In the same spirit as with his dear ones, Luther consorted with the high powers of his faith. All the good characters from the Bible were true friends to him. His vivid imagination had confidently given them shape, and, with the simplicity of a child, he liked to picture to himself their conditions. When Veit Deitrich asked him what kind of person the Apostle Paul was, Luther answered quickly, "He was an insignificant, slim little fellow like Philip Melanchthon." The Virgin Mary was a graceful image to him. "She was a fine girl," he said admiringly; "she must have had a good voice." He liked to think of the Redeemer as a child with his parents, carrying the dinner to his father in the lumber yard, and to picture Mary, when he stayed too long away, as asking—"Darling, where have you been so long?" One should not think of the Saviour seated on the rainbow in glory, nor as the fulfiller of the law—this conception is too grand and terrible for man—but only as a poor sufferer who lives among sinners and dies for them.
Even his God was to him preëminently the head of a household and a father. He liked to reflect upon the economy of nature. He lost himself in wondering consideration of how much wood God was obliged to create. "Nobody can calculate what God needs to feed the sparrows and the useless birds alone. These cost him in one year more than the revenues of the king of France. And then think of the other things! God understands all trades. In his tailor shop he makes the stag a coat that lasts a hundred years. As a shoemaker he gives him shoes for his feet, and through the pleasant sun he is a cook. He might get rich if he would; he might stop the sun, inclose the air, and threaten the pope, emperor, bishops and the doctors with death if they did not pay him on the spot one hundred thousand gulden. But he does not do that, and we are thankless scoundrels." He reflected seriously about where the food comes from for so many people. Old Hans Luther had asserted that there were more people than sheaves of grain. The Doctor believed that more sheaves are grown than there are people, but still more people than stacks of grain. "But a stack of grain yields hardly a bushel, and a man cannot live a whole year on that." Even a dunghill invited him to deep reflection. "God has as much to clear away as to create. If He were not continually carrying things off, men would have filled the world with rubbish long ago." And if God often punishes those who fear Him worse than those who have no religion, he appears to Luther to be like a strict householder who punishes his son oftener than his good-for-nothing servant, but who secretly is laying up an inheritance for his son; while he finally dismisses the servant. And merrily he draws the conclusion, "If our Lord can pardon me for having annoyed Him for twenty years by reading masses, He can put it to my credit also that at times I have taken a good drink in His honor. The world may interpret it as it will."
He is also greatly surprised that God should be so angry with the Jews. "They have prayed anxiously for fifteen hundred years with seriousness and great zeal, as their prayer-books show, and He has not for the whole time noticed them with a word. If I could pray as they do I would give books worth two hundred florins for the gift. It must be a great unutterable wrath. O, good Lord, punish us with pestilence rather than with such silence!"
Like a child, Luther prayed every morning and evening, and frequently during the day, even while eating. Prayers which he knew by heart he repeated over and over with warm devotion, preferably the Lord's Prayer. Then he recited as an act of devotion the shorter Catechism; the Psalter he always carried with him as a prayer-book. When he was in passionate anxiety his prayer became a stormy wrestling with God, so powerful, great, and solemnly simple that it can hardly be compared with other human emotions. Then he was the son who lay despairingly at his father's feet, or the faithful servant who implores his prince; for his whole conviction was firmly fixed that God's decisions could be affected by begging and urging, and so the effusion of feeling alternated in his prayer with complaints, even with earnest reproaches. It has often been told how, in 1540, at Weimar, he brought Melanchthon, who was at the point of death, to life again. When Luther arrived, he found Master Philip in the death throes, unconscious, his eyes set. Luther was greatly startled and said, "God help us! How the Devil has wronged this Organan," then he turned his back to the company and went to the window as he was wont to do when he prayed. "Here," Luther himself later recounted, "Our Lord had to grant my petition, for I challenged Him and filled His ears with all the promises of prayer which I could remember from the Scriptures, so that He had to hear me if I was to put any trust in His promises." Then he took Melanchthon by the hand saying, "Be comforted, Philip, you will not die;" and Melanchthon, under the spell of his vigorous friend, began at once to breathe again, came back to consciousness, and recovered.
