Life of Luther by Julius Koestlin

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Whilst now the justices of the town of Halle were protesting against
this treatment of their fellow-townsman to the Archbishop, who
turned a deaf ear to their remonstrance, and Antony, the brother of
the murdered man, exerted himself in vain to vindicate his honour
and the rights of their family, Luther was drawn into the affair by
the fact that one of his guests, Ludwig Rabe, was threatened with
punishment by Albert, for expressions he let fall soon after the
deed was committed. Luther thereupon wrote several times to Albert
himself, and told him openly he was a murderer, and, for his
squandering of Church property, deserved a gallows ten times higher
than the Castle of Giebichenstein. He was restrained, however, from
taking further steps by the Elector of Brandenburg and other of
Albert's influential relatives, who appealed to John Frederick on
his behalf, whilst Albert sought to make a cheap compensation to the
family of the murdered man, or at least pretended to do so.

When, however, a young Humanist poetaster at Wittenberg, named
Lemnius--properly Lemchen--actually glorified the Archbishop in
verse, or, as Luther put it, 'made a saint of the devil,' and at the
same time vilified some men and women at Wittenberg, Luther read
aloud from the pulpit, in 1538, a short indictment, couched in the
plainest possible terms, against the shameless libeller, as also
against the Archbishop whom he glorified; and this indictment soon
appeared in print. And now he no longer refrained from taking up the
cause of Schonitz in a pamphlet of some length. When the Duke of
Prussia endeavoured once more in a friendly way to dissuade him from
his purpose, for the honour of the house of Brandenburg, he replied,
'Wicked sons have sprung from the noble race of David, and princes
ought not to disgrace themselves by unprincely vices.' In the
pamphlet to his opening he declared that a stone was lying upon his
heart which was called 'Deliver them that are drawn unto death, and
those that are ready to be slain' (Prov. xxiv. 11). He denounced the
contempt and denial of justice of which the Archbishop was guilty,
and at the same time boldly exposed the real objects of those
private expenses which the Archbishop, together with his servant,
had incurred, and of which the latter was naturally unable to give
an account--least of all, those that ministered to his carnal
appetites, such as his establishment at Morizburg in Halle. He
himself, says Luther, does not judge the Cardinal; he is simply the
bearer of the sentence pronounced by the great Judge in heaven. To
those who might perhaps have taken exception to his words he says,
'I sit here at Wittenberg, and ask my most gracious lord the Elector
for no further favour or protection than what is given to all
alike.' Albert found it more prudent to keep silent.

But what disturbed and grieved Luther more than anything else during
this, the closing chapter of his life, was the bitter experience he
had yet to make in his own religious community, nay, amidst his most
intimate companions and friends.

The way of life--in other words, the way of saving faith--was now
rediscovered and clearly brought to light; and, as Luther said, a
truly moral life should be the consequence. And great pains were
taken to stamp this new truth clearly and distinctly on doctrine,
and to guard against new errors and perversions. Differences,
however, now arose among those who had hitherto worked so loyally
together for the establishment of the faith--a beginning of those
doctrinal disputes which after Luther's death became so disastrous
to his Church. Again and again Luther bitterly complained of the
moral wrongs and scandals which proved that the faith, however
widely its confession had spread through Germany, was far from
living in its purity and strength in the hearts of men, and bearing
the expected fruit. Only his own conviction, his own faith was never
shaken by this result. It must needs be, as Christ Himself had said,
that offences must come; and, in the words of St. Paul (1 Cor. xi.
19), 'there must be also heresies,' and false teachers and deceivers
must arise.

[Illustration: Fig. 44.--AGRICOLA. (From a miniature portrait by
Cranach, in the University Album at Wittenberg, 1531.)]

We have seen above how cordially Luther welcomed Agricola back at
Wittenberg after throwing up his appointment at Eisleben. He
obtained for him from the Elector in 1537 an ample salary, to enable
him to fill the long-coveted office of teacher at the university,
and be a preacher as well. It soon became known that Agricola
persisted in maintaining that doctrine of repentance in defence of
which he had attacked Melancthon at the first visitation of churches
in the Saxon Electorate. He had been accused of this at Eisleben,
and Count Albert of Mansfeld, whose service he had quitted with
rudeness and discontent, denounced him as a restless and dangerous
fellow. And now at Wittenberg also Agricola had some sermons
printed, and some theses circulated, embodying a statement of his
peculiar doctrine. Luther considered it his duty to refute these,
and he did so from the pulpit, but without naming their author.

