John Tulloch · 10 of 27

I. Luther. · Part 5

But it is not only as marking definitely the dogmatic significance of the Reformation that the Diet of Augsburg is important. It marks also a significant political epoch. In the Preface to the Confession, addressed to the Emperor, attention is specially called to the two preceding Diets at Spires, in 1526 and 1529, when the Protestant States rightly believed they had gained a definite standing-ground from which they could not be fairly displaced. At the former of these Diets the Emperor had specially conceded that the matters in dispute were beyond his own jurisdiction. He was neither willing nor able to conclude anything touching them, but to endeavour to obtain the sanction of the Roman Pontiff to the assembly of a General Council; “every State in the meantime to live, rule, and bear itself, as it shall be ready to answer for to God and his Imperial Majesty.” The same promise of a General Council had been repeated at the second Diet of Spires, held only the year before, notwithstanding that the Emperor was then in a far less tolerant humour, and disposed to abrogate the Act of Toleration passed in 1526. A majority of the Diet in fact virtually did this, by falling back upon the Edict of Worms, and proposing its enforcement wherever it was practicable. It was then that the minority prepared the famous Protest, from which the name Protestant has come. “The Diet has overstepped its authority,” they said; “our acquired right is that the Decree of 1526, unanimously adopted, remain in force until a Council can be convened. Up to this time the Decree has maintained the peace, and we protest against its abrogation.” At the Augsburg Diet the same ground was taken up, and the same protest renewed. “To the convention of a General Council, as also to your Imperial Majesty, we have, in the due method and legal form, before made our protestations and appeal in this greatest and gravest of matters. To which appeal, both to your Imperial Majesty and a Council, we still adhere; nor do we intend, nor would it be possible for us to forsake it, unless the matter between us and the other party should, in accordance with the latest Imperial citation, be composed, settled, and brought to Christian concord in friendship and love; concerning which appeal we here also make our solemn and public protest.”

From this point, accordingly, the political attitude of the Protestant States was really changed. They were already banded together in their defence before the league of Schmalkald united them. The religious difference had merged into a difference in the great political body of which they were members. So long as the head of the empire held the balance between the Pope and the insurgent States, some compromise seemed possible, but now that he had entered into affiance with Rome, they were threatened with exclusion not only from the Catholic Church but from the Public Peace, as the shelter of the Empire was called. The crisis in every respect was a grave one; and it bespeaks much for the courage of the protesting minority that they resolved to face it, and “never to abandon the religious position which they had taken up, and the importance of which filled their whole souls.” It was in the last days of the same memorable year that John of Saxony, Ernest of Lüneburg, Philip of Hesse, Wolfgang of Anhalt, the Counts of Gebhard and Albrecht of Mansfeld, and delegates from George of Brandenburg and several cities, assembled at Schmalkald, and, amidst the severities of winter, entered into the great league which bound them to support one another in the event of any hostile movement of the Emperor. Happily, any such movement was thwarted by another Turkish invasion, which divided the attention of Charles, and, with other causes, gave peace during the remainder of Luther’s life. The civil war, however, came at last, and in the most terrible form, and no country ever paid more dearly than Germany for religious freedom.

It was some dim forethought of all this that changed Luther much during the last sixteen years of his life. Courageous against the Pope and the devil, he shrunk now again, as in the time of the peasants’ war, from all civil commotion. To his simple German heart the empire was a sacred reality, far more sacred than the Pope. He could only contemplate with the utmost reluctance any alliance against the imperial power. From this time, therefore, Luther is found comparatively withdrawn from public life. He is no longer leader of the movement in the sense in which he has hitherto stood forth as its public champion on all occasions. He seems to have felt that his part of the work was done. He lacked sympathy, unhappily, with both the political and Zwinglian side of the Reformation, which called forth the strong interest of Philip of Hesse and others. He stood aloof from further projects of reform, and the conservative elements of his large and many-sided nature gathered force with advancing years. The wild excitements of the times—the terrifying advance of the Turks, and the dreadful excesses of the Anabaptists, which broke out afresh in the north, under the leadership of John of Leyden—all tended to moderate and somewhat sadden his spirit. To crown all, the affair of the Landgrave of Hesse, who married, in 1536, a second wife while his first was still living, proved to him, as to Melanchthon (whom it nearly killed), a dark and humiliating trial, and left, as his letters show, a gloomy shadow on his temper and the prospects of the cause so dear to him. “Who is not now ruffled by the folly of Luther?” he wrote, in bitterness of spirit, to a friend who asked him to be present at his marriage, while excusing his absence.

