Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  In itself it could only have a salutary effect when Luther goes on to speak, as he frequently does, against begging among the class whose duty it was to work with their hands, and when he attempts both to check their idleness and to rouse a spirit of charity towards the deserving. He even regards the Bible text, “Let there be no beggar or starving person amongst you,” as universally binding on Christians. Only that he is oblivious of the necessary limitations when he exclaims: “If God commanded this even in the Old Testament how much more is it incumbent on us Christians not to let anyone beg or starve!”

  The latter words refer to those who are really poor but quite willing to work (a class of people which will always exist in spite of every effort); as for those who “merely eat” he demands that they be driven out of the land. This he does in a writing of 1526 addressed to military men; here he divides “all man’s work into two kinds,” viz. “agricultural work and war work.” A third kind of work, viz. the teaching office, to which he often refers elsewhere, is here passed over in silence. “As for the useless people,” he cries, “who serve neither to defend us nor to feed us, but merely eat and pass away their time in idleness, [the Emperor or the local sovereign] should either expel them from the land or make them work, as the bees do, who sting to death the drones that do not work but devour the honey of the others.” His unmethodical mind failed to see to what dire consequences these hastily penned words could lead.

  With the object of alleviating poverty he himself, however, lent a hand to certain charitable institutions, which, though they did not endure, have yet their place in history. Such were the poor-boxes of Wittenberg, Leisnig, Altenburg and some other townships. This institution was closely bound up with his scheme of gathering together the “believing Christians” into communities apart. These communities were not only to have their own form of divine worship and to use the ecclesiastical penalties, but were also to assist the poor by means of the common funds in a new and truly Evangelical fashion.

  The olden poor-law ordinances of mediæval times had been revised at Wittenberg and embodied in the so-called “Beutelordnung.” Carlstadt and the town-council, under the influence of Luther’s earlier ideas, substituted for this on Jan. 24, 1522, a new “Order for the princely town of Wittenberg”; at the same time they reorganised the common funds. These regulations Luther left in force, when, on his return from the Wartburg, he annulled the rest of Carlstadt’s doings; the truth is, that they were not at variance even with his newer ideals.

  In 1523 he himself promoted a similar but more highly developed institution for the relief of the poor in the little Saxon town of Leisnig on the Freiberg Mulde; this was to be in the hands of the community of true believers into which the inhabitants had formed themselves at the instigation of the zealous Lutheran, Sebastian von Kötteritz. At Altenburg also, doubtless through Luther’s doing, his friend Wenceslaus Link, the preacher in that town, made a somewhat similar attempt to establish a communal poor-box. In many other places efforts of a like nature were made under Lutheran auspices.

  How far such undertakings spread throughout the Protestant congregations cannot be accurately determined. We know, however, the details of the scheme owing to our still having the rules drawn up for Leisnig.

  According to this the whole congregation, town-councillors, aldermen, elders and all the inhabitants generally, were to bind themselves to make a good use of their Christian freedom by the faithful keeping of the Word of God and by submitting to good discipline and just penalties. Ten coffer-masters were to be appointed over the “common fund” and these were three times a year to give an account to the “whole assembly thereto convened.” Into this fund was to be put not merely the revenue of the earlier institutions which hitherto had been most active in the relief of the poor, viz. the brotherhoods and benevolent associations, as also that of most of the guilds, and, moreover, the whole income drawn by the parish from the glebes, pious foundations, tithes, voluntary offerings, fines, bridge dues and private industrial concerns. Thus it was not merely a relief fund but practically a trust comprising all the wealth of the congregation, which chiefly consisted in the extensive Church property it had annexed. In keeping with this is the manner in which the income was to be apportioned. Only a part was devoted to the relief of the poor, i.e. to the hospital, orphanage and guest-houses. Most of the money was to go to defray the stipend of the Lutheran pastor and his clerk, to maintain the schools and the church, and to allow of advances being made to artisans free of interest; the rest was to be put by for times of scarcity. The members of the congregation were also exhorted to make contributions out of charity to their neighbour.

  The scheme pleased Luther so well that he advised the printing of the rules, and himself wrote a preface to the published text in which he said, he hoped that “the example thus set would prove a success, be generally followed, and lead to a great ruin of the earlier foundations, monasteries, chapels and all other such abominations which hitherto had absorbed all the world’s wealth under a show of worship.”

  Hence here once more his chief motive is a polemical one, viz. his desire to injure Popery.

  He invites the authorities on this occasion to “lay hands on” such property and to apply to the common fund all that remained over after the obligations attaching to the property had been complied with, and restitution made to such heirs of the donors as demanded it on account of their poverty. In giving this advice he was anxious, as he says, to disclaim any responsibility in the event of “such property as had fallen vacant being plundered owing to the estates changing hands and each one laying hold on whatever he could seize.” “Should avarice find an entry what then can be done? It must not indeed be given up in despair. It is better that avarice should take too much in a legal way than that there should be such plundering as occurred in Bohemia. Let each one [i.e. of the heirs of the donors] examine his own conscience and see what he ought to take for his own needs and what he should leave for the common fund!”

