Not only was Faith for Luther thus possessed of a mystical character as an inward discovery and as a personal experience which laid hold on God immediately, but it also owed its illuminating birth in his consciousness largely to the influence of the writings and the lives of the mystics. However suddenly the "revelation" seemed to burst into his mind, there had nevertheless been a long period of psychological gestation and preparation for it before the epoch-making moment finally came. He had already in his early convent days come under the spell of St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Gerson, and many another guide into the deep regions of inward personal religion, and his intimate friend, the Vicar-general Staupitz, had been to him in some sense a personal embodiment of this type of religion. But the German mystics of the fourteenth century, with their mighty experience and their extraordinary depth, carried him still farther in this direction. He was so enthusiastic over that beautiful anonymous classic of mystical religion, the Theologia Germanica, that he twice edited and published it, declaring in his Preface that he had learned from it "more of what God and Christ and man and all things are" than from any other book except the Bible and St. Augustine. John Tauler, the great Dominican preacher of Strasbourg, impressed him no less profoundly. "Neither in the Latin nor the German language," he {7} wrote to Spalatin in 1516, "have I ever found purer or more wholesome teaching, nor any that so agrees with the Gospel." Both these great teachers of spiritual religion helped him to see that complete confidence in and surrender to the will of God is salvation—"Put off thy own will and there will be no hell."
In Luther's earlier writings we come frequently upon passages which reveal the way in which experience still saturates Faith for him, and which exhibit the mystical depth of his Christianity at this period. Commenting on the phrase, "Christ liveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20), in his Commentary on Galatians[9] he says, "He [Christ] is my form, my furniture, and perfection, adorning and beautifying my faith as the colour, the clear light, the whiteness, do garnish and beautify the wall. Thus are we constrained grossly to set forth this matter. For we cannot conceive that Christ is so nearly joined and united unto us as the colour or whiteness is unto the wall. But Christ thus joined and united unto me and abiding in me, liveth this life in me which now I live; yea, Christ Himself is this life which now I live. Wherefore Christ and I in this behalf are both one."[10] And in a famous passage in the tract "On Christian Liberty," he declares that "Faith has the incomparable grace of uniting the soul to Christ as bride to husband, so that the soul possesses whatever Christ Himself possesses."
Not only was this Luther of the early period the hero of the people and the prophet of a deep and inward religion, he seemed also to have found, even more emphatically than had the Humanists, a far-reaching principle of individualism which took the key from the Church and put it into the hands of the Christian man himself. Salvation in its essence, he sees, is conferred upon no one from without. The soul is dependent for it upon no organization, no traditions, no dogma, no sacred performances. It is a transaction between the {8} individual soul and God, and the person who lays hold on God in living faith thereby has salvation, assurance, and joy. With this principle of individualism there came naturally to Luther a new conception of the Church altogether.[11] It was for him, in ideal at least, a community or congregation ["Gemeinde">[ of believers, each member a spiritual priest, ministering to the spiritual and social life of all: "I believe that there is on earth, wide as the world is, not more than one holy universal Christian Church, which is nothing else than the community or assembly of the saints. . . . I believe that in this community or Christendom, all things are common, and each one shares the goods of the others and none calls anything his own. Therefore all the prayers and good works of the entire community help me and every believer, and support and strengthen us at every time in life and in death."[12]
This ideal of a priesthood of believers, ministering to each other in mutual service and practising neighbourly love in daily life, would, if it had been actually carried into effect, have marked a great step in the direction in which the Humanists were going, namely, the transfer of the emphasis from dogma to life, from doctrine to ethics, from ecclesiasticism to personality. Luther's great discovery that personal faith is the only thing which counts toward God, and that love and service are the only things in the human sphere which have religious significance would have introduced, if it had been put full into play, a new era of personal freedom and a new stage in the progress of the Kingdom of God as a world-wide brotherhood of men engaged in mutual service.
{9}
II
But the young Luther of these glowing ideals is not the actual Luther of the Protestant Reformation, any more than the Augustine of the mighty spiritual experiences portrayed in the Confessions is the St. Augustine of history. The historical Luther had the hero-spirit in him in high degree; he had mystical depth and inward experience as we have seen, and he possessed the prophetic power of vision and forereach which makes him often seem far in advance of his time; but these dynamic traits were more than overbalanced by his fundamentally conservative disposition and by his determination not to go faster or farther than he could carry Germany, especially the nobility, with him. He was, in a very real sense, a child of his time, a product of medieval Europe, and he never succeeded in liberating himself from the tight swaddling-bands in which his youth was wrapped. He could not comprehend, as we shall see, the bold spirits who were dedicated to the task of reinterpreting Christianity in terms of the new age; he loved the old, in so far as it seemed to him unspoiled by apostacy and corruption, and he naturally kept reverting to the ancient dogma and the accepted theology of the old Church instead of leading the way into a fresh, vital, spiritual form of Christianity adapted to the social aspiration of the time.
In spite of the fact that Luther knew and loved the German mystics and had himself received a powerful inward experience of Christ as the bridegroom of his soul—an experience which quickened all the forces of his will and raised him to the rank of a world-hero—nevertheless his normal tendency was toward a non-mystical type of Christianity, toward a Christianity thoroughly based on Scripture, logically constructed out of concepts of the nature of God and Man, so ancient, sacred, and orthodox, that they seemed to him axioms of theology and capable of being formulated into a saving {10} system of truth, as universal and as unalterable as the multiplication table.
However unconscious Luther himself may have been of the shift of emphasis that was taking place in him as the movement progressed, the historical observer has no difficulty in noting the change from the Luther who is endeavouring to sound the deeps of life itself, and whose religion is the creation of the inward stream of life within him; and the Luther who wanders far afield from experience, draws curious conclusions from unverified concepts, piles text on text as though heaven could be scaled by another Pelion on Ossa, and once more turns religion back to the cooled lava-beds of theology. He never could succeed in getting the God of his heart's glowing faith into the theologies which he laboriously builded. As soon as he started constructing he invariably fell back upon the building-material which had already been quarried, and which lay at hand. His experimental Faith discovered a God of all Grace, but his inherited concept of God, the God of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression in his De servo arbitrio ["The Unfree Will">[ of 1525: "This is the acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of love. If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be no need of faith." There could, in his thought, be no salvation for man, no hope, and no joy, until some way of escape was found from the stern judgments of this angry and wrathful God. This way of escape is found in what Luther calls "the Word of God," by which he means "the Gospel of God concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and glorified."[13] {11} This Word of God is for him the sum total of "the promises that God is for us": "the pure Gospel" of a pardoning, forgiving God; the revelation in the Cross of Christ that no self-merit counts or is needed, but that on Christ's account God forgives the sinner and bestows His Grace upon him.
Speaking theologically, Faith consists in believing in the God whom Christ has historically revealed—believing without any doubt that He will be and will do to us according to the things which are said of Him in "the Word of God." It must be said that for Luther himself, Faith was an "active, powerful thing," "a deliberate confidence in the grace of God," which made him "joyous and intrepid" and "for which he could die a thousand deaths";[14] but there was always an irresistible tendency in the Lutheran teaching for faith to drop to the lower level of doctrine, and to consist in the acceptance of a scheme of justification.