There were special causes, also, in his own immediate experience, during the year which followed the Diet of Augsburg, which gave a pensive cast to his life. His dear and illustrious friend, the Archduke John, died in the autumn of 1532. Luther and Melanchthon were suddenly summoned to his bedside, but he was unconscious before they arrived. Luther preached his funeral sermon at Wittenberg, as, seven years before, he had performed the same office for his brother, and, according to Spalatin, was deeply moved and wept as a child. The good Archduke had stood firm in the great cause in the hour of danger, and well earned for himself the epithet of “Steadfast.” The reformer traced in his character, above all, the simple attributes of piety and goodness, as in his brother those of wisdom and understanding. “Had these qualities only been united in one person,” he said, “it would have been a miracle.” Along with such changes, Luther felt in himself a growing sense of old age and weakness. He complained in his letters of dizziness and unfitness for his work in the morning. “I am become so useless,” he says, “that I hate myself. I hardly know how the time passes, and I do so little. I am dying slowly, not of years, but of decay of strength.” His physical suffering culminated in a serious attack of illness at Schmalkald in 1537. He had come there on one of the many projects of a union among all Protestants which occupied these years. He had preached a powerful sermon, “not so much speaking as thundering from heaven in the name of Christ,” and immediately afterwards he was seized with violent pain. Physicians were called from Erfurt to attend him; but he disliked doctors, and they did him no good. He could find no relief, and his body swelled till he thought his end was at hand. “They made me drink,” he afterwards said, “as if I was a great ox.” In immediate prospect of death, he cried to God—"I die a foe of Thy foes, under the curse and ban of Thine enemy, the Pope. May he too die under Thy ban, and we both appear before Thy judgment seat.” The young Elector, son of the good John, stood by his bedside, lamenting that God would take away with him his dear Word. Luther quieted him with the assurance that God would raise up many true men to defend the good cause, and committed to him the care of his wife and children. As Melanchthon began to weep, he could not restrain some of his old humour, reminding him of a saying of one of their friends, that there was no art required in drinking good beer, but only beer that was sour; and recalling to him the words of Job, “‘Have we received good from the Lord, and shall we not also accept evil.’ The wicked Jews had stoned the holy Stephen, but his stone, the villain, was stoning him” (Ihn steinige sein Stein, der bösewicht). He never lost his confidence in God, to whom he repeatedly committed his soul. At length, as none of the physicians of Schmalkald did him any good, they resolved to remove him to Coburg; and, happily, on the way thither, the rough jolting in the carriage which conveyed him did for him what medical skill had failed to do. He obtained relief, and immediately felt his whole body lightened, and was filled with thankful joy. “I was dead,” he wrote at once to his wife, “and had committed you and the dear children to God, but He has had compassion upon me for your sakes.”

