Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  It even seemed to Luther that the decay of almsgiving and the parsimony displayed towards the churches and the preachers proved the truth of the Evangel (“signum est, verum esse evangelium nostrum”), for, so he teaches in a sermon preached at Wittenberg in 1527, “the devil is the Prince of this world and all its riches, as we learn from the story of Christ’s Temptation. He is now defending his kingdom from the Evangel which has risen up against him. He does not now allow us so many possessions and gifts as he formerly did to those who served him (i.e. the Papists), for their Masses, Vigils, etc.; nay, he robs us of everything and spends it on himself. Formerly we supported many hundred monks and now we cannot raise the needful for one Evangelical preacher, a sign that our Evangel is the true one and that the Pope’s empire was the devil’s own, where he bestowed gifts on his followers with open hands and incited them to luxury, avarice, fornication and gluttony. And their teaching was in conformity therewith, for they urged those works which pleased them.”

  The observer may well marvel at such strange trains of thought. Luther’s doctrine has become to him like a pole-star around which the whole firmament must revolve. Experience and logic alike must perforce be moulded at his pleasure to suit the idea which dominates him.

  It was impossible to suppress the inexorable question put by his opponents, and the faint-hearted doubts of many of his own followers: Since our Saviour taught: “By their fruits shall you know them,” how can you be a Divinely sent teacher if these are the moral effects of your new Evangel? And yet Luther, to the very close of his career, in tones ever more confident, insists on his higher, nay, Divine, calling, and on his election to “reveal” hidden doctrines of faith, strange to say, those very doctrines to which he, like others too, attributed the decline.

  Concerning his Divine mission he had not hesitated to say in so many words: Unless God calls a man to do a work no one who does not wish to be a fool may venture to undertake it; “for a certain Divine call and not a mere whim” is essential to every good work. Hence he frequently sees in success the best test of a good work. In his own case, however, he could point only to one great result, and that a negative one, viz. the harm done to Popery; the Papacy had been no match for him and had failed to check the apostasy. The Papists’ undertaking, such is his proof, is not a success; it goes sideways “after the fashion of the crab.” “Even for those who had a sure Divine vocation it was difficult to undertake and carry through anything good, though God was with them and assisted them; what then could those silly fools, who wished to undertake it without being called, expect to do?” “But I, Dr. Martin, was called and compelled to become a Doctor.... Thus I was obliged to accept the office of a Doctor. Hence, owing to my work, this which you see has befallen the Papacy, and worse things are yet in store for it.” To those who still refused to acknowledge Luther’s call to teach he addresses a sort of command: St. Paul, 1 Cor. xiv., 30, commanded all, even superiors, to be silent and obey “when some other than the chief teacher receives a revelation.” “The work that Luther undertakes,” “the great work of the Reformation,” he assures all, was given not to the other side, but to him alone. — It is no wonder that his gainsayers and the doubters on his own side refused to be convinced by such arguments and appeals to the work of destruction accomplished, but continued to harp on the words: “By their fruits you shall know them,” which text they took literally, viz. as referring to actual fruits of moral improvement.

  The “great work of the Reformation,” i.e. of real reform, to which Luther appeals — unless he was prepared to regard it as consisting solely in the damage done to the Roman Church — surely demanded that, at least at Wittenberg and in Luther’s immediate sphere, some definite fruits in the shape of real moral amelioration should be apparent. Yet it was precisely of Wittenberg and his own surroundings that Luther complained so loudly. The increase of every kind of disorder caused him to write to George of Anhalt: “We live in Sodom and Babylon, or rather must die there; the good men, our Lots and Daniels, whom we so urgently need now that things are daily becoming worse, are snatched from us by death.” So bad were matters that Luther was at last driven to flee from Wittenberg. The sight of the immorality, the vexation and the complaints to which he was exposed became too much for him; perhaps Wittenberg would catch the “Beggars’ dance, or Beelzebub’s dance,” he wrote; “at any rate get us gone from this Sodom.”

