Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The diplomatic artifices by which the latter protected Luther whilst pretending not to do so, the dissembling and double-dealing of his policy throws a slur on the memory of one who was a powerful patron of Lutheranism. Even in Köstlin-Kawerau we find his behaviour characterised as “one long subterfuge, seeing, that, whilst giving Luther a free hand, he persisted in making out that Luther’s cause was not his”; his declaration, that “it did not become him as a layman to decide in such a controversy,” is rightly branded as misleading.

  The Protestant Pietists were loudest in their complaints. In his “Kirchenhistorie,” Gottfried Arnold, who was one of them, blamed, in 1699, this Elector for the “cunning and the political intrigues” of which he was suspected; he is angry that this so undevout promoter of Lutheranism should have written to Duke George, his cousin, “that he never undertook nor ever would undertake to defend Luther’s sermons or his controversial writings,” and that he should have sent to his minister at Rome the following instructions, simply to pacify the Pope: “It did not become him as a secular Prince to judge of these matters, and he left Luther to answer for everything at his own risk.” The same historian also points out with dissatisfaction that the Elector Frederick, “though always unmarried, had, by a certain female, two sons called Frederick and Sebastian. How he explained this to his spiritual directors is nowhere recorded.” The “female” in question was Anna Weller, by whom he had, besides these two sons, also a daughter.

  Against his brother and successor, Johann, surnamed the Constant (1525-1532), Luther’s friends brought forward no such complaints, but merely reproached him with letting things take their course. Arnold instances a statement of Melanchthon’s according to which this good Lutheran Prince “had been very negligent in examining this thing and that,” so that grave disorders now called for a remedy. Luther, too, whilst praising the Elector’s good qualities, declares, that “he was far too indulgent.” “I interfere with no one,” was his favourite saying, “but merely trust more in God’s Word than in man.” The protests of the Emperor and the representations of the Catholics, politics and threats of war left him quite unmoved, whence his title of “the Constant”; “he was just the right man for Luther,” says Hausrath, “for the latter did not like to see the gentlemen of the Saxon Chancery, Brück, Beyer, Planitz and the rest, interfering and urging considerations of European politics. ‘Our dear old father, the Elector,’ Luther said of him in 1530, ‘has broad shoulders, and must now bear everything.’”

  The favour of these Princes caused Luther frequently to overstep the bounds of courtesy in his behaviour towards them. Julius Boehmer, who is sorry for this, in the Introduction to his selection of Luther’s works remarks, that he was guilty of “want of respect, nay, of rudeness, towards the Elector Frederick and his successor Johann.” Of Luther’s relations with Johann Frederick, Hausrath says: “It is by no means certain that the Duke’s [Henry of Brunswick’s] opinion [viz. that Luther used to speak of his own Elector as Hans Wurst (i.e. Jack Pudding)] was without foundation; in any case, it was not far from the mark. With his eternal plans and his narrow-minded obstinacy, Luther’s corpulent master was a thorn in the side of the aged Reformer.... ‘He works like a donkey,’ Luther once said of him, and, unfortunately, this was perfectly true.”

  In his will, dated 1537, Luther addressed the following words of consolation to the princely patrons and promoters of his work, the Landgrave and the Elector Johann Frederick: It was true they were not quite stainless, but the Papists were even worse; they had indeed trespassed on the rights and possessions of others, but this was of no great consequence; they must continue to work for the Evangel, though in what way he would not presume to dictate to them. — Melanchthon, who was so often distressed at the way the Princes behaved on the pretext of defending the Evangel, complains that “the sophistry and wickedness of our Princes are bringing the Empire to ruin,” in which “bitter cry,” writes a Protestant historian, “he sums up the result of his own unhappy experiences.”

  From the accounts of the Visitations in the Electorate we learn more details of the condition of morality, law and order in this the focus of the new Evangel. The proximity and influence of Luther and of his best and most faithful preachers did not constitute any bulwark against the growing corruption of morals, which clear-sighted men indeed attributed mainly to the new doctrines on good works, on faith alone and on Evangelical freedom.