As God was the source of all good, so, for Luther, the Devil was the author of everything harmful and bad. The Devil interfered perniciously in the course of nature, in sickness and pestilence, failure of crops and famine. But since Luther had begun to teach, the greater part of the Enemy's activity had been transferred to the souls of men. In them he inspired impure thoughts as well as doubt, melancholy, and depression. Everything which the thoughtful Luther stated so definitely and cheerfully rested beforehand with terrible force upon his conscience. If he awoke in the night, the Devil stood by his bed full of malicious joy and whispered alarming things to him. Then his mind struggled for freedom, often for a long time in vain. And it is noteworthy how the son of the sixteenth century proceeded in such spiritual struggles. Sometimes it was a relief to him if he stuck out of bed the least dignified part of his body. This action, by which prince and peasant of the time used to express supreme contempt, sometimes helped when nothing else would. But his exuberant humor did not always deliver him. Every new investigation of the Scriptures, every important sermon on a new subject, caused him further pangs of conscience. On these occasions he sometimes got into such excitement that his soul was incapable of systematic thinking, and trembled in anxiety for days. When he was busy with the question of the monks and nuns, a text struck his attention which, as he thought in his excitement, proved him in the wrong. His heart "melted in his body; he was almost choked by the Devil." Then Bugenhagen visited him. Luther took him outside the door and showed him the threatening text, and Bugenhagen, apparently upset by his friend's excitement, began to doubt too, without suspecting the depth of the torment which Luther was enduring. This gave Luther a final and terrible fright. Again he passed an awful night. The next morning Bugenhagen came in again. "I am thoroughly angry," he said; "I have only just looked at the text carefully. The passage has a quite different meaning." "It is true," Luther related afterward, "it was a ridiculous argument—ridiculous, I mean, for a man in his senses, but not for him who is tempted."
Often he complained to his friends about the terrors of the struggles which the Devil caused him. "He has never since the creation been so fierce and angry as now at the end of the world. I feel him very plainly. He sleeps closer to me than my Käthe—that is, he gives me more trouble than she does pleasure." Luther never tired of censuring the pope as the Anti-Christ, and the papal system as the work of the Devil. But a closer scrutiny will recognize under this hatred of the Devil an indestructible piety, in which the loyal heart of the man was bound to the old Church. What became hallucinations to him were often only pious remembrances from his youth, which stood in startling contrast to the transformations which he had passed through as a man.
For no man is entirely transformed by the great thoughts and deeds of his manhood. We ourselves do not become new through new deeds. Our mental life is based upon the sum of all thoughts and feelings that we have ever had. Whoever is chosen by Fate to establish new greatness by destroying the greatness of the old, shatters in fragments at the same time a portion of his own life. He must break obligations in order to fulfil greater obligations. The more conscientious he is, the more deeply he feels in his own heart the wound he has inflicted upon the order of the world. That is the secret sorrow, the regret, of every great historical character. There are few mortals who have felt this sorrow so deeply as Luther. And what is great in him is the fact that such sorrow never kept him from the boldest action. To us this appears as a tragic touch in his spiritual life.
