John Tulloch · 6 of 27

I. Luther. · Part 1

LUTHER is the most notable of all the Reformers. His name at once starts the most stirring associations, and leads into the widest details and discussions. His work was comparatively single and original in its energy; and his life was especially heroic in its proportions, and varied and graphic and interesting in its incidents. There is a grandeur in the whole subject, below which we are apt to feel that we constantly fall, particularly within the limits of a mere sketch.

Few characters have been more closely observed or more keenly scrutinised. There is a breadth and intensity and power of human interest in the career of the German reformer, which have concentrated the attention both of friend and foe upon it; while the careless freedom and humorous frankness with which he himself has lifted the veil and shown us his inner life, have furnished abundant materials for the one and the other to draw their portrait and point their moral. I do not know that in all history there is any one to whose true being, alike in its strength and weaknesses, we get nearer than we get to that of Luther. This is of the very greatness of the man, that from first to last he is an open-hearted honest German, undisguised by education, unweakened by ecclesiasticism, unsoftened by fame. Whatever faults he had lie upon the surface: they appear in all the manifestations of his character, and we have nowhere to search for any secret or double motives in his conduct. No one has ever ventured to accuse him of insincerity. He lives before us in all that he did; and neither dogmatic violence nor political necessity ever serve to hide from us the genuine human heart, beating warm beneath all the strong armour of controversy, or the thin folds of occasional diplomacy.

The life of Luther divides itself into two great periods, which denote as well an important distinction in his work. The first of these periods terminates with the Diet of Worms (1521) and his imprisonment in the Wartburg, and is marked by the striking series of events which signalise his education and conversion, his conflict about indulgences, and then his general conflict and final breach with Rome. The whole series falls naturally into three main groups or stages sufficiently distinct, yet of disproportionate outline. The first may be said to extend to the memorable year of 1517, and summons before our minds a varied and lively succession of pictures—the boy at Mansfeld, the scholar at Eisenach, the student and monk at Erfurt, the pilgrim to Rome, the professor and preacher at Wittenberg. The second stage, with all its peculiar significance, is a very rapid one, lasting exactly a year from October 1517, when he posted the ninety-five theses on the gates of the Church of All Saints, to October 1518, when he fled by night from Augsburg after his unsuccessful interview with the Legate Cajetan. The third is traced in its successive steps by the Leipzig Disputation, July 1519; the burning of the Papal Bull, Dec. 1520; and, finally, the Diet of Worms, April 1521.

Between these several stages of the reformer’s career there Is an intimate natural connection—a connection not merely accidental, but, so to speak, logical, in the manner in which they follow one another. They arise, the later from the preceding, by a sure process of rational and spiritual expansion, issuing in order like the evolving steps of a great argument, or the unfolding scenes of a great drama, or like both together,—presenting a marvellous combination at once of logical consistency and dramatic effect. It is of great importance, therefore, to understand the principle and ground of the whole, as portrayed in the struggles and experience of the first part of his life. The convent at Erfurt is the significant prologue to the whole drama.

Luther was born at Eisleben on the evening of the 10th of November 1483. His parents were poor,—his father, John Luther, being a miner; his mother, Margaret, a peasant. Humble in their circumstances, they were both of superior intelligence and character. The father was a diligent reader of whatever books came within his reach, and had his own somewhat immovable convictions as to life and duty; the mother was esteemed by all her honest co-matrons as peculiarly exemplary in her conduct,—ut in exemplar virtutum, as Melanchthon says. The story is, that they had gone to Eisleben to attend a fair, when their son was unexpectedly born on the eve of St Martin. The next morning he was carried to the Church of St Peter, and baptised by the name of the patron saint of the day. Shortly after Luther’s birth, his parents removed to Mansfeld, where, by industry and perseverance, his father’s worldly circumstances improved. He became the owner of two small furnaces, and was elevated to some civic dignity in the town of the district. Here, in the “Latin school,” the young Martin first began to experience the hardships of life. He appears to have been a somewhat unruly boy, or the school discipline must have been of a very savage description. He is said to have been flogged by his master fifteen times in one day; and while the scholastic rod thus weighed heavily on him, the parental rod was not spared. Neither father nor mother nursed the boy in softness. He himself gives us rather an unpleasant glimpse of the domestic discipline. “He was whipped for a mere trifle,” he says, “till the blood came.” But then, as a companion picture, serving to relieve by its bright tenderness the severity of the other, we are told of the father carrying the little Martin to school in his arms, and bringing him back in the same manner.

