Life of Luther by Julius Koestlin

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For the clergy Carlstadt sought, by a perverse interpretation of
Scripture, to make the married state into a law. Only married men
were to be appointed to offices in the Church. For monks and nuns he
claimed the liberty of renouncing their cloistered and celibate
life, if they found its moral requirements insupportable; but the
biblical evidence that he adduced in support of this doctrine was
unhappily chosen; and he still declared the renunciation of vows to
be a sin, though justified by the avoidance thereby of a still
greater sin, that of unchastity in monastic life. Luther had
required that at the Lord's Supper the cup, in accordance with the
original institution of Christ, should be given to the laity.
Carlstadt and Zwilling, however, wished to make it a sin for a
person to partake of the Communion without the cup being given to
the communicants. Other changes also were now demanded in the mode
of administering the elements, conformably with the Holy Supper held
by Jesus Himself with His twelve disciples. Zwilling would have
twelve communicants at a time partake of the bread and wine. It was
further insisted that, like as at ordinary meals, the elements
should be given into the hand of each individual to partake of, and
not put into his mouth by the priest. The sacrifice of the mass
Zwilling would abolish altogether, but Carlstadt thought it
necessary, in dealing with so important a feature of the old form of
worship, to proceed with caution.

Upon these questions and proceedings Luther expressed his opinion
early in August to Melancthon, who was keenly excited about them,
but on many points was unsettled in his mind. The project of
restoring at Wittenberg the celebration of the Lord's Supper, as
originally instituted, with the cup, met with Luther's full
approval; for the tyranny which the Christian congregations had
hitherto endured in this respect had been acknowledged there, and
there was a general wish to resist it. He declared further, with
regard to private masses, that he was resolved never to say any more
while he lived. But compulsion he would not dream of: if any who
still suffered from this tyranny partook of the Communion without
the cup, no man durst account it to him as a sin. As for the
troubles of the monks and nuns, under their self-imposed vows, his
sympathy for them was no less acute than that of his friends at
Wittenberg, but the arguments by which they sought to help them to
liberty he did not consider sound. He gave now this subject a more
searching and deeper consideration, and shortly addressed a series
of theses on celibacy to the bishops and deacons of the church at
Wittenberg. He attacked vows in general, and assailed them at the
very root. Inasmuch, moreover, as the vows of chastity, he said, and
of other monastic observances were commonly made to God with the
intent and purpose of working out one's own salvation by one's own
works and righteousness, these were not vows in accordance with the
will of God, but denials of the faith. And even though a man should
have made a vow in a spirit of piety, he placed himself at all
events, by his own will and act, under a restraint and yoke at
variance with the gospel and the liberty which faith in Christ
bestows. Luther went still farther, and declared that the chastity
enjoined upon the monk was only possible if he possessed the special
gift of continence spoken of by St. Paul. How dare a man make a vow
to God, which God must first endue him with the power to keep? A
man, therefore, in vowing chastity, makes a vow which it is not
really possible for him to keep, whilst true chastity is made
possible for him by God in the married life which he condemns. These
vows, accordingly, are radically vicious and displeasing to God, and
cease to be binding on a Christian who has been made free in faith,
and has recognised the true will of God.

Personally concerned as Luther was, as an Augustine monk himself, in
these questions which he discussed, he treated the liberty, which
inwardly he knew himself to possess, as quietly and coolly as
possible. On receiving the news from Wittenberg, he wrote to
Spalatin, 'Good Heaven! our Wittenbergers will allow even the monks
to have wives, but they shall not force me to take one.' And he asks
Melancthon jokingly, if he was going to revenge himself upon him for
having helped him to get a wife; he would know well enough how to
guard against that.

At Wittenberg there was great excitement, particularly on account of
the mass. In the Augustinian convent there, the majority of the
monks held with Zwilling; they wished to celebrate the sacrament of
the Lord's Supper in strict accordance with the institution of
Christ. Their prior, Conrad Held, took the opposite side, and
adhered to the ancient usage. Justus Jonas, the provost, expressed
his views with equal ardour in the convent church attached to the
university, and met with violent opposition from other members of
the foundation. A committee, composed of deputies from the
university and chapter of canons, from whom the Elector in October
demanded a formal opinion on the subject, expressed by their
majority the same view, and requested the Elector himself to abolish
the abuse of the mass. But Frederick utterly rejected the idea of
decreeing on his own authority innovations which would constitute a
deviation from the great Christian Catholic Church, more especially
as opinions were not agreed on them even at Wittenberg. He would do
no more than give free scope and protection to the new testimony of
biblical truth, until it should be properly sifted by the Church. In
the church of the Augustinian convent, the mass and the Lord's
Supper were now both suspended.

