[Illustration: Permission Underwood & Underwood, New York
LUTHER MONUMENT AT WORMS by ERNST RIETSCHEL]
But the spirit of the nation does not long endure the preëminence of a single, well-centred personality; for the life and the power and the needs of a nation are more manifold than even the greatest single force and lofty aim. The eternal contrast between the individual and the nation appears. Even the soul of a nation is, in the presence of the eternal, a finite personality—but in comparison with the individual it appears boundless. A man is forced by the logical result of his thoughts and actions, by all the significance of his own deeds, into a closely restricted path. The soul of the nation needs for its life irreconcilable contrasts and incessant effort in most varied directions. Much that the individual failed to assimilate rises to fight against him. The reaction of the people begins—at first weak, here and there, based on different reasons and with slight justification; then it grows stronger and ever more victorious. Finally the intellectual influence of the life of the individual is limited to his own followers, and crystallizes into a single one of the many elements of national growth. The last period of a great life is always filled with secret resignation, with bitterness, and with silent suffering.
Thus it was with Luther. The first of these periods continued up to the day on which he posted his theses, the second until his return from the Wartburg, the third to his death and the beginning of the Schmalkaldic War. It is not the purpose of this sketch to give his entire biography, but to tell briefly how he developed and what he was. Much in his nature appears strange and unpleasing so long as he is viewed from afar; but this historic figure has the remarkable quality of becoming greater and more attractive the more closely it is approached, and from beginning to end it would inspire a good biographer with admiration, tenderness, and a certain good humor.
Luther rose from the great source of all national strength, the freeholding peasant class. His father moved from Möhra, a forest village of the Thuringian mountains, where his relatives constituted half the population, northward into the neighborhood of Mansfeld, to work as a miner. So the boy's cradle stood in a cottage in which was still felt the old thrill of the ghosts of the pine wood and the dark clefts which were thought to be the entrances to the ore veins of the mountain. Certainly the imagination of the boy was often busy with dark traditions from heathen mythology. He was accustomed to feel the presence of uncanny powers as well in the phenomena of nature as in the life of man. When he turned monk such remembrances from childhood grew gloomier and took the shape of the devil of Scripture, but the busy tempter who everywhere lies in wait for the life of man always retained for him something of the features of the mischievous goblin who secretly lurks about the peasant's hearth and stable.
His father, a curt, sturdy, vigorous man, firm in his resolves, and of unusual, shrewd common sense, had worked his way, after hard struggles, to considerable prosperity. He kept strict discipline in his household. Even in later years Luther thought with sadness of the severe punishments he had endured as a boy and the sorrow they had caused his tender, childish heart. But Old Hans Luther, nevertheless, up to his death in 1530, had some influence on the life of his son. When at the age of twenty-two Martin secretly entered the monastery the old man was violently angry; for he had already planned a good match for him. Friends finally succeeded in bringing the angry father to consent to a reconciliation; and as his imploring son confessed that a terrible apparition had driven him to the secret vow to enter the monastery, he replied with the sorrowful words, "God grant that it was not a deception and trick of the devil;" and he still further wrenched the heart of the monk by the angry question, "You thought you were obeying the command of God when you went into the monastery; have you not heard also that you shall obey your parents?" These words made a deep impression on the son, and when, many years after, he sat in the Wartburg, expelled from the Church and outlawed by the Emperor, he wrote to his father the touching words: "Do you still wish to tear me from the monastery? You are still my father and I your son. The law and the power of God are on your side—on my side human weakness. But look that you boast not yourself against God, he has been beforehand with you,—he has taken me out himself." From that time on it seemed to the old man as if his son were restored to him. Old Hans had once counted upon having a grandson for whom he would work. He now came back obstinately to this thought, caring nothing for the rest of the world, and soon urged his son to marry; his encouragement was not the least of the influences to which Luther yielded, and when his father, advanced in years, at last a councillor of Mansfeld, lay in his death throes and the minister bent over him and asked the dying man if he wished to die in the purified faith in Christ and the Holy Gospel, old Hans gathered his strength once more and said curtly, "He is a wretch who does not believe in it." When Luther told this later he added admiringly, "Yes that was a man of the old time." The son received the news of the father's death in the fortress of Coburg. When he read the letter, in which his wife inclosed a picture of his youngest daughter Magdalena, he uttered to a companion merely the words, "Well, my father is dead too," rose, took his psalter, went into his room, and prayed and wept so hard that, as the faithful Veit Dietrich wrote, his head was confused the next day; but he came out again with his soul at peace. The same day he wrote with deep emotion to Melanchthon of the great love of his father and of his intimate relations with him. "I have never despised death so much as today. We die so often before we finally die. Now I am the oldest of my family and I have the right to follow him." From such a father the son inherited what was fundamental to his character—truthfulness, a sturdy will, straightforward common sense, and tact in dealing with men and affairs. His childhood was full of rigor. He had many a bitter experience in the Latin school and as a choir boy, though tempered by kindness and love, and he kept through it all—what is more easily kept in the lowlier circles of life—a heart full of faith in the goodness of human nature and reverence for everything great in the world. When he was at the University of Erfurt, his father was already in a position to supply his needs more abundantly. He felt the vigor of youth, and was a merry companion with song and lute. Of his spiritual life at that time little is known except that death came near him, and that in a thunder storm he was "called upon by a terrible apparition from heaven." In terror he took a vow to go into a monastery, and quickly and secretly carried out his resolve.
