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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

The Lutheran Movement of the
Sixteenth Century

AN INTERPRETATION

By DAVID H; BAUSLIN, D.D., LL.D.
The George D. Harter Professor of Historical Theology in the Ham ma Divinity School,
Wittenberg College, Springfield, Ohio

PHILADELPHIA, PA.
THE LUTHERAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY

Copyright, 191 9, by
THE LUTHERAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY

DEDICATION

TO THE REVERED MEMORY OF
THREE GREAT TEACHERS
IN
THE MOST EXALTED SPHERES OF TRUTH
SAMUEL SPRECHER
SAMUEL BRECKENRIDGE
SAMUEL ORT
MEN HONORED AND BELOVED
FOR THEIR NOBLE GIFTS, FOR THEIR MANY
ACCOMPLISHMENTS, FOR THEIR LARGE USEFULNESS
AND, MOST OF ALL, FOR THE BEAUTY AND
STRENGTH OF THEIR CHRISTIAN FAITH
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY ONE OF THEIR OWN STUDENTS.
HAVING DIED IN PEACE AND IN CHRIST
THEY REST FROM THEIR LABORS AND
THEIR WORKS DO FOLLOW THEM

PREFACE
The purpose of the writer in this book is not to present a con
nected and detailed narrative of the events of the great move
ment of the sixteenth century known as the Reformation, but
rather to offer something of an interpretation. What he has
sought to do is more in the nature of a valuation than an account.
He is conscious of the manifold imperfections and shortcomings
of his work on a great subject, which has occupied, with profit
and pleasure, much of his attention in the more recent years of
his life. The sixteenth century not only saw great changes,
which transformed medieval into modern civilization, but also
witnessed the birth of a new type of Christianity, which is known
as Protestantism. Those changes, with their far-reaching results,
came as the consequence of the reinstatement of vital principles
in religion, and for this reason its moral, theological and ecclesias
tical aspects have always claimed the special attention of the
student of history. But that epoch-making movement produced,
indirectly, political, national and international results of the
greatest importance.
In any study of the great conflicts of history it is important
not only to know when and where they were fought, and the
leading participants, but also why they were fought and to what
issues they led. The scenic and dramatic, the personal and in
dividual, however fully and precisely and brilliantly brought out,
are far from exhausting what an historian has to think about and
set in order for the times to come. He must know something of
those political and religious principles which give purpose to his
narration of events, and which serve to interpret men, their mo
tives, fidelity and courage. Church history, like the history of the
great kingdoms and nations of the earth, requires a key, and that
key is theology in the case of the Church, as in the other case it
is political science. Ecclesiastical history is a history of prin
ciples and doctrines, as well as a narration of events. The great
and permanently influential movements in that sphere had for the
foundations upon which they were builded certain fundamental
principles of enduring value. 5

6 PREFACE
No biography of Luther, the chief of the reformers, however
excellent it may be, is an adequate history of the movement
associated principally with his name, nor any more a mere recital
of the successive events following upon the act of the nailing up
of the tlieses in 1517. The Reformation as a whole cannot be
judged by the career of the great Reformer alone, remarkable as
that career was in its personal aspects. Nor, again, is that great
movement to be judged finally by the merely temporary struc
tures of doctrine and polity which took on shape and statement
largely because of the exigencies in which both the Church and
the State found themselves after the Reformation became a
reality. In harmony with these views of the genius of history, the
author of this book has attempted to confine himself largely to
an interpretation of the Lutheran movement of the sixteenth cen
tury under a fourfold aspect of the subject. Historical data and
biographical events, accordingly, when used have been made to
serve the purpose of illustrating and interpreting great principles.
"No event ever happens in this world of ours," it has been said by
one of the world's great preachers, "until the fulness of its time has
come." This belief must go along with any true faith in the
governing and guiding providence of God. It is in the light of
this belief that the writer of these pages has sought to interpret
the significance of one of the greatest movements in the history
of mankind, without any attempt at giving an exhaustive account.
No effort has been made to conceal personal bias. That the mere
annalist may be able to do ; but the historian cannot, unless he
accepts a theory of determinism that is fatalistic and unethical.
Bias and partisanship are not equivalent terms. The historian is
a witness who must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but
the truth ; but he is also something of a judge, who must do full
and strict justice to every person and event which comes before
his tribunal. Divesting himself of all partisan interest and preju
dice, truth and fidelity are his chief duties. But this does not
imply that he must lay aside his own mental energy, the results
of his study, and even his religion itself. He is not to be sup
posed, after an induction into all available historical data, to love
nothing and hate nothing. "A Church history," says Hase, "in
which the author exhibited no distinct ecclesiastical character, and
did not imprint this with clearness on his work, would be of little

PREFACE 7
value to the Church." A man cannot be expected to ignore his
own beliefs, his training or his prepossessions. "To pose," says
Professor Bright, "as external to a subject on which we have in
terior convictions, to attempt, for instance, to sweep the belief in
a divine Christ out of our minds, before we begin to read about
the Nicene Council, would be like trying to take ourselves out of
ourselves, to pretend to be not what we are. If our object is
truth, we must not begin by being untrue, and affectation of un
reality is untruth." The man who is so impartial that he has
no preference for great leaders whom he regards as both good
and right, or for religious principles that he regards as sound and
Scriptural, and no reprobation for their antitheses, may be qual
ified to make himself agreeable to all classes, but not to be an
accredited historian of the Church, or a qualified interpreter of
its great men and events. The writer has made no effort to con
ceal his convictions, remembering always that these belong to the
things that may be disputed or invalidated if untrue.
It is needless to add that this book is not intended primarily for
professional students of either history or theology. It is rather
for all people who want to know what the aims, the principles and
the methods of the Reformation of the sixteenth century were —
that movement which achieved their great spiritual emancipation
and secured to them their inalienable heritage of religious and
political truth.
It remains only for the author to express his best thanks to a
good friend and former pastor of his family, the Rev. Charles F.
Steck, D. D., Pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Epiphany,
Washington, D. C. At the instance of the Lutheran Publication
Society, he has reduced the manuscript of the volume to type
written form, in order to facilitate the work of the printer. This
work, which he declares has been a real labor of love, Dr. Steck
has done with unusual care and accuracy, and the author desires
in this place and way to express his heartfelt appreciation.
In the hope that among Christian believers this book may serve
to quicken interest in the origin, principles and development of
the movement which inaugurated the modern age, these pages
have been written.
David H. Bauslin.
Springfield, Ohio.
Monday after the first Sunday in Lent, 1918.

CONTENTS

SECTION I

PAGE

The Needed Reformation  1 1
SECTION II
The Chief Personal Factor of the Movement  82
SECTION III
The Principles of the Movement  164
SECTION IV
Some of the Attained Results  268
f

The Lutheran Movement of
the Sixteenth Century

SECTION I
THE NEEDED REFORMATION
The Church has never, even at its worst, rested content in the
face of moral or administrative evils. The quickening into new
ness of life has always been marked by the bringing out from its
treasures of things new and old. Sometimes that quickening has
put new life into old forms and decaying institutions. Some
times it has developed new institutions, and found expression in
new forms of Christian devotion. All these features we can
fliscern in the years just preceding the coming in of the sixteenth
century. Even before that, "reformation in head and members," which
had been urged by great Councils of the Church, but which never
came through that agency; mysticism, a deeper relation between
religion and learning, new discipline and life, and new forms of
devotion to the Lord and Head of the Church, all bore witness to
the effective reformatory forces that were lodged in the Church,
and to her capacity to meet the new demands made upon her in
the period of the most urgent need of the times. For long
periods, it is true, there were no very serious, and certainly no
successful, plans for cleansing what was very properly called the
"Augean Stable of the Papacy" ; but the forces capable of doing
that much-needed work had been resident in the Church from the
beginning.

By the Reformation we mean that great religious movement
which had its origin in the grace of God, and which had been
principally effected through the splendid mental and spiritual
influence of His chosen instrument — that marvelous leader and
11

12 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
reformer, Martin Luther. That movement restored to the Chris
tian Church the true and pure doctrines of the Scriptures for
the faith and practice of all believers.
We may speak loosely of this great Lutheran movement of
the sixteenth century, as though it were a definite event. We
ought, rather, to regard the overthrow of the papal supremacy
and the restoration to the Church of the gospel, as set forth in
the Pauline epistles, as the result of a number of causes, which
had slowly, and through a long period of time, been gathering
strength. "To divide history according to centuries is a difficult
task. Great events do not cease with one and begin with the
next; they dovetail into each other, and are lost gradually from
sight when absorbed in the one paramount spirit of the age.
We can see the leading characteristics of successive centuries
without knowing their source or their results."
We are reminded of this reflection of Goethe when we are
looking for a point or event from which we can definitely trace
the history of the reformatory movement. When it was really
precipitated was October, 1517; but at that point of beginning
we stand, as it were, on one of the most significant of historical
frontiers, with our glance backward over the centuries preceding
the sixteenth, and forward from the theses, and yet discover
no exact and easily determined boundary between the medieval
period and the new and modern age.
Any great movement in history which has perpetuated itself
in far-reaching consequences, permanent and widespread in their
influence, has not been without antecedents. It can not be en
tirely traceable to the persons or the circumstances of the par
ticular age which produced it. There must have beeen predis
posing causes which were deeply rooted in the past. Any great
movement which has permanently affected the life of the Church
or the progress of civilization is never solitary. It is not to be
studied or interpreted in itself alone, or dissociated from pre
existing causes or circumstances.
There were such antecedents in the case of this vitalizing
movement. While it was distinctly a sixteenth century product,
it is to be interpreted as the culmination of forces long at work,
and the reassertion of isolated truths long neglected by the
Church. For a right and adequate interpretation of that move
ment, it must be studied not only in the worked-out results of

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 13
subsequent events, but also in the light of precedent conditions
and causes. Not until this movement came was there a reasser
tion of vital truths and their proper co-ordination into a system
that rendered a disruption of Western Christendom and a revision
of Church doctrine inevitable. Whether we look at that move
ment with eyes that are prejudiced, or whether we occupy a sym
pathetic or hostile attitude — however much we may censure some
of the purely incidental features of the movement, and with
whatever condemnation we may see fit to disapprove any par
ticular agent brought to the front in that great revolution, the
movement itself, it cannot be successfully contradicted, was an
historical fact of great magnitude, a religious and social agitation
of fundamental importance.
Loud and urgent demands for the reformation of the Church
had, in one form or another, been made from time to time.
But these demands had, each in turn, been proven ineffectual in
the succession in which they followed one upon another prior
to that day when the brave monk of Wittenberg nailed his theses
upon the church door — an event from which a new world of
faith, ecclesiastical reorganization and Christian civilization has
followed. The hierarchy had been practically unmoved, and by
one after another of its chief representatives the cry for reform
had been disregarded. But these, for the time, ineffectual pro
tests and signs of revolt went on until at last the real reformation,
proceeding upon the basis of great and fundamental Christian
certainties, came forth in both the forms of revolution and re
construction. That individualism which, in one way or another,
had been unheeded in both the earlier and later forms of monas
ticism, now declared itself in the revolt and reaffirmations of
Luther. He and his coadjutors asserted their independence, not
by withdrawal from the world into the seclusion of the hermit
and the monk, but by resisting the encroachments of the world on
the Church, and by the restoration to the Church and the
world of neglected truths which had originally been set forth
by our Lord and in the epistles of the New Testament.
It was, indeed, an age of transition in which all this occurred,
and a period in which no one could exactly forecast what was
coming. The old order had crumbled away, or was tottering to
its inevitable fall, and the age of change was at hand. Feudalism,
which had held in strong grasp the whole of society, was gone,

14 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
it having been rendered inoperative largely by the invention of
gunpowder. The mariner's compass was pointing the way to
new worlds awaiting discovery and presenting vast opportunities
for adventure and enterprise. These, in turn, were certain to
react upon the older civilizations of the medieval world, and upon
the worked-out results of its mental activity. The invention of
printing, too, which, hand in hand, had come along with the
recovery of valuable manuscripts of well accredited ancient writ
ings, was opening up'the thought of the generations of literary
culture and expression that were long past. The old ideas and
conceptions on which the organization of Christian society had
rested throughout the Middle Ages were no longer proving to be
secure and practicable. The papacy had, in spite of its theories,
its power, its antiquity and its elaborately articulated organiza
tion, lost caste by becoming of the earth earthy, and its old
rallying cries were at last falling upon deaf ears.
A division in Western Christendom was inevitable — a division
so considerable and far-reaching in its importance that all the
schisms in the Church during the middle ages were, by com
parison, insignificant. The process at work for a thousand years
in the construction of the system of "Catholicism," as the papal
system presumed to call itself, was at last to be antagonized in all
its crucial points and replaced by a new edifice to be founded and
erected upon a new apprehension of the Gospel. The tradi
tional basis of the old ecclesiastical system that had been building
for a thousand years was to be impugned in widely separated
circles, entirely replaced in some others, and a new order of
things in the spheres of authority, doctrine, organization and life
was to take its place.
A movement, not to be classified with pre-Lutheran reform
atory efforts, was to introduce an entirely new phase in the
development of Christianity. The reactionary forces of the
primitive, spiritual idea of the kingdom of God, which were
rooted in the Gospel, began more and more to assert themselves.
Even inside the stately and imposing edifice of the medieval
ecclesiastical system some of these forces were struggling for
freedom, and were more and more showing their capacity to
break down the wall that confined them. Christianity as gospel
was ready to assert itself against Christianity as law.
The Catholic Church and the medieval papacy were the greatest

THE NEEDED REFORMATION. 15
of the creations of the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era.
The evolution of the papacy is the central fact of the first thirteen
centuries after Christ. The time had now come when this great
organization, which aimed to control the whole life of its subjects
here, and to determine their eternal destiny hereafter, was forced
to reckon with the incoming new forces that were to inaugurate
the modern era. The great and transforming movement associ
ated with the name of Luther, as with that of no other man or
force, created the unmistakable line of division between the old
and the new. An enlarging horizon, quickened intellectual life,
new facilities for the acquisition and communication of knowl
edge, the growing consciousness of strength and personal rights,
the bold declarations and lofty standards of great masters of
both political and religious science, all proclaimed that the fulness
of time had come for the Reformation.
The Church, it may be recalled, had entered the Gentile world at
the beginning of its history as a forbidden cult, had been subjected
to fierce persecution, and had been largely identified with the
less influential social classes. In contradiction of the spirit of the
gospel and the announced principles of the kingdom of our Lord,
and by the mere momentum of the social and political conditions
dominant at Rome, the primitive Church had been rapidly trans
formed into a great worldly system, with a mighty organization,
made after the pattern of that maintaining in the empire, with
an elaborate and spectacular ritualism, rigid dogma and mar
velous accumulation of wealth. All these factors in the life of
the Church had grown up side by side.
In the Church there had come about a striking resurrection of
that paganism which it had believed itself commissioned to over
throw. The parallelism between the constitution of the Church
and the old imperialism was striking. In its dogmas, its worship,
the place it assigned the Virgin, the saints, angels and archangels,
we may discover an indisputable series whose steps correspond to
the heroes, demigods, gods and goddesses of the older pagan days.
The old empire had not been Christianized, if it had been even
baptized. Christianity had moved into the heathen temples, not
so much to transform them as to give them its name. Speaking
of this period as it influenced the Church, in his book, "The Socio
logical Study of the Bible," Prof. Wallis says: "The Roman
Church appealed to the barbarians as the heir of a great empire

16 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
which had long held sway over the world. The new peoples of
the West were not converted in the sense in which we now under
stand that word ; and it is more exact to say that they were con
verted to the Church rather than to Christianity. The conquest
of barbarian paganism by the religion of the Bible was at first the
displacement of old state religions by a new state religion. The
God of the Bible represented by the figure of Jesus (which had
now acquired the religious value of God) was accepted by the new
peoples of Europe almost on the basis of the paganism which they
abandoned." Speaking of the introduction of these pagan features into the
life of the Church, Prof. Adeney, in his historical work on "The
Greek and Eastern Churches," says that "Old heathen rites con
tinued to be performed under the guise of Christian ceremonial,
and saints' images, like idols, were carried around as a protection
against fire, illness and death. It was a change of name, but not
of substance. Siegfried's dragon became the dragon of St.
George, while the virtues of the old goddesses were transferred to
the Virgin Mary." "There was a growing approximation of
pagan ritual in the ceremonials of the Church and the feelings of
awe with which they were approached."
The emancipation of the Church from this paganizing alliance
and thraldom was, accordingly, no inconsiderable task. The
Church, as an organized body, had gone off into a wrong path, and
to bring it back to the right ways of the Lord was the most
urgent need of the times for the sake of both true religion and
civilization. The Lutheran movement of the sixteenth century, in view of
all this, is not only the most important event of that deeply sig
nificant time, but one of the most important events in the history
of the world. In its far-reaching importance this most vitalizing
movement of modern times, which marks at once the close of the
medieval age and the inauguration of the modern age, ranks with
such historical events as the invasion of the Barbarians, the
Crusades and the French revolution. It was not the work of
one generation or of one school of thought, nor was it influential
in but one phase of life. It was the outcome of ages in which
various forces had been at work, the inevitable evolution of prin
ciples rooted in the history of the early Church, wide-stretching in
its purpose* and in its results, and soon became a potential in-

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 17
fluence in most human things. It marked not only a decisive
turning point in the spiritual and moral life of the Church, as
then organized, but served, also, as a great landmark in the intel
lectual, political and social development of mankind. For some
hundreds of years certain forces had been gathering strength,
until at last they broke in the revolt of a considerable portion of
northern and western Europe against the Medieval Church and
subjection and allegiance to its unauthorized claims and assump
tions. When the papacy broke up and the division came in
western Christendom it buried the world of the Middle Ages in its
ruins, but with the hopeful result that the new forces that were
introduced became free and effective.
If the essence of Christianity, if the gospel of the grace of the
Son of God, was once more to be allowed free scope, if it was
to readjust its relations to the world, or to acquire or generate
new life, the all-powerful conception of the Church then main
tained must be shattered, or at any rate, deprived of its old-time
strength. This was the primary requirement for an age of tran
sition and reconstruction. Such a movement as that we propose
to consider was necessarily complex. It was the work of friends
and foes, of powers sometimes antagonistic and warring against
each other, and sometimes, perhaps, unconsciously striving to
gether for the same end. It was a movement which profoundly
influenced European literature, affected social life, modified the
political system of the civilized world, and altered the problems,
the methods and the conditions of philosophical thought.
Thus the Lutheran movement, like all other impressive and
influential movements in human history, sprang out of the con
current operation of various forces of human thinking and
activity. There were political, ecclesiastical, social, moral and
religious influences combined in the antecedent conditions out of
which it issued.
But after we have credited a due measure of importance to all
these forces and influences, the real secret of that great and con
structive event associated with the name and influence of Luther
is to be found in the revival of the religious spirit. That had
been forecast, and many preliminary forms of preparation had
been enacted during an interval covering four hundred years.
The long period of revolt in one form and another against the
usurpations and abuses in the Church, the cultivation and ex-

18 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
pression of genuine piety among the dissenting monks and
mystics, together with the awakening of the public conscience, had
produced a powerful revulsion against the government, worship
and doctrines peculiar to the Church of that time. The spiritual
aptitudes of the people had been awakened, and their wills had
been stirred to action. The leaders who came to the front in
the movement not only made the Reformation a fact, but were
in turn also largely made by it.
This great movement, that was at once revolutionary and recon
structive, came contemporaneously with the full splendor of the
medieval renaissance, in an age when intellectual curiosity was
awakening, when philosophy, the sciences, and the ancient literary
treasures were studied with an increasing interest and a real
critical enthusiasm. The change that passed over Europe in the
sixteenth century is traceable primarily, as we shall see more
and more as we study its leaders, its principles and results, to the
development of new conceptions, political, intellectual and re
ligious. These asserted themselves in a period of bitter conflict
between contending forces and antithetical principles, religious
and ecclesiastical.
The philosophy of the period preceding the Reformation was
but little more than mere school logic, derived at second or third
hand from Aristotle. The science was a somewhat grotesque
amalgam of empiricism and tradition. There was a superstitious
and uncomprehending reverence for ancient Rome, at once the
great imperial and ecclesiastical capital, but which had also
become the center of spiritual apostasy. Here the papacy had be
come a great political institution. The spiritual significance of the
Church, the body of Christ, had here been merged with worldly
magnificence and imposing pageantry. The time had come when
a man was needed whose feet should be shod with iron and
brass, who could trample upon the impostures and heresies of the
day; who should have the courage to defy popes and princes,
bound together, frequently, in an unholy and unscriptural alliance.
A man was needed ; not a mere saint, who could by his holiness
do no more than kindle spiritual aspirations among the masses
of the people. For such a man the times were waiting and
urgently calling.
The new century, too, in which this movement was inaugurated
was pre-eminently aggressive in its constructive and destructive

