Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  “Conscience’s greatest consolation,” he also says, according to the same notes, “is simply the Lord Christ,” and he proceeds to describe in detail this consolation in language of much power, agreeably with his doctrine of Justification. He, however, concludes: “But I cannot grasp this consoling doctrine, I can neither learn it nor bear it in mind.”

  “I am very wretched owing to the weakness of my faith; hardly can I find any comfort in the death and resurrection of Christ, or in the article of the forgiveness of sins.... I cannot succeed in laying hold on the essential treasure, viz. the free forgiveness of sins.”

  “It is a difficult matter to spring straight from my sins to the righteousness of Christ, and to be as certain that Christ’s righteousness is mine as I am that my own body is mine.... I am astonished that I cannot learn this doctrine.”

  In a passage already quoted Luther rightly described the task he assigned to grace and faith as something “which affrights a man,” for which reason it is “hard for him to believe”; he himself had often, so to speak, to fight his way out of hell, “but it costs much before one obtains consolation.”

  Such statements we can well understand if we put ourselves in his place. The effects he ascribed to fiducial faith were so difficult of attainment and so opposed to man’s natural disposition, that never-ending uncertainty was the result, both in his own case and in that of many others. Moreover, he, or rather his peculiar interpretation of Holy Scripture, was the only guarantee of his doctrine, whereas the Catholic Church took her stand upon the broad and firm basis of a settled, traditional interpretation, and traced back her teaching to an authority instituted by God and equipped with infallibility. In his “temptations of faith,” Luther clung to the most varied arguments, dwelling at one time on the fact of his election, at another on the depravity of his opponents, now on the malice of the devil sent to oppose him, now on the supposed advantages of his doctrine, as for instance, that it gave all the honour to God alone and made an end of everything human, even of free will: “Should Satan take advantage of this and ally himself with the flesh and with reason, then conscience becomes affrighted and despairs, unless you resolutely enter into yourself and say: Even should Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, St. Peter, Paul, John, nay, an angel from heaven, teach otherwise, yet I know for a certainty that what I teach is not human but divine, i.e. that I ascribe all to God and nothing to man.”

  “I do not understand it, I am unable to believe ... I cannot believe and yet I teach others. I know that it is right and yet believe it I cannot. Sometimes I think: You teach the truth, for you have the office and vocation, you are of assistance to many and glorify Christ; for we do not preach Aristotle or Cæsar, but Jesus Christ. But when I consider my weakness, how I eat and drink and am considered a merry fellow, then I begin to doubt. Alas, if one could only believe!”

  “Heretics believe themselves to be holy. I find not a scrap of holiness in myself, but only great weakness. As soon as I am assailed by temptation I understand the Spirit, but nevertheless the flesh resists. [That is] idolatry against the first table [of the law]. Gladly would I be formally just, but I am not conscious of being so.”

  And Pomeranus replied: “Neither am I conscious of it, Herr Doctor.”

  Before passing on to some of Luther’s statements concerning the consonance of his life with faith, we may remark that there is no lack of creditable passages in his writings on the conforming of ethics to faith. Although here our task is not to depict in its entirety the morality of Luther and his doctrine, but merely to furnish an historical answer to the question whether there existed in him elements which rendered his claim to a higher mission incredible, still we must not forget his many praiseworthy exhortations to virtue, intended, moreover, not merely for others, but also for himself.

  That the devil must be resisted and that his tricks and temptations lead to what is evil, has been insisted upon by few preachers so frequently as by Luther, who in almost every address, every chapter of his works, and every letter treats of the sinister power of the devil. Another favourite, more positive theme of his discourses, whether to the members of his household or to the larger circle of the public, was the domestic virtues and the cheerful carrying out of the duties of one’s calling. He was also fond, in the sermons he was so indefatigable in preaching, of bringing home to those oppressed with the burden of life’s troubles the consolation of certain evangelical truths, and of breaking the bread of the Word to the little ones and the unlearned. With the utmost earnestness he sought to awaken trust in God, resignation to His Providence, hope in His Mercy and Bounty and the confession of our own weakness. One idea on which he was particularly fond of lingering, was, that we must pray because we depend entirely upon God, and that we must put aside all confidence in ourselves in order that we may be filled with His Grace.

  Unfortunately such thoughts too often brought him back to his own pet views of man’s passivity and absence of free will and the all-effecting power of God. “The game is always won,” he cries, “and if it is won there is no longer any pain or trouble more; there is no need to struggle and fight, for all has already been accomplished.” “Christ, the Conqueror, has done all, so that there is nothing left for us to do, to root out sin, to slay the devil or to overcome death; they all have been trampled to the ground.... The doing was not, however, our work.”— “The Christian’s work is to sleep and do nothing”; thus does he sum up in one of his sermons the exhortations he had previously given to rest altogether on the merits of Christ; even should a man “fall into sin and be up to the neck in it, let him remember that Christ is no taker, but a most gracious giver”; this is “a very sweet and cheering doctrine; others, it is true, teach that you must do so much for sin, must live in this or that way, since God must be paid to the last farthing before you can appear before Him. Such people make of God a torturer and taskmaster.” After having recommended prayer he inveighs against what he calls its abuse: “They say: I will pray until God gives me His Grace; but nothing comes of it, because God says to them: You cannot and never will be able to do anything; but I shall do everything.” “Everything through Christ: through works, nothing whatever.”

