Moral cleanness is indelibly stamped upon hundreds of pages of Luther's writings. The Sixth Commandment in its wider application to the mutual relation of the sexes and the sexual condition of the individual was to Luther the solemn voice of God by which the holy and wise Creator guards and protects the fountains whence springs human life. "Because there is among us," he says, "such a shameful mixture and the very dregs of all kinds of vice and lewdness, this commandment is also directed against all manner of impurity, whatever it may be called; and not only is the external act forbidden, but every kind of cause, incitement, and means, so that the heart, the lips, and the whole body may be chaste and afford no opportunity, help, or persuasion for impurity. And not only this, but that we may also defend, protect, and rescue wherever there is danger and need; and give help and counsel, so as to maintain our neighbor's honor. For wherever you allow such a thing when you could prevent it, or connive at it as if it did not concern you, you are as truly guilty as the one perpetrating the deed. Thus it is required, in short, that every one both live chastely himself and help his neighbor do the same." (Large Catechism, p. 419.) The reason why God in the Sixth Commandment refers to only one form of sexual impurity Luther states correctly thus: "He expressly mentions adultery, because among the Jews it was a command and appointment that every one must be married. Therefore also the young were early married, so that the state of celibacy was held in small esteem, neither were public prostitution and lewdness tolerated as now. Therefore adultery was the most common form of unchastity among them." (Ibid.)
In his Appeal to the German Nobility Luther says: "Is it not a terrible thing that we Christians should maintain public brothels, though we all vow chastity in our baptism? I well know all that can be said on this matter; that it is not peculiar to one nation, that it would be difficult to demolish it, and that it is better thus than that virgins, or married women, or honorable women should be dishonored. But should not the spiritual and temporal powers combine to find some means of meeting these difficulties without any such heathen practise? If the people of Israel existed without this scandal, why should not a Christian nation be able do so? How do so many towns and villages manage to exist without these houses? Why should not great cities be able to do so? . . . It is the duty of those in authority to see the good of their subjects. But if those in authority considered how young people might be brought together in marriage, the prospect of marriage would help every man and protect him from temptations." (10, 349; transl. by Waring.)
This is the Luther of whom Catholic writers say that he would not be considered qualified to sit with a modern Vice Commission.
But what about the many coarse references in Luther's writings to sexual matters-references which are unprintable nowadays? Do these not show that Luther was far from being even an ordinary gentleman, that he was depraved in thought and vulgar nauseating, in speech whenever he approached the subject of marriage and sexual conditions? We have just cited a few of Luther's references to these matters. They are clean and proper. We could fill pages with them, and they would prove most profitable reading in our loose, profligate, and adulterous age. Those other references which are also found in Luther's writings should be studied in their connection. Leaving out of the account humorous references and playful remarks, which only malice can twist into a lascivious meaning, they are indignant and scornful expostulations with the defenders and practisers of vice that flaunted its shame in the face of the public. Righteous anger will give a person the courage to speak out boldly and in no mincing words about things which otherwise nauseate him. When Catholic writers cull from Luther vile and disgusting remarks about sexual affairs, it should be investigated to whom Luther made those remarks, and what reason he had for making them. There is another side to this matter, and that concerns medieval Catholicism itself. We have indicated in sundry places in this review the social conditions in respect of the sex relations that existed under the spiritual sovereignty of the Roman Church in Luther's day in the very city of Rome, and had grown up and were being fostered by her leading men. Luther's references to lustfulness are paraded as evidence of the lust that was consuming him; they are, in reality, evidences of the lust that he knew to be raging in very prominent people with whom he had dealings.
