Doctrines, indeed, are not the beginnings of things; they are, at the best, storehouses of past and blessed experiences. This is true of most knowledge in all departments of research. We may recognise that there is some practical use in the rules of logic, ancient and modern, but we know that they are but the uncouth and inadequate symbols of the ways in which an indefinable mental tact, whose delicacy varies with the mind that uses it, perceives divergences and affinities, and weaves its web of knowledge in ways that are past finding out. We know that logical argument is a good shield but a bad sword, and that while syllogisms may silence, they seldom convince; that persuasion arises from a subtle sympathy of soul with soul, which is as indefinable as the personalities which exhale it. There is always at the basis of knowledge of men and things this delicate contact of personality with personality, whether we think of the gathering, or assorting, or exchanging the wisdom we possess. If this be true of our knowledge of common things, it is overwhelmingly so of all knowledge of God and of things divine. We must be in touch with God to know Him in the true sense of knowledge. At the basis of every real advance in religion there must be an intimate vision of God impressed upon us as a religious experience which we know to be true because we have felt [pg 435] it; and what one has, another receives by a species of spiritual contagion. The revival under Francis of Assisi spread as it did because the fire flaming in the heart of the preacher was also kindled in the hearts of his hearers. Luther headed a Reformation because men felt and knew that he had, as he said, found a gracious God by trusting in the grace of God revealed to him in Christ Jesus. It was not the Augsburg Confession that made the Reformation; it was the expansion of that religious experience which finds very inadequate description in that or in any other statement of doctrines.
§ 2. The universal Priesthood of Believers.
Luther's religious experience, that he, a sinner, received forgiveness by simply throwing himself on God revealed in Christ Jesus the Saviour, came to him as an astounding revelation which was almost too great to be put into words. He tried to express it in varying ways, all of which he felt too utterly inadequate to describe it. We can see how he laboured at it from 1512 to 1517. It lay hidden in his discourse to the assembly of clergy in the episcopal palace at Ziesar (June 5th, 1512), when he declared that all reform must begin in the hearts of individual men. We can see it growing more and more articulate in his annotations, notes, and heads of lectures on the Psalms, delivered in the years 1513-1516, struggling to free itself from the phrases of the Scholastic Theology which could not really express it. His private letters, in which he was less hampered by the phraseology which he still believed appropriate to theology, are full of happier expressions.[396] Justificatio is vivificatio, and means to redeem from sins without any merit in the person redeemed; it takes place when sin is not imputed, but the penitents are reputed [pg 436] righteous. Grace is the pity (misericordia) of God; it manifests itself in the remission of sins; it is the truth of God seen in the fulfilment of His promises in the historical work of Christ; Jesus Christ Himself is grace, is the way, is life and salvation. Faith is trust in the truth of God as manifested in the life and work of Jesus Christ; it is to believe in God; it is a knowledge of the Cross of Christ; it is to understand that the Son of God became incarnate, was crucified, and raised again for our salvation. The three central thoughts—justification, grace, faith—expressed in these inadequate phrases, are always looked upon and used to regulate that estimate of ourselves which forms the basis of piety. It is needless to trace the growing adequacy of the description. Luther at last found words to say that the central thought in Christianity is that the believer in possession of faith, which is itself the gift of God, is able to throw himself on God in Christ Who is his salvation and Who has mirrored Himself for us in Christ Jesus. He had trod the weary round that Augustine had gone before him; he had tried to help himself in every possible way; he had found that with all his striving he could do nothing. Then, strange and mysterious as it was, the discovery had not brought despair, but rejoicing and comfort; for since there was no help whatever in man, his soul had been forced to find all—not part, but all—help in God. When he was able to express his experience he could say that the faith which throws itself on God, which is God's own gift, is the certainty of the forgiveness of sins. It was no adherence to doctrines more or less clearly comprehended; it was no act of initiation to be followed by a nearer approach to God and a larger measure of His grace; it was the power which gives life, certainty, peace, continuous self-surrender to God as the Father, and which transforms and renews the whole man. It was the life of the soul; it was Christianity within the believer—as Jesus Christ and His work is Christianity outside the believer.
It is manifest that as soon as this experience attained [pg 437] articulate statement, it was bound to discredit much that was in mediæval theology and religious usage. Yet the striking thing about Luther was that he never sought to employ it in this way until one great abuse forced itself upon him and compelled him to test it by this touchstone of what true Christianity was. This reserve not only shows that there was nothing revolutionary in the character of Luther, nothing romantic or quixotic, it also manifests the quiet greatness of the man. Nor was there anything in the fundamental religious experience of Luther which necessarily conflicted with the contents of the old ecclesiastical doctrines, or even with the common usages of the religious life. There was a change in the attitude towards both, and an entirely new estimate of their religious value, but nothing which called for their immediate criticism, still less for their destruction. Faith, which was the Christian life, could no longer be based upon them; they were not the essential things that they had been supposed to be; but they might have their uses if kept in their proper places—aids to all holy living, but not that from which the life sprang. The thought that the entire sum of religion consists in “unwavering trust of the heart in Him Who has given Himself to us in Christ as our Father, personal assurance of faith, because Christ with His work undertakes our cause,” simplified religion marvellously, and made many things which had been regarded as essential mere outside auxiliaries. But it did not necessarily sweep them away. Though the acceptance of certain forms of doctrine, auricular confession, the monastic life, communion by the laity in one “kind” only in the Sacrament of the Supper, a celibate priesthood, fasting, going on pilgrimages, not to eat meat on Friday, had nothing to do with the essentials of the Christian life; still it was not necessary to insist on eating meat on Friday, on abstaining from fasting, and so on. The great matter was the spirit in which such things were performed or left undone. What the fundamental religious experience had done was to show the liberty of the Christian man to trust courageously in [pg 438] God and count all things of little moment compared with this which was the one thing needful.