  Luther has some remarkable admissions to make, particularly in his private utterances, concerning the manner in which he himself and his chosen circle lived their faith.

  “I cannot express in words what great pains I took in the Papacy to be righteous. Now, however, I have ceased entirely to be careful, because I have come to the insight and belief that another has become righteous before God in my stead.”

  “My doctrine stands whatever [my] life may be.”

  “Let us stick to the true Word that the seat of Moses may be ours. Even should our manner of life not be altogether polished and perfect, yet God is merciful; the laity, however, hate us.”

  “Neither would it be a good thing were we to do all that God commands, for in that case He would be cheated of His Godhead, and the Our Father, faith, the article of the forgiveness of sins, etc., would all go to ruin. God would be made a liar. He would no longer be the one and only truth, and every man would not be a liar [as Scripture says]. Should any man say: ‘If this is so, God will be but little served on earth’ [I reply]: He is accustomed to that; He wills to be, and is, a God of great mercy.”

  “I want to hand over a downright sinner to the Judgment Seat of our Lord God; for though I myself may not have actually been guilty of adultery, still that has not been for lack of good-will.” — The latter phrase was a saying of the populace, and does not in the least mean that he ever really had the intention of committing the sin.

  “I confess of myself,” he says in a sermon in 1532, “and doubtless others must admit the same [of themselves], that I lack the diligence and earnestness of which really I ought to have much more than formerly; that I am much more careless than I was under the Papacy; and that now, under the Evangel, there is nowhere the same zeal to be found as before.” This he declares to be due to the
devil and to people’s carelessness, but not to his teaching.

  On other occasions he admits of his party as a whole, more particularly of its leaders, viz. the theologians and Princes, that they fell more or less short of what was required for a Christian life; among them he expressly includes himself: “It is certain with regard to ourselves and our Princes that we are not clean and holy, and the Princes have vices of their own. But Christ loves a frank and downright confession.”

  Among such “confessions” made by Luther we find some concerning prayer.

  Comparing the present with the past he says: “People are now so cold and pray so seldom”; this he seeks to explain by urging that formerly people were more “tormented by the devil.” A better explanation is that which he gave in his Commentary on Galatians: “For the more confident we are of the freedom Christ has won for us, the colder and lazier we are in teaching the Word, praying, doing good and enduring contradictions.”

  We possess some very remarkable and even spirited exhortations to prayer from Luther’s pen; on occasion he would also raise his own voice in prayer to implore God’s assistance with feeling, fervour and the greatest confidence, particularly when in anxiety and trouble about his undertaking. (See vol. iv., xxv. 3.) He refers frequently to his daily prayer, though he admits that the heretics, i.e. the Anabaptists, also were in the habit of praying — in their own way. His excessive labours and the turmoil of his life’s struggle left him, however, little time and quiet for prayer, particularly for interior prayer. Besides, he considered the canonical hours of the Catholics mere “bawling,” and the liturgical devices for raising the heart mere imposture. During the latter years he spent in the cloister outside cares left him no leisure for the prayers which he was, as a religious, bound to recite. Finally, towards the end of his life, he often enough admits that his prayers were cold. Frequently he was obliged to stimulate his ardour for prayer as well as work by “anger and zeal”; “for no man can say,” as he puts it, “how hard a thing it is to pray from the heart.”

  Even in the early part of his career he had deliberately and on principle excluded one important sort of prayer, viz. prayer for help in such interior trials as temptations against the celibacy enjoined by the religious state, which he came to persuade himself was an impossibility and contrary to the Will of God. Then, if ever, did he stand in need of the weapon of prayer, but we read nowhere in his letters, written in that gloomy period, of his imploring God humbly for light and strength. On the contrary, he writes, in 1521: “What if this prayer is not according to God’s Will, or if He does not choose to grant it when it is addressed to Him?” He ironically attacks those who rightly said that “we must implore in all things the grace of God, that He denies it to none,” and, that, with God’s grace, it was possible to keep the vows. He replies to “these simple people and those who care nothing for souls”: “Excellent! Why did you not advise St. Peter to ask God that he might not be bound by Herod?” “That,” he says, “is to make a mockery of serious matters” (“est modus ludendi”) — a censure which might very well have been flung back at such a teacher of prayer.