  According to his letters, the Wittenberg authorities did not interfere even in the case of the gravest disorders, but allowed themselves to be “playthings of the devils”; they looked on whilst the students “were ruined by bad women,” and “though half the town is guilty of adultery, usury, theft and cheating, no one tries to put the law in force. They all simply smile, wink at it and do the same themselves. The world is a troublesome thing.” “The hoiden-folk have grown bold,” he writes to the Elector, “they pursue the young fellows into their very rooms and chambers, freely offering them their love; and I hear that many parents are recalling their children home because, they say, when they send their children to us to study we hang women about their necks.” He is aghast at the thought that the “town and the school” should have heard God’s Word so often and so long and yet, “instead of growing better, become worse as time goes on.” He fears that at his end he may hear, “that things were never worse than now,” and sees Wittenberg threatened with the curse of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capharnaum.

  In point of fact he did preach a sermon to the Wittenbergers in which, like a prophet, he predicts the judgments of heaven.

  In another sermon he angrily acquaints them with his determination: “What am I to do with you Wittenbergers? I am not going to preach to you any longer of Christ’s Kingdom, seeing that you will not accept it. You are thieves, robbers and men of no mercy. I shall have to preach you the ‘Sachsenspiegel.’” They refuse, he says, to give anything to clergy, church or schools. “Are you still ignorant, you unthankful beasts (‘ingratæ bestiæ’) of what they do for you?” He concludes: They must make up their minds to provide the needful, “otherwise I shall abandon the pulpit.”

  “Later you will find my prophecy fulfilled,” he cried on one occasion after having foretold “woes”; “then you will long for one of those exhortations of Martin Luther.”

  His Table-Talk bears, if possible, even stronger witness than his letters and sermons to the conditions at Wittenberg, for there he freely lets himself go. Some of the things he says of the town and neighbourhood, found in the authentic notes of docile pupils, such as Mathesius, Lauterbach and Schlaginhaufen, are worth consideration.

  We hear from Lauterbach not only that Hans Metzsch, the town Commandant whom Luther had “excommunicated,” continued to persecute the good at Wittenberg “with satanic malice” and to “boast of his wickedness,” but that in the same year Luther had to complain of other men of influence and standing in the town who injured the Evangel by their example. “So great is the godlessness of those of rank that one was not ashamed to boast of having begotten forty-three children in a single year; another asked whether he might not take 40 per cent interest per annum.” In the same year Luther was obliged to exclude from the Sacrament another notorious, highly-placed usurer.

  “The soil of Wittenberg is bad,” he declared, speaking from sad experience; “even were good, honest people sown here the crop would be one of coarse Saxons.”

  “The Gospel at Wittenberg,” he once said poetically, if we may trust Mathesius, “is like rain that falls on water, i.e. it has no effect. The good catch the law and the wicked the Gospel.”

  “I have often wondered,” he said in 1532, according to Schlaginhaufen, “why Our Lord God sent His Word to this unfaithful world of Wittenberg: I believe that He sent it to Jerusalem, Wittenberg and such-like places that He might, at the Last Day, be able to reprove their ingratitude.” And again, “My opinion is that God will punish severely the ingratitude shown to His Word; for there is not a man of position or a peasant who does not stamp on
the ministers; but the service of the Word must remain; even the Turk has his ministers, otherwise he could not maintain his rule.”

  Luther’s Evangel had made “law and command” to retreat into the background as compared with the liberty of the children of God; the penalties he devised, e.g. his exclusion of persons from the reception of the Sacrament, proved ineffectual. He would willingly have made use of excommunication if only “there had been people who would let themselves be excommunicated.” “The Pope’s ban which kept the people in check,” he says, “has been abolished, and it would be a difficult task to re-establish law and command.”