If these latter years of Luther’s life are comparatively deficient in stirring incident, they enable us to see the man in his home-life, among his friends and his children, more clearly than in previous years. They were years also of good, if less notable, work. Although the higher projects, which he never cherished with much confidence, of formal union among the branches of the Reformation, miscarried or never came to anything, the time was, upon the whole, a prosperous one for that branch of the Church in which he was specially interested. In the face of the dangers threatening his own power, and even Christendom, Charles recognised the necessity of keeping peace with his Protestant subjects. The truce of Nuremberg followed the league of Schmalkald, and the Protestant states rested from their fears, and rapidly grew in numbers. Würtemburg became genuinely Protestant. Even the Elector-Archbishop of Cologne inclined to the new movement and the apprehension of such a defection, amidst his other difficulties, was enough to keep Charles in check. Luther was satisfied with the progress he had made. He continued his labours at Wittenberg, publishing various expositions or lectures on portions of Scripture, particularly on the Epistle to the Galatians and the Psalms of Degrees. As already mentioned, he had the joy of seeing, in 1534, the first entire translation of the Old as well as the New Testament made public, and a new edition of the Wittenberg Hymn-book appeared in the following year. His weapons of controversy against both Roman Catholics and Zwinglians were not stayed but controversy formed a far less important element of his life. He lived happily with his wife and children in the old cloister on the banks of the Elbe, which had been his first lodging when he came from Erfurt. His salary was not large, but many presents were sent to him, not only by the Elector, but by the free cities, and men of all lands looked to him with respect and admiration. He was able at last to buy a small house in the country and farm, which his “heartily beloved housewife Catherine, Lady Luther, Lady Doctor, Lady Zuhlsdorf, Lady of the. Pigmarket, and whatever else she may be,” managed for him with much thrift and profit. He was never tired of commending matrimony and its blessings. “The state of matrimony,” he says, “is the chief in the world after religion.” Again, “How great, how rich, and how noble are the blessings God gives in marriage! what a joy is bestowed on man through his children—the fairest and sweetest of all joys.” “God’s best gift is a pious, cheerful, God-fearing, home-keeping wife, to whom you can trust your goods and body and life.” Like all large-hearted men, he was never so happy as when in his country home, surrounded by his family. He wrote to Spalatin with delighted enthusiasm of his garden and his fountain, his lilies and roses. As, one day, his children were standing round the table, looking eagerly at the grapes and peaches on it, he said, “He who would know what it is to rejoice in hope, may see a perfect counterpart of it here.” Everything in nature charmed his imaginative sense, and brought out the poetry as well as the piety of his life. When, one day, two birds kept flying into his garden, where they had made a nest, but were repeatedly scared away by the steps of passers-by, he exclaimed, “Oh you dear little birds, do not fly away; I mean you well, from the bottom of my heart, if you could but believe it. Just so do we refuse to trust and believe in our Lord God, who yet means us and shows us all kindness.”

We have already described his deep affection for his children. He remembered, perhaps, the hardness of his own youth, and the occasional severity of his father, and he resolved to make his own home bright, sunny, and cheerful, full of satirical frolic and unfailing gentleness and love. “Natural merriment,” he said, “is the best food for children.” He would joke with his well-beloved Catherine over her thrifty carefulness, calling her a “Martha” more than a “Mary,” and quietly touching, with a tender stroke, her love of profit and business. Yet he prized her worth above all price—“more highly than the kingdom of France or the empire of the Venetians,” as he phrased it. “Everywhere among married people he heard of much greater faults and failings than any she had.” “She is more to me than I dared to hope, thanks be to God.”