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 19
work. It showed but scant courtesy to that which was ancient
if it had no other ground for its justification than antiquity. That
"elegant pagan pope," as Leo X was called, dominated as he
was by aesthetic rather than religious ideals, might attempt to
restore the vanished glories of the age of Augustus, with such an
elegant gentleman as himself to fill the place of Augustus. But
the age was becoming too earnest to any longer spend its energies
in worshiping painted virgins or sculptured Venuses, even though
the one was the creation of the pencil of Raphael and the other
of the chisel of Michelangelo. The real cry of the times was for
those abiding spiritual realities that could alone satisfy soul and
conscience. The Church of this period had accumulated a multitude of
relics and wonder-working images that had thrilled the hearts of
the believing and quickened among the superstitious anticipations
of miraculous deliverance from a long catalogue of ills. These
had been made a source of unholy profit and unblushing
imposture. Indulgences, which had originally been invented to induce
spiritual tranquillity for the troubled, to assuage the anguish of a
despairing conscience, or to add to the joyous devotions of the
pious, had been at last made a substitute for all real religion.
The peoples, and their dependents at Rome, found this indulgence
traffic a very profitable one, and, as was openly said, tried to
make as much money as possible out of "the sins of the
Germans." Upon the papal see itself were discernible the strains of the
most degrading vices, and the palatial abode of the pope, the
medieval darkness was drawing to its close, while its most de
pressing aspects were innumerable signs of ecclesiatical disorgani-
alleged vicar of the Lord from heaven, not infrequently exhibited
the spectacle of a pagan court without the redeeming virtue of
pagan sincerity in paganism's better days. The long night of
zation, corruption and decay. Blind faith, countless bogus mir
acles and childish legends had all been so persistently pressed upon
popular attention, and so exalted by the popular imagination, that
in consequence there had been produced a condition of benighted
ignorance and unreasoning credulity that is almost inconceivable
in our time. Monasteries, once the scenes of the most marvelous
and even revolting displays of ascetic self-abnegation and piety,

20 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
became the seats of disgraceful revelry, scandalous sensuality and
worldly avarice. II
The darkness of the two centuries that followed the end of
Charlemagne's reign was little short of the densest in history. It
was at that time that the Holy See had sunk to the lowest depth of
its degradation and impotence, when eight popes in as many years
were elected and overthrown, and weak emperors struggled for
the rent mantle of the great Charles, while over all a deluge of
barbarism swept in recurring waves of Saracens, Huns and Nor
mans. Dean Church has well pointed out that by the end of the
tenth century Christian preaching had been almost hopelessly cor
rupted. The traditions of society at large were still the traditions
of undiluted heathenism. In the conflict which ensued with the
barbarians who had overrun the degraded Latin civilization, the
Church had conquered, 'tis true, although at times it might seem
as though the chief result had been to make barbarism more
superstitious and cruelty more ingenious. From the times of Leo
the Great and Gregory the Great on through the times of Gregory
VII and Innocent III the internal government of the hierarchy
had developed into an oppressive and arrogant absolutism. No
priest, however good and wise and faithful, was to think and act
for himself in the name of the one Lord Jesus Christ. For him,
as well as for the laity, there was a great ecclesiastical lord over
the conscience and the reason, while an enforced and arbi
trary uniformity repressed individual initiative and freedom.
Authority had degenerated into intolerance. The clergy for a
long period had lived upon a level conspicuously below even that
of the laity. There were many cases, reaching over a long
period of time, of abnormal popular and pontifical depravity.
The vices of Pope John XII had been a common scandal. But
it was only when he turned traitor to the Emperor that he was
evicted from his pontifical office in favor of a more decent and
reputable successor in the person of Leo VIII. Pope John the
XXIII, notorious for numerous crimes and unholy profanity,
acquired when he was a pirate on the high seas, was condemned
for incestuous and adulterous practices. The Abbot-elect of
St. Augustine at Canterbury was found, upon investigation, in
the twelfth century to have been the father of seventeen illegi-

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 21
timate children in a single village. Another Abbot in Spain, in
1130, was proved to have kept no less than seventy concubines,
while another bishop was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five
illegitimate children.
Even as late as Luther's day, Albrecht, the Archbishop of
Mainz, whom Erasmus had styled "the finest ornament of Ger
many in the present century," but whom Kaiser Karl said was
neither a Catholic nor a Lutheran, but a pagan, bought his office
for about $300,000 in our money. Of this fine example of
ecclestiastical officialism, the Rector of the Catholic Institute at
Paris said that he "employed the chief artists of his time and
rewarded them in princely style. He collected the most cele
brated musicians from, all parts, gave splendid entertainments,
and made a dazzling display of pomp. But the religious con
victions of this archbishop had little depth; his moral conduct
was not worthy of respect." Pie kept a harem for himself, the
chief among his female accomplices in sin being a woman named
Ursula Neidinger. This base fellow was even accused of
robbing one of his mistresses, namel Elsa, of her jewels, and then
of adding to his offense by casting her into prison. What he
allowed himself he was generous enough to accord to others, and
so his priests were permitted to keep concubines, the only con
dition being that they should help along the archbishop's revenues
by purchasing a license from him.
A long line of Church Councils and a prominent group of
ecclesiastical writers concur in depicting and deploring the scan
dalous conduct of popes and prelates. The writings of the Middle
Ages are full of the accounts of nunneries that were brothels
instead of nurseries of piety and centers of holy influence. In
fanticides were numerous within these alleged sacred inclosures.
Unnatural love is repeatedly spoken of as lingering within the
walls of the monasteries. In the period immediately preceding
the Reformation complaints were loud and frequent that the
confessional was being perverted from its religious purposes
and employed for those of debauchery. The Church was greatly
in need of purification, not merely from the heresy that was con
tinually asserting itself, but from notorious scandals which were
even more aggravated and serious than the heresies. It seemed
to be utterly incapable of reforming itself. There were men
within it, for example, like Dr. Gascoigne, who looked with alarm

22 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
upon the growing evils and debasing corruptions, but their cen
sures and bewailings were generally very judicious and admin
istered strictly within Church lines. Bishops and priests were
neglectful of their sacred duties in the cure of souls. Living in
luxury and pomp, many of them were scandalous sinners, so
gross in their disregard of the moral law that they preached
neither by word or example. There was a distressing absence of
all true pastoral care and protection, while the flock of Christ
looked up in vain and continued to go, for the most part, un-
shepherded and unfed. The sheep were attended by the under-
shepherds to the extent that they might be the more profitably
shorn in the interest of the big and pretentious hierarchy, to
the scepter of which for a long period every crown in Europe
was subject.
The immoral lives of the clergy, the ignorant fanaticism of the
religious orders and the sophisticated subtleties of the scholastic
theology had brought about conditions which had made the situa
tion in the Church at the middle of the fifteenth century almost
hopeless. In the debased Church the salt had well nigh lost its
savor, and in the periods of its greatest corruptions preceding
the Reformation, religious leaders repeatedly permitted, eulogized,
and, as a rule, acted upon principles that were contradictory of
the dictates of the most common standards of honesty, not to say
anything of the transcendent sanctities of religion. They were
known to applaud falsehood and to practice the most scandalous
and wholesale forgery. They had habitually and grossly falsified
history, and used imposture to such an extent that history had
become an impious scandal and the most glaring of frauds.
Judgment was openly sold, and plots and tricks were always
among the resources of the opulent suitor to direct the course of
justice and hasten the desired conclusion. According to papal
annalists themselves, the innumerable regulations promulgated by
every pontiff had no other object than to give free scope to
venality and plunder. Among the reforms proposed at the Coun
cil of Constance was one to limit the vast number of reserved
cases in which the Roman curia had assigned itself original
jurisdiction, and by means of which the power of the local
courts had been reduced almost to a nullity, and conferring on
privileged classes and persons the right to carry their suits at
once to Rome. But the project failed, along with all the other

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 23
proposed reforms of that Council that committed John Huss,
leading pre-Reformation reformer, to the stake. The skillful
manipulations of those who were interested in the perpetuation of
the profitable abuses in the Church were potent in taking off the
chariot wheels of the conciliar reformers. The well-meaning
representatives of universities and theological science, and pre
lates who saw the urgent need of reform, were not equal to the
task of the period and effected no reforms of permanent value.
Official attempts at reform by Church Councils, as well as those
made by heretical sects and by individual reformers, were demon
strated failures. Of the reforming councils, Pisa was not able to
formulate an adequate remedy for the ills of the Church. The
best it seemed to be capable of doing was to call on the chieftains
of the double-headed hierarchy, the two popes, the one residing
at Avignon in France and the other at Rome, to abdicate, and .
without even awaiting a response as to their willingness or un
willingness, proceeding to elect a third pope in the person of
Alexander V. As neither the French nor the Italian pope found
himself in the resigning mood, instead of unity in the head of the
Church, the alleged successor of St. Peter, the papacy had attained
to a pontifical trinity. Instead of two heads it had three, each
clamoring for recognition as the one and only real head of the
Church and the only rightly qualified occupant of the chair of
St. Peter. The chief distinction of the Council of Constance
may be summarized in the fact that in 1415, one hundred and two
years before Luther's theses, it had triumphantly sealed, in
treachery, blood and fire, the pact of Christian unity.
The truth is this, that the whole of the medieval history of the
organization of the Church is a history of the growth of despotic
authority and centralization of ecclesiastical power. The con
trolling section of the Church could see in it nothing more than a
sphere of operations in the enjoyment of benefices and the per
petuation of abuses. The Church became filled with the covetous
and unscrupulous, who brought in their train corruption of every
kind and instituted forms of oppression which rivaled those of the
feudal seigniory. In an atmosphere of sordid financial and
political intrigue, the popes immediately preceding Luther's time
thought but little of right conduct, and most of all of glorifying the
capital of Christendom with architecture and art. Many of the
popes had been transformed from vicars of Christ, the real and

24 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
only Head of the Church, into mere adventurous politicians, even
when their utterances assumed the cover of religious phrases.
The papal elections not infrequently were scenes of wild dis
order. So tumultuous was the conduct of the people at the
time of such an election late in the fourteenth century that a
furious mob broke into the pontifical cellars, and the papal wine
added to the disturbance of the occasion. The cardinals hesi
tated to face the crowd with the news that they had failed to
elect a Roman pope, the man of their choice not even being a
member of the sacred college. The chosen head of the Church
not being present, they had no one to present for the purpose of
quickening the reverence of the crowd and quieting their tur
bulence. Fearing, too, that, according to an old custom, the
conclave chamber would be sacked, they took the precaution to
send the plate and jewels they had with them to the castle of St.
Angelo. Finding that these treasures were thus being carried
away, the crowd became even still more suspicious and indignant.
Placing no further restraints upon themselves, the mob rushed to
the door, which had already been broken down to admit the pre
lates, when the cardinals became thoroughly terrified at the pros
pect of facing the turbulent and dangerous populace with the
tidings that they had not yet been successful in the election of a
Roman pope.
During the period of the "schism," which began a little more
than one hundred years before the birth of Luther, extending from
1387 to 1409, zeal had grown cold in high places, and the breaches
in the papal system were such that they have never to this day
been entirely closed. The evils of the times were open and
avowed. The Church was venal and corrupt in all its members.
The ancient seat of the alleged primacy of St. Peter and his suc
cessors was for a long time even bereft of its papal head. The
history of the times deals with accounts of a debased clergy, who
were often married and given to taverns and brawling, trading
and usury. As late as the Council of Basel, 1431-1443, it was
deemed necessary to pass a resolution, not only to do away with
papal reservations, but against the possession of concubines by the
clergy, and that assembly of the Church would have done even
more had it not been dispersed by order of Pope Eugenius IV.
Much can be said for the machinery and organization of the
medieval papacy, for its enormous superiority, for the times, not

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 25
merely as a religious center, but also as the center of law and
government, for its many restraints over turbulent peoples, and
its conservation of the forces that were real civilizing agencies in
that time. For multitudes of people its decisions and imposed
beliefs were the veritable oracle and tribunal of Almighty God.
But after all that may be said in its behalf that can be truthfully
affirmed, there will be left a deep impression of abuses uncon
cealed and long endured, and of the narrow selfishness and wholly
political character of its aims and the dominance of worldly
principles in all its extended borders. There were moral dis
orders and license, partly due to growing riches and changing
tastes that marked the fifteenth century. There were ecclesias
tical abuses, such as tardy and even corrupt courts at Rome and
elsewhere, excessive fees and corruption, vows made but disre
garded, and duties unperformed.
One of the most unworthy features of the system was its
willingness to prosper and advance its unscriptural pretentions
by the use of traditional jugglery of facts, mystification and
forgery. By means of miraculous deception, associated with su
perstitious fears, and the use of administrative machinery and
canonical law, the ecclesiastics of western Europe had become,
in great part, its real rulers. By means of the ceremonial of
consecration and coronation of civic rulers they had come to be,
in large measure, the dictators of the kings of the earth. By
means of the mighty adjuncts of excommunication and the inter
dict they had succeeded in dominating rulers and terrorizing
whole communities. By virtue of their ecclesiastical distinction
they became the counselors of kings and the judges in civil mat
ters, while in some instances the function of legislation in matters
purely of the state was actually usurped by the assembly of
bishops. By means of confession, penance, purgatorial consign
ments, and other impositions, the Church had established its
lordship over the conscience of the individual, and that individual
soon became the subject of an organization that aspired not so
much to control the conduct of men as to enlarge its power over
mankind. Against such low ideals in religion and their faithful realization
in a sacredotal and political Church, a revolt was inevitable.
Reason recoiled against such despicable ideals, and conscience
protested against their realization in the organized life of the

26 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Church, and the result, by and by, was the Reformation. When
it came, as we shall see, it was no mere reaction against an ex
hausted and tyrannical system, but a noble and successful en
deavor to find a more excellent way by which Christian men
could get nearer to the truth and the truth get nearer to man.
Ill
Secure in the possession of a temporal power which, contrary
to the teachings of the Head and Founder of the Church, did
not belong to it, the Church became less and less mindful of its
own distinctively spiritual duties. Its immense authority was
constantly and more and more devoted to the purposes and de
signs of the individual and personal ambition of its chief repre
sentatives and the exploitation and oppression of Christendom.
The deplorable situation was indicated in the attitude of the Arch
bishop of Mainz, who formulated three needs of Germany, which,
repeated in 1457, 1510 and 1522, may be summarized as mainly
reforms in papal relations, ecclesiastical finance and patronage.
The reform so pompously promised at Constance was easily
evaded by the intrigue of those whose interests it would have
compromised or jeopardized. Better things had been expected of
the next Council, that held at Basel, but that had degenerated
into an unhallowed squabble between the head and members of the
Church, which brought both into contempt, and its efforts to
diminish the abuses connected with the use of the powerful
weapons of excommunication and interdict were of but little
avail. The demands of the secular power for a thorough reform
of the Church were so reiterated and so urgently pressed upon
public attention that at last it became difficult to evade them. It
was one of the results of these demands and this pressure that
these so-called reformatory Councils were assembled. The last
of them, which finally became a kind of a "Rump" Council, held
at Basel, after a useless struggle with the pope, came to an
inglorious end in the year 1443, forty years before the birth of
Luther. The power of the Councils was destroyed and the work
of reformation undertaken by the bishops had failed.
The hoary belief in the supernatural attributes of sacerdotalism
had received nothing more than a severe shock. But it had at
least come to pass that men, at last, felt at liberty in the rising

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 27
revolt to criticize the scandalous lives of popes, cardinals and lesser
prelates, while the medieval species of veneration was fast dis
appearing. Churchmen showed but little sense of responsibility
for the solemn and awful functions entrusted to them, and the
laity, yielding to the deplorable infection of the time, came soon
to look upon the sacerdotal leaders of the people as their equals
and not as demigods, unapproached and unapproachable in their
sacrosanct isolation.
The rnoral state of the Roman ecclesiastics of every grade and
rank was scandalous and it was only a question whether their
vices themselves, or the shamelessness with which they indulged
themselves in their debasing practices, was the worse feature.
The Church having proven false to its great and distinctive mis
sion and having employed its almost illimitable power, not in
softening the manners of mankind and inclining the minds of the
people to the truths of the gospel, it is not surprising that the
laity had become fierce and lawless. In consolidating its author
ity and increasing its already vast worldly possessions, the Church
had in a large degree abrogated its divine commission. Of the
situation, bewailed by all good men, the biographer of one of the
popes, Leo IX, of the eleventh century, says : "The world lay in
wickedness ; holiness had perished ; truth had been buried ; Simon
Magus lorded it over the Church whose bishops and priests were
given to luxury and fornication." We have presented to us, as
has been said, "A papal court which seemed, by some inebriation
of the intellect, to have dreamed itself out of Christianity into
paganism, to have ignored, by a sort of common consent, the
Gospel revelation, and instituted again the Groves of Academis."
Even in Rome, the Capital of Christendom, the churches were
neglected and in ruins, sheep and cattle went in and out of the
broken down doors and the monks and clergy were steeped in im
morality. According to John Pico, of Mirandola, one of the
leading Italian Humanists, scepticism was enthroned frequently
in the chair of St. Peter. He accuses one pope of disbelieving
in the existence of God and another with questioning the doc
trine of immortality.
Plurality of benefices, the appropriation of parish churches and
the purchase of desirable positions in the Church constituted at
the last the principal cause of a revolt of the downtrodden and
impoverished people against the miserable cupidity and injustice

28 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
that prevailed in the high places of the Church. The law of the
Church had even become an instrument of wrong and tyrannical
jurisdiction in the hands of wordly men, who had in many in
stances usurped the offices of ecclesiastical distinction. The hier
archy, that carefully articulated and co-ordinated machine for the
government of the Church, whose head was in Rome, making the
unscriptural and unhistorical claim to be the one and only official
successor of St. Peter, seemed to be so consigned to evil as to defy
all possibility of reform in either head or members. High posi
tions in the Church were secured by means of political devices
unsurpassed in the most degenerate periods of civic maladmin
istration. Even scholarship was not indispensable in many pro
motions to positions where scholarship had always been regarded
as a necessary adjunct. Degrees were often sold at the univer
sities, and it is no cause of surprise that astounding ignorance and
evil living went hand in hand. The average monastic life, where
it was not impure, was at least not strenuous. The mendicant
orders — Franciscans and Dominicans — had, if not corrupt, at
least grown cold in the decline from their earlier enthusiasm.
For long periods there was nothing in the political history
of the papacy which would in any degree have suggested that the
spirit and method of the Head of the Church had contributed
anything perceptible as a guiding principle in its councils. Its
methods, in contrast with those of its Lord, were cruel, fraudu
lent and unscrupulous, even to a greater degree than those of
most of the purely and confessedly secular powers. If the
Founder of Christianity had appeared in Europe during what is
known as "the age of faith," it is not at all unlikely that He
would have been misunderstood and He Himself been burned
at the stake or crucified as a common malefactor or pestilential
heretic. What the Latin Church had preserved was not the
religion of Christ in its purity, and which had lived on perforce
of its own inherent indestructibility, but parts of the Aristotelian
and Platonic philosophies, distorted and petrified by scholasticism,
a vast amount of Pagan superstitution, and in its organization a
massive reproduction of Roman Cassarism.
The crying need for reform in the Church and the state is
strongly indicated, for example, in the extreme depression of the
tenth century, many of the bad features of which endured down
to the time of Luther. That century constitutes the darkest of

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 29
the "dark ages," it being a century of ignorance and superstition,
anarchy and crime in Church and state alike. It has been
truthfully said that "the lowest point which civilization has
reached in Europe since the century and a half which followed
the fracturing of the western empire by Odoacer, A. D. 476, was
that which is found at the end of the tenth and the beginning of
the eleventh of the Christian centuries." Never was the papacy
more degraded than during the one hundred and twenty years
extending from 880 A. D. to 1000 A. D. After the breaking up
of the Carlovingian Empire Europe lapsed into a state of almost
complete anarchy. The papacy lost almost all of its power and
prestige and came to be a bone of contention among rival fac
tions. Beginning in the state the demoralization reached the
Church and culminated in the papacy. Of this degenerate period
in the history of Christianity the able historian, Dr. Philip Schaff,
has said that "no Church or sect in Christendom ever sank so
low as the Latin Church in the tenth century. The papacy, like
the old Roman god Janus, has two faces, one Christian, one anti-
Christian, one friendly and beneficent, one fiendish and malignant.
In this period it shows almost exclusively the anti-Christian face.
It is an unpleasant task of the historian to expose these shocking
corruptions; but it is necessary for the understanding of the
Reformation that followed."
It was during this time that the political disorder of Europe
had affected the Church and paralyzed its efforts for good to an
extent unattained at any other time, and that the papacy itself
had lost all independence and dignity and had fallen a prey to
avarice, violence and intrigue, and had become a veritable
synagogue of Satan. It was, during this time, dragged through
the quagmire of the darkest crime, and would no doubt have
perished from the earth in consequence of its own degeneracy
had not Providence, which is the genius of all history, saved it
for better times and the real service which it rendered to man
kind even in the periods of its most turbulent history. Pope
followed pope in rapid succession, most of them ending their
careers in deposition, prison or murder. Prior to the violent
taking of the papal chair by Sergius III, in A. D. 904, there had
been nine popes in thirteen years. One had died so hated that
his body had been disinterred, stripped, mutilated and thrown into
the Tiber, while those who had been ordained by him were com-

30 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
pelled to be re-ordained. His successor had been already twice
deposed from clerical office for scandalous wickedness and died
within two weeks after being made pope. Leo V, A. D. 903, in
less than two months was thrown into prison by one of his own
presbyters, who thereupon took his place, to be himself in turn,
and within a year, ignominiously expelled. The rich and power
ful Marquises of Tuscany and the Counts of Tusculum acquired
control over the city of Rome and of the papacy for more than
fifty years of its bad history.
From the assassination of John VIII, the moral character of
the papacy went rapidly downward. The politics of Italy played
a prominent part in papal elections. The political factions cor
rupted the clergy and used them as their tools. This, too, is
the period of what is known as the "Pornocracy," or the "reign
of the harlots," when the papacy fell under the baleful influence
of three bold and energetic women of the highest rank, but of
the most debased character, Theodora the Elder, the wife or
widow of a Roman senator, and her two daughters, Marozia and
Theodora. Under Pope Sergius this famous trio of courtesans
came to power. They, combined with the fatal charms of per
sonal beauty and wealth a rare capacity for intrigue and a burn
ing lust for power and pleasure. For years they controlled the
pontificate, placing in the chair of St. Peter their companions in
guilt, bestowing the highest position in Christendom on their
lovers or illegitimate sons. It is not possible fully to tell the
story of the apostasy of this period. These Roman Amazons
succeeded in turning the Church into a den of robbers and the
pontifical residence into an Oriental harem. One of the fav
orites of the elder Theodora had been made successively Bishop
of Bologna and Archbishop of Ravenna, and later, in 914, through
her favoritism, was made pope under the name of John X. It
was about the middle of this century that Marozia, the daughter,
who had been called by an accredited historian "a drunken
Venus," but who, notwithstanding this vile characterization, held
the papacy in her hand, and in the bestowment of the headship
of the hierarchy had placed one lover and three sons and grand
sons in that coveted position, once occupied by Leo the Great,
the man who had formulated for all time the papal conception
that the successor of Peter had the care of all the churches of
the world, and later by Gregory the Great, the man who had im-