  “No, I should not like to endure this life for another forty years,” so he told his friends on June 11, 1539, “even were God to turn it into a Paradise for me. I would rather hire an executioner to chop off my head; the world is so bad that all are turning into devils, so that they could wish one nothing better than a happy death-bed, and then away!” “The dear, holy Evangel of Christ, that great and precious treasure, we account as insignificant, as if it were a verse from Terence or Virgil.”

  He found such disdain of his teaching even in his own household and family. This it was which caused him, in 1532, to preach a course of sermons to his family circle on Sundays. No head of a family, least of all here, could connive at any “contempt of the Word.” To the question of Dr. Jonas as to the wherefore of these private addresses, he replied: “I see and know that the Word of God is as much neglected in my house as in the Church.”

  There was no more hope for the world; nothing remains “unspoiled and incorrupt” although, “now, God’s Word is revealed,” yet “it is despised, spurned, corrupted, mocked at and persecuted,” even by the adherents of his teaching.

  Luther made Mathesius the recipient of some of his confidences, as the latter relates in his sermons; on account of the scandals among the preachers of the neighbourhood he was forced and urged by his own people to appeal to the Elector to erect a jail “into which such wild and turbulent folk might be clapped.” “Satan causes great scandals amongst the patrons and hearers of the new doctrine,” says Mathesius. The common people have become rough and self-confident and have begun to regard the ministers as worthless. “Verily,” he exclaims, “the soul of this pious old gentleman was sadly tormented day by day by the unrighteous deeds he was obliged to witness, like pious Lot in Sodom.”

  With a deep sigh, as we read in Lauterbach’s Notes, Luther pointed to the calamities which were about to overtake the world; it was so perverse and incorrigible that discipline or admonition would be of no avail. Already there was the greatest consternation throughout the world on account of the revelation of the Word. “It is cracking and I hope it will soon burst,” and the Last Day arrive for which we are waiting. For all vices have now become habitual and people will not bear reproof. His only comfort was the progress made by studies at Wittenberg, and in some other places now thrown open to the Evangel.

  But how were the future preachers now growing up there to improve matters? This he must well have asked himself when declaring, “with sobs,” as Lauterbach relates, that “preachers were treated in most godless and ungrateful fashion. The churches will soon be left without preachers and ministers; we shall shortly experience this misfortune in the churches; there will be a dearth not only of learned men but even of men of the commonest sort. Oh, that our young men would study more diligently and devote themselves to theology.”

  In view of the above it cannot surprise us that Luther gradually became a victim to habitual discouragement and melancholy, particularly towards the end of his life. Proofs of the depression from which he suffered during the latter years of his life will be brought forward in a later volume.

  Such fits of depression were, however, in those days more than usually common everywhere.

  4. A Malady of the Age: Doubts and Melancholy

  One of the phenomena which accompanied the religious revulsion and which it is impossible to pass over, was, as contemporary writers relate, the sadness, discontent and depression, in a word “melancholy,” so widespread under the new Evangel even amongst its zealous promoters.

  Melanchthon, one of Luther’s most intimate friends, furnished on many occasions of his life a sad spectacle of interior dejection. Of a weaker and more timid mental build than Luther, he appeared at times ready to succumb under the weight of faint-heartedness and scruples, doubts and self-reproaches. (Cp. vol. iii., ff.) We may recall how his anxieties, caused by the scandal subsequent on his sanctioning of Philip’s bigamy, almost cost him his life. So many are the records he left behind of discouragement and despondency that his death must appear in the light of a welcome deliverance. Luther sought again and again to revive in him the waning consciousness of the Divine character of their work. It is just in these letters of Luther to Melanchthon that we find him most emphatic in his assertion that their common mission is from God. It was to Melanchthon, that, next to himself, Luther applied the words already quoted, spoken to comfort a dejected pupil: “There must be some in the Church as ready to slap Satan as we three; but not all are able or willing to endure this.”