These latter years also are the years of the ‘Tischreden’ or ‘Table-Talk,’ which bring us so near to him in his familiar thoughts. He was open-handed in his hospitality, and his table was always furnished for friends and guests as well as the members of his own family. Never man had more numerous and warm-hearted friends—some who had struggled with him from the beginning in “the good cause,” and younger disciples who gathered round him with admiring veneration in his later years, who came to listen to his talk, and take notes of the many wise and racy sayings that dropped from his lips. It is to the notes of two of these younger friends that we owe the remarkable volume of ‘Table-Talk’ which has done more than any of his works to make his name known, not merely as a theologian but as a humourist and close observer of man and nature. It reveals more than all else the dramatic breadth of his intellect, his hearty interest in life, and wise, pathetic, and droll insight into its heroisms and follies. It is stamped with genius throughout, and retains its vivacity and readableness when so much that he has written remains covered with the dust of centuries, untouched save by the student of polemical theology. In this volume, more than in any other, the German people of divers kinds have found a point of sympathy with his life, its poetry and music, its affection and free-heartedness, its deep piety and earnest aspiration. His reporters have been too indiscriminate in their notes, as he himself told them they, were. They beset him too closely, not merely at his table, but on his walks, and in the discharge of his duties. “They were with him,” it is said, “at his down-sitting and uprising; they looked over his shoulder as he read or wrote his letters: did he utter an exclamation of pain or of pleasure, of joy or of sorrow, down it went; did he aspirate a thought above breath, it was caught by the intent ear of one or other of the listeners.” But if they have added some crude pieces to the heap of his sayings, and filled the volume here and there with repetitory notes, it has also given freshness and genuineness to them, and served to bring out his intellect and character in vivid mass, with something of the natural bulk and fulness with which Cranach has presented his person in his well-known portrait of Luther standing with the Bible in his hands.

The first edition of the ‘Tischreden’ was published twenty years after his death—in 1566—and successive editions were immediately called for. It has been partially translated in our own language, among others by William Hazlitt; and some of its best sayings have been widely circulated. It will interest our readers, however, and serve to vivify our sketch, to present a brief selection. His simple faith; his hatred of the Pope and of all lies; his high estimate of his friend and fellow-labourer, Melanchthon; his dislike of Erasmus; his love of nature, birds, and children; his humorous sense, as he looked abroad upon life in all its civil and domestic aspects,—all appear in rich and unguarded language, here and there touched with exaggeration, such as naturally falls from a great mind freely ranging over many topics. A great proportion of the Table-Talk sayings are of course theological, and we may begin with these. As might be expected, he exalts greatly Holy Scripture. “Homer, Virgil, and other noble and profitable writers,” he says, “have left us books of great antiquity, but they are nothing to the Bible. The books of the heathen contemplate only the present. Look not therein for aught of trust or hope in God. But see how the Psalms and the Book of Job treat of faith, hope, resignation, and prayer,—in a word, the Holy Scripture is the highest and best of books, abounding in comfort under all afflictions and trials. It teaches us to see, to feel, to grasp, and to comprehend faith, hope, and charity far otherwise than mere human reason can; and when evil oppresses us, it teaches us how these writers threw light upon the darkness, and how, after this poor miserable existence of ours on earth, there is another and eternal life. . . . A theologian should be thoroughly in possession of the basis and source of faith—that is to say, the Holy Scriptures. . . . He who wholly possesses the text of the Bible is a consummate divine. . . . Let us not lose the Bible, but with diligence, in fear and invocation of God, read and preach it. While that remains and flourishes all will be well with the state; ‘tis head and empress of all arts and faculties. Let but divinity fall, and I would not give a straw for the rest.”

“The School Divines, with their speculations in Holy Writ, deal in pure vanities. Bonaventura, who is full of them, made me almost deaf. I sought to learn in his book how God and my soul had become reconciled, but got no information from him. They talk much of the union of the soul and the understanding, but ‘tis all idle fantasy. The right practical divinity is this—Believe in Christ, and do thy duty in that state of life to which God has called thee.”

“I have grounded my preaching on the Divine Word. Although I am an old doctor of divinity, to this day I have not got beyond the children’s learning—the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer; and these I understand not so well as I should, though I study them daily, praying with my son John and my daughter Magdalene.”

“Forsheim said that the first of the five books of Moses was not written by Moses himself. Dr Luther replied, What matters it even though Moses did not write it?”

We have spoken of his high esteem of Melanchthon. His admiration of him as a theologian never failed, even when he deplored his lack of faith and courage. Every student of theology, he said, should read over and over again Melanchthon’s ‘Loci Communes’ “until he has it by heart. Once master of these two volumes, he may be regarded as a theologian whom neither devil nor heretic can overcome. Afterwards he may study Melanchthon’s ‘Commentary on the Romans,’ and mine on Deuteronomy and the Galatians.”

