“For it is the command of our stern Lord [the Elector],” he says elsewhere, “that we should maintain undefiled the government of the Church, dispense aright the Word, the Absolution and the Sacraments according to the institution of Christ, and also comfort consciences.”
Towards his end, according to Ratzeberger, he frequently told the faithful at Wittenberg that, in order to fight shy of false doctrines, they must hate reason as their greatest foe. “As soon as he was dead they would preach and teach at Wittenberg a very different doctrine”; hence they must “pray diligently and learn to prove the spirits aright”; they were to keep their eyes open to see whether what was preached agreed with Holy Scripture (here again the right of judging falling on the simple faithful). But if it was “outside of and apart from God’s Word, sweet and agreeable to reason and easy of comprehension, then they were to avoid such doctrine and say: No, thou hateful reason, thou art a whore, thee I will not follow.”
In a sermon on the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, 1546, published three years later after Luther’s death by Stephen Tucher under the title “The last Sermon of Dr. Martin Luther of blessed memory,” Luther again speaks at length of the “heresiarchs” who had already arisen and whom more would follow; what the devil had been unable to do by means of the Kaiser and Pope, that he “would do through those who are still at one with us in doctrine”; “there will be a dreadful time. Ah, the lawyers and the wise men at Court will say: ‘You are proud, a revolt will ensue, etc., hence let us give way.’” But, in matters of faith, there must be no talk of giving way, “pride may well please us if it be not against the faith.”
The picture of reason as a mere prostitute was now once more vividly before him. He hoped to dispose of the variant doctrines of others, who, like himself, interpreted the Bible in their own fashion, simply by urging contempt for reason. The faith in his own teaching, so he declared, “in the doctrine which I have, not from them but from the Grace of God,” must be preserved by means of a deadly warfare against “reason, the devil’s bride and beautiful prostitute”; “for she is the greatest seductress the devil has. The other gross sins can be seen, but reason no one is able to judge; it goes its way and leads to fanaticism.” The evil that is inherent in the flesh had not yet been completely driven out; “I am speaking of concupiscence which is a gross sin and of which everyone is sensible.” “But what I say of concupiscence, which is a gross sin, is also to be understood of reason, for the latter dishonours and insults God in His spiritual gifts and indeed is far more whorish a sin than whoredom.” When a Christian hears a Sacramentarian fanatic putting forward his reasonable grounds he ought to say to that reason, which is speaking: “Dear me, has the devil such a learned bride? — Away to the privy with you and your bride; cease, accursed whore,” etc. Hence some restriction was to be placed on private judgment; it was to be used in moderation and only in so far as it tallied with faith (“secundum analogiam fidei”). This “faith,” however, was in many instances simply Luther’s own.
As Luther’s personality could not replace the outward rule of faith, viz. the authoritative voice of the teaching Church, his dreary prognostications were only too soon to be fulfilled. Hence in the appendix to another Wittenberg edition of Luther’s last sermon these words, as early as 1558, are represented as “the late Dr. Martin Luther’s excellent prophecies about the impending corruption and falling away of the chief teachers in our churches, particularly at Wittenberg.”
It is curious that, towards the close of his life, the Wittenberg Professor should have come again to insist so strongly on those points in his teaching for which he had fought at the outset, in spite of all the difficulties and contradictions they had been shown to involve, with the Bible, tradition and reason. He could at least claim that he had not abandoned his olden theses of the blindness of reason, of the unfreedom of the will, of the sinfulness of that concupiscence, from which none can get away, of the saving power of faith alone and the worthlessness of good works for the gaining of a heavenly reward, of the Bible as the sole source of faith and each man’s right of interpreting it, and, last, but not least, that of his own mission and call received from God Himself.
The decline of morals, now so obvious, was another phantom that haunted the evening of his days.