The proclamation of God's law, so Agricola now taught, was no
necessary part of Christianity, as such, nor of the way of salvation
prepared and revealed by Christ. The Gospel of the Son of God, our
Saviour, this alone should be proclaimed, and operate in touching
the hearts of men and exposing the true character of their sins as
sinfulness against the Son of God. In this way he sought to give
full effect to the fundamental evangelical doctrine, that the grace
of God alone had power to save through the joyful message of Christ.
The personal vanity, however, which was the chief weakness of this
gifted, intellectual, and fairly eloquent man, and which was now
increased by the dissatisfaction it had caused at Eisleben,
displayed itself further in the assertion of his eccentricities of
dogma. Moreover, he was far from clear in his first principles, and
while maintaining his tenets he was unwilling to stake too much on
his own account, and yet refused actually to abandon them.

He came at first to an understanding with Luther by offering an
explanation which the latter deemed satisfactory, but he then
proceeded to revert to his peculiar tenets in a new publication.
Luther now launched a sharp reply against these antinomian theses,
as well as against others, which went much further, and whose origin
is unknown. He found wanting in Agricola that earnest moral
appreciation of the law, and of the moral demands made of us by God,
whereby the heart of the sinner, as he himself had experienced, must
first be bruised and broken, and thus opened to receive the word of
grace, before that word can truly renew, revive, and sanctify it.
But together with Agricola's tenets he then placed the others,
betraying an equally frivolous estimate of the real nature of those
demands and of the duties they entailed, as evidence of one tendency
and one character, since Agricola, indeed, taught like them, that
the good willed by God in His Commandments was fulfilled in
Christians by the simple fact of their belief in Christ, and as the
fruit of His word of grace. Thus it came about that this tendency
which Luther found represented in Agricola, stood out before him in
all its compass and with its extremest and most alarming
consequences, and called forth the boldest exercise of his zeal. It
grieved him sorely, nevertheless, to have to enter into this dispute
with his old friend. 'God knows,' he said, 'what trials this
business has prepared for me; I shall have died of sheer anxiety
before I have brought my theses against him (Agricola) to the
light.'

At the instance, however, of the Elector, who valued Agricola,
another reconciliation was brought about. Agricola humbled himself;
he even authorised his great opponent to draw up a retractation in
his name, and Luther did this in a manner very damaging to Agricola,
in a letter to his former colleague and opponent at Eisleben, Caspar
Guttel. Agricola thereupon received a place in the newly-formed
consistory. But even now he could not refrain from fresh utterances
which betrayed his old opinions. Luther's confidence in him was thus
destroyed for ever: he spoke with indignation, pain, and scorn of
'Grikel (Agricola), the false man.' The latter at length complained
to the Elector against Luther for having unjustly aspersed him. The
Elector testified to him his displeasure; Luther gave a sharp answer
to the charge, and his prince made further inquiries into the matter
of complaint. Agricola finally snatched at a means of escape offered
by his summons to Berlin, whither he had been called as a preacher
of distinction by the Elector Joachim II., who was a convert to the
Reformation. In August 1540 he left Wittenberg. He sent thither from
Berlin another and fully satisfactory retractation in order to
retain his official appointment. But Luther's friendship with him
was broken for ever.

In another quarter also Melancthon had been charged with deviating
in certain statements from the path of right doctrine.

We know already how his anxiety about the dangers caused by the
separation from the great Catholic Church seemed to tempt him to
indulge in questionable concessions, and how it was Luther himself,
with a disposition so different to Melancthon's, who nevertheless
held firmly to his trust in his friend and fellow-labourer,
particularly during the Diet of Augsburg. And, indeed, subsequent
events brought this tendency to concession more fully into notice.