Men set to work now in earnest to give effect to the new principles
applied to monachism. Thirteen Augustine monks, about a third of the
then inmates of the convent at Wittenberg, quitted that convent
early in November, and cast away their cowls. Some of them took up
at once a civil trade or handicraft. This step increased the growing
feeling of hostility to the monks among the students and inhabitants
of the town. All kinds of enormities ensued: monks were mocked at in
the streets; the convents were threatened; and even the service of
the mass was disturbed by rioters who forced their way into the
parish church.

Meanwhile Luther went on, in the quietness of his seclusion, to
teach the Christian truth about vows and masses, to explain and
establish his newly-acquired knowledge and convictions, and to
prepare by that means the way of ultimate reform. He composed a
tract, in Latin and German, 'On the Abuse of Masses,' and another,
in Latin, 'On Monastic Vows.' The latter he dedicated to his father,
taking note of his protest against his entering the convent, and
telling him with joy that he was now a free man, a monk, and yet no
longer a monk. As for his brethren's desertion of the convent,
however, he disapproved the manner of it. They could, and should,
have parted in peace and amity, not as they did, in a tumult. These
two works he completed in November, and sent them to Spalatin, to
have them printed at Wittenberg.

In this manner Luther occupied himself from the summer to the
winter, continuing all the while his biblical studies and the
composition of his Church-Postills. But he was also preparing to
deal a heavy blow at the Cardinal Albert. This prelate had abstained
as yet, with great caution, from taking any stringent measures to
prevent the spread of Lutheran preaching in his diocese. But he was
in want of money. To supply this want, he published a work, giving
news of a precious relic, which he had placed for view at Halle, his
town, and inviting pilgrimages to see it. A multitude of other rich
and wondrous relics had been collected there; not only heaps of
bones and entire corpses of saints, with a portion of the body of
the patriarch Isaac, but also pieces of the manna, as it had fallen
from heaven in the desert, little bits of the burning bush of Moses,
jars from the wedding at Cana, and some of the wine into which Jesus
there had changed the water, thorns from the Saviour's crown, one of
the stones with which Stephen was stoned, and a multitude of other,
in all nearly 9,000, relics. Whoever should attend with devotion at
the exhibition of these sacred treasures in the Collegiate Church at
Halle, and should give a pious alms to the institution, was to
receive a 'surpassing' indulgence. The first exhibition of this kind
took place about the beginning of September. Albert also had not
scrupled to cause one of the priests who wished to marry to be
imprisoned, though it was notorious how he himself made up for his
celibacy by his loose living.