Having got all the schooling he could get at Mansfeld, he went first to the school of the Franciscans at Magdeburg, and then nearer home to Eisenach. It was in the latter place, while singing in the streets for bread, according to a common practice of the German schoolboys, that his fair appearance and sweet voice attracted the notice of a good lady of the name of Cotta, who provided him henceforth, during his stay at school, with a comfortable home. Luther in after years recalled his school-days with till the zest of his genial and affectionate nature, and used, in his familiar house-sermons, to exhort his hearers “never to despise the poor boys who sing at their doors, and ask bread for the love of God.” He would illustrate the advantage of prayer by a humorous story drawn from his experience as a street-singer. “Importunity in prayer,” he says, “will always bring down from heaven the blessing sought. How well do I remember singing once as a boy before the house of a rich man, and entreating very hard for some bread. At last the man of the house came running out crying aloud, ‘Where are you, you knaves?’ We all took to our heels, for we thought we had angered him by our importunity, and he was going to beat us but he called us back and gave us two loaves.”

On his reaching his eighteenth year, it became a question to what profession he should devote himself. His father’s ambition was excited by his talents, and the law seemed the most likely avenue by which these talents could carry him to distinction and emolument. He accordingly entered the University of Erfurt, then the most distinguished in Germany, with the view of preparing himself for the legal profession. There he studied philosophy in the writings of the school-men, and perfected his classical knowledge in the pages of Cicero and Virgil. Even thus early the barren subtleties of the scholastic philosophy rather repelled than interested him. They left, however, a permanent influence on his intellectual character.. He took his degree of Doctor of Philosophy or Master of Arts in 1505, when he was twenty-two years of age, and the event, according to custom, was celebrated by a torchlight procession and great rejoicing.

But before this event he had begun an education of a far more real and profound character than any that the university could impart to him. One day, as he was turning over the books in the University library, he fell upon a copy of the Vulgate. He beheld with astonishment that there were more gospels and epistles than in the lectionaries. A new world opened upon him; he returned again and again with avidity to the sacred page, and, as he read, his heart burned within him. Several circumstances served to deepen these feelings—a dangerous sickness, which brought him near to the point of death, and the decease of a friend of the name of Alexis, accompanied, or at least somehow deeply associated in his mind, with a dreadful thunderstorm to which he was exposed on his return to Erfurt after a visit to his parents. This latter event especially made a powerful impression upon him. The common version of the story is, that the lightning struck his friend by his side as they journeyed together, and that Luther was so appalled by the disaster that he fell upon his knees in prayer, and resolved, if spared, to dedicate himself to the service of God. The story is at least a fair tribute to the childlike piety that now and always animated him. He kept his resolve, silent and apparently unmoved for some time, yet cherishing it in his heart. His mode of carrying it out was characteristic. One evening he invites some of his fellow-students to supper, gives them of his best cheer; music and jest enliven the company, and the entertainment closes in a full burst of merriment. The same night there is a solitary knock at the door of the Augustine convent, and the student who has just gaily parted from his companions, two volumes alone of all his books in his hand, a Virgil and a Plautus, passes beneath its portal. He has separated from the world, and devoted himself to God, as he and the world then understood devotion.

The three years which Luther now spent in the convent at Erfurt are among the most signal and significant of his life. During these years were laid deep in his heart those spiritual convictions out of which his whole reforming work sprang and grew into shape. The sparks which were afterwards to explode in the overthrow of the Papacy, and to lighten up into the glory of a restored Gospel, were here kindled. The struggle for which Germany was preparing, was here rehearsed in the single soul of a solitary monk. It is a painful and somewhat sad spectacle; but it possesses not only the interest of an earnest individual struggle, but the sublimity of a prelude to the great national conflict which was impending.