  In the protocols of the first Visitation (1527-1529) we read: The greater number of those entrusted with a cure of souls, are “in an evil case”; reckless marriages are frequent amongst the preachers; complaints were lodged with the Electoral Visitors concerning the preacher at Lucka who “had three wives living.” At a later Visitation a preacher was discovered to have had six children by two sisters. Many of the preachers had wives whom they had stolen from husbands still living. The account of the people whether in town or country was not much more reassuring; many localities had earned themselves a bad repute for blasphemy and general adultery. In many places the people were declared to be so wicked that only “the hangman and the jailer would be of any avail.” Besides this, the parsonages were in a wretched state. The foundations had fallen in, or, in many instances, had been seized by the nobles, the lands and meadows belonging to the parsonages had been sold by the parish-councils, and the money from the sale of chalices and monstrances spent on drink. The educational system was so completely ruined that in the Wittenberg district, for instance, in which there were 145 town and country livings with hundreds of chapels of ease, only 21 schools remained.

  As early as 1527 Melanchthon had viewed with profound dismay the “serious ruin and decay that menaces everything good,” which, he says, was clearly perceived at Wittenberg. “You see,” he writes, “how greatly men hate one another, how great is the contempt for all uprightness, how great the ignorance of those who stand at the head of the churches, and above all how forgetful the rulers are of God.” And again, in 1528: “No one hates the Evangel more bitterly than those who like to be considered ours.” “We see,” he laments in the same year, “how greatly the people hate us.”

  His friend Justus Jonas, who was acquainted with the conditions in the Saxon Electorate from long personal experience, wrote in 1530: “Those who call themselves Evangelical are becoming utterly depraved, and not only is there no longer any fear of God among them but there is no respect for outward appearances either; they are weary of and disgusted with sermons, they despise their pastors and preachers and treat them like the dirt and dust of the streets.” “And, besides all this, the common people are becoming utterly shameless, insolent and ruffianly, as if the Evangel had only been sent to give lewd fellows liberty and scope for the practice of all their vices.”

  The next Visitation, held seven years later, only confirmed the growth of the evil. In the Wittenberg district in particular complaints were raised concerning “the increase in godless living, the prevailing contempt and blasphemy of the Word of God, the complete neglect of the Supper and the general flippant and irreverent behaviour during Divine service.”

  Of a later period, when the fruits of the change of religion had still further ripened, Melanchthon’s friend Camerarius says: “Mankind have now attained the goal of their desires — boundless liberty to think and act exactly as they please. Reason, moderation, law, morality and duty have lost all value, there is no reverence for contemporaries and no respect for posterity.”

  The Elector Augustus of Saxony goes more into particulars when he writes: “A disgraceful custom has become established in our villages. The peasants at the high festivals, such as Christmas and Whitsuntide, begin their drinking-bouts on the eve of the festival and prolong them throughout the night, and the next day they either sleep through the morning or else come drunk to church and snore and grunt like pigs during the whole service.” He reproves the custom of making use of the churches as wine-cellars, the contempt displayed for the preachers, the scoffing at sacred rites and t
he “frequent blasphemy and cursing.” “Murder and abominable lasciviousness” were the consequences of such contempt for religion. But any improvement was not to be looked for seeing that there were hardly any schools remaining, and the cure of souls was left principally in the charge of ministers such as the Elector proceeds to describe. The nobles and the other feudal lords, he says, “appoint everywhere to the ministry ignorant, destitute artisans, or else rig out their scribes, outriders or grooms as priests and set them in the livings so as to have them all the more under their thumb.”

  The state of things in Saxony provided the Landgrave with a serviceable weapon against Luther when the latter showed an inclination to repudiate the bigamy, or to say he had merely “acted the fool” in sanctioning it. The passage has been quoted above (), where the Landgrave exhorted him to pay less attention to the world’s opinion, but rather to set himself and all the preachers in the Saxon Electorate to the task of checking the “vices of adultery, usury and drunkenness which were no longer regarded as sins, and that, not merely by writings and sermons, but by earnest admonition and by means of the ban.”