  The setting up of such a “common fund” was also suggested in other Lutheran towns as a means of introducing some sort of order into the confiscation of the Church’s property. The direct object of the funds was not the relief of the poor. This was merely included as a measure for palliating and justifying the bold stroke which the innovators were about to take in secularising the whole of the Church’s vast properties.

  This, however, makes some of Luther’s admonitions in his preface to the regulations for the Leisnig common fund sound somewhat strange, for instance, his injunction that everything be carried out according to the law of love. “Christian charity must here act and decide; laws and enactments cannot settle the difficulties. Indeed I write this counsel only out of Christian charity for the Christians.” Whoever refuses to accept his advice, he says at the conclusion, may go his own way; only a few would accept it, but one or two were quite enough for him. “The world must remain the world and Satan its Prince. I have done what I could and what it was my duty to do.” He was half conscious of the unpractical character of his proposals, yet any failure he was determined to attribute to the devil’s doing.

  His premonition of failure was only too soon realised at Leisnig. The new scheme could not be made to work. The magistrates refused to resign the rights they claimed of disposing of the foundations and similar charitable sources of revenue or to hand over the incomings to the coffer-masters, for the latter, they argued, were representatives, not of the congregation but of the Church. Hence the fund had to go begging. Luther came to words with the town-council, but was unable to have his own way, even though he appealed to the Elector. He lamented in 1524 that the example of Leisnig had been a very sad one, though, as the first of its kind, it should have served as a model. Of Tileman Schnabel, an ex-Augustinian and college friend of Luther’s at Erfurt, who had been working at Leisnig as preacher and “deacon,” Luther wrote, that he would soon find himself obliged to leave if he did not wish to die of hunger. “Incidents such as these de
prive the parsonages of their best managers. Maybe they want to drive them back to their old monasteries.”

  Thus the parochial fund of Leisnig, which some writers have extolled so highly, really never came into existence. It lives only in the directions given by Luther.

  So ill were parson and schoolmaster cared for at Leisnig, in spite of all the Church property that had been sequestered, that, according to the Visitation of 1529, the preacher there had been obliged to ply a trade and gain a living by selling beer. In 1534, so the records of the Visitations of that date declare, the schoolmaster had for five years been paid no salary.

  Link, the Altenburg preacher, was also unsuccessful in his efforts to carry out a similar scheme. He complained as early as 1523, in a writing entitled “Von Arbeyt und Betteln,” that this Christian undertaking had so far “not only not been furthered but had actually gone backward” in spite of all his efforts from the pulpit. He, too, addresses himself to the “rulers” and reminds them that it is their duty “to the best of their ability to provide for the poverty of the masses.”

  To Luther’s bitter grief and disappointment Wittenberg (see above, ) also furnished anything but an encouraging example. Here the incentive to the introduction of the common fund by Carlstadt had been the resolve of the town council “to seize on the revenues of the Church, the brotherhoods and guilds and divert them into the common fund, to be employed for general purposes, and for paying the Church officials.… No less than twenty-one pious guilds were to be mulcted.” Yet the Wittenberg measures were so little a success, in spite of all Luther’s efforts, that in his sermons he could not sufficiently deplore the absence of charity and prevalence of avarice and greed amongst both burghers and councillors. The Beutelordnung continued indeed in existence, but merely as an administrative department of the town council.

  It is not surprising therefore that Luther gave up for the while any attempt at putting into practice the Leisnig project elsewhere; his scheme for assembling the true Christians into a community had also perforce to betake itself unto the land of dreams. Only in his “Deudsche Messe” of 1526 does the old idea again force itself to the front: “Here a general collection for the poor might be made among the congregation; it should be given willingly and distributed amongst the needy after the example of St. Paul, 2 Cor. ix.… If only we had people earnestly desirous of being Christians, the manner and order would soon be settled.”

  Subsequent to 1526, however, Bugenhagen drafted better regulations and poor laws for Wittenberg and other Protestant towns, founded this time on a more practical basis. (See below, f.)

  Luther, nevertheless, continued to complain of the Wittenbergers. The indignation he expresses at the lack of all charitable endeavours throughout the domain of the new Evangel serves as a suitable background for these complaints.

  Want of charity and of neighbourly love was the primary and most important cause of the failure of Luther’s efforts.

  “Formerly, when people served the devil and outraged the Blood of Christ,” he says in 1530 in “Das man die Kinder zur Schulen halten solle” (see above, ), “all purses were open and there was no end to the giving, for churches, schools and every kind of abomination; but now that it is a question of founding true schools and churches every purse is closed with iron chains and no one is able to give.” So pitiful a sight made him beg of God a happy death so that he might not live to see Germany’s punishment: “Did my conscience allow of it I would even give my help and advice so as to bring back the Pope with all his abominations to rule over us once more.”

