,—for clear ideas on the various bearings of his thought or deed. So his life is a series of starts; his actions incongruous and spasmodic, unlinked, unharmonized by any thoughtful plan or principle.
But Carlstadt is a man of books as well as of action. He writes treatises, repeating the doctrines of Tauler and the German Theology, all about abandonment, and not seeing God or enjoying Him more in this than in that event or employment; about the sin of enjoying ordinances and media, rather than God immediately; about the blessed self-loss in the One; about the reduction of ourselves to nothing. Ah, Dr. Bodenstein, thou mayest write for ever that way, and no one now will read! Men have left all this behind. A ripe full vintage invites their thirst; thine acrid and ascetic grape is now deserted. Gladly do they, for the most part, exchange the refined and impracticable requirements of mysticism, its vagueness, its incessant prohibition, for the genial, simple truth of that German New Testament which Luther is giving them.
At the juncture of which we are about to speak, Luther lay hidden in the Wartburg. In the small town of Zwickau, in the Erzgebirge, there arose a knot of enthusiasts for whom Luther did not go half far enough. There was Storch, a weaver, to whom Gabriel had made very wonderful communications one night; another weaver, named Thomas, and a student, Stübner, who had forsaken the toil of study for the easier method of supernatural illumination. To these should be added the more notorious Thomas Münzer, who has been erroneously regarded as the founder of the party. ‘Why such a slavish reverence for what the Bible says?’ cry these mystics. ‘What is a mere book?’ ‘Have we not immediate voices, impulses, revelations from the Holy Spirit, dictating all we should do? Better this than your Bible reading and college work.’ Then, next, they prophesy terrible woes and judgments to come on Christendom, mainly through the Turks; they themselves, perhaps, in fitting time, may draw the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, and win the land for the saints.
These worthies were put down by the magistrates of Zwickau. Shaking off the Zwickau dust against their enemies, several of them seek a ‘larger sphere of usefulness’ in Wittenberg. They found the city already in no small excitement concerning certain reforms which Carlstadt was making at full speed. He fraternizes with the Zwickau prophets at once. Indeed, he had been heard to say of the whole body of Scripture what divines were accustomed to say of the law only, that it was a killing letter, leading to nothing more than a sense of guilt and deserved condemnation. Faster and faster come his changes, so well-meant, but so ill-advised. With a few strokes he abolishes auricular confession, makes it incumbent to violate the fast days, and renders it customary to come to the sacrament without preparation. Next an iconoclast riot is raised. Carlstadt declares that the magistrates have power to render criminal those observances which the popular voice declares contrary to the Word of God; that if they refuse, the community may take the law into its own hands.
A scholar like Carlstadt, a professor of established repute, surrenders at last to the vulgar error of the very coarsest mysticism. He advises his students to go home; human learning is vain; Hebrew and Greek an idle toil; inspiration is far above scholarship. Were there not prophets among them, wiser than all the doctors, who had never studied anything or anywhere for half an hour? He himself went about among the poor people, asking them the meaning of Scripture passages, and believing that the hap-hazard notions they put forth were a special revelation from Him who hideth from the wise and prudent what is revealed unto babes. Imagine the Professor bawling a text into the ear of some deaf old crone who cowers beside the stove, and awaiting the irrelevant mumblings of ignorant decrepitude as the oracle of God! Fancy him accosting the shoemaker at his stall, and getting his notion of the text in question, noting it down as infallible, and going his way rejoicing; while Crispin, who knows him, thinks over and over again what a far cleverer answer he might have given, and wishes unsaid what Carlstadt believes inspired!
Is there no one in Wittenberg to unmask these follies, and to quiet the smouldering excitement dangerously spreading among townspeople and students? Melanchthon is young. The loud browbeating volubility of the prophets overpowers his gentle nature. He is undecided—he fancies he sees some force in what they say about baptism. He is timid—he will do nothing.
Friends write to Luther. Back comes an answer from a man who sees to the heart of the matter in a moment—a standing confutation of the mystic’s ambition, in three sentences. Thus replies Luther—‘Do you wish to know the place, the time, the manner in which God holds converse with men? Hear then—‘As a lion so hath he crushed all my bones;’ and again, ‘I am cast out from before thy face;’ and again, ‘My soul is filled with plagues, and my life draweth nigh unto the gates of hell.’ The Divine Majesty does not speak to men immediately, as they call it, so that they have vision of God, for He saith, ‘No flesh shall see me and live.’ Human nature could not survive the least syllable of the Divine utterance. So God addresses man through men, because we could not endure His speaking to us without medium.’
And the mystics could not say (as mystics so commonly plead) that Luther was a man unable, from defective experience, to understand them. If any man had sounded the depths of the soul’s ‘dim and perilous way,’ it was he. Nay, it is for him to question their experience. ‘Inquire,’ he says to Melanchthon, ‘if they know aught of those spiritual distresses, those divine births, and deaths, and sorrows, as of hell.’[[206]]
Luther receives day by day more alarming intelligence. He fears the spread of false doctrine—insurrection in the name of reform. He is anxious lest the elector should persecute the new lights—a step which the fat, amiable, children-with-sugar-plums-feeding Frederick, was not very likely to take. He forms the heroic resolve of quitting his refuge, and suddenly reappears in Wittenberg. He preaches sermons marvellous for moderation and wisdom—sermons which accomplish what is so hard, the calming of heated passion, the reconciliation of adversaries. At his voice Violence and Tumult slink away—their hounds still in the leash; and Charity descends, waving her wand of peace, and shedding the light of her heavenly smile on every face. So triumphs Religion over Fanaticism.