Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  When the preacher Leonard Beyer related to Luther how in his great “temptations” the devil had tried to induce him to stab himself, Luther consoled him by telling him that the same had happened in his own case.

  We are told that in latter life Luther’s pupil Mathesius was a prey to a “hellish fear” which lasted almost three months; “he could not even look at a knife because the sight tempted him to suicide.” Later, his condition improved. The same Mathesius relates how Pastor Musa found consolation in his gloomy doubts on faith in Luther’s account of his own similar storms of doubt.

  In the 16th century we hear many lamentations in Protestant circles concerning the unheard-of increase in the number of suicides.

  “There is such an outcry amongst the people,” wrote the Lausitz Superintendent, Zacharias Rivander, “that it deafens one’s ears and makes one’s hair stand on end. The people are so heavy-hearted and yet know not why. Amidst such lowness of spirit many are unable to find consolation, and, so, cut their throats and slay themselves.” — In 1554 the Nuremberg Councillor, Hieronymus Baumgärtner, lamented at a meeting attended by the clergy of the town: “We hear, alas, how daily and more than ever before, people, whether in good health or not, fall into mortal fear and despair, lose their minds and kill themselves.” In 1569, within three weeks, fourteen suicides occurred at Nuremberg.— “You will readily recall,” Lucas Osiander said in a sermon about the end of the century, “how in the years gone by many otherwise good people became so timorous, faint-hearted and full of despair that they could not be consoled; and how of these not a few put an end to their own lives; this is a sign of the Last Day.”

  Luther himself confirms the increase in the number of suicides which took place owing to troubles of conscience.

  In a sermon of 1532 he bemoans, that “so many people are so disquieted and distressed that they give way to despair”; this was chiefly induced by the “spirits,” for there “have been, and still are, many who are driven by the devil and plagued with temptations and despair till they hang themselves, or destroy themselves in some other way out of very fear.” He is quite convinced that the devil “drives” all suicides and makes them helpless tools of his plans against human life. — It was to this idea that the Lutheran preacher Hamelmann clung when he wrote, in 1568, that many trusted “that those who had been overtaken and destroyed by the devil would not be lost irretrievably.”

  Andreas Celichius, Superintendent in the Mark of Brandenburg, was of opinion that such suicides, such “very sudden and heartrending murders,” “gave a bad name to the Evangel in the world”; one sees and hears “that some in our very midst are quite unable to find comfort in the Evangelical sanctuary.... This makes men distrustful of the preaching of Jesus Christ and even causes it to be hated.”

  Michael Helding, Bishop-auxiliary of Mayence, found a special reason for the increase in the number of suicides amongst those who had broken with the Church, in their rejection of the Catholic means of grace. In a sermon which he delivered towards the end of 1547 at the Diet of Augsburg he pointed out that, ever since the use of the Sacraments had been scorned, people were more exposed to the strength of the evil one and to discouragement. “When has the devil ever driven so many to desperation, so that they lose all hope and kill themselves? Whose fault is it? Ah, we deprive ourselves of God’s grace and refuse to accept the Divine strength which is offered us in the Holy Sacraments.”

  Among the Lutheran preachers the expected end of the world was made to play a part and to explain the increase of faint-heartedness and despair.

  Mathesius says in his Postils: “Many pine away and lose hope; there is no more joy or courage left among the people; therefore let us look for the end of the world, and prepare, and be ready at any moment for our departure home!” “For the end is approaching; heaven and earth and all government now begin to crack and break.”

  Luther’s example proved catching, and the end of the world became a favourite topic both in the pulpit and in books, one on which the preachers’ own gloom could aptly find vent. The end of all was thought to be imminent. Such forebodings are voiced, for instance, in the following: “No consolation is of any help to consciences”; “many pine away in dejection and die of grief”; “in these latter days the wicked one by his tyranny drives men into fear and fright”; “many despair for very dejection and sadness”; “many pious hearts wax cowardly, seeing their sins and the wickedness of the world”; “the people hang their heads as though they were walking corpses and live in a constant dread”; “all joy is dead and all consolation from God’s Word has become as weak as water”; the number of those “possessed of the devil body and soul” is growing beyond all measure.