Again, “we possess no body of Christian theology like Melanchthon’s ‘Commonplace Book.’” “All the fathers, all the compilers of sentences, are not to be compared with this book. ’Tis, after the Scriptures, the most perfect of works.”

There is at times a harshness in his ready and emphatic speech, as when he pronounced the Epistle of St James to be a “strawy epistle” and in such a sentence as the following. “When one asked where God was before heaven was created, St Augustine answered: He was in Himself. When another asked me the same question, I said: He was building hell for such idle, presumptuous, flattering, and inquisitive spirits like you. . . . How should God deal with us? Good days we cannot bear, evil we cannot endure. Gives He riches unto us? then are we proud so that no man can live by us in peace; nay, we will be carried upon head and shoulders, and will be adored as gods. Gives He poverty unto us? then are we dismayed, impatient, and murmur against Him. Therefore nothing were better for us than forthwith to be covered with the shovel.

“Since God knew, said some one, that man would not continue in a state of innocence, why did He create him at all? ‘Be sure,’ Dr Luther said, laughing in reply, ‘God knew quite well what He is about. Let us keep clear of such abstract questions, and consider the will of God as it has been revealed to us.”

“God only, and not wealth, maintains the world; yet is the world so mad that it sets on riches all its joy and felicity.”

“There is no greater anger than when God is silent and talks not with us, but suffers us to go on in our sinful works, and to do all things according to our own passions and pleasures.”

“Melanchthon asked Luther if this word ‘hardened,’ ‘hardeneth whom He will,’ were to be understood directly as it sounded, or in a figurative sense. Luther answered, ‘We must understand it specially, and not operatively; for God works no evil. Through His almighty power He works all in all; and as He finds a man, so He works in him, as He did in Pharaoh, who was evil by nature, which was not God’s but his own fault.”

“Christ lived three-and-thirty years, and went up thrice every year to Jerusalem—making ninety-nine times He went thither. If the Pope could show that Christ had been but once at Rome, what a bragging and boasting would he make! Yet Jerusalem was destroyed to the ground.”

“When Jesus was born, doubtless he cried and wept like other children, and his mother tended him as other mothers tend their children. As he grew up he was submissive to his parents, and waited on them, and carried his supposed father’s dinner to him; and when he came back, Mary no doubt often said, ‘My dear little Jesus, where halt thou been?’ He that takes no offence at the simple, lowly, and mean life of Christ is endowed with high divine art and wisdom—yea, has a special gift of God in the Holy Ghost.”

“We cannot vex the devil more than by teaching, preaching, singing, and talking of Jesus. Therefore I like it well when, with sounding voice, we sing in the church, ‘Et homo factus est; et verbum caro factum est.’ The devil cannot endure those words, and flies away.”

“I expect more goodness from Kate my wife, from Philip Melanchthon, and from other friends, than from my sweet and blessed Saviour Christ Jesus; and yet I know for certain that neither she nor any other person on earth will or can suffer that for me which He has suffered. Why, then, should I be afraid of Him? This very foolish weakness grieves me much.”

“When Jesus Christ utters a word, He opens His mouth so wide that it embraces all heaven and earth, even though that word be but a whisper. The word of the emperor is powerful, but that of Jesus Christ governs the whole universe.”

Luther’s powers as a preacher were universally recognised. God gave especially to him the word of power to the God-fearing and the ungodly alike. He was once reproached by a popish priest because he reproached the people with such passion and vehemence. He answered: “Our Lord God must first send a sharp pouring shower with thunder and lightning, and afterwards cause it mildly to rain, as then it wets finely through. I can easily cut a willow or a hazel wand with my trencher-knife; but for a hard oak a man must use the axe, and little enough to fell and cleave it.”