  Spalatin, who has so frequently been referred to as Luther’s go-between at the Electoral Court, and who afterwards became pastor of Altenburg, towards the end of his life fell into incurable despondency. Justus Jonas, likewise, was for a considerable time a prey to melancholy. Hieronymus Weller, one of Luther’s best friends, confessed to having suffered at times such violent doubts and fears as would have driven a heathen to commit suicide. The preachers George Mohr and Nicholas Hausmann (a very intimate friend of Luther’s) had to endure dreadful pangs of soul; the same was the case with Johann Beltzius, Pastor at Allerstedt in Thuringia, and with Simon Musæus, who died at Mansfeld in 1576 as Superintendent and who composed two works against the devil of melancholy. Nicholas Selnecker, who died Superintendent at Leipzig, was responsible for the rearranged edition of Luther’s Table-Talk; according to the title his hope was to produce a work “which it might console all Christians to read, especially in these wretched last days.” Elsewhere he confirms the need of such consolation when he says: “We experience in our own selves” that sadness is of frequent occurrence.

  Wolfgang Capito, the Strasburg preacher, wrote in 1536 to Luther that his experience of the want of agreement in doctrine had caused him such distress of mind that he was on the verge of the “malady of melancholia”; he trusted he would succeed in reaching a better frame of mind; the burden of gloom, so he comforts himself, was, after all, not without its purpose in God’s plan in the case of many under the Evangel. With Capito, too, melancholy was a “frequent guest.” Bucer wrote in 1532 to A. Blaurer that Capito had often bemoaned “his rejection by God.”

  Joachim Camerarius, the celebrated Humanist and writer, confessed in a letter to Luther, that he was oppressed and reduced to despair by the sight of the decline in morals “in people of every age and sex, in every condition and grade of life”; everything, in both public and private life, was so corrupt that he felt all piety and virtue was done for. Of the Schools in particular he woefully exclaimed that it would perhaps be better to have none than to have “such haunts of godlessness and vice.” At the same time, however, he makes admissions concerning faults of his own which may have served to increase his dejection: He himself, in his young days, had, like others, disgraced himself by a very vicious life (“turpissime in adolescentia deformatum”).

  The Nuremberg preacher, George Besler, fell into a state of melancholia, declared “in his ravings that things were not going right in the Church,” began to see hidden enemies everywhere and finally committed suicide with a “hogspear” in 1536. William Bidembach, preacher at Stuttgart, and his brother Balthasar, Abbot of Bebenhausen, both became a prey to melancholia towards the end of their life.

  It would, of course, be foolish to think that many good souls, in the simplicity of their heart, found no consolation in the new teaching and in working for its furtherance. Of the preache
rs, for instance, Beltzius, who has just been mentioned, declares, that, amidst his sadness Luther’s consolations had “saved him from the abyss of hell.” Amongst those who adhered in good faith to the innovations there were some who highly lauded the solace of the Evangel. But, notwithstanding all that may be alleged to the contrary, we cannot get over such testimonies as the following.

  Felix, son of the above-mentioned William Bidembach, and Court preacher in Würtemberg, declared in a “Handbook for young church ministers”: “It happens more and more frequently that many pious people fall into distressing sadness and real melancholia, to such an extent that they constantly experience in their hearts fear, apprehension, dread and despair”; in the course of his ministry he had met with both persons of position and common folk who were oppressed with such melancholia. Nicholas Selnecker (above, ) assures us that not only were theologians perplexed with many “melancholy and anxious souls and consciences whom nothing could console,” but physicians, too, “never remembered such prevalence of evil melancholia, depression and sadness, even in the young, and of other maladies arising therefrom, as during these few years, and such misfortune continues still to grow and increase.”

  The Leipzig Pastor, Erasmus Sarcerius, speaks in a similar strain of the “general faint-heartedness prevalent in every class,” who are acquainted with nothing but “fear and apprehension”; Victorinus Strigel, Professor at the University of Leipzig, of the “many persons who in our day have died simply and solely of grief”; Michael Sachse, preacher at Wechmar, of people generally as being “timid and anxious, trembling and despairing from fear.”