^ N^ \ \\ \^ \ ;^^'\ \ N V\n ^ X <:^^\ ^ \, \^ ^ QfornsU Uniocraitg Sltbrarg Stljaca, Sfew ^arfe BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 Cornell University Library BR325 .B36 1896 Martin Luther and the reforrnatipn In Ger olln 3 1924 029 249 203 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029249203 MARTIN LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION IN GERMANY UNTIL THE CLOSE OF THE DIET OF WORMS BY THE LATE CHARLES BEARD, B.A., LL.D. Author of " Lectures on the Reformation in its Relation to Modern Thought and Knowledge." (Hibbert Lecture, 1883) EDITED BY J. FREDERICK SMITH CHEAP EDITION ILonOon PHILIP GREEN, 5, ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C. 1896 Five Shillings net. PEEFACE From the author's Introduction, in' which he describes the scope of his projected History of the Eeformation in Ger- many, it will be seen that this volume is but a first instal- ment of a larger work. Happily the volume is, however, anything but an unfinished fragment. It was not only left by the writer ready for the. press, but it brings its story down to the close of the first great period of the German Eeforma- tion. When the Diet of Worms broke up, German Pro- testantism had been finally and fully inaugurated, and its central figure, Martin Luther, had reached the summit of his heroism and his revolt. My editorial duties have been hardly more than to see through the press a singularly and characteristically perfect manuscript ; and they have been lightened by the faithful care with which Mrs. Beard and her son, Mr. Lewis Beard, B.A., have compared manuscript and proof. ■ I have considered it needful, in order to guard against accidental error, to exercise a general supervision of the narrative, to compare quotations with the origiual passages, and to verify references. No alterations have been introduced into the text or the notes, except where an obvious lapsus calami had crept in, which, however, thanks to the author's extreme accuracy, has happened but very occasionally. Here and there in the notes a reference to books or articles published since the manuscript was finished has been added. Por the title of the volume, the headiugs of the chapters and the pages, and the list of the principal authorities and editions used by the author, I am responsible ; and for the Index, Mr. Lewis Beard. viii ., PREFACE From the list of authorities and from the notes it will be seen that Dr. Charles Beard kept pace to the very last with the latest research in a field which has been thoroughly upturned by the critical industry of such specialists as Seide- mann, Kostlin, Kolde, Knaake, Kawerau, and their fellow- labourers. And it may not be out of place to remark that Dr. Julius Kostlin's Life of Luther, with others that have followed it, placed aU preceding Lives of the Eeformer in the class of antiquated literature, in point of historical accuracy and thoroughness. Of the mingled feelings with which I have worked, all readers of the book will, I believe, share those of thank- fulness for what is here finished, and of regret for what has been lost in the volumes which remain unwritten. It is much to have the great story of the successful launching of the German Eeformation told by one who was so singularly quali- fied to tell it well. "Would that his pen had been permitted to trace the further development of the movement, and to foUow the lives of its prominent representatives until their work was done ! To his Hibbert Lectures the author prefixed a motto, taken from Lessing, and I cannot resist the temptation to append here a passage from Goethe, which, like that from Lessing, seems to me to breathe the spirit that inspired all Dr. Charles Beard's studies in this great period of history : — " Wir wissen gar nicht was wir Luthern und der Eeforma- tion im allgemeinen alles zu danken haben. Wir sind frei geworden von den Fesseln geistiger Borniertheit, wir sind infolge unserer fortwachsenden Kultur fahig geworden, zur Quelle zuriickzukehren und das Christenthum in seiner Eein- heit zu fassen. Wir haben wieder den Mut, mit festen Fiissen auf Gottes Erde zu stehen und uns in unserer gottbe- gabten Menschennatur zu fiihlen . . . "Wir werden alle nach und nach aus einem Christenthum des Wortes und Glaubens immer mehr zu einem Christenthum der Gesinnung und That kommen." — Gesprdche mit EchermoMn. J. EEEDEEICK SMITH. Clifton, Bristol, July 1889. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 1 CHAPTEE I Political Condition of the Empiee . 5 CHAPTEE II The Eeligio0s Life of Geemant 24 CHAPTEE III The Renaissance in Germany 62 CHAPTEE IV Luther's Life prior to his Eevolt . 116 CHAPTEE V Luther's Ninety-five Theses . 200 CHAPTEE VI The Year 1519 : Friends and Foes . 259 CONTENTS CHAPTEE VII PAGE The Yeab 1520 ; Lutheb's Appeal to the Nation . 319 CHAPTEE VIII Luther and the Theology op Rome. . . .379 CHAPTEE IX The Diet op Woems ..... 406 INDEX . . 459 PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES WITH 'THE ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THIS VOLUME Luther's Collected Works — 1. The Frankfurt and Erlangen edition. Erl. D. S. (a) German: vols, i.-xxvi. 2d ed. 1862-1885. vols, xxvii.-lxvii. 1st ed. 1853-1857. Erl. 0pp. (b) Latin: a. Exegetica, vols, i.-xxviii. 1829-1886. Erl. Ep. Gal. /3. In Epist. Gal. vols, i.-iii. 1843-1844. Erl. 0pp. V. a. y. 0pp. Varii Argumenti, vols. i.-vii. 1865- 1873. Weimar ed. 2. The Weimar Critical Edition, in chronological order, now in course of publication, vols, i.-iv. vi. 1883- 1888. Wakh. 3. The edition of J. G. Walch in 24 vols. 4to, Halle, 1737-1753. Luther's Letters — De Wette. 1. Dr. Martin Luther's Briefe gesammelt von W. M. L. De Wette, vols. i.-v. 1825-1828. vol. vi. edited by Seidemann, 1856. Seidemann. 2. Seidemann, Lutherbriefe, 1859. Burhhardt. 3. Dr. M. Luther's Briefwechsel, von C. A. H. Burk- hardt, 1866. Enders. 4. Dr. Martin Luther's Briefwechsel, von E. L. Enders, vols, i.-ii. 1884-1887 (containing letters from and to Luther, with some others, of the years 1507-1520). Luther's Table Talk — T. T. 1. German: edited by Ebrstemann and Bindseil, vols. i.-iv. 1844-1848. Coll. 2. Latin: D. Martini Lutheri CoUoquia edita ab H. E. Bindseil, vols, i.-iii. 1863-1866. xii PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES USED IN THIS VOLUME Album Academiae Vitebergensis, 1502-1540, ed. Forsteniann, 1841. Historia Joannis Cochlaei de Actis et Scriptis, M. Lutheri, etc., Coloniae, 1568. Corpus Eeformatorum, torn, i-xxviii., sive Melantbonis Ph. Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Bretsobneider et Bindseil (Historia de vita et actis D. Martini Lutheri conscripta a Philippo Melanthone being in tom. vi.). Erasmi Eoterodami Opera Omnia, Lugd. Bat. 1703-1706, vols, i.-xi. Pbrstemann — Neues Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der Evangelischen Kirchen-Reformation, vol. i. 1842. Neue Mittheilungen aus dem Gebiet historisch-antiquarischen Forschungen, des Thiiringisch-Sachischen Vereins, etc., vols, i.-viii. 1834-1850. Herzog — Eeal-Encyklopaedie fiir protestantische Theologie und Kirche, 1st ed. 1854-1868, 2d ed. 1877-1888. Ulrichi Hutteni equitis Germani Opera Omnia, edidit Eduardus Bdcking, vols. i.-v. 1859-1861 ; U. H. Operum Supplementum, vols. i. ii. 1864-1870. Jiirgens — Luther's Leben, von seiner Geburt bis zum Ablassstreite, 1483-1517, 3 vols. 1846-1847, von Karl Jiirgens. Kampsohulte — Die Universitat Erfurt in ihrem Verhaltnisse zu dem Humanismus und der Reformation, vol. i. 1858, vol. ii. 1860. Kolde— Martin Luther, Eine Biographie, von Theodor Kolde, Liefe- rungen, 1-3, 1884 (brings the life down to end of Diet of Worms). Die deutsche Augustiner-Congregation und Johann von Stau- pitz, von T. Kolde, 1879. Luther's Stellung zu Concil u. Kirche bis zum 1521, von T. Kolde, 1876. Kostlin— Martin Luther, sein Leben und seine Schriften, 2 vols. 1875; 2d and 3d ed. 1883. Lauterbach's Tagebuch auf das Jahr 1538, ed. Seidemann, 1872. Liber Decanorum Faoultatis Theologicae Academiae Vitebergensis, ed. by Forstemann, 1838. Lingke— Dr. M. Luther's merkwiirdige Reisegeschichte, etc , von J T. Lingke, 1769. Ldscher— Vollstandige Reformations -acta und Documenta ausgefertigt von V. E. Loschern, vol. i. (the year 1517), voL ii. (the year 1518), vol. iii. (the year 1519). Mathesius-Historien von D. M. Luther's Anfang, etc., Niirnberg 1567 Myconius-Frid. Myconii Hist. Reformationis, 1518-1542 ed bv Cyprian, 1715. ' • J PRINCIPAL A UTHORITIES USED IN THIS VOLUME xiii Eatzeberger — Die handschriftliche Geschiclite Eatzeberger's viber Luther u. seine Zeit, hferausgegeben von Neudecker, 1850. Eiederer — (1) Beitrag zu den Eeformationsurkunden, etc., 1762. (2) Naohrichten zur Kirchengescliiohte und Biicbergeschiolite, 8 vols, in 4, 1764-1767. Scheurl — Cbristopb Scbeurl's Briefbuch, Lerausgegeben von F. v. Soden und J. K. F. Knaake, 2 vols. 1867-1872. Seckendorf — Commentarius Mstoricus et apologetious de Lutheranismo, ed. 2da, Lips. 1694, folio. Seidemann, J. E. — Die Leipziger Disputation, 1843. Spalatin — G. Spalatini Annales Eeformationis, apud Menckenii Scrip-^ tores rerum German. 1728-1729, vol. ii. Strobel — ^Beitrage zur Literatur besonders des xvi. Jabrh. 4 pts. in 2 vols. 1784-1787. Neue Beitrage, etc., 5 vols. 1790-1794. Tentzel — Historiscbe Bericbt von Anfang, etc. der Eeformation Lutheri, 2 vols. 1718. Tentzelii Supplementum Hist. Gothanae, primum C. Mutiani Rufi Epistolas complectens, Jenae, 1701. UUmann — Eeformatoren vor der Eeformation, von Dr. Carl Ullmann, 2d ed. 2 vols. 1866. "Weissenborn, J. C. H. — Acten der Erfurter Universitat, pts. i. and ii. 1881-1884. INTEODUCTION Theee are two points of view from which the Eeformation of the SLsteenth century may be regarded. Looked at from the first, it appears to he what its name imports — an effort to reclaim the Christian Church from inveterate doctrinal and practical corruption to a more primitive conception of truth and a higher standard of purity. In the practical or disciplin- ary sense the Latin Chiirch had made repeated efforts to reform itself. Monasticism, both in its original foundation and in its repeated revivals, was such an effort. An organised and gene- ral attempt at reformation was the object of the Councils of Pisa, Constanz, and Basel at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The corruption of Christianity, in the forms in which it was commonly presented to the people, threw mystics back upon the ideas which lie at the basis of all religion, and gave rise to sects, which lived a hidden life, beneath the surface of mediaeval society. A disciplinary reformation was carried into effect by Ferdinand and Isabella, in Castile and Arragon, at the end of the fifteenth century, and was the object of the Fifth Lateran Council, held at Eome in 1512-1517. In Spain, in France, in Germany, in England the weaknesses of the existing system were strongly felt, and demands were made for reform, which Eome, then under the rule of profligate Popes, resisted or evaded. But this movement was taken out of the hands of the Church by Luther. Having fought his own way to what would now be called a Protestant conception of spiritual reh- gion, though without becoming conscious of his divergence from Catholic standards, he first attacked the abuses connected with the sale of indulgences, and then was led on, step by step, to B INTRODUCTION an assault upon the whole position of the Church. His doctrine of the authority of Scripture undermined that of the authority of the Church ; his theory of the priesthood of the believer, the whole sacerdotal and sacramental system. The result was, within certain territorial limits, the foundation of Churches which not only separated themselves from allegiance to the Pope, but established an administration of Christianity based upon ideas of religion other than those which obtained within the Catholic pale. The Protestant Eeformation was thus, in its essence, doctrinal ; it was the substitution of one series of conceptions of Christianity for another: and it reformed the practical abuses peculiar to Catholicism by destroying the system upon which they were an excrescence. But whUe, at the Diet of Augsburg, and on every similar occasion, the Catholic Church refused to make the slightest doctrinal concession to the dissi- dents, the demand for disciplinary reform was never silent within her borders : and the Council of Trent, which settled the Creed of the Church upon the old lines, in matters of administration, opened a new era. The necessity of recovering lost ground from a victorious Protestantism, the election to the Papal Chair of a series of austere Pontiffs, the foundation of the Society of Jesus and other orders animated by a spirit of stern and enthusiastic piety, produced the Counter-Eeformation. The doctrinal position of the Latin Church remained unchanged, but it was purged of its worst practical scandals. But this summary does not cover all the facts of the case, or indicate their wider relations. Why were the efforts of the Church to reform itself ineffectual ? It may be said that monasticism, in its attempt to lift humanity to an unreal and impossible height of perfectness, always carries within itself the seeds of failure; that reformation by General Councils broke down, because the moral energy of the few could not contend successfully against the selfishness and the worldliness of the many ; that mystic religion, almost always pure and good, can- not spread itself beyond the few souls which have a natural afSnity for it. But the characteristic ideas of the Eeformation . were older than Luther ; Wichf had preached them in England, Hus in Bohemia : a series of Catholic theologians in Germany had attacked indulgences, and expounded justification by faith INTRODUCTION in terms almost identical with those afterwards employed by the Saxon reformer. Why was no general effect produced ? The answer is, that the Eeformation in its wider aspects is part of that greater movement of the human mind, known as the Eenaissance ; a rebirth, due to the revived study of classi- cal Literature and philosophy ; a rebellion against mediseval systems of thought, which has issued in modern science and speculation. Without the fresh intellectual activity produced by this movement, and augmented in the fifteenth century by the invention of the art of printing, Luther might have been as ineffectual as Wiclif was. But the time was ripe for change ; the seed was cast into the ground at the right moment. Never- theless, the Lutheran soon separated itself from the purely Humanist movement, and has never since been fully reconciled with it. Lutheranism first, and Calvinism afterwards developed into a Protestant scholasticism, only less fatal to the unrestricted movement of the humane mind than that of the Middle Ages. At the same time, on other than Church ground, the tide of free speculation has steadily risen, nor, for the last hundred years, have the gradually decaying bulwarks of dogma been able to oppose any effectual resistance to it. From this point of view, the Eeformation was the manifestation of the spirit of the Eenaissance in the realm of religion ; and Kant, Niebuhr, Ewald, Darwin, are, each on his own line of affiliation, heirs of Luther. In the following pages I propose to teU the story of the German Eeformation from the publication of the Ninety-five Theses in 1517 to the death of Melanchthon in 1560. Even this, however, is a wider subject than I can pretend to treat with equal minuteness in all its parts ; the centre point of my narrative wiR be Saxony, and its principal personages, the Eeformers of Wittenberg, with those whom an irresistible attraction drew within their orbit. I shall thus grasp the advantage of a story alive with a single interest, and confined within manageable limits; whUe at the same time opportu- nity will be given of illustrating the principles which. animated the general movement of reform in Europe. But before I can begin this task, a large preparation must be made. I must attempt to describe the political condition of the Empire at the INTRODUCTION beginning of the sixteenth century; to combine into a single picture the various elements of the religious life of Germany about the same period ; to foUow the story of the revival of classical literature in Germany, and then to analyse the intel- lectual soil into which the germinal ideas of the Eeformation were cast ; and in the last place, to tell the story of Luther's life up to the moment of his rebellion against the Church, and to trace his characteristic ideas to their origin in his own inward pains and coniiicts. These, then, will be the subjects of four introductory chapters. Should any reader complain that he is long held back from the main interest of the book, let him remember that no great and general movement of the human mind can be understood without careful analysis of the forces which have combined to produce it, and that every stage of iatellectual progress presupposes another out of which it has been evolved. The development of human afiairs is one con- tinuous web, in which no real breaks answer to the artificial periods into which we divide history. CHAPTER I POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIEE The political condition of Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century was due to forces which, although they had been long in operation, had not yet whoUy spent themselves. The Carolingian kingdom of the Franks, which had been invested with the succession to the Eoman Empire, and had renewed its Imperial character under Otho the Great, was slowly dissolving into a confederacy of States, spiritual and civil, of which the nominal head, in dignity the chief of earthly monarchs, had little power except such as his own hereditary possessions conferred upon him. . We find ourselves at a point midway between the comparatively homogeneous kingdom of Charlemagne and the phantom Empire which in 1815 still gave a title to the royal house of Austria. And the disintegra- tion of Germany, at the moment which we are considering, stood in strong contrast to processes of national consolidation which were going on over the rest of Europe. The task of uniting Italy was indeed left for the nineteenth century to accomplish ; but Spain had just been constituted by the union of Arragon and Castile under Ferdinand and Isabella : England, gathering strength after the exhaustion caused by the Wars of the Eoses, was fast recovering a national consciousness : the breaking up of the Burgundian kingdom, and the absorption of Brittany in the dominions of the House of Valois, gave France a more solid power than it had ever before possessed. Ger- many alone showed an irresistible tendency to separate into fragments. Every year the centrifugal force grew stronger. 6 POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE chap. the common bond of union weaker. Nothing ever occurred which arrested for more than a moment the fading of Imperial rights into imposing unreality : everything helped the Elector- ates, the PriQcipalities, the Dukedoms, on their way to political independence. The theory of the Empire had, at no moment of mediaeval history, been fully carried into practice. According to it the Emperor was the head of the civil as the Pope of the spiritual order. They held the two swords which divided all the power of the world between them : another common metaphor described them as the sun and moon of the intellectual sky. The Emperor claimed more than a titular supremacy over other monarchs : he had inherited the privileges and pretensions of the successors of Augustus. But England and the kingdoms of the Spanish peninsula went on their way in practical inde- pendence of him, while he was brought into contact with the growing French kingdom which had its capital at Paris, chiefly on the frontier of Burgundy and Elanders. In Italy, on the contrary, he was always busy. There he was a living force. He went to Eome to be crowned. He was the titular king of the Eomans, a monarch often distant and disregarded, but stni the symbol of the power which had once made Eome the capital of the civilised earth. In all the throes of the Italian EepubHcs he stood for the general as contrasted with the local order of things, for the State in opposition to the Church. Every now and then an Emperor made the attempt to convert his theoretical into a real supremacy over Italy, but could never long hold his ground : and the chief result was to keep old claims alive in men's miads, and to prepare the way for a fresh assertion of them. But Guelph and Ghibelline were words that represented a very real opposition of political feel- ing ; and the dream that Dante dreamed of an Imperial mon- archy, which, in the exercise of its just rights, should heal the woes of Italy by giving it a well-ordered government, shows how strong a hold the idea of the Empire had upon men's minds. But before the beginning of the sixteenth century all this had faded away, and Italy had become only the battle- ground on which the rival ambitions of France and Germany contended for the mastery. THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY The struggle of the Empire for a territorial hold on Italy was, however, complicated with another, wider in extent and of deeper significance. The relations of the Empire with the Papacy were always peculiarly close. Pipin twice delivered Eome from the Lombards, and was rewarded with the title of Patrician. The coronation of Charles by Leo III (a.d. 800) is " the central event of the Middle Ages." ^ Charles's con- quests in Northern and North -Eastern Germany had been made in the name of Christianity : conversion or slaughter was the alternative practically offered to the Saxons. Almost for the first time in the history of Christianity, the civil and the spiritual power are manifestly and happily in accord : the Church is secure under the protection of the Frankish swords, the State borrows the authority, and uses the instruments of the Church. But the relation was changed when, in 962, Otho came down from the Alps with a victorious army, and was crowned Emperor at Eome by John XII. This time it was the State imposing itself upon the Church. "The Pope owned himself a subject ; and the citizens swore for the future to elect no Pope without Otho's consent." ^ It was one of the moments at which the Papacy, both politically and morally, was at the lowest ebb ; and Popes, set up and deposed by rival factions, and each equally unworthy of rule, obeyed the Emperor's nod. A little more than a hundred years brings us from John XII to G-regory VII, and the same interval from Otho the Great to Henry IV. We pass from the Emperor receiving an oath of allegiance from the Pope, to the Emperor waiting in the snow, in the castle-yard of Canossa, tiU the Pope should be willing to see and to absolve a penitent. Even this, however, is hardly the lowest point of submission to which the spiritual reduced the temporal power ; that was reached when, before the porch of St. Mark's at Venice, Frederic Barbarossa humbly bowed before Alexander III. The first thing that Henry needed to help him in his contests with his rebellious subjects was the removal of the ban of excommunication, and that once extorted by submission, he flew back to Germany to continue the struggle with vassals and Pope alike. But in the person 1 Bryce, Soly jRoman Empire, 3d ed. p. 50. ^ Ibid. p. 88. 8 POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE chap. of Frederic the Empire, almost at its strongest, came into conflict with the Papacy, and deliberately confessed itself vanquished. It is not necessary in this connection to tell the story, how the edifice of Papal pretensions was gradually built up on the foundation of the pseudo-Isidorian decretals, by astute and resolute Popes ; how it was strengthened by the enforcement of clerical celibacy and the iofluence of the mon- astic orders ; how fortified by men's belief in the unity of the Church and the need of a supreme court of appeal in matters political as well as spiritual ; and how it finally crumbled to pieces iu the degradation of the captivity of Avignon, and the scandal of the Schism. To do so, would be to undertake the task of epitomising the history of mediaeval Europe. The main point we have at present to notice is that in the enforcement of Imperial claims, made real by able and powerful monarchs, reduced to a vanishing point under weak and irresolute ones, the opportunity was missed of consolidating Germany into a homogeneous kingdom. When the Papacy of Gregory VII and Innocent III disappeared from the scene, to give place to that of men like Sixtus IV and Alexander VI, whose base ambition was bounded by the erection of Italian priucipalities for their sons and nephews, Frederic III and Maximilian were struggling against the impotence of the Empire. And when in the person of Charles V the Empire seemed all at once to rise to its old predominance in Europe, it was only because the- Emperor was the hereditary ruler of richer and more powerful States than had ever before' been united under one sceptre. Germany, the ancient seat of Empire, was much more his weakness than his strength. To a considerable extent, the fact that the German mon- archy was not hereditary but elective, worked in the same direction. At first sight it might seem as if the periodical selection of the ablest man would tend to establish monarchy on a more stable basis than the chances of hereditary descent. In truth, the two principles were contending for the mastery, with the result, until the claims to Empire of the House of Hapsburg were finally recognised, of arraying two or three great families one against the other, and so giving the ever- .watchful Pope his opportunity of interference and aggression. I GROWING INDEPENDENCE OF THE STATES 9 A weak hereditary raonarch has at least this advantage over a chosen king who is otherwise no fitter for rule than himself, that his claim to the throne is unquestioned. So that whatever its other wrongs and sorrows, his kingdom escapes the miseries which arise out of a disputed succession. And while an here- ditary kiug receives his office from his ancestors with its privi- leges unimpaired, and is under no temptation to impair them, an elective monarch usually begins by buying his own election at the cost of parting with power, and goes on to secure in the same way the supremacy of his house. Then there is the tendency, only too prevailing at some periods of German history, for great feudatories to entrust supreme authority to hands which they know to be too weak to wield it, and thus to secure the growth of their own independence. Nor can anything show more clearly the change which had been fully effected at the beginning of the sixteenth century th&n the willingness of the electors to bestow the Imperial crown on a prince who, like Charles V, might have fair ground to aspire to universal dominion. The long impotence of Frederic III, and the inability of Maximilian to carry the German States with him in his plans, either of internal organisation or foreign conquest, seem to have convinced them that their sectional independence was fully assured, and that however powerful the Emperor might be outside the Empire, he could do little to disturb the equili- brium iato which it had gradually settled. The experience of the next two centuries amply justified this expectation. Ger- many came out of the Thirty Years' War, the most desolating experience through which a nation ever passed, with her terri- torial arrangements almost unaltered. Until the new Empire effaced some at least of the old political landmarks, the reign- ing houses of the niueteenth century were the descendants of the Electors, Princes, Dukes who met Charles V at the Diet of Worms. We may mark two chief epochs in this growing inde- pendence of the States. The first is that of the Pragmatic Sanctions, by which in 1220 and 1232 Frederic II granted the bishops and nobles "legal sovereignty m their own towns and territories, except when the Emperor was present." ^ It is 1 Bryce, p. 212. lo POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE chap. obvious that this was not so much a fresh Imperial grant as a necessary confirmation of rights which had been long growing up, and which it was easier to define than to deny. The second is the Golden BuU of 1356, in which Charles IV settled the Electoral College, to which the choice of the Emperor was thenceforth to be entrusted. Here agaia, the measure was one which rather defined old and customary than created new rights. The College was to consist of seven persons ; and seven persons are mentioned in a letter of Pope Urban IV, of the date of 1265, as having the right of choosiug the King of the Eomans. These seven are the three great Archbishops of Mainz, Koln, and Trier ; whUe the other four must origiually have been the Dukes of the chief tribes which composed the German nation : Franks, Swabians, Saxons, and Bavarians. Eetaining the ecclesiastical electors, among whom the Archbishop of Mainz was first in rank, Charles IV gave the four other places in the College to Bohemia, the Palatinate, Saxony, and Branden- burg. With subsequent changes and additions we have here nothing to do ; the order established by Charles IV remained unbroken till the Thirty Years' War. The result of this legis- lation was, in the first instance, the introduction of order into the discharge of an important national function ; but it also invested the seven electors with something of the sacrosanct character which belonged to the Empire, and at the same time largely recognised their independence within their own domin- ions. It established the principle of hereditary succession in the lay electorates ; gave all the electors the right of coining money and levying taxes ; confirmed the authority and iade- pendence of their courts of justice; and placed their persons under the protection of the law of treason. It was another important step in the process which converted Germany from a monarchy into a confederation of States. A peculiar element was, however, introduced into the politi- cal development of Germany by the fact that so many of the feudatories, who were always struggling towards a larger measure of independence, were ecclesiastical. A glance at the map^ shows that at the beginniag of the sixteenth century ^ See Spniner-Menke, BwndaXlas fiir neueren Zeit. Map 43 : DeutscMand im die Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Zeitraum der BeformaMon. THE POWER OF THE CHURCH one-fourth, perhaps one-third of the country was in the hands of the Church. On the extreme north-east had once been the wide domains of the Teutonic Knights, which, having been seized in 1466 by the kingdom of Poland, afterwards fell in great part to the House of Brandenburg. But on the north- west still stretched in continuous line the dioceses of Bremen, Utrecht, Miinster, and Paderborn. The bishopric of Liege occupied a not inconsiderable portion of the Netherlands, while those of Metz and Strassburg covered the French frontier. The great electoral archbishoprics of Koln, Trier, and Mainz ran along the course of the Ehine. In Central Germany, Hildesheim, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, Wiirzburg, and Bamberg were all ecclesiastical States, while Salzburg and Trent carried the line of clerical fortresses down to the confines of Italy. Wherever the Diet met, three out of the seven electors, who made up the first line of the poKtical hierarchy, were ecclesias- tics, while the great bishops successfully held their own with the crowd of minor potentates. This state of things had its origin in the circumstances under which the power of the Prankish kings was first acquired and consolidated. Ecclesi- astical went hand in hand with civil organisation. Under Charles Martel and his successors, Boniface, who had received episcopal consecration from Gregory II, at once gave form and order to the Church in Germany, and united it in the firmest bonds of obedience to the Papacy. When Charlemagne pushed the confines of his kingdom into the barbarous regions of the north-east, his subjection of the Saxons was a victory of Christianity over heathenism, and the newly-acquired territory was at once divided into dioceses. Otho pursued the same policy : he confirmed the conquests which his father had made on the Elbe and the Saale by the erection of bishoprics, and when he carried his own victorious arms beyond the former river, he founded the dioceses which he afterwards united under the primacy of Magdeburg.^ It is not difficult to see how, in these outposts of civilisation, the bishops, who were usually the best representatives of law and order in a time of recurring confusion, gradually arrogated to themselves rights and powers usually associated with sovereignty, and how the Emperor ' Kanke, Deutsche Oeschichte im Zettalter der Beformation, 3d ed. vol. i. p. 18. 12 POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE dHAP. found it convenient to play them off against the tui;bulent lay potentates by whom they were surrounded. But a distinct step in the process of converting the prelates into civil rulers of their dioceses was taken by Otho the Great, who set the example, followed by many of his successors, of endowing the sees with large tracts of land, to be held as fiefs of the Empire. Nor need we doubt that this process, so conducive both to the honour and profit of the Church, was accelerated by the arts by which ambitious and unscrupulous ecclesiastics have always been wont to prey upon the weaknesses of kings. It is dif&cult to sum up in a few sentences the complex effect upon German politics of the existence and gradually consolidating power of these ecclesiastical States. One result was that the struggle between kings and popes for the right of investiture was especially severe in Germany. At first, the bishops were faithful liegemen and submissive subjects of the Emperor. He nominated them ; he invested them with their ^ fiefs ; he received from them an oath of obedience ; where need was, he deposed them. But as, with the growing power of the Pope, the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual elements of episcopal life was more clearly seen, and the in- dependence of the latter more vigorously asserted ; as strong pontiffs made claims which weak emperors only feebly resisted, a new loyalty began to dispute supremacy with, the old. Nothing is now easier than to see that the status of the bishops was a double one : that as officers of the Church they natur- ally looked to its head, as feudatories of the Empire, to the Emperor, and that the problem was the old one in a mediaeval form, that of rendering to Caesar the things that be Caisar's, and to God the things that be God's. But the prize was a great one, and each of the contending parties claimed the whole of -it. Could the Pope have sustained his contention, he would have been practically sovereign of a large part of Germany, and that the richest and most civilised ; while the Emperor in holding his own was fighting for the integrity of his dominions and the possibility of effectual rule. Canossa was not the last act of the struggle, but only one of its most dramatic episodes ; it really came to an end in the Concordat of "Worms, concluded in 1122, between Calixtus II and Henry I THE RIGHT OF INVESTITURE 13 V, and confirmed in the subsequent year by the First Lateran Council. Like the similar agreements formally or informally made in other parts of Europe, it was a compromise. Epis- copal elections were to be free and canonical; investiture of spiritual powers, by ring and pastoral staff, belonged to the Pope, of lands and temporal jurisdiction, by the sceptre, to the Emperor. The double character of the ecclesiastical States was fully recognised, and they were left, free from an over- powering Papal dictation, to play their part in the development of the Empire.^ The termination of the struggle of the investitures by no means shut out the Papacy from effectual interference with the affairs of the Church in Germany. Most, however, of the grievances under which it groaned, and which constantly swelled the national cry for reform, were ecclesiastical rather than political, and will be enumerated in another connection. At the same time, what the Emperor lost by the settle- ment of the controversy, the Pope gained. The former could no longer fill the great sees with creatures of his own wiU ; the latter found that, however they were filled, archbishops and bishops naturally looked to Eome for the inspiration of their policy. But in truth, neither Emperor nor Pope, but the great nobility of Germany reaped the chief advantage of the change. When chapters had it in their power to confer a principaHty upon one of themselves, it became important that their choice should be properly limited and directed. Presently the usage was estabhshed, that all canons and other cathedral dignitaries must be of noble birth; a single class seized upon all the richest and most desirable preferments ; the commonalty was left to find what indemnification it could in the monastic orders. One result of this great social change was that the richest sees, the widest dioceses, became the appanages of princely and noble houses ; and that whatever political influence the bishops had, went in the same direction as that of their lay kinsmen, and tended to the independence of the Pope and the disintegration of the Empire. But another was that in Germany the Church lost that democratic character 1 Gieseler, Lehrluch cLer Kinhen- 64, 65. Milman, History of Latin geschvMe, 3d ed. vol. ii. pt. ii. pp. Christianity, 2d ed. vol. iii. p. 215. 14 POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE chap. which had been throughout the Middle Ages one of its chief glories. Elsewhere it was possible for men of humble birth to rise by genius and piety to the highest ecclesiastical station. A butcher's son might become a cardinal ; a fisherman's boy fill the chair of St. Peter. But in Germany cathedral chapters asked quarterings of nobility of candidates for a stall, and bishoprics and archbishoprics were reserved for sons of great houses. Perhaps in a country where, more almost than in any other, loyalty has always taken a personal form, the resulting alienation of the people from the Church was less than might have been expected ; but the fact remains that the bishops took their natural place with the princes, mingled in their intrigues, and furthered their pohcy. StUl, throughout the whole of these slow changes, a peculiar connection of the Empire with the Papacy was officially recognised. One con- trast of a vivid kind will illustrate this. In England, that a legate should land upon its shores was an offence against the law. Wolsey's legatiae authority was treacherously, but still legally avenged, not only upon him but upon the whole English clergy. In Germany, whenever the Emperor opened a Diet, a Papal legate stood as a matter of course by his side.^ A powerful influence on the development of the independ- ence of the German principalities was exercised by the revived study of the Eoman or civil law. The memory of that law had indeed never perished; and it had lain, unseen, at the basis of many institutions ; but it was in the twelfth century that it began to be studied with eager zeal in the universities of Italy. Hence it spread as a recognised branch of education to Paris, to Orleans, to Oxford, to the universities of Germany ; ever5rwhere professors were surrounded by crowds of students, and a knowledge of the Pandects, and of the comments upon them, came to be regarded as the necessary equipment for what we should now call public life. There was even a superstitious reverence for it : it was regarded as the essence of ancient wisdom ; it was pure reason reduced to writing ; it was a system of jurisprudence always and everywhere applicable, from whose decisions there could be no appeal. At first, the ^ Eanke, vol. i. p. 46. I REVIVED INFLUENCE OF ROMAN LAW ij influence of the study was favourable to Imperial claims in Italy and elsewhere. The civil law assumed the shape in which it has come down to modern times, under the later Empire, at a time when Eoman society had long learned to submit itself to an absolute master, and the traditions of republican liberty and self-government were all but forgotten. "Absolutism," it has been well said, "is the civilian's creed :"^ an absolutism, too, which presupposes a servile basis of society. But when the civil law had made its way into Germany, when, by the exactness of its prescriptions, the logical coherence of its structure, the.fecility with which it could be quoted and applied, it had overborne the hereditary customs, the undigested codes which it found in possession of the field; when the jurists, who were fuU of it, came by their superior fitness for such functions to be the trusted servants of princes, and formed a kind of legal bureaucracy, it became an instrument for consolidating the powers of the local rulers, and in like manner for diminishing that of the Emperor. Logically, perhaps, the jurist who filled an important post in Saxony or Brandenburg was bound by his system to make much of the Emperor, who stood theoretically in the place of Augustus or Justinian ; but his own employer was nearer to him, and represented the monarchical principle with a more practical force. And as Imperial Italy had been cultivated by slaves, the same influence which magnified the uncontrolled prerogative of the prince, tended gradually to depress the peasant into the serf The enumeration of the electorates, spiritual and temporal, of the princely houses of the second rank, and of the great bishoprics, by no means exhausts the elements of the German political system. There were noble families of less considera- tion, but each independent in its own territory, making war and concluding peace in accordance with ancestral custom, and exercising right of life and death over its own subjects. Some of these, by fortunate marriages or chance of inheritance, were slowly consolidating their power ; others, in obedience to the unwritten law^ which placed all sons of great houses on the same footing, were being weakened by subdivision of territory. Below these ^ Bryce, p. 256. 1 6 POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE chap. again were the free knights, who also claimed an independence, which now seems strangely inconsistent with the first principles of organised society. Perched on their rocky eyries, often so placed as to command the chief channels of trade, and owning no superior but the Emperor, usually distant, and without the means of enforcing his will upon rebellious subjects, they made war upon one another in pursuance of ancestral feuds, or swooped down upon the merchants of the free cities, whom they at once despised and plundered. It had been counted an advance in civilisation when the right of private war was at once recognised and limited : when one of these petty poten- tates was compelled to send a letter of feud to an enemy, and to give him notice of intended attack, it was an improvement upon the time when every man's hand was against every other, and the reign of turbulence and bloodshed never ceased. Such was Gotz von Berlichingen, the hero of Goethe's earliest drama, who lived to take part in the Peasants' War of 1525 ; such, Franz von Sickihgen, who in the last years of Maximilian became a power in Germany, making himself a terror at home and concluding alliances abroad. In the attempts to reorganise the Empire, which occupied so much thought and effort at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, it is instructive to note how the first thing desired was the establishment of peace in the land, unmolested intercourse between city and city, protection against robbery and violence, the succour of the weak from the lawlessly strong. It came at last, but not in the way that was expected. The invention of gunpowder was the first great agent in introducing order into Germany, for cannon made mediaeval castles useless. But the territorial disintegration of Germany had introduced a new and beneficial element into the national life, by allowing the rise and growth of the free cities. These were of two classes : those which stood in immediate connection with the Empire, and were practically independent republics ; and those which, while owning some dependence upon spiritual or tem- poral princes, had yet conquered for themselves a large measure of self-government. The local distribution of the former, which is curiously unequal, depended upon the circumstances which attended the dissolution of the old tribal dukedoms. "Wherever THE FREE CITIES 17 some powerful house was able to seize upon the inheritance, free cities were few : wherever the contrary was the case, they sprang up in abundance. In Swabia and on the Ehine there were more than a hundred : Franconia, on the contrary, counted only Niirnberg and five smaller cities : Westphalia, Dortmund and Herford : while in Bavaria, Eegensburg stood alone. To the second class of partly dependent cities belonged, among many others, Magdeburg, Halberstadt, HUdesheim, Erfurt, Wiirzburg, and Bamberg, all under Episcopal patron- age ; Dantzig and Konigsberg in the territory of the Teutonic order, and such as are now known as the chief towns of Brandenburg, Hesse, Saxony, and Austria. In these the degree of autonomy varied, but in the more independent of them life was practically the same as in the Imperial free cities. These were self-governed, under constitutions in which the aristocratic and the democratic elements mingled in various proportions : they provided for their own defence : they were republics,. in the midst of States where the personal will of the ruler counted for more and more. At Frankfurt the Emperor was chosen; at Aachen he was crowned. At Augsburg, Worms, Speier, Niirnberg, Eegensburg, Constanz, diets were held which have left a permanent mark on German history. Koln, Basel, Erfurt, were the seats of famous universities. Ntirnberg was at once the Venice and the Florence of Ger- many, the emporium of trade and the home of art : Augsburg was a centre of European finance. In these cities the refined and luxurious civilisation, to which the princes were indifferent, and on which the knights waged predatory war, found expres- sion in the pursuit of letters and the cultivation of the arts of life. There, too, the Imperial feeling, which was elsewhere slowly dying out of the land, retained much of its force. The cities held, so to speak, directly of the Empire, to which they looked for protection against powerful and lawless neighbours, and they felt that their liberties and privileges were bound up with the maintenance of the general order. Some of them stood on terms of special friendship with this or that Emperor : Maximilian was jocosely called the Burgomaster of Augsburg. In them, too, as we might naturally expect, religious life put on a freer aspect. In the Middle Ages they were the chosen c, 1 8 POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE chap. home of the secret sects, which worked beneath the surface of society ; and when the Keformation came, they accepted the new ideas eagerly, yet, for the most part, after a fashion of their own. Such were the heterogeneous elements of which the Empire was composed, when in the reign of Maximilian, which ex- tended from 1493 to 1519, strenuous attempts were made to arrest the progress of political disintegration. The fifty- three years during which his father Frederic III had worn the Imperial crown (1440-1493) had reduced the estimation of the Empire both in and out, of Germany to the lowest. For twenty-five years — nearly half of his long reign — he never appeared in the Empire at all, or interfered in its affairs except by letter ; and when he came it was as a fugitive, glad to accept the hospitality, now of a great monastic house, now of a free city. He spent the larger part of his life in his hereditary dominions, letting things go as they would in the greater monarchy of which he was the titular head. What- ever disorder arose in the Empire, whatever infringements were made upon his own dignity or the rights of any confederate State, he had no power, even if he had the wUl, to interfere: had his character entitled him to higher respect, his poverty and helplessness would have condemned him to contempt. He was kiud-hearted ; was not without a slow, sarcastic good sense, took an interest in the science of the day. Perhaps as a ruler his best quality was a quiet persistence, which forbad him to give up any right, and helped him to endure misfortune with patience : but no man was ever less in his place upon a throne, no monarch could look back upon a longer career of failure. His one stroke of luck was in marrying his son Maximilian to Mary, daughter and heiress of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and in procuring his election (1486) as King of the Eomans. By this act, if- he did nothing to consolidate the Empire, he at least founded the fortunes of his own house, and made it possible that, iu a few years more, it should aspire to universal dominion. Maximilian was full of schemes of conquest. Brilliant, versatile, drawing men'-s eyes upon himself by shining personal qualities, exciting larger expectations than his soM abilities PROJECTS OF IMPERIAL REFORM 19 enabled him to gratify ; gracious to literary men, whose imaginations he touched, and with an ambition to distinguish himself in authorship, he plunged into the mid -stream of European politics, aspiring much more to extend the bound- aries of the Empire than to consolidate its power or to remedy its grievances. Of the inheritance of Mary of Burgundy, Louis XI had seized on Provence : but Maximilian still held — as guardian of his infant son — the richest part, Flanders and Holland, which, with his hereditary dominions in Austria, which he had rescued from the grasp of Hungary, gave him an independent foothold outside the Empire. He had many projects. He wanted to be crowned at Eome, like his father, and others of his predecessors, more illustrious. He dreamed of a crusade to push back the Turks, of which, as Emperor, he would be the natural leader. He desired to reassert the claims of the Empire over MUan, and once and for ever, to expel the French from that fair and fertile duchy. Mary of Burgundy died after a brief union, leaving a son and a daughter to share her rich inheritance : and then Maximilian planned a marriage with Anne of Brittany, the heiress of the last great feudal appanage, not united to the Crown of France. But this, like most of his schemes, ended iu failure : Charles VIII carried off the prize, and France, with but trifling excep- tions, was thenceforth a homogeneous kingdom. Indeed nothing that this brilliant and adventurous politician ever put his hand to was greatly successful. He was not crowned at Eome ; he led no crusade against the Turks : under his rule the Swiss Confederacy broke away from the Empire. Poland, in his father's time, had absorbed a large part of the domain of the Teutonic Knights, and he did nothing to recover it; the Slavonian monarchies pressed hard upon the Eastern frontier of Germany ; he waged futile war on Venice ; he was obliged to accept Louis XII as Imperial feudatory in Milan. It was partly his own fault, but partly too, that he and his Ger- man subjects were latent on different and irreconcilable objects. Projects of internal reorganisation and reform had long occupied men's minds in Germany. High hopes had been entertained of Albert II, in whom the House of Hapsburg, after a long interval, reascended the throne : but he reigned 20 POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE chap. only two years, and was succeeded by Frederic III. Even under that dreary rule of incapacity, an attempt had been made to introduce a better state of things, by Nicholas of Cues, better known as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, a very re- markable man, who felt, on almost every side, the wrongs and weaknesses of his age, and endeavoured to remove them. His ideas of reform were the same as were in part reduced to practice some decades later : frequent Diets, an improved repre- sentation of the estates ; the division of the Empire into circles, each under a head, appointed by, and responsible to the Emperor ; a better administration of justice, troops to enforce the solemn sentences of Imperial authority, and money, raised by general taxation, to pay them.^ But Nicholas of Cues died in 1464, and it was reserved for another great churchman, Berthold, Elector Archbishop of Mainz, to attempt to embody ideas similar to his in the constitution of the Empire. The story of many Diets, of schemes carried but partially into effect, of compromises between the Emperor and the estates, cannot be here told, even in the briefest way. What the reformers wanted was a better internal organisation of the Empire ; what Maximilian desired was to have the Empire, in men and money, at his back in his adventurous schemes of conquest. Neither party accomplished much : the supplies which Maximilian received were ludicrously small: the reforms to which he un\yilliQgly submitted were never fuUy carried out : his wars ended in failure, and the disintegration of the Empire was hardly checked. It will, however, be necessary to note what the proposed reforms were, and to explain why they came to so little. First, there was a loud demand for the cessation of civil war, and the proclamation of peace iu the land. Next, it was required that an Imperial court of justice should be constituted, and perma- nently settled in one place, so as to be easy of access to aU complainants. Thirdly, men asked that some kind of " Eeichs- regiment" or Imperial Council should be established, which should represent the Emperor in his frequent a,bsences, and take measures for the general good. Both the last demands were displeasing to Maximilian ; to such a court of justice as > Kanke, vol. i. p. 79 et seq. I THE FAILURE OF ALL REFORMS 21 has been mentioned, he preferred one attached to his person, and presided over by his own servants ; and he justly thought that it would be difficult to prevent the " Eeichsregiment" from encroaching on his Imperial prerogatives. I cannot enumerate the various forms taken by either proposal ; it is enough to say that both were finally adopted. But the success of the whole plan hinged upon the raising of the money necessary to carry it out. Judges must be paid. Troops must be levied, if order was to be enforced within the Empire, or the Em- peror supported in his warlike projects beyond its bounds. But in whatever form the attempt was made it failed. Taxes could not be collected, even though an appeal was made to the faith- ful to aid in a crusade against the Turks. When the States were required to furnish soldiers for the Imperial army, in a fixed ratio to population, the command was quietly disobeyed. Except in isolated instances, and these chiefly among the cities. Imperial feeling was dead. Princes cared for their own aggran- disement ; burghers for their civic republics ; the Empire was little more than the shadow of a great name, and Maximilian an Austrian prince, fighting for Austrian or Burgundian pur- poses. Here and there a humanist, like Wimpheling, fresh from the study of Greek and Eoman history, was impassioned for his country's greatness ; here and there a statesman, like . Berthold of Mainz, thought it possible to compass a much- needed reform on these lines. But how completely the idea of a German Emperor of a German Empire had faded from men's minds was shown when, on Maximilian's death, more than one Elector shamelessly sold his vote to Francis I. This, then, was the Germany on which Martin Luther opened his eyes in 1483, and in the midst of which he was brought up. The Empire was still an object of popular pride ; the idea prevailed that to Germany belonged a primacy among European nations, of which the Emperor was a visible symbol. But Imperial iastitutions were rather a vague tradition of the past than the basis on which political life really rested ; and what loyalty men felt was much more to their immediate ruler, or to the civic republic in which they lived, than to a distant and for the most part invisible monarch, whose political activity was manifested more beyond the limits of the Empire 22 POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE chap. than within them. Even as an European power, the Empire was shrinking both in territory and in influence. The fall of Charles the Bold, and the division of the Burgundian lands, brought it face to face with France, which by the acquisition of Dauphin^ in 1457, and of Provence in 148'6, drew nearer to Switzerland, and gained an access to Italy. Beyond the Alps, neither Frederic III nor Maximilian had any real hold ; after 1500 the Swiss Confederation must be looked upon as practi- cally independent; Poland had absorbed territory in the far North-East which had once been under German rule. Behind the Slavonian kingdom, however, was a danger greater than itself. The Turks, who had taken possession of Constan- tinople in 1453, were continually pushing their arms west- wards ; and before many years have passed will be found thundering at the gates of Vienna. To the Emperor, if his primacy among monarchs meant anything, belonged the task of defending Europe against the Mussulman ; over all the Empire the dread of the Turk perpetually hung, while the House of Hapsburg, whose hereditary dominions were first threatened, felt the common fear with peculiar vividness. An appeal for aid against the Turk was the one thing that stirred the ima- gination and quickened the loyalty of Germans ; something of the old crusading feeling was still left, and hatred of the infidel mingled in men's minds with instincts of self-defence. Within the Empire, local dynasties were waxing and wan- ing; lay and clerical interests alternately gaining and losing ground, without any change in the growing incapacity of the central power. In the last decade of the fifteenth century, private wars were stUl waged, no permanent Imperial court had been organised ; even if the ban of the Empire had been pronounced against an offender, there were no means of en- forcing it. A powerful potentate might indeed find it to his interest to put down a robber knight, and in so doing to repre- sent himself as the instrument of Imperial authority, as a few years afterwards the Elector Palatine united with Philip of Hesse and the Archbishop of Trier to suppress Franz von Sickingen ; otherwise men were reluctant to make themselves the executants of an Imperial justice, which might afterwards be invoked against themselves. I have already spoken of the I EFFECTS OF CHANGES IN MILITARY ART 23 effect of tlie invention of gunpowder, and especially of cannon ; another revolution in the art of war, which was taking place, worked in the same direction. The feudal mUitia, the mail- clad knight with his attendants, was being gradually super- seded by a trained infantry. War became a profession ; there were bands of lanzknechts ready to sell their services to the highest bidder, and generals like George Frundsberg, who on many stricken fields had acquired a knowledge of tactics. Already the Swiss are showing in Italy what can be accom- plished by foot soldiery, not only brave, but well armed, well drilled, well manoeuvred ; and in the next generation the Spaniards will better the lesson. Under these circumstances the robber knight becomes an anachronism ; he cannot keep the field against the new troops, and his stronghold is battered about his ears. In all matters military, Europe is passing into a new era. It is obvious that this is a soil in which a new social movement may readily take root, and where it can easily be protected from outward harm, till it is strong enough to protect itself. If Frederic of Saxony chooses to throw the shield of his authority over Luther, who is to execute the sentence of the Empire ? If the city of Niirnberg puts down the Mass, and instals the new preachers in the churches, what Catholic power can interfere without setting the Empire in a flame ? Charles V was never wanting in will to suppress the Eeformation ; but sometimes the divisions of Germany and his own lack of Imperial power, sometimes his schemes of universal empire, sometimes the dread of the Turk drew him away ; and when at last he addressed himself to the task, he found that he was not strong enough to accomplish it.^ ^ For the facts of this chapter I Catholic prepossession. For the reign desire to refer, in addition to the of Maximilian I am much indehted to works already mentioned, to J. Jans- an Essay in the 51st volume of the sen, Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes "Preussische Jahrbiicher," by Hans seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, v. Spielberg, Maximilian I. wnd das 7th ed. voL i., a very able and Deutsche Reich. learned work, though coloured by CHAPTER II THE EELIGIOUS LIFE OF GEEMAifY At the end of the fifteenth century the unity of the Church imposed upon the mind of the believer with more than the weight of a law of nature. For this was often broken by miracle : that was always majestically the same. It seemed as if it had been so always and everywhere ; the remembrance of ancient heresy and schism had faded away ; the Greek Church was distant and had hardly any point of contact with western life ; the Bohemian Church, the existence of which a bitter experience had compelled Germany to recognise, was the exception that proved the rule. Elsewhere, all over Europe, insular as well as continental, the same ecclesiastical organisation professed obedience to the same head : worship was conducted according to the same rites in the same sacred language, and one form of doctrine asked for universal assent. The Church was the bond which to some extent united rival kingdoms and contending dynasties into one commonwealth : religion gave the type of the common as distinguished from the national life : do what he would, the Pope could not narrow himself to be merely the head of an Italian State ; a kind of European presidency was involved in the very conception of his office. The universality of the great monastic orders tended in the same direction : wherever the Cistercian, the Dominican, the Franciscan went, he found himself equally at home, and the provincial organisation of each order culminated in the ecclesiastical capital of Europe. Since the suppression of the Albigensian heresy in the thirteenth century, the Church CHAP. II THE SUPREMACY OF THE CHURCH 25 had been generally successful, both in unposing an external uniformity upon Christendom, and in converting to her own uses forces which might otherwise have wasted themselves in rebellion and schism. Whatever elements of sectarian life existed were hidden from common view. And when a reformer threatened ■ to arise, impatient of old dulness, aad thrilling with a sense of grievance, the Church was adroit in casting her nets about him, and compelling him to work within her pale, and in obedience to her prescriptions. This vast and imposing unity was organised on well-defined principles. The power of the Papacy, which varied from little more than an honorary presidency over the Church to a spiritual supremacy, claiming the largest rights and exercising the amplest privileges, rested partly on documents, which an un- critical age rashly accepted as genuine, partly on a body of precedents, which had been slowly accumulated by a succession of astute and ambitious Pontiffs. But the influence of the Church as a whole made itself felt in Europe, because it was interwoven with every web of national and individual life. From the time when the northern tribes descended upon the Eoman Empire, submerging and threatening to destroy the old society, the Church had been the great restraining, organising, civilising force. In Italy, in Gaul, in Spain, it had converted the barbarians, taught them, supplied to them the desire and the forms of settled life. In Germany, Prankish conquest and Christian organisation had gone hand in hand. The civil and the rehgious elements of society were everywhere inextricably intertwined. The bishop stood side by side with the earl, the primate was inferior only to the king. Literature, edu- cation, aU but the simpler arts of life were chiefly clerical. It is impossible to say how much agriculture owes to the monks who went out into the silent wilderness to plant and to tni : or architecture to the monastic builders of cathedrals and. convents. It is true that these great services to society were not rendered without some corresponding loss. Even in the age of Augustine and of Jerome, Christianity had begun to dissociate itself from classical literature. The Ifirst of these great men bewailed the hours which he had lost with Homer : the second received angelic chastisement because he was more a 26 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. Ciceronian than a Christian : before long it was possible for Gregory the Great to rebuke a bishop for wasting his time upon grammatical studies. So the rich iaheritance of the past was gradually abandoned: ancient philosophy feU into the same neglect as ancient poetry and history: whatever had the mark of Pagan- ism upon it was condemned as unworthy of Christian attention. But although some ages may achieve a more brOliant intellectual result than others, the activity of the human mind varies much less than is commonly taken for granted, and there are no idle centuries. The period before the rise of vernacular literature in Europe — when Christianity, having cut itself off from the old Greek tradition, had driven science to take refuge among the Moors in Spain — was one of intense philosophical activity. Nothing strikes the student more than the way in which metaphysical discussions, which now interest only a chosen few, formed the staple of the higher education, and attracted to mediaeval universities crowds of eager disciples. But philosophy too suffered the universal impress of the ChurcL It was not an independent speculation on the nature of thongs, an attempt to conceive of the universe as a reasoned whole, so much as a conversion of Christian teaching into a logical form, and a representation of it, therefore, as universal and self-consistent truth. The aim of the schoolmen was to show that Christianity was identical with the results of sound knowledge and right- thinking : in other words, to make religion philosophical and philosophy religious. Beginning with the threefold material afforded by Scripture, tradition, and the Fathers, aU accepted, though as having different degrees of certitude, on the authority of the Church, they built up, with the assistance of the Aristo- telian logic, a vast system of belief, into which was incorpor- ated, as time went on, whatever popular prejudices grew into faiths, and gradually hardened into doctrines. The method was eminently one that lent itself to processes of development. And the result was not only that the theological teaching of the Church assumed, both in its larger outline and lesser details, a reasoned form, which added to the weight of its in- fluence, but that aU speculation was conducted with a distinct reference to ecclesiastical authority, and on lines which the Church had sanctioned. The Church was supreme, not in the 11 THE CHURCH SOLE MEDIUM OE SALVATION 27 domain of theology alone. It imposed itself, with almost equal force, upon every part of the intellectual activity of Europe. The theological system, which thus presented itself to the mind of Europe in the strength of long prescription, boldly claimed an indefeasible authority. The Church was an inter- preter of the mind and will of God, from whose decision there was no appeal. Her bishops and priests were the successors of the Apostles : it was a common phrase to call the Pope the Vicegerent of Christ. There was no competing authority : the Bible was known only through the medium of the Church, which vouched for it and interpreted it. If a man would be religious, this was the only way open to him, unless indeed an imperious intellectual necessity drove him into paths of secret heresy. And the doctrine of the Church was that sacraments were the chief, and certainly the indispensable nourishment of the religious life, and that they could be administered only by a duly ordained body of priests. It is not necessary at this moment to give accurate definitions of the word " sacrament " and the word "priest": they stand for co-ordinated ideas, and the out- come of the system which they denote is, that what some would caE a way of communication, others a wall of hindrance, is built between the soul and God. For grace, spiritual life, the satis- faction of religious needs, as well as for the ruder substitutes for these things, with which commoner natures are content, the believer is dependent upon the Church in the person of her servants. Apart from the Church, he has no access to God ; she can at any moment thrust him into the outer darkness. And when we consider how these intermediaries between God and the soul, once set up, tend to multiply, how Mary takes the place of Christ, and the intercession of saints becomes use- ful an.d almost necessary ; when we recollect how the exter- nality of sacraments impresses itself upon the whole practical system of which they form a part, giving virtue to relics, merit to pilgrimages, worth to crosses, and scapularies, and medals, it is clear how a network of belief and observance is woven round the disciple, through which it is almost impossible that he should break. Nor is this hold of the Church upon him confined to this world : she keeps the keys of the vast treasury of supererogatory merit, and can bind and loose in purgatory as 28 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. on earth. So that for all good, the believer was the suppliant of the Church. She led him, she fed him, she imposed her laws upon him ; she rewarded him upon her own terms. He accepted her word for everything ; she was the perpetual, the all-powerful mediator between heaven and earth. Without her there was no access to God ; no spiritual life now, no salvation hereafter. And the Church was omnipresent. In the cities the most conspicuous, the most ornate, the stateliest building was the cathedral, upon whose yet unfinished splendour the efforts of many generations had been expended, and where religious rites were performed with a perfection of impressive beauty to which every art contributed. Eound it were grouped many churches more, parochial and conventual, each stately and splendid in its degree, and each offering- its special attraction to the wor- shipper. In every village and hamlet rose a more modest edifice, yet in its modesty surpassing the secular buildings which surrounded it ; often the memorial of the liberal piety of some great house, or the monument of a bitter sorrow or an inexpiable sin. The greater or lesser monasteries stood apart, each in its own domain the home of a community, which, if rarely learned and often lax in morals, usually diffused about it material prosperity and an atmosphere of social goodwill. Distinct from the parochial clergy, and not always on the best terms with them, the friars, black, white, and .gray, were at home in every parish, and did not suffer the claims of the Church, as represented in their own persons, to be long unheard or unheeded. The universities were in the. hands of the clergy : in diets, parliaments, estates the bishops and mitred abbots sat with the great nobles ; ecclesiastics, as almost the sole possessors of the necessary learning, were judges, ministers, diplomatists. More than any other single person the Pope was the pivot of international policy in Europe, while there was certainly no country in which he did not constantly make his influence felt. The Church was the characteristic, the inspiring, the formative element of mediaeval life. If any man evaded her friendliness it was only to encounter her hostility. To live apart from her on terms of bare neutrality was impossible. n WEALTH AND IMMORALITY OF THE CHURCH 29 The wealth of the Church was enormous, and nowhere greater th^n in Germany. The recollection of how ecclesi- astical property in England had accumulated, at the time of the Eeformation, under the restrictions of a severe act of mort- main win help us to conceive what it must have been where no such legislation was in force. Wealth, held by the dead hand, escapes most of the usual chances of division and dispersion, while it is constantly increased by the goodwill or the fears of the . pious. The splendour to which this wealth ministered was in part public property; only a stern reformer here and there objected to the jewelled croziers, the embroidered vestments, the domestic pomp, the lavish hospitality of bishops, while the lands of the Church were usually administered in a liberal and kindly way. All this, it is true, was the reverse of apostolic, but until the Bible was released from its imprisonment in the ancient tongues, and given to the people by the printers, there was no primitive model with which to compare it. And in Germany, as has been already stated, the wealth of the Church combined with its political power to give it a position of peculiar influence. The three ecclesiastical electorates, as well as the greater bishoprics, filled an important place in the political hierarchy. Not only the prelates themselves, but the chapters by whom they were elected were of noble birth, sharing the prejudices and devoted to the interests of the order to which they belonged. Almost every conceivable force worked together to lower the spiritual character of the great German bishops. That some of them cared for learning, and patronised men of letters, is hardly a fact on the other side ; it is equally true of Cardinal Albert of Mainz and of Leo X. A bishop really zealous for godliness was a much rarer thing. It was long since the occupant of the Fisherman's Chair had conciliated any moral respect. • The public and private vices of Popes were matters of notoriety ; only self-seeking and self-indulgence were expected of them ; all Popes alike, even those whose offences against decency and morality were least flagrant, were recognised as obstacles to necessary reform. Perhaps the exUe at Avignon, which lasted from 1305 to 1370, may be taken as the epoch at which the Papacy most deci- sively drew public contempt upon itself; there had been evil 30 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. Pontiffs before, but none that had so dragged their office in the mire of political subservience. And from this decline in general esteem, made more marked by the scandals of the Schism, the Papacy never recovered till the Oounter-Eeformation placed a line of Popes in the Chair, who, whatever else they were, were austere and ascetic men. Two causes combined to make the Popes of the Eeformation period, from Sixtus IV to Paul III, a by-word in the history of Christianity. One was the absorp- tion of Papal energies ia the task of building up a temporal dominion ia Italy, varied, as ia the case of Alexander VI, by the desire of the Pope to carve out independent principalities for his own children ; the second, the paganising influence of the new culture upon minds empty of faith in either God or man. I do not mean that these were the sole or even the most efficient causes of Papal sin and shamelessness ; but that, superadded upon others that had been long at work, they gave to sin a peculiar blackness, to shamelessness an unapproachable audacity. There is something frightful in the contrast between the theoretical sanctity of the Papal office and the very prac- tical worldlihess and wickedness of the men who filled it. Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII are names that are iascribed in the book of human infamy as a page by themselves. The annals of no secular State can show such a succession of rulers, profligate, self-seek- ing, cruel, dead to all higher responsibilities of government ; a succession — except for the few months during which Adrian VI tried to cleanse the Augean stable — without a break. A medise- val story tells how a Jew, going to Eome, was converted to Christianity by the sight of the wickedness that he saw there. No system, he thought, that did not enjoy the direct protection of heaven could live under the weight of such abominations.-' In hke manner, that the Popes of the Eenaissance did not of themselves pull down the Church, of which they were the head and representatives, is the strongest possible testimony to the tenacity of its hold upon the habits, the affections, the super- stitions of the people. Popes of the great order, such as Gregory VII, Alexander ^ This story forms the subject of the cacoio's Decamerone. It is also told second novel, of the first day, of Boo- by H. Bebel in his Faeetios. 11 SYSTEM OF ECCLESIASTICAL JURISPRUDENCE 31 III, Innocent III, had made it their aim to establish a European supremacy; they had entered upon wide schemes of policy; they had bearded emperors and kings ; they had attempted to turn the currents of national development. But when the Papacy fell from its high estate, its interference with the affairs of the various European kingdoms was of a pettier, yet perhaps more irritating kind. It revived old, and invented new claims to a universal supervision of the Church, every one of which had for its object partly the centralisation of ecclesiastical govern- ment, but much more the exaction of tribute and the extension of patronage. This was particularly the work of the fourteenth century, during the greater part of which the Popes in exile at Avignon were politically the creatures of the French monarchy. The basis of these Papal claims was the Canon Law, which about the year 1140 had been collected by Gratian, an Italian monk, into his Decretum, a book which in form and arrange- ment was an imitation of the Pandects. But in the course of the next century this was added to and developed, under the direction of successive Popes, until it became a regular system of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, founded upon the pseudo-Isidorian decretals, and comprising all the judgments which the Supreme Pontiffs had given in favour of their own jurisdiction, all the bulls which they had issued in extension of their own claims. The mendicant orders, which depended directly upon the Pope, spread the doctrine of his supremacy through Europe ; and Thomas Aquinas, the great Dogmatist of the Church, who was a Dominican, laid it down in terms at once ample and precise. The climax of all was that Boniface VIII ^ solemnly declared that to believe in the subjection of every human creature to the Pope was a thing necessary to salvation. Upon this broad basis of principle was erected a very comprehensive and well com- pacted edifice of practice. In the first place, jurisdiction over clerics belonged only to clerics, and by final appeal to Eome. This was the theory : that in every country of Europe it was more or less successfully resisted, and crimiaal clerks brought under the cognisance of 1 The words of the Pope are "Sub- necessitate salutis," quoted by Mauren- esse Eomano Pontiiici, omni lumanae breeber, Stitdien wnd Shizzen zur Ge- oreaturae declaramus, dicimus, defini- scMchte der Beformationszeit, p. 293, mus, et pronunciamus omniuo esse de etc. 32 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. the civil magistrates, need not be said. But there were offences which were supposed to belong to the ecclesiastical courts by right, whether committed by clerks or laymen, and contentions which could be finally decided only by Eome. Among the former were adultery, fornication, bigamy, heresy, blasphemy, perjury, usury ; among the latter all legal questions relating to marriage. Upon these the Pope assumed to legislate in a variety of minute and often arbitrary edicts. Side by side, however, with the enactiag, ran the dispensing power — the authority that decreed the law could absolve from its obligation ; and dispensations were a matter of influence bought or backed with money. A costly dispensation was necessary to enable a powerful monarch to marry a distant kinswoman, or to break an oath which he had sworn to his subjects or an ally ; a cheap one, if a pious merchant wanted to eat meat in Lent, or a humble parish priest to retain in his house the wife who went by a less honoured name. The Papal official was ready in either case, and the tariff regulated on strictly commercial principles. In the same category with the traffic in dispensations must be placed the sale of indulgences, of which I shall speak more at length in another connection. Neither the abuse nor the pro- test against it was new in 1517 ; among others, John XXIII had flooded Europe with these commodities ; and John Wessel, in the generation before Luther, had assailed the theological theory on which this base commerce was founded. Then there was taxation of a more direct kind : the tithes, the Peter's pence, the contributions raised in support of a crusade against the iafidels, but often spent on other objects; the annates, the year's income of a benefice, demanded of each fresh incumbent ; the paH money, which metropolitans were expected to pay in exchange for the tippet of white wool, which was the symbol of their jurisdiction. More burdensome on the one hand, more profitable on the other, were perhaps the encroachments which the Popes were perpetually making on the patronage of national churches. Appeals as to disputed elections of bishops were carried to Eome ; every episcopal election was supposed to need Papal confirmation ; how easy to set aside a disagreeable nomina- tion, and to fin the place with a favoured candidate ! Little by little the Popes assumed the right of direct patronage ; by II PAPAL EXACTIONS AND ABUSES , 33 means of what were called provisions, reservations, and the like, they appropriated to themselves the best sees, the richest pre- bends ; while princes often found it the easiest way of infringing the rights of chapters in their own interests to strike a bargain with Eome. The history of mediaeval England is full of this struggle, in which victory now incUnes to this side, now to that, according as the monarch is sufficiently self-denying and patriotic to take part with his people against the Pope. But at the best, the result was that much of the richest preferment in England, and still more in Germany, was in the hands of Italian ecclesiastics, and that the wealth of the national church was devoted to keep up the shameless luxury of Eome. These exactions and abuses, of which the above is only a feeble and general outline, were nowhere more grievous than in Germany, nowhere more bitterly felt. Germany was the milch cow of the Papacy, which it at once despised and drained dry. The Emperor Maximilian, always at his wit's end for money, ruefully declared that the Eoman Curia drew from Germany a revenue an hundred -fold greater than his own.-' At Constanz, at Basel, these abuses had been repre- sented in the strongest terms, but without obtaining any effi- cient redress. The only result had been concordats, which, while appearing to remedy some of the most objectionable usages, had legalised and confirmed the rest. At the beginning of the sixteenth century formal remonstrances were constantly made by Germany to the Papal See. The Diet hardly met without taking into consideration the grievances of the ecclesi- astical system. Those which assembled at Augsburg in 1500, in*1510, and again in 1518, aU uttered the same complaint. Even at the famous Diet of Worms in 1521, which may be said to have been held in the interests of the Papacy, gravamina against the Pope and the clergy were lodged with the young Emperor, with a request that he would use his influence for their redress. . By this time the general feeling of wrong was rising to fever heat. In TJlrich von Hutten's dialogue, Vadis- cus, seu Trias Bomana,^ published in 1520, in which he discharges aU his hatred of Eome in one lightning flash of 1 Ranke, vol. i. p. 43. Booking, vol. iv. p. 145 et seq. See ■2 Ulr. Hutten's Opera Ommia, ed. especially p. 157 ei seq. D 34 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. epigrammatic invective, there is manifest a strong feeling of irritation against tlie quick-witted and insolent Italians, who did not care to conceal their contempt of the nation which they plundered. More and more the protest against the admin- istrative system of Eome grew to be a matter of German patriotism, quite independent of nascent doctrinal differences, until at the Diet of Niirnberg in 1522-1523, the Legate Chiere- gati, asking why the Edict of Worms had not been enforced against Luther, was answered by the production of one hundred gravamina, a long and heavy bill of indictment against the Church, which it was demanded should be tried by a national- council, to be held within a year, in a German city, under the presidency, not of the Pops' but of the Emperor.^ Abuses of every kind, dispensations, indulgences, patronage, jurisdiction, spiritual pains and penalties, are here enumerated with cumulative effect. And the document, drawn up, it must be remembered, by representatives of Catholic States, only one or two of which were beginning to be affected by the breath of Lutheran reform, leaves upon the miud the impression of a system full of sordid corruption, and worked for the conscious purpose of extracting money from a superstitious and subservient people. Another constant complaint was of the immorality of the clergy. Nor is this merely to be taken of offences against the law of clerical cehbacy ; that was a thing confessed. All mediaeval literature from the time of Gregory VIL when the obligation of abstinence from marriage began to be rigorously enforced on the parochial clergy, down to the Eeformation, is full of this subject. It is treated in every variety of tone ; it is made the topic of grave rebuke and fiery invective ; it far- nishes plentiful material for satire ; it is woven into the stuff of popular novels ; it embodies itself in proverbs ; it gives rise to decrees of synods and councils innumerable. In Germany, at the end of the fifteenth century, it seemed as if the contest against invincible propensities of human nature had been given up in despair ; from such a prelate, for instance, as Albert of Mainz no one would have expected chastity, and no one thought the worse of him for not practising it ; while parish priests every- 1 Marheineke, Geschichte der teutschen gravamina will be found in "Waloh, vol. Eeformation, 2d ed. vol. i. p. 430. The xv. p. 2560 et seq. 11 CLERICAL IMMORALITY 35 where openly kept women in their houses, who were wives in all but the name, and the mothers of children whose recogni- tion involved no shame. The fine which was inflicted on such a breach of ecclesiastical disciphne, naturally converted itself into a yearly payment for a dispensation ; and the laity openly declared that they felt themselves more secure with such a clergy than with one to whom no similar indulgence was shown. But there is no safe middle way between such a rigid self-control as the Catholic clergy, at least in Protestant countries, have in modern times imposed upon themselves, and the legal- isation of marriage. A mistress cannot take the place of a wife; nor is it easy to say whether man or woman is more demoralised by a connection which can be terminated at the will or caprice of either, and while it lasts is stigmatised by pubKc opinion. Stress has usually been laid on the degrada- tion brought upon the occupant of a sacred office by this shock- ing state of things ; Luther, with his usual keen insight into human nature, saw the other side strongly. A woman, he said, who sinned with a priest was a lost creature, despair robbed her of aU hope of recovery. There was no worse sort of womenfolk than the parson's maid.'^ The whole system of the Eoman Catholic Church is one the character of which depends largely upon the men by whom it is administered. It places enormous power ra the hands of the hierarchy. The direction of the conscience, the control over the sacraments, the exercise of the Church's teaching and dispensing authority, the wielding of the sword of disciphne, the power of binding and loosing not only on earth but in heaven, are functions which may conceivably be in the hands of a priesthood so wise, so holy, so self-controlled as to be used for the eternal welfare of the community which they govern. It is indeed a spiritual despotism which is thus set up; but a spiritual, like a political despotism, if it cannot caU out certain free and generous virtues in those who are subject to it, may yet produce solid fruits of good government. But all despot- isms, whether administered by one man or by a privileged class, are fataUy dependent upon the character of the despot. 1 Erl. ed. vol. xxviii. p. 195: lichen Stand des Papstes und der "Wider den falsch genannten geist- Bisoliofe." 1522. 36 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. From an Augustus there may be a rapid descent to a Caligula ; a Marcus Aurelius may be followed by a Commodus : nor is the deposit of unlimited power less dangerous to a sacerdotal order than to a single monarch. The Catholic Church strove in vain, throughout the Middle Ages, against the corruptions which iaevitably attended the power and the wealth which were poured in upon her. It might almost seem as if, by a kind of divine Nemesis, she became less able to do her supernatural work the more firmly she fixed her claims in the minds of men, and the larger were the resources which she accimiulated. All Europe groaned under the exactions, if it did not feel the shame of the Papacy of the Eenaissance. And when the im- purity of the clerical life shocked the moral sense of Germany, the impression was deepened by the recollection that these priests, whose ignorance and incapacity dragged the people down to their own level, owed their benefices to every kind of irregularity and corruption, and that the Empire was made to contribute to foreign luxury and prodigality the funds that ought to have supported its own religious establishments. Nothing, however, could be a greater mistake than to suppose that the Latia Church, as a whole, was ignorant- of its own weaknesses and corruption, or that it made no steady efforts to remedy them. The history of these attempts is too instructive in relation to the main subject of this book to be wholly passed over in this place, although the treatment of it must necessarily be brief and imperfect. They are of two kinds. The first are in the nature of a revival of religious life : attempts to put new flesh upon the dry bones of the valley of vision, and to breathe new breath iuto them. The second proceed upon the assumption that, apart from this, which is a strictly prophetic work, what is needed can be accomplished by fresh laws and more stringent regula- tions. The establishment of the mendicant orders is an example of the one ; the efforts of conciliar reform at Constanz and at Basel a type of the other. But it is a singular and convincing proof of the decadence of the Papal Church, that the first of these methods, which alone carried ia it the seed of possible success, was also the earlier in date. There was a great out- break of the monastic spirit in the first haK of the thirteenth CATHOLIC EFFORTS OF REFORM 37 century, which witnessed the foundation of the three great mendicant orders, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Augus- tinians. But from that time, until the Counter-Eeformation called into being the Society of Jesus, the annals of monasticism are comparatively barren. Old orders were indeed reformed, some unimportant monastic communities came into existence, but there was no overpowering rush of enthusiasm for the ascetic life such as drove crowds of eager and devoted adherents to the side of Dominic or of Francis. On the other hand, a General Council was held on the very eve of the Eeformation. It was a failure, as all the rest had been ; if the spirit was baffled by the inveterate diseases of the Church, how should the letter prevail ? Catholic efforts of revival all took, with more or less rigidity, the monastic form, and their successive failure is due to the inherent weaknesses of monasticism. It sets before men an unnatural and impossible ideal. It substitutes for the social and domestic virtues, upon which the world rests, an ascetic and self-regarding type of holiness. It is the attempt " to wind ourselves too high for sinful men beneath the sky," and so is peculiarly exposed to reaction, laxity, corruption. The story of all monastic orders, truly told, is one of perpetual striving after a holiness which hungers and thirsts after self-denial, and finds no self -maceration too hard; then of slow falling away into formality, idleness, self-indulgence, open vice : and a period once more of enthusiastic reform, and repentant return to the old ideal. Never were orders more bound down to poverty and humUity, either by the spirit of their founders or the letter of their statutes, than the Dominicans and the Franciscans ; yet, like other older communities, they heaped up boundless wealth, they aimed at ecclesiastical power, they laid hold of the universities, they mounted the Papal Chair ; in a word, they changed themselves into something quite different from what they were intended to be. It could not be otherwise. The overbent bow breaks, the pendulum violently drawn to one side swings violently back to the other. None of these monastic reformers introduced — their defenders will say that they could not introduce — a fresh principle of faith into the corruption of the times ; yet, in default of such a principle, the successive 38 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. movements of reform fell under the law of reaction and extinc- tion. Nor let it be alleged that this necessity of failure attends upon monastic reform only because it sets before itself too high an object. The fault of its ideal is not that it is too lofty, but that it is unnatural. It attempts to develop certain noble instincts of humanity at, the cost of suppressing others, which equally have their root in the constitution of man, and to exalt individual holiness, while disparaging social and domestic virtue. But the event has shown often enough, and wiU show again should the occasion arise, that human society repudiates the monastic conception of goodness as being in essential contrariety to the principles on which it is itself built up. Many such efforts of monastic reform were made in Germany in the fifteenth century. The two great Councils of Constanz and of Basel could not be quite without effect in this direction. The first movement spread from the Congregation of Eegular Canons at Windesheim, near Zwolle, which stood in close connection with the Brethren of the Common Life, of whom we shall hear more presently. John Busch was the reformer. Its second centre was the Benedictine convent of Bursfeld, round which grouped themselves seventy -five others in Saxony, Thuringia, Westphalia, and the Ehineland. Dederich Coelde accomplished a similar work for the Franciscans ; Andreas Proles for the Augustinians. The general movement of reform was promoted by that Cardinal Nicholas of Cues, of whom we have already heard in the region of politics. He appeared in Germany in 1451 in the character of -a Papal legate, charged with the task of ecclesiastical and, in especial, of monastic reform. He travelled through the whole land, everywhere exhorting to the strict observance of conventual rules, estab- lishing provincial synods, and leaving visitors behind him to see to the continuance of his work. But it is instructive to note that none of these movements of reform is successful in extending itself over a whole order. They limit themselves to the establishment of special congregations within the larger body, having a greater or less cohesion of their own, and bound to a stricter observance of the common rule. It seems as if the time were past at which it was possible for a great wave of enthusiasm to sweep over a monastic community, and II THE COUNCILS OF PISA AND CONSTANZ 39 to carry every member of it, even the lax and tlie vicious, to a higher level of life. The reformation of the Church ta root and branch was the object set before each of the great Councils which were held suc- cessively at Pisa, at Constanz, and at Basel. That of Pisa was called in 1409 by the College of Cardinals, for the purpose of putting an end to the Schism which affected Europe with pious horror. That purpose it altogether failed to accomplish ; it deposed indeed the rival Popes, and elevated Alexander V to the Papal See in their room ; but when Alexander died, after a few months' reign, and John XXIII was elected, there were three Popes instead of two, and the last state of things was worse than the first. Another General Council was summoned to meet at Constanz in 1414. The cry for reform was raised all over Europe ; the old grievances remained without a remedy, while in John XXIII the Church had a Shepherd all whose care was for the wolves. The University of Paris, with its Chancellor, John Gersou, headed the party of reform : the Emperor Sigismund took the same side ; deputies came together from all parts of Europe. The Council set before itself a threefold object — the reunion of the Church under one Pope ; its reformation in its head and in its members ; the extirpation of aU heretical doctrine. The first was attained in the election of Martin V ; the sincerity of the Council in regard to the last was vindicated by the condemnation of John Hus and Jerome of Prague. But the second came to nothing. When once the Council had given itself and the Church a new head in a generally acknowledged Pope, it found that it had lost at once its initiative and its authority. Martin V's first measure was to confirm aU the regulations which had obtained in the Papal Chancery, and with them, therefore, the whole series of practical abuses of which the Church so bitterly complained ; his next step, to break the force of the general league for reform, by concluding separate concordats with the Transalpme nations. These were unsatisfactory, almost trivial documents ; that with Germany, published May 2nd, 1418, was limited m its operation to five years. Cardinals were to be created only in moderate numbers. The Pope placed some restriction on himself in regard to provisions and reservations. Annates 40 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. were to be paid on the old valuations ; and any valuation which seemed excessive was to be revised. In the matter of com- mendams, dispensations, the issue of indulgences, promises were made, for the keeping of which no guarantee was offered, while in each case it was left to the Pope to decide upon the necessity of exception to his own rule. The accept- ance of this concordat by the German nation, while it seemed to take away a part of the burthen of Papal exaction, really bound the rest more firmly on its back ; and at the end of five years everything was as it had been.^ Proceedings, similar in kind, though not in detail, followed the Council of Basel, which sat with various interruptions and changes of fortune from 1431 to 1449. Again the conciliar method of reform was found to be impossible, and each nation was left to make its own bargain with Eome. For a brief period it seemed as if Germany, under the leadership of Albert II, was about to seize and to maintain her ecclesiastical liberties. The Diet of Mainz, held in March 1439, solemnly accepted and confirmed the reforming decrees of Basel, which asserted the superiority of General Councils over the Pope, provided for the organisation of provincial and diocesan synods, abolished reservations, annates, and the like brood of Papal exactions, enjoined freedom of election to bishoprics and lesser benefices, and restricted appeals to Eome.^ But the state of things thus brought about was of short duration. Albert II was succeeded by Frederic III : Nicholas V, a Pope whose authority was neither impugned by a Council nor shared by an Antipope, followed Eugenius IV. The Emperor in his capacity as an Austrian prince, and the electors as territorial sovereigns, were all open to the temptation of bartering away the common liberties for private concessions of patronage. The price was duly paid to each, and in February 1448 was concluded the Concordat of Vienna, which, going back to the ground occupied by the agreement of Constanz, sacrificed almost everything that had been claimed at Mainz. Wlierever the Concordat of Vienna differed from the Concordat of Mainz, it was in favour of the Pope. Again the apparent limitation of some rights ' Milman, vol. vi. p. 68 ; Gieseler, of (he Reformation, vol. i. pp. 405, vol. ii. pt. 4, p. 38 note; CreiglitoD, 406. Eistory of the PapcLcy during the period ^ Creighton, vol. ii. p. 200. II ABORTIVE COUNCIL AT PISA 41 only confirmed their substantial validity. And presently the German princes found out that it was an easier and more certain way of providing for their ecclesiastical prot^g^s to keep up friendly relations with the Pope, than to trust in the goodwill of chapters.^ One more attempt at conciliar reform must be mentioned, less on account of its intrinsic importance than because it was made at the very moment when the storm of the Eeformation was about to break on the Papacy. The story may be very briefly told. Ecclesiastical affairs in Germany, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, were conducted on the footing of the Concordat of Vienna, with what result of national dissatis- faction we have seen. Eemonstrances, covering always the same familiar ground of grievance, were constantly made, and as con- stantly disregarded. At last, in the pontificate of Julius II, Maximilian braced himself for decisive action. He was irritated by the Pope's abandonment of him in his war with Venice. Men said that for a moment he entertained the wild project of making himself Pope in succession to Julius. He asked the distinguished humanist and patriot Wimpheling to draw up, on behalf of the German nation, a list of gravamina against the Papacy,^ and in conjunction with Louis XII called a General Council at Pisa. The invitations to the Council bore the signatures of three cardinals, while six more were under- stood to approve it. The objects of the Council were the familiar ones: pacification of all, Christian peoples, common war against the Turks, extirpation of heresies, and the necessary reformation of the Church. A few ecclesiastics, chiefly French, assembled at Pisa, but the Council was only a poor shadow of the great assemblies which a century before had drawn upon themselves the atten- tion of Europe. Maximilian himself, with characteristic changefulness, showed no interest in it. When Julius caUed together the Fifth Lateran Council to meet in Eome in April 1512, he was universally felt to have checkmated his opponents. It sat first under the presidency of Julius II then under, that of Leo X, from 1512 to 1517, and for the reform of the 1 Creighton, vol. ii. p. 282 ; Gieseler, = Wimpheling's ten grayamina will vol ii pt 4, p. 101 ; Maurenbrecher, be found m Gieseler, vol. 11. pt. 4, p. St. M. 'Sh. pp. 330-336. 185 noU. 42 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. % notorious evils and scandals of the Church, accomplished nothing. Fra Egidio da Viterbo, the General of the Augus- tiuians, a man of high character and zealous piety, preached a sermon to the Council, in which he laid down the necessity of radical reform: Pico della Mirandola addressed a memorandum to the Pope, in which he made the sensible remark, that if there were any real desire for reform, the old laws of the Church would suffice, without enacting new ones. But beyond the passing of certain perfunctory regulations, which nobody could ever sup- pose were intended to be carried iuto practice, nothing was done. The real achievement of the Council was of quite another kind. It procured the abolition of the document known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, in which, in 1438, Charles VII had embodied the decrees of the Council of Basel, and which from that time forward had been the charter of the liberties of the GaUican Church. In so doing it renewed and confirmed the Bull, Unam Sanctam, in which Boniface VIII had declared the salvation of men to depend on their submis- sion to the Papal See. When the Council separated in 1517 it might have seemed that the Pope was finally triumphant over aU national opposition, and that -the demand for any reform, save such as was of his own initiation, had been vic- toriously repelled. Yet it was in 1517 that Luther published the Ninety-five Theses.^ A grave injustice would be done to the religious life of Germany if it were forgotten that it was the country of the " Priends' of God " and the " Brethren of the Common Life," of Gerhard Groot and Johann Tauler, of the TheologiL Ger- manica and the Imitation of Dhrist. It is true that all these, except the last, are manifestations of the fourteenth, not of the fifteenth century; but they had been worked into the stuff of the national mind, and must be counted as permanent factors in its development. In a preliminary sketch like this, it is not possible to teU in detail the story of the mystical sects which lived and worked below the surface of German Catholicism ; to describe the precise character of each, and to determine their mutual relations ; to decide to what extent one ^ For the Lateran Council see lischen Reformation, bk. i. chap. iii. Maurenbreoher, Geschichte der Katho- vol. i. pp. 89-118. II THE CATHOLIC MYSTICS 43 slid into pantheism, and another lapsed into immorality. Nor again is it fair to pass on whatever credit attaches to these manifestations to the Protestant movement of the sixteenth century, and to regard them as premonitory, though ineffective efforts of the spirit of reform. Such as they were, for good or evil, they sprang naturally out of Catholicism, and were a part of its life : the Latin Church cannot be justly judged unless Tauler be set by the side of Alexander Borgia, Gerhard Groot by Torquemada. We accomplish nothing in the history of reli- gion by establishing sharp contrasts, which have no counterpart in the reality of things, and overlooking the slow and gradual developments which make the transition from one age to another. Each stage of human progress grows out of one immediately preceding. Even Luther, in all the strength of his brilliant originality, his seK- centred will, is the child of his country and his time. It is the peculiarity of mysticism to be neither Catholic nor Protestant. It aims to soar into a region above that in which ecclesiastical and theological diversities arise. Its method is the direct apprehension of God by the soul, as form, colour, sound, are apprehended by the senses. Mysticism does not argue; it cannot appeal to any external authority; it broods, it meditates, it listens for the Divine voice. When that voice is heard, all others are necessarily silent — Church, Bible, opinions of men. Naturally, the awe of the presence of God, the joyful confidence which results from the consciousness of being taught and led by God, overshadow less lofty emotions; these things are sufficient in their own intensity, and do not suffer minor matters of belief to obtrude themselves. Mysti- cism penetrates to the ultimate ground of religion, the soul that enjoys God needs and can ask no more. So the works of the mystics are the world's great books of devotion, used by every sect ^nd belonging to none ; it would be impossible to say from internal evidence whether the Theologia Germanica was written before or after the Eeformation, and the Imitation of Christ, with some change of phrase, is used in the worship of the Eeligion of Humanity. Another aspect of the same fact is that mystics arise in every Church, and form none. The mystic's attitude to religion is a matter of natural endowment ; 44 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. lie has nothing that he can impart to a soul of different mould from his own ; he does not reason, he affirms, and affirmation persuades only where it wakes an echo. Even liis affirmations are often indistinct, perhaps self- contradictory ; the divine realities which he contemplates are too vast, too splendid, too many-sided to be confined within limits of human words ; he looks at them, now in this aspect, now in that, and his reports, each true to the vision of the moment, cannot be identical with one another. No great religious movement, therefore, proceeds from mysticism ; what enthusiasm it evokes is retired, restrained, self-centred. But it is a thread of gold running through the coarser ecclesiastical stuff of the ages, that in which all nobler and sweeter spirits become conscious of common accord. I pass over some of the philosophical aspects of mysticism, as illustrated by the great names of Eckhart and Eysbroeck, to call attention to two of its most important practical manifesta- tions — the "Friends of God," upon whom Tauler and the Theologia Germanica are to be affiliated, and the " Brethren of the Common Life," who produced Thomas k Kempis and the Imitation of Christ. The former were a secret association of men and women who, in the second half of the fourteenth century, had their chief centres of action upon the Upper Ehine. They were of very various rank and degrees of education. They did not form any visible sect, and do not appear to have felt the temptation to nonconformity. Their object was to deepen and purify the spiritual Hfe of their members, a purpose for which the devotional forms of the Church were accepted by them as adequate. But as they did not desire to draw upon themselves the notice of the Inquisition, they designedly threw an air of secrecy over their proceedings, and in the Church history of the time come and go in a mysterious fashion, which up to a quite recent period concealed their true character. Their leader is usually supposed to have been Nicholas of Basel, the layman who, in a weU-known narrative,'- now be- Ueved to have been written by himself, appears as coming to Tauler, rebuking him for his Pharisaic self-sufficiency, and condemning him to a two years' abstinence from preaching. There are others of the Friends of God whose names deserve ^ Videii/c and Sermons of Dr. John Tauler, ed. Susanna Wink worth, p. 1 etseq. n THE BRETHREN OF THE COMMON LIFE 45 mention, but in comparison with Tauler, a great preacher in Strassburg, whose sermons still find readers, they are but dim figures moving across a confused and ill-lighted stage. To this school of thought may be unhesitatingly referred the Thcologia Germanica. When Luther first discovered and printed it, he thought and spoke of it as Tauler's,^ although it declares itself in its preface to be the work of a God's Friend, a priest in the House of the Teutonic Knights at Frankfort. To this origin its contents answer with absolute accuracy. It is the exposition of a pure and profound rehgious faith, unalloyed by any local or temporary dogmatic element. It is a book for every century, for it bears the distinguishing mark of none. The " Brethren of the Common Life " belong more to the practical order of things. Their founder, Gerhard Groot, a native of Deventer, was born in 1340, studied first in Aachen and Koln, then in Paris, and returned home to enter upon what promised to be a course of rapid promotion in the Church. How the wealthy and worldly ecclesiastic was transformed into an ascetic, is a story not to be told here ; it does not essentially differ from that of other similar conversions. The intellectual turning-point of Groot's life lay in his inter- course with Johann Eysbroeck, the well-known mystic, who was the Prior of a House of Augustinian Canons at Groenendal, near Brussels. Taking deacon's orders, Groot was for some years a successful preacher, till, silenced by authority, he con- tented himself with gathering round him a few young men, who rather threw their resources together and lived a common life than bound themselves by vows or strove to reduce existence to a fixed uniformity. They copied and bound books, and presently began to devote themselves to the education of the young. Groot died at a comparatively early age ; and it was under his successor, Florentius Eadewins, that the community, assumed a more fixed form. But it was the loosest of monastic orders, if indeed monastic it can be called. There was no irrevocable self-dedication. There was no cloistered seclusion. The Brother -houses, as they were called, — there were also female communities of the same kind, — were bodies of friends who agreed to Uve together, to have but one purse, and to 1 Dr. M. Luther's Briefe, ed. De Wette, vol. i. p. 46. 46 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. occupy themselves in the same tasks. Connected with these were one or two houses of Eegular Canons, that for instance at Windesheim, of which I have already spoken, which furnished opportunity for gratifying the more strictly monastic aspira- tions of some of the Brethren. An air of simple piety, of sanctified good sense, seems to breathe through these com- munities during the comparatively short period in which they flourished; nor was the tradition of the founder lost or impaired by his successors. Of one of their characteristic occupations, the copying of books, the community was deprived by the invention of printing ; the products of the presses of Mainz, of Ulm, of Niirnberg, slowly came to be preferred to their beautiful MSS., many of which still enrich the libraries of Holland. The latest research seems to show that the merits of the Brothers of the Common Life, in regard to education, have been misapprehended, perhaps exaggerated. No improve- ments in the art of teaching can be directly traced to them. But scholars were received into the Brother-houses for educa- tion : the celebrated schools at Deventer and at Zwolle owed much to teachers who belonged to the order, and they must have the credit of having brought to the work of education an earnestness which was ethical not less than religious. Some of the greatest teachers of Germany in the fifteenth century stood in more or less close connection with the schools of the Brethren : nor from the theological point of view can it be forgotten that two of their pupils were Thomas ^ Kempis and John Wessel.^ Educated opinion is more and more settling down to the conviction that the ancient tradition, which makes Thomas Haemerken the author of the Imitation of Christ, is well founded. Born at Kempen, a little town near Koln, in 1380, he became a pupil of the Brethren in the school at Deventer in his thirteenth year, and from that time, till he died at ninety-one, was content in their pious companionship. Under the advice of riorentius, he entered the monastery of St. Agnes, near Zwolle, one of the houses of Eegular Canons in close connection with 1 See an article by Hirsche, Briider 2d ed. vol. ii. pp. 678 sqq. ; also UU- des Gemeinsamen Lebens, in Herzog's mann, Seformatoren vor der Beforma- EncyMopadie fiir Thsol. und Kirehe, Hon, 2d ed. vol. ii. bk. iii. II THOMAS A KEMPIS 47 the Brotherhood, and there passed his long and innocent life in the peaceful occupation of copying books, writing the bio- graphies of the great men of his order, and composing treatises of mystic devotion. The chief of them is that famous book, which has been translated into every European language, which has passed through innumerable editions, and, next to the Bible, has perhaps counted more readers than any other, the Imitation of Christ. That it should have met with so much acceptance at the hands of other than Catholic readers, is a striking testimony to the depth and sincerity of its religious feeling ; for the odour of incense is upon it, and its ideal of human perfectness is distinctly monastic. Indeed it is justly liable to the charge of being only a manual of sacred selfishness ; the domestic and social virtues are entirely over- looked by it ; it points the way to the salvation of the solitary soul. But within these limitations its devoutness is so direct, so pure, so profound ; its vision of divine realities so unclouded, its insight into human nature so deep and clear, as quite to obscure and overbear for the pious soul the difficulties of the form into which it is thrown. Its rehgiousness is mystical only in the best sense of that often-abused word ; the soul is indeed invited to look straight into the face of its Divine Lord, but there are no affected obscurities of thought, no needless indis- tinctness of phrase ; all is simple, straightforward, practical. To those who can study it in the original, the epigrammatic force, the subtle melody, the apt terms of expression double the charm. It was one of the merits of G-erhard Zerbolt, a younger contemporary of Florentius, to have advocated the reading of the Bible and the use of hymns and prayers in the vernacular tongue, and so to have prepared the way for the severance of Germany from the Papacy. But in the Imitation we are still in communion with the whole Latin Church ; the language of Augustine and of Jerome, moulded indeed by centuries of monastic use, is upon our hps ; we have not passed from the universality of mediaeval to the national separations of modern Christianity. It was only twelve years after Thomas h. Kempis died that Luther was born. John Wessel, also a pupil at Zwolle, illustrates a very differ- ent school of thought, which did its part in moulding reUgious 48 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. opinion in Germany in the fifteenth century. With John Pupper of Goch (1400-1475), John of Wesel (1410 ?