In the beginning of 1546 he confided to Amsdorf his anxiety regarding Meissen, Leipzig and other places where licence prevailed, together with contempt of the Gospel and its ministers. “This much is certain: Satan and his whole kingdom is terribly wroth with our Elector. To this kingdom your men of Meissen belong; they are the most dissolute folk on earth. Leipzig is pride and avarice personified, worse than any Sodom could be.… A new evil that Satan is hatching for us may be seen in the spread of the spirit of the Münster Dippers. After laying hold of the common people this spirit of revolt against all authority has also infected the great, and many Counts and Princes. May God prevent and overreach it!”
He tells “Bishop” George of Merseburg, in Feb., 1546, that “steps must be taken against the scandals into which the people are plunging head over heels, as though all law were at an end.” It seems to him that a new Deluge is coming. “Let us beware lest what Moses wrote of the days before the flood repeats itself, how ‘they took to wife whomsoever they pleased, even their own sisters and mothers and those they had carried off from their husbands.’ Instances of the sort have reached my ear privately. May God prevent such doings from becoming public as in the case of Herod and the kings of Egypt!” “The world is full of Satan and Satanic men,” so he groans even in an otherwise cheerful letter.
Up to the day of his death he was concerned for the welfare of the students at Wittenberg University. Among the 2000 young men at the University (for such was their number in Luther’s last years) there were many who were in bitter want. Luther sought to alleviate this by attacking, even in his sermons, those who were bent on fleecing the young; he not only gave readily out of his own slender means but also wrote to others asking them to be mindful of the students; of this we have an instance in a note he wrote in his later years, in which he asks certain “dear gentlemen” (possibly of the University or the magistracy) for help for a “pious and learned fellow” who would have to leave Wittenberg “for very hunger”; he declares that he himself was ready to contribute a share, though he was no longer able to afford the gifts he was daily called upon to bestow.
We know how grieved he was at the downfall of the schools and how loud his complaints were of the lawlessness of youth; how it distressed him to see the schools looked down upon though their contribution to the maintenance of the Churches was “entirely out of question.”
For his University of Wittenberg he requests the prayers of others against those who were undermining its reputation. He sees the small effect of his earnest exhortations to the students against immorality. The excellent statutes he had laid down for the town and the University were nullified by the bad example of men in high places. “Ah, how bitterly hostile the devil is to our Churches and schools.… Tyranny and sects are everywhere gaining the upper hand by dint of violence.… I believe there are many wicked knaves and spies here on the watch for us, who rejoice when scandals and dissensions arise. Hence we must watch and pray diligently. Unless God preserves us all is up. And so it looks. Pray, therefore, pray! This school [of Wittenberg] is as it were the foundation and stronghold of pure religion.” He once declared sadly that, among all the students in the town there were scarcely two from whom something might be hoped as future pastors of souls. “If out of all the young men present here two or three honest theologians grow up then we should have reason to thank God! Good theologians are indeed rare birds on this earth. Among a thousand you will seldom find two, or even one. And indeed the world no longer deserves such good teachers, nor does it want them; things will go ill when I, and you and some few others are gone.”
“The world was like this before the flood, before the destruction of Sodom, before the Babylonian captivity, be
fore the destruction of Jerusalem — and so again it is before the fall of Germany.… Should you, however, ask what good has come of our teaching, answer me first, what good came of Lot’s preaching in Sodom?”
To divert his thoughts from these saddening cares he often turned to Æsop. It is of interest to note how highly he always prized Æsop’s Fables, not merely as a means of education for the young in the elementary schools, but even as furnishing a stimulating topic for conversation with his friends.
He is very fond of adducing morals from these fables both in his Table-Talk and in his writings.
Æsop’s tale of the fight between the wounded snake and the crab he dictated to his son Hans as a Latin exercise, and, in 1540, when a Mandate of the Kaiser aroused his suspicions owing to its kindly wording, the old man at once related to his guests the fable of the wolf who seeks to lead the sheep to a good pasture, and declared that he could easily see through this “Lycophilia.”
