The plan of reform sketched includes—the complete abolition of the power of the Pope over the State; the creation of a national German Church, with an ecclesiastical Council of its own to be the final court of appeal for Germany, and to represent the German Church as the Diet did the German State; some internal religious reforms, such as the limitation of the number of pilgrimages, which were destroying morality and creating a distaste for honest work; reductions in the mendicant orders and in the number of vagrants who thronged the roads, and were a scandal in the towns.
“It is of much more importance to consider what is necessary for the salvation of the common people than what St. Francis, or St. Dominic, or St. Augustine, or any other man laid down, especially as things have not turned out as they expected.”
He proposes the inspection of all convents and nunneries, and permission given to those who are dissatisfied with their monastic lives to return to the world; the limitation of ecclesiastical holy days, which are too often nothing but scenes of drunkenness, gluttony, and debauchery; a married priesthood, and an end put to the degrading concubinage of the German priests.
“We see how the priesthood is fallen, and how many a poor priest is encumbered with a woman and children, and burdened in his conscience, and no one does anything to help him, though he might very well be helped.... I will not conceal my honest counsel, nor withhold comfort from that unhappy crowd who now live in trouble with wife and children, and remain in shame with a heavy conscience, [pg 247]hearing their wife called a priest's harlot, and their children bastards.... I say that these two (who are minded in their hearts to live together in conjugal fidelity) are surely married before God.”
The appeal concludes with some solemn words addressed to the luxury and licensed immorality of the German towns.
None of Luther's writings produced such an instantaneous effect as this. It was not the first programme urging common action in the interests of a united Germany, but it was the most complete, and was recognised to be so by all who were working for a Germany for the Germans.
The three “Reformation treatises” were the statement of Luther's case laid before the people of the Fatherland, and were a very effectual antidote to the Papal Bull excommunicating him, which was ready for publication in Germany.
§ 5. The Papal Bull.
The Bull, Exurge Domine, was scarcely worthy of the occasion. The Pope seems to have left its construction in the hands of Prierias, Cajetan, and Eck, and the contents seem to show that Eck had the largest share in framing it. Much of it reads like an echo of Eck's statements at Leipzig a year before. It began pathetically: “Arise, O Lord, plead Thine own cause; remember how the foolish man reproacheth Thee daily; the foxes are wasting Thy vineyard, which Thou hast given to Thy Vicar Peter; the boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it.” St. Peter is invoked, and the Pope's distress at the news of Luther's misdeeds is described at length. The most disturbing thing is that the errors of the Greeks and of the Bohemians were being revived, and that in Germany, which had hitherto been so faithful to the Holy See. Then came forty-one propositions, said to be Luther's, which are condemned as “heretical or scandalous, or false or offensive to pious ears, or seducing to simple minds, and standing in the way of the Catholic [pg 248] faith.”[172] All faithful people were ordered to burn Luther's books wherever they could find them. Luther himself had refused to come to Rome and submit to instruction; he had even appealed to a General Council, contrary to the decrees of Julius ii. and Pius ii.; he was therefore inhibited from preaching; he and all who followed him were ordered to make public recantation within sixty days; if they did not, they were to be treated as heretics, were to be seized and imprisoned by the magistrates, and all towns or districts which sheltered them were to be placed under an interdict.