Luther now, as he wrote to Spalatin on October 7, 1521, could not
restrain himself any longer from breaking out, in private and in
public, against his 'Idol of indulgences' and his scandalous
whoredoms. He took no thought of the fact that his own pious
Elector, only a few years before, had arranged a similar, though
less showy exhibition of relics at the convent church at Wittenberg,
and was thus indirectly assailed by reproaches now no longer
deserved. By the end of the month Luther had a pamphlet ready for
publication. But an attack of such a kind on a magnate like Albert,
the great prince of the Empire, Elector of Mayence, and brother of
the Elector of Brandenburg, was not to Frederick's taste, and he
informed Luther, through Spalatin that he forbade it. He would not
sanction anything, he said, which might disturb the public peace.
Luther told Spalatin, in his reply, that he had never read a more
disagreeable letter than Frederick's. 'I will not put up with it,'
he indignantly broke out; 'I will rather lose you and the prince
himself, and every living being. If I have stood up against the
Pope, why should I yield to his creature?' He wished only to show
his pamphlet first to Melancthon, and submit a few alterations in it
to the judgment of his friend. For this purpose he sent it to
Spalatin, requesting him to forward it. Then, on December 1, he
wrote a letter to Albert himself. Its tone and contents indicate
pretty plainly what the pamphlet itself contained. In clear vigorous
German, and without any circumlocution, he submits to the Cardinal
his 'humble request,' to abstain from corrupting the poor people,
and not to show himself a wolf in bishop's clothing. He must surely
know by this time that indulgences were sheer knavery and trickery.
He was not to imagine that Luther was dead: Luther would trust
cheerfully in God, and carry on a game with the Cardinal of Mayence,
of which not many people were yet aware. As for the priests who had
wished to marry, he warned the Archbishop that a cry would be raised
from the gospel about it; and the bishops would learn that they had
better first pluck out the beam from their own eyes, and drive their
own mistresses away. Luther concluded by giving him fourteen days
for a 'proper' answer; otherwise, when that time expired, he would
immediately publish his pamphlet on 'The Idol at Halle.' All this
while, the news from Wittenberg kept Luther in a state of constant
anxiety. The distance and the difficulty of correspondence had
become quite insupportable. A few days after his letter of December
1, he suddenly re-appeared there among his friends. In secret, and
accompanied only by a servant, he had gone thither on horseback in
his knight's dress. He stayed there for three days with Amsdorf.
Only his most intimate friends were allowed to know of his arrival.
His meeting with them again gave him, as he wrote to Spalatin, the
keenest pleasure and enjoyment. But it was a bitter sorrow to hear
that Spalatin would not look at, or listen to, his pamphlet against
Albert, nor his tracts on masses and monastic vows, but had kept
them back. What his friends now told him of their efforts and
labours he approved of, and he wished them strength from above to
persevere. But he had heard already, when on his way, of fresh
outrages committed by some of the townspeople and students against
the priests and monks, and henceforth he deemed it his nearest duty
to warn them publicly against such acts of violence and disorder.

CHAPTER II.

LUTHER'S FURTHER SOJOURN AT THE WARTBURG, AND HIS RETURN TO
WITTENBERG, 1522.

In secret, as he had first gone there, Luther returned to the
Wartburg, and now set to work with his 'True Admonition for all
Christians to abstain from turbulence and rebellion.' He had before
his eyes the danger of an insurrection, involving the lives of all
the priests and monks who opposed reform, and one in which the
common people, in revenge for their many grievances, might fall to
laying about them with clubs and flails, as the 'Karsthans'
threatened. To the princes, magistrates, and nobles, he had already
addressed a demand to put a stop to the corruption of the Church and
the tyranny of the Pope. Of the civil authorities and the nobility,
he says now that 'they ought to do this, in duty to their ordinary
position and power, every prince and lord on his own territory; for
what is brought about by the exercise of ordinary power is not to be
accounted turbulence.' At the same time, to the masses and to
individuals he plainly prohibits a rising by force. Turbulence was
the usurpation of justice, and revenge, which God would not suffer,
for He said, 'Revenge is Mine.' All turbulence, he said, was wrong,
however good might be the cause, and only made bad worse. As for the
magistrates, he would not have them kill the priests, as once Moses
and Elias had done to the worshippers of idols; they were simply to
forbid them from acting contrary to the gospel. Words would do more
than was enough with them, so there was no need of hewing and
stabbing. We have seen how emphatically Luther expressed himself to
the same effect before he went to Worms. The Apostle's words that
the Lord should consume the Antichrist with the Spirit of His Mouth,
were to be fulfilled, according to Luther, in the words of gospel
preaching. It was his own previous experience that had taught him to
rely with such lofty confidence on the simple Word; he had done more
injury with it alone to the Pope, and the priests and monks, than
all the emperors and princes had ever done with all their power. He
still looked forward steadfastly to the approach of the Last Day,
when Christ by His coming should utterly destroy the Pope, whose
iniquity the Word had exposed. As he had done formerly in his
treatise on Christian liberty, and had now good reason to do with
the Wittenbergers, he exhorts men to a loving and merciful regard to
their weaker brethren, whose consciences were still ensnared by the
old ordinances respecting fasting and masses. They ought not to be
taken unawares, but instructed kindly and, if unable to agree at
once, dealt with patiently. 'The wolves,' he says, 'cannot be
treated too severely, nor the tender sheep too gently.'

