§ 10. The Spread of Luther's Teaching.
It may be said that the very year in which the imperial edict against Luther was published (1521) gave evidence that a silent movement towards the adoption of the principles for which Luther was testifying had begun among monks of almost all the different Orders. The Augustinian Eremites, Luther's own Order, had been largely influenced by him. Whole communities, with the prior at their head, had declared for the Reformation both in Germany and in the Low Countries. No other monastic Order was so decidedly upon the side of the [pg 306] Reformer, but monks of all kinds joined in preaching and teaching the new doctrines. Martin Bucer had been a Dominican, Otto Braunfells a Carthusian, Ambrose Blauer a Benedictine. The case of Oecolampadius (John Hussgen (?) Hausschein) was peculiar. He had been a distinguished Humanist, had come under serious religious impressions, and had entered the Order of St. Bridget; but he was not long there when he joined the ranks of the Reformers, and was sheltered by Franz von Sickingen in his castle at Ebernberg.[304] Urban Rhegius, John Eck's most trusted and most talented student at Ingolstadt, had become a Carmelite, and had quitted his monastery to preach the doctrines of Luther. John Bugenhagen belonged to the Order of the Præmonstratenses. He was a learned theologian. Luther's struggle against Indulgences had displeased him. He got hold of The Babylonian Captivity of the Christian Church, and studied it for the purpose of refuting it. The study so changed him that he felt that “the whole world may be wrong, but Luther is right”; he won over his prior and most of his companions, and became the Reformer of Pomerania.
Secular priests all over Germany declared for the new evangelical doctrines. The Bishop of Samlund in East Prussia boldly avowed himself to be on Luther's side, and was careful to have the Lutheran doctrines preached throughout his diocese; and other bishops showed themselves favourable to the new evangelical faith. Many of the most influential parish priests did the like, and their congregations followed them. Sometimes the superior clergy forbade the use of the church, and the people followed their pastor while he preached to them in the fields. Sometimes (as in the case of Hermann Tast) the priest preached under the lime trees in the churchyard, and [pg 307] his parishioners came armed to protect him. If priests were lacking to preach the Lutheran doctrines, laymen came forward. If they could not preach, they could sing hymns. Witness the poor weaver of Magdeburg, who took his stand near the statue of Kaiser Otto in the market-place, and sang two of Luther's hymns, “Aus tiefer Not schrei Ich zu dir,” and “Es woll' uns Gott gnädig sein,” while the people crowded round him on the morning of May 6th, 1524. The Burgermeister coming from early Mass heard him, and ordered him to be imprisoned, but the crowd rescued him. Such was the beginning of the Reformation in Magdeburg.[305] When men dared not, women took their place. Argula Grunbach, a student of the Scriptures and of Luther's writings, challenged the University of Ingolstadt, under the eyes of the great Dr. Eck himself, to a public disputation upon the truth of Luther's position.
Artists lent their aid to spread the new ideas, and many cartoons made the doctrines and the aims of the Reformers plain to the common people. These pictures were sometimes used to illustrate the title-pages of the controversial literature, and were sometimes published as separate broadsides. In one, Christ is portrayed standing at the door of a house, which represents His Church. He invites the people to enter by the door; and Popes, cardinals, and monks are shown climbing the walls to get entrance in a clandestine fashion.[306] In another, entitled the Triumph of Truth, the common folk of a German town are represented singing songs of welcome to honour an approaching procession. Moses, the patriarchs, the prophets, and the apostles, carry on their shoulders the Ark of the Holy Scriptures. Hutten comes riding on his warhorse, and to [pg 308] the tail of the horse is attached a chain which encloses a crowd of ecclesiastics—an archbishop with his mitre fallen off, the Pope with his tiara in the act of tumbling and his pontifical staff broken; after them, cardinals, then monks figured with the heads of cats, pigs, calves, etc. Then comes a triumphal car drawn by the four living creatures, who represent the four evangelists, on one of which rides an angel. Carlstadt stands upright in the front of the car; Luther strides alongside. In the car, Jesus sits saying, I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. Holy martyrs follow, singing songs of praise. German burghers are spreading their garments on the road, and boys and girls are strewing the path with flowers.[307] Perhaps the most important work of this kind was the Passional Christi et Antichristi.[308] Luther planned the book, Luke Cranach designed the pictures, and Melanchthon furnished the texts from Scripture and the quotations from Canon Law. It is a series of pairs of engravings representing the lives of our Lord and of the Pope, so arranged that wherever the book opened two contrasting pictures could be seen at the same time. The contrasts were such as these:—Jesus washing the disciples' feet; the Pope holding out his toe to be kissed: Jesus healing the wounded and the sick; the Pope presiding at a tournament: Jesus bending under His Cross; the Pope carried in state on men's shoulders: Jesus driving the money-changers out of the Temple; the Pope and his servants turning a church into a market for Indulgences, and sitting surrounded with strong boxes and piles of coin. It was a “good book for the laity,” Luther said.