-1481), Wessel is counted as one of the " Eeformers before the Eeformation," who to a considerable extent anticipated the pecuKarities of Lutheran teaching. John of Goch was the founder and director of a priory of Ganonesses near Mecheln ; John of Wesel, a teacher at the University of Erfurt, about the middle of the century, afterwards a popular preacher at Mainz and at Worms, who was tried for heresy, recanted, and died in prison. Wessel ran a more distinguished course ; born at Groningen, he studied at many universities, Koln, Louvain, Paris, Heidelberg; ac- quired so large a reputation for learning as to be decorated with the pompous title of Lux Mwndi ; was the friend of Cardinal Bessarion, and Francesco deUa Eovere,-afterwards Pope Sixtus IV ; was connected with the classical revival in Ger- many as the teacher of Eudolf Agricola and Eeuchlin, and died at his birthplace uncondemned in 1489. All these men, though not willing to be accounted heretics, stand on the verge of heresy. They assert the sole authority of Scripture in matters of faith. They attack indulgences from both the doctrinal and the practical side. Wessel formulates a doctrine of justifica- tion by faith, though always faith that worketh by love. At the same time it is a mistake to speak of any of them as if they actually stood in the line of Luther's intellectual ancestry. It cannot be proved that he learned anything from them. John of Goch was a recluse, whose writings were first published in the sixteenth century with the express purpose of showing how Lutheran men had been before Luther. Of the two books by John of Wesel which still survive, one was first published in the sixteenth, the other not till the eighteenth century. To the third edition of John Wessel's Farrago rerum theologicarum, published in 1522, Luther prefixed a preface, in which he declares the almost verbal identity of his own doctrine with that of Wessel. But while so saying, he denies the existence of any actual link between himself and his predecessors. " Sic pugnavi ut me solum esse putans " (" I fought as thinking myself alone ").-^ The coincidences between Luther's thought ^ Seckendorf, Cormnentarius historicus et apologeticus de Lutheranismo, 2(3. ed. bk. i. sec. 54, § cxxxiii. p. 226. HUSSITE INFLUENCE 49 and that of the men of whom I have been speaking were many and striking ; but their teaching is nevertheless best regarded as only one of the numerous elements which were mingling and seething together in that Germany of the fifteenth out of which the Germany of the sixteenth century was evolved.-' Luther's relation to Hus was the same as to Wessel, one of unconscious agreement. At the disputation with Eck at Leipzig in 1 5 1 9, on being pressed to say whether he acknowledged the authority of the Council of Constanz and the justice of Hus's sentence, he was bold enough to declare his opinion that not all the doctrines condemned by the Council were heretical. But it was not till 1520, when he had read some of Hus's books, and received congratulatory messages from Bohemia, that he found c«it that he had all the while been a Hussite without knowing it.^ I find it difficult, however, to determine how much of Hus's thought had been working in the German mind during the century that had elapsed since his condemna- tion. It was necessarily below the surface, for Hus was a convicted heretic, and to sympathise with him was to share his offence. Bohemia, though poUticaUy a part of the Empire, was separated from Germany by differences of race and speech ; nor were the victories of Ziska or the ravages of Procopius hkely to procure friends for their faith. StUl, as Luther himself said in 1520, there had always been a murmur of John Hus in many parts of the land,^ and that, too, continually on the increase. About 1430 a Saxon priest, John Drandorf, was burned near Worms for Hussite heresy. In Bavaria, in Swabia, in Franconia, even in Prussia, there were distinct traces of the same tendency. The city council of Bamberg at one time thought it necessary to exact from all the citizens an oath against Hussite doctrine. About 1446 we hear of one Frederick Miiller, who, near Eothenburg on the Tauber, always a centre of political and religious enthusiasm, taught the Hussite doc- trines, and gathered many adherents, of whom 130 were after- 1 For a full account of these men and Staupitz ; brevlter sumus omnes Hus- tlieir theology, see Ullmann, Beforma- sitae ignorantes ; denique Paulus et torm vor der Reformation. Augustinus ad verbum sunt Hussite. 2 Briefe, ed. be Wette. To Spalatin, Vide monstra, quaeso, in quae yenimus Feb. 1520: "Ego imprudens hucusque sine duce et doctore Bohemico." omnia Johannis Hussen docui et tenui ; ^ Erl. ed. vol. xxiv. p. 28 : ' 'Von den docuit eadem imprudentia et Johannes neuen Eckischen BuUen mid Liigen." 50 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. wards compelled to abjure their errors at Wiirzburg. It seems possible to trace a direct connection between certain disciples of Hus, who had been expelled from Saxony by the Bishop of Meissen, and Zwickau, whence proceeded the first fanatical opposition to the Eeformation of Wittenberg. Probably Hus- site sympathies, wherever they manifested themselves, took the social revolutionary rather than the theological form ; a theory which would make Hus the precursor quite as much of the Peasants' War as of the Eeformation.-' There is always a little difficulty in separating zeal for reform from heretical tendency; the preacher who, in the heat of moral conviction, denounces practical abuses is rarely able to restrain himself from attacking the corruptions of theory from which they spring. But throughout this period there were theologians, of more or less orthodox reputation, who felt the vices and weaknesses of their age, and were zealous in trying to remedy them. Such was Pelix Hem merlin (■|"1464), who in the first half of the century held high preferment in Solothurn and Ziirich, an ecclesiastic learned, liberal, full of the energy of moral reform. He had taken part in both Councils of Constanz and of Basel, on the reforming side, and was equally active with tongue and with pen. But his name will hardly be found inscribed in good Catholic annals ; for that he was too direct and outspoken in his attack upon the Papal system of oppres- sion and plunder ; he ended his days in the imprisonment of the cloister, to which he had been judicially condemned. A name less suspected is that of Heynhn von Stein (■|"1496), who lived and worked at Basel, where he divided his attention between the Latin Fathers on the one hand, and Cicero and Aristotle on the other. He seems to have stood half-way between the old and the new tendencies of thought ; was at once a humanist and a scholastic, and made his influence felt in the pulpit no less than in the professor's chair.^ The man, however, who above all others deserves the name of a Catholic reformer, is Geiler von Kaisersberg (1445-1510), whose eloquence for thirty -two years rang through all the 1 Janssen, vol. ii. bk. iii. § 1 ; Ranke, " Ranke, vol. i. pp. 192-195 ; Hagen, vol. i. pp. 218, 219; vol. ii. p. 16; vol. i. p. 100 et seq.; Maurenbrecher, Hagen, Deutschland's literarische und Oesch. der Kath. Reformat. voL ii. p. religiose Verhdttnisse im Reformations- 169. zeitalter, vol. i. p. 169. 11 GEILER VON KAISERSBERG 51 Ehineland, from the cathedral pulpit of Strassburg. Born at Schaffhausen, he received his education at the universities of Freiburg and of Basel. His learning was that of the time ; he was well acquainted with Latin, and especially with patristic literature, but he knew no Greek and no Hebrew. It was soon seen that the bent of his genius lay in the direction of preaching : there was a contest between Wiirzburg and Strass- burg for his services, which at last Strassburg obtained. There the office of preacher in the cathedral was created and endowed for him ; and for the long period above mentioned, he preached every Sunday and feast day, and daily through Lent. Many of his sermons still survive, though for the most part in the form in which they were written down by his hearers. Their ultimate object was moral, to rebuke vice and to recommend virtue ; and to this end he used the plainest speech. Neither clergy nor laity escaped the edge of his invective. On one occasion, indeed, the fearless preacher came into direct collision with the authorities of the city, whom he had charged with conniving at many abuses and corruptions. But it speaks well for both parties that Geiler, called to account, formulated his accusations in more temperate, but still distinct terms ; and that the magistrates recognised that ethical instruction and rebuke belonged to the preacher's office. The form of Geiler's sermons was often peculiar. He made a plentiful use of allegory, both in his interpretation of Scripture and in the general treatment of his subject. He was accustomed to preach long series of sermons on books written by other men ; and, in this way, illustrated the Shi'p of Fools, by his friend Sebastian Brant. But while many of the works thus turned into homilies were grave theological treatises, he would preach, if the fancy took him, or if he thought he saw a prospect of useful impression, on popular ballads, ^sop's fables, current proverbs. The division of his sermons was often amusingly artificial ; he was fond of acrostics, as, for instance, he divided a sermon on St. Aurilea into seven heads, the subjects of which were suggested by the seven letters of the word. Natur- ally he made a free use of anecdote ; painted typical characters in the plainest colours; introduced dialogues into the sub- stance of his sermons. There was no mistaking his meaning ; 52 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF GERMANY chap. he lashed the vices and follies of his time with the whip of a sharp invective, which went straight to its mark. He would allegorise anything. A Hon at a fair suggested to him the Devil seeking what he might devour ; while from Proverbs XXX. 26 he preached a sermon upon the hare as a type of the Christian, in which he pursued him through every stage of his career, tiU at last he is roasted and served before the king on a golden dish. But with all this he was an honest, outspoken man, zealous for righteousness, and doing his duty fearlessly in spite of indifference and opposition. The way in which Geiler made himself a centre of reform in the Ehineland, by acquiring an ascendency over its pre- lates, is very remarkable. There was that in the real re- ligiousness, the transparent honesty of the man which made him very attractive to some at least of the well-born and wealthy ecclesiastics, with whom his office at Strassburg brought him into contact. His first convert was a bishop of Strassburg itself, Albert of Bavaria, who invited him to preach before his provincial synod, and took his advice in the reformation of monasteries : the next. Count Frederic of Zollern, who afterwards became Bishop of Augsburg, whither he persuaded Geiler for a time to follow him. Christopher von Utenheim, afterwards Bishop of Basel, was another of the young men upon whom his charm worked ; and at a later period William von Honstein, who succeeded Albert as Bishop of Strassburg; and Phnip von Daun, who in 1508 became Elector -archbishop of Koln. It follows naturally from all this that Geiler laboured strictly within the lines of the Church. He does not seem to have felt a moment's tempta- tion to be heterodox. His miad was all given to the practical objects of preaching ; he has left behind him no theological treatise. He was a devoted partisan of Mary apd her immaculate conception : he bowed to the authority of the Papal See, and had nothing but condemnation for heretics and schismatics. But he was at once anxious to raise the intellec- tual status of the clergy, which he felt to be disgracefully low, and eager in rebuking their moral laxity. His exertions, however, chiefly took a disciplinary direction, and did not contemplate radical changes of any kind. He thought that a II EFFECT OF THE ART OF PRINTING 53 fresh spirit breathed into the old form would suf&ce, and that devoted bishops and pious priests would create the Church anew. Still it is characteristic both of the man and the times that he often despaired of success, and meditated retire- ment into a convent. ■'^ It is necessary to mention iu this connection the effect upon German religion of the invention of the art of printing. It spread with wonderful rapidity from Mainz all over Germany: in the latter half of the fifteenth century it may even be said that the literature of Europe was in the hands of German printers, who set up their presses in every considerable city. The new art, which was perfected almost as soon as born, fell in with the rising tide of humane learning, and was carried by it to a condition of marvellous prosperity. Mainz soon had five priuters, Ulm six, Basel sixteen, Augsburg twenty, Koln twenty -one, Ntirnberg twenty -five. Of the printers in Niirnberg iu 1470, Antony Koburger was the most famous. He had twenty -four presses, worked by above a hundred journeymen. At Basel the name of Johann Froben is in- separably connected with that of Erasmus, whose edition of the, Greek New Testament he priuted ia 1516. The Frank- fort fair became the centre of an active book trade. Nor was the Church slow to avail herself of the assistance of the new art. The first book printed at Mainz was the Latin Bible, and before the century was out ninety-seven editions of the Vulgate had been printed, of which twenty- six were from German presses, while of thirty-two more, which give no in- dication of place, some, if not all, must certainly be assigned to Germany.^ But besides these there were issued from the press no fewer than fourteen German Bibles, without reckon- ing others in Low German dialects.^ Of annotated Bibles, as weU as of editions of portions of Scripture, this enumeration takes no account. Psalters, books of popular devotion, collec- tions of sermons, manuals of confession, were multiplied m large editions. The great glory of the Koburger press at 1 ForGeiler,seeDacheux,?7wr Erasmi 0pp. vol. v. p. 37 E, p. 38 A. edition of the works of Erasmus, 1703. in ERASMUS'S METHOD OF REFORM 93 of all human striving is Christ, and Christ is no empty word, but only love, simplicity, patience, purity ; in brief, whatever He taught.-' This was hardly Catholicism, certainly not the Catholicism accepted in universities and current in con- vents ; but it was just as little Protestantism. A Lutheran of a few years later would, have pronounced the Unchiridion pagan in grain, and traced its inspiration rather to Epictetus than to Paul. But whether first moved by Colet or not, Erasmus had a special object in view, and a definite theory of Church reforma- tion. Like all the older German humanists, he deeply felt the practical abuses of the Church, which indeed he had done more than any other man in Europe to hold up to contempt and ridicule. But he looked much farther afield for a remedy than to the disciplinary activity of Popes or the reforming zeal of Councils. Owing perhaps to the fact that he was not brought into contact with it tUl the bent of his mind had settled itself, and his opinions in some degree become fixed, he had no sympathy with the scholastic theology, which he placed with monasticism in the category of things to be hated and despised. He had him- self gone behind the Schoolmen, to the Fathers and the Apostles for his faith, and he saw in the rising tide of learning the opportunity of putting before the eyes of Christendom the primitive in fair contrast with the existing Church. He made up his mind to give the world for the first time the Greek text of the New Testament. This was to be followed by critical editions of the chief Greek and Latin Fathers. Without open, revolt against the Church, without other attack upon her corruptions than such as he had been making through- out his literary life, he thought that the desired end must surely come. The leaven of scientific culture would slowly leaven the whole inert lump. The charm of Christianity, thus revealed in its first pure beauty, would be all -pre- vailing; men would see how simple a thing it was and yet how powerful in the production of a strong and happy life. It was a scholar's conception of reform, and one that was soon interrupted and set aside by ruder and more drastic methods. Yet it may be questioned whether, after ^ Erasmi 0pp. vol. v. p. 25 A. 94 THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY chap. all, the slow way is not in the long run the surest, and whether any other agent of human progress can permanently be substituted for culture. The Eeformation of the sixteenth century was Luther's work ; but if any fresh Eeformation is come or coming now, it can only be based upon the principles of Erasmus. The first step towards the realisation of this project was the publication in 1505 of Lorenzo Valla's Annotations upon the New Testament, with a prefatory letter addressed to Christopher Fischer.^ This work is less remarkable in itself than as being the first beginning of modern textual criticism of the New Testament ; Erasmus expressly claims for Valla, that his emendations were founded upon the collation of certain ancient and correct MSS. But he did not print the book without foreseeing the storm of opposition which it was Hkely to raise. The objections to which he addresses himself in his letter to Fischer are of the most childish kind, but not on that account less generally entertained or less difficult to overcome. Jerome's Latin was practically regarded as the original text of Scripture, and any attempt to amend it by reference to the Greek and stOl more to the Hebrew, was regarded as a laying of profane hands upon the ark of God, which no cogency of argument could justify. Then for ten years the matter apparently slept, but only apparently, for Erasmus was gathering materials for two of the great achievements of his life, his Greek New Testament and his edition of Jerome, both of which came to the birth in 1516. But even after this long delay, the first was hurried if not premature. The volume of Cardinal Ximenes's Complutensian Polyglot, which contained the New Testament, was in type as early as January 1514, though the completed work did not receive the Papal licence tiH 1520. And Johann Eroben, the printer of Basel, not desiring that the honour of first printing the New Testament in Greek should belong to Spain, made an offer to Erasmus to undertake the task. It was accepted ; the work was pushed on with a rapidity fatal to exact workmanship, and in February 1516 the book was published with a preface by the printer, and a dedication from Erasmus's own pen to Leo X. It is a beautifuUy-printed folio, ■^ Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. p. 96 : Ep. ciii. in - ERASMUS'S "NOVUM TESTAMENTUM" 95 volume, containing the complete text of the New Testament in Greek, followed by copious annotations.'' The defects of the edition, arising from the haste with which it had been prepared, are numerous and on the surface. It is full of small typographical errors. A quaint mistake upon the title-page called into existence a hitherto unknown Father of the Church, Vulgarius. Erasmus's declaration to Leo, " that he had consulted many codices, in both languages, and those not of any kind that might chance, but the oldest, and most correct," ^ is hardly borne out by the scanty list of not very valuable manuscripts that were alone at his disposal. He had no manuscript authority at all for the last six verses of the Apocalypse, and supplied the gap by his own retranslation from the Latin, a proceeding the traces of which are still visible on what is called the Eeceived Text. But having once established their priority, editor and printer set diligently to work to repair their mistakes. In the lifetime of Erasmus four more editions were issued, in 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1535, each of which was an improvement upon the last, except that in deference to ignorant clamour the verse 1' John v. 7, which had been omitted from the editions of 1516 and 1522, as supported by no MS., was inserted in that of 1527. The book had a large sale : of the first two editions put together 3300 copies were printed, and we may conclude that the others were in like proportion.^ The Greek Testament of Erasmus is at once the completest homage and the most signal service which the classical revival rendered to theology. It was a scholar's work,^and executed in the true spirit of scholarship. Its object was to place within reach of all who could read Greek — -a number that ^ The full title of this great work is : veram Theologiam, lege, cognosce, ac " Novum Instrumentum omne, diligen- delude iudica. Neque statim offendere, ter ah Erasmo Koterodamo reoognitum si quid mutatum offenderis, sed expende et emendatum, no solum ad graecam nnm in melius mutatum sit. Apud veritatem, verum etiam ad multorum inolytam Germaniae Basileam. [Here utriusq ; linguae codicum eorumq ; follows the printer's mark] Cum privi- veterum simul et emendatorum fidem, legio Maximilian! Caesaris Augusti, ne postremo ad probatissimorum autor- quis alius in sacra Eomani imperii um citationem, emendationem et in- ditione, intra quatuor annos excudat, terpretationem, praecipue Origenis, aut alibi excusum importet. " Chrysostomi, Cyrilli, Vulgarii, Hier- ^ Nomi/m Instrumentum, 1516, cm onymi, Cypriani, Ambrosii, Hilarii, 2 b. Augustini, una cum Annotationibus, ' See Scrivener, Introduction to the quaeleotorem dooeant, quid qua ratione Criticism of the New Testament, 2d ed. mutatUm sit. Quisquis igitur amas p. 380 et seq. 96 THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY chap. increased every day — the earliest documents of Christianity in the least adulterated form. It was one of the first examples of what we now call a critical edition ; most of the classical authors had been printed from any single manuscript which the editor had at his command ; for the moment it was thought sufficient that the insecurity of a single written copy should be ex- changed for the safety which the multiplying power of the press seemed to offer. But Erasmus recognised not only the fact that the Greek original must be preferable to any version, however venerable and authoritative, but that the text had come down to modern times with many variations. To com- pare such manuscripts as he could collect, and to choose what readings appeared to him most likely to be correct, was the first tentative beginning of that complicated science of textual criticism which now claims to be able to trace error through the mazes of many centuries, and to place its finger on the indubitable reading of the Post-Apostolic age. After all, the procedure of Erasmus was unscientific rather in its necessary incompleteness than in its method, and in doing all that was possible to him, he performed a service for theology which cannot be over-estimated. But perhaps a more remarkable thing, at least in relation to the generally received ideas as to his character, is the glow of enthusiasm in which he did his work. In a Paraclesis or Hxhortation to the Study of the Christian Philosophy, prefixed to the first edition of the Novum Instrumentum, he says : " Eor I utterly dissent from those who are unwilling that the sacred Scriptures should be read by the unlearned, translated into their vulgar tongue, as though Christ had taught such subtleties that they can scarcely be under- stood even by a few theologians, or as though the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men's ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings it may be safer to conceal, but Christ wished His mysteries to be published as openly as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel — should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish that these were trans- lated into all languages, so that they might be read and under- stood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens. To make them understood is surely the first step. It may be that they might be ridiculed by many, but some I" ERASMUS AS AN INTERPRETER 97 would take them to heart. I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the time of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with their stories the tedium of his journey." ^ The whole document breathes the same spirit. No more impassioned eulogy of the Scriptures, and of the bene- fits to be derived from their study, was ever written. From the free intercourse, now made possible between Christ and the mind of his disciples, Erasmus expects everything for the practical life. " This kind of philosophy," he says, " lies rather in the affections than in syllogisms ; it is a hfe rather than a disputation, an inspiration rather than an erudition, a trans- formation rather than an argument. To be learned lies within the reach of few, but every one may be a Christian, every one may be pious, yea, I will add boldly, every one may be a theologian." ^ Erasmus's labours on the New Testament were, however, by no means confined to the emendations of the text. His Anno- tations were an important part of the original edition, and the whole work may be said to have been crowned by the Para- phrases, which came gradually into being between 1517 and 1524. But although, in these works, he rendered important services to Bibhcal criticism, he did not take up so clear and scholarly a position in regard to the theory of interpretation as Luther did afterwards. He could not get rid of a respect for those mystical senses of Scripture in which mediaeval interpre- ters so greatly delighted, and by help of which they were able to deduce any doctrine from almost any passage. He says in his Enchiridion that if you take it only in its literal sense, the story of Adam is not better worth reading than that of Prometheus. He advises the choice of those interpreters of Scripture " who depart as far as possible from the letter." " What does it matter whether you read the Books of Kings or Judges or Livy's History, if in neither you look to the Allegory?"^ "The letter," he says, in the preface to the Annotations, "is the least part of all; but on this, as on a 1 I have availed myself of Mr. ^ Nov. Inst. 1516, aaa 4 d. Seebohm's excellent translation of this ' Erasmi 0pp. {UncMridion), vol. v. passage : Oxford Beformers, p. 256; Nov. p. 29 B, c, n ; ibiti. 8 D. Inst. 1516, aaa i b. H 98 THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY chap. foundation, rests the mystical sense." ^ At the same time, it may be questioned whether from this unpromising beginning he did not make a nearer approach to scientific rationalism than Luther, who started from a sounder principle. All Biblical students know the story of his omission, from his first two editions, of the verse 1 John v. 7, and his subsequent insertion of it in the third, though not without a protest, when a G-reek MS. containing the words had been brought under his notice.^ This critical instance is a fair sample of his pro- cedure. He admits lapses of memory and failures of judgment in the Apostles ; Christ alone is called the Truth, and is wholly free from error.^ He thinks that the Gospel of Mark is an abridgment of that of Matthew,* and calls attention to the fact that Luke is not an eye-witness of the events which he relates.^ He repeats Jerome's opinion that Clement of Eome was very likely the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,^ and casts doubt on the Johannine authorship of the Apocalypse.'' From others of his works it would be easy to cite passages in which he subjects even the most sacred mysteries of the faith to free handling. He was much more Scriptural than Athanasius ia his assertions as to the Trinity.^ He resolved the torturing flames of heU. into "the perpetual anguish of mind which accompanies habitual sin." ' Melanchthon declared that the whole Eucharistic controversy had its origin ia him.^" It is plain that we have here all modern rationahsm in germ. 1 Nov. Inst. 1516, p. 227. ' Note to Apoc. sm6 fine. : 0pp. vol. ^ His note on the passage {0pp. vol. vi. p. 1124 F. vi. p. 1080 b) is, however, couched in ' Adversus monachos quosdam His- terms which show how little he was panes : 0pp. vol. ix. p. 1023 et seq. : convinced. " Verumtamen, ne quid conf. vol. ix. pp. 1040 B, 1050 D. dissimulem, repertus est apud Anglos * Enchiridion : 0pp. vol. v. p. 56 o. Graecus codex unus, in quo habetur quod " Nee alia est flamma, in qua cruoiatur in vulgatis deest. . . . Ex hoc igitur dives ille comessator evangelicus. Neo codice Britannico reposuimus, quod in alia supplicia inferorum, de quibus nostris dicebatur deesse, ne cui sit ansa multa scripsere Poetae, quam perpetua calumniandi. Tametsi, suspicor codi- mentis anxietas, quae peccandi consue- cem ilium ad nostros esse correctum." tudinem comitatur. Tollat igitur qui 2 Note to Matthew ii. 7 ; 0pp. vol. velit futuri seculi tarn dlversa praemia; vi. p. 13 E. habet annexum sibi virtus propter quod * Note to Mark i. 1 : 0pp. vol. vi. abunde debeat expeti ; habet adjunctum p. 151 B ; Luke i. 2 : 0pp. vol. vi. p. peocatum, cujus causa debeat horreri." 217 0. 1° Letter of Melanchthon toCamera- ' Note to Luke i. 4, 5 : 0pp. vol. rius : Melancth. 0pp. : Corpus Reforma- vi. p. 218 D. tormn, vol. i. p. 1083 ; conf. Letter to ^ Note to Hebrews xiii. 18 : 0pp. Aquila, iUd. vol. iv. p. 970. vol. vi. pp. 1023, 1024. in THE CLIMAX OF ERASMUS'S LIFE 99 This was the climax of Erasmus's life. Nothing that the author of the Adages and the Praise of Folly could do could add to his literary reputation. In Germany, in Holland, in England, and only in a less degree in France, in Italy, in Spain, he was recognised as the first scholar of his day. All men of erudition, aU men of literary accomplishment, all princes and prelates who cared, or wished to seem to care about learning, were his correspondents. His journey to Basel in 1514 was a kind of triumphal progress ; the scholars of Alsace and the Ehineland met him, and feasted him as their acknowledged head. In the publication of his Jerome in 1516 he began that series of editions of the Greek and Latin Fathers which were necessary to complete the picture of primeval antiquity, which he desired to place before the eyes of Christendom. He was no mere scholar who had found in ecclesiastical literature a fit field for his powers, but an ardent theologian, eager for the reformation of the Church in doctrine and discipline, and with distinct ideas of his own as to the way of bringing it about. He thought that if he poured the new wine of culture into the old bottles of tradition, there could be but one result, even if long delayed. /But he was not a man of combat. He was incapable of dashing himself like a forlorn hope against the serried battalions of ecclesiastical ignorance and bigotry. /Always aUing, he did not feel that vigorous physical impulse which is necessary to aggressive heroism. Something of the scorn which often accompanies the conscious- ness of superior culture -was in him ; he disliked rough and ready ways, and preferred refined mockery to indignant invec- tive. It must be added that he was not independent of patrons, perhaps did not wish to be. The profits of authorship in those days went to printers and booksellers, and a scholar who did not teach like Hegius, or had not a profession like Eeuchlin or Brant, was necessarily dependent upon the liberality of the great. There was held to be nothing deroga- tory in the acceptance of such liberality, and Erasmus was proud to show the gold medals, the chased goblets, which he had received from Electors and Cardinals. But the feeling that the eyes of all the magnates with whom he desired to stand well were fixed upon him, added to his natural timidity. THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY Church reformers of Luther's type do not live on terms of friendly intimacy with Popes and Cardinals and Archbishops. Still to all appearance, in 1516, Erasmus was master of the situation. Beyond the little world of which Wittenberg was the centre, Luther, still an Augustinian monk, was unknown. It meant much that the first of northern scholars had openly declared for reform, and in books that were read all over Europe had preached a Christianity from which almost every element of mediaeval superstition had dropped away. But it is rarely, if ever, given to scholarship to touch the popular heart, and for the last twenty years of his life it was the fate of Erasmus to see the sceptre of theological supremacy passing from his hands into those of a younger and more resolute rival, and to watch the triumphant progress of a reform with which he felt less sympathy from day to day.^ Another prominent figure of the German revival was Ulrich von Hutten. He was so much younger than Eeuchlia and Erasmus, and played so large a part in the early years of the Eeformation, as to relieve me now from the necessity of doing more than endeavouring to bring his strange, yet on the whole attractive personality before the reader's eye. He was one of a numerous knightly family settled in mid Germany where Hesse and Franconia meet. Steckelberg, the castle where he was born in 1488, which, half a century earlier, had had an evil reputation as a robbers' nest, was not far from Fulda, the great Benedictine Abbey, which traced its origin back to Boniface. The Huttens were a tough and energetic race ; no fewer than thirty of them fought in Maximilian's armies ; others were high in the service of the Princes and Prelates who had divided Franconia among them. Ulrich's father, also Ulrich, had abandoned the predatory pursuits of his ancestors, but he was proud of his knightly independence, ready to take part in any blood feud, and full of contempt for the peaceful arts of Hfe. Why he destined his eldest son and namesake to the cloister we are not told ; possibly in pursuance of some vow, or because the boy was from the first of a sickly ' The life of Erasmus still needs Drummond's Erasmus, Ms Life and careful critical examination. But I may Character, and to F. Seebohm, The acknowledge my obligations to R. B. Oxford Seformers of li98. ULRICH VON HUTTEN constitution. Whatever may have been the reason, Hutten was sent in his eleventh ye.ar to Fulda, first to be educated, and then to be received into the house, one of the oldest and greatest in Germany. Here he remained till 1505, when, able to bear the restraint no longer and aided by his friend Orotus Eubianus, then studying at Erfurt, he made his escape. He had taken no vows, and his father, who seems to have had more than a common share of brutal obstinacy, let him go. The lad, only seventeen years old, was upon the world with no other provision than some knowledge of Latin, and a talent for making verses — and a very hard world he found it. In none of the German humanists was the passion for movement stronger than in Hutten. Something may be due to the fact that he never had a home ; but from this time till his death he is a wanderer — misery, as is her wont, making him acquainted with strange bedfellows. With what funds he began his university life, and why he and Crotus chose re- actionary Koln as their place of study, we cannot tell ; but they did not remain there long: in the summer of 1506 they are at Erfurt ; in the winter of the same year Hutten seeks the University of Frankfurt on the Oder, then newly founded. Here he seems to have taken the degree of Bachelor, but neither now nor in his subsequent legal studies in Italy did he proceed farther on the academic path. Some, at least, of the younger humanists despised- the distinctions which the universities had to offer, but which were to be earned only by the old methods, against which their whole lives were a pro- test ; and all the spirit of the newer humanism was embodied in Hutten. In the winter session of 1507-1508 we find his name on the register of the University of Leipzig ; then, in the late summer, of 1509, he appears on the inhospitable shores of the Baltic, first at Greifswald, then at Eostock, ragged, without resources, completely broken down in health. Whether he had already contracted the terrible and shameful disease which clung to him through life, and has infected his memory, it is difficult to say :■ nothing can be more pitiful than the account which he gives of his own misery. Yet there is a wonderful spring of recovery in him : a little rest, a 102 THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY chap. little kindness bring him out of the depths : in some strange way he acquires. a marvellous mastery of Latin, and pours forth verses which win him reputation and friends. He is stUl only twenty-one : surely the possibility of greatness is yet before him. From Eostock he went to Wittenberg ; next to Vienna, and in the spring of 1512 to Italy. Then came what might have been the chance of his life. Eeturning homewards in 1513, he fell under the notice of an old family friend who had in vain interposed some years before at the crisis of his fate at Fulda, Eitelwolf von Stein. He was a fine specimen of the enlightened statesman, who loved literature and honoured men of letters. It was at his instigation that Joachim I., Margrave of Brandenburg, had founded the Uni- versity of Frankfurt on the Oder in 1506. When in March 1514, Albert of Brandenburg, already Archbishop of Magde- burg and Administrator of Halberstadt, was chosen Elector Archbishop of Mainz, he brought Eitelwolf von Stein with him as his minister. Men began to entertain the highest hopes for literature in the Ehineland. Frankfurt on the Oder had been a disappointment: founded in the interests of the new learning, the reaction had early taken possession of it. But the University of Mainz, established by a former arch- bishop, Diether von Isenburg, was to make up for all. It was Eitelwolf s desire to attract thither the best scholars of the time ; and the electoral court, presided over by a young and splendid archbishop, was to become the centre point of German culture. For a little while Hutten shared this bril- liant dream : work was already found for him, and a permanent place promised, when a single day brought him — as he was trying to repair his shattered health at Ems — the double news, that Eitelwolf was dead, and that his cousin Hans von Hutten had been foully murdered by Duke Ulrich of Wiirtemberg. The story of this crime, romantic as it is, cannot be told here. The whole clan of Huttens cried for vengeance, and Ulrich was their mouthpiece in elegy, oration, dialogue. He went back to Italy in 1515, and was still there when the struggle between Eeuchlin and the theologians of Koln reached its crisis in the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum. He is not YOUNG GERMANY 103 thirty : still a wanderer, and to be so for the few years that are left him. He has not achieved much, though in many ways he has shown what metal he is made of; and Lueian, whom he has learned to know in Italy, has taught him the art of brilliant and incisive dialogue. His travels have brought him into contact with most learned men on either side the Alps ; he has conversed with Eeuchlin and Erasmus ; he has some little acquaintance with courts, and the ways of the great. Eome, as it was in the pontificate of Julius II and Leo X, he has seen with his own eyes ; and in Latin epigrams, which the sight could not but provoke from a man of mocking wit and ready pen, he has begun the war which he was after- wards to wage with such savage earnestness. There is some- thing of the Ishmael about him ; he will strike in any direction, so the passion moves him ; and till he is fired by enthusiasm for Luther — and even that is more than half political — he is not swayed by deep or lasting moral impulse. But he believes in the new learning with all his heart, and, like most of his fellow-humanists, he is a passionate patriot. And there is such an inexhaustible spring of vitality in him, that, sickly, the butt of fortune, experienced in misery, he is yet able to exclaim, " Learning flourishes, men's minds awaken, in such an age it is a delight to live." ^ So great an intellectual innovation as that which I have described could not be made without exciting much opposition and raising many controversies. The old scholasticism, though growing stiff and obsolete, and not illustrated by any teacher of original power, held firm possession of the universities, where it still dictated the method of instruction and prescribed the way to honour. It had the Church, and particularly the all-powerful mendicant orders, at its back — ^in a word, all the forces of intellectual and religious conservatism. Against this must be reckoned the young mental life of the nation, which all 1 Eanke, vol. i. p. 218. — ForHutten Eduwrdus Booking, 5 vols., Leipzig, see D. F. Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten, 1859-1861, is a magnificent specimen 2d ed. Hutten has been exceptionally of both German editorship and Ger- fortunate : Strauss's biography is all man typography. Two supplementary that such a work ought to be, and he volumes (1864-1869), to which I shall has found an editor in Ed. Booking have occasion to refer presently, contain who -leaves nothing to be desired, the Epistolae Ohscurorum Virorum,viith. Ulriohi Hutteni, equitis Germani, Opera a large mass of illustrative literature. quae reperiri potuerant omnia. Edidit I04 THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY chap. poured itself into the fresh moulds. There was an enthusiasm for the new learning to which the advocates of the old could show nothing similar. Almost everywhere the battle raged more or less fiercely. Many of the older humanists were devout sons of the Church and never ceased to be her defenders ; what suspicion of heresy they fell into was unwittingly incurred. Others went on their way, careless of ecclesiastical approval or censure, and when struck were prompt to strike again. Every uni- versity had its humanists, by friends and enemies alike called " poets," who, believing in literary culture, mocked at both the via Thomae and the via Scoti, and strove to substitute the classics for the schoolmen. They were denounced as teachers who desired to corrupt the purity of youth by the study of obscene pagan poets ; as heretics who denied the all-sufficient authority of the Church ; and, on the other hand, retorted upon their monkish adversaries with the charge of purblind obscur- antism, of ludicrous ignorance of even their own books, of bad logic and worse Latin. Gradually the two parties of the old and the new learning separated themselves, and took up hostile posi- tions : it was well known to which of the two any distinguished churchman or scholar belonged, and it seemed as if each were only waiting for the signal to engage in pitched battle. There was a preliminary skirmish in 1505 and the succeeding years. Jacob Wimpheling, who always prided himself on the soundness of his orthodoxy, published in 1505 a little book of moral theology, De Integritate, in which, in strict conformity with historical fact, he asserted that St. Augustine was no monk, and knew nothing of the rule which went by his name. !N"otliing could be more irritating to the Augustinians ; they rushed into the fray, supported by their fellow-mendicants, the Dominicans and the Franciscans ; even the Benedictines took the same side. Wimpheling, in a second pamphlet, defended his first assertion ; but his opponents, perhaps feeling that they were stronger in "authority than in argument, soon appealed to the Pope, and the case was cited to Eome. It does not seem ever to have come to formal trial: in 1514 Leo X, with whom the Emperor Maximilian had used his good offices, pronounced in favour of the old scholar, and imposed silence on his assailants. But by this time the main battle between humanists and in PFEFFERKORN AND REUCHLIN 105 monks was raging, and in the dust that was raised about Eeuchlin, Wimpheliag was lost to sight.^ In the autumn of 1509 Eeuchlin, a man of fifty-five, was living in Stuttgart. He had resigned his judicial offices, and in- tended to pass the rest of his days in literary repose. To him came on a strange errand John Pfefferkorn, a converted Jew, who seems to have felt in no common degree the rage against his former associates which sometimes takes possession of a rene- gade. Pfefferkorn, full of the idea that the only way to con- vert Jews into Christians was to deprive them of their books, had sought out the Emperor Maximilian, then busy in Italy with his war against Venice, and had obtained from him a mandate, dated from headquarters at Padua, requiring all the Jews of the Empire to deliver up such of their books as were in any way directed against the Christian religion. Of their noxious character Pfefferkorn himself was to be the judge, and now came to the greatest Christian Hebraist of the age to assist him in his crusade against his people's literature. All the evidence seems to show that he was an ignorant fanatic, who did not know what he was doing ; but he may have been misled by the fact that Eeuchlin was the official legal adviser of the Dominican order in Germany, which, there as elsewhere, exercised the powers of the Inquisition. Be this as it may, Eeuchlin put his visitor off by pointing out some technical errors in the mandate, which his legal knowledge had enabled him to detect, and probably hoped that he should hear no more of him. But Pfefferkorn's bigotry was of the persistent kind ; he went to Frankfurt, the seat of a numerous and wealthy Jewish colony, and actually procured the confiscation by the city council of many of their books. He had already achieved a similar success ia several of the cities on the Ehine, when the Archbishop of Mainz interposed, not so much for want of sympathy for Pfefferkorn as because he resented his un- authorised activity in his diocese. But the unwearied man conferred with the Archbishop, made a fresh journey to the Emperor, and returned with a new mandate, requiring the Primate to call together certain learned theologians, and, with their consent, to confirm the confiscation of the Jews' books. ^ Schmidt, vol. i. pp. 49 et segi., 83. io6 THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY chap. This conference does not seem to have taken place ; on the contrary, the affair dragged itself along for some months, till in the summer of 1510 we find EeuchUn, in obedience to a third Imperial command, preparing a report on the whole subject. He executed his task, as a scholar should, in entire independence of what he knew the Emperor and Primate alike wished of him. Jewish books he divided into seven classes, of which only one, that of works directly vituperative of Christianity, he condemned to be burned. AU the rest he pronounced, on one ground or other, worthy of preservation. But he did more than this : he defended the right of the Jews to freedom of conscience, both as citizens of the Empire and as having undertaken no obligations to Christianity ; and he advocated no harsher method of conversion than the establish- ment of professorships of Hebrew in the universities. Of other reports which were sent in at the same time from the universities of Mainz, Koln, Erfurt, and Heidelberg, the two first inclined to the side of Pfefferkorn, the two last to that of Eeuchlin, although, on the lofty ground of scientific toleration, the old Hebraist stood alone. The end was that Maximilian, to whom the reports were sent, announced in January 1511 his intention of conferring upon the matter with the Estates of the Empire. But, in fact, nothing was done ; the books of the Jews were returned to them, and so far as they were concerned, the muttering storm of persecution died away into silence. The question which was now to divide Germany into two hostile camps was not whether the Jews were to be allowed to read their books in peace, but whether Eeuchlin was a heretic, and could be made to pay the penalty of heresy. Pfefferkorn, to whom we cannot deny a certain savage sincerity of bigotry, must have been deeply disappointed with the result. In his rage he turned upon Eeuchlin, -"holding the mirror up to nature," in a pamphlet called Ber Hand- spiegel. To this Eeuchlin replied ^ in another, Der Augenspiegel. Mirror and Spectacles alike were written in the vulgar tongue, and both, as was the custom in those days, were much more vigorous than polished in their invective ; the pity was to see 1 Easter, 1511. in REUCHLIN'S CASE AT ROME 107 one of the greatest scholars of the age descend into the arena of controversy, and there contend on equal terms with a wretched pretender to learning. But the debate might have prolonged itself without substantial harm had not the Dominicans of Koln, with the chief Inquisitor of Germany, Jacob Hoogstraten, at their head, intervened in the fray.- They asserted their right, not only to examine the Augensjpiegel, to ascertain if it contained heretical doctrine, but to bring its author in person to trial. The step was a bold one. It was a declaration of war by the old learning against the new. The first blow was struck against one whom all the younger scholars deUghted to honour, and it was proclaimed that the war was to be waged with the old and cruel weapons of persecution. It is not necessary for our present purpose to tell the story of the Keuchlin case in all its details. First, the theologians of Koln, who had themselves condemned the Augenspiegel, submitted it to the judgment of other universities. Louvain, -Mainz, even Erfurt, notwithstanding the efforts of Mutian and his friends, censured it, while Paris, the mother of univer- sities, urged by the personal authority of Louis XII, followed the example. Next, as soon as the theological faculty in Koln had spoken, Hoogstraten cited Eeuchhn before the tribunal of the Inquisition in Mainz. Again the Archbishop, in all likelihood secretly irritated by the presumption of the Dominicans, interposed, and Eeuchlin appealed to Eome. The third stage of the affair was, that Leo X referred the case to the Bishop of Speier, who, with the help of certain assessors, was to hear and decide it. But before the tribunal at Speier had given its decision, the theologians of Koln so far took matters into their own hands as in February 1514 to burn the Augenspiegel publicly, an impotent exhibition of spite, as it turned out, for in a few weeks more, Eeuchlin was formally acquitted (29th March 1514), and his persecutor condemned in costs. It was now Hoogstraten's turn to appeal, and he went. to Eome confident in a full purse and the support of the mendicant orders. That influence, before which even the Pope bent, was sufficient to prevent Eeuchlin's acquittal, but it could not procure his condemnation. Leo, whose love for learning was much more sincere than his zeal for orthodoxy. io8 THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY chap. looked with an eye of kindness upon the persecuted scholar.^ Maximilian, who at first had done all that Pfefferkorn asked of him, now, with characteristic instability, took the other side. He was supported by electors, princes, bishops, abbots, and no fewer than fifty-three cities of Swabia, who bore witness both to the soundness of Eeuchlin's doctrine and the purity of his life. On the other hand, his grandson, soon to be Charles V — also true to himself — lent his influence to the cause of Hoogstraten. In July 1516 a theological commission, which had been appointed to examine the case, reported in Eeuch- lin's favour, and the two cardinals who officiated as judges might have been expected to confirm the decision, when the Pope stopped the case by a mandaUim de supersedendo, imposing silence on both parties. He would not condemn Eeuchlin ; he dared not incur the open enmity of the friars. It is at this point that the general interest of the controversy ceases, but a few words more will bring us to the end of the suit, which may then be dismissed from our story. The theologians of Koln were still carrying on the war in books and pamphlets, when Franz von Sickingen, in his character of a general reformer of abuses, took up Eeuchlin's case, probably at the instigation of Ulrich von Hutten. He addressed a letter to Hoogstraten, requiring the Dominicans to write to Eome to announce their retirement from the case, to cease all persecu- tion of Eeuchlin, and to pay the costs in which they had been condemned at Speier. Should they fail to comply with these conditions, he signified his intention of ravaging the diocese of Koln with fire and sword. It was impossible to argue with a master of legions ; -Sickingen's conditions were accepted, the costs paid, and Hoogstraten laid down his office of Inquisitor. But the Church always waits for her opportunity, and never fails to seize it. Within a few months a favourable occasion presented itself The letter to Eome was declared to have been written under compulsion. Leo X, who by this time had been enlightened by events at "Wittenberg, issued, in June 1520, ^ Franoiscus Poggius Florentinus habere potui. Homini fit injuria. Cui nuper ad Summum Pontificem oravit : Pontifex post multa respondit : Noli Pater Sancte, Ego sumam niihi parteis curare, Poggi, non feremusutquicquam Reuchliui et volo stare loco ipsius. malipatiaturhicvir. PaulGeraeanderto Legi suas luoubrationes omneis quas 'Reuchliu: lUtistriumVirorumMpistolae. in '' EPISTOLAE OBSCURORUM VIRORUM" 109 a brief, quashing the judgment given at Speier : Eeuchlin was con- demned, and Hoogstraten restored to his functions and dignities.^ The progress of this contest was watched with the liveliest interest by the humanists of Germany on the one side, by the monkish theologians on the other. It was felt to be decisive as between the old learning and the new. The object of the Dominican attack was an old and famous scholar, of orthodoxy hitherto unimpeached, second only to Erasmus in width of reputation, and superior even to him in being master of three languages. If Eeiichlin could be silenced and put to shame by the Inquisition, what hope for meaner men ? The trial was the subject of constant conversation and correspondence among the humanists, and every stage of it was eagerly discussed. WTierever letters were a matter of interest, two parties were formed ; Eeuchlinist was synonymous with Poet ; " Salve Eeuchlinista " was a common form of salutation among the friends of learning. Presently the idea suggested itself that some public expression of opinion might assist the persecuted scholar, and in 1514 a collection of letters addressed to him by various distinguished men was published, Claroruni Virorum Epistolae ad Joannem Reuclilin? This gave rise in the subse- quent year to one of the most successful pasquinades recorded in literary history, the Epistolae Ohscurorum Virorum.^ If Eeuchlin had been addressed by his friends, why not his ^ For the story of the Eeuchlin suit venies mox sequent!. " This list, which see Geiger, p. 205 etseq.; Strauss, U. v. contains forty- three names, is headed by Suiten, p. 141 et seq. Most of the " D. Erasmus Eoterodamus, vir seculi documents in the case are printed nostri doctissimus, qui Capnionem suis either by Hermann von der Hardt, divinis operibus undique purgat ac de- Historia Literaria Beformationis, pt. fendit." Curiously the only English ii., or in the supplementary volumes of name is that' of Bishop Fisher, " Rev- Bocking's edition of Hutten's -works. erend. D.N. Joannes Episcopus Roffen- ^ The full title of the book is : "Clar- sis." The letter of Joh. Cochlearilig- orum Virorum Epistolae, Latinae, Grse- neus (JBp. Obsc. Vir. pt. ii. No. 69) cae, et Hebraicae, variis temporihus mis- contains a burlesque list of the same sae ad Joannem Eeuchlin Phorcensem, kind, as does also the Carmen rifhmi- LL.Doctorem." Tiibingen, March 1514. cole Magislri Philippi Schlauraff (pt. In May 1519 a second edition was ii. No. 9). Their opponents are, in printed at Hagenau, entitled " Illus- modem German literature, the"Dun- trium Virorum Epistolae, Hebraicae, kelmanner," the "Finsterlinge,"eachof Grsecae, et Latinae, ad Joannem Reuch- which terms is rather a play upon the linPhorcensem,virum nostra aetate doc- word "obscuri" than a translation of it. tissimum, diversis temporibus missae, ^ The full title of the first edition of quibus jampridem additus est liber thefirstpart is: "Epistolae Ohscurorum secundus, nunquam antea edituS. Virorum ad venerabilem virum Magis- Eeuchlinistarum exercitum pagina in- trum Ortuinum Gratium Daventrien- THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY opponents by theirs ? It was felt, however, that it would hardly be prudent to choose Hoogstraten as the recipient of these letters ; inquisitors, however stupid and ignorant, are dangerous people to laugh at. The selected butt, therefore, was Ortuinus Gratius, professor of polite literature at Koln, who had been a pupil of Alexander Hegius at Deventer, and was suppos'ed by his friends to be as good a poet as any of the profane ones. To him, therefore, were addressed the forty-one letters of a little volume, which appeared in the autumn of 1515. The writers, who bear feigned and grotesque names, and who write the choicest bad Latin (yet, it must be supposed, not much worse Latin than the monks themselves), address to Ortuinus, from all parts of Germany, the most ridiculous questions, a,sk for news of the Eeuchlin prosecution, complain of the treatment which they receive from the poets, are made to display, as if unconsciously, both an astounding ignorance and a revolting coarseness of life and conversation. The squib was a success ; a second and a third edition were published in 1 5 1 6, to the last of which an appendix of seven fresh letters was added ; while in 1517 a second part, containing sixty-two more letters (afterwards again enlarged by eight), completed the work. By this time EeuchHn's trial at Eome was in a state of suspended animation, and the effect of the Epistolae Ohscurorum Virorum was to summon the theologians of Koln before a new tribunal, which unanimously condemned them. All Germany, except the monks and their friends, laughed and applauded ; nor did it lessen the laughter and applause when in March 1517 Leo forbad all good Christians to possess or read the book, on pain of excommunication.^ The Epistolae Ohscurorum, Virorum is one of the few satires that has not lost its salt by lapse of time. It is indeed quite untranslatable ; much of its peculiar humour depends upon the vileness of the Latin in which it is clothed. But it is so sem, Coloniae Agrippinae bonas literas ^ A copy of this brief was incor- docentem: variis et locis et temporibus porated with the Lcpmentationes Obscur- missae, ac demum in volumen coaotae. " ontm Virorwm, in which Ortuinus It bore on the colophon the imprint of Gratius ineffectually endeavoured to Aldus Manutius at Venice, " annoque borrow his opponents' weapons of supra." Koln, Hagenau, and Mainz satire. It will he found in the supple- have all been mentioned as the place ment to Booking's edition of Hutten's where the book was really printed. works, vol. i. p. 335. WHO WROTE THE EPISTLES? complete and consistent a presentation of the intellectual con- dition of a period and a class, the characters are made to reveal themselves with so charming an unconsciousness, the incidents, if often coarse, are so genuinely amusing as to make it still a laughter-moviug book. How far, taking the necessary exaggerations of satire into account, is it a fair picture ? It cannot have been grossly unfair, if we may believe Erasmus and More, that monks both in Brabant and in England took the book seriously as a genuine tribute of respect to Ortuinus, and a blow on the right side, and were only undeceived by the universal laughter.^ Its Latinity answers to what we know of the state of scholarship before the revival of learning, while its accusations against monkish morality only add another note to the accordant testimony of all literature from the thirteenth century downwards. But in truth no vigorous counter-plea was ever urged. The cause was suffered to go by default. The Koln theologians were angry enough ; so angry that they even attempted to fight their adversaries with their own weapons. ' But their shafts of satire were both weak and aimless, and they found Papal censures their best resource. The controversy, such as it was, soon died away in the noise of the more serious collision between Luther and the Papacy. Who was the author of these letters ? General surmise soon fixed upon Ulrich von Hutten and his friend Johann Jager, better known as Crotus Eubianus, one of the Erfurt humanists who owned Mutian as their chief. And with certain modifica- tions, recent research has come to the same conclusion. Hutten, however, was in Italy when the JEpistolae were published : and in August and September 1516 wrote two letters ^ to the English scholar, Eichard Crocus, then in Leipzig, which have been taken to prove, on the one hand, that he had no share in the authorship of the book, on the other that he was guilty of a deliberate attempt to conceal the fact that he had. In the first he says that he has heard that the Letters have been published in Germany ; in the second, a few days later in date, he mentions that he has now received a copy, and hears that he is suspected of having written them. But in neither 1 Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. : Ep. ^ Eutteni 0pp. ed. Booking, vol. i. dcccclxxix. p. 1110 c. Appendix : J^. pp. 124, 125. lixxvii. p. 1575 a. THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY of them is there anything inconsistent with the supposition that he knew of the book beforehand, and had been admitted to the secret councils of its authors. But whether he had to do with the first part of the Letters or not, there can be no doubt of the presence of his hand in the second. Many of them are dated from Rome, and show a minute acquaintance with details of life in the Holy City, which could belong only to a resident. We hear of him as reading similar letters to his friends at Bologna, while, in a letter to Erasmus in July 1517, he distinctly identifies himself with those upon whom the Papal Brief inflicted the penalty of excommunication.^ To Crotus, however, as the original conceiver of the plan of the Letters and probably their editor, many converging lines of evidence point. Long afterwards, in 1532, when he had taken refuge in the ancient Church, he was made the object of a violent attack by an anonymous writer, once supposed to be Justus Jonas, but now more probably identified with Justus Menius, both of whom were zealous Lutherans, and both students at Erfurt. In this document^ the fact that Crotus was the chief author of the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, and that Hutten was his coadjutor, is spoken of as universally known ; and Crotus is even reminded of the way in which he had been wont to go about, making notes on his tablets of any- thing that might serve his purpose. Further than this into the question of authorship it is not necessary to go. Eoban Hess, Petrejus, and possibly some other of the Erfurt humanists may have had a share in the book, but no one can now say what, or how great. Its spirit is that of Crotus, a humorist, who, if he had a serious purpose underneath his laughter, loved the laughter itself better. Had Hutten inspired it, the satire would have had a sharper edge, a more definite moral. The creator of the Obscure Men loves his puppets while he smiles at their antic ways ; no seriousness, as from a dissolving world, broods over him, and he changes sides at last, in all likelihood, conscious of no broken allegiance. The Letters of the Obscure Men were not the only literary ' Tuum Huttenum amare ne desine, quid enim tumidius, quid imbecillius ? rumpantur ut ilia obscuris viris, qui Hutteni 0pp. ed. Bdcking, vol. 1. p. 147. jam, qua nos excommunicamur, ingeu- ^ Hutteni Opjp. ed. Bbcking, vol. ii. tern circumferuut bullam, beue buUam, p. 456. in ERASMUS AND THE EPISTLES 113 form taken by the joy of the German humanists in the victory which they had won. In 1517 Pirckheimer prefixed to his translation of Lucian's dialogue, The Fisherman, an Apologia •pro ReuchliTbo ; while Hutten wrote a Triumphics Capnionis,^ a poem of more than a thousand hexameters, which he published under a feigned name in 1518. Erasmus joined in the fray after his own fashion. As undisputed head of the religious humanists it is his business to take sides with EeucUin, and he is not wanting. He acts, it is true, in an independent way ; he does not march in line with the army of the Eeuchlinists ; as one of the " obscure men " says, " Erasmus est homo pro se."^ The two men met at Frankfurt in April 1514 : Erasmus was on his way to Basel, Eeuchlin had just left Speier, where judgment had been given in his favour. The elder scholar placed in the hands of the younger a brief statement of his case, with a request that he would bring it under the notice of the English humanists ; the result being expressions of hearty sympathy on the part of both Fisher and More.^ But Erasmus did much more than this. We find him writing, within a few weeks, to Leo X, to Cardinal Grimanus, to Cardinal Eaphael of St. George, pleading the cause of his friend, in the warmest terms.* But with the publication of the Epistolae Ohscttrontm Virorum a change comes over him. At first he is said to have enjoyed them like other people ; two of them, one ascribed to Crotus, another to Hutten, he was reported to have committed to memory, and often recited upon festive occasions.^ But pre- sently he began to think them too personal ; they might get him into trouble with great men with whom he was anxious to stand weU ; his own theological position Was not altogether safe, and it was imprudent to provoke Inquisitors too far. In August 1517 he wrote a letter to Caesarius,^ which Pfeffer- 1 Suitmi 0pp. ed. Bbcking, vol. iii. etiam scribens adPapam." Spp. Obsc. p. 413. Fir. pt. ii. JEp. 69. ^ Time quaesivi ab aliis an etiam ' Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. p. 1524 : Erasmus Roterodamus esset cum eis. -A-pp. Ep. v. Eespondit miM quidam Eaufmannus * Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. pp. 141, dicens: ' Erasmus est bomo pro se. Sed 144, 149: ^^. cxxvii. clxviii. elxxiv. certum est quod nunquam erit amicus ^ Justus Menius ? Hutteni 0pp. ed. illorum tbeologorum et fratrum, et quod Booking, vol. ii. p. 460. ipse manifeste in dictis et scriptis suis ^ Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. App. p. defendit et excusat Johannem Reucblin, 1622 : Ep. clx. 114 THE RENAISSANCE IN GERMANY chap. korn and his friends did not fail to publish, complaining of the introduction of his own name into the second part of the Letters, and finding fault with the personal character of their satire. He himself, he said, had lashed folly ; but he had never touched any man's reputation. Again in 1519 he attempted to mediate with Hoogstraten,^, writing him a letter, which, while it breathed the spirit of Christian moderation, did nothing to conciliate the Inquisitor, and drew down on himself the remonstrances of the humanists.^ By this time Luther has appeared upon the scene, and Erasmus, too keen-sighted not to see the connection between Eeuchlin's case and his own, re- doubles his caution. " What have I to do," he asks again and again, in various phrase, " with the cause of Eeuchlin and of Luther ?" He hardly knows Eeuchlia ; he says he has only seen him once or twice. Th^ Cabbala and the Talmud are things he does not care about.^ To the Pope and Cardinals he assumes an apologetic tone ; he is anxious to separate himself from audacious innovators and reckless reformers. Yet this cowardly and selfish mood passed away in its turn, and in the third edition of his Colloquies, pubhshed in 1522, was found a dialogue called the Apotheosis of Eeuchlin. The great Hebrew scholar was dead, and this was the elegant and touching tribute which Erasmus laid upon his grave.* Whether any result of reform, or what, would have followed upon this collision between the Eenaissance and the Papacy it is impossible now to say. Luther intervened, and gave the current of the times a new direction. Many of the Erfurt humanists threw in their lot with him ; Hutten was, for the ' Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. p. 484 : Ep. * It is entitled "De incomparabili cooclii. heroe Joh. Reuehlin in divorum nu- 2 Hutteni cum Erasmo expostulaiio, merum relato." A Franciscan monk 0pp. vol. ii. p. 192. sees in a vision Reuchlin conducted ' Primum illud praefandum est, mihi into heaven, under the especial escort of neque cum Eeuchlini negotio, neque St. Jerome. The interlocutors in the cum Lutheri causa quicquam unquam dialogue express their intention of count- fuisse. Cabbala et Thalmud, quicquid ing him among the saints, and the whole hoc est, meo animo nunquam arrisit. . . . ■winds up with a collect in his honour. Primum enim, quid rei bonis stndiis " Amator humaui generis Deus, qui cum fidei negotio ? deinde, quid mihi donum linguarum, quo quondam Apoa- cum causa Capnionis ao Lutheri? Ep. tolos tuos ad Evangelii praedicationem cccclxxvii., to the -Archbishop of per Spiritum tuum Sanctum coelitus Mainz : 0pp. vol. iii. pp. 514 A, 516 F. instruxeras, per electum famulum tuum Conf. Ep. cooxvii., to Wolsey, vol. Joh. Eeuchlinemmundorenovasti,"eto. iii. p. 322 B, v. Erasmi 0pp. vol. i. p. 692. Ill REFORMATION NOT RENAISSANCE! 115 brief remnant of his life, his hot partisan ; Melanchtlion, the most illustrious of the rising scholars of Germany, became his friend and helper. But Eeuchlin, Erasmus, Mutian, Crotus, all died in the ancient comnylnion, having lived long enough to learn what the new Church had to offer them, and to reject it. The dividing line of the age in Germany was no longer between Monks and Humanists, but between Papalists and Eeformers. CHAPTEE IV LUTHER'S LIFE PEIOE TO HIS REVOLT FROM ROME Martin Luther was born at Eisleben on the 1 0th of November 1483.^ His father was Hans Luther; his mother Margarette, whose maiden name was Ziegler,^ came of an old and honour- able family, residing in the neighbourhood of Eisenach. The chUd was born between ten and eleven o'clock at night, and was baptized on the 11th of November in the Church of St. Peter at Eisleben, receiving the name of the saint of the day, Martin. ^ There is a dispute, incapable of precise settlement, as to tlie year of Luther's birth. Such chronological indications as have, with great care, been collected from his works, point in some cases to 1483, in some to 1484, in some may be interpreted either way. It looks as if Luther himself, and Melanchthon with him (" anno puto esse 1484": Corp. Ref. vol. iv. p. 1053), had been for some time uncertain upon the point, though they finally settled down upon 1483. Melanchthon in his Historia de vita LutJieri thus gives the testimony of Luther's family. He is speaking of his mother : ' ' Haeo mihi aliquoties interroganti de tempore, quo filius natus est, respondit, diem et horam se certo meminisse, sed de anno dubitare. Adfirmabat autem natum esse die decimo Novembris, nocte post horam undecimam, ao nomen Martini attributum infanti, quod dies proximus, quo infans per baptismum Ecclesiae Dei insertus est, Martino dicatus fuisset. Sed frater ejus Jacobus, vir honestus et integer, opinionem familiae de aetate fratris hanc fuisse dicebat, natum esse anno a natali Christi 1483 "■ {Corp. Bef. vol. vi. p. 156). There were, however, astrological reasons, which might induce either friend or foe to substitute 1484 for 1483, and which probably weighed with Melanchthon in the opinion above quoted. Conf. Kostlin, Studien u. Kritiken, 1873, p. IZh' et seq. ; Seidemann, ibid. 1874, p. 309 et seq. ; Kbstlin, ibid. ' 1874, p. 315 et seq. ^ Up to a quite recent period it was supposed that the maiden name of Luther's mother was Lindemann. So the modern biographers, Jiirgens, Meurer, Kostlin (1st ed.) But Knaake {St. u. Kr. 1881, p. 684 et seq.) seems to have established that her name was Ziegler, and KbstUn (3d ed.) has accepted his conclusions. The error seems to have arisen out of a confusion with Luther's grandmother, on the father's side, whose name was Margar- ette Lindemann. CHAP. IV LUTHER'S ANCESTORS 117 Hans Luther was a native of Mohra, a village which lies south of Eisenach, about half-way to Schmalkalden, and not far from Salzungen. Here the Luthers occupied and still occupy a respectable station, as peasants, t illin g their own land. The Eeformer's testimony to the condition of his ancestors is explicit. " I am a peasant's son ; my father, grandfather, fore- fathers, have been right peasants." ^ Attempts have been made to affiliate the Luthers of Mohra upon a noble family of the same or a similar name, which had been long settled in the neighbourhood of Fulda. There is, however, no evidence to support the affiliation, except the name itself, not, in its various forms, an uncommon one, and some alleged resemblance of armorial bearings, which does not stand the test of strict examination. Another tradition, less intrinsically improbable, though not supported by adequate evidence, connects the Luthers of Mohra with one Fabian Luther von der Heede (Heide) who in 1413 was ennobled, with a grant of arms, by the Emperor Sigismimd. But it is difficult to see how, in the comparatively short period of fifty years, his alleged descendants at Mohra should have forgotten their nobility, and settled down into the condition of peasants. It is at once safest, and most ia accord with the probabihties of the case, to abide by the Eeformer's own statement.^ The Luthers still remain in Mohra, ' T. T. (Tischreden, ed. Forstemaun) origin to the family pride of those who vol. iv. p. 578 ; Coll. (OoUoquia, ed. wished to be considered his descendants. Bindseil) vol. ii. p. 153. Conf. vol. A white rose is said to have formed part iii. p. 177. of the shield ; whUe there is no doubt ^ Vide Geschichtliche NoUzen iiber that Luther adopted as his device a Martin I/uiTier's Vorfahren, von K. white field-rose in fuU bloom, with a Luther. He makes Fabian one of the heart in the midst of it, and on the old Luthers of Fulda, and represents heart a cross (see his description of this his coat of arms, not as having been device in a letter to L. Spengler, De for the first time, but only W. vol. iv. p. 80). It is engraved improved and augmented. Conf. more than once by Juncker, Das Gwl- Eostlin, St. u. Kr. 1871, p. 15. dene u. Silbeme Ehrengedachtniss D. Melanchthon's phrase (Corp. Bef. vol. Martini I/wtheri, pp. 223, 230, 552, who vi. p. 156) is "vetus familia et late adds the legend, "Des Christen Herz propagata mediocrium hominum. " As auf Kosen geht, "Wenn's mitten unter to the armorial bearings the allegation dem Ereutz steht. " It will also be found is that Jacob Luther, the Reformer's on the frontispiece of J. A. Fabricius's brother, used the coat of arms granted Centifolium IDutheranwm. That this by the Emperor Sigismund to Fabian, device was adopted by Luther as early and that Martin Luther's children after- as 1520 appears from the fact that it wards adopted it. These are facts forms part of the illuminated page with which it must be left to heralds to which, according to custom, Crotus investigate. It is at least possible that Rubianus began the record of his the Fabian-Luther coat of arms owes its Rectorship of Erfurt University in the ii8 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. where it is said that the type of countenance which the art of Cranach has made familiar to all newer time is yet to be seen. In 1536, according to a tax register of Salzungen, there were five Luther famihes in the village, all belonging to the class of yeomen, and living on well -stocked farms. The same number appear in 1862 ; before 1880 two seem to have died out.'' This tenacity of local and family life speaks weU for the race. They were able to hold their own ; and if the rural archives are to be trusted, did not always wait for the inter- vention of the law to seize it.^ The name was variously speUed — Luder, Liider, Ludher, Luther, and Luthar. In the register of the University of Erfurt we find two forms, Martinus Ludher and Martinus Luder. At Wittenberg the Eeformer was matriculated as Martinus Liider. In the list of the Deans of the Faculty of Theology in the same University his name is given indifferently as Luder and Liider. It is not till the summer session of 1517 that the form Luther makes its appearance. On the other hand, the earliest letter of Luther's which has come down to us, that addressed to John Braun, on the 2 2d April 1507, is signed " Frater Martinus Lutherus," though in 1516 and 1517 the form Luder occurs again. The Eeformer was not consistent in the explanations which he gave of the origin of his name. Sometimes he derived it from Lothair (Chlothar), more frequently from " Lauter." The meaning he put upon the word may be gathered from the fact that when his old friend and physician Eatzeberger wished him to stand godfather to his daughter he Michaelmas of-^at year. His own Fabian Luther's was Heintz, of whom a device, a haiid holding a horn (his name characteristic story is told. He was was J'Agen, appears in the centre of the commandant of the fortress of Ziegen- page, and is surrounded by the arms of hain in Hesse. "When the Imperial the leaders of this revolt. The date is troops had taken the Landgrave significant ; in 1520 the Reformers and prisoner, they came before the fortress the humanists had not parted company, with the threat that unless Heintz and the devices at each corner of the Luther would give it up, they would page are those of Luther, Erasmus, bring the captive Landgrave and hang Reuchlin, and Mutian. This very him before his eyes. Whereupon he interesting page is engraved by Weis- answered, ' If the Landgrave is yours, senborn, Aden der Erfurter phiversitat, this fortress is mine ; do with him as pt. ii. p. 316. you wiU ; I shall do with it as I will. ' " ' Kostlin, St. u. Kr. 1871, p. 18 ; Plainly a man not unworthy to be an Kostlin, M. Luther, vol. i. p. 20. ancestor of Martin Luthei-. E. Luther, ^ Vide Mohra, der Stwmmort Dr. M. Notizen, p. 27. Luthers v. J. 0. Ortmann. A son of IV HIS BIRTHPLACE 119 called her Clara, " because," he said, " ' Lauter ' and ' Klar ' are cousins." Sometimes he signed himself " Martinus Eleutherius," with an evident allusion to e\,ev6epo<;, and at least once, in an access of humility, " M. Luther, Christi lutum." The last two signatures are evident playing upon words : the Eeformer's other utterances may be taken as sober, if not very certain etymologies.^ But how came Martin Luther to be born in Eisleben ? The old story was that Margaret Luther had gone there to attend a fair, and had been suddenly taken in labour. But against this two considerations are decisive : first, that Eisleben is fourteen German miles from Mohra, and next that there is no trace of any fair that was wont to be held there on or about the 10th of November. Another tradition is that Hans Luther had found it expedient to quit Mohra, to escape the consequences of a homicide, which he had half- in voluntarily committed. The story, in its earliest form, goes back to 1537, when we find the first mention of it in the letters of George Witzel,^ a well-known convert from Pro- testantism, and a bitter enemy of Luther and the Eeformation. It was not tUl a much later period that it took root at Mohra, where the field in which the deed was committed is now shown to the curious. But the fact cannot be said to be vouched for by adequate evidence ; and it is easy to find a more probable cause for the migration. Not far from Mohra were deposits of copper ore, which had been worked from an early period. Hans Luther at Mansfeld was a miner, and so ^ Weissenbom, Aden, pt. ii. p. 219 ; many attempts have teen made to get Forstemann, Albwm Academiae Vite- the number of the beast 666 out of bergensis, p. 28 ; Fovstemann, Idber De- Martin Luther. For some of them see ccmorwm Facult. Theo. Acad. Viteberg. Ortmann, Mohra, p. 90. pp. 4, 12, 13, 20 ; De W. vol. i. pp. 3, ^ q Wicelii, Epp. Lib. iv. 1537. 73, 75,76, vol. iii. p. 222; Ortmann, " Sed si ita commodet caussae publicae, p. 77 ; Erl. 0pp. Exeg. vol. x. p. 89 possim ego patrem Lutheri tui homi- (EnWnationes in Genesin). "Meum cidam dicere." The book is not paged, cognomen proprium est Lyder; Saxonice but this passage occurs in a letter in Luder, id est Lauther. Adversarii the 4th book. It is entitled Contra Lother et Luther fecerunt." Ooll. vol. Fures alienae Epistolae, et eosdem Crim- ii. p. 254. Luther was preceded at inatores alienae Famae, and was written Erfurt by a namesake Peter Luder, one from Eisleben in 1536, where Witzel of the earliest of the German humanists, at that time was preaching. May not He appears in the matriculation list of the story represent some local gossip Michaelmas 1460. Weissenbom, Aden,, of a place where the Luthers must pt. i. p. 281 ; Kampsohulte, Erfurt, have been well known ? Oitmann, vol. i. p. 31. It need not be said that p. 114. • 1 20 L UTHER 'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS RE VOL T chap. probably the Luthers in Mbhra .too sought the hidden treasures of the earth, as well as tilled its surface. What more likely than that it should be necessary for one of the family to seek his fortune at a distance, and that Hans Luther was attracted first' to Eisleben and afterwards to Mansfeld by the mining industry which had recently received a great impulse in that neighbourhood ? ^ We may conjecture from the shortness of his stay at Eisleben that the venture there was unsuccessful ; at Mansfeld, after a few years' hard work, he laid the founda- tions of a modest prosperity.^ The struggle was, however, for some time, a very hard one. " My father," says Luther, " was a poor miner; my mother carried all her wood upon her back." ^ Presently things mended, and Hans Luther became the proprietor of two furnaces, paying royalty for the one which he dug and smelted to the Counts of Mans- feld. The family was large ; besides Martin, the eldest, there were at least three sons and as many daughters. Two of the sons died of the plague before 1507;* the third, Jacob, and the husbands of the daughters we shall meet again. Both Hans Luther and his wife were persons of great strength and uprightness of character. Melanchthon says of the former "that for his integrity he was greatly beloved by all good men " ; of the latter, " that while there were in her the other virtues which become an honourable matron, yet in her were especially conspicuous modesty, the fear of God, prayerfulness ; and other honourable women looked up to her as an example of virtue." * Luther himself always alludes to his parents in the most tender and respectful terms, acknowledging the deep ' If Hans Luther were the eldest son, the funeral sermon for Luther preached this would be all the more likely. His at Eisleben, 20th February 1546, says son says (Erl. O'pp. Exeg. vol. xi. p. that his parents lived six months in 167, Enarrationes in Oenesin), "In that town before removing to Mansfeld. mundo autem quando multi filii sunt, Walch, vol. xxi. p. 306. jure civili minimus natu haeres est ' Coll. vol. iii. p. 160. domus paternae," and this law of in- * Tentzel, JSistorischer Bericht, vol. i. heritance' certainly prevailed in some p. 147. parts of Saxony, Kostlin, St. u. Kr. ^ Corp. Eef. vol. vi. p. 166. Spal- 1871, p. 29. Conf. Ortmann, p. 112 ; atin (apud Mencken : Scriptores rerum Ratzeberger, Handsehriftliche Gesch- Germanicarum praeeipiie Saxonicarum, ichte, p. 41. vol. ii. p. 611) was, in 1622, greatly '^ Melanchthon (Corp. Sef. vol. vi. struck with the resemblance, both in p. 156) distinctly represents both bearing and feature, which Luther parents as living at Eisleben at the exhibited to his mother, time of the child's birth. Coelius, in PARENTAL DISCIPLINE obligation under which he lay to them. He adopted their names into his marriage service — " Hans, wilt du Grethe haben ? " He wrote to Melanchthon on occasion of his father's death, " Therefore, in my sadness, I do not write now at length, because it is both right and pious that I, as a son, should lament such a parent, by whom the Father of Mercies begot me, and who, by his sweat, has nourished and formed me into what I am." ^ Presently Hans Luther made money, was personally known to the Counts of Mansfeld whose ore he worked; and finally became a member of the City Council. When he died, his property, for the friendly division of which among his children a document in the Eeformer's own hand provided, was estimated at 1250 gulden.^ With all this, the rule in Hans Luther's house was a hard one. He and his wife firmly believed and acted upon the maxim, that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Martin Luther cordially approved of this theory of education in after years, even though he may have found it a little harsh in its application to himself ; many passages in favour of a judicious parental severity may be quoted from his writings. At the saine time it was his opinion that " the apple should be with the rod." On one occasion, he says, his father beat him so severely that.it was long'before they made friends again. On another, his mother was the executioner, and thrashed him tiU the blood fiowed, all on account of a nut ; " so that," said he, " the severe and harsh life which I led with them was the reason that I afterwards took, refuge in the cloister, and became a monk." " They meant it," he added, " heartily well, but they could not discern dispositions, according to which corrections should be tempered." Things were no better at school. There he was one day beaten fifteen times in a single morning. Such schools as that of which he himself had •^retched experience he calls " prisons," " hells," " purgatories." The masters were tyrants and jailors, knowing only one method, that of brutal severity. The children were genuine 1 De Wette, vol. iv. p. 33. 1592. A gulden, according to Kostlin - Eatzeberger, p. 42 ; Erl. vol. xxvii. {M. L. vol. i. p. 26), was equivalent, p. 76: JErklarwiig etlidher Artikel m in the first halfof the sixteenth century, seinem Sermon v. d. heiligen Sacrament ; to from fifteen to twenty marks of Corp. Bef. vol. •n.y. 156; Waloh,vol.xxi. present German money. 122 L UTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS RE VOLT chap. "martyrs." And, after all, little was learned. In one emphatic passage he speaks of the "hell ahd-/purgatory of schools where we were inwardly tortured with Gasualibus et temporalibus, and yet with all the beating, trembling fear, and wretchedness, learned absolutely nothing." " Is it not a misery," he says in another place, " that a boy must study twenty years or more, for the sole purpose of learning as much bad Latin as will enable him to become a parson, and to read mass ? " One pleasant recollection of the Mansfeld schooldays alone survives. In 1544, two years before he died, Luther wrote, in a Bible belonging to his brother-in-law, Nicholas Oemler, these words, " To my good old friend, Nicholas Oemler, who, more than once, carried me, when a little child, in his arms to and from school, when neither of us knew that one brother-in-law was carrying another." ^ Of the school at Mansfeld we know very little. Mathesius calls it a " Latin " school, and says that Luther there learned "industriously and quickly his Ten Commandments, Child's Belief, Our Father, with Donatus's ChUd's Grammar, Cisio Janus, and Christian Hymns." ^ Almost all schools, in those days, were directly or indirectly under the control of the clergy. The masters were men who had taken minor orders, and were looking forward to rising in the Church. The revival of letters had yet hardly penetrated the Universities, and was far enough from touching the school of such an unimportant place as Mansfeld. The methods and objects of education were a:like clerical. In the letter which, in 1524,^ Luther addressed "to the Councillors of all German cities, that they should set up and maintain Christian schools," he complained that the decay of the monastic life was bringing with it a decay of education ; common people did not see the necessity of teaching children who were not to be priests, monks, and nuns. Against the learning of the Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, the Paternoster, and Christian Hymns, as the foundation of a religious training, there is nothing to be said ; but that the 1 T. T. vol. iv. pp. 76, 129, 130, dms sie chrtstlidhe Sehulm aufrkhten 542 ; Erl. 0pp. Exeg. vol. vili. p. 198 und Jialten sollen) ; De W. vol. v. p. (Enarraticmes in Genesin) ; Deutsche 709. , Schrifteii, vol. xxii. pp. 191, 196 {An ^ Mathesius, p. 3 A. die Rathaherren alUr Stadte, etc., ^ Erl. D. S. vol. xxii. p. 168 et seq. IV FIRST SCHOOL AND CHILDHOOD ' 123 secular education of a clever boy, up to the age ,of fourteen, should have ] been confined to Donatus and Cisio Janus, is very significant of the low ebb to which letters had fallen. Donatus was a Eoman grammarian of the fourth century, the teacher of Jerome, and the author of a Latin Grammar, which fixed itseK firmly, and almost to the exclusion of any other in mediaeval use. Its vogue may be inferred from the fact that it was engraved on wooden blocks before the invention of printing, and was one of the first books to be committed to the press. At the same time it had gradually suffered mutilation and corruption, and when learned by rote, without any intelligent explanation, can hardly have been satisfyiug or stimulating food to a youthful mind. " Cisio Janus " was far worse. It was a " memoria technica " of the tenth or eleventh century, containing in barbarous verses an ecclesiastical calendar. The following are the two first lines : — " Cisio Janus Epy sibi vindioat ; Oo Peli Mar An Prisca Fab Ag Vincenti Pau Pol Car nobUe lumen." Without expounding its precise method, it wUl be enough to say that Janus stands for January ; Cisio for the Feast of the Cirfiumcisim ; Epy for Epiphany, and so on. Stones for bread this/cEaff thrice winnowed for grain ! ^ In the almost total absence of direct evidence it is difficult to reconstruct Luther's childhood. Yet the attempt must be made at least to describe the circumstances in which he lived, and which must have had a share in the formation of his character. Thuringia had been the scene of Boniface's labours, and had been won by him at once to Christianity and to civil- isation. Tradition declared that the Chapel at Mohra had, with many more, been founded by him. WeU - endowed convents were plentiful in the land, and other ecclesiastical ^ Grafenhahn, Geschichte der Klas- Luther's care in his last days. Two sicJien PMlologie, vol. iv. p, 106 ; days before he died he concluded an Jiirgen's iMther's Leien, vol. i. p. 172. agreement between the Counts of Mans- The schoolhouse at Mansfeld (at least feldwhichsettled, among other disputed so far as its ground floor is concerned) matters, the constitution and endow- stiU exists, and in 1839 was permitted ment of the school. De W. vol. v. by Eoyal decree to call itself the p. 792. Krumhaar, Luther's Vaterhaus " Luther's Schule. " A more important in'' matter is that it was the object of 1 24 LUTHER 'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS RE VOL T chap. corporations were wealthy and powerful. I have already pointed out that the last years of the fifteenth century were a period of great religious excitement in Germany, that new saints and new devotions came up, and that the disputes as to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin had the effect of enthroning her parents, St. Joachim and St. Anna, in the affections of the faithful. But these new saints, however heartily adopted, did not displace from popular esteem and affection older objects of reverence, such as St. Elizabeth of Marburg, who, besides being the very type of mediaeval holi- ness, was of the race of native princes, and had a gracious humanity about her which drew aU hearts. Still it would be a- mistake to suppose that Thuringia was simply and happily orthodox. The Flagellants had swept in a storm of pious passion through the land. The doctrines of Wiclif and of Hus had worked below the surface of society. Of a sect, called the Brothers of the Cross, ninety-one were in 1414 burned at Sangerhausen.^ On the other hand, there was an obstinate but half-unconscious adhesion to old Paganism, which lasted far into Christian times. In 1462 a Bishop of Halberstadt thought it necessary to issue an edict against the worship of " the good Lubbe," who, near Schochwitz, not far from Mans- feld, was honoured with oblations of the bones of animals. And Pastor Coelius in the funeral sermon for Luther, which he preached at Eisleben in 1546, alludes to the worship near Mansfeld of " the good Lutze," as well as of the " Weidenstock " — which the people called " Gedut." ^ Closely connected with this were other superstitions, some of which claimed a Christian origin. Every one knows how large a part good and bad angels played in Luther's life, and how, to the entire exclusion of the idea of natural law, he ascribed to their influence all human misfortunes and deliverances. But only readers of the Table Talk can have any conception of the wild absurdity of the stories of demoniacal action and possession to which he gave unquestioning credence. This was a survival ^ Bensen, OeschicMe des Bauern- vol. vi. pp. 1, 25. An enormous mass of Tcriegs in Ost Frcmken, p. 42. [Giese- animal bones was removed from the ler, £■.(?. vol. ii. pt. iii. p. 276 eJ seg'.] so-called Kuockenberg, near Schocli- ^ Fbrstemann, Neue Mittheilungen, witz, early in the present century, vol. iii. pp. 1, 130 ; vol. v. pp. 2, 110 ; Walch, vol. xxi. p. 308. DEMONOLOGY ^ 125 from his childish years. He borrowed his demonology from the Catholic Church, and shared in the popular superstitions, which she not only did not discourage but absolutely fostered. The mining people had strange faiths of their own, in which Luther had his part. " The devil," he said, " often deceives miners iato the beKef that they see a great mass of ore, where in reality there is nothing."-' But more than this, Luther's childhood was a time at which the idea of witchcraft had suddenly gathered strength. It was in 1484, the year after he was born, that Innocent VIII issued a bull, which at once took the theory of witchcraft under Papal protection, and handed over the offence to be dealt with by the Inquisition ; and this was followed in 1487 by the publication of the famous Malleus Maleficarv/m, of which I have before spoken. Luther never emancipated himself from the opinions of his childhood in this matter ; nor did he escape the contagion of the universal madness. He tells a story of the way ui which his mother was plagued by a witch, and caps it with many more, in which he manifests a like unquestioning belief He even thought that he was bewitched himself.^ He had no pity for such offenders, his only remedy was the fire. It meant something that Luther, though the grandchild of a peasant, was brought up as a citizen's son. Mansfeld, under the protection of its Counts, whose castle overtopped the town, was one of the places in which men lived a quiet, self-controlled, civic life. There was not indeed that full and varied play of political activity which is to be noted in such free cities as Augsburg and N'iirnberg — prosperous communities, able to hold theit own against powerful adversaries, and counting for something in the organisation of the Empire. But Mans- feld, too, had its Council, of which ia time Hans Luther came to be a member ; its mining industry gave it a fair share of wealth; it does not seem to have been vexed with private feud or public war. Its clergy did' not pretend to obey the law of celibacy, but at the same time were not guilty of graver offences against the social order. It must be confessed, however, that an ordinance of the magistracy of Mansfeld is 1 T. T. vol. iii. p. 30. Vide tie whole section xxiv. of the Table Talk " Vom Teufel und seinen "Werken." " T. T. vol. iii. pp. 96, 97. 126 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. extant which classes the " parsons' maids " with other " public common women," and enjoins upon them to wear their mantles on their heads in the street. A reminiscence of Luther's seems to show the existence of an almost puritanical discipline. " When I was a boy all games were forbidden, so that card-makers, pipers, and actors were not admitted to the sacrament, and those who had played games, or danced, or been present at shows and plays, made it a matter of confession." And there certainly existed in the minds of the burghers — below the surface of pious observance — a distrust of monks and priests, which found expression in common rhymes and proverbial say- ings. One will serve as a sample : — "Wer will haben rein sein Haus, Der behalt Pfaifen und Mdnche draus." ^ There can be no doubt that Hans Luther shared to a consider- able extent in this feeling. He was a thoroughly pious man, acting up to his own ideas of truth and right, but decidedly unwilling to put his conscience into ecclesiastical keeping. It is true that when in 1497 two new altars, dedicated to various saints, were consecrated in the Church of St. George at Mansfeld, and sixty days' indulgence was offered to those who heard mass at them, Hans Luther is named, with some of his colleagues in the magistracy, as having availed himself of the privilege.^ But this act of official piety is not inconsistent with his usual attitude to the Church. He sternly set his face against his son's becoming a monk, though he appears to have accepted him as a Eeformer without difficulty. All Martin Luther's recollections of his father point in the same direction. On one occasion, when he was very Ul, and in supposed danger of death, his confessor asked him whether he would not leave something to the Church. "N"o, his children stood in more need of it." Again, when Count Gunther of "Mansfeld died without making any bequests to the Church, Martin, whose mind was already taking an ecclesiastical turn, was astonished 1 Jiirgens, vol. ,i. p. 136 ; T. T. vol. que raptus alienarum oonjugum impud- i. p. 279, vol. ii. p. 407. "Me puero entisaime committereut ; adeo crevit memini sacerdotes non fuisse suspectos nostra memoria petulantia sacrificul- de adulterio et fornicatione, tametsi orum," Erl. O'pp. Mceg. vol. ix. p. cohabitarent mulieroulis, donee postea 260 (Enarrationes in Genesin). incestus, adulteria, fornioationes, deni- ^ Kostlin, M. L. vol. i. p. 29. IV CATHOLIC INFLUENCES 127 to find that his father heartily commended the omission. The old man's own death, which took place in 1530, while Luther was at Coburg, waiting for news from the Diet of Augsburg, which he was not permitted to attend, was very characteristic. He had received from his son, not long before, a letter of exhortation and comfort, and the minister in attend- ance asked him, after the fashion of the day, whether he abode by the faith which it set before him. "Yea, if I did not, I should act like a rogue," \yas all his answer. Evidently there was much of rugged simplicity, of strong sense, of sturdy moral steadfastness in the man.^ Men who looked back from a time when their minds had free access to all sources of Christian instruction to a youth trained under Catholic influences, were apt to exaggerate the darkness from which they had emerged. Mathesius, for instance, says that he never remembered in his youth — he was a Catholic till he was twenty-five — hearing from the pulpit anything about the Commandments, the Creed, the Paternoster, or Baptism.^ Legends of the saints in plenty he had read, but he recollected neither written nor printed expositions of the faith for the use of children. Luther seems to have looked at his childish days with a kinder and perhaps a more accurate eye. " I was baptized," he says, " in the house of the Pope, I was catechised, I learned the Scriptures." He mentions with hearty commendation the " fine hymns " that were sung, enumerating those peculiar to different seasons of the Church's year, and only complaining that " there were no preachers to teU us what they all meant." The pictures in the churches had his life-long approval, he valued them for their suggestiveness to the young and ignorant, and brushed aside the hint that they encouraged idolatry. So, too, with the childish plays which were acted : all school amusements naturally took a religious shape. Still, while recalling these things with pleasure, and acknowledging his obligations to them, he confesses that the impression of Christ left upon him from his childhood was a terrifying one, and goes on to say that the 1 ErL D.S. voL xliv. p. 235 (Predig- vol. iii. p. 550 ; Coll. vol. iii. p. ten ueber etzliche Kapitel des Ev. 168. Matthai) ; Eatzeberger, p. 42 ; De "W. ^ Mathesius, p. 63 B. 128 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. natural result was a recourse to Mary and her saints. The truth seems to be, that while the Church made a constant appeal to the soul through the senses, there was little attempt to reach and inform the mind. But there is no evidence to show that Luther, quick-witted as he was, felt this at the time. It was the judgment which his maturer passed upon his childish ye'ars.^ In 1497, Luther, when ia his fourteenth year, was sent to school at Magdeburg, in company of John Eeinecke, a comrade whose friendship lasted through life. He says himself that he went to the school of the " IsTullbriider." The phrase is a quite unusual one, and no one knows certainly who they were. The latest and probably the best-grounded opinion identifies them with the Brethren of the Common Life, who had at that time a settlement ~at Magdeburg, and who made teaching one of their regular occupations. If this is so, a link of singular interest is established between Luther and the order which was founded by Gerhard Groot, and Olustrated by the name of Thomas k Kempis. Magdeburg must have produced a con- siderable impression upon the boy's mind. It was the first large town that he had seen. The change from such places as Mansfeld and Eisleben to a cathedral city of .40,000 inhabit- ants cannot but have been great. Magdeburg was a commercial city, one of the Hanse towns, with trade and manufactures, just then flourishing in great prosperity. But it was also an ecclesiastical place, subject, under the Emperor, to the Arch- bishop only. That prelate was Ernest of Saxony, the brother of the Elector Frederick^, who was afterwards to exercise so large an influence on Luther's fate. Chosen to fill the See at the age of twelve, he held it from 1476 to 1513. He was a man who, as might be expected from his high birth, loved show, and magnified his office as a Prince Bishop ; but he was earnest in the performance of his duties, a friend of learned men, kiud to the poor, just and merciful as a ruler^ and anxious to raise the standard of morality among his clergy. It is not un- reasonable to conjecture that Magdeburg, under such an Arch- ^ Erl. 0pp. Uxeg. vol. xviii. p. 230 tag zu Augsburg) ; ibid. vol. v. p. 23 {MiarratioTies Psalmorum) ; D. S. vol. (JSauspostilU) ; ibid, vol, vi. p. 241 xxiv. p. 375 {Vermahnung an die (HauapostilU). Geistlichen, versam/mlet auf dew, Beichs- IV THE YEAR AT MAGDEBURG 129 bishop, and with the pomp and circumstance of its cathedral services, may have presented the Church and her demands in a favourable light to Luther's mind. What we know of his Ufe during the single year that he spent at Magdeburg can be told in very few words. He was a poor scholar, and as such sang and begged " panem propter Deum" from door to door. He had done it at Mansfeld. There is a story which he often told in later life, of a peasant at whose door he and some other lads were singing, who frightened them away by his gruff voice, though all the while he had sausages in his hand which he intended to give them. He was no worse off than others of his class, nor ashamed of belonging to it. Mathesius, his first biographer, who knew him well, says that this kind of mendicancy was practised by the children of "honourable and well-to-do people." At the same time he was not without friends ; in a letter written in 1522 to Glaus Storm, Burgomaster of Magdeburg, he speaks of having seen him at the house of Dr. Paul Mosshauer. Here, too, it is possible that he met Wenceslaus Link, who followed him into the Augustinian order, then to Wittenberg, and finally into rebellion against the Papacy. Beyond this, two anecdotes of the year at Magdeburg fill up the scanty canvas. One, told by the physician Eatzeberger, is that Luther, lying sick of a fever, and left alone in the house, crept on hands and feet to where a great jug of cold water stood, drank plentifully, went to sleep, and woke convalescent. The other relates to a Prince William of Anhalt Bernburg, who had embraced the monastic life and become a Franciscan. Luther saw him in the streets of Magdeburg, clad in the garments of the order, pale, wasted, bearing about with him the semblance of approaching death, carrying on his shoulders a heavy sack that bowed him to the ground, and collecting alms from door to door. The sight made a deep impression upon the susceptible boy, on whom, possibly, some passing shadow of the cloister was beginning to rest. No more striking example of eccle- siastical holiness could well present itseK to him, and of other hohness than the ecclesiastical he had as yet no conception.-' - 1 De "W. vol. i. p. 390, vol. ii. p. p. 157 ; T. T. vol. ii. p. 164 ; Mathes- 212 ; Melanolithon, Corp. jSef. vol. vi. ius, p. 3 A ; Jiirgens, vol. i. p. 266 ; K I30 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. From Magdeburg Luther was sent in 1498 to Eisenach, a pleasant Thuringian town, lying in the shadow of the hills, upon which, almost within sight, rises the Wartburg. Here he had kinsfolk on the mother's side, and Mohra, his father's old home, was not far off. There were three parish churches at Eisenach, to each of which a school was attached ; it was in that of St. George that Luther was a scholar. Its master was John Trebonius, a man of whom we hear nothing in the general history of the revival of letters in Crermany, and who probably, therefore, had not abandoned the old methods of teaching. But that he knew what true education was, a characteristic anecdote survives to tell. He was wont, on entering the school, to walk bareheaded to his seat, out of respect to the latent capacities of his boys, "of some of whom," he said, " God might make rulers, chancellors, doctors, magistrates." It was a Latin school, and the study of that language, as it was then taught, was Luther's chief occupation; in grammar, in the art of writing prose and verse, he easily, according to Melanchthon, surpassed his companions. The poverty at home stiU continued. The boy, who had a fine alto voice, and seems ta have cultivated at an early age the art which he afterwards loved so much, sang from door to door, and received the alms that were given to the poor scholars. But in so doing he attracted the notice and awakened the compassion of a lady, the wife of Conrad Cotta, who took hifli into her own house, and admitted him to her table. The Cotta house, gray and bent with age, still stands at Eisenach, Seckendorf, Commentariiis de Lather- land, suffering mucli hardship, and anismo, vol. i. p. 113 ; Eatzeberger, p. often contracting very undesirable 41; Erl. 0pp. Exeg. vol, x. p. 259 habits as they went. The older scholars (Enarrationes in Genesin) ; D.S. vol. were called " Bachanten, " the younger, xvii. p. 414 ( Vermischte Predigten) ; who, to borrow a word from a very ibid. -vol. xxxi. p. 239 (Verantwortung different system, "fagged" for them, des aufgelegten Aufruhrs von Eerzog "Schiitzen." A typical account of Georg). In his letter to Cardinal this kind of life may be found in the Cajetan, 1518 (De W. vol. i. p. 162), autobiography of Thomas Platter, the Luther speaks of " dulcissimus frater son of a peasant in the valley of Visp meus, Magister Wenceslaus Linens, qui (1499-1582), who, after roving all over ab ineunte aetate pari mecum studio Germany in search of an education, adolevit." The wandering scholars of ended his days as city schoolmaster this age in Germany were a rdugh and at Basel. Couf. " Thomas und Felix hardy race. They migrated in bands Platter, Zwei LeUnsbilder aus der Zeit from school to school, sometimes der Reformation. Ed. Heman, 1882." through the length and breadth of the IV FRAU COTTA OF EISENACH 131 and pilgrims are invited to view the room in which the choir- boy from Mansfeld slept.-' The Cottas were a noble family, originally, it is said, of Italian origin. More than one of them, during the years that followed Luther's schooldays, were Burgomasters of Eisenach. Long afterwards a Henry Cotta studied at Wittenberg, and boarded at the table of Luther, then grown famous. What relation he was to Frau Ursula, who died in 1511, it is not easy to determine with certainty ; Luther writes about him, under the date of 1541, to his relatives Frederick and Bona- ventura Cotta in Eisenach. But there are other traces of his kindly relations with the family. Frau Cotta's maiden name was Schwalbe, and there was a " Schwalbische Collegium," a corporation of Franciscan monks, founded by St. Elizabeth, and settled on the road between Eisenach and the Wartburg, with the members of which he was on the friendliest terms. One Caspar Schwalbe is mentioned more than once in his letters ; of Henry Schwalbe he speaks as " mine host," and as on terms of the closest intimacy with " these Franciscans." It is im- possible to estimate too highly the effect upon the rough miner's son of intercourse with a family of gentle birth and good breeding. It was his first glimpse of a social Hfe that had any pretension to being refined. Nor can it be doubted that it made a deep impression upon him. He calls Eisenach "his dear town." In his translation of the Bible he af&xes to Proverbs xxxi. 10 the well-known description of a virtuous woman, " Nothing on earth is dearer than woman's love, to whosesoever lot it may fall." "And this," he is reported in the Table, Talk to have said, "my hostess at Eisenach rightly said, when I went there to school." ^ 1 De W. vol. i. p. 390; Jiirgens, nieht die Gesellen, die fur der Thur vol. i. p. 273. Luther also speaks of panem propter Deum sagen, und deu one "Wigand as having been Ms school- Brodreigen singen ; du hbrest grosser master. He may have been a teacher Fursten und Herren singen. Ich bin under Trebonius. De W. vol. i. p. aucheinsolcherPartekenhengstgewest, 29 ; vol. iii. p. 112 ; Seckendorf, vol. und hab das Brod fur den Hausern i. pp. 20, 21 ; Ratzeberger, p. 43 ; genommen, sonderlieh zu Eisenach, in Melanchthon, Corp. Eef. vol. i. p. 157 ; meiner lieben Stadt." Lingke, Dr. M. iMther's merkwiirdige ^ De W. vol. vi. p. 290 ; Corp. Bef. ReisegesoMohte, pp. 6, 7. Luther him- vol. xxvii. p. 627 ; Erl. D.S. vol. Ixiv. self says (Erl. D.S. xvii. p. 414, p. 113 {Eandglossen) ; T. T. vol. iv. Vermischte Predigten), "Teraohte mir p. 75. 132 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT , chap. In one sense Eisenach may be supposed to have continued and deepened the impressions of Magdeburg. Besides its three churches it had no fewer than nine convents. The memory of St. Elizabeth, who had inhabited the Wartburg, hung about the place. Whatever we hear of Luther at this period of his life, connects him with the Franciscan order. His earliest extant letter, dated 2 2d April 1507, is to- John Braun, the vicar of St. Mary's Church at Eisenach, and contains a very cordial message to the members of the " Schwalbische Collegium." It is hardly possible to doubt that Frau Cotta was a devout friend and disciple of the order with which her family was so closely connected. Another story of this time points in the same direction. John Hilten, a Fran- ciscan monk of Eisenach, who, breaking through the bonds of conventual orthodoxy, had written against the abuses of Papal power, the neglect of Scripture, and the irreligious lives of monks, was, when Luther was at school there, held in strict durance, and died in prison about 1502. Melanchthon, in his Apology for the Confession of Augsburg, long afterwards claimed Hilten as a friend and forerunner of the Eeformation, noting that before his death he had prophesied that in 1516 would arise a monk who would destroy monkery. In a note on this passage Luther professes to have heard Henry Schwalbe speak of Hilten with compassion, " as of one that lay bound." But it is not Ukely that more than a vague rumour of the prisoner would reach the boy's ears, or that he would become acquainted with the prophecy which his friends were wUling to think had been fulfilled in himself^ i ^ In 1501 Martin Luther, then in his eighteenth year, pro- ceeded to the University of Erfurt, where, at the beginning of the summer semester, he matriculated under the Eectorate of Jodocus Trutvetter of Eisenach. The entry in the matricu- lation book, "Martinus Ludher ex Mansfeldt," is the first contemporary record of him which survives. At Micha6lmas ' Jlirgens, vol. i. p. 295 ; De Wette, gorum, p. 3. Another form of Hilten's vol. i. p. 3; Oorp. Ref. vol. xxvii. p. 627; prophecy given by Eatzeherger, p. 45, T. T. vol. iii. p. 252. For lives of is "Sub Leone exoritur Heremita, qui Hilten vide Erhard, OescMchte des reformabit fidem Eomanam." Theinter- , etc. , vol. iii. p. 455 ; pretation, of course, is of Leo X, and M. Adaini Vitae Oermanorum Theolo- Luther, as an Augustinian or Hermit. IV V ERFURT 133 1502 he was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy, being the thirtieth among fifty-seven candidates ; at Epiphany 1 5 5 he became Master, the second among seventeen competitors. The press of poverty at home seems now to have been relaxed, and he was dependent upon his father only for a maintenance.-^ Convenience of access was probably the chief reason why Erfurt was chosen as the scene of Luther's further studies. The town was happily situated, lying in the midst of a fruitful country, and, serving as an entrepot of trade between Upper and Lower Germany, it had acquired political importance as a place where Diets and Synods were held. Technically, it belonged to the See of Mainz ; a city seal of the twelfth century bore the inscription, "Erfordia est fidelis fiUa Moguntinae sedis." But the tie was not a very close one. The burghers of Erfurt, balancing themselves between the Archbishop of Mainz, on the one hand, and the Landgrave of Thuringia (to whose rights the Saxon electors had succeeded), on the other, not only developed a prosperous and independent civic life, but claimed for their town the rank of a free Imperial city. In any case, they were practically their own masters, acquired terri- tory, made peace and war on their own account; nor was it till, in the first years of the sixteenth century, they had encumbered themselves with a hopeless load of debt, that the rival claims of Mainz and Saxony again came into play. But in 1501 there were no outward signs of coming embarrassment, and the wealth of Erfurt made a deep impression upon Luther's mind. iHe often, in after years, contrasted it with sandy and sterile Wittenberg. The amenity of its situation was such that if it were burned down, he thought, another city would immediately arise in its place. He recalled the word of one Sebastian Weinmann, who, preaching at Erfurt a little before his own time, declared that " God tried other cities with scarcity, Erfurt with abundance." Naiturally, a part of the wealth of Erfurt had been spent upon ecclesiastical foundations. The town still abounds with churches ; in 1501 it had convents of almost every order. Without being a place upon which the seal of religious enthusiasm was deeply impressed, life in '1 Weissenborn, Acim,yo\. ii. p. 219; Erl. D.S. vol. xvii. p. 4'15 (Fermischte Kostlin, St. u. Kr. 1874, p. 319 ; PredigUn) ; ibid. vol. Ixv. p. 257. 134 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. Erfurt was marked by a sufSoient and willing conformity with ecclesiastical custom. Its old landmarks are now nearly gone. The University buildings are hardly to be distinguished ; fire and restoration have almost destroyed the Augustinian convent, though the church in which Luther sang his first mass still stands. But the G-era, a stream which has inspired thousands of indifferent Latin verses, yet wanders through Erfurt in various channels, and from the height of their arched founda- tions the Cathedral, and by its side the quaintly coupled spires of St. Severin, tower over the spacious market-place.