It was Luther’s duty as a novice to perform the meanest offices in the convent. He had chosen his lot, and he was not the man to shrink from its mere servile hardships; so he swept the floors, and wound the clock, and ministered in various ways to the laziness of his brother monks. He was even driven to his old trade of street-begging, as they assailed him with their doggerel cry, “Saccum per nackum”—“Go through the streets with the sack, and get us what you can to eat.” After a while, and by the friendly interference of the university in his favour, he was able to resume his studies. Augustine and the Bible on the one hand, and Occam and Gerson on the other, shared his attention, and we are left vaguely to guess what seeds of divine truth from the one, and of papal disaffection from the other, were sown in his mind. All was as yet a chaos in his spiritual condition. The darkness had been stirred within him, and a profound uneasiness produced, but no ray of light yet rested on. it. By fasting and prayer, and every species of monkish penance, he laboured to satisfy his conscience and secure his salvation. “If ever monk could have got to heaven by monkery,” he afterwards said, “I might have done so. I wore out my body with watching, fasting, praying, and other works.” He was sometimes for four days together without meat or drink. But all his labours and mortifications brought him no peace. The terrors of guilt haunted him as a bodily presence—clung to him as a pursuing shadow, so that one day at mass he cried out, as some dire aspect of wrath rose up before him, “It is not I! it is not I!” On another occasion he disappeared for certain days and nights alarm was excited; his cell door was broken open, and he was found prostrate on the floor in a state of helpless emaciation—unconscious, and apparently dead, till roused by the chanting of the young choristers. The one human influence to which he was never insensible, moved him when everything else had failed. Now and always, music had a charm for him only second to theology. “It is the only other art,” he says, “which, like theology, can calm the agitations of the soul and put the devil to flight.”

At length light began to dawn upon him, and it came from a source already recognised and described. The Augustines had recently received a new vicar-general in the person of Staupitz, and he now came on a visit of inspection to the convent at Erfurt. The character of this man stands out, amid the prevailing unworthiness of the Romish clergy of the time, as a remarkable and most honourable exception. Of clear intelligence, simple and affectionate feelings, and most real and living piety, he reflects the brightest side of the system which he represented; and it is well for us to remember that it had such a bright side, and that, saving for this, Luther and his work might never have been what they were. With characteristic frankness the reformer never ceased to confess his spiritual obligations to the head of his order. “Through him,” he said, “the light of the Gospel first dawned out of the darkness on my heart.” Touched by the undisguised zeal and” grave and melancholy looks of the young monk, Staupitz sought his confidence. Luther unbosomed himself. “It is in vain,” he said, “that I promise to God; sin is always too strong for me.” “I have myself,” Staupitz replied, “vowed more than a thousand times to lead a holy life, and as often broken my vows. I now trust only in the mercy and grace of God in Christ.” The monk spoke of his fears—of the terrors of guilt that haunted him, and made him wretched amidst all his mortifications. “Look at the wounds of Christ,” said the vicar-general; “see the Saviour bleeding upon the cross, and believe in the mercy of God.”—Surely a brave and true Gospel speaking from the bosom of the old and corrupting hierarchy to the heart of the nascent and reviving faith! Luther further deplored the inefficacy of all his works of repentance. “There is no true repentance,” answered Staupitz, “but that which begins in the love of God and of righteousness. Conversion does not come from such works as you have been practising. Love Him who has first loved you.” There was comfort in such words to the heart of the weary monk. The darkness began to clear away; but again and again it returned, and the struggle went on. “Oh, my sins! my sins!” he exclaimed, in writing to the vicar-general. “It is just your sins that make you an object of salvation,” was the virtual reply. “Would you be only the semblance of a sinner, and have only the semblance of a Saviour? Jesus Christ is the Saviour of those who are real and great sinners.” To these precious counsels Staupitz added the present of a Bible; and Luther, rejoicing in its possession, devoted himself more than ever to its study. Gradually the truth dawned upon him as he nourished himself upon Scripture and St Augustine. Still he had not attained a clear and firm footing. A renewed sickness, brought on by the severity of his mortifications, brought back his old terrors. God seemed an offended judge ready to condemn him, and he lay miserable in his fears, when an aged monk, who had come to see him, sought to console him by repeating the words of the Creed, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” Luther caught at the words. The monk pressed the point by urging that it was necessary to believe not only that David’s or Peter’s sins were forgiven, but that his own sins were forgiven. From this time the doctrine of grace was clearly seen by him, his soul passed into its bright light. The confusions which had rested on the language of Scripture cleared away. “I saw the Scripture in an entirely new light,” he says, “and straightway I felt as if I were born anew; it was as if I had found the door of Paradise thrown wide open.”