For a long time he had a work on hand which he was destined never to complete; he was anxious to provide a new and better edition of Æsop for the schools, which, so he hoped, should replace the, in some respects unseemly, fables of Steinhöwel’s edition then in use which had been corrupted by additions from Poggio’s Facetiæ. A series of amusing and at the same time instructive fables which he translated with this object in view is still extant. That he found time for such a work in the midst of all his other pressing labours is sufficient evidence that he had it much at heart. The Preface to his unfinished little work, which he read aloud to a friend in 1538, pointed out, that writings of this kind were intended for “children and the simple,” whose mental development he wished to keep in view, carefully excluding anything that was offensive. The collection of Fables then in circulation, “though written professedly for the young,” unfortunately contained tales with narratives of “shameful and unchaste knavery such as no chaste or pious man, let alone any youth, could hear or read without injury to himself; it was as though the book had been written in a common house of ill fame or among dissolute scamps.”
He was very determined in putting down scandals when they occurred in his own home. A young relative, who was addicted to drunkenness, he took severely to task, pointing out the good example, which in the interests of the Evangel his household was strictly bound to give; when the maidservant, Rosina, whom he had taken into his house, turned out a person of bad life, he could not sufficiently express his indignation and dismissed her from the family. A similar case also occurred at the time of his flight from Wittenberg in July, 1545; he writes to Catherine in the letter in which he tells her of his intention of not returning: “If Leck’s ‘Bachscheisse,’ our second Rosina and deceiver, has not yet been laid by the heels, do what you can that the miscreant may feel ashamed of herself.”
Catherine Bora was a good helper in matters of this sort. In fact she performed with zeal and assiduity the duties that fell to her lot in tending the aged and infirm man, and looking after the house and the small property. Amidst his many and great difficulties he often confessed that she was a comfort to him, and gratefully acknowledges her work. In his letters to her during his later years he writes in so religious a strain, and in such heartfelt language, that the reader might be forgiven for thinking that Luther had entirely succeeded in forgetting the irreligious nature of the union between a monk and a nun. “Grace and peace in the Lord,” he writes in a letter from Eisleben of Feb. 7, 1546, to his “housewife.” “Read, you dear Katey, John and the Smaller Catechism, of which you once said: All that is told in this book applies to me. For you try to care for your God just as though He were not Almighty and could not make ten Dr. Martins should the old one be drowned in the Saale, etc. Leave me in peace with your cares, I have a better guardian than even you and all the angels.”
3. Luther’s Death at Eisleben (1546)
In March, 1545, there was sent to Luther by Philip of Hesse an Italian broadside purporting to have been printed in Rome, and containing a fearsome account of Luther’s supposed death. In it “the ambassador of the King of France” announces that Luther had wished his body set up on the altar for adoration; also that before he died he had received the Body of Christ, but that the Host had hovered untouched over the grave after the funeral; a diabolical din had been heard coming from the grave, but, on opening it, it was found to be empty though it emitted a murderous stench of brimstone. Luther at once published the narrative with an half-ironical, half-indignant commentary. He sought to persuade the people that the Pope had actually wished for his death and damnation. In a poem which he prefixed to the pamphlet he tells the Pope in his usual style that: his life was indeed the Pope’s plague, but that his death would be the Pope’s death too; the Pope might choose which he liked best, the plague or death. — About the real origin of this alleged Italian production nothing is known.
In his bodily sufferings and anxiety of mind concerning the present and the future of his life’s work Luther frequently spoke of his desire for a speedy release by death. His words on this subject throw a strong light on his frame of mind.
As things are “ever growing worse,” he says, “let our Lord God take away His own. He will remove the pious and then make an end of Germany.” “I am very weary of life,” he declared, “may Our Lord come right speedily and take me away, and, above all, may He come with His Judgment Day! I will reach out my neck to Him that He may strike me down with His thunderbolt where I am. Amen.” — As early as June 11, 1539 (?), when he was wished another forty years of life, he said that, even were he offered a Paradise on earth for forty years, “I would not accept it. I would rather hire an executioner to chop off my head. So wicked is the world now! And the people are becoming real devils, so that one could wish him nothing better than a good death and then away!”