  What leads him to such admissions as, that, the Christians, “under the plea of freedom are now seven times worse than they were under the Pope’s tyranny,” is, in the first place, his bitter experience of the drying up of charity, which now ceases to care even for the parsonages and churches. Under the Papacy people had been eager to build churches and to make offerings to be distributed in alms among the poor, but, now that the true religion is taught, it is a wonder how everyone has grown so cold. — Yet the people were told and admonished that it was well pleasing to God and all the angels, but even so they would not respond. — Now a pastor could not even get a hole in his roof mended to enable him to lie dry, whereas in former days people could erect churches and monasteries regardless of cost.— “Now there is not a single town ready to support a preacher and there is nothing but robbery and pilfering amongst the people and no one hinders them. Whence comes this shameful plague? ‘From the doctrine,’ say the bawlers, ‘which you teach, viz. that we must not reckon on works or place our trust in them.’ This is, however, the work of the tiresome devil who falsely attributes such things to the pure and wholesome teaching,” etc.

  He is so far from laying the blame on his teaching that he exclaims: What would our forefathers, who were noted for their charity, not have done “had they had the light of the Evangel which is now given to us”? Again and again he comes back to the contrast between his and older times: “Our parents and forefathers put us to shame for they gave so generously and charitably, nay even to excess, to the churches, parsonages and schools, foundations, hospitals,” etc.— “Indeed had we not already the means, thanks to the charitable alms and foundations of our forefathers, the Gospel itself would long since have been wiped out by the burghers in the towns, and the nobles and peasants in the country, so that not one poor preacher would have enough to eat and drink; for we refuse to supply them, and, instead, rob and lay violent hands on what others have given and founded for the purpose.”

  To sum up briefly other characteristic complaints which belong here, he says: Now that in accordance with the true Evangel we are admonished “to give without seeking for honour or merit, no one can spare a farthing.” — No one now will give, and, “unless we had the lands we stole from the Pope, the preachers would have but scant fare”; they even try “to snatch the morsels out of the parson’s mouth.” The way in which the “nobles and officials” now treat what was formerly Church property amounts to “a devouring of all beggars, strangers and poor widows; we may indeed bewail this, for they eat up the very marrow of the bones. Since they raise a hue and cry against the Papists let them also not forget us.… Woe to you peasants, burghers and nobles who grab everything, hoard and scrape, and pretend all the time to be good Evangelicals.”

  He is only too well acquainted with the evils of mendicancy and idleness, and knows that they have not diminished but rather increased. Even towards the end of his life he alludes to the “innumerable wicked rogues who pretend to be poor, needy beggars and deceive the people”; they deserve the gallows as much as the “idlers,” of whom there are “even many more” than before, who are well able to work, take service and support themselves, but prefer to ask for alms, and, “when these are not esteemed enough, to supplement them by pilfering or even by open, bare-faced stealing in the courtyards, the streets and in the very houses, so that I do not know whether there has ever been a time when robbery and thieving were so common.”

  Finally he recalls the enactments against begging by which the “authorities forbade foreign beggars and vagabonds and also idlers.” This brings us back to the attempts made, with the consent of the authorities in the Lutheran districts, to obviate the social evils by means similar to those adopted at Leisnig.

  A Second Stumbling Block: Lack of Organisation

  It was not merely lack of charity that rendered nugatory all attempts to put in force regulations such as those drafted for Leisnig, but also defects in the inner organisation of the schemes. First, to lump all sorts of monies intended for different purposes into a single fund could prove nothing but a source of confusion and diminish the amount to be devoted directly to charitable purposes; this, too, was the effect of keeping no separate account of the expenditure for the relief of the poor.

  Then, again, the intermingling of secular and spiritual which the arrangement involved was very unsatisfactory. We can trace here more clearly than elsewhere the quasi-mystic idea of the c
ongregation of true believers which retained so strong a hold on Luther’s imagination till about 1525. With singular ignorance of the ways of the world he wished to set up the common fund on a community based on faith and charity in which the universal priesthood was supposed to have abolished all distinction between the spiritual and secular authorities, nay, between the two very spheres themselves. He took for granted that Evangelical rulers would be altogether spiritual simply because they possessed the faith; faith, so he seemed to believe, would of itself do everything in the members of the congregation; under the guidance of the spirit everything would be “held in common, after the example of the Apostles,” as he says in the preface of the Leisnig regulations. But what was possible of accomplishment owing to abundance of grace in Apostolic times was an impossible dream in the 16th century. “The old ideal of an ecclesiastical commonwealth on which, according to the preface, Luther wished to construct a kind of insurance society for the relief of the poor, could not subsist for a moment in the keen atmosphere of a workaday world where men are what they are.”