Luther's works on the mass and monastic vows were now actually in
print. Cardinal Albert, however, gave the answer demanded by Luther,
in a short letter of December 21. He assured him that the subject of
his complaint had been removed; that as to himself, he did not deny
that he was a miserable sinner, the very filth of the earth, as bad
as anyone. Christian chastisement he could well endure; he looked to
God for grace and strength, to live according to His will. So
abjectly did this magnate quail before the Word, with which Luther
threatened to expose his doings. He must no doubt have been ashamed
of his traffic in indulgences before all his Humanist friends, and
especially Erasmus; and must have expected that the other scandals
with which Luther charged him would be laid bare without mercy or
regard. At the same time we see in all this, how perfectly free from
reproach in this matter of morality must Luther have been, not only
in his own conscience, but also in the eyes of Albert. Luther, on
receiving this letter, doubted indeed the sincerity of its
professions, and even abstained from acknowledging it. But he now
finally abandoned, nevertheless, the publication of the pamphlet,
intended to expose him, which had hitherto been hindered by the
Elector.

But the most important task that Luther now undertook, and in which
he persevered with steadfast devotion during his further stay at the
Wartburg, was one of a peaceful character, the most beautiful fruit
of his seclusion, the noblest gift that he has bequeathed to his
countrymen. This was his translation of the Bible--first of the New
Testament. 'Our brethren demand it of me,' he wrote to Lange shortly
after his return from Wittenberg. And in these words the wish was
evidently expressed, or else laid to heart anew. The Bible, it is
true, had been translated into German before Luther's time, but in a
clumsy idiom that sounded foreign to the people, and not, like
Luther's version, from the original text, but from the Latin
translation used in the churches. Luther declared that no one could
speak German of this outlandish kind, 'but,' he said, 'one has to
ask the mother in her home, the children in the street, the common
man in the market-place, and look at their mouths to see how they
speak, and thence interpret it to oneself, and so make them
understand. I have often laboured to do this, but have not always
succeeded or hit the meaning.' None the less strictly and faithfully
did he seek to adhere to the spirit of the text, and, where
necessary, even to the letter. Such an interpretation, he said,
required a 'truly devout, faithful, diligent, fearful, Christian,
learned, experienced, and practised heart.' Penetrated himself with
the substance and spirit of the Scriptures, he understood how to
combine in his language, as if by intuition, a dignified tone and a
national character. So hard did he work, that he finished the New
Testament at the Wartburg in a few months; he then wished to revise
it with the help of Melancthon.

Meanwhile, affairs at Wittenberg were assuming so serious an aspect
as to make Luther's apprehensions increase from day to day. The
question of monastic vows indeed was settled peaceably, and in a
manner such as Luther would have desired, by some resolutions (so
far as resolutions could settle it), passed by the Augustinian
brethren at a chapter held at Wittenberg by Link, the Vicar of the
Order. It was there resolved that free permission should be given to
leave the convent, but that those who preferred to adhere to the
monastic life should remain there in voluntary but strict
subordination to their superiors and to the established rules; some
of them should be employed in preaching the Word of God, others
should contribute by manual labour to the support of the
institution. Outside, however, among the people of Wittenberg,
Carlstadt, who had shortly before restrained even his own partisans
in regard to the question of the mass, and who was neither a regular
preacher in the town nor in the possession of any other office, now
pressed forward, by his sermons and writings, impetuously in the
van, and made hasty strides towards the furtherance of his misty
projects of reform. Anticipating a prohibition from the Elector, he
celebrated the Lord's Supper at Christmas in the new manner. Even
the usual vestments were discarded as idolatrous: Zwilling performed
the service in a student's gown. The people were enjoined to eat
meat and eggs on fast days; and confession was no longer held before
the Communion. Carlstadt went further, and denounced the pictures
and images in the churches; it was not enough to desist from
worshipping them, nor durst it be hinted that they served as books
for the instruction of laymen. God had plainly forbidden them; their
proper place was in the fire and not in God's house. Whilst the
town-council, at his instance, resolved to have the images removed
from the parish church, some of the populace stormed in, tore them
down, hewed them to pieces, and burned them.