From that time date our reports about the troubles of his soul. At odds with his father, full of awe at the thought of an incomprehensible eternity, cowed by the wrath of God, he began with supernatural exertions a life of renunciation, devotion, and penance. He found no peace. All the highest questions of life rushed with fearful force upon his defenseless, wandering soul. Remarkably strong and passionate with him was the necessity of feeling himself in harmony with God and the universe. What theology offered him was all unintelligible, bitter, and repulsive. To his nature the riddles of the moral order of the universe were most important. That the good should suffer, and the evil succeed; that God should condemn the human race to the monstrous burden of sin because a simple-minded woman had bitten into an apple; that this same God should endure our sins with love, toleration, and patience; that Christ at one time sent away honorable people with severity, and at another time associated with harlots, publicans, and sinners—"human understanding with its wisdom turns to folly at this." Then he would complain to his spiritual adviser, Staupitz: "Dear Doctor, our Lord treats people so cruelly. Who can serve Him if he lays on blows like this?" But when he got the answer, "How else could He subdue the stubborn heads?" this sensible argument could not console the young man. With fervid desire to find the incomprehensible God, he searched all his thoughts and dreams with self-torture. Every earthly thought, every beat of his youthful blood, became for him a cruel wrong. He began to despair of himself; he wrestled in unceasing prayer, fasted and scourged himself. At one time the priests had to break into his cell in which he had been lying for days in a condition not far from insanity. With warm sympathy Staupitz looked upon such heart-rending torment, and sought to give him peace by blunt counsel. Once when Luther had written to him, "Oh, my sin! My sin! My sin!" his spiritual adviser gave him the answer, "You long to be without sin, and you have no real sin. Christ is the forgiveness of real sins, such as parricide and the like. If Christ is to help you, you must have a list of real sins, and not come to Him with such trash and make-believe sins, seeing a sin in every trifle." The manner in which Luther gradually raised himself above such despair was decisive for his whole life. The God whom he served was at that time a God of terror. His anger was to be appeased only by the means of grace which the ancient Church prescribed—in the first place through constant confession, for which there were innumerable prescriptions and formulæ which seemed to the heart empty and cold. By strictly prescribed activities and the practice of so-called good works, the feeling of real atonement and inward peace had not come to the young man. Finally a saying of his spiritual adviser pierced his heart like an arrow: "That alone is true penance which begins with love for God. Love for God and inward exaltation is not the result of the means of grace which the Church teaches; it must go before them." This doctrine from Tauler's school became for the young man the basis of a new spiritual and moral relation to God; it was for him a sacred discovery. The transformation of his spiritual life was the principal thing. For that he had to work. From the depths of every human heart must come repentance, expiation, and atonement. He and every man could lift himself up to God, alone. Not until now did he realize what free prayer was. In place of a far-off divine power which he had formerly sought in vain through a hundred forms and childish confessions, there came before him at last the image of an all-loving protector to whom he could speak at any time joyfully and in tears; to whom he could bring all sorrow, every doubt; who took unceasing interest in him, cared for him, granted or denied his heartfelt petitions tenderly, like a good father. So he learned to pray; and how ardent his prayers became! From this time he lived in peace with the beloved God whom he had finally found, every day, every hour. His intercourse with the Most High became more intimate than with the dearest companions of this earth. When he poured out his whole self before Him, then calm came over him and a holy peace, a feeling of unspeakable love. He felt himself a part of God, and remained in this relation to Him from that time throughout his whole life. He heeded no longer the roundabout ways of the ancient Church; he could, with God in his heart, defy the whole world. Even thus early he ventured to believe that those held false doctrine who put so much stress on works of penance, that there was nothing beyond these works but a cold satisfaction and a ceremonious confession; and when, later, he learned from Melanchthon that the Greek word for penitence, metanoia meant literally "change of mind," it seemed to him a wonderful revelation. On this ground rested the confident assurance with which he opposed the words of Scripture to the ordinances of the Church. By this means Luther in the monastery gradually worked his way to spiritual liberty. All his later doctrines, his battles against indulgences, his imperturbable steadfastness, his method of interpreting the Scriptures, rested upon the struggles through which he, while a monk, had found his God; and it may well be said that the new era of German history began with Luther's prayers in the monastery. Life was soon to thrust him under its hammer, to harden the pure metal of his soul.
