A History of the Reformation (Vol. 1 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

Another source of Luther's power was that he had been led step by step, and that his countrymen could follow him deliberately without being startled by any too sudden changes. He was one of themselves; he took them into his confidence at every stage of his public career; they knew him thoroughly. He had been a monk, and that was natural for a youth of his exemplary piety. He had lived a model monastic life; his companions and his superiors were unwearied in commending him. He had spoken openly what almost all good men had been feeling privately about Indulgences in plain language which all could understand; and he had gradually taught himself and his countrymen, who were following his career breathlessly, that the man who trusted in God did not need to fear the censures of Pope or of the clergy. He emancipated not merely the learned and cultivated classes, but the common people, from the fear of the Church; and this was the one thing needful for a true reformation. So long as the people of Europe believed that the priesthood had some mysterious powers, no matter how vague or indefinite, over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women, freedom of conscience and a renovation of the public and private moral life was impossible. The spiritual world will always have its anxieties and terrors for every Christian soul, and the greatest achievement of Luther was that by teaching and, above all, by example, he showed the common man that he was in God's hands, and not dependent on the blessing or banning of a clerical caste. For Luther's doctrine of Justification by Faith, as he himself showed in his tract on the Liberty of a Christian Man (1520), was simply that there was nothing in the indefinite claim which the mediæval Church had always made. From the moment the common people, simple men and women, knew and [pg 193] felt this, they were freed from the mysterious dread of Church and priesthood; they could look the clergy fairly in the face, and could care little for their threats. It was because Luther had freed himself from this dread, because the people, who knew him to be a deeply pious man, saw that he was free from it, and therefore that they need be in no concern about it, that he became the great reformer and the popular leader in an age which was compelled to revise its thoughts about spiritual things.

Hence it is that we may say without exaggeration that the Reformation was embodied in Martin Luther, that it lived in him as in no one else, and that its inner religious history may be best studied in the record of his spiritual experiences and in the growth of his religious convictions.

§ 2. Luther's Youth and Education.

Martin Luther was born in 1483 (Nov. 10th) at Eisleben, and spent his childhood in the small mining town of Mansfeld. His father, Hans Luther, had belonged to Möhra (Moortown), a small peasant township lying in the north-east corner of the Thuringian Wald, and his mother, Margarethe Ziegler, had come from a burgher family in Eisenach. It was a custom among these Thuringian peasants that only one son, and that usually the youngest, inherited the family house and the croft. The others were sent out one by one, furnished with a small store of money from the family strong-box, to make their way in the world. Hans Luther had determined to become a miner in the Mansfeld district, where the policy of the Counts of Mansfeld, of building and letting out on hire small smelting furnaces, enabled thrifty and skilled workmen to rise in the world. The father soon made his way. He leased one and then three of these furnaces. He won the respect of his neighbours, for he became, in 1491, one of the four members of the village council, and we are told that the Counts of Mansfeld held him in esteem.

In the earlier years, when Luther was a child, the [pg 194] family life was one of grinding poverty, and Luther often recalled the hard struggles of his parents. He had often seen his mother carrying the wood for the family fire from the forest on her poor shoulders. The child grew up among the hard, grimy, coarse surroundings of the German working-class life, protected from much that was evil by the wise severity of his parents. He imbibed its simple political and ecclesiastical ideas. He learned that the Emperor was God's ruler on earth, who would protect poor people against the Turk, and that the Church was the “Pope's House,” in which the Bishop of Rome was the house-father. He was taught the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer. He sang such simple evangelical hymns as “Ein Kindelein so lobelich,” “Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist,” and “Crist ist erstanden.” He was a dreamy, contemplative child; and the unseen world was never out of his thoughts. He knew that some of the miners practised sorcery in dark corners below the earth. He feared an old woman who lived near; she was a witch, and the priest himself was afraid of her. He was taught about Hell and Purgatory and the Judgment to come. He shivered whenever he looked at the stained-glass window in the parish church and saw the frowning face of Jesus, who, seated on a rainbow and with a flaming sword in His hand, was coming to judge him, he knew not when. He saw the crowds of pilgrims who streamed past Mansfeld, carrying their crucifixes high, and chanting their pilgrim songs, going to the Bruno Quertfort chapel or to the old church at Wimmelberg. He saw paralytics and maimed folk carried along the roads, going to embrace the wooden cross at Kyffhaüser, and find a miraculous cure; and sick people on their way to the cloister church at Wimmelberg to be cured by the sound of the blessed bells.