  It is true that the conditions which accompanied the introduction of his new system were a trial to Luther, which he sought to remedy. The Landgrave could not reproach him with actual indifference. Not merely by “writings and sermons,” but also by “earnest admonition” and even by re-introducing the “ban of the Church” he strove to check the rising tide of moral evil. But the evil was the stronger of the two, and the causes, for which he himself was responsible, lay too deep. We have an example of the way in which he frequently sought to curb the mischief, in his quarrel with Hans Metzsch, the depraved Commandant of Wittenberg, whom he excluded from the Supper.

  He sums up his grievances against the state of things in the Electorate and at Wittenberg in a letter to Johann Mantel, in which he calls Wittenberg a new Sodom. He writes to this preacher (Nov. 10, 1539): “Together with Lot (2 Peter ii. 8), you and other pious Christians, I, too, am tormented, plagued and martyred in this awful Sodom by shameful ingratitude and horrible contempt of the Divine Word of our beloved Saviour, when I see how Satan seizes upon and takes possession of the hearts of those who think themselves the first and most important in the kingdom of Christ and of God; beyond this I am tempted and plagued with interior anxiety and distress.” He then goes on to console his friend, who was also troubled with melancholy and the fear of death, by a sympathetic reference to the death of Christ. He then admits again of himself that he was “distressed and greatly plagued” and “compassed by more than one kind of death in this miserable, lamentable age, where there is nothing but ingratitude, and where every kind of wickedness gains the upper hand.... Wait for the Lord with patience, for He is now at hand and will not delay to come. Amen.”

  3. Luther’s Attempts to Explain the Decline in Morals

  Luther quite candidly admitted the distressing state of things described above without in the least glossing it over, which indeed he could not well have done; in fact, his own statements give us an even clearer insight into the seamy side of life in his day. He speaks of the growing disorders with pain and vexation; the more so since he could not but see that they were being fomented by his doctrine of justification by faith alone.

  “This preaching,” he says, “ought by rights to be accepted and listened to with great joy, and everyone ought to improve himself thereby and become more pious. But, unfortunately, the reverse is now the case and the longer it endures the worse the world becomes; this is [the work of] the devil himself, for now we see the people becoming more infamous, more avaricious, more unmerciful, more unchaste and in every way worse than they were under Popery.”

  The Evangelicals now are not merely worse, but “seven times worse than before,” so he complains as early as 1529. “For after having heard the Evangel we still continue to steal, lie, cheat, feed and swill and to practise every vice. Now that one devil [that of Popery] has been driven out seven others worse than it have entered into us, as may be seen from the way the Princes, lords, nobles, burghers and peasants behave, who have lost all sense of fear, and regard not God and His menaces.”

  From his writings a long, dreary list of sins might be compiled, of which each of the classes here mentioned had been guilty. In the last ten years of his life such lamentations give the tone to most of what he wrote.

  “The nobles scrape money together, rob and plunder”; “like so many devils they grind the poor churches, the pastors and the preachers.” “The burghers and peasants do nothing but hoard, are usurers and cheats and behave defiantly and wantonly without any fear of punishment, so that it cries to heaven for vengeance and the earth can endure it no longer.” “On all hands and wherever we turn we see nothing in all classes but a deluge of dreadful ingratitude for the beloved Evangel.”

  “Nowadays the Gospel is preached, and whoever chooses can hear it ... but burghers, peasants and nobles all scorn their ministers and preachers.”

