But Luther's inward life calls for greater sympathy. It was after all a terrible period for him. Close to exaltation and victory lay for him deathly anxiety, torturing doubt, and horrible apparitions. He, almost alone, was in arms against all Christendom, and was becoming more and more irreconcilably hostile to the mightiest power, which still included everything that had been sacred to him since his youth. What if, after all, he were wrong in this or that! He was responsible for every soul that he led away with him—and whither? What was there outside the Church but destruction and perdition for time and for eternity? If his adversaries and anxious friends cut him to the heart with reproaches and warnings, the pain, the secret remorse, the uncertainty which he must not acknowledge to any one, were greater beyond comparison. He found peace, to be sure, in prayer. Whenever his fervid soul, seeking its God, rose in mighty flights, he was filled with strength, peace, and cheerfulness. But in hours of less tense exaltation, when his sensitive spirit quivered under unpleasant impressions, then he felt himself embarrassed, divided, under the spell of another power which was hostile to his God. He knew from childhood how actively evil spirits ensnare mankind; he had learned from the Scripture that the Devil works against the purest to ruin them. On his path the busy devils were lurking to weaken him, to mislead him, to make innumerable others wretched through him. He saw their work in the angry bearing of the cardinal, in the scornful face of Eck, even in the thoughts of his own soul. He knew how powerful they had been in Rome. Even in his youth apparitions had tormented him; now they reappeared. From the dark shadows of his study the spectre of the tempter lifted its claw-like hand against his reason. Even while he was praying the Devil approached him in the form of the Redeemer, radiant as King of Heaven with the five wounds, as the ancient Church represented Him. But Luther knew that Christ appears to poor humanity only in His words, or in humble form, as He hung upon the cross; and he roused himself vigorously and cried to the apparition: "Avaunt, foul fiend!"—and the vision disappeared. Thus the strong heart of the man worked for years in savage indignation—always renewed. It was a sad struggle between reason and insanity, but Luther always came out victorious; the native strength of his sound nature prevailed. In long prayer, often lasting for hours, the stormy waves of his emotion became calm, and his massive intelligence and his conscience brought him every time out of doubt to certainty. He considered this process of liberation as a gracious inspiration of his God, and after such moments he who had once been in such anxious doubt was as firm as steel, indifferent to the opinion of men, not to be moved, inexorable. Quite a different picture is that of his personality in contest with earthly foes. Here he retains almost everywhere the superiority of conviction, particularly in his literary feuds.
The literary activity which he developed at this time was gigantic. Up to 1517 he had printed little. From that time on he was not only the most productive but the greatest popular writer of Germany. The energy of his style, the vigor of his argumentation, the ardor and passion of his conviction, carried away his readers. No one had ever spoken thus to the people. His language lent itself to every mood, to all keys; now brief, forcible, sharp as steel, now in majestic breadth, the words poured in among the people like a mighty stream. A figurative expression, a striking simile, made the most difficult thoughts intelligible. His was a wonderfully creative power. He used language with sovereign ease. As soon as he touched a pen his mind worked with the greatest freedom; his sentences show the cheerful warmth which filled him, the perfect charm of sympathetic creation is poured out upon them. And such power is by no means least apparent in the attacks which he makes upon individual opponents, and it is closely connected with a fault which caused misgivings even to his admiring contemporaries. He liked to play with his opponents. His imagination clothed the form of an enemy with a grotesque mask, and he teased, scorned, and stabbed this picture of his imagination with turns of speech which had not always the grace of moderation, or even of decency; but in the midst of vituperation, his good humor generally had a conciliatory effect—although, to be sure, not upon his victims. Petty spite was rarely visible; not seldom the most imperturbable good-nature. Sometimes he fell into a true artistic zeal, forgot the dignity of the reformer, and pinched like a German peasant boy, even like a malicious goblin. What blows he gave to all his opponents, now with a club, wielded by an angry giant, now with a jester's bauble! He liked to twist their names into ridiculous forms, and thus they lived in Wittenberg circles as beasts, or as fools. Eck became Dr. Geck; Murner was adorned with the head and claws of a cat; Emser, who had printed at the head of most of his pamphlets his coat-of-arms the head of a horned goat, was abused as a goat. The Latin name of the renegade humanist Cochläus, was retranslated, and Luther greeted him as a snail with impenetrable armor, and—sad to say—sometimes also as a dirty boy whose nose needed wiping. Still worse, terrible even to his contemporaries, was the reckless violence with which he declaimed against hostile princes. It is true that he sometimes bestowed upon his sovereign's cousin, Duke George of Saxony, a consideration hardly to be avoided. Each considered the other the prey of the devil, but in secret each esteemed in the other a manly worth. Again and again they fell into dissension, even in writing, but again and again Luther prayed warmly for his neighbor's soul. The reckless wilfulness of Henry VIII. of England, on the other hand, offended the German reformer to the depths of his soul; he reviled him horribly and without cessation; and even in his last years he treated the hot-headed Henry of Brunswick like a naughty school-boy. "Clown" was the mildest of many dramatic characters in which he represented him. When, later, such outpourings of excessive zeal stared at him from the printed page, and his friends complained, he would be vexed at his rudeness, upbraid himself, and honestly repent. But repentance availed little, for on the next occasion he would commit the same fault; and Spalatin had some reason to look distrustfully upon a projected publication even when Luther proposed to write very gently and tamely. His opponents could not equal him in his field. They called names with equal vigor, but they lacked his inward freedom. Unfortunately it cannot be denied that this little appendage to the moral dignity of his nature was sometimes the spice which made his writings so irresistible to the honest Germans of the sixteenth century.