Certain peculiarities now asserted themselves in Melancthon's
independent opinions, with regard both to theology and practical
life, which distinguished his mode of teaching from that of Luther.
He who, again and again, in the Augsburg Confession and the Apology,
as also in the system of evangelical theology which in his 'Loci
Communes' he was the first to elaborate, had expounded with full and
active conviction the fundamental evangelical truth of a justifying
and saving Faith, was anxious also--more so, even, than many strict
confessors of that doctrine--to have the whole field of moral
improvement and the fruits of morality which were necessary to
preserve that faith, estimated at their proper value. And further,
with respect to God's will and the operation of His grace, whereby
alone the sinner could obtain inward conversion and faith, he wished
to make this depend entirely on man's own will and choice, so that
the blame might not appear to lie with God if the call to salvation
remained fruitless, and a temptation thereby be offered to many to
indulge in carelessness or despondency. In addition to this, he
differed unmistakably from Luther in his doctrine of the Sacrament.
For, though it was he who at Augsburg in 1530 had flatly rejected
the Zwinglians, still his historical researches impressed him with
the belief, that, in reality, as indeed the Zwinglians maintained,
not Augustine himself, among the ancients, had taught the Real
Bodily Presence after the manner of Luther, or even of Roman
Catholicism; and his own theological opinion induced him at least to
satisfy himself with more or less obscure propositions about the
communion of the Saviour Who died for us with the guests at His
table, without any fixed or clear declarations about the
substantiality of the Body. This appears, for instance, in his 'Loci
Communes,' although in the formula of the Wittenberg Concord of 1536
he went farther, together with Luther.

On the first point above-mentioned, a priest named Cordatus, a
strict adherent of Luther, had raised a protest against him in 1536.
But the opponent whom Melancthon chiefly feared in this respect was
the theologian Amsdorf, who was not only an old familiar friend of
Luther, but the especial guardian, both then and still more after
Luther's death, of Lutheran orthodoxy. But Luther himself was
anxious to avoid, even in this matter, any rupture or discord with
Melancthon. He took great pains to reconcile the difference, and
knew also how to keep silence, though without deviating from his own
strict standpoint, or being able to overlook the peculiarity of his
friend's teaching, conspicuously apparent as it was in the new
edition of his book.

We are reminded by this, moreover, how Luther, during his illness at
Schmalkald in 1537, made no secret of his fear of a division
breaking out at Wittenberg after his death.

CHAPTER V.

LUTHER AND THE PROGRESS AND INTERNAL TROUBLES OF PROTESTANTISM.
1538--1541.

In the great affairs of the Church, amid the threats of his enemies
and in all his dealings with them, Luther continued from day to day
to trust quietly in God, as the Guider of events, Who suffers none
to forestall His designs, and puts to shame and rebuke the
inventions of man. His hope of external peace had hitherto been
fulfilled beyond all expectation. And it had been permitted him to
see the Reformation gain strength and make further progress in the
German Empire. Indeed, it seemed possible that a union might be
effected with those Catholics who had been impressed with the
evangelical doctrine of salvation. These were results accomplished
by the inward power of God's Word, as hitherto preached to the
people, under a Divine and marvellously favourable dispensation of
outer relations and events--fruits as unexpected as they were
gratifying to Luther. Great plans or projects of his own, however,
were still far from his thoughts; nor even did the details of this
historical development demand such activity on his part as he had
shown in the earlier years of the movement. And yet there was no
lack of discord, difficulty, and trouble within the pale of the new
Church and amongst its members; prospects of further, and possibly
much more serious dangers to be encountered; thoughts of sadness and
disquietude to vex the soul of the Reformer, now aged, suffering,
and weary. The goal of his hopes had ever been, and still remained,
not indeed a victory to be gradually achieved for his cause, perhaps
even in his own lifetime, by the course of ecclesiastical and
political changes and events, but the end which the Lord Himself,
according to His promises, would make of the whole wicked world, and
the Hereafter whither he was ever waiting to be summoned.

Since the Schmalkaldic allies had rejected the Emperor with his
invitation to a Council, the Romish zealots might well hope that
Charles at length would prepare to use force against them. He was
not yet able to bring his quarrel with King Francis to a final
termination; but, nevertheless, he concluded a truce with him in
1538 for ten years, while at the same time his vice-chancellor Held
contrived to effect a union of Roman Catholic princes in Germany in
opposition to the Schmalkaldic League. This union was joined, in
addition to Austria, Bavaria, and George of Saxony, by Duke Henry of
Brunswick, the bitter enemy of the Landgrave Philip. Already in the
spring of that year people at Wittenberg talked of operations on a
large scale ostensibly directed against the Turks, but in reality
against the Protestants. Or at least it was feared that the imperial
army, in the event of its defeating the Turks, might, as Luther
expressed it, turn their spears against the Evangelical party. In
this respect Luther had no fears; he did not believe in a victory
over the Turks, and, even in that case, his opinion was that the
imperial troops would no more submit to be made the instruments of
such a policy than they had done some years before, after their
victory at Vienna. Most earnestly he exhorted the Elector, for his
part at least, to do his duty again in the war against the Turks,
for the sake of his Fatherland and the poor oppressed people. On the
other hand, the right of the Protestant States to resist the
Emperor, if it came to a war of religion, was one which he now
asserted without scruple or hesitation. The Emperor, he said, in
such a war would not be Emperor at all, but merely a soldier of the
Pope. He appealed to the fact that once among the people of Israel
pious and godly men had risen up against their sovereign; and the
German princes had additional rights over their Emperor, by virtue
of their constitution. Finally, he reasoned from the law of nature
itself, that a father was bound to protect his wife and children
from open murder; and he likened the Emperor, who usurped a power
notoriously illegal, to a murderer. For the rest, he declared, in a
publication exhorting the Evangelical clergy to pray for peace, that
as to whether the Papists chose to carry out their designs or not he
was perfectly indifferent, in case God did not will to work a
miracle. His only fear was lest a war might arise, if they did so,
which would never end, and would be the total ruin of Germany.