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 31
mensely strengthened the papacy to do vast service in anarchic
Europe, and who, in an age of confusion, corruption and
cowardice, was a mighty protagonist of high ideals. One of
these favorites of Marozia, known in the long line of the papal
successors as John XII, was the man who, according to the testi
mony of contemporary churchmen, turned the pontifical palace
into a vast school of prostitution. Devout women were deterred
from visiting the tomb of St. Peter, "lest," as declared by the his
torian Gibbon, "in the devout act they should be violated by his
successor." No more severe arraignment of the apostasy of this
pope could be adduced than the fact that a synod at Rome com
posed principally of German, Tuscan, French and Lombard pre
lates, and at which bishops and priests of the neighborhood were
also in attendance, received testimony against him from high
ecclesiastics as well as from laymen, accusing him of simony,
cruelty, promiscuous licentiousness, of homicide, perjury, sacri
lege, incest, of drinking wine to the honor of the devil, and of
invoking the aid of pagan gods and goddesses to give a favorable
turn to the dice in his gaming contests. IV
In the period immediately preceding the Reformation the de
generacy of the monastic institutions had reached a debased level.
In a brief issued by Pope Innocent VIII, in 1490, it is stated that
for some time past great laxity in discipline had prevailed in
monasteries of the Cluniac, Cistertian and Premonstratensian
Orders, and that dissolute lives were being led in some of their
houses even within the bounds of the archbishop's city, diocese
and province. In a letter addressed to the Abbot of St. Albans,
head of the largest and oldest establishment of the Benedictine
Order in England, this monastic official was charged, according
to common report, with being guilty of simony, usury and waste
of the goods of his own monastery, while many of the monks
were found to be leading dissolute lives and even of defiling the
churches with their unholy alliances with nuns. Such institu
tions, it was openly alleged, had degenerated into public brothels,
and in one nunnery, at least, good and religious women had been
deposed that wicked ones might be promoted to official position.
These exponents of monastic piety were charged further with

32 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the neglect of divine worship and with all kinds of evil practices,
both within and without the holy precincts of their institutions ;
with selling the chalices and jewels of the Church to satisfy the
abbot's own greed for honors and promotions, and, what was
worse, with stealing for the same base purpose jewels from the
shrine of the monastery.
These monastic orders were no doubt less demoralized than
the secular clergy. It is not a reasonable presumption that they
were all bad and incapable of further usefulness. They had not
as yet entirely outlived the great reforms instituted by Norbert
and Bernard. They were still capable of producing some good
men. Nevertheless, there is truth in the testimony of an author
ity on the subject, that "Monarchism had become an oppression
and a scandal, a hissing and a reproach to all men" as early as the
close of the twelfth century. It is claimed that what strikes one
most forcibly in an examination of the old monastic books of this
period and later, written evidently by pious men, is this, that there
is almost no mention of "personal religion" in them; that the
whole gist of the thinking set down in them, and their speculation,
seems to be the "privileges of our order," "strict exaction of our
dues," "God's honor," meaning by that the honor of our saint,
and more on the same well-worn lines. Carlyle's generalization
in "Abbot Samson" is no doubt too sweeping; but he lays his
finger on the great weakness and sin of the monastic system of
the time. It was not so much in what the monk did as in what he
left undone. His system of external renunciation had been dis
placed by the anxiety of Carlyle's abbot that "above all things
there be no shabbiness in the matter of meat and drink." The
monk not only dwelt at ease in Zion, selfishly unconscious of
the souls around him, but what was worse, lived with many of
his kind in the degradation of scandalous offences against God
and men. Monasticism had fallen upon bad days. Its spirit and
life were lost and its ideals obscured, although at last it had
enough of salt and life to make its contribution of Luther, the
greatest product of the medieval monastic system in its better
aspects. The picture of the Church in France before Boniface
disciplined it into some decency, drawn by Principal Workman
in one of the chapters of "The Church of the West in the Middle
Ages," is not overdone. The majority of the priests were run
away slaves or criminals who had assumed the tonsure without

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 33
any ordination. Its bishoprics were regarded as private estates,
and were openly sold to the highest bidder. * * * The
Archbishop of Rouen could not read ; his brother of Treves had
never been ordained * * * Drunkenness and adultery were
among the lesser vices of a clergy that had become rotten to the
core." This view of the Christian life, which was based upon the idea
of the abasement of man before God, in which individualism,
intelligence and emotion were all alike killed, did not prove itself
to be, even to a considerable degree, ethical. In consequence of
the gross ignorance that maintained in the Church, the period for
centuries before the Reformation was one of widespread supersti-
tution. Especially was this true as far back as the time of Greg
ory the Great, in the opening years of the seventh century, who
was generally recognized as the most able man in the Church.
He was a man capable enough in administrative gifts to have
merged the office of Roman Emperor and Christian Bishop into
essentially one, and thus to have become the real founder of the
medieval papacy. But big as he was, Gregory was a true son of
an age of credulity and superstition. He believed in all the tales
current in his day about ghosts, ecclesiastical miracles and super
natural manifestations. He pronounced genuine, for example,
the linen of St. Paul and the chain that had held him in bondage
in a Roman prison, and which was said to be possessed of
miracle-working power. To a converted Visi-Gothic king of
Spain he sent a key made from the chain of St. Peter, a bit of
the true cross and some hairs from the head of John the Baptist.
This head of the papacy at the termination of the sixth cen
tury and opening of the seventh was proficient in all the arts
and sciences cultivated in his time. But notwithstanding his gifts
and powers, he looked upon the slightest act, and sometimes no
act at all, as surrendering the soul to the powers of an irresistible
indwelling evil. In his day relics had attained a kind of self-
defensive power, so that profane hands that touched them were
withered and men who endeavored to move them were stricken
to death. It was an awful thing even to approach to worship
them. Men who had merely touched the bones of St. Peter, St.
Paul and St. Lawrence, even with the pious desire of changing
their position or of placing the scattered bones together, had
fallen dead — in one case to the number of ten. The greatest

34 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
gift that the Church could bestow would be a cloth which had
been permitted to come in contact with the holy but dismembered
remnants of once living saints. Gregory himself writes that if
the chains of St. Paul would yield any of their precious iron to
the file, which it is said they not infrequently refused to do, he
would generously transmit this to the empress, consoling her for
the smallness of the gift by the miraculous power which it in
herently possessed. This great pope doled out gifts of this order
with pious parsimony, and, we must believe, in entire sincerity.
The smallest bit of filing from the chain of St. Peter became an
inestimable present to a patrician, an ex-consul or some barbarian
chieftain. In one of his letters Gregory refers to the fragments
of the gridiron on which St. Lawrence was roasted. One of the
most precious relics from the chain of St. Peter once tempted
some profane Arian, Lombard or heathen, who, in his effort to
secure it by the use of his knife, found this simple bit of his
property suddenly transformed into an instrument of destruction.
springing back, as it did, to cut his sacrilegious throat !
Closely connected with saint worship was the universal use of
a vast catalogue of relics and a belief in their miraculous power.
This expression of medieval piety was based by Thomas Aquinas
upon that peculiar kind of regard which human nature prompts
us to pay to the bodies of our departed friends and the things
held as the most prized and sacred by them while they lived.
The bodies of the saints were to be reverenced because they were
in a special manner the temples of the Holy Ghost. The dominant
interest of popular piety circles around the saints and their relics.
These sacred mementoes in the Church were the greatest treas
ures of the community, while the relic chest became the choicest
ornament of the private room of a lady, the armory of the
knight, the stately halls of the king and the palace of the bishop.
So wild, indeed, at one time, in the Church of the West, had this
craving for the wonder-working relic become that imperial law
had to prohibit the corpses of the martyrs being cut into pieces
and offered for sale. Ambrose had refused to consecrate a
church which had no relics, while at the time the Pantheon was
dedicated by Pope Boniface IV twenty-eight cartloads of the
bones of the martyrs were transferred to that building from
various cemeteries. The seventh Ecumenical Council, held in 787
A. D., forbade bishops to dedicate a church which had no sacred

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 35
relics under penalty of excommunication, while the traffic in
such goods became a regular business and a source of temptation
to the cupidity of enterprising dealers. They increased until
western Europe was full of them and every community had
miracle-working wonders, which were the products of excessive
piety, fraud and credulity.
It was looked upon as a special mark of impiety to doubt the
reliability and efficacy of the most scandalous impostures of this
order. And this species of medieval piety did not decrease with
the passage of the centuries after the time of Gregory the Great.
The devolpment of saint worship and relics which we find at
the beginning of the sixteenth century amply illustrates this truth.
The medieval saints, with their many alleged attributes and quali
fications, reproduced, as Melanchthon said, the leading ideals of
pagan mythology. St. George became the patron of Norsemen
and the Virgin Mary the goddess of the sea, like Castor and
Pollux in the case of the former, and Venus in the case of the
latter. The saints, too, were endowed with the gifts of healing.
One worked the cure of toothache and another of headache and
yet another of diseases of the eyes. St. Louis healed the ills of
horses, and St. Anthony cured the swine of fever. The image of
the Virgin was carried round the fields to make the flax and corn
grow ; the maimed and crippled found relief in St. Cornelius, his
rival being St. Koryn, who cured bad legs. St. Remus was
credited with the cure of lunatics, St. Vincent healed those
afflicted with bad mouths and St. Lievan those who suffered with
boils and blains. At Einsiedeln, in Switzerland, one of the most
celebrated of the holy places, the monastery had been built in
the tenth century in honor of the Virgin Mary, and according to
the popular legend, had been consecrated at midnight by Christ
Himself. The pope expressly forbade the devout and simple-
minded children of the Church to intimate even a doubt of the
truth of this legend.
In the period of the Crusades, beginning in the closing years
of the eleventh century, with open-mouthed credulity the people
of the West received the holy objects, sometimes transported from
the East and more times not, which were imposed upon them.
These outbursts of fanatical zeal were responsible for a queer
and ludicrous aggregation of impostures. There were the bones
of Elisha, excepting the head, which it was alleged had been

36 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
stolen by the Austin friars. The Holy Grail, of which Lowell
writes so charmingly, was found at Caesarea in 1101. The bones
of the three kings, Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, reputed to
have been the magi who came to present their gifts at the manger
at Bethlehem, were removed from Milan to Cologne, where they
are still reposing. In the holy collection transmitted from the
East were Noah's beard, the horns of Moses, the stone on which
Jacob slept at Bethel, the branch of the tree on which Absalom
hung, the table on which the last supper was eaten, the stone
rolled away from the sepulchre of our Lord, the basin in which
the feet of the disciples had been washed, the crosses of the two
thieves crucified with our Lord, the stone on which Jesus stood
before Pontius Pilate, Paul's thorn in the flesh, a tooth of St.
Lawrence and other equal reliquian absurdities. Connected with
the body of Our Lord there was named a group of these sacred
mementoes too sacrilegious and revolting to be even mentioned.
The true cross on which He had been crucified for the sins of
the world was found more than once, and fragments of it were
so numerous that the fiction had to be invented that the true cross
had the singular property of multiplying itself indefinitely.
These fragments were declared to have been so numerous and
large as to have been sufficient to build a man-of-war. The
spearhead which had pierced Christ's side was shown at Rome, at
Paris and near Bordeaux. The sword and buckler of the Arch
angel Michael were exhibited in France. Fourteen different
places claimed the possession of different portions of the head of
John the Baptist. The body of Matthias was to be seen at three
places and the body of Sebastian at four. At the Episcopal City
of Rodez, in France, was exhibited and adored the slipper of
the Virgin Mary, which was especially worshiped on Saturdays.
A dish containing the paschal lamb of the Last Supper was to be
found at Rome, at Genoa and at Aries. The cup containing the
eucharist wine was found at two different places. The Princess
of Fretelsheim claimed to be in possession of two relics of the
ass which carried Christ into Jerusalem.
Some idea of the popular estimate of the value of such relics
may be gathered from the story of a certain monk called Bernard,
who was in the habit of carrying about with him a box containing
relics of St. Paul and St. Peter. Happening one day to give way
to unpermitted thoughts, Bernard felt the two saints giving him

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 37
a thump in the side. On recovering himself and coming back to
a proper mental state, the thumping stopped, but was renewed
upon the return of the unseemly thoughts. At last, it is said,
the stupid fellow took the hint and being expurgated of the illicit
thinking the troublesome thumping ceased. We have said
enough, and much more might be said, to show that relics of the
Church in Luther's day were both of the ludicrous and impossible
order, such as straw from the manger in Bethlehem and plumage
from the archangel's wings.
The Reformers commented sarcastically upon the absurdities
to which this accumulation of relics gave rise. In the collection at
Wittenberg there were 5005 distinct and separate specimens of the
holy wares, among them pieces of the rods of Moses and Aaron
and some ashes from the burning bush. In the Church upon
the door of which Luther nailed his theses were shown a fragment
of Noah's Ark, some soot from the furnace into which the three
young men of Daniel's time were cast, a piece of wood from the
cradle of Our Lord and hundreds of other such pious absurdities.
At Wurtemburg there was a seller of indulgences whose head was
adorned with a feather said to have been plucked from the head
of St. Michael, who is mentioned in the Epistle of Jude and de
scribed in Daniel. An inventory of the relics once shown at Can
terbury, the present head and center of Anglican Christianity,
intended to excite the faith and secure the money of the throngs
of pilgrims who came thither, indicates the immense resource
fulness of the Church on that line. At that seat of religion there
were to be seen a fragment of the robe of Christ ; three splinters
from the crown of thorns ; a lock of Mary's hair ; a tooth of John
the Baptist; a shoulder blade of Simeon; blood of the Apostles
John and Thomas; part of the crosses of Peter and Andrew; a
tooth and finger of Stephen; some hair of Mary Magdalene; a
lip of one of the innocents slain by Herod; the head of Thomas
a' Becket; a leg of St. George; the bowels of St. Lawrence; a
finger of St. Urban; bones of St. Clement, St. Vincent and
St. Catherine; a leg of Mildred the Virgin, and another of a
virgin saint called Recordia. At Halle there were 8933 of these
relics, among them being some of the wine from the wedding
feast at Cana and some of the earth out of which Adam was
created. In ridicule of such impostures Luther advertised that
he had recently obtained "a piece of the left horn of Moses, three

38 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
names from the burning bush and a lock from the beard of
Beelzebub." Thus we have example of the urgent need of reform in the
Church. Thus superstition and credulity had been increased
until the traffic in relics was something enormous. "The western
world," it was said, "had been deluged by corporeal fragments of
departed saints" and "every city had a warehouse of the dead."
An organized traffic was carried on by unscrupulous venders of
the sacred wares, who had imposed them upon the credulity of
the pious. The Fourth Lateran Council sought to put a stop to
these commercial abuses, forbidding the veneration of relics
which did not have the papal sanction, which it was said was
easily obtained. The attitude of Luther and the Lutheran move
ment was expressed by the Reformer in his larger catechism,
when he said "est ist alles tot ding das niemand hertegen kann."
"They are lifeless, dead things that can make no man holy."
This worship of the saints and adoration of images became so
widespread and general that there was a veritable craze for the
shrines of the saints, and pilgrimages in Europe were greatly
multiplied, the last decades of the fifteenth century being espe
cially given to such pious journeys. German princes and wealthy
merchants made trips to the Holy Land, visited the sacred places
there and came back with many prized relics which they stored
away in favorite churches. Frederick the Wise, the Elector of
Saxony, the friend and protector of Luther at a later period, made
such a pilgrimage and upon his return placed the relics he had
obtained in the Castle Church at Wittenberg, upon the doors of
which Luther nailed his theses on October 31, 1517, thus
inaugurating the revolt against these and other ecclesiastical
abuses which had for centuries been engrafting themselves upon
the Church of Rome.
When such an array of absurdities was recognized as valid it
is not surprising that frequently at the most sacred seasons in the
Church calendar the priest should act the buffoon and the clown.
On Easter Sunday, which should always be observed with a note
of quiet but triumphant joy, the religious teachers of the people
studied how they might best raise a laugh among the church
attendants. One preacher imitated the note of the cuckoo,
another hissed like a goose, while another related indecent stories.
True religion was abashed at such practices, and that morals

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 39
declined is not surprising. "If on our days," says D'Aubigne,
"we should bring together all the immoralities and all the dis
graceful crimes committed in a single country the mass of cor
ruption would doubtless shock us still. Nevertheless, the evil at
this period wore a character and universality that it has not borne
subsequently." V
Still another of the signs that the Church was greatly in need of
purification is found in the scandalous commercializing practices
that had grown up in connection with ecclesiastical offices. The
greed for place, and gain in the securing of place, is voiced in
what was said of one promotion to a bishopric : "He was
licensed at Rome to gather the moneys of Exeter, and not ta
gather the souls of that bishopric to God." In one of the ac
counts of the apostasy of the Church of the fifteenth century the
details are given of a man who had spent 1400 marks to secure
for himself a deanery, and who confessed, in addition to the
charge that he was both worldly and carnal in morals, that he
knew not even the principles of Latin grammar.
One of the best accredited of the historians of Rome itself in
the fifteenth century, writes : "It is notorious that boys, young
men, and men living in the courts of the worldly, for money are
placed in churches and in great offices and prelacies, others being
passed over who have long been occupied in study and preaching
and in the government of the people without worldly gain." An
other instance is given of a foolish youth of eighteen years of age,
the son of a simple knight, who was declared to be "like an idiot,
drunk almost every day," who was promoted to twelve prebends
and a great archdeaconry of one hundred pounds' value, and to
a leading rectory. This silly and incompetent youngster was re
ported to have been promoted by the bishops to please a great
worldly lord, whose playmate he had been in his boyhood. In
the enjoyment of these prebends and of the archdeaconry he had
remained for nearly twenty years, although during all this time
he was never judged capable of being an ordinary priest, nor
did he ever reside in any of his dozen prebends, nor in the arch
deaconry, nor in the rectory. For him, in consequence of his
inability to do anything in meeting the requirements of his nu
merous profitable ecclesiastical holdings, all things were dispensed

40 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
from the see of Rome, which at that time was the center of all
errors and superstitions. It was of the order of things in the
papal system that a man deeply conscious of the abuses of the
Church should turn his eyes for redress and correction to Rome,
because the supreme and governing power was there. But even
at Rome, as late as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, justice had
to fight its way through many tedious delays and obstacles of
divers order. In numerous cases the abuse of authority was used
to defeat law and justice. "I know a man," says the papal his
torian Gascoigne, "who, wishing to be elected dean of Salisbury,
on the day of election, by the authority of the archbishop, pro
nounced certain men by name to be then excommunicated, and
to have been, for several years before, pronounced contumacious ;
and this he did because he knew that those men would not elect
him to the deanery, and so by excommunication they would not
have a voice in the election." When high positions in the Church
could be secured by such devices, when a desired majority was
obtained by the process of eliminating the doubtful members of
the electorate, it is not surprising that neither character, scholar
ship nor age were regarded as required conditions among those
seeking promotion.
Excommunication had frequently been made available in reduc
ing to submission the proudest monarchs of Christendom, as in the
case of Henry IV, of Germany, in the memorable contest at
Canossa in the eleventh century. It now came to be used as a
method of assuring a favorable majority by means of exscinding
a contumacious minority, a method that not only would secure the
desired majority, but would also preclude all possibility of reform.
"Rome," says the papal authority above quoted, "as a special
and principal wild beast has laid waste the vineyard of the
Church, her court reserving to themselves the election of bishops,
that none may confer an episcopal church on any one unless
he first pays the annates, or first fruits and produce of the vacant
church. Likewise she has destroyed the vineyard of the Church
of God in several places by annulling the elections of all the
bishops in England. Likewise, she destroys the Church by pro
moting evil men according as the king and the pope consent.
Herein has she ravaged the Church like a wild beast, that she has
annulled all the elections made in cathedral churches, ordaining
that all elections of bishops belong to the Apostolic Chamber,

