Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  As a preacher he was able often enough to tell the various classes quite frankly what he found to censure in them. At the Court, for instance, he could, when occasion arose, reprove the nobles for their drunkenness, and that in language not of the choicest. He was not the man to wear kid gloves, or, as an old German proverb he himself quoted said, to let a spider spin its web over his mouth. A saying attributed to him characterises him very well, save perhaps in its latter end: Come up bravely, speak out boldly, leave off speedily. “I have warned you often enough,” so we read in the notes of a Wittenberg sermon of Se, 1531, “to flee fornication, and yet I see that it is again on the increase. It is getting so bad that I shall be obliged to say: Bistu do zurissen, sso lop dich der Teuffl.” The preacher then turns to the older hearers, begging them to use their influence with the younger generation, to prevail on them to abstain from this vice.

  As to his subject-matter, he was fond of urging Biblical texts and quotations, wherein he displayed great skill and dexterity. In general, however, his attacks on Popery are always much the same; he dwells with tiresome monotony on the holiness-by-works and the moral depravity of the Papists. Though his theory of Justification may have proved to him a never-failing source of delight, yet his hearers were inclined to grow weary of it. He himself says once: “When we preach the ‘articulum justificationis’ the people sleep or cough”; and before this: “No one in the people’s opinion is eloquent if he speaks on justification; then they simply close their ears.” Had it been a question of retailing stories, examples and allegories he could have been as proficient as any man.

  Mathesius has incorporated in his work some of Luther’s directions on preaching which might prove a good guide to any pulpit orator desirous of being of practical service to his hearers. Some of these directions and hints have recently appeared in their vigorous original in the Table-Talk edited by Kroker.

  It was his wish that religious addresses in the shape of simple, hearty instructions on the Epistles and Gospels should be given weekly by every father to his family. He himself, in his private capacity, set the example as early as 1532 by holding forth in his own home on Sundays, when unable to preach in the church, before his assembled household and other guests. This he did, so he said, from a sense of duty towards his family, because it was as necessary to check neglect of the Divine Word in the home as in the Church at large.

  He also himself catechised the children at home, in order, as he declared, to fulfil the duties of a Christian father; on rising in the morning he was also in the habit of reciting the “Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Our Father and some Psalm as well” with the children.

  He even expressed the opinion that catechetical instruction in church was of little use to children, but that in the home it was more successful and was therefore not to be omitted, however much trouble it might give. When, however, he adds, that the Papists had neglected such home teaching and had sacrificed the flock of Christ, he is quite wrong. The fact is, that, before his day, it was left far too much to the family to give religious instruction to the children, there being as yet no properly organised Catechism in schools and churches. It was only the opposition aroused among Catholics by the religious changes that led to religious teaching becoming more widespread in the Catholic schools, and to a catechetical system being organised; a fuller religious education then served to check the falling away. How highly, in spite of such apparent depreciation, he valued the ministerial teaching of the Catechism we learn from some words recorded by Mathesius: “If I had to establish order, I should see that no preacher was nominated who had not previously taught the ‘bonæ artes’ and the Catechism in the schools for from one to three years. Schools are also temples of God, hence the olden prophets were at once pastors and schoolmasters.” “There is no better way,” he writes, “of keeping people devout and faithful to the Church than by the Catechism.”

  At Wittenberg an arrangement existed, at any rate as early as 1528, by which, every quarter, certain days were set apart for special sermons on the articles of the Catechism. The Larger and the Smaller Catechism published by Luther (see vol. v., xxxiv., 2) were intended to form the basis of the verbal teaching everywhere. The three courses of sermons preached by Luther at Wittenberg in May, Sep. and Nov., 1528, and since edited by George Buchwald, were arranged to suit the contents of the Greater Catechism and to some extent served Luther as a preparation for this publication. Luther, in the first instance, brought out the Smaller Catechism, as we see from certain letters given by Buchwald, not in book form, but, agreeably with an earlier ecclesiastical practice, on separate sheets in the shape of tablets to hang upon the walls; hence what he said on Dec. 18, 1537, of his being the author of the Catechism, the “tabulæ” and the Confession of Augsburg.

  He displayed great talent and dexterity in choosing the language best suited to his subject. We hear him denouncing with fire and power the vice of usury which was on the increase. He knows how to portray the past and future judgments of God in such colours as to arouse the luke-warm. When treating of the different professions and ways of ordinary life he is in his own element and exhibits a rare gift of observation. On the virtues of the home, the education of children, obedience towards superiors, patience in bearing crosses and any similar ethical topics which presented themselves to him, his language is as a rule sympathetic, touching and impressive; in three wedding sermons which we have of him he speaks in fine and moving words on love and fidelity in the married state.

  In addition to his printed sermons, which were polished and amended for the press and from which we have already given many quotations on all sorts of subjects, the hasty, abbreviated notes of his sermons, made by zealous pupils, give us an insight into a series of addresses full of originality, outspokenness and striking thoughts. Indeed these notes, which are becoming better known at the present day, frequently render the sermons in all their primitive simplicity far better than do the more carefully arranged printed editions.