But the Emperor was less zealous and more cautious than his
vice-chancellor. He sent another representative to Germany, with
instructions to prevent an outbreak of hostilities. This envoy, in
the course of some negotiations conducted at Frankfort in April
1539, agreed to an understanding by which the ecclesiastical
law-suits hitherto instituted in the Imperial Chamber against the
Protestants were suspended, and a number of chosen theologians of
piety and laymen were to 'arrange a praiseworthy union of
Christians' at an assembly of the German Estates.

On April 17, in the midst of these transactions, Duke George of
Saxony died after a short illness. His country passed to his brother
Henry, who in his own smaller territory of Freiburg had for some
years, much to the grief of George, established the Evangelical form
of worship, and given shelter to the heretics banished by his
brother. The latter had left no male issue to succeed him. He had
lost two sons in boyhood; and his son John, who held the same
opinions as himself, had died two years ago, when quite a young man,
without leaving any children. His last remaining son Frederick was
of weak intellect, but had nevertheless been married after his
brother's death, and died a few weeks later. He was soon followed by
his unhappy father and sovereign. Luther said of him that he had
gone to everlasting fire, though he would have wished him life and
conversion. To us his end appears the more tragic because we cannot
but acknowledge the honest zeal with which, from his own point of
view, he endeavoured to serve God, and would willingly even have
effected a reform in the Church; whilst, in spite of all his
severity against heretics, he never suffered himself to be hurried
into deeds of coarse violence and cruelty. There are extant prayers
and religious discourses, composed and written down by himself. He
read the Bible, and expressed a wish, when Luther's translation
appeared, that 'the monk would put the whole Bible into German, and
then go about his business.'

Thus the old and constantly revived quarrel between Luther and the
Duke came at length to an end. The Reformation was immediately
introduced throughout the duchy by the appointment of Evangelical
clergy, by changes in public worship, and by a visitation of
churches after the example of the one in Electoral Saxony. When
Henry was solemnly acknowledged sovereign at Leipzig, he invited
Luther and Jonas to be present. On the afternoon of Whitsunday, May
24, 1539, Luther preached a sermon in the court chapel of that
Castle of Pleissenburg, where he had once disputed before George
with Eck, and on the following afternoon he preached in one of the
churches of the town, not venturing to do so in the morning on
account of his weak state of health. He now proclaimed aloud, in his
sermon on the Gospel for Whitsunday, that the Church of Christ was
not there, where men were madly crying 'Church! Church!' without the
Word of God, nor was it with the Pope, the cardinals, and the
bishops; but there, and there only, where Christ was loved and His
Word was kept, and where accordingly He dwelt in the souls of men.
He refrained from any special reference to the state of things
hitherto existing at Leipzig and in the duchy, or to the change
brought about by God. But we call to mind the words he had spoken in
1532, 'Who knows what God will do before ten years are over?' Very
soon, indeed, the magnates of the Saxon court and the nobility,
though accepting the reformed faith of their new sovereign, gave
occasion to Luther for bitter complaints of their rapacity, their
indifference to religion, and their improper and tyrannical
usurpations on the territory of the Church.

In addition to the Saxon duchy, the Electorate of Brandenburg was
also about to go over to Protestantism. The Elector Joachim I.
adhered so strictly to the ancient Church, that his wife Elizabeth,
who was evangelically inclined, had fled to Saxony, where she became
an intimate friend of Luther's household. But on his death in 1535,
his younger son John, together with his territory, the 'Neumark,'
joined at once the Schmalkaldic allies. And now, after longer
consideration, his elder brother also, Joachim II.--a man of quieter
disposition and more attached to ancient ways--took the decisive
step, after an agreement with his Estates and the territorial
bishop, Jagow. On November 1, 1539, he received from the latter
publicly the Sacrament in both kinds.