Thus Luther fought his way step by step to the freedom of the Gospel; from hard and painful asceticism to despair of holiness by any such means, and then from the very depth of this despair to the comfort and gladness of a free salvation in Christ, as preached to him by Staupitz and the aged monk. By the end of his stay at Erfurt his Christian convictions were well matured, although he was still far, and for many years after this still far, from seeing their full bearing, and the inevitable conclusions to which they led.

In the year 1507 he was ordained a priest, and in the following year he removed to Wittenberg, where the Elector Frederick of Saxony had recently planted a university, destined to be memorably associated with the reformer. If Erfurt be the cradle of the Reformation, Wittenberg was its seminary and the chief seat of its triumph; and the old Augustine convent there, even more than that at Erfurt, gathers to itself a stirring and glorious, if somewhat less solemn interest.

At first Luther lectured on dialectics and physics, but with little good-will. His heart was already in theology—that theology “which seeks out the kernel from the nut, and the flour from the wheat, and the marrow from the bones.” In 1509 he became a bachelor of theology, and immediately began lecturing on the Holy Scriptures. His lectures produced a powerful impression by the novelty of their views and the boldness of his advocacy of them. “This monk,” remarked the rector of the university, “will puzzle all our doctors, and bring in a new doctrine, and reform the whole Roman Church, for he takes his stand on the writings of the apostles and prophets, and on the word of Jesus Christ.” On such truly Protestant ground he already stood, although he called himself after this, and truly enough so far as all practical recognition of his position was. concerned, “a most insane Papist.”

From lecturing he passed to preaching, although here, as at every step, with a struggle. He had an awful feeling of the responsibility of speaking to the people in God’s stead, and it required the urgent remonstrance of Staupitz to make him ascend the pulpit. He began his career as a preacher in the small chapel of the convent, a mean building of wood, thirty feet long and twenty feet broad, decayed and falling to pieces. There for the first time was heard that mighty voice which at length shook the world. His words, Melanchthon said, were “born, not on his lips but in his soul;” they sprang from a profoundly awakened feeling of the truth of what he spake, and kindled a corresponding feeling. They moved the hearts of all who heard them, as they had never been moved before; and very soon the creaking and mouldy timbers of the old edifice were altogether unable to contain the numbers who thronged to hear him. He was invited by the town-council to preach in the parish church, and there his burning words reached a much more general and. influential audience.

One important element in the education of the reformer still remains to be mentioned. He was destined to see and study the Papacy in the very centre of its power—in its full-blown magnificence in Rome. In the year 1510—some say 1511—he went on a mission to this city. What he saw and heard there made an ineffaceable impression on him, although it did not produce any immediate result. “I would not take a hundred thousand florins,” he afterwards said, “not to have seen Rome. I have said many masses there, and heard many said, so that I shudder when I think of it. There I heard, among other coarse jests, courtiers laughing at table, and bragging that some said mass and repeated these words over the bread and wine, Panis es, Panis manebis; Vinum es, Vinum manebis.” For the time, however, the fervour of his monastic devotion burned bright amid all this blasphemy. He ran the round of all the churches, and believed all the lying legends repeated to him. It even passed through his mind as a regret that his parents were still living, as otherwise he might have wrought their deliverance from purgatory by his masses and penances. He tried to mount the Scala Sancta (Pilate’s staircase, miraculously transported from Jerusalem) on his knees, and yet (strange evidence of the conflict raging in his heart), as he essayed the painful task, a voice of thunder kept shouting to him, “The just shall live by faith!”