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 41
that is, to the judgment of the pope and his cardinals. Also, that
Rome does not call any one a bishop except one whom the pope
and cardinals elect as bishop or as archbishop, having had pre
viously paid to them at Rome fruits to the extent of thou
sands of marks, and also presents to Roman and papal cour
tesans." This is no prejudiced and biased Protestant fulmination against
papal abuses, but a bitter lamentation of a loyal son of the Church
over the corruption and wrong-doing that prevailed even at the
chief seat of authority. Even the pope, who avowed himself to
be the vicar of Christ, the head of Christendom and the ruler of
states, was in bondage to the abuses of the times. Such was the
almost hopeless condition of the Church and of its government, in
its head and members, at the middle of the fifteenth century, when
affairs were rapidly verging toward the revolt under the leader
ship of Luther and the reaffirmation of the truth of the Gospel,
the only basis of permanent reform.
Whether well or ill-deserved, the Roman curia had the reputa
tion of doing anything and everything for money, and this reputa
tion, while most profitable to the officials of the Church, was
utterly subversive of order and morality throughout all the bor
ders of Christendom. At the close of the twelfth century, shortly
after Innocent III had come to the papal throne, and under whose
pontificate the papal ideals had attained to their zenith, Conrad,
the Abbot of Ursperg, thus describes the condition of the German
Church in its relations with Rome : "There scarce remained a
bishopric or a prelacy, or even a parish church, that was not in
volved in law, and therefore forced to apply to Rome, but not
empty-handed. Rejoice, O Mother Rome! for the fountains of
the riches of the world are opened that rivers and heaps of
money may pour into thee! Make merry over the iniquity of
the sons of men, for thou gettest thy price for all these evils. Be
glad over thy ally, discord, which has broken loose from hell that
thou mayest wax rich ! Thou hast what thou hast always thirsted
for; raise the song of joy, for thou hast conquered the world,
not by thy holiness, but by the wickedness of man. Men are
drawn to thee, not by their devotion or their conscience, but by
the increase of their iniquity, and the sale for money of thy
decision of their quarrels." Two hundred years later the com
plaints of the best of the land show us that such abuses were as

42 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
rife as ever, and that even at Rome, where gold was all-powerful,
the poor ecclestiastical suitor had no chance. The god of this
world had ascended the high places of the Church's dominion,
and gold could always direct the course of justice. Papal collect-
tors traversed Europe to exact the payments levied upon the
churches by Rome. Armed with the unlimited power of excom
munication and interdict, they carried consternation, ruin and
desolation into entire provinces. There prevailed one vast sys
tem of pecuniary mulcts as a condition of absolution. The vice
gerent of Christ himself openly used, as did Sixtus IV, his su
preme control over the sacraments for the base purpose of extort
ing money from his subordinates, levying arbitrary and enormous
subsidies upon the Roman clergy and enforceing their payment by
a liberal use of the dreaded excommunication, his ursurped power
of arbitrarily shutting men out of the kingdom of heaven.
We must always remember that it is inevitable in the chronicles
of any age that vice will be singled out, especially vice that is prev
alent under religious forms, and that virtue, especially common
place virtue, should be somewhat overlooked. There was much
that was good in the period preceding Luther's age, but it was
good in the midst of abounding evils. The Church presented to
the men of that day the good and the bad, the mentally alert
along with the superstitious, that peculiar mixture of gross abuses
with the most placid and easy self-complacency among the very
men who were maintaining and who were responsible for the
abuses that prevailed. The papal court allowed the lowest fraud
and imposture in the working system of the Church, and it was
rather imposing, too, much of a burden upon the intellectual hon
esty that was beginning to come to the front to expect men longer
lo embrace all the lies perpetrated in her name while she herself
did not believe them, and was laughing on the sly at the credulity
of the faithful.
Such was the almost hopeless condition of the Church and its
supreme government in the fifteenth century. Secure in the pos
session of the temporal power, it had become less and less mind
ful of its spiritual prerogatives, while its boundless authority
was constantly devoted more and more exclusively to the purposes
of individual ambition and the oppression of Christendom. The
manifold abuses and corruptions that had grown up in the Church
had almost forfeited its spiritual character and abrogated its

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 43
claim to be the body of Christ. Its clergy were debased, and
it was enslaved in simony, until at last it was said that "one can
only get at Simon Peter through Simon Magus." As we ap
proach the beginning of the sixteenth century we come to a
period of moral degradation in the papacy having no parallel save
in the tenth century, when harlots disposed of the pontifical
office. "The governments of Europe," says the historian Ranke,
"were stripping the pope of a portion of his privileges, while, at
the same time, the latter began to occupy himself exclusively
with worldly concerns." The revelations of the degeneracy of
the ecclesiastical establishment of the time are appalling. They,
however, give this ground for belief in the continued vitality
of the true Church of Christ, in that they show, by way of con
trast, the deep pit and the miry clay from which the Lord and
Head of the Church can call out his people when the times of
restoration come.
Myconius was long a monk of the Church, and became a
Protestant and one of Luther's fellow-laborers. He wrote a de
scription of the religious life of the age in which he lived from
which there may be gleaned such facts as these:
"Christ's sufferings and death Lipon the cross were regarded by
priests and people as an idle tale. They had no influence what
ever upon the hearts and lives of men. Christ was looked upon
as a severe judge who condemned all who did not look to the
intercession of the saints or to papal indulgence for salvation.
To secure such intercessions it was necessary to perform works
of penance which were invented by priests and monks, and which
brought money into the treasury. Ave Marias must be repeated.
Prayers must be offered night and day, to Saint Ursula and Saint
Bridget. Pilgrimages must be made to shrines found in moun
tains, forests and valleys. But in place of such works of penance
money could be paid. The people, therefore, brought to the con
vents and to the priests money and everything that had value —
fowls, ducks, geese, eggs, wax, straw, butter and cheese. Then
hymns resounded, bells rang, incense filled the sanctuary, sacri
fices were offered up, the larders overflowed, the glasses went
around, and masses terminated and concealed these orgies. The
bishops no longer preached, but they consecrated priests, bells,
monks, churches, chapels, images, books and cemeteries; and all
this brought in large revenue. The bones, arms and feet of the

44 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
saints of bygone times were preserved in gold and silver boxes ;
they were given out during mass for the faithful to kiss, and
this, too, brought in much money."
The head of the Church and those who stood nearest his throne
seem to have been completely unaware of momentous changes that
were impending. During the fifty years preceding Luther's
theses not one word uttered by the popes indicates any suspicion
that the dayspring of a new age was dawning. They were in
capable of discerning the signs of the times. They were heedless
of the currents which were sapping the foundations of their spirit
ual dominion, which was rapidly slipping from their grasp. Not
one of the famous dynasties of history has ever illustrated with
more convincing truth than the papacy the terrible proverb,
"The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth
have been set upon edge."
The Church held in full possession an absolute monopoly, and
as with other monopolies this one was conducted primarily and
principally for power and profit. Ecclesiastical offices had be
come the objects of wholly selfish ambition, the ambition of every
cardinal to be the pope, of every archbishop to become a cardinal,
of every bishop to be an archbishop, and of every parochial priest
to be a bishop. To attain the object of this graduated ambition in
every case, the means most likely to win was money, and but few
were found who were unwilling to use the means. Simony, with
all its associated evils, was almost universal, and the debasing
practice was worked from both ends — by the one who desired the
advancement and by the one who had it to bestow. The man who
would get the coveted position must pay high for it. But if what
this one would pay seemed, to the one who had the office to
bestow, not to promise enough of the means to secure such com
modities, then the position was given to the one who would
most largely share with the superior the plunder of the office,
which was often in the greedy transaction bestowed upon boys of
fourteen, ten, or even as juvenile as seven years of age, or upon
the most worthless of men. Thus it was that money and how
to get it became the one chief activity of the clergy, from the high
est to the lowest. Whenever the bishop made a visitation over his
diocese, it became a new occasion for money; when a cardinal
came hence, it meant still more money; when the papal nuncio
came, it meant yet more money, and when the pope chanced to

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 45
come, it meant the most money of all. For a sufficient price, it
was even made easy to find that a marriage was within the for
bidden degrees of relationship, and accordingly void.
Peter Cantor was a churchman of sufficient standing to have
influence even with Pope Innocent III, the great defender of
Church dogmas, a master organizer of the hierarchy, and an ad
ministrator with but one peer in the history of the papacy. It
is Cantor who asserts that "the most holy sacrament of matri
mony, owing to the remote consanguinity coming within the pro
hibited degrees, was made a subject of derision to the laity by
the venality with which marriages were made and unmade to
fill the pouches of the episcopal officials." This was but one
phase of the infinite casuistry by which any truth or principle of
righteousness could be avoided. The forbidden degree of con
sanguinity was never discovered until after the marriage, and not
even then except for a monetary consideration of consequence.
The Romish Church offered no proper resistance to the cor
rupting order of things. On the contrary, papal agents were con
tinually laboring to swell the list of mercenaries for the service of
the pope. Referring to the practices of an energetic cardinal in
his own country of Switzerland who had wrought to this end
with indefatigable zeal, Zwingli said: "With right do the car
dinals wear red hats and cloaks; for, shake these garments, and
out fall ducats and crowns ; wring them, however, and they drip
with the blood of your sons, fathers and best of friends." Ex
pressions of judgment of this order could be multiplied in
definitely, and all tending to confirm what we have contended for
— that corruption and wrong-doing prevailed everywhere, having
even ascended to the high places of authority.
But Protestant indictments of popular abuses are not neces
sary. Innumerable incidental notices in the writers of the times,
even of Romanists themselves, exhibit a condition of depravity
and degradation which has seldom been surpassed. The cor-
luption had reached all classes, and had come to dominate insti
tutions that should have been the most holy among men.
A most startling picture of the condition of the clergy comes
from the pen of Desiderus, the Abbot of Monte Cassino, who later
(in 1086) became Pope Victor III. "The Italian priesthood,"
says he, "and among them most conspicuously the Roman pontiffs,
are in the habit of defying all law and all authority; thus utterly

46 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
confounding together things sacred and profane. During all this
time the Italian priesthood, and none more conspicuously than
the Roman pontiffs, set at naught all ecclestiastical law and
authority. The people sold their suffrages for money to the
highest bidder ; the clergy, moved and seduced by avarice and am
bition, bought and sold the sacred rites of ordination, and carried
on a gigantic traffic with the gifts of the Holy Ghost. Few pre
lates remained untainted with the vile pollution of simony; few,
very few, kept the commandments of God, or served him with up
right heart; following their chiefs to do evil, the great sacerdotal
herd rushed headlong down the precipice into a quagmire of
licentiousness and profligacy; priests and deacons, whose duty it
was to serve God with clean hands, and with chaste bodies to
administer the sacraments of the Lord, took to themselves wives
after the manner of the laity ; they left families behind them, and
bequeathed their ill-gotten wealth to their children; yea, even
bishops, in contempt of all shame and decency, dwelt with their
wives under the same roof — a nefarious and execrable custom,
prevailing, alas! most commonly in that city where laws, thus
shamefully set at naught, first issued from the sacred lips of the
Prince of the Apostles and his holy successors."
The rapid multiplication of orders and their marvelous in
crease of wealth was followed by equally rapid degeneration and
decay, so that the original purpose of the monastic organizations
was lost after a few generations had passed. Those who dwelt
under vows of poverty in monastic seclusion were changed into a
worldly aristocracy under a religious name. The promise of
chastity was forgotten, the abbeys became centers of corruption,
and many of the nunneries were almost transformed into housesof
prostitution. In many such institutions devoted to piety and
meditation the inmates lived riotously and waged war upon their
neighbors. Men like the Abbot Gilbert confessed with shame
that monasticism had become an oppression and a scandal, a
cause of hissing and reproach among men. In 1147 St. Bernard,
in many respects the most commanding figure of the medieval
Church, said of the region of the Count of Toulouse: "The
churches are without people, the people are without priests, the
priests without the reverence due them, and the Christians with
out Christ. The churches are regarded as synagogues ; the sanc
tuary of the Lord is no longer holy; the sacraments are no longer

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 47
held sacred; feast days are without solemnity; men die in their
sins, and their souls are hurried to the dread tribunal, neither
reconciled by penance nor fortified by the holy communion."
Cardinal Baronius is one of the well-authenticated annalists of
the Papal Church. Of the papacy in the ninth century Baronius
says : "Never had divisions, civil wars, the persecutions of the
pagans, heretics and schismatics caused it to suffer so much as
the monsters who installed themselves on the throne of Christ by
simony and murders. The Roman Church was transformed into
a shameless courtesan, covered with silks and precious stones,
which publicly prostituted itself for good.
"The palace of the Lateran was become a disgraceful tavern,
in which ecclesiastics of all nations disputed with harlots the price
of infamy. Never did priests, and especially popes, commit so
many adulteries, rapes, incests, robberies and murders ; and never
was the ignorance of the clergy so great, as during this de
plorable period. * * *
"Thus the tempest of abomination fastened itself on the Church,
and offered to the inspection of men the most horrid spectacle.
The canons of councils, the creed of the apostles, the faith of
Nice, the old traditions, the sacred rites, were buried in the abyss
of oblivion; and the most unbridled dissoluteness, ferocious
despotism, and insatiable ambition, usurped their place.
"Who could call legitimate pontiffs the intruders who seated
themselves on the chair of the apostles? And what must have
been the cardinals selected by such monsters ?"
Of the papacy in the tenth century Baronius says :
"In this century the abomination of desolation was seen in the
temple of the Lord; and in the See of St. Peter, reverenced by
angels, were placed the most wicked of men; not pontiffs, but
monsters. "And how hideous was the face of the Roman Church when
filthy harlots governed all at Rome, changed Sees ¦ at their pleas
ure, disposed of bishoprics, and intruded their gallants and their
bullies into the See of St. Peter !"
Of the twelfth century the same writer avowed that "it ap
peared as if antichrist then governed Christendom." Baronius
was writing as an historian, but Bernard, the distinguished monk
of Cluny, the author of "Jerusalem the Golden," lived at the
time and it is he who writes thus :

48 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
"The golden ages are past. Pure souls exist no longer. We
live in the last times. Fraud, -impurity, rapine, schisms, quar
rels, wars, treasons, incests and murders desolate the Church.
Rome is the impure city of the hunter Nimrod. Piety and re
ligion have deserted its walls. Alas ! the pontiff, or rather king,
of this odious Babylon tramples under foot the Gospels and
Christ, and causes himself to be adored as a god."
In an address before Pope Innocent IV and his cardinals, in
the thirteenth century, Robert Greathead, the Bishop of Lincoln,
England, in a personal appeal for a check on the abuses of the
time told the assembled prelates plainly that "the clergy were
a source of pollution to the whole earth; they were antichrists
and devils masquerading as angels of light, who made of the
house of prayer a den of robbers ; and the Roman curia was the
source of all the vileness which rendered the priesthood a hissing
and a reproach to Christendom."
In the fourteenth century, in speaking of the scheme of Pope
John XXII to make capital out of the abominations of the times
by means of a systematic tax on sins for "absolution," "free dis
pensation" and "assurance," the abbot of one of the monastic in
stitutions exclaimed: "Rejoice now, Vatican! all treasures
are open to thee. Thou canst draw in with full hands. Rejoice
in the crimes of the children of men, since thy wealth depends
on their abandonment and iniquity! * * *
"Now the human race are subject to thy laws! Now thou
reignest — through depravity of morals and the inundation of
ignoble thoughts. The children of men can now commit with
impunity every crime, since they know that thou wilt absolve
them for a little gold. Provided he brings thee gold, let him
be soiled with blood and lust. Thou wilt open the kingdom of
heaven to debauches, Sodomites, assassins, parricides — what do I
say? Thou wilt sell God Himself for gold!"
In the time of the "schism," and during the double pontificate
of Boniface IX and Clement VII, the one reigning at Rome
and the other at Avignon, the doctors of the University of
Paris addressed a letter to the King of France in which they
said: "Two popes elevate to prelacies only unworthy and corrupt
ministers, who have no sentiments of equity or shame, and who
think only of satiating their passions.

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 49
"They rob the property of the widow and the orphan, at
the same time that they are despoiling churches and monas
teries. "Sacred or profane, nothing comes amiss to them, provided
they can extract money from it.
"Religion is for them a mine of gold, which they work to
the last vein.
"They sell everything from baptism to burial.
"They traffic in pyxes, crosses, chalices, sacred vases, and the
shrines of saints.
"One can obtain no grace, no favor, without paying for it.
"It is not the worthiest, but the richest, who obtain ecclesiasti
cal dignities."
The earliest writer on English Canon Law, John Athon,
writing of abuses found in the Church of England by a legatine
inquest made in 1237, indulges in no protest against its severity,
but adds some touches and reflections of his own: "Our pre
lates," says he, "are pilots asleep in the storm." "Churchmen
strain the canons by casuistry so as to give countenance to Eng
land's greatest evil, robbers." "The rural deans have neither
the courage nor the knowledge for their work." "They are fat
with the plunder and the blood of the poor." "Ecclesiastical
lawyers say to a scrupulous client, answer thus and you will
lose your case; but they fail to add, if you do not answer thus
you will lose your soul." This native churchman took even a
.gloomier view of the English Church of his time than the
Roman legate who had conducted the inquest on the Apostate
Church, in which, in order to aid in the detection of the rascals,
Pope Innocent III had issued elaborate direction how to detect
nine different sorts of sham papal bulls.
The deplorable fact was this, that for centuries before Luther
the papacy, from being the teacher of religion, the organizer of
civilization, the heart and soul of Christendom, was changing
into a piece of tyranny, depressing incubus and a by-word. The
spiritual empire of the Gregories and the Innocents had been
rapidly verifying the famous epigram of the English unbeliever
Hobbes, who had come to regard it as a translation into spirit
ual terms of the empire of the Caesars, and who said, "If a man
consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will
easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of

50 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave
thereof." VI
If we would understand aright the force of the feelings that
had come to make the papacy hateful among the people, until
that hatred broke out at last into open revolt under Luther's
leadership, it is worth while to note what we have already cited
and much more that can be adduced from the impassioned ut
terances of this time. Dietrich Vrie, a well-meaning monk, who
had gone to the Council of Constance, in a Latin poem which is
more remarkable for its vigor than for its grace of expression,
puts this language into the mouth of the degenerate and dis
consolate Church : "The pope, once the wonder of the world,
has fallen, and with him fell the heavenly temples, my members.
Now is the reign of Simon Magus, and the riches of this world
prevent just judgment. The papal court nourishes every kind of
scandal, and turns God's houses into a market. The sacraments
are basely sold; the rich is honored, the poor is despised; he
who gives most is best received. Golden was the first age of the
papal court; then came the baser age of silver; next the iron
age long set its yoke on the stubborn neck. Then came the age
of clay. Could aught be worse? All things are degenerate;
the papal court is rotten; the pope himself, head of all wicked
ness, plots every kind of disgraceful scheme, and while absolving
others hurries himself to death." This author's "History of
the Council of Constance" opens with a severe denunciation of
the simony, the avarice, the ambition and the luxury of the pope,
the bishops and the entire clergy. "What shall I say of their
luxury when the facts themselves cry out most openly on the
shameless life of prelates and priests ! They spare neither con
dition nor sex; maidens and married men and those living in
the world are all alike to them." "Benefices," he complains,
"which ought to provide alms for the poor have become the
patrimony of the rich."
If these utterances of this historian, himself a papist, may be
thought of as too highly rhetorical, they are more than confirmed
by the writings of soberer spirits, in which denunciations of
the same order and lamentations over the abuses that every
where prevailed plentifully abound. Even in the Council of

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 51
Trent, which assembled in the year before that in which Luther
died, much plain speaking was indulged in by zealous brethren
in the presence of the assembled fathers of the Church. The
monstrous declension of the ecclesiastical system, the seculari
zation of the whole body of the clergy, the greed of the Curia,
the ignorance, laziness and lewdness of many of the secular
clergy, the corruption of the monks, in short, the degeneracy of
the officials of the Church, were all laid at that great assembly of
the papacy, and with much plainness of speech, at the Church's
own door. Evidences were multiplying that at last Rome was
becoming sobered and forced to put its house in order. Pope
Paul III contemplated with anxiety the progress of the Refor
mation in the lands beyond the Alps when he became head of the
Church in 1534. Knowing full well that the appalling corrup
tion of the Vatican, the clergy and the monks must cease, or that
each in its turn must pass away, as late as the beginning of his
pontificate Paul had appointed a commission of the more strict
from the College of Cardinals to examine into Luther's indict
ment of the Church. The letters of the early Jesuits make it
impossible for any fair-minded historian to longer question the
appalling corruption of priests, monks and people in every part
of Europe at the period of the inauguration of Luther's reform
atory and reconstructive work. Even from Rome, the head and
center of Christendom, one priest wrote to another that there
were not three men of his class in the city who were not
stained by concubinage and crime. Papal infamy had become
the subject of most widespread discussion. No other subject in
the spiritual struggles of the time attracted a wider interest.
Symptoms were multiplying to show that a new order of things
was at hand. Causes that paved the way for the Reformation
were working effectively, if not always harmoniously.
One of the certain signs of the degeneracy of any period in
Christian history may be found in the kind of men tolerated as
the leaders and teachers of the Church and as the sacrosanct
exponents and examples of the spirit of Christianity. Most of
the popes, it must be said, were men of mediocre ability but
respectable character. Some were but little removed from idle
voluptuaries, while others were apostate and vicious. Roman
Catholic writers do not hesitate to admit that there have been
wicked popes. Dante is far from being alone in remanding

52 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
some of them to the pains of perdition. Judas, say some of the
papal apologists, betrayed his Master and Peter denied Him,
and how can we reasonably expect that the successors of the
apostles should be better than the apostles themselves?
Prophets in the Old Testament were sometimes cowardly and
unfaithful, and the Church of that period passed through times
of darkness and corruption. Then why not the Church of
the new covenant? But notwithstanding the apologies, from
its very beginning it was notorious that badness, even in violent
forms, had sometimes climbed up into the chief places of papal
power and dominion and that enormities and atrocities were
found even in the court of the pontificate and among the wearers
of the papal tiara.
Leo the Great, who became pope in the year 440, was the
man who first really elaborated the papal theory of the Church,
laying the greatest possible emphasis on the fact that there is
one' God, one Church, one universal Bishop, one faith and one
interpreter of that faith, and that the recognition of this primary
fact alone could bring unity and efficiency to the Church on
earth. That he was sincere there is no doubt. He disdained
all diplomacy and argument. His tone was always authorita
tive, arrogant and dogmatic in the highest degree. His writings
indicate that he spoke, not as the individual Leo I, lacking an
increment of personal prestige, but, as he in all honesty regarded
himself, as the official successor of St. Peter, and in obedience to
a command which he unquestionably believed had been laid upon
him. He died November 10th, 461 — just 1022 years earlier than
the birth of Luther — but while he lived he had formulated for all
time, as he thought, the papal conception that the successor of
St. Peter had the care and headship of all the churches of the
world. He came upon the stage at a time when he had the
chance to observe the growing prestige of the papacy, which in
Rome, now no longer an imperial residence, was drawing to
herself the authority and influence of the waning and dis
credited empire. His own conception of the greatness and
possibilities of the chair of St. Peter must have been largely
moulded by what he had thus actually seen — a conception to
which he was to give most effective expression, when, by and
by, he himself came to occupy that exalted position. This was
his line of argument : It was Peter who had been singled out by