^ Here, at the end of the fourteenth century, had been founded a university. The first bull for its establishment was published by Clement VII in 1379, but the new institution was not opened till 1392. Its object was defined by Urban VI as "the praise of the Divine name, the propagation of the Catholic faith, and the exaltation of the Eoman Church." The group of German Universities of which Erfurt was the fifth in order of date — Prag, founded in 1348 ; Vienna in 1365 ; Heidelberg ia 1385 ; and Koln in 1388 — were aU essentially Catholic and scholastic in inspiration, and preceded the introduction of the new humanism from Italy into Germany. At the same time, though completely medieeval in their objects and methods, they were a first effect of that gradual reawaken- ing of the human mind which was destined to produce such large results. Erfurt differed from the rest ia being a mani- festation of civic interest in education; no pruicely or episcopal patron protected its birth : it was the citizens themselves who applied to the Pope for his necessary sanction to their under- taking. Some signs of this civic character appear in the original statutes. The students were not divided into nations, and had a share in the choice of the Eector. By the side of the Eector was placed a University Council, whose advice he was bound to take. Otherwise, as was inevitable, the consti- tution of the University was moulded on the religious ideas of the day. But it cannot be doubted that its close connection with the life of a busy and self-governing city had something ^ Jiirgens, vol. i. p. 332; Kamj)- Erfurter-lAUherfest-AlmaTiach, "Die schulte, Die Universitdt Erfurt, vol. i. Lutherstatte in Erfurt v. £. Scheibe" ; p. 120 se?.; T. T. vol. iv. p. 666 ;' Coll. De Wette, vol. iii. p. 228. vol. ii. pp. 13, 14; vol. iii. pp. 100, 101; IV CATHOLIC REFORMERS AT ERFURT 135 to do with making it especially sensitive to the growth and change of general opinion.^ I have already, in telliag the story of the revival of letters in Germany, alluded to the brilliant band of himianists who from 1500 to 1520 gave Erfurt the first place among German Universities. The line was unbroken, from Luder and Pub- licius, the first teachers of the new learniag, through Maternus Pistoris and Nicholas von Marschalk, to the group of " poets " who acknowledged Mutian as their head, and who, under his anonymous leadership, defended Eeuchlin against the monks and Inquisitors of Koln. At the same time, it was only slowly and by degrees that Erfurt had assumed an attitude of opposition to ecclesiastical modes of thought. All through the fifteenth century we find different, if not irreconcilable, tendencies of opinion manifesting themselves by turns. Not long after the establishment of the University -there was a great migration of German students from Prag to Erfurt, and the words "Erfordia Praga" grew into a proverb, in which Luther, after he had discovered how nearly his doctrine accorded with that of Hus, found something prophetic. But one of the representatives of Erfurt at the Council of Constanz, John Zaeharia, was so active in procuriag the condemnation of Hus as to receive from Martin V the gift of the Golden Eose, usually reserved for princes who have deserved well of the Church. Again, a distinguished teacher in Erfurt was John of "Wesel, who lectured there about the middle of the century, a Eeformer before the Eeformation, who, relying on the authority of Scripture, denounced indulgences in seven pro- positions, not less trenchant than Luther's ninety -five, and died, a condemned heretic, iu prison. " I remember," writes Luther, "how M. Johannes Wesalia, who was preacher at Mainz, formerly at Erfurt, ruled the University with his bqoks, out of which I myself proceeded Master." But it is quite clear from what follows that Luther did not know for what heresies Wesel had been condemned, and the books to which he alludes were plainly philosophical or dialectical. Sebastian Weinmann, to whom a passing allusion has already been made, denounced in strong terms, not long before Luther's 1 "Weissenborn, Aden, vol. i. p. 1 seq.; Kampschulte, vol. i. p. 3 sej. 136 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. time, the practical abuses of the Church, and prophesied reformation, so that the citizens and students heard him gladly, while on the other hand the clergy and the council joined hands to expel him from the town. But against this may be put the splendid reception which in 1502 was given to the Cardinal Legate Eaymond, the preacher of the Jubilee, and the bearer to Germany of Papal indulgences, hitherto unparalleled in largeness and abundance. City and University went forth in state to meet him ; sixty horsemen formed his escort, and from the elevation on which the Cathedral stands, he distributed his blessing to the crowds below.-' Other similar facts might be enumerated to show that Ijwhile the leaven of the new learning was working below the surface, the Erfurt to which Luther came was yet an orthodox city, sound in faith and punctual in observance. It was not tiU after he left it that humanism and mediaevaHsm came into decisive collision, and he found that he belonged to neither camp. The method of new culture, in dealing with old faith, is usually one of silent corrosion ; open conflict is postponed to the latest moment ; and there are those who return to the accustomed position, rather than face the chances of decisive collision. So the two ^ men from whom Luther probably received the greater part of his theological and philosophical training, Bartholomew Arnoldi von Usingen and Jodocus Trutvetter of Eisenach, appear to have lived on friendly terms with the humanists, who were half-imconsciously their irrecon- cilable foes. Both were teachers in the philosophical faculty, and both, though tinged with classical learning, remained at the old standpoint of thought. Usingen, perhaps the more 1 De "W. vol. ii. p. 5; Erl. D.S. He attained considerable reputation as vol. xxiv. p. 27 ( Von den nmcn Ecleis- preacher at the Cathedral, where ch£n Bullen und Liigen) ; TJUmann, Luther mayhaveheard him (1501-1605), Beformatoren vor der MeforTnation, -vol. was driven from Erfurt in the civic i. p. 202 seg.; Erl. D.S. vol. xxv. p. trovibles of 1509, retired to Magdeburg, 384 ( Von den Conciliis und Kirchen, and returned to Erfurt where he died 1539) ; Jiirgens, vol. i. p. 335. The probably in 1514. ' account of Weinmann in the text is ^ Luther once speaks of another Tentzel's {Hist. JBericht, vol. i. p. 28, teacher: "meinem institutor Johann Twte). According to Erhard, vol. iii. p. Grefifenstein, gelehreten und frummen 462 seq., Weinmann studied in Erfurt Maun, wilchen ich nu wohl mag from 1476, took his Master's degree in nennen, dieweil er todt ist" : Erl. D.S. 1482, was Doctor of Theology in 1490, vol. xxiv. p. 28 ( Von den neiten and in 1493 Rector of the University. Eckisehen Bulhn und Liigen, 1520). IV HIS STUDENT LIFE 137 conservative of the two, was an Augustinian, and so, after a time, brought into peculiarly close relations with Luther. His works, especially an exposition of Donatus, though written in a' barbarous style, were full of illustrative quotations from Latin authors. Trutvetter best represented the orthodox speculation of the University. He was known, far excellence, as the Doctor of Erfurt. Luther calls him the first dialectician of the age. In 1507 he was invited to Wittenberg, where he taught for some years, returniag to Erfurt in 1510. He was a Nomin- alist of the school of Occam, and at the same time a leader of the party who called themselves "moderns," in opposition to the "ancients": men, that is, who were not deterred by respect for old traditions from the attempt to improve existing text- books and to carry forward their science into new fields of thought. His numerous works prove his acquaintance with classical, though chiefly Latin, authors, and the yoimg humanists, with whom he lived on friendly terms, adorned them with commendatory verses. The most characteristic thing that we know of him is that he taught Luther to distinguish between the faith due to the Canonical books of Scripture and the free judgment that might be applied to others. Even so late as May 1518, some months after the publication of the Ninety- five Theses, Luther writes to him in the - friendliest terms, if not in the expectation of winning his support, at least hoping to disarm his opposition.-' What we know of Luther's student life at Erfurt can be briefly told. Mathesius says of him, "Although he was by nature a lively and cheerful young feUow, he began his learning every morning with hearty prayer and churchgoing ; as indeed his motto was, ' Well prayed is more than half ' studied.' He neither overslept himself nor omitled any lecture, vrillmgly asked questions of his teachers, talked to them resgectfuUy, often went over his work with his companions, and^Een no public lecture was ^ing on, spent his time in the library of the University." Melanchthon, in the single ^ DeW. vol. i. pp. 107, 127 ; Kamp- speaks of him as "singulare ornamen- sohulte, vol. 1. p. 43 seq. For Trut- turn et lumen fulgidumgymnasiinostri," vetter vide Dr. G!asts.v Vlitt, Jodokus and again as " modernorum princeps. " Trutvetter von Bisenach. Soheurl, who Briefbuch, vol. i. pp. 62, 123. was with Trutvetter at Wittenberg, 138 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. paragraph which he devotes to the subject, assumes a more critical tone. He hints at what Luther's eager mind might have accomplished " if he had found fit teachers." He laments that " he fell at Erfurt into the sufficiently thorny dialectic of that age." " But as his mind, greedy of learning, sought for more and better things, he read for himself most of the works of the old Latin authors, Cicero, Virgil, Livy, and others." These, however, he studied not as boys do, purely from the linguistic side, but with a view of acquiring a practical knowledge of human life. " So did he stand out," tontiaues Melanchthon, " in his youth, that his genius was an object of admiration to the whole University." One other I scrap of information completes all we know of his philosophical course. In the train of Cardinal Eaymond came to Erfurt a man whose '^hief claim to remembrance is that ^ he was after- wards one of Luther's strongest opponents, Hieronymus Emser. He remained there for a while to teach, the subject of his lectures being the Sergius, a Latin comedy of Eeuehhn's. And it was afterwards Emser's boast that he had nimibered Luther among his hearers.'' Melanchthon's account of Luther's classical studies answers with sufficient ' accuracy tp what we otherwise know of the facts. He learned no Greek at Erfurt, and his knowledge of that language, acquired at a later period, was chiefly confined to the dialect of the New Testament. The only Greek author with whom his works show any familiarity is Aristotle, whom, however, he probably learned to know ia mediaeval translations and abridgments. On the other hand, he not unfrequently quotes the better known Latin poets and histgrians. His poetical quotations, however, have nothing recondite about them, and do not indicate a minute acquaintance with the books from which they are taken ; they consist rather of such verses as, from their weighty meaning or apt expression, have always been the common property of educated men. For Cicero he had a great admiration, setting . him far above Aristotle. The story ^ that when he went into the convent 1 Mathesius, p. 3 B ; Corp. Bef. vol. eri," by Valentimis Bavarus, a citizen vi. p. 157 ; Jiirgens, vol. i. p. 472. of Naumburg, who compiled it shortly ^ This story is told by Seckendorf, after Luther's death. It is preserved vol. i. p. 21, on the authority of a MS. in the library at Gotha. " Rhapsodiae de dictis et scriptis Luth- IV HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE CLASSICS 139 the only books he took with him were Virgil and Plautus, is only partially borne out by ascertained facts. Virgil and Terence he often quotes, but a diligent search has brought to light only one allusion to Plautus. The impression made upon the mind by the carefully collected evidence of Luther's acquaintance with the classics is, that it was the knowledge, not of a well-trained and systematic student, but of a man of quick and vigorous intellect, eager to collect impressions from every side. What Melanchthon says practically amounts to this, that Latin had to Luther neither a philological nor a literary, so much as a human interest. He read Virgil and Cicero for what they had to say, not for the way in which they said it. His own Latin prose — to his few verses no allusion need be made — corresponds with this. It is clear, terse, vigorous, carryiug the reader along with its impetuous flow, and putting him fully in possession of its subject matter, but neither elegant in construction nor classical in idiom. Luther scruples neither to make a word when he wants one, nor to break into German where he thinks Latin would be weaker and less vivid. He does not pretend to be a master of style ; he writes to such men as Mutian and Erasmus with professions of inferiority in this respect, which were no doubt sincere. Nor is there any sign that he repented of not having applied himself to the niceties of classical culture ; what he is sorry for is, that he did not read poetry and history more widely, with a view of enlarging his knowledge of men.^ He lived thus on the verge of the humanistic circle, but did not belong to it. Their spirit and object were not his ; at the moment when, if he had pursued his legal studies, he might possibly have felt more drawn to them, monastic religion took possession of him, and he emerged from the spiritual conflicts of his cell a theologian for life. One or two friends stood with him in the same relation to the " poets." Lange,^ ^ De "W. vol. i. p. 84 ; to Mutian, harum rerum ut sum imperitus, ita vol. i. p. 21 ; to Reuchlin, vol. i. p. peritis prorsus non haec laboro." On 196 ; to Erasmus, vol. i. p. 247 ; to this subject see 0. G. Schmidt, Luther's Hess, vol. ii. p. 313 ; Erl. D.S. vol. Bekanntschaft mit den alien Classikem. xxii. p. 191 {An die Raihsherren alien ^ Lange to Mutian, Tentzel, iJeKguiac Stddte Deutsches Landes). Luther writes Epp. Mutiani, p. 29: "Is Doctor in 1521 to the Elector Frederick (De Martinus est, quocum Erphurdiae per- W. vol. i. 565), "Non de elo^uentia et quamfamiliaritervixi, necparumauxilii Latini sermonis elegantia dice. Nam bonis in Uteris olim mihi attulit." I40 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. a good Greek scholar, as Greek scholars then went, afterwards Prior of the Erfurt Augustinians, and George Burkhardt, from his birthplace Spalt, called Spalatin, Elector Frederick's chaplain, and the intermediary between him and Luther. Mutian and Hess, the two most distinguished of the humanists, Luther did not know till his own Erfurt days were passed. The single friend who belonged to the ianer circle of the poets was Johann Jager, better known as Crotus Eubianus,a man associated with Ulrich von Hutten through the whole of his brief and stormy life, and now identified as the chief author of the Epistolae Ohscurorum Virorum, as we saw. But this intimacy seems to have been suspended, till about lol8-1520a temporary alliance was formed between Luther and that section of the humanists who, on patriotic grounds, were filled with anti-Eoman rage.'' Luther was no true humanist at heart. He cared for learning, partly for practical, still more for theological, purposes. One cannot conceive of him as sitting down to file and polish Latin verses into a passable imitation of Ovid. He wrote, not to show how well he could write, but because there was that within him which imperatively demanded utterance. But the principal part of the general training which each student of the University went through before applying him- self to the special studies of a faculty was philosophical. Logic, dialectic, rhetoric, the nature of ideas, the classification of conceptions, the rules of persuasive speech, these — followed by some rude explanations of physical phenomena, resting not on observation and experiment, but on the authority of Aris- totle and his commentators — were the chief constituents of this method of education. Such as it was, it lay under the grave disadvantage of being, in Luther's time, in a state of decay. The great days of the Scholastic Philosophy, when some of the world's keenest intellects applied themselves to the task of welding philosophy and religion into an indivisible whole, were long past. Even within the old confining limits no new developments took place. The well- worn road of definition and distinction was trodden with monotonous and depressing fidelity. Philosophy at Erfurt was Nominalist; one of the last great schol- astics, Gabriel Biel, a disciple of Occam, had taught there, and ' Crotus to Luther, 16th Oct. 1519 : Hutteni 0pp. ed. Booking, vol. i. p. 309. IV SCHOLASTICISM AT ERFURT 141 Luther professed himself Occamist and Nominalist to the end of his life. Such as the instruction was, he entered into it heartily, and made it his own. He thought highly of the public disputations, which formed an important part of this training ; they taught men what they knew, and what their powers were. But the whole system was open to the objection of dealing with words more than thoughts, and with thoughts more than things. Accuracy of definition, subtlety of distinc- tion, readiness of disputation are of comparatively little avail if the mind be scantily provided vnth matter on which to work.^ Andreas Proles, the provincial vicar of the Augustinian congregation, who preceded Staupitz in that office, aptly compared the scholastic system of education, and especially the disputations, to " a man who should sit down to whet an axe, and should whet and whet it continually, but never use it to hew anything down." ^ Of incident in Luther's hfe during these student ^ears but little has been preserved. Once,' on a jouriiey to Mansfeld, he is said to have pierced an artery, either in the thigh or the foot. The wound, which had been bound up, broke out again the following night, and on both occasions of danger he is said, not unnaturally, to have invoked the aid of the Virgin. One account, given in the Tcihle Talk, says that he used the period of convalescence to teach himself to play upon the lute. Music, indeed, was one of his recreations from a very early date. He himseK recommends music and fencing as an • anti- . dote to dangerous amusements ; Crotus writes to him in 1 5_0 0, "Thou wast formerly in our companionship both musician and learned philosopher." One incident engraved itself deeply on his memory. A nameless friend, whom he was consoling for the loss of his son, told him that some day he would become a great man. If, as another account states, this happened at a moment of severe physical depression, it will sufficiently explain his word, "I have very often recollected this saying ; for, as I have said, such voices as these have something of divination and oracle in them." For the 1 Jiirgens, vol. i. pp. 358, 395, 421 ; Laiomiamae) ; ibid. D.S. vol. xxi. p. T.T. vol. iv. pp. 385, 560j',CoZZ. vol. Si5 (An den christlichen Adel DeutscAer ii. pp. 143, 144; Eri. 0pp., var. arg., Nation). vol. V. p. 520 {ConfiUatio rationis 142 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. rest, he was proud of his University. In comparison with it he thought all others but boys' schools {Schutzschulen). In after years he lamented its decay. " What majesty and splen- dour there was," he said, " when masters were admitted to their degrees with torch processions and aU honour. I hold that no temporal, no worldly rejoicing was ever like it. And what pomp and show there was when doctors were made, when they rode round the city with special garments and ornaments, all of which is gone and fallen into disuse. But I would that it were still observed." -^ It is at this point that a story must be told, which, more than any other incident in Luther's early Ufe, has excited ahnost fierce controversy. Mathesius, after having alluded to the time which Luther was wont to spend in the University library, says,^ " Once, as he was looking at the books, one after another, in order that he might learn to know the good ones, he came upon the Latin Bible, which he had never before seen in his life, and there remarked with great astonishment that there was in it much more text, more epistles and gospels than were expounded in the ordinary homilies, and from the pulpits of the churches. And as he looks about bim in the Old Testament, he comes upon the story of Samuel and his mother Hannah, which he quickly reads through with hearty delight and joy ; and because all this was new to him, he begins from the bottom of his heart to wish that our faithful would at some time or other give him also such a book of own, a wish and sigh which was richly fulfilled." This st is confirmed by Luther himself. He is reported in the fabW. Talk to have said, " Thirty years ago Bibles were unknown. Nobody named the Prophets, and they were thought impossible to understand. When I was twenty years old I had never seen a Bible. I thought that there were no Gospels or Epistles, save such as were in the lessons. At last I found a Bible in the ^ Lingke, Reisegesch. p. 11 ; Ooll. dates it 22d Feb. 1538 (Lauterbach, p. vol. iii. p. 170 ; T. T. vol. iv. p. 695 ; 36). An illustrative passage is found ffutteni 0pp. ed. Booking, vol. i. p. in the Latin Table Talk {Coll. vol. ii. 340; DeW. vol. iv. p. 188 ; Mathesius, p. 240), "Magnae fueru'nt tenehrae, et p. 4 A ; T. T. vol. iv. pp. 544, 545. D. Carolostat promotus est in Doctorem ^ Mathesius, p. 3 B. The story is now qui nunquam vidit (v. r. viderat) traced back to Lauterbach's Tagebuch, Bibliam, et ego solus in monasterio a diary of Luther's conversation. He Erphordiae legi Bibliam." IV THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY 143 library, and often read it, to the very great astonishment of Dr. Staupitz." In further corroboration may be quoted what Mathesius says of himself: "I have in my youth seen an ungerman German Bible, without doubt translated from the Latia ; it was dark and obscure. For at that time learned men set almost no store by the Bible. My father had a German book of homilies (Postille) in which, besides the Sunday's Gospels, some passages of the Old Testament were expounded ; out of it I have often read to him with pleasure. 'How gladly,' said my father, ' should I see a complete German Bible !"'i Against these positive statements has been set the improb- ability of the case. The first printed book was the Latin Bible, and between its issue and the year 1500 there were no fewer than niaety- seven editions. Of German Bibles, prior to 1518, there are fourteen, without reckoning others in Low German dialects. In the remains of the University library, still preserved at Erfurt, there are two Latin Bibles, either of which may, from its date, be the one which, if this story be true, Luther read. But there also still exists there the library of the Amplonian College, a corporation within the University founded in 1412, which is curiously interesting as a collection of books formed for the use of students before the invention of the art of printing. According to the statutes of the College, the study of theology is to begin with the Bible ; men are to endeavour to understand it in the literal and in the moral sense, with help of Nicholas De Lyra's commentary. And half the theological books of the Amplonian library are exegetical. Couple with this the fact that, however overlaid with tradition, however postponed to patristic commentary, the Bible indisputably lay at the basis of all theological instruc- tion and speculation, and it may well be asked whether the story, which has played so great a part ia controversy between Protestants and Catholics, is not inherently incredible.^ At the same time the positive testimony to its truth is clear and explicit, and cannot be justly invalidated by any ^ Coll. -vql. iii. p. 270 ; T. T. vol. W. Grimm, Kurzgefasste Geschichte der iii. p. 229 ; Mathesius, p. 160 A. Lutherischen Bibeliibersetzung, p. 2 ; ^ Herzog, Beal-Encyklopddie, 1st ed. Weissenborn, Amplonius Matingh de vol. xvii. p. 438; 2d ed. p. 643 sq.; BerJca, und seine Stiftung, p. 22. 144 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. presumption of improbability. From the early currency of the story, and the precise and unvarying form in which it is told, we may conclude that it was often in Luther's mouth. And it must be recollected that Mathesius puts the incident at a time when he was not yet a student of theology. He was going through the general phiLosophical training for the study of a profession, which ia his case was to be that of the law. I cannot but think it natural enough that, however busily occupied on the Biblical text theologians and theological students might be, the Bible should not have fallen into the hands of a young layman who had no outlook towards the Church. Two other utterances of Luther's seem to me to weigh heavily on this side. In 1527 he addresses a preface to a book by Justus Menius, then pastor in Erfurt, " to aU pious Christians " in that city. " You have had," he says, " for many years a University in your city, of which I was for some years a member, but I can well swear that all through that time not a single right Christian reading or preaching was given by any one — of which you now have every corner full. Oh how happy should I then have thought myself, if once I could have heard a Gospel, yea, a Psahn, and now you have the whole Scripture, clear to be heard. How dear, and deeply buried, lay then the Scripture, although we were so right hungry and thirsty after it, and there was no one to give us anything. And yet there was so much trouble, cost, danger, toU, spent upon it ! " While what the defenders of the old theology thought of the matter, is plain from the anecdote following : " Dr. Usingen, an Augustirdan monk, who was my teacher in the convent at Erfurt, once said to me,. when he saw that' I valued the Bible so highly, and willingly read the Scriptures, ' Eh, Brother Martin, what is the Bible ? You should read the old teachers ; they have sucked the juice of truth out of the Bible ; the Bible is the cause of aU uproar.' " On the whole, perhaps, the story is not quite as incredible as it has been represented to be.-' The possession of a Master's degree gave Luther the right of lecturing in philosophy, though there is no positive evidence ^ De W. vol. iii. p. 228 ; T. T. vol. 37.5 ( Vermahnung an die Oeistlichen i. p. 29 ; Conf. Erl. D.S. vol. xxlv. p. m . ' IV THE AUGUSTINIAN MONK 145 that he ever exercised it. On the contrary, he seems to have applied himself diligently to the study of jurisprudence, probably under the direction of Henning Gode, a distinguished lawyer, who was afterwards one of the earhest ornaments of the University of Wittenberg. His father's plan for him was that he should become a lawyer, and, if possible, secure his social position by a rich and honourable marriage. We know that he was, with this purpose iu view, ia possession of a Corpus Juris, which was then a costly book ; and he had read something of Accursius, a jurist, whose commentary was frequently bound up with it. But his legal studies, which cannot have been long pursued, came to a sudden end. On St. Alexius' Day, iVtb July 1505,-' he presented himself at the gate of the Augustioian Convent at Erfurt, beggiag for admittance as a novice. It was a turniag-point, not only in his own life, but in the history of European Christianity.^ The external circumstances of the change are certified to us by contemporary testimony, and may be disengaged without difficulty from some shght accretions of tradition, which have gathered about them.- Luther, possibly to avoid an epidemic which had been devastating Erfurt, had been on a visit to his parents, when, on his return, near the village of Stotterheim, he was overtaken by a violent thunderstorm. Believing him- self to be in imminent danger, he cried out, " Help, dear St. Anna., I will become a monk ! " The story that a young friend was killed by lightning at his side has no foundation ; on the other hand, both Melanchthon and Mathesius record that some close companion had not long before met with a violent death. He himself says that he repented of his vow, though he clave to it. A fortnight afterwards he invited his most intimate friends to his lodgings, took part with them for the last time in the music which he loved, and asked for their escort to the monastery. Then, saying good-bye to them with the words " To-day ye see me, but never again," he left them in tears. " I never thought," he continues, " to come out of the convent ; I was clean dead to the world, until God deemed 1 The Golloquia (vol. iii. p. 187) seem => Coll. vol. iii. p. 185 ; Erl. 0pp. Lot. to give the 16th of July as St. Alexius' vol. xi. p. 169 [Enarrationes in Gene- Day. I find it, however, allotted' in the sin). Roman Breviary to the 17th. L 146 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. that the time had come, and Tetzel with his iadulgences drove me." His father, who, as we have seen, was not ecclesiastically incUned, and whose plans for his son were thus suddenly frustrated, was gravely displeased. Hans Luther had been accustomed to address his son, from the date of his Master's degree, with the ceremonious and honourable " you " ; now he reverted to the sterner and less respectful "thou." Nor was his anger quite laid to rest tiU the Monk became the Eeformer.^ The inner history of this change is far less easy to narrate. "We have no direct contemporary evidence on which to rely ; while Luther's own reminiscences, on which we chiefly depend, are necessarily coloured by his later experiences and feehngs. Of one thing we may be sure, that if the change of purpose culminated in a moment of sudden and sharp crisis, that crisis had been long prepared by slowly -working causes. The un- ecclesiastical tone of Hans Luther's house cannot have affected his son to any great extent. From an early age he had been little at home. . All the influences of his education had been more or less directly religious. At Magdeburg, at Eisenach, at Erfurt, his teachers had been priests, and he had breathed the atmosphere "of the Church. We may. infer from the deep impression made upon him by the severity of his parents that the house at Mansfeld rather repelled than attracted him ; ia one place he even gives their hardness, which at the same time he qualifies as " well meant," as one of the forces that drove him into the cloister. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that he took, till long afterwards, any but the ordinary Catholic view of hfe. And according to that, through the monastery was the only way to peace, to such perfectness as can be attained upon earth, to sure reconciliation with God. Whoever elected to remain in the world voluntarily confronted a thousand dangers, and could not expect to go far on the way of sanctity. The coarse license of the students' life may 1 Coll. vol. iii. p. 188. Luther's dentia, (juaudo te redeuntem a paren- conversion was soon and inevitably tibus coeleste fulmen veluti alteram compared witb tbat of Paul. Crotus Paulum ante oppidum Erffurdianum in Rubianus writes to him in 1519 {Eut- terram prostravit atque intra Augus- teni 0pp. ed. Booking, vol. i. p. 311), tiniana septa compulit e nostro consor- "Nam ista faoio, non sine numine cio, tristissimo tuo discessu." divum ; ad haec respexit divina provi- IV THE GENESIS OF HIS CONVERSION 147 well have revolted him. "Erfurt," he said, ia after years, "had been nothing better than a brothel and beer -house." When once the inextinguishable thirst for holiaess was awakened in any soul, it had no possible recourse except to the life of the monk, guarded from temptation, ordered by discipline, consciously and wholly devoted to self-purification.'' Under the surface of " the active and cheerful young fellow," who loved music and bodily exercises, and poured all the energy of a strong and vivid nature iato the life of the place, lay a deep and copious spring of religious passion. "We must recollect that we have to do with one of the brightest and strongest spirits of which the history of religion makes mention ; and that the Luther of the Diet of Worms lay un- developed ia the choir-boy of Eisenach, the student of Erfurt. And his spiritual struggles began early. The "Anfechtungen," the temptations, the conflicts, the despairs, which play so large a part ia his life, and, to the last, never left him, were facts of his earlier years also. They were not temptations of the flesh, incident to a hot youth ; they were concerned with the terrorR of the divine wrath, and the abandonment of the soul by God Now, or a little later, wholly unnerved and occupied by a single thought or passion, he fell into something like trances. Naturally his distress took the form of the fear of divine judgment : the pure desire for holiness, the horror of sin for sin's sake, is not the flrst trouble of the saiat, but his final achievement, and when it comes, breathes peace rather than inspires terror. But to Luther the Father retreated behind the Son : and the Son was an awful figure, sitting upon the rainbow to judge the earth, and moved to compassion, if at all, by the tender pleadings of His mother. And how to placate the judge ? How conjure away the cloud of divine anger that overhung and darkened his life ? " Oh, when wilt thou, only once, be pious, and do enough to get for thyself a gracious God ? " This and such as this, he says, were the thoughts that drove him. into monkery. Fastings and prayers, rigid self-discipline, aU mortifications of the flesh, a complete self- abandonment to wise and pious direction, were the only method of perfectness which he knew ; and it lay hidden in his soul 1 T. T. ToL iv. p. 129 ; Coll. vol. iii. p. 101. 148 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. to try it. Then, at the moment when his own physical weakness, the violent death of his comrade, the plague that had raged or was still raging at Erfurt, had brought out all these thoughts into strong relief, came the thunderstorm at Stotterheim. It is very possible that he stood in no real danger ; " nothing," he said long afterwards, " is more unquiet and harder to lay to rest than a fearful heart, which grows pale at every thunderclap, yea, even at the rustling of a leaf." But at this instant of terror he took a resolution which he did not dare to break. He exchanged the Corpus Juris for the Bible, and, turning his back upon the honourable profession and wealthy marriage of which his father dreamed, entered upon the way of perfeotness.^ The order into which Luther thus entered was founded in the first half of the thirteenth century.^ At that epoch Innocent IV and his successor Alexander IV drew together certain scattered monastic communities of Italy, and formed them into a single order, bearing the name and obeying the rule of Augustine. Some of these communities pretended to trace their origin to the great Bishop of Hippo himself, and to find their rule in his writings ; but we are here upon traditional rather than historical ground. The monastic life is as old as St. Augustine, and the rule that bears his name has so little that is distinctive in it as to have been adopted by more orders than one. At the same time, the Augustinian order cannot be said to have had a history till its various elements were welded by Innocent IV into a whole. The result was to add another brigade to that Papal army of which the Dominicans and the Franciscans were already the right 1 Erl. Comment, in IBp. ad Oalatas, his father (1521), which formed the vol. i. p. 260 ; D. S. vol. xix. p. 152 preface to his book on monastic vows : {Vermischie Predigten) ; ibid. vol. xxiv. in German, De W. vol. ii. p. 100 ; in p. 375 ( Vermahnung an die Geistlichen Latin, and mpre authentic, De "W. vol. zu Augsburg) ; Und. vol. xl. p. 164 vi. p. 25. Cbnf. OoU. vol. iii. p. 187 ; {Auslegimg des 110 Psalms) ; ibid. vol. Tentzel, vol. i. p. 146, note. xliv. p. 72 {Predigten ueber etzliche ^ For the history of the German Kapitel des Ev. Mattk.) ; ibid. 0pp. Augustinians and the life of Staupitz, Lat. vol. X. p. 180 (Enarrationes in vide Kolde, Die Deutsche Augustiner- Genesin). For the story of Luther's Congregation imd Johamn von Staupitz. conversion, vide Melanchthon, Corp. They were Augustinian hermits, and Ref. vol. vi. p. 158 ; Ratzeberger, not to be confounded with the Augus- p. 45 ; Mathesius, p. 4 B. His own tinian Canons, account wUl be found in the letter to IV THE AUGUSTINIAN ORDER 149 and left wings. The " Hermits," as they loved to call them- selves, who had hitherto lived in independence of mutual or any other control, were formed into an order, organised on a European basis, divided into provinces, given a distinctive dress, subjected to a common rule, endowed with pecuKar privileges. They were a preaching order, as the remains of some of their churches still bear witness. They were mendi- cants, and followed the example of other monastic beggars in soon amassing property. The double right of hearing con- . fessions and of burying the dead in their churches placed them in a position of independence as regards the parochial clergy. At a very early period they directed their attention to the Universities, and, in 1261; one of their number already occupied a professor's chair at Paris. There was a close connection at Tubingen between the Augustinian convent and the infant University. We shall see presently that the University of Wittenberg, in its first years, was almost wholly under ■ Augustinian direction. In each province one monastery was a studium generale, a college in which theo- logy was taught by competent professors with the assistance of a library : for Thuringia and Saxony, for instance, at Magde- burg and Erfurt. But the Augustinian Order neither has the individuality nor rises to the historical importance of the Dominican 'or the Franciscan. Its great apostate is its chief illustration. The name of Augustine has given rise to the idea that some tradition of Augustinian doctrine, such as was after- wards preached by Luther, may have survived in the order that bore it. .The name of Andreas Proles, who held a very prominent position in the order throughout the latter half of the fifteenth century, has been cited as that of a forerunner of the Eeformer ; tradition brings them together in Magdeburg, and asserts that Proles predicted a fall of the Papacy, which he was himself too old to see. But there can hardly have been anything in common between the dignified churchman and the choir-boy who was receiving a charitable education, while the alleged prophecy rests upon late and untrustworthy testimony. It is a well -authenticated fact that Proles condemned the action of his brother Augustinian, John Zacharia, at the ISO LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. Council of Constanz/ but his protest seems to have been much more in the interests of fair play than in those of free theological thought. And the activity of Proles as a reformer was practical, not doctrinal. Like every other monastic order, the Augustinian had its recurring periods of laxity, out of which successive Eeformers strove to recall it. In Germany, and in part in Italy too, this drew after it a breach in the organisation of the order. Convents, called of " the Observ- ance," in which the desire for a stricter obedience to the rule had manifested itself, banded themselves together, and slowly, and amid many obstacles, coalesced into a Congregation, an order within an order, withdrawn from the Provincial jurisdiction, and subject to a Vicar, elected by themselves, who, in his turn, was responsible only to the General It would be impossible to tell in this place how Proles, with the help of Duke William of Saxony, thus established on a firm basis the German or Saxon Congregation of Observant Augustinians, over which he presided as Vicar from 1461 to 1503. We need only note that it was to this severer branch of the order that the convent at Erfurt belonged. At the same time, the whole order was at once of unimpeachable orthodoxy and thoroughly loyal to the Papacy. It was a common boast that till Luther arose, it had never incurred a suspicion of heresy. In the matter of indulgences, in particular, it stood upon the common ground of the Church, as the works of John von Paltz, who graduated at Erfurt in 1483, and afterwards taught in the Augustinian convent there, remain to testify. He not only preached the Jubilee Indulgence of 1500, under Cardinal Eaymond, but developed his theory in popular books, both Latin and German, which had a large circulation.^ No distiaction was at first made between the brilliant young Master of Arts and the other novices. He exchanged his baptismal name for that of Augustine.^ He was compelled ^ This tradition came through Stau- approved the change: "Ego in baptismo pitz to Luther. De W. vol. ii. p. nominatus sum Martinus, postea in 493. Conf. Erl. D.S. vol. xxiv. p. 27 monasterio Augustinus. Quid possit (fom denh neiien Eekisclien Bullen fieri turpius aut magis sacrilegum wnd lAigen) ; ibid. vol. Ixiv. p. 80 quam abjicere nomen baptismi propter (Nachlese). indutum cucullum." Erl. 0pp. Lat. ^ Vide antea, p. 60. vol. ix. p. 9 (Enarrationes in Genesin). ^ He does not seem to have heartily In his extant correspondence, which, IV IN THE ERFURT CONVENT 151 to share the common labours of the monastery ; he scrubbed and swept with the rest, and when his turn came, took his bag upon his back, and perambulated Erfurt and the villages round about, collecting alms.'^ There was no disposition on the part of the older monks to excuse him from any of the labours which they had themselves gone through. He was put imder the care of the Master of the Novices, of whom he speaks with much respect as "a really excellent man, and, without doubt, under the damned cowl, a true Christian," but whose name we do not know. All that is recorded of his intercourse with his pupil may be told in very few words. He placed in Luther's hands, during the year of his novitiate, a MS. of Athanasius de Trinitate, which he had himself copied. He gave him instructions how and when to speak to women. On one occasion when Luther was in deep distress of spirit, he said to him, in words which made a profound and lasting impression on his mind, "Do you not know that the Lord has commanded us to hope ? " But the influence of this nameless teacher was not that which most powerfully turned the current of the young man's life. Presently the convent was visited in its turn by the Vicar, John von Staupitz. Whether he had heard of Luther before, or whether now for the first time he remarked the bright-eyed novice and asked his history, we do not know. At all events, with the discernment of a true leader of men, he at once perceived his promise, and saw the way to draw it out. He asked the Prior Winand von Dieden- hofen to relieve Luther from his servile labours and to send him back to his studies. It was characteristic of Staupitz that in the new constitutions which he had given to the Congre- gation in 1504, the study of the Scriptures was prescribed. He now enforced his regulation in Luther's case, bidding him lay the Bible at the base of his theological studies, and to become, in the language of the day, a good " textualis et begins with the year 1507, there are covering the whole ground between one only two letters signed Augustinus. convent and another, whither, at stated And as these have also Martinus intervals, the monks proceeded to per- Luthenis, it is a question whether, form religious offices, and to collect even here, we ought not to read Angus- alms. This, in the language of the tinianus. monastery, was called " terminiren. " 1 The Augustinians, like other orders, Kolde, Aug. Oong. p. _ 47 ; T. T. vol. had a series of country stations, often iii. p. 336 ; OoU. vol. i. p. 122. \ 152 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. localis." The monks gave him a Bible, bound, we are told, in red leather, and he eagerly followed the Vicar's counsel. He impressed the Bibhcal phrases on his memory ; he learned on what page, and in what connection each stood ; often he medi- tated a whole day on a single saying. Perhaps the fact that at this time " he did not think much of Be Lyra," indicates that the impression made upon him by the text was so deep and vivid as to obscure the comment. But he was alone in his devotion to the Scriptures. " I only," he said long afterwards, " read the Bible in the monastery at Erfurt." ^ The name of Staupitz is that which is chiefly associated with Luther's during what may be called his transition period ; and, before going farther, it wiU be necessary to dwell for a little while on his history and character. He was a man of gentle birth and noble presence, a member of an ancient family settled in the neighbourhood of Meissen, highly esteemed at the courts of the Saxon princes, and one of Frederick's chief advisers in the foundation of the University of Wittenberg. We first hear of him. in 1497, when, already Master of Arts and Header in Theology, he entered the Augustinian convent at Tubingen, of which he was soon elected Prior. At Tubingen he took his theological degrees, proceeding Doctor of Holy Scripture in July 1500. Hence he was soon transferred to Munich, where he again occupied the position of Prior, until in 1503 he removed to Wittenberg, where he took a professor- ship in the infant University, and was the first Dean of the Theological Faculty.^ In the same year followed his election as Vicar of the Augustinian Congregation, in succession to Andreas Proles, a capacity in which he procured an entire revision of its statutes. It was as visitor of the convents within his Province that he first fell in with Luther, whose strik- ing personahty must in some way have attracted his notice. But from this time he never lost sight of him. It was Staupitz who procured him Hberty of study, who was his guide through the spiritual darkness in which he soon became involved, who 1 Eatzeberger, pp. 47, 48 ; Vol. Bav. vol. iv. p. 112 (Miarr. in Gme&in) ; apud Seckendorf, vol. i. p. 21 ; Coll. ibid. vol. xix. p. 100 {^Enarr. Ps. 11.); vol. ii. pp. 1, 240 ; T. T. vol. ii. p. 291; Kolde, Aug. Gong. p. 224. De W.'vol. iv. p. 427. Conf. Lauterbach, '' Fbrstemann, Album Acad. Vite- Tagebmh, pp. 84, 197 ; Erl. Ojop. Lat. berg. p. i. IV JOHN VON STAUPITZ i53 called him to "Wittenberg to take part in the teaching of the University. But the precise history of their intellectual relations is not easy to trace. At first, no doubt, the influence was all in one direction. The novice, the peasant's son, must have looked up with unfeigned reverence to the stately church- man, whose noble birth enhanced the dignity of his high office. But, with one unimportant and doubtful exception, Staupitz wrote nothing till 1515;^' and as by that time the force of genius had asserted itself in .opposition to inequality of station, it is unsafe to assume that what he was then he had been when he first took Luther by the hand. All seems to show that he was one of those evangelical souls which may be born and grow within, as well as beyond, the Catholic Pale, a nature on which the corruptions and the formalities of the Church alike sat lightly, but which was apt to penetrate beneath them into the secret places of faith. Though hardly to be reckoned among the Mystics, or claiming a place in their succession, he had a side of relation to them ; the essence of religious affection and aspiration was nearer to him than the form ; while under any form he was quick to detect the essence. It is thus that we can best explain the fact that though never giving up his friendly intercourse with Luther, he did not follow him into open opposition. In 1522, after a painful period of indecision, he transferred himself from the Augus- tinian to the Benedictine Order, and died, two years after. Abbot of the Monastery of St. Peter at Salzburg. It need hardly be said that a friendship between two such men, under such circumstances, was subject to many strains, and it is to the credit of both that the strand never wholly parted. To Luther his old teacher is always " my dear Dr. Staupitz." He constantly and fully acknowledges his great obligations to him. As late as 1542 he writes of temptations "in which I also was fast held, and in which, if Dr. Staupitz — or, much rather, God through Dr. Staupitz's means — had not helped me out, I should have been drowned, and in hell, long ago." In 1529 he requests the visitors of the Saxon Church to secure to Magdalena Staupitz, who had been a nun at Nimptsch, a 1 In 1868 Knaake commenced the Staupitz's works, but it has so far got publication of a, collected edition of only to one small volume. 154 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. cottage belonging to the convent at Grimma, for her life, " in token of honour and gratitude to her brother. Dr. John Staupitz;" and in 1531 he appeals on behalf of the same lady to the Elector John. And in an affecting letter written by Staupitz to Luther, only a few months before his own death, and as the superscription bears " post longa silentia," he says, " My most constant love to thee, a love passing the love of women, is always unbroken." ^ Luther's reading, however, was not confined to the Bible. As, I have already mentioned, the monastery at Erfurt was a " studium generale " of the order, in which theology and philosophy were carefully taught, and there was an active intellectual life. Usingen, one of the foremost representatives of scholastic theology at Erfurt, was, as we have seen, one of the brotherhood. John Nathin and John von Paltz were professors of Holy Scripture. Melanehthon mentions Augus- tine as one of the authors whom Luther chiefly studied about this time. " At the same time," he says, " he did not abandon the scholastics. Gabriel (Biel) and Cameracensis (Peter d'Ailly) he could repeat by heart, almost word for word. He read much and long the writings of Occam.^ His acumen he preferred to Thomas (Aquinas) and Scotus. He also read Gerson diligently." Traces of these and similar studies are to be found not unfrequently in his writings. In a conversation on the merits of the scholastics which he had with Amsdorf in 1538 he says, "I still keep the books which then tormented me." ISTor was this strong phrase idly used. In his peculiar trouble these books not only gave him no help, but brought his difficulties more vividly home to him. When he read Gabriel Biel on the Canon of the Mass, "his heart bled." Bonaventura, with his speculative theology, " all but drove him ' De W. vol. V. p. 513 ; vol. ii. p. so highly exhorts me, for Dr. Staupitz's 408; vol. vi. p. 101. Conf. vol. iii. p. sake, whom (if I would not he a 470. Burkhardt, Briefwechsel Luther's, damned ungrateful Papal ass) I must p. 196; Kolde, Aug. Cong. p. 446. praise as having been at first my father In 1545, the year before Luther's death, in this doctrine, and as having borne one Margaretha Staupitz, who signs me in Christ, " etc. Burkhardt, pp. 464, herself " a forsaken widow," appeals to 465. him as "her especial good friend," ^ "Vuilhelmus Occam, Scholastic- and the result was a letter next day to orum doctorum sine dubio princeps the Elector John Frederick, recommend- et ingeniosissimus : " Erl. 0pp. v. a. ing her case. It contains the following vol. iv. p. 188 {Bespmisio Zutheriana characteristic passage : "As she thus ad condemnationem, etc. ) IV ADMISSION TO THE PRIESTHOOD 155 mad." On the other hand, he thought that St. Bernard surpassed in his preaching all other doctors, even Augustine, " for there he teaches Christ admirably, but when he comes to disputation, he is quite unequal to himseE" To Augustine he returned agaia and again, " finding there," says Melanchthon, " many clear statements, confirming that teaching and comfort of faith which had been kindled in his own breast." Now, probably, as throughout life, Luther's intellectual method was eminently subjective. He worked out his conclusions in the secret depths of his own soul, with much toil and conflict; and then assimilated from without, from Scripture and Fathers, whatever was iu accordance with them. He was the wilhng disciple of Paul and Augustine : he could not conceal his con- tempt for James and Jerome.^ Luther was an inmate of the convent at Erfurt from July 1505 to October or November 1508. This period is cut in two by his admission to the priesthood on 2d May 1507. It is not impossible to reconstruct his mental history, with some degree of probability, through what were the three most important years of his development ; but in the absence of dates the story cannot be divided into what took place before, and what after his ordi- nation. The narrative, therefore, of that event must precede . the attempt to describe the gradual change in Luther's mind. Hans Luther had utterly disapproved of his son's entrance upon the monastic life, and had shown his displeasure in an emphatic way. But in May 1507 he was in a softer mood. I Two other sons died of the plague. The world was prospering with him. If the father were not wholly dead within him, ^ he must have longed for a sight of the face on which he had once looked so complacently, and which now, for almost two years, had been buried in the living grave of the cloister. He was urged to give his consent to his son's ordination,^ and to ' Kolde, Aubg. Cong. p. 246 ; Mel- bled at the Diet of Augsburg 1530," anohtlion, Corp. Mqf. vol. vi. p. 159; Luther says: "My bishop, when he for St. Bernard, Erl. D.S. vol. xlvi. made me a priest, and gave the p. 243 ; conf. ibid. vol. xlvii. p. 38 ; chalice into ray hand, spoke thus, for Gerson, Coll. vol. ii. p. 297; T. T. ' Accipe potestatem sacrificandi pro vol. iv. p. 393; Lauterbach, p. 18; vivis et mortuis. ' That the earth did Coll. vol. iii. pp. 134, 270. not swallow us both up was unjust, 2 The officiating bishop at Luther's and God's all too great patience. " Erl. ordination was John von Lasphe. In D. S. vol. xxiv. p. 378. his " Admonition to the clergy assem- 156 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. grace the occasion, as was customary, by his presence ; and after , much resistance he half unwillingly consented. When the day caiae on which Martin's first mass was to be celebrated, he rode to the monastery with an escort of twenty horsemen, and made his son a present of as many florins. At the subsequent feast, however, the storm broke out. Luther, at once rejoicing in the reconciliation, and willing to justify him- self, asked his father why he had shown himself so obstinately angry. " Whereupon he spoke up before all doctors, masters, and other gentlemen: — 'Ye learned ones, have ye not read in Scripture, that a man should honour his father and his mother ? ' When I heard that I was terrified, and so dumbfoundered that I could answer nothing.'' Whether the learned ones answered anything we are not told. Luther says that their stock reply was, " It is better to obey God than man." But the honours of the day in disputation appear to have rested with the old miner of Mansfeld, who, pressed with the thunderstorm and the divine call, would only reply, " Would to God that it may not turn out to have been a devil's spectre ! " When in 1521 Luther dedicated to his father his work on Monastic Vows, he tells the story. " He fortified his heart," he said, " as well as he could against his father and his father's word ; but hardly ever in his Ufe had he heard speech of man that more powerfully impressed and abided with him." But he was still in the midst of his religious exaltation, and resolved to work out his salva- tion on the path which he had chosen. The new leaven was at work in him ; but the time of full operation was not yet.^ From the moment of his entrance into the convent Luther applied himself with great zeal to the monastic method of perfectness. What he desired above all other thiags was acceptance with God. The divine justice terrified him ; God turned to him only an angry face. It is useless to attempt to distinguish in his case between a pure attraction to holiness and the terror of God's judgments ; the two motives were subtly intermingled, and each reinforced the other. He had fled to the cloister to avoid temptation, to put himself in the way of spiritual discipline, and now flung himself into the experiment with all the ardour of his nature. " I was a monk in earnest," ^ Val. Sav. apud. Tentzel, vol. i. p. 146 ; Ratzeberger, p. 48'; De W. vol. vi. p. 26. IV RELIGIOUS LIFE IN THE CONVENT 157 he said ; " I Kved hardly and chastely ; I would not have taken a farthing without the knowledge of my prior ; I prayed industriously day and night." This is only one of many simi- lar declarations. In fastings, watchings, prayers, — he says in another place, — he surpassed those who afterwards so bitterly hated and persecuted him. Often, for the space of three days, neither bit nor drop passed his lips ; fasting became almost a habit with him. " True it is I was a pious monk, and so strictly observed the rules of my order that I can say,. if ever a monk got to heaven by monkery, so should I also have got there; and to this all my comrades in the cloister, 'who have known me, will bear witness. For if it had lasted longer, I should have tortured myself to death with watching, praying, reading, and other work." ^ For a time this method was successful. He seemed to have begun another life, to have been lifted into a purer air. It was part of the monastic theory, that profession was equiva- lent to rebaptism ; that the new-made monk "was hke an innocent child, fresh from the baptismal font " ; even that the monk acquired by his self-maceration a stock of superfluous merits, which could be transferred for a consideration to the laity. ■ But then the thought stole in, that for perfect obedience, no effort, no watchfulness could be a sufficient guarantee. God was unchanged, the divine justice had not lost its awful aspect ; how be sure that its inexorable demands were satisfied ? Luther's experience in the monastery coincided, he says, with Paul's teaching. " I have seen many who, with the most ardent desire, and the best conscience, did everything to lay their consciences to rest : wore hair shirts, fasted, prayed, afflicted and wearied their bodies with various discipline, which, even had they been iron, would have destroyed them at last ; and nevertheless became more fearful the more they toiled." At the moment of his severest self- discipline, he shrank with ^ Erl. D. S. vol. xlviii. pp. 306, '317 vigorous physical frame. Even when {Auslegimg des Hv. Johannis) ; Mp. ad he was quite well, he would go, he says, Gal. vol. i. p. 107 ; D. S. vol. xxxi. for four days together almost without p. 273 (Kleine Antwort auf Herzog food or drink, and at other times was Georgs nahestes Buck), Ooll. vol. iii. p. content with a little bread and a 185. Melanchthon, in after I life, often herring for his day's sustenance. Corp. wondered at his abstemiousness, which Bef. vol. i. p. 168. contrasted stijangely with his large and 158 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. horror from the presumptuous thought, that the Holy Spirit was with him; he could not assure himself that God was pleased with his effort, or listened to his prayer. What certainty had he that these things were acceptable to God at all ? The toil was never ending, still beginning, and a single slip was at any moment fatal. The same was even more the case with the ceremonial obedience demanded -of the priest. The minutest directions were given for the celebration of mass, and a chance word, an incorrect gesture, even an uncertain into- nation were all sins. " To have sacrificed with an unconsecrated chalice is a sin, to have celebrated in vestments not yet conse- crated is a sin, to have celebrated without the maniple or any other part of the vestments is a sin, to have called the boy, or to have spoken between the words of the Canon is a sia, even to have stammered or hesitated ia the words of the Canon is a sin, to have touched the sacred relics is a sin," and so on, through a still longer catalogue of ceremonial offences. The minute prescriptions of the rule as to dress and behaviour gave rise to ianumerable possibilities of transgression ; and an anxious conscience found perpetual opportunities of self-torment. Nor was confession a sure resource, or absolution a certain comfort. How be sure that every sia, great and small, had been made known to the director ? What guarantee that the contrition was of that absolute quality which deserved the absolution and made it valid ? The form of absolution made it in part dependent upon "the good works which thou hast done and wilt do for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ ; " how be certain as to the sufficient purity of the motive ? Take what paias he would, there was always some loophole left. He seemed to have undertaken an impossible task under the eye of an inexorable taskmaster.-' 1 Erl. D. S. vol. xxxi. p. 279 hrav/ih der Messe) ; Ep. ad Gal. vol. (Kleine Antwort auf Herzog Georgs i. p. 225 ; T. T. vol. ii. p. 303. "If nahestes Buck) ; 0pp. Lat. vol. xi. any one then had asked me, at what p. 241 {Enarr. in Genesin) ; Ep. ad cost I was willing to buy peace with Gal. vol. ii. p. 301 ; D. S. vol. xlix. Christ, and those magnificent glories pp. 168, 314 {Auslegwig des Ev. Joh.) ; which now we have through the Word 0pp. Lot. vol. xix. p. 102 {Enarr. and the Spirit of God, I should have Fsalmi. Ii.) ; 0pp. v. a. vol. v. p. 372 humbly fallen to the earth, and willingly {Eesponsio ad Catharinum) ; D. S. vol. poured forth my life, and asked only xlviii. p. 203 (Auslegimg des Ev. to have my conscience set free. " 0pp. Joh.); vol. xxviii. p. 65 {Vom Miss- ioii. vol. xx. p. 281 (.Bream Ps. cxxxii.) IV THE NATURE OF HIS RELIGIOUS TROUBLES 159 Let us understand once for all that the spiritual troubles which beset him were not those temptations of the flesh which Protestants suppose to play so large a part in a life voluntarily vowed to chastity.^ He mentions it as an accustomed device of the evil one, to leave passion unaroused in the first years of profession, that the after struggle might be the fiercer. But he was not himself greatly troubled in this way, " although the more he macerated himself the more he burned." In his commentary on the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians he has described his case with an accuracy that leaves nothing to be desired. " When I was a monk I was wont to think that it was all over with my salvation if ever I felt the concupiscence of the flesh, that is, evil affection, lust, anger, hatred, envy, and the hke, towards any brother. I tried many things. I confessed daily. But I profited nothing. Because the concupiscence of the flesh always returned, there- fore I could not be quiet, but was perpetually tortured with these thoughts : ' This and that sin hast thou committed, also thou labourest under envy, impatience, and the hke. In vain, therefore, hast thou entered the holy order, and aU thy good works are useless.' If at that time I had rightly understood the words of Paul, ' the flesh lusteth against the spirit,' and ' these are contrary the one to the other,' I should not have so afflicted myseK ; but as I am wont to do now, I should have reflected, ' Martin, thou wilt never be altogether without sin, because thou art yet in the flesh, and therefore wilt feel its struggle, according to that word of Paul, ' the flesh striveth against the spirit.' Despair not, therefore, but resist that thou fulfil not its desire; and then thou art not under the ■law.'" 2 All this worked upon an awe of sacred things and a vivid perception of their treniendous reality which perhaps more than anything else made Luther what he was. It was not merely that he was a sincere and unquestioning behever ; he saw and felt the grandeur of God ; and the feeling of the Infinite and Eternal took entire possession of him. But he 1 " To Dr. Staupitz have I often =" Erl. Oi^p. v. a. vol. vi. p. 364 (Bi confessed, not about women, tut the real votis moTMSticis) ; Ep. ad Gal. vol. knots " (sondern die rechten Knoten). iii. p. 20 sj. ; Coll. vol. ii. p. 352. T. T. vol. iii. p. 135. i6o LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. was not drawn to God : he stood afar off, and was filled with terror. When celebrating his first mass, he was so overcome with fear that he would have fled from the altar had not the prior prevented him. Once, when taking part in a Corpus Christi procession at Eisleben, in which Staupitz carried the Host, he was seized with sudden terror, the sweat broke out upon him, and he thought that he should faint out of sheer anguish. " Ah," wisely said his friend and Superior, " your thoughts are not Christ ; Christ does not terrify but console." Cochlaeus has a story, which, although plainly told in an unfriendly spirit, is too like many others better vouched for to be rejected as improbable. Mass was beiug celebrated in the convent church, and the Gospel was read of the casting out of the deaf and dumb devil, when Luther, suddenly falling to the ground, cried out, " It is not I, it is not I." ^ All his life he was subject to beiug, as it were, carried out of him- self by some absorbing thought, or strong religious emotion. Melanchthon relates how he once saw him, in the midst of a doctrinal disputation, throw himself upon a bed in the next room, and repeat over and over agaiu, mixed with words of prayer,, the sentence, " He has concluded all under sin, that he might have mercy upon all." But nothing of this kind is more striking than his own confession. " And I also know a man who declared that he had often gone through these pains, certainly for a very small space of time, yet so great and so hellish as neither tongue can tell, nor pen write, nor one who has not experienced them can believe, so that if they had gone on to the end, or lasted for half, yea, for the tenth part of an hour, he would have perished utterly, and all his bones would have been reduced to ashes." No wonder that, under such circumstances, he persuaded himself that he had defiled his baptismal garment. JSTo wonder that he could not bear to look upon picture or image of Christ. No wonder that he turned away from a God whom it was impossible to placate, to implore the intercession of human -hearted saints. " St, Anna," he says, " was my idol." He had a special devo- 1 Cochlaeus, p. 2. DUngersheim von was Professor of Holy Writ in the Ochsenfakrt also alludes to this story convent at Erfurt. Seidemann, iMther- as early as 1530, basing it on the Iriefe, p. 12. authority of Dr. John Nathin, who IV HOW HE FOUND PEACE i6i tion to the Virgin. He chose twenty -one saints, three of whom, in turn, he invoked at his daily mass, and so completed the cycle every week. But it was all in vain. " When I was the most devout, I went a doubter to the altar, a doubter I came away from it ; if I had confessed my penitence, I still doubted, had I not, I was in despair." " I had almost died of despair," he says in another place, " if Staupitz had not rescued me."^ The precise steps of the process by which Luther's soul at last emerged into light and peace are past recovery. We see him struggling ia the slough of despond, sometimes fancy- ing that he had reached firmer ground, sometimes falling into deeper mire, with now this hand, now that, held out to help him. We have heard how the Master of the Novices reminded him that God had commanded His children to hope. A name- less old man, mentioned by Melanchthon, referred him to the article of the Creed, " I believe in the forgiveness of sins," and tpld him — an interpretation greatly strengthened by a passage in a sermon of St. Bernard's — that he was to put faith in it, not only as a general fact, but as one applicable to his own case. But his chief helper was Staupitz. The counsel of his Vicar seems to have been at once so tender and so judicious as irresistibly to suggest the conclusion that he had been in a similar plight himself and had passed through the same valley of the shadow. At first, indeed, when Luther went to him in confession, he repelled him with,^ " Master Martin, I under- stand you not." " Then thought I," says Luther, " no one has struggles and temptations, but only thou. Then was I as a dead body. At last Dr. Staupitz addressed me at table, when I was so sorrowful and beaten down, and said, ' Brother Martin, why art thou so sorrowful?' Then said I, 'What will become of me ? ' Said he, ' Do you not know that such temptations are good and needful for you, else will no good come of you ? ' " This seems to have been the beginning of better things. Staupitz strove to call away Luther's mind from ^ Erl. Ojop. Lat. vol. vi. pp. 158, 296 (EauspostilU) ; iUd. vol. ix. p. 291 {Eiharr. in Genesin) ; Coll. vol. iii. pp. (Kirchenpostille) ; ibid. xliv. p. 127 169, 184 ; T. T. vol. i. p. 409 ; vol. ii. {Predigten ueber etzliche Kap. des Ev, p. 164; Melanchthon, Corp. Bef. vol. vi. p. 158 ; Weimar, vol. i. p. 557 ^ A slightly different account {Eesolutiones) ; Erl. D.S. vol. iv. p. 69 given, De "W. vol. iv. p. 187. M 1 62 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. constant self- questioning and petty scrupulosity. Probably he was the confessor who said to him, after a recapitulation of many small offences, " Thou art a fool, God is not angry with thee, it is thou who art angry with God." Once Luther wrote to him, " Oh, my sins, my sins, my sins ! " and received for an answer, " Thou wUt be without sins, and yet hast no true sins. Christ is the forgiveness of genuine sins, murder of parents, public blasphemy, contempt of God, adultery — these are true sins." Perhaps it is to this that Luther alludes in a letter to Spalatin, written as late as 1544. "Thus was my Staupitz wont formerly to console me in my sorrow. Thou wishest, he said, to be a sham sinner, and to have Christ as a sham Sa^ietur. Thou must accustom thyself to the thought that 'thou art a real sinner, and that Christ is a real Saviour ; the doings of God are neither unreal nor absurd ; He is not jesting with us in sending His Son and dehvering Him up for us." ' But this appeal to what may be called the common sense of conscience would have availed little without some means of putting conscience to rest, and setting the Godward will in happy motion. A phrase which Staupitz is said to have often used paints the situation vividly. " The law of God says to us men, 'Here is a high mountain, thou must over it.' Then says the flesh and presumption, ' I will over.' Where- upon conscience, 'Thou canst not.' 'Then I will let it alone,' answers last of all despair." What outlet from this difficulty ? Another word of Staupitz's supplies the answer. " More than a thousand times," he was wont to say, " I have vowed to God that I would be more righteous, but I have never performed what I vowed. From this time forth I will never again make any such vow, because experience has taught me that I cannot perform it. Unless, therefore, God is appeased and propitious to me for Christ's sake, and will give me a last hour, desired and happy, when I must depart out of this miserable hfe, I cannot stand with all my vows and good works." But if the work of pleasing God had been done, if the divine justice had been satisfied by another, then 1 Melanchthon, Corp. Be/, vol. vi. p. 169 ; T. T. vol. iii. pp. 135, 136 ; vol. ii. p. 23 ; De "W. vol. v. p. 680. JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH __^ 163 for the first time the will, hiving shaken off the burthen that had so long weighed upon and benumbed it, might joyfully enter upon the path of obedience. Only believe and the terror vanishes, the fetters are struck off. The very sense of liberation is new hope and fresh life. The root of true peni- tence is seen to be in the love of that very divine justice which once showed itseK so terrible. It was in this form of the doctrine of justification by faith alone that Luther first found a way of egress from his troubles. Once having received the idea from Staupitz, he began to discern it every- where—in the New Testament, in the works of Augustine, even in phrases scattered through the Fathers and Schoolmen. We should make a mistake in supposing that he developed the doctrine at this time into anything like philosophical complete- ness,^ or that he was at all conscious of having made a discovery in Scripture of which the Church might possibly not approve. It is not likely that the purely intellectual side of the matter was that most prominent in his mind. He Kad been bound, and he was free ; wretched, and he was happy ; entangled in a net of scrupulosity, and he was able to rejoice in " the exceeding broad commands " of God. It was only at a later period that he began to find out the irreconcilability of this central doctrine with much in the system of the Church to which he still clung : the immediate result was that as the one took firmer possession of him the other gradually faded out of his life. "We are yet a long way even from Luther's first modified revolt against Eome and the excesses of the indulgence.^ It is a' part of the same fact that Staupitz discouraged Luther from trying to plumb the deep things of faith. As is ^ See a remarkable passage in the prove that Luther has here made a preface to the first volume of his mistake; and, of course, it is possible collected works, dated March 1545 (Erl. that, writing a year before his death of Qpp. V. a. vol. i. p. 22), in which he what took place twenty-six years before, expressly says that it was not till 1519, his memory had failed him ; but it is after his negotiations with Miltitz, that, also true that all his other statements applying himself a second time to the as to this particular point are undated, interpretation of the Psalms, he found and it is indisputable that he advanced out the Pauline signification of the to the position, which he finally took up, phrase "justice of God," and appro- only slowly, and with much hesitation, hended what was meant by "the just ^ T. T. vol. ii. p. 48 ; Erl. Ep. ad shall live by faith." Kostlin (iufter's Gal. vol. iii. p. .21 ; D.S. vol. xlviii. Theologie, vol. i. p. 49) tries hard to p. 201 [Aushguiig des Ev. Joh.) l64 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. almost always the case with such minds in such circumstances, speculations upon " fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," laid their fascination upon him, and ministered to his distress. "Why, say men under temptation of Satan, listen to the Gospel, when all depends upon predestination ? Then Staupitz consoled me with these words, ' Why torturest thou thyself with these speculations ? Look at the wounds of Christ, and His blood shed for thee; from them will predestination shine forth.' " " In predestination," said Luther himself, " we forget God, then the Laudate ceases and the Blasphemate begins. Tor in Christ all treasures are hidden ; and out of Christ all are shut up." There is not only no attempt here to form a system, but there is the tacit acknowledgment that the formation of a system is inexpedient, if not impossible. It is a simple looking to Christ ; a belief that He has already done for the soul all that can or need be done, without definition, without theory, with- out rounding off of conceptions, or reconciliation of difficulties. The point of view is essentially mystic, and the mystic ceases wh^e the dogmatist begins.-' So far, and for many years more, Staupitz and Luther walked hand in hand; and Staupitz, as we have seen, never left the Catholic Church, and died at last in her high places. And we may confidently affirm that nothing that Luther had yet thought or said at all touched his allegiance to Eome: the conflict and the victory had all been within himself. He began to preach, though unwillingly, and with much fear, being compelled to do so by Staupitz ; he even heard a few con- fessions. It is fair to conclude, from what we know of his after life, though there is no direct evidence on the subject, that what peace he attained to was not unbroken, that his doubts and difficulties recurred, and that periods of gloom alternated with times of happy confidence. But the great inspiration of his life had now taken possession of him, and he was never really unfaithful to it. He bought a Hebrew dictionary, as if to study the Old Testament in the original. He probably did not make much progress with the language ; Greek in any case was a later acquisition. According to his own account, he remained a loyal and devoted subject of the 1 Erl. Ojpp. Lat. vol. vi. p. 2a6 {Enarr. in Genesin) ; Coll. vol. i. p. 80. IV FROM ERFURT TO WITTENBERG 165 Pope. He calls himself " a most mad Papist" ; " so drunken, so drowned in the Papal dogmas as to be ready to slay, if I could, or to consent and co-operate with the slayers of all who detracted from the obedience due to the Pope by a single syllable." But at the very moment that he sajrs " ex animo, I held none but the common opinions of Pope and Councils and Universities," he goes on, "Although many of these things appeared to me absurd, and quite alien from Christ, I refrained my thoughts for more than the ten years of which Solomon speaks." One day he found in the convent library a book which bore the abhorred name of John Hus, and opened it, curious to see what the arch -heretic would say. "There I truly found so much that I was amazed that a man who could write so Christianly and so powerfully should have been burned. But because his name was so cruelly condemned, that I thought the walls would become black, and the sun lose his shining for whoever thought well of Hus — I shut the book and went- away with a wounded heart, comforting myself, however, with such thoughts as these, — Perhaps he wrote thus before he became a heretic ; — for I did not then know the history of the Council of Constanz." But if the leaven of freedom was already working, it was in secret. Men augured great things of him. John Nathin — we have the fact on the authority of a bitter opponent — spoke of him as another Paul, miraculously converted by the direct interposition of Christ. No shadow of suspicion rested upon the orthodoxy of his faith or the purity of his character ; and a great ecclesiastical career seemed to open before him.'' y In the autumn of 1508 Luther was invited by Staupitz to remove to the Augustinian convent at Wittenberg, and to become a teacher in the University founded in that town six years before by Frederick the "Wise, Elector of Saxony. It was not only a momentous but an unexpected turn in his life. In one of his earliest extant letters he apologises to his friend John Braun of Eisenach for having left Erfurt too suddenly to say good-bye. His work began with the winter half-year of 1 Ratzeberger, p. 47 note; Coll. vol. opera sua) ; ibid. vol. v. p. 400 {Con- iii. p. 109 ; De W. vol. ii. p. 203 ; futatio rationis Latomianae) ; D. S. Erl. Ep. ad Gal. vol. i. p. 107 ; 0pp., vol. Ixv. p. 81 (Nachlese) ; Seidemann, V. a., vol. i.'p. 16' {Praefatio M. L. in Lutherbriefej p. 11. 1 66 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. 1508-1509. He was to teach philosophy, which " he would only too willingly," he said, " exchange for theology." But he had now found the place in which he was to spend all the rest of his days, and the circumstances in the midst of which he was to do his life's work.-' Wittenberg, a town which lies close to the Elbe, though not actually upon it, was the ancient capital of Electoral Saxony. In the way of situation or of natural beauty, it has nothing to recommend it. It stands in the midst of sandy heaths, which stretch in flat and monotonous barrenness for many miles around it. No hills break the level line of the horizon, nor is there any rural richness in the landscape to make up for the lack of more striking beauty. After it became famous as a seat of learning, its name was fancifully declared to be equivalent to " Hill of "Wisdom " ; but it was really derived from the white sandhills which form the banks of the Elbe. Even now it consists of little more than one street, perhaps three- quarters of a mile in length, extending from what was once the Elster Gate — outside of which Luther burned the Pope's bull — at one end, to the Castle and the Castle Church at the other. Not far from the Elster Gate, on the left-hand side, is the Augustinian convent ; a little beyond it Melanch- thon's house; then the street expands into a square or market- place, surrounded by handsome old houses, and having the Eathhaus in the midst. Looking from~ this square, now adorned with statues of Luther and Melanchthon, the visitor sees the twin towers of the Parish Church rising from another open space, to which access is gained by a covered way, passing through which he finds himself before a worn and battered edifice, bearing frequent marks of alternate ruin and repair, and by its side a Chapel of Corpus Christi, also dating from the ages of faith. From the market-place the main line of street again leads to what remains of the Castle, the faqade of which, flanked by two massive and truncated towers, looks out upon the open country. Attached to this is the Castle Church, a building which has fared far worse in the frequent wars of Germany than its parochial sister. Some of its monuments, the graves of Luther and Melanchthon, and the 1 De W. vol. i. p. 6. IV WITTENBERG IN 1508 167 bronze effigies of Electors Prederick and John, are happily intact ; but there is very little in the existing church upon which the living eyes of the Eeformer can have rested. This, with one or two side streets of little importance, and some stately burgher houses, to which recollections of the Eeforma- tion still cling, makes up the Wittenberg of to-day.— Its University was incorporated with that of Halle in 1817, and a seminary for Protestant preachers only imperfectly supphes its place. The careless traveller, if ever he sought it out in its sandy solitude, would look upon it as a very ordinary North German town of the third class ; its architecture is not particu- larly interesting, and all that remains to it is an air of old- world respectability, which does not reach to splendour. It requires an effort to recollect that ia the first half of the sixteenth century it could put forward a better claim to be the intellectual centre of Europe than Paris or Bologna or Oxford. In 1508, however, Wittenberg was httle better than a poverty-stricken village. ' It had been a favourite residence of the Ascanian dynasty of Saxon princes which died out in 1422. Many of them were buried in the Franciscan Church, while the Castle Church, originally built in 1306, had been refounded between thirty and forty years later, by Eudolph I., as a place of worship and interment for himself and his descendants. But when the House of Wettiu succeeded to the Electoral dignity, Wittenberg ceased to bfe an object of preference ; the Castle was allowed to fall into decay, and the town had no longer anything to distinguish it from others of hke unimportance, until, in 1502, Prederick the Wise took the first steps towards making it the seat of a university. Christopher Seheurl, a young jurist of Niirnberg, who, in 1507, was invited to become Professor of Law at Wittenberg, had previously, in 1505, delivered before the University of Bologna, in which he was pursuing his studies, a flowery oration in praise of Germany in general, and the Saxon princes in particular. In this he declared, among other things, that Frederick had found Wittenberg a city of brick, and had left it a city of marble. But unless this was a conscious oratorical flourish, Seheurl must have been wofully disappointed 1 68 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. when he arrived at Wittenberg. Myconius, describing it as it was, not long afterwards, says, " Up to this time Wittenberg was a poor insignificant town ; little, old, ugly, low, wooden houses, more like an old village than a town." Even in 1513 it counted only three hundred and fifty-six rateable houses. Luther must have found it a strong contrast to wealthy, busy, luxurious Erfurt. He says that it was on the further verge of civilisation, a traveller that went a little way on would be in the midst of barbarism.. The people were rude in manners, careless of learning, unsusceptible to Gospel teaching. Saxony had the reputation of being the most drunken part of Germany, Wittenberg of being the most drunken town in Saxony. Scheurl told the same tale when he arrived at the city of his hopes ; " the people," he said, " were above measure drunken, rude, and given to revelling." Presently all this was idealised by enthusiastic children of the Eeform; Wittenberg became ^ another Zion, and an etymology, more pious than scientific, which Luther himself did not disdain to countenance, discovered an identity in name between the villages round Jerusalem and those in the neighbourhood of the Saxon city. But a first impression, though long obliterated, often returns to mind, and Luther found a rude and unmalleable element in Wittenberg to the very last.^ To understand the circumstances under whieh the new University was founded, we must take up at a remoter point the history of the Saxon House of Wettin. In the middle years of the fifteenth century it was represented' by the Elec- tor Frederick and his brother WiUiam, Landgrave of Thuringia. The latter died without issue ; Frederick was the father of two boys, Ernest and Albert, who are memorable in German history as having been, in their childhood, stolen by Kunz von Kaufungen, though safely restored, after a day or two's fright, to their parents. These lads were the progenitors respectively of what are known as the Ernestine and Alber- tine lines of Saxon princes. The territories of the House fell ' Stier, Wittenberg im Miltelalter, dem Weisen, p. 3 ; Myconius, Hist. Eef. p. 14 ; Stier, Die Schlosskirche zu p. 27 ; Mathesius, p. 206 B ; Coll. vol. Wittenberg, p. 4 ; Von Soden, Beiirage iii. pp. 101, 102 ; T. T. vol. i. pp. 16, zur Geschichte der Befonnation, i^i. 10; 65; vol. iv. p. 672; Brl. D.S. vol. Scheurl, Briefbuch, vol. 1. p. 44 ; xxviii. p. 140 (Fom Missbrauch der Schmidt, Wittenberg vmter K. Friedrich Messe) ; Kbstlin, M. L. p. 91. IV THE ELECTOR FREDERICK 169 into three main divisions : Electoral Saxony, of which Witten- berg may be taken as the capital ; the Misnian land, of which Meissen, Dresden, and Leipzig were the chief towns ; and the fairer and more fertile Thuringia, in which stood Eisenach, "Weimar, Jena. Over these the princes ruled, some- times conjointly, sometimes in pursuance of formal family divisions, the head of the Ernestine branch always, ta virtue of his seniority, retaining the electoral dignity and territory. At the 'beginning of the sixteenth century Frederick, surnamed the Wise, was Elector of Saxony. His brother John, who afterwards succeeded him in the Electorate, reigned by his side, in complete fraternal amity, over the Thuringian territory, which they held in common. The Misnian land, perhaps the richest portion of the whole inheritance, had for its ruler Duke George, sometimes called the Bearded, the son of the little Albert whom Kunz von Kaufungen stole. But a close friend- ship united the two branches of the House, and the obliga- tions of kindred were fully acknowledged.^ In 1502 Frederick was thirty -seven years of age, a popular ruler in Saxony, and gradually making his way to recognition as the ablest and, after the Emperor, the most powerful of German princes. He had been educated at the chapter school of Grimma, where he learned to read, and, in a somewhat imperfect way, to speak Latin and French. The connection of the whole family with the Church was unusually close. Of Frederick's younger brothers one, Albert, was Elector and Archbishop of Mainz ; another, Ernest, Arch- bishop of Magdeburg and Administrator of Halberstadt. Frederick himself was fuU of the piety of his age. The last years of the fifteenth century were, in Germany, years of an increased fervour of rehgious faith and practice, in which he bore his part. In 1493, accompanied by Duke Christian of Bavaria and a large retinue, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, receiving there the honour of knighthood, and bringing back a plentiful store of relics. In the same spirit he rebuilt and re-endowed the Castle Church of Wittenberg, which was completed in 1499, and solemnly consecrated in 1502, by the Cardinal Legate Eaymond, Bishop of Gurk. '' Bottiger-Flathe, GeschicMe von Sachsen, vol. i. p. 385 seq. I70 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. This building, which, in accordance with its purpose as a private chapel of the Electoral family, consisted only of a vaulted choir, unsupported by pillars and without transepts, he designed to make the religious centre-point of his dominions, and with that view enriched it with an extraordinary collec- tion of relics. The number, according to a contemporary list, amounted to 5005, and among them was everything that a fanciful and childish superstition could suggest as worthy of reverence. Once a year, on the Monday after Miser icordias, these were solemnly exposed to the view of pUgrims, who ^ were attracted in great numbers to the show by large promises of indulgences. Ten thousand masses were solemnised in the church every year. It was calculated that a pilgrim who knew how to make the most of his opportunities could obtain indulgence for 1443 years. Cardinal Eaymond himself offered a hundred days' indulgence for every Paternoster said on Frederick's behalf^ Nothiag, therefore, could be farther from Frederick's thought in founding a university than that it should become in any sense a centre of action against the Church. Not only was his orthodoxy beyond reproach, but his procedure shows that he was not conscious of any dissatisfaction with existing methods of thought or teaching. His principal ad-, visers in the matter were Staupitz and Martin Pollich of Mellerstadt, or Mellrichstadt, the physician who had attended him to the Holy Land. Had it not been for Luther's subse- quent rebellion, Staupitz would never have been known except as a Vicar of the Augustinian Congregation, who was zealous for conventual observance, and touched by the old Catholic mysticism of Germany. Pollich, who was already Doctor of Medicine and of Philosophy, and who, after the University was foimded, added to these a third degree in Divinity, was a man of many-sided cxilture, one of the older generation of humanists, and known to be opposed to some of the absurd extravagances of the scholastic theology. Frederick's chief motive seems to have been a desire to provide higher ^ Spalatin, Friedrich der Weise, p. Hrche, p. 8 ; Schmidt, wSi supra, p. 22. For a, curious account of Frede- 15 ; Corp. Eef. vol. i. p. 219 ; Kbstlin, rick's pilgrimage see the same work, M. L. vol. i. p. 93. Beilage, vol. i. p. 76 ; Stier, Schloss- THE UNIVERSITY OF WITTENBERG 171 teaching within his own dominions, a duty which it was said that the Diet of Worms in 1495 had declared to be incum- bent on every Elector. Leipzig, where a university had existed since 1409, was ih the part of Saxony which, by a partition made in 1485, had fallen to the Albertine line. Erfurt, as we have seen, was an almost free city, leaning more upon the Archbishops of Mainz than upon the Electors of Saxony. No site for the new institution, therefore, seemed to be so fit as Wittenberg. Connected with the Castle Church was a weU-endowed Chapter or Stift, to the members of which might be entrusted definite duties of teaching. It was in all likelihood Staupitz who suggested that the Augustinian con- vent could be turned to the same account. The Franciscans, who also were estabhshed in Wittenberg, held altogether aloof.^ It was no unusual thing that a new university should be thus closely connected with the Church, or that the funds for its endowment should be provided by -a kind of half seculari- sation of ecclesiastical revenues. Education of every kind was so completely in the hands of the clergy, that the application of Church lands and tithes to the support of university teaching was not looked upon as diverting them from their original purpose. Vienna, Heidelberg, Koln, Erfurt, as well as later foundations, Basel, Greifswald, Ingolstadt, and Eostock, were all provided with an income in the same way. At the same time Wittenberg was one of the first German universities which was basBd, not upon a Papal bull, but upon an Imperial charter. In the document, dated July 6th, 1502, which gave permission to teach and grant degrees in all faculties, Maxi- milian declares the protection of all sciences to belong to the head of the Empire, whose duty it is "to provide for the happy progress of knowledge, good arts, and liberal studies, that they, drawn from the fountain of Divine Wisdom, may make our subjects more apt to the administration of the common-weal, to foresight in the provision of things necessary to life." Nevertheless, there was no intention of dispensing with the blessing of the Church. Cardinal Eaymond, in an instrument which alludes to the Imperial charter already 1 Losoher, Reformations- Acta, vol. i. p. 87. 172 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. , granted, confirmed the foundation of the University, and, in virtue of the plenary powers entrusted to him by Pope Alexander VI, especially established in it the privilege of granting degrees in Theology and Canon Law. But this did not satisfy the pious scruples of Frederick, and a bull issued by Pope Julius II on the 20th of June 1507 once more confirmed all that had already been done, and gave the highest ecclesiastical sanction to the endowment of the University out of the property of the Church.^ This was chiefly effected by a union between the Univer- sity and the College of All Saints which had its seat in the Castle Church. Its head was converted into a Dean ; under him were an Archdeacon and Canon, each of whom enjoyed a separate prebend or benefice, and each had to undertake fixed teaching duties in the University. They were in all twelve : three Theologians, four Jurists, five Masters of Arts who had received a philosophical training. Other endowments followed upon this ; both Frederick and his brother and successor John kept an open hand to the University which they had founded. In 1508 the statutes by which it was to be governed were enacted ; they had been drawn up by Scheurl, who received ten gulden as his re- muneration. They did not proceed from the University itself; they were a code of laws enacted by the Elector, upon the advice of his councillors, and imposed by him upon the new iastitution. They established the University as a corporation, with a Eector at its head, divided into four faculties, each of which wa3 presided over by a Dean. There were no "nations"; unconscious of the coming concourse from all parts of Europe, the founders thought only of a High School for Electoral Saxony and Thuringia. What was peculiar was the institution of four " studii generalis Eeformatores," the Eector and three others, who were to stand at the head of everything in the Elector's place, and to whom he gave "supreme and absolute power of every kind." But this office seems to have fallen into decay before twenty years had passed; probably ^ Muther, Die Wittenberger Uhiver- len der Universitdt zu,WiUenherg, vol. sifats-und Facultdtsstatuten vom Jahre i. ch. i. 1508 (Prolegomena); Grohmann, Anna- IV THE UNIVERSITY OF WITTENBERG 173 the dignity of those who held it was overshadowed by the solid authority of Luther and Melanchthon. The connection of the University with established religion was drawn very close ; the Castle Church was its church ; its pulpit the place where its exercises were read ; its door the board to which academical notices were affixed. The University was solemnly consecrated to God and His immaculate Mother. Augustine was adopted as the patron saint of the whole institution ; Paul of the theological, Ivo of the legal, Cosmas and Damian of the medical, Catharine of the arts faculty. In some of these names it is possible to discern a secret omen of what was coming.'' Four hundred and sixteen students matriculated ru 1502, under the rectorate of Martin PoUich. In 1503 this number fell to 390; in 1504 to 271; in 1505 to 127. In 1506 a pestilence compelled the removal of the University to Herzberg, and it was not tiU 1508 that the number of matri- culations again rose to 179. In May 1507 Christopher Scheurl was elected Eector. ■ Among the records of an office which he is pompously said to have filled " with the utmost dignity, magnificence, humanity and the general good-will," we find that he forbad members of the University to frequent taverns for the purpose of drinking ; and imposed a penalty of haK a gulden upon the wearing of arms. But we possess a more valuable rehc of Scheurl's year of office than this, in a list of lectures for the year 1507, which he published with an appropriate preface. In this he describes Wittenberg as a place of a wonderful mildness of air; free, by God's grace, from every epidemic ; fuU of kindly citizens. A year's board may be had for eight gold gulden ; and, by the niunificence of the Princes, degrees are conferred gratis.^ By favour of the Supreme Pontiff and the Emperor, Wittenberg possesses all the privileges which are enjoyed by Bologna, Padua, Pavia, Perugia, Paris, Leipzig. Finally, the good man breaks almost into a rhapsody: "If only you will believe me, who have myself been' educated in Italy, and have travelled over almost the whole of it, so many, and so variously learned men ' Muther, uU mpra; Schmidt, p. 13 5), this privilege was granted only for sea ■ Grohmann, vol. i. p. 103. three years It had apparently ceased ^2 According to Grohniann (vol. i. p. before Luther's graduation, mde p. 184. / 174 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. neither Padua possesses, nor Bologna herself, the mother of studies." The ensuing programme of lectures, however, hardly bears out the boast. In theology there are five professors, of whom three are known to us by name, Staupitz, Pollich, and Trutvetter. In canon law there are seven, of whom Scheurl himself is one ; in Imperial law three, Scheurl's name appearing again. There are four teachers of medicine, among whom Pollich is once more enumerated. Amsdorf, whom we shall learn to know as the most devoted of Lutherans, heads a list of nine philosophical teachers, of whom the second is a man even more famous in the history of the Eeformation, Carlstadt. How Little the University was yet emancipated from old methods of teaching may be inferred from the fact that the former is announced as lecturiug " in via Scoti," the latter "in via S. Thomae." When we come to polite letters, we find that Balthazar Phacchus proposes to read Virgil's Eneid, Valerius Maximus, and Sallust's Jugur- thine War; Scheurl, Suetonius; George Sybutus, Silius Italicus, and a poem of his own on the site of Wittenberg. And that is all. There is no Greek, no Hebrew, no history, and only such physics as philosophy and medicine can provide between them. A Hst of five extraordinary lecturers in philosophy, and as many " in htteris secularibus " — the sub- jects of whose instruction are not given — closes the meagre programme.^ The transference of Luther from Erfurt to Wittenberg was part of a general policy. Frederick and his adviser Stau- pitz did their best to attract teachers from the older to the younger university. Marschalk, whom we have already learned to know as one of the elder humanists of Erfurt, joined the new institution in the year of its foundation, and remained at Wittenberg till brighter prospects drew him, first to Branden- burg, and then to Eostock. In 1507 he was followed by Jodocus Trutvetter of Eisenach, Luther's old teacher, a man who stood in the highest esteem as a lecturer on philosophy. He was at once elected Eector, and made Archdeacon of the College of All Saints on the new foundation. He remained ' Fbrstemann, Alh. Acad. Fit. p. 1 Literatur bes. des XVI. Jahrhunderts, seq., 21 ; Strobel, Neuc Beytriige zur vol. iii. pt. ii. p. 57. THE SPIRIT OF THE UNIVERSITY 175 till 1510, when he was chosen Archdeacon of the Cathedral at Erfurt, and decided, to the displeasure of the Elector, to go back to his old academical allegiance. About the same time Henning Gode, the chief law teacher at Erfurt, left it in consequence of the riots of 1509-1510, and entered himself at Wittenberg. He was received with open arms, was made Provost of the College of All Saints, a post which he held till his death, and lectured upon canon law. He was one of the last representatives of old opinions at Wittenberg, a man of great legal learning and deserved influence, who was chosen by Frederick to accompany him to the election and coronation of Charles V, and who lies buried with his master and the great Eeformers in the church over which he presided, the last of its Catholic Provosts. We know that Trutvetter had been Luther's teacher ; it is not impossible that during the few months in which he studied law, the future Eeformer had been the pupil of Gode. At all events, he found well-known Erfurt faces in Wittenberg, and could not have felt wholly strange there from the first.^ On the whole, the intellectual atmosphere of the Witten- berg to which Luther came in 1508 is fairly clear to us. The ] teachers whose names we know belong to the class of men ' upon whom the new learning had begun to make an impres- / sion, though it had yet done little to wean their minds from traditional methods of thought. The more pronounced human- ism of Mutian, of Eoban Hess, of Crotus, of Petreius, develops itself at Erfurt in almost entire independence of such influ- ences as prevail at Wittenberg. Hermann von dem Busche delivers an oration at the opening of the University, and enters his name upon its books, but we hear no more of him ; and it is not till 1510 that Ulrich von Hutten, in the course of his wanderings, pays it a passing visit. Staupitz, Trutvetter, Scheurl, Gode, PolUch, had none of them broken with the past, either consciously or unconsciously ; all we can say of them is, 1 that they were men not incapable of movement and wilHng to j turn their faces towards new light. Carl^tadt, afterwards so 1 Kampschulte, vol. i. p. 53 ; Er- Plitt, Jod. Trutvetter, pp. 36, 41 ; hard, vol. iii. p. 411 ; Forstemann, Stier, Schlosskirche zu W. pp. 58, Alhum, Acad. Vit. vol. i. pp. 20, 31 ; 60. 176 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. furious an innovator, makes his first appearance at Witten- berg as a hard and dry scholastic, lecturing " in via S. Thomae," , and not reading the Bible, till he had been for eight years a Doctor of Theology. Amsdorf writes to Spalatin in 1518 that he had then hardly begun to read genuine books of theology, and should not have done so, had not " Martin with his own money bought him Augustine and sent it to his house." " Led by his advice, his requests, his earnest persuasions, I have left the studies which I Hked : I have left logic, I have left the logical theologians, I have left philosophy — but with the utmost regret : so little delight did I take in Augustine, Jerome, and all doctors of that kind, whom I thought to be mere gram- marians, for indeed they were and are still unknown to me. Of a truth, I thought that the highest wisdom was hidden in Scotus and Gabriel (Biel) and their like." It was the life of Erfurt over again, before the new humanism had laid hold of it.-^ All we know of Luther's first academical work at Witten- berg is,, that he read lectures on Aristotle's Dialectics and Physics, meanwhile not neglecting his private study of the Scriptures. Among the many things in this period of his life which are hidden from us, is the mood in which he entered upon his new career. It was, at least in part, one of depres- sion and humiliation. He probably came to Wittenberg as an act of monastic obedience. He certainly did not look upon his removal from Erfurt as a promotion. There was a custom, half solemn, half burlesque, at the German universities of the time, which was called a " deposition." The new student, the " Bachant," fresh from the hardships and coarseness of his school, or possibly his wandering in search of instruction, was received at a meeting of his fellows, presided over by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. A speech was made to him (one delivered by Luther himself on such an occasion is pre- served in the TahU Talk), in which he was jocosely and yet seriously admonished to lay aside aU his evil ways, and to conform himself to the decencies of academical life, and a 1 lAber Decanorimi Fac. Theol. Strauss, U. v. Huttem, p. 54 ; Theol. Acad. Viteb. ed. Forstemann, p. 1 ; St. u. Krit. 1878, p. 698. Album, p. 2 ; Coll. vol. ii. p. 214 ; IV DOCTOR OF THEOLOGY 177 series of comic ceremonies was closed by pouring a glass of wine upon his head. Luther afterwards said that when he went from Erfurt to Wittenberg he was " deponiert." His meaning can only be that his entry upon what turned out to be the solemn business of his life 'was accompanied by experiences that were not wholly pleasant, though what these were it is impossible now to say. His real work in Wittenberg did not begin till after his return from Eome in 1512.'- The events of Luther's life between Oct^ober 1508, when he first went to Wittenberg, and October 1512, when he took his doctor's degree, are involved in some obscurity.- To throw upon them what light is possible, I must describe the com- plicated process by which, in the German universities of that day, a student attained the rank of Doctor in Theology. Having passed through the philosophical curriculum, which was the indispensable preliminary to graduation in any special faculty, he became in the first place " Baccalaureus Biblicus," or "tanquam ad Biblia," and was empoweredsj^in that capacity to expound the Scriptures. At this stage he remained for a ^bear, or if a monk, only* for six months, at the end of which ^1 might be admitted " Sententiarius." The meaning of this was that he was now entitled to lecture on the first two books of tlie Sentences of Peter Lombard. The next step was to become " Sententiarius Formatus," by which was conferred upon him the right of expounding^the whole work of the master of the Sentences. Then the candidate proceeded ad Ucentiam magistrandi, or the condition of a Licentiate, upon which fol- lowed, without further delay, the final admission to the degree of Master or Doctor of Theology. Now Luther, as we have seen, had taken his degrees in philosophy at Erfurt. On St. Luke's Day, 1-508, we find his name, "Fr. Martinus Liider de Mansfelt," in the list of students matriculated at Wittenberg, the third of six, who are described as Augustinians. The degree of Baccalaureus Biblicus followed on the 9th of March 1509, the entry in the Deaii'S book being accompanied by this remark: "But being called to Erfurt, he has not yet 1 Melanchthon, Corp. Mef. vol. vi. Muther, Aiis dem Universitdts -u. p. 160 ; Goll. vol. ii. pp. 16, 240 ; T. GeUhrtenleben im ZeUalter der Befor- T. vol.' ii. p. 70 ; vol. iv. p. 547 ; mation, p. 20. N 178 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. satisfied the Faculty." To this is added in Luther's own handwriting, evidently of a later date: "Nor wiU he do. Because at that time, being poor and under obedience, he had nothing. Erfurt therefore will pay." ^ Why Luther thus went back to Erfurt at the very begin- ning of his career at Wittenberg we do not know ; nor, as the Erfurt registers for those years are lost, are we able to ascer- tain his academical position there. Kolde, who has • made minute and fruitful research into the history of the Augus-. tinian order in Germany, asserts that during Luther's second stay at Erfurt he was occupied in negotiations with the German protector of the order, the Archbishop of Magde- burg, or rather with his deputy, Adolph von Anhalt, Provost of the Cathedral of Halle ; a statement which, though hardly supported by adequate evidence, sufficiently tallies with the fact that in 1511-1512 he was sent to Eome on Augustinian business. And it is certainly true that he took his doctor's degree in Wittenberg in October 1512. But where, and how, did he pass through the stages of ^aduation intermediate between bachelor and doctor ? Two still extant letters of Luther's, one of June 1514, addressed to the Prior and Fathers of his old convent, the other of December in the same year, to the Theological Faculty of the University of Erfurt, throw a little light upon this dark place. It seems that he was accused of unfaithfulness to his academical obligations in having, contrary to the statutes which he had sworn to, ob- serve, proceeded to the degree of Doctor in Theology elsewhere than at Erfurt. We need not go into the details of his de- fence. It comes out that, in a somewhat strange way, his graduation had been divided between the two universities. The first and last steps were taken at Wittenberg, the inter- mediate ones at Erfurt. We are still left without information as to Luther's abrupt abandonment of Wittenberg immediately after his first settlement there, or the reasons of his return. But it is perhaps open to us to conclude that there was a friendly rivalry between the two universities for the services 1 Jiirgens, vol. ii. p. 213 ; Lih. Dec. is March 1508, but this is evidently a p. 144 ; Statute De promotionibus, mistake for 1509. Conf. Kostlin, Alium, p. 28 ; Zib. Dec. p. 4. The Theol. St. u. Krit. 1874, p. 320 note. date here actually given by Forstemanu HIS JOURNEY TO ROME 179 of a man, who, though yet untried, was thought likely to add lustre to either.^ It has long been thought that Luther's journey to Eonie,^ which in part filled up this interval, and which I suppose to have taken place in the winter of 1511-1512, had something to do with Augustinian politics. So early a biographer as Coch- laeus represents him as having been sent thither by certain convents who differed in opinion with the Vicar, and who selected him as their advocate, because he was "sharp of mind, and bold and vehement in contradiction." When, how- ever, we recoUect that the Vicar in question was Staupitz, and that Luther was then and for some years afterwards, not only an admiring friend, but a willing instrument in his hands, the statement of Cochlaeus becomes hardly credible. And recent ^ Kolde, Martin Luther, vol. i. p. 74, who refers to Seidemann, Luther- hriefe, p. 11 ; De "W. vol. i. p. 12 ; vol. vi. p. 4. Conf. Theol. St. u. Erit. 1874, p. 319 et seg. ^ That Luther's journey to Rome was made in the autumn and winter months may be fairly inferred from allusions in his Table Talk to pome- granates {Colt. vol. i. p. 374; T. T. vol. iv. p. 677) and to grapes {T. T. vol. i. p. 181). Butwasit in 1510-1511 or in 1511-1512 ? If we could regard it as absolutely settled that the object of his journey was precisely the affair of the Augustinian order mentioned in the text, it would be decisive in favour of the latter date, as Staupitz did not publish the' bull till September 1510, , and some months must be allowed for' opposition to ripen. But there is no- thing in Melanchthon's phrase {Corp. Sef. vol. Vi. p. 160) that Luther went to Rome, propter monachorum contro- versias, or the corresponding though inaccurate account of Cochlaeus, to determine the occasion with absolute ■certainty. Luther's own testimony, so far as it is accessible to us, either in his writings or. in the Taile Tali, is chiefly though not quite uiiiformly in favour of 1510. In one place (Erl. D. S. vol. xxvi. p." 146) he says, " Anno Domini (if I am right) 1510, I was in Rome"; and again {iMd. vol. xxxii. p. 424) hi speaks of passing through Milan in the same year. " from the Table Talk may be cited in a similar sense. On the other hand, Melanchthon {Corp. Sef. vol. vi. p. 160) appears to fix 1511-1512 as the date; while Mathesius (p. 6 A), profess- ing to quote from a MS. in Luther's own hand, distinctly says 1510. But two considerations seem to make it necessary to adopt the later date. One is, that in the letter which in December 1514 Luther addressed to the Dean and Doctors of the Theolo- gical Faculty at Erfurt (De W. vol. vi. p. 5) he speaks of himself as having been one of them "for nearly a year and a half." The other is, that while it is all but certain that Luther saw Pope Julius II in Rome {Coll. vol. i. p. 165 ; T. T. vol. iv. p. 687 ; Mathesius p. 6 A), that Pontiff was absent from the city from September 1610 to the end of June 1511. It is more likely that Luther, writing many years afterwards, or in loose talk loosely reported, should make a mis- take, than that the chronological in- dications above given should lead us astray. It may be mentioned that Kostlin, after at first accepting the earlier, has settled finally upon the later date. Vide Theol. St. u. Krit. (KostUn) 1871, p. 47 et seq. ; ibid. (Kostlin) 1874, p. 321 et seq. ; ibid. (Buddensieg) 1879, p. 335 et seq. ; Zeitschrift filr Kirchengeschichte (Kolde) vol. ii. p. 460 et seq. ; ibid. (Brieger) vol, iii. p. 197 ei seq. i8o LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. researches into Augustinian history have placed the matter in its true light. Staupitz, in his anxiety to extend the principles and practice of the Congregation of the Observance over the whole of the Augustinian order in Germany, had procured a Papal Bull, by which the office of Vicar of the Congregation, and that of Saxon Provincial, were united in the same person, with the result of practically welding into one the two bodies over which they presided. More than this, he had prevailed upon the General of, the order, before the bull was published, to confer both offices on himself. To this, strange to say, objection was made, not by the laxer, but by the severer communities ; and seven convents, with that of Niirnberg at their head, appealed to Eome. It is not necessary to follow the matter into its details, which are indeed only imper- fectly known. In the autumn of 1511, if our chronological data be correct, Luther, in all probability accompanied by another Augustinian, John von Mecheln, set out for the Holy City, returning in the spring of the followiag year. It is hardly needful to say that his mission was to support the policy of Staupitz at headquarters. It is difficult to decide whether Erfurt or "Wittenberg was the starting-point of the journey. We only know that on September 10th, 1510, Luther was in Erfurt, and that on May 8th, 1512, he was again in Wittenberg.^ The travellers were expected to proceed on foot, trusting for shelter and food by the way to monastic hospitality. Luther took with him ten gold gulden ; but this was not for travelling expenses, but to pay an advocate in the Papal courts. Various local legends exist, which, if they could be trusted, would help to fix his route : it seems most likely that he took his way through Switzerland, while it is certain that ^ Coohl. p. 3 ; Kolde, Staupitz, was, on the 25th February 1512, sent p. 233 seq., p. 241 ; M. Luther, vol. by Staupitz from Salzburg to Kbln. i. p. 75 ; Kolde, Analecta Imtherana, The Wittenberg Lib. Dec, p. 10, re- pp. 3, i ; conf. Erl. 0pp. .Lat. vol. iv. cords the fact that the same J. v. p. 13 {Enarr. in Genesin) ; Zeitschrift Mecheln was admitted to the degree fur K. G. (vol. ii. p. 460 et seq.) It of D.D. on 16th Sept. 1511, and to was a rule of the order, strictly en- the Theological Faculty on the 4th of forced, that two brothers should always October. This seems to be decisive as travel together. We know that John to the date of Luther's journey, if we von Mecheln, an Augustinian monk, assume that John v. Mecheln.was his who had just returned from Rome, companion. IV? HIS JOURNEY TO ROME on his return he stopped at Augsburg. Of the duration of the journey we may form an estimate from the fact that in 1505 Nicholas Besler, also an Augustinian monk, took six weeks to get from Munich to Eome. Some few incidents of travel, some general impressions refceived by the way, survive in Luther's Table Talk and elsewhere. He felt the beauty and the fertility of Italy ; especially the fruitful plain of Lom- bardy, watered by its mighty river, and lying between two great mountain chains, struck him with admiration. He mentions the size of the grapes, the healthful properties of the pomegranates; the richness which the olives distilled from the rocks. He was much impressed by the magnificence of some of the monasteries that sheltered him ; their fasts, he said, were more luxurious than feasts in Germany. Yet the Italians were sober in comparison with his own countrymen, though at the same time arrogant, deceitful, capable of the basest crimes, full of lusts, natural and unnatural. He was enthusiastic about the splendour, the efBciency, the cleanliness of their hospitals and foundling asylums, commemorating especially those at Florence. Milan, through which he passed on his return, afforded him a surprise ; he was refused permission to say his mass there, on the ground that he was not Ambrosian, and so appears to have found out, for the first time, that the universality and identity of Catholic ritual had its exceptions. He may be supposed to have entered Eome by the Flaminian Gate — the Porto del Popolo — and tradition houses him hard by, in the Augustinian convent to which the well-known Church of St. Maria del Popolo was attached.