In the autumn of 1517 he had got into a quarrel with a reprobate Dominican friar; in the winter of 1520 he burned the Pope's bull. In the spring of 1518 he had prostrated himself at the feet of the Vicar of Christ; in the spring of 1521 he declared at the Diet of Worms, before the emperor and the princes and the papal legates, that he believed neither the Pope nor the Councils alone, only the testimony of the Holy Scripture and the interpretation of reason. Now he was free, but excommunication and outlawry hovered over his head. He was inwardly free, but he was free as the beast of the forest is free, and behind him bayed the blood-thirsty pack. He had reached the culminating point of his life, and the powers against which he had revolted, even the thoughts which he himself had aroused among the people, were working from now on against his life and doctrine.
Even at Worms, so it appears, it had been made clear to Luther that he must disappear for a while. The customs of the Franconian Knights, among whom he had faithful followers, suggested the idea of having him spirited away by armed men. Elector Frederick, with his faithful friends, discussed the abduction, and it was quite after the manner of this prince that he himself did not wish to know the place of retreat, in order to be able, in case of need, to swear to his ignorance. Nor was it easy to win Luther over to the plan, for his bold heart had long ago overcome earthly fear; and with an enthusiastic joy, in which there was much fanaticism and some humor, he watched the attempts of the Romanists to put out of the way a man of whom Another must dispose, He who spoke through his lips.
Unwillingly he submitted. The secret was not easy to keep, however skilfully the abduction had been planned. At first none of the Wittenbergers but Melanchthon knew where he was. But Luther was the last man to submit to even the best-intentioned intrigue. Very soon an active communication arose between the Wartburg and Wittenberg. No matter how much caution was used in delivering the letters, it was difficult to avoid suspicion. In his fortified retreat, Luther found out earlier than the Wittenbergers what was going on in the world outside. He was informed of everything that happened at his university, and tried to keep up the courage of his friends and direct their policy. It is touching to see how he tried to strengthen Melanchthon, whose unpractical nature made him feel painfully the absence of his sturdy friend. "Things will get on without me," he writes to him; "only have courage. I am no longer necessary to you. If I get out, and I cannot return to Wittenberg, I shall go into the wide world. You are men enough to hold the fortress of the Lord against the Devil, without me." He dated his letters from the air, from Patmos, from the desert, from "among the birds that sing merrily on the branches and praise God with all their might from morning to night." Once he tried to be crafty. He inclosed in a letter to Spalatin a letter intended to deceive: "It was believed without reason that he was at the Wartburg. He was living among faithful brethren. It was surprising that no one had thought of Bohemia;" and then came a thrust—not ill-tempered—at Duke George of Saxony, his most active enemy. This letter Spalatin was to lose with well-planned carelessness so that it should come into the hands of the enemy. But in this kind of diplomacy he was certainly not logical, for as soon as his leonine nature was aroused by some piece of news, he would determine impulsively to start for Erfurt or Wittenberg. It was hard for him to bear the inactivity of his life. He was treated with the greatest attention by the governor of the castle, and this attention expressed itself, as was the custom at that time, primarily in the shape of the best care in the matter of food and drink. The rich living, the lack of activity, and the fresh mountain air into which the theologian was transported, had their effect upon soul and body. He had already brought from Worms a physical infirmity, now there were added hours of gloomy melancholy which made him unfit for work.