  Though the special advantage claimed for the new Evangel lay in the sure comfort it afforded troubled consciences, many found themselves unable to arouse within them the necessary faith in the forgiveness of their sins. Luther’s own experience, viz. that “faith won’t come,” was also that of many of the preachers in the case of their own uneasy and tortured parishioners; their complaints of the fruitlessness of their labours sound almost like an echo of some of Luther’s own utterances.

  “There are many pious souls in our churches,” says Simon Pauli, of Rostock, “who are much troubled because they cannot really believe what they say they do, viz. that God will be gracious to them and will justify and save them.”

  The widespread melancholy existing among the parishioners quite as much and sometimes more so than among the pastors, explains the quantity of consolatory booklets which appeared on the market during the second half of the 16th century, many of which were expressly designed to check the progress of this morbid melancholy. Selnecker’s work, mentioned above, is a specimen of this sort of literature. The Hamburg preacher, J. Magdeburgius, wrote: “Never has there been such need of encouragement as at this time.” The Superintendent, Andreas Celichius, laments that people “are quite unable to find comfort in the sanctuary of the Evangel, but, like the heathen who knew not God, are becoming melancholy and desperate,” and this too at a time when “God, by means of the evangelical preaching, is daily dispensing abundantly all manner of right excellent and efficacious consolation, by the shovelful and not merely by the spoonful.” — It was, however, a vastly more difficult matter to find comfort in the bare “Sola Fides” than it had been for the ancestors of these Evangelicals to find it in the Church’s way. Thanks to their co-operation, it was given to them to experience the vivifying and saving strength of the Sacraments and of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, to find example and encouragement in the veneration of the Saints and in the ritual, to be led to display their faith by the performance of good works in the hope of an eternal reward, and to enjoy in all the guidance and help of pastors duly called and ordained. In spite of all the abuses which existed, their Catholic forebears had never been deprived of these helps.

  Many Protestants were driven by such considerations to return to the Church. Of this Nicholas Amsdorf complained. Many, he says, “have fallen away from Christ to Antichrist in consequence of such despair and doubts,” and the uncertainty in matters of faith is nourished by the want of any unity in teaching, so that the people “do not know whom or what to believe”; this was also one of the reasons alleged by Simon Pauli why “many in the Netherlands and in Austria are now relapsing into Popery.”

  “We find numerous instances in our day,” Laurence Albertus said in 1574, “of how, in many places where Catholics and sectarians live together, no one was able to help a poor, deluded sectarian in spiritual or temporal distress, save the Catholic Christians, and especially their priests; such persons who have been helped admit that they first found real comfort among the Catholics, and now refuse to be disobedient to the Church any longer.” Albertus wrote a “Defence” of such converts.

  Johann Schlaginhaufen, Luther’s pupil, with the statements he makes concerning his own sad interior experiences, brings us back to his master. Schlaginhaufen himself, even more than the rest
, fell a prey to sadness, fear and thoughts of despair on account of his sins. Luther, to whom he freely confided this, told him it was “false that God hated sinners, otherwise He would not have sent His Son”; God hated only the self-righteous “who didn’t want to be sinners.” If Satan had not tried and persecuted me so much, “I should not now be so hostile to him.” Schlaginhaufen, however, was unable to convince himself so readily that all his trouble came from the devil and not from his conscience. He said to Luther: “Doctor, I can’t believe that it is only the devil who causes sadness, for the Law [the consciousness of having infringed it] makes the conscience sad; but the Law is good, for it comes from God, consequently neither is the sadness from Satan.” Luther was only able to give an evasive answer and fell back on the proximity of the Last Day as a source of consolation: “In short, why we are so plagued, vexed and troubled is due to the Last Day.... The devil feels his kingdom is coming to an end, hence the fuss he makes. Therefore, my dear Turbicida [i.e. Schlaginhaufen], be comforted, hold fast to the Word of God, let us pray.” Such words, however, did not suffice to calm the troubled man, who only became ever more dejected; his inference appeared to him only too well founded: “The Law with its obligations and its terrifying menaces is just as much God’s as the Gospel.”