The boy Luther went to the village school in Mansfeld, and endured the cruelties of a merciless pedagogue. He was sent for a year, in 1497, to a school of the Brethren of the Common Lot in Magdeburg. Then he went to St. [pg 195] George's school in Eisenach, where he remained three years. He was a “poor scholar,” which meant a boy who received his lodging and education free, was obliged to sing in the church choir, and was allowed to sing in the streets, begging for food. The whole town was under the spell of St. Elizabeth, the pious landgravine, who had given up family life and all earthly comforts to earn a mediæval saintship. It contained nine monasteries and nunneries, many of them dating back to the days of St. Elizabeth; her good deeds were emblazoned on the windows of the church in which Luther sang as choir-boy; he had long conversations with the monks who belonged to her foundations. The boy was being almost insensibly attracted to that revival of the mediæval religious life which was the popular religious force of these days. He had glimpses of the old homely evangelical piety, this time accompanied by a refinement of manners Luther had hitherto been unacquainted with, in the house of a lady who is identified by biographers with a certain Frau Cotta. The boy enjoyed it intensely, and his naturally sunny nature expanded under its influence. But it did not touch him religiously. He has recorded that it was with incredulous surprise that he heard his hostess say that there was nothing on earth more lovely than the love of husband and wife, when it is in the fear of the Lord.

After three years' stay at Eisenach, Luther entered the University of Erfurt (1501), then the most famous in Germany. It had been founded in 1392 by the burghers of the town, who were intensely proud of their own University, and especially of the fact that it had far surpassed other seats of learning which owed their origin to princes. The academic and burgher life were allied at Erfurt as they were in no other University town. The days of graduation were always town holidays, and at the graduation processions the officials of the city walked with the University authorities. Luther tells us that when he first saw the newly made graduates marching in their new graduation robes in the middle of the procession, he thought that [pg 196] they had attained to the summit of earthly felicity. The University of Erfurt was also strictly allied to the Church. Different Popes had enriched it with privileges; the Primate of Germany, the Archbishop of Mainz, was its Chancellor: many of its professors held ecclesiastical prebends, or were monks; each faculty was under the protection of a tutelary saint; the teachers had to swear to teach nothing opposed to the doctrines of the Roman Church; and special pains were taken to prevent the rise and spread of heresy.

Its students were exposed to a greater variety of influences than those of any other seat of learning in Germany. Its theology represented the more modern type of scholastic, the Scotist; its philosophy was the nominalist teaching of William of Occam, whose great disciple, Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), had been one of its most celebrated professors; the system of biblical interpretation, first introduced by Nicholas de Lyra[132] (d. 1340), had been long taught at Erfurt by a succession of able masters; Humanism had won an early entrance, and in Luther's time the Erfurt circle of “Poets” was already famous. The strongly anti-clerical teaching of John of Wessel, who had lectured in Erfurt for fifteen years (1445-1460), had left its mark on the University, and was not forgotten. Hussite propagandists, Luther tells us, appeared from time to time, whispering among the students their strange, anti-clerical Christian socialism. While, as if by way of antidote, there came Papal Legates, whose magnificence bore witness to the might of the Roman Church.

Luther had been sent to Erfurt to learn Law, and the Faculty of Philosophy gave the preliminary training required. [pg 197] The young student worked hard at the prescribed tasks. The Scholastic Philosophy, he said, left him little time for classical studies, and he attended none of the Humanist lectures. He found time, however, to read a good many Latin authors privately, and also to learn something of Greek. Virgil and Plautus were his favourite authors; Cicero also charmed him; he read Livy, Terence, and Horace. He seems also to have read a volume of selections from Propertius, Persius, Lucretius, Tibullus, Silvius Italicus, Statius, and Claudian. But he was never a member of the Humanist circle; he was too much in earnest about religious questions, and of too practical a turn of mind.