In 1508 Luther reluctantly accepted the professorship of dialectics at the new university of Wittenberg. He would rather have taught that theology which even then he believed the true one. When, in 1510, he went to Rome on business for his order, it is well known what devotion and piety marked his sojourn in the Holy City, and with what horror the heathen life of the Romans and the moral corruption and worldliness of the clergy filled him. It was there where his devotions, while he was officiating at mass, were disturbed by the reckless jests which the Roman priests of his order called out to him. He never forgot the devil-inspired words[2] as long as he lived.
But the hierarchy, however deeply its corruption shocked him, still contained his whole hope; outside of it there was no God and no salvation. The noble idea of the Catholic Church, and its conquests of fifteen hundred years, enraptured the mind even of the strongest. And when this German in Roman clerical dress, at the risk of his life, inspected the ruins of ancient Rome and stood in awe before the gigantic columns of the temples which, according to report, the Goths had once destroyed, the sturdy man from the mountains of the old Hermunduri little dreamed that it would be his own fate to destroy the temples of medieval Rome more thoroughly, more fiercely, more grandly. Luther came back from Rome still a faithful son of the great Mother Church. All heresy, such as that of the Bohemians, was hateful to him. He took a warm interest, after his return, in Reuchlin's contest against the judges of heresy at Cologne, and, in 1512, stood on the side of the Humanists; but even then he felt that something separated him from this movement. When, a few years later, he was in Gotha, he did not call upon the worthy Mutianus Rufus, although he wrote him a very polite letter of apology; and soon after he was offended by the inward coldness and secular tone in which theological sinners were ridiculed in Erasmus' dialogues. The profane worldliness of the Humanists was never quite in harmony with the cheerful faith of Luther's soul, and the pride with which he afterward offended the sensitive Erasmus in a letter which was meant to be conciliatory, was probably even then in his soul. Even the forms of literary modesty adopted by Luther at that time give the impression that they were wrung from an unbending spirit by the power of Christian humility.
For even at that time he felt himself secure and strong in his faith. As early as 1516 he wrote to Spalatin, who was the link of intercourse between him and the Elector, Frederick the Wise, that the Elector was the most prudent of men in the things of this world, but was afflicted with sevenfold blindness in matters concerning God and the salvation of the soul. And Luther had reason for this expression, for the provident spirit of that moderate prince appeared in his careful efforts, among other things, to gather in for domestic use the means of grace recommended by the Church. For instance, he had a special hobby for sacred relics, and just at this time Staupitz, the vicar of the Augustinian order for Saxony, was occupied in the Rhine region and elsewhere in collecting them for the Elector. For Luther the absence of his superior was important, for he had to fill his place. He was already a respected man in his order. Although professor (of theology since 1512), he still lived in his monastery in Wittenberg and generally wore his monk's habit; and now he visited the thirty monasteries in his charge, deposed priors, uttered severe censure of bad discipline, and urged severity against fallen monks. But something of the simple faith of the brother of the monastery still clung to him.
It was in this spirit of confidence and German sincerity that he wrote, October 31, 1517, after he had posted the theses against Tetzel on the church door, to Archbishop Albert of Mainz, the protector of the seller of indulgences. Full of the popular belief in the wisdom and the goodwill of the highest rulers, Luther thought (he often said so later) that it was only necessary to present honestly to the princes of the Church the disadvantage and immorality of such abuses. But how childish this zeal of the monk appeared to the polished and worldly prince of the Church! What so deeply offended the honest man was, from the point of view of the Archbishop, a matter long settled. The sale of indulgences was an evil in the Church a hundred times deplored, but as unavoidable as many institutions seem to the politician; while not good in themselves, they must be kept for the sake of a greater interest. The greatest interest of the Archbishop and the curia was their supremacy, which was acquired and maintained by such commercial dealings. The great interest of Luther and the people was truth. This was the parting of the ways.