One of the signs of the times was the enthusiasm displayed in the imperial cities for the cause of Luther. The way had been prepared. Burgher songs had for long described the ecclesiastical abuses, and had borne witness [pg 309] to the widespread hatred of the clergy shared in by the townsfolk. Wolfgang Capito and Frederick Mecum (Myconius), both sons of burghers, inform us that their fathers taught them when they were boys that Indulgences were nothing but a speculation on the part of cunning priests to get their hands into the pockets of simple-minded laity. Keen observers of the trend of public feeling like Wimpheling and Pirkheimer had noticed with some alarm the gradual spread of the Hussite propaganda in the towns, and had made the fact one of their reasons for desiring and insisting on a reformation of the Church. The growing sympathy for the Hussite opinions in the cities is abundantly apparent. Some leading Reformers, Capito for instance, told their contemporaries that they had frequently listened to Hussite discourses when they were boys; and the libraries of burghers not infrequently contained Hussite pamphlets. Men in the towns had been reading, thinking, and speaking in private to their familiar friends about the disorders in the life and doctrine of the Church of their days, and were eager to welcome the first symptoms of a genuine attempt at reform.
The number of editions of the German Vulgate, rude as many of these versions were, shows what a Bible-reading people the German burghers had become, enables us to wonder less at the way in which the controversial writers assume that the laity knew as much of the Scriptures as the clergy, and lends credibility to contemporary assertions that women and artisans knew their Bibles better than learned men at the Universities.
These things make us understand how the townsmen were prepared to welcome Luther's simple scriptural teaching, how his writings found such a sale all over Germany, how they could say that he taught what all men had been thinking, and said out boldly what all men had been whispering in private. They explain how the burghers of Strassburg nailed Luther's Ninety-five Theses to the doors of every church and parsonage in the city in 1518; how the citizens of Constance drove away with [pg 310] threats the imperial messenger who came to publish the Edict of Worms in their town; how the people of Basel applauded their pastor when he carried a copy of the Scriptures instead of the Host in the procession on Corpus Christi Day; how the higher clergy of Strassburg could not expel the nephew and successor of the famed Geiler of Keysersberg although he was accused of being a follower of Luther; and how his friend Matthew Zell, when he was prohibited from preaching in the pulpit from which Geiler had thundered, was able to get carpenters to erect another in a corner of the great cathedral, from which he spoke to the people who crowded to hear him. When the clergy persuaded the authorities in many towns (Goslar, Danzig, Worms, etc.) to close the churches against the evangelical preachers, the townspeople listened to their sermons in the open air; but generally from the first the civic authorities sided with the people in welcoming a powerful evangelical preacher. Matthew Zell and, after him, Martin Bucer became the Reformers of Strassburg; Kettenbach and Eberlin, of Ulm; Oecolampadius and Urbanus Rhegius, of Augsburg; Andrew Osiander, of Nürnberg; John Brenz, of Hall, in Swabia; Theobald Pellicanus (Pellicanus, i.e. of Villigheim), of Nördlingen; Matthew Alber, of Reutlingen; John Lachmann, of Heilbron; John Wanner, of Constance; and so on. The gilds of Mastersingers welcomed the Reformation. The greatest of the civic poets, Hans Sachs of Nürnberg, was a diligent collector and reader of Luther's books. He published in 1523 his famous poem, “The Wittenberg Nightingale” (Die Wittembergisch Nachtigall, Die man jetz höret überall). The nightingale was Luther, and its song told that the moonlight with its pale deceptive gleams and its deep shadows was passing away, and the glorious sun was rising. The author praises the utter simplicity of Luther's scriptural teaching, and contrasts it with the quirks and subtleties of Romish doctrine. Even a peasant, he says, can understand and know that Luther's teaching is good and sound. In a later short poem he contrasts [pg 311] evangelical and Romish preaching. The original edition was illustrated by a woodcut showing two preachers addressing their respective audiences. The one is saying, Thus saith the Lord; and the other, Thus saith the Pope.
§ 11. Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt.[309]
Every great movement for reform bears within it the seeds of revolution, of the “tumult,” as Erasmus called it, and Luther's was no exception to the general rule. Every Reformer who would carry through his reforming ideas successfully has to struggle against men and circumstances making for the “tumult,” almost as strenuously as against the abuses he seeks to overcome. We have already seen how these germs of revolution abounded in Germany, and how the revolutionists naturally allied themselves with the Reformer, and the cause he sought to promote.