Speaking of learned Bible-study in the Middle Ages, Mosheim says: "Nearly all the theologians were Positivi and Sententiarii [that is, they taught what the Church ordered to be taught], who deemed it a great achievement, both in speculative and practical theology, either to overwhelm the subject with a torrent of quotations from the fathers, or to anatomize it according to the laws of dialectics [that is, the laws of reasoning, logic]. And whenever they had occasion to speak of the meaning of any text, they appealed invariably to what was called the Glossa Ordinaria [that is, the official explanation], and the phrase Glossa dicit (the Gloss says), was as common and decisive on their lips as anciently the phrase Ipse dixit (he, viz., the teacher, has said) in the Pythagorean school." (III, 15.)
In his controversies with the theologians of Rome, Luther found that they were constantly wriggling out of the plain text of the Bible and running for shelter to the traditions, to the fathers, to the decrees of councils of the Church.
At the Council of Trent some one rose to inquire whether all the traditions recognized as genuine by the Church could not be named; he was told that he was out of order. (Pallavivini, VI, 11, 9; 18, 7.) Hase has invited the Roman Church to say whether all the traditions are now known. He has not been answered. (Protest. Polem., p. 83.) If Romanists answer: Yes, the reasonable request will be made of them to publish those traditions once for all time, in order that men may know all that God is supposed to have really said to men that is not in the Bible. If they answer: No, the conclusion is inevitable that the Christian faith is an uncertain thing. Any tradition may bob up that upsets a part of the Creed.
Add to this the dogma of papal infallibility, promulgated July 18, 1870, which asserts for the Pope "the entire plenitude of supreme power" to determine the faith and morals of Christians, and we have reached a point where it becomes plain to any thoughtful person that the Bible is, from the Catholic view-point, not at all such a necessary book as men have believed. Nor can the faith of a Romanist be a fixed and stable quantity. Any papal deliverance may bring about a change, and the conscientious Catholic must study the news from the Vatican with the same vital interest as the merchant studies the market reports in his morning paper, and a very pertinent question that he may ask his wife over his coffee at the breakfast table would be, "Wife, what do we believe to-day?"
12. Luther's Visit at Rome.
Catholic writers ask the world not to believe Luther's tales about the city of Rome. Luther, they say, came to Rome as a callow rustic comes to a metropolis. To the wily Italians he was German Innocence Abroad; they hoaxed him by telling him absurd tales about the Popes, the priests, the wonders of the city, etc., and the credulous monk believed all they told him. He left Rome with his faith in the Church unimpaired. Later in life, after his "defection" from Rome, he told as true facts and as reminiscences of his visit at the Holy City many of the false stories which had been palmed off on him. This is said to have given rise to the prevailing Protestant view that during his visit at Rome Luther's eyes were opened to the corruption of the Roman Church and his resolution formed to overthrow that Church. Luther himself is said to be responsible for this false view. He fostered it by his tales of what he had seen and heard at Rome with disgust and horror. His horrid impressions are declared pure fiction, and simply serve to show how little the man can be trusted in anything he states.
To leave a way open for a decent retreat, Catholics also point to a difference in temperament between the phlegmatic Luther coming from a northern clime, which through its atmospheric rigors begets somber reflections and gloomy thoughts, and the airy, fairy Italians, who revel in sunshine, flowers, and fruits, drink fiery wines, and naturally grow up into a freedom of manners and lack of restraint that is characteristic of people living in southern climes. All of which means— if it means anything serious—that the Ten Commandments are subject to revision according to the geographic latitude in which a person happens to be. When your austere gentleman, raised among the fens and bogs of the Frisian coast, sees something in a grove in Sicily which he denounces as wicked, you must tell him that there is nothing wrong in what he has seen. He has only omitted to adjust his temperament to the locality. If you follow out this line of thought to the end, you will come to a point where you strike hands with Rudyard Kipling, who has sung enthusiastically about a certain locality beyond Aden where the Ten Commandments do not exist. And to think that this plea is made by people who have charged Luther with having put the Ten Commandments out of commission for himself and others! Italians, lovers of freedom and unrestraint, were the first to fill the world with tales about the moral besottedness of Luther! This goes to show that in any application of the Ten Commandments it matters very much who does the applying.
We have in a previous chapter briefly reviewed the Popes that were contemporaries of Luther. Their character was stamped on the life of the Holy City: The Popes and their following gave Rome its moral, or immoral, face. The chroniclers of those days have described the existing conditions. Luther need not have said one word about what wicked things he had seen and heard at Rome, either ten years, or twenty years, or thirty years after he had been there, and the world would still know the record of the residence of the Popes. Luther really saw very little of what he might have seen, and it is probable that he has told less. But what he did see and hear are facts. He did not grasp their full meaning nor see their true bearing at the time. The real import of his Roman experiences dawned on him at a later period. He spoke as a man of things that he had seen as a child. But that does not alter the facts.
Luther was shocked at the levity of Italian monks who were babbling faulty Latin prayers which they did not understand and remarked laughing to him: "Never mind; the Holy Ghost understands us, and the devil flees apace."
Luther's confidence in the boasted unity of the Roman Church was somewhat shaken when he discovered that he could not read mass in any church in the territory at Milan, because there the Ambrosian form of service was prescribed while he had been trained to the Gregorian.