On two successive days he joined hunting parties, but his heart was with the few hares and partridges which were driven into the net by the troop of men and dogs. "Innocent creatures! The papists persecute in the same way!" To save the life of a little hare he had wrapped him in the sleeve of his coat. The dogs came and crushed the animal's bones within the protecting coat. "Thus Satan rages against the souls that I seek to save." Luther had reason for protecting himself and his friends from Satan. He had rejected all the authority of the Church; now he stood terribly alone; nothing was left to him but his last resort—the Scriptures. The ancient Church had represented Christianity in continual development. The faith had been kept in a fluid state by a living tradition which ran parallel with the Scriptures, by the Councils, by the Papal decrees; and they had adapted themselves, like a facile stream, to the sharp corners of national character, to the urgent needs of each age. It is true that this noble idea of a perpetually living organism had not been preserved in its original purity. The best part of its life had vanished; empty cocoons were being preserved. The old democratic church had been transformed into the irresponsible sovereignty of a few, had been stained with all the vices of an unconscientious aristocracy, and was already in striking opposition to reason and popular feeling. What Luther, however, could put in its place—the word of the Scriptures—although it gave freedom from a hopeless mass of soulless excrescences, threatened on the other hand new dangers.
What was the Bible? Between the earliest and latest writings of the sacred book lay perhaps two thousand years. Even the New Testament was not written by Christ himself, not even entirely by those who had received the sacred doctrine from his lips. It was compiled after his death. Portions of it might have been transmitted inexactly. Everything was written in a foreign tongue, which it was difficult for the Germans to understand. Even the keenest penetration was in danger of interpreting falsely unless the grace of God enlightened the interpreter as it had the apostles. The ancient Church had settled the matter summarily; in it the sacrament of holy orders gave such enlightenment. Indeed, the Holy Father even laid claim to divine authority to decide arbitrarily what should be right, even when his will was contrary to the Scriptures. The reformer had nothing but his feeble human knowledge, and prayer.
The first unavoidable step was that he must use his reason, for a certain critical treatment even of the Holy Bible was necessary. Nor did Luther fail to see that the books of the New Testament were of varying worth. It is well known that he did not highly esteem the Apocalypse, and that the Epistle of James was regarded by him as "an epistle of straw." But his objection to particular portions never shook his faith in the whole. His belief was inflexible that the Holy Scriptures, excepting a few books, contained a divine revelation in every word and letter. It was for him the dearest thing on earth, the foundation of all his learning. He had put himself so in sympathy with it that he lived among its figures as in the present. The more urgent his feeling of responsibility, the warmer the passion with which he clung to Scripture; and a strong instinct for the sensible and the fitting really helped him over many dangers. His discrimination had none of the hair-splitting sophistry of the ancient teachers. He despised useless subtleties, and, with admirable tact, let go what seemed to him unessential; but, if he was not to lose his faith or his reason, he could do nothing, after all, but found the new doctrine on words and conditions of life fifteen hundred years old, and in some cases he became the victim of what his adversary Eck called "the black letter."
Under the urgency of these conditions his method took form. If he had a question to settle, he collected all the passages of Holy Scripture which seemed to offer him an answer. He sought earnestly to understand all passages in their context, and then he struck a balance, giving the greatest weight to those which agreed with each other, and for those which were at variance patiently striving to find a solution which might reconcile the seeming contradiction. The resulting conviction he firmly established in his heart, regardless of temptations, by fervent prayer. With this procedure he was sometimes bound to reach conclusions which seemed, even to ordinary human understanding, vulnerable. When, for instance, in the year 1522, he undertook, from the Scriptures, to put matrimony on a new moral basis, reason and the needs of the people were certainly on his side when he subjected to severe criticism the eighteen grounds of the Ecclesiastical Law for forbidding and annulling marriages and condemned the unworthy favoring of the rich over the poor. But it was, after all, strange when Luther tried to prove from the Bible alone what degrees of relationship were permitted and what were forbidden, especially as he also took into consideration the Old Testament, in which various queer marriages were contracted without any opposition from the ancient Jehovah. God undoubtedly had sometimes allowed his elect to have two wives.
And it was this method which, in 1529, during the discussions with the Calvinists, made him so obstinate, when he wrote on the table in front of him, "This is my body," and sternly disregarded the tears and outstretched hand of Zwingli. He had never been narrower and yet never mightier—the fear-inspiring man who had won his conviction in the most violent inward struggles against doubt and the Devil. It was an imperfect method, and his opponents attacked it, not without success. With it his doctrine became subject to the fate of all human wisdom. But in this method there was also a vivid emotional process in which his own reason and the culture and the inward needs of his time found better expression than he himself knew. And it became the starting-point from which a conscientious spirit of investigation has wrought for the German people the highest intellectual freedom.