A further and last step of academical honour awaited him on his return. He was created a Doctor in the Holy Scriptures in the year 1512; and the oath which, on this occasion, he solemnly swore on the. Bible, to study and preach it all his life, and maintain the Christian faith against all heretics, is said to have been often afterwards a source of comfort to him in the great crises of his work.

And now our reformer’s education was nearly complete, while everything was preparing for the approaching struggle. Some visits of inspection which he made in the place of Staupitz to the Augustine convents, served still more to awaken his feeling of the need of reform, and to call forth his activity and practical abilities. “The whole ground,” he complained, “was covered, nay, heaped up, with the rubbish of all manner of strange doctrines and superstitions, so that the word of truth can barely shine through; nay, in many places not a ray of it is visible.” The train of conviction was thus fully laid; the impulse and power of reform were fully prepared. It only required a spark to kindle the train—some special excitement to call forth the energy still slumbering, but all ready and furnished for the struggle. Could Rome only have penetrated beneath the surface at this moment, and seen what a deep tremor and current agitated the German mind—how light had begun to peer through unnumbered chinks of the old sacerdotal edifice, revealing not only its weak defences, but the vile and unclean things within—how warily would she have acted! But the blindness of decay had struck her—falsehood had eaten away her judgment, as well as undermined her strength, and foolishly she went onwards to her overthrow.

The system of indulgences was a natural result of the general system of penance; it rested on the same fundamental falsehood. So soon as the purely spiritual character of repentance became obscured, and the idea of sin as an outward accident under the control of the Church, rather than an inward and spiritual fact, began to prevail, there was obviously no limit to the growth of ecclesiastical corruption. If the Church possessed the power of freeing the sinner from the consequences of his sins, it was a mere development of this principle that the Pope, as the head and sum of the Church, should possess this power in an eminent degree; and when attention was once fixed on the mere externals of penance, it was only a fair logical conclusion that these externals could be appointed and regulated by the Pope at pleasure. The steps of the degradation are plainly marked, from the recognition of outward satisfaction as a condition of salvation, to the substitution of mortifications, pilgrimages, &c., as exhausting the demands of the Church, and then, as the moral feeling sank, and the hierarchical spirit rose, to a payment of money in place of actual service of any kind. Once materialise the spiritual truth, and gradually the material accident will become everything, and not only substitute itself in place of that truth, but necessarily pass from one degraded form to another, till it find its last and summary expression in money—money being always the brief and convenient representative of all mere external work. In so far as there was anything distinct in the character of indulgences, they were worse than even the general system of which they formed a part. While penance and priestly absolution, corrupted as they had become, confessedly based upon the merits of Christ, and were held to imply contrition in the offender; indulgences were rested upon the special doctrine of the treasure of the Church or the overflowing merits of the saints, and were in some of their forms confessedly dispensed irrespective of the moral condition of the recipient. Regular ordination, moreover, was a requirement of the one system, whereas indulgence was arrogated by the Pope as his peculiar privilege, and could be exercised at will by any one nominated by him.

It may be easily imagined what a system this was in the hands of an unscrupulous and low-minded agent; and such an agent, of the worst description, it was the misfortune of Rome to send abroad at this time through Germany. At Jüterbock, a few miles from Wittenberg and the borders of Saxony, which the Elector had refused him permission to enter, John Tetzel, a Dominican friar, established himself for the sale of the papal indulgences. A shameless traffic had fallen into the hands of a man conspicuous for shamelessness of tongue, and who scrupled not at any blasphemy to exalt the value of his wares. As the dispenser of the treasure of the Church, he claimed to be on a level with St Peter, and even to have saved more souls than the apostle. Distinguished by an unblushing countenance and stentorian voice, with the papal red cross borne aloft, the papal brief prominently displayed to view, and the money-counter before him, he proclaimed aloud the merits of his paper pardons; while his companion, Friar Bartholomew, shouted always as he closed, “Come and buy! come and buy!” His mingled impudence and impiety almost baffle belief. He even went the length of saying, that “when one dropped a penny into the box for a soul in purgatory, so soon as the money chinked in the chest the soul flew up to heaven.”