“Out of a complex system of expiations, good deeds, and comfortings, of strict statutes and uncertain apportionments of grace, out of magic and blind obedience, Luther led religion forth and gave it a strenuously concentrated form. The Christian religion is the living assurance of the living God Who has revealed Himself and opened His heart in Christ—nothing more.”[397]
It was a vital part of this fundamental experience that the living God Who had manifested Himself in Christ was accessible to every Christian. To quote Harnack again:
“Rising above all anxieties and terrors, above all ascetic devices, above all directions of theology, above all interventions of hierarchy and Sacraments, Luther ventured to lay hold of God Himself in Christ, and in this act of faith, which he recognised as God's work, his whole being obtained stability and firmness, nay, even a personal joy and certainty, which no mediæval Christian had ever possessed.”[398]
God Himself gave the believer the power to throw himself directly on God. But this contradicted one of the most widely diffused and most strongly held religious beliefs of the mediæval Church, and was bound to come in collision with it whenever the two were confronted with each other. It was the universal conception of mediæval piety that the mediation of a priest was essential to salvation. Mediæval Christians believed with more or less distinctness that the supernatural life of the soul was created, nourished, and perfected through the sacraments, and that the priests administering them possessed, in virtue of their ordination, miraculous powers whereby they daily offered the true sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the altar, forgave the sins of men, and taught the truths of salvation with divine authority. It was this universally accepted power of a mediatorial priesthood which had enslaved Europe, and which had rendered the liberty of a Christian [pg 439] man an impossible thing. Everywhere the priesthood barred, or was supposed to be able to bar, the way to God. The Church, which ought to have shown how God Who had revealed Himself in Christ was accessible to every believer, had surrounded the inner shrine of the sanctuary of His Presence with a triple wall of defence which prevented entrance. When man or woman felt sorrow for sin, they were instructed to go, not to God, but to a man, often of immoral life, and confess their sins to him because he was a priest. When they wished to hear the comforting words of pardon spoken, it was not from God, but from a priest that the assurance was supposed to come. God's grace, to help to holy living and to bring comfort in dying, was given, it was said, only through a series of sacraments which fenced man's life round, and priests could give or withhold these sacraments. Man was born again in baptism; he came of age spiritually in confirmation; his marriage was cleansed from the sin of lust in the sacrament of matrimony; penance brought back his spiritual life slain by deadly sin; the Eucharist gave him with his voyage victual as he journeyed through life; and deathbed grace was imparted in extreme unction. These ceremonies were not the signs and promises of the free grace of God, under whose wide canopy, as under that of heaven, man lived his spiritual life. They were jealously guarded doors from out of which grudgingly, and commonly not without fees, the priests dispensed the free grace of God.
During the later Middle Ages a gross abuse made the evils of this conception of a mediating priesthood emphatic. The practical evil lying in the whole thought was not so very apparent when the matter was regarded from the side of giving out the grace of God; but when it came to withholding it, then it was seen what the whole conception meant. The Bishops of Rome gave the peoples of Europe many an object lesson on this. If a town, or a district, or a whole country had offended the Pope and the Curia, it was placed under an interdict, and the priests were commanded to refuse the sacraments to the people. They [pg 440] stood between the newborn babe and the initial grace supposed to be bestowed in baptism, and to be absolutely withheld if baptism was not administered; between the dying man and the deathbed grace which was received in extreme unction; between young men and women and legal marriage blessed by God; between the people and daily worship and the bestowal of grace in the Eucharist. The God of grace could not be approached, the blessings of pardon and strength for holy living could not be procured, because the magistrates of a town or the king and councillors of a nation had offended the Bishop of Rome on an affair of worldly policy. The Church, i.e. the clergy, who were by the theory enabled to refuse to communicate the grace of God, barred all access to the God who had revealed Himself in Christ Jesus. The Pope by a stroke of the pen could prevent a whole nation, so it was believed, from approaching God, because he could prohibit priests from performing the usual sacramental acts which alone brought Him near. An interdict meant spiritual death to the district on which it fell, and on the mediæval theory it was more deadly to the spiritual life than the worst of plagues, the Black Death itself, was to the body. An interdict made the plainest intellect see, understand, and shudder at the awful and mysterious powers which a mediatorial priesthood was said to possess.