Luther himself, even with regard to rites and ordinances which he
rejected altogether, always counselled moderation and patience
towards the weak. He could not believe that the great body of his
Wittenberg congregation were already ripe for such changes, or that
many conscientious but weaker brethren among them were not in need
of tender consideration. People might say that it was only a
question of time; well, he did not wish to delay genuine reform for
ever, merely to humour the minority. But it was precisely that those
members should have proper time allowed them, and every means taken
for their instruction and edification, that was to Luther a matter
of conscience. External matters, of which the other Reformers made
so much, such as eating on fast days, the taking with one's own
hands the bread and wine at the Communion, and so forth, he regarded
as trifles, the performance or non-performance of which in no way
affected the true liberty of the faithful, while grievous wrong was
done to the souls of the weaker brethren, if they were compelled to
do anything therein against their consciences. 'By acting thus,' he
says, 'you have made many consciences miserable; if they had to give
an account on their death-beds, or when troubled with temptation,
they would not for the life of them know why or how they had
offended.' Nay, he accuses a man of corrupting souls, who 'plunges'
them carelessly into practices that offend their consciences. 'You
wish,' he says, 'to serve God, and you don't know that you are the
forerunners of the devil. He has begun by attempting to dishonour
the Word; he has set you to work at that bit of folly, so that
meanwhile you may forget faith and love.' Thus Luther wrote in a
work intended for the Wittenbergers. Even the innovations with
regard to pictures and images he numbers among the 'trivial matters
which are not worth the sacrifice of faith and love.' Those which
represented truly Christian subjects he would preserve at all times,
and he valued them highly.

These Wittenberg Reformers, however, with all their desire to assert
the higher spiritual character of evangelical Christianity, still
remained devotees, in their peculiar 'spirit,' to the externals of
worship and, in regard to images, to the letter of the Old Testament
law. And yet their conception of the Christian spirit and of
Christian revelation produced results of another and still stranger
kind. Not only did they repudiate all titles and dignities conferred
by the university, on the plea that, in the words of Christ, no man
durst call himself Rabbi or master, but Carlstadt and Zwilling now
openly expressed their contempt of all human theology and biblical
learning. God, they said, has hid these things from the wise and
prudent, and has revealed them unto babes; the Spirit from above
must enlighten a man. Carlstadt went to simple burghers in their
houses, to have passages in the Bible explained to him. He and
Zwilling won over to their side the master of the boys' school in
the town, and the school was broken up. A new municipal
constitution, supported by the magistracy, made strange inroads on
the rights of the citizens and the domain of social life; a common
chest, containing the revenues of the Church, was utilised for
advancing money without interest to needy handicraftsmen, and making
loans to other townsmen at a low rate of interest. Meantime the
spiritual wants of the community were neglected, and in the
hospitals and prisons entirely overlooked.

Such was the direction here taken by the reform for which Luther's
preaching had prepared the way. And just at this time, at Christmas,
three fanatics came to Wittenberg from Zwickau, with the object of
taking part in the movement and furthering the work of God. These were
Nicholas Storch, a weaver, Mark Stubner, a former student at Wittenberg,
and another weaver, who were now zealously joined by the theologian
Martin Cellarius. They boasted of a direct revelation from God, of
prophetic visions, dreams, and familiar conversations with the Deity.
Compared with these pretensions, Scripture was a thing of small
importance in their eyes. They rejected infant baptism, as incapable
of imparting the Spirit. For communion and intercourse with God they
looked not to faith, which, as Luther taught, accepts submissively
what the Word of God reveals to the conscience and the heart, but to
a mystic process of self-abstraction from everything external, sensual,
and finite, until the soul becomes immovably centred in the one Divine
Being. This spirit, seemingly so elevated and pure, broke out
nevertheless into fanaticism of the wildest kind, by proclaiming and
demanding a general revolution, in which all the priests were to be
killed, all godless men destroyed, and the kingdom of God established.

These fanatical displays had begun at Zwickau, no doubt under
Bohemian influence, and were characterised by the ravings common to
the middle ages. Thomas Munzer, from Stolberg in the Harz country,
who was a preacher at one of the churches, took the lead; and he was
certainly the most important and most dangerous personage among
them. He accounted the civil authorities, with their rights, no more
as Christians than he did the clergy and the hierarchy; and began
already to prate of universal equality and communism. This novel and
exciting doctrine soon won adherents, and propagated the 'spirit of
revelation.' Already disturbances were brewing. But the magistrates
took vigorous and timely measures. Storch, Stubner, and Cellarius
fled to Wittenberg, while Munzer roamed about elsewhere in Germany.