  “I have often said that a plague must fall upon Germany; the Princes and gentry deserve that our Lord God should play them a trick; there will be such bloodshed that no one will know his own home.” “Now that all this [the Evangel] is preached rightly and plainly, people cannot despise it enough. In old days monasteries and churches were built with no regard for cost, now people won’t even repair a hole in the roof that the minister may lie dry; of their contempt I say nothing, it is enough to move one to tears to witness such scorn. Hence I say: Take care, you are young; it may be you will live to see and experience the coming misfortune that will break over Germany. For a storm will burst over Germany, and that without fail.... I do not mind so much the peasants’ avarice and the fornication and immorality now on the increase everywhere, as the contempt for the Evangel.... That peasants, burghers and nobles thus contemn the Word of God will be their undoing.”

  To the question whence the moral decline amongst the adherents of the new teaching came, Luther was wont to give various answers. Their difference and his occasional self-contradictions show how his consciousness of the disorders and the complaints they drew from every side drive him into a corner.

  The most correct explanation was, of course, that the mischief was due to the nature of his teaching on faith and good works; to this, involuntarily, he comes back often enough.

  “That we are now so lazy and cold in the performance of good works,” he says, in a recently published sermon of 1528, “is due to our no longer regarding them as a means of justification. For when we still hoped to be justified by our works our zeal for doing good was a marvel. One sought to excel the other in uprightness and piety. Were the old teaching to be revived to-day and our works made contributory to righteousness, we should be readier and more willing to do what is good. Of this there is, however, no prospect and thus, when it is a question of serving our neighbour and praising God by means of good works, we are sluggish and not disposed to do anything.” “The surer we are of the righteousness which Christ has won for us, the colder and idler we are in teaching the Word, in prayer, in good works and in enduring misfortune.”

  “We teach,” he continues, “that we attain to God’s grace without any work on our part. Hence it comes that we are so listless in doing good. When, once upon a time, we believed that God rewarded our works, I ran to the monastery, and you gave ten gulden towards building a church. Men then were glad to do something through their works and to be their own ‘Justus et Salvator’ (Zach. ix., 9).” Now, when asked to give, everybody protests he is poor and a beggar, and says there is no obligation of giving or of performing good works. “We have become worse than formerly and are losing our old righteousness. Moreover, avarice is increasing everywhere.”

  Though here Luther finds the reason of the neglect of good works so clearly in his own teaching, yet on other occasions, for instance, in a sermon of 1532, he grows angry when his doctrine is made responsible for the mischief.

  Only “clamourers,” so he says, could press s
uch a charge. Yet, at the same time, he fully admits the decline: “I own, and others doubtless do the same, that there is not now such earnestness in the Gospel as formerly under the monks and priests when so many foundations were made, when there was so much building and no one was so poor as not to be able to give. But now there is not a town willing to support a preacher, there is nothing but plundering and thieving among the people and no one can prevent it. Whence comes this shameful plague? The clamourers answer, ‘from the teaching that we must not build upon or trust in works.’ But it is the devil himself who sets down such an effect to pure and wholesome doctrine, whereas it is in reality due to his own and the people’s malice who ill-use such doctrines, and to our old Adam.... We are, all unawares, becoming lazy, careless and remiss.”

  “The devil’s malice!” This is another explanation to which Luther and others not unfrequently had recourse. The devil could do such extraordinary and apparently contradictory things! He could even teach men to “pray fervently.” In the Table-Talk, for instance, when asked by his wife why it was, that, whereas in Popery “we prayed so diligently and frequently, we are now so cold and pray so seldom,” Luther put it down to the devil. “The devil made us fervent,” he says; “he ever urges on his servants, but the Holy Ghost teaches and exhorts us how to pray aright; yet we are so tepid and slothful in prayer that nothing comes of it.” Thus it might well be the devil who was answerable for the misuse of the Evangel.

  On another occasion, in order to counteract the bad impression made on his contemporaries by the fruits of his preaching, he says: “Our morals only look so bad on account of the sanctity of the Evangel; in Catholic times they stood very low and many vices prevailed, but all this was unperceived amidst the general darkness which shrouded doctrine and the moral standards which then held; now, on the other hand, our eyes have been opened by a purer faith and even small abuses are seen in their true colours.” His words on this subject will be given below.