Under these circumstances the Emperor resolved to give effect to the
essential part of the Frankfort agreement. He summoned a meeting at
Spire 'for the purpose of so arranging matters that the wearisome
dissension in religion might be reconciled in a Christian manner.'
In consequence of a pestilence which appeared at Spire, the assembly
was removed to Hagenau. Here it was actually held in June 1540.

Meanwhile, the most vigorous champion of Protestantism, the
Landgrave Philip, took a step which was calculated to damage the
position of the Evangelical Church and to embarrass its adherents
more than anything which their enemies could possibly attempt.
Philip, in his youth (1523) had taken to wife a daughter of Duke
George of Saxony, but soon repented of his ill-considered resolve,
on the ground that she was of an unamiable disposition and was
afflicted with bodily infirmities, and accordingly proceeded to look
elsewhere for a mistress, after the fashion only too common at that
time with emperors and princes, but scarcely commented upon in their
case. The earnest remonstrances made to him on religious grounds
against this step had the effect of causing him certain prickings of
conscience; he had not ventured on that account, as he now
complained, to present himself at the Lord's table, with one single
exception, since the Peasants' War. But his conscience was not
strong enough to make him give up his evil ways. At last the Bible,
which he read industriously, seemed to him to provide a means of
outlet from his difficulty. He sheltered himself, as the Anabaptist
fanatics had done before him, behind the Old Testament precedent of
Abraham and other godly men, to whom it had been permitted to have
more than one wife, and pleaded, moreover, that the New Testament
contained no prohibition of polygamy. With all the energy and
stubbornness of his nature, he fastened on these notions and clung
to them, when, at the house of his sister, the Duchess Elizabeth, at
Rochlitz, he chanced to meet and fall in love with a lady named
Margaret von der Saal. She refused to be his except by marriage. Her
mother even demanded of him that Luther, Butzer, and Melancthon, or
at least two of them, together with an envoy of the Elector and the
Duke of Saxony, should be present as witnesses at the marriage.
Philip himself found the consent of these divines and of his most
distinguished ally, John Frederick, indispensable. He succeeded
first of all in gaining over the versatile Butzer, and sent him in
December 1539, on this errand, to Wittenberg.

He appealed to the strait that he was in, no longer able with a good
conscience to go to war or to punish crime, and also to the
testimony of Scripture, adding, very truly, that the Emperor and the
world were quite willing to permit both him and anyone else to live
in open immorality. Thus, he said, they were forbidding what God
allowed, and winking at what He prohibited. In other respects,
indeed, a double marriage was not a thing unheard of even by the
Christendom of those days. It was said, for instance, of the
Christian Emperor of Rome, Valentinian II., to whose case Philip
himself appealed, that he had been permitted to contract a marriage
of that kind. To the Pope was ascribed the power to grant the
necessary dispensation.

On December 10 Butzer brought back to the Landgrave from Wittenberg
an opinion of Luther and Melancthon. They told him in decided terms
that it was in accordance with creation itself, and recognised as
such by Jesus, 'that a man was not to have more than one wife;' and
they, the preachers of God's Word, were commanded to regulate
marriage and all human things 'in accordance with their original and
Divine institution, and to adhere thereto as closely as possible,
while at the same time avoiding to their utmost all cause of pain or
annoyance.' They urgently exhorted him not to regard incontinence,
as did the world, in the light of a trifling offence, and
represented to him plainly that if he refused to resist his evil
inclinations, he would not mend matters by taking a second wife. But
with all this exhortation and warning, they confessed themselves
bound to admit that 'what was allowed in respect of marriage by the
law of Moses was not actually forbidden in the gospel;' thereby
maintaining, in point of fact, that an original ordinance in the
Church must be adhered to as the rule, but nevertheless admitting
the possibility of a dispensation under very strong and exceptional
circumstances. They did not say that such a dispensation was
applicable to the case of Philip; they only wished him earnestly to
reconsider the matter with his own conscience. In the event,
however, of his keeping to his resolve, they would not refuse him
the benefit of a dispensation, and only required that the matter
should be kept private, on account of the scandal and possible abuse
it would occasion if generally known.