Do you know, he said on one occasion, who it is that holds back God’s arm? “I am the block that stops God’s way. When I die He will strike. No doubt we are despised; but let them gather up the leavings when they are most despised; that is my advice.”
That, “even in our own lifetime, the world should thus repay us,” seemed to him intolerable. “I hold that, for a thousand years, the world has never been so unfriendly to anyone as to me. I am also unfriendly to it, and know of nothing in life that I take pleasure in.”
Of the sudden death that confronted him he had, however, no idea. On the contrary, in 1543, when he was suffering from severe trouble in the head, he said to Catherine Bora, that he would summon his son Hans from Torgau to Wittenberg to be present at his death, which now seemed near at hand; but, he added: “I shall not die so suddenly, I shall first take to my bed and be ill; but I shall not lie there long. I have had enough of the world and it has had enough of me.… I give thanks to Thee My God that Thou hast numbered me in Thy little flock which endures persecution for the sake of Thy Word.”
Incidentally he declared: “If I die in my bed it will be to defy the Papists and put them to shame.” Why? Because they will not have been able to do me the harm “they wished, and, in fact, were in duty bound to have done me.”
The thought of death often made his hatred of the Catholics to flame up more luridly. “Only after my death will they feel what Luther really was”; should he fall a prey to his adversaries before his time, he would carry with him to the grave “a long train of bishops, priestlings and monks, for my life shall be their hangman, my death their devil.” He announces angrily, “They shall not be able to resist me,” and that, “in God’s name, he will tread the lion and the dragon under foot,” but of all this, according to him, they were to have only a taste during his lifetime; only after his death would matters be carried out in earnest.
Brooding over his own death he says of the death of the believing Christian, viz. of the man who puts his trust in the Evangel: “If a man seriously meditates in his heart on God’s Word, believes it and falls asleep and dies in it, he will pass away before he realises that death has come, and is assuredly saved by the Word in w
hich he has thus believed and died.” These words he wrote on Feb. 7, 1546, to an Eisleben gentleman in a copy of his Home-Postils. He prefaced them with a passage from Scripture in which he himself doubtless had often sought comfort: “He that keepeth my Word shall not taste of death for ever” (John viii. 51). In one of his last lengthy notes he also seeks to make his own this believing confidence: “Christ commands us to believe in Him. Although we are not able to believe as firmly as we should yet God has patience with us.” “I hide myself under the shelter of the Son of God; Him I hold and honour as my Lord to Whom I must fly when the devil, sin or any other ill assails me. For He is my shield, extending beyond the heavens and the earth and the foster-hen under whose wings I creep from the wrath of God.” Thus he was so steeped in the delusion of faith alone that he could thus wish to die in sole reliance on the “Word of God,” thanks to which he is to escape “the devil, death, hell and sin.” We may remember that, in one of his earliest controversial sermons, where a glimpse of his new doctrine is already to be detected, he had used the simile of the foster-hen. Now, in his old age, he returns to it, the richer by the experience of a long lifetime, albeit he now sees that it is difficult, nay impossible, “to believe as firmly as we should.”
In Jan., 1546, Luther set out for the third time for Mansfeld, in order to settle the business of Count Albert of Mansfeld; only as a corpse was he to return home.
The Elector did not look with approval on Luther’s arduous labours as peacemaker, while Chancellor Brück even went so far as to characterise the Counts’ interminable lawsuits about the mines and the rest as a “pig-market.” Luther, nevertheless, set out again on Jan. 23, regardless of his already impaired health, betaking himself this time to Eisleben. He was accompanied by his three sons, their tutor and his famulus Aurifaber, the editor of the German Table-Talk. At Halle they were detained three days in the house of Jonas on account of the floating ice and the flooded state of the Saale. “We did not wish to take to the water and tempt God,” so he wrote to Catherine on Jan. 25, “for the devil bears us a grudge and also dwells in the water; and, moreover, ‘discretion is the best part of valour’; nor is there any need for us to give the Pope and his myrmidons such cause for delight.”
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 886