  “How doleful you look,” Luther said to him some weeks later. “I replied,” so Schlaginhaufen relates: “‘Ah, dear Doctor, I was brooding; my thoughts worry me and yet I can do nothing. I am unable to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel.’ The Doctor replied: ‘Yes, dear Master Hans, if you could do that then you would be indeed a Doctor yourself,’ saying which he stood up and doffed his cap.... ‘Paul and I have never been able to get so far ... the best thing to do is to hold fast to the man Who is called Christ.’” In answer to a new objection Luther referred the young man to the secret counsels of God, for, according to him, there was a hidden God Who had not revealed Himself and of Whom men “were unable to know what He secretly planned,” and a revealed God Who indeed speaks of a Divine Will that all should be saved; how, however, this was to afford any consolation it is not easy to see. On other occasions Luther simply ordered Schlaginhaufen to rely on his authority; God Himself was speaking through him words of command and consolation. “You are to believe without doubting what God Himself has spoken to you, for I have God’s authority and commission to speak to and to comfort you.”

  CHAPTER XXV

  IN THE NARROWER CIRCLE OF THE PROFESSION AND FAMILY LUTHER’S BETTER FEATURES

  1. The University Professor, the Preacher, the Pastor

  Relations with the Wittenberg Students.

  Among the pleasing traits in Luther’s picture a prominent one is the care he evinced for the students at Wittenberg.

  The disagreeable impression caused by the decline of the University town is to some extent mitigated by the efforts Luther made to check the corruption amongst the scholars of the University. He saw that they were supervised, so far as academic freedom permitted, and never hesitated to blame their excesses from the pulpit. At the same time, in spite of the growing multiplicity of his labours and cares, he showed himself a helpful father to them even in temporal matters, for instance, when he inveighed in a sermon against their exploitation at the hands of burghers and peasants: They were being sucked dry and could scarcely be treated worse; this he had heard from all he knew.

  The respect he enjoyed and the example of his own simple life lent emphasis to his moral exhortations. His eloquent lectures were eagerly listened to; his delivery was vivid and impressive. People knew that he did not lecture for the sake of money and, even at the height of his fame, they gladly pointed to the unassuming life he led at home. He did not expect any marks of respect from the students, greatly as they, and not only those of the theological Faculty, esteemed him. Melanchthon had introduced the custom of making the students stand when Luther entered the class-room; Luther, however, was not at all pleased with this innovation and said petulently: “Doxa, doxa est magna noxa; who runs after glory never gets it.”

  Oldecop, the Catholic chronicler and Luther’s former pupil, who, as a youth and before the apostasy, had listened to him at Wittenberg, remembered in his old age how Luther, without setting himself in opposition to their youthful jollifications had known how to restrain them; just as he “reproved sin fearlessly from the pulpit,” so he earnestly sought to banish temptation from the pleasures of the students.

  We may here recall, that, as early as 1520, Luther had urged that all bordels should be done away with, those “public, heathenish haunts of sin,” as he termed them, at the same time using their existence as a weapon against the Catholic past. The fact that many such houses were closed down at that time was, however, to some extent due to fear of the prevalent “French disease.”

  When, in his old age, in 1543, the arrival of certain light women threatened new danger to the morals of the Wittenberg students, already exposed to the ordinary temptations of the town, Luther decided to interfere and make a public onslaught at the University. This attack supplies us with a striking example of his forcefulness, whilst also showing us what curious ideas and expressions he was wont to intermingle with his well-meant admonitions.