  Luther, in 1524, according to one of these sets of notes, spoke on Good Works in the following style: “The Word is given in order that you may awaken! It is meant to spur you on to do what is good, not that you should lull yourself in security. When fire and wood [come together there ensues a fire; so you in like manner, must be inflamed]. If, however, the effect of the sermon is, that you do not act towards your brother as Christ does towards you, that is a bad sign, not, indeed, that you must become a castaway, but that you may go so far as one day to deny the Word.” “The devil knows that sin does not harm you, but his aim is to tear Christ out of your heart, to make you self-confident and to rob you of the Word. Hence beware of being idle under the influence of Grace. Christ is seen with you when you take refuge in Him, whether you be in sin or at the hour of death,” etc. “This is preached to you daily, but we produce no effect. Christ has bones and flesh, strength and weakness. Let each one see to it that above all he possess the faith ... the Gospel is preached everywhere, but few indeed understand it. Christ bore with His followers. In the same way must we behave towards the weak. And the day will come when at last they will understand, like the disciples. But that will never be unless persecution comes.”

  Excerpts from Luther’s Sermons on Our Lady.

  In a sermon of 1524 on the Feast of the Visitation, taken down in Latin by the same reporter and recently published, Luther not only voices the olden view concerning the virtues and privileges of the Blessed Virgin but also, incidentally, supplies us with a sample of his candour in speaking of the faults of his hearers: “You are surprised that now I preach here so seldom, I, on the other hand, am surprised that you do not amend. There may possibly be a few to whom the preaching is of some avail; but the more I preach, the more ungodliness increases. It is not my fault, for I know that I have told you all what God gave me [to speak]. I am not responsible and my conscience is at peace. I have forced you to nothing. We have introduced two collections. If they are not to your taste, do away with them again. We sha
ll not force you to give even a single penny.” — He then deals with the Gospel of the Feast which records Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, and the canticle of praise with which she greeted her cousin. He draws apt lessons from it and praises the virtues and the dignity of the Blessed Virgin in a way that does him honour: “First of all you see how Mary’s faith finds expression in a work of charity. Her faith was not idle but was proved real by her acting as a mere maid, seeking out Elizabeth and serving her. Her faith was immense, as we also learn from other Gospel-readings. That is why Elizabeth said to her: ‘Blessed art thou that hast believed.’... This is a true work of faith when impelled thereby we abase ourselves and serve others. We, too, hear all this, but the works are not forthcoming.... Yet where there is real faith, works are never absent.”

  “When Mary was magnified by Elizabeth with words of praise, it was as though she did not hear them, for she paid no heed to them. Every other woman would have succumbed to the temptation of vainglory, but she gives praise to Him to Whom alone praise is due. From this example all Christians, but particularly all preachers, ought to learn. You know that God preserves some preachers in a state of grace, but others He permits to fall.... God must preserve them like Mary so that they do not grow proud. When God bestows His gifts upon us it is hard not to become presumptuous and self-confident. If, for instance, I am well acquainted with Scripture, people will praise me on this account, and when I am praised, I, as a carnal man, am exposed to the fire; when on the contrary I am despised, etc. [i.e. this is helpful for my salvation].... Mary acted as though she did not hear it, and never even thanked Elizabeth for her praise.”

  Mary said, so he continues, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, not myself; I am a mere creature of God; He might have set another in my place; I magnify Him Who has made me a Mother.” In this way Mary teaches us the right use of the gifts bestowed by God, for she rejoiced only in God. On the other hand, any woman who is even passably pretty becomes vain of herself, and any man who has riches, boasts of his possessions. Mary is merely proud that God, as she says, has regarded her humility. This is the praise which we too must pay her. We ought to extol her because she was chosen by the Divine Majesty to be the Mother of His Son. That, she says, will be proclaimed to the end of the world (“all generations shall call me blessed”), not on her own account, but because God has done this. Concerning her own good works and her virginity she was silent and simply said: “He has done great things in me.” In the same way we ought to be nothing in our own eyes and before the world, but to rejoice simply because God has looked down on us, confessing that all we have comes from Him. In this spirit Mary counted up great gifts; though she could have said: All that you have just told me is true. “Ah, hers was a fine spirit; and her example will assuredly endure.” “The whole world will never attain to it, for the soul that is not exalted by God’s gifts and depressed by poverty is indeed hard to find.” By her words, so the speaker continues, Mary condemned the world, raised herself above it and cast it aside; her language was not human, but came to her from God.

  Though such praise of Mary — from which at a later date Luther desisted — may be placed to his credit, yet it must be pointed out, that even the above discourse is disfigured by bitter and unwarrantable attacks on Catholic doctrine and practice. He even speaks as though the veneration of Mary did not rest on the principles we have just heard him expound, viz. on the dignity bestowed by God on Mary as the Mother of God, and on the virtues with which she was endowed from on high, such as faith and humility. The Catholic Church, so Luther complains quite unjustly and falsely, had made of Mary a goddess (“fecimus eam Deam”) and had given her honour and praise without referring it to God.

