When the Visitation was completed and the reports presented, the Visitors were asked to draft and issue an Instruction or lengthy advice to the clergy and people of the “circle” they had inspected. This Instruction was not considered a regular legal document, but its contents were expected to be acted upon.
These Visitations and Instructions were the earliest attempts at the reorganisation of the evangelical Church in Electoral Saxony. The Visitors remained as a “primitive evangelical consistory” to supervise their “circles.”
The Saxon Visitations became a model for most of the [pg 411] North German evangelical territorial Churches, and the Instructions form the earliest collection of requirements set forth for the guidance of pastors and Christian people. The directions are very minute. The pastors are told how to preach, how to conduct pastoral visitations, what sins they must specially warn their people against, and what example they must show them. The care of schools and of the poor was not forgotten.[378]
The fact that matrimonial cases were during the Middle Ages almost invariably tried in ecclesiastical courts, made it necessary to provide some legal authority to adjudicate upon such cases when the mediæval episcopal courts had either temporarily or permanently lost their authority. This led to a provisional arrangement for the government of the Church in Electoral Saxony, which took a regular legal form. A pastor, called a superintendent, was appointed in each of the four “circles” into which the territory had been divided for the purpose of Visitation, to act along with the ordinary magistracy in all ecclesiastical matters, including the judging in matrimonial cases.[379] This Saxon arrangement also spread largely through the northern German evangelical States.
A third Visitation of Electoral Saxony was made in 1532, and led to important ecclesiastical changes which formed the basis of all that came afterwards. As a result of the reports of the Visitors, of whom Justus Jonas seems to have been the most energetic, the parishes were rearranged, the incomes of parish priests readjusted, and the whole ecclesiastical revenues of the mediæval Church within Electoral Saxony appropriated for the threefold evangelical uses of supporting the ministry, providing for schools, and caring for the poor. The doctrine, ceremonies, and worship of the evangelical Church were also settled on a definite basis.[380]
The Visitors pointed out that hitherto no arrangement had been made to give the whole ecclesiastical administration one central authority. The Electoral Prince had always been regarded as the supreme ruler of the Church within his dominions, but as he could not personally superintend everything, there was needed some supreme court which could act in all ecclesiastical cases as his representative or instrument. The Visitors suggested the revival of the mediæval episcopal consistorial courts modified to suit the new circumstances. Bishops in the mediæval sense of the word might be and were believed to be superfluous, but their true function, the jus episcopale, the right of oversight, was indispensable. According to Luther's ideas—ideas which had been gaining ground in Germany from the last quarter of the fifteenth century—this jus episcopale belonged to the supreme secular authority. The mediæval bishop had exercised his right of oversight through a consistorial court composed of theologians and canon lawyers appointed by himself. These mediæval courts, it was suggested, might be transformed into Lutheran ecclesiastical courts if the prince formed a permanent council composed of lawyers and divines to act for him and in his name in all ecclesiastical matters, including matrimonial cases. The Visitors sketched their plan; it was submitted for revision to Luther and to Chancellor Brück, and the result was the Wittenberg Ecclesiastical Consistory established in 1542.[381] That the arrangement was still somewhat provisional appears from the fact that the court had not jurisdiction over the whole of the Electoral dominions, and that other two Consistories, one at Zeitz and the other at Zwickau, were established with similar powers. But the thing to be observed is that these courts were modelled on the old mediæval consistorial episcopal courts, and that, [pg 413] like them, they were composed of lawyers and of theologians. The essential difference was that these Lutheran courts were appointed by and acted in the name of the supreme secular authority. In Electoral Saxony their local bounds of jurisdiction did not correspond to those of the mediæval courts. It was impossible that they should. Electoral Saxony, the ordinance erecting the Consistory itself says, consisted of portions of “ten or twelve” mediæval dioceses. The courts had different districts assigned to them; but in all other things they reproduced the mediæval consistorial courts.
The constitutions of these courts provided for the assembling and holding of Synods to deliberate on the affairs of the Church. The General Synod consisted of the Consistory and the superintendents of the various “circles”; and particular Synods, which had to do with the Church affairs of the “circle,” of the superintendent, and of all the clergy of the “circle.”
Such were the beginnings of the consistorial system of Church government, which is a distinctive mark of the Lutheran Church, and which exhibits some of the individual traits of Luther's personality. We can see in it his desire to make full use of whatever portions of the mediæval Church usages could be pressed into the service of his evangelical Church; his conception that the one supreme authority on earth was that of the secular government; his suspicion of the “common” man, and his resolve to prevent the people exercising any control over the arrangements of the Church.
Gradually all the Lutheran Churches have adopted, in general outline at least, this consistorial system; but it would be a mistake to think that the Wittenberg “use” was adopted in all its details. Luther himself, as has been said, had no desire for anything like uniformity, and there was none in the beginning. All the schemes of ecclesiastical government proceed on the idea that the jus episcopale or right of ecclesiastical oversight belongs to the supreme territorial secular authority. All of them [pg 414] include within the one set of ordinances, provisions for the support of the ministry, for the maintenance of schools, and for the care of the poor—the last generally expressed by regulations about the “common chest.” The great variety of forms of ecclesiastical government drafted and adopted may be studied in Richter's collection, which includes one hundred and seventy-two separate ecclesiastical constitutions, and which is confessedly very imperfect. The gradual growth of the organisation finally adopted in each city and State can be traced for a portion of Germany in Sehling's unfinished work.[382]
The number of these ecclesiastical ordinances is enormous, and the quantity is to be accounted for partly by the way in which Germany was split up into numerous small States in the sixteenth century, and also partly by the fact that Luther pled strongly for diversity.