Luther's words and teaching would count for little if his personal conduct and his acts were in open contradiction to his chaste professions. We would simply have to set him down as a hypocrite. But so would the people in Luther's own day have done. It is a poor argument to say that the common people were no match for Luther in an argument. They were cowed into silence, they were afraid to tell him to his face that he ought to practise what he preached. Luther's work proved the spiritual emancipation of the common people, and one of the effects which mark his reformatory work is the intelligent layman, who forms his own judgment on what he hears and sees, and speaks out to his superiors. The Wittenbergers in Luther's day were not a set of ninnies; the constant association with the professors and students of the university, the growing fame of their town, which brought many strangers to it, important civil and religious affairs on which they had to come to a decision, had made many of them far-sighted and resolute men of affairs. Luther's home life before and after his marriage was open to public inspection as few homes are. The most intimate and delicate affairs had to be arranged before company at times. In a small town-and Wittenberg was no modern metropolis-what one person knows becomes public information in a short time. Small communities have no secrets, or at least find it extremely difficult to have any.
But the lewdness which Luther attacked in his writings on chastity existed chiefly among persons of wealth and among the nobility. Not a few of them resented Luther's invectives against their mode of life. They surely did not lack the courage nor the ability to express themselves in retaliation against Luther if they had known him to be immoral himself while preaching morality to others. Last, not least, there were the Catholic priests and dignitaries of the Roman Church whose scandalous life Luther exposed. Aside from their disagreement from Luther in point of doctrine, personal revenge animated not a few of them with the desire to find a flaw in Luther's conduct. A few reckless spirits among them insinuated and declared openly that Luther was immoral, but the animus back of the charge was so well understood at the time, and the people who were in daily and close touch with Luther were so fully convinced of the purity of his life, that the charges were treated with contempt.
Luther's life from the age of puberty to his marriage was, indeed, a fight against temptations to unchastity. Is it anything else in the case of other men? The physical effects of adolescence, as we remarked before, are a natural and morally pure phenomenon; Luther's frank way of speaking of them does not make them impure. But this physical condition in a growing young man or woman may become the occasion for impure acts. Against these Luther strove as every Christian strives against them who has not the special grace of which our Lord speaks Matt. 19, 12, in the first part of the verse. Luther had his flesh fairly well in subjection to the Spirit. History has not recorded those acts of immorality which his enemies insinuate or openly charge him with. The illegitimate children which are imputed to him were born in Catholic fancy. His constitutional amorous propensities, too, are fiction. Though Luther admits a few months prior to his marriage that he wears no armor plate around his heart, it is known that he had been all his life anything rather than a ladies' man.
Luther's courtship of Catherine—if we may call it that—was almost void of romance. The nine nuns who had fled from the cloister at Nimpschen to escape "the impurities of the life of celibacy," had turned to Wittenberg in their trouble. They were not seeking new impurities, but running away from old ones. What was more natural than that they should seek the protection of the man whose teaching had opened the road to liberty for them. They did not come to Wittenberg to surrender themselves to Luther, but to seek his protection, advice, and help in beginning a new, natural life after the unnatural life which they had been leading. Luther responded to the call of distress. He did not receive them into his own domicile in the cloister where he lived, but found shelter for them with kind citizens of the town. Next, he found husbands for them. In less than two years after the escape from the cloister all had been respectably married, except Catherine. A love-affair of hers with Jerome Baumgaertner of Nuernberg had terminated unhappily, in spite of Luther's urging the young man. Another choice which Luther proposed to her—Dr. Glatz of Orlamuende—was declined peremptorily by Catherine, because, it seems, she had read the man's character. In declining this second offer, Catherine had made complaint to Luther's friend Amsdorf that Luther was trying to marry her against her will. She appears to have been a frank and resolute woman; in her conversation with Amsdorf she remarked that her decision would be altogether different if either he or even Luther were to ask for her hand. This was not, as has been said, a bald invitation to either of these two gentlemen, but only Catherine's energetic way of explaining what sort of a husband she would like, and why she would not take Glatz. Amsdorf so understood her remark and made nothing of it. By an accident he came to relate it to Luther six months later, when the latter had written to him in great despondency, describing his