Another thing most momentous for him was the attitude which he had to take toward his own doctrine. He had left to his followers nothing but the authority of Scripture. He clung passionately to its words as to the last effective anchor for the human race. Before him the pope, with his hierarchy, had interpreted, misinterpreted, and added to the text of the Scriptures; now he was in the same situation. He, with a circle of dependent friends, had to claim for himself the privilege of understanding the words of the Scriptures correctly, and applying them rightly to the life of the times. This was a superhuman task, and the man who undertook it must necessarily be subject to some of the disadvantages which he himself had so grandly combatted in the Catholic Church. His mental makeup was firmly decided and unyielding: he was born to be a ruler if ever a mortal was; but this gigantic, daemonic character of his will inevitably made him sometimes a tyrant. Although he practised tolerance in many important matters, often as the result of self-restraint and often with a willing heart, this was only the fortunate result of his kindly disposition, which was effective also here. Not infrequently, however, he became the pope of the Protestants. For him and his people there was no choice. He has been reproached in modern times for doing so little to bring the laity into coöperation by means of a presbyterial organization. Never was a reproach more unjust. What was possible in Switzerland, with congregations of sturdy free peasants, was utterly impracticable at that time in Germany. Only the dwellers in the larger cities had among them enough intelligence and power to criticise the Protestant clergy; almost nine-tenths of the Protestants in Germany were oppressed peasants, the majority of whom were indifferent and stubborn, corrupt in morals, and, after the Peasant War, savage in manners. The new church was obliged to force its discipline upon them as upon neglected children. Whoever doubts this should look at the reports of visitations, and notice the continued complaints of the reformers about the rudeness of their poverty-stricken congregations. But the great man was subject to still further hindrances. The ruler of the souls of the German people lived in a little town, among poor university professors and students, in a feeble community of which he often had occasion to complain. He was spared none of the evils of petty surroundings, of unpleasant disputes with narrow-minded scholars or uncultured neighbors. There was much in his nature which made him especially sensitive to such things. No man bears in his heart with impunity the feeling of being the privileged instrument of God. Whoever lives in that feeling is too great for the narrow and petty structure of middle-class society. If Luther had not been modest to the depths of his heart, and of infinite kindness in his intercourse with others, he would inevitably have appeared perfectly unendurable to the matter-of-fact and common-sense people who stood indifferent by his side. As it was, however, he came only on rare occasions into serious conflict with his fellow-citizens, the town administration, the law faculty of his university, or the councillors of his sovereign. He was not always right, but he almost always carried his point against them, for seldom did any one dare to defy the violence of his anger. With all this he was subject to severe physical ailments, the frequent return of which in the last years of his life exhausted even his tremendous vigor. He felt this with great sorrow, and incessantly prayed to his God that He might take him to Himself. He was not yet an old man in years, but he seemed so to himself—very old and out of place in a strange and worldly universe. These years, which did not abound in great events, but were made burdensome by political and local quarrels, and filled with hours of bitterness and sorrow, will inspire sympathy, we trust, in every one who studies the life of this great man impartially. The ardor of his life had warmed his whole people, had called forth in millions the beginnings of a higher human development; the blessing remained for the millions, while he himself felt at last little but the sorrow. Once he joyfully had hoped to die as a martyr; now he wished for the peace of the grave, like a trusty, aged, worn-out laborer—another case of a tragic human fate.
But the greatest sorrow that he felt lay in the relation of his doctrine to the life of his nation. He had founded a new church on his pure gospel, and had given to the spirit and the conscience of the people an incomparably greater meaning. All about him flourished a new life and greater prosperity, and many valuable arts—painting and music—the enjoyment of comfort, and a finer social culture. Still there was something in the air of Germany which threatened ruin: princes and governments were fiercely at odds, foreign powers were threatening invasions—the Emperor of Spain, the Pope from Rome, the Turks from the Mediterranean; fanatics and demagogues were influential, and the hierarchy was not yet fallen. As to his new gospel, had it welded the nation into greater unity and power? The discontent had only been increased. The future of his church was to depend on the worldly interests of a few princes; and he knew the best among them! Something terrible was coming; the Scriptures were to be fulfilled; the Day of Judgment was at hand. But after this God would build up a new universe more beautiful, grander, and purer, full of peace and happiness, a world in which no devil would exist, in which every human soul would feel more joy over the flowers and fruit of the new trees of heaven than the present generation over gold and silver; where music, the most beautiful of all arts, should ring in tones much more delightful than the most splendid song of the best singers in this world. There a good man would find again all the dear ones whom he had loved and lost in this world.
The longing of the creature for the ideal type of existence grew stronger and stronger in him. If he expected the end of the world, it was due to dim remembrances from the far-distant past of the German people, which still hovered over the soul of the new reformer. Yet it was likewise a prophetic foreboding of the near future. It was not the end of the world that was in preparation, but the Thirty Years' War.