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 53
the Lord for the commission to strengthen his brethren, and
to feed the flock of Christ. Peter is, therefore, the Chief
Shepherd, who is set over the undershepherds of that flock. He
is at once the pattern and the source of all ecclesiastical author
ity. In other words, according to Leo's argument, Peter was
directly ' appointed by Christ as the Prince of the Universal
Church, the primate to whose authority all bishops must defer.
As for Rome, she is holy and elect, a priestly and royal city,
which the chair of St. Peter has raised to the position of the
capital and first city of the world, conferring upon her wider
sway than that which her earthly lordship had ever bestowed.
Of these claims Leo speaks with conviction, and as a man
conscious of his undoubted right to speak as he does. He
speaks always as a superior to an inferior, or as a commander to
his subordinates. But even the startling character of these
claims of the founder of the papacy, and the persistence and force
with which Leo asserted the prerogatives of his position, did
not save the great organization of which he was the official
head from indications, early in its history, of official degeneracy
and appalling corruption.
Even in the time of Gregory the Great, who became pope in
590, that influential prelate wrote to the ecclesiastical chieftains
in widely separated countries : "I hear that no one can obtain
orders in your province without paying for them." As early
as 599 he had to issue a circular letter forbidding bishops to have
women in their houses, and ordering priests, deacons and sub-
deacons to separate from their wives. In an age of confusion,
corruption and cowardice, Gregory became a mighty force for
the creation of greatly improved ideals which did not long retain
their idealism. The popes were great temporal sovereigns,
and as early as the eighth century the art of forging documents
to bolster up their unscriptural and secularized pretensions and
claims was cultivated. This method of fortifying papal su
premacy reached its culmination in what are known as the
"Pseudo-Isadorian Decretals," a collection of documents, both
genuine and forged, which appeared in Europe about the middle
of the ninth century. The aim of these forgeries, which ap
peared under the name of Isadore Mercator, was to furnish the
Church something of a written constitution, and to give as
surances of primitive sanction to Roman supremacy. Their

54 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
genuineness was generally believed in almost without question
until the time of the Reformation; but for the most part they
made up one of the most stupendous of all forgeries. Worked
out with admirable skill and consummate ingeniousness, they con
stituted the most audacious and pious fraud ever perpetrated in
the history of the Church. But notwithstanding the belief that
all things were allowable which were adduced to uphold the doc
trines and prerogatives of the Church, and the bogus piety of
the fraud, the cares of earthly dominion enfeebled the sense of
spiritual duty and at times warped the character of other
wise good men. Pope Stephen III, for example, in an age of
easy dissolution of the marriage relation had but little to say
about divorce, but became violently denunciatory of an alliance
with the Lombards, the disproportion of his indignation being
one of the most conspicuous features of his pontificate.
Pope Nicholas I, who died in 867, largely through the in
fluence of the false decretals raised the Church above the State,
causing the former, during his time, to reach the acme of
earthly dominion. He came to regard himself, in deep sincerity,
as the veritable representative of God on earth, as such a real
and elevated vicar of Christ that he occupied a throne so high
that from its great elevation all men, kings and beggars, patri
archs and monks, were of the same size. He believed that his
prerogatives were so great that he was officially responsible to
God, as he frequently said, for every immoral and irreligious
movement in "every part of the world." Historical truth com
pels us to say that, even for a pope, he assumed an immense
responsibility. He looked upon himself as divinely appointed
and "inspired," and, in consequence, soon came to believe that
disobedience to him was disobedience to God. From him kings
received their crowns, and to him they were to be abjectly subject.
even as the common serfs were to them. To his orders great and
powerful prelates were to render obedience, or be deposed from
all ecclesiastical preferment and distinction. Without his sacro
sanct approval no council of the Church could be held in Europe.
Without his papal authorization no church could be built and no
book of any importance be published. He lived at an assumed
elevation never authorized of God for any man or official, ecclesi
astical or secular. He adopted a lofty tone in dealing with
princes, and fell little short of the dictatorial manner of the most

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 55
powerful autocrats who ruled from the chair of St. Peter in the
crowning era of the papal theocracy under Hildebrand and Inno
cent III.
Nicholas was the greatest personal constructive force in the
making of the medieval papacy up to his time. He was a
strict example of the prestige of the system. He rebuked with
sternness the most autocratic and aristocratic sinners. He
scolded princes and kings as if they had been the most sub
servient lackeys. Like Gregory the Great, he added dignity to
his assumptions by the moral animus which, in general, dis
tinguished his pontificate. But after all, it was the loftiness of
the claims of his sacerdotal creed more even than the strength of
his personality or manifest sincerity that served to exalt him so
much above the disorders of the troublous times in which he
lived. When we think of it as a time of murder, incest, rape,
spoliation; a time of monastic and priestly corruption, of un
questioned and monstrous evils, which are amply reflected in the
letters of this pontiff himself — whatever our view may be as to
the unscriptural and unhistorical claims of this man — we cannot
but feel that it was well for Europe at that time to have had such
a masterful ecclesiastical official. The forged decretals, which
were but little used by the popes before the middle of the
eleventh century, were of immense service to the papacy in
spreading a conviction, in a credulous and superstitious age, of
the antiquity of these advanced but entirely untenable claims of
the greatest of medieval organizations, if not the greatest of
all times. It used methods, and proceeded at times on the basis
of principles, at complete variance with the teachings of Christ,
the Head of the Church — principles which no cause could
sanctify, and which, being bequeathed to its later history, have
caused the papacy to be distrusted, and which have continued to
arouse hostility extending from the days of Nicholas I to
Benedict XV.
But the seeds of degeneracy were deeply rooted in the papal sys
tem itself, which had been bolstered up by interpolations and for
geries. Bad days were at hand. The history of the Western
Church, controlled by Rome during the latter part of the ninth
and tenth centuries, deals with a period of unparalleled corrup
tion and inefficiency. The papacy as a constructive spiritual
force almost disappears from view. The influence of such lead-

56 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
ers and organizers as Leo the Great, Gregory the Great and
Nicholas I has almost entirely disappeared, and their ideals and
ambitions for the Church have fallen upon days of depressing de
generacy. After the death of Nicholas in 867, there came for
over two hundred years a line of weak popes for the greater
part of the unholy succession. Many of them were not only
weak, but wicked and worldly. The Church was reaping the
direful reward of her own unscriptural mesalliances, unholy and
secular in character.
Prior to the time of Nicholas there had been among the oc
cupants of the chair of St. Peter but few men of commanding
ability or dominating personality, but even fewer of ignoble
character. But even as much cannot be said of most of his suc
cessors down to the time of Hildebrand. It was a pope, Stephen
VI, the official vicar of Christ and alleged successor of Peter,
who had exhumed from its grave the half putrid body of For-
mosus, a predecessor, and treated it, in a wretched outburst of
his papal brutality, with appalling indignity and outrage. At a
time when violent disorders broke out under John VIII, one of
the stronger of the successors of Nicholas, speaking of the lead
ing ecclesiastics, one of the most conservative and reticent of
writers has said : "Their swinish lust was only second to their
cruelty and avarice." Hadrian II had the widow of one of
these base officials whipped naked through the streets of Rome,
and had the eyes of another put out. In the tenth century
came the reign of the "Pornocracy," when, in the lamentable
development of the papcy in this period, the dominion of such
dissolute women is all the more queer and inexplicable, because
it is the record of the feminine ascendancy in a nominal theoc
racy. It was during this period that there were three popes
at the same time, with but little of choice between each of the
three pontifical scoundrels. Though very young on his accession
to the papal throne in 1033, Benedict IX was noted for his cor
ruption. His crimes were many and flagrant. He committed
murders and adulteries openly, "robbed the pilgrims on the
graves of martyrs, and turned Rome," as was said of him, "into
a den of thieves." His atrocious conduct at last exhausted the
patience of the Romans and they expelled him, electing Sylves
ter III in 1044, one year before Benedict's death. But the de
posed vicar of Christ, by the help, of the Tusculans, returned and

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 57
reinstated himself in power. He then sold the papacy in 1045
to John Gratian, who became Pope Gregory VI, and who hoped,
by means of reforming the institution, to justify the illegal
proceeding of buying it. But Benedict again returned and
claimed what he had sold, on the ground that the sale was
illegal, inasmuch as he had no right to sell the successorship of
St. Peter — an instance of a troubled conscience and an example
of luminous piety in a dark time.
The history of the times demonstrates beyond any doubt,
even in the minds of fair-minded papalists, that various repre
sentatives of the papacy had fallen below even an average stand
ard of righteous conduct, and some of them of even common
decency, and that at least a few in the lists of badness had given
adequate ground to be rated as specimens of extraordinary de
pravity. Even as early as the fourth century some of the
successors of the humble fisherman, St: Peter, seem to have
yielded to the temptations of worldly display and luxury, to say
nothing worse. Even a heathen historian refers to their costly
turnouts, and declares that their feasts surpassed those of
"kings' tables." This same writer informs us further that, even
at such an early period, the episcopal chair was considered worth
contending for even unto the shedding of blood, and that in one
case the sacrifice of one hundred and thirty-seven lives in the
storming of a church was only an incident of the struggle
through which Pope Damasus, elevated to his office in A. D. 366,
was made the Roman bishop. It is not affirmed, to be sure, how
great was the responsibility of the successful candidate for pon
tifical honors in this disgraceful and unholy contest, but it would
be something of a strain upon charity to suppose that the chief
beneficiary was in no degree accountable for the bloody violence
of his successful advocates.
Not less discreditable were the circumstances attending the
elevation of Vigilius in the year 537. According to Hefele, the
Catholic historian of the Church, this man came to his lofty posi
tion as the conscious instrument of an intriguing empress, and
as the result of outrageous injustice against his predecessor, who
was made the victim of lying accusations and driven from
office in order to make room for a characterless successor, an
irritating official of whom it was said that he promised every
thing and paid only with prevarications.

58 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Beginning with Sergius III in 904, the chief office of the
whole papal system for more than half a century was the spoil of
unprincipled Italian nobles and a bad trio of notorious females.
At a later period, according to the admission of Pastor, another
of the Catholic historians, the conduct of these depraved "Vicars
of Christ" was, in general, conspicuous for its worldly tone,
even at times going into the extreme of a demoralizing and dis
graceful luxury. Some of them exhibited a temper somewhat
at variance with that of the real Lord and Head of the Church,
whose special representatives they claimed to be. One of these
popes, Clement V, who, as one of the subjects of the French
king, was elevated to the papacy in 1305, became much enraged
at the encroachments of the Venetians upon Ferarra. He not
only expended the full list of penalties against these Venetians,
but in addition made their property liable to confiscation and
their persons to enslavement wherever they might be seized.
Gregory XI, one of the popes of Avignon from 1370 to 1378,
was not surpassed by Clement when he gave vent to his rage
against the Florentines in violent and outrageous speech. An
other of these vicars, Clement VI, who resided during the Baby
lonian captivity at Avignon, in his effort to crush the Emperor,
Lewis of Bavaria, showed himself to be something of an expert
in the use of violent invective. If that kind of speech were
effective certainly Lewis must have been somewhat reduced, for
speaking of him the pope indulged in this strain: "We humbly
implore divine power to repress the insanity of the aforesaid
Lewis, to bring down and crush his pride, to overthrow him by
the might of its right hand, to inclose him in the hands of his
enemies and pursuers and to deliver over to them his prostrate
body. Let the oven be made ready for him in secret and
let him fall into it. Let him be accursed coming in; let him
be accursed going out. The Lord smite him with folly and
blindness and frenzy of mind. Let the heaven send their light
nings upon him. Let the wrath of the omnipotent God and of
the Saints Peter and Paul turn against him in this world and
that to come. Let the whole earth fight against him; let the
ground open and swallow him up alive. In one generation let
his name be blotted out and his memory extinguished from the
earth. Let all the elements be against him. Let his habitation
become a desert ; let all the merits of the saints above confound

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 59
him, and make open display of vengeance upon him in this life ;
and let his sons be cast out of their habitations and with his own
eyes let him see them destroyed in the hands of enemies." There
is evidence that this outburst of rabid pontifical execration had
the desired effect upon the spirit of the contumacious Lewis,
for in September, 1343, he wrote to the pope that as a babe
longs for its mother's breast, so his soul cried out for the grace
of the pope and the Church.
In such representatives of corrupt papal administration all
sense of spiritual responsibility was overshadowed by their thor
oughly securalized ambitions. The historian Gregorovius says :
"With Sixtus IV the priestly character of the people began to
vanish and that of territorial lord became so prominent that the
successors of Peter in that era appeared as representatives of
Italian dynasties, only accidentally holding the place of popes, and
wearing the tiara in the place of the ducal crown. The thor
oughly worldly schemes to which the popes now devoted them
selves required more than ever the use of worldly means such
as financial speculations, traffic in offices and in matters of grace,
unprincipled acts of statecraft, and the dominance of nepotism.
Never before was nepotism driven with such recklessness, papal
proteges (in most instances the actual bastards of the popes),
Vatican princes, being brought upon the theater of Roman affairs
with every new incumbent of the papal office, advanced sud
denly to power, tyrannized over Rome and over the pope him
self, contended for countships in a brief round of craft and
intrigue against hereditary lords and against cities, kept in good
fortune oftentimes only so long as the pope lived, and founded,
even when their power went to pieces, new families of papal
princes." Adequately to describe the character of the medieval Church
from the days of Wiclif to those of Luther would tax the
powers of portrayal possessed by a Dante. The plain facts,
however, stated as briefly and as simply as possible, carry their
own sad and depressing impression, without the aid of a brilliant
imagination. There is a medieval proverb, quoted somewhere
by the historian Hase, that if a man would enjoy himself for a
little while, let him kill a chicken; if for a year, let him marry
a pretty wife; if for life, let him become a priest. In this high
office it had -come to pass that avarice and luxury, greed and

60 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
ambition, simony and extortion, seemed to be linked up together,
the papacy itself having set the bad example. Petrarch said
that the court of the popes at Avignon was a place where the
hope of heaven and the fear of hell were regarded as old fables,
where virtue was regarded as a thing for peasants, and sin was
looked upon as a sign of manly independence. Considering the
manifold apostasies and unmeasured badness of many of these
unworthy successors of Peter, it is not surprising that Dante,
the great Florentine, a true and loyal son of the Church, should
not only have had the courage to criticise the action of the
papacy, but to have consigned some of its chief representatives,
not simply to purgatory, but to the deepest hell. The knowl
edge of them that has been gathered since, with the passing of
the centuries, has not induced any disposition to reverse the wis
dom and justice of Dante's consignments. VII
The papal system which had thus become so degenerate, was
not so much evolved as created. It may be said that seven men
were the creators of this vast piece of sacerdotal and hierarchical
machinery, so much like the ancient Empire of Rome in its
eleborate articulation and co-ordination of officials and parts.
These seven men were Gelasius I, Leo I, Gregory I, Hadrian I,
Nicholas I, Gregory VII, and Innocent III. From Innocent to
Benedict XV the system, with varied applications to changing
conditions, has largely been an inheritance. Each of these seven
men amplified and deepened the foundations, and did much
to enlarge the structure of this great religious principality which
became the guiding and organizing power in the Church, until,
when its power was turned into omnipotence, it became a factor
in the Church's disorganization and final disruption at the time
of the Reformation.
No man had ever ascended the papal throne with so preten
tious an idea of its prestige and responsibility, and no pope ever
confronted a more disordered state in Christendom, than Hilde
brand, or Gregory VII. Most of the priests of every country at
his accession were legally married, though in some places the
law of celibacy was enforced, while many of them were living
in illicit relations. He believed that his sacerdocracy was of the

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 61
will of God, that it was divinely ordained and instituted, and
that it was the only means of maintaining religion and morality
in Europe. His coming to leadership in the Church, by popular
demand, in 1073, did not so much usher in as bring to its highest
point the wave of reformation already set in motion more than
twenty-five years before. His fierce and unyielding campaign
against simony not only filled the entire period of his famous
pontificate, but also serves as a commentary on the state of the
Church with which he had to deal. He was the great organizer
of the papacy, and proclaimed its absolute right in the Church.
The pope's word, thought he, is God's word, the pope's acts are
God's acts. He proclaimed and made effective the idea that the
apostolic chair, in a spiritual sense, is present everywhere, and
that its occupant, judged by no man, is to be the judge of all.
Severe and uncompromising as he was, Hildebrand's soul was
stirred by the thought of the greatness of his mission. He over
threw one tyranny, but in its place he reared another and more
intolerable one. Hildebrand has been variously intrepreted.
Whether he was one of the good men of the earth it is not for us
fully to determine, but he was unquestionably one of the great
of the earth.
Innocent III was the last great maker of the papacy. He
entered upon his pontificate in 1198, and reigned for eighteen
years. From the beginning of his rule he recognized the neces
sity of moral reformation, and to his credit it must be said
that, from the year of his election he endeavored to abolish
pluralism, luxury, rapacity, pride, arrogance and the other evils
that had debilitated and corrupted the Church. Under him the
papal theory reached its culmination. The earthly empire he
compared to the moon shining faintly from light borrowed from
the spiritual power of which he was the embodiment and ex
pression. He wielded an almost absolute authority, brought
the papal power to its zenith, and made his voice heard as none
other in the public affairs of the Europe of his day. He came
to his exalted position with a belief in man's utter depravity, and
in the pope's power to pardon all sin and to remit all penances.
In his memorable administration, in which he exercised a dominion
hitherto unattained, and never since maintained in the same de
gree even by the papacy, he reaped what Hildebrand had sown
and filled in an outline traced by his master hand in the eleventh

62 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
century. He enforced his lofty claims as the head of all things
by compelling the prefect who represented the empire and the
senator who represented the Romans to take oaths of allegiance
to himself, thus casting off the last trace of an imperial yoke.
After the grimmest medieval fashion, he sent his troops to lay
waste the properties of rebellious nobles. He placed England
under an interdict until the affrighted and superstitious people
saw the doors of their churches closed upon them, while, de
prived of the seven sacraments and Christian burial, they
imagined the jaws of a medieval hell gaping wide for their souls.
He drove priests and prelates out of his kingdom. In 1215 he
rebuked the barons of England for their "infamous presump
tion" at Runnymede in taking up arms against John Lackland,
a vassal of the Roman see, and denounced the Great Charter of
Rights wrung from the unwilling hands of John as a devil-
inspired document, and forbade his imperial vassals to accede to
its unjust demands. He excommunicated the barons when they
refused to lay down their arms, and suspended Stephen Lang-
don, his own archbishop of Canterbury, when that prelate re
fused, on the ground that it was dictated by false representa
tions, to promulgate the sentence.
Innocent had, within the space of ten years, raised the power
of the papacy in England to its supreme height, and then
dealt it a blow from which it could never recover. He taxed
the clergy, confiscated the funds of monks, and forbade nobles
to wear costly furs or eat sumptuous dinners, or to indulge in
sports at tournaments. He gave countenance to the monstrous
crime of persecuting the Albigenses, in that historical butchery
of a brave reforming people, whose bones, as said John Milton,
"lie bleaching on the Alpine mountains cold." His ideal was
papal power, but of the attribute of love he knew but little. In
the interest of his papal ideals he sacrificed himself. He was
one of the great makers of' the papacy. Nearer than any other
who went before him, this alleged successor of St. Peter came to
lealizing that ideal after which he was striving. Pie it was who
put the finishing touches on that mighty Colossus which Luther
by and by was to smite to its undoing. He advanced claims as
extravagant as Hildebrand, and succeeded in making them more
effective in their execution. He could say, "The Lord be
queathed to Peter not merely the government of the universal

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 63
Church, but the whole secular estate." Gregory VII could have
said no more.
Boniface VIII was the last great representative of the papal
ideal in its earlier and more austere and autocratic medieval
form. He attempted to give the last notable expression to the
world power of the papacy, but not with the old-time success of
Nicholas I, Gregory VII or Innocent III. Boniface was bold
and keen, and had made himself acquainted with the political sit
uation in Europe. He had adopted the Hildebrandian ideals
with their immeasurable pretensions, and ventured to enforce
his authority over princes. But the papacy was passing into a
period of comparative impotence. Influences were at work
which were not only to become fatal to the worldly grandeur of
the pope and to his life, but to his fame to the latest ages.
Unfortunately for the colossal piece of ecclesiastical machinery
of which the pope was the head, the days of declining power
came just at the time when the eyes of Europe were growing
sharper. It was the period of the rising renaissance of classical
culture, and, in Germany especially, of biblical exposition and
religious earnestness. It was a period rich in civic development
and prosperity, when keen-eyed laymen and scholars of dis
tinction were coming to the front. Obedience to the pope as a
condition of salvation was encountering manifold difficulties.
There were signs of rising revolt against the abuses and usurpa
tions of the ancient orders of things. The general of one of the
orders impeached Pope John XXII for heresy. William of Oc
cam, "the Doctor Invincibilis," one of the most astute of the later
schoolmen, and others assailed the existing institutions with
powerful assaults of invective. The pope, honored as the "vicar
of Christ," was denounced as the "anti- Christ." "The dragon
with the seven heads," and other designations big with bad mean
ing. Crushing indictments of the papal pretensions and vindica
tion of the secular power, were launched in quick succession by
such men as Arnold of Brescia and Marsilio of Padua. The
basis upon which papal claims had been made to rest in forged
decretals and conciliar declarations was at last being subjected
to scrutiny.
The resourcefulness of the popes is a matter of some note. A
jubilee, for example, had been announced for 1390, and from
that the pope had reaped a rich harvest. But that did not deter