  Seventeen years later he gave the following advice on prayer: “We must not curse, that is true, but pray we must that God’s name be hallowed and honoured, and the Pope’s execrated and cursed together with his god, the devil; that God’s Kingdom come, and that End-Christ’s kingdom perish. Such a ‘paternosteral’ curse may well be breathed, and so should every Christian pray.” That the Pope be “cursed, damned, dishonoured and destroyed, etc.,” such was his “daily, never-ending, heartfelt prayer, as it was of all those who believe in Christ,” so he assures us, “and I feel that my prayer is heard.” His opinion is that it is impossible to pray for anything without “cursing,” i.e. excluding the opposite. “Someone asked Dr. Martin Luther whether he who prayed thus must curse. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘for when I pray “Hallowed be Thy Name,” I curse Erasmus and all heretics who dishonour and blaspheme God.’” His anger against the devil often broke out in his prayers. “Though I cannot read or write,” he writes to Melanchthon from the Coburg, “I can still think, and pray, and rage (‘debacchari’) against the devil.”

  He ought to “offer incense to God,” he complains on one occasion in 1538 in his “Table-Talk,” but, instead, he brings Him “stinking pitch and devil’s ordure by his murmuring and impatience.” “It is thus that I frequently worship my God.... Had we not the article of the forgiveness of sins, which God has firmly promised, our case would indeed be bad.” Again and again does he cast his anchor on this article when threatened by the storms.

  His private, non-polemical religious exercises seem to have been exceedingly brief: “I have to do violence to myself daily in order to pray, and I am satisfied to repeat, when I go to bed, the Ten Commandments, the Our Father and then a verse or two; while thinking these over I fall asleep.” Unusual, and at the same time peculiar, were the prayers which we hear of his offering with the intention of doing some wholesome ill to his neighbour, or even of bringing about the latter’s death in the interests of the Evangel. In a sermon on July 23, 1531, after reprimanding certain Wittenberg brewers, who, in the hope of adding to their profits, were accustomed to adulterate their beer, he says: “Unless you mend your ways, we shall pray that your malt may turn to muck and sewage. Don’t forget that.”

  The Christian’s life of faith ought not merely to be penetrated with the spirit of prayer but, in spite of all crosses and the temptations from earthy things, to move along the safe path of peace and joy of heart. Luther must have found much concerning “peace and joy in the Holy Ghost” in his favourite Epistle to the Romans. He himself says: “A Christian must be a joyful man.... Christ says, ‘Peace be with you; let not your heart be troubled: have confidence, I have overcome the world.’ It is the will of God that you be joyful.”

  Of himself, however, he is forced to add: “I preach and write this, but I have not yet acquired the art when tempted the other way. This is in order that we may be instructed,” so he reassures himself. “Were we always at peace, the devil would get the better of us.... The fact is we are not equal to the holy Fathers in the matter of faith. The further we fall short of them [this is another of his consolations], the greater is the victory Christ will win; for in the struggle with the devil we are the meanest, most stupid of foes, and he has a great advantage over us.... Our Lord has determined to bring about the end [the impending end of all] amidst universal foolishness.” Thus, according to him, the victory of Christ would be exalted all the more by the absence of peace and joy amongst His followers.

  What do we see of pious effort on his part, more particularly in the matter of preparation for the sacraments, and repressing of self?

  The spiritual life was to him a passive compliance with the faith which God Himself was to awaken and preserve in the heart.

  For “this is how it takes place,” he says, in a carefully considered instruction, “God’s Word comes to me without any co-operation on my part. I may, it is true, do this much, go and hear it, read it, or preach it, so that it may sink into my heart. And this is the real preparation which lies not in man’s powers and ability, but in the power of God. Hence there is no better preparation on our part for all the sacraments than to suffer God to work in us. This is a brief account of the preparation.”

  Yet he himself perceived the peril of teaching that “those people were fit to receive the sacrament whose hearts had been touched by the Word of God so that they believed, and that whoever did not feel himself thus moved should remain away.” He says: “I remark in many, myself included, how the evil spirit, by insisting too much upon the right side, makes people lazy and slow to receive the sacrament, and that they refuse to come unless they feel assured that their faith has been enkindled. This also is dangerous.”

  Nevertheless he will have no “self-preparation”; such preparation, “by means of one’s own works,” appeared to him Popish; it was loathsome to God, and the doctrine of “f
aith alone” should be retained, even though “reason be unable to understand it.” Hence it is not surprising that he declared it to be a dreadful “error and abuse” that we should venture to prepare ourselves for the sacrament by our own efforts, as those do who strive to make themselves worthy to receive the sacrament by confession and other works.

  He storms at those priests who require contrition from the sinner who makes his confession; his opinion is that they are mad, and that, instead of the keys, they were better able to wield pitchforks. Even “were Christ Himself to come and speak to you as He did to Moses and say, ‘What hast thou done?’ kill Him on the spot.” “Contrition only gives rise to despair, and insults God more than it appeases Him.” Such language may be explained by the fact, that, in his theory, contrition is merely consternation and terror at God’s wrath produced by the accusations of the law; the troubled soul ought really to take refuge behind the Gospel. — How entirely different had been the preparation recommended by the Church in previous ages for the reception of the sacraments! She indeed enjoined contrition, but as an interior act issuing in love and leading to the cleansing of the soul. According to Luther, however, excessive purity of soul was not advisable, and only led to presumption. “The devil is a holy fellow,” he had said, “and has no need of Christ and His Grace”; “Christ dwells only in sinners.”