-' Notices of Eome ate scattered pretty abundantly through Luther's Tahle, 'Talk. But it is clearly necessary to discriminate between his mood at the time and the light which after- experience threw upon his recollections. Nothiag that he saw in Italy detracted from the feeling of high- wrought enthusiasm with which he approached the Holy City. Twice at Erfurt he had made a general confession, a process which he desired 1 M. Dresser, Narratio brevis de iii. p. 35 ; T. T.lvol. i. pp. 141, 182 ; profectione M. Lutheri in uriem So- vol. iv. p. 679 ; Lauterbach, pp. 87, mam; Tkeol. St. u. Krit. 1882, p. 104,165; Erl. D.S. vol. xxxii. p. 424 550 ; Seidemann, Lutherlriefe, p. 64 ; (Kurzcs Bekenntiiiss iiom Jieiligen Sa- Coll. vol. i. pp. 121, 195, 376; vol. crdment). i82 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. to repeat and make more efficacious at Eome. So it was with great expectation of spiritual good that, when first the domes and towers of the city burst upon his sight, he fell to the ground, exclaiming, " Hail, holy Eome ! " And this appears to have been his habitual mood during the few weeks that he remained there. It is quite a mistake to suppose that the seed of Protestant rebellion, which undoubtedly lay hid ia his heart, had yet begun to germinate. There was nothing in his spiritual experiences at Erfurt which had produced in him any conscious dissatisfaction with Catholic doctrine and practice. "I was,'' he said in 1530, "like a mad saint in Eome; ran through all churches and holes ; believed everything that is lied and stunk there. I have also said more masses than one at Eome ; and while there was heartily sorry that my father and mother were yet living, so willingly would I have released them from purgatory by my masses and other excellent works and prayers. There is a saying at Eome, ' Happy the mother whose son reads a mass on the Saturday of St. John ! ' How willingly would I have made my mother happy ! But it was too thronged, and I could not get to the altar." Yet there were interruptions to this mood of exaltation. The confessors to whom he opened his conscience were very ignorant men. And when he was painfully toiling on his knees up the Santa Scala, a voice seemed to repeat to him in tones of thunder words which had followed him from Erfurt to Wit- tenberg, and from Wittenberg to Eome, " The just shall live by faith." The old doubt, whether through pilgrimage and penance really lay the way to peace, returned with irresist- ible force, and he left the labour -and the prayer incomplete.^ Naturally the external aspects of the Eternal City made a deep impression on Luther's quick and receptive mind. " At the peril of his hfe," he says, he investigated the ruins of classical Eome, then les"s pillaged and destroyed than modern eyes have seen them. He enumerates the great round of the 1 Coll. vol. i. p. 165 ; vol. iii. p. 169 ; ad, Somanos . . . explicatio, Jenae, T. T. vol. iv. p. 687 ; Lauterbach, p. 1595. He relates it in his preface on 9 note; Erl. D.S. vol. xl. p. 284 (Aus- the authority of the Refoi-mer's son legung des 117. Psalms). The character- Paul, who had heard it from his father istlc story of the Santa Scala is pre- in the year 1 544. Kostlin, M. L. vol. served by G. Mylius, Ep. D. Pauli i. p. 781. IV HIS JOURNEY TO ROME 183 Coliseum, the Pantheon, with its single eye open to the heavens, the Catacomb of' St. Calixtus with its Papal Crypt, the height of the Tarpeian rock, the Franciscan convent on the Capitol, as having fixed themselves in his memory. He saw the stately processions in which the Pope passed from church' to church. So far as we know, he was not successful in his mission, but he found the procedure of the Papal courts of law one of the few things to be praised in Eome. The police he characterises as severe and yet not' efficacious. He saw and heard much, the full significance of which he did not recognise till long afterwards, but which he knew how to describe in vivid phrase, and to use as the barb of the sharpest invective. Not for a thousand gulden, he was wont to say, would he sell his personal knowledge of Eome. Stories of the superhuman wickedness of Alexander YI were stUl going about the streets while he was there, and he could see for himself how Julius II was bathing Italy with blood. He found Cardinals held in repute as saints whose one merit it was to abstain from unnatural vices. Men said openly, that if there were a hell Eome was built over it, to which others added, that before long it must break through. In the public services of the Church there was hardly a pretence of reverence. He' heard it told as a good story, that for the words of consecra- tion men jestingly substituted " Panis es, panis manebis, viaum es, vimmi manebis." Indecent haste in celebrating the mysteries was a common thing : " Before I got to the Gospel my neighbour priest had finished his mass, and was calling to me 'Passa, Passa,' come away, come away." "Everything is laughed at in Eome," he says iu another place, " and whoever is grieved thereby is a Bon Christian, that is, a fool." And yet it would be too much to assume that he left Eome disenchanted. Such a mood as that which bid him hail the Holy City with prostrate reverence, would hardly within a month be changed to another, and a quite opposite. The charm of sacred sites, the spleiidour of ceremonies, the magic of historical association, the awe of faith throned in her central seat would still work powerfully within him. Only upon refiection would moral repulsion awaken, till as time went on, and oppositions of feeling grew more definite, the spell ceased to operate, and 1 84 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. Eome revealed herself to him as no longer the city of saints and martyrs, but the throne of Antichrist, and the sink of all iniquity. But it would be to anticipate the result of processes which were hardly begun, if we were to suppose that in 1512 Luther turned his back upon Eome, in deep disgust, and with half-developed designs of rebellion.-^ •With the autumn of 1512 we are again in clear daylight, and on firm chronological ground. Luther has come back to Wittenberg and taken up his abode in the Augustinian convent. The Prior is his old friend Wenceslaus Liak, who was at school with him at Magdeburg, and whose course has hitherto run on parallel lines with his own ; he himself fills the office of Sub-Prior. It is very probable that during his first brief stay at Wittenberg trial had been made of his preaching powers. No church in connection with the Augus- tinian convent had yet been built ; the lines for one had indeed been inarked out, but the walls hardly rose above the ground. " In the midst of these foundations," says Myconius, "stood an old chapel, built of wood and daubed over with clay, very ruinous, "and propped on all sides. It was, as I myself have seen, about thirty feet long and twenty broad. . . . On the south wall was a pulpit of old roughly hewn boards." " For all the world," he goes on to say with pardonable enthusiasm, " it had the look which the painters give to the* stable in Bethlehem, where Christ was born." It was in this humble place that Luther first established his Tame as an orator ; here, we must suppose, that the Elector heard him, greatly approving both the matter and the manner of his preaching. For when it was a question of his taking Ijis doctor's degree," and so wholly devoting himself to theology, it was Frederick who provided the necessary funds.^ Long afterwards Luther used to point out the pear tree in the convent garden under ^ Goll. vol. i. pp. 162, 163 ; vol. iii. ' ^ The receipt whicli Luther gave p. 169 ; T. T. vol. iii. p. 185 ; vol. iv. to Frederick's chamberlains for the p. 688 ; Lauterbach, p. 64 ; Mathesius, iifty gulden required for this .purpose, p. 6 ' A ; Erl. 0pp. Lat. vol. iv. p. 264 fortunately survives to contradict a (Enarr. in Genesin); ibid. D.S. vol. scandalous story, which Cochlaeus, p. 4, xxiii. p. 10 (Vorrede aufden Unterricht rather insinuates than openly affirms. der Visitatorn) • ibid. vol. xxvii. p. 90 De "W. vol. i. p. 11 ; conf. vol. vi. p. ( Von dem PapstTium zu Rom) ; ibid. vol. 3 ; Burkhardt, Luther's £riefwechsel, xxxi. pp. 327, 328 ( Von der Winkel- p. 1. messe) ; Kolde, Staupitz, p. 241. IV AT WITTENBERG ISI3-I5I7 185 which Staupitz urged the desirability of his graduation, and at last imposed it upon him, in the name of his monastic obedience. He pleaded his youth, his fragile health, his dread of the responsibility of the pulpit. He was only in his twenty- ninth year; at Paris Doctors of Theology were made only after ten years' study ; at Erfurt, not till they were fifty years of age. " Master Staupitz," he said, " it is a matter of life and death to ine. I shall not survive it a quarter of a year." But Staupitz knew with whom he had to deal, and parried the pleading with a joke. " Do you not know," he said, " that our Lord God has many great matters to settle ? So that He is in great need of wise and prudent people to help Him with their advice. Wherefore, even if you die, you must be His counsellor." Luther yielded, but against his will. He always seamed to think that he had been compelled into his vocation. " I was dragged by the hair of my head," he said once, " to the office of teaching and preaching, but had I known then what I know now, ten horses should hardly have drawn me into it." The final steps were taken between St. Francis' Day, the 4th of October 1512, and the 22nd of the same month, when he was formally admitted into the Senate of the Theological Faculty. He was evidently quite unconscious of having given any offence at Erfurt, for he invited his old 'comrades of the Augustinian convent to join in the festivities of his graduation.^ The five years between 1512»and 1517, between Luther's full resumption of work at Wittenberg and the publication of the Ninety-five Theses against indulgences, form a period of great importance in the growth of his mind. They were years of much intellectual and practical activity; He was lecturing in the University. He was preaching in the parish church at Wittenberg, often four times a day, in place of the stated minister, who was a man in infirm health. He was pursuing his Bibhcal researches with great ardour, adding meanwhile to his slender store -of attainments in Hebrew, and perhaps in 1 Myconius, Hist. Bef. p. 24 ; Me- Lauterbaeh, pp. 103, 160 ; Eri. D. S. lanch. Carp. Ref. vol. vi. p. 160 ; vol. xxxix. p. 266 {Auslegung des 82. Kolde, Staupitz, pp. 243, 356 ; Coll. ■ Psalms) ; De W. vol. 1. p. 9 ; Ub. vol. i. p. 409 ; vol. iii. pp. 109, 154 ; Dec. pp. 12, 13, 82. T. T. voL.i. p. 26; vol. ii. p. 369; 1 86 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. Greek. He was Eegent of studies in the Augustinian convent ; sorely tried, too, with the number of poor scholars who were sent to him, and for whom he was expected to find food and shelter. From 1515 to 1518 he was- District Vicar over the ten convents of Wittenberg, Dresden, Herzberg, Gotha, Salza, l^ordhausen, Sangerhausen, Erfurt, Magdeburg, and ISTeustadt ; decanus vicarius, as he called himself, or when Eisleben was added to the list, wndecies prior. Of the letters which he wrote in this capacity, enough remain to show that he filled the office with dignified and judicious efficiency ; now consoUng a despondent brother, now sternly deposing a prior who could not rule his household. In a letter addressed to Lang, dated October 1 5 1 6, he says, " I have need of almost two secretaries ; all day I do little but write letters," and then goes on to give an account of his avocations, iacluding work in the convent, in the university, at the parish church, throughout the monas- teries over which he was set. " Seldom have I sufficient time to say my hours, and to celebrate — to say nothing of my private temptations by the world, the flesh and the devil." At the same time he meets this accumulation of toil with high spirits and indefatigable energy. He cannot make up his mind to send away promising students. " Twenty-two priests, twelve young men, in all forty -one persons, subsist on our more than very scanty resources ; but God wiH provide." In the midst of all this the plague made its appearance at Wittenberg. " Thou persuadest me and Master Bartholomew," he writes in the same letter, " to fly with thee. Whither should I fly ? I hope the world wUl not come to an end if brother Martin does. The brethren, indeed, if the plague should make progress, I will disperse in every direction : I am stationed here, and my obedience forbids me to fly until I receive fresh orders. Not that I do not fear death — for we are not the Apostle Paul, but only a lecturer upon him — but I hope that the Lord will deliver me from my fear." ^ The moment at which Luther began his work in Witten- berg was propitious to his influence. Trutvetter-left the place, as we have seen, in 1510; PoUich, the first Eector of the ' Lauterbach, p. 66 ; Kolde, Staupitz, p. 264 ; De "W. vol. i. pp. 19, 28, 31, 37, 41, 42, 66, 64. SPALATIN 187 University, died in 1513 ; Link was prior of the Augustinian convent ; Lang, an old Erfurt friend, and in Greek tljg most learned of the band, had migrated to Wittenberg in 1511, and became Baccalaureus tanquam ad Bihlia in 1515. ^ "We find no specific traces of either Link's or Lang's work in the University, and the inference is that Luther was left to make his impression upon it, unimpaired by any effective rivalry. An important circumstance was the friendship which he now formed, or more probably renewed, with George Burkhardt, usually known as Spalatin. A few weeks younger than Luther, he passed from St. Sebald's school at JSTiirnberg in 1499 to the University of Erfurt, whence in 1502 he migrated to Witten- berg. Here his name is found in the first list of matriculated students. In 1505 he returned to Erfurt with the intention of studying jurisprudence, but in 1507 took orders, and be- came pastor of Hohenkirchen. Before long, however, he was recommended by Mutian to the Electoral family of Saxony as a fit person to be entrusted with the education of John Frede- rick, the only son of Duke John, and the presumptive heir to the Electorate. This appointment fixed his fate. He became chaplain, historiographer, friend, and ecclesiastical adviser both of Frederick the Wise and his successors. At the moment of which we are speaking, he was acting as tutor, not only to John Frederick, but to his cousins Otto and Ernest, Dukes of Brunswick-Llineburg, the sons of the Elector's youngest sister Margaret, young men who had matriculated "at Wittenberg in 1511. And with Luther he formed a very close and firm friendship, which lasted till the Eeformer's death. The collection of Luther's letters includes no fewer than 415 addressed to him. He is the intermediary between the Electors — especially Frederick, who never had any personal communication with Luther^ — and the Eeformers; to htm they address their requests, and he is their kindly, zealous, success- ful agent at the Court. Without himself possessing any re- markable abiKties, he knows a king of men when he sees him ; from the first he' regards Luther with unqualified admiration, 1 The date 1516 given in the Lib. (Wider Hans Wurst), "Denn ich seine Dec. p. 18, is plainly a mistake for Stimm main Lebenlang nie gehbret, X515. noch sein Angesicht gesehen, ohne zu ■ 2 Erl. D. S. vol. xxvi. p. 67 Wormes auf dem Eeichstage. " i88 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. and is faithful to him to the end. According to Lang (1515), he " revered and consulted him as an Apollo." He hardly knows whether to admire most the extent of his learning, the whole- ness of his character, or the keenness of his judgment.^ Luther had never any doubt as to what his vocation was. The business, he thought, of a Doctor of Theology was to expound the Scriptures. Already in revolt against the School- men and their master Aristotle, he passed by in sUent con- tempt the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which were supposed to form the proper subject of the' lectures of the finished theologian. As to the order, however, in which he applied himself to the Biblical books, some uncertainty exists.^ The account which he himself gives in his Preface to his collected works, is that he began with the Psalms,^ then went on to Eomans, Galatians, Hebrews, and returned in 1519 to the Psalms again. All his life long he had what Catholics would call a devotion to the Psalter. That wonderful collection of lyrics, which gives voice to all the highest and keenest reli- gious aspirations of the Jewish people at every later stage of its development, answered exactly to the subjective character of his own religiousness. It is a record of the soul's in- tercourse with God in all the varied moods in which piety mingles ; it is the changeful melody drawn from the human instrument by the hand of the Divine musician. Uncon- sciously, it may be, Luther's preferences drew him into a Biblical region where priests and rites did not enter, but where praise and penitence and aspiration found their own way to God, and- were accepted or rejected for what they were in themselves. All his life long he was wont to throw the 1 Album Acad. Fit. p. 38, cor- ' Erl. 0pp., v. a., pp. 1, 22. The rected by Kolde, Anal. Luth. p. 4 ; ibid. Weimar ed. of Luther's works (vol. iv. p. 5. Lange to Mutian ; Spalatin to p. 527) contains a fragmentary "Prae- Lange, inKampschulte,vol. ii. p.lOmote, lectio in'Librum Judicum," which is p. 11 note. For particulars of Spala- part of a "Lntherfund" recently tin's early life, see his biography by Ed. made in the Rathsschulbibliothek at Engelhardt, chaps, i. ii. iii. [Eolde's Zwickau, by Dr. Buchwald. The article on Spalatin in 2d ed. of MS., however, is not in the Refor- Herzog's RealSncyklopOdie fur Theol. mer's own handwriting, and bears u. Kirche]. signs of being an inaccurate transcript. ^ Melanchthon (Corp. iJe/. vol. vi. p. From internal evidence the Weimar 160) makes him begin with the Ep. to editors ascribe the lectures, which the Eomans. But this is certainly con- they confidently believe to he Luther's, trary to all the probabilities of the case, to the years 1516-1518. HIS FIRST BIBLICAL EXPOSITIONS expression of his deepest and most personal feeling into the form of an exposition of a Psalm, and there were Psalms in which he saw his own spiritual history as in a mirror. It is therefore not wonderful that the first record we have of his teaching is a Latia Psalter,^ which he caused to be printed with wide lines and broad rnargins in order that he might fill up the blank spaces with expository notes. These notes he appears to have afterwards copied out and enlarged until they formed a tolerably complete and connected commentary, which has recently been disinterred from the Eoyal Library at Dresden, and edited with loving care. But this was not all. The first of Luther's works which he himself gave to the press was an exposition in German of the Seven Penitential Psalms, which was printed at Wittenberg in 1517, and soon went through many editions. Then in 1519 he again returned to the Psalter, in what he called his Operationes in Psalmos. But the excitement of the Diet of Worms interrupted all peaceful academical labour, and the commentary was carried no farther than the 21st Psahn. Fi-om the earlier of these expositions, from such of his sermons as have been preserved, and from a Commentary on 1 The Psalter in question, the pre- dlteste Psalmenerkliirung, by Riehm), oise genealogy of which it is not neces- and ibid. 559 et seq. (Die ersten Vor- sary to give in this place, is preserved lemngen Luther's iiber die Psalmen, by in the Ducal Library at Wolfenbiittel. Seidemann). Of the Weimar ed. vol. m. "Walch, in his edition of Luther's works and nearly the whole of vol. iv. are (vol ix.), gives this commentary, trans- occupied with this exposition of the latad into German by Rambach (see Psalms. They contain not only the Pref to vol ix p. 257), and Riehm exposition of the Psalms derived from has quite recently (1874) published in the Wolfenbiittel and the Dresden MSS., the original Latin that part of it but a third series of marginal anno- which relates to the Seven Penitential tations made by Luther on a copy- Psalms under the title Initium Theo- of the Quincuplex Psaltenum, edited ' logiae Lufheri. A second and fuller by Le Fevre d'Etaples and printed by form of this commentary has been found Henri Etienne m 1509 and agam in in a MS. in the Royal Library at 1513. A copy of the first edition ot Dresden, which once belonged to John this book, with notes m Luther s Ernest Luther, a grandson of the Re- handwriting, was discovered m the former's, and was preserved by him as Dresden Library in 1885, ^7 P™fess°r an heirloom (quem^ ut ^.^Xca asser- Schnorr von Carolsfeld. The student vavi) This has been published in may be referred for statements ot two goodly volumes by Seidemann: Luther's exegetical work at this period, D M. Lutheri SchoUe ineditae de which do not agree with one another Psalmis habitae annis 1513-1516, c in all respects, to Erl.D.S vol. xxv. coclice MS. bibUo. Beg. Dresdensis : 2d p. 291 ( Fan den Conahxs uMrehen); ed Dresd. 1880. Conf. Theol St. u. Coll. vol. lu. p. 175 ; conf. De W. Krit. 1875, p. 114 et seq. (luther's vol. i. pp. 41, 42, 47. 190 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. the Ten Commandnients, " preached to the people of Witten- berg,"^ and first pubHshed in 1518, it is possible to gain a tolerably clear conception of Luther's theological position at this period of his life. Melanchthon describes the character and effect of his lectures ia terms ^ which would almost justify the inference that the first preaching of the Eeformktion must be antedated to Luther's earliest activity in Wittenberg. And no doubt there was much that was novel and striking in his earnest presentations of the theology which he had beaten out for himself ia the struggles of his cell at Erfurt. But he was a long way yet from understanding, as he afterwards understood, that difference between law and Gospel which Melanchthon declares to have been a chief subject of his preaching. He says of himself that even in 1519^ he could not comprehend Eomans i. 1 7, " For therein is the righteous- ness (justitia) of God revealed from faith to faith : as it is written, The just shall live by faith ! " that he hated the words " justitia Dei " ; that it was only after much meditation, and by the mercy of God, that he perceived their true meaning, and grew to love, as much as he had hated, them ; and finally, that he found, beyond all hope, his interpretation of them confirmed by Augustine. Unless, therefore, this clear and explicit testi- mony is to be rejected, it is plain that through this period Luther was only struggling towards the light into which he afterwards emerged. Though still tempted and troubled, he had worked out his own peace ; but the theoretical basis of his theology had yet to be firmly laid. In one sense his revolt "^ Decern praecepta Wittenbergensi longam et obscnram noctem nova predicata populo MDXVIII. "Weimai- dootrinae lux oriri videretur, ommum ed. vol. i. p. 394. Besides the works piorum et prudentum judicio. Hie enumerated in the text there is an monstravit legis et Evangelii disorimen, exposition of the Lord's Prayer, which hie refutavit errorem, qui tunc in was delivered by Luther in the shape soholis et concionibus regnabat, qui of lectures in 1517, and taken down and docet, mereri homines remissiouem pec- published by John Agricola in January catorum propriis operibus, et homines 1518. In the course of the same year coram Deo justos esse disoiplina, ut it was reissued in a revised form by Pharisaei docuerunt. Revocavit igitur Luther himself, under the title, Aus- Lutherus hominum mentem ad Slum legung des Vater U-nsersfur die einfal- Dei, et ut Baptista monstravit agnum tigen Layen : Erl. D. S. vol. xxi. p. Dei, qui tulit peccata nostra, ostendit 156; Kawerau, J. Agricola, p. 14. gratis propterfilium Dei remitti peccata, ' "Postea enarrare epistolam ad et quidem oportere id beneficium fide Romanos coepit, delude Psalmos. accipi," Corp. Hef. vol. vi. pp. 160, 161. Haec scripta sio illustravit, ut post ^ Erl. 0pp., v. a., vol. i. pp. 22, 23. IV HIS THEOLOGY 1512-1517 191 was consciously begun, for he had deliberately turned away from Aristotle and the Schoolmen to seek divine truth in the Scriptures, but he had as yet no suspicion that the end would be a disagreement with, much less a severance from, the Catholic Church. Other Eeformers had arisen before him, who had successfully poured new wine of faith into old ecclesiastical bottles ; why should his fate be different from theirs ? It would be an almost useless labour to analyse, as some industrious Germans have done,^ the early works of Luther which I have enumerated, in the hope of collecting from them an exact account of his theological belief For these were years of growth and change, often perhaps for the most part unconscious ; years in which he was slowly working his way towards a firm foothold of faith not to be fully reached till long afterwards. At the same time the method of his think- ing is not difficult to be discerned. With him the centre-point of Christianity was that conviction of justification by faith which he had learned from no teacher, but which was the priceless result of his own spiritual struggles. Whatever else 'was true or false, that stood fast. It was the key to unlock all mysteries, divine and human; whatever seemed to contradict it, could not rightfully command belief Naturally Luther finds this principle and its corollaries everywhere in Scripture, not less in the Epistles of Paul, where he first learned it, than in the Psalms, which he proceeds to interpret in accordance with it. And as he is yet far from the behef of his later years, that there is but one simple sense in Scripture ; as he still interprets every word literally, tropologically, allegorically, and anagogically, and sometimes goes so far as to find a sixfold meaning in Holy Writ,^ it is not difficult for him to extract from the Psalter whatever he wants to find in it. But his doctriae of justification is in a more or less fluid condition. He is sure that we are justified by faith in Christ. He is sure that in the work of salvation God is everything, man nothing. But he is far from having worked out the idea of " faith '^only " into the precision which it afterwards assumed 1 pr^g Kbstlin, Luther's Theologie, seugnis, Tlieol. St. und Krit. 1877, ■itr^ i n 64 sea. ; Hering, Luther's p. 683 seq. ^ ersie Voriesungen als Lehr-und Lebens- ^ Seidemann, Psalmen, vol. 1. p. 399. 192 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. with him. The omnipotence of divine grace has not yet developed into a consistent doctriae of election. These things will come presently, when the characteristic ideas of his theology are beaten out upon the anvil of controversy ; now he is only lecturing and preaching to a crowd of admiring hearers. He is all unconscious of being a heretic, and no keen-eyed critic has found him out. It is plain, however, that he has already, for good or evil, made his own the subjective principle, which is the life of what was afterwards called Protestantism. However little he may know it, he has a court of appeal within, whose decisions, should they come into conflict with those of Church or Pope, must prevail with him. And this conflict is certain ; it may come sooner or later, but come it must. So all through the expositions and sermons of these years we see the leaven working, though yet far from having finished its work. Luther's method of exposition is still the traditional, though he uses it to bring out results that are the reverse of traditional. But the external apparatus of the Catholic Church is either neglected or comes in for hard knocks. He speaks with a kind of general reverence of the saints, and recognises the value of their intercession ; but a large part of his exposition of the First Commandment consists of an attack upon their popular cultus,^ which coiild hardly have been more trench- ant had it been written thirty years later. His reverence 'for bishops in the abstract is unexceptionable; they are the leaders of the Church, in them Christ is set over the people, by their mouth God speaks ; but he does not hesitate to say very hard things of their avarice and profligacy, and breaks into eager remonstrance when it is proposed to make Staupitz a bishop. The theory of the Papacy and of the monastic life is not attacked, but popes and monks alike are reminded of their shortcomings in very plain terms. But the peculiarity of his position is clearest in regard to the abuse which was finally to cut him off from the Church. In his exposition of the Psalms he is by no means on the level of the Ninety-five Theses. , He does not deny the existence of the heavenly treasure, or the power of the Church to dispense it ; he thinks 1 Weimar, vol. i. p. 411 seq.; conf. pp. 425, 426. IV HIS REVOLT FROM THE SCHOOLMEN 193 that there may be some communication of the merits of the saints to humbler brethren. But in the Sermons he has got much further than this. Tetzel is already hovering about the frontiers of Saxony, and Luther sees, with his own eyes, the unspeakable coarseness and immorality of the administration. On the one hand, he notes how the indulgences, as presented by their vendors and accepted by the people, strike at the root of ' all spiritual religion ; on the other, how base and sordid are the motives of the great churchmen who hawk them about. And in some of the trenchant words which he uttered from the pulpit of Wittenberg we may hear the muttering of the coming storm.^ The one element of conscious revolt which is to be traced ia Luther's thought and speech during these years lies in his turning away from Aristotle and the Schoolmen to the Scrip- tures and the Fathers. This did not in itself involve doctrinal rebellion, though, as the event proved, it carried the seeds of doctrinal rebellion within it. But nothing could be more momentous as a change of method. It was as marked a deviation from the old paths as that of the humanists, though made in a different direction; they turned from the dry rigidity of the scholastic system to the freshly-moving life of classical antiquity, Luther to the fountains of Hebrew and Christian piety in the Bible. Once he had drunk large draughts of inspiration there, he found it impossible to go back to the arid subdivisions, the pedantic arrangement, the formal deductions of Aquinas or Peter Lombard, which were to all his theological compeers the only form in which scientific theology had ever presented itself. " Truly," he says in his exposition of the Eighth Commandment,^ "we have been led astray by Aristotle and his comments. And if there were no other, this single argument would suffice, that there are as many sects and heads in that heathen beast as Hydrae in the Lerna ; for there are Thomists, Scotists, Albertists, Moderns, and Aristotle has become four-headed, and a kingdom divided against itself ; and it is marvellous that it is not desolate-— yet the time is near at which it shaU be desolate." This, 1 Weimar vol. i. pp. 65, 135, 141 ; Seidemann, Psalmen, vol. i; pp. 8, 112 ; vol. u. pp. 46, 211 ; De W. vol. i. p. 24. ' Erl. 0?>p. Lat. vol. xii. p. 197. 194 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. it will be seen, is sufficiently trenchant. He does not prefer one form of scholastic theology to another ; he aims, in destroy- ing the authority of Aristotle, to cut away the common root of all. And in this he was almost unexpectedly successful. The depth and eagerness of his conviction, his vigorous and persuasive eloquence, the absence of serious rivalry, the natural attractiveness of the principles which he laid down, all drew the studious youth to his side, and Wittenberg gradually grew to be unlike every other German university. As usual Luther is bold, decisive, aggressive. In February 1517 we find him sending to Trutvetter, through Lang, what he calls "letters full of questions against logic and philosophy and theology — that is, of blasphemies and maledictions against Aristotle, Porphyry, the Sententiaries, in short, the ruined studies of our age." What the old scholastic thought of it we do not know ; meanwhile his audacious disciple went on with his polemic. A few weeks later he announces to the same congenial cor- respondent, that " our theology and St. Augustine, by God's help, go on prosperously and reign in the University; Aris- totle descends gradually to eternal ruin ; the lectures on the Sentences are wonderfully disdained ; only teachers of the new Biblical theology can hope for hearers." All this culminated in a series of Niaety-seven Theses, " Contra Scholasticam Theo- logiam," which Francis Giinther of Nordhausen, a candidate for the degree of Baccalaureus Biblicus, offered to defend under Luther's presidency, on the 4th of September 1517. Of these, the forty-first, " Almost the whole of Aristotle's ethics is the worst enemy of grace " ; the forty-third, " It is an error to say that without Aristotle no man becomes a theologian " ; and the forty-fourth, " ISTo one becomes a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle," are decisive enough.-' Two influences, neither of them directly Biblical, were power- ful with Luther at this time. The first, and the more decidedly intellectual, was that of Augustine. He was not yet prepared to make that appeal to the Bible, and the Bible only, which was characteristic of his maturer thought ; he went behind the Schoolmen to the Bible as interpreted by the Fathers ; and of the Fathers, Augustine fell in most with his mood. But ^ De "W. vol. i. pp. 15, 57 ; "Weimar, vol. i. p. 221 ; Lib. Decan. p. 20. IV ''THEOLOGIA GERMANICA" 195 he was something more than a submissive disciple of Augus- tine. His theology was the outcome of his own personal struggles, the result of his own painful meditation on Scrip- ture, and the great African Father did not so much produce the impression as deepen and confirm it. They were kindred souls ; and it was a singular joy to Luther to find himself, after having long wandered in the dry and waterless deserts of scholasticism, in a region of what seemed to him perennial springs of life. But it was characteristic of Luther's first introduction to Augustinian theology — as well as of his final presentation of it — that he approached it, not from the divine, as did Calvin, bu.t from the human side. He accepted, indeed, the immutability of the divine decrees ; but not this, so much as the incapacity of man to work out his own salvation, was the germinal point of his theology. In regard to this matter, too, we have an early set of Theses, which were defended by Bartholomew Bernhardi of Feldkirch, under Luther's presidency, probably in September 1516. The question put is, "Whether man, made in the image of God, can by his own natural strength keep the commandments of his Maker, or do or think anything good ? " The answer, of course sternly and sweep- ingly negative, is supported by copious citations from the Bible and Augustine.^ The second influence was of a very different kind. In 1516 there came into his hands, we do not know how, a manuscript containing about a fourth part of the little treatise which has since had so wide a reputation as the Theologia Germanica. It made a deep impression upon his miud, and he published it with a short preface in the December of that year. It was, and has continued to be, anonymous ; but Luther connected it in his own mind with the sermons of Tauler, with which, we must suppose, he was acquainted. "Writing to Spalatin, just after the publication of the book, he says,^ " If it delights thee to read a theology, pure, solid, after the fashion of the ancients, written in the German tongue, you can get the sermons of John Tauler, of the Order of Preachers ; of all which I send thee, as it were, an epitome herewith. For I have 1 AVeimar, vol. i. p. 142 ; Lib. Bmm. p. 19 ; De W. vol. i. p. 34. 2 De W. vol. i. p. 46. 196 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. never seen, either in Latin or in our own language, a whole- somer theology, or one more consonant with the Gospel." Two years afterwards he procured the rest of the book, and forth- with issued it, preceded by a very characteristic preface. Next to the Bible and St. Augustine, he said, no book had ever come into his hands from which he had learned, or would wish to learn, more of what God and Christ and man and all things are. He adduces it as a witness to the soundness of the theology which he was teaching amid much opposition. " Eead this little book who will, and then say whether our theology is old or new." And then he goes on, with a touch of that patriotic feeling which won him an access to so many German hearts, " I thank God that in my German tongue, I so hear and find God as I, and those with me here, have never fOimd Him, either in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew." The Deutsche Theologie, thus started on its career of modest useful- ness, has been reprinted more than seventy times.^ No one, however, who knows and is able to estimate the Deutsche Theologie truly, will suppose that it is identical in religious tone with Lutheranism at every point of its development. It is hke the Imitation of Christ, one of the great mystical books of the world, and freer even than that celebrated manual of devotion from dogmatic suggestion and limitation. That the Imitation is a Catholic book forces itself upon the mind of every reader; its piety never loses the scent of cloister incense ; and it is only the depth and worth of the contents that enable the Protestant reader to forget the peculiarities of the form. But the Deutsche Theologie moves in a region above ecclesiastical individuality and differ- ence. It has to do only with that immediate intercourse and union of the divine with the human spirit which is the atmo- sphere breathed by aU mystical religion. Given a belief in God and Christ and eternal life, it makes an equal appeal to all readers. There is nothing in it of predestination, or human incapacity for good, or justification by faith alone. ' Prefaoetoeditionof 1516, Weimar, by Professor Pfeiffer, based on a MS. vol. i. p. 152 ; to edition of 1518, ibid, recently discovered, and somewhat vol. i. p. 375. Miss Winkworth's longer than that used by Luther, translation of the Theologia Germanica, Each recension has its warm defenders, by which it is at present chiefly known Zealous Lutherans are apt to think in England, is made from an edition that "the old is better." IV HIS Delation to the humanists 197 These things may be read into it at the reader's pleasure, but so may many other things quite incompatible with them. It is difficult, therefore, not to believe that the side on which it touched Luther was that on which he was least distinct- ively Lutheran. It took possession of him because he was one of those deep and passionate souls to which the pure voice of religiott makes effectual appeal ; for the moment, he could not help using its utterances as the vehicle of his own thought, though he did not see that they also expressed some- thing wider and more universal. At the sam^ time he had a real affiliation upon the line of German mystics. Except in his worst and most dogmatic days, there is a certain inwardness, a penetrating directness about his thought and speech, which distinguish his prevailing religious mood from the calm, ethical, good sense of ZwingU, and the systematising logic of Calvin. The Deutsche Theologie introduced a strain iato his thinking which can be traced through all his growth and change. The years between 1512 and 1517 were a period of great intellectual excitement in Germany. It was in the autumn of 1509 that Pfefferkorn paid his memorable visit to Eeuch- lin, with results that have been already narrated. The first imperfect edition of the Upistolae Obscurorum Virorum was published at the end of 1515, the second part in 1517. But although Luther had had his intellectual training in Erfurt, which was now the centre of enthusiasm for Eeuchlin, and was bound by ties of old friendship with many of the chief Eeuchlinists, he held himself aloof from the controversy. It is true that in a letter to Spalatin, of uncertain date, he expresses himself strongly on Eeuchlin's side as against the Dominicans, of Koln; but we do not hear of his taking any active part in the fray, and when the Epistolae Ohscurorum Viroritm appear, he puts them somewhat contemptuously aside. His mood was too serious for such light-hearted trifling ; he was on the eve of a struggle of which he could net foresee the end. The truth is that he had never really belonged to the party of the humanists, and now had deci- sively taken another direction. A time is coming, before long, at which they will be full of enthusiasm for him, but it will be, so to speak, on his own terms, and the imperfect and Ul- 198 LUTHER'S LIFE PRIOR TO HIS REVOLT chap. concerted alliance will soon be dissolved. His polemic against Aristotle is hardly in the interests of humanism ; he has no enthusiasm for classical culture ; he thinks heathen virtue nought, and its method altogether opposed to that of evan- gelical righteousness. In a word, he is Hebraic, not Hellenic, to the core. But even when the contrast between Christian and classical modes of thought is not in question, it is easy to see how strongly his mind is set in the direction from which it never afterwards swerved. Nothing can be more signifi- cant than the way in which he speaks of Erasmus, long before their formal friendship had been dissolved in the acids of con- troversy. They read Paul with different eyes. Luther cannot understand Erasmus' preference of Jerome to Augustine as an interpreter of Scripture. The more he studies Erasmus the less he likes him. " I fear," he says, " that he does not sufficiently put forward Christ and the grace of God, in which things he is much more ignorant than Stapulensis (Le Efevre d'Etaples) ; human things prevail with him over divine." Already the movement at Wittenberg has disengaged itself from the general tendency of the age in Germany, and takes a line of its own.^ The name which best expresses the tendencies of this period is still that of Staupitz ; though it may be questioned whether the influence of the disciple on the master was not stronger than that of the master on the disciple ; and the time was rapidly approaching at which they sorrowfully parted company. But the evangelical and the mystic were as subtly intertwined in Staupitz as in Luther, and neither at this moment dreamed of any breach with the Church. At Wit- tenberg Luther indisputably held the first place. The doctors of the old scholastic type, on whom the University rested its earliest reputation, had left it; Melanchthon, with his fresh humanistic culture, had not come. Carlstadt, recalled by the Elector from Italy in 1516, suddenly, and with his wonted levity, went over to the new theology, and in April 1517 offered 152 Theses for disputation, in which he took the Biblical and Augustinian side. Amsdorf, afterwards so un- }■ De "W. pp. 1, 8, 37, 39, 40, 52. der ihnen so bliitsaure Arteit maolien Reuchlin (Meyerhoff, p. -234) is re- wird, dass sie mich alten Mann, wohl lorted to have said of Luther : " Gott- in Frieden werden hiufuhren lassen." port lob, nun haben sie einenMann gefunden, IV HIS GROWING INFLUENCE 199 compromising a Lutheran, still lectured " in via Scoti," and it was not till 1518 that, under the persuasion of Luther, he began to study Augustine. But Luther's lectures attracted all the studious youth; the parish church was crowded when he preached ; the disputations at which he presided marked the highest point reached by speculation. John Lang, another Augustinian and pupil of Staupitz, now presided over the convent at Erfurt, whence Luther's career was watched with eyes of very various judgment. At JSTiirnberg, then the first of German cities in wealth, in refinement, in intellectual activity, Luther's influence began to prevail. Christopher Scheurl, to whom we owe much of our earlier knowledge of the University of Wittenberg, had returned to the service of his native city at the end of 1511, and in January 1517 began an eager correspondence with Luther. Before this time, how- ever, Staupitz had made a deep impression upon the burghers of Niirnberg by a series of advent sermons, twenty-four in number, on the doctrine of predestination, which Scheurl had published both in Latin and in German. The Augustinian Church was crowded ; the humanists, the artists, the stately patricians who governed the free city, talked of nothing else. Next came Link, also an Augustinian, whose sermons at once deepened the mark which Staupitz had made, and drew men's attention to Luther as the chief representative of the new religious tendency. All seemed to open to him a brilliant future in the service of the Church. He held .high office in his order, and might expect still higher ; he enjoyed the favour of his prince ; his university hung upon his words ; no con- sciousness of discord with the Church infused uncertainty into his utterance. But in 1516 Tetzel appeared upon the fron- tiers of Saxony. A chronicle of Grimma is the insufficient authority for the story that when Luther heard of his pro- ceedings, he exclaimed, " Now, if God will, I will make a hole in his drum." What he afterwards . said of himself was, " I was dead to the world till God thought it time, and Juncker Tetzel drove me with the indulgence." ^ ■■ Jager, Andreas Bodenstein von Scheurl, Briefiueh, vol. ii. p. I ; Casel- Carlstadt, pp. 6, 7 ; Theol. St. u. Krit. mann, W. Link's Leien, p. 341 ; Kbst- 1878, p. 698 ; Kolde, Staupitz, pp. 265, lin, M. Luther, vol. i. p. 150 ; Coll. 270 ; von Soden, Beitrdge, p. 25 ; vol. iii. p. 188. CHAPTEE V luthee's ninety-five theses In 1517 Albert of Brandenburg was Elector Archbishop of Mainz, ArchchanceUor of the Empire, and Primate of Germany. The younger of the two sons of John, Elector of Brandenburg, he was born in 1490, and in 1499 succeeded in common with his brother Joachim: to the inheritance of his house. It was not, however, the way of the Hohenzollerns to divide their territories ; and before long it was determined to indemnify the younger brother for the loss of his share in Brandenburg by a brOliant ecclesiastical position. As early as 1509 a foundation for future greatness was laid in his admission to the Chapter of Mainz ; while soon after a similar promotion at Magdeburg opened the way for his accession to that Arch- bishopric also. He had not long to wait. In 1513 he was admitted to priest's orders, and sang his first mass ; in the same year he was elected Archbishop of Magdeburg, and ten days afterwards Administrator of the neighbouring diocese of Halberstadt. Before the confirmation of his election came back from Eome, the Archbishop of Mainz, Uriel von Gem- mingen, died, on the 8th of February 1514, and the Hohen- zollerns cast eyes of longing on this rich and splendid piece of preferment. To make a youth, not yet twenty-four and who had been ordained only a year. Primate of Germany seemed, notwithstanding his high birth, a bold undertakiag ; but fortune favours the bold, especially when they have cash in hand. The see had already been vacant twice within ten years — after the death of Archbishop Berthold in 1504, of Archbishop CHAP. V ALBERT OF MAINZ 201 Jacob von Liebenstein in 1508, and on each occasion 24,000 florias had been paid to Eome for the pallium, the tippet of white wool which was the symbol of metropolitan dignity. If to these sums be added the annates, or first fruits, one year's income of the see, and other customary fees also pay- able to Eome on the election of an Archbishop, it wiU be easily understood that the diocese was unwilling, perhaps un- able, to incur further expense. Joachim and his brother were equal to the occasion. They offered to bear the whole cost themselves ; the ready money was borrowed from the Fuggers of Augsburg, the great financiers of the day, and Albert was elected Archbishop. The whole transaction, which does not appear to have excited any contemporary criticism, was crowned, when, four years' later, in 1518, Leo X admitted the new Primate to the College of Cardiuals. Albert Diirer has left behind him two portraits of the Archbishop of Mainz ; Lucas Cranach, or a painter who goes by his name, introduced him into a picture which still hangs in the church which he buUt at Halle ; and his efiigy is to be seen on one of the pillars which separate the choir from the north transept of his own cathedral. All these tell the same tale. An ignoble, though not an unkindly face, with sensual lips, and full double chin, a long, well-set nose, and above it eyes looking out with a kind of sad seriousness, unite to give the impression of a man who might have played a more dignified part in the world, had not dignity been so early thrust upon him. But it is qidte plain that religious enthusiasm, or ascetic goodness, or any form of self-devotion are things with which he has no sympathy. AVhen he came to Maiuz, bringing with him as his minister EitelwoLf von Steiu, who had been active in the foundation of the University of Frank- furt on the Oder, men thought that a new era for letters and art in the Ehineland was about to open ; the young Arch- bishop's court was to be the place in which reviving humanism and the Church were to meet and be reconciled. Ulrich von Hutten, who had already knitted close relations with the " poets " at Erfurt, and was ready to take decisive part with Eeuchlin, celebrated the arrival of the Archbishop in almost' rapturous verse. Erasmus writes to him as an enlightened LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES and liberal patron of polite learning, and dedicates to him his little treatise, On, the Method of a true Theology. There are even moments at which men are not quite sure whether the Primate has .not some secret leaning to the new doctrines which Luther is beginning to teach ; what a solution of aU difficulties if the Primate of Germany, the Elector first in rank, should put himself at the head of the new movement of reform ! But these expectations were based on a total mis- apprehension of Albert's character. A wise and liberal patron of letters he might have become, although, by some mischance, he never fulfilled the hopes of even the humanists ; but it is impossible to conceive of him as fired by the passion for righteousness or the enthusiasm of humanity. And he was entangled in the net of circumstance. In one sense Luther's revolt was directed against him personally — not only as the Primate of Germany, but as the Papal agent for the indul- gence. His only course was to remonstrate, to threaten, to repress ; and if ever he thought of making terms with the Eeformer, it was not till it was too late.^ The sale of indulgences was at this time a favourite method of raising money with the Papal Curia, and Germany was, for some reason, the best market. "We have already noticed the enterprise of this kind connected with the JubUee of 1500, of which Cardinal Eaymond Perrand took charge, and which found its theologian in the Augustinian monk, John von Paltz. A year or two later Julius II adopted the same means to collect the funds required for the rebuilding of the Eoman Basilica of St. Peter, a project which had been conceived by Nicholas V about the year 1450, but which had been suffered to sleep for more than half a century. But Leo X again took up the uncompleted work, which admirably fell in with his love of aesthetic display, and had recourse to the same source of revenue. Whether the money thus raised was, all honestly appropriated to the declared object might be difficult to say ; the rumour was bruited abroad that ecclesiastical revenues of this kind found their way, at least in part, into the pockets of the Pope's kinsfolk, and there is documentary evidence to ' May, Kurfurst Albrecht II von Eutteni 0pp. ed. BBcking, vol. iii. p. Mainz u. Magdeburg, vol. i. chapa. 1-5 ; 353 ci seq. ; Erasmi 0pp. vol. v. p. 73. V THE TRAFFIC IN INDULGENCES 203 show that 100,000 livres, which his nephew Lorenzo de Medici paid to the King of France, came out of the tithe which was contributed for the war against the Turks. But the purchasers of indulgences were told that they had nothing to do with the application of their cash ; they got their full money's worth in spiritual privileges and immunities, and ought to be content. Germany was divided into three districts for the better vending of the indulgence. With two of these we have little to do ; the administration of the third, which consisted of the dioceses of Mainz, Magdeburg, and Halberstadt, together with the Mark of Brandenburg, was committed to the Arch- bishop of Mainz and the Guardian of the Franciscan convent in the same city. The latter, according to one account, soon drew out of the transaction, leaving the Primate not only ia sole command of his own district, but to the exercise of his great official and personal influence in favour of the indulgence in Germany at large. The traffic was to last for eight years ; in the meantime the preaching of all other iadulgences was to be suspended. The whole affair was a financial speculation, the character of which no one took the trouble to disguise. The proceeds were to be equally divided between Albert and the Pope. The share which fell to the former was to be app'hed to the payment of his debt to the Fuggers, who sent their clerks round with the preachers of the indulgence, furnished with duphcate keys to the chests ia which the offerings of the , faithful were collected. The mutual distrust of these purveyors of spiritual wares finds an apt commentary ia the fact that their most notorious agent, Tetzel, was accused, on incontro- vertible evidence, of having made a purse for himself What- ever pains may be taken by modern apologists to deprive the theory of iadulgences of its most repulsive features, it cannot be denied that the traffic, cynically undertaken and cynically conducted, was a too successful attempt to make money of men's fears and superstitions, and that it drew a peculiar baseness from the fact that it was authorised and carried into effect by the heads of the Church.-' The industry of antiquarians has collected many documents of various date to illustrate the practical application of the ' Ranke, vol. i. p. 236 ; Myconius, p. 18 ; Korner, Tdzd, p. 120. 204 LUTHER'S, NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. doctrine of indulgences, but it will be desirable to confine our attention to the particular traffic which had such momentous results. The Archbishop, with his colleague, issued a " summary instruction" to the "Sub -Commissaries, Penitentiaries, and Confessors," ^ who were entrusted with the duty of preaching the indulgence. In this they were enjoined to make much, in their sermons to the people, of " the very great authority of the Supreme Pontiff and Vicar of God, which is able to impart such graces and gifts, and how needful is the same to every man who wishes to attain to eternal hfe," to lay before them " the immeasurable and priceless advantage of the said apostolical indulgences," and to exhort them to visit diligently the stations or altars in the churches to which the indulgence is attached. The indulgence itself consists of fovir separate graces. " The first is the plenary remission of all sins . . . by which remission of sins, the penalties which a man must pay in purgatory for his offences against the Divine Majesty are most fully remitted, and the punishments of the said purgatory whoUy wiped out." The second grace relates to confession. It gives the purchaser liberty to choose his own confessor, who- shall have the power of absolving him, once in life, and in the article of death, even in cases other- wise reserved to the Apostolical see. The third grace is a share in the spiritual wealth of the universal Church, so that contributors, both for themselves and their deceased relations who have departed this life in charity, have their part in all prayers, petitions, ahns, fasts, and pilgrimages. The fourth grace " is for souls actually in purgatory, namely, a plenary remission of all sins," which is to be bought by the freewill offerings of survivors. And this fourth grace has this further advantage, that while some formal expression of repentance, some perfunctory application to confession is necessary for the attainment of the other three, which are personal and not vicarious in their scope, it is a simple matter of purchase, unclogged by any religious conditions. Payment alone is necessary ; remorse and confession are superfluous. ' The summary instruction is to be Eistoria Evangelii Seculo XVI renovati, found in German in Walch, vol. xv. p. vol. i., app. p. 83. 371 ; in the original Latin in Gerdes, V ■ CA THOLIC THEOR Y OF IND ULGENCE 205 The pecuniary part of the matter is treated with business- like accuracy. It is enjoined upon the preachers of the iadulgence that, after having expounded to their penitents the greatness of the grace conferred, they should put it to their consciences for what money or worldly goods they would be content to miss it. Eoyal personages, princes, prelates, were to pay twenty-five Ehenish gold gulden ; abbots, canons, with counts, barons and their wives, ten. Other persons of the same kind, but of less distinction, whose annual income amounted to five hundred gold gulden, are charged six ; while merchants and citizens, who have two hundred gold gulden a year, get the- commodity for three. Provision, however, is made for still smaller contributions of a single, and even of half a gold gulden; while the section concludes with the words, "And let those who have no money supply the place of a contribution by prayer and fasting. For the Kingdom of Heaven ought not to be more open to the rich than to the poor." At the same time it is only too probable that in practice the rich had the preference. Myconius tells a story how, when a youth at Annaberg, where he was an inmate of the Franciscan convent, he in vain endeavoured to extract from Tetzel a letter of indulgence without payment. The indulgence-monger put his own interpretation on the words, "pauperibus gratis propter Deum," and felt that to give away such wares as his would be a fatal precedent.'- It is not easy to state the Catholic theory of indulgences in a shape that shall altogether escape criticism; for the Church has. never authoritatively defined its doctrine on this point, and with the Counter-Eeformation what was chiefly offensive in the way of practical abuse disappeared. At a time when rebellion had not yet raised its head, popes made large assertions of their power to forgive sins, which were afterwards ignore'd or withdrawn by more cautious' theologians ; while the doctrine was emphatically one which lent itself to sweeping and therefore inaccurate statement by popular preachers. The theory of indulgences connects itself with that of the Sacra- ment of Penance. This consists of three parts : Eepentance, Confession, Satisfaction. The first of these, according to the ^ Melch. Adami Vitae Germanorwm Theologorum, p. 173 ; Eorner, Tetzel, p. 27. 2o6 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. best expositors, is a truly spiritual emotion, a hatred of sia, spriagLng not from fear of punishment, but from the love of God, coupled with a hearty resolve not to repeat the offence. It belongs to the external element, which according to the Catholic conception enters into every sacrament, that this should pass into confession to a duly ordained priest, and the acceptance at his hands of absolution. But the act of penance is not complete until it issues in satisfaction, which may either have a backward look, as in the case of the restitution of stolen property, or consist in the performance of certain penitential acts, imposed by the priest as conditions of restora- tion to church fellowship. These acts are not so much purely penal as educational, disciplinary, medicinal ; they remind the sinner of his offence, and arm him with strength to resist temptation. But they have nothing to do with the greater satisfaction, once offered for all men upon the cross. In virtue of that sacrifice, the punishment of eternal death which waits upon sin is remitted as soon as the priest, upon due proof of repentance, has spoken the absolving word. These satisfactions are a part of the Church's discipUnary system ; and she claims the right of mitigating or remitting penalties which she has herself imposed. Such mitigation or remission is, primarily, what is known as an indulgence. It may accord with ecclesiastical notions of justice or expediency, or still more, it may serve the Church's purpose to lighten in specific cases the burthen of her own penalties. Such a power of partial or total remission is evidently involved in the idea .of discipline. The particular penance appropriate to the sin was exchanged for the obligation to give alms, to go on crusade, to take up arms against the Turks, to contribute to some work of ecclesiastical utility, even to visit certain shrines, to engage in a prescribed round of devotion. The introduction of the pecuniary element into what was at first a religious transaction was partly due to the prevalent usage of the " Wehrgeld," or money compensation made to the injured, or the relatives of the slain. If an offence against man could be thus assessed in coin, why not one against God and the Church ? But with the prevalence of this idea, that of ecclesiastical discipline more and more V CATHOLIC THEORY OF INDULGENCE 207 faded away. It was not so much that a definite penance was annexed to a particular sin, as that by certain gifts or a,cts the penalties due to sin in general might be escaped. That a suiner, in any recognised way, acquired a thirty days' indul- gence meant, that so much of the penal penance as he could perform in that time was remitted to him. But in the eyes of stricter theologians repentance and confession were always conditions precedent of indulgence ; and its effect was confined to the remission of punishments over which the Church had jurisdiction. But how far did the power of the Church extend ? Not, at least in this shape, to openiag or shutting the gates of eternal life ; that belonged to the divine sacrifice of Christ. But as it was impossible for even the priest to say at what point the limit of a purely temporal satisfaction had been reached, there was, so to speak, no sharp dividing line between earthly penance and the purifying fires of purgatory. And did not the emphatic words, with which the keys were committed to Peter,^ confer upon his successors the power of binding and loosing in heaven ? In aid, then, of this extension of Papal power over purgatory came the scholastic doctrine of the heavenly treasure of the Church, first invented by Alexander Hales and Albert the Great, and moulded into logical symmetry by Thomas Aquinas. In Christ's sacrifice there was a large supererog4tory element. He did far more than was necessary for the world's salvation. The same is true, in their degree, of Mary and the saints. And these supererogatory merits con- stitute a spiritual treasure, which the Church, as represented by the Pope, is able to apply to the benefit of the souls in purgatory. As to the method of that application, there were " two theories ; one that it was effected vid, jurisdidionis, that is to say, by the direct right conferred upon the Pope, by the words of Christ above alluded to ; the other, and more generally held, that it was p^r suffragium, in virtue of a general intercession of the Church, to which God would not refuse to listen. But the fact was held to be certain, what- ever the method ; and the obvious result was that men believed it to be in the power of the Church to release a ^ Matthew xvi. 19. 2o8 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. soul from purgatory, and thereby, indirectly, to open to it the gates of heaven. From the administration of the theory of indulgences, involved in the above exposition, to their open sale is not a difficult transition. The words " sale " and " price," it would be urged by a Catholic apologist, import into the matter an invidious association; the alms of the faithful, contributed for an object in itself worthy, as, for instance, the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, are really only a condition precedent of the spiritual benefits conferred ; while the necessity of previous repentance, confession, satisfaction remains. But I have stated the theory in the shape which it has assumed since its suddenly developed disruptive force split the Church into fragments ; before Luther, popes promised indulgences on large and easy terms, and theologians, zealous for the juris- diction of the Church, vied with one another in widening the scope of doctrine. When Boniface VIII issued, in the year 1300, the bull announcing the first JubUee, he offered the world in the most explicit terms, not a remission of penance, but a forgiveness of sins.-' John von Paltz, the Augustinian monk of Erfurt, who preached the Jubilee of 1500 under the superintendence of Cardinal Eaymond Perrand, declared that forgiveness of sins was the peculiar grace of Jubilee indtdgences. It would be easy to adduce many authoritative documents in which, for popular purposes, the nature and effect of indul- gences are spoken of in a way quite inconsistent with the strictness of scholastic theory. What this doctrine became in the hands of preachers who were more solicitous to collect money than to keep within orthodox Hnes, or to work for moral reformation, we shall see before long; but apart from actual abuse, it is clear that from possible abuse no caution on the part of Church authorities could save it. The distinctions involved were too fine for popular apprehension. What did the ignorant peasant who bought his " Ablassbrief " know of the difference between guilt and penalty, between punishment ' Nos, de omnipotentis Dei miseri- solum plenam sed largiorem, immo cordia et eorundem Apostolorum ejiis plenissimam omnium suorum conced- meritis et auctoritate oonfisi, . . . vere imus veniam peccatorum. Gieseler, vol. poenitentibus et confessis, vel qui vere ii. pt. 2, p. 499 note. poenitebunt et eonfitebuntur . . . non JOHN TETZEL 209 on this side the grave, and on the other ? What he thought he was buying was forgiveness of his past sins, and at the same time liberty to commit more. What else should he think, when he was earnestly exhorted to purchase the ransom ^ of the souls of his dead from purgatory by the expenditure of a little money, to which it was not necessary to add any con- trition of his own ? Whatever spiritual element there had at first been in the transaction soon faded out of it : attrition, the mere fear of punishment, was substituted for contrition, which involves the love of God : soon even attrition was taken for granted, and the magic documents were sold indiscrimi- nately to all comers. It was impossible that it should not be so. The doctrine was one that, even if it had been far more carefully limited by theologians than was the case, must have been apprehended by the people in a crude and superstitious sense. On the other hand, no one can deny that the sale of indulgences was at Eome simply regarded as a permitted expedient of Papal finance, and took its place among other methods by which the fears and superstitions of men were made to contribute to the needs of the Church. Nor was it to be wondered at that a generation, which rebelled in vain against first fruits and reservations and the abuse of patronage and the open sale of benefices, should find indulgences a more unspiritual exaction than all the rest. Presently, it is true, a bold spirit here and there began to ask why, if the Pope could release souls from purgatory for a consideration, he did not, in the plenitude of his power, empty the place of torment, out of pure humanity ? But the mass of the people believed and bought, and the traffic went merrily on.^ The man whose name is inseparably connected with the promulgation of the Indulgence of 1517 in North Germany is John Tetzel. His reputation suffered shipwreck in the storm which Luther raised, and he was tacitly abandoned by the authorities of the Church, which he had striven to serve in his own way, believing that it was hers too. Even while he 1 Mohler, Symholik, vol. i. p. 281 'K3s&,Eandluc,'hderProt.Pole'milc,-p.Zi7 seq.; Neue Untersuchungen {Vertheidi- seq.;con{.Luther'sXOV ThesenundiAre gvmg der Symholik), p. 301 seq.; Canones dogmenhistorischen Voraussetzungen, v. et Decreta Ooncilii Tridentini, sess. xxi. Bratke. For Paltz's theory, Kolde, 0. ix. p. 115, sess. XXV. 0. xxi. p. 204. Staupitz, p. 174 seq. 2IO LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. lived, stories which contained an element of legend gathered round his name, until at last, in the minds of uncritical Pro- testant historians, he became the typical iadulgence-monger, upon whom any weU-worn anecdote might be fathered. Of late, when Catholic Germany has made vigorous efforts to dis- credit what it calls the Luther legend, Tetzel has been re- habilitated as uncritically as he had formerly been assailed ; and we are gravely assured by a recent biographer, that with a little less piety and humility he might have been a Luther, or, transplanted to Italian soil and the turmoil of Florence, a Savonarola.'- The facts of the case, however, lie upon the surface, and the historian, whose judgment is not warped by dogmatic prepossession, has Kttle difficulty in forming a clear conception of the man. He was a native of Leipzig, born probably early in the second half of the fifteenth century, and educated, not without credit to himself, at the university of his native town. Such learning as he had appears to have been of the old-fashioned kind ; no breath of the new scholar- ship, so far as we know, passed over him. His natural apti- tudes, which were those of a popular preacher, took him into the Dominican order ; and from the beginning of the century we find him everywhere busy as a preacher of indulgences. His first appearance in that capacity was in connection with the Jubilee iudulgence of 1500 ; next we find him recom- mending an indulgence which Julius II had proclaimed for the benefit of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, then hard pressed by Sclavonic foes. From that time his destiny was fixed. He was a recognised agent for this kind of clerical work, and we do not hear of him in connection with any other. In 1508-1509 he is preaching in the Church of St. Peter at GorUtz, collecting money to cover it with a copper roof. In 1510 he sells indulgences and " Butterbriefe " — Papal permis- sions to eat butter on fast days — for the benefit of a bridge over the Elbe at Torgau. Everywhere successful, he gained the same kiad of reputation as is enjoyed in some Protestant churches by a preacher of charity sermons whose eloquence is affirmed by large collections. And as Saxony and the country round about had been the scene of his triumphs, it was quite 1 Grbne, Tetul und Luther, p. 4. JOHN TETZEL natural that the Archbishop of Mainz should choose him as the agent for the indulgence which was at once to rebuild the Basilica of St. Peter and to reimburse the Fuggers. Myconius, who in these years was a Franciscan monk at Annaberg, and saw what he described, gives a lively picture of the ceremonial observed in the first promulgation of an indul- gence — a ceremonial which is beheved to owe its form to Cardinal Eaymond Perrand.^ " So highly honoured," he says, " was the indulgence, that when the Commissary was brought into a town, the Bull was borne aloft on a velvet or golden cushion, and all priests, monks, councillors, schoolmasters, scholars, men, women, virgins, and children marched in pro- cession with banners and tapers and singing. Then all bells were rung, all organs played ; the Commissary was escorted to the churches, a red cross set up in the midst, and the Pope's banner displayed : summa, God Himself could not be better received, or held in greater honour." It often happened that advantage was taken of saints' days and church festivals, so that people, streamiug together, half for amusement, half for devotion, found the indulgence preacher at work in the midst of the fair. For this rough work Tetzel was admirably fitted. He had a commanding person, a sonorous voice, a ready tongue ; and if the nature of his occupation gave no oppor- tunity for the display of finer qualities, he could at least bring home his lesson to the hearts of his audience, and wile the money from their pockets. There is no proof that he aimed at anything higher. N"o man could preach indulgences for seventeen years in North-Eastern Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century and keep much fineness of spiritual touch. Either the work must drag the preacher down to its own level, or the preacher forsake the work in unspeakable disgust. Such undoubted fragments of Tetzel's preaching as have descended to us answer to this estimate of his powers and temptations. He accepted the theory of indulgences in all good faith, and, with the instincts of a man who rejoiced in his ability to sway a great audience at his will, only too probably fell into the snare of adapting his statement of it to their coarse and crude conceptions.^ ^ Myconius, p. 15. ^ See Note A, p. 256, infra. 212 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. The traffic in indulgences seems first to have attracted Luther's attention in the summer of 1 5 1 6. A sermon on the subject, which he preached on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity in that year, is still extant ; and he returned to the attack in another, which, dated on " the day before the dedication " of the Castle Church, must be assigned to the 31st of October. A third allusion to the topic, which was evidently filling his mind more and more, occurs in a sermon preached on St. Matthias' Day, February 24, 1517. All these show a some- what doubtful and perplexed state of mind. He does not deny the value of indulgences or the right of the Pope to issue them ; but he cannot bring them, especially as he hears they are being preached, into accord with the spiritual theory of salvation to which he had worked his own way. Mean- while Tetzel was drawing closer to the confines of Saxony, and strange things came to Luther's ears. Burghers of Wittenberg went to Zerbst or Jiiterbogk to buy these religious wares, and, coming back, advanced their letter of indulgence against Ms authority in the confessional. Eumour, true or false, brought startling echoes of Tetzel's preaching ; he had declared that if any one had sinned in the grossest way against the Mother of God, forgiveness was to be bought at a price ; he had set him- self up against St. Peter, saying that he had delivered more souls with the indulgence than the Apostle with his preaching ; he had asserted that the red cross of the indulgence, with the Pope's arms, erected in the churches, was as powerful as the Cross of Christ ; he had told the people that when money was paid into the chest for the release of a soul in purgatory it mounted upwards to heaven so soon as the coin rang upon the bottom. There may have been an element of exaggeration in all this ; such stories commonly lose nothing in the telling ; but men talked of them and believed them, and Luther shared their belief. By friends and strangers, in conversation and in writing, he was asked his opinion of these strange novelties, and found when he held his peace that hot and bitter words were spoken of the authority of the Papal chair. " No one," he said, " would bell the cat." Tetzel was a Dominican, and the Dominicans wielded the terrible power of the Inquisition. He himself was " but a young Doctor, just out of the smithy, eager V PUBLICATION OF THE THESES 213 and .lusty in Holy Scripture," and he had already run the risk of iU-will from the Elector by preaching against the indulgences, which attracted men to the church which he had founded and enriched with so many relics. So the advantage of silence and the necessity of speech contended together in his mind till, while he was musing, the fire burned, and at last he spake with his tongue. The 1st of November, All Saints' Day, was that of the dedication of the Castle Church, on which its treasures were wont to be displayed to the faithful, and its indulgences were chiefly to be earned. But the door of the church was also the " blackboard " of the University, on which all notices of disputations and other high academic functions were displayed. Hither, then, went Luther, accompanied by John Agricola, on the afternoon of the 31st October 1517, and nailed to the door his Mnety-five Theses. We need not wonder that, interpreted by subsequent events, this bold act made a deep impression upon the imagination of the sole witness of it ; long afterwards Agricola was wont to speak of the Little " half sheet of paper " which so shook the world.^ The form which Luther's action took was strictly academic ; nor, as we have seen, were these Theses the first that he had propounded. Such disputations were regarded in the uni- versities of the Middle Ages partly as recognised means of defining and elucidating truth, partly as a kind of mental gymnastic, apt to train and quicken the faculties of the dis- putants. It was not understood that a man was always ready to adopt in sober earnest propositions which he was wOliag to defend in the academic arena ; and in hke manner, a rising disputant might attack orthodox positions without endangering his reputation for orthodoxy. At the same time, the element of serious conviction involved in formal disputation varied greatly; and such an encounter as that in 1519, between Eck on the one hand, Luther and Carlstadt on the other, was no mimic fight, but a duel to the death. How serious the announcement of this disputation was (though in fact no dis- putants appeared), may be inferred from the terms in which it 1 Weimar ed. vol. i. pp. 66, 94, Jdh. Agricola, p. 16 ; Forstemanii, 138 ; Erl. D. S. vol. xxvi. p. 69 Neues Urkundenbuch, p. 301 ; Corp. {Wider Sajis Wurst); Myconius, p. Eef. vol. xxv. p. 777. 21 ; De W. vol. i. p. 113 ; Eawerau, 214 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. was made. " For love and desire of elucidating the truth, these following Theses will be disputed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Eeverend Father, Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Doctor of Theology, and Ordinary Lecturer on the same, in that place. Wherefore he asks, that whosoever can- not verbally and in presence debate with us should, absent, do the same in writing. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen." And the form of Luther's action accurately repre- sented the state of his mind. The Church, he said, in effect, to his diocesan, Scultetus, Bishop of Brandenburg, had put forth no authoritative doctrine of indulgences, and the subject was therefore legitimately open to disputation. " These," he wrote in his first letter to Leo X, " are disputations, not doctrines, not dogmas ; and, in accordance with custom, put somewhat obscurely and enigmatically." He was quite convinced that he had only to bring the excesses of the indulgence-mongers under the notice of the proper authorities to have them condemned. He was the furthest possible from charging upon the doctrine or practice of the Church the scandals of Tetzel's preaching and traffic. Nor indeed did he imagine that the blows of his hammer would echo far beyond the quiet precincts of the church and university of Wittenberg. Early in 1518 he writes to Scheurl, who had expressed astonishment that the Theses had not been sent to a friend like himself, that he had not intended to make them known outside a limited circle of friends and neighbours. To Lang, at Erfurt, they were indeed sent on the 11th of November, with the characteristic words, " If the work be of God, who shall hindeit* it ? If not of God, who shall further it ? Not my will, nor theirs, nor ours, but thine be done. Holy Father, which art in heaven, Amen." But it was impossible that the fire once kindled should not spread ; in a fortnight the Theses had run through all Germany, in a month through all Christendom, " as if," says Myconius, " the angels had been the messengers." ^ This momentous step was not taken without due notice given to the authorities of the Church. In the letter which Luther wrote to Leo X on the 30th of May 1518, he says ' Weimar ed. vol. 1, p. 233 ; Erl. Wurst) ; Myconius, p. 23 ; De W. D. S. vol. xxvi. p. 71 ( Wider Bans vol. i. pp. 73, 95, 113, 121. V LUTHER'S LETTER TO THE ARCHBISHOP 215 that he had previously warned some '' great ones " of what he was about to do, being kindly receiyed by some and laughed at by others ; while Myconius reports that he wrote to four bishops, those, namely, of Meissen, Frankfurt, Zeitz, and Merse- burg. Luther's own more precise account is that he wrote to his own diocesan, the Bishop of Brandenburg, " in whom," he says, " he had a very gracious bishop," and to the Elector Arch- bishop, in whose name the traffic in indulgences was being carried on. Of these letters, only that to the Primate is now extant, and its date " Vigil of All Saints, 151 7," bespeaks for it the character of a solemn declaration of the writer's feeling and conviction. It is humble, some critics have thought almost abject in tone ; though perhaps not more so than might be expected, when it is remembered that the writer was a httle- known monk, " a peasant, and a peasant's son," and the receiver, not only Primate of Germany, Elector and Archchancellor of the Empire, but by birth a member of a reigning house. But this only brings out into stronger contrast the clearness with which Luther states, and the firmness with which he defends his position. It is, he says, in the exercise of the loyalty which he owes to the Archbishop that he speaks. Then, hav- ing told the tale of the strange and horrible things which Tetzel was alleged to have preached, he breaks out : " Good God, thus are the souls entrusted to your charge, most excel- lent Father, instructed unto death ! " He could be silent no longer. No gift that a bishop has to dispense can make a man secure of salvation. The Apostle enjoins' upon us to work out x)ur salvation with fear and trembliag, and the just shall hardly be saved. / Indulgences can do nothing for men's souls ia the way of salvation or holiness, but only remit external penalties, such as were formerly canonically imposed. Works of piety and charity are infinitely better than indulgences, yet these elbow those out of the way, " although it is the chief and only office of bishops that the people should learn the gospel and charity of Christ. How great therefore is the horror, how great the danger of a bishop, if, with a silent gospel, he suffers only the noise of indulgences among his people, and cares for them more than for the gospel ? " Then, by this time emboldened by the righteous indignation which had 2i6 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. possessed him, he ventures to impugn the Instruction which the Archbishop had given to his Commissaries, although he is careful to say that, while issued in his name, it cannot have been with his knowledge and consent. And finally, after imploring the Archbishop to restrain the excesses of the preachers, "lest some one should arise to confute both preachers and instruction, to the deepest reproach of your most Illustrious SubHmity — a thing which I should vehemently regret to see done, yet which I fear will be done, unless measures be promptly taken," — he asks him to look at his Theses, in order that he may see how undefined and uncertain a thing is that doctrine of Indulgences, of which the preachers dream as absolutely fixed and sure.^ ISTo answer was given to this letter. In the eyes of the Elector Archbishop, the professions of submissive humility with which it began would count for nothing against the offence committed in the earnest and lofty rebuke into which its concluding sentences rose. We know, however, what Albert thought of it, and to what action it roused him, from a docu- ment under his own hand. He had entrusted the administra- tion of his northern dioceses of Magdeburg and Halberstadt to a council, composed of members of both chapters, which sat at HaUe, and this body had hastened to iuform him of the action of " the audacious monk at Wittenberg," sending him at the same time the documents of the casQ. In a long letter, dated at Aschaffenburg on the 13 th of December, the Archbishop acknowledges the receipt of their report, and tells them, first, that he has referred the matter to the University of Mainz for its advice ; next, that he has instituted a process of inhibi- tion against Luther ; and thirdly, that he has sent all the papers to Eome for the judgment and action of the Holy See. These steps are to be made known to Luther by Tetzel, as the Archbishop's Commissary, whom at the same time he further appoints to preach the indulgence in Prussia and the Mark of 1 Ei-l. 0pp. V. a. vol. i. p. 16; "Quas ego indulgentias atq^ue adeo D. S. vol. xxvi. p. 71 {WiMr Sans potius indulgentiarum illarum minis- I ; De W. vol. i. pp. 67, 120 ; tros neque nunc defendo, et tunc cum Myconius, p. 22. Cardinal Sadolet decretae illae atque publicatae sunt, (quoted by Janssen, vol. ii. p. 76 nott) recorder me contradixisse." says of the indulgences in question, V HIS UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HERESY 217 Brandenburg. So far, then, he seems to take Tetzel and his past conduct unreservedly under his episcopal protection. But he goes on toi mention and approve a complaint which has been made by E^ome of the expense which Tetzel and his sub- ordinates have incurred — their pay alone amounting to up- wards of 300 gulden a month — and lays upon them his strongest commands to lessen it ; while at the same time he blames the sub-commissaries for having indulged, both in preaching and in the inns which they frequented, in unseemly speech and behaviour, " to the injury of the holy business." With some directions as to the opening of the boxes, and the rendering of a strict account of their contents to himself, this singular letter ends. The Archbishop tacitly admits that there is some ground for Luther's complaints, but he does not on that account intend to put an end to a lucrative traffic. On the contrary, he contents himself with a rebuke, directly of Tetzel's subordinates, indirectly of Tetzel himself, and proposes to extend the trade into Prussia and the Mark. StiU this lofty indifference to Luther's remonstrance is only half real ; his reference of it to the Pope shows at once that it has touched him to the quick, and that, great prelate as he is, he is anxious to transfer the responsibihty of dealing with it to stronger hands than his own.^ The Ninety-five Theses are so important a document in the history of the Eeformation as to tempt the critic to see in them a larger and more definite element of ecclesiastical and theologi- cal revolt than they really contain. The seed of rebellion is indeed there ; but there is no prevision in Luther's mind of what it may grow to. As we have already seen, the result of his long and bitter struggle in the cell at Erfurt had been a thoroughly spiritual conception of salvation, which, if as yet theologically indefinite, commanded his entire mental adhesion, and had gained complete possession of his souL His years of quiet teaching at Wittenberg had only confirmed this conviction, negatively, his revolt against Aristotle and the Schoolmen, posi- tively. The influence of the Theologia Germanica had worked in the same direction. But although this belief was vital to him, and, as the event proved, too strong for his allegiance to the 1 Korner, Tetzel, p. 148. 2i8 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. Church when the two came into decisive collision, he had not yet realised the fact that he could not hold it and still be a loyal and submissive Catholic. So far as we know, he had incurred no suspicion of heresy. He held high office in his order, and held it acceptably. He had not said or done anything to forfeit the confidence of Staupitz. He taught and preached at Wittenberg under the protection of a Prince whose reputation for orthodox piety stood high. Even now the point of difference with the Church, which Tetzel's preaching revealed to him, was not ia regard to the theory of justification, or any other matter of defined doctrine as to which he might be called upon to submit himself to the voice of authority. The controversy went deeper than any dogma, how fundamental soever ; for it was between a profoundly spiritual and a coarsely material conception of religion. A man who had fought his way to the thought that the essential thing was a strong spiritual affection, filling and transforming the whole nature— that without this, nothing else availed, that with this, nothing else was neces- sary, could not but be impatient with the rough and common machinery both of the theory and the practice of the indul- gence-mongers. Still he lays the blame on Tetzel and his tribe. He takes advantage of the fact that the Church has authorita- tively laid down no doctrine of indulgences, to acquit the Archbishop and the Pope. He is sure that he has only to put the matter in the right light, to secure the suppression of the abuse. But whether this is so, or not, he must speak. Un- consciously, perhaps, to himself, his loyalty to the truth is stronger than his loyalty to the Church, and he cannot, silently and without protest, see the Gospel degraded and dragged in the mire. It answers to this that the Theses do not, in strict logical order, and with due subordination of parts, state and defend a theory. They strike the reader as having been thrown together, somewhat in haste, and in obedience to an over- mastering moral impulse, rather than as the outcome of care- fully digested thought, and deliberate theological intention. ■Two currents of feeling, not always in complete accord, run through them ; now of righteous wrath at the depravation of spiritual religion implied in the indulgence preaching, and V CONFLICTING FEELING IN THE THESES 219 again of unwillingness to be cut off from Papal authority, if only duly limited and rightly exercised. And as these currents meet and mingle, not without some opposition and commotion, we seem to see the tides of passionate conviction in Luther's soul ebb and ilow, bearing him at one moment into the audacity of rebellion, and at the next, carrying him back into the obedience of conformity. For instance, the 1st Thesis begins by declar- ing, that in the intention of Christ, the whole life of the faithful disciple was to be an act of repentance : the 4th lays down, that punishment remains so long as hatred of one's self remains : the 5 th sets the axe to the root of indulgences, by asserting that the Pope neither can nor will remit any punishments, save such as he has imposed by his own will or in accordance with the Canons : the 6th limits the power of the Pope in remitting guilt to the declaration and approval of the fact that it has been remitted by God. But the tide turns with the 7th : " G-od forgives no man his sins without in all things subjecting him to His priestly Vicar." It is, however, only fair to say that the theses which can be interpreted into even a partial recognition of Papal power in the remission of penalties and the forgiveness of sins, are much less numerous and much less sharply expressed than those which impugn it. And even of these, most seem to contemplate an ideal Pontiff, who, Luther chooses to assume, would think and act only as a wise and good Pope should. On the other hand, such propositions as the following are absolutely destruc- tive of ceremonial religion. Thesis 23: "If remission of all' penalties of every kind can be given to any, it certainly can only be to the very perfect, that is, to the very few." Thesis 30: "No one is sure of the reality of his own contrition, much less of his having attained full forgiveness." Thesis 31: "As rare as the true penitent is the man who truly obtains indulgence, that is, very rare indeed." Thesis 36:" Every Christian who is truly repentant has a plenary remission of punishment and guilt due to him, even with- out letters of pardon." Thesis 37: " Every true Christian, living or dead, has from God a full share of all the wealth of Christ and the Church, even without letters of pardon." Thesis 39: " It is very difficult for even the most learned theologians , LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES at the same time publicly to extol the amplitude of pardons and the reality of contrition." And yet, with a sudden return of feeling, such as we have before seen, the 3 8th Thesis runs : " The remission and participation of the Pope is in no wise to be despised, since, as I have said, it is the declaration of the divine remission." The series of propositions from the 42d onwards are very trenchant in their contrast of the material with the spiritual. Thesis 42 : " Christians are to be taught that it is not the mind of the Pope, that buying of pardons is in any way to be compared with works of mercy." Thesis 43 : " Christians are to be taught that whoever gives to the poor, or lends to the needy, has done better than if he had bought pardons." Thesis 44 : " Because by the work of charity, charity is increased, and the man becomes better ; but by pardons, he does not become better, but only freer from punishment." Thesis 45 : " Christians are to be taught that whoever, having seen a poor man and passed him. by, gives money for pardons, acquires for himself not the indulgences of the Pope, but the indignation of God." Thesis 47 : " Christians are to be taught that buying of pardons is free, not prescribed." Thesis 48: "Christians are to be taught that, in giving of pardons, the Pope desires more, as he needs more, their pious prayers for himself than their ready money." Thesis 49 : " Christians are to be taught that the pardons of the Pope are useful if they do not put their trust in them, but most hurtful if thereby they lose the fear of God." Thesis 50:" Christians are to be taught that if the Pope knew of the exactions of the preachers of indulgences, he would choose that-the Basilica of St. Peter should lie in ashes, rather than be built up of the skin, the flesh, and the bones of his sheep." Other and later propositions go still farther in re- bellion. The 8 2d Thesis asks why the Pope, who can release souls from purgatory for money, does not, for very charity, and the supreme necessity of souls, empty the place of fiery trial ; the 86 th, accusing the Pope of being richer than the richest Croesus, why he does not build a BasUica for St. Peter out of his own money rather than that of the faithful poor ? With questions like these, it is difficult to reconcile any formal pro- fession of allegiance to a supreme Pontiff, either actual or ideal. V THE THESES AT WITTENBERG 221 The Ninety-five Theses are not, therefore, a manifesto of the Eeformation as it was destined to be. The word faith does not occur in them. They make no appeal to the authority of Scripture, as opposed and superior to that of the Church or the Pope. Their attack upon sacerdotal religion is only feeble and indirect. At the same time they breathe the spirit of the coming change, if they do little to anticipate its form. Not only are they a pubhc declaration of rebellion more decisive than any that had been made for centuries past, but they are the protest, even if somewhat inarticulate and confused, of spiritual insight. Here is one who has clearly discerned that reconciliation with God is an inward personal process, consummated ui the strength of a divine affection, and therefore essentially independent alike of human intervention and ecclesiastical forms. He has not yet, it is trtie, worked his thought clear, else he would see that the possibility of placing the soul face to face with God, and interfusing it with a divine strength, carries with it the needlessness of priests and sacraments and an authoritative Church. But the great antithesis, which it was Luther's life work to present to the world, between a religion which clothes itself in sacramental forms and a religion which casts them aside, already lies half hidden, half expressed, in these Theses. As to the reception in Wittenberg of Luther's audacious act, we are largely left to scattered hints and indications. He himself was in a strangely mixed mood. Writing to Staupitz in May 1518, he speaks of himself as a lover of retirement, one who was more willingly a spectator of the great game of human affairs than an actor in it, a man, infirm in health, whom his enemies by force or fraud coidd deprive of only a few hours' life. Who was he, he said many years afterwards, a wretched despised monk, more like a corpse than a man, that he should set himself up against the Pope's majesty ? Desire of fame did not move him ; God, in answer to his prayers, had wonderfully set him free from ambition ; so that he relied not on himself, but on the goodness of his cause, and the Word of God. But .whatever his reluctance to descend into the arena, the step once taken, he was serene and joyful. At a later time he told the story, how the Prior and Sub-Prior of his LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES convent came to him, moved by the growing clamour, and begged him not to put his order to shame. The affair of the Dominicans, burned at Bern in 1509 for inventing miracles to disprove the Immaculate Conception of Mary, was still fresh in men's memories ; the same powerful order had just suffered defeat at the hands of Eeuchlin and the humanists ; what more likely than that they should avenge themselves, and " it be the turn of the Augustinians to burn ? " To which Luther answered, " Dear Fathers, if the matter is not begun in God's name it wiU soon fall to the ground, but if it is, let Him take charge of it." It must have been about this time that, riding to Kemberg with his colleague the jurist Hieronymus Schurf, he was asked by his companion, "What are you about in writing against the Pope ? It will not be borne," and an- swered, in the true heroic tone, " What if it mu&t be, borne ? " His theological friends at Wittenberg, Carlstadt, Amsdorf, and the rest, came only gradually to his side, being divided, prob- ably at first between uneasy astonishment at his boldness and the habit of submission to his intellectual ascendency. They had accepted his theory of grace and works, and, a little more slowly than himself, were beginning to discern to what decisive- ness of ^volt against the Church it might lead them. The Elector Meady appears in that attitude of benevolent neutrality from which he never wholly departed. He cannot have regarded with satisfaction what was virtually an attack, not only upon his own cherished convictions, but upon his favourite foundation : but he makes no sign ; and on the other hand, Luther is anxious to have it widely known that Frederick has not been cognisant of his onslaught on the authority of the Archbishop. In the theological world outside, much loudly- expressed astonishment and contempt divided men's minds with scant sympathy. Mathesius teUs the story of a Dr. Fleck, a monk of Steinlausig, near Bitterfeld, who, when he read ' the Theses, cried out for joy, " Ho, ho, he is come for whom we have waited ; he will do it," and thereupon wrote a letter of encouragement to Luther. Not all friends, however, were equally confident. A pendant to this is the anecdote of one Albert Cranz of Hamburg, who said on the same occasion, " Thou speakest the truth, good brother, but thou wilt effect TETZEL'S REPL Y 223 nothing : go, therefore, into thy cell and pray, ' Lord, have mercy upon me.' " Each mood is true to facts of human nature ; but it is in the former, which was happily Luther's, that victories of reform are won.'' "^ It was not to be expected that Tetzel should sit quietly down under Luther's attack. The force of the onslaught may be measured by the fact that for the time at least it put an end to the Dominican's activity in the sale of indulgences. In December 1517 we hear of him at Halle, where he procures certificates, still extant, from both lay and ecclesiastical authorities, to prove that in that city at least he had not uttered the revolting proposition as to the Virgin, ascribed to him by common report. Thence, apparently supposing that only as a Doctor of Theology he could adequately answer Luther, he went to Frankfurt on the Oder for the purpose of taking that degree. The university of that city, which had been founded in 1506 as a centre of the new learning, had fallen altogether rato Dominican hands, and was in the north of Germany, as Koln in the west, a seat of reaction. One of its leading teachers was Conrad Wimpina, a stout representa- tive of the scholastic method, who at Leipzig had already been Tetzel's teacher. Under Wimpina's inspiration, many said with his help, Tetzel prepared a series of 106 Antitheses, followed by a second set of 50, in which he took the field of disputation against Luther. The first of these appeared in priat at the end of the year, when Tetzel made the first step towards the coveted degree; on the 20th of January 1518 a great assembly of 300 Dominican monks was held ; on the 21st the 156 Theses were offered for disputation, and Tetzel solemnly declared Doctor of Theology. The dialectic encounter was in this case not a mere friendly tournament : a real opponent presented himself in the person of John Knipstrow, a young Franciscan monk who, for learning's sake, had come to the university from his Silesian monastery, and now ve- hemently defended the cause of Luther. With him, however, 1 Erl. D. S.. vol. xli. p. 37 {AwsU- Walch, Vol. xiv. p. 470 ; De W. vol. gung.des 118. Psalms) ; vol. xxvi. p. 71 i. pp. 76, 108, 118; T. T. vol. ii. p. (Wider Hans Wwrst) ; 0pp. Lat. vol. 421 ; Lauterbach, p. 18 ; Mathesius, iii. p. 280 (Enarrationes in Genesin) ; p. 13 A ; Tentzel, vol. i. p. 269 ; vol. XX. p. 91 {Ena/rralio Psalmi 127.) ; Lbsclier, vol. ii. p. 3. 224 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. short work was made, as might be expected where 300 Domi- nicans were got together; he was sent to the monastery of Piritz in Pomerania to digest his difficulties as best he could. It is pleasant to be able to add that a few years afterwards he emerged into light, and died at last General Superintendent of the district of Wolgast.^ Eecent apologists are anxious to make out that both the 106 and the 50 Theses were Tetzel's own, and that the com- mon belief, which Luther shared, that Wimpina had been their real author, was unfounded. It is a matter of very little moment ; such assistance as Wimpina may have given Tetzel was a common academical incident, held to reflect no shame on the receiver ; of the " Declarations " by Melanchthon, so many of which are stiU extant, nearly aU were written to be de- livered by others on occasions of university solemnity ; and if it is true that Wimpina afterwards printed the Antitheses in a work of his own without mentioning Tetzel's name, we may take it as a further proof that authorship in such cases was a very indefinite thing. But in truth the Antitheses do not shed much lustre upon any one. The 106 refer to the Theory of Indulgences ; the 5 lay down the doctrine of the Papal Supremacy in the crudest and most uncompromising form. There is a certain rude force in the latter ; their author is troubled by no scruples as to the rights and liberties of the Church, which he delivers bound hand and foot to the dictation of the Sovereign Pontiff. But the 106 on Indulgences are a very feeble and futile document compared with the 95 against which they were directed, and quite miss all the deeper moral and rehgious issues of the dispute. Luther took no notice of either. Some time in March, however, a man came over from Halle to Wittenberg briugiag a large supply of Tetzel's theses, and offering them publicly for sale. The students gathered eagerly round, bought a few, then forcibly took the rest from the terrified hawker, and, after having in- vited the whole university to the funeral pyre, burned them in the market-place. We may suppose that Luther was 1 Seidemann, Erlduterungen, p. 1 ; Tetzel's two sets of Theses may be Lbscher, vol. i. p. 504 ; vol. ii. p. 7 ; found at lengtli in Erl. 0pp. v. a. vol. Seckendorf, lib. iii. sec. 15, p. 139. i. p. 294 et seq. V DEFENCE OF HIS THESES 225 secretly not displeased with the generous indiscretion of his youthful adherents ; but he was anxious to clear himself and the authorities of the university of any complicity with the deed, and made it the subject of grave admonitions from the pulpit.^ During the winter months of 1517-1518 Luther abated nothing of his literary activity. He followed up his Theses with a sermon, " Of Indulgence and Grace," in which, under twenty heads, probably amplified in oral delivery, he expounded their doctrine in the vernaciilar to the people. It is not im- probable that the MS. of this sermon was sent, with the Theses, to the Archbishop of Mainz, but it did not appear in print till February or March 1518.^ One or two other ser- mons of the same period still remain, showing that, careless of the clamour that was rising outside, he persevered in the exposition of the theological ideas that were more and more taking possession of him. He published a short explanation of the 110th Psalm, and furnished a preface to an edition, by Carlstadt, of Augustine's Be Spiritii et Liter d. He was engaged on an elaborate statement and defence of the position taken up in the Theses, which was to be his justification in the eyes of the Church. But he was not thinking of rebellion. He had had a kind reply to his first letter to his ordinary, the Bishop of Brandenburg, who bade bim beware how he dashed himself against Holy Church: now, probably in February 1518, he sent him, with a second letter, a copy of the yet 1 "Weimar ed. vol. i. p. 277 ; Uesolu- elusion " is plainly the Ninety - five tiones, ibid. vol. i. p. 632; De W. vol. Theses ; the "tractat" may very well i.~pp. 98, 99, 109; Loscher, vol. i. p. he the "Sermon von AhlassundGnade," 504. The story that Tetzel had already although there seems to be sufficient burned the Ninety-five Theses at Jilter- proof that it was not published till the bogk, or elsewhere, though it was gener- middle of February 1518. If so, it can ally believed, and has no element of only have been communicated to the improbability in it, rests on no certain Archbishop in MS. Luther's own evidence. words, in the Latin preface to the first 2 Weimar ed. vol. i. p. 239. The volume of his collected works (1545), Archbishop of Mainz, in the letter to are "Mox scrips! epistolas duas, al- his council at Halle above mentioned, teram ad Moguntinensem archiepis- says, "Wir haben eur schreyben mit copum Albertum. . . . Ego contemptus zugesandten tractat uud conclusion eins edidi Disputationis schedulam simul vermessnen Monichs zew Wittenberg et germanicam concionem de indulgen- das heyUg negotium Indulgenciarum tiis, paulo post etiam Resolutiones." und unsern Subcommissarieu betref- Kbrner, Tetzel, p. 148 ; Erl. 0pp. v. a. fend Inhalts horen lessen." The "con- vol. i. pp. 16, 17. 226 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. unpublished Eesolutiones, submitting it to his episcopal cen- sure. The answer was brought by a dignified churchman, the Abbot of Lehnin, who was also the bearer of a request from the bishop, that Luther would for a time postpone the publica- tion of the book, and meanwhile would not sell the German sermon. To this request the Eeformer, touched by the con- descension of the bishop, gave a ready assent, and all further action was for a time deferred. But the inward fire was still burning, and the more Luther meditated on indulgences the more difficult of reconciliation with spiritual religion did he find them. In the pubKc eye it was necessary to wait with caution ;, but, writing to Spalatin on the 15 th February, he reveals his whole miad. He can see nothing in indulgences but a deluding of souls ; they are utterly useless, except to snorers and slothful in the way of Christ. Compared with the exercise of charity, they are naught ; he cannot doubt that one who passes by a poor man to buy them deserves the anger of God.i These occupations were broken in upon by a journey to Heidelberg, which Luther undertook in the months of April and May. The occasion was the triennial assembly of the Augustinian Congregation, held for the election of ofBicers and the transaction of other necessary busiaess. Some of Luther's friends doubted whether he ought to go ; the indulgence- mongers were breathing out threats against him, talking of lighting a heretic's faggot within a month ; nor did Luther himself, who relied upon the offered protection of the Elector, and had made up his mind to go to Heidelberg in any case, think that these menaces were altogether idle words. Frede- rick's permission for the journey was given in a letter to Staupitz, which shows how highly he esteemed his Professor, and how unwilling he was that he should be long detained from his work at Wittenberg ; and when on the 1 1th of April Luther set out, it was in company of an escort provided by the Elector, and furnished with a strongly-worded letter of com- ' Weimar ed. vol. i. pp. 266, 317, (to Spalatin, wrongly dated Not. 1517, 325, 335, 687 ; Erl. 0pp. v. a. vol. vide Enders, LutTier's Brie/wechsel, vol. vii. p. 488 ; T. T. vol. 11. p. 367, vol. i. p. 177) ; conf. vol. i. pp. 92, 96. iii. p. 315 ; De W. vol. i. pp. 89, 71 V HEIDELBERG THESES 227 mendation.^ The first part of the toilsome road, as far as Coburg, he accomplished on foot : " a sin," he pleasantly writes to Spalatin, " which, inasmuch as his contrition is perfect, and a most ample satisfaction has been imposed upon him, needs no remission of indulgences." From Coburg he made his way to Wiirzburg, where he was most hospitably received by the Bishop, Lorenz von Bibra, a prelate, who, if he had not died in the subsequent year, might, men thought, have pubhcly associated himself with the cause of reform.^ Here, however, he met John Lang, the Prior of his old convent at Erfurt, and other brethren of the order, on their way to Heidelberg, and, joining himself to them, pleasantly accomplished the rest of the journey.' , The chief business of the Assembly was despatched by the re-election of Staupitz as Vicar, and the replacing of Luther by Lang, in the minor office of District Vicar. But according to the custom of the order, the occasion was taken to hold a dis- putation, which was under the presidency of Luther. He prepared forty Theses — twenty-eight theological, twelve philo- sophical, which were to be defended against all comers by his friend and scholar Leonard Beyer. The theological theses he called " Paradoxa," proposing for inquiry, whether they were " well or ill derived from the divine Paul, Christ's most chosen vessel and organ ; and, in the second place, from St. Augustine, his most faithful interpreter." There is no mention of indul- gences here ; he seems to regard that controversy as a quite unimportant thing compared with the " Theology of the Cross," which he sets forth in bold and striking phrase. His theme — the theme which he had elaborated in his cell at Erfurt, and had since at Wittenberg been throwing into a completer logical form — is the utter impotence of man to do good works, and his sole reliance upon Christ for salvation. The tendency of the 1 In a letter to Spalatin of May 18, ^ Just before his death lie wrote to Luther says of Jacob Simler, who had the Elector Frederick, recommending been the tutor of the Pfalzgraf Wolf- Luther to his special care, ' ' Eur Liebe gang, " Non potuit satis commendare wolle je den frummen Mann, Doctor Magister Jacobus literas Principis nos- Martinus, nicht wegziehen lassen, denn tri pro me datas, dicens sua Nechar- ihm geschehe Unrecht," Spalatin, F. ena lingua, 'ihr habt by Gott einen d. W. p. 161. kystlichen Credenz,'" De W. vol. i. , = De W. vol. i. pp. 98, 105, 106; p. 111. Kolde, Staupitz, p. 314 note. 228 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. whole may easily be inferred from the 26th Thesis: "The Law says, ' Do this,' and it is never done. Grace says, ' Be- lieve on Him,' and all things are done already." The twelve philosophical Theses, on the other hand, are chiefly remarkable in their pronounced rebellion against the authority of Aristotle, as rivals to whom Plato and Anaxagoras are set up. The chief interest of the disputation, however, must have been upon the theological side. The Lutheran doctrine of salvation could not be more vividly stated than in these theses, presented by an Augustinian monk to the brethren of his order, at the moment of laying down an important office, which he had filled to the general satisfaction.^ The disputation went off amid much applause and mutual congratulation. The Pfalzgraf "Wolfgang, who received the Saxon Augustinians with princely hospitality, and exhibited to them all the treasures of the Castle, wrote to Frederick that Luther had won for himself no little praise, and worthily upheld the credit of Wittenberg. One only of the Heidelberg doctors, the youngest of them all, had cried out amid general laughter, " that if the peasants heard these things they would certainly stone him." More remarkable still was the concourse of young men, afterwards to be Luther's most vigorous lieu- tenants in the army of reformation, who then, for the first time, looked upon his face, and caught the inspiration of his presence. There was John Brenz, then in his nineteenth year, a student at Heidelberg; afterwards famous as the Reformer of Swabia, and, if possible, more uncompromising than Luther himself in his defence of the Eeal Presence in the Eucharist. In all likelihood there was Erhard Schnepf, a few years older than Brenz, who was to play a great part in intro- ducing the reform into Wiirtemberg, and who survived to share in the unhappy controversies which followed the death of Luther. There was Theobald Billican, afterwards Pastor of Nordlingen, who finally abjured Lutheranism, and in the last years of his life taught Canon Law at Heidelberg, History and Rhetoric at Marburg. Better known than any of them there was Martin Butzer, or Bucer, the would-be mediator between the German and the Swiss Reformers, who ended his 1 The Heidelberg Theses will be found in Weimar ed. vol. i. p. 353. V BREACH WITH OLDER TEACHERS 229 days as professor of the reformed theology at Cambridge. In a letter to Beatus Ehenanus, full of admiring enthusiasm, Bucer has left behind his impressions of Luther, derived partly from his public appearance at the disputation, partly from a private interview that followed it. "What Erasmus only insinuated," thought Bucer, " Luther openly and freely taught.". The contrast in all probability suggested itself to many young and ardent minds ; the time was quickly becoming ripe for clear and decisive speech.^ To awaken the enthusiasm of the young, never averse to change, is, however, another and an easier thing than to win the approval of the old, whose convictions and sympathies are all with the past. On his way home, Luther travelled in the same vehicle with Bartholomew Arnoldi von Usingen, one of his old teachers at Erfurt. But he was not successful in presenting his new views to him, and left him, he says, "thoughtful and wondering." Nor did he make more way with Trutvetter, who had written to him to express dissatis- faction with his general philosophical and theological attitude. On his way through Erfurt, Luther knocked at his old master's door ; but not being able to see him, addressed to him a letter, in which he gives an account of himself, as a scholar to a teacher, beloved and respected. But the guK between them was too wide to be bridged over. Trutvetter was a convinced disciple of Aristotle and the Schoolmen, and not likely to acknowledge the futility of the studies to which his life had been devoted. And Luther, without departing from the tone of almost submissive respect, is not disposed to concede one inch of the position which he had taken up. He asserts that the whole University of Wittenberg, with the exception of a single licentiate, is with hun in his doctrine of grace and works ; he declares that the Elector and the Bishop of Bran- denburg take the same view ; " many other prelates and all intelligent citizens now avow with one mouth, that before they had never known or heard Christ and the Gospel." But he is not content with the adduction of these authorities. " I absolutely believe," he goes on to say, " that it is impossible to 1 De W. vol. i. p. Ill ; Tentzel, vol. Buoer's letter to Beatus Menanus will i. p. 330 ; Hartmann, Joh. Br'enz, p. 5. be found in Gerdes, vol. i. App. p. 175. 230 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. reform the Church, unless the canons, the decretals, the schol- astic theology, philosophy and logic, as they are now treated, are utterly rooted up, and other studies put in their place. And in that opinion I go so far as daily to pray God that this may happen at once, in order that the pure study of the Scriptures and the Fathers may be restored. ' I may seem to you to be no logician, nor, perhaps, am I ; but one thing I know, that in the defence of this opinion I fear no man's logic." With this, though we hear of no open rupture, the breach must have been complete. From the old he turned with renewed expectation to the young. "My chief hope," he writes to Spalatin on the 1 8th of May, " is, that as Christ, rejected by the Jews, passed over to the Gentiles, so now too his true theology, which these obstinate old men reject, may transfer itself to the young." He had come back from Heidelberg full of cheerful energy ; his friends thought him looking better and stouter. He had found an audience for his opinions outside the Wittenberg circle ; and in proportion as he was compelled to break with a passing generation, felt himself in accord with one that was coming. In the same letter to Spalatin he begs that provision may be made for the teaching of Greek and Hebrew at the University. That sentence is the courier announcing the speedy arrival of Melanchthon.