He gives many excellent advices as to preaching; as for example—

“I would not have preachers torment their hearers and detain them with long and tedious preaching, for the delight of hearing vanishes therewith, and the preachers hurt themselves. . . . But to speak deliberately becomes a preacher, for thereby he may the more effectually and impressively deliver his sermons. Seneca writes of Cicero that he spake deliberately from the heart. . . . We ought to direct ourselves in preaching according to the condition of the hearers; but most preachers commonly fail herein: they preach that which little edifies the poor simple people. To preach plainly and simply is a great art.”

“The defects of a preacher are soon spied. Dr Justus Jonas has all the good virtues and qualities a man may have; yet merely because he hums and spits, the people cannot bear that good and honest man.”

“Luther’s wife said to him, Sir, I heard your cousin John Palmer preach this afternoon in the parish church, whom I understood better than Dr Pommer, though the Doctor is held to be a very excellent preacher. Luther answered, John Palmer preached as ye women use to talk—for what comes into your minds ye speak. A preacher ought to remain by the text and deliver that which he has before him, to the end people may well understand it. But a preacher that will speak everything that comes in his mind is like a maid that goes to market, and meeting another maid, makes a stand, and they hold together a goose-market.”

“A preacher must be both soldier and shepherd. He must nourish, defend, and teach; he must have teeth in his mouth, and be able to bite and to fight. There are many talking preachers, but there is nothing in them save words. They can talk much, but teach nothing rightly.”

“I would not have preachers in their sermons use Hebrew, Greek, or foreign languages, for in the church we ought to speak as we are wont to do at home—the plain mother-tongue. . . . To be condemned are all preachers who aim at high and hard things. When I preach I sink myself down. I regard neither doctors nor magistrates—but the multitude of young people, children, and servants, of whom are more than two thousand. Will not the rest hear me? The door stands open, they may be gone. . . . When preachers come to me, as Melanchthon and Dr Pommer, let them show their cunning, how learned they be. They shall be well put to their trumps. But to sprinkle Hebrew and Greek in their public sermons savours much of show, according with neither time or place.”

“I have more than once heard him say at table,” Mathesius says, “how that in the Schools it was proper to dispute and bring forward acute arguments to confute the adversaries; but that in the pulpit those are the best preachers who discourse in a childlike, ordinary, simple style, intelligible to the common people.”

We have already spoken of Luther’s view of the devil. Whatever Luther learned to doubt of the medieval theology, he certainly retained its strong faith in the existence and constant work of an evil personality fighting against God and the kingdom of God. This persuasion made him also believe in witchcraft, with its attendant horrors. He was in many ways the child of his time, much as he rose above it in some things. “I should have no compassion on these witches,” he says. “I would burn all of them.” “Witchcraft is the devil’s own work.” “The devil is so crafty a spirit that he can ape and deceive our senses. He can cause one to think he sees something which he sees not; that he hears thunders or a trumpet which he hears not.” “When I could not be rid of the devil with sentences out of Holy Scripture, I made him often fly with jeering words. Sometimes I said to him, Saint Satan! if Christ’s blood which was shed for my sins be not sufficient, then I desire that thou wouldst pray to God for me.”

In contrast with such superstitions, which plainly tended to darken the Reformer’s views of life, and even to degrade his conception of Christianity, may be placed his keen love of nature, of music, and all the brighter aspects of social fellowship. He not only delighted in nature, but he was almost scientifically observant of its phenomena—their beautiful order, their ministries of service. “God’s power and wisdom,” he says, “are shown in the smallest flowers. Painters cannot rival their colour, nor perfumers their sweetness: green and yellow, crimson and blue and purple, all growing out of the earth. And we do not know how to use them to God’s honour. We trample on lilies as if we were so many cows.” “Could a man make a single rose we should give him an empire; but these beautiful gifts of God come freely to us, and we think nothing of them. The most precious of things is nothing, if it be only common.”