When Luther heard what was going on in his neighbourhood, we can understand how his spirit was stirred in him. At first, indeed, and before the full enormities of the system became manifest, he seems to have taken it somewhat quietly. “He began,” he himself says, “to preach with great moderation, that they might do something better and more certain than buying pardons.” But when he saw the practical influence of the traffic on the members of his own flock, and heard of Tetzel’s blasphemies, his whole soul was roused, and he exclaimed, “God willing, I will beat a hole in his drum.” He felt the necessity of taking some decided step, as no one else seemed disposed to interfere. He took counsel with God and his own heart, with none besides; and on the eve of All Saints, when the relics, collected with great pains by Frederick for his favourite church, were exposed to view, and multitudes thronged to gaze on them, Luther appeared among the crowd, and nailed on the gate of the church his ninety-five theses on the doctrine of Indulgences, which he offered to maintain in the university against all opponents, by word of mouth or in writing. These famous propositions generally asserted the necessity of spiritual repentance, and limited the dispensing power of the Pope to those penalties imposed by himself. They did not absolutely deny the doctrine of the treasure of the Church, but only the sole authority of the Pope over this treasure, and altogether denied that this treasure had any power to absolve the sinner without contrition and amendment on his part. “If the sinner had true contrition he received complete forgiveness; if he had it not, no brief of indulgence could avail him,—for the Pope’s absolution had no value in and for itself, but only in so far as it was a mark of divine favour.”

The publication of these theses is commonly considered the starting-point of the Reformation. The excitement produced by them was intense and widespread. Luther’s diocesan, the Bishop of Brandenburg, a good easy man, expressed sympathy, but counselled silence for peace’s sake. Silence, however, was now no longer possible. Everywhere the excited popular feeling caught up the bold note of defiance. It seemed, in the words of Myconius, “as if angels themselves had carried them to the ears of all men.” The excitement grew and strengthened, and sympathetic voices were heard through all Germany. Tetzel retreated to Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and, with the assistance of Dr Wimpina, drew out a set of counter-theses, while he publicly committed those of Luther to the flames. But this was a game easily played at; and the students at Wittenberg retaliated, by seizing the messenger bearing the counter-theses, and burning them in the market-place. Frederick of Saxony refused to interfere. He did not encourage, he did not even promise to protect; but, what was the very best thing he could do, he let things take their course. Yet if the story of his dream be true, he must have had his own thoughts about the matter. It is told that on the night of All Saints, just after the theses were posted on the church doors, he lay at his castle of Scheinitz, six leagues distant, and as he was pondering how to keep the festival, he fell asleep, and dreamed that he saw the monk writing certain propositions on the chapel of the castle at Wittenberg, in so large a hand that it could be read at Scheinitz: the pen began to expand as he looked, and gradually grew longer and longer, till at last it reached to Rome, touched the Pope’s triple crown, and: made it totter. He inquired of the monk where he had got such a pen, and was answered that it once belonged to the wing of a goose in Bohemia. Presently other pens sprang out of the great pen, and seemed all busy writing; a loud noise was heard, and Frederick awoke. The dream, mythical or not, foreshadowed the great crisis at hand. The hundred years had revolved, and Huss’s saying had come true. “To-day you burn a goose; a hundred years hence a swan shall arise whom you will not be able to burn.” The movement, long going on beneath the surface, and breaking out here and there ineffectually, had at length found a worthy champion; and all these forming impulses of the time gathered to Luther, welcomed him and helped him. The Humanists, Reuchlin, Erasmus, and others, expressed their sympathy; the war-party, Hutten and Sickingen, uttered their joy; above all, the great heart of the German people responded; and while the monk of Wittenberg seemed, as he said afterwards, to stand solitary in the breach, he was in reality encompassed by a cloud of witnesses, a great army of truth-seekers, at whose head he was destined to win for the world once more the triumph of truth and righteousness.