§ 12. Luther's Death.
It was in these months, while the alarms of war were threatening Germany, that Luther passed away. He had [pg 385] been growing weaker year by year, and had never spared himself for the cause he had at heart. One last bit of work he thought he must do. The Counts of Mansfeld had quarrelled over some trifling things in the division of their property, and had consented to accept Luther's mediation. This obliged him to journey to Eisleben in bitterly cold weather (January 1546). “I would cheerfully lay down my bones in the grave if I could only reconcile my dear Lords,” he said; and that was what was required from him. He finished the arbitration to the satisfaction of both brothers, and received by way of fee endowments for village schools in the Mansfeld region. The deeds were all signed by the 17th of February (1546), and Luther's work was done at Mansfeld—and for his generation. He became alarmingly ill that night, and died on the following morning, long before dawn. “Reverend Father,” said Justus Jonas, who was with him, “wilt thou stand by Christ and the doctrine thou hast preached?” The dying man roused himself to say “Yes.” It was his last word. Twenty minutes later he passed away with a deep sigh.
Luther died in his sixty-third year—twenty-eight and a half years after he had, greatly daring, nailed his Theses to the door of All Saints' in Wittenberg, twenty-seven after he had discovered the meaning of his Theses during the memorable days when he faced Eck at Leipzig, and twenty-five after he had stood before the Emperor and Diet at Worms, while all Germany had hailed him as its champion against the Pope and the Spaniard. The years between 1519 and 1524 were, from an external point of view, the most glorious of Luther's life. He dominated and led his nation, and gave a unity to that distracted and divided country which it had never enjoyed until then. He spoke and felt like a prophet. “I have the gospel, not from men, but from heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ, so that I might have described myself and have glorified in being a minister and an evangelist.” The position had come to him in no sudden visionary way. He had been led into it step by step, forced forward slowly [pg 386] by a power stronger than his own; and the knowledge had kept him humble before his God. During these years it seemed as if his dream—an expectation shared by his wise Elector, the most experienced statesman in Germany—of a Germany united under one National Church, separated from the bondage of Rome, repudiating her blasphemies, rejecting her traditions which had corrupted the religion of the ancient and purer days, and disowning her presumptuous encroachments on the domain of the civil power ordained of God, was about to come true.
Then came the disillusionment of the Peasants' War, when the dragon's teeth were sown broadcast over Germany, and produced their crop of gloomy suspicions and black fears. After the insurrection had spent itself, and in spite of the almost irretrievable damage which it, and the use made of it by papal diplomatists, did to the Reformation movement, Luther regained his serene courage, and recovered much of the ground which had been lost. But the crushing blow had left its mark upon him. He had the same trust in God, but much more distrust of man, fearing the “tumult,” resolute to have nothing to do with anyone who had any connection, however slight, with those who had instigated the misguided peasants. He rallied the forces of the Reformation, and brought them back to discipline by the faith they had in himself as their leader. His personality dominated those kinglets of Germany, possessed with as strong a sense of their dignity and autocratic rights as any Tudor or Valois, and they submitted to be led by him. Electoral Saxony, Hesse, Lüneburg, Anhalt, East Prussia, and Mansfeld, and some score of imperial cities, had followed him loyally from the first; and as the years passed, Ducal Saxony and Würtemberg in the centre and south, and Brandenburg in the north, had declared themselves Protestant States. These larger principalities brought in their train all the smaller satellite States which clustered round them. It may be said that before Luther's death the much larger portion of the German Empire had been won for evangelical religion,—a territory [pg 387] to be roughly described as a great triangle, whose base was the shores of the Baltic Sea from the Netherlands on the west to the eastern limits of East Prussia, and whose apex was Switzerland. Part of this land was occupied by ecclesiastical principalities which had remained Roman Catholic,—the districts surrounding Köln on the west, and the territories of Paderborn, Fulda, and many others in the centre,—but, on the other hand, many stoutly Protestant cities, like Nürnberg, Constance, and Augsburg, were planted on territories which were outside these limits. The extent and power of this Protestant Germany was sufficient to resist any attempt on the part of the Emperor and the Catholic princes to overcome it by force of arms, provided only its rulers remained true to each other.
Over this wide extent of country Evangelical Churches had been established, and provisions had been made for the education of children and for the support of the poor in ordinances issued by the supreme secular authorities who ruled over its multitudinous divisions. The Mass, with its supposed substitutionary sacrifice and a mediatorial priesthood, had been abolished. The German tongue had displaced mediæval Latin in public worship, and the worshippers could take part in the services with full understanding of the solemn acts in which they were engaged. A German Bible lay on every pulpit, and the people had their copies in the pews. Translations of the Psalms and German evangelical hymns were sung, and sermons in German were preached. Pains were taken to provide an educated evangelical ministry who would preach the gospel faithfully, and conscientiously fulfil all the duties connected with the “cure of souls.” The ecclesiastical property of the mediæval Church was largely used for evangelical purposes. There was no mechanical uniformity in these new arrangements. Luther refused to act the part of an ecclesiastical autocrat: he advised when called upon to give advice, he never commanded. No Wittenberg “use” was to confront the Roman “use” and be the only mode of service and ecclesiastical organisation.
The movement Luther had inaugurated had gone far beyond Germany before 1546. Every country in Europe had felt its pulsations. As early as 1519 (April), learned men in Paris had been almost feverishly studying his writings.[360] They were eagerly read in England before 1521.[361] Aleander, writing from Worms to the Curia, complains that Spanish merchants were getting translations of Luther's books made for circulation in Spain.[362] They were being studied with admiration in Italy even earlier. The Scottish Parliament was vainly endeavouring to prevent their entrance into that country by 1525.[363] The Lutheran Reformation had been legally established in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden long before Luther passed away.
Luther was the one great man of his generation, standing head and shoulders above everyone else. This does not mean that he absorbed in his individual personality everything that the age produced for the furtherance of humanity. Many impulses for good existed in that sixteenth century which Luther never recognised; for an age is always richer than any one man belonging to it. He stood outside the great artistic movement. He might have learned much from Erasmus on the one hand, and from the leaders of the Peasants' War on the other, which remained hidden from him. He is greatest in the one sphere of religion only—in the greatest of all spheres. His conduct towards Zwingli and the strong language he used in speaking of opponents make our generation discover a strain of intolerance we would fain not see in so great a man; but his contemporaries did not and could not pass the same judgment upon him. In such a divided Germany none but a man of the widest tolerance could have held together the Protestant forces as Luther did; [pg 389] and we can see what he was when we remember the sad effects of the petty orthodoxies of the Amsdorfs and the Osianders who came after him.
It is the fate of most authors of revolutions to be devoured by the movement which they have called into being. Luther occasioned the greatest revolution which Western Europe has ever seen, and he ruled it till his death. History shows no kinglier man than this Thuringian miner's son.