-' On his return to Wittenberg Luther applied himself to the task of finishing his Besolutiones Disputationum de Indulgen- tiarum Virtute, the work in which he expounded and defended his Ninety-five Theses. On the 2 2d of May he sent the MS. to his ordinary, the Bishop of Brandenburg; on the 30th to Staupitz, as the officer of his order to whom he was immed- iately responsible. What he asked of Staupitz, however, was to transmit the Resolutiones to the Pope, together with a letter, in which he submissively placed himself and his doctrine at the disposal of the Holy See. In the meantime, the printing of the book went on, but was not completed, until, on the 21st of August, its author was able to send a copy to Spalatin, no doubt for the Elector's use. In these letters, especially in that to the Bishop of Brandenburg, Luther still adheres to his position that the Theses are matters for disputation only, and 1 De "W. vol. i. pp. 108, 112. Lingkej p. 37 seq. V RESOLUTIONES DE INDULGENTIIS 231 are not to be ,taken as deliberate and irrevocable expressions of opinion. " Among them," he says, " are some things of which I doubt ; of some I am ignorant ; some I deny ; while I pertia- aciously assert none, and submit all to Holy Church and its judgment." So to Leo also he expresses himself in terms of the most submissive humility. "Wherefore, most blessed Father, I offer myself prostrate at the feet of your Blessedness, with all that I am and have ; quicken, slay, call, recall, approve, reprove, as may seem to you good. I will acknowledge your voice as the voice of Christ, residing and speaking in you. If I have deserved death, I will not refuse to die." And again to Spalatin : " I may err in disputation: I wiU. never be a heretic. But I desire to define nothing ; 'still more, not to be led captive by the opinions of men." ^ If the book itself hardly answered to the modesty of these assertions, and proved to be a bold restatement and defence of the Theses, the last words may to some extent furnish the reason. Luther was able to assert, with truth, that the doctrine of indulgences had never been formally defined by competent authority, aiid therefore to take up the technically impregnable position, that in attacking it, he was not rebelHng against Church or Pope. Whether, ia his own mind, he really separated Leo from foi-mer Popes, of whom he spoke in terms of just severity, or was able to persuade himself that the Pontiff who had issued the indulgence could be brought to recognise its abuses, it is difficult to say. There is no lack of speaking out in the Besolutiones. The form of disputation is a transparent mask of the writer's fixed and vehemently held opinions. And the implications of the book are, perhaps, in some respects, more remarkable than its direct statements. It adopts, as if by instinct, the Scriptural method. It does not anywhere lay down the principle that the Bible is the ultimate authority on matters of faith, but it assumes it in illustrating every position by an abundant citation of texts. It brushes aside scholastic authorities, even of such high distinction as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, with the apostolic word, " Prove all things : hold fast that which is good." ^ Still more ' De W. vol. i. pp. 112, 114, 115, = Weimar ed. vol. i. p. 568 {Besolu- 119, 122, 133. Hones). 232 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. remarkable is the way in which, as by an inward necessity of his nature, Luther penetrates to the spiritual reality under- lying a disputed point. It is the first public revelation, except to some extent in the Theses themselves, of the peculiar power which made him what he was. He cannot rest in words, or symbols, or figures of speech. Beneath these he must fin4 the actual relations of the human soul to God, which they involve and are intended to express. , Many things in this treatise must have struck harshly on the ears of Leo and his courtiers ; as, for instance, the assertion of the superiority of an Ecumenical Council to the Pope ; the declaration that the Pope, " who is but a man like others," cannot of himself decree an article of faith ; the contempt cast on pilgrimages in search of indulgences ; the slighting way in which reUcs are spoken of If the Archbishop of Mainz read the book, which is not likely, he could hardly be pleased with its sharp criticism of his " Summary Instruction " to the indul- gence-mongers. The theory of the heavenly treasure was undermined by a denial of the supererogatory merits of the saints : " no single saint has in this life completely fulfilled the commands of God," and consequently none has anything to spare for others. Sometimes, no doubt unconsciously, he strikes a rationalistic note. " Even if St. Thomas, the blessed Bonaventura, Alexander Hales, are illustrious men, with their disciples Antoninus, Peter Paludanus, Augustine of Ancona, besides the Canonists, who follow them aU, it is right to prefer to them, in the first place, truth, in the second, the authority of the Pope and the Church." But perhaps the boldest, and, in that respect, the most notable passage of all, is th,e following, in which he at first laments the ill success of the Lateran Council : " Although there are in the Church both very learned and very holy men, it is nevertheless the infelicity of our age, that even they, being what they are, cannot succour the Church. How little at this day learning and pious zeal can do, has been sufficiently proved by the unhappy issue of the efforts of those most wise and holy men, who, under Julius II, applied themselves to the reformation of the Church by a council called together for that purpose. Everywhere there are excellent and erudite bishops, whom I know; but the example of the few V ATTITUDE OF LEO X 233 imposes silence on the many. For, as the prophet Amos says (v. 13), 'Therefore the prudent shall keep sUence in that time; for it is an evil time.' Now, at last, we have a most excellent Pontiff, Leo X, whose integrity and learning are a dehght in all good men's ears. But what can that most benign of men do alone, in so great a confusion of affairs, worthy as he is to reign in better times, or that the times of his reign should be better ? In this age we are worthy only of such pontiffs as Julius II, Alexander VI, or other such atrocious Mezentii as poets have invented. For Eome herself, yea, Eome most of all, now laughs at good men ; in what part of the Christian world do men more freely make a mock of the best Bishopsjthan in Eome, that true Babylon ? But enough of this. ... It is better that truth should be "spoken by fools, by children, by drunkards, than never spoken at all." Language like this was a distinct step in advance. What was to come of it, probably Luther never asked himself ; he was under a moral necessity of speech, and he spoke, leaving the issue to time and God. But it was no longer a mere dispute as to indulgences and their abuse: obscure, and almost alone, he had challenged the whole Papal system.^ The controversy with Tetzel did not trouble him much ; he had better work on hand before long, and worthier foemen. In May 1518, the Dominican published a Refutation of the sermon on Indulgence and Grace : to which, in the following month, Luther replied by a Defence^ on neither of which is it necessary to delay. Already the first mutterings of that controversy with Eck, which culminated in the Disputation of Leipzig, were beginning to be heard. A more important matter was that the Pope had taken up the case. There were those about Leo X, Dominicans especially, who were, after a fashion, zealous for- the purity of the faith, and eager to main- tain the authority of the Pope ; but it is difficult to believe that the Supreme Pontiff himself cared much about the theo- logical aspects of the question. He probably felt as a monarch might who suddenly saw an important source of revenue in 1 Weimar ed. vol. i. pp. 573, 583, Loscher, vol. i. p. 484 ; Luther's in 589, 597, 606, 611, 613 {Besolutioms). Weimar ed. vol. i. p. 380. ^ Tetzel's pamphlet will be found in 234 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. danger of drying up, and did' not know how to replace it ; but he was no theologian, and, but for the accident of his position, hardly a Churchman. " Sihce G-od has given us the Papacy, let us enjoy it," was his characteristic exclamation on hearing of his election ; and all he desired was peace and quietness to taste the full sweetness of his position, and money to spend on the pursuits that he loved. He was a true child of the Eenaissance ; the Head of the Church as a result of family ambition ; and for aU that a Pagan in grain. If his life did not emulate the outrageous licence of some of his predecessors, it was equally free from any taint of asceticism ; his policy was, like that of any other Italian potentate,- frankly selfish and worldly, and he was as devoted to the interests of the Medici as Maximilian to those of his own branch of Hapsburgs. What he really cared for was art : the last MS. of a Greek poet brought from Constantinople ; the newest statue dug up from the ruins of Eome ; the basilica which' Michael Angelo was slowly rearing by the side of the Vatican ; the frescoed glories which were growing under Eaphael's brush, r The poem was no worse to him for being lascivious, and the indecency of the statue only made it piquant ; the laymen of the Eenaissance were above moral prejudices, and if Churchnien were obliged to put on a demurer outside, it only added to the secret savour of the delight. Naturally Leo had not in him' the. stuff of which persecutors are made ; he was too anxious to live not to be wUhng to let live ; and he escaped the last indignity of, com- pelling men to believe, put of an unbelieving heart. He would do any one a kindness which did not cost him any effort ; he liked to see people happy about him ; but he had no conception of the serious thought, the sustained effort, the moral restraint which are necessary for good government ; and when he was gone the Eoman people forgot his lonhomie in the recollection of the prodigality which had emptied the treasury of the Church. Possibly, if he had been of harder metal, or possessed a keener insight, he might have burned out the Eeformation in the pyre of one resolute heretic ; but he either did not see his opportunity or let it, slip. He had favoured Eeuchlin as long as the mendicant orders would let him ; and now the story went, that he had said that " Brother V PRIERIAS'S DIALOGUE 235 Martin was a very clever fellow, and that all the quarrel came of monks' envy.' ^ It was, however, necessary to do something in answer to the appeal of the Archbishop of Mainz, and Leo's first step was, in February 1518, to refer the case to the Pto visional General of the Augustinian Order, Gabriel Venetus, then newly appointed: " If he acted," said the 'Pope, " with promptitude, it would not; be difficult to extinguish the flame that had been kindled ... If, on the contrary, he delayed, and the evU took head, he feared, that when they wanted to apply a remedy to the conflagration, they would be unable to do it." ^ What steps the Augustinian General took in answer to this request, if indeed any, is rnatter of controversy ; in the meanwhile a champion of the Holy See came forward, in the person of Silvester Mazzolini, usually, from his birthplace Prierio, called Prierias. • Like all Luther's other antagonists at this time, he was a Dominican, a censor of books, an inquisitor and judge in matters of faith, who held the dignified office of Magister Sacri Palatii, instructor, that is, of the Papal household. Already a man advanced in years, and holding an official position very near the seat of authority, he despised an adver- sary whose obscurity was only equalled by his audacity. Tearing himself away from his favourite study of Thomas Aquinas, he composed, in three days, a treatise, in the form of a dialogue between himself and Luther, in which, taking up the Mnety-five Theses in succession, he flattered himself that he demonstrated the heresy of their author. The only interest of the Dialogue, however, lies in four fundamental principles which he laid down at the beginning. In these was ex- pressed in uncompromising terms the doctrine of the Church which found favour with the Eoman Curia. The Universal Church was virtually, the Eoman Church and the Supreme Pontiff. Eepresentatively, the Eoman Church is the College of Cardinals, virtually the Pope himself. This Church, in matters of faith and morals, cannot err, nor can the Pope, " speaking in the exercise of his office, and doiiig what in him lies to appre- f ^ Matteo Bandello, quoted by Giese- bellisaimo ingegno, e clie coteste erano ler {KirahengeschicMe, vol. iii. pt. 1, invidie fratesche." p. 38 note), " Che Fra Martino fosse un ^ Gieseler, vol. iii. pt. 1, p. 38 note. 236 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. hend the truth." "Whoever," says the Third Proposition, " does not lean upon the doctrine of the Eoman Church and the Eoman Pontiff as an infallible rule of faith, from which even the Sacred Scriptures derive their force and authority, is a heretic." What the Eoman Church does, as weU. as what it says, constitutes a custom and acquires the force of law. From all of which follows the obvious corollary, " Who, in the matter of indulgences, says that the Eoman Church cannot do what it actually does, is a heretic." A quod, erat demonstrandum which must have been infinitely satisfactory to the mind of the Master of the Sacred Palace.-' To prove to Luther that his Theses were not in accordance with the doctrine of St.^^mas — a fact which he already knew quite well — was haK^ the way to convince him of his error. At first he effectually marked his contempt for the character of the attack by puraishing in Germany two editions of the Dialogue without comment or answer ; then, as these were eagerly bought up, he issued about the end of August a third edition, accompanied by a Besponsio, which he had written, as he told Spalatin, ia two days. But it is significant that his answer is entitled. Of the Power of the Pope, as if, while Prierias's attack upon the Theses might weU be passed by in silence, his fundamental propositions were worth refuta- tion. The treatise, however, hardly answers to its title ; it takes up Prierias's objections to the Theses one by one, and answers them in true dialectical fashion. At first,- indeed, he brushes aside the four fundamental propositions, laying down others which are sufficiently subversive of them. He quotes Paul, " Prove all things : hold fast that which is good ; " he cites Augustine for the principle, that only the Canonical books can be regarded as wholly free froni error. Again and again in the course of his argument he repudiates the authority of St. Thomas, to which hjs adversary appeals as all-sufiScient. He lays it down that it is possible for either Pope or Council to err. Then he breaks out, " I deny and hold of no account your fundamental principles, in which you have distinguished an essential, a representative, a virtual Church. Por they are your own, that is, laid down without Scripture or any authority. 1 For Prierias's Dialogus, vide Erl. 0pp. v. a. vol. i. p. 341 seq. V HIS SERMON ON EXCOMMUNICA TION 237 I do not know the Church virtually, except in Christ : repre- sentatively, except in a Council. Else, if whatever the virtual Church, that is the Pope, does, is to be accounted the act of the Church, what monstrous things in the Church shall we have to number among things well done ? What of the horrid effusion of Christian blood by Julius II ? What of the tyranny of Boniface VIII, hated by the whole world and reprobated in all chronicles, of whom the saying is current, ' He came in like a fox, he reigned like a lion, he died like a dog ? '" Writing like this could not but widen the breach ; it was of little use to appeal to the Pope in terms of humble sub- mission, and at the same time to run full tilt against theories of Papal authority which the Church was doing its best to elevate into articles of faith. Gerson and D'Ailly were long dead, the age of great Councils past ; it was an anachronism to set up the Church against the Pope. For those who were not prepared to accept the opinions and actions of the Supreme Pontiff and his subservient advisers, it was every day more plain that only one alternative was open, revolt and schism.i ' Another utterance of Luther's about this time, apparently made without any reference to his controversy with Eome, lessened the chances of reconciliation. One Sunday in May, he preached a sermon in Wittenberg on the Force of Excom- munication. The occasion of it was purely local ; there had been some trouble with the officials of the Bishop of Branden- burg, of what precise kind we do not know. .The sermon made a great noise and excited much criticism ; so that Luther proposed to make the doctrines which he had advanced a sub- ject of disputation, and only abandoned the idea at the request of the Bishop. In the meantime the matter grew in passing from mouth to mouth ; the story got to the Diet which was being held at Augsburg, and was told, with additions much to Luther's disadvantage ; on a visit which he paid to Dresden, he was confronted and reproached with it. The result was that he made up his mind to print what he could recollect of it ; if the exact words were gone, he could at least recall the sense. The Sermo de Virtute Excommunicationis .was there- 1 Weimar ed. vol. i. pp. 647, 656 {Ad dialogum S. Frieratis Hesponsio) ; De "W. vol. i. p. 135. ' 238 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. fore published between the 21st and 31st of August. The issue vindicated Luther from the charge of having spoken unworthily of Church authorities ; but only at the cost of proving him a more hopeless rebel than before. "Excom- munication," he said, " is only the deprivation of communion ; the placing of a man outside the communion of the faithful. This communion of the faithful is twofold : one, internal and spiritual; the other, external and corporal. Spiritual com- munion is the one faith, hope, charity towards God. Corporal communion is participation in the same sacraments, that is, in the sigTis of faith, hope, charity." The obvious conclusion from this is, first, that so far as spiritual communion is concerned, only God can take it away or restore it ; and that the only true excommunication is that which a man inflicts on him- self by his own sin ; and next, that Church excommunication is only the deprivation of external communion, that is of the sacraments, burial, public prayer, and the like. " From which things," he goes on, " it is abundantly evident that, so long as faith, hope, and charity remain, true communion and partici- pation in all the goods of the Church remain also." This is spiritual, but hardly Catholic doctrine. It not only took out of the hands of the Pope aE the terror implied in the power of the keys, but indicated the chief line of fissure between the mediaeval Church and that which was yet unborn.-' In the meantime the formal proceedings against Luther were taking shape. Mario di Perusco, a Papal Procurator-fiscal, was ordered to draw up an indictment for heresy against him, and Hieronymus Ghinucci and Prierias were named as judges. The former was auditor of the Papal Camera, a man concerned with legal and financial matters, not supposed to possess any special knowledge of theology ; the latter had already decisively taken up the position of a partisan.^ A citation was issued, ordering Luther to appear in Eome, and to plead to the in- dictment within sixty days. This he received at Wittenberg on the 7 th of August. At once he wrote to Spalatin, begging 1 De "W. vol. i. pp. 130, 134, 138. [Hist. Cone. Trid. lib. i. cap. vii.) sajrs Conf. letter of Spalatin to Luther, that opportunity was given to Luther Enders, vol. i. p. 233 ; Weimar ed. vol. to object to Prierias, "ob commissam i. p. 639. _ prius inter eos contentionem." The text ^ It is fair to state that Pallavicini of the citation has not come down to us. V HIS CITATION TO AUGSBURG 239 him to use his iafluence with the Elector and his minister, Degenhard Pfeffinger, both of whom were attending the Diet at Augsburg, that they might prevail with the Pope to permit his cause to be heard before commissaries ia Germany. A few days later he wrote again, suggesting that if the Elector should refuse him a safe conduct through his dominions, it would be a sufficient excuse for not going to Eome. Frederick behaved on this occasion as he behaved all through. To the Cardinal della Kovere, who, as an old friend, had written to remonstrate with him on his protection of so notorious a heretic,^ he answered, in effect, that he had no sympathy with heretics and heresy ; and that all he desired was that Luther should have a fair trial, to which, he understood, he was quite willing to submit himself. This was indeed the avowed object of his diplomacy, which was, after a few weeks, successful. There was a good deal of writing to and fro, and no doubt much anxious talk, of which no record now remains. It is worth mentioning that the University of Wittenberg addressed two letters, one to the Pope himself, one to his Saxon cham- berlain, Charles von Miltitz ; the former excusing Luther from going to Eome on the ground of his infirm health, the latter testifying not only to his character but to his orthodoxy. But before these were written, the desired result had been reached. On the 23d of August the Pope wrote to the Elector, bidding him produce Luther, whom he describes as " a son of iniquity," before Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg, to be judged by the Holy See." Luther accordingly set out from Wittenberg on or about the 26 th of September with a heavy heart. He might well have thought that this was the crisis of his fate. Friends warned him not to trust himself out of Wittenberg ; Count Albert of Mansfeld sent him word that there was a plot to take him off; Staupitz wrote to him from Salzburg, telling him that, so far as he could see, "nothing remained for him but a cross," and begging him " to come and live and die with him," abandoning, it must be supposed, the work to which he 1 The Cardinal's letter, wMch is ^ 'Weiiiiar ed. vol. ii. pp. 23, 25, lost, was dated' April 3 ; tlie Elector's 30, 38 (Acta Auguslana) ; De W. vol. reply, August 5: Erl. Opp. v. a. vol. i. pp. 131, 132; Erl. 0?)p. v. a. vol. ii. p. 351. ii. pp. 352, 361. 240 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. had set his hand. His health was not good; the "tempta- tions," which were a continually recurring element of his mental history, chose this occasion of assault. "The citation," he writes to Staupitz, " and the threats aimed at me, move me not at all. I suffer, as you know, incomparably worse things, which compel me to regard as trifles these temporal and momentary thunders." He was filled with melancholy fore- bodings. " Now," he thought, " I must die " ; he saw in imagination the heretic's pyre already prepared ; " what a scandal I shaU be to my dear parents," was a word often upon his hps. Travelling on foot, as was his wont, he arrived at Weimar, where the Elector was holding his court, on the 28th : there said mass, and preached ; and proceeded on his way, with a letter of recommendation and twenty gulden, the gift of Frederick, in his pocket.^ At Niirnberg, he was hospitably received by his old friend Link, who lent him a good cowl, and with another Augustinian monk, Leonard Beyer, accom- panied him to Augsburg. Before he got there, however, on the 7th of October, fatigue and illness compelled him to take to a vehicle. But his spirit was undaunted, however weak and weary his body. A Carmelite monk at Weimar, John Kestner, had warned him that the Itahans were a learned folk, and that if he could not hold his own with them, they would certainly burn him. "Nettles might do," was the cheerful answer, "fire, dear friend, would be too hot. The affair *s Christ's ; if he sustains it, it is already sustained ; if not, I can- not sustain it for him, and he must bear the shame." So, in a fragment of a letter written from Niirnberg, to whom we do not know, he says, " I have found some men so pusillanimous in my cause, as to have begun to tempt me not to go to Augs- burg. But I persevere with a fixed mind. The will of the Lord be done. Even at Augsburg, even in the midst of his enemies, Jesus Christ reigns." ^ 1 A further evidence of the Elector's Niirnberg at the time, and the request personal interest in Luther's journey is fell to the ground. Letter from afforded by the fact that he wrote to Frederick to Tucher, Sept. 27, 1518, Anton Tucher of NUrnberg, requesting quoted by Ebstlin, Theol. Stud. u. that the Senate of that city would Kritiken, 1882, p. 692. allow Scheurl to go to Augsburg to ^ DeW. vol. i. pp. 129, 137 ; Enders, act as Luther's friend and adviser. ' vol. i. pp. 234, ' 238 ; Coll. vol. ii. p. 175 ; Scheurl was, however, absent from Myoonius, p. 31 ; Lingke, p. 47, V THE DIET OF AUGSBURG 241 The Diet which had been held at Augsburg in the autumn of 1518, and which was just separating into its component elements, was the last over which Maximilian presided. All unconscious, however, that his end was near, he was busier than ever in weaving schemes for the aggrandisement of the Austro-Burgundian House. The romantic marriage which in his youth he had contracted with Mary, the daughter and heiress of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, though it had brought little profit to himself personally, had laid the founda- tion of a fortune of unexampled brilliancy for his family. She had died after a few years' marriage, leaving two infant children, Philip and Margaret ; Lewis XI had seized whatever of the inheritance he could lay his hands upon ; and as Philip grew to manhood, it was made clear that the Burgundian States considered their allegiance to be due not to the father, but to the son. But again the House of Austria made one of the great marriages, upon which, rather than upon successful wars, its fortune was founded ; Philip, by his union with Joan,^ the daughter and heiress of Eerdinand and Isabella of Spain, saw before him the dazzling prospect of subjecting to one sceptre not only Naples and the Netherlands, but almost all the Spanish Peninsula, with its rich outlook upon the new world. But once more the prospect was overclouded. The rooted melancholy of the bride, a fatal inheritance which she was to transmit to so many of her descendants, deepened into mad- ness ; the bridegroom was fickle and careless, a standing outrage to the gravity of Spanish manners and the pride of Spanish patriotism. He died in 1506, and when, ten years afterwards, Ferdinand followed him, his son Charles, already in right of his mad mother King of Castile, saw the whole vast inheritance fall into his hands. But what of the Empire ? If it were possible that Charles 1 Joan 'became heiress of Spain only 1498, after the birth of her son Miguel, in consequence of a series of family Had this child lived, he would have misfortunes, and after her marriage united the Peninsular Kingdoms, and ■with Philip. She was the second so have altered the course of subsequent daughterand third child of her parents. European history ; but he died before She was married in 1496. In October he was two years old, and the vast 1497 died her only brother Juan. Her inheritance subsequently fell to Joan elder sister Isabella, married to King and her son Charles V. Baumgarten, Manuel of Portugal, then became the Karl V. vol. i. pp. 9, 10. heir ; she, however, died in August K 242 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. should succeed his grandfather on the highest of earthly thrones, the House of Hapsburg would reach a pinnacle of greatness to find a parallel to which it would be necessary to go back to the reign of Charlemagne. There were, however, many difficulties in the way, some of them almost insurmount- able. One, and not the least, was that Maximilian himself was not technically Emperor, but only Emperor-elect ; he had never been crowned at Eome or elsewhere ; and it seemed to be a political solecism to place one King of the Eomans beside another.^ Nothing daunted, the old man nevertheless set to work to weave a web of intrigue which should enclose all the electors ; and was, in fact, successful in bringing over to the interests of his house all but Frederick of Saxony, and Eichard von Greiffenklau, Archbishop of Trier. Into the details of these tortuous and discreditable negotiations it is not necessary to go ; for the death of Maximilian, only a few weeks after the Diet had broken up, compelled the entire reweaving of the web. But the facts already stated will sufficiently show two things : first, that Maximilian, apparently on the point of attaining the great object of his life, was more than usually anxious to conciliate the Church ; and next, that the directors of a mingled ecclesiastical and Imperial policy were unwilling to offend an Elector so powerful, both from position and character, as Frederick. It was indeed while the Diet was still sitting that the Pope announced, his intention of sending to the latter the Golden Eose, afterwards actually conveyed by Miltitz ; a mark of grace usually bestowed upon the potentate who at the moment stood highest in Papal favour. y The choice of a legate was made with special reference to both the political and the theological exigences of the case. He was Thomas de Vio, a Dominican monk, who had been General of his order, and had just been admitted to the Sacred College under the title of Cardinal of St. Sixtus. History, however, knows him best as Cajetan, a name which he took from his birthplace, Gaeta. He was a real theologian of the 1 For instance, in Pope Leo's instruc- the Bishop of Li^ge, alluded to below, tions to Cajetan, Maximilian is spoken he styles himself " Maximilianus, div- of as "in Imperatorem eleotum " inS. favente olementiS, eleotus Eoma- (Losoher, vol. ii. p. 310). In the noram semper Augustus." Eapp, £"^61716 Emperor's answer to the memorial of NacMese, vol. ii. p. 418. V CARDINAL CAJETAN 243 Dominican sort.^ Devoted to Thomas Aquinas, from whom he had taken his monastic name, he had written a commentary on the Sumnia, which he considered as the quintessence of theological wisdom. But this was not all ; he had made his way to distinction by adopting and defending the opinions on Papal authority which were then fashionable at Eome : he had played a part in this sense at the Lateran Council ; and had, at the moment of which we are speaking, recently pub- lished a treatise on Indulgences. Indeed, through all his subsequent life — he died in 1534 — he mingled in the con- troversies of the day, always on the Papal side and from his Dominican point of view, yet not without showing a certain independence of opinion and speculation. In 1518 he was just fifty ; a man who loved pomp and splendour, and was apt to magnify the dignity of his office. Luther was not named in his instructions. He was to stir up the Emperor, as well as Christian, King of Denmark, to a crusade against the Turks, which was to be made under the auspices of the Pope, and in the strength of united Christendom; and if he could, to reconcile Bohemia, which, under the influence of the enemy of mankind, had fallen away into heresy, with Mother Church. Still, the interests of the true faith occupy so large a place in the injunctions which Leo gave to, Cajetan as to make it im- possible not to believe, when we read in one place of " the parts adjacent to Bohemia" as also infected with heresy, that both Pope and Legate had a secret outlook towards Saxony.^ The ceremonial part of his mission was no doubt greatly to Cajetan's mind. He invested Maximilian with a cap and sword which the Pope had blessed. He brought with him to Germany a red hat for Albert of Mainz. In the political object of his mission he was hardly as successful. It fell in exactly with the wishes of the old Emperor, still, in spite of a thousand disappointments, full of schemes, and always rest- lessly reaching after a success that never came. He had been trying all his life to induce the Princes and free cities of Ger- '' Pallaviciiii (bk. i. chap. 9) calls Conf. Zeitschrift fur KirchengescMchte, Cajetan "Theologus ejus aetatis spec- vol. v. p. 618 ; Zeitschrift fiir die his- tatissimus ac facile princeps." torische Theologie, 185S, p. 431 et seq. 2 The Pope's instructions to Cajetan (C. F. Jager, Cajetan's Kampf gegen die will be found in Loseber, vol. ii. p. 310. LiUherische Lehrreform). 244 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. many to raise troops and to pay taxes for Imperial purposes, in accordance with a generally adopted assessment. Nothing could have pleased his adventurous spirit better, nothing would more completely accord, with his dynastic policy, than to place himself at the head not only of the Empire but of Europe in a crusade against the common enemy of Christen- dom. But the States of Germany had their minds fixed on quite different objects. They were fuU of wrath and distrust against Pope, Curia, and all that was involved in the word Eome. The crusade against the Turks was, they thought, only a device to get hold of German money ; the real Turks, against whom it was necessary to contend, were in Italy. They had contributed to a Turkish war before, not once but many times, and nothing had come of it. The Princes, in their unwillingness to trust Emperor and Pope with the pro- ceeds of taxation, even took up a position which was new in the history of the Empire : they could do nothing, they said, without consulting their subjects ; a declaration which, in its implied denial of the plenary powers of the Diet, was one step more towards the autonomy of the separate States. On the other hand, the old accusations against Eoman abuse and ex- tortion were showered on the Legate. The Prince Bishop of Lifege, Erardus de Marca, presented a memorial to Emperor and Princes, in which he recited the accustomed grievances in the strongest terms. The Concordat between Eome and the Empire had been only too favourable to the Church ; but even the Concordat was infringed at almost every point. As the event proved, it would have availed nothing, had Maxi- milian at this last moment thrown himself on the side of the national aspirations, and at the head of a united Empire de- manded of the Pope redress of grievances, and some effectual reform. He was not without a dim perception of Luther's importance — perhaps as much as an aged Emperor was likely to have in the case of a poor Augustinian friar. " What is your monk about ? " he is said to have asked Pfeffinger at Augsburg. " Truly his Theses are not to be despised ; he will play a game with the parsons : teU. your Elector to take good care of him, he will be wanted some day." There is even a story, which, however, rests on insufiBcient evidence, that he V LUTHER AT AUGSBURG 245 wrote to the old humanist, and patriot Wimpheling, to ask what at this juncture he should do with Luther. But if he at all saw and approved the better course, he followed the worse ; he wrote to the Pope from Augsburg, on the 5 th of August, a letter of general adhesion, in which he mentioned Luther only to condemn him ; and for the sake of the dynastic objects, which always held the first place in the mind of a Hapsburg, sacrificed the chance of at once reforming the Church and uniting the Empire.^ There was no Augustinian convent in Augsburg, but Luther on his arrival was hospitably entertained by the Car- melites, whose Prior, John Prosch, had been a student at Wittenberg. He was indeed far from friendless. Apart from the populace, who were eager to gaze at him " as the Hero- stratus of so great a conflagration," some of the chief citizens of Augsburg were ready to advise and assist him, among whom were Conrad Peutinger, the well-known humanist, and a canon, Christopher Langemantel, and Dr. John Auer, a lawyer and a member of the city council. Two of Prederick's trusted ad- visers. Dr. Eiihel and Philip von Feilitsoh, gave him help and countenance, and a message which he despatched, we do not know exactly whither, soon brought Staupitz to his side. A year all but a few days had elapsed since he had pubUshed the Ninety-five Theses, and every week had brought him fresh friends, every month had made him more the representative of the religious aspirations of the German people. It was in compliance with these advisers that he did not attempt to see the Cardinal at once. So far into the hon's mouth he had ventured without any other safe-conduct than was implied in the promises which Cajetan had made to Frederick ; but before going further it was thought desirable that he should receive a formal pledge of safety from the Emperor, and Maxi- milian was hunting at some little distance from Augsburg. In the meantime he received two official visits from an Italian diplomatist. Urban di Serralonga, who had in 1517 represented the Marquis of Montferrat at the court of Saxony, and had ^ De W. vol. i. p. 140 ; Kapp, i. p. 94 ; Erl. Op^. v. a. vol. ii. p. 349 ; Kleme NachUse, vol. ii. p. 409 ; Secken- Kanke, vol. i. p. 248 et seq. ; Walch, dorf, lib. i. sec. 16, § xxxiii. p. 42 ; vol. xv. p. 544 et seq. Schmidt, ITist. Litt. de VAlsace, vol. 246 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. now attached himself to Cajetan. He was an Italian of the Italians, a man of a light mind and a loose tongue, quite iu- capable of seeing the gravity of the issues involved, and per- haps desirous in his own careless way that the difficulty should be smoothed over, and the daring monk allowed to go scot free. He came to offer Luther his friendliest advice as to both the matter and the manner of his behaviour to the Cardinal ; but in truth he did not see what there was before him but recantation. The only question, he said, was as to the six letters EEVOKA. Joachim of Flora had recanted, and though he had written heretical things, was not accounted a heretic. When Luther, true to the position which he main- tained all through, declared that he wanted to be instructed and convinced of his errors, " do you wish," said Serralonga, " to play at running at the ring with the Cardinal ? " He even cynically declared that he did not see why untrue propositions should not be presented to the people, if only they brought in money. Such an adviser as this was not likely to make much way with Luther, who, on his second visit, met him with a rebuke which seems to have pierced the thick hide of his indifference. " Do you think," said Serralonga, " that the Elector will take up arms on your account ? " — " I neither think nor wish it," was the reply. " And where wiU you be then ? " — " Under the heavens." To this it was evidently hard to find a rejoinder.-' The safe-conduct arrived on October 11th, and on Tuesday the 12 th Luther had his first audience of the Cardinal He took with him his host, the Carmelite Prior, and two of his monks, his old friend Link, and another Augustinian ; on the other hand, the Cardinal had by his side the Apostolical Nuncio, and Serralonga. As he had been instructed by the latter, Luther prostrated himself before the Cardinal, who courteously bade him rise. After one or two complimentary sentences, the real busi- ness of the interview was entered upon, and the divergence between the two parties at once made plain. Cajetan was perfectly willing to behave in a kindly and fatherly way to ' De W. vol. i. pp. 143, 144, 146, zel, vol. ii. p. 166; Erl. 0pp. v.'a. vol. 160, 167 ; vol. vi. p. 7 ; Lih. Pecan, i. p. 18 (Praefatio) ; Deutsche Schrif- p. 17 ; Loscher, vol. ii. p. 452 ; Tent- ten, vol. Ixiv. p. 363 {Nachlese). V LUTHER BEFORE CAJETAN 247 Luther, if he would promptly and unconditionally recant ; Luther, on the other hand, asked that his alleged errors might be pointed out and proved to be erroneous. The Cardinal's demand was threefold : (1) that Luther should repent and recant his heresies ; (2) that he should promise not to pro- mulgate them for the future ; (3) that he should abstain from whatever might disturb the Church. Then, upon Luther's request to have his errors specified, the Cardinal alleged the 58th of the Ninety-five Theses, in which it was denied that the merits of Christ were the treasure of the Church, and next, the doctrine laid down in the exposition, in the Resolutiones of the 7th Thesis, that faith is necessary to the effectual reception of the Sacraments. In regard to the first point, he brought forward the Extravagans of Clement VI's Unigenitus, which he supposed that Luther had not seen, while he confidently stig- matised the second as a new and heretical doctrine.^ But strange to say, Luther was not at all disposed to bow down to the authority of the JExtravagans, with which he was perfectly familiar, as well as with another of Sixtus IV bearing upon the same subject. These documents, he thought, were of com- paratively little account, as audaciously perverting the plain sense of Scripture. What floodgates of controversy were opened by so bold a declaration it is easy to imagine ; the Cardinal quoted St. Thomas, magnified the authority of the Pope as above Councils, Scripture, the Church ; threw scorn upon the University of Paris and those whom he called the Gersonists — in brief, endeavoured to overbear Luther by sheer force of clamour. " Here, here," he cried, " you see that the Pope defines that the merits of Christ are the treasure of indulgences, do you believe or not ? " On the one hand, there was a repetition of the cry, Eecant or be condemned ; on the other, an equally persistent demand for the Scriptural and Patristic proofs which were not forthcoming. The Cardinal ' There were two collections of different Popes, from Urban IV, 1261, Extrwvagantes, that is, of Papal to Sixtus IV, 1484. The Extravagans decrees subsequent to the collection referred to in the text will, of course, known as the Decretals (extra decretum not be confounded with Clement XI's vagantes). The iirst, Extravagantes Bull Unigenitus, which played so im- Joannis P. xxii. , contains twenty such portant a part in the history of the documents ; the second, Exlravagantes Galilean Church. commv/nes, seventy, proceeding from 248 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. sought to bring to bear upon the recusant the authority of the Church, as summed up in the ipse dixit of the Pope ; Luther replied with the one saving clause, SalvA Scripturd. And thus the dispute went on, till Luther at last, seeing that it could lead to no good result, asked to be allowed to present on the morrow a written document; and so went back to his lodgings.^ The next day, Wednesday, he returned, accompanied this time by three Imperial Councillors, one of whom was Conrad Peutinger, another Philip von Feilitsch, as representative of the Elector Frederick. He also brought with him Staupitz, and a notary to serve as an official witness of the interview. His object was to present to the Cardinal the written statement of what he conceived to be his position in regard to the Church. In this document he declared, first, his desire to be obedient to Holy Church "in all his acts and words, present, past, and future." As to the demands which the Cardinal had made upon him, he said that he had committed no offence in seeking the truth, and could not, unheard and uncondemned, be forced to recant. " I protest this day," he went on, " that I am not conscious of having said anything that is contrary to Holy Scripture, the Fathers of the Church, the Decretals of the Pope, or right reason ; but aU that I have said seems to me, even to-day, to be sound, true, CathoUc." Then, after acknow- ledging his HabOity to err, he declared his willingness to dispute publicly as to his alleged heresies, or to reply to any objections in writing, or to submit to the judgment of the three Imperial Universities, Basel, Freiburg, Louvain ; or if that were not enough, to the University of Paris, " mother of studies, of old most Christian, and in. theology most flourishing." This, however, was not at all what Cajetan wanted. He had been sent to Augsburg, not to involve the Church in theological controversy, but to reclaim, if possible, a dangerous heretic. He suavely put aside the idea of discussion, and when Luther half apologetically said that on the previous day there had been contention enough, answered, " My son, I have not con- 1 De W. vol. i. p. 148 ; Spalatin Luther to the Elector, Erl. 0pp. v. v.. ap. Walch, vol. xv. p. 679 ; Weimar vol. ii. p. 413. ed. vol. ii. p. 7 et seq. (Acta Augustana) ; V LUTHER BEFORE CAJETAN 249 tended, nor am I willing to contend with you, but kindly and patiently to hear and to advise.'' At this point, however, Staupitz intervened, and with some difficulty obtained from the Legate, who insisted upon unconditional recantation, per- mission for Luther to defend his theological position in writing. StUl, the directness of the issue was not fully felt on either side. The Cardinal did not allow himself to doubt that his fatherly admonitions would have the desired effect, nor did Luther as yet lose faith in the Cardinal's goodwill.^ On Thursday, however, matters came to a crisis. Luther came back with a document of some length, deahng first with the authority of the Clementine Eostravagans, and next with the incriminated proposition as to faith. His method in regard to both was Scriptural and Patristic ; in defence of the latter especially, he heaped up Biblical quotations. " I indeed," he said, "am not of such signal temerity as, on account of one Papal Decretal, thus ambiguous and obscure, to withdraw from most clear testimonies of Holy Scripture, so many and so great." So again, " While these authorities stand, I cannot do other than what I know to be obeying God rather than man." We have the whole essence of the Eeformation here, though not yet worked out into principles acknowledged to be antagon- istic to the Church of Eome : the rejection of the authority of the Pope in favour of the authority of Scripture; the asser- tion of the subjective necessity and supremacy of faith. Luther may not have known it ; Cajetan certainly did not ; what was present in the Legate's mind was probably a duU ' sense of irreconcilable opposition. These were mere words, he said ; he would, however, send the document to Eome, and in the meantime urged recantation more than ever. Ten times Luther tried to speak, but was always overborne by the noisy authority of the Legate. At last he too began to shout : " If it can be shown that the Extravagans lays it down that the merits of Christ are the treasure of indulgences, I will recant as you wish." Upon this apparent concession of the chief point at issue followed loud laughter ; the Legate quickly took up the book and eagerly turned over the pages till he found ' Weimar ed. vol. ii. p. 8 (Acta Walch, vol. xv. p. 683 ; De "W. vol. i. Augustana) ; Spalatin's report, ap. p. 181. 2SO LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. the place, and read, " that Christ by His passion had acquired the treasure," and so forth. " Mark that word, most Eeverend Father," broke in Luther, '' acquired. If Christ by His merits acquired the treasure, then the merits are not themselves the treasure." The Cardinal tried hard to parry this straight- forward thrust, but the spirit of the successful disputant was all aUve in Luther now, and he was not disposed to give his adversary any quarter. " Do not let your Eeverend Paternity thiuk that the Germans are altogether without grammar ; it is one thing to be a treasure, another to acquire it." There was evidently nothi:^g for it but to return to the demand for recantation, pure and simple. " Go," said the Cardiaal, " and come back to me no more till you are willing to recant." ^ The same evening the Cardinal sent for Staupitz and Link, to see whether Luther's friends might not be more malleable than himself. From such authentic information as to the transactions of the next day or two as has come down to us, it is not very easy to reconstruct the mood of some of the chief actors on the scene. The Cardinal adhered steadily to his demand for recantation. Luther, on the other hand, was willing to go to almost any length of submission that did not involve unfaithfulness to convictions which made him, he said, not only a Churchman but a Christian. Staupitz was in a mixed mood. He told the Cardinal that Luther was his superior in strength of mind and Biblical knowledge. He reminded Luther in words, which at the moment seemed to come from a higher than any human source, " that what he had undertaken, he had undertaken in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ." He formally released him from his vow of monastic obedience to himself as Vicar of the Augustinian Congregation : whether with a desire to leave him absolutely free to take his own course, or wishing to disconnect himself and the order from a cause which seeined to be becoming desperate, who can tell ? Luther at all events did not regard ^ Weimar ed. vol. ii. p. 9 et seq. nolo amplius cum Bac bestia loqui. {Acta AugiLstana) ; Erl. 0pp. v. a. Habet enim profundos oculos et mira- vol. ii. p. 365 (Riihel's report) ; De W. biles speculationes in capite suo." vol. i. pp. 148, 181. Luther's eyes are said to have been We may place at this point the very bright and piercing, a tradition anecdote related by Mycouius (p. 33), which is strongly confirmed by his that the Cardinal exclaimed, ' ' Ego earlier portraits. V LUTHER'S CONCESSIONS TO CAJETAN 251 it as a friendly act ; he was wont, in after life, to call it the first of his three excommunications. What is absolutely cer- tain is that Staupitz and Link, first, did their best to persuade Luther to submit, and, then, on Saturday the 16th rode away from Augsburg, without taking leave of the Cardinal. The population of the free city was friendly, some of its most dis- tinguished men were active on Luther's side ; but the two Augustinians had heard of certain extraordinary powers entrusted to Cajetan, and persuaded themselves that they were in danger. Was it a desertion ? The intercourse by letter between Luther and Staupitz slackens after this, though there are in it, especially at the last, notes of regretful tenderness, as if a single failure of friendship at a moment of crisis was felt to be little to set against years of helpful love and perfect confidence. Nor must it be forgotten that Staupitz had in him none of the stuff of which rebels are made; the mystic was much stronger in him than the reformer, and he would have found a way of living for holiness under any administra- tion of the Church.-' It says much for a reasonableness of conscience for \yhich Luther usually gets little credit that his first impulse, when thus left to himself, was to take the advice which his friends had given him, and to try to meet the Cardinal half-way. He ■ accordingly wrote a letter to Cajetan on Sunday the 1 7th, in which he went as far in tlie direction of submission as he could ; too far, indeed, for his own subsequent approval, if, as Myconius says, he often declared that " God never suffered him to sink so low as then." He confessed that he had been indiscreet, bitter, wanting in reverence to the Pope ; he promised that if silence was imposed upon his adversaries also, he would let indulgences alone. But as to the truth of the opinions which he had put forward, he could only fall back upon his own conscience, to say or do anything against which no authority could permit him. St. Thomas and the Schoolmen could not satisfy him in this matter. "This one thing re- mains, that I should be overcome by better reason, supposing 1 De W. vol. i. pp. 148, 149, 541 ; § 37, p. 47 (quoting from Vol. Bav.) ; Enders (Cajetan to Frederick), vol. i. Kolde, Staupitz, App. p. 443 ; Scheurl, p. 271 ; Seokendorf, lib. i. sec. 18, BriefluA, vol. ii. p. 52. 252 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. I should deserve to hear the voice of the Bride, for this is certainly to hear the voice of the Bridegroom." • Last of all, he begged the Cardinal to refer the case to the Pope, in order that it might be finally and authoritatively determined. "I desire only," he went on, "to hear and obey the Church. For I know not what my recantation of doubtful and undetermined matters would effect — except I fear that it might rightly be objected to me, that I know not either what I have asserted, or what I have withdrawn." To this letter no answer was vouchsafed. No answer was indeed to be expected. Profuse as were its expressions of submission, it still fell far short of the unconditional retractation which the Cardinal demanded. Next day Luther wrote again. He had done all, he said, that became an obedient son of the Church. Notwithstanding the distance, his poverty, the infirmity of his health, he had come to Augsburg to give an account of himself The Legate had bid him begone, unless he were willing to recant ; what, and how far he could recant, he had already signified in writing. Now he could stay no longer ; he had no means of his own, and had already sufiiciently burthened his Carmelite hosts. The only thing left him, then, was to make a solemn appeal not merely from the Legate, but from the Pope himself imper- fectly informed, to the Pope who should be better instructed.^ What answer he expected to this it is not easy to conjecture, but he waited in Augsburg two days more, and on Wednesday night rode secretly away, through a postern -gate, which Langemantel opened for him, leaving Leonard Beyer to lodge his appeal with the Cardinal. He evidently thought that he was in danger of liberty or life; for only half equipped for such a journey he rode for his first stage to Monheim, eight German miles on the way to Ntirnberg. When, on his arrival, he attempted to dismount in the stable, he was too worn out to stand, and fell at once into the straw. He arrived at Witten- berg on the 31st, exactly a year after the publication of the Theses.^ On his way home Luther received, at Niirnberg, from 1 "A sanctissimo Domino Nostro 166; Myconius, p. 33; Erl. 0pp. v. a. Leone X male informato, ad melius vol. ii. p. 419 ; Deutsche Schriften, informandum." vol. Ixiv. p. 364 {NoAihUse). 2 De W. vol. i. pp. 161, 163, 164, y FREDERICK'S A TTITUDE 253 Spalatin a copy of a Papal Brief addressed to Cajetan, drawn up and signed in due form, and dated August '23d, in which he found himself treated as an already convicted heretic, whom the Legate, unless in case of complete repentance and recanta- tion, was ordered to arrest and send to Eonie. The authen- ticity of this Brief, which we know in no other way than that above stated, will be discussed elsewhere;^ Luther's first thought was to treat it as spurious. Possibly, on reflection, he changed his mind ; it answered to the vague apprehensions that had filled the air at Augsburg ; and, at all events, until repu- diated by the Curia, it was a document of which good argu- mentative use might fairly be made in the controversy. His first business, on reaching home, was to prepare a report of all that had happened at Augsburg, with illustrative papers, among which this Brief, accompanied by an indignant commentary, took its place. His own mood was that heroic one to which past difficulties and dangers seem of small account. " I am full of joy and peace," he writes to Spalatin, " so that I wonder that this trial of mine should have seemed anything great to many and great men." Still his position was doubtful and perplexing. He could not conceal from himself that he Vas practically a rebel against the authority of the Pope ; would Frederick, as a good, a peace-loving, an orthodox prince, throw the shield of his protection over him ? No one could suppose that he would be safe except upon Saxon soil ; would he be told to betake himself elsewhere ? ^ The answer to these questions soon came. Cajetan wrote to the Elector a letter, which, though dated October 25th, was not delivered till November 19 th, in which he gave his own account of the transactions at Augsburg, and asked that Frederick should consult for his own honour and conscience by either sending Luther to Kome or at all events by expeUing him from Saxony. This letter the Elector at once loyally sent to Luther, who immediately replied, not only controverting the Cardinal's account of the facts, but reasserting his own posi- tion. He again asked that his errors might be pointed out and proved to be erroneous ; he pleaded that he might not be 1 This brief will be found Erl. Opg. v.- a. vol. ii. p. 354. See Note B at the end of the chapter, p. 257. ^ De W. vol. i. p. 166. 254 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. sent to certain death at Eome, "where not even the chief Pontiff himself lives in safety " ; he painted the misery and danger of banishment from Saxony. Still he is sincerely anxious that his errors and offences, whatever they may be, shall not inflict a stain upon the fair fame of the Elector, whom the world may unjustly regard as his abettor, and in that view he is willing to sacrifice himself " Wherefore," he says, " lest in my name any evil should befall your illustrious Lordship, which is of all things what I least wish, lo, I leave your territory, to betake myself whither a merciful God may will, and trusting myself in every event to His divine pleasure. For there is nothing I desire less than that any man, and least of all your illustrious Lordship, should on my account be led into any odium or peril." For a little whUe his fate and the fate of the Eeformation trembled in the balance. He thought he would go to France, where the University of Paris, true to its old traditions, had lately protested against the abridgment, by the Lateran Council, of the liberties of the Galilean Church. Once, on the very point of departure, he assembled his friends for a farewell meal, when a letter came from Spalatin, which changed his purpose. On another occasion there was a momentary foreshadowing of that scheme of a friendly arrest and concealment which was actually carried into effect after the Diet of Worms. But the Elector's better genius prevailed, and he wrote to Cajetan on the 8th of December, enclosing Luther's letter, and at the same time distinctly refusing to withdraw his protection from a man who was not yet proved to be a heretic. Had Luther been so convicted, he would have known how to do his duty as a Christian prince, without external exhortation or admonition ; as it was, he would not run the risk of wrecking his University. The situation, in its political aspect, was practically the same as before the audience at Augsburg.^ In the meantime, however, Luther had made another step in advance. Dissatisfied with the appeal ad Papam melius in- formanduTTi which he had lodged with Cajetan at Augsburg, he replaced it by one to a future General Council, to be lawfully ' De W. vol. i. pp. 187, 189, 195. ander's MS. quoted by Seidemann, Enders, vol. i. pp. 268, 309, 310. Obeii- Theol. Stud. u. Krit. 1878, p. 705. V HIS APPEAL TO A GENERAL COUNCIL 255 called and held in a safe place, where he should himself have free coming and going. This he formally completed, in that chapel of Corpus Christi, which still stands ia the churchyard at Wittenberg, on the 28 th of November, in the presence of a notary and witnesses. To some extent this appeal must be taken as the logical consequence of the Brief of the 23d of August, which Luther had now resolved to treat as a genuine document. If the Pope could thus condemn him unheard, what advantage in appealing to him better instructed ? But it would perhaps be too much to infer from this appeal that Luther had adopted any distinct theory of the iufaUibility of councils, or the precise relation in which they stood to Pope and Church. There is evidence to show that he was not un- acquainted with the conflict of opinion on this subject, which had existed since the breaking up of the Council of Basel, and that he sympathised with the freer tendency, still represented by the University of Paris. Indeed his appeal to a General Council was drawn up on the lines of one which that body had made, on the 27th of March 1517, against the abrogation by the Lateran Council of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, and in some cases actually adopted its phraseology. But the fact that it may fairly be doubted whether he would have sub- mitted to the adverse judgment of a council, even had it fulfilled all the conditions which he had laid down, shows that in regard to this important subject his miud was in a state of transition. Not, however, that he was steadily thinking the matter out from point to point, and so able at any given moment to express himself without inconsistency. The Hving germ of his theology, which was perpetually demanding room for growth and expansion, was essentially subjective, the con- sciousness of an inward change wrought in himself by forces the reality of which it was impossible to question, and which in their very nature could not be subordinated to any others. Almost from month to month he discerns new applications of this great principle : but the process of change is half uncon- scious, and he has not yet reduced his convictions to logical form, or ascertained their relations to one another. The chief thing with him at this moment is that he cannot expect fair trial from a Pope ; and he appeals to a free council. But he 2S6 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap. has already laid it down that councils can err. The question of an absolute basis of authority is plainly still in the future.^ The Acta Augustana, in which Luther told his Augsburg story, were published on the 11th of December, very much against the Elector's will. He had interposed to forbid the printing when it was too late ; all he could do was to have one passage scored through and made illegible, which has since exercised much ingenuity of conjecture.^ So in like manner, and about the same time, the Appeal made its escape from the printing press. Is it fair to conjecture that if the injunc- tion not to publish had been very seriously intended, it would, at such a moment as this, have been rigorously obeyed ? The whole policy of these days may be summed up in one phrase : to combine a decent hberty of action for Luther with the least possible responsibility for Frederick. However this may be, the case, stated fully and without passion, was now before the world. And the Catholic Church completed it by a new Decretal, in which Leo X, addressing Cajetan, reaf&rmed the doctrine of Indulgences, in opposition to all recent cavillers.^ 1 Weimar ed. vol. ii. p. 34 ; Loscher, ' De "W. vol. i. pp. 149, 160, 169, Tol. i. p. 6.54. 174, 195, 198 ; vol. vi. p. 8. Erl. 0pp. " Vide Note B, at the end of the v. a. vol. ii. p. 428. chapter. NOTE (A) TO Page 211. In Order to form the estimate given in the text, I have studied more or less assiduously five monographs on Tetzel. The earliest in date is that of Vogel (2d. ed.), 1727. This is Protestant. The next is that of Grbne (2d. ed.), 1860, a Catholic rehabilitation. To this succeeds a Protestant reply by Korner, 1880, answered again by Hermann (2d. ed.), 1883. To these may be added a pamphlet, GeschicMsqueUen iiber den Ahlas^rediger Tetzel, by Eayser, 1877. Apart from the view of Tetzel's character, and the common admission that stories have been told of him which belong to the indulgence-monger in general (one as old as Boccaccio), the controversy revolves round one or two principal points. (1) Was Tetzel, at some date which it is impossible to fix, condemned at Innsbruck to be drowned in the Inn for the crime of adultery, rescued by the intercession of Frederick the Wise, and his punishment commuted to im- prisonment for life at Leipzig, whence he escaped to preach the indulgences of 1517 ? The strongest evidence for this story, which plainly was in general circulation (Mathesius, p. 10 A), is derived from a statement made by Luther in 1541. In the book Wider Hans Wurst (Erl. Deutsche Schriften, vol. xxvi. p. 68), in which he gives an account of the beginning of the controversy, he speaks of " a preaching monk, by name Johannes Detzel, a great shonter, whom Duke Frederick had formerly liberated from the sack at Innsbruck, for Maxi- V NOTES 257 miliaja had condemned him to be drowned in the Inn (you may well suppose on aoeount of his great virtue). And Duke Frederick caused him to remember that, when he began to abuse us Wittenbergers ; also he freely confessed it." _ This is a piece of positive testimony not easy to get over, except on the .supposition that Luther would stick at no calumny that would blacken an opponent's character. On the other hand, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to fit in the story with what we know of Tetzel's life. (2) Did Tetzel declare in his preaching, that if any one had violated the Mother of God the indulgence which he offered would avail to wipe away the sin ? Such was indisputably the report in his own life- time ; the shocking accusation plays a part both in Luther's Theses and Tetzel's Antitheses. Luther, in his Resoluticmes ("Weimar ed. vol. i. p. 622), which may be taken to express his deliberate opinion, says that although it was asserted by many men of name that it had been so preached in many places, he himself ' ' marvelled rather than believed. " He adds, however, that it was not wonderful that the people should have understood some such thing when they heard great and horrible sins treated as of no account, in comparison with the magnitude of the indulgence. On the other hand, it is evident that two certificates, one from temporal, the other from ecclesiastical authorities at Halle (first published by Seidemann, Urlduterungen, p. 1), to the effect that they had never heard Tetzel use the incriminated phrase, nor had been told of his using it by others, are good only as negative and partial evidence. That Tetzel, however, asked for these certificates shows that he was ashamed of the accusation and anxious to deny it. Probably the fairest thing is to withdraw the sentence from history as not fully authenticated, with the double remark that the report could hardly have become current unless there had been a strong element of probability in it, and that it is difficult to limit the excess to which a popular preacher addressing an ignorant audience on such a subject might easily be led. (3) There is an undoubted Catholic witness against Tetzel. A letter is extant from Miltitz, the Papal Chamberlain, who in 1519 was sent to Saxony to compose the Lutheran dilficulty, to Degenhard Pfeflnger, in which, after an interview with Tetzel in the presence of the Dominican Provincial, he declares him guilty of having made a purse for himself out of the indulgence, and says that he has two children. The force of this authoritative accusation is hardly evaded by the Catholic apologists, who accuse Miltitz of the common German vice of drunkenness, and narrate with some gusto that he was at last drowned in the Rhine or Main (Kbmer^ p. 121). NOTE (B) TO Pages 253, 256. In the Acta Augustana — the collection of documents relative to the hearing in Augsburg, which Luther published early in December 1618 — is found a Brief addressed by Leo X to Cardinal Cajetau, dated August 23, 1518, and signed "Jacobus Sadoletus." It is, if genuine, an important document, reciting the appointment of the Bishop of Ascoli as judge in Luther's case, but going on to say, that as the said Luther had abused the Papal benignity by publishing other heretical books, Cajetan should, with help of the secular arm, take him into custody, until. In pursuance of further instructions, he should present him before the Pope in Rome. If, indeed, Luther voluntarily repented, the power of recon- ciling him to the Holy See was given to the Legate, who was at the same time armed with aU the terrors of the Church against the favourers and abettors of the heretic, no matter of what rank CWeimar ed. vol. ii. ■p. 2S, Acta Augustana). This Brief is not known to history in any other way than as published by Luther. "When at Nttmberg, on his way home from Augsburg, about the end of October, he received a copy of it from Spalatin. His first impulse was to treat it as unauthentic. " It is incredible," he writes to Spalatin (De W. vol. i. p. 166), " that a monster of such a kind should have proceeded from the Supreme Pontiff, above all, from Leo X." On further consideration he seems to have changed his opinion, for he published it in the Acta Augustana with brief but indignant comment. It is not without significance, however, first, that the Elector objected to the publication of the Acta at all, and next, that, when his ' S 2S8 LUTHER'S NINETY-FIVE THESES chap, v objection came too late, the first lines of Luther's comment on the Brief were, in the first edition, scored out with a pen, and in all subsequent ones omitted. More than one attempt has been made to read them, with the probable result, that in the obliterated passage Luther accused Ghinucci of having, with Cajetan's connivance, forged the Brief (couf. Weimar ed. vol. ii. p. 1 sej.). Ranke, in the supplementary volume of his German History in the Age of the Reformation, was the first to point out the difiiculties in the way of accepting this Brief as genuine. The Papal citation reached Luther on the 7th of August : it gave him sixty days to appear in Rome. But if this Brief is to be relied upon, within sixteen days, and in his absence, Luther had been already condemned ; "dictum Martinum haereticum per praedictum auditorem jam declaratum. " Such a proceeding is so contrary, not only to every principle of justice, but to all legal forms, especially in a Court noted, like the Roman Curia, for its dilatoriuess, as to be incredible. But it is still further inconsistent with the letter which, on the 25th of October, Cajetan wrote to the Elector. In it he distinctly says that Luther's case is not yet decided (Enders, vol. i. p. 271) " lUud sciat lUus- trissima Dominatio Vestra, nequaquam hoc tarn grave et pestilens negotium posse diu haerere, nam Romae prosequentur causam, quando ego lavi manus meas, et ad Sanctissimum Dominum, Dominum nostrum, hujuscemodi fraudes scripsi." It is worth noting that Pallavicini {Hist. Gone. Trid. lib. i. cap. ix. § 3) accepts the Brief as genuine. It is true that he gives Luther himself as his authority : on the other hand, his statement of the contents of the document shows that he finds in it nothing improbable or incredible per se. On the whole, however, it is certainly safer to treat the Brief aa not authentic. (Conf. Kolde, iMther's Stellung zu Ooncil wnd Kirche, Anhang, p. 1, in which he defends the authenticity of the Brief. Also Waltz, Zeitschrift fiir Kirchengeschichte, vol. ii. p. 623, who takes the other side.) This is probably the best place to mention a strange document, which has recently been brought to light by Kolde {Zeit- schrift fiir Kirchengeschichte, vol. ii. p. 472). It comes from a MS. volume at Munich, containing records of the Augustinian Order in Germany ; and is only a copy, of which the original has not yet been found. It is a letter dated August 25, 1518 (two days later, therefore, than the Brief above discussed), from Gabriel Venetus, the General of the Augustinians, to Gerhard Hecker, the Saxon Provincial, in which he requires him to seize Luther, and to keep him ironed, in the straitest custody. I quote the exact words, " Iccirco mandamus sub p9,ena privationis omnium tuorum graduum, dignitatum, et of&ciorum, ut praefatum fratrem Martinum Luther his acceptis capi et incarcerari cures, faciasque in vin- culis, compedibus, et manicis ferreis ad iustantiam summi domini nostri Leonis Decimi sub arta custodia detineri : Cum vero is de congregatione ilia sit quae ah obedientia nostra se exemptam putat, ut nuUus tergiversandi sibi relinquatur locus, damns propterea tibi in ea parte omnem nostram autoritatem significamusque S. D. N. Papam communicasse tibi autoritatem, apostolicam, amplissimam ad hominem hunc incarcerandum, vinciendum, detinendumque non obstantibus quibuscunque in contrarium facientibus " (p. 477). In view of the strict discipline that was enforced within the monastic orders, and the rough treatment of personal rights and liberties often shrouded in conventual silence and seclusion, it can hardly be said that this document should be rejected as containing matter per se incredible. Perhaps, however, till the original is forthcoming, it ought not to be admitted as historical evidence. Waltz {uti supra) boldly pronounces it a forgery, adducing one or two internal difiiculties, which are not, however, of any great importance. On the other hand, Kolde returns to the charge in the 3d appendix of his book on Staupitz, and certainly scores a point in referring to a letter from Staupitz to the Elector, dated October 15, 1518 (p. 443), and to another of Luther's (De W. vol. i. p. 182), both of which allude to current report in accord with the General's alleged letter. Luther's words are — he is speaking of the time when he was in Augsburg—" Taoeo quod rumor oircumferebatur, permissum esse a Reverendo Patre Generali, me capiendum et in viuoula, nisi revocarem, oonjiciendum." CHAPTEE VI THE YEAR 1519: FRIENDS AND FOBS Notwithstanding the distraction of mind which was the necessary result of the controversies in which Luther found himself ever more deeply involved, his thoughts, during the year 1518, of which we have just told the story, were often occupied with the welfare and development of the University. E"o provision had yet been made at Wittenberg for teaching either Greek or Hebrew, languages equally essential to the student, whether education be regarded from the humanist or the purely theological point of view. This want was largely supplied by the arrival of a teacher, who, though stUl very young, was looked upon as the rising hope of German scholar- ship, Philip Melanchthon. At first he undertook to lecture in both languages, until after a little while a Hebrew teacher was found in the person of John Boschenstein, who in 1521 was succeeded by Matthew Aurogallus, Luther's colleague in the translation of the Old Testament. Wittenberg soon knew that it had acquired in Melanchthon not only an accomplished scholar but a great systematising theologian; while he took his place at Luther's side as the friend and lieutenant without whose help the Eeformation would have been other than it was. Philip Schwartzerd was born on the 16th of February 1497 at Bretten, then a village of the Palatinate, but now included in the Grand Duchy of Baden. He was thus fourteen years younger than Luther. His father, George Schwartzerd, was an armourer, a native of Heidelberg, who stood high in the favour of the princes of the land, and had had the honour 26o THE YEAR IS19 : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. of making a suit of armour for the Emperor Maximilian. His mother was Barbara Eeuter, the daughter of John Eeuter, a citizen of good standing, whose wife Elizabeth was the sister of the great scholar, John Eeuchlin. Three daughters and two sons, of whom Philip was the eldest, were the offspring of this marriage. The household was at once a pious and a happy one; George Schwartzerd was a master of his craft ; there was no lack of worldly wealth, and the spirit of old Catholic devotion pervaded the family. More than one domestic tradition survives to show that a moral feeling, which had much of ancient simplicity and seriousness in it, regidated the relations between parents and children. But in 1507 the home was broken up by the death of the father. In 1504, when war was raging between Bavaria and the Palatinate, he had been sent, in the pursuit of his calUng, to Monheim, and there, it was thought, had drunk of a poisoned well. From that time his health gradually failed, until, three years afterwards, he succumbed to his malady. John Eeuter, who would otherwise have been the stay of the family, had died eleven days before, and his widow, Elizabeth Eeuchlin, went back to her native place, Pforzheim, taking with her, for purposes of education, her three grandsons, John Eeuter and Philip and George Schwartzerd.^ PhUip's education had already begUn at Bretten, where he was sent to the common schooL at a very early age. His grandfather, however, dissatisfied with the master, and possibly discerning the rare promise of the boy, had applied to his brother-in-law Eeuchlin for a tutor, and at his recom- mendation had placed Philip in the hands of John linger, a native of Pforzheim, who, besides being learned in theology and medicine, had a competent knowledge of the classical languages. By his searching and severe method Philip was thoroughly furnished with the rudiments of Latin scholarship. The lesson usually consisted of twenty or thirty lines taken from Baptista 1 In 1557Melanohtlion writes, "Ante naufragiumfacturumesse. Saepemiratus sexaginta annos meus pater milii des- sum, our mihi nato in ooUibus Ehrnio cribi yeviBXia curavit a Palatini mathe- vicinis praedixerit pericula in Arotoo matioo viro ingeniosa Hasfurto, amico Oceano. Nee volui eo accedere Tocatus suo. In ea praedictione diserte scriptum in Britanniam et in. Daniam." Corp. est, itinera me ad Boream periculosa Ref. vol. ix. p. 189. habiturum esse, et me in mari Baltim .VI PHILIP MELANCHTHON 261 Mantuanus, the Italian poet, whose fame for a time almost ap- proached that of the older and greater Mantuan; and the boy was required to define accurately the meaning of every word, and its relation to the sentence in which it stood. " As often as I made mistakes, he heat me," said Melanchthon long afterwards, " and so made me a grammarian. Very often I was thrashed two or three times in a lesson ; he loved me as a son, and I in turn him as a father ; and I hope that before long we shall meet in the life eternal." ^ We must not conclude from these castigations that the boy was slow or unwilling to learn : blows, as Luther too found out, were then looked upon as an essential part of the schoolmaster's method. Indeed, everything points to a singular precocity in the lad ; we are told that when wandering scholars came to Bretten his grandfather would set him to dispute with them, which he did to the admiration of the bystanders and the shame of the discomfited antagonists. The scene is not difficult to reproduce in imagination : the boy, grave and instructed beyond his years, the wondering relatives, the neighbours gathering round in friendly admiration, and the rough " Bachanten " quite wiUing to purchase a night's hospi- tality from the Burgomaster of Bretten at the price of a dialectical defeat from his grandson. At Pforzheim Philip attended the school of G-eorge Simler, an excellent scholar, who had been a pupil of Dringenberg's at Schlettstadt, and who afterwards studied in the University of Koln. Simler had some knowledge of Greek, which he imparted to his favourite pupils, Melanchthon among the rest. It was now that the boy fell directly under the influence of his great uncle, Eeuchlin, then, next to Erasmus, the first of German scholars, and in his knowledge of Hebrew superior even to the Master of Eotterdam. Coming to Pforzheim to visit his sister, Eeuchlin noticed him, took pleasure in his progress, gave him books, and, by way of jocose encouragement, put his own doctor's cap on his head. Philip, on the other hand, delighted the heart of the old scholar by preparing for one of his visits a representation of his Latin comedy, the Sergius, by himself and his schoolmates. It was upon this occasion that Eeuchlin, ' "Waltz, Dicta Melanthonis, Zeitsch. fur K. G. vol. iv. p. 327. Conf. Corp. Sef. vol. XXV. p. 448. 262 THE YEAR 1519 : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. whose own name Hermolaus Barbarus had grsecised into Capnio, translated Schwartzerd into Melanchthon, a name of happy omen, and one that has gained an undying renown. No attempt was ever made to furnish Luther with a classical appellation; and the conjunction of his name with that of Melanchthon may serve to keep in recollection the fact that the humanist element so powerful in the one was aU but absent in the other.^ In October 1509 Melanchthon, not yet thirteen years of age, matriculated in the University of Heidelberg, where, something less than two years afterwards, he proceeded Bachelor of Arts. In after years he did not think much of the instruc- tion which he received there. The days when Dalberg, Eudolf Agricola, and Conrad Celtes had endeavoured to make Heidel- berg a seat of the newer learning, in opposition to the obscuran- tism of Koln, had passed, and the old scholastic methods were in fuU vogue. Nothing was taught to the studious youth, says Melanchthon, but "that garrulous dialectic, and a little physics." He read Latin literature diligently, but without much distinction between the ancient authors and their modern imitators, and so, as he complains, missed in the unconscious formation of his style the classic grace and precision. Prom the first, astronomy, which was then little better than astrology, exercised a strong attraction upon him, and his curiosity was partly gratified by the lectures of one Conrad, a Swiss, who had studied at Koln. When we are told that he drew upon himself the notice of Wimpheling, and conceived a strong admiration for Geiler, it is easy to forget that he was only a boy, of great capacity, indeed, and with unusual stores of in- formation, upon whom, for his great uncle's sake, the scholars of an elder generation looked with kindness. He did not stay long at Heidelberg. When in 1512, at the age of fifteen, he applied for the degree of Master of Arts, and was told that he was too young to receive it, he shook the dust off his feet against his father's native city, and, under the pretext that the air of the place was injurious to liis health, removed to Tiibingen.^ 1 According to Carl Schmidt, Mel- ^ Corp. Ref. vol. iii. p. 673 ; vol. anchthon wrote his name as we have iv. p. 715 ; vol. x. p. 469 ; vol. xx. p. given it tiU 1531 ; afterwards, for 765. euphony's sake, Melanthon. VI PHILIP MELANCHTHON 263 The University of Tiibingen, which had been founded in 1477 by Duke Eberhard with the Beard, was still largely pervaded by the old scholastic spirit, though the new learning had its eager representatives. The one name in its list of professors which has a claim to a place in the annals of the German Eenaissance is that of Bebel, the author of the Facetiae and the Triumphus Veneris, both books in which the popular and anti-ascetic elements of the movement were vividly reflected. But if the names of Brassicanus, Stadianus, Simler, Stoffler, and their fellows are now forgotten, except by a few exact students of the period, there was enough in their lectures to stimulate and occupy a bright lad of fifteen, who already aimed at making all knowledge his province. A friendship with Oeko- lampadius, whom, though twice his own age, he found a student at Tiibingen, seems to have exercised considerable influence over him. Together they read Hesiod, whose Works and Days filled him with fresh astronomical curiosity, and sent him to Stoffler's lectures. He also mentions Eudolf Agricola's work on dialectics, then recently pubhshed, as having given him a new view of that study. It not only impelled him to read the orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, but helped him to gain a clear in- sight into their merits. He threw himself into the prevalent Nominalism of the place in the study of Occam. His know- ledge of Greek enabled him to learn something of Aristotle at first hand. He attended lectures on medicine, and read Galen for himself Under two now forgotten teachers he studied jurisprudence and the Canon Law. He added theology to the list of his intellectual acquirements, though rather for the sake of universality than from any goodwill to a science which was taught only in a dull scholastic way, and little dreaming that in after life he was to win his own greenest laurels as a theo- logian. And the reward of this assiduous and varied study was that in January 1514 he was admitted Master of Arts, the first among eleven competitors for the degree.-' It is curious to note how the boy of seventeen plunges--afe~. once into the labours of the literary life. Thomas Anshehn, a well-known printer, had an office at Tiibingen, and Melanch- 1 Corp. Bef. vol. i. pp. 26, 321, 1083 ; vol. iv. pp. 716, 720 ; vol. xii. p. 243 ; vol. xxiv. p. 118. 264 THE YEAR ijig: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. thon became his corrector of the press. In this capacity he edited the chronicle of Nauclerus, not merely purging it of typographical errors, but correcting, adding, rearranging, as occasion required.^ When in March 1514 the Clarorum Virorum, Epistolae issued from Anshelm's press, to the suc- cour of Eeuchlin, then sorely beset by Pfefferkorn and the theologians of Koln, the prefatory letter was written by Melanchthon. In 1515 we find him producing an edition of Terence, which claims the merit of being the first — a curious commentary on the Latin scholarship of the age — so printed as to indicate the metrical structure. But it would be a tedious task to enumerate the prefaces, the dissertations, the Latin epigrams, the Greek odes which flowed from Melanchthon's facile pen. Like his later productions they indicate the workman rather than the artist ; they show the foundations of learning rather than the beginnings of taste. But, iu com- bination, perhaps, with their author's relationship to Eeuchlin, they drew upon him the attention of learned Germany in a quite extraordinary way. The young scholar of Tubingen was talked of even in Eome, where literary cardinals asked what he was doing. What compliment could be higher than to be mentioned in terms of praise by Erasmus ? The great scholar, in his Annotations on the ISTew Testament, introduced an all but rapturous allusion to the learning and literary merits of one whom he describes as " almost a boy." The student wUl not find the compliment there now ; it appeared in the first edition of 1516, but it was withdrawn when Melanchthon went to join Luther at Wittenberg.^ The next two years Melanchthon passed at Tiibingen, ' This statement rests on the au- * " At deum immortalem, quam non thority of Veit Winsheim, who makes spem de se praebet, admodum etiam it in a funeral oration which he pro- adolescens, ao pene puer, Philippus nounced at Melanchthon's funeral (0. ille Melanchthon, utraque literatura B. vol. X. p. 188). It is, however, now pene ex aequo suspiciendus ! Quod doubted, on the strength of certain inventionis acumen ! Quae sermonis typographical indications, whether puritas ! quanta reconditarum rerum Nauclerus's Chronicle was among the memoria ! Quam varia lectio ! Quam books for which Melanchthon corrected verecunda regiaeque prorsus iudolis the press : and the theory has been festivitas. " Erasmi Awiwtaiiones, 1 advanced that there is a cojifusion here Thess. ii. 7 (first edition of 1516), with the Chronicle of Carlo, which, at fol. 555. a later period of his life, he undoubtedly Corp. Eef. vol. i. p. 9 ; vol. x. p. edited ( Vide Spiess, Forschungen zur 192. Clar. Vir. Epp. (Paul Gereander Deutschen Oeschichte, vol. xxvi. p. 138). to Reuchlin), fol. B iii. VI PHILIP MELANCHTHON 265 engaged partly in teaching, partly in literary occupations of the kind which we have described. But he was growing tired of a place where, he said, "-it was a capital offence to touch polite literature." " It was no better than a prison to him : among boys, he felt as if he were becoming a boy again." While he was in this mood, Eeuchlin received a letter from the Elector Frederick, stating that he intended to establish chairs of Greek and Hebrew in the University of Wittenberg, and asking for a recommendation of fit teachers. Eeuchlin answered that he was too old and Wittenberg too far off to accept the Elector's invitation in his own person, but that he put forward in his place his "dear cousin. Master PhUip Schwartzerd," whom he had already refused to the University of Ingolstadt. There was no need of further negotiation : Melanchthon put himself absolutely at his uncle's disposal. " Have no doubt at all about the matter," wrote Eeuchlin to the Elector on the 2 5 th of July, " I know no German who is before him, except Erasmus Eoterodamus, who is a Dutchman. He indeed surpasses us all in Latin." On the other hand, the old scholar's delight in thus opening his young kinsman's way to honourable work and possible fame is quite touching. He addresses him as "my PhiUp, my work, and my consola- tion." He exhorts Mm in Scripture phrase, " Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house into a land that I wiU show thee : and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great ; and thou shalt be a blessing." Whether Tubingen at large knew what it was losing we cannot tell ; Simler, Me- lai^thon's old schoolmaster, who was now a professor there, said, that whatever learned men there were in the university, they were not learned enough to appreciate the erudition of their departing colleague. With this testimony Melanchthon, in August, set , out for Augsburg, where Maximilian was then holding his last Diet. Having there made the acquaintance of Frederick, and his chaplain Spalatin, he went next to Niirn- berg, where he was the guest of Scheurl and Pirckheimer, and Anally, by way of Leipzig, arrived at Wittenberg on the 25th of August. Everywhere he met with the friendliest reception from scholars ; at Leipzig, the professors tried to detain him 266 THE YEAR ijig : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. among themselves, telling him that the hundred gulden a year promised him at "Wittenberg was too small a stipend. But Melanchthon would listen neither to these blandishments nor to a renewed iavitation which reached him from Ingolstadt : he had set his heart upon Wittenberg, and to Wittenberg he loyally gave his life.^ He was duly inscribed in the matriculation book of the University on the 26th of August, and three days afterwards delivered his inaugural address, " de corrigendis adolescentiae studiis," to a large and delighted audience. His personal appearance was hardly prepossessing ; if Albert Diirer and Lukas Cranach are to be trusted, a towering brow and an aquUine nose gave an impression of strength which the lower part of the face did not confirm : he had a slight stammer, he carried one shoulder higher than the other, and embarrassment showed itself in twitching eyebrows and nervous gesticulations. But there was no doubt of the effect which he produced. Luther wrote to both Spalatin and Lange in the warmest terms of the new Professor. So long as he can have him, he declares that he wants no other teacher of Greek. On the other hand, Melanchthon plunged into his work not only with the industry that was characteristic of him, but with the eagerness of new expectations and a fresh start in life. He sends to Spalatin a long list of publications which are to appear within the year. He not only lectures on Greek, on physics, on the exposition of the New Testament, but until a Hebrew teacher appears on the scene on that language also. He sends for a copy of the Hebrew Bible from Leipzig ; in conjunction with Luther he procures the invitation to Wittenberg of the printer Melchior Letter, who has a fount of Greek types. The effect of the new impulse given by Melanchthon to the studies of the place was soon seen ; in May 1519 Luther writes that students were pouring in like a flood.^ It must not be forgotten that Melanchthon went to Witten- berg as a humanist. So far as he had studied theology it had rather repeUed than attracted him. His relationship to 1 Corp. Ref. vol. i. pp. 31, 680. ^ ^^j^^ Amd. Vitah. p. 73 ; Corp. Reuchlin's Bricfwechsel, ed. Geiger, pp. Eef. vol. i. p. 43 ; vol. x. pp. 299, 531 ; 289, 294, 302, 303. ' Corp. lief. vol. i. vol. xi. p. 15 ; De "Wette, vol. 1. pp. p. 41 ; vol. X. p. 299. 135, 141, 257, 278, 279 ; vol. vi. p. 15. VI PHILIP MELANCHTHON 267 Eeuchlin, and the part which, though so young, he had taken in his quarrel with the theologians of Koln, had procured him a place in the Letters of the Ohscure Men. In Master Philip Schlauraff's Carmen Bithmieale, in which that-worthy describes his adventures among the humanists of Germany, we read : " Then I went to Tubingen, where many companions live who make new books, and vilipend the theologians. Among whom the most violent of all, as I found out, is Philip Melanchthon ; wherefore I made a vow to God, that if I could see him dead I would go on pilgrimage to St. James." Nor did Melanchthon to the last lose his interest in pure literature ; we shall find him by and by deeply lamenting that at "Wittenberg theology pushed it aside. His contributions to an accurate knowledge of classical languages and literature were incessant, and justly earned for him the title of "Praeceptor Germaniae." But he could not resist, perhaps did not wish to resist, the fascination of Luther, with whom he was soon united in a close and tender friendship. Before he has been at Wittenberg many months he seriously thinks of leaving it again should Luther be com- pelled to go away ; while in June 1519 we find him accom- panying his friend to that disputation at Leipzig which did so much to define and confirm his rebellion against the Pope. But the price which he paid for his adhesion to the Reform was the loss of Eeuchlin's friendship. Of any correspondence which may have taken place between them after Melanchthon's settlement at Wittenberg only one letter remains, in which the younger man declined to follow the fortunes of the elder at the University of Ingolstadt This seems to have been the occa- sion of avowed alienation between them; Eeuchlin asked Melanchthon not to write to him again, and bequeathed his library, which he had promised to his nephew, to his native town of Pforzheim. It was the act of an old, a broken, a dis- appointed man, who had been the mark of a persecution which he felt to be undeserved, and saw the age leaving him behind. But it was not worthy of Melanchthon that when Eeuchlin died, he should have passed by in silence an event which ought to have touched him nearly. When, in 1523, he alluded, in a letter to Spalatin, to the fate of his uncle's library, it was to depreciate its value ; and he added the cold comment, " I never 268 THE YEAR isig: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. promised myself any but common benefits from Eeuchlin, although there was an old friendship between our families, and he seemed to love me very heartUy." Without going so far as to say that Melanchthon was disloyal to his friends, there was in him at times a certain querulous self-regard which was at least inconsistent with generous judgment.^ It would be difficult to overestimate the importance, at this moment, of the direction and impulse given to the studies of "Wittenberg by a man who knew Greek as thoroughly as in those days it was possible to know it. Up to this time the influence of the new learning had hardly made itself directly felt at the Saxon University. The fresh breath of inspiration had come wholly from the theological side, out of the fiery soul and vivid personality of Luther. Now, under Melanchthon, Luther himself widened and deepened his knowledge of Greek, for the first time seriously applying himself to the original text of the New Testament, and making it the basis of his exegesis. But as I have already pointed out, he was no humanist at heart, though for a little while he and the humanists found them- selves in the same camp ; while Melanchthon cared for the classical languages and literature for their own sake, Luther in their cultivation never ceased to have a theological end in view. Presently, when the emotions which had arisen out of the new situation had in some degree spent themselves, a certain difference of feeling between the two friends began to manifest itself. Luther wished to withdraw Melanchthon from lecturing on Greek, which he qualified as " childish," to employ him in teaching theology, whUe Melanchthon was loud in his com- plaints of the neglect of classical studies in the University, and the absorption by theology of all interest and industry. Theo- logian Melanchthon was, and continued to be to the last years of his life, almost in his own despite, and certainly to the destruction of his peace. But the humanist never died out of him ; if he had been left to the bent of his own desires, he would have been simply the greatest scholar of his generation, the successor of Erasmus rather than the helpmeet of Luther.^ ^ Corp. Mef. vol. i. pp. 141, 149, ^ The chief authority for Melanoh- 363, 646 ; Epp. Obsc. Kir. ed. Bocking, thon's early life is, besides the funeral vol. i. p. 201 ; Scheurl, Briefhuch, vol. orations delivered after his death, col- li, p. 91. lectecj. in Corp. Bef. vol. x. p. 177 et VI . KARL VON MILTITZ 269 The situation in regard to the Pope and the Elector in which Luther found himself at the beginning of the year 1519 was plainly one that could not last. The interview with Cajetan had come to nothing ; the Cardinal had demanded unconditional recantation, Luther had asked for fair and formal trial, and neither would accept the other's point of view. The Elector, himself sincerely orthodox, had no desire to shield heretics ; but could Luther be justly treated as a heretic until his heresy was proved ? He still considered himself a true son of the Church, whose protest was only against manifest corruptions and distortions of her doctrine ; while behind him was slowly gathering a great force of popular opinion, perhaps more decisively anti-Eoman than himself On the other hand, the Pope was not wiUing to put pressure on the Elector, whose age and character gave him great influence in that contention for the succession to the Empire in which the Holy See took so deep an interest. Frederick was never- theless the next point of attack, if that can be called attack which took the form of blandishment. Even before Cajetan's interview with Luther, Leo had announced his intention of sending to the Elector the Golden Eose, not only the most signal mark of pontifical favour, but one which Frederick had long coveted; and in JSTovember 1518 the bearer, Charles von Miltitz, was already on his way to Germany. The relation of his mission to that of Cajetan is by no means clear ; he is indeed ordered to submit himself, in all that concerned it, to the Legate ; but, as we shall see,, he interpreted his instructions in his own way. Probably he was sent with general orders to do what he could, under difficult and complicated circum- stances, and suffered them to mould his proceedings into a form not contemplated at Eome. The ambassador was weU chosen. He was one of the twenty-four children of Sigismund von Miltitz, a Saxon noble- man, whose home was in the neighbourhood of Meissen. sec[., and various allusions in his own JoaoMmi Camerarii.' A yalued edition works, to wMch reference lias been of this work is that edited with notes made, the biography written by his by G. Th. Strobel, 1777, to whose friend Camerarius (first published in Melanchthoniana, nil, I may also 1566). 'De PhUippi Melanchthonis refer. An elaborate modem life of ortu, totius vitae currioulo, et morte Melanohthon is that by Dr. Carl . . . narratio diligens et accurata Schmidt, Elberfeld, 1861. 270 THE YEAR Jjig: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. Born about 1490, he was educated at Koln, and thougli only in minor orders, was soon preferred to canonries at Mainz, Trier, and Meissen. He chose, however, to push his fortunes at Eome, where, at an early age, he became Papal Chamber- lain, a function with which he united that of agent for the Saxon Courts, acting sometimes for Elector Frederick, some- times for Duke George. His clerical character seems to have sat very lightly upon him — a fact which did him no injury with Leo. He was an active and enterpristag man of business, like too many of his countrymen williag to drink deeply, and not sufficiently on his guard against the treacherous frankness of the wine cup. In short, for the agency of the sumptuous and unyielding churchman, unwilling to bate a jot of his Thomist orthodoxy, was to be substituted that of a cleric who was also a man of the world, knowing how to make concessions if necessary, and by apparent concession to secure the real object in dispute. But the Holy See in no way drew back from its position of uncompromising hostility to Luther. In letters to the Elector, to his minister Degenhard PfeflBnger, and to the Burgomaster and Council of Wittenberg, Leo described him as " the son of perdition," " the son of Satan," whose actions had been instigated by the devil, and whose impudence was damnable. The mailed hand was not indistinctly seen beneath the velvet glove. Miltitz set out from Italy some time in November 1518; at the beginning of December the rumour of his coming was widely spread among those whom it concerned. He was plainly expected as a messeiager of Papal anger : Scheurl wrote to Staupitz, " Miltitz has brought the Eose, and with it briefs by no means rosy, but cruel, horrid, dire." Luther heard that Miltitz's object was to obtain possession of his person, and to dehver him up to the Pope. The envoy's intention had been, in the first instance, to confer with Cajetan ; but finding that the Legate had gone into Austria, he resolved to spend a few weeks with his old friend Degenhard Pfeffinger, at his paternal estate in Bavaria, and in talk with him to ascertain how the land lay. What he heard in Germany seems not only to have surprised him but to have changed his tactics. Luther was no infirm old man, as he had supposed, but in the prime of life VI MILTITZ'S MISSION 271 and full of energy ; wherever lie went he found three friends of the rebellious monk for one champion of the Pope. His altered mood is manifest in a two days' talk which he had with Scheurl in Ntirnberg about the middle of December, which the latter reported to Luther. He had left behind him at Augsburg, he said, the Golden Eose and his bag of minatory briefs until he saw in what mood Luther and the Elector were. The Pope was by no means as hostile to Luther as might be supposed ; he had heard some of the stories about Tetzel with great indignation, and was not at all pleased with Prierias and his share in the controversy. All was yet capable of amicable arrangement ; learned discussion of the points at issue he did not so much deprecate as appeal to the vulgar, l^othing for many years had so moved the Papal See, which was sincerely anxious for an accommodation. Pfefiinger, who accompanied Miltitz, added his word from the politician's point of view ; if Luther would only give way, a bishopric or some other high ecclesiastical dignity might easily be found for him. Nor, indeed, was the faithful Scheurl unmoved by the blandishments of the Nuncio ; he wrote to Luther counsels of prudence : "Your conscience moves you," he says, "to obey Scripture rather than the Pope ; but it seems to many that it has been given to the Pope to declare the sense of Scripture ; and all things are to be done circumspectly, prudently. ... If the princes fail you, what will you effect ? You have sufBciently shown what you can do ; Eome fears you. It has always been the part of a wise man to yield to occasion ; other things should be kept for a more convenient season. I agree with the sentiment, it is better to yield with gain than to prevail with loss. These things, Eeverend Father, I have written sincerely ; I ask that they should be faithfully interpreted by a friend." More briefly, but in the same sense, Scheurl wrote to Spalatin. He plainly thought that the time for mutual concession and accommodation had come.'^ Prom Niirnberg Miltitz travelled with Pfefiinger into Saxony, where, in the last days of December, he had interviews, first with Spalatin, and then with the Elector. The result ■^ Scheurl, Briefbuch, vol. ii. pp. 63, ed. 0pp. v. a. vol. i. p. 21 ; De Wette, 71-74; Lbscher, vol. ii. p. 666 ; Erl. vol. i. pp. 191, 216. 272 THE YEAR 1519 : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. seems to have been a conviction on his part that it was neces- sary as far as possible to disavow and discredit Tetzel. He sent at once to the indulgence-monger, who was living in monastic retirement at Leipzig, to come to him at Altenburg. Tetzel, in a long and abject letter, excused himself. He could not, he said, leave Leipzig except at the peril of his life, " for Martin Luther, the Augustinian, has so raised up and moved the mighty against me, not only in all German lands but in the kingdoms of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, that I am no- where safe." Miltitz took no notice either of his letter or of one which Hermann Eab, the Donainican Provincial in Saxony, wrote to him on Tetzel's behalf; but about the middle of January went to Leipzig and summoned the monk before him. The result of the investigation — we do not know whether it assumed the shape of a formal trial — was highly unsatisfactory. Miltitz reports in a letter to Pfeffinger that he is fully con- vinced of Tetzel's mendacity and roguery ; that he must be held guilty of having embezzled a part of the proceeds of the indulgence ; and that he had two children, a piece of intelli- gence to which he subjoins a significant " and so on." With very few words more we may dismiss Tetzel from our story. Ashamed and broken, he retired from the presence of the Nuncio to hide his confusion in the convent of his order, and died about six months afterwards, at the very crisis of Luther's disputation with Eck. Not, however, without kindly words from his old opponent, who wrote him a letter of consolation on his deathbed. The letter has perished, but Emser, who alleged that he had seen it, reports that Luther bade Tetzel " be comforted, that the affair had not been begun on his account, but that the child had had quite another .father." If this was so, it meant that by that time Luther was beginning to see that his whole theological system was anti-Papal, and that Tetzel's coarse presentation of Eoman doctrine had been only the occasion, not the cause, of the strife.'' On or about the 6th of January, Miltitz met Luther at Spalatin's house at Altenburg, Fabian von Feilitsch, a trusted 1 Spalatin ap. Mencken, vol. ii. p. De Wette, vol. i. pp. 223-231 ; Seide- 593 ; Korner, Tetzd, pp. 117, 120 ; mann. Die Leipziger Disputation, p. Erl. ed. 0pp. v. a. vol. i. p. 21 ; conf. 56 note. VI HIS CONCESSIONS TO MILTITZ 273 councillor of the Elector's, being also present. The interview was friendly on both sides. If the Nuncio made the same uncompromising demand for a recantation as the Cardinal had done, it was soon withdrawn: a document, drawn up by Luther himself, apparently while the negotiations were in progress, shows that he was never less inclined than at this moment to extenuate or to forgive the share of the Pope and the Elector of Mainz in Tetzel's mission and the scandal which it had caused. But when Miltitz abated something of his high pretensions, Luther showed no reluctance to meet him half-way. At last, after more than one interview, they came to an agree- ment upon two articles. Both parties were to be forbidden to preach, write, or act further in the matter in dispute. Miltitz was to report to the Pope what he had learned ; and to procure the reference of Luther's case to some erudite bishop, who should indicate the poiuts of doctrine in which he had gone astray. "And then," adds Luther, "provided I am instructed of my error, I wiH willingly recant the same, and no further impugn the honour and power of the holy Eoman Church." The meeting was closed by a dinner, and Miltitz took leave of the heretic, whom he hoped he had reduced to silence, with the kiss of peace. But if at the moment he had con- vinced Luther of his sincerity, the impression soon wore off. Before many days had passed the Eeformer contemptuously qualified his flattering speeches ■ as " Italitates," and compared his kiss to the salutation of Judas.'' Soon after the interview at Altenburg followed negotiations as to the choice of a bishop who should act as judge in the case. Luther, appealed to by Miltitz, mentioned three : first, Eichard von Greiffenklau, Elector Archbishop of Trier ; next, Matthew Lang, Archbishop of Salzburg ; and finally, the Count Palatine, Bishop of Freisingen and Naumburg. But there were ^ De Wette, vol. i. pp. 209, 216, 231 ; only two. In favour of this view it is vol. vi. p. 9. There are two letters to be said that the shorter letter is from Luther to the Elector, in which undoubtedly the more formal. If we he gives a report of his negotiations adopt the common opinion, we must with Miltitz, a longer and a shorter, conclude that, if for some unknown both undated (De Wette, vol. i. pp. reason the actual treaty was confined 207, 209). The longer, in which four to the two articles, the four were not articles of agreement are mentioned, is the less considered binding upon the assumed by aU the critics to be earlier parties, and were in fact acted upon, in date than the shorter, which recounts 274 THE YEAR 1319: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. other articles of the agreement, perhaps more onerous than those which he had formally reported to the Elector, which he had yet to fulfil. He was to publish a paper in the German language ^ which should make his orthodoxy manifest to the unlearned, and he was to write a submissive letter to the Pope. The first, which was issued at the end of February, was a short but very significant document, referring to six points of belief: the Intercession of Saints, Purgatory, Indulgences, the Commands of Holy Church, Good Works, and the Church of Eome. The saints are to be honoured and invoked, though it is more Christian to ask them for spiritual than for physical aid. Purgatory is to be firmly believed: though what the pain is, and whether it effects amendment as well as satis- faction, neither he, Luther, nor any one else knows. Of indulgences it is enough for a common man to know that they are a release from satisfaction for sin, and a less thing than good works, which we are commanded to perform. God's command is to be esteemed above the Church's command : cursing, swearing, neglecting to help a neighbour, are worse things than to eat flesh on Friday. Both commands, God's and the Church's, are to be kept, yet distinguished with the greatest care. No one can be holy and do good, unless God's grace make him holy ; by good works no man becomes holy, but good works are performed only by one who is holy. An evil tree cannot bear good fruit. There is no doubt that the Eoman Church is honoured by God above all others ; if, unhappily, things at Eome might be better than they are, that is no reason for separation from her. But as to what the precise power and superiority of the Eoman Church is, let learned men contend. We should have regard to unity, and not withstand Papal injunctions ; and in all things, giving credence to no hypocrite, follow the Holy Eoman See. All we can say of this document is, that if it is no recantation, it is at least marvellously like one. Such papers have been written a hundred times by men, who, feeling themselves carried away by a' current of heretical thought, have greatly 1 " Dr. Martinus Luther's Unterricht werden." 1519. Weimar ed. vol. ii. auf etliohe Artikel, die ihin von seinen p. 66. Abgbnnem aufgelegt und zugemessen VI LUTHER'S LETTER TO LEO X 275 desired to attach themselves to some fixed moorings of orthodoxy, and often, too, at the very moment at which they were about to abandon themselves to the force of the stream which bears them onward. In a similar spirit is conceived the letter to Leo X, dated March 3d.^ It begins with expres- sions of the most profound submission to the Holy See. It is a great grief to Luther that his attempt to protect the honour of the Church has brought such evil suspicion upon him. But what is to be done ? His writings are too widely spread abroad to be recalled. " It is they," he breaks out, " most Blessed Father, they whom I have resisted, who have brought this injury, I might almost say, this infamy, upon the Eoman Church among us in Germany; who, speaking most foolishly in the name of your Blessedness, have furthered only the worst avarice, and have made sanctification contaminate and abomin- able with the opprobrium of Egypt. And as if that were not evil enough, they blame me, who have contended with such monsters, to your Blessedness, as the author of their own temerity." He goes on to say that he has not, nor has ever had, the wish to touch the power of Church or Pope ; he believes the might of the Church to be above all other might, Christ only excepted. Provided that his adversaries also are silent, he will say no more about indulgences ; his only object has been that the Eoman Church, the mother of all, should not be polluted by the foulness of an alien avarice, nor the people be led into the error of believing that indulgences are better than charity. If he can do more than this, he will be most ready to do it. When we recollect that six weeks before this letter was written Luther had expressed to ScheurP the distrust which he felt of the new decretal, which he had not yet seen, and his resolu- tion to resist it, if, as he expects, it is issued out of the plenitude of Papal authority, without adduction of Scripture or Canons, and that his promise of submission and silence was broken at Eck's priDvocation almost as soon as made, it is easy to accuse him of conscious and deliberate insincerity. Yet might not this be a mistake arising out of an imperfect insight into the complexity and changefulness of human motives ? A rigid 1 De Wette, vol. i. p. 233. ^ lUd. vol. i. p. 211. 276 THE YEAR 1519: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. consistency is the virtue, if it be a virtue, only of small minds. A great soul, open to the impact of many waves of impulse, balances long before it enters upon an irrevocable course of action, and for a while turns a different face to observers who approach it from different sides. Motives are not always of equal weight ; they vary according to the quarter from which they come and the mood on which they operate. We must take into account that Luther's theological principles were only slowly developed out of his own spiritual necessities ; that it was long before he discovered what were their logical conse- quences ; that it was a terrible thing for a man to put him- self into open opposition to a Church that had been visibly unbroken for centuries ; that he was surrounded by friends less clear-sighted, less strong-wiUed than himself, who besought him not to throw away this chance of peace ; that he looked to the Elector, whose fate was in part involved with his own, with grateful respect ; that he might well think that he was doing the Church a service ia exposing corruptions that struck at her best strength. I have no doubt that Luther was per- fectly siacere in his promise to be silent, and perfectly sincere too in his inabihty to keep sUence. His fate was too strong for him. The whole set of his nature, his inmost thoughts, his deepest convictions, irresistibly impelled him in the direction of rebellion, and if for a while more superficial feelings held him back, or an effort of will arrested his progress, the strain could not last. But the apparent changefulness, which is profoundly true to the mood and circumstances of the hour, is no proof of insincerity.