lonely life and the disorderly state of his domicile which needed very much the care of a woman's hand. Then it was that Amsdorf related what Catherine had remarked. Luther had never thought of her in such a relation. He had been attracted, it seems, by another of the nine escaped nuns, Ave von Schoenfeld, but whatever affection he may have entertained for her must have been a passing incident, never seriously entertained, for it must be remembered that at that time Luther declared that he would live and die a bachelor. Besides, Ave had now been happily married to another. At this juncture the influence of another woman enters into the private life of Luther. Argula von Staufen, a noblewoman who had been won over to the cause of the Reformation and was actively engaged in breaking down the power of the hierarchy even by her pen, wrote to Luther, expressing her surprise that he who had written so ably and so well on the holy estate of matrimony was still single. Among the peasants, too, the question was being debated whether Luther would follow up his preaching with the logical action. Luther was ruminating on these matters when the Peasants' Revolt broke out, and with them in his mind went to Mansfeld. He soon reached the conclusion that he owed it to his profession as a preacher of the divine Word, to his Creator, to himself, and to the lonely Catherine to marry. He foresaw that the celibate clergy of Rome would raise a hue and cry about the act, but he considered it a noble work to offend these men, because they had by their law of celibacy offended the most holy God. He would marry to spite all of them, and the Pope, and the devil. This resolution was promptly carried out, for Luther was not in the habit of dallying long with serious matters. If he had asked his timid friend Melanchthon, he would most likely have been advised against his marriage. Faint-hearted Philip was not the man to advise in a matter which at the time required a heroic faith. Philip, therefore, was duly shocked when he heard about it. His consternation is now used by Catholics to prove that he regarded Luther's marriage as a wanton act prompted by lust. This is utterly unhistorical: Philip was only afraid of the wild talk that would now be started against all of them. On the right and duty of the clergy to marry he believed with Luther.
And now a word about the chastity of Rome, particularly that peculiar brand which was inaugurated by Gregory VII for the Roman clergy and the religious of both sexes, and riveted upon them by the Council of Trent- the chastity of the celibate state. That the unnatural principle had never worked out toward true chastity, that the robbery which it has perpetrated on men and women had to be compensated for by connivance at, and open permission of, concubinage, is a matter of current knowledge. Luther's advice to priests and bishops who had opened their hearts to him on the state of their chastity to marry their cooks, even if they had to do it secretly; rather than maintain the other relation to them, was a good man's effort to meet a grave difficulty as best he could. This advice is now used to show that Luther was ready to approve any kind of cohabitation. The very opposite is true: it was because he did not approve of any kind of sexual intercourse, but because he desired to obtain some kind of a legal character for that relation, that he gave the advice to which we have referred.
Before the assembled representatives of the Church and of the German nation the following statements were read in Article XXIII of the Augsburg Confession: "There has been common complaint concerning the examples of priests who were not chaste. For that reason, also, Pope Pius is reported to have said that there were certain reasons why marriage was taken away from priests, but that there were far weightier ones why it ought to be given back; for so Platina writes. Since, therefore, our priests were desirous to avoid these open scandals, they married wives, and taught that it was lawful for them to contract matrimony. First, because Paul says (1 Cor. 7, 2): 'To avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife.' Also (9): 'It is better to marry than to burn.' Secondly, Christ says (Matt. 19, 11): 'All men cannot receive this saying,' where He teaches that not all men are fit to lead a single life; for God created man for procreation (Gen. 1, 23). Nor is it in man's power, without a singular gift and work of God, to alter this creation. Therefore, those that are not fit to lead a single life ought to contract matrimony. For no man's law, no vow, can annul the commandment and ordinance of God. For these reasons the priests teach that it is lawful for them to marry wives. It is also evident that in the ancient Church priests were married men. For Paul says (1 Tim. 3, 2) that a bishop should be the husband of one wife. And in Germany, four hundred years ago for the first time, the priests were violently compelled to lead a single life, who indeed offered such resistance that the Archbishop of Mayence, when about to publish the Pope's decree concerning this matter, was almost killed in the tumult raised by the enraged priests. And so harsh was the dealing in the matter that not only were marriages forbidden for the time to come, but also existing marriages were torn asunder, contrary to all laws, divine and human, contrary even to the canons themselves, made not only by the Popes, but by most celebrated councils.