  “The devil,” so he begins, “has, by means of the gainsayers of our faith and our chief foes [presumably the Catholics], sent here certain prostitutes to seduce and ruin our young men. Hence I, as an old and tried preacher, would paternally implore you, my dear children, to believe that the Wicked One has sent these prostitutes hither, who are itchy, shabby, stinking and infected with the French disease as, alas, experience daily proves. Let one good comrade warn the other, for one such infected strumpet can ruin 10, 20, 30, or even 100 sons of good parents and is therefore to be reckoned a murderess and much worse than a poisoner. Let one help the other in this poisonous mess, with faithful advice and warning, as each one would himself wish to be done by!”

  He then threatens them with the penalties of the Ruler, which dissolute students had to fear, “in order that they may take themselves off, and the sooner the better”; “here [at Wittenberg] there is a Christian Church and University to which people resort to learn the Word of God, virtue and discipline. Whoever wants to drab had better go elsewhere.”

  Were he able, he would have such women “bled and broken on the wheel.” Young people ought, however, to resist concupiscence and fight against “their heat”; it was not to no purpose that the Holy Ghost had said: “Go not after thy lusts” (Eccl. xviii. 30). He concludes: “Pray God He may send you a pious child [in marriage], there will in any case be trouble enough.”

  Some polemics have characterised such exhortations of Luther’s as mere “hypocrisy.” Whoever knows his Luther, knows, however, how unfounded is this charge. Nor was there any hypocrisy about the other very urgent exhortation which Luther caused to be read from the pulpit at Wittenberg in 1542, when himself unable to preach, and which is addressed to both burghers and students. He there implores “the town and the University for God’s sake not to allow it to be said of them, that, after having heard God’s Word so abundantly and for so long, they had grown worse instead of better.” “Ah, brother Studium,” he says, “spare me and let it not come to this that I be obliged like Polycarp to exclaim, ‘O my God, why hast Thou let me live to see this?’” He points to his “grizzly head” which at least should inspire respect.

  The Preacher and Catechist.

  As a preacher Luther was hard-working, nay, indefatigable; in this department his readiness of speech, his familiarity with Holy Scripture and above all his popular ways stood him in good stead. At first he preached in the church attached to the monastery; later on his sermons were frequently preached in the parish church, and, so long as his health stood the strain, he sometimes even delivered several sermons a day. Even when not feeling well he took advantage of every opportunity to mount the pulpit. In 1528 he took over the parochial sermons during Bugenhagen’s absence from Wittenberg, in spite of being already overwo
rked and ill in body.

  All were loud in their praise of the power and vigour of his style. Mathesius in his “Historien” records a remark to this effect of Melanchthon’s. Luther frequently laid down, after his own fashion, the rules which should guide those who preach to the little ones and the poor in spirit: “Cursed and anathema be all preachers who treat of high, difficult and subtle matters in the churches, put them to the people and preach on them, seeking their own glory or to please one or two ambitious members of the congregation. When I preach here I make myself as small as possible, nor do I look at the Doctors and Masters, of whom perhaps forty may be present, but at the throng of young people, children and common folk, from a hundred to a thousand strong; it is to them that I preach, of them that I think, for it is they who stand in need.” And elsewhere: “Like a mother who quiets her babe, dandles it and plays with it, but who must give it milk from her breast, and on no account wine or Malmsey, so preachers must do the same; they ought so to preach in all simplicity that even the simple-minded may hear, grasp and retain their words. But when they come to me, to Master Philip, to Dr. Pommer, etc., then they may show off their learning — and get a good drubbing and be put to shame.” But when they parade their learning in the pulpit this is merely done “to impose on and earn the praise of the poor, simple lay-folk. Ah, they say, that is a great scholar and a fine speaker, though, probably, they neither understood nor learnt anything.”

  “Nor should a preacher consider individual members of his congregation and speak to them words of comfort or reproof; what he must seek to benefit is the whole congregation. St. Paul teaches this important doctrine [2 Cor. ii. 17]: ‘We speak with sincerity in Christ as from God and before God.’ God, Christ and the angels are our hearers, and if we please them that is enough. Let us not trouble ourselves about the world and about private persons! We will not speak in order to please any man nor allow our mouth to be made the ‘Arschloch’ of another. But when we have certain persons up before us, then we may reprove them privately and without any rancour.”