^ The provocation which induced Luther to break the truce which MUtitz had so laboriously negotiated had long been pre- paring, and took its origin in the Mnety-five Theses. One of the rising theologians of the day was John Maier, who, from the fact that he was born in the Bavarian village of that name, was commonly known as Eck. He was three years younger than Luther, having been bom in 1486, and was, like Luther, ^ The documents which refer to are, however, in a confused condition, Miltitz's mission are printed by Lbscher, out of which Seidemann, in his indis- vol. ii. pp. 552-569; vol. iii. p. 6 et pensable pamphlet, Zarfi;o«i/iftite,am(! sej., and by Tentzel, Historische Chronologische Vntersuchung, Dresden, Bericht, vol. ii. p. 53 et seq. They ISii, has done much to rescue them. JOHN ECK 277 '' a peasant and a peasant's son." At the age of nine he was adopted by his uncle, Martin Maier, the parish priest of Eottenburg on the Neckar, and by him indoctrinated into the learning of the day with such astonishing success that before he was twelve he was able to enter the University of Heidel- berg. It is not necessary to follow the details of his university career there, and at Tiibingen, Koln, and Freiburg ; everywhere he seems to have manifested an astonishing capacity of acquir- ing knowledge. But he had no corresponding power of dis- tinguishing the traditional from the scientific, the false from the true, which, in an age when canons of certainty are rapidly changing, is necessary, if erudition is to be more than an empty form of words. He was on terms of friendly inter- course with humanists, without having imbibed the spirit of humanism, and only waited for the moment at which the new learning and the old should come into decisive collision to throw in his lot with the latter. His strong point was dis- putation. He delighted in these academical exercises, for which an imposing presence, a retentive memory, a large com- mand of words, a loud voice, and an unblushing front eminently fitted him. Like the knight-errant of an earher time he would go far to meet an opponent worthy of his steel, nor, if the lists were fairly measured out and the conditions of combat honourably observed, did it greatly matter to him which side he took. One of the moral problems of the day was the lawfulness of taking interest on money — a practice which the Church qualified as usury. The doctrine was emi- nently inconvenient to the great financiers, whose operations were beginning to foreshadow the all-powerful exchanges of modern times; and in 1515 Eck travelled to Bologna, paid and recommended by the Fuggers, to defend in public disputa- tion the lawfulness of five per cent. This was the first of the many great dialectical tournaments in which he played a principal part; a prelude to his more serious encounter at Leipzig with Carlstadt and Luther in 1519. He leaves upon the mind the impression of a professional gladiator rather than of a serious theological controversialist. He is strident, arro- gant, overbearing ; his instincts are those of self-display ; he fights more for victory than for truth. In 1517 he was 2/8 THE YEAR 1519: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. settled at Ingolstadt as Vice- Chancellor of the University and Professor of Theology ; he was in priest's orders and held a canonry in the Cathedral Church of Eichstadt. But he had not yet developed any opposition to the men of Wittenberg. He was the friend and correspondent of Scheurl, and through his iatroduction had exchanged amicable letters with Luther and Carlstadt. He evidently looked upon them as belonging with himself to the party of what may be called the theo- logical humanists.'' A man who bore a superficial likeness to Eck,^ which, however, veiled an essential dissimilarity, was Andrew Boden- stein, iisually, from his Franconian birthplace, called Carlstadt. His age, his parentage, his early training are wrapped in ob- scurity ; it is conjectured rather than known that he was some years older than Luther, and that he had studied in foreign universities. But he was already Baccalaureus Biblicus when in 1504 he was invited to the new University of Wittenberg, where we find him in 1507 lecturing in via S. Thomae. Then and for some years afterwards he was a pure scholastic, writing books ia exposition of his philosophical views, and without any conscious outlook to the coming change. In 1510 he took the degree of Doctor in Divinity ; and when, in the same year, Trutvetter went back to Erfurt, he was ap- pointed to succeed him, not only as Professor of Theology, but in the Archdeaconry of the Collegiate Church, to which the revenues' of the parish of Orlamtinde were attached. Already Carlstadt showed signs of that strangely mixed character which led him into so many distresses and perplexities, and made him a constant centre of unrest to others. His learning was undoubted ; Scheurl ^ speaks of him as " great as a pliilosopher, greater as a theologian, greatest of all as a Thomist," and de- clares that Wittenberg, had it more Carlstadts, might compete on equal' terms with Paris. But with all his gifts he had the irritable self- consciousness which shows itself sometimes in vanity, sometimes in instability, sometimes in desire for repu- 1 Wiedemann, Johann Fck, pp. 1- disputator acerrimus, amicus mens, 139. Scheurl, Briefbuch, vol. ii. pp. quem in plerisque animi dotibus tibi 12, 13, 33. judioavi similem." 2 Scheurl writes to Carlstadt (B.B. s Quoted by Erbkam, p. 177. vol. ii. p. 13): "Eokius Ingolstadiensis, VI CARLSTADT 279 tation, sometimes in contentiousness. Self-manifestation was a necessity to him ; a Thomist, he expounded Scotus to the Franciscans of "Wittenberg ; and he had conceived the great idea of uniting theology with jurisprudence in one science. He had quarrelled with his colleagues of the chapter on a question of income, which he refused to submit to the decision of the university court ; in 1515 he abandoned his duties to make a pilgrimage to Eome, whence he was only recalled by the Elector's stern warning that in case of his continued ab- sence his income would be sequestrated. On the other hand, there was an eager sincerity in the man which urged him to give practical expression to the convictions of the moment, as well as a clear-sightedness which now and then enabled him to deduce, from principles which they held in common, con- clusions which escaped his more famous contemporaries. The fact that he so constantly recovered the respect and iniiuence which he often temporarily forfeited, testifies to the existence of a certain basal moral soundness in him ; but he was born in a troubled time, and he lacked the steady balance of char- acter which alone could have enabled him to withstand and rule the storm.-' When Carlstadt returned from Eome in 1516 he found Luther's the prevailing influence at Wittenberg, and, still strong in his scholastic preferences, set himself to oppose it. " Carlstadt and Peter Lupinus," says Luther,^ " were, in the beginning of the Gospel, my most violent opponents ; but when I convinced them with disputations, and overcame them with the writings of St. Augustine, and they themselves had read him, they were hotter in the matter than I." There was a little preliminary skirmish between Luther and Carlstadt as to the genuineness of Augustine, Be verd et falsd Poenitentid, which the latter asserted and the former denied ; but on the 26th of April 1517, the day on which the rich store of relics in the Castle Church was solemnly' displayed, we find Carlstadt proposing foi; disputation a series of 152 Theses, "concerning nature, law, and grace against the Schoolmen," of which Luther ' Album Acad. Viteb. p. 16 ; Lib. C. F. Jager, Andreas Bodenstein von Dec. pp. 8, 9 ; Strotel, Neue Seitrage, Carlstadt. vol. iii. pt. 2, p. 66. For Carlstadt see = T. T. vol. iii. p. 345. 28o THE YEAR 1519: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. writes to Scheurl in great exultation. From this time Luther and Carlstadt appear as allied forces ; Luther mentions in terms of high praise to Spalatia Carlstadt's edition of Augus- tine's Be Spir'itu et lAterd, and when Eck throws down the gauntlet, after the publication of the Ninety-five Theses, it is Carlstadt who rushes forward to take it up. But in Carlstadt the scholastic and the mystic were always strangely blended with the orthodox reformer ; and throughout the whole of his troubled life intellectual and spiritual forces, not easily to be reconciled, contended for the mastery of him.^ In the year 1518 it happened that Eck paid a visit to Gabriel von Eyb, Bishop of Eichstadt and Chancellor of the University of Ingolstadt. The conversation between them turned on Luther's Ninety-five Theses ; and the Bishop asked his Canon to give him his opinion of them in writing. The result was that Eck selected eighteen propositions out of the Theses as worthy of animadversion, and sent them to the Bishop with a running commentary. But the document, which Eck called Obelisci, was not printed ; Eck himself says that he kept no copy of it, and it was through one or two private hands that it reached Luther. He had, however, received it by the 24th of March, on which date he speaks of it, not without surprise and regret, ia a letter to Sylvius Egranus. In all probability he at once composed his answer, Asterisci Jyutheri adversus Obeliscos Echii, in which he ex- amined Eck's criticisms one by one. But whether this was priated in a separate form then or afterwards, is uncertain ; it is known to us only from the copy contained in the first volume of the Wittenberg edition of Luther's collected works. Most likely he contented himself with sending it to Link, from whom he had received the Obelisci; and, notwithstanding the imputation of Hussite heresy, which Eck twice threw out against him, looked upon the affair, perhaps with some passing shade of annoyance, as one of those interchanges of opinion which might well take place between opponents who wished still to be friends. But if Luther shunned, Carlstadt was eager for the fray. In May and June he published a double series of 406 Theses, in which he attacked not only Eck but Tetzel. 1 De Wette, vol. i. pp. 34, 55, 89 ; Riederer's Nachrichten, vol. iv. p. 63. VI CARLSTADT'S THESES AGAINST ECK 281 There was something of the professional disputant in Carlstadt too ; it was intolerable to him that a challenge, direct or in- direct, should not be accepted.^ These Theses might well be passed over with cursory mention, as only a preliminary step in a controversy which soon grew to larger issues, were it not that they contain the first specific declaration made by the theologians of the Eeform of the supreme and final authority of Scripture. In the preface which Carlstadt prefixed to one series of the Theses, the posi- tion which he takes up is made sufficiently clear. "Let opinions," he says, "remain opinions, and be nothing but opinions, and hot burthens upon Christian backs. Let us not make the opinions of modern theologians equal to articles of faith and the decrees of Christ and Paul." And again, "at last, theologians, for our Lord Jesus Christ's sake, open your eyes, and passing by the opinions of the Schoolmen, passing by all puerile disputations, approach the fountains of the Scripture themselves."^ Of the Theses, it may be sufficient to quote the 1 2th : ^ " The text of the Bible is above not one only or many doctors of the Church, but even the authority of the whole Church." But this was followed by many others, not iadeed so decisively expressed, but all tending in the same direction. Two years later Carlstadt returned to the subject in an im- portant work. Be Ganonicis Scriptwris, which will demand our close attention. At the same time these Theses were a dis- tinctly forward step in the process of revolt against Eome, which is all the more important as having been made by another than Luther. It was the first time that the great assumption of Protestantism had been clearly stated. Before Oarlstadt's Conclusiones had appeared, Eck, who had heard of their preparation, endeavoured to ward off the blow by a letter of excuse. His Oielisci, he said, had been written in obedience to his ecclesiastical superior, and were not intended for publication; under these circumstances he might 1 Eoli, quoted by Wiedemann, p. MS. of the Ohelisci to Luther's friends. 76 ; De Wette, vol. i. p. 100 ; Jager, Luther received it from Wenzel Link, Carlstadt, p. 11 ; Soheurl tells us to whom he addressed the Asterisci. (B.B. vol. ii. p. 47) that Bernard "Weimar ed. vol. i. pp. 281, 302, 305. Adelmann, a canon of Augsburg, where ^ Loscher, vol. ii. pp. 66, 67. Eck was preacher, communicated the ' IMd. vol. ii. p. 80. 282 THE YEAR 1519: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. possibly have expressed himself in too strong language ; he certainly had not intended to offend Luther ; why should they not endeavour to convince one another in private corre- spondence ? But the spirit of the theological gladiator was too strong in Carlstadt to permit him to accept this overture of peace, and the Condusiones were published. Another attempt was made to stay the impending quarrel, this time by Luther, who wrote to Eck, stating that Carlstadt had acted without his knowledge or consent, and begging, that though he must be answered, he should be answered as mildly and moderately as possible. But Eck's Defence was hardly conceived in the spirit of this counsel ; Carlstadt published a rejoinder ; and the con- troversy, as is the wont of such debates, gradually became more bitter. Eck was particularly annoyed by a satirical woodcut which Carlstadt published, and which was afterwards followed by explanatory letterpress. It represented two carriages, one of which, surmounted by a crucifix and inscribed with appropriate mottoes, was supposed to be taking the way to heaven, while the other, decorated with maxims of the schol- astic theology, was faring ia an opposite direction. So the dispute went on during those summer months of 1 5 1 8, in which Luther, summoned to Eome, was negotiating an audience with Cajetan in Augsburg. In Eck's Defence, however, occurred a challenge to Carlstadt to hold a public disputation at some University, to be agreed upon, on all the matters in question ; an invitation which the latter, regarding with apprehension, as he did, his opponent's skill in the dialectical tourney, thought himself bound in honour to accept. In October Luther was iu Augsburg, and there meeting Eck, arranged with him the pre- liminaries of a formal disputation between him and Carlstadt. More than one University was proposed and rejected as the scene of the duel ; at last, subject to the approval of Duke George and the other authorities, ecclesiastical and academical, Leipzig was chosen.^ To Leipzig, therefore, both Luther and Eck made respectful application. The first negotiations were, however, unsuccessful. ' Lbscher, vol. ii. p. 64 ; Eok's Seidemann, Leipz. Disp. p. 22 et seq. ; DefcTisio, quoted by Wiedemann, p. 78 ; Lbscher, vol. ii. p. 158. De Wette, vol. i. pp. 125, 171, 216 ; VI THE DISPUTATION AT LEIPZIG 283 The theological faculty of the University was unwilling to interfere in so delicate and difficult a matter. It represented to Duke George, to whom Eck had made a personal appeal, that it had already been consulted by the Archbishop of Mainz, and had advised him to refer the dispute between Luther and Tetzel to a synod ; that the proposed disputation might annoy the Elector, and breed ill-feeling between him and the Duke ; and that the subject of debate, which was plainly Luther's teaching, had already been taken in hand by commissaries of the Pope. Before, however, Eck could have received the un- favourable reply of the Leipzig faculty, he took the field in twelve Theses, which he printed and sent with a letter to Matthew Lang, the Cardinal Archbishop of Salzburg. " In the University of Leipzig Eck wUl debate the propositions stated below against D. Bodenstein of Carlstadt, Archdeacon and Doctor of Wittenberg." But though Carlstadt was thus the nominal, the Theses themselves left no doubt as to the identity of the real opponent. Indeed, if other proof were wanting it would be supplied by the fact that in Eck's letter to the Arch- bishop of Salzburg, in which he gives an account of the dispute, he speaks of Carlstadt as " Luther's champion." And Luther at once took up the glove. He published Eck's Theses with counter Theses of his own and a letter to Carlstadt, in which he altogether abandoned the part of mediator which he had up to that moment played, and assailed his opponent with reproaches that were little less than abusive. And as the University of Leipzig would have nothing to do with the debate, he invited Carlstadt to join with him in persuading Duke George to provide place and opportunity for it. This pamphlet, under the title Disputatio D. Johannis Eccii et P. Martini Zutheri in studio Lipsiensi futura, Luther sent to Spalatin on the 7th of February 1519. Eck's reply was a republication of his Theses, now made thirteen in number by the addition of one on the subject of free-will, and avowedly directed contra M. Lutherum. Carlstadt rejoined by sending to Eck, with a letter, dated April 2 6th, in which even the pretence of courtesy was thrown aside, seventeen Theses, which he proposed to defend at Leipzig, and Luther followed with a Disputatio et excusaiio F. Martini Luther adversus criminationes D. Johannis 284 THE YEAR 1519: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. Eccii, in which he too enlarged his twelve theses to thirteen. This, with Eck's last pamphlet, he sent to John Lange on the 1 6th of May. The conditions of the combat were thus finally settled, but what and where were the lists in which it was to be fought out?^ For many reasons Eck had acted prudently in preferring Leipzig to Erfurt as the place of disputation. The University was a well-known seat of orthodoxy. The occasion of its foundation in 1409 was the dissension which arose in the University of Prag between the Bohemian and the German students; its founder, Frederick the Warlike, had won his chief military fame in the Hussite wars, and it had assumed from the first an attitude of opposition to ecclesiastical innova- tion. It did not cordially welcome the new learning ; no distinguished humanist would stay long at Leipzig ; something in the academical air impelled them to seek more congenial abodes. Its theological professors enjoyed rich canonries at Meissen, Zeitz, and Merseburg, often taking refuge in these pleasant places from the irksome duties of teaching, which they left to unendowed Masters and Bachelors. Not even from their own scholastic point of view did they understand their business. " There was not a professor at Leipzig,'' said Luther,^ " who understood a single chapter of the Gospel, or the Bible, or even of Aristotle." These were the divines who looked unfavourably upon Eck's and Luther's request for a disputation ; they had no desire to give unnecessary publicity to the new doctrines, and shunned the labour and excitement which the debate would bring upon them. In this attitude they were supported by the Chancellor of the University, the Bishop of Merseburg, Prince Adolphus of Anhalt ; not only for various good reasons which seemed to him sufficient, but in pursuance of express instructions from the Pope, he forbade the disputation to be held. But the University, a wider body than the Theological Faculty, and in this instance not of one mind with it, successfully appealed to the Duke against this decision. In a highly characteristic letter^ Duke George complained' to the Bishop of his theologians ; they did not want ^ Seidemann, Z. D. App. 7, p. 113 ; = De "Wette, vol. i. p. 101. De Wette, vol. i. p. 249 ; Lbsoher, ^ Seidemann, L. D. App. 11, p. 119 vol. iii. p. 284 ; Weimar ed. vol. ii. et sea. p. 153. VI THE DISPUTATION AT LEIPZIG 285 the disputation, he said, because it would interrupt them in their sloth and their boozing; it would be quite another thing if there were a prospect of its bringing in money, or a good dinner. He thought his University had been a " universale studium," where, salvA fide, Catholic^, anything might be fairly debated : if without harm to any one disputations had been held at Leipzig on the Trinity, the Eucharist, and other articles of the faith, why not on the ascent of the soul to heaven as soon as the money rings at the bottom of the box ? He besought the Bishop, therefore, to withdraw his protection from these people who called themselves theologians, and yet were ashamed of bringing their knowledge to the light, " that we poor laymen may be instructed wherein we do right, and wherein we are deceived by false interpreters of Scripture." The Bishop was still obdurate ; perhaps, in face of the Papal attitude, could not be otherwise. Whereupon George took the matter into his own hands : " if he is Bishop of Merseburg, he is not ruler of the land " ; and formally approved of the disputation being held on the 27th of June. There was still some difficulty as to Luther's admission to a debate, which in all the negotiations, up to almost the latest point, had been assumed to be between Carlstadt and Eck. But already, in the general opinion, Carl- stadt was beginning to take the second place in what promised to be a solemn, and perhaps decisive, encounter of opposing theological principles. On the 19 th of February Eck had written to Luther, " Although Carlstadt is your champion, you are the real leader, you who have scattered broadcast through all Germany these doctrines, which, to my poor and slender judgment, appear false and erroneous. Wherefore it is right that you also should come to Leipzig, and either defend your own, or impugn my Theses. . . . For you see by the schedule of dispute that I have laid down propositions, not so much against Bodenstein, as against your doctrines." This, though a late, was so manifestly a true statement of the case, that Luther's claim to be allowed to intervene in the debate could hardly be denied. After some difficulties and delays it was allowed ; though not formally, till the disputants had actually arrived in Leipzig, and the disputation was about- to begin.-^ 1 Bottiger, Qesdh. Sachsens, vol. i. p. 343 ; Seidemann, L. D. App. 11-18, pp. 112, 126 ; Enders, vol. i. p. 429. 286 THE YEAR 1519 : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. Duke George, sometimes called the Bearded, at this time the head of the younger or Albertine line of the Saxon princes, was the son of that Albert whom Kunz von Kaufungen stole, and of Sidonia, daughter of George Podiebrad, King of Bohemia.^ Born in 1471, he succeeded his father in the year 1500 as Duke of that part of Saxony which we may describe as the Meissen, Dresden, Leipzig land. He was originally intended for the Church, and in that view had received a better education than commonly fell to the lot of princes ; he corresponded with Erasmus and Sadolet ; he took a deep personal interest in the University of Leipzig, which he was grieved to see overshadowed by the rising fame of Wittenberg. His morals were pure ; his religious feeling genuine ; if some- times hard and arbitrary in his procedure, he had a high idea of the duties of a ruler, and tried to govern his land justly and mercifully. Though a sincere Catholic, and deliberately pre- ferring the doctrinal system of the Church to that introduced by Luther, he was deeply persuaded of the necessity of reform, and was among the foremost in urging the subject upon the attention of Imperial Diets. But the reform he wanted was disciplinary not doctrinal ; nor did he at all see that the way to the former lay through the latter. Perhaps the tinge of his Catholicism became deeper as he grew old and was more and more involved in opposition to the innovators of Witten- berg ; but there was an earlier time at which his aims and theirs had not been so far apart. A story was current that he had compared Erasmus with the Wittenbergers, not to the advantage of the Dutch scholar : they at least could utter a decisive Yes or N"o. But what if their Yes were his own No ? Luther, who, notwithstanding much bitter conflict between them, was not slow to acknowledge Duke George's good qualities, found this out at an early period. On the 2 5th of July 1518^ he preached before the Duke at Dresden, on a text from the 1 It is a curious proof of the intensely ^ This date is usually given as July aiistocratio spirit of the German chapter 25, 1517. The story was iirst told that George, although the son of a by Fabricius, Originum lUustrissimae reigning Duke and ofa King's daughter, Stirpis Saxonicae lAhri mi. p. 859, was refused a canonry at Kbln on who dates it " paulo ante quam nota account of some diflSculty as to the fuerat haec controversia," and it was nobility of his mother's descent. Bot- copied by Seokeudorf, lib. i. sec. 8, p. tiger, vol. i. p. 562. 23. The sermon is fixed as having VI COMMENTARY ON GALATIANS, ETC. 287 gospel of the day, " Ye know not what ye ask," and from it took occasion to set forth his cardinal doctrine of Christ alone the justification, the sanctification, the salvation of men. The Duke's attention was powerfully excited; and turning to Barbara von der Sala, his wife's chief lady-in-waiting, he asked what she thought of the sermon. " If she could only hear such another," she said, " she hoped one day to die in peace." The answer did not please the Duke, who declared more than once that he would give a great deal not to have heard it, for it could only make the people secure and reckless. It was the old and perennial difference between opposite schools of religious thought that came out in this speech ; the Augustinian accuses the Pela- gian of spiritual chill and death ; the Pelagian retorts upon the Augustinian the charge of moral laxity and indifference. And it cannot be too carefully borne in mind that not all who defended the ancient Church against the attacks of the Keformers were blind devotees of superstition, or dull advocates of abuse and license. The doctrine of justification by faith alone is not so powerfully buttressed by scriptural arguments as to make its denial an act of intellectual suicide : while, if the tree is to be known by its fruits, it must be admitted to be one that is peculiarly susceptible of moral perversion. Duke George, both as a man and as a ruler, was not dissimilar in character to his cousin, the Elector Frederick, and the two obeyed the same order of motives. But they looked at religion from different points of view. During the first six months of 1519, through which the negotiations for the Leipzig disputation had been prolonged, Luther had been actively engaged in both academical and literary work. Besides scattered sermons which have been preserved, his chief productions at this time were his German Exposition of the Lord's Prayer for Simple Laymen, the first part of his Operationes in Psalmos, and the earhest form of his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. The first of these arose out of lectures on the Lord's Prayer, which he had been delivered on St. James's Day, by a year later ; and he supposes that a letter addressed by Luther to Spalatiu Luther, writing at the very beginning (De Wette, vol. i. p. 84), ■which is of the year 1519, wrote 1518 by mistake, plainly dated Jan. 14, 1518. Enders, and from the force of habit. Kostlin however (vol. i. p. 353), has adduced (p. 788, note to p. 204) has adopted this several passages in the letter itself emendation, which rec[uire that it should be put 288 THE YEAR ijig: ERIENDS AND EOES chap. delivered as far back as the winter of 1516-1517, and which, having been taken down in Latin by John Agricola of Eisleben, and publislied by him, had had a large circulation. But Luther was not satisfied with this unauthorised edition of his book, and in December 1518 set to work on another, which was printed and ready for circulation at the beginning of the followiag April. The repeated editions of this book, both in German and in Latin, testify to its wide popularity ; it was soon translated into the Italian and Bohemian languages ; Beatus Ehenanus, the celebrated humanist, wrote to Zwingh, expressing his wish that it could be read in every house in Switzerland ; while Duke George told its author that he had introduced confusion into many consciences, and that men were complaining that if he were listened to, it would take them four days to get through one Paternoster. I have already alluded to Luther's devotion to the Psalter and to his earliest lectures on that book, recently republished from his manuscript. These, with his enlarged knowledge and advancing views, he now looked upon as superseded, and replaced them by a second course, which he himself carefully prepared for the press. The first instalment of the work, containing a commentary on Psalms i.-v., was published with a preface by Melanchthon, addressed to students of theology, and dedicated by Luther to the Elector in a letter dated March 2 7th. Other instalments, bring- ing the commentary down to the twenty-first Psahn, were issued in the succeeding years, until the Diet of Worms put a stop to labours which were never again systematically resumed. Of the Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians — the Pauline letter which Luther was afterwards wont to call his Kathe von Bora — it will be time to speak when we are able to review it in its final form. It was the result of lectures which he had been delivering since October 1516, but the printing was not complete till September 1519. A second and revised edition, soon followed by a German translation, was published in August 1523, while the Commentary, as it at present exists — one of Luther's most celebrated works, and a chief authority for his theological opinions— belongs to 1535.^ ^ Kawerau, Joh. Agricola, p. 14 ; 193, 223, 239, 288, 559 ; Weimar ed. Mathesius, p. 199 A; Zwingli, 0pp. toI. ii. pp. 7i etseq., iZ6 et seq. vol. vii. p. 81 ; De Wette, vol. i. pp. VI A PERIOD OF MENTAL GRO WTH 289 While he was engaged in these labours, and actively shar- ing in every detail of university management, the negotiations with Miltitz still dragged on, though, in view of the coming disputation, they had lost much of their importance. Ten days after his letter to Leo X, Luther wrote to the Elector, declaring that he had seriously and joyfuUy intended that "the game should come to an end," and in that view had passed by with- out notice Sylvester Prierias's Eeply ; but that now Eck had, suddenly and without warning, attacked him, and not him alone, but the whole University of Wittenberg ; and that it was not fair his mouth should be closed while another was allowed to speak. After this it mattered very little that in May Miltitz summoned Luther to Coblenz to submit himself to the judgment of the Archbishop of Trier in the presence of Cajetan. The affair had gone too far for that. Luther replied in a letter which, under the forms of courtesy, veiled something like a defiance, and turned all his attention to the impending controversy with Eck. It was one of the busiest periods of a singularly busy life ; probably it was at this time that, as he himself tells the story, he could not find leisure to recite his daily hours, and was accustomed to bring up his arrears of prescribed devotion once a week. The energy which thus poured itself forth was apparently inexhaustible ; no wonder that he made upon Germany the impression of a portent, and that his enemies feared as much as his friends admired him.^ The months preceding the opening of the disputation at Leipzig were for Luther a period of marked mental growth and change, especially in regard to his relation to the Papacy. His collision with Cajetan, the difficulties of his position towards the Elector, the soft speeches of Miltitz, reinforced as they were by the solicitations of his friends, no doubt taught him much ; but it was the function of Eck, a function unconsciously ' De Wette, vol. i. pp. 237, 270, 274, recantation, orders hini to come to 275 ; Coll. vol. iii. p. 279. Eome at once to make his submission, There is extant a letter from Leo to promising that he shall find there a Luther, dated March 29th, first pub- pious and kind father. So far as it is lished by Lbscher, though in an incom- possible to judge, this document never plete form, in which the Pope, stating reached Luther. If it came through that he had received Miltitz's report, the hands of Miltitz, he may have and making the most of what it con- thought it inexpedient to forward it to tained as to Luther's repentance and its destination. Enders, vol. i. p. 492. U 290 THE YEAR 1519: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. exercised, to excite him to research into the historical founda- tions of the Papacy. In Luther's Besolutiones on the Ninety- five Theses he had, in his exposition of Thesis 22, let fall the remark, that in the time of St. Gregory the Koman was not above other Churches. Upon this unguarded expression Eck, who had a keen eye for a disputable proposition, had fastened, and had made it the occasion of the last of the thirteen Theses which he issued in reply to Carlstadt on the 29th of December 1518. It ran, "That the Eoman Church was not superior to other Churches before the time of Sylvester we deny : but him who possesses both the chair and the faith of Peter we have always recognised as Peter's successor and the general vicar of Christ." There was nothing in Carlstadt's Theses which should have called out this ; it was meant to be a direct challenge to Luther, and was at once recognised as such. Nor did Luther hesitate to accept it. Before the 7th of February he had pre- pared thirteen counter Theses, of which the last was, " That the Eoman Church is superior to all others is proved by the most frigid decrees of the Eoman Pontiffs, issued during the last 400 years; in opposition to which stand the approved history of 1100 years, the text of Holy Scripture, and the decree of the Nicene Council, which is the most sacred of all." No issue could be more clearly joined ; but it was upon a new and perilous field, chosen, not by Luther, but by an artful adversary. The doctrine of indulgences had never been defined by authority ; in regard to it it was possible to make little of differences, to slip out of a doubtful position, to hide concession in a cloud of words. But in more ways than one the primacy of the Eoman See was the key of the position.'^ Luther's friends were seriously alarmed at the new turn the controversy had taken. Carlstadt did not like it. Spalatin, who had the Elector on one side and Luther on the other, was in an agony of apprehension. It was just at this moment, too, that Diingersheim von Ochsenfahrt, a professor of theology at Leipzig, and a clumsy champion of the old learning, wrote to Luther the first of a series of long letters, proving the primacy of the Pope by the well-worn arguments and reference to the ancient authorities. Luther's answers were brief, but not 1 Weimar ed. vol. i. p. 571 ; vol. ii. pp. 161, 185. VI THE POPE ANTICHRIST? 291 uncourteous ; he referred his correspondent to the approaching disputation at Leipzig; he pointed out to him that their standards of historical truth were not the same ; he declared that he rested upon the words of the Gospel, and found in the Scriptures the test by which the statements of the Fathers were to be tried. In truth, under the sting of these various impulses, and urged by an inner necessity of his own mind, he is dihgently studying the subject with a view to the coming contest. It is, he thinks, as if the Lord were leading him. The more he reads, the more he comes into contact with the actual pretensions of the Papacy, the graver grows his mood. As early as the end of February we find him greatly struck with a satirical dialogue — once attributed to Erasmus and to Hutten, but now known to be the production of neither — in which in the other world Julius II is made to tell the story of Papal wars and wickedness to Peter, who keeps locked against him the gate of Paradise.^ It is now that, notwith- standing his smooth negotiations with Miltitz, he writes to Lange that he , has played with Eome hitherto, but will play no longer ; it is now that he tells Spalatin, whom he alternately soothes and alarms, that if the Pope be not Antichrist, he is at least Antichrist's apostle. At last he sees whither his prin- ciples have been leading him all the time. " My Spalatin," he writes about the end of May, " the truth of Scripture and the Church cannot be handled unless this beast be attacked. Do not therefore hope that I shall be quiet and safe, unless you are willing that I should give up theology altogether. Let my friends therefore think me mad. The affair will not reach an end (if it is from God) unless, as His disciples and acquaint- ances deserted Christ, so also all my friends desert me, and truth be left alone — truth, which will save itself by its own right hand, not mine, nor yours, nor any man's. And this ^ De Wette, vol. i. p. 230. This several editions, and was translated dialogue, entitled "F. A. F. Poetae into German and French. Booking Regii libellus de obitu Julii Pontiflcis gives it among the ' ' Dialogi Pseudo- Maximi anno domini MDXIII," will be Huttenici." Erasmus was gravely found in Eutteni 0pp. ed. Bbcking, annoyed that it should be ascribed to vol. iv. p. 421. F. A. F. stands for him, Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. p. 437 A. Faustus Andrelinus of Forli, an Italian Letter to Cardinal Campeggio. Conf. poet who enjoyed the protection of Strauss, U. v. Hutten, p. 74. Lewis XII of France. It ran through 292 THE YEAR 1319 : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. have I foreseen from the beginning. . . . And last of all, if I perish, the world will lose nothing. Thanks to God, the Wittenbergers have got ^ far enough not to need me. What do you want ? I, unhappy, fear lest perchance I should not be worthy to suffer and to die in such a cause ; that will be the happiness of better men, not of so foul a sinner." In this mood he went to Leipzig. Henceforth no looking back was possible.'- It was Luther's original intention not to give the world or his opponent any hint of the line of argument which he intended to take. For some reason, however, with which we are unacquainted, he changed his mind, and early in June pub- lished a pamphlet entitled Besolutio Zutheriana super Froposi- tione sua xiii. de potestate Papae. It was a gauntlet thrown down to the Papal See. He begins by the complaint, which sounds strange in our ears, but which was no doubt true to one of Iris own changeful moods, that he has been forced into a public appearance, and declares that he desires nothing so much as, with his Christian name unsmirched, "_to retire to his own corner." He fully accepts the fact of the Papal primacy, and in it recognises the will of God. If Christ's precept was to go two miles with the man who asks us to go with him one, how much more should we yield to the Pope, whether he act justly or unjustly ? For his supremacy is an incomparably less thing than that through us unity and charity and humility should be destroyed for its sake. But when he has enumer- ated six reasons of this kind in favour of recognition of the Papacy, he goes on to examine the grounds on which it is alleged to be of divine right, subjecting texts of Scripture, dicta of the Fathers, and decrees of the Popes to rigid scrutiny and careful interpretation. , In like manner the history of the early Church is made to give evidence against Papal claims ; the rule of Eome is wide, but it neither is nor ever has been universal. It is not, however, necessary to follow the steps of an argument which we shall meet with again and again, and which is familiar to every student of ecclesiastical history. A ^ Conf. otto Beokmann to Spalatin : Enders, vol. i. pp. 355, 365, 373, 437, Loscher, vol. iii. p. 91. Kolde, Anal. 451, 478. De Wette, vol. i. pp. 217, iMtlier. p. 6. The correspondence 230, 239, 260 ; vol. vl. p. 13. with Diingersheim will be found in VI THE DISPUTATION AT LEIPZIG 293 more important thing is the example v?hich Luther set of critically examining the Papal claims, and the principles of spiritual judgment which he applied, though without fully see- ing their scope and significance. If the - Pope's primacy be taken out of the category of things which rest on a basis of divine right, how long will it be accepted as a matter of administrative expediency ? Luther himself suggests the answer : " If the primacy of the Eoman Pontiff should begin to tend to the injury of the Church, it ought to be utterly taken away ; for human rights and customs ought to save the Church, not to contend against her." And such passages as the following, which at once go down to the roots of the con- troversy and expose the foundations of all spiritual religion, breathe the noblest spirit of the coming reformation. " "Where- fore, wherever the word of God is preached and behoved, there is the true faith, that rock immovable ; where faith, there the Church ; where the Church, there the Bride of Christ ; where the Bride of Christ, there all things that are the Bridegroom's. So faith has with it whatever follows upon faith — ^keys, sacra- ments, power, and all the rest." And at the end : " Last of aU, I say, that I do not know whether the Christian faith can bear it, that there should be any other head of the Universal Church on earth than Christ Himself" ^ Eck arrived in Leipzig on the 21st or 2 2d of June, furnished with letters of recommendation from the Dukes of Bavaria and the F^ggers of Augsburg ; and on the 23 d, which was the festival of Corpus Christi, took part in the public procession, duly clad in sacerdotal garments. The next day his opponents from Wittenberg made a solemn entry into the city. Carlstadt rode in one carriage, Luther and Melanchthon in another ; Duke Barnim of Pomerania, the youthful rector of their University, accompanied .them, and a crowd of two hundred students, armed with pikes and halberts, formed their escort. John Lange, who was now prior of the Augustinian convent at Erfurt, two licentiates in theology, one of whom was Nicholas Amsdorf, and three doctors of law, completed the party. Just as the procession was passing the churchyard of St. Paul's, Carlstadt's carriage came to pieces, and let him 1 Weimar ed. vol. ii. pp. 180, 183, 186, 208, 239. 294 THE YEAR 1519 : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. down in the mire, a misfortune which the populace took as an augury of his approaching defeat at the hands of Eck. But auguries can ^ always he interpreted in two ways ; and as Luther's carriage passed on and took the first place in the cavalcade, men said that it was clear that he and not Carlstadt was the real champion of the new movement. The city was all alive with excitement, which the presence of the Witten- berg students did much to augment. Every lodging-house which gave them shelter, every tavern in which they took their meals, was the scene of the liveliest debate, and their hosts had much to do to keep the peace. Almost all Leipzig took Eck's side ; it was not only the old learning against the new, but university against university, the ancient seat of scholarship against an upstart rival. Luther and the Witten- bergers did not complain of the formal civility which they received ; but they were made to feel that the cordial welcome of the authorities was reserved for Eck. At the last moment the Bishop of Merseburg, true to the attitude which he had assumed from the first, caused notices to be affixed to the church doors of Leipzig, in which he for- bade the holding of the disputation, on pain of excommunica- tion of all concerned. But it was a sign of the times that the magistracy of Leipzig took no further notice of the monition than to commit to the city prison the official by whom it was made. Then came the question of the conditions under which the disputation was to take place. It had been originally agreed, a good deal against Eck's will, that the proceedings should all be reduced to writing by official reporters, and from this stipulation Carlstadt refused to withdraw. The next proposition was that this report should not be published until judges, stni to be appointed, had given their decision upon the result of the disputation. To this Luther demurred. What he wanted was a free appeal to public opinion. He was will- ing to take the risk of debate against so accomplished a dis- putant as Eck, if only competent hearers and readers were allowed to judge for themselves of the facts and arguments produced on either side. He could hardly doubt that whoever was the judge agreed upon, the decision would go against himself, and he did not wish that element of adverse prejudice VI THE DISPUTATION AT LEIPZIG 295 to be imported into the affair. He was, however, obliged to give way. The matter had gone too far for withdrawal from the lists to be possible. Any decisive objection on his part to the conditions laid down, however intrinsically reasonable, would be interpreted as cowardice ; and he contented himself, therefore, with a simple reservation of his right of appeal to a council. The question as to who the judges should be was by mutual consent adjourned to the close of the disputation.^ On Monday, June 27th, all was ready. The proceedings began at seven a.m. with a Latin speech, addressed by Simon Pistoris, Professor of Jurisprudence, to the assembled University with all guests and strangers. Then a procession, in which a Leipzig Master walked with each Master from Wittenberg, was formed to St. Thomas's church, where a solemn mass. Be Sancto Spiriiu, was sung, written by the Cantor George Ehau, in twelve parts, a thing unknown before. The assembly next adjourned to the Pleissenburg, the Duke's castle, on the out- skirts of the town, over which a guard of seventy-six armed citizens kept watch and ward during the disputation. Here a spacious hall, hung with costly tapestry, had been made ready foriihe encounter, with seats for the Duke and his distinguished guests, ample accommodation for the reporters and the learned audience, and two desks for the disputants, that allotted to Eck adorned by a picture of St. George, that to the Witten- bergers by one of St. Martin. But there were still more solemn prehminaries to go through. Peter Schade, usually known as Mosellanus, the only humanist of the University, and on that account more favourable to Luther than any of his colleagues, delivered a Latin speech of nearly an hour's length, " on the method of disputation, especially in matters theological," at the end of which the Veni Sancte Spiritus was thrice sung, with orchestral accompaniment, all the company meanwhile devoutly kneeling. Last of all, a herald proclaimed the actual opening of the disputation at two o'clock in the afternoon ; and the doctors, weary and hungry, went to their mid-day meal. Besides the official report of this famous discussion, six or seven descriptions of it by eye-witnesses still remain to keep ^ The terms of the contract will he found in Seidemann, L. D. App. 28, p. 137. 296 THE YEAR ijig : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. the memory of the scene alive. One, written by Mosellanus to a well-known Saxon nobleman, Julius Pflug, contains vivid por- traits of the three chief actors. " Martin," he says,^ " is of middle height, of spare body, spent alike with cares and study, so that whoever looks at him can almost count his bones ; still in the prime of life, with strength undiminished, and a high and clear voice. His Scriptural knowledge and learning are admirable, and he can give chapter and verse for his quota- tions." He has a competent knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, and a great store of matter. " In his private life and manners he is obliging and facile ; nothing stoic, nothing supercilious : he plays the man of all occasions. He is festive, jocund, alert, always with a cheerful face, no matter how horrible his adversary's threats : you would with difficulty believe that a man could accomplish such arduous things without divine assistance. What people generally blame in him is that he is somewhat too bold in reprehension and more biting in speech than is either safe in one who introduces religious novelties or decorous in a theologian." "I am not certain," adds Mosellanus, " whether he does not share this defect with all late-taught men." Carlstadt is of smaller stature, with a dark and adust complexion. His voice is indistinct and un- pleasant : his memory is less retentive, and he more easily gives way to anger. Eck is tall, of figure solid and square, with a voice so full as to be sufficient not only for a tragedian, but for a crier, yet rough rather than distinct. His countenance, his eyes, his whole appearance are such as to suggest the butcher or the soldier more than the theologian. He has a remarkable memory, not mated with an equal intellect. A quick apprehension, a discerning judgment, without which all other gifts are futile, the man has not. He brings forward a great mass of arguments, Scripture texts, dicta of the Fathers, which he throws down before his audience, without much caring whether they are appropriate or cogent, and trusts to this display of undigested learning to produce an effect upon the less thoughtful. With this he has an incredible audacity, which he conceals with admirable cunning. If ever by over- boldness he feels that he has fallen into the enemy's snare, he ^ Lbscher, vol. iii. p. 247. VI . CARLSTADT AND ECK AT LEIPZIG 297 gradually turns the disputation in another direction. Some- times he adopts his adversary's view, though expressed in other words, and with wonderful skill charges his own ab- surdity on his opponent ; so that he might seem to be able to vanquish a very Socrates. So far, in effect, Mosellanus, who, though he has his preferences, which he does not hesitate to avow, writes with the vividness of an eye-witness and the discernment of a, man of sense. We may pass over with little remark the duel between Carlstadt and Eck. By common consent it turned upon Divine Grace and human freewill — whether any share in the production of good works could be assigned to the latter, and if so, under what conditions and to what extent ? Carlstadt took the Augustinian, Eck the semi -Pelagian view ; intel- lectually the debate was chiefly remarkable as showing how nearly it is possible for disputants upon such a subject to approach, without conceding to either the honours of victory, or feeling the fact of agreement. To minds unaccustomed to the nice distinctions of scholastic logic it seems to be a reductio ad absurdum of disputation to declare, as did Eck, that though every good work of man is from God, it is totum sed non total- iter. Perhaps the- interruptions of the debate were more interesting than the debate itself. On the evening of the 2 8th of June Eck broke into the course of the disputation with a complaint of the way in which his adversary was conducting it. Carlstadt had made written notes of the arguments which he intended to use, and in order to secure accuracy in his quota- tions had brought with him the books from which they were taken, a proceeding which, in Eck's opinion, deprived him of the advantage which he might fairly expect to derive from his more retentive memory and his superior self-confidence. The Duke and his councillors, on being appealed to, decided in favour of Eck's protest, and Carlstadt was ordered to leave his books and papers at home ; but the sentence at once degraded the disputation from a scientific attempt to thresh out theo- logical truth into a contest in which the victory remained to the loudest lungs and the most unabashed audacity. The day after this little episode, the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul, the disputation was interrupted, and by the desire of Duke 298 THE YEAR 1519 : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. Barnim of Pomerania Luther preached in the hall, the Castle chapel being too small to contain the numbers who streamed from Leipzig to hear him. Nor did he scruple to plunge into the matters in dispute ; the first part of his sermon was on grace and freewill ; the second on the power of the keys. Duke George was not among Luther's hearers ; his minister, Caesar Pflug, when he heard of it, wished that he had kept the sermon for Wittenberg. This, however, was the only occasion offered to Luther of addressing the common people ; Eck, on the contrary, preached four times in various Leipzig churches, makiag his boast that he had done what he could to stir up repugnance to the Lutheran errors.^ The second act of the drama began on the 4th of July, when Eck and Luther entered upon their dispute as to the primacy of the Pope. The line which the latter took has already been sufficiently indicated in the account which we have given of his preliminary pamphlet, and need not now be described at length. It was the divine right of the successors of Peter which he denied ; their primacy as an actual ecclesi- astical fact, as a useful part of the administration of the Church, he fuUy admitted. He criticised the usual interpretation of Matt. xvi. 18 and John xxi. 15 ; he asked where was the primacy of the Church in the twenty years before Peter went to Eome ; he adduced precedents to show that great prelates in the first century did not acknowledge the Bishop of Eome as their superior ; he brought forward the decrees of the Nicene Council ; he appealed to the theory and example of the Greek Church. In this argument he had greatly the advantage of Eck, whose knowledge of Christian antiquity was of the most imperfect and uncritical kind, and who quoted, as of equal authority, genuine and spurious works of the Fathers, false decretals, and well-authenticated canons. Overmatched in fair fight Eck had then recourse to the appeal ad, invidiam, and made up for lack of facts and arguments by bold insinuations of heresy. One name he had to conjure with, that of Hus ; one recollection that was sure to excite the prejudices of his audience, that of Bohemian misbelief and the bloody wars of 1 Melanchthon, Corp. Ref. vol. i. p. 92 ; Loscher, vol. iii. pp. 310, 516 ; De Wette, vol. i. pp. 285, 288, 293. VI LUTHER AND ECK AT LEIPZIG 299 which it had been the occasion. Early in the debate we find him introducing the word " Bohemian " ; he even, with hypo- critical courtesy, apologises for connecting it with Luther's case ; but what can he do ? Luther at first is satisfied with energetically repudiating the association ; but as Eck presses him, his allegiance to truth gets the better of his controversial caution, and he declares that among the doctrines ascribed to Hus were many that were plainly most Christian and evan- gelical, and such as the universal Church could not condemn. Then, pressed still further with the condemnation of Hus by the Council of Constanz, he was compelled to allow that even Councils may err, and have erred. Eck had all he wanted ; to have elicited such a confession from his opponent more than made up for any argumentative defeat on matters of detail. But it was not till some months afterwards that Luther recog- nised the full scope of what he had said. He read Hus's books ; he received letters of congratulation and encouragement from Bohemia; and in February 1520 he was ready to write to Spalatin, " Up to this time I have unknowingly held and taught all John Hus's doctrines ; in a like unknowingness has John Staupitz taught them ; briefly, we are all unconscious Hussites. In fine, Paul and Augustine are Hussites to the letter." ^ The debate on the primacy of the Pope lasted tUl the 8th of July. The next subject was purgatory. Upon this Luther held a less tenable position than his adversary ; for while he firmly believed the reality of purgatory, he denied that there was any warrant for it in Scripture, or in the writings of the early Fathers. On July 11th issue was joined on indulgences ; but Eck did not defend the abuses of the doctrine, which alone, up to this time, Luther had attacked, and the debate languished. " If indulgences had never been preached in any other way,"^ was the Eeformer's caustic remark to Spalatin, " no one would ever have heard the name of Luther." Whether repentance included the love of God, or might rightly be said to spring from the fear of punishment; and what was the scope of priestly absolution, were questions which occupied the 1 Lbscher, vol. iii. pp. 360, 372, 389, 649 ; De Wette, vol. i. pp. 315, 341, 425. 2 Ihid. vol. i. p. 297. 300 THE YEAR ijig: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. 12 th and 13 th of July ; after which Carlstadt returned to the field for a day or two. On the 16 th the disputation was brought to an end by an "Encomium Theologicae Disputationis" by John Lange/ after which George Ehau and the city pipers again made their appearance, the one intoning the " Te Deum Laudamus," the others " blowing their best and noblest." The fact was that Duke George had received notice of the speedy ' arrival in Leipzig of the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, and needed the free use of the Pleissenburg for his entertainment. The only question left for decision was who the judges should be to whom the official reports were to be submitted. All the parties to the disputation agreed in the selection of the Universities of Paris and of Erfurt,^ Eck stipulating that in the case of the latter the Augustinians, as possibly prejudiced in Luther's favour, should have no voice. Two propositions, made by Luther, first, that Dominicans and Franciscans also should be excluded, and next, that all Masters in the univer- sities named, and not merely the graduates of the theological faculty, should be invited to take part in the decision, were referred to Duke George, and by him rejected. But they are noteworthy as showing the kind of public opinion to which he wished to appeal.^ It was a drawn battle, as almost all such battles must be. Luther, not long afterwards, pronounced it " a loss of time, not an inquiry into truth." * Probably the arguments on each side did httle more than strengthen those who heard them in their antecedent prejudices. The Leipzig doctors, who dozed away the long mornings amid the hum of learned eloquence, and needed to be awakened when the clock struck the hour of dinner, were not likely to be very accessible to the rhetoric of the Wittenbergers, who, on the other hand, addressed them- selves with better hope of result to their young rectOr, Duke Barnim, and the audience of students which they had brought with them. Duke George, who attended with great regularity, was only confirmed in dislike of Luther and his doctrines. 1 Not Luther's friend of that name, 413, 607. De Wette, vol. i. p. 320 ; but a Silesian scholar. toI. vi. p. 18. Seidemann, L. D. App. ^ Eck and Carlstadt agreed upon 28, p. 137. Erfurt only. * De Wette, vol. i. p. 291. ^ Loscher, vol. iii. pp. 280, 412, VI MEANING OF THE DISPUTATION FOR LUTHER 301 An eye-witness, Sebastian Frbschel, tells us that when Luther declared that some of John Hus's doctrines were Christian and evangelical, Duke George put his arms akimbo, and said in a voice loud enough to be heard all over the hall, " Pest take that I " He was not prepared for innovation. We seem to hear the voice of the practical statesman in opposition to that of the speculative theologian when he said to Luther, " After all, human right or divine right, the Pope is and remains the Pope." The general feeling in Leipzig was almost unanimous in favour of Eck ; he was courted, feasted, invited to preach, presented with robes of honour, treated, in a word, as the champion of the faith. The Duke once invited Luther, Melanchthon, and Carlstadt to dinner ; and one or two other persons extended to them a like hospitality. The city sent them an honorary present of wine, an attention which the manners of the time rendered imperatively necessary. Pros- chel tells the story that when Luther entered by chance the Dominican Church, the monks, in hot haste, took the Host from the altar and locked it up out of sight and reach of the dangerous heretic. Under these circumstances it was not wonderful that he should wish to get away as soon as possible from the unfriendly city. He left Leipzig for Wittenberg on the 15th of July, a day before the conclusion of Carlstadt's second debate with Eck. Eck remained, sunning himself in the popularity which he had acquired, a week or ten days longer, and then travelled in the train of Duke George to Annaberg.^ To Luther at least the Leipzig disputation was something much more than the dialectical tournament which Eck had desired to provoke, and in which he so greatly delighted. The necessity of precisely formulating his opinions on several questions which the Papal champions regarded as vital, and again of defending them against the attack of a keen and pertinacious disputant, helped to show him what his position really was. It was not that he interpreted the mind of Christian antiquity more critically than his opponent, but that he had read it in a sense altogether irreconcilable with the Eoman claims. It was not merely that he denied the divine 1 Lbscher, vol. lii. p. 280 ; De Wette, vol. i. pp. 290-302. 302 THE YEAR 1519 : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. authority of the successor of St. Peter, but that he set up against it another authority, to which it could not but bow. All through the disputation Luther makes his appeal to Scripture, as the test by which Fathers, Popes, Schoolmen, even Councils must ultimately be tried. He has not drawn out his theory in logical form; he has not settled for himself the relation between the authority of the Bible and that which the Church lawfully and undoubtedly possesses; he is as far as possible from seeing that the authority of the Bible is with him only an assumption, beneath which lie sleeping many questions which will one day demand settlement. He does not know that unconsciously, and under cover of the Bible, he is in large part resting upon his own masculine judgment, his own keen spiritual insight. What is, however, increasingly clear to him is, that he has broken with Eome. He cannot remain in the fold of the Church and at the same time make light of indulgences, deny the divine right of Papal authority, and maintaia the fallibility of Councils. Eck's instinct as a disputant was unerring ; he had gained his end when he exhibited Luther as taking sides with Hus against the Fathers of Constanz. Their ways now parted decisively; Eck went to Eome to ask for the Bull of Excommunication, Luther to Wittenberg to inveigh against the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and to appeal to the nobles of the German nation.^ Under what seemed to be the extinguished ashes of the Leipzig disputation soon began to glow embers of petty and unprofitable controversy. ' ' Eck, who from this time forward assumed the character of an official champion of Eoman ' Lbsoher (vol. iii. p. 214 et seq. ) Hones to Spalatin (De Wette, vol. i. p. gives seven reports of the Leipzig Dis- 290), and Luther and Carlstadt's joint putatioa. (1) That addressed by letter to the Elector (De Wette, vol. i. Melanchthon to Oekolampadius ; (2) by p. 307). Seidemaun's Leipziger JDispit- Eck to Hoogstraten ; (3) by Cellarius tation is a model of careful research, to Capito ; (4) by Luther to Spalatin ; and its Appendices give important (5) by Amsdorf to Spalatin ; (6) by documents in their original form. A Mosellanus to Julius Pilug ; (7) of which paper by R. Albert in the Zeitschriftfur one Kubens is the author. He also die Sistorisehe Theologiie fox 1S7S, -p. 382 gives the naive narrative of Sebastian <;< sej., "Aus welchem Grunde disputierte Froschel, published forty - seven years John Eck gegen Jtf . Luther in Leipzig later in the preface of his book O71 the 1519?" makes careful reference to all Kingdom of Christ. To these may be the original authorities, but does not added Luther's dedication of his Resolu- seem to add anything to Seidemann. VI CONTROVERSIES WITH ECK AND EMSER 303 orthodoxy and authority against Lutheran revolt, wrote to the Elector Frederick, explaining and excusing the part which he had taken. The Elector replied by placing the letter in the hands of Luther and Carlstadt, who were not slow in self- vindication. There was a dispute as to the manner in which the debate had been conducted, especially as to whether the chief combatants had not received unfair help from their adher- ents. Melanchthon, immediately on his return to Wittenberg, wrote an account of the whole affair to Oekolampadius, which soon found its way into print. This Eck resented as a breach of the compact as to the publication of the official notes, although he had himself sent a similar report to Hoogstraten, with the view of influencing the judgment of the University of Paris ; and an exchange of hostile pamphlets took place between him and Melanchthon. A controversy in which, in the early part of the year, Luther had become involved with the Fran- ciscans of Jtiterbogk was revived and embittered by the inter- ference of Eck on the one hand, of the Bishop of Brandenburg on the other ; and now Luther published a Defence in which he parried the double assault. He had a little brush of his own with Hoogstraten, Eeuchlin's old enemy ; he published Resolutiones, or detailed explanations of the propositions which he had defended at Leipzig, and before the end of the year another polemical pamphlet against Eck. In the meantime a new opponent, who was destined to harass him for many years, made his appearance. Hieronymus Emser, a humanist of the older school, and a correspondent of Erasmus, had been for some time Duke George's secretary. So far as we can now see, his relations to Luther had been outwardly friendly, though each must have recognised the fact that the other belonged to a different school of thought and scholarship. Emser had naturally been active at Leipzig in making arrange- ments for the disputation, and probably had been present at all its most interesting moments. In August he wrote a letter, it is difficult to see why, except to make mischief, to Dr. John Zack, a dignitary of the Catholic Church in Prag, in which, under the transparent pretext of defending Luther from the charge of sympathy with Bohemian heresy, he artfuUy strove to connect him with it. For some reason or other this 304 THE YEAR is 19: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. covert attack was peculiarly irritating to Luther, who replied in a very bitter pamphlet, the violence of which it is impossible to defend. Emser, who claimed to be a man of family, was accustomed to have his crest, the head of a mountain goat, accompanied by some appropriate motto, printed on the title- page of his books. Luther's first pamphlet is addressed to the " Emserian Goat " ; before long Emser retorted upon the "Mad Bull of Wittenberg," and a controversy began which, in the interests of Christian truth, it is not worth while to follow, in the interests of Christian charity best to pass by.-'- Not even the Leipzig disputation seems to have discouraged that sanguine diplomatist Miltitz. It is difficult to believe that he can have really cherished any hope of succeeding in his mission, though, so long as a chance remained, he may have been unwilling to go back to Eome with a confession of failure. He kept a cheerful countenance, he wrote letters, he arranged interviews, boasting that "he had Dr. Martin in his hands." The Golden Eose, which he had hoped to carry into Witten- berg with solemn pomp and himself place in the hands of the Elector, he had been obliged to give up at Altenburg to a com- mission, of which Eabian von FeUitsch was the head ; worse still, he had been dissatisfied with the honorarium of 200 gulden offered him by Frederick, and had asked to have it doubled. Then, on the 9th of October, he met Luther at Liebenwerda, and there endeavoured to induce him to accompany him to Trier, where the Archbishop was willing to try his case. But the Eeformer again refused to put himself in the power of his enemies, and Miltitz had no other resource than to begin renewing the web of his futile intrigue. MeanwhUe it became increasingly clear that the great debate at Leipzig could come to no decisive issue. Before the end of the year the University of Erfurt declined the function of judgment. Paris was still silent; and when, on the 15th of April 1521, she spoke at last, contented herself with a condemnation of certain proposi- tions extracted from Luther's work on The Babylonian Cap- tivity of the Church. The Bishop of Merseburg had been wiser ^ Loscher, vol. iii. pp. 604, 660 ; De Wette, vol. i. p. 307 ; Weimar ed. vol. ii. pp. 388, 621, 656, 698. VI SERMONS ON PENANCE, ETC. 305 in his generation than Duke George ; the effect of the debate had not been to settle controversy, but to embitter it.^ Despite outward distractions Luther was busy through these months with academical and pastoral work at Wittenberg. The University flourished; 458 students were matriculated in 1519 ; in 1520, 579.^ But we have minuter record of his activity in the pulpit at this period. Several sermons which he now preached have found a permanent place in his works,, notably, one on " Usury," in which, possibly with an eye to Eck's rhetorical campaign at Bologna, he defended the common opiuion of the Church as to the unlawfulness of lending money at interest.^ The most important, however, of this year's sermons are those which in November he published with a dedication to Duchess Margaret of Brunswick - Liineburg.* Their subjects were the three sacraments of Penance, Baptism,, and the Eucharist. His treatment of them is eminently char- acteristic both of his general way of working and of the state of his mind at the moment. He approaches them from the spiritual and practical side. He does not seem at aU intent upon defining how far he agrees with or differs from the orthodox doctrine. The questions which afterwards had so strong an attraction fpr him at present do not seem to exist. He takes transubstantiation as a matter of course, and is silent as TO the sacrifice of the mass ; but he almost carelessly lets drop the dangerous remark that it were well that the wine as well as the bread should be given to the laity. In the sermon on Penance we hear little of the absolving power of the priest, much of the necessity of faith in the penitent. It is impossible not to believe that even yet Luther was not eager to enter upon a process of self-examination which might end in showing him that he was an alien from the Church. Indeed, he still writes letters upon Augustinian affairs which show that he has a living interest in them, and has not forfeited the confidence of all his brethren.^ At the same time the new leaven con- tinues to work. The Elector, still moved by traditional piety, 1 Tentzel, Eist. BericU, vol. i. p. ^ AUum Acad. Viteb. p. 80 et seq. 415 ; De Wette, vol. i. pp. 328, 339, ' Eri. D.S. vol. xvi. p. 77 ; Weimar 343, 344, 349, 380 ; Seidemann, L. D. ed. vol. vi. p. 33. App. 34, p. 161 ; Corp. Bef- vol. i. * Weimar ed. vol. li. p. 709 et sect. 3o6 THE YEAR 1519 ■■ FRIENDS AND FOES chap. wished to institute a new celebration of the Passion in the Castle Church. It was innocent enough in itself; two priests and eight choristers were to be endowed to sing psalms with this intention three days in the week. But Luther objected that church ceremonies were already too numerous ; that they had an irresistible tendency to become empty, formal, super- stitious, and to substitute themselves for spiritual life and growth. And in December he teUs Spalatin^ that he must not expect anything from him in relation to the other sacraments, alluding, no doubt, to the sermons of which we have spoken. He cannot write of them until he has investigated the grounds on which they rest. " What has been fabled of the seven sacraments you shall hear at another time." And again, in the same letter, " I do not know what are the duties of a priest, as to which you inquire of me, since the more I reflect upon them the less I know what to say, unless indeed it be ceremonial things. Next, that word of the apostle Peter has great weight with me (1 Pet. ii.), 'that we are all priests,' and John the same in the Apocalypse ; so that this kind of priesthood in which we are does not at all differ from the condition of the laity, except in the ministry by which we minister the word and sacraments. . . . Even so, your office in no way differs from that which is common to laymen, except in the burthens which the Eoman Curia has laid upon aU priests, without exception." He had been talking over these things, he said, with Melanchthon, and possibly felt the influence of his colleague's more defining and systematising intellect. It would be difficult to say which of the two friends at this time was exercising the deeper influence on the other. The large and vivid personality of the older man had com- pletely carried away the younger. For the time at least, Melanchthon was quite cured of his indifference to theological studies. He threw himself eagerly into the Leipzig disputa- tion, and the controversies which followed it. In September 1519 he took the degree of Bachelor of Theology. Throughout the summer he lectured on the Epistle to the Eomans, and then turned his attention to the Gospel of Matthew. In December he wrote to a friend that he was altogether absorbed 1 De Wette, vol. i. pp. 378, 379. VI LUTHER AND MELANCHTHON 307 in theological studies, which, he says, give him "wonderful pleasure," and delight him " as with a certain heavenly am- brosia." A few months afterwards he says to the same corre- spondent that "Martin is to him much greater, much more admirable than can be shadowed forth in words." Luther's enthusiasm for his young colleague is not less remarkable. " That little Greek," he fondly said, " beats me even in theology." " Master of Arts, of Philosophy, of Theology as I am," he wrote to Spalatin, " I am not ashamed to give up my own opinion if it differs from that of this grammarian. And this I have often done, and daily do, on account of the divine gift which God has, with a large benediction, poured into this earthen vessel. I do not praise Philip ; he is God's creature : nor do I venerate aught save the work of my God in him.'' Nor is it difficult to see that at this moment Melanchthon was in advance of Luther in the precise definition of the points in which they were at issue with the Church. Two sets of theses from his pen are still extant, which, though it is impossible to date them exactly, must both belong to this period. In them he denies that the mass is a sacrifice, that to reject transub- stantiation is heresy. No Catholic, he says, need believe in any articles of faith save such as are proved by Scripture : and the authority of Scripture is above that of Councils. It was from Luther's mind, and especially from his spiritual neces- sities, that the impetus of the new movement came ; but Melanchthon possibly saw more clearly of the two in what direction they were going, and how far they had gone. Already the relation between them answers to the fact that the theology which is known as Luther's receives its most systematic exposition in Melanchthon's Loci Communes} We get a glimpse of a different side of Luther's character than that displayed in the controversies of the time in a work which, though not published till 1520, was completed in the last months of 1519. The Elector had been seriously ill, and Luther, prompted by Spalatin, had committed to writing some thoughts which he hoped would be consolatory to him.^ The ^ Lib. Dec. p. 23 ; Corp. Bef. vol. i. he conceives to be Melanchthon's Theses pp. 126, 128, 138, 264. De Wette, pp. on taking the degree of Bachelor of 305, 380. Kraflft, Briefe und Docu- Theology, Sept. 9th, 1519. inemte aiis der Zeit der Beformation, p. ^ Erl. 0pp. v. a. vol. iv. p. 134. De 1, has recovered and published what WettejVol.i.p.SSejWeimariVol.vi.p.lOl. 3o8 THE YEAR isig: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. book, the original text of which was in Latin, was sent to the chaplain to be translated into German for the Prince's use. It was called Tessaradecas, a Booh of Consolation for the Weary and Heavy Laden. A popular superstition in Germany put especial faith, in time of trouble, in fourteen saints — on what principle chosen it is impossible to say — called the Helpers (Nothhelfer).i Por these Luther substituted as many aids of Christian meditation, dividing his work into two parts, the first treating of the seven evils which we escape, the second of the seven blessings which we enjoy. It is a quaint little treatise of practical theology, with a faint flavour of mysticism about it ; grave, even austere in its tone, not sinking into any abysses of despondency, not rising into any heights of rapture. What makes it peculiarly interesting is that Luther asks Spalatin to send him back the manuscript, that he may use it for his own comfort. He was not always, then, the eager dis- putant, the self-confident controversialist, prompt in speech, bitter in reproach, eager in recrimination, which we might infer from his polemical writings : not even the deep spiritual teaching, the calm practical wisdom of his sermons, display all sides of his changeful character. He had his dark hours of uncertainty and despondency, in which he recoiled in some- thing like doubt and fear from the strong things he was saying, the brave things he was doing: when he probably felt the beauty of church unity, and looked back upon the peace of earlier days, and longed for the love of friends whom he was driving away. In some such mood he wrote to Staupitz on the 3d of October : ^ " What do you desire of me ? You desert me too much. To-day I have been very sorrow- ful on your , account, as a weaned child on account of • its mother. I beseech you, praise God in me, even though a sinner. I hate life, which is as bad as can be ; I dread death ; and though fuU of other gifts, which Christ knows I do not desire, if I may not serve Him, I am empty of faith." And at the conclusion of the same letter, as if to show that the personal affection overbore all other interests, " Last night I dreamed of you, as if about to depart from me : I all the ^ The fourteen were : Blaise, George, gidius,Dionysius,Eustaoliius, Catharine, Erasmus, Vitus, Margaret of Antioch, Achatius, Barbara. Christopher, Pantaleon, Cyriacus, Ae- ^ De Wette, vol. i. pp. 342, 343. THE ELECTION OF CHARLES V 309 while most bitterly grieving and lamenting. But you, with a motion of your hand, bade me be quiet, saying that you would return to me. This certainly has become true this very day. But now, farewell, and pray for me, most miserable." It is one more proof, were any needed, that aU great victories for mankind are won, as it were, by an agony and bloody sweat, and that the strongest souls have the hardest battle to fight. The year 1519 was, quite independently of the events which we have narrated, one of capital importance in the history of the Eeformation, for it witnessed the election of Charles V to the Empire. But to understand the sequence of events which ended in this result of world-wide import, we must retrace our steps a little. As Maximilian's life drew visibly near its close, the possibility of becoming his successor agitated the minds of many princes. He was not old, if we reckon by years, having been born in 1459 ; but at that time few men in high station attained old age ; and the approach of their sixtieth year usually found them feeble and broken. In the pursuit of his own tortuous and changeful policy, he had not disdained to dangle the glittering bait before more than one of his con- temporaries ; at one moment he assured Henry VIII of England of his sincere wish that he should be elected to the Empire, at another he made similar promises to the young Lewis of Bohemia. Apart from the promises or hints of the Emperor, the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg once flattered himself that the prize might be his ; while it was actually, for a few hours, within reach of Frederick of Saxony. But whatever Maximilian might say or do for a temporary purpose, his heart was really set on the election of his grandson Charles, who, by the successive deaths of Isabella of Castile in 1504, of his father Philip in 1506, and of Ferdinand of Arragon in 1516, had inherited Spain, Naples, and the Netherlands. And Charles's only real competitor for the Empire was Francis I. of France. In 1519 Francis was twenty-five years old, in the first flush of manhood, adorned with shining qualities, which drew all men's eyes upon him, and moved them to overlook defects of character, which became at once more marked and less pardonable as he grew older. How cruel, how treacherous, 3IO THE YEAR ijig-: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. how selfish he could be, they did not yet know ; but they marked the beauty of his person, his mastery of all chivalrous accomplishments, his interest in art and literature, his burning desire to make a name for himself. Under his immediate predecessors France had become one and powerful ; Lewis XI had taken advantage of the death of Charles the Bold to seize Burgundy and Tranche Comt^ and Artois ; while the marriage of Anne of Brittany, first with Charles VIII and then with Lewis XII, had united to the crown the last independent fief. And the first years of Francis I. had been an uninterrupted series of brilliant successes. In a campaign, which took the world by surprise, he had led his army across the Alps by passes before unknown ; had defeated the Swiss, up to that time unbeaten, at the two days' battle of Marignano, had reconquered the Duchy of Milan, and made French influence once more para- mount in Northern Italy. His territories were not so wide as those which owed allegiance to his rival, but they were far more compact, were not weakened by internal rivalries and dissensions, and placed their resources unreservedly at his disposal. His command of ready money was undoubted ; 3,000,000 of livres, he thought, would not be too much to spend in buying his way to the Empire. But the Empire, if he attained it, was only to be his stepping-stone to greater things still. All Europe then lived in terror of the Turk ; and the dream of Popes and Emperors was of a crusade against the unbeliever, which should at least repel him from the shores of Spain and Italy, or perhaps, by the hands of some heaven-born leader, once more restore the sacred sites to Christian worship. The adventure was one after Francis's own heart. When, in the spring of 1519, Sir Thomas Boleyn, Henry VIII's ambassador at his court, asked him whether, if he were elected Emperor, he would really lead an expedition against the Turks, he took the envoy's hand, and swore on his honour that within three years after his election he would be ia Constantinople, or lose his Ufe in the attempt. At that moment, at once of success and of expectation, nothing seemed too difficult to attempt, no achievement too high for his ambition. His rival was a sickly backward boy of nineteen, burthened, to aU appearance, by a fate too great for him. Born at Ghent CHARLES V 311 in 1500, Charles had been brought up in Flanders by his father's sister, Margaret. There seemed to be nothing of the Spaniard in him ; Flemish was his only language ; when he made his iirst journey to Spain in 1517, the grandees of Castile and Arragon were shocked to find that their king could neither speak to them nor understand them. For his intellectual training first Lewis Vacca, a Spaniard, and after- wards the Fleming, Adrian of Utrecht, were responsible ; what- ever else they taught him, they made him a sound Cathohc, himself an unquestioning believer in the faith, and iudisposed to allow others to question it. Declared to be of age in January 1515, Charles devoted himself steadily to the business of the State, presiding at the meetings of his Council, and reading all despatches. But those who watched him narrowly thought that he was wholly in the hands of his ministers, of whom the Seigneur de Chifevres, a member of the ancient and powerful house of Croy, was omnipotent. It was impossible to say what germs of great qualities the boy's shy gravity might hide ; but at first he showed Kttle sign of independent will and judgment. He was not inapt at manly exercises,- shot well with the bow and took pleasure in field sports, " a sign," as his grandfather remarked when the fact was reported to him, " that he was no bastard." But his health was feeble, he was subject to sudden attacks on occasions of excitement ; men whispered that he had the falling sickness, and would not live long to enjoy his great dignities. Possibly Chi^vres did the best thing for him in keeping him under close and long tutelage ; he was a plant that could not be forced ; his un- doubted abilities came slowly and late to maturity. But he was not without the consciousness of power, if the story be true that at a tournament, held not long after his arrival in Spain, he appeared in a suit of white armour, and on his shield the motto "ISTondum"- — "Not yet." And when at the be- ginning of the year 1519 there was a disposition on the part of his aunt Margaret and her German advisers to substitute his more popular brother Ferdinand for himself, as the Austrian candidate for the Empire, his strong will unmistakably flashed out, and he made it clear that the great prizes of ambition open to a member of his house were for its head alone. 312 THE YEAR ijig : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. His power was greatly crippled by the conditions under which he exercised it. Each separate constituent of his vast dominions had its own interests upon which its international pohcy depended. In regard to the territory which had once been Burgundian, Charles was a vassal of France ; and in any case the contiguity of France and Flanders made French friendship a thing to be conciliated and preserved. On the other hand, Spain had a perpetual subject of quarrel with France in the little border kingdom of Navarre; and the French alliance, which Chifevres imposed upon Charles in the early years of his reign, was profoundly unpopular in his Peninsular kingdoms. His first appearance in Spain was anything but a triumph. I do not merely allude to the fact that his Flemish councillors excited the jealousy and trampled upon the susceptibilities of the Spanish Grandees ; that Cardinal Ximenes was treated by Charles himself with cold and shameful ingratitude ; that the rich archbishopric of Toledo was given to a nephew of Chi^vres, hardly out of his teens ; and that the Flemings generally behaved themselves in Spain as if they were at free quarters in a conquered country. If all this had been otherwise, his position would still have been difficult. The unity of the Spanish kingdoms had been only half accomplished. Castile and Arragon had fallen apart at the death of Isabella. Each of the Peninsular kingdoms had its own Cortes, its own rights, its own local prejudices. In Castile the loyalty of the people still clung to the poor mad Queen ; in Arragon Ferdinand would willingly have had his favourite grandson and namesake for a successor. Charles was not accepted in his various Spanish kingdoms till he had sworn to respect their several privileges ; and even then no great pecuniary resources were placed at his disposal. He had always been poor; he was obliged to borrow money from England before he could make the voyage to Spain at all ; and now he found that the land of his hopes by no means glittered with gold and sUver. The fact is, that at this time Spain, compared with France, England, the Netherlands, was a poor country : the expulsion of the Moors had deprived it of an industrious and prosperous population : Spaniards were more given to warlike than to agricultural or manufacturing pursuits, VI ELECTION OF THE EMPEROR 313 and the mineral wealth of the New World was only just beginning to pour in. It was the German patriotism of the Fuggers, the great bankers of Augsburg, which supplied Charles with funds to bribe the Electors — perhaps the earliest instance on record of the decisive interference in pohtics of the kings of finance. The campaign of the two rivals began as far back as 1516. Francis was first in the field. Of the seven Electors, Mainz, Trier, Koln, the Count Palatine, Brandenburg, Bohemia, Saxony, he gained, or seemed to gain four by large promises, pecuniary and otherwise. Without going into the details of the odious traf&c — details which change almost from month to month, till the student is equally weary of their complexity and their baseness — ^it may be said that the two HohenzoUern brothers, Joachim of Brandenburg and Albert of Mainz, were at all times ready to sell their votes to the highest bidder, and anxious only to know where he was to be found. The Elector Palatine, Lewis, was almost as venal, though perhaps less cynical in his venality ; and the same may be said of Hermann von Wied, the Archbishop of Koln. The King of Bohemia was a minor, not only under the joint guardianship of Maxi- milian and Sigismund, King of Poland, but closely connected by marriage with the House of Hapsburg, and on that account his vote was supposed to be secured to the Austrian candidate. Eichard von Greiffenklau, Archbishop of Trier, steadily gave his support to Francis. There remained Fred- erick of Saxony, "among the faithless faithful only found." He had no reason to love the House of Hapsburg, for Maxi- milian's Imperial policy had been constantly directed to aggran- dising the Brandenburg and depressing the Saxon princes. But through the whole of the tortuous negotiations he maintained one attitude. He would accept no bribe. He would make no promise. It was his duty as an Elector, as defined by the Golden BuU, to reserve his vote tiU the day of actual choice, and he meant to do it. He is the only respectable figure in a crowd of princely and mitred sharpers. By what means Maximilian was able, when the Diet met at Augsburg in the autumn of 1518, to change all this, may be left to the minute historian of the times to tell. It is enough to say that except the incorruptible Frederick and , the 314 THE YEAR ijig : FRIENDS AND FOES chap. Archbishop of Trier, who still clung to France, he had won over all the Electors to the side of Charles. But there were diffi- culties in the way of the election of the latter as King of the Eomans. The chief was that Maximilian, who had never been crowned by the Pope, was himself only King of the Eomans, and that one Emperor-elect could hardly be put by the side of another. What was to be done ? That Maximilian should make an expedition into Italy to be crowned was not to be thought of, especially while Francis held Milan. Would the Pope send the crown to Germany ? Would he send it to Trent, and with it a couple of cardinals to perform the cere- mony in his stead ? These were the questions which the restless old monarch was agitating when death suddenly over- took him at Wels, in the Tyrol, on the 12th of January 1519. At once the politics of the Empire assumed a new aspect. The five Electors who had pledged their votes to Charles, in a document under their own hands, treated it as so much waste paper. Under the new condition of things no promises held good, and the work of coaxing, flattering, bribing, had to be recommenced. Francis at once took heart, and sent a roving em- bassy to Germany : Margaret stepped into her father's place, and directed the operations of Charles's candidature from Flanders. The two HohenzoUern Electors again showed themselves pre-eminent in greed. It is difficult to decide whether the palm of corruption belongs to the Archbishop or to the Margrave. Even the agents of Charles and Francis, who on such a subject can hardly be supposed to have been squeamish, were astonished and disgusted. The Margrave they called "the father of all avarice." At one time Francis flattered himself that he had certainly secured four votes out of the seven, namely, Mainz, Brandenburg, the Palatinate, and Trier, and was not without well-founded hope that Koln would go with them. And he had the advantage, if advantage it were, of the Pope's support. Nothing can be more instructive as to the purely worldly character of the Papal policy than Leo's conduct on this occasion. From every ecclesiastical point of view Charles was the preferable candidate. All the circum- stances of his education, whatever was known of his personal inclinations, indicated the soundness of his orthodoxy. If VI ELECTION OF THE EMPEROR 315 regard was to be paid to the possibility of a great campaign against the Turks, Charles represented on one side the Spanish crusade against the Moors, on the other the Austrian resistance to Ottoman invasion. But these were not the things of which Leo was thinking, but of the position in Italy of the States of the Church, and perhaps still more the interests of the Medicean House. He could not endure the idea that the Kiug of Naples should also be Emperor, and the Papal territory, therefore, shut in between the dominions of a more powerful prince to north and south. At an early period of the negotiations, therefore, he declared that it was inconsistent with the conditions on which Naples was held as a Papal fief that its monarch should also rule over the Empire, and went so far as to notify to the Electors that this was an insurmount- able hindrance to Charles's election. On the other hand, the connection between Prancis and the House of Medici had, since the battle of Marignano had made the former a great Italian power, been close. Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino, the last legitimate male of the family not in holy orders, had by his marriage with Madeline de la Tour d'Auvergne become allied with the Prench royal house, and there was nothing that the Pope would not do to advance the interests of his worthless relative. Some writers, willing to suspect in Leo's policy a deeper depth of duplicity, have supposed that his support of Prancis only veiled a real prefer- ence of Charles, or some possible third candidate. But the evidence, so far at least as it is accessible, goes the other way. It is hardly likely that if this had been the case he should have given Prancis, by a brief under his own hand, the power of promising cardinals' hats to the Archbishops of Trier and Koln, and of offering to him of Mainz the still more glitter- ing bribe of permission to hold a fourth bishopric, and the office of perpetual Papal Legate in Germany. Indeed it was only when Lorenzo de Medici died, in May 1519, and the Pope clearly saw that in the then temper of the German people Charles's election was inevitable, that he withdrew his opposi- tion on the score of Naples, and acquiesced in what he could not prevent. It would be unfair, not indeed to the probity, but to the good 3i6 THE YEAR i5ig: FRIENDS AND FOES chap. sense of the Electors, to suppose that in their final decision they were guided by pecuniary and personal considerations alone. Francis might offer the best terms, but at the same time terms which it would be neither advantageous nor safe to accept. A concurrence of events in the spring of 1519 put a preponderance of physical force in the hands of the House of Hapsburg, which was the more considerable because it had behind it an overwhelming strength of national and patriotic feeling. Franz von Sickingen, the adventurous knight, whose power in the Ehineland exceeded that of many princes, after some coquetting with France, threw the weight of his lanz- knechts into the opposite scale. But the most important event of this kind was a revolution which in the spring of 1519 took place in Wurtemberg. Duke Ulrich, the arbitrary and passionate prince who had murdered Hans von Hutten, was an avowed partisan of France, and formidable, inasmuch as he had at his disposal a large force of disciplined Swiss soldiers. The Confederated Cantons, it is true, had severed themselves from the Empire, but they were conterminous with it, and the fact that they were ready to sell their swords to the highest bidder gave them a certain political importance. They had not forgotten Marignano, and envoys sent by Charles found a friendly welcome ; although they would not openly declare for the King of Spain, they renewed their old alliance with Austria, and recalled their troops from Wiirtem- berg. This was the signal for Ulrich's downfall. He had filled up the measure of his offences by an attack upon the free city of Keutlingen, which he had besieged, taken, and added to his own dominions. Then the Swabian League, a powerful confederacy in South -East Germany, moved. The Duke of Bavaria, whose sister, Sabina, was Ulrich's much-injured wife, raised an army, and after a brief and bloodless campaign took possession of Wurtemberg, driving its ruler into deserved exile. But the troops were not disbanded when the immediate results of the war were attained, and lay not too far from Frankfurt to be, if not a menace to the Electors, at least a mute witness to the influence of the Austrian House within the Empire. It was indeed made abundantly plain, as the day of elec- VI ELECTION OF THE EMPEROR 317 tion drew near, that the sympathies of the people were all in favour of a prince of German blood, and that if the Electors decided for Francis, it would be at their own personal peril. A strong wave of Teutonic patriotism was rising throughout the land, which humanism and the study of history helped to swell. That Leo was on the side of France made in the same direction : aU. Germany, and not merely the part which was under Luther's influence, was weary of Papal extortion and oppression. Maximilian, too, had been a popular monarch — affable, easy of access, touching the common imagination by attributes of chivalry ; his contemporaries did not know him as posterity does, stooping to all ignoble shifts to get money, and thwarting his own policy by an incurable levity and treachery. And when the Electors came to compare the two candidates, the very terms in which Francis set forth his claims were such as to awaken caution. He. was rich, powerful, suc- cessful in war, absolute ruler of his own subjects, disposing of the resources of the first monarchy of Europe ; why should the Electors put such a master over their own heads ? The silent, backward boy, who was content to leave his affairs in the hands of his aunt and his ministers, who had as yet developed no military talents, and whose ability to rule was still doubtful, offered, notwithstanding the vastness of his dominions, the promise of an Emperor who would be plastic in their hands. In despite, therefore, of the arguments and promises of France, the Austrian began finally to prevail. An attempt which, almost at the last moment, Henry VIII made to put himself forward was naturally futUe. When the Electors were actually assembled at Frankfurt for the choice, a final effort was made to set aside both candidates, and to put some German prince in their place. For a few hours the highest crown in the world was at the disposal of Frederick of Saxony. But he firmly pushed it away. He was too old, his health was too broken, possibly, at the bottom, the temper of his mind was too irresolute, to assume so vast a burthen of responsibihty. He thought, perhaps rightly, that a prince who should restore the ancient glories of the Empire, reorganising it within, and making it respected abroad, should have at his command greater resources than his. But it is impossible not to speculate upon 3i8 THE YEAR 1519: FRIENDS AND FOES chap, vi what the after -history of Germany might have been if the Elector who loved and protected Luther had, at the very crisis of his fortune, been placed at the rudder of the State. The formal proceedings of the election began at Frankfurt on the 1 7th of June ; on the 2 8th Charles was unanimously chosen Emperor. The " capitulation " which he was required to sign consisted of thirty-four articles. Besides promising in general terms to protect the rights and privileges of all Estates of the Empire, he bound himself to enter into no alliance with foreign States, to impose no tax, to summon no Diet without the consent of the Electors ; he was not voluntarily to enter upon any war, but to defend the Empire if attacked ; he was to bring no foreign soldiers into the Empire ; and to appoint to its offices only men of native birth and good standing. The language of intercourse between himself and the Estates was to be either German or Latin. The " Eeichsregiment " was to be re-established ; the increasing Papal demands of every kind to be brought within bounds ; the coinage to be reformed. Other articles were intended to save the rights of the Princes and other lower grades of the political hierarchy ; no one was to be placed under the ban of the Empire unheard, or without just cause ; no new laws were to be enacted except in accordance with the Golden Bull and with the assent of the Estates. The first Diet of the new reign was summoned to meet at ISTiirn- berg. Charles promised, lastly, to come to Germany to receive his crown, to reside within the Empire as much as possible, and at a convenient season to go to Eome to be crowned by the Pope. These articles much more express the wish of the seven Electors to interpose themselves as a ruling order in the State between Emperor and people, than give any indication of the course which attempts at administrative reform actually took in Germany. It will be enough to remark in this place that, in pursuance of them, Charles was crowned at Aachen on the 2'3d of October 1520.^ ^ For the story of Charles's election V ; Mignet, Tine Election, d, V Umpire see Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeit- en 1519, Rmue des deux Mondes, alter der Reformation, vol. i. pp. 248- 1854, pp. 209-264 ; Baumgarten, Ges- 303 ; R. Rosier, Die Kaiserwahl Karls chichte Karls V, vol. i. pp. 102-158. CHAPTEE VII THE YEAE 1520 : LUTHEE'S APPEAL TO THE NATION No great revolution in thought, and especially no great revolu- tion in religious thought, wholly depends upon the intellectual activity of a single thinker. It is, at least in part, the function of a powerful mind, a vivid personality, to gather into one focus tendencies of thought and feeling widely diffused, in a less concrete and concentrated form, through society, to give consciousness to emotions that before were half unconsciously felt, to find articulate voice for convictions that were only silently entertained. The question always arises. Did the age make the man, or the man mould the age ? — and can never be fully answered in either sense. Forces act and react ; there is a subtle correspondence between the master-thinker and the society which his thoughts quicken and change; at any other time, in any other circumstances, he would be impossible ; yet again he bends circumstance to his purposes, and leads on a new time. The more individual a leader of men is, and the more he stands out from the common level, the easier it is to trace the reaction of contemporary tendencies upon him ; sometimes opposition strengthens the tenacity of his purpose, sometimes he acts in the line of least resistance ; often forces which rise out of a strange region of thought and feeling deflect him from his course ; and again he may become the unconscious mouthpiece of passions with which he sympathises only in part. All this was true of Luther, though perhaps never so true as in the earlier stages of his revolt from Eome. No sooner had he ventured out from the retirement of his cell at Wittenberg, 320 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. and become involved in the current of German thought, than he found himself in the presence of intellectual and social forces which in part determined the line of his development. There was the strong feeling of anger and disgust, which the vices of the clergy and the corruptions of the system which they administered aroused in the common people of Germany. There was the revolt against exactions and oppressions, which patriots represented as the work of an alien power. There was the slowly growing rebellion against scholasticism, against monkery, against medisevalism in general, of which Erasmus and the humanists were the leaders. There was the desire for the reform of the Church and the revival of religion, which manifested itself on the one side in the Greek New Testament of 1516 and all that gathered round it, and on the other in the popular broadsheets and pamphlets which circulated from hand to hand of citizen and peasant. National and political was strangely mingled with ethical and religious feeling, and, for different reasons and with different methods, the learned and the ignorant found themselves in pursuit of the same object. And the year 1520, in which these forces were still in strongest interaction but had not yet found their resultant, was decisive in the history of the Eeformation. It was that year which saw the publication of the books in which Luther laid down the principles of the revolt : the Address to the Ger- man Nobility, the Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, the tractate on the Freedom of a Christian Man. In June 1520 the Pope solemnly anathematises him in a Bull, which he no less solemnly burns in December. In April 1521 he appears before the Emperor and the States of Germany at the Diet of Worms. Nothing more vividly illustrates the fact that Europe in 1520 was one literary republic than the rapidity with which Luther's first books became known. Myconius,^ it is im- possible to say on what authority, declares that in a fortnight the Ninety-five Theses had run through all Germany, in a month through all Christendom. The assertion is rendered credible by the number of editions of Luther's earlier works which are still extant. Of the Exposition of the, Penitential Psalms the ^ Myconius, p. 23. Yn THE CIRCULATION OF HIS BOOKS 321 earliest authorities enumerate nine issuesbetweenl5l7andl525. The book against Tetzel, Eine, Freiheit des Sermons papstlichen, Ablass und Gnade helangend, ran in a very short time through eleven editions. Of the Ten Commandments preached to the people of Wittenberg, theve were five editions in Latin and six in German. The Sermo de Virtute Excommunicationis of 1518 was almost immediately reprinted nine times. Of the Sermon on the Con- templation of the Sufferings of Christ, of 1519, there are twenty- four editions in German and one in Latin. Six editions of the Besolutio de Potestate Papae, all printed before the end of 1520, are still extant. What the size of these editions was does not appear ; but a definite fact of this kind is that the Address to the German Nobility was published at the end of June 1520, and that by the middle of August fpur thousand copies had been sold. As early as October 1518, Froben, the famous priater of Basel, acting on the suggestion of Beatus Ehenanus, who was then his corrector of the press, made the first attempt at a coHeeted edition of Luther's works. They were soon spread all over Europe. Froben writes to Luther (February 14th, 1519) "that all the editions, with the exception of ten copies, were already exhausted; he had never made a more fortunate venture in any book. Six hundred copies had been sent into France and Spain; others had been distributed through Italy ; others again had gone to England and to Brabant. The Cardinal of Sion, Matthias Schinner, had been loud in his approbation ; so too the Bishop of Basel, Christopher von Uttenheim, was an admirer of Luther." A few weeks after the date of this letter even the ten copies were gone ; on the 23d of May a friend writes to Agrippa von Nettesheim that he has searched all Basel in vain for one, and that a new edition was talked of at Strassburg. A second edition, again printed at Basel, actually followed in February 1519, and a third in August of the same year. In JSTovember 1520, when the excitement had risen to a still greater height, Glareanus writes to Zwingli that he had heard of a bookseller who, at the last Frankfurt fair, had sold no fewer than one thousand four hundred of Luther's books, a thing hitherto unheard of. Nor was answering encouragement from distant friends wanting. Le F^vre d'Etaples, in April 1519, bade Y 322 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. Beatus Ehenanus greet Luther in his name ; while a little later .Peter Tschudi wrote to him from Paris that Luther's works were received there by all scholars with open arms. John Hess reported to Lange that Luther had many friends in Italy. We have already seen that the Exposition of the Lord's Prayer was very soon translated into Italian and Bohemian. In Switzerland Luther's works circulated as freely as in Germany itself^ In May 1519 Erasmus wrote to Luther : " There are many in England who have the highest opinion of your writings, and those men of the greatest importance." ^ But more definite evidence of the extent to which England had been touched by rising controversy in Germany is afforded by a curious document recently published — the Day-book of John Dome, a bookseller of Oxford, in which he entered all the books that he sold in the year 1520. As might be expected, there was a large demand for the various works of Erasmus, who not only had a peculiarly English reputation, but whose friendship at Oxford with Colet and More must have been yet fresh in men's memories. Ulrich von Hutten furnishes three entries to the Day-book — two of an unspecified dialogue, one of the Fehris ; while there are two of the Upistolae Obscurorum Virorum. The name of Luther occurs thirteen times. There are two copies of the Opera Lutheri, probably the Basel edition of 1518. One copy of the Commentary on the Galatians and one of the Disputation of Luther at Leipzig (probably the official report of 1519) are noted. One copy of the Besponsio ad Bialogum. Sylv. Prieratis was sold. But the most popular book was the Besolutio de Potestate Papae, which appears, if John Dome's abbreviated entries are rightly interpreted, no less than eight times. Besides these there is a book which apparently is on the other side of the controversy, Condemnatio Lutheri, but really the decrees of condemnation passed on his books by the Universities of Koln and Louvain, and printed ^ Weimar ed. vol. i. pp. 154, 380, vol. iii. p. 81 ; Fatricius, CenMfoliwm 394, 634; vol. ii. pp. 131, 180; De iM«Acra»iw)i, pp. 318,766; Hermiujard, Wette, vol. i. pp. 457, 478 ; Hottinger, Correspondence den Beformateurs, vol. i. Helvetische Kinkengeschichte, vol. iii. pp. 45, 47 ; Kolde, Anal. Luth. p. p. 37 ; Enders, Briefw. Luther's, vol. i. 10 ; Zwingli, 0pp. vol. vii. p. 151. p. 420 ; vol. ii. p. 354 seq.; Losoher, ^ Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. p. 445 B. VII HIS THREE POPULAR TRACTS 323 by Lutlier himself, with his reply. In what precise relation this bookseller stood to the reading public of Oxford or of England generally it is impossible to say : in all probability the works of one who, like Luther, was soon branded as a heretic, were brought to England privately by merchants, and passed, with some precaution of concealment, from hand ^ hand. StiU, the facts as they stand are sufficiently remarkable, and testify to the rapidity with which news of Luther's attack upon the system of the Church travelled to even distant seats of learning. But it is to be noted that none of the great books of 1520 appear to have found their way to Oxford in the course of that year.^ It is not easy to estimate the extent to which, up to this time, Luther had touched the common people of Germany. We can enumerate, without much difficulty, the names of the well-known humanists, the dignified churchmen, the dis- tinguished laymen who were his friends and admirers ; but to find out what was his influence upon the burgher and the peasant, we are thrown back upon anonymous broadsheets and satires, which rarely give any indication of origin or date. Up to this time his most characteristic works had been written in Latin, and therefore made their appeal only to the cultivated classes. Others, however, such as his Uxposiiion of the Lord's Prayer for simple Laymen, as well as some of the sermons, which enjoyed the largest circulation, were in German ; while his younger colleagues were always busy in translating his more learned works into the vernacular. But in 1520, in the publication of his Address to the German Nobility, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian Man, all of which were either written in the language of the people or at once translated into it, he may be said to have definitely taken up a new position, not so much in opposition to as by the side of the humanists. Everybody in Europe that pretended to be an educated man had read Erasmus's Colloquies, Adages, Praise of Folly, and had enjoyed or resented his lively polemic against monkish supersti- tions and self-indulgence ; and Hutten, in the biting satire of his 1 Collectanea of the Oxford Hist. Soc. 1st series. The Daily Ledger of John Dome, 1-520. Ed. F. Madan, M.A. 324 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. Dialogues, addressed himself to the same audience. But as long as opposition to the corruptions of the Church and the vices of the clergy was confined within limits of Latin it was an esoteric thing, like the philosophic contempt with which Mutian, from his scholarly retreat at Gotha, regarded the squabbles of the theologians. It was reserved for Luther, in whose footsteps, before the end of 1520, Hutten^ followed, to throw himself upon the German people,' to speak to them in the only language which they understood, to appeal to their patriotic instincts, to point to a redress of the wrongs which they deeply felt. It is not within the compass of my present purpose to define Luther's exact relation to the development of the German language ; it is enough to say that, at a moment at which the Latin threatened to supersede it as the vehicle of cultivated thought, he suffused it with the glow of his own genius, and made it a literary tongue, capable of expression, clear, vivid, pathetic, and, above all, strong. The little quarto pamphlets, brown, worm-eaten, each with its engraved and often allegorical title-page, which collectors still prize, passed from hand to hand, in farms and workshops, giving a clear voice to dimly-felt religious aspirations, a,nd definition to long- cherished discontents. As time went on it became more and more evident that Luther was at the head of a really national movement, and that he was formidable to Emperor and, Pope, because, more than any other man, he represented the desires and purposes of the people of Germany. Such popular pamphlets as can with confidence be assigned to this early date are hardly theological at all. Their authors do not touch upon the controversial aspects of Luther's revolt against Eome. They are severe upon the devourer of benefices — the man who goes to Eome, makes his way into the favour of some cardinal or high official, by services often too dis- graceful to be named, and receiving church preferment in Germany as his reward, spends the rest of his days in sloth and self-indulgence. Such men make no pretence of shepherd- ing- the souls entrusted to them ; their parishes are utterly neglected ; they spread the contagion of carelessness round about them ; they bring the Church into ill -repute. The habitual infraction of the law of clerical celibacy, the pomp VII 5^ TIRICAL PAMPHLETS, ETC. 325 and worldliness of the higher clergy, the avarice and self- indulgence of monks, and the all-devouring greed of Eome — these are the evils which demand a remedy. And Luther, with whom Erasmus is often coupled, appears as the restorer of ancient morals and primitive piety. These broadsheets have little that can be called Evangelical or Protestant about them. They give the impression that those who wrote and read them would be quite satisfied with the moral purification of the existing system. Their authors have not at all com- prehended, as perhaps Luther himself at that time had not, the dissolvent force upon mediaeval Christianity of the principles which were slowly taking form at Wittenberg. But they were preparing the seed-bed for them. When it was made clear that Eome's only policy was suppression, and that it was use- less to look to the new Emperor for help in the direction of reform, the commonalty were ready to follow Luther into paths of popular revolt.-' The quarrel between Eeuchhn and the theologians of Koln, which had so sharply divided learned opinion in Germany, was now in its final stage. It was in March 1514 that Eeuchlin had been acquitted at Speier, in July 1516 that his second acquittal at Eome had been followed by the Pope's mandate, ordering the suspension of all proceedings in the case. The Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum assumed their complete form in the spring of 1517, and were promptly condemned by the Pope. Then followed the armed inter- vention of Sickingen, and the deposition of Hoogstraten from his dignities, till at last, in June 1520, the case was finally closed by the Brief of Leo X, which reversed all previous judicial decisions and restored the Inquisitor to his office. The effect of this long controversy, which had extended over nearly eleven years, had been to divide the learned men of Germany, or those who thought themselves learned, into two hostile camps. It was the old scholarship against the new. It was the devotees of the scholastic philosophy against the children of the classical revival. It was the theologians against 1 Conf. Schade, Satiren und Pas- Jahren, 1517-1525, betrachtet im Lichte quille aus der Reformationszeit, 3 vols., gleichzeitiger anonymer und pseudony- and Aug. Baur, Deutschland in den mer deutscher VblJcs-und Flicgschriften. 326 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. the "poets." It was the men who held what learning they had at the service and under the censorship of the Church against the men who cared for learning for its own sake, and feared no conclusions to which it might lead them. There were some among the older humanists who occupied a middle position, as for instance Wimpheling, who was called " medius Eeuchlinista " (" half a Eeuchlinist "),^ men who had pursued their studies in full accord with the Church, and who regarded with apprehension whatever looked like revolt against her. But it is not unfair to qualify the assailants of Eeuchlin as obscurantists, or his defenders as the friends of light and learning. And there was a hot struggle between them for the possession of the Universities, the training of the rising generation, the approval of educated opinion. Into this current of thought and feeling swept the stream of Luther's movement, as the Arve joins the Ehone at Geneva, bearing with it very different waters, which are nevertheless destined to mix and flow in the same channel. Luther was no humanist at heart. The springs of his life were all theological. In his education he had enjoyed the advantage of partial emancipation from the old methods of thought, and had drunk, though not deeply, at the rediscovered fountains of scholarship. But he had stood outside the humanist circle at Erfurt, from which his entrance into the monastic life seemed to have finally cut him off. And when, as we have seen, the intellectual activity which his spiritual struggles had interrupted was resumed, it was still directed by theo- logical considerations. The acquaintance with Greek, which he laboured to increase, the knowledge of Hebrew, which he for the first time acquired, were devoted to the exposition of the Scriptures ; and it was his desire, as far as possible, to give the classical studies of Wittenberg the same direction. So that although, as time wore on, it became evident that he and the humanists had the same object of attack — the Church of Eome and its corruptions, they did not assail it from the same side, or with the same weapons. "What with them was almost an accident of the strife, was to him its essence. They struck for free learning ; he for pure doctrine and a reformed Church. ^ Antea, p. 72. VII WITTENBERG AND THE HUMANISTS 327 There was at first no great approximation between Wit- tenberg and the humanists. In a letter, written in August 1514, to Spalatin Luther warmly espouses the cause of EeuchUn ; but with the exception of one or two slighting re- ferences to the Letters of the Obscure Men, there is no further mention of the matter in his correspondence for four years. In the meantime Erasmus's New Testament and his edition of St. Jerome had been published ; and Luther had fully grasped the essential difference between the theological tend- ency of the Master of Eotterdam and his own. Erasmus did not sufficiently put forward Christ and the grace of God ; it was a significant thing that he should place Jerome on a level with Augustiue. " I read over Erasmus," says Luther, " but my inclination towards him decreases from day to day." Ifor is evidence lacking that Luther's indifference to the humanists was reciprocated by them. Hutten, in a letter, written in April 1518, to Count Hermann von Neuenar, a canon of Koln, who was also a friend of, Eeuchlin, informs him in con- temptuous terms of a monk's quarrel as to indulgences which has broken out at "Wittenberg, and expresses the hope that those enemies of the light may destroy one another in inter- necine strife. In a tone of even greater scorn Mosellanus announces to Erasmus the disputation which is about to take place at Leipzig between Eck and Carlstadt : " the Democriti," he says, "would find sufficient matter for laughter in it." At the end of 1518, however, when, after his fruitless inter- view with Cajetan, he was feeling the necessity of gather- ing round himself all possible friends and allies, Luther wrote, at the instigation of Melanchthon, a letter to EeuchUn. This letter, which afterwards appeared in the Uluatrium, Virorum, Epistolae, was not only a formal compliment and tender of allegiance to the old scholar, but a distinct assertion that his cause and Luther's were substantially identical. Their enemies were the same, he said, and their methods of attack; he opposed them with the same constancy of mind as Eeuchlin, though with less ability and learning. But the letter, though couched in the most respectful terms, drew out no answer. The old man was weary of a conflict in which he had been unwillingly involved, and which had wrecked the 328 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. peace of his declining years. He had nothing of the Eeformer in him, and probably would never have felt very deeply the corruptions of a Church which allowed him to pursue his Cabbalistical studies in quiet ; still less was he disposed to cast in his lot with a new and revolutionary movement. Once we find him sending a kindly message to Luther through Melanchthon ; at a later period he prevented Eck from burning Luther's books in Ingolstadt. But this was all. We have already seen that he quarrelled with his nephew, in whom he had taken so much pride, for his adherence to the Wittenberg theology. At the beginning of 1521, just before Luther's appearance at the Diet of Worms, Hutten addresses to him an indignant letter, reproaching him with having fallen away from his old friends. What Eeuchlin wanted was peace ; a truce to controversy, a cessation of persecutions; and he found it in reconciliation with the Church. He died in 1522.^ At the end of March 1519, Luther, this time under the influence of Capito, wrote a similar letter to Erasmus. Nothing could be more flattering than its terms ; it was a letter from a hiunble member of the literary republic to its acknowledged head. It did not propose any definite terms of alliance, its writer was evidently uncertain of his ground, and trying to feel his way to a more confidential communication. Erasmus's answer, dated the 30th of May, was perfectly polite, but he made it plain that he would not depart from his attitude of neutrality. He spoke of the excitement caused by Luther's books, of the public rumours which associated himself with their authorship, and made him the standard-bearer of the movement, of the clamour and calumny which were the weapons of the orthodox theologians. With the exception of the Ojperationes in Fsalmos, which he very much liked, he had not read Luther's books ; he neither approved nor disapproved whatever was contained in them. He threw out a characteristic hint that such subjects were best discussed by the learned only, and were not fit for popular appeal ; he advised a quieter and less 1 DeWette, vol. i. pp. 13, 37, 38, 39, wechsel EeiichUn's, pp. 327, 357; Eras- 52, 87, 196, 404 ; Hutteni 0pp. ed. mi 0pp. vol. iii. p. 404 D. Bocking, vol. i. p. 167 ; Geiger, Brief- VII THE A TTITUDE OF ERASMUS 329 eager mode of treating thera, alleging the example of Christ and Paul. It was not a letter with which it was easy to find fault; but it invited no reply, and it received none.^ All the allusions to Luther and his affairs contained in Erasmus's letters about this time are in the same tone. Common rumour will persist in identifying him with the "Wittenberg movement, and he does not like it. Eeuchlin, Erasmus, Luther, — these names came naturally together from men's lips ; but the too reckless satire of the Letters of the, Obscure Men had driven him out of the camp of the. Eeuchlinists, and he is still less willing to be made answerable for the new ecclesiastical demagogue. What he cares for is the " cause of good letters," which he does not wish to have confounded with the quarrel of any man, or wrecked in storms of theological controversy. He does not know Luther ; he has not read his books, except, perhaps, a page here and there. The man, he admits, bears a high character, but he cannot approve the violence of his tone. As to his doctrine, he neither accuses nor excuses it. From none of Erasmus's letters at this time would it be possible to derive the slightest notion of what it was that Luther assailed in the theological system of the Church, or what were the weapons of his attack. Erasmus's tone, it must be confessed, varies with the person to whom he is writing ; to Leo X, to Cardinal Albert of Mainz, to Wolsey, he insists on his own obedience to the Church, and emphasises his ignorance and independence of Luther ; to Melanchthon, to Pirckheimer, to Oekolampadius, he shows the more friendly side of what is stiU a neutrality, and makes it clear that he has no desire to quarrel with "Wittenberg. But he does not become more friendly to Luther as time wears on, and the accent of controversy grows sharper; he has no wish to take a side, but he sees that neutrality becomes every day less possible. But while there is a remarkable similarity in all Erasmus's utterances on this subject about this time, it is only fair to point out that there were moments at which the insight of the man of letters got the better of the timidity of the theologian, and he saw that, up to a certain point at least, Luther's line of movement coincided with his own. In his letter to Erasmus ' DeWette, vol. i. p. 247; Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. p. 444. 330 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. Luther had ventured to allude to passages in the Preface to the new edition of the Enchiridion which seemed to be in accord with his own teaching. Both had said hard things of the monks, and especially of the mendicant orders; both were assailed by the same enemies, fighting with the same weapons. In a letter which Erasmus addressed in November 1519 to the Archbishop of Mainz, and which contains the usual protestations that he has nothing to do with Luther, occurs also the following remarkable passage : " Of the articles which are made a ground of objection to Luther, I say nothing now ; I speak only of the manner and the occasion. Luther has dared to doubt of in- dulgences, as to which others had before made assertions, but were too shameless. He has dared to speak with somewhat too little moderation of the power of the Eoman Pontiff, of which others, of whom the chief were three of the order of Preachers, — Alvarus, Sylvester, and the Cardinal of St. Sixtus, had before written much too immoderately. He has dared to despise the decrees of St. Thomas, decrees which the Dominicans almost prefer to the Gospels. He has dared to discuss certain scruples as to confession, a matter in which the monks ensnare the consciences of men without end. He has dared to neglect, to some extent, the decrees of the Schoolmen, things to which they themselves attribute too much, in regard to which, never- theless, they differ among themselves, and which, last of all, they do not hesitate to change, substituting new thiags for old. And it was a torment to pious minds to hear in the schools hardly any mention of evangelical doctrine, and that the sacred authors, formerly approved by the Church, were held to be antiquated ; yea, even from the pulpit hardly anything was said of Christ, almost everything of the power of the Pope and the opinions of the Moderns." But it did not help matters when a copy of this letter was surreptitiously procured and printed, probably by Ulrich von Hutten, who was then in the Archbishop's service. The great scholar might be pardoned for feeling that even his impartiality was being used against him, and that he was being involved in a movement which he only partly approved, and was quite unable to control.^ A curious and characteristic story completes the picture of ^ De Wette, vol. i. p. 247 ; Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. p. 515 F. VII THE ATTITUDE OF ERASMUS 331 Erasmus's mood in these years. In October 1520 Charles V was crowned at Aachen. Frederick of Saxony, accompanied by Spalatin, went to be present at the ceremony in his official capacity as Marshal of the Empire, but, intercepted by gout, got no farther on his way than Koln. " Thereby at Koln," says Spalatin, " the highly-learned man Erasmus Eoterodamus was with this Elector of Saxony, and talked with him of all manner of things ; and was asked whether it was his opinion that Dr. Martin Luther had erred in his writing and preaching. Where- upon he answered in Latin, ' Yes, indeed, in two thuigs, that he has attacked, first, the Pope's crown, and next the monks' bellies.' Thereupon this Elector smiled, and bethought him of this answer hardly a year before his death." It was after this interview, or another a few days later, that Erasmus, going with Spalatin into the house of the Count of Neuenar, hastily committed to paper certain "axiomata," in which he briefly gave his view of the whole controversy. These he had no sooner written than with characteristic caution he asked for them back again, fearing lest they should bring him into trouble with Aleander and Caraccioli, the Papal agents, who were then in Koln. Before a year had passed, however, the document had found its way to the press, through what channel it is now impossible to say. As might be supposed from the circum- stances under which it was written, it represents Erasmus's relation to Luther on its friendliest side. Erasmus takes up no theological position, but advises caution, condemns the severity of the Pope's buU, sustains Luther's claim to a fair trial, and speaks with some contempt of his adversaries. Had not the tone of this paper been so completely that of Erasmus himself in his more courageous moments, it might seem to have been an echo caught from the Elector's. But indeed the con- troversy had long overpassed these bounds.-'- It has been too much the custom to put down the attitude of Erasmus to Luther and his movement to mere timidity or selfish caution. He was a sickly scholar, it is said, whose character was cast in no heroic mould ; living on terms of intimacy with great men in Church and State, and unwilling 1 Spalatin, Fried, der Weise, p. 164 ; Seckendorf, lib. i. sec. 34, § Ixxxi. ; Erl. ed. 0pp. V. a. vol. v. p. 238. 332 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. to imperil his position with them by avowed sympathy with revolution. No doubt this is a part of the truth, though only a small part. Erasmus was constitutionally averse to loud talk and violent action ; irony, not invective, was his favourite rhetorical weapon, and abuses which moved others to indigna- tion excited him only to mocking satire. But it should always be recollected that he had a method of reformation of his own, the method of literary culture ; that up to the year 1517 this method appeared to be in successful operation, and that he suddenly found its character compromised, and its issue en- dangered by Luther's movement. He tried in vain to evade the shock of theological opposition which first Eeuchlin and then Luther drew down upon all religious innovators. He found not only that he was charged with complicity in a line of action with which he imperfectly sympathised, but that the new Eeformer carried away with him all the young and pro- mising minds of the humanist party. He never gave his adhesion to the peculiar tenets of Luther's theology ; if we may anticipate the use of terms, he was upon the Catholic, not the Protestant, side of the controversy. He probably saw from the first the danger, as he conceived it to be, that the theo- logical element in Luther's movement would overbear every other, and felt that the time would come at which he would be compelled to say, "Wherever Lutheranism reigns, there good letters perish." ^ So that, if he were to be true to him- self, he could not act otherwise than he did. It is a mistake to find fault with him because he did not join to a command of literary culture, a knowledge of antiquity, a mastery of style, which Luther never possessed, the fiery religious earnest- ness, the absolute fearlessness of consequences which are necessary to make a revolution in religion. Criticism has completely established the fact that the Letters of the Obscure Men, which so decisively intervened in the affair of Eeuchlin, were the production of that band of Erfurt humanists of which Mutian was the head. After the pubKca- tion of that famous satire, Crotus, its chief author, went to Italy ; the leadership of the party silently passed from Mutian to Eoban Hess, and the enthusiasm of its members was trans- ^ Erasmi 0pp. vol. iii. p. 1139 B. VII THE REFORMATION AT ERFURT 333 ferred from Eeuchlin to Erasmus. The great humanist was in 1517 and 1518 at the zenith of his fame, and now that the crisis of Eeuchlin's fate had passed, it was felt how much more attractive, how far better calculated to awaken youthful enthusiasm, were the Adages, the Praise of Folly, the New Testameifvt of 1516 than the old Hebraist's mystical specula- tions on the Cabbala. It became a fashion to make pilgrimages from Erfurt to the Netherlands, to visit the master of all erudition ; one such was made by Eoban Hess, another by Justus Jonas. When Edward Lee, afterwards Archbishop of York, attacked Erasmus with all the virulence of obscurantist orthodoxy for his great contribution to theological scholarship — the Greek New Testament, the humanists of Erfurt fell foul of him, as they had before fallen foul of the monks of Koln. Eoban Hess lectured on the Enchiridion, Crafft on the En- comium Moriae. Much indifferent Latin verse was produced at Erfurt about this time ; besides Eoban Hess, inexhaustibly fertile in every metrical form, there was Euricius Cordus, who embodied his loves and hatreds in innumerable epigrams, and by both Erasmus was largely celebrated. His influence was religious as well as literary ; the long letter is still extant in which he persuaded Justus Jonas to abandon law for theology, little thinking that he was preparing for Luther one of his most intimate and efficient allies. Shortly after his return from the Netherlands, at Easter 1519, Justus Jonas was elected Eector of the University, and commemorated the event on an illuminated page of the matriculation book, which recorded his visit to Erasmus. A more important result of that visit was the reform in the studies of the University which the new Eector undertook. Henceforth the true spirit of humanism was to prevail in them, and provision was made for the institution and maintenance of lectures on the Greek and Latin classics.'^ But a change was impending. Erfurt was too near Witten- berg not in some degree to catch its infection. The two universities had been closely united for some years after the foundation of the younger, and the double relationship of Erfurt to Maiuz and to Saxony placed it in the focus of the new move- ment. John Lange, who enjoyed Luther's confidential friend- ^ Kawerau, Briefwechsel Justus Jotuxs, Erfurt. Univ. vol. ii. p. 307 ; Erause, vol. i. p. 21 ; Weissenborn, Acten der Eoban Hess, vol. i. p. 3Q2. 334 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. ship, was living there as Prior of the Augustinian Convent, and though not actually belonging to the band of humanists, many of whom were his old class-mates, was on friendly terms with them. And in October 1519 Crotus Eubianus, who was about to return northwards from Italy, wrote from Bologna two letters to Luther. They had been friends before the latter entered the monastic life ; but that event parted them, and communication between them seems to have wholly ceased. The first letter simply gives the last news of Eck's proceedings in Eome, the second is an impassioned proffer of allegiance. " Often, Martin,'' says Crotus, " when men have spoken of you, have I been wont to call you the father of our country, worthy of a golden statue and a yearly festival ; you, who first dared to call away the people of the Lord from noxious opinions and to assert true piety. Go on as you have begun ; leave an example to posterity ; for you do these things not without diviae assistance. This was the purpose of Providence, when, before the town of Erfurt, as you were returning from your parents, the bolt from heaven struck you down, Hke another Paul, and drove you from our companionship, most sad at your departure, into the Augustinian Convent. And although our opportunities of intimacy after that were few, nevertheless my mind always remained yours, as you might have seen from the letter which last year I wrote to you at Augsburg, if in- deed it was delivered to you." In the following April Hutten, who had already opened the communication with Luther of which we must presently speak, met his old friend at Bamberg, and in consultation with him no doubt drew closer the bonds which were about to unite the Keformer with the Erfurt humanists. Eoban Hess was prepared to pour the stream of his facile enthusiasm into this fresh channel ; Cordus had already found matter for many a bitter epigram in the corrup- tions and oppressions of the Church. It was significant of the change that was setting in, that at the end of 1519 the Uni- versity declined to pronounce any judgment on the disputation at Leipzig ; and when at Michaelmas 1520 Crotus Eubianus was elected Eector, the alliance between the Eeformers and the humanists was complete.-' ^ Eutteni 0pp. ed. Bocking, vol. i. pp. 307, 311 ; Enders, vol. ii. pp. 204, 211. VII HUMANISTS OF GREA T CITIES 335 A curious monument of this fusion of feeling (which, it may be remarked in passing, did not last very long) is extant in the illuminated page which, according to custom, the new Eector' prefixed to the entries made during his term of office. It is entirely heraldic. The centre is occupied by Crotus's own arms — a hand coming out of a cloud holding a hunter's horn, in evident allusion to his name Johann Jager. Eound this are the heraldic devices of sixteen of his friends, some humanists, some Eeformers, who perhaps never before or after found themselves associated in so friendly a contact. The four corners are held by the great names of Luther, Erasmus, Eeuchlin, and Mutian. The other shields are those of Hutten, Eoban Hess, Justus Jonas, Melanchthon, Lange, Henry Eberbach, Eorchheimius, Urbanus Ehegius, Draco, Adam Crafft, Joachim Camerarius, and Justus Menius. Underneath stands the legend — " Ut numquam potuit sine charis vivere amicis, Hie etiam solus noluit esse Crotus ; Picta vides variis fulgere toreumata signis, His sociis nostras praefuit ille scholae " — while the initials E. H. refer to the pen of Eoban Hess. There is . something almost ■ pathetic in the aspect of this brilliant heraldic scroll, which is illustrated by so many famous names and commemorates transitory as well as durable friend- ships.^ But with a certain class of humanists Luther had made his own way. In every populous German city, whether the seat of a university or not, there were men who culti- vated the new learning, kept up an active correspondence with one another, and felt that they belonged to the one republic of letters. Among these, both of the older and the younger generation, Luther was the occasion of great searchings of heart. Some of the seniors felt, like Eeuchlin, indisposed to embark in their old age on what promised to be a boundless ocean of controversy ; the Church, though they would wiUingly see it reformed, was good enough for them, and they had no sympathy with the peculiar theological opinions which were the mainspring of the new movement. For others, Luther ^ Weissenborn, vol. ii. p. 317 ; Kampschulte, vol. 1. p. 258. 336 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. more decisively exercised the function of a prophet, in reveal- ing their secret thoughts and making them conscious of their own position. Some of these, Bucer, Brenz, Schnepf, at Heidelberg ; Hedio and Capito, at Mainz ; Oekolampadius, at Augsburg, were afterwards chief instruments of the Eeforma- tion either in Germany or Switzerland, men who, though at a distance from "Wittenberg, owed their first religious inspiration to Luther's writings and took the tone of their life from him. At Leipzig we find Mosellanus, a professed humanist, lectur- ing in 1519 on the letters of St. Paul, and declaring that " all the studious youths are eager in the pursuit of sacred literature." ^ On the other hand, Eck and Emser and Cochlaeus, all of whom, in various degree, would have a right to be counted among the humanists, found occupation and notoriety in bitter and persistent opposition to Luther. The old antithesis between theologian and poet was in two ways being obliterated. First, the new learning was conquering ground hitherto resolutely held against it by the champions of scholasticism and the Church, so that to read Greek and Latin was no longer a sufficient ground of ecclesiastical sus- picion ; and next the religious principles of Wittenberg had made a fresh line of cleavage. It was quite possible with Erasmus to love " good letters," and yet to turn a cold face of neutrality to Luther. It would answer no good purpose to give a list of those who in all the great towns of Lower Germany and along the banks of the Ehine were either receptive of Luther's in- fluence or were preaching doctrines more or less akin to his. It may be enough to mention two cities, Augsburg and Nlirnberg, each of which held a Lutheran circle ; while each in its way was a centre-point of German commerce, and an ex- ample of the finest development of its civic Hfe. At Augsburg, at the time of which I am speaking, Conrad Peutinger and Christopher Langemantel were examples of the new influence among the rich and educated citizens. Two canons of the Cathedral Church, Conrad and Bernard Adelmann, belonged to the humanist society, of which Willibald Pirckheimer of Niirn- berg was the acknowledged head, liberal churchmen who were ^ Tentzel, Beliquiae Epp. Mutiani, p. 43. VII HUMANISTS AT AUGSBURG AND NURNBERG 337 unwilling to admit that devotion to learning was incompatible with faithfulness to the Church. In 1520 Oekolampadius, afterwards among the foremost of the Eeformers of Switzerland, was preacher in the Cathedral of Augsburg ; and when, in that year, he retired in a strange fit of devotion into a monastery, Urbanus Ehegius, who had been vicar-general at Constanz, and before whom a lifetime of reforming energy still stretched, was invited to fill his place. And it was in December 1519 that an effective blow for Luther was struck from Augsburg. In a pamphlet which Eck contributed to the controversy between Emser and Luther he made the scornful remark that all the clergy, except a- few ignorant canons, were against the innova- tor. The challenge was at once taken up, and an anonymous little work,' The, Beply of the Ignorant Lutheran Canons to John Eck, which was ascribed to one of the Adehnann brothers, but was really the work of Oekolampadius, showed, much to Eck's chagrin, that the ignorant canons were quite able to take care of themselves. The book has a special interest in being perhaps the first in which the word " Lutheran " was publicly adopted as a party designation.^ I have already mentioned the sermons which Staupitz delivered in Nurnberg in the wiater of 1516-1517; the effect which they produced was deepened and confirmed by the sub- sequent preaching of Link. The Augustinian convent was the centre of the new movement, which spread to every class in the city. With Christopher Scheurl, who had been professor at Wittenberg from 1507 to 1511, Luther kept up a confidential correspondence : to Hieronymus Ebner, another of the city Fathers, he dedicated an early work. Although Pirckheimer was closely connected, in the persons of his admirable and accomplished sisters, with the St. Clara convent at Niirnberg, there was nothing as yet in the new religious teaching that shocked his sense of right or offended his prejudices ; while Lazarus Spongier, the city scribe, a man whose high character and great ability gave him an influence in Niirnberg dis- proportionate to his official station, was an avowed disciple of Luther. Hans Sachs, shoemaker and master-singer, who stood at the head of the poetic guild, which is one of the illustrations ^ Eri. ed. Opp. v. a. vol. iv. p. 59. Z 338 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. of Niirnberg at this period, had seen Luther at Augsburg. It is recorded of him that in 1522 he had already made a collection of forty of the Eeformer's books; and in 1523 he celebrates his hero's praises in a poem, "The Nightingale of Wittenberg." Perhaps in the whole of German literature there is no more affecting passage than the entry which Albert Durer makes in his diary when, as he is travelling in the Netherlands, he hears that Luther, on his return from the Diet of "Worms, has disappeared, and fears that he has been betrayed to his death. The dull routine of entries, recording the places which he has visited, the friends who have hospitably received him, the money which he spent, is suddenly interrupted, and he breaks into a passion of tears and prayer, which is often stayed and as often renewed, as if sorrow and indignation could not find vent enough. It is too long to quote entire, too sacred to mutilate ; we seem to hear in it the voice of the deepest religious gratitude to a quickening teacher lost for ever ; the cry of one noble soul to another, bound to it in the closest spiritual bonds.^ ' Two contributions to the controversies in which Luther was engaged, made about this time from Niirnberg, are at once important in themselves, and curiously characteristic of their respective authors. The first, published some time in 1519, and written in German for the common people, was entitled "An Apology and Christian answer of an honourable Lover of the Divine truth of Holy Scripture, upon occasion of the contradiction of some ; with reasons why Dr. Martia Luther's doctrine should not be rejected as unchristian, but rather should be held to be Christian." It was anonymous, but Spengler made no secret of the fact that he was the author. An avowedly controversial work more charitably moderate in its tone, more completely penetrated with a certain sober and modest devoutness, never was written ; it produces at once the most favourable impression of the mind which gave it birth and of ' Burer's Briefe, Tagebucher und und in Kupfer stechen, zu einem Meime, ed. Thausing, p. 119. At the dauernden Andenken des christliolien beginning of 1520 Diirer writes to Mannes, der mir aus grossen Aengsten Spalatin, "Und hilft mir Gott, dassich . geholfeu hat." Ibid. 42. UnhappUy zu Doctor Martinus Luther komme, so this intention, so far as we know, was wiU ich ihn mit Fleiss abkonterfeien never carried into effect. VII GERMAN PATRIOTISM 339 the force and purity of the religious impulse out of which it sprang. The second was a Latin satire, Eccius Dedolatus, der dbgelwhelte Ech, which, recollecting that " Eck " in German means " a corner," we may translate " the corner planed away." It was published in 1520; its author announced himself as Joannes Franciscus Cattalambergius, Poet -Laureate, and the place and date of printing are not given. It was a furious satire against Eck, not without salt, but of the grossest and most personal kind; not only making the victim ridiculous, but trampling him under foot in the mire of scorn and con- tempt. It is a dialogue in the spirit, though not in the Latinity, of the Letters of the Obscure Men, but full of a savage earnestness, as if the writer had a private grudge to avenge, and would hold no terms with Ms enemy. The authorship was never acknowledged ; but it was an open secret that the shaft was from Pirckheimer's quiver. At all events it was upon Pirckheimer that the insult was avenged : Eck was far too vain a man to forgive an assault which made him the laughing- stock of all learned Germany.'' There was, however, another element of popular feeling with which Luther had to reckon — the sentiment of German patriotism. That it was vague, inconsistent with itself, with- out fixed object or policy, did not prevent it from being strong. The revival of letters had led to the reopening of the records of the national past, the glories of Charlemagne and of Otho were not the less sympathetically because uncritically re- counted, and men went back to the days when emperors did not tamely submit to the Eoman yoke, but themselves nominated and deposed popes. The common people, to whom these things were little more than dim legends, saw with their own eyes the expropriation of German church revenues by a foreign race, who despised while they plundered them ; every benefice held by a cardinal's nominee, all tax and toU that was poured into the bottomless gulf of Eoman avarice, was felt by them as an injury inflicted upon their German nationahty. What the patriots wanted was a strong Imperial government, ad- ^ Both the &te<3rerf and the .Bccms artem^era, etc., Altdorf, 1762. The latter Dedolatus will be found reprinted in will also be found in 0pp. Sutteni, ed- Riederer's Beytrag zu der Reformations- Bbcking, vol. iv. p. 515. 340 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. ministering justice and keeping the peace without fear or favour, at home and abroad, once more widening the Empire to its ancient bounds, and making it in reality as well as in repute the most powerful monarchy in the world. That this desire was doomed to disappointment all subsequent German history tells with one voice ; the active forces of politics worked in the opposite direction. The princes were intent upon rounding off their own territorial sovereignty ; the minor nobility, the free cities, had no principle of cohesion, and were incapable of united action ; no plan of common taxation could be devised which the several States would accept ; not even a powerful Emperor like Charles V could force new organisation on unwilling feudatories. The ideal which the patriots had in their minds was essentially one be- longing to a past age, which probably no cunning of statecraft, no enthusiasm of self-sacrifice, would have availed to recall ; Germany was slowly moving towards the anarchy of the Thirty Years' War, and the territorial disintegration of the century that followed it. But in 1520 patriotism was still a living force, for it compelled, as we have seen, venal electors to choose an emperor who, whatever his other disqualifica- tions, was at least of German blood. The man who more than any other represents this phase of national feeling is Ulrich von Hutten. He returned from Italy to Germany in June 1517, and after a few months' interval, during which he prepared for the press Laurentius Valla's work On the Donation of Constantine, entered for the second time the service of Albert of Mainz. In the spring of 1519 he eagerly took part in the campaign against Duke Ulrich of Wurtemberg, with whom he had a private blood feud. This was the turning-point of his career. During the short war he contracted a close intimacy with Franz von Sickingen, the cele- brated partisan leader, whose history sheds so strange a light on the political disorganisation of Germany at this time, and induced him so to throw the shield of his protection over Eeuchlin as for the moment to bring the Don).inicans of Koln to their knees. In January 1520 he was again with Sickingen in his castle of Landstuhl, and endeavoured to win him to the side of Luther, as he had already won him for Eeuchlin. The .VII FRANZ VON SICKINGEN 341 result was a letter from Hutten to Melanchthon, followed by another a month later, written on the supposition that the first had miscarried, in which, on Sickingen's behalf, he offered Luther a refuge in his castle of Ebernburg. A similar letter reached the Eeformer, perhaps before Sickingen's, from Sylves- ter von Schaumburg, a Pranconian nobleman, who, sooner than he should fly to Bohemia, as common report averred that he was meditating, offered him the protection of a hundred of his own order. Luther's letters to both these new friends are no longer extant, but there is evidence enough that they put a fresh courage into him. " Schaumburg and Sickingen," he says to Spalatin, "have made me secure from the fear of men." He wishes the Elector to let the Cardinal of St. George know that if he is driven from Wittenberg it will only make matters worse, for he will then take refuge, not in heretical Bohemia, but in the midst of Germany, where there are those who are willing and able to protect him. It is the policy of the hour ; Hutten urges it ; Crotus writes from Bamberg to recommend it. Whether Luther ever seriously thought of adopting it, we do not know ; as it was, the Elector's friendship never failed him.^ Franz von Sickingen was one of the independent nobles of the Ehineland, who, from small beginnings, had become a power in the German Empire. By services at the court of the Elector Palatine, by a system of family alliances and joint heirships, and by bold " fighting for their own hand," the Sick- ingens had won a position of considerable influence ; and Schwicker von Sickingen, Franz's father, was lord of three fast- nesses, Landstuhl, Ebernburg, and Hohenburg, each with many attached fiefs. He was as fierce a robber knight as any of his mediaeval forefathers, as may be inferred from the fact that he laid a plot for surprising Koln and murdering its chief inhabitants, because in that city his dagger, which he was wearing, in defiance of municipal laws, had been taken from him. From this beginning of the family fortunes, Franz, who had an undoubted faculty as a leader of men, went far. He carried on a great feud with the city of Worms. He led 1 O'pp. Euttmi, ed. Bbcking, vol. i. 1942 ; De Wette, pp. 448, 451, 460, 469, pp. 320, 324, 340 ; Walch, vol. xv. p. 470. 342 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. border raids into France. He was put under the ban of the Empire by Maximilian, and by Maximilian again reconciled with it. When the contest for the Empire began, both candi- dates, Charles and Francis, strove to bind to their service, by pensions and honours, a leader who could bring into the field some thousands of disciplined men, and was willing to fly at any quarry, however high. He and his troops formed an important part of the expedition into Wiirtemberg, which deposed Duke Ulrich, and, as they lay not yet disbanded in the neighbourhood of Frankfurt, were a significant hint to the Electors not to choose the foreign candidate. At the moijient of which we are speaking, Sickingen had been formally taken into the Imperial service : not that he and his men were part of any regular army, or had specific military duties to perform, but that they were bound to throw their weight into the Emperor's scale should the necessity arise. They were an imperium in ivvperio, an irregular military assemblage, held together by common interests and the ascendancy of a leader's character, but only imperfectly subordinated to the supreme authority in the State. Some rude spirit of patriotism, partly inspired perhaps by Hutten, mingled with Sickingen's ambition. He regarded himself as the representative and champion of the lesser nobUity, whose independence was threatened, and whose rights were invaded by the growing power of the princes. These robber nobles, for they were little better, had always been on terms of enmity with the Free Cities, whose burghers they thought it no shame to plunder upon the highway. There were indeed formalities to be observed, some coloui'able cause of quarrel to be found, a letter of feud to, be delivered ; but this done, the roads were no longer safe for the merchants of the offending community. In Hutten's dialogue Inspicientes, which was published in 1520, after his friendship with Sickingen had been formed, there is a literary defence of this state of things, which suggests the theory of the origin of society which Eousseau made popular two hundred years afterwards. The cities and their inhabitants are the fruits of a corrupt civilisation. They and their trade are the centres from which an enervating luxury diffuses itself. It can never vn SICKINGEN AND HUTTEN 343 be well with Germany so long as their power is maiataiaed and increases. On the other hand, the nobles, each living in his own castle, content with the produce of his own land, reproduce the conditions of a time when the country was great, prosperous, and happy. What inference could be plainer than that when Sickingen intercepted a convoy of merchants from Worms, and carried off their wares to the Ebernburg, he was not guilty of any vulgar robbery, but striking a blow for the restoration of a pure and primitive state of society ? The same kind of blood ran iu Hutten's veins as in Sickingen's, and there is no reason to suppose that he was anything but perfectly sincere in this apology. Nor was it difficult for Sickingen to persuade himself that he was working not only against the overweening power of the ,princes, but for the consolidation of Imperial rule, although indeed such armed organisations, as that of which he was the head, were fatal to all settled government. He hardly rose to the dignity of a revolutionary element in German politics ; for revolution implies some fixed outlook towards the future, and Sickingen and his allies were a survival of the past. Princes and cities alike were too strong for him. It was too late to prevent the territorial disintegration of the Empire. It was too late to treat Augsburg and Niirnberg as anachron- isms of civilisation. Sickingen and Hutten were well qualified to meet on equal terms of friendship. The former was the older by seven years, but his life had been spent in castles and camps, and Hutten, with his eager rhetoric, his quick satiric wit, his acquaintance with the new learning, soon became the intellec- tual force that guided the mailed hand. Probably Sickingen, in his rough martial way, was of the two the more suscept- ible of a purely religious impression ; he seems afterwards to have conceived a real admiration of the Eeformer, to whom he was at first willing to extend a somewhat careless protec- tion. Hutten, on the contrary, always appears to desire Luther's alhance oa the political side. The motives which swayed him were not of the religious order. Even when he substitutes the Biblical phrases of the new school for the classical allusions famihar to the humanists they sound unreal. 344 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. But of his passionate hatred of Eome, as the power that at once plundered, oppressed, and despised Germany, there can be no doubt. Here he was in fullest accord with Luther, whom he would gladly have carried with him more com- pletely than was actually the case, in his methods of action. For nearly three years after his return from Italy, he is as it were groping after a vocation. He writes satirical dialogues in the manner of Lucian. He exhorts the German princes to unite in war against the Turks. He is the busy political agent of Albert of Mainz. Presently, in April 1520, he publishes two dialogues, Vadiscus, or the Roman Trinity, and Inspicientes, The Onlookers, which may be taken as his formal declaration of war against Eome. Henceforth all his writings bear a gage of battle in the motto "Jacta est alea," or its German equivalent, " Ich hab's gewagt." Vadiscus is a dialogue supposed to take place at Frankfurt between himself and his friend Ernhold.^ There is nothing dramatic in it; it is simply a bitter epigranomatic invective against Eome, in which accusation is heaped on accusation with a wonderful cumulative force. Whatever Hutten has to tell of Eome is cast into the form of a triad. Three things in Eome are without number — strumpets, priests, and scribes. Three things are banished from Eome — simplicity, moderation, and purity. Three things pUgrims are wont to bring back from Eome — unclean consciences, bad digestions, and empty purses. Three things Eome chiefly fears — that the princes should be agreed, that the people's eyes should be opened, and that its own deceit should come to light. Three things only will reform Eome — that the princes should be in earnest, the people impatient, and a Turkish army at the gates. And so he goes on, putting the same intense conviction of the moral corruption of Eome into an endless variety of triads, so arranged that one seems to arise inevitably out of the other in the natural course of conversation. Tlie Onlookers is much more after the true Lucianic model. Sol stops his chariot over the city of Augsburg at the time of the Diet of 1518, and having drawn aside the intervening canopy of cloud, converses upon what he sees there with his son Phaethon, who has sown his wild oats, and is a kind of assistant whip VII HIS POPULAR EXEGETICAL WORKS IN 1520 345 to his father. Perhaps it is the Germans who, in this dialogue, are made to feel the sharpest lash of satire; their drunken habits are stigmatised in the severest terms, and, with their general stupidity, are assigned as the reason why they suffer themselves to be robbed and trampled upon by the wUy Italians. At the end of the dialogue Cardinal Cajetan is made to enter into colloquy with the celestial speakers, and, in virtue of the unbounded powers which he has received from the Pope, claims to be able to excommunicate the Sun himself^ This, then, was the Germany in which through the year 1520 Luther became more and more a chief motive power. The year began and ended for him in controversy. Every month bears its own witness to the fact that his intellectual activity was strained to the highest point, and a less energetic, a less tough, a less buoyant nature than his must have broken down under the incessant pressure. When the year began he had been busy for some time with a series of " PostiUs," or exegetical comments on the Gospels and Epistles, a work which he had undertaken at the request of the Elector, who desired to withdraw him from the controversies which were taking up so much of his time and strength, to the quieter labours of his professorship. The task hardly had the desired effect, for 1520 was a year of per- petual struggle, but he persevered in its performance, and these Latin Postills, which were a prelude to a more important work of the same kind in German, were finally dedicated to the Elector, in a letter dated March 3d, 1521, and then given to the world. But however vehement was Luther's controversial spirit, and how little, in the opinion of some of his friends, under due regulation, it never diverted him from the work of building up the religious life of those who looked to him for guidance. Two or three little books, published at the begin- ning of 1520, one of them not much more than a broadsheet, expounded the Lord's Prayer, the Commandments, the Belief, for simple folk.^ They were the foundation of the catechetical ^ 0pp. Butteni, ed. Booking, vol. Vater Unsers, vor sich und kinter sich, iv. pp. 145-269. For Hiitten and Erl. D. S. vol. xlv. p. 208 ; Weimar ed. Sickingen I may refer in general to vol. vi. p. 20 ; Kurze Form der zehen D. F. Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten, and Gehote, des Qlaubens, und des Vater to H. Ulmann, Franz von Sickingen. Unsers, ibid. vol. xxii. p. 1 ; conf. " Kurze Auslegung des heiligen 0pp. Ex. vol. xii. p. 219. 346 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. works, by means of which Luther afterwards exercised so wide and deep an influence on the German people. To these must be counted the great Sermon on Good Works, on which he laboured during the first months of the year, and which he dedicated on the 29 th of March to Duke John. It was more than an ordinary sermon ; " it grew," he said, " in his hands into a not small volume," and became a treatise on a cardinal point of his doctrine — the relation of good works to faith. Like all his German works, it had a prompt and large popularity ; eight editions appeared in 1520, five more before 1525, while the Latin translation also was not without its numerous readers.^ The suggestion which Luther had made in his Sermon on the Sacrament, that it would be well to restore the cup to the laity, had excited an opposition quite out of proportion to the intrinsic importance of the subject. But it was characteristic of the Bohemian Church to administer the Communion in both kinds, and popular prejudice always eagerly fastens upon a visible sign of heresy. It might be difficult to draw the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the matter of indulgences ; but to give the cup to a layman, was a proof of radical un- soundness which no one could mistake. In the last days of December 1519, Duke George wrote to his kinsman, the Elector Frederick, a very strong letter, in which he said that a book of Dr. Martin Luther's had fallen into his hands of which the doctrine was " almost Pragish." The word " Bohemian " was repeated again and again ; he identified Luther with the heretics whom Germany most feared and hated ; he called upon his cousin, as "the oldest and most Christian Elector," to stay a plague which threatened the dominions of both of them alike. Frederick replied in Ms usual calm, cautious way ; " he does not undertake to defend Luther, as he has already made clear to Cardinal Cajetan, and to Miltitz; but he hears that his doctrine is held to be Christian by many learned and understanding men, and he knows that he is ready to submit his case for trial to commissioners appointed by the Pope." Indeed the accusa- tion of Bohemianism, first started by Eck at the Leipzig 1 (PosHlU) De "Wette, vol. i. pp. Erl. ed. D. S. vol. xvi. p. 118 seq. ; 366, 376, 378, 405, 453, 563; {Sermon of "Weimar ed. vol. vi. p. 196 seq. Good Works), ibid. vol. i. pp. 434, 447 ; VII INHIBITION OF SERMON ON THE SACRAMENT 347 disputation, seems by this time to have spread far and wide. The story ran that Luther had been born in Bohemia, brought up in Prag, and instructed in Wiclif 's books ; an accusation of Hussite heresy was even manufactured out of the engraved title- page, which, without his knowledge or sanction, the printer had prefixed to his sermon. It is curious to note how Luther thinks it necessary to deny all this, not only in a letter to Spalatin, but in an Explanation of some, Articles in his Sermon on the Holy Sacrament — a tract, in German, which he published about the middle of January. But it is very characteristic of him that he will not yield to common orthodox prejudice in the matter of the Bohemians. In so far as the communion in both kinds is concerned he declares that they may be schismatics, but certainly are not heretics. And all that he himself has said is that a change back to the ancient practice might well be made by a lawfully constituted council of the Church.^ But the matter was not allowed to rest here. The Bishop of Meissen issued a mandate on the 24th of January, dated from Stolpe, and sealed with the official seal, in which he inhibited Luther's sermon, and declared its doctrine to be con- trary to that laid down by councils of the Church. Luther, justly irritated by this unmistakable attempt to brand him as a heretic, quickly replied in an " Answer to the Placard," ^ which has been issued under the seal of the official at Stolpe. He chose to believe that such a document, so unguarded, so calumnious, so malicious, could not have been published with the knowledge and consent of the Bishop, and accordingly assumed a bearing towards its supposed author which would not have been respectful to a Father of the Church. He pointed out with unanswerable logic that his only offence had been to desire that a change "might be introduced on the authority of a council, and vehemently denied the heresy imputed to him of believing that the Body and Blood of Christ were not to be partaken of under either species. But the contention was waxing somewhat warm, and Frederick, or Spalatin for him, became alarmed. How moderate this im- ^ Lbscher, vol. iii. p. 920 seq. ; De ^ Erl. D. S. vol. xxvii. p. 77 seq. ; "Wette, vol. i. p. 390. Erl. D. S. vol. Latin, 0pp. v. a. vol. iv. p. 136 ; xxvii. p. 70 seq. ; Weimar ed, vol. vi. p. "Weimar ed. vol. vi. pp. 135 seq., 142 76 seq. seq. 348 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. petuous theologian, who seemed bent upon making the line of policy which the Elector was still willing to pursue impossible ? Luther's letters make it plain that he was assailed by frequent remonstrances from Spalatin on what the latter thinks his violence and contentiousness ; while the chaplain is especially shocked that he should so unsparingly criticise an episcopal mandate. In some respects, Luther is not unwHling to excuse himself : " I am certainly," he says to his friend,^ " of a quick hand and a ready memory, so that what I write rather flows from me than is deliberately put forth. Even so, I am not sufficient for the occasion ; . what happens to others who are slower, I wonder." Again, a little later : ^ " I cannot deny that I am somewhat more vehement than I ought to be ; and as my opponents know it they should not provoke the dog. How difficult it is to temper heat and pen you may learn even from your own case. This is the reason why I am always vexed to be involved in public affairs ; and the more I am vexed the more I am involved against my will. And that not without the cruellest accusa- tions, directed against myself and the Word of God : whereby it happens, that if I were carried away neither by heat nor by pen, even a stony mind might be moved to arms by the very indignity of the thing — and how much more I who am hot and have a pen that is not altogether blunt ? By these monsters I am borne beyond the decorum of modesty. And at the same time I wonder whence that new religion has arisen, according to which whatever is said against an adversary is called an insult. What do you think of Christ ? Was He an utterer of insults when He called the Jews an adulterous and perverse generation, the offspring of vipers, hypocrites, children of the devil ? And then Paiul ? " "I beseech you," he says in the same letter,^ " if you think rightly of the Gospel, not to suppose that it can be promoted without tumult, scandal, sedition. You will not make a pen out of a sword, or peace out of war ; the word of God is a sword, is war, is ruin, is scandal, is perdition, is poison ; and, as Amos says, it meets the sons of Ephraim like a bear in the way and a lioness in the wood. I wrote much more vehemently against Emser, ' De "Wette, vol. i. p. 405. = Md. p. 418. » lUd. p. 417. VII COMMENTARY ON GALATIANS 349 Eck, Tetzel, and you did not complain." Other passages of the same kind might be quoted ; but though Luther felt the danger of an ungoverned pen, he was not disposed to yield an inch to remonstrance. " I have delivered and offered myself in the name of the Lord : His will be done. Who asked Him to make me a Doctor ? If He has made me one, let Him have me for Himself, or again destroy me, if He repents having created me. . . . This alone I care for, that the Lord may be propitious to me in those causes of mine which are between me and Himself." ^ Nevertheless Luther, probably at Spalatin's instigation, made another attempt to conciliate his ecclesiastical superiors. On the 4th of February he wrote two letters, one to the Archbishop of Mainz, the other to the Bishop of Merseburg, the prelate who had attempted to prevent the disputation at . Leipzig. They were couched in respectful, but at the same time manly terms, asking that his books might be read and fairly judged, and professing his readiness to be instructed. Probably the most remarkable thing about the correspondence is the courteous moderation of the answers which he received ; both prelates, indeed, gently reprove him for the vehemence of his way of writing on difficult and disputed matters, but neither ventures to condemn him as a stiff-necked heretic. Perhaps they were waiting for the decision which they knew that Eome was preparing to take ; but meanwhile it is easy to read between the lines that the Augustinian monk is now a power in the land, in treating with whom at least a show of courtesy is to be preserved. But in truth the conflict was deepening day by day. In the Preface to the first edition of his Commentary on the, Epistle to the Galatians, published in September 1519, Luther had given strong expression to the resentment against Eome, which the proceedings of the Diet of Augsburg, and we may suppose the catalogue of grievances presented by the Bishop of Li^ge, had awakened in his mind. He did indeed draw a distinction, which was at this time a very real one to him, between the Eoman Church and the Eoman Curia, the first of which it is not lawful to oppose, while the second ought to be more stoutly resisted by all kings ' De Wette, vol. i. p. 391. 350 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. and princes than the Turks themselves ; but Hutten himself, in his bitterest mood of patriotism, never said anything stronger of the contempt in which the German nation was held by the Italian ecclesiastics who deceived and plundered it. Now, just before the 24th of February, he first saw Hutten's republication of Laurentius Valla's book on the Donation of Constantine. Its exposure of the legendary basis on which the temporal power of the Pope rested made a great impres- sion upon his mind. He is aU but convinced by it that the Pope is that veritable Antichrist whom the world expects ; everything in his life, sayings, doings, decrees, answers to that supposition. It is like a revelation to him, that the power which is exercised with such utter disregard of righteousness should be founded on a lie. Every day some scruple is lightened or removed, and he becomes a rebel with a quieter conscience.'' Sometime in the spring or early summer of this year — the precise date is not easy to fix — Valentine von Teutleben, a Saxon nobleman at Eome, who was also a canon of Mainz, wrote to the Elector to tell him that on account of the protec- tion which he extended to Luther he was ill looked upon by the Holy See. This, with a letter of similar import from the Cardinal of St. George, Frederick sent to Luther, with a request that he would advise as to the answer which should be given to them. He respectfully put the task aside ; but in comparing the two letters which he wrote to Spalatin on the subject with the Elector's answer to Teutleben, it is easy to see that he in- spired, if he did not actually write, the latter. It contains two passages which deserve careful notice. In the first Frederick declares that at one time he had arranged with Luther that he should of his own accord iretire from Saxony and the University of Wittenberg, and that the retirement would actually have taken place but for the earnest interces- sion of Miltitz, who thought that elsewhere Luther, relieved from the authority of the Elector and the influence of his colleagues, would write and act still more freely than he had yet done. The date of this negotiation is not given ; was it 1 De Wette, vol. i. pp. 398, 401, Mp. ad Gal. vol. iii. p. 133 ; "Weimar, 420 ; Walch, vol. xv. p. 1644 ; Erl. vol. ii. p. 447 seg. vii mS WORKS CONDEMNED AT LO UVAIN &- KOLN 35 1 upon Miltitz's first coming to Saxony, after Luther had re- turned from Augsburg, and about the publication of the Acta Aiigvj&tana ? The second remarkable passage in the Elector's letter is one in which he calls his correspondent's attention to the growing learning of Germany, both among divines and lay- men, and the harm that will arise should men come to feel that Luther has been unfairly, and without due judgment of his case, condemned. " For the doctrine of Luther has already so rooted itself everywhere, both in Germany and elsewhere, in the minds of the majority of men, that if it be not refuted by true and solid arguments and clear witness of Scripture, and he be put down by the mere terror of the Church's power, the result cannot but be to excite in Germany the sharpest offence, and horrible and deadly tumults, whence no good can come either to our most holy lord, the Pope, or to any one else." The whole letter affords a clear indication of the Elector's poUcy. He is anxious to keep Luther within bounds of moderation. He will do nothing to hasten the day of decisive conflict. But he rightly estimates the force of public opinion at the Eeformer's back, and he sees that it is futile to oppose blind force to reasonable conviction.^ Meanwhile adversaries multipUed. The theological faculty of the University of Louvain had early taken alarm at Froben's edition of Luther's works, and had sent it in August 1519 to their brethren of the University of Koln, to examine and report upon. The divines of Koln promptly condemned the book, ordering it to be publicly burned, a sentence in which, on the 7th of November, Louvain cordially concurred. The condemnation was then sent to the Cardinal of Tortosa, afterwards Pope Adrian VI, who at the moment was doing his best to administer the troubled affairs of Spain, for his old pupil Charles V. He fully approved the sentence, and ordered it to be published. A copy soon found its way to Wittenberg, which Luther, after his own daring fashion, re- printed with an answer, in which "he repudiated in the strongest terms the pretensions of the two Universities to constitute themselves judges of theological orthodoxy.^ Next, a Franciscan lErl. OiJp.v. a. vol. V. p. 7; DeWette, "^ "Weimar ed. vol. vi. p. 170 sej.; vol. i. pp. 461, 463. Erl. ed. 0pp. v. a. vol. iv. p. 176. 352 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. monk, Augustine of Alfeld (usually called Alveld), entered the lists, with a work on the divine right of the Papacy. Luther's first intention was not to waste his time in answering an attack which he regarded with contempt, and he delegated the task to one of his pupils at "Wittenberg, John Lonicerus. But presently, when Alveld republished his book in German, the controversial impulse got the better of him, and he issued in June a tract. Of the Roman Papacy, against the highly renowned Romanists at Leipzig^ which is to some extent notable as laying down that theory of the Church which was a fundamental principle of the Eeformation. But about the same time an old adversary reappeared. Sylvester Prierias, dissatisfied, it may be presumed, with his former effort of that kind, had been preparing an elaborate book on the Papacy, in which he put forward the extreme Eoman view of its unlimited dignity and privileges. Before publishing this, however, he issued what he called an Epitoma of it, a brief statement of the propositions which he intended to prove, arranged in their logical order. This, though dating from 1519, only reached Luther in the spring of 1520, and he republished it, at the same time as his answer to Alveld, with incisive notes and a brief introduction and epilogue. The large claims which Prierias made for the Papacy angered him in the highest degree-; he thought that the book had been written with the express purpose of destroying the authority of Councils, and therefore of invalidating his own appeal. " If Eome thus beUeves and teaches," ^ he breaks out, " with the knowledge of Popes and Cardinals (which I hope is not the case), then in these writings I freely declare that the true Antichrist is sitting in the temple of God, and .is reigning in Eome, that enpurpled Babylon, and that the Eoman Curia is the Syna- gogue of Satan." And again, "If Eome thus believes, blessed is Greece, blessed is Bohemia, blessed all who have separated themselves from her, and have gone out from the midst of that Babylon — but condemned, one and all, who have held communion with her."^ But in his Epilogue he rises to a ^ Weimar ed. vol. vi. p. 277 seq.; Weimar ed. vol. vi. p. 328. Erl. D. S. vol. xxvii. p. 86 seq. ' Erl. 0pp. v. a. vol. ii. p. ' 80 ; - Erl. 0pp. V. a. vol. ii. p. 79 ; Weimar ed. vol. vi. p. 329. vn A TURNING-POINT 353 still higher pitch of indignation, and in words which stand almost, if not quite, alone among his utterances, he says,^ " Indeed, it seems to me that if the fury of the Eomanists thus goes on there will be no remedy left, except that emperor, kings, and princes, girt about with force and arms, should attack these pests of the world, and settle the matter, no longer by words, but by the sword. ... If we strike thieves with the gallows, robbers with the sword, heretics with the fire, why do we not much more attack in arms these Masters of perdition, these Cardinals, these Popes, and all this sink of the Eoman Sodom which has without end corrupted the Church of God, and wash our hands in their blood ? " I do not think that these strong words ought to be taken metaphorically. Probably Luther only meant them for a moment. There are others, written in a calmer and more deliberate mood, and of diametrically opposite tendency, to be set against them. But they were the wild cry of a passion that undoubtedly moved him.^ This was a turning-point of the Eeformation ; a moment at which it was necessary to make a decisive choice between un- compromising resistance to Eome and some form of transaction with her. ISTews came to Wittenberg that Eck was in Eome, moving heaven and earth to secure Luther's formal condemna- tion. On the other hand, behind the Eeformer was an immense and growing mass of German opinion ; the religious enthusiasm which the new movement had called out, the scorn of the younger humanists for mediaeval learning and all that was connected with it, the indignation of the people against the vices of the clergy and the exactions of Eome, the revolt of ^ Erl. 0pp. V. a. vol. ii. p. 107 ; Papal Legates, and carrying them off to "Weimar ed. vol. vi. p. 347. the Ebernburg. That some such ^ Loscher, vol. iii. p. 848 ; Tent- scheme was at least considered probable zel, vol. ii. p. 157 ; Seckendorf, lib. is plain from a passage in one of Ale- i. sec. 27, § Ixx. p. 106 ; De Wette, ander's despatches, in which he says vol. i. pp. 445, 448, 449, 451, 453 ; that the Archbishop of Trier had Corp. Ref. vol. i. p. 201. Much has warned him to be on his guard against been made by Catholic critics of a Hutten as he travelled from Mainz sentence in a letter from Luther to to Worms (Brieger, Aleaiider tiiid Spalatin, dated November 13th (De Luther, 1521, p. 19 ; Balan, 3Ionu- Wette, vol. i. p. 523), "Gaudeo Hut- menta Eeforinationis Lutheranae, -p. 25). tenum prodiisse, atque utinam Marinum But by the very simple expedient of aut Aleandrum intercepisset. " "What translating " intercepisset " as if it this alludes to we do' not know; were "interfeclsset," it has been easy possibly to some wild scheme of ' to represent Luther as an accomplice of Hutten's for sweeping down on the assassination. 2 A 354 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. the patriots against an unworthy subservience to Italy — all coalesced into one threatening force. If we may judge by Spalatin's letters, the Elector was alarmed at the impetuosity of his theologian, but he never withdrew his protection from him, and the offers of Schaumburg and Sickingen gave him a confidence which he might not otherwise have felt. Unfortu- nately Luther's letters at this time to the patriots have perished ; and room has been left for much misconstruction of his methods and motives. How far the reproach of sympathy with revolution can justly be attached to his name is a matter which can best be discussed a little later on ; at this moment it was quite unmerited. Whatever were Hutten's and Sickingen's schemes afterwards, they were strictly constitutional just now. It is quite curious, almost touching, to see what hope every one connected with the party of reform places in the young Emperor. He is to redress all wrongs ; he is to remedy aU weakness ; he will defend the lesser nobility against the encroachments of the princes ; he will restore law and order to a distracted Empire ; more than aU., he will feel as a German should as to Italian pretensions, and will put himself at the head of his faithful people against Eome. Only httle by little were those who entertained these expectations disenchanted ; only little by little did they learn that the boy on whom their hearts were fixed was Catholic to the core, and surrounded by ad^'isers whose sympathies were neither anti-Papal nor German. StUl, it was through the House of Hapsburg, and in accord with the spirit of Imperial loyalty that Hutten and Sickingen resolved to work. In the autumn, of 1519, Hutten, examining the ancient library of the Abbey of Fulda, found a dusty MS., without title-page or author's name, which showed by its contents that it belonged to the end of the eleventh century. It dealt with the circumstances and principles of the great struggle between Henry IV and Gregory VII, and though, as has since been ascertained, written by a German Bishop, Walram of Naumburg, decisively took the Imperial and national side. This document, under the title Be Unitate Ecclesiae Conservanda, Hutten edited with a strong anti-Papal preface, and dedicated, as Charles had not yet arrived in Germany, to the Archduke Ferdinand. It was one more appeal to the national feeling, of which it was Hutten's desire VII THE ARCHBISHOP OF MAINZ AND HUTTEN 355 that the Hapsburg Princes should become the representatives. And in June he left Mainz to visit Ferdinand in the Nether- lands, upon some vague hope of winning over the young prince, who stood next to the throne, to his side. The journey excited the utmost interest among Eeformers : Melanchthon reported the fact in terms of exultant expectation : " what, therefore," he adds, " may we not hope % "^ The journey was a futile one. We are not acquainted either with Hutten's plans or the circumstances which frustrated them ; whether he even saw Ferdinand is uncertain. He soon began to think that he was not safe at the Archduke's court, and turned his steps homeward. But it was only to find that he had lost his footing at Mainz. That he should have kept it so long is strange enough ; the editor of Valla's book on the Donation of Constantine, the author of the Trias Bomana, could hardly have been an acceptable servant of the Primate of Germany, especially when that Primate was one who was so little troubled ' by scruples as to ecclesiastical irregularities and corruptions. But in truth Albert of Mainz was perhaps half unconsciously playing a double game. He had a genuine sympathy with humanism. Erasmus was his friend as well as Hutten. Capito, who was closely connected with the humanist reforming circle, and who afterwards became the Eeformer of Strassburg, was at this moment his counsellor and secretary. We have seen that he looked to the success of Francis I. in his candidature for the Empire to make him Papal Legate in Germany. Might he not expect, M Sickingen and Hutten were successful in revolt from Eome, to be the first head of a truly national Church, a Pope in his pwn country, owning no superior beyond the Alps ? If these were his dreams, they were rudely dissipated ; letters from Leo X called upon him, in terms which were not less imperative because veiled with courtesy, to choose between obedience to the Holy See and rebellion. First, he was offered the Golden Eose, an honour till then reserved for secular princes ; secondly, he was told that the Pope had noted with astonishment the position which Hutten held at his court, and the fact that books containing the most atrocious attacks on 1 Corp. Bef. vol. i. p. 201 ; Sutteni 0pp. ed. Booking, vol. i. pp. 325-356 ; vol. iv. p. 689 ; Strauss, U. v. E. p. 322. 356 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. the Holy See had been printed at Mainz. A private letter from Valentine von Teutleben, a canon of Mainz, who was then at Eome, to his Archbishop, told the same story in still plainer words : the favour which the Elector showed to Hutten made him an object of suspicion to the Pope. Hutten declared to his friends that the Pope had ordered the Archbishop to seize him, and send him in chains to Eome ; and it is certainly true that one of the five briefs which the Papal Nuncios, Caracciolo and Aleander, brought with them was directed against him by name. Under these circumstances, he thought it advisable to join Sickingen at the Ebernburg ; and the Arch- bishop wrote a letter, full of submission, to the Pope, in which he reported that the printer of the obnoxious books was fast laid up in hold ; while their author had betaken himself to his mountain fortress and the protection of his men-at-arms. Henceforth Hutten had done with courts, and from the safe eminence of his friend's castle he addressed one passionate appeal after another to the German people.^ Meanwhile Eck had not been idle. According to his own account he was summoned to Eome by the Pope ; his enemies said that he had repaired thither to negotiate a fit reward for his dialectical triumph at Leipzig. When he arrived there, probably in February 1520, he was received in the most cordial way as a champion of the Holy See. He took with him the MS. of a work which he had written on the Primacy of Peter, and on the 1st of AprQ presented it to the Pope. Nothing, if we may believe *him, could be more gracious and friendly than the behaviour of Leo and his cardinals ; the Pope publicly kissed him ; he was constantly consulted on the Bull that was to be issued; on one memorable occasion, as he narrates with just pride, " His Holiness, two cardinals, a Spanish doctor, and I," privately deliberated for five hours on the subject. The Sacred CoUege was far from being of one mind ; the lawyers, in opposition to the theologians, still desired to summon Luther to Eome, and there put him on his defence ; while a personal contest raged between Cardinal Peter Accolti — sometimes known as Anconitanus — and Laurentius 1 0pp. Eutteni, ed. Booking, vol. i. pp. 356, 357, 360, 363, 367, 368 ; De Wette, vol. i. p. 486. vu THE BULL '■'■ EXSURGE DOMINE" 357 ,Pucci as to who should prepare the important document. The draft of the former was in substance finally adopted ; and after repeated consistories had been held, the Bull Exsurge Doviine was issued on the 15 th of June. This document, which like others of its class combined an unctuous religious phraseology with a quite legal diffuseness and repetition, stated the especial kindness with which the Holy See regarded the German nation, and vaunted the patience, the moderation, the fatherly long-suffering extended to Luther by the Pope. But it went on to condemn forty-one articles extracted from his works, and extending over a wide range of Christian doctrine. At the same time the selection- of the incriminated opinions was not so made as to give any distinct or comprehensive view of the matters really in dispute between Luther and the Church. All books of Luther's, wherever found, are to be burned; Luther himself is prohibited from preaching. He and his adherents are required to recant within sixty days of the publication of the Bull in the dioceses of Brandenburg, Meissen, and Merseburg ; and sixty days more are given for the news of their recantation to reach the Pope. Otherwise they are declared to be self- convicted of obstinate heresy, and given over to the punishment reserved for heretics : a sentence which takes a lurid light from the fact that the 33d of the condemned propositions is, "To burn heretics is contrary to the wiU of the Spirit." The author of the Bull affected a judicial style ; but how little of the judicial character belonged to it may be inferred from the fact that Eck was invested with the office of Papal Prothonotary, with a view to the pubhcation of the Bull in those parts of Germany where Luther's influence was greatest ; and that he was authorised to insert in the document, at his own discretion, the names of not more than twenty-four persons who were to share the penalties inihcted on the arch-heretic himself Eck declared afterwards that he had unwillingly undertaken the task of publishing the Bull ; but if it were so, he soon overcame his reluctance, and showed no lack of energy in its performance.-' ' Erl. Opp.Y. a. vol. iv. p.256 ; Walch, 150 ; Riederer, Beytrag, pp. 56-59; En- voi. XV. p. 1658; Pallavicini, bk. i. ch. ders.vol.ii. p. 412. The Bull itself, with 20;S3LT-pi,IstoriaclelCoiiciUoTrideniino, Hutten's annotations, will be found in bk. i. ch. 12; Wiedemann, Joh. Eck, p. Euttmi Op^.ed. Bocking, vol. v. p. 301. 358 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. A gossiping letter, written from Eome at the end of the. year 1520 by we know not whom, and afterwards found among Pirckheimer's papers, gives a lively account of the state of opinion in the sacred city. There is nobody there, says the writer, who does not know that in most things Martin has spoken truly ; but the good hide their opinions for fear of oppression, and the bad rage because they are compelled to hear the truth. There is much difference of opinion as to the policy of issuing the Bull ; many good and prudent men are in favour of moderate measures ; but indignation and fear have conquered. To debate with Luther, said the advocates of re- pression, was not consistent with the dignity of the Holy See ; and the precedent was alleged of the seasonable punishment inflicted upon John Hus and Jerome of Prag. The two men who were most conspicuous on the side of severity were Cajetan and Prierias. The former, returning disappointed from Augsburg, declared that unless the Germans were put down with fire and sword they would altogether shake off the yoke of the Papacy ; the latter went back to the precedent of Eeuchlin : if he had been repressed Luther would never have dared so much. Finance, in the person of the Fuggers, was on the same side ; it was they who had sent Eck to Eome, " a not unfit instrument of the Eoman Curia if he had not been drunken, for in temerity, audacity, lying, dissimulation, adulation, and other vices well adapted to the Curia, he was a great proficient." Nor indeed did his inebriety much stand in his way ; men said it was appropriate that a drunken legate should be sent to a drunken people. Aleander was a fit companion for him; the drunken- ness of the one was balanced by the Jewish birth of the other. The talk of the predominant party ran high ; everything was to be done to destroy Luther, who was a worse enemy than the Turk, and with him his doctrine ; the approaching Diet at Worms would be occupied with little else. The Emperor was to be assailed by prayers and threats ; the Germans were to be flattered and bribed ; in Spain advantage was to be taken of the popular risings. But if these things do not prevail, "we will' depose the Emperor," said the high-flying Papalists ; " we will liberate the people from their allegiance ; we will elect another Emperor, who shall be well pleasiitg to us, in his place ; vii CARACCIOLO AND ALEANDER 359 we wiR stir up among the Germans a sedition such as now rages in Spain; we will call France, England, and all the kings of the earth to arms ; we will omit nothing that our pre- decessors have been wont to do, not without fortunate issue, against emperors and kings." So far Pirckheimer's nameless correspondent, whose words, which have a certain verisimilitude of their own, may be taken for what they are worth.^ Eck, however, was not the only ambassador whom at this juncture the Pope despatched to Germany. It was necessary that the Holy See should be represented at the coronation of Charles at Aachen, and at the important Diet at which he was to meet the Estates of Germany for the first time. The political interests involved were entrusted by Leo to Martin Caracciolo, an Italian diplomatist of noble birth, who had already earned by his services the title of Apostolical Prothonotary, and who afterwards received a red hat from Paul III. With him was conjoined, for the express purpose of dealing with the Lutheran difficulty, a more remarkable man, Hieronymus Ale- ander. Born in 1480, at a little town in Istria, and,, as his enemies said, of Jewish parents,^ Aleander's first claim to distinction was made as a humanist. ■ Invited by Lewis XII he had taught Greek with great acceptance in the University of Paris in 1508, and had filled the office of Kector. Thence he had passed into the service of Erhard, that Bishop of Lifege whose schedule of grievances against Home had been laid before the Diet of Augsburg. By him Aleander was sent to Eome to support his claims to a cardinal's hat, opposed, as he thought, by the King of France, and there remaining to push his own fortune, became, first, secretary to the Cardinal de Medici, and afterwards librarian of the Vatican. ' A certain pride which he took in being a native of the Empire, his familiarity with German men of letters, and his long experience of Papal business, marked him out as a fit person to negotiate not only with Charles, but with the electors and princes who were to gather around Mm. Eck was entrusted with the thunderbolts of the Church, Caracciolo and Aleander were to ^ Eiederer, Nachrichten, vol. i.. p. aspersion. Vide Balan, Monii/mmUa 178. Reformationis Lutheranae, p. 58. 2 Aleander emphatically denied this 36o LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. awaken against Luther the justice of the Empire. Nor were the latter less zealous in their function than the former.^ The news, which letters from Italy brought to Wittenberg, that these weapons were being forged against him, found Luther undismayed. To draw back was impossible even if he had desired it; but he never thought of retreat. At the beginning of June he writes to Spalatin : ^ " I have a mind to make a public appeal to Charles and the nobility of all Germany against the tyranny and worthlessness of the Eoman Curia." This, which he dedicated on the 23d of the same ■ month to his brother-in-arms, Nicholas von Amsdorf, was the famous address, " To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, of the amending of the Christian State." Even in the dedication Luther strikes a strange note, as if he knew that he was taking a' new departure, which was irrevocable. " The time of silence is past," he begins, " and the time to speak is come, as says Ecclesiastes." He has put together certain matters relative to the reform of the Christian state, to lay before the Christian nobility of the German nation ; of "amend- ment from the side of the priestly order, he has no present hope. Perhaps he thinks too highly of himself, that he, a despised monk, should address persons of such condition on a matter so important, "but I am perhaps debtor to my God and the world of a folly," and, like Paul, though he does not compare himself to the Apostle, would have his friends bear with him in his foolishness. " But as I am not only a fool, but also a sworn Doctor of Holy Scripture, I am glad that I have the opportunity of being faithful to my oath, even in this foolish fashion." He was about to make the great venture of his Hfe, and this is the way in which he lets his irony play for a moment with the deep seriousness of his purpose.^ For the book was an indictment of the whole Papal system, expressed in the most trenchant terms, and laid before the princes and nobles of Germany, who groaned, or ought to groan under its oppressions. The opportunity was at the door ; " God has given us a noble young blood for our head ; " it ^ Pallavicini, bk. i. ch. 23. Weimar ed. vol. vi. p. 381 scg.; De W. 2 De Wette, vol. i. p. 453. vol. i. p. 457. 2 Erl. D. S, vol. xxi. p. 277 seg.; VII ''ADDRESS TO THE GERMAN NOBLES" 361 needed but a resolute determination to shake off the yoke, and a free Council would do the rest. In accordance with the fact that the book is addressed to the laity, Luther lays down no elaborate foundation of theological principle. He enumerates what he calls three walls of defence which the Eoman Curia has built up ; three principles, that is, which are assumed to be beyond controversy. First, that the spiritual power is above the temporal ; second, that no one, save the Pope alone, can interpret Scripture ; third, that only the Pope can law- fully summon a Council. These he briefly demolishes, chiefly by the establishment in their place of the doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers, and then proceeds at great length to enumerate articles of practical reform, to which the future free Council is to direct its attention. What these were will be stated on another occasion : it is enough now to say that every one of them made more or less appeal to the reli- gious instincts, the good sense, the personal interests, or the patriotic feeling of those to whom he was writing. He covers the whole ground of civil as well as of ecclesiastical reform ; and spares the nobles to whom he appeals as little as the churchmen whose corruptions are the subject of his invective. As we read this fiery address, of which the earnestness never flags, and which indicates from the first page to the last the most masterly grasp of the subject, it is impossible not to admire its splendid moral audacity, its depth of patriotic feel- ing. If Leo had up to this time under-estimated his humble and distant antagonist, he could do so no longer. Here was a fire that, if it kindled and spread, would burn up the Papal system in Germany like so much stubble.^ And it seemed as if the fire were kindling. Four thousand copies of the Address were sold in a few days ; Lange called it a trumpet of war ; Staupitz wrote, though happily too late, to 1 Luther speaks of a certain "Cor- and finally, in 1533, was put to death tisanus Dr. Viccius," from whom he hy the Cauons of Miinster. De W. derived much of the material for this vol. i. p. 465 ; Lauterbach, p. 19 ; Coll. Address. This was John De Wick, or vol. ii. p. 160 ; T. T. vol. i. p. 259 ; Van der Wieck, who had acted as pro- Bbcking, Epp. Obs. Vir. vol. i. p. 263 ; curator for Reuchlin at Rome in his vol. ii. p. 502. [See further the Weimar litigation with Hoogstraten, who after- editors' preface to their edition of the wards took the Protestant side, was Address, vol. vi. p. 391 sey.] active in the Reformation of Bremen, 362 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. prevent its publication ; Luther, with the modesty which some- times accompanies what looks to the world like excess of self- confidence, said, " Perhaps I am the precursor of PhUip, whose way, after the manner of Elias, I am preparing." A Sermon on the Mass followed at the beginning of August ; ^ then a little later a letter to the Emperor, which was doubtless written in compliance with the wish of the Elector. It was a respectful, but at the same time a manly appeal to Imperial justice. He had been dragged into controversy, he said. " Witness my own conscience, and the judgment of the best men, I have endea- voured to publish only evangelical truths against the supersti- tious opinions of human tradition, for which cause, now for almost three years, I have suffered endless anger, contumely, danger, and whatever of evil my adversaries can devise. In vain I ask for pardon, in vain I offer silence, in vain I pro- pose conditions of peace, in vain I ask to be better instructed ; the one thing that is being prepared against me is, that I, and with me the whole Gospel should be extinguished." Under these circumstances he appeals to Charles, as did Athanasius to Eoman emperors of old. He does not wish to be protected, if he be found impious or a heretic. Whether his doctrine be true or false, let it not be condemned unheard. But the appeal of strong conviction, asking opportunity to vindicate itself, was never addressed to deafer ears.^ This was the moment at which a final attempt was made to influence Luther in the direction of submission, partly from the side of his order, partly by Miltitz. A chapter of Augustinian monks had been held at Venice in June 1519, at which Gabriel Venetus had been elected General. Staupitz was expected to be present, to consult with his brethren as to Luther and the reproach which he was bringing on the Augus- tiiuan order, but he did not come. On the 15th of March 1520, therefore, Venetus wrote to Staupitz begging him to use his great personal interest with his former pupil and friend : * "Wherefore we implore you, by your piety and religion and love to God, that if indeed zeal, honour, the advantage of reli- ■' "Weimar ed. vol. vi. p. 351 ; Erl. ' Zeitschrift fiir Kirchcngeschichte, D. S. vol. xxvii. p. 141. vol. ii. p. 480 ; Kolde, Staupitz, p. 2 De Wette, vol. i. pp. 393, 478, 479. 325. VII FINAL EFFORTS OF MEDIATION 363 gion and your own Congregation, are things that lie near your heart, to apply all your care, your effort, and your mind to bring Master Martin back to himself, and, with him, to save our order from so great and so wretched a reproach." Such a request from such a quarter threw Staupitz into the greatest perplexity. He loved Luther; he felt a profound sympathy with the religious side of his action ; he would willingly have brought him back to ways of moderation. But he knew that his remonstrances would be fruitless. A responsibility was cast upon him which he felt that he could not sustain. Per- haps his request that the Address to the German nobility might not be published was the outcome of this mood, and its ill success showed him how untenable his position was. When then, on St. Augustine's Day, the Chapter of the Congregation was held at Eisleben, Staupitz laid down his office. It is a curious sign of the spirit that pervaded the province, that it was conferred on "Wenceslaus Link, Luther's early and constant friend, who was already committed to his theology, and who stood by his side when the day of decisive revolt came.^ Now once more, and for the last time, Miltitz thought that he saw his opportunity. He had been flitting about Saxony, talking and writing to people in authority, and making himself pleasant in his convivial way, though not able to effect any- thing with the steadfast Elector or his resolute theologian. But he persuaded the Augustinians at Eisleben to send Staupitz and Link as a deputation to Luther, to ask him to write a letter to the Pope stating that he had never intended to attack him personally. They came to Wittenberg in the early days of September, and found Luther willing enough to make the small concession which they asked. " What can I write," he says to Spalatin, " more easily and more truly ? " But the interview, of which we have no record, is deeply interesting, as being the last occasion on which Luther and Staupitz met. The older man retired to his new preferment at Salzburg, seeking in the Benedictine the peace which the Augustinian order denied him : the younger remained in the forefront of a struggle which grew hotter every day. The one must have been saddened by a sense of disappointment with a state of ' Kolde, Staupitz, p. 327. 364 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. things which he could no longer do anything to naould and rule : the other was still full of confidence in the forces of a newer time. But they loved one another still, and the recollection of the past was strong within them both. It is weU to think that such a friendship could not be broken by any stress of adverse circumstances, and that the last words exchanged between Luther and Staupitz were words of sincerest affection.^ The letter to the Pope, however, was not written just yet ; nor, when actually sent, was it in the form which Miltitz expected. On the 3d of October Luther tells Spalatin ^ that he shall postpone it to some indefinite period, as he hears that Eck is already in Leipzig with the Bull. Whatever schemes - of conciliation Miltitz might still cherish, Eck had no wish for the cessation of a war on which his own present notoriety and his chance of future preferment ahke depended. In virtue of the plenary powers confided to him, he had inserted in the Bull six names in addition to Luther's, in the selection of which even his Catholic apologist is forced to admit that he was influenced by personal vindictiveness. Carlstadt paid the penalty of the Leipzig disputation ; Bernard Adelmann of the Canonici Indocti ; Pirckheimer of the Eccius Dedolatits. The other three were undoubted adherents of Luther's : Lazarus Spengler, the author of the Schutzrede ; Sylvius Egranus, parish priest of Zwickau ; and John Dolzig of Feldkirchen, a professor of theology at Wittenberg. The Bull, thus enlarged in its scope, was duly published at Meissen on the 21st, at Merseburg on the 25th, and at Brandenburg on the 29th of September. The formalities required for Luther's condemna- tion were now complete.^ Eck's mission, however, was not regarded by the bishops and universities of Germany with very favourable eyes. It was an innovation upon ecclesiastical usage that a theologian whose reputation did not stand high, and whose vanity and prejudices were notoriously involved in the controversy, should be sent on a roving commission from diocese to diocese to insist upon the execution of the Papal decree. He found bishops inclined 1 De "Wette, vol. i. pp. 483, 486 ; ^ j)e Wette, vol. i. p. 491. Seidemann, K. v. Miltitz, p. 25 ; •'' Wiedemann, /. Eck, p. 170 ; Kolde, Staupitz, p. 446. Riederer, Beytrag, p. 8. vii THE RECEPTION OF THE BULL 365 to make difficulties, to fall back upon precedents, to think more of their own independence than of the danger to the faith. Everywhere in the universities Luther had many adherents, especially among the young, who made light of Papal threats, and mocked at the pompous disputant who was their bearer. It is not necessary to tell in detail the story of Eck's reception in every city, an example or two may suffice. On the 29th of September he was in Leipzig, the scene of his recent triumph, where, if anywhere, he might have expected a cordial welcome. He entered the city with a ducal escort ; and Duke George wrote to the Council requesting them to present him with a gilt goblet full of silver coin. But it was Fair time ; a considerable number of students, not disinclined to mischief, had come over from "Wittenberg, and Eck, who was no hero, was soon in terror for his life. Miltitz, who happened to be in Leipzig, asked him to dinner, and having filled him with wine and drawn from him his vainglorious intentions, artfully played upon his fears. Satirical placards were posted up and down the city; songs were made upon the Papal Prothonotary, and sung in the streets. He took refuge, somewhat ignominiously, in the Dominican convent, appealing for protection to Csesar Pflug, the Duke's minister, who inter- vened in his behalf, without much effect, with the Eector of the University. The students had by this time fully entered into the spirit of the game. Daily letters of feud were thrown into the precincts of the monastery, a persecution which at last so terrified Eck that he left Leipzig by night, and betook himself to Freiburg. Nor was the official reception of the Bull by the University much more favourable. It raised difficulties and appealed to Duke George for advice. Even he refused to accept Eck's copy of the Bull as necessarily genuine : he wanted to know why the original, or at least a copy formally accredited by notary and witnesses, had not been produced, and ended by advising delay. It was only after some months that these difficulties were removed, and the BuU finally accepted by the University. Luther's books were burned at Merseburg on the 23d of January, and at Leipzig a few days afterwards.^ 1 Seidemann, Beitrage, p. 38 seq. ; p. 26 ; Wiedemann, J. Eck, p. 153 seq.; Erliiuterungen, p. 5 seq.; K. vmi Miltits, De "Wette, vol. i. p. 492. 366 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. It was in the last days of September that Luther first vaguely heard that the Bull had been promulgated in Saxony. Day by day the news became more definite ; then came in- telligence of Eck's ill success at Leipzig. This was the moment which the Eeformer chose for delivering his second great blow — -the book, On the, Babylonian Ca,ptwity of the Church. It was an elaborate and resolute attack upon the sacramental system of Eome ; less vehement in style, as became a scientific theological treatise, than the Address to the German Nobility, but, for those who could discern the wide sweep and necessary issues of the principles laid down, not less trenchant. " I hear," ^ says Luther in its last paragraph, " that Bulls and Papal threats have been again made ready against me, in which I am urged to recant on pain of being declared a heretic. If these things are so, I desire this book to be a part of my future recantation." This deliberate defiance of the Pope, for it was no less, was issued at first in Latin, in the shape of a letter to Hermann Tulich, one of the Wittenberg professors, but almost immediately translated into German. Then on the 11th of October Luther reports to Spalatin that the BuU itself has arrived in Wittenberg. Eck had sent it to Peter Burkhardt, the Eector of the University, with a request that it might be at once put in force, and a threat that in case of refusal the Pope would withdraw from the University all the privileges which his predecessors had granted. Luther's mood on hearing the news is one of scorn ; he is far freer than he was before, he says, being at last certain that the Pope is Antichrist, and that the seat of Satan is plainly mani- fest. To us it seems strange that in this extremity his thought should turn to the boy Emperor : " Oh, that Charles were a man, and, in Christ's cause would attack these Satans."' But the exclamation is uttered rather in despair than in hope. " Erasmus writes," he goes on, " that the Emperor's court is beset with the mendicant tyrants, and that no hope can be placed in Charles. Nor is it wonderful. 'Trust not in princes, neither in the children of men, in whom is no help.' " ^ The Elector was at this moment in Koln. He had got so &^ lErl. 0pp. V. a. vol. V. p. 118; ^ Dg -Wette, vol. i. pp. 488, 489, 493, Weimar, vol. vl. p. 573. 494, 495 ; Walch, vol. xv. p. 1874. VII FREDERICK AND THE NUNCIOS A T KOLN 367 far on his way to Aachen, to be present at the coronation of the Emperor, when gout overtook him and prevented his further journey. Here there came to him a letter from Burkhardt asking what the University was to do, and no doubt hinting its unwillingness to take any steps against its most distinguished member. But Frederick had his own battle to fight. As soon as the coronation was over, Caracciolo and Aleander had sought a formal interview with him^; had delivered to him the Papal briefs of which they were the bearers ; and had de- manded of him, first, that he would cause Luther's books to be burned in his dominions, and next that he would arrest the culprit, and either subject him to condign punishment, or send him to Eome for that purpose. The tone of the Papal mes- sengers, probably raised by what they knew of the Emperor's Catholic sympathies, was high and confident. Emperor and princes, they said, were agreed on this matter; Frederick alone stood out. But indeed the very existence of the Empire depended upon its obedience to Eome ; Greece had fallen away from the faith, and the Pope had transferred the Empire to the Germans ; and it was hiated, not darkly, that what the Holy See had once done it could do again. The private talk of the Italian diplomatists was, if we may trust Erasmus, nothing less than insolent. " The Pope," said one of them, " who has put down so many dukes, so many counts, will easily put down three lousy grammarians." Again, " The Pope can say to the Emperor, ' Thou art a day labourer.' " Then the other, with such a look as a schoolmaster gives a boy before he whips him, "We shall find a way with your Duke Frederick." It is not wonderful that Erasmus, with his keen eye for facts, and his cautious and moderating spirit, thought this an ill-judged method of forwarding the interests of the Holy See.-' The Elector's answer to the Nuncios, delivered to them a few days after, was such as might have been expected of him. He declared his attachment, and that of his brother, to the Holy See ; he denied that he had, or had ever had, anything in common with the cause of Luther, and that if the latter had written or spoken wrongly against the Pope, or otherwise than became a Christian and a theologian, it was displeasing to him. 1 Von der Hardt, Hist. Lit. Reform, pt. i. p. 169. 368 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. A judge had been appointed in the case, namely the Archbishop of Trier, to whom Luther would show himself obedient if he were summoned before him under the protection of a safe-con- duct. Nor, again, had he been informed, either by the Emperor or any one else, that Luther's writings had been so condemned as to be adjudged worthy of the fire. If he had known it, he would certainly have acted as might be expected of a Christian Elector and an obedient son of the Church. And the document closed with the familiar request that Luther should not be condemned unheard, as he was condemned by the Bull, but should have a fair trial before "just, learned, pious, and un- suspected judges." The Elector's answer to Peter Burkhardt, which was despatched on the 18 th of IS'ovember from Hom- burg, enclosed a report of his interview with the Nuncios, and left the University free to act in the spirit of his reply to them. An attempt which Eck made after his ignominious flight from Leipzig to stir up Duke John, was equally fruitless ; the matter was referred to the Electoral Council, which was fertile in reasons for doing nothing. So the days went on, until in January 1521, Scultetus, Bishop of Brandenburg, in whose diocese Wittenberg lay, announced his intention, as he was travelling to the Diet of Worms, of 'himself promulgating the Bull in the recalcitrant city. But by this time the burning of the Bull had conclusively shown that all Wittenberg, pro- fessors, students, and citizens, were on Luther's side, and the Bishop came to the conclusion that it was unwise to provoke further opposition. Eck's failure at Wittenberg was final and complete.^ On the 11th of October, a day or two after the B\ill reached Wittenberg, Luther and Melanchthon met the in- defatigable MUtitz at Lichtenberg. Now at last the scheme agreed upon at Eisleben was to be carried out. Luther was to write to the Pope a letter, in which he disclaimed any intention of per,sonal attack, and was to accompany it by a document explanatory of his position. There was no reason why he should not ; a temperate statement of his case could not make matters worse ; though what Miltitz hoped from it for the success of his mission, now that the Bull had actually 1 Erl. 0pp. T. a. vol. V. p. 243 sej.; Walch, vol. xv. pp. 1875, 1881. VII LUTHER'S LETTER' TO THE POPE 369 been published in the Saxon dioceses, no one can tell. He was, however, never more sanguine than at this moment of final failure. He wrote to the Elector an account of his interview with Luther, and the result at which they had arrived, speaking in the most contemptuous terms of Eck and his proceedings, and promising that within a hundred and twenty days he would procure from Leo a brief which should either abrogate or greatly modify the BuU.^ Luther's letter to the Pope, really written about the middle of October, but at Miltitz's request dated back to the 6th of September, in order that it might appear to anticipate the publication of the Bull in Saxony, is a very different document from those which had preceded it. It is respectful, but not servile : Luther's intense feeling of the difference of rank between himself and the Pope seems to have passed away, and he addresses him almost as an equal. He clears himself, so far as protestation of innocence can do it, of the charge of having attacked the Pope personally ; but he more than makes up for this by the severest invectives against the corruptions of the Eoman Curia and the vices of the sacred city. What end of con- ciliation could possibly be served by a passage like the following, which may be taken as a fair sample of the whole ? " Next, my Father Leo, beware how you listen to those sirens who make you no mere man, but a mixed god, so that you can command and exact whatever you will. It will not be so, nor will you prevail; you are a servant of servants, and, more than all men, in a most miserable and dangerous position. Let not them deceive you who pretend that you are Lord of the world ; who permit no one, apart from your authority, to be a Christian ; who babble that you can do , what you will in heaven, heU, purgatory. These are yoiir enemies, who seek your soul, to destroy it, as saith Isaiah, ' My people, who call thee blessed, they themselves deceive thee.' They err who elevate you above Council and Universal Church ; they err who attribute to you alone the right of interpreting Scripture. AU these seek to set up in the Church their own impieties under your name ; and alas ! by their means Satan effected much in your predecessors. In a word, believe none who 1 De Wette, vol. i. pp. 495, 496 ; Tentzel, vol. i. pp. 444, 449. 2 B 370 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. exalt you, but only those who humble you. For this is the judgment of God, ' He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted them of low degree.' " If Giovanni de Medici, the head of a house which had long come to consider itself princely, and the occupant of the Fisherman's chair, when it claimed to be the highest of earthly thrones, read this bold apostrophe, addressed to him by " a peasant and a peasant's son," he miist have thought him mad with conceit and vanity. He was incapable of being touched by the moral nobleness of the appeal, and so audacious a contempt of merely social distinctions the world has rarely seen.^ The letter ends thus : ^ " Last of all, that I may not come empty handed to your Blessedness, I bring with me this little tractate, put forth under the protection of your name, as an omen of peace to be concluded, and of good hope ; wherein you may discern in what studies I might be able, and should wish to be more fruitfully occupied, if it were per- mitted, or had hitherto been permitted, to me by your flatterers. It is but a little thing if you look at its bulk, but, if I mistake not, the sum of the Christian life, compendi- ously put together, if you grasp its meaning. Nor have I, being a poor man, anything else to give you, nor do you need anything save to be enriched with a spiritual gift." This was the treatise Of the, Freedom, of a Christian Man, the last of the three great books which Luther produced in this eventful year. In size it was the least, in contents perhaps the noblest, being occupied less with matters of controversy, however vital, than with the principles of spiritual religion. Its tone is singularly calm and dignified, as if the felt posses- sion of the truth of God levelled all inequalities between the peasant's son who wrote it and the Pontiff to whom it was addressed ; and the abundance of its quotations from Scripture testifies to the source from which flowed its serene self- confidence. It never descends to those depths of polemical objurgation in which Luther often wasted so much of his strength ; as it deals in the simplest and most straightforward way with the inner mysteries of the Christian life, we seem to catch an echo of the Deutsche Theologia and the pure ' De Wette, vol. i. p. 504. - Ibid. vol. i. p. 505. ' VII THE RECEPTION OF THE BULL 37 1 religious mysticism of a past age. To Leo the little trea- tise undoubtedly went in its Latin form, but it was at once published in German, somewhat abbreviated, and dedi- cated to Hieronymus Muhlpfort, the Burgomaster of Zwickau. Like all Luther's works, it ran rapidly through many editions.^ Meanwhile Eck was busy, though with various fortune. The South German bishops, when asked to publish the Bull, made difficulties and interposed delays. The Bishop of Freising, who was also administrator of Naumburg, issued letters to a number of his brother prelates, asking for their advice in this matter; some announced their intention of appealing to their several metropolitans ; all expressed doubt of the genuineness of the Bull. Even Eck's own diocesan, the -Bishop of Eichstadt, although he issued a mandate in favour of the Bull to the University of Ingolstadt (which was obeyed not without resistance), put off its publication in his own diocese. The Bishop of Augsburg received the Bull only after Eck had made a second demand upon him to that effect. The Bishop of Bamberg at first resolutely refused to publish the BuU; whether he afterwards consented to do so I do not know. At Erfurt the University took a similar course ; the Senate declared that the Bull, which Eck had transmitted to it in a letter, had not been regularly notified. Then Eck came to Erfurt himself — but only to find a rough reception. The students took the copies of the Bull that were on sale in the booksellers' shops, tore them in pieces, and threw them into the river, with the words, "BuUa est, iu aqu^ natet" (" It is a bubble, let it swim "). Complaints to the University authorities were made in vain ; they were of one mind with the rioters. At Torgau and at Leipzig the copies of the Bull publicly displayed were covered with filth ; at Doebeln, the insulting words were added : " The nest is here, the birds are flown." Duke Henry at Freiberg, Duke George's brother, would have nothing to say to it ; at Magdeburg it was affixed to the pillory. On the other hand, wherever Imperial influ- ence prevailed, its injunctions were carried out. The burning 1 (Latin) Erl. 0pp. v. a. vol. iv. p. 219 seg. ; (German) Ihid. D. S. vol. xxvii. p. 173. 372 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. of Luther's books ^ began in Charles's hereditary dominions at Louvain ; Koln followed the example. At Mainz, where Ale- ander himself presided over the ceremony, there was almost a riot. The executioner, standing on the scaifold, asked the people whether he, whose books were to be burned, had been lawfully condemned. There was a universal shout, of answer that he had not been condemned at all, whereupon the official leaped down, declaring that he would have nothing more to do with it, and Aleander with difficulty escaped the shower of stones which was poured upon him.^ It is not difficult to understand the pitch of righteous wrath, not unmingled with exasperation, to which Luther was roused by the proceedings of Eck and his abettors. " I rejoice," he writes to Spalatin, "that you at last see that the hopes of the Germans are vain, that you may learn not to put your trust in princes, and may cease to hang upon the judgment of men, who either praise or condemn what I do. If the Gospel had been such that it could have been either propagated or preserved by the Potentates of the world, God would not have entrusted it to fishermen." " It is a difficult thing," he says iu the same letter, "to differ from all prelates and princes, but there is no other way left of avoiding hell and the Divine anger." He ' Hutten wrote a poem in Latin genuineby Kampschulte (vol. ii. p. 39), verse, and another in German, on the by Kahnis (Die Deutsche Heformation, burning of Luther's books at Mainz, p. 317), by Gieseler (vol. iii. pt. i. p. 85), These, with some other satirical litera- and which Booking prints without ex- ture on the same subject, will be found pressing any suspicion. It was printed, in 0pp. Hutteni, ed. Bbcking, vol. though without indication of date or iii. p. 450 et seq. Much is made in place, by Schoefifer of Mainz, being sent them of Aleander's alleged Jewish to Hutten, it is supposed for that birth, and he is brought into un- purpose, by Crotus. It purports to be savoury comparison with Pfefferkorn. an appeal from the Eector, Masters, 2 De "Wette, vol. i. pp. 519, 522, Bachelors, Theological Professors, all 527, 542, 569, 570 ; Druffel, Die and singly, of the University of Erfurt Aufnahmeder BulW'Exsurge Domine" to all its members, announcing the von seiten einiger SuddeutscTien Bis- arrival of the Bull, and imploring them chofe (Sitzungsberichte der Acad, to resist it by every means in their der "Wissenschaften zu Miinchen, 1880 power. " Exhoptamur in Domino Jesu (Historische Klasse), p. 571 seq.); Rie- Christo, consurgite, agite animosius in derer, iVac^cAfeji, vol. i. p. 327; Kraft, verbo Christi, defendendo, pugiles re- Briefe u. Documente, p. 23 ; 0pp. sistite, reclamate, immo manibus pedi- Hutteni, ed. Booking, vol. i. pp. 366, busque rabidissimis illius Martini prae- 427, 436. dicti obtrectatoribus — repugnate." But In 0pp. Eutteni, ed. Booking, vol. this is not exactly the style of a Uni- V. p. 335, wiU be found a document, versity document, nor is it likely that entitled Intimatio Mphurdiana pro the authorities of an old and famous Martina Luther, which is accepted as place of learning would describe the VII HIS REPLY TO THE BULL 37 i thinks, as was his wont at any sharp crisis of his life, that tlie last day is at hand. He is quite sure that the reign of Antichrist has begun. It is impossible, he declares, for any to be saved who have either approved, or have not repudiated this Bull. His own course is clear ; he will appeal to the people. " 1 will not write privately to the princes, but I wiU renew my appeal in a public placard, asking for the adhesion of all Germans, great and small, and exposing the indignity of the thing." A series of controversial pamphlets came rapidly from his pen. The first, entitled Of the new Eckian Bulls and Lies, in which he took the ground that the Bull was a machination of his enemies for which the Pope was not responsible, is also remark- able as containing an outspoken defence of John Hus. At the time of the Leipzig disputation, he said, he had not read Hus's works, but the case was different now, and he at once put himself on the side of the murdered heresiarch, and condemned the treachery of the Fathers of the Council in the strongest terms. In the last four hundred years no book had been written like Hus's noble treatise on the Church. Ifot Hus's doctrines alone but those of Christ, Paul, Augustine, had been condemned at Constanz. For such articles would that he were worthy to be exiled, burned, torn in pieces ! In a second pamphlet. Against the Bull of Antichrist, which appeared first in Latin, then in an extended German version, he examined, though in a brief and cursory fashion, some of the accusations made against him in the Bull, which he now accepts as a genuine document. Then on the 1 7 th of November he formally removed his appeal from Leo X, whom he qualifies as an unjust judge, an obstinate heretic and schismatic, and an enemy and oppressor of Holy Scripture, to a free Christian Council.^ But what was the result of all this at "Wittenberg ? The Bull as "tyrannica ilia et plus quam is certainly not that of men who aimed diabolica exoommunicatio papistica." at classical parity of language. The Suspicion is still further excited by the document is not mentioned by Luther, recollection that, if in 1520 the "Poets" or alluded to by any contemporary were supreme in Erfurt, many represen- writer. On the whole I am inclined to tatives of the older learning — among agree with Kbstlin (M.L. vol. i. p. 797) them Usin^en — were still living and in not taking it seriously, teaching. The fact of a contemporary ^ Erl. D. S. vol. xxiv. pp. 17 seq., edition of the Intimatio is .not to be 31 seq., 38 seq.; 0pp. v. a. vol. v. pp. disputed, but may it not have been an 119 seq., 132 seq. ; Weimar, vol. vi. academical joke, such as the Erfurt p. 576 seq. ; Ibid. p. 595 seq. ; De humanists delighted in ? The Latinity Wette, vol. i. pp. 521, 522. 374 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. Elector was not without his fears for his University, which, if not with his express sanction, yet certainly with his tacit con- sent, had assumed the attitude of revolt against Eome. Some students left it ; timorous friends thought that more would follow. A canon of Breslau set the example ; the Bishop of Wtirzburg, Duke George, the city of Halberstadt were recall- ing their young men : the last might be reckoned at one hundred and fifty. But Spalatin soon sent a report which relieved his master's anxieties. Dr. Martin was joyful and of good courage : he was writing an exposition of the Magnificat, which he intended to dedicate to the young prince John Frederick ; he thought that what cowardice had been shown sprang from the timidity of a few priests. At Luther's house Spalatin had seen thirty letters of comfort and encouragement from princes and distinguished men; from Swabia and Pomerania, from Switzerland and Bohemia. Melanchthon's and Luther's lecture -rooms were crowded; both the Augus- tinian convent and the parish church were too small to contain the crowds that came to hear the latter preach. Wittenberg was full of industrious students, and new ones came every day. But the strangest paragraph in these letters — one which throws a new light on the relations between Luther and the Elector — is that in which Spalatin announces to his master that the former intends to burn the Bull publicly, as soon as he hears that his own books have been burned at Leipzig. Possibly, if all Spalatin's voluminous correspondence were brought out of the obscurity of manuscript into the daylight of print and annota- tion, we might find that the Elector's attitude to the Eoman See was one of assumed diplomatic caution, and that this was not the only instance in which he was forewarned of bold strokes of policy which he did not interfere to prevent.^ This intention of burning the Bull had been long taking shape in Luther's mind. As far back as the 10 th of July he had written : ^ "As for me, the die is cast : I despise alike the favour and the fury of Eome ; I do not wish to be reconciled to her, or ever to hold any communication with her ; let her condemn and burn my books : I, in my turn, unless I can ' Seckendorf, lib. i. sec. 28, § Ixxiii. p. 121 ; Miither, Aus dem Universitdts- p. 114 ; Zeitschrift filr K. G. vol. ii. u. OelehrtenUhen, etc. p. 429. 2 De Wette, vol. i. p. 466. vii BURNING OF THE PAPAL BULL 375 find no fire, will condemn and publicly burn the whole pontifical law, that swamp of heresies." At the end of November he had heard of the burning of his books at Louvain and Koln ; he was only waiting to hear that the same holocaust had taken place at Leipzig. But early in December he made up his mind that he would wait no longer. A handbill was circu- lated among the students, calling upon " the pious and studious youths" of Wittenberg to assemble at nine o'clock of the morning of the 10 th of December, outside the Elster gate, near the Spital, to witness " the pious and religious spectacle " of the burning of the books of the pontifical constitutions and the scholastic theology. It was a touch characteristic of Luther to add to his summons the words : " For perhaps now is the time in which it behoves that Antichrist should be revealed." A Master, whose name has not been preserved, had built up at the assigned place a pyre, upon which, when it was lighted, Luther placed first the Decretals, with other official documents of the Papacy, and finally the Bull, with the words, " Quia tu conturbasti Sanctum Domini, ideoque te conturbet ignis eternus " (" Because thou hast troubled the Holy One of God, so let eternal fire destroy thee ! ") This done he retired to his monastery, not many steps distant, accompanied by a crowd of Doctors and Masters who had witnessed the deed. The students, however, were not willing that what was to them, in part at least, a frolic, should end so soon. Some sang the Te JDeum, others celebrated the mock obsequies of the Decretals. In the afternoon a cart, driven and fiUed by masquers, and decorated in ridicule of the Bull, went about the town collect- ing books of the kind that had been already burned, and the fire was kept up, with all hilarious mockery, till late in the afternoon. The next day Luther solemnly assured the audience to whom he was expounding the Psalter, that there could be no salvation for their souls, unless with their whole heart they separated themselves from the rule of the Pope. It was excommunication against excommunication ; the Augustinian monk of Wittenberg against the Pontiff, whom all western Christians had hitherto obeyed as the vicar of Christ.-' ' De Wette, vol. i. p. 527. Exus- Acta, Erl. 0pp. v. a. vol. v. pp. 251-255 ; tionis Antibhristmarum Decretalium Kolde, Anal. Imth. p. 26. The language 376 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap. This decisive blow was followed and justified by two works ; one, An Assertion of all the Articles of Martin Luther con- demned in Leo X's Bull, which, dedicated to Fabian von Feilitsch on the 1st of December, was really published in January 1521. Of this, which appeared both in Latin and in German, it is not necessary to speak at length. The second, also issued in both languages. Why the Books of the Roman Pontiff and of his Biseiples have been burned hy Br. Martin Luther, was a justification of his act, in answer to objections which were raised by some of the Canon lawyers of Witten- berg. In it he enumerates thirty propositions, taken from the books of Canon Law and the Papal Decretals, which he sub- mits, without annotation, as being worthy of the fire. But the most important part of this little work is its prologue, in which Luther gives five reasons for his action. First, he declares that burning of bad books is an old custom, and appeals to the example of Paul at Ephesus. Secondly, he says that he is a baptized Christian, a sworn Doctor of Holy Scripture, and, moreover, a daily preacher, whose business it is to drive away all false, misleading, and unchristian doctrine ; nor is his con- science excused if there are others, in like office, who neglect their duty. Yet, thirdly, he would not have undertaken to do this unless he had found that the Pope and his officials were whoUy deaf to his instructions and warnings. Fourthly, he doubts, unless more evidence be forthcoming, whether the authors of the Bull are really obeying the commands of Leo, and ventures to hope that the books which he has burned, though authorised by his predecessors, are really not approved by him. And fifthly, because by the burning of his own books a great peril has come upon the truth, and suspicions may be raised among the untaught people, to the injury of many souls, (De Wette, vol. i. p. 532) in which adjeota per alios sunt : ut videant Luther announces to Spalatin the burn- inceudiarii Papistae non esse magnarum ing of the BuU is singularly brief virium libros exurere, quos confutare and business-like : ' ' Salutem. Anno non possunt. Haec erunt nova. " In MDXX, decima Decerabris, hora nona, the Zeitschrift f-ilr K. G. vol. iii. p. cxustisuntWittenbergae ad orientalem 325, will be found a curious poem on portam, juxta S. Crucem, omnes libri the burning of the Bull. It is in Papae — Decretum, Decretales, Sext. rhyming Latin verse, and may not Clement. Extravagant. , et Bulla novis- impossibly be the very song, or a re- sima Leonis X: item Summa Angelica, collection of it, which the students of Chrysoprasus Eocii, et alia ejusdem Wittenberg sang about the burning autoris, Emseri, et quaedam alia, quae pile. vii LUTHER'S COMPANIONS IN THE BULL 377 he, in his turn, by an instinct as he hopes of the Spirit, has burned books which there was no hope of amending and cor- recting to the preservation and confirmation of Christian truth. "With this his defence is complete, his rebellion final. He has set up his own judgment against the authority of the Church. He declares that his action has been suggested to him by the Spirit of God. He condemns the system of the mediaeval Church as unchristian, immoral, dangerous to men's souls. What is to be the result of his revolt, what is to become of himself he does not know ; if he is safe to-day, he may fall into the hands of his enemies to-morrow ; but he has spoken the truth that was in him, he has liberated his soul, and he is content. He writes to Staupitz, " I have burned the Pope's books and the Bull, at first trembling and praying, but now more joyful than in any other act of my whole life, for they were more pestilential than I thought." ^ It only remains briefly to mention the six persons whose names Eck had inserted in the Bull. Carlstadt was carried forward into the full stream of the Eeformation ; at this moment he, like Luther, wrote pamphlets in his own defence, and made a formal appeal to a General Council. Of Dolzig we know little, except that he died in 1523. Sylvius Egranus, if we may judge from a single sentence in one of Luther's letters, more than wavered in his allegiance to the new faith, and afterwards joined the ranks of those who, without going back to the old Church, severely criticised the doctrines and methods of nascent Protestantism. Bernard Adelmann of Augsburg thought a speedy retreat the best course open to him, and made his submission to Eck on the latter's own terms. There remained Lazarus Spengler and Willibald Pirckheimer, the former in full sympathy with Luther's theological position, the latter a man unaccustomed to submit, especially to clerical dictation. Had they been left to themselves they would probably have stood out; but the city council of Niirnberg, of which Pirckheimer was a leading member, while Spengler was its servant, was not yet prepared for revolt against Eome, and urged them to compliance. It is not necessary to follow the 1 DeWette, vol.i. p. 542 ; Erl. ed. Oio^. v.a. vol. v. pp. 154se2'., 257 seg'., D.S. vol. xxiv. pp. 55 scj., 161 sej. 378 LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION chap, vii story into its details ; to narrate how Eck insisted, as his right, that the submission should be made to himself personally, and in the terms which he prescribed ; how Duke William of Bavaria intervened in vain ; how Pirckheimer and Spengler made fruitless appeal to the Pope. Aided by the influence of the Council of Niirnberg, which was moved not by Catholic zeal, but by desire of peace, Eck finally triumphed. Even so, the fact does not seem to have been properly reported at Eome ; for both Pirckheimer's and Spengler's names appeared in the second Bull of January 3d, 1521. To some historians it has seemed doubtful whether, in consequence of the deaths of Leo X and Adrian VI, and the rapid progress of the Eeformation in Niirnberg, the two offenders were ever formally absolved by the Pope ; but the question has been definitely settled in the affirmative by a lately published extract from the archives of the Vatican. It might seem at first sight as if the chief result of the Bull of June 1520 had been to enable a vindictive theologian to wreak a petty personal spite upon enemies who otherwise stood too high for him to touch. But it also helped to make it clear that there was no longer any resting-place between "Wittenberg and Eome.^ ^ Riederer, Beytrag, passim ; Nach- mann, Joh. Eck, p. 178 seq.; Eoth. richten, vol. i. pp. 167, 318, 438 ; vol. Die Eiiifuhrung der Reform, in Num- ii. pp. 54, 179 ; for Sylvius Egranus, herg, p. 81 seq.; Brieger, pp. 224, 245 ; De Wette, vol. 1. p. 522 ; DoUinger, Balan, p. 18 (in the Bull, Spengler is Die Reformation, vol. i. p. 135. [For curiously calledJohannes), p. 279 : "Vi Egranus, see further an article by Dr. si mandano due brevi, uno per I'absolu- Buchwald, in Beitrdge zur sdchsischen tion di quel due da Norimberga." KirchengesehicMe, pt. iv. 1888.] For Vicecancellarius Aleandro. Pirckheimer and Spengler, Wiede- CHAPTEE VIII luthee's eelation to the theology of the latin chuech The moment at which we leave Luther waiting for a summons to the Diet of Worms is a convenient one at which to interrupt our narrative, in order to ascertain his exact relation to the theological system of the Latin Church. The year 1520 had been with him one of incessant literary activity. In it were published five of his most important works ; none of them long; but each marking a distinct advance in theory. These are the Sermon of Good Works} the tractate, Against the highly renowned Bomanists of Leipzig^ the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation^ the Prelude concern- ing the Babylonian Captivity of the Church^ and finally, the little treatise. Of the Freedom of a Christian Man!' At this time of his life literary activity meant for Luther a gradual working out of his characteristic principles of thought, and a more careful definition of his theological position. As we have already shown, he was not a reformer all at once. He kept his attitude of submission to the Church as long as he was able — longer indeed than could be logically justified, either by himself at the time or by his defenders since. He was sincerely reluctant to be thrust out of communion with her, and resented nothing so much as the imputation of heresy. At a time when he still held office in the Augustinian order ^ Erl. D. S. vol. xvi. p. 118 et seq. ; Weimar, vol. vi. p. 380 et seg. Weimar, vol. vi. p. 196 et seq. * Erl. 0pp. var. arg. vol. v. p. 13 ^ Erl. D. S. vol. xxvii. p. 85 et seq.; et seq. ; Weimar, vol. vi. p. 484 et seq. Weimar, vol. vi. p. 277 et seq. ^ (Latin) Erl. 0pp. vol. iv. p. 219 ; ^ Erl. D. S. vol. xxi. p. 274 et seq. ; (German) D. S. vol. xxvii. p. 173 ei seq. 38o LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. he maintained his characteristic priaciple of justification by faith ; he appealed from Aristotle, the Schoolmen, the Fathers, to Scripture ; nor did he feel that his action was inconsistent with sound Catholicism. It was only gradually that he perceived whither principles which had become incorporated with his being were leading him, and saw, after a hard struggle, that he must either give them up or rebel agaiast the Papacy. But on this account it is a difficult, and not a very useful task, to attempt to define Luther's theological position at any given moment. The period of flux and change is not yet passed. The road on which he is travelling is plain enough ; but he is not to-day where he was yesterday, and it is impossible to predict how far he will go. Wor must it be forgotten that the peculiarity of Luther's movement was the enunciation of priaciples of belief which, on being worked out to their logical issues, were found to be dissolvent of the Catholic system. He saw with the keenest insight, he felt with the hottest indignation, the practical abuses of the Church, and so advocated a large scheme of disciplinary reform. But there is no reason to suppose that had this been his sole object he would have been more successful in attaining it than others before him. Where reforming Popes had failed, where councils had decreed in vain, where princes had exhausted themselves in fruitless remonstrance, it was hardly likely that a simple monk, how- ever eloquent, however earnest, should prevail. It was only under the pressure of an attack which was felt to be far more deadly that at last, after innumerable hesitations and delays, the Council of Trent was assembled, and the work of the Counter-Eeformation begun. The question thus decided was of revolution as against reform, the rebuilding of the Christian Church on fresh foundations as against the repair and cleans- ing of the ancient structure. The facts of Christianity were taken for granted on both sides ; but Luther looked at them in a new light, approached them with fresh principles of belief, gave them a different practical application. Of course his contention was that in so doing he was only reverting to primitive ways, and restoring to the Church the freshness, the purity, the force of apostolic faith; while at the same VIII SCRIPTURE PUT IN THE BACKGROUND 381 time he owned that he derived his chief intellectual and religious impulse from the study of the Scriptures. But the fact remains that the new system was in irreconcilable opposition to the old, that Lutheranism could not live within the Church, and that if Lutheranism were victorious the Church must crumble away. And this irreconcilability was perhaps most .evident at the moment at which Luther's principles were first distinctly enunciated by himself and repudiated by Eome. Presently, when heretics of every kind bettered his instructions, and pushed his doctrines to conclusions for which he was not prepared, a reaction took place. He himself restated his principles, with limitations and safeguards, while it was reserved for a school of mediating theologians, of which Melanchthon was the head, to try to minimise the differences which separated Wittenberg from Eome. The Church of Eome claimed to be the visible representa- tive of Christ upon earth. Founded by the Saviour himself upon the rock of Peter, it was a divine organisation for the administration of the life of God to man, perpetually guided and governed by the Holy Spirit. Its claims, therefore, were exclusive : no other Church could live beside it ; Greeks and Bohemians were heretics and schismatics. It existed before the New Testament, which gave an account of its origin ; and it did not rest upon its authority so much as guaranteed its authenticity to its own members. In like manner the creeds had successively arisen out of its collective consciousness ; it possessed the power of developing and defining doctrine ; the Church was not tried by conformity to any independent standard of truth, but itself authoritatively declared what was truth. As a matter of fact the Scriptures had fallen into the background in the system of the mediseval Church ; first, overlaid with patristic comment and interpretation, and next, woven into the complex web of the scholastic philosophy, they had ceased to make an independent impression upon the clerical, and, much more, upon the popular mind. While such part of them as was susceptible of pictorial representation lived in the sculptured porch, or glowed in the painted window, their plain meaning was hidden by mystical and allegorical interpretation, which misapplied them to the support of the 382 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. Church's highest pretensions ; and the most childish legends of the saiats toolc their place in popular preaching by the side of the Gospel narratives. In like manner, to documents like the creeds, which were in different ways genuine monuments of Christian antiquity, were added forged decretals, upon the basis of which arbitrary canons of ambitious popes built up a vast system of ecclesiastical law, the origin of which was to uncritical students lost in the mists of an indefinite past, but which, in the comprehensiveness of its application to the facts of life, weighed with imposing authority on the minds of men. This mystic communion, which alone represented religion to "Western Europe, was the sole custodian of the Sacraments, the sevenfold channel by which the iadispensable gi-ace of God descended upon the spirit of man. Without participation in the sacraments there was no possibility of spiritual life in this world, or of salvation in another ; they were the machinery, so to speak, through which the grace, earned by the sufferings and death of Christ, was distributed to each single soul in order to restore or to confirm its spiritual health. A sacrament is defined by the Catechism of the Council of Trent to be " a sensible thing, which, by the institution of God, has the power of both signifying and effecting holiness and righteousness."^ It consists, therefore, of two parts : an outward sign and an inward grace, but without the external element the internal cannot exist. And it is further essential to the nature of sacraments, that except in certain rare and carefully specified cases, which are recognised as exceptions to a general principle, they can only be administered by an order of priests solemnly set apart for that purpose. These ideas are closely involved with that of the apostolical succession. Through every age of the Church the sacramental ordination of priests has been handed down from Peter, to whom Christ delivered the power of binding and loosing. The sacraments are thus the tie which not only binds all true members of the Church in one, but which unites every generation with that which has pre- ceded and that which is to follow it. And it is plain that if the grace of God, which is indispensable to the weakness of ' GatecMsnius ex decreto Cone. Trid. p. 116. VIII THE PAPAL SUPREMACY -fi^ humanity, can be communicated only in this way — and if sacra- ments can be administered only by a body of men who are organised into a hierarchy, obeying one code of laws and animated by a common purpose, they furnish the basis of a complete and most effectual discipline. Taken in its crudest form, as apprehended by the common people, the theory amounts to this, that the Church, by its methods of excom- munication and interdict, can shut out men and nations from any access to God ; that it can arrest in this world the flow of the waters of life, and in another close, by its authoritative fiat, the gates of heaven. History shows that so vast and well compacted a power as this cannot be safely entrusted to any organised priesthood, however high its aims, however rigid its principles of self- government. But the spiritual tyranny which lies involved in these principles was made at once more intense and more hateful by the fact that it was concentrated in one hand and used for the basest purposes. It is impossible, in this place, to give even the briefest sketch of the process by which the federated republic of the Church became at last an autocracy, and the Bishop of Eome, at first only jprimus inter pares, was developed into the Pope, who received unquestioned homage from all other prelates, and admitted only a qualified dependence upon General Councils. The establishment of the monastic, especially the mendicant orders, had much to do with it : the enforced celibacy of the clergy worked in the same direction. The claims of Papal authority, supported in documents the authenticity of which was not questioned till they had done their work, were urged by a succession of astute and ambitious pontiffs : the position of the popes was strengthened by the fact that they represented the rights and immunities of the Church against what was called the usurpation of emperors and kings. Nullum tempus occurrit Ecclesiae was a principle of , policy which the Court of Eome never forgot; a claim, tem- porarily abandoned, was never suffered to lapse ; and preten- sions, which powerful monarchs had successfully resisted, were renewed against weak ones. The international position of the popes, once universally acknowledged, afforded a starting-point for fresh advances. One monarch, one national church, was 384 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. played off against another, with the inevitable result of lessen- ing the independence of all. The captivity at Avignon, and the consequent schism in the Church, seemed at one time likely to frustrate the plans which such popes as Gregory VII and Innocent III had laid, and sanguine ecclesiastical reformers hoped great things from the Councils of Pisa, of Constanz, and of Basel. But the principle of the Papacy emerged stronger than ever from the chaos of discredited synods, and it was reserved for the popes of the latter half of the fifteenth and the first years of the sixteenth century to show how much shame and wrong Christendom could endure without making a de- cisive effort to shake off a yoke which ages of use had bound upon its shoulders. I have already spoken at length of the moral consequences of this state of things, and have enumerated the abuses under which every Christian nation, above all Ger- many, groaned, and not without frequent complaint. There is no real conflict of evidence here. That Eome was a sink of iniquity is a fact undisputed and' indisputable. That the Papacy strove to estabhsh its own autocracy over all national churches, and used the power which it had acquired in the most corrupt and venal way, is proved over and over again, not by the invectives of reformers, but by the complaints of Diets and the remonstrances of orthodox monarchs. Every system of sacramental religion has a necessary tendency to the external and the formal. The visible element of the sacrament naturally draws to itself the attention of the vulgar, to the comparative neglect of the internal and the spiritual. From the definition of a sacrament which has been given follows, almost by logical necessity, the inference, that, once the external conditions are fulfilled, no internal con- ditions on the side of man are of any consequence ; that the flagitious priest may administer, that the faithless recipient may partake of a real sacrament. A sacrament becomes an oi^s operatum : a thing done, an item set down to the credit side of the account, whatever the spiritual state of either giver or recipient may be. The same tendency of mind illus- trates itself in the theory of good works, which grew out of the Church's doctrine of penitence and the disciplinary system dependent upon it. The original basis of repentance, in the viii HIS OPPOSITION TO PRACTICAL ABUSES 385 love of Grod and the awe of His holiness, gradually faded out of view, and attention was concentrated on the number, the variety, the severity of the penitential acts themselves, rather than on the state of mind from which they flowed. Benefac- tions to the Church, pilgrimages, devotion to relics, repetitions of the Eosary, fastings, self-mortifications, acquired a value in themselves — untU at last, in the practical corruption of the doctrine of indulgences, a pecuniary equivalent was substituted for them, and escape from the consequences of sin was publicly sold in the market-place. The first step in the descent which led to this moral abyss was the introduction of an external element into the soul's spiritual communion with God : the second, the administration and interpretation of that external element by a priesthood, subject not only to the ordinary temptations of humanity, but to those which lie in wait for a sacred caste. It is a besetting weakness of mankind that the sign should usurp the place of the thing signified — that men should take refuge from the difficult simplicity of spiritual in the tangible attractiveness of formal worship. It is always difficult to state, with due theological accuracy, the principles and doctrines of the Latiu Church. For while it boasts a continuity of history and a tenacity of purpose such as no other Church can show, it always turns one side to scientific exposition and another to popular apprehension. The Neapolitan peasant, who chides his favourite Madonna for not attending to his petitions, looks at the cultus of the Saints in quite a different light from that in which it is presented by the Canons of the Council of Trent; and a recipient of the consecrated wafer may devoutly believe in the Eeal Presence without being able to give an intelligent account of the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Pious opinions are often suffered to grow up in the Church, to which in due time the seal of infallibility, may or may not be set, according to the exigencies of the case. The Counter -Eeformation quietly ignored the abuses which had gathered round the doctrine of indulgences ; while, on the other hand, we have seen in our own day that theory of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, about which Dominicans and Franciscans wrangled so long, adopted as an article of faith. But there can be no uncertainty as to either 2 386 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. the informing principles, the ruling tendencies of the Catholic system, or as to the practical abuses of it which confronted Luther. These were the formahty and hollowness which characterised so large a part of religious worship ; the super- stition attaching to relics, places of pilgrimage, indulgences, popular miracles ; the shameless immorality of Eome and the Papal Court ; the oppressions and extortions practised upon Germany in the name of ecclesiastical law and order; the scandals of clerical celibacy ; the abuses of monasticism ; the decline of national morals. The contention of Erasmus was, that a wider knowledge of Christian antiquity and the exten- sion of " good letters " would cure these evils ; of such men as Duke George, that the Church itself could effect a disciplinary reform, if only its princes and potentates would set about the task in earnest. It was the peculiarity of Luther to discern that " the whole head was sick and the whole heart faint," and that only new principles of belief could lead to a purer practice. The central and germinal point of Luther's theological system was his doctrine of justification by faith. When he was engaged in his cell at Erfurt in working out the problem of his spiritual fate, the diflEiculty which perplexed him was how to please God, and how to know, with a certainty that should bring peace with it, that he had pleased Him. The most painful performance of ritual duty involved no such assurance ; and it was equally absent from the struggles of his heart for a perfect love and a complete service. It lay in the very nature of the case that it was impossible to know that the conditions of acceptance with God were all fulfilled ; the troubled spirit loaded itself with perpetually fresh self- accusation ; nor could it venture to believe that there was no false note in the most passionate penitence, no flaw in the most carefully planned obedience. And the God who asked this full tale of sacrifice was no benignant Father stooping down in love upon His children, and meeting their offering half-way, but a stern, almost a vindictive Judge, who visited in wrath the servants who had failed to perform an impossible task. Out of this terrible slough of despond Luther was extricated by the doctrine of justification by faith. When once he believed that Christ had already done for him what vni JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH 387 he could not do for himself; that his sins and shortcomings were Christ's, Christ's strength, purity, obedience, his ; and that God, whom he could never believe would accept him for his own sake, was infinitely propitious to him for his Saviour's sake, the burthen fell from his shoulders, the sadness was lifted from his heart. The impossible task of pleasing God was at an end, for he knew that in Christ He was evermore gracious ; while for the hard service of the slave was substituted the child's happy obedience. And, first, from this sense of the free reconciliation of the soul with God, and next, from its intimate incorporation with the living holiness of Christ, flow an eagerness to please God, a natural inclination of the will towards all godliness, which are fruitful in good works. That which was before a toil, a task, a struggle, becomes an unforced and happy activity of the spirit, which performs the will of God because in its marriage with Christ it is one with God. Justification by faith, thus conceived, is essentially a spiritual, almost a mystical doctrine. It reduces the elements of religion to the simplest possible. On the one side there is the weak and sinful soul &f man, desiring, under the influence of divine grace, to be at one with God. On the other, there is the spectacle of the Saviour's love, the pathetic reality of His atoning sacrifice, the promise of reconciliation with the Father which He holds out. And faith grasps the promise — that is all. ISTothing more is needed. In that single act all the possibilities of the spiritual life are involved. It breeds grati- tude, affection, aspiration, self-mastery, self-denial; while all grow into finer strength and a more rounded symmetry as the soul draws vital energy from its mystic communion with Christ. At the same time there is nothing miraculous in this; the process is in strict accordance with well-known laws of human nature. Men are moved by their affections and passions : especially are all great moral changes effected in a certain fire of the soul; what they vehemently love draws them to itself and moulds them into its own likeness. So Luther found the force which, making him a new creature, gave him peace for struggle, happy obedience for hopeless effort, a merciful Father for an inexorable Judge, in the love and gratitude which the acceptance of the infinite boon 388 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. offered by Christ awoke in his heart. But in this process there is no formal element whatever. It is a matter simply between the soul and its Saviour. No material conditions arfe attached to it. It is all conducted in the secrecy of divine communion. It asks for no witnesses ; it needs no guarantees; it is complete in itself. A soul set free from the bondage of sin into the liberty of the sons of God has everything, and knows that it has everything. That this doctrine . needed to be fenced about on the side of antinomianism must have presented itself to Luther's mind at a very early date. If he had not seen it himself, his Catholic critics would have been quick to point it out to him. Duke George's characteristic objection to his preaching was that it would make the common people reckless. Nor was Luther himself always sufficiently careful in his enunciation of it ; his mind was naturally prone to that kind of paradox which consists in putting one side of a truth in the strongest language, without regard to balance or symmetry of statement. This was more and more the case as he grew older and felt more keenly the irritation of opponents; but even in 1520 he could say startling things of his favourite principle. " So you see," he says in the Babylonian Captivity of the Church} " how rich is a Christian or baptized man, who, even if he will, cannot lose his salvation, by no matter what sins, unless he will not believe. For no sin can damn him save unbelief alone." But as a rule he sees the danger into which men of less spiritual insight, of a poorer capacity of moral passion than himself, are likely to fall, in substituting a mere intellectual acceptance of the atonement for that living incorporation with Christ which can alone exercise a transforming power over the heart and life. And he is very anxious to show that the doctrine of justification by faith not only does not wither the fruits of godliness, but is the secret of their life and beauty. This is the object of the great Sermon of Good Works, which is one of the characteristic writings of the year 1520. In it he first states and defends the theory of the relation of faith to good works which has been drawn out above, and then proceeds to apply it to every precept of the Decalogue in turn. The result of thus showing 1 ErI. 0pp. V. a. vol. V. p. 59 ; Weimar, vol. vi. p. 529. vin JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH 389 how faith is the living principle of obedience is a complete system of Christian morals. It was therefore, in all probability, not a mere accident that Tetzel and the Indulgence were the first point at which Luther attacked the system of the Church. Between 1507 and 1517 he must have seen with questioning eyes many things in the Eoman administration of religion with which he could not wholly agree ; but he was not excited to protest, or led to dream of rebellion. But the theory which lay at the basis of the Indulgence cut the doctrine, which was the principle of his spiritual life, across the grain. Merits that could be transferred, even by the coarse commercial process of purchase ; good works that were efficacious to salvation, and yet were purely formal and perfunctory, involving no pious passion in those who performed them, nor springing from any spiritual movement within the soul, were altogether alien to the theory that the moral life of the believer had its origin and renewed its strength in faith in Christ. The Eefornier, as he looked back upon himself at Erfurt, wrestling for peace and holiness, and find- ing them in the assurance of divine forgiveness, stands at the opposite pole of the religious life from the burghers of Witten- berg, who flaunted in his face the letters of iadulgence which they had bought for so much hard cash of Tetzel at Jiiterbogk. He had no choice but to strike and spare not : this monstrous perversion of Christian theory was like that " other gospel " against which Paul warned his Galatian converts. But the practical effect of Luther's doctrine was not confined to the deadly blow which it dealt at the traffic in indulgences ; it extended to the whole moral administration of the Church, as it was popularly understood. For it substituted an inner for an outer standard in the estimate of good works. Not the regularity and the frequency of prayers ; not the toU of pilgrimages ; not the splendour of benefactions to the Church ; not the extremities of self-mortification — ^much more, not any vicarious fulfilment of the Church's demands which a man could purchase — but the faith which might or might not be hidden in these observances was the main thing. And it is plain that this is a matter of which God alone can be the judge. The Church cannot weigh, or measure, or estimate, or reward. 390 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. or sell it. And with the power of thus treating human merits, its accustomed hold upon the allegiance of the common people was gone. Human life in this world passed into a region whither the Church could not follow ; and it could no longer reign in purgatory" nor open the gates of heaven. Faith leaves the soul alone with its Saviour, and is, in its essence, incompatible with ecclesiastical estimate or mediation. The same principle, carried to its complete logical issue, is fatal to the sacramental theory of religion. For if faith, the immediate contact of the soul with God, be all that is required, and is indeed a force of spiritual change and renewal by which every other is superseded, no material mediation of any kind is necessary. Without faith no sacrament can be efficacious, with faith no sacrament can be essential. It is true that this sweeping view of the matter is an argument, not so much for reducing the number of sacraments from seven to three, as for abolishing them altogether ; a measure for which Luther, in view of the Scriptural institution of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, was by no means prepared. But that he saw whither his theory logically led, and was not altogether unwilling to go with it, is clear from the fact that he more than once quotes with approbation Augustine's dictum, Grecie, et mandiicdsti, "Believe and thou hast eaten." It would be only too easy to show that in after years he receded from this advanced position, and, under the influence of a doctrine of the Eeal Presence which he believed to be Scriptural, maintained that the body and blood of Christ were partaken of by the ungodly recipient. He is puzzled 6ven in 1520 to reconcile the omnipotent necessity of faith with the efficacy of infant baptism, and is obliged to fall back upon a vicarious faith of sponsors, and a certain prevailingness in the prayers of the Church. But the radical incompatibility between a doctrine of justification by faith only and a theory of sacraments remained ; and if Luther failed fully to recognise it, it became the acknowledged basis of a more advanced and logical Protestantism than his. The Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church made its attack on this line. A sacrament Luther defines to be a promise made by God to man, accompanied by a material vni LUTHER'S THEORY OF THE SACRAMENTS 391 sign which sets its seal, as it were, upon the covenant. Thus, for instance, in the Lord's Supper there is both a testament and a sacrament ; first, the will of the dying Christ, promising to His disciples the remission of their sins, and next, the sacrament, the bread and the wine, which are the body and the blood. But the essential thing here is the acceptance of the promise by faith. If that is so, no actual participation in the material symbols is necessary. "Believe and thou hast eaten." Yet if this is what the mass really is, it cannot be regarded as an opus operatum which can be performed for another, or set down to a second account : " as well," says Luther,'- " be baptized for another, be married for another, be ordained for another, be anointed for another." The case of baptism is similar. Here the divine promise is, "Whoso believes, and is baptized, shall be saved," and the place of faith in regard to the sacrament is plain enough, until the difficulty as to iafant baptism arises, to which I have already alluded. It is not quite so easy to bring penitence within the category of sacraments, as above defined ; Luther finds the word of promise is, "Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven," — but he fails to point out the correspond- ing signs. The other four sacraments — Confirmation, Marriage, Orders, Extreme Unction, he altogether rejects, as not coming within his definition. Possibly a rigid criticism might succeed in proving that in this cardinal point of controversy Luther was not always sure of his own theoretical ground, or did not apply his principles with logical thoroughness ; at the same time his general position is at once clear and unassailable. The faith of the receiver is the living element in the sacrament. All sacraments have been instituted for the furtherance of faith, which alone justifies. From this principle Luther draws many strong and sweep- ing conclusions. The mass is no sacrifice. Transubstantiation is an invention of men. Vows ought to be abolished as inter- fering with the efficacy of baptism^ From the abuse of the sacrament of penitence has arisen the multifarious tyranny of the Church's disciplinary system. In hke manner, to regard ^ Erl. 0pp. T. a. vol. v. p. 47 ; Weimar, vol. vi. p. 621. 392 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. marriage as a sacrament has given the Papacy an opportunity of arbitrary interference with the domestic affairs of men which ought to be taken away. On the whole the priaciple of faith makes for freedom. Of faith there can be no external judgment or regulation ; salvation is, so to speak, a transaction between the soul and its Saviour, with which no third person, not even the Church, has a right to meddle, and upon which no conditions other than God has laid down ought to be imposed. Nothing can be more definitely outspoken than Luther's assertion of Christian liberty against Papal or eccle- siastical aggression. "I say, therefore, that neither Pope, nor Bishop, nor any man, has the right of imposing a single syllable upon a Christian man, unless it be done by his own consent ; and whatever is done otherwise is done in the spirit of tyranny." ^ " Upon Christians no law can rightfully be imposed, either by men or angels, except so far as they are willing — for we are free from all." ^ Faith is anterior to the Church ; how then should the Church lay restrictions upon it, or annex conditions to it ? " For the Church is born from the word of promise by faith, and by the same is nourished and preserved ; that is, the Church is constituted by the promises of God, not the promises of God by the Church."^ Faith involves " the freedom of the Christian man." From the same great principle springs a new doctrine of the Church. It is the Communion of Saints, the assembly of those who have apprehended the promises of God by faith. But the principle of communion is internal, not external, and the lines of the invisible do not coincide with those of any visible Church. Nor can any excommunication do more than remove a man from external fellowship by depriving biTn of the sacraments, which are its material signs : it cannot touch the spiritual fellowship of which faith, hope, and charity are the essence. In a word, wherever faith is, there is the King- dom of God. Of this Church Christ alone is the Head, nor has He any earthly vicegerent. The Papacy, indeed, may be admitted as an actual fact : it exists, and is therefore to be ' Eri. 0pp. V. a. vol. v. p. 68 ; Weimar, v6l. vi. p. 537. Weimar, vol. vi. p. 536. ^ Erl. Qpp. v. a. vol. v. p. 102 ; " Erl. Opp. V. a. vol. v. p. 70 ; Weimar, vol. vi. p. 560. Yiii UNIVERSAL PRIESTHOOD OF CHRISTIANS 393 taken as the expression of the Divine Will : men should not withstand it, but bear it, as they would the Turk, were he set over them. To this statement, however, there are two prac- tical limitations. " First," says Luther, " I will not suffer it that men should enact new articles of faith, and blame, insult, condemn all other Christians as heretics, schismatics, infidels, for the sole reason that they are not under the Pope. . . . The second, that I will accept all that the Pope enacts, makes, and does, in order that I may judge it according to Holy Scripture. For me, he shall remain under Christ, and suffer himself to be judged by Scripture." -^ Each of these principles is sufficiently far-reaching. Although Luther himself would have been the last to acknowledge it, although in the very book from which this extract is taken,^ he speaks of human reason with a con- tempt that afterwards became habitual with him, they involve a declaration of the rights and duty of private judgment in matters of religion. Unhappily the time was not far distant at which he was to stand iu the position of an orthodox theo- logian, over against heretics who had pushed his characteristic doctrines to unwelcome conclusions, and his principles would not bear the strain. The lesson of perfect religious toleration is too difficult and complex to be mastered by any single generation : if ever learned at all, it is from the slow instruc- tion of ages. From this conception of the Church we pass, by no violent transition, to the theory of the universal priesthood of Chris- tians. The beHever, iacorporated with Christ by faith, receives from Him his royalty and his priesthood. We are all kings, all priests like the Saviour, with whom we are one. Accordiug to this sweeping doctrine, there is no difference between the peasant and the priest, save one of office only. The former tills the ground, the latter administers the sacraments, and that is all. Orders are not a sacrament, but simply a matter of Church organisation ; and the " indelible character " of the priesthood is a figment of men. Suppose a body of Christian believers cast upon a desert island, who by popular election ^ Wider dm, hochheruhmten Boman- ^ Erl. D. S. vol. xxvii. pp. 93, 94 ; istenzu Leipzig, Erl. D. S. vol. xxvii. p. Weimar, vol. vi. p. 291 seq. 136 ; "Weimar, vol. vi. p. 322. 394 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. chose one of their number to perform the functions of a priest — a priest in very deed he would be as long as he held his office, and when he resigned it, or was deposed, would become a layman again like the rest. It is plain that this principle, from which Luther never swerved, and which he apprehended with much more logical completeness than the analogous prin- ciple of the purely spiritual character of the sacraments, effectually undermined the disciplinary system of the Papacy. It abolished the religious monopoly of the Church. It made it possible for a national Church to come into existence without at the same time cutting itself off from fellowship with the Divine Head and the invisible communion of Saints. At one stroke it freed those who accepted it from the tyranny of all existing priesthoods. More important still, it was a further step in the direction of bringing the individual believer into personal communion with God. No sacred caste could hence- forth claim a peculiar privilege of presenting men's homage to God, of conveying God's grace to men. Whatever functions rightly belonged to the priesthood were thrown open to all the faithful. Throughout the long mental processes which had led Luther to these results his method had been largely Scriptural. It was under the influence of the Bible that he had emancipated himself from the scholastic theology which had been instilled into him at Erfurt. Augustine had taught him much ; the Deutsche Theologia had interwoven itself with the stuff of his thinking ; but it was in his growing knowledge of the Scrip- tures that he had rebelled against Aristotle and the Schoolmen, and had recognised at last that there was an authority in matters of religion behind the Fathers, above the Pope, to which even Councils were subject. He owed his own spiritual liberation, for the most part, to words of Scripture the meaning of which he had painfully spelled out, first in Latin, then in Greek and in Hebrew. Under these circumstances we need not wonder that the Bible made so deep an impression upon him as to overbear in his mind the spirit of humanism. He soon came to value the study of the ancient languages only for the help which they gave in the interpretation of the Scrip- tures, and, for a while at least, carried away with him in the vm LUTHER'S RULES OF INTERPRETATION 395 same direction that born humanist, Melanchthon. No sooner had he taken his degree of Dociior of Theology than he began courses of exegetical lectures, which, while they attracted large audiences and produced a deep religious impression, gave the lecturer himself the opportunity of gradually beating out his theological convictions and co-ordinating them into a system. Presently we shall note that his way of looking at Scripture was far from scientific, as indeed in that age it could not but be ; and he did not yet see the necessity of some theory by which his doctrine of salvation could be brought into intel- lectual accord with the sum of Scriptural facts and utterances. What had really happened was, that the Pauline theology, to which Augustine had first introduced him, had taken hold of him in the Apostle's living and burning words, had transformed his whole nature, had brought him out of darkness into light, had given him peace for disquietude. Naturally, what had so moved and strengthened him he proclaimed to the world. The words of his teacher might have been perpetually upon his lips, " I believed, and therefore have I spoken." Luther began by the unquestioning acceptance of the scholastic method of interpreting Scripture. According to this, it has a double sense, one literal, the other mystical or spiritual. The latter is threefold, as the old verse runs — " Litera gesta docet, quid credas Allegoria, Tropologia quid agas, quid speres Anagogia.'' The literal is thus the least important sense ; the true gold of Qriptural thought lies deep beneath the su:^'ace,'^d~is^nl2_ to _ be gor^ ariTy-ffluch— patrent digging. Another difficulty is that the theory of the fourfold "sense' at once throws the reins of critical restraint upon the necks of commentators, and takes away all possibility of certain interpretation. Any one who has the slightest knowledge of mediaeval exegesis knows that while the plain significance of Scripture was constantly passed over with contemptuous neglect, the wildest absurdities of mystical comment were the delight of interpreters, who vied with one another in their efforts to find evidence for the doctrines and practices of the Church in the unlikeliest places. It says much for Luther's good sense and critical insight that he gradually abandoned a method which was not only 396 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. universally practised by orthodox theologians, but could claim the powerful advocacy of Erasmus. In his earliest exposition of the Psalter, indeed, he is upon the traditional ground. He makes the distinction between the literal and the mystical sense of Scripture, the same as that which the Apostle draws between "the letter that killeth and the Spirit that giveth life " — an identification against which he afterwards contended with great vehemence. He goes so far in one passage as to announce a sixfold sense in Scripture. But by the time we come to the "Decem Praecepta Wittenbergensi praedicata populo" of 1518, all this is changed. He enumerates among the offenders against the Eighth Commandment " those foolish and inane dreamers who, playing with the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical sense," make of Scripture what they will.^ He thinks that such a fourfold interpretation of the Bible is tolerable only if regarded as rudiments for beginners. In 1521 he is prepared to speak more strongly stOl. In one of his pamphlets against Emser, who had declared that if the Bible were to be interpreted literally, it were better to read a legend of Virgil's, he says,^ " The Holy Ghost is the all simplest writer and speaker that is in heaven or on earth: therefore His words can have no more than one simplest sense, which we call the scriptural or literal meaning." Whether Luther, throughout his career, strictly adhered to this principle, it is not now necessary to inquire : it was the general law of his teaching, and its importance cannot be over-estimated. This new canon of interpretation was one of the last in a series of facts which restored the Bible to a position in the Church from which it had been long excluded. It was to the task of multiplying copies of the Scriptures that the new art of printing first addressed itself. Editions of the Vulgate were repeatedly issued during the latter half of the fifteenth century ; the first Hebrew Bible was printed at Soncino in 1488, the first New Testament in Greek at Basel in 1516. In like manner Bibles in both High and Low German had multiplied during the same period ; and though books were still scarce and dear, compared with the abundance and the cheapness of later times, the Scriptures had become accessible to all who 1 "Weimar ed. vol. i. p. 507. ^ Erl. D. S. vol. xxvii. p. 259. VIII LIMITS OF LUTHER'S BIBLICAL CRITICISM 397 seriously desired to read them. Now, for the first time, it was announced that they were of private interpretation : that to ascertain , their meaning, and to receive their inspiration, no special erudition, no acquaintance with artificial rules of exegesis, no practice in mystical speculation were necessary, but only an attentive mind and a docile heart. On the one side, this principle laid the axe to the root of the jungle of absurd and contradictory theological comment which had over- grown the literal and historical sense of Scripture. On the other, it brought men's minds into immediate contact with a literature which experience has proved to be more powerful and quickening than any other. Men have misinterpreted the Bible in all ages, have drawn from it many unwarranted inferences, have built upon it many unstable edifices of doctrine,, but they have never failed to be moved by it. The fresh interest of its narratives, the charm and the warning of its examples, the power of its words to touch the heart and to prick the conscience, attest the religious life which breathes and moves in it ; and its spell is naturally the strongest upon a generation that has grown up in ignorance of it. And what made it particularly powerful as an engiae of reformation was its picture of the primitive Church, which came like a revelation to men whose only idea of a Christian community was that with whose vices and whose weaknesses they were only too well acquainted. To know Peter threw a new light on the character and pretensions of his Eoman successor. In such Prince-prelates as at once oppressed and plundered Germany, it was hard to trace the lineaments of the Apostles. Whatever arguments might be adduced in defence of existing institutions — :monasteries, celibate priests, indulgences, veneration of relics, cultus of Mary and the Saints, — it ,was startling to find no trace of them in the New Testament. The Church was, as it were, put on its defence, and invited to account for its divergence from primitive purity and simplicity. At the same time, we do not find that Luther ever dis- tinctly asked himself whether the authority of Scripture was based on anything more ultimate than itself, or appreciated the force of the objections that might be urged against it. These difficulties belong to a later age and a different mood of mind. 398 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. It was not till modern criticism had done its slow work upon the Bible that the peculiarities of its structure and the diffi- culties, scientific, historical, doctrinal, which arise out of them, raised a host of questions as to the ground of its authority which are stUl the subjects of eager controversy. Some of the more obvious of these difficulties Luther soon began to feel, and had his own trenchant way of settling — a way which can- not be described as critical. But in 1520, and in the years that preceded, it is truest to say that the newly-revealed Bible had wholly taken possession of him. He was too deeply im- pressed with the truth that he found there, and the Hfe which flowed out of it, to raise cavils as to its authority. It answered for him aU the questionings of his eager soul, his restless intellect. It began by setting him free from the bondage of sin and death ; it sustained him in his successive struggles with hostile authority ; it vindicated itself as above Aristotle, Fathers, Schoolmen, Pope, Councils. He does not seem to have been tempted to go a step farther, and to ask whether the ultimate ground of authority was not in the interpreting miad rather than in the interpreted text. Till he presently found- by woful experience that men could read the Bible with open eyes and not come to the same conclusions as himself, he thought that the path was so plain that " not even a wayfaring man could err therein ; " the splendour of the light was every- thing, the keenness of the perceiving eye nothing. He had no inclination to inquire into the ground of Scriptural authority. The weight and force of the appeal which the Bible made to him were enough. Nor did he ask himself. What was the Bible? Were aU parts of it of equal authority ? Were there books which, from uncertainty of authorship or want of general recognition by the Church, made a less imperious demand than others upon the mental submission of believers ? In the dispute with Eck at Leipzig on the subject of purgatory, Luther had drawn a dis- tinction between the authority of the books of Maccabees ^ and others which were more indisputably canonical, while in his Besolutiones super propositionibus suis Zipsiae disputatis he for ^ Weimar ed. {Disputatio L Ecdi et M. Lutheri Lipsiae habita, 1519), vol. ii, p. 324. yiii CARLSTADT ON THE CANON 399 the first time uttered that disparaging judgment of the Epistle of James which he so often repeated in terms stni stronger.-' It was upon the latter provocation that Carlstadt entered the lists with a little book, De. Canonicis Scripturis libellus^ which was published at Wittenberg in the autumn of 1520, and fol- lowed a few months afterwards by a German translation, in some points altered from the original, Welche Bucher Biblisch seint. Carlstadt, who had been expounding the Epistle of James to a class of students, seems to have fancied that Luther's disparagement of that letter had something to do with jealousy and animosity towards himself, and devotes a dispro- portionate amount of space to the proof, that even if its Apos- tolical authorship is uncertain it is not on that account the less canonical. But the tract is a remarkable one, inasmuch as it starts a discussion which, however important and necessary it may seem to modern eyes to be, the Eeformers almost unani- mously agreed to neglect. We find little to put in line with Carlstadt's Lihellus till we come to Faustus Sociaus, Be Sacrae Scripturae Auctoritate. In Carlstadt's treatment of the inner ground of the authority of Scripture there is nothing new. He founds it upon the words of Scripture. He collects passages in which Biblical writers or speakers claim a divine origin and authority for what they utter. What is curious here is the use which he makes of Augustiae, quoting his dicta so frequently and with such absolute respect as to expose himself to the imputa- tion of wishing to base the authority of the Bible on that of the great African Father. But as to the weight and supremacy of the authority of Scripture he is very explicit. It excludes aU other authority. It furnishes the test by which all other writings may be tried. Any Christian layman is, by its help, placed in a position to judge aU Bishops and Doctors. It is above Popes, above Councils. No usage of the Church, how- ever venerable, however universal, is to be quoted against it. But this is only on condition that the interpreter of Scripture ^ Weimar ed. vol. ii. p. 425. Conf. TAeologiae Doctoris et Archidiaconis De Captiv. Bahyl., Erl. 0pp. v. a. vol. Wittenbergensis, 1520. A reprint of V. p. Ill ; Weimar, vol. vi. p. 569. this rare and curious tract will be found ^ De Canonicis Scripturis lilellus D. in Credner, Zur Geschichte des Kanons, Andreae JBodensiein Carlstadii Sacrae HaUe, 1847. 400 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. surrenders himself entirely to its guidance. He is to keep himself strictly within its bounds ; nor does it tolerate any admixture of human tradition. And it is the Christ who lives and breathes under the letter of Scripture who imparts to the simple soul the grace of iaterpretation. Externally, the Canon defines the Scripture. This is Carl- stadt's distinguishing principle ; his book treats " de Canonicis Scripturis." There is an audible protest in it against Luther's subjective principle of judgment, which he afterwards so freely applied, making the authority of a Biblical book depend upon his estimate of its contents, not frankly accepting the contents on the authority of the book. With Carlstadt, on the other hand, the Canon is everything ; nor does he seem to see that historically it only represents the gradually formed opinion of the Church, which thus becomes the guarantor of Scripture. With this important limitation, his treatment of the subject is fairly scientific. He goes for information as to what the Canon is to Augustine and to Jerome ; nor, considering the doctrinal prepossessions of Wittenberg, is it little to his credit that he chiefly follows the latter. His view is, that while there is a sharp dividing line to be drawn between books that are, and books that are not, included in the Canon (as, for instance, between the Hagiographa and the Apocrypha of the Old Testa- ment), so within the Canon also writings are capable of classi- fication. Taking the well-known division of the Old Testa- ment into Law, Prophets, and Hagiographa, he ventures upon a similar division in the New. First, he places the Gospels ; next, thirteen epistles of Paul, the first Epistle of Peter, and the first Epistle of John ; and last of all, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of James, the second Epistle of Peter, the second and third Epistles of John, the Epistle of Jude, and the Apocalypse. In what class the Acts of the Apostles is to be placed he failed to explain. Carlstadt's third class plainly corresponds to the "Anti- legomena '' of the ancient Church ; and the books which he places in it stand on a lower level of authority from the con- joint fact that some uncertainty hangs about their authorship, and that they have not always enjoyed universal recognition. But there are evident traces throughout his book of what we viii CARLSTADT'S THREE CLASSES OF N.T. BOOKS 401 should now call the critical method. He detects signs of various authorship in the Pentateuch, and points out that Moses could not have written the account in Deuteronomy of his own death. He accepts Jerome's reasonable belief that not all the Psalms are the productions of David, in preference to Augustine's absurd theory that those which are ascribed to other poets were written by him in the spirit of prophecy. He follows Jerome and Erasmus in rejecting the last chapter of Mark. But his most remarkable position — one which Luther would have fiercely contested, one which opposes itself to the subsequent course of Protestant thought in this matter — is, that of the three classes of New Testament books the authority of the first is to be preferred to that of the second, the authority of the second to that of the third. On this ground the word of Paul is not to be put on a level with that of Christ. " Oportet enim servos dominis obsequi, atque sicut spiritus Apostoli in came non fuit par vel major Domino, ita quoque pectus Paulinum sub Uteris non habet autoritatis tantundem, quantum habet Christus." ^ It is in accord with this principle that an instructed servant of Christ will apply himself to each of these classes of books in order : first to the evangelical, next to the apostolical, lastly to the catholic anonymous. Nor is it altogether inconsistent with his objective method that Carlstadt should find in some Biblical books utterances of surpassing and supreme authority, for these are passages which purport to be the voice and words of God Himself. Plainly the adoption of Carlstadt's principle would have made it impossible for the Eeformer to embrace a Pauline theology, except under the condition of finding it in the books of first and greatest authority, the Gospels themselves. I do not find that Carlstadt's book produced any great effect. Modern critics, looking at it in the light of long subse- quent controversy, pronounce it epoch-making ; but in truth it made no epoch. The passion and enthusiasm of the Eeformation spent themselves in quite different directions : while Carlstadt's aberrations, under the influence of Thomas Miinzer and the prophets of Zwickau, which date from 1522, 1 Carlstadt, Be Canoniois Scripturis, ed. Credner, § 161. 2 D 402 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. deprived him of much influence over nascent Protestantism. Yet he had not only thought out the relation of the Bible to religious belief more completely than Luther, but was on the track of a more scientific theory. The time for this contro- versy had not yet arrived. It was not till ages of gradual education in criticism had forced upon the attention of Europe the literary facts of the Bible, and placed them in their true light, that the question of its authority could be satisfactorily discussed. In 1520 Luther for the first time drew up a scheme of practical Church reform. It occupies the latter and the larger half of his " Address to the Christian nobility of the German nation on the amendment of the Christian estate " — the nobility including the newly-elected Emperor as their natural head. To them he turned in despair of the clergy : " if God be willing by means of the laity to help His Church, since the clerical order, to whom the business more properly belongs, is become quite indifferent." ^ It is a very precise document, showing that its author had fully apprehended the facts of the case, and deeply sympathised with the feelings of annoyance and indignation against the Church which moved so many of his countrymen. After a brief introduction, in which he describes and undermines the three walls of defence which the Papacy had set up (the principles, first, that the spiritual power is above the temporal ; secondly, that no one but the Pope can interpret Scripture ; thirdly, that no one can call a council but the Pope), he marshals under twenty-eight heads the articles of reform on which a General Council might with advantage deliberate. These are not set out in logical sequence, or dis- criminated from each other with anxious care. The Address was written in fiery haste, and was intended much more to move men's indignation and enthusiasm than to furnish " agenda " for any deliberative meeting. Had there been any prospect of such a synod being called together, Luther would no doubt have been prepared with a more exact statement of grievance. In his own eager way, however, he now goes over the whole ground. He demands that the splendour and luxury of the Papal court should be replaced by a simpler 1 Erl. D. S. vol. xxi. p. 277 ; Weimar, vol. vi. p. 404 e.t seq. VIII HIS SCHEME OF PRACTICAL REFORM 403 mode of living, and that the vast crowd of hangers-on at Eome, from the cardinals down to the meanest servant who hopes to be rewarded with a German benefice, shall no longer feed on the spoils of foreign Churches. He would abolish first- fruits, pallia, reservations, commendams, and all the devices by which lucrative patronage is concentrated in the hands of Eome. No cases of conscience should be reserved for Papal decision : all appeals of civil action to Eome should cease. The bishops are no longer to take an oath of allegiance to the Pope, and the Emperor's independence of him is to be acknow- ledged. Pilgrimages to Eome and masses for the dead are to be abolished ; there is to be no more kissing of the Pope's toe ; the monastic, and especially the mendicant orders are to be restricted, and priests are to be allowed to marry. The power of the interdict is to be done away, and that of excommunica- tion Kmited. All festivals save Sunday are to be abolished ; there are to be no more indulgences; permissions to eat butter in Lent are no longer to be sold : at one stroke the Canon Law is to be swept away. It was high time, Luther thought, that some terms should be come to with the Bohemians, so that mutual calumny, hatred, and envy should cease. The Church should acknowledge that Hus and Jerome of Prag had been unrighteously and treacherously burned at Constanz, whether they were heretics or not. " Heretics should be over- come with arguments, not by fire : if the latter be the true method, then are the executioners the most learned doctors upon earth." ^ Erudite bishops and doctors — not cardinals or Papal inquisitors — should be sent to Bohemia on a message of reconciliation ; and he advises that the Hussites should be allowed to continue their practice of communion in both kinds. But Luther is much too fearless and too thorough a reformer to confine his criticisms and recommendations to matters of ecclesiastical interest alone. He wishes to abolish mendicancy by instituting something which we should now call a Poor Law. He advocates a sweeping reform of the universities, involving the degradation of Aristotle from his pride of place, and a largely extended study of the Scriptures. In every German town he would set up a girls' school in which ' Erl. D. S. vol. xxi. p* 341 ; Weimar, vol. vi. p. 455. 404 LUTHER AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROME chap. the maidens should learn to read the Gospel, either in Latin or in their own tongue. He inveighs in burning words agaiast undue splendour in attire ; he is strong against usury, or, to speak with more exactness, against lending out money at interest : he thinks that Germany would be better without any foreign trade, which he holds to be the cause of luxury and effeminacy. Excessive eating and drinking was a vice for which Germans were unhappily notorious ; nor does he spare the lash. " Last of all," he says,^ " is it not a lamentable thiag, that we Christians should have among us free and public brothels, although we are all baptized into chastity ? " He cannot think that they are necessary. " If the people of Israel maintained itself without such an abuse, why should not Christian people be able to do as much ? Yea, as many towns, markets, villages, hamlets are without such houses, why should not great cities be the same ? " "I know very well," he says,^ at the end of his long list of actual grievances and desirable reforms, " that I have sung a high note, have put forward many things that will be regarded as impossible, have attacked many abuses too fiercely. But what should I have done ? It has been laid upon me to say these things : if I could I would also do them. I had rather that the world were angry with me than God : man cannot take from me more than my life." Animated and strengthened by these principles, and striving towards these practical ends, Luther expected his summons to the Diet of Worms : a new Athanasius, alone, not agaiast the world, but against the Church. But it would be unfair, even at this crisis of his story, to look at the Catholic system only through the medium of his strong and, in the main, justi- fiable invective. Three centuries and a half have passed away since Protestantism, at the Diet of Augsburg, asserted its right to separate ecclesiastical organisation, and the Catholic Church stUl exists, almost unimpaired in power and splendour, if no longer able to put forth the old claim to universality. The impartial historian must admit that, however deep and iu- veterate were the practical corruptions which in part caused 1 Erl. D. S. vol. xxi. p. 358 ; [Weimar, vol. vi. p. 467, witli editor's note]. 2 md. p. 360. . VIII THE PERMANENCE OF CA THOLICISM 405 and justified Luther's revolt, she had within her a power of self-reformation, which, in the latter part of the sixteenth cen- tury, bore good fruit. Though her type of holiness be not the Protestant, it is one which exercises a powerful attraction over some forms of character, and has a marvellous plastic force : in all. ages, even those of her moral degradation, she has been a prolific mother of saints. Many minds, weary of q^uestioning the grounds of faith, gladly take refuge in the arms of authority ; her organised piety, her careful discipline, are inexpressibly grateful to spirits that feel themselves incapable of self-guidance ; the splendour of her ritual appeals to souls which are best approached through the medium of the senses. Perhaps no Church has completely realised the idea of author- ity ; none has wholly abstained from interference with indi- vidual liberty ; but the authoritative Church and the voluntary assembly of free men will always continue to exist side by side, each uttering an eternal protest against the other, yet both necessary to supply the various rehgious wants of mankind. And each, perhaps, answers its end more perfectly because it lives in the presence of the other. CHAPTER IX THE DIET OF WOEMS The Diet of the Holy Eoman Empire which was held at Worms in the first months of 1521 is now chiefly memorable as the occasion on which Luther was brought face to face with the Emperor and the Estates, and decisively refused to draw back from the position which he had taken up. But what is to us the central fact of the Diet was to the German princes and cities who took part in it only an episode in its proceedings, though an episode of absorbing interest. It was Charles's first meeting for deliberative and executive purposes with his new subjects. Many questions, both of foreign and domestic policy, loudly cried out for settlement. There was the old difficulty of a " Eeichsregiment " — an administrative body which, in the absence of the Emperor, should take charge of the internal affairs of the Empire. The Supreme Court of Justice, which should do right between prince and prince and settle all appeals from inferior tribunals, still waited to be constituted. The Emperor asked for an army, to be furnished in due proportions by the several States, which should form his escort into Italy, when, in pursuance of due precedents, he went to Eome to be crowned. But again, these things, right and necessary as they might be, all cost money : Germany was both unused and un- willing to tax herself ; on what principle were the contributions from the several Estates to be assessed, and how was the money to be collected ? In short, all the questions which, when Maximilian was a young man, Berthold of Mainz had tri^d to settle, were still open, and the promised era of national adminis- CHAP. IX THE EMPEROR'S DIFFICULTIES 407 tration and organisation had not begun. In the meantime, the Emperor's situation was one of extreme difficulty. In Spain the Commons were in open insurrection against his authority, and his viceroy, Cardinal Adrian of Tortosa, who was main- taining an unequal fight with them, begged for his speedy return to his Peninsular dominions. He was in the utmost straits for money ; he had even borrowed 20,000 gulden without interest from Franz von Sickingen.^ Spain had not yet begun to profit by the discovery of America. In Germany he had inherited little but his grandfather's debts. At the moment of his elevation to what seemed to be the pinnacle of earthly greatness, he was at once hampered by vulgar embarrassments and exposed to grave dangers. But the greatest peril threatened from the side of his unsuccessful competitor for the Empire, Francis I. of France. It was the old rivalry between France and Burgundy, manifesting itself on a wider field, and with issues that affected the civilised world. Each of the rivals might easily persuade himself that he had a just claim to preponderance in Europe. Francis wielded the whole power of France, now for the first time consolidated into a single State, and was flushed with his recent military success in Italy, which had made him master of the rich duchy of Milan, hitherto a fief of the Empire. On the other hand, Charles added to the hereditary dominions of Austria and Burgundy the kingdoms of Spain and Naples, the prestige of the Empire, and the rapidly fulfilling promise of the Indies. And it was plain that the shock of these rival powers would take place in Italy. Each had already a footing there, more or less firm, and each was eagerly desirous to extend and strengthen his influence. For many years the web of diplomatic intrigue was being woven and pulled to pieces; it had been so when Alexander VI and Julius II filled the fisherman's chair, and the feeble and irresolute Maximilian had been the plaything of their policy. Now the great question was, which side would the Pope take ? It was hardly Likely that he would wish to have the Papal dominion shut in between ■ the Empire on the north and Charles's Arragonese inheritance on the south. Then Leo was a Florentine and a Medici, and 1 Ulmann, Franz v. Siddngen, p. 163. 4o8 THE DIET OF WORMS chap. therefore not unmindful of the old connection of his house with France ; what better thing than to play off the new master of Milan against the old, and so relieve himself of the pressure of an Imperial influence over the whole of Italy ? It is true- that Charles was in his heart a much truer son of the Church than Francis, and as far as that went, more likely to advance her interests. But throughout the whole course of this tangled history it is instructive to note how small is the part played by the religious convictions of the chief personages in it. If religion can be made a lever for the attainment of any distinct worldly advantage, by all means use it ; if not, let it be put aside as one of the inferior motives which no wise man takes into account. It is not the good of the Church which the Pope has in view when he hesitates as to which of the two great rivals he shall support, but the advantage of the Papacy and the interests of the Medicis. It was thus that the fate of Luther became a matter of European policy. Charles had no sympathy with him either doctrinal or practical. Adrian of Utrecht had brought him up a sound Catholic ; and when he saw Luther at Worms he is reported to have said, not without an accent of contempt, " This man will never make a heretic of me."^ But for the larger interests that were involved, he would have crushed him as remorselessly as most men set their foot upon a worm. Still, Luther was a power in the German land. One great Electoral House protected him. He had friends in all the chief com- mercial cities. The people everywhere read his sermons and pamphlets eagerly. The feeling against the oppressions and extortions of the Papacy was strong in every class of society from the highest to the lowest ; and he was looked upon by many as its representative and embodiment. Already he was excommunicated by the Church ; should he also be placed under the ban of the Empire ? Charles was willing enough to run the risk of popular discontent in thus making himself the instrument of Papal policy — but it must be upon terms. JEe had no mind to pleasure the great Italian ally of Francis. If the Pope were willing to ally himself with him, and in the great struggle that must come throw the weight of the Papal ' PallaTioini, lib. i. cap. 26. INCREASING POWER OF HOUSE OF AUSTRIA 409 lence into his scale, he would be well content that the sup- 3sion of heresy should be one article of the treaty. Such an mce between Charles and Leo was indeed concluded on the of- May 1521 ; and the Edict of Worms, by which Luther I condemned, was — perhaps by a curious chance — antedated ;he same day. But now that diplomacy has revealed to a LOUS posterity some of her secrets, it is not difficult to see J Luther's fate trembled so long in the balance. Before we turn to the history of the Diet of Worms it f be the fit time to notice a series of transactions which mented the already prosperous fortunes of the House of stria. For the moment Charles was the sole possessor of its ly kingdoms and dignities. But the position of his only ther Ferdinand required to be considered. More popular n Charles, he was commonly credited with the possession of iter talents, and it was doubtful how far, at least in the editary dominions of the House of Austria, a strict law of nogeniture prevailed. Then there were old treaties of mar-/ fe between the Hapsburgs and the Jagellon dynasty in lemia and Hungary. When Wladi slaus died ___ in 1 5J.6, zing but one feeble son Lewis, only ten years old, and a L jle daughter Anna, there was plainly room for one of those liant marriages on which the prosperity of Austria has n so largely founded. It is needless in this place to recite negotiations in their chronological order : suffice it to say, t in November 1520 they came to a definite issue. To vis was given Maria, a sister of Charles and Ferdinand. On other hand, Ferdinand was to marry Anna, with expecta- is of succession to Bohemia and Hungary, which were ful- ■d — though against fierce opposition — after the battle of hacz in 1526. But the important part of the bargain was t Charles abandoned to his brother all his rights in the five 3trian duchies and their dependent territories. A further iressed intention of elevating these territories into an here- iry kingdom was never fulfilled ; but the firm foundation of Austro-Burgundian House with dominions stretching into item Europe, is an event of capital importance in modern }ory. And its immediate effect was, at the cost of dividing •itories which were too vast and too scattered to have been 4IO TUE DIET OF WORMS chap. easily kept together, to convert , Perdinand from a possible rival into a friend and ally, and, at least as long as Charles lived, to secure the preponderance of their House.^ Charles's first care, after his coronation at Aachen, was to satisfy, as far as possible, the claims of the Electors. Into these transactions it is not necessary now to enter. A more important matter was the transference of Wiirtemberg, from which Duke Ulrich, under circumstances which I have already narrated, had been expelled by the Swabian League, to the Emperor as head of the Austrian house, in exchange for the payment of certain war expenses. By him it was again handed over to Ferdinand, and included in the settlement of his new hereditary dominions. But while this important change in the inner economy of the Empire was being negotiated, Charles was preparing for the Diet. Augsburg was originally named as the place at which it should be held, possibly with the implied suggestion that the Emperor con- templated an immediate expedition into Italy ; but as early as the 1st of N'ovember it was summoned to meet at Worms. On the 28th of the same month Charles, who in the mean- time had been slowly ascending the Ehine, reached that city, there to await the arrival of the Electors and Estates. Apart from the complications of foreign policy which were looming in the distance, the situation was one of much un- certainty, not to say peril. Society in Germany was stirred to its depths. The discontent which broke out in the Peasants' War only four years afterwards was seething beneath the surface. The lesser nobility, whose political aspirations were represented at the moment by Sickingen and Hutten, felt themselves pressed out of independent existence by the territorial system. The free cities, which were con- scious of the same pressure, regarded the Empire as the bulwark of their liberties. The organisation of the common life which was looked for in the institution of a "Eeichs- regiment," a Supreme Court of Justice, a system of common taxation, amounted to the erection of a new constitution in Germany upon the ruins of old anarchy ; while the task was ^ Eanke, vol. i. p. 357 ; Baum- Kaiserwdhl, p. 20 ; Bucholtz, Ferdi- garten, Karl V. vol. i. p. 376 ; Eosler, namA der Erste, vol. i. pp. 156-158. IX LUTHER THE VOICE OF GERMANY'S HEART 411 rendered difficult, if not impossible, by the jealousies and quarrels of the rival houses, and their determination to yield nothing either to each other or to the common weal. In addition to all this was the profound dissatisfaction felt in Germany at the national relations with Eome, a dissatisfaction wMch found a voice in "gravamina," which had been pre- sented at many Diets, and were about to confront the Papal Legates at Worms with added vehemence. But the popular heart 'spoke most of all in Luther. No one else had so fear- lessly attacked the abuses which at once saddened and disgusted religious men ; no one else had so clearly indicated the only remedy. These were his best days, when he was still making his clear appeal to the spiritual principles which lie at the basis of all religion, and was receiving the reply of the unspoiled conscience. His thoughts had not yet hardened themselves into a logically compacted system, which, like all system's, had its vulnerable points ; nor had the fear of those who went further than himself driven him back upon incon- sistencies and half truths. As yet he is no rebel against the Church ; his appeal is to the fair judgment of a free council : if he is to be a schismatic, he will be driven into schism, only foot by foot, against his will. His principles he cannot give up, because he believes them to be rooted in Scripture and his own apprehension of the truth ; but he leaves the issue of them to God, going on his way meanwhile with manly courage. If ever any man expressed for a great nation its best opinion, and gave a voice to its highest aspiration, it was Luther in 1521. Whether he still entertained hopes of the Emperor's character and intentions we do not know ; Aleander put his faith in princes with much more justification. Charles was not yet twenty-one, a silent, somewhat backward young man, who had up to this time given no proof, except such as is implied in political industry, of the talents which he undoubtedly possessed. Chifevres, who held an entire ascendency over him, was still his chief minister, a statesman who, next to the aggrandisement of his own family, turned his chief attention to the maintenance of the French alliance. Charles's chan- cellor was Mercurino Gattinara, one of those astute Italians 412 THE DIET OF WORMS chap. who were the condottiere of statesmanship, ready to take service at any court, without reference to patriotic or dynastic considerations. But this very fact often gave them a certain breadth and flexibility of mind which emancipated them from partial views : it was Gattinara's distinction among Charles's advisers to be the constant advocate of a council of the Church. Naturally, with a pious Emperor, the confessor played a con- siderable part : this was Glapion, a Franciscan of Maiae , educated at the Sorbonne, and afterwards superior of a ^Mvent at "Bruges. Our authentic knowledge of him is not large ; soon we shall see him, whether sincerely or not it is hard to say, attempting to reconcile Luther with the Holy See ; not improbab^Jie was the advocate of a reformation after the Spanish moOT^% disciplinary without being doctrinal. Among other ecclesiastics who stood near the Emperor were Ludovico Marliano, Bishop of Tuy, a friend and correspondent of Erasmus, and royal physician ; Pedro Euiz de la Mota, Bishop of Palencia, a Spaniard of much literary cultivation, who had excited the hatred of his countrymen by making himself the instrument of Chi^vres's policy ; Eberhard von der Mark, Bishop of Lifege, the author of the vigorous remonstrance against the oppres- sions and exactions of the Holy See, presented to the Diet of Augsburg in the summer of 1518, a document the responsi- bility for which he now repudiated ; and last of all Matthias Lang, Cardinal Archbishop of Salzburg, a statesman who had SCTved in turn Frederick III and Maximilian, caring nothing for the Church except as a tool of policy. The influence of none of these promised much for the cause of Luther. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Charles ever wavered in his determination to put down the new movement, however he might be temporarily diverted from his purpose by reasons of policy. Immediately after his election to the Empire he wrote to Francis I. (August 3d, 1519), "that no advancement of his will ever diminish his anxiety for their mutual amity and the peace of Christendom ; and as his correspondent has more power than any other in this respect, he should hold the first place in the extirpation of heresy." In a remarkable' despatch written to his aunt, the Governor of the Netherlands, in March 1519, he states as his " chief object " " the exaltation IX THE WORMS OF LUTHER'S DAY 413 and increase of our Holy Catholic faith." We shall find him in the spring of 1521 defending the severity of the Spanish Inquisition against the Pope himself. If sometimes he seems to lean for a moment to the other side, the secret is revealed in a letter which his ambassador Juan Manuel addressed to him from Eome in May 1519, recommending that " when he came to Germany he should show some favour to a certain monk, named Brother Martin, which, as the Pope was extra- ordinarily afraid^f him, would be a good way to compel his Holiness to an SEance." ^ The ancient and famous city of Worms has long since fallen from its high estate. Of medieeval Worms all that is left J^Me great Minster, a mountain of red sandstone, whose ^MiStern apse rises in tier upon tier of Eomanesque arcades, and whose lofty towers and twin domes catch the last rays of the setting sun. If not the Minster of the Mbelungenlied, it probably stands on its site ; it is impossible to believe that Luther did not worship there at the crisis of his own fate, while under its roof the edict which condemned him was signed. But Worms, which had suffered severely in the Thirty Years' War, was reduced to a heap of ashes by Lewis XIV, and, though rebuilt when the storm was over- passed, has never recovered its ancient size and splendour. But at the moment of which I am speaking it was the political centre of Europe. Electors, princes, prelates, nobles, represen- tatives of free cities were gathering from aU Germany to do honour to the new Emperor, and to take part in the transaction of Imperial business of the greatest moment. Every day saw the arrival of some new potentate ; the Elector of Saxony came on the 6th of January ; Duke Henry of Brunswick on the 7th ; the Elector Palatiue on the 8th ; PhiHp of Hesse rode in on the 2 2d, with an escort of six hundred, horsemen ; the Elector of Brandenburg did not come till February 7th, when the Diet was already opened. The English and French ambassadors were there ; the two Papa 1 .. jmnHns, nfir aeeisia.-a Bd A l ea a dW v; representatives of the Kings of Hungary and Poland ; accredited ^BTe-weT,Zettersa7id Papers, Foreign JBrieger, Aleander und Luther, 1621, arid Domestic, of the reign of Senry pp. 79-87 ; Baumgarten, vol. i. pp. Vin. vol. iii. pt. i. pp. 148-378 ; 138, 339, 390, 321. 414 THE DIET OF WORMS chap. messengers from Venice and Mantua. The Emperor was sur- rounded by a brilliant court, gathered from every part of his dominions, while the throng was swollen by nobles who came to display their magnificence, and adventurers in pursuit of their own advantage. The authorities of the city did their best to cope with the difficulties created by the ever-increasing crowd, but in vain. They published an ordinance regulating the price of lodgings and provisions, and prescribing the rate at which coin should pass; but, as might be expected, the forces of supply and demami were too much for them. The representative of Frankfurt wrote to his city, "It is im- possible to accommodate the priaces. To-day one nails his escutcheon on a lodging, to-morrow another tears it down." ^ Prices rose in spite of strict regulation. Quarrels and uproar were frequent ; the streets were full of gay women ; the im- perial Provost Marshal, whose notions of justice were sharp and sudden, had a busy time. Elector Frederick writes to his brother John, who was preparing to come to Worms, " that his people will find it difficult, if not impossible, to find stable room for the horses that he is intending to bring with him ; his own lodging is quite insufficient for his needs ; he has three kitchens, yet cannot get his meals properly cooked. Worse than all, the Diet has not yet opened, and he has already spent 4000 gulden." All was joyous confusion, not unmingled with baser passion. " The cause of the postponement," again, writes Frederick to his brother, " is that questions of precedence can- not be settled ; the Bavarians claimed a higher place than the Saxons. It is truly a grievous thing that Imperial Majesty and the Estates must lie here doing nothing because of this court pettiness." And again, " God grant that it may turn out well. I am grieved that the Italians should see our court pettiness and disunion. The Almighty grant us His grace that we poor Germans come to a better frame of mind." ^ With this throng mingled Aleander, watching his oppor- tunity, appraising the characters of influential men, and reporting all he saw and heard to Eome. His despatches ^ Quoted by Baumgarten, vol. i. p. Duke John in Fbrstemann, Ncues 399. UrkuTidenbuch, pp. 5, 6, 7 ; Baumgarten, 2 Letters of Elector Frederick to vol. i. pp. 398 seg[. IX THE PAPAL NUNCIO ALEANDER 41S (those of his colleague. Caracciolo have never been published) are one of the chief authorities for the inner history of the Diet.-'- They do not at all answer to his reputation as • a scholar, being written in a strange mixture of Italian and Latin, as if he had recourse indifferently to whichever language best expressed the thought of the moment. But they bear abundant witness to the contemptuous hatred, not unmingled with fear, with which Luther was regarded by the leading Papalists ; he has no better names for him than "ribald," "thief," "assassin," "monster," "Arius," "Mahomet," and the like ; while of any perception of the strength of his character, or the righteousness of his cause, there is not a trace. He leaves upon the reader's mind the impression of a devoted servant of the Papacy, contending strenuously against obstacles, yet not without a kind of peevish displeasure at the necessity of contention. He makes much of his labours and privations, and is quite sure that he goes in danger of his life from the Lutherans ; but the spirit of faithful obedience is strong within him, and he never thinks of abandoning his post. He is quite incapable of understanding the position of his opponents, to whom he freely attributes the basest personal motives, nor does he hold his own on any large grounds of policy. Even when he writes beseechiug letters to Eome, that this or that specific abuse may be remedied, it is not so much that the abuse grieves his conscience, or wounds his sense of ecclesiastical propriety, as that he sees how such things exasperate Germany, and put obstacles in the way of the success of his mission. His chief hope is in the Emperor ; " Caesar," he says, " has the best inclination of any man born this thousand years ; if he were not so, certainly our affairs would be much entangled with private interests."^ Again, " Above all, both our hope and plan of victory are in Caesar 1 Aleander's despatches, in MS., Aleander und Luther 1521 (Gotha, were used by Cardinal Pallavicini in 1884); and Balan.JfoMmcKto iJe/orma- his ffistory of the Cowncil of Trent tionis Lutheranae ex tahvXarhs secrd- (Rome 1656). Partial publications of ioribxis S. Sedis" (Katisbon 1884). them have since been made by Miinter Brieger and Balan do not always agree (1798) Friedrich (1870), and Jansen as to the date of the several despatches : (1883)' Two books, however, of more wherever there is a difference I have recent' date, put us in full possession followed Brieger of these valuable documents— Brieger, Brieger, p. 23. 4i6 THE DIET OF WORMS chap. only, who, if he perseveres as he has begun, will carry every- thing according to our wishes, and will give peace to the Church." ^ The Spaniards who surround Charles are like- minded with him, the only exception being " the merchants suspected of Moorish descent (Marani), who in Antwerp and elsewhere favour Martin, because he has said that neither heretics nor any one else ought to be burned." ^ On the other hand, the Archbishop of Mainz, though faithful to the Church, is timid, being surrounded by a crowd of crypto -Lutheran councillors, who, professing to be orthodox, do all they can for the heretical cause.^ But among the Germans generally Aleander is forced to acknowledge that he should fare badly. Against him he had a legion of poor nobles, with Hutten at their head, " thirsting for the blo^d of the clergy." The lawyers and canonists are all most manifest Lutherans, — and worse than these, "the race of grammarians and poets, whereof Germany is full." * He notes it as " a great and incredible miracle," that there are monks of other orders than Luther's who favour liim ; indeed all the clergy, except the Eectors of the parochial churches, are above measure infected, and the worst of all are those that have been promoted by Eome. Every- where the common people are more or less,' on the same side, especially at Mainz and Worms, a fact for which the un- fortunate Nuncio is obliged to take consolation in an old inscription to the effect that " Maguntia ab antique nequam." ^ " At present," he writes on the 8 th of February, " all Germany is in conmiotion : nine out of every .ten cry ' Luther,' and the tenth, if he do not care for what Luther says, at least cries,- ' Death to the Court of Eome ! ' and every one demands and shrieks ' Coimcil ! Council ! ' and wiU have it in Germany ; and those who ought to do most for us, yea for themselves, some out of timidity, some for despite, others, each for his own interest." ^ Aleander's instructions were quite explicit.'' He was to demand the burning of Luther's books. He was to ask that the heretic himself should be sent to Eome for condign punish- ment. The case was concluded, Eome had spoken : no Diet, 1 Brieger, p. 27. == Ibid. p. 25. = /M. < Ibid. pp. 27, 28. " Ibid. p. 30. " Ibid. p. 48. '' Balan, pp. 7, 8. IX THE PAPAL NUNCIO ALEANDER 417 or other assembly of laymen had any power to hear or to try Luther ; all that remained was that the sentence of the Church should be executed. Up to the time of which I am speaking the burning of the books had been successfully accomplished. Charles had issued an order to that effect in his Burgundian dominions, and Koln and Mainz, as we have seetf, had followed the example of Louvain.-' But when Aleander wanted to go farther than this he was met by a difficulty. It was an article of the "capitulation" which Charles had signed after his election that no German of high or low degree should be placed, unheard, under the ban of the Empire. Here there was a decisive conflict of principle. . Aleander's contention was, that all necessary trial had already taken place, that to the Pope belonged the condemnation of heretics, to Princes only the execution of the sentence at the instance of the Holy See ; and above all, that Luther's writings spoke for them- selves. Besides, he was astute enough to perceive that there were other matters in dispute between Emperor and Pope, and that Luther, once at Worms and allowed to speak for himself, might become an important factor in the negotiations. These views Aleander put forward in a council held, under the presidency of the Archbishop of Salzburg, in the early days of December. He made a long speech, full on the one hand of citations from Luther's works, and on the other of hostile dicta of the Fathers. But the council would not take the desired action. The Archbishop of Mainz, who was also Chancellor of the Empire, had not yet arrived, and without him nothing could be done.^ ^ Aleander (Brieger, p. 19) makes this March implies that this was the first statement explicitly. "Haveva im- edict against Luther, valid in the petrato, ut scripseram, a Lovanio da Netherlands, issued hy the Emperor." Cesare un mandato per tutti suoi He farther supposes that Aleander had dominii, terre et regni contra li lihri di been deceived by a promise iirst ful- Frk Martino Luther et di tutti altri, filled six months later, against which che havessero seritto mal di Nostro the words which I have italicised are Signore della Sancta Sede Apo- surely conclusive. The burning of his - stolica, M Hund, Burkhard, 456 Hus, John, his relation to Luther, 49 ; his influence on German thought, 49 : 2, 39, 299, 358, 373, 403, 419, 432, 440 Hutten, Hans von, 102, 316 "Hutten, Ulrich von, his birth, descent, and education, 100 ; early life, 101 ; at Mainz, 102 ; his cousin's murder, 102 ; his enthusiasm for the new learning, 103 ; his relationship to the J^p. Obsc. Vir., Ill ; his Triumph/us Capnionis, 113 ; a partisan of Luther, 114 ; visits Wittenberg, 175 ; his indifierence to Luther's movement, 327 ; is drawn to the Reformers, 334 ; intimacy with Sicltingen, 340, 342 sqq.; his patriot- ism, 340 ; hatred of Rome, 344 ; his VcuMscus and iTispicientes, 344 ; leaves the service of Albert of Mainz, 355 ; INDEX 463 joins Sickingen, 356 ; at tlie Diet of "Worms, 416, 420, 423 ; his intrigue with Armstorflf and Glapion, 430 sjj.: 33, 76, 77, 108, 201, 322, 324, 328, 330, 334, 335, 350, 354, 430 Imiiation of Christ, 42, 43, 44, 46 sq., 196 Immaculate conception, doctrine of the, 57, 222, 385 Indulgence of 1500, 59 sq^. Indulgence of 1516, 203 Indulgences, 32, 202, 256, 389 ; Catholic theory of, 205 sq^. ; ceremonial of pro- mulgation, 211 ; disputation on, at Leipzig, 299 Innocent III (Pope), 8, 31, 384 Innocent IV (Pope), 148 Innocent VIII (Pope), 30, 57, 125 Inrestiture, struggle for the right of, 12 ; effect of its decision, 13 Isabella of Castile, 1, 5, 241, 309, 312 Jagbr, Johann ■». Crotus Jerome of Prague, 39, 358, 403 Jesus, Society of, 2 Joachim I., Elector of Brandenburg, 102, 200, 300, 309, 313, 413, 445, 446, ^52, 453 Joachim of Flora, 246 Joan of Spain, 241 John XII (Pope), 7 John XXIII (Pope), 32, 39 John, Elector of Brandenburg, 200 John, Elector of Saxony, 154, 169, 172,, 187, 368, 414, 428, 457 John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, 187, 427 Jonas, Justus, 78, 112, 333, 335, 428, 430, 433 Jubilee, the, of 1500, 59 Julius II (Pope), 30, 41, 172, 183, 202, 210, 232, 233, 237, 291, 407 Justice, Imperial Court of, 20, 406, 410, 449 KAtJFnNQEN, Kunz von, 168, 169, 286 Kestner, John, 240 Knipstrow, John, 223 Koburger, Antony, 53 Koln, University of, and Eeuchlin, 107 ; condemns Luther's works, 351 Kraft or Crafft, Adam, 75, 333, 335 Lang, Matthew, Archbishop of Salzburg, 273, 283, 412, 417 Lang or Lange, John, 77, 139, 186, 187, 194, 199, 214, 227, 291, 293, 322, 333, 335, 361, 429 Lange, John (of SUesia), 300 Lange, Rudolf, 69, 70, 71 Langemantel, Christopher, 245, 252, 336 Lateran Council, the First, 13 Lateran Council, the Fifth, 1, 41 Latin, a living language in Italy, 62 Le Pfevre d'EtapIes d. Stapulensis Lee, Edward, Archbishop of York, 333 Legates, Papal, their position in England and Germany contrasted, 14 Leipzig Disputation, the, 283, 293 sqq. Leipzig, the University of, 284 Leo X (Pope), (Giovanni de Medici), his character, 233 ; attitude towards Luther, 233 ; towards the candidatures of Charles and Francis, 314 : 29, 30, 41, 104, 107, 108, 110, 113, 201, 202, 214, 231, 243, 256, 269, 270, 275, 289, 325, 329, 355, 356, 361, 370, 373, 378, 407, 409, 418, 421, 451, 454 Lewis of Bohemia, -309, 409 Liber, Antonius, 69, 70 .(•Linaore, 89 Link, Wenoeslaus, 129, 184, 187, 199, 240, 246, 250, 337, 363, 427 Loans, Jehiel, 86 , Locher, 72, 83 Lombard, Peter, Sentences of, 68 Lonicerus, John, 352 Letter, Melchior, 266 Louis XI (of France), 19, 241, 310 Louis XII (of Prance), 19, 41, 107, 310 Louvain, University of, condemns Luther's works, 351 4,Luder, Peter, 71, 77, 135 — „ Lupinus, Peter, 279 ' Luther, Fabian, 117 Luther, Hans, 116, 119, 120, 125, 126, 146, 155 Luther, Jacob, 120 Luther, Margarette, 116, 119 Luther, Martin, his doctrine of the authority of Scripture, 2 ; theory of the priesthood of the believer, 2, 393 ; view of clerical immorality, 35 ; rela- tion to Wessel, 48 ; to Hus, 49 ; letter to Diet of Augsburg, 57 ; life prior to his revolt, 116 sgq^. ; birth, 116 ; ancestors, 117 ; various spellings of the name, 118 ; birthplace, 119 ; character of parents, 120 ; discipKne at home and at school, 121 ; first school and childhood, 122 sq. ; religion in Thuringia, 124 ; his belief in witch- craft, 124 ; life at Mansfeld, 125 ; his father's attitude towards the Church, 126 ; Catholic influences, 127 ; at school at Magdeburjf, 128 ; his life there, 129 ; goes to EisenBch, 130 ; the Cottas, 131 ; his earliest letter, 132 ; -y-i-u 464 INDEX matriculates at Erfurt, 132 ; graduates, 133 ; Erfurt and its university, 133 sjj. ; his student life, 137 ; classical studies, 138 ; relations witli the humanists, 139 ; philosophical studies, 140 ; incidents of his life at Erfurt, 141 j iirst sight of the Bible, 142 ; proh- ability of the story, 143 ; studies juris- prudence, 144 ; enters the Augustinian Convent, 145 ; genesis of his conver- sion, 147 ; his AnfecMungen,, 147 ; the Augustinian order, 148 ; life in the convent, 150 ; studies the Bible, 151 ; association with Staupitz, 152 ; other studies, 154 ; admission to the priest- hood, 155 ; his father's anger, 155; his zeal in the monastic life, 156 ; his religious troubles, 159 sj. ; how he found peace,_ 161 ; Staupitz his chief helper, 161 ; justification by faith and predestination, 163 ; begins to preach, 164 ; goes to Wittenberg, 165 ; descrip- tion and history of Wittenberg and its University, 166 sqii. ; spirit of the Uni- versity, 175 ; entrance upon his work there, 176 ; the degree of Doctor of Theology, 177 ; he takes it at Witten- berg, 178, 185 ; his journey to Eome, 179 and note ; impressions of Italy, 181 ; of Eome, 181 syy. ; at Wittenberg, 1512-1517, 184 sj?.; Sub-Prior of the Augustinian Convent, 184 ; begins to preach, 184 ; his unwillingness, 185 ; his life and work at this time, 185 sq. ; friendship with Spalatin, 187 ; first Biblical expositions, 188 ; his theolo- gical position at the time, 189 sg'. ; justification by faith the centre point of his Christianity, 191 ; revolt from the Schoolmen, 193 ; influence of St. Augustine, 194 ; of the Theologia Germanica, 195 ; his relation to the humanists, 197 ; opinion of Erasmus, 198 ; his growing influence, 198 ; appearance of Tetzel, 199 ; the Ninety- five Theses, 200 sqq, ; preaches on the trafSc in indulgences, 212 ; publi- cation of the Theses, 213 ; their seri- ousness, 213 ; attitude of his mind, 214 ; letter to the Archbishop, 215 ; his unconsciousness of heresy, 217 ; conflicting feeling in the Theses, 218 ; their spirit, 221 ; their reception at Wittenberg, 221 ; Tetzel's Antitheses, 223 ; prepares to defend the Theses, 225 ; journey to Heidelberg, 226 ; the Heidelberg Theses, 227 ; concourse of future reformers, 228 ; breach with older teachers, 229 ; publication of the Resolutiones de Indulgentiis, 230 ; their character, 231 ; attitude of the Pope, 233 ; Prierias's Dialogue, 235 ; Luther's Responsio, 236 ; his sermon on Excommunication, 237 ; cited to appear at Augsburg, 238 ; his journey thither, 239 ; at Augsburg, 245 ; be- fore Cajetan, 246 sqq. ; his conces- sions, 251 ; return to Wittenberg, 252; the Papal Brief, 253, 257 ; the Elec- tor's attitude, 253 ; ' Luther appeals to a General Council, 254 ; friends and foes in 1519, 259 sqq. ; arrival of Mel- anchthon at Wittenberg, 266 ; friend- ship between him and Luther, 267 ; his influence on Luther, 268 ; Miltitz and his mission, 269 sqq. ; meeting of Luther and Miltitz at Altenburg, 272; Luther's concessions, 273 ; his public declaration of orthodoxy, 274 ; letter to the Pope, 275 .; question of its sin- cerity, 275 ; Eck and Carlstadt, 276 sqq. ; Luther's friendship with Carlstadt, 279 ; Eck attacks the Ninety-five Theses, 280 ; Carlstadt'-S Theses against Eck, 281 ; their importance, 281 ; Luther arranges for the disputation between Eck and Carlstadt, 282 ; himself Eck's real" opponent, 283 ; admitted to take part in the disputation, 285 ; preaches before Duke George, 286 ; Com- mentary on Galatians, etc. , 287 ; his activity, 289 ; period of mental growth, 289 ; correspondence with Ochsenfahrt, 290 ; is the Pope Anti- christ ? 291 ; Resolutio de Potestate Papae, 292 ; the disputation at Leip- zig, 293 sqq^ ; the disputants described, 297 ; meaning of the disputation for Luther, 301 ; controversies with Eek and Emser, 303 ; renewed negotiations with Miltitz, 304 ; sermons on Penance, etc., 305; relation between him and Melanohthon, 307 •; the Tessaradecas, 308 ; appeal to the nation, 319 sqq. ; circulation of his books, 320 ; friends and admirers, 321 ; his three great popular tracts, 323 ; his influence on the people, 324 ; satirical pamphlets, 324 ; division^ of leamfed opinion in Germany, 325 ; inflvience of Luther's movement, 326 ; Wittenberg and the humanists, 327 ; Luther and Eeuchlin, 327 ; attitude of Erasmus, 329 ; of Erfurt, 333 ; humanists of great cities, 335 ; at Augsburg and Niirnbefg, 336 ; offers of protection from Schaum- burg and Sickingen, 341 ; his popular exegetical works, in 1520, 34S ; accu- sation of " Bohemianism," 346 ; inhi- bition of the Sermon on the Sacrament, INDEX 465 347 ; his answer, 347 ; the Commen- tary on Galatians, 349 ; the Elector's attitude, 350 ; his works condemned at Louvain and Kbln, 351 ; attacks of Alveld and Prierias, 352 ; a turning- point of the Reformation, 353 ; the Bull Bxsurge Oomine, 357 ; state of opinion at Eome, 358 ; mission of Caraeciolo and Aleander, 359 ; the "Address to the German nobles," 360; letter to the Emperor, 362, 426 ^ final efforts of mediation, 363 ; last meeting with Staupitz, 363 ; publication of The Babylonian Captimty of the Church, 366 ; letter to the Pope, 369 ; the tract " On the Freedom of a Christ- ian Man," 370 ; burning of his books, Maier, Martin, 277 Mainz, Diet of, 40 Malleus Malefiearum, the, 57, 125 Mantuanus, Baptista, 78 Manuel, Juan, 413 Marca, Erardus de v. Eberhard Margaret of Austria v, Austria Margaret of Saxony, 187 Margaret, Duchess of Brunswick-Liine- burg, 305 Maria of Austria v. Austria Marignano, battle of, 310, 315 Marliano, Ludovico, Bishop of Tuy, 412, 452 Marschalk, Nicholas von, 77, 135, 174 TKlartin V (Pope), 39 Mary of Burgundy, 18, 19, 241 372; his reply to the Bull, 373 ;_^aternus Pistoris, 77, 135 state of feeling at Wittenberg, 374 ; burning of the Bull, 375 ; his justifi- cation, 376 ; his companions in the BuU, 377 ; his relation to the theology of the Latin Church, 379 sqq. ; , the Church and the Scriptures, 381 ; Sacra- ments, 382 ; the Papal Supremacy, 383 ; his opposition to practical abuses, 385 ; justification by faith, 386 s®. ; his theory of the Sacraments, 390 ; his doctrine of the Church, 392 ; of the universal priesthood of Christians, 393 ; his method of interpreting Scripture, 394 ; limits of his criticism, 397 ; Carlstadt on the Canon, 399 sqq.; Luther's scheme of practical reform, 402; the Diet of "Worms, 406 sqq.; Luther's fate a matter of European policy, 408 ; Luther the voice of Ger- many's heart, 41 1 ; his heroic mood, 419 ; his reception of Glapion's pro- posals, 423 ; his case before the Diet, 424 ; summoned to Worms, 425 ; his literary labours, 427 ; his journey to Worms, 428 sqq.; entry into the city, 433 ; before the Diet, 434 sqq. ; his final answer, 441, 442, twte ; the Em- peror's declaration, 443 ; answer of the Estates, 444 ; popular agitation, 444 ; before a Committee of Estates, 445 ; with the Archbishop of Trier, 446 sq. ; departure from Worms, 448 ; his moral ' triumph, 449 ; the Edict against him, 453 ; his journey from Worms, 455 ; carried off to the Wartburg, 456 "Lutheran," first public adoption as a party designation, 337 Lutheranism, a Protestant scholasticism, 3 Madeline db ia Tour d'Atjveeqne, 315 Magdeburg, its size and prosperity, 128 Maier, John v. Bck Mathesius, 127, 129, 137, 142, 428 Maximilian (Emperor), his character and projects, 19 ; his schemes at the Diet of Augsburg, 241 sq. ; his death, 314 : 8, 9, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 33, 41, 58, 59, 74, 104, 105, 106, 108, 171, 243, 244, 245, 265, 309, 313, 317, 342, 407, 412 Mazariu Bible, the, 69 Mazzolini, Silvester v. Prierias Mecheln, John von, 180 Medici, Giovanni de v. Leo X. Medici, Lorenzo de, 203, 315 Melanchthon, Philip, his birth and educa- tion, 259 sqq.; influence of Reuchlin, 261 ; becomes corrector of the press to Anshelm, 263 ; his fame, 264 ; goes to Wittenberg, 265 ; effect of his arrival, 266, 268 ; friendship with Luther, 267 ; alienation from Reuchlin, 267 ; relation between him and Luther, 307 : 115, 132, 137, 293, 301, 303, 306, 327, 329, 335, 355, 368, 374, 381, 395, 457 Menius, Justus, 112, 144, 335 Military art, effect of changes in, 23 Miltite, Charles von, birth and education, 2W?; his mission to Germany, 270 ; meets Luther at Altenburg, 272 ; final effort to mediate, 362 sq.: 239, 269, 289, 304, 346, 350, 365, 445 Mirandola, Pico della, 42, 78, 85 Mohacz, battle of, 409 Monasticism, its inherent weaknesses, 37 Montferrat, Marquis of, 245 "Moral Sentences," the, 68 JVlore, Sir Thomas, 89, 91, 113, 322 Mosellanus (Peter Schade), 295 ; his description of the disputants at Leipzig, 296 ; 327, 336 242, 368, 2 H 466 INDEX Mosshauer, Dr. Paul, 129 Mota, Pedro Ruiz de la, 412 Mountjoy, Lord, 88 Miiller, Frederick, 49 Miinkewitz, Hans von, 434 Munzer, Thomas, 401 Murner, Thomas, 83, 427 -^utian (Conrad Muth), 77 syg., "81, 107, 111, 115, 135-, 140, 175, 1,87, 324 332 335 ' Myoonius, 168, 184, 205, 211, 214, 215, 251, 428 Mystics, the Catholic, 42 sqq^. Nathin, John, 154, 165 Nicholas V (Pope), 40, 65, 202 Nicholas of Basel, 44 Nicholas of Cues, his projects of Imperial reform, 20 ; 38 ; monastic reform, 38 Nobles, the, seize upon ecclesiastical pre- ferments, 13 Niirnberg compared with Florence, 78 ; humanists at, 337 Niirnberg, Diet of, 34 OcHSENFAHRT, Dtingersheim von, 290 Oekolampadius, 263, 303, 329, 336, 337 Oemler, Nicholas, 122 Ortuinus Gratius, 110 Otho the Great (Emperor), 6, 7, 11, 12 Otto, Duke of Brunswick-Liineburg, 187 Palatine, the Counts, 228, 273, 313, 413, 452 Paltz, Johann von, 60, 150, 154, 202, 208 Pannartz, 54 Papacy, relations of, with the empire, 7 ; at its lowest ebb in public esteem, 29 ; its usurpation of ecclesiastical patron- age, 32 ; its exactions and abuses, 33 ; Luther attacks its primacy, 290, 298 ; its supremacy, 383 Pappenheim, Ulrich von, 434, 436 Paris, University of, 39 ; condemns Eeuchlin's Aiogenspiegd, 107, 300 ; its judgment on the Leipzig disputa- tion, 304; condemns Luther's books, 457 Paul III (Pope), 30 Peasants' war, 16, 50, 55, 410 Pestilence in Germany, 66 ; in Rome, 69 Petrarch, 62 Petrejus (Peter Eberbach'), 77, 112, 175 Petzensteiner, John, 428, 456 Teutinger, Conrad, 74, 75, 245, 248, 336, 436, 445, 447 Peutingeriana, Tabula, 74 " Pfefferkorn, John, visits Eeuchlin, 105 ; his crusade against Jewish literature, 105 ; his anger against Eeuchlin, 106 ; 113, 197 Pfeffinger, Degenhard, 239, 270, 271 Pflug, Cssar, 298, 365 Pflug, Julius, 296 Phacchus, Balthazar, 174 Philip of Austria v. Austria Philip of Hesse, 22, 413, 438 Philip, Elector Palatine, 71 Pilgrimages, 58 sj. Pipin, 7 ^tirckheimer, Charitas, 76 Pirckheimer, Clara, 76 UPirckheimer, Willibald, 75, 113, 265, 329, 336, 337, 364, 377, 378, 420 Pisa, Council of (1409), 39, 384 ; abortive council at (1511), 41 Pistoris V. Maternus Pistoris, Simon, 295 Pius 11 V. iEneas Sylvius Pletho, Gemistus, 65 Politian, 75 Pollich, Martin, 170, 173, 174, 175, 186 Pragmatic Sanctions, 9 ; of Bourges, 42 Prierias .(SUvester Mazzoliai), 235, 238, 271, 289, 352, 358 Printing, effect of invention of, 53 Private war, the right of, 16 Proles, Andreas, 38, 141, 149, 150, 152 Publicius Rufus, Jacobus, 71, 77, 135 Puooi, Laurentius, 357 Pupper, John, 48 Purgatory, the Leipzig disputation on, 399 Rab, Hermann, 272 Radewins, Plorentius, 45 Raphael of St. George, Cardinal, 113 Ratzeberger, 118 Raymond, Cardinal, Bishop of Gnrk, 59 s??., 136, 138, 150, 169, 170, 171, 202, 208, 211 lleformation, two points of view of, 1 sqq. ; a part of the Eenaissanoe, 3 " Eeichsregiment, " the demand for, 20, 318, 406, 410, 449 Reinecke, John, 128 Renaissance, the, its work defined, 64 ; in Germany, 62 sqfl- ; controversies . aroused by, 104 ; in Italy, 63 ; its effect on religion, 65 ^Eeuchlin, John, birth and education, 84 ; in the service of Eberhard with the Beard, 85 ; visits Italy, 85 ; his meet- ing with Argyropulos, 85 ; his eager- ness for learning, 85 ; nature of his studies, 86 ; his scholarship, 86 ; his Hebrew studies, 86 ; Cabbalistic specu- lations, 87 ; publishes a Hebrew grammar, 87 ; the restorer of Oriental learning in northern Europe, 87 ; visited by Pfefferkorn, 106, 197 ; his report on Jewish books, 106 ; cited INDEX 467 before the Inquisition, 107 ; course of the proceedings, 107 sqci., 325 ; in- terest aroused by the contest, 109 ; Glarorum Yirorum Bpistolae, 109 ; Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 109 ; meeting with Erasmus, 113 ; always a Catholic, 115 ; relationship to Mel- auohthon, 260, 261 ; recommends lim to Frederick the Wise, 265 ; alienation from Melanchthon, 267 ; attitude towards Luther, 327 ; death, 328 : 48, 69, 76, 335 Ehau, George, 295, 300 Rhegius, Urbanus, 335, 337 Soman Law, its revived study and influ- ence, 14 sq. Rome, corruption of, 30, 183, 344 ; pestilence in, 59 ; Luther's journey to, 179; his impressions, 181 sqq.; Eck at, 356 ; state of opinion at, 358 Rosary comes into fashion, 57 Rovere, Cardinal della, 239 Rudolph I. of Saxony, 167 RUhel, Dr., 245 ' Rysbroeck, 44, 45 Sabina of Bavaria, 316 Sachs, Hans, 337 Sacraments, the, 282 ; Luther's theory of, 390 Saxony, its princes and territories, 168 Sohade, Peter v. Mosellanus Schaumburg, Sylvester von, offers Luther protection, 341, 354 Scheurl, Christopher, 167, 173, 174, 175, 199, 214, 265, 270, 271, 275, 278, 337 Schinner, Matthias, Cardinal of Sicn, 321 Schnepf, Erhard, 228, 336 Schoolmen, the method and results of their philosophy, 26 ; Luther's revolt against them, 193 Schurf, Hieronymus, 222, 436, 445, 446 Schwalbe, Caspar, 131 Sohwalbe, Henry, 131, 132 Schwartzerd, Philip v. Melanchthon Schweynheim, 64 Scripture («. also Bible), put in the hack- ground by the Church, 381 ; Luther's method of interpretation, 394; restora- tion to its proper position, 396 ; Carl- stadt on the Canon, 399 Scultetus, Bishop of Brandenburg, 214, ' 225, 230, 368 Serralonga, Urban di, 245 SsAip of Fools, the, 51, 83 Sicldngen, Franz von, offers Luther a refuge, 341 ; his career, character, and position, 34] ; his intimacy with Hutten, 340, 342 sq. : 16, 22, 108, 316, 325, 354, 355, 356, 407, 410, 430, 431, 432, 433, 457 Sickiugen, Schwicker von, 341 Sigismund (Emperor), 39 Sigismund, King of Poland, 313 Simler, George, 261, 263, 265 Sixtus IV (Pope), 8, 30, 48 Socinus, Faustus, 399 LSpalatin (George Burkiardt), his early career, 187 : 77, 140, 197, 230, 263, 264, 265, 271, 290, 291, 331, 348, 349, 354, 374, ?19, 427, 432, 436, 441, 445 Spengier, Lazarus, his "Apology and Christian Answer," 338 : 337, 364, 377, 378, 420, 436 Spiegelberg, Count Moritz von, 69, 70, 71 Sprenger, Jacob, 57 Stadianus, 263 p^tapulensis (Le Fivre d'Etaples), 197, 321 Staupitz, John von, his career and char- acter, 152 sqq.: 141, 161, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 170, 174, 175, 180, 186, 192, 198, 199, 218, 221, 227, 230, 239, 245, 248, 249, 250, 270, 337, 361, 362, 363 Staupitz, Magdalena, 153 Stein, Eitelwolf von, 102, 201 Stein, Heylin von, 50, 84 Stdffler, 263 Storm, Claus, 129 Sturm, Caspar (Herald " Deutsohland " ), 426, 428, 433, 435 Swaven, Peter, 428 Sybutus, George, 174 Sylvius Egranus v. Egranus Taulek, Johanu, 42, 44, 196 Tetzel, John, birth, education, and char- acter, 209, 266 ; his preaching, 211, 212 ; his relations with Albert of Mainz; 216 ; his reply to the Ninety- five Theses, 223 ; further publications, 233 ; death, 272 : 146, 193, 199, 203, 205, 271, 281, 283, 389 Teutleben, Valentine von, 350, 356 Teutonic knights, 11, 210 Theologia Gei-manica, 42, 43, 44, 370 ; its influence on Luther, 195 sqq., 217 Thirty Years' War, the, 9 Thomas a Kempis v. Imitation of Christ Thun, Frederick von, 434 J.'Trebonius, John, 130 Trent, Council of, 2, 380, 424 Trier, the Holy Coat of, 57 •