64 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
his thrifty successor from also reaping another golden harvest
from another jubilee in the year 1400, after the lapse of only a
single decade.
Being fearful of the band of brigands, robbers and ravishers
which infested the papal estates, many pilgrims from Germany
and Scandinavia were deterred from coming to Rome. But the
reigning Pope, Boniface, met this emergency in the interest of
the piety of these frightened children of the Church and the in
crease of the resources of his own treasury by enacting that such
pilgrims from lands of the north might obtain the same pardon
granted their southern brethren by visiting certain shrines nearer
home and paying the papal agents the cost of the coveted jour
ney to Rome. Such simoniacal practices are established and ad
mitted by papists as well as asserted by the reformers of the
day. We have the official assurance of the Council of Con
stance that John XXIII "sold absolution from punishment and
guilt," together with other and abundant indications of the con
tinuance of this abuse. Even the gamblers and prostitutes had
to pay the tithe from their infamous earnings, while complainants
were mercilessly punished. One historian asserts that this man
Baldessare Cossa, who later became Pope, when a cardinal deacon,
had violated no less than two hundred maidens and matrons of
Rome. He pressed the sale of indulgences so flagrantly and by
such objectionable agents that the Bohemian reformers burned the
bull announcing the terms of the sale, in the streets. He was
described as "addicted to the flesh," "the dregs of vice," "a mirror
of infamy," "guilty of poisoning, murder and persistent addition
to the vices of the flesh."
And yet it is not to the moral indigation caused by this
man's character that he owed his fall, but to the treachery of the
Emperor Sigismund and the Council of Constance, both bent on
restoring at least the outward unity of the Church. He was
made a victim of the growing zeal for the unification of the dis
tracted Church. It was all the while becoming more and more
evident that reform must come from without the Church. Popes
and cardinals could not effect it, and in the prevailing creed there
was no canonical basis for the action of a council in defiance
of them. But notwithstanding, one hundred and two years be
fore Luther's theses, this pope, who had preached the opening
sermon of the Council of Constance from the text, "Speak

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 65
every man the truth," was deposed and disgraced by the same
Council that ordered the burning of Huss, and declared to be
"unworthy, useless and harmful." On the inside the papacy was
slowly discerning the rising tide of revolt, while on the outside
the new culture was sharpening the pens of the critics.
Three typical popes of Luther's own day, and each in his own
way, indicate in their different careers the imposing and obstinate
array of obstacles the reformer had to face in the great work he
wrought in the name of the Head of the Church.
Alexander VI was the pope during whose pontificate the
lowest depths of degradation of the papacy was reached. In the
year in which Christopher Columbus discovered America, and
when Luther was but nine years old, this man, hitherto known
as Cardinal Roderigo Borgia, ascended the papal throne. He
pursued the same policy as Pope Sixtus IV, who died when
Luther was but one year old, and who had conducted himself in
such a manner as to warrant the belief that he regarded him
self not only as the official head of the Church, but as not even
being indirectly related to Christianity as a moral and religious
system. With more boldness and skill, and with greater good
fortune, Alexander followed in the way of the wicked Sixtus.
He was certainly the most notorious of the venal and secular
popes of the period of the Renaissance, and probably the most
immoral, though it is but fair to say that in the matter of wicked
ness he had some formidable pontifical rivals among his imme
diate predecessors, such as Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII.
LTnder the influence of Alexander the papacy sank to the level' of
other Italian principalities and showed itself, like them, also,
ready to sacrifice even the welfare of Italy for its own tem
poral advantage, and to further the designs of the Borgia fam
ily. The sole aim of this pope in securing the papacy seemed to
be the formation of an independent kingdom for the benefit of
his own family. Quite in harmony with the character of the
man, he had obtained the coveted tiara by intrigue, and after one
of the most corrupt elections known in history. He never
shrank from any form of diplomatic intrigue, nor from war or~
assassination, in order to realize his purposes and carry out his-
designs in behalf of his own. He made himself stronger than
his rival secular princes by using the spiritual weapons of excom
munication and interdict, which they could not use and which had

66 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
not yet been rendered entirely ineffective. In a country pro
verbial in the sixteenth century for the terrible laxity of its
morals, he was one of the worst of his time. The Holy Father
of Christendom had abandoned even the pretence of decency,
and followed a course of life not merely openly secular, but im
pudently and scandalously immoral. He was one of the vilest,
most sensual and cruel men of whom history affords us any
knowledge. He may be fairly rated as the culminating figure
in a considerable group of pontifical badness. Surrounded by
troops of courtesans, as a kind of papal monstrosity he made the
Vatican the scene of orgies that would have satisfied the de
praved tastes of Caligula, Commodus, or Heliogabalus. He
despoiled the Church of its rightful adornments as the bride of
Christ, and exposed her to the European nations in all her
hideous and unbecoming medieval deformities, so that she had
become a byword and reproach, making inevitable the coming
revolt on the part of the people who shared in a clearer appre
hension of the gospel and of the nature and sanctity of the
Church. The papal and other documents relating to the children of
Alexander, at least six in number, and which have been found
in the Vatican archives and in other places, reveal an extraor
dinary moral degeneracy and laxity at Rome. The baseness of
the pope's character, the sensuality of his court and the mys
terious murders which filled Rome with terror, gave currency to
stories which pictured him, as well as his children, Lucretia and
Csesar, as monsters of badness. In his absence from the Vati
can he left Lucretia as his representative at the papal residence,
while the world wondered at the abnormal spectacle of a pope's
bastard, and a woman at that, sitting as the regent on the steps
of the throne of St. Peter and exercising supreme authority even
at the fountain head of papal dominion and authority. He lived
in open illicit relations with one concubine named Rosa Vanozza,
and without any regard for the disorderly proceeding or any ap
parent compunction used his high position to promote the inter
ests of his son Caesar Borgia whom he had in turn made his
bishop and archbishop. The vices of this Caesar were equal to
those of his father. In a bad age he abandoned the priesthood
that he might the more freely, without any kind of ecclesiastical
restraint, run his career of crime. Among his other enormities

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 67
it is alleged that he mixed the cup of poison which his father
drank by mistake and from which he died at the end of his ill-
spent life as an unworthy priest, an apostate in his high vocation
and, as the supreme pontiff, a traitor to the spiritual interests
of the Church of which he was the avowed spiritual and titular
head. Of this Caesar, the degenerate son of a bad father, it has been
said that he was at once the image, the ideal and the terror of
his age.
Alexander's chief objects in life seem to have been his own
personal security and the advancement of his own children. In
view of the loftiness and sacredness of his high position he was
a selfish voluptuary of the most ignoble type — a man who in the
name and for the ends of religion employed fraud, treachery and
crime. The condition in which the papacy soon found itself
showed that his policy had not even the redeeming merit of ef
fecting the security of the hierarchy over which he so ignomin-
iously presided.
When Alexander died on August 8, 1503, but two years before
Luther entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt, it is said
that his departure called out unspeakable joy at Rome. He had
proven himself to- be most hostile to the interests of that re
ligion whose chief exponent he was supposed to be. Even he
had acknowledged, although it must be confessed somewhat
tardily, the need for reform. But this impulse to better things
soon passed away in the stress of politics and dynastic injustice.
But even Alexander VI made his contribution to reform. His
secularization of the Church, his scandalous life and the indigna
tion it aroused contributed in no inconsiderable degree to pre
pare the way for that new religious movement, then near at
hand, and which was destined to open up a new and brighter
chapter in the history of Christianity. He Who hath all power
and Who directeth all things by the word of His power could so
order it that even this notoriously wicked pope should become,
in spite of himself and by reason of his very enormities, a herald
and forerunner of reform.
The state of the Church could be expected to be in nothing
superior to its bad but tolerated head. Of one prince of the
ecclesiastical establishment, who had been drawn from the ob
scurity of a Franciscan monastery, it was said that his chief mis-

68 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
tress flaunted 8000 ducats' worth of pearls on her embroidered
slippers. In one night of gambling one lay prince lost to one of
the unregenerate cardinals 100,000 ducats. Another cardinal left
at his death a fortune of 100,000 ducats, largely the result of his
skill in the same unrighteous industry, while still another of these
papal electors was the leading sportsman of his day in fashion
able Roman society.
The state of Rome was in accord with that of the sacred col
lege of cardinals. Prosperous criminals who were by some
chance, or by some failure to recognize the fact of their opulence,
arrested, bought their liberty at the Vatican. The incidental
allusions of contemporaries to the condition of Rome make
somber, and some of it grewsome, reading. A writer in the
"American Catholic Quarterly Review," as late as 1900 ob
serves "that Borgia secured his election through the rankest
simony is a fact too well authenticated to admit a doubt." Fre
quently prurient comedies and still more prurient dances en
livened the sacred palace. In 1501 one historian dispassionately
notes in his diary that the pope was unable to attend to his spirit
ual duties, but was not prevented from enjoying in the Vatican
what was known as a "Chestnut Dance" and other performances
of fifty nude courtesans whom Caesar Borgia had brought in for
the pleasure of his father. This even a fair-minded Romanist
ought to be willing to see — that there has been no Borgia among
the popes since the Reformation of the sixteenth century.
In the time of Alexander the Church was moving in an atmos
phere of sordid financial and political intrigue. In the fast
growing splendor and opulence of Rome the Church was nearing
the edge of a formidable chasm of which even the vicar of Christ
seemed to be unaware. VIII
Another of these Renaissance popes, who in himself and his
career indicated the urgent need of reformation, was the martial
"Vicar of Christ" known in the history of the papacy as Julius
II, who, after the brief pontificate of Pius III, that lasted less
than a month, succeeded the infamous Alexander VI. If the
one object of Alexander had been the advancement of his own
children, that of Julius was to build up and strengthen the tem
poral sovereignty of the pope. He ascended the papal throne

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 69
in 1503, while Luther was yet a student in the University of
Erfurt. His ambition, if more respectable than that of his
immediate predecessors, was yet altogether worldly. He was de
termined to make the papal state the strongest political power in
Italy. He was the most warlike among all the successors of St.
Peter. It was he who afforded the world of his day the spec
tacle of the supreme religious teacher of Christendom and the
Christian King of France, Louis XII, the "First son of the
Church," engaged in war with one another. At the opening of
his campaign against Louis, Julius was smitten with a sickness
that was supposed to be unto death. But to the amazement of
his court, he left his bed, in January, 1511, and betook himself to
the camp of his soldiers. Snow covered the ground but the
pope set an example to his papal troops by enduring all the hard
ships of the camp. At his death he was known as the "pontefice
terrible." A satire known as "Julius Exclusus," which appeared after the
pontiff's death, represented him as appearing at the gate of heaven
with great din of warlike noises. Peter suggested that as he
was a brave man and had a large army and much gold and was
also a busy builder, he might build his own paradise. At the
same time the apostle reminded him that he would have to build
the foundations deep and strong so as to resist the assaults of the
devil. Julius retorted, so the story runs, by peremptorily giving
Peter three weeks to open heaven to him and that in case of re
fusal he would begin a siege with 60,000 men.
Whatever the gain may have been which the policy of Julius
brought to the papacy, it certainly involved in the issue great haz
ard and loss. He was a man of fine mental endowments, capable
of sympathizing with all things great in life and art, but he was a
secular prince wearing the papal tiara. He was a soldier wholly
devoted to war, in which he led in person. Much of the time he
lived in the field, subdued his Italian neighbors, and, had his reign
lasted long enough, would no doubt have conquered all Italy.
He fought like a soldier and lived like a prince, but he was eco
nomical in financial matters, even though he was the patron of
Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael. Devoted to war, he yet
valued the arts of peace. The foundations of St. Peter's had
been traced by one of his predecessors, Nicholas V, but they were
laid by Julius, who failed not to encourage the rare group of men

70 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
of genius who adorned the period of his pontificate, so full of
contradictions. Of him a contemporary says : "He was for
tunate rather than prudent, courageous rather than strong, but
ambitious and beyond measure desirous of every kind of great
ness." Piety was not one of the notable traits of Julius' reign,
but it afforded an agreeable relief from the coarse scandals of the
reign of Alexander VI. He had, it is true, a family of three
daughters, in strong contrast with the Hildebrandian ideals, but
the festivities attending the marriage of one of them were not
appointed for the Vatican, nor did any of them give offence by
their ostentatious presence in the pontifical palace.
But Julius sacrificed all interest in the moral and religious con
cerns of Christendom, even though the firm establishment of the
states of the Church for the next three centuries was his work.
To the end he kept up his tortuous diplomacy. In spite of his
own bull against simony, the curia remained as corrupt as ever,
and money continued to be raised in all the evil ways which were
the fruits of the evil resourcefulness of the papal system. From
a worldly standpoint, he had exalted the papal throne to the emi
nence of the national thrones of Europe. In the terrific convul
sion which Luther's Reformation produced, it has been said that
"the institution of the papacy might have fallen in ruins had not
Julius re-established it by force of arms."
But this pope who did so much in a worldly way, and whose
patronage of art was so commendable, did not have the temper of
a reformer, and his eyes, so beclouded by temporal ideals and
concerns, could not discern the signs of the times. One of the
best accredited historians of the Church, Dr. Schaff, writing of
the period immediately preceding the Reformation, says : "In vain
will the student look for signs that Julius II had any intimation
of the new religious reforms which the times called for and
which Luther began. What measures this pope, strong in will
and bold in execution, might have employed if the movement in
the north had begun in his day, no one can surmise. The monk
of Erfurt walked the streets in Rome during this pontificate for
the first and only time. While Luther was ascending the scala
sancta on his knees, and running about to the churches, wishing
his parents were in purgatory that he might pray them out, Julius
was having perfected a magnificently jeweled tiara, costing
200,000 ducats, which he put on for the first time on the anniver-

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 71
sary of his coronation, 1511. These two men, both of humble
beginnings, would have been more a match for each other than
Luther and Julius' successor, the Medici, the man of luxurious
culture." It is said that there was great joy among the people in Rome in
the year 1513, when it was announced, in due medieval form, that
Julius II was dead, that their spiritual father, whose blessing they
so devoutly received, was no more, that his fierce and warlike
spirit had fled forever. Men respected Julius, but they feared
and hated him. Having succeeded in making the policy of the
Church more respectable, he had not even made a pretence of
raising it above its purely secular course. Accordingly, when the
tolling of the great bell in the Capitol, which was sounded only on
such solemn occasions, announced to Rome and to the Church
that the Holy Father had been deposed by death, there was ap
preciation of him as the founder of the papal states, but little
veneration for his memory, and still less affection for him as the
chief shepherd of the flock of Christ, whose vicar on earth he had
claimed to be.
The warlike Julius was succeeded on the pontifical throne by
the chief voluptuary of his time, Giovanni di Medici, who took
the official title of Leo X. Men smiled, it was said, upon his suc
cession, felicitating themselves, as they believed, on the fact that
he was more like a gentle lamb than a fierce lion. The papacy of
Leo is great in the history of culture, but insignificant in the his
tory of religion and the Church. If he shared but little in the
martial tastes of his predecessor, he was equally secular in tone.
In place of military tactics and strategy, he put the arts of diplom
acy and devotion to heathen ideals of culture. Politics and lit
erature filled up his horizon. He loved pleasure, and was an
adept in duplicity. The story was widely believed that at the
opening of his pontificate he had given expression to his epicur
ean conception of the supreme office in the Church in writing to
his brother Julian : "Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has
given it to us." He became pope four years before Luther's
theses, but any spiritual conception of his exalted office came not
with him to the papal chair. A liberal patron of learning, fond
of sumptuous feasts and splendid outlays, intent only upon
worldly advantage, he did nothing to appease the growing de
mand for reform, which, when at length it came to his own

72 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
pontificate with irresistible energy and began to revolutionize
Europe, he estimated to be nothing more than a squabble between
jealous and bigoted monastic orders.
The festivities at the new pope's coronation showed at once
to all men that a reign of unusual worldly magnificence had been
inaugurated. The pomp and splendor of the great procession on
that occasion was famous even in that day of gorgeous pageants.
In his patronage of art and the pursuit of the political interests
of the house of Medici, Leo seems to have been unmindful of the
real interests of Christendom. In him paganism seemed to have
installed itself in the seat of papal dominion. Among his favor
ite amusements the chase occupied a leading place, although such
a form of pleasure was forbidden by canonical law to the
earthly vicegerent of God, and other clergy. Portions of the year
he passed, booted and spurred, in his devotion to such unsancti-
fied pursuits. At one assembling of this order the pope found
himself in the midst of eighteen cardinals, besides other prelates,
musicians, actors and servants, the ecclesiastical sportsmen being
aided by a pack of sixty or seventy dogs. Leo, too, was fond of
the theater, being accustomed to attend plays in the palaces of the
cardinals, those of rich bankers, in St. Angelo, and looking on as
they were performed in the Vatican itself — some of them, it is
said, being of the lascivious order. Festivities of all sorts ab
sorbed much of the pope's attention, the horizon of his outlook
seeming always to be his own pleasure. He encouraged the vanity
of wretched poetasters, and rewarded them with wine mixed
with water in proportion to the blunders made in their sometimes
wretched versification and rhyming. The number of such
blunders that called for this peculiar form of remuneration, it is
said, was large. He had a vulgar kind of delight in practical
forms of joking, totally unbecoming in an ordinary representa
tive of the Christian religion, not to say anything of the alleged
vicegerent of the Almighty. He was habitually frivolous, play
ing cards much of the time with the cardinals, and concluding the
game by contributing money to the bystanders.
In spending so much of his leisure in sports and games, the
pope was fibt only indulging in that which gave him pleasure but,
as was affirmed of him by a contemporary, because he also had
been led to think that indulgence in such recreation served
the additional purpose of prolonging his pontifical life. Con-

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 73
certs and comedies were features of many festive evenings
passed within the sacred courts of the Vatican, when the guests
frequently numbered as many as two thousand. His success at
sports, it is also said, had something to do with the granting of
pontifical favor, those seeking papal advancement finding the best
time to present their petitions to be at the end of a day of suc
cessful hunting of the stag or fishing in the Lake of Bolsema.
During Leo's pontificate a new social order at Rome came into
existence, an order founded upon luxury, art and wealth, the
leading features of Italian papal civilization having become spa
cious palaces, splendid and lavish entertainments and a court of
literary dependents and obsequious flunkeys. Princely luxuri-
ousness absorbed the papal funds. Opulent bankers, such as
Strozzi, gave great banquets at which the cardinals of the
Church fraternized with courtesans, while the pope, personally
temperate after the irregularities of his youth, was sometimes in
attendance. Men of abnormal appetities, one conspicuous ex
ample being a Dominican friar, were brought to the table of the
holy father to amuse him and his guests by an exhibition of their
incredible gluttony. At carnival time the pope entered without
restraint into the wild gaiety of Rome, and comedies of libidin
ous character were staged before the eyes of the man who
claimed to sit in the chair of St. Peter, but who had, in fact, de
spoiled his high office of its sacredness and prostituted it into a
vehicle of his own carnal propensities. This reigning head of
Christendom had but few spiritual interests and but little per
sonal religion. Of him it was wittily said that his learning and
fine tastes would have made him a perfect pope, if he had but
combined with these attainments some knowledge of religious
matters and some inclination to piety. By some writers Leo has
been commended for his fasts, but it should be remembered that
his weekly self-abnegation of this order was intended rather to
reduce the flesh than to subdue it. A wit, a scholar and an epi
cure, he set himself diligently to enjoy that which had been con
ferred upon him. When not engaged in the pursuit of grosser
pleasures of the life that now is, he was dabbling in European
politics. Of this Leo X, so destitute of seriousness and knowledge of
the situation confronting him when the Reformation came, it has
been said by Bishop Creighton, one of the fairest historians of

74 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the papacy, "He studied his personal appearance, he was proud
of his delicately formed hands, and called attention to them by
wearing a profusion of splendid rings. He chose to live in
public, and surrounded himself with amusing companions ; he en
joyed a laugh, and his mirth was not always refined. He took
pleasure in the vulgar witticism of buffoons, and found cynical
delight in the sight of human nature reduced to the lowest level
of animalism. He encouraged by his laughter portentous feats
of gluttony, and though habitually temperate himself, he liked to
see the eyes of his guests glisten with undisguised enjoyment at
the dainty fare which his table set before them. Sometimes he
played tricks upon their voracity and served unclean animals,
such as monkeys and crows, dressed with rich sauces which be
guiled the palates of his guests, whose confusion was great when
they discovered the truth."
In behalf of Leo it has sometimes been said that his qualities
were those of the epoch to which Italy long looked back as the
period of its greatest glory. It may be so, but to him belongs the
unenviable distinction of having turned the Vatican, the dwelling
place of God's vicegerent on earth, which he claimed it to be, into
the house of frivolity and reveling, and of so steeping himself in
the pleasures of time and sense as to have rendered him oblivious
of the impending catastrophe in the north. Lavish without re
flection, the pope had not only exhausted all his spiritual arts but
his treasury as well, the one rendering him bankrupt as a moral
and religious influence and the other inducing him to resort to
mercenary expedients, unscriptural in character and revolting to
the most enlightened Christian judgment of the times.
Such were the popes of the Renaissance. Luther saw Julius
II on his visit to Rome in 1511, and Leo was pope when Tetzel's
disgraceful huckstering of indulgences roused the soul of the
great Reformer and stirred his moral indignation. Leo had
made some pretence at reform, but the sincerity of that was
doubted and the results showed its ineffectiveness. Decrees
were passed for the reformation of the Roman Court and the
repression of concubinage, blasphemy and simony among the in
ferior clergy. In the year before the nailing up of Luther's
theses, Leo had also issued a bull in which he renewed and re
affirmed the famous bull Unam Sanctum, issued by Boniface
VIII, in November, 1302, against Philip the Fair of France.