  The supreme distinction which the Church acknowledges in Mary — viz. her immaculate conception and exemption from original sin from the first moment of her soul’s existence — Luther himself accepted at first and adhered to for a considerable time, following in this the tradition of his Order.

  All honour was to be given to Christ as God; this right and praiseworthy view, which Luther was indefatigable in expressing, misled him in the matter of the veneration and invocation of Mary and the Saints. Of this he would not hear, though such had ever been the practice of the Church, and though it is hard to see how God’s glory can suffer any derogation through the honour paid to His servants. In this Luther went astray; the dogma of the adorable Divinity of Jesus Christ was, however, always to remain to him something sacred and sublime.

  Statements to Luther’s advantage from various Instructions. His Language.

  In his sermons Luther was so firm in upholding the Divinity of Christ, in opposition to the scepticism he thought he detected in other circles, that one cannot but be favourably impressed. He was filled with the liveliest sense of man’s duty of submitting his reason to this mystery; he even goes too far, in recommending abdication of the intellect and in his disparagement of human reason; what he is anxious to do is to make all his religious feeling culminate in a trusting faith in the words: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son for us.”

  In his sermons and instructions he demands a similar yielding of reason to faith with regard to the mystery of Christ’s Presence in the Sacrament, though in this case he had not shrunk from twisting the doctrine to suit his own ideas. It would hardly be possible to maintain more victoriously against all gainsayers the need of standing by the literal sense, or at least of excluding any figurative interpretation of, the words of institution “This is My Body,” than Luther did in many of his pronouncements against the Sacramentarians.

  With advancing years, and in view of the dissensions and confusion prevailing in the Reformed camp, he came to insist more and more on those positive elements, which, for all his aversion for the ancient Church, he had never ceased to defend. Of this we have a monument in one of his last works, viz. the “Kurtz Bekentnis,” to which we shall return later. Embittered by the scepticism apparent in Zwinglianism and elsewhere, which, as he thought, threatened to sap all religion, he there obeys his heart’s instincts and gives the fullest expression to his faith in general and not merely to his belief in Christ’s presence in the Sacrament.

  Concerning the Sacrament of the Altar he gave the following noteworthy answer to a question put to him jointly, in 1544, by the three princely brothers of Anhalt, viz. whether they should do away with the Elevation of the Sacrament in the liturgy. “By no means,” he replied, “for such abrogation would tend to diminish respect for the Sacrament and cause it to be undervalued. When Dr. Pommer abolished the Elevation [at Wittenberg, in 1542] during my absence, I did not approve of it, and now I am even thinking of re-introducing it. For the Elevation is one thing, the carrying about of the Sacrament in procession quite another [at Wittenberg Luther would not allow such processions of the Sacrament]. If Christ is truly present in the Bread (‘in pane’), why should He not be treated with the utmost respect and even be adored?” — Joachim, Prince of Anhalt, added, when relating this: “We saw how Luther bowed low at the Elevation with great devotion and reverently worshipped Christ.”

  Certain controversialists have undoubtedly been in the wrong in making out Luther to have been sceptical about, or even opposed at heart to, many of the ancient dogmas which he never attacked, for instance, the Trinity, or the Divinity of Christ. A few vague and incautious statements occasionally let slip by him are more than counterbalanced by a wealth of others which tell in favour of his faith, and he himself would have been the last to admit the unfortunate inferences drawn more or less rightly from certain propositions emitted by him. It is a lucky thing, that, in actual life, error almost always claims the right of not being bound down too tightly in the chains of logic. When Luther, for instance, made every man judge of the meaning of the Bible, he was setting up a principle which must have dissolved all cohesion between Christians, and thus, of necessity, he was compelled to limit, somewhat illogically, the application of the principle.

  In a passage fre
quently cited against him, where he shows himself vexed with the ancient term employed by the Church to express the Son’s being of the same substance with the Father (“homoousios”), it was not his intention to rail against the doctrine therein expressed, but merely to take exception to the word. He explicitly distinguishes between the word and the thing (“vocabulum et res”). He says that, so long as one holds fast to the doctrine (“modo rem teneam”) scripturally defined by the Nicene Council, it was no heresy to dislike the word or to refuse to employ it. Hence the passage affords no ground for saying, that “Luther was rash enough to tamper with the doctrine of the Person of Christ.” On the other hand, the new doctrine of the omnipresence of the Body of Christ evolved by him during the controversy on the Sacrament, can scarcely be considered creditable. His views on the “communicatio idiomatum” in Christ, and particularly on the Redemption, also contain contradictions not to be explained away.

  Contrariwise we must dismiss the charge based on his repugnance for the word “Threefoldhood,” by which Germans designate the Trinity, as if this involved antagonism on his part to the mystery itself. He was referring merely to the term when he said: “It is not particularly good German and does not sound well, but since it cannot be improved upon, we must speak as best we can.” An undeniable confession of faith in the Trinity is contained in this very passage, and in countless others too. — When abbreviating the Litany he indeed omitted the invocation “Sancta Trinitas unus Deus,” but this was not from any hostility to the doctrine but from a wish not to have “too many words.” He left in their old places the separate invocations of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and deemed this quite sufficient.