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 75
This bull contains this passage: "There are two swords, the
spiritual and the' temporal. Our Lord said not of these two
swords, 'It is too much' but 'It is enough.' Both are in the power
of the Church, the one the spiritual, to be used by the Church,
the other the material, for the Church ; the former, that of the
priests, the latter that of kings and soldiers, to be wielded at
the command and at the sufferance of the priest. One sword
must be under the other, the temporal under the spiritual. The
spiritual instituted the temporal, and judges whether that power
is well exercised. We, therefore, assert, define and pronounce
that it is necessary to salvation to believe that every human being
it subject to the Pontiff of Rome." Thus on the very eve of the
Reformation we encounter the most extreme of all assertions of
the supremacy of the papacy over the whole world reaffirmed,
and by the most luxurious and worldly of all the popes, who was
himself to be a witness of the rending asunder of western Chris
tendom, the inauguration of the modern era in the history of
mankind, and the overthrow of a power that had continued for
more than a thousand years. For the first time in hundreds of
years men were aroused in feeling and untrammeled in reasoning.
The cup of indignation was more than full. If Europe was to
remain Christian, the Reformation must come.
That the Reformation was urgently called for is evident in
the deplorable and astonishing ignorance of the clergy even so
late as the period of Luther's death. In England, for example, a
royal visitation had been instituted, extaiding over a series of
years beginning in 1547, the year of the accession of Edward VI.
A report of a visitation under the direction of Bishop Hooper, in
the diocese of Gloucester in 1551, has been published along with
comments. One of the purposes contemplated in this visitation
was to find out the qualifications or disqualifications, as it proved
to be, for the important function of preaching. The illiteracy
exhibited in this report was of this order : "Three hundred and
eleven clergymen were examined, and of these one hundred and
seventy-one were unable to repeat the Ten Commandments,
though, strangely enough, all but thirty-four could tell the chapter
in which they were to be found; ten were unable to repeat the
Lord's prayer ; twenty-seven could not tell who was its author ;
and thirty could not tell where it was to be found.
"The report deserves study as a description of the condition of

76 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the clergy of the Church of England before the Reformation.
These clergymen of the diocese of Gloucester were asked nine
questions — three under separate heads: 1. How many com
mandments are there? Where are they to be found? Repeat
them. 2. What are the articles of the Christian Faith? Re
peat them. Prove them from Scripture. 3. Repeat the Lord's
Prayer. How do you know it is the Lord's? Where is it
found?" That the equipment for the work of preaching was ludicrously
meager is evident in this summary, given in Lindsay's Reforma
tion in England:
"Only fifty of the three hundred and eleven answered all these
simple questions, and of the fifty, nineteen are noted as having
answered 'mediocriter.' Eight clergymen could not answer any
single one of the questions; and while one knew that the number
of the Commandments was ten, he knew nothing else. Two
clergymen, when asked why the Lord's Prayer was so called,
answered that it was because Christ had given it to His disciples
when he told them to watch and pray; another said that he did
not know why it was called the Lord's prayer, but that he was
quite willing to believe that it was the Lord's because the king
had said so ; and another answered that all he knew about it was
that such was the common report. Two clergymen said that
while they could not prove the articles of the Creed from Scrip
ture, they accepted them on the authority of the king; and one
said that he could not tell what was the Scripture authority for
the Creed, unless it was the first chapter of Genesis, but that it
did not matter, since the king had guaranteed it to be correct."
"It seemed," says Dr. Schaff, in writing of the situation con
fronting Christendom, "as if Providence allowed the papal office
at the close of the medieval age to be filled by pontiffs spiritually
unworthy and morally degenerate, that it might be known for all
time that it was not through the papacy the Church was to be re
formed and brought out of its medieval formalism and scholasti
cism. What popes refused to attempt, another group of men
with no distinction of office accomplished."
If, then, the evils of the Church were enormous — and this was
admitted, in his time and place, by each of the Renaissance popes
— it was something that they were admitted, and that their re
moval had even been suggested, and that higher ideals of life

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 71
were being contemplated and held up to the expiring Middle
Ages. Signs of danger and promise were strangely mingled, but
the official leaders of the Church did not seem to be able to dis
cern either. The period of the papacy immediately preceding
Luther, the instrument of the Church's deliverance, came to an
end in the tawdry luxuriance and unscrupulous measure of Leo
X, a man to whom the objections and arguments of the refomer
sounded like the accents of an unknown tongue. To such a man
Luther's attack upon the indulgence traffic of Tetzel was of im
portance only in so far as it imperiled one of his sources of
revenue. Of the spiritual significance of that attack he could
have no understanding whatever.
Had the demoralization calling so urgently io" ~eform been
but half as bad as it actually was, the sequel mignt have been
entirely different. Had there been no Luther there had been no
reform, but Luther was demanded by the situation, and, in some
sense, made by the conditions he confronted. Half-grown evils
do not compel revolutions. They create, not men like Luther,
but men like Erasmus, whose principle respecting the evils of his
times was this: "Evils which men cannot remedy, they must
look at through their fingers." To compel the growth of thor
oughbred reformers, error must have time to come to a head.
Evil must declare itself by acting out its real character and to the
full before it dies. Tetzel was only the exponent of the full-
grown abuses of the medieval penitential system. Froude called
him a "spiritual hawker," whose business it was to "sell passports
to the easiest places in purgatory." His methods were so inso
lent to the common sense, and so offensive to the indignant
consciences of good men, that the Reformation, the restatement
of the old faith of the gospel, came somewhat in the form of a
stupendous reaction against those impulses and impostures which
gave the world, and tolerated in the Church, men like Alexander
VI, Julius II and Leo X.
The literature of a period not only serves to indicate the
type of the literary expression that maintained at a particular
time, but is also a reflection of the spirit of that particular period.
The literature of the later Middle Ages, which grew out of the
opening intelligence of Europe at that time, is full of interest as
one of the adjuncts that served to prepare the way for the Refor
mation of the sixteenth century. In the judgment of Hallam,

78 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
"the greater part of the literature of the Middle Ages, at least
from the twelfth century, may be regarded as artillery being
leveled against the clergy." Much of it was taken up with satiri
cal and other forms of literary bombardment of the avarice, in
consistencies and moral degeneracy of the papacy in its head and
members. In April, 1520, there appeared Ulrich Von Hutten's
scathing pamphlet entitled Vadiscus. It clearly shows the di
rection which German interest was taking. It says in a dialogue
with epigrammatic triplets against the Roman court: "Three
things keep Rome in power : The authority of the pope, the
bones of the saints and the traffic in indulgences. Three things
are banished from Rome : Simplicity, temperance and piety.
Three things the Romans trade in : Christ, ecclesiastical bene
fices and women. Three things are disliked in Rome : A Gen
eral Council, a reformation of the clergy and the fact that the
Germans are beginning to open their eyes. Three things pil
grims usually bring back from Rome : Soiled conscience, a sick
stomach and an empty purse."
In England, in "Piers the Plowman," Langland sets forth in a
series of visions the condition of the State and the Church, in
which mild reproof and humorous satire are exchanged for
righteous wrath, and fierce invectives are hurled at a corrupt
Church and its unworthy priesthood. The friars furnish every
impersonated vice, and are depicted as the foes of every virtue.
The cardinal legate is represented as having been seen in Eng
land riding in his pride and pomp, with lewdness, rapacity,
merciless extortion and insolence in his train.
Geoffrey Chaucer did not have the temper of a reformer, but
the picture of the worldly and corrupt representatives of the
papal Church which Chaucer draws is no more pleasing and
favorable than pictures presented by his contemporaries in Eng
land and Germany.
The vivid portrayals given us in the "Canterbury Tales" of the
typical churchman of the day — the pleasure-loving, worldly
monk, the easy-going friar, the lying, unscrupulous pardoner —
all possess satirical bearing which it is impossible to ignore.
"In Rome," wrote Hutten, "you may live from robbery, com
mit murder and sacrilege, break the laws as you will ; your talk
may be shameful, your actions criminal ; you may revel in lust,
and deny God in Heaven; but if you do but bring money to Rome

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 79
you are a most respectable person. Virtue and heavenly blessings
are bought and sold at Rome. You may even buy the privilege
of sinning in the future. At any rate, it is madness to be virtu
ous ; sensible people will be wicked."
In Italy, Petrarch invoked fierce maledictions upon the proud
and voluptuous papal court. Boccaccio draws a frightful pic
ture of the depravity of Italian cloisters and of the papal court,
while Dante, chief among the poets of his country, had the
courage and fidelity to medieval teaching to consign to purgatory
and hell such popes as Nicholas III, Boniface VIII and Clement
V. Similar citations from the literary productions of the time
might be adduced almost indefinitely, indicating the great popular
unrest, and presenting the religious condition of their age as the
writers saw it and portrayed it in their indignant protests and
satire directed at the cupidity, inconsistency, fraud and licentious
ness of the degenerate Church and its official classes.
IX
That which Europe needed at the end of the Middle Ages, and
desired in its inmost heart, was not a Renaissance, a revival of
intellectual activity, but a deep and fundamental reformation in
the sphere of religion. The existing conditions called not so
much for a regeneration of art and learning, as for the regenera
tion of the Church in its alleged head and all of its members.
What was of the greatest urgency was not the proclamation of
the tidings that the ancient world, with its treasures, had been re
discovered and made accessible to the appreciation and estimates
of mankind, but the real Glad Tidings preached to the poor, and
which, with its mighty transformations, could bring blessings to
the world lying in wickedness and sin, and effect the real ref
ormation of Church and Society. To the credit of the men who
then lived, be it said, they were not unaware of the real source of
the evils that afflicted the land. In the degeneracy of the Church
and the evils that had fastened themselves upon its head and
members, the men of that day recognized, with increasing cer
tainty, the cause of the widespread corruption. The Church,
they perceived, had become merged in the world. The salt had
lost its savor, and the fair garments in which the Church had at
first been arrayed, had been bedraggled in the mire by the very

80 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
men who were supposed to be the conservators of their white
ness. The vessels of faith had'been tarnished by their own ac
credited custodians, by the men who were expected to be the
heralds of divine truth and examples to the flock of Christ.
The decay of the Church was the dominating evil of the times,
and this was felt wherever the longing after a better and restored
spiritual life was deepest and most widespread. The cry for
reformation, not merely of the intellectual and aesthetic aspect of
life, not simply for a renewal of an interest in art and learning,
went up from the land. The hope for the coming time lay in the
demand for what was of more fundamental importance — the re
newal of the Church in head and members. The splendid plans
of conciliar reformation of the morals and administrations of
the Church instituted at Pisa, Constance and Basel had all mis
carried, and the hurt of the people went unhealed. It was all a
hopeless expenditure in plans, money and labor, and dealt only
with the outworks of the apostate Church. The Renaissance
very soon became, in part at least, an adjunct of the movement
for reform, but the revival of interest in art and learning, both of
which had long been in exile, very soon proved its inadequacy
as a regenerative force.
The Italian society of the second half of the fifteenth century
was brilliant in its culture, full of aesthetic interests, and rich in
natural talents, but in its real life it was immoral, corrupt and
full of animalism. What the Church in Italy needed was not art
or quickened intellectual life, or new methods of administration,
so much as new men.
In the forefront of the movement for reform stood Germany,
whose people had a depth and sincerity surpassing those of the
peoples in the south of Europe. There spiritual interests had
been kept more to the front. Those great desires which can only
find satisfaction in the gospel had a basis deep in the heart of that
people. There, more than elsewhere in Europe, people were
longing after the certainty of salvation. As Hegel has set forth,
while other maritime nations were going out to America and the
Indies in quest of riches and the dominion of lands, Luther was
opening up new realms of thought and life among a serious-
minded people. Among this people were heroic men who made
the revived classical learning the assistant of Christian revelation.
In the Renaissance there were helps to the acquisition of the

THE NEEDED REFORMATION 81
truth of the Scriptures, but that Word itself, in the hands of
Luther, became the primary means of restoring the Church.
That was back of the theses which inaugurated this most vitaliz
ing movement in modern Christianity and civilization.
The fifteenth century had attempted a reformation of the
Church by experiments with its constitution, by laying down new
rules for the discipline of clergy and laity, but it was all in vain.
When, however, in the sixteenth century, Luther attacked the
doctrines of the Church, showed its departure from the faith
once for all delivered unto the saints, he touched, without fully
being aware of it, the single point from which the renovation
must proceed, and from which the whole being and life of the
Church could be restored and transformed. Then the long-
wished for and fervently-desired Reformation was at hand, and
the modern era in the history of mankind had begun.
The old Church on the eve of the Reformation had come upon
days of such awful moral degradation that it was utterly unfit to
contend against the forces of decay, on the one hand, and of
reform on the other.

SECTION II
THE CHIEF PERSONAL FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT
The man who is right with himself and with his God, in his
deepest and most secret life, is the man who possesses that pe
culiar creative moral power which is always at the basis of great
revolutions and reconstructions in the spheres of religion and civ
ilization. When new reforms are pressed on the public convic
tion by overpowering necessity and constraining justice, com
mending themselves to the deepest conscience and the most cor
rect judgment, the vast majority of those who recognize the
righteousness of those reforms are slow to espouse, champion
and defend them. In a period in which such reforms are ur
gently needed most men promptly inquire what other men think,
what the journals of the days are saying, and what personal ad
vantages are likely to ensue. But surely self-assertion, within
proper limitations and in the proper spirit, is needful, not only as
an expression of all high character, but an essential in the for
ward movements of mankind. That righteous self-assertion,
even under adverse conditions and in perilous times, has always
been a distinctive mark of the great captains and leaders. Noth
ing more certainly reduces the grandeur of human life, and
paralyzes the forces that make of men the great champions of
faith and righteousness in the earth, than that inert kind of
gregariousness which makes a man to be content in being and
doing like every one else at the critical eras in human history.
The stalwart leaders of their day and generation who have been
instrumental in starting peoples along new paths of progress have
never denied themselves and limited their influence by shrinking
into the crowd and losing their identity. Next to the rejection of
God and His truth, this is the way to the suicide of high character
and to diminishing influence.
When Emerson looked upon a great city, it is said that in
his estimate, it stood for something more than streets and ware
houses, crowds and external splendors. To him it stood most of
all for the few noteworthy men who dwelt in the big town, and
when he had seen them he had exhausted his interest in the place.
82

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 83
That which makes men distinguished and eminently useful in
the world is their capacity and willingness to project themselves
trustfully and courageously into the lives of other men — the
willingness to stand alone with the truth in spite of the clamor of
majorities and the threats of the officially and commercially great
and powerful. Such men are not content to allow the secondary
and the partial to swerve them from the supreme and the eternal
verities ; they will not let the mandates of princes or emperors or
potentates in either Church or State outweigh God's solemn voice
and subordinate the higher utilities of life. In consequence of
such considerations there is an undying interest in striking and
powerful historical characters, an interest which pervades the
most widely differing schools of sentiment and doctrine. It is
this peculiar interest that, in an unusual degree, attaches to the
name of Luther, the dominating personal factor in the Reforma
tion movement of the sixteenth century, and which is always in
separable from his name. I
The name of this distinguished Teutonic chieftain and leader
of his people in the revolt and work of religious reconstruction
which mark the termination of the Middle Ages and the frontier
of the new age, looms larger and larger as the years go by.
More and more the place assigned him by the wisest, but most
widely differing interpreters of the persons and factors that have
entered into the making of human history, is that of leader and
chieftain. More and more is he rightfully assigned the first
place among the recognized leaders of the modern era, the right
and proper place in harmony with the fitness of things. The
memory of the assertion of great and fundamentally important
principles and of great achievements is constantly linked with his
name. The men who know best how to estimate the forces
which have made great civilizations and given permanence to
great religious movements constantly accord him the primacy.
Far beyond the circle of scholars and theologians, far beyond the
limits of all ecclesiastical organizations, this great leader and
constructive force touches life at many points, and his name con
tinues to avail in kindling great enthusiasms and mighty move
ments. In consequence of the simple transaction of nailing cer
tain propositions upon the church door at Wittenberg in Ger-

84 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
many, which, according to the academic methods of his time, he
prosposed to discuss, coupled with that remarkable courage with
which he followed that transaction up to its logical consequences,
the civilization of modern times and their civil and religious free
dom were rendered possible. Through that simple act as a be
ginning and what ensued, he was instrumental in God's hands in
bringing untold blessings to men in all succeeding ages. Since the
end of the great career of St. Paul the footprints of no man have
left so deep an impression upon the sands of time. The chief
among the reformers was not ambitious of distinction. He an
ticipated none of that greatness which men have been constantly
prone to attach to his name, and were he here today, at the end
of four hundred years, he would no doubt be surprised more than
others at the posthumous renown that has come to be his and at
the constant testimony which is borne to his greatness.
The more this man is studied the more do his vigor, earnest
ness, courage, decision of character, sincere and hearty piety
challenge our admiration. Among those who have come to in
terpret him without prejudice he has always been loved and hon
ored, while he has been hated by the enemies of light and feared
by the trimmer and time-server. He was, so far as men can dis
cern, always ready not only to contend for the truth but to lay
down his life for the cause of his Lord and Master, in the in
terpretation of whose person and work he always discerned the
ground of human redemption and the basis of true civilization.
In him we are constantly encountering a life that is always bat
tling its way and overcoming opposing forces, while at the same
time we are led into the study of one who in his own rich and
varied experience passed through the purifying fires of tempta
tion and the struggles of a soul greater than those of any other
man in the sphere of religion since St. Paul and Augustine. In
him we are constantly confronting a character that reflects in an
extraordinary degree the conflict, strength and victory of human
nature under the influences of divine grace. In him we are con
tinually coming in contact with the tragic and the humorous, the
childlike in combination with the imposing massiveness of the
great and mighty. Rough and turbulent at times, in a rough and
turbulent age, there was also a charming gentleness in his char
acter, and we can adopt Carlyle's well-known characterization of
him: "Unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 85
heavens, yet in the clefts of its fountains, green, beautiful valleys
with flowers."
Hallam attributes to Machiavelli the profound suggestion that
states are formed or reformed by the influence of one man, a
suggestion which finds illustrious verification in the case of
Luther. Not only was he, as has been said, the father of the
German language ; he was the incarnation of German genius, the
mighty intellectual and moral power that shaped the destiny of
the German people. The world now rejects with scorn the proud
and arrogant boast of the pompous Louis XIV, who affirmed that
"he was the State," but in all places where the judgment is the
most enlightened it grants that in the brain and heart and conscience
of an humble Augustinian brother there was hidden, not only the
splendid future of his own country, but also the future of much
of that individual religious liberty, that independence of thought,
and those restless struggles of conscience out of which have
grown the most significant and splendid achievements in every
land of Christendom. To him, in modern days, our thoughts go
back, and from him forward, for unto him, as the pivotal point of
personal influence, is attributed the turning place in the Church's
history. What follows after has been set down, much of it, to
his credit ; and what went before is now compared and judged by
the standard of that which he reaffirmed and led to a successful
issue in the stormy times of the century in which he did his work
and ended his earthly career. In consequence of his command
ing personality, his Christian courage, his faith and magnetic
words, a quickening breath went through the Europe of his day,
in all parts o'f which there soon began to prevail a secret convic
tion that the world was about to witness, not the establishment of
a new sect, but a new spiritual birth of the Church and a wide
spread reconstruction of society. Thousands of men, born of the
new spirit, rallied round this chieftain, who was the man for the
crisis, and the gladly-recognized leader, who was the instrument
under God in this widespread revival.
It was the conjunction of the hour and the man which made the
new era in which to one brave heart was assigned the mighty task
of checking the ravages of sin and darkness and to start the mul
titude, kings and subjects and all peoples, along a nobler and up
ward path. Had not something come to purify the heart and
enlighten the mind in Luther's day, the world would have re-

86 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
lapsed into barbarism. Accordingly, the transformation of so
ciety and civilization associated always with his name and leader
ship was the first and most far-reaching in its effects of all those
which have been conspicuous in the course of modern history.
At the particular junction of events in Germany at which he
came, his capacity for anger and assault, coupled with positive
reaffirmations of the truths of the Gospel, was something the
world needed. The times demanded the internal honesty, and
the utter fearlessness, and hot temper, of the reformer no longer
content to mildly contemplate the abuses of the times. The
mighty work to be done waited for a Hercules of Christian mold
and convictions, a strong son of power whose words, in the lan
guage of the common people, should sound like martial music in
times of conflict, to summon them to a new appraisement of the
gospel of grace and a new estimate of their own place and power
and prerogatives. The world was waiting for a witness of re
ligious thinking, experience and freedom, some one big enough
and comprehensive enough to actualize the best thought of his age
on these lines in conjunction with a renewed sense of that joyous
trust in God which overcomes the world. The necessities of the
situation in Church and State called for a man who could rally
the dissenting forces in a revolt against a Church which had for
gotten the precepts of its Founder, against the tyranny of a tradi
tional scholasticism and the arrogant assumptions of a priest
caste, and lead the way for the restoration of a biblical theology
as a strictly historical science. A crisis had come in the history
of Christianity and civilization that called for an independent
spirit who would tolerate no outside interference and who was
not to be deterred or frustrated by the mandates from thrones,
councils or popes. Happy was it for his own age and fortunate
for subsequent ages that, in that day, Germany could grow one of
these out of its fertile soil.
Of Luther, who came to his mighty task in the fulness of time,
and who at once became the greatest personal force in the great
movement of the sixteenth century inseparably associated with
his name, his distinguished Scotch biographer, the late Profes
sor Lindsay, has said that "history knows no other man of such
kingly power." Of him also the distinguished Baptist scholar,
Prof. W. C. Wilkinson, has said, "No other man perhaps ever
lived, who, simply by what he was, stamped himself so indelibly

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 87
as did Luther upon the universal imagination of the human race ;
no other man who, by his own single force, did so much to turn
into a new channel the main current of human history."
Many causes had been at work preparing the way for the far-
reaching Teutonic revolt. The hour was at hand, and in Luther
the man came with the hour. The chief of the reformers had an
advantage in the time of his appearing. The Christian world of
his day was ripe for the change in which he was destined to lead.
To the transformation he was to effect, the great earlier move
ments of the human mind and society had contributed. The fail
ure of the reformatory councils held in the preceding century at
Pisa, Constance and Basel had left a deep impression on all
sincere souls of the inadequacy of the methods of reform con
templated by such great gatherings of the medieval Church.
Preachers, the founders of religious orders, the councils, all in
turn were bewailing the evils of the times and denouncing the
abounding superstition and oppression that so urgently called for
a change. Inventions like that of gunpowder and of the mari
ner's compass were serving to break up the old civilization and
pointing to a new world beyond the Atlantic. The invention of
printing was making knowledge available among all classes of
men. The study of Greek literature was creating disgust with
the barbarous anachronisms of the scholastic theology and displac
ing a method of culture that was peculiar to the Middle Ages.
Commerce and discovery were liberalizing the minds of the com
mercial classes and making them restless under the priestly yoke
imposed upon them. The growth of the national spirit was incit
ing men to revolt against the unscriptural, autocratic and much-
abused papal claim of political supremacy. Literary and
scientific movements of the day were enlarging the area and mul
tiplying the subjects of thought and investigation. The fall of
feudalism and of the aristocratic form of government made it
necessary to reckon with the people, who were far from being
satisfied with their position and prospects.
There had been during the age that was now closing repeated
isolated assertions of the spirit of democracy, and in the con
flicts between the crown and the people against the nobles, the
latter were losing their prestige. They looked jealously upon the
rising movement toward concentration of power in the hands of
the princes, seeing themselves thrust aside without voice in the

88 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Diet, and gradually, but surely, declining from the importance
which they had enjoyed under the old feudal system. The peas
ants, who were the subjects of grievous oppression, were quite as
much dissatisfied as the nobles, and with much better reason.
In addition to the more secular movements which were tending
to radical change must be reckoned those more profound and
vital forces which rule the religious nature of man. To political
restlessness there must be added the stimulus of that great re
ligious agitation which had been started in Germany. There was
a rising tide of resentment against Rome and the hierarchy, and
a widespread preparation among receptive and inquiring minds
for the teachings of the reformer. The old order was passing
and the new was at hand. The latter half of the fifteenth cen
tury may be regarded as the eve before the day of modern Chris
tianity, that new day of which the Reformation epoch is the
dawn. The records of that fifty years have an important bearing
both on the great ecclesiastical event which was then impending
and on the condition of modern Christendom.
To his work the son of a poor miner came, to stamp his tre
mendous personality on an entire age, when the discovery of
America was opening up new avenues of adventure, colonization
and trade; when the printing press was giving knowledge wider
currency, thought a vaster range, and opening up for the Church
of modern times her pathway of power ; when the revival of let
ters brought the stores of the ancient Greek and Roman literature
before the schools of all Christendom; when the quickening im
pulse of the intellectual awakening of the Renaissance in Ger
many was forming its alliance with religion; when the papacy,
under Innocent III, had reached the height of its grandeur and
sway, and, under the disastrous reign of Boniface VIII, of
whom it was said that "He came in like a fox, ruled like a lion
and died like a dog," passed into the period of its decline ; when
Spain, under the control of Charles V, was, in arms and political
power and wealth of resources, the leading nation on the earth,
powerfully effecting the policy of the, at that time, distinct king
doms of England and Scotland as a consequence of martial and
other alliances ; when there were heart longings in the homes of
the German fatherland that neither art nor literature, nor the
medieval Church with its grand cathedrals, its splendid ritual
and its impressive celebration of the mass, could satisfy.

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 89
The times demanded a man of deep spiritual experience and
intense moral earnestness, who loved the truth and who sought
liberty to believe and teach the truth. There was a call for some
one who was large enough to gather up all the forces and inter
ests which we observed to be awakening — national, democratic,
humanistic, mystical, pious and reformatory — and bring them to
bear among princes and scholars, citizens and peasants, in achiev
ing the mighty work that was waiting to be done. There was
needed a great religious leader who could capture men by the
manifest reality there was in him; a man with overwhelming re
ligious convictions, who was able and courageous enough to com
municate them to others, and who had a whole cause to cham
pion and more than half a world to challenge and defeat. The
times called for one who was able to overcome odds against him
that were enormous ; a man who was qualified for a crisis in the
general progress of society in its troubled passage from the Mid
dle Ages to modern civilization.
For such times and conditions Luther was amply qualified by
nature, grace and training. Rich in his endowments, many sided
in his nature and attainments, frank and popular in the commun
ication of his experiences, poet, musician, preacher of popular
gifts, theologian and commentator of rare insight into the truth,
the Reformation of the sixteenth century is identical, for the most
part, with his history. He was the primate among reformers,
the greatest single personal factor in the history of the modern
era in which we are living.
He came into exciting times for the man who dared to throw
down the gauntlet against imperial power and pontifical assump
tion. It is interesting to recall here the report of a dream of
the Elector Frederick of Saxony, which he dreamed while sleep
ing in his palace, six miles from Wittenberg, only a night or two
before the nailing up of the theses on the door of the Castle
Church. This dream was told by Frederick the next morning.
"I dreamed," so runs the report, "that the Almighty sent me a
monk who was a true son of Paul the Apostle. He was accom
panied by all the saints, in obedience to God's command, to bear
him testimony, and to assure me that he did not come with
any fraudulent design, but that all he should do was conformable
to the will of God. They asked my gracious permission to let
him write something upon the doors of the palace chapel at Wit-

90 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
tenberg, which I conceded through my chancellor. Upon this the
monk repaired thither and began to write. So large were the
characters that I could read from my palace, six miles distant,
what he was writing. The pen he used was so long that its ex
tremity reached as far as Rome, where it pierced the ears of a
lion which lay there, and shook the triple crown on the pope's
head." Certain it is that this dream of Frederick was an accurate
forecast of the events which came in rapid order after the nailing
up of the theses. This son of a miner, with a stout heart and an
open Bible, and a trust in God and His word, did shake the
triple crown of the pope and the foundations of the old medieval
hierarchy, foiled the craft and might of the empire, and smote
the pontifical See with blows from which it has never, even to this
day, recovered. That this is true is verified even by Catholic
writers themselves. In one of the encyclopedias of the Church,
and published with ecclesiastical sanction, it is said: "There is
not, perhaps, in history, a guiltier name than that of Martin Lu
ther, the patriarch of Protestantism. For fifteen centuries the
Church of Christ has seen many heretics assail her, many rebel
lious children turn against her; but never a sect, never a heresy,
never a persecution, presented traits so grave, and principles so
dangerous, as the revolt of the sixteenth century raised and dis
guised under the delusive banner of Reform."
In the use of the figure of speech based upon the meaning of
his name in the Bohemian language, from the dungeon in which
he was imprisoned, and just before he was burned at the stake,
on July 6, 1415, John Huss wrote these words : "They may kill
a goose, but a hundred years from now a swan will arise which
they will not be able to kill."
The dream of Frederick the Wise, the violent denunciation of
the papal encyclopedist and the prophecy of the forerunner, John
Huss, were all fulfilled when Luther's mighty and penetrating
voice, responding to God's call to duty as it came to him, shook
the foundations of the most powerful and carefully articulated ec-
clesiastico-political system that the world had ever seen.
II
It was doubtless a divine ordination that Luther was born poor.
His origin furthered his work. "I find it altogether suitable to

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 91
Luther's function in this earth, and doubtless wisely ordered to
that end by the providence presiding over him and us and all
things," says Carlyle, "that he was born poor and brought up
poor, one of the poorest of men. Hardship, rigorous necessity,
was the poor boy's companion; no man or thing would put on a
false face to flatter Martin Luther. Among things, and not the
show of things, had he to grow up. It was his task to get
acquainted with realities and keep acquainted with them at what
ever cost; his task was to bring the whole world back to reality,
for it had dwelt too long with the semblance of things."
His grandparents, and the ancestors before them, dwelt in the
little town of Moehra, in the Thuringian forest. They were
sturdy, honest, hard-working peasants, marked by those char
acteristics of life that make for strength of character, power of
will, firmness of purpose under the pressure of adverse condi
tions. Of his origin the Reformer was never ashamed, but spoke
of it repeatedly with pride. "I am," said he, "a peasant's son;
my father, grandfather and all my ancestors were farmers." Of
this family line only his father was compelled to leave the ances
tral estate and take up a trade. He removed to Mansfeld, where
there were rich mines, and at that place, devoting himself to that
industry, his forges brought him but scanty profits. Luther thus
repeated much of the world's best history by being born, cradled
and disciplined in poverty. "The wheels of youth rest or rust in
riches," says Carlyle, in further estimate of the Reformer's
power; "in poverty they all run. Wealth says, how shall I en
joy myself? Poverty says, what shall I perform? Out of
the former come those who play ; out of the latter those who
work." Poverty and piety seem to have been the only estate of Hans
Luther and Margaret Lindemann, his parents. Some wind uf
fortune brought this humble pair from their earlier home at
Moehra to Eisleben, where, on the 10th of November, 1483, at 11
o'clock at night, their first child was born, upon whom the next
day, at his baptism, they bestowed the name of Martin. "Strange
enough to reflect upon it," says Carlyle again. "In all the world
of that day there was not a more entirely unimportant looking
pair of people than this miner and his wife. And yet what are all
emperors, popes and potentates in comparison? There was born
here a mighty man, whose light was to flame as a beacon over

92 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its
history was waiting for this man."
The pictures of these people which have come down to us pre
sent rugged faces, into which toil, exposure and care have been
traced in wrinkles and furrows and features, which were made
hard by incessant application to hard tasks. The home training
was stern even to the extent of cruelty. The family scepter was
a birchen rod, which was mercilessly wielded, no matter how
trivial the offence ; and any intervals of exemption at home were
made good by the village schoolmaster, who heartily believed in
the same scepter applied in the field of pedagogy. This youth,
who was destined to such future distinction and influence, was
once roundly beaten with a stout stick until the blood came, when
he had committed the heinous crime of stealing a handful of nuts !
Luther did not look back with approval, but with sadness, upon
this severity ; but it did not abate his affection for his parents, for
when he was the foremost man in Germany, he said of them:
"They meant it all for my best good." "But they did not know
how to distinguish the dispositions to which the punishment is to
be adapted."
But associated with this mistaken parental severity was a readi
ness of father and mother to take upon themselves all kinds of
hardships, and a willingness to make sacrifices for the benefit of
the children ; and posterity owes an immense debt of gratitude to
the hard-handed peasant father, who cared enough for his tal
ented boy to make the sacrifice necessary to spare him from his
home and to give him the best educational advantages of his day.
Luther was the son of a poor man, but a man of enough refine
ment and appreciation of the higher utilities of life to give his son
an opportunity at a time when fortune had but few darlings and
philanthropy fewer still.
Every man who has permanently influenced the Church has
been characterized by three factors : Fine native gifts, the train
ing of the schools, and profound personal religious convictions.
Luther had them all. He was a man of fully disciplined powers,
having been educated successively at Mansfeld, Magdeburg,
Eisenach and Erfurt. In 1497, when he was fourteen, with
another lad from Mansfeld he was sent to Magdeburg, in order
that he might prepare for the university. After being here for a
year he went to Eisenach, where he secured the means of support,

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 93
according to the custom of the times, by singing at the doors of
the houses of the principal citizens. Here it was that Frau Cotta,
a woman of wealth and refinement, was so charmed by Martin's
singing that she became his much-needed friend, offering him a
place at her table and in her family. In 1501, being then in his
eighteenth year, he was sent to the University of Erfurt, one of
the centers of humanistic learning in northern Europe, and the
most renowned university in Germany. Students from all parts
of Europe were drawn thither, and it was a common saying that
"whoever wants to study thoroughly must needs go to Erfurt."
Here he came in contact with the advancing learning of his times
and was captivated by it, while his talents from the first com
manded the attention of all who came in contact with him, so that
he soon became the admiration of the university. It was in the
library one day that an event occurred of unusual importance to
him and to the world. Here he found the first complete copy of
the Scriptures he had ever seen. He read, and, as he read, his
interest in the divinely inspired volume deepened. He had found
the real source of religious truth, which for him had been hither
to unexplored. Deeply religious from his boyhood, religious
problems had always had a special interest for young Luther —
problems for which he had not been able to find any real solu
tions in the teaching of the Church. Neither mind nor heart had
found rest. But this Book of Books satisfied him, and into its
treasures he plunged with earnestness, enthusiasm and reverence,
being fascinated by its simplicity and religious fervor. In his
diligent application to his studies he went from science to science,
mastering each with a thoroughness and rapidity that amazed his
teachers and fellow-students. The department which he made
his specialty was that of philosophy. In 1502 he received the de
gree of Bachelor of Philosophy, and in 1505 took his doctor's de
gree, ranking second in a class of seventeen candidates. He was
now, according to the plans of his father, to enter upon the study
of law, and, in view of his fine gifts and his devotion to study, his
friends were predicting for him a splendid career, leading on to
both distinction and fortune.
But Providence here interposed. The Lord of the Church had
other work for Luther. Suddenly, to the surprise of his friends,
to the consternation of the university, much to the grief of his
father, after taking his master's degree, he bade the world fare-

94 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
well, and on July 17, 1505, entered the Augustinian cloister as a
monk. Here he subjected himself to the severe discipline 'of the
monastic life, denied himself all comforts, tortured his body and
fasted and prayed to a degree that almost proved fatal to his life.
Differing, however, in one respect from most of his monastic
brethren, he held on to his much loved studies, and of him his
fellows by and by came to say: "If this brother keeps on to his
studies he will rule us" — a prophecy that was literally fulfilled.
A fact worth mention in connection with Luther's entrance into
the monastery shows in itself the need of reformation and a re-
estimate of the relative importance of things. When he went to
become one among the Augustinian brethren he took with him
just two books, possibly the only ones that he possessed. They
were not the gospels and epistles of the New Testament contain
ing the life of our Lord whom he was seeking to serve, and the
matchless writings of St. Paul, or the lofty strains of David and
Isaiah and Job. This finely endowed, well-trained and deeply
religious young man of the sixteenth century took with him two
books of heathen authorship, and in another tongue than that of
his people. They were the writings of Plautus and Virgil.
Much of the secret of the Reformation is found in this fact, the
ominous fact, that Luther had grown to manhood, and in the
Church of his day, without ever having seen a Bible, the one
infallible source of truth and salvation.
In 1507 he was ordained to the priesthood, and in the following
year was made a professor in the university of Wittenberg, which
had been founded by Frederick of Saxony in 1502, the school
always destined to be memorably associated with the Reformer's
work and influence. Here, at first, he lectured on dialectics and
physics, but his heart was already in theology. In 1509 he be
came a Bachelor of Theology, and immediately began lecturing
on the Holy Scriptures. He quickly gained a reputation as a
lecturer, and at once deeply impressed his students. Plis teach
ing was practical and personal, and he was equally forcible in the
pulpit and the lecture-room. While at Erfurt he had attained
to some knowledge of the Bible, and had seen something of the
difference between the simplicity of the gospel and the life and
practice of the Church. In the university and in the pulpit of the
parochial church Luther found a field, the first in his life, for the
use of his remarkable powers. His lectures produced a powerful

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 95
impression by the novelty of his views, the freshness of that
which was scriptural, and the boldness of his advocacy of what he
was coming step by step to believe. "This monk," by and by
remarked the rector of the university, "will puzzle all our doctors,
and bring in a new doctrine, and reform the whole Roman
Church, for he takes his stand on the writings of the apostles and
prophets, and on the word of Jesus Christ." On so much of
truly Protestant ground he had already planted himself. Grad
ually he was led by his biblical studies to see the full light of the
gospel of grace. The books which he read and studied most of
all were the Psalms and the Epistles to the Romans and Gala
tians. He had come through his study of these Scriptures to see
that the righteousness of God is not merely an attribute of the
great Judge of all the earth, but that God in His compassion
freely gives His righteousness to the believer, and along with this
gift bestows, also, full salvation and life eternal. Having
grasped this great truth, he was made free. "Now," said he, "I
became happy; now the whole of the Bible, even heaven itself,
was open to me."
Writing of his work at Wittenberg, his fine interpreter, Pro
fessor Lindsay, says that "his lectures were experimental. He
started with the fact of man's sin, the possibility of reaching a
sense of pardon and of fellowship with God through trust in His
promises. From the beginning we find, in the germ, what grew
to be the main thoughts in the later Lutheran theology. Men are
redeemed apart from any merits of their own; God's grace is
really His mercy revealed in the mission and work of Christ; it
has to do with the forgiveness of sins and is the fulfillment of
His promises ; man's faith is trust in the historical work of Christ
and in the verity of God." From lecturing he passed to preach
ing, although in this, as in all other steps of his progress, not
without a struggle. He was constantly under an awful sense of
the responsibility of speaking to the people in God's stead, and it
required the urgency of Staupitz to persuade him to be obedient
to the call. He carried with him into this part of his work the
timidity of the monk, but the fire and magnetism of a master
mind. In the history of the pulpit Luther has had but few
equals. His natural advantages were very great. In a large de
gree he possessed that fulness of being and co-ordination of his
powers which are of such immense value in the work of preach-

96 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
ing. He had a boundless faith combined with a boundless and
masculine joy in God that put the note of triumph into his pulpit
ministrations. His strong and rich voice, his remarkable capacity
for popularizing the truths of the Gospel, his full knowledge,
quickness of perception, added to overflowing feeling, unaffected
sincerity and deep-seated conviction, made of him the most com
manding preacher of his day. At Wittenberg, the seat of his
teaching and preaching, he soon became a great personality,
and his genial manhood, his realism and courage, his frankness,
sincerity and homely common sense made him to be both admired
and loved.
The degree of Bachelor of Theology enabled him to add to ser
mons preached in the monastery, in the royal chapel and in the
church, university lectures on the text of the Scriptures, and of
this work it was said "never in any Saxon professorial chair was
heard such luminous explanation." In this field he delighted, and
in the preparation of such lectures he sometimes passed whole
nights. Eminent doctors came to listen and retired full of ad
miration. The venerable Pollich, known by the sobriquet "Lux
Mundi," heard him, and struck with wonder, exclaimed, "This
father hath profound insight, exceeding imagination; he will
trouble the doctors before he has done."
In 1511 Luther was sent on the affairs of the Augustinian
Order to Rome. This was a welcome mission. To see the im
perial seat of the papacy was an ardent desire of his heart. This
opportunity to study the papacy in the very center of its power
and in its full-blown magnificence was one of the most important
elements in the Reformer's education. To one of his thirsting
mind and religious fervor such an opportunity was hailed with
inexpressible delight. He had been doubting the practices of the
Church, but no thought of adverse criticism had yet arisen in his
mind. He was yet the devoted Augustinian brother and firm and
full believer in the one Holy Catholic Church. He was no
schismatic bent upon the division of the body of Christ. Coming
in sight of Italy from the southern slopes of the Alps, he fell upon
his knees and with uplifted hands cried out, "I greet thee, holy
Rome, thrice holy from the blood of the martyrs which has been
shed in thee." He soon was aware of the fact that he had not
been ushered into the seat of holiness. Upon the pontifical
throne he found the worldly, ambitious and warlike Julius II, a

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 97
man thoroughly devoted to temporal prospects. In the convent
where he was entertained by the Augustinian fraters they smiled
at the simple faith of the German pilgrim, winking at one another
over his sober sincerity and making light of his learning. What
he saw and heard there made an ineffaceable impression upon
him, although not producing any immediate result. He observed
priests who carried religious indifference to the point of levity
and mockery. "I would not take," said he, "a hundred thou
sand florins not to have seen Rome. I have said many masses
there, and heard many said, so that I shudder when I think of it.
There I heard, among other coarse jests, courtiers laughing at
table and bragging that some said mass and repeated these words
over the bread and wine : Panis es, et panis manebis; vinum es,
et vinum manehis."
He was deeply pained by the loose principles and worse than
loose practices of his brethren. He saw, heard, studied carefully
and thought much, and bold and strong were the impressions made
upon his mind and which he carried to the end of his days. The
scenes which passed before his eyes had but little influence in
strengthening his love for the Church, although for the time the
fervor of his monastic devotion burned bright amid all this
blasphemy. He went the round of all the churches and believed
all the lying legends repeated to him, but while he was ascending
the famous Pilate's Staircase as a reverent and penitential pil
grim, the painful task was at least arrested by the voice that kept
sounding in his ears, "The just shall live by faith."
After his experience and observations here he once more
turned his face northward toward his own Germany, where re
ligion had more depth and sincerity, no one in the mighty city
there on the Tiber giving even a passing thought to the future of
this inconspicuous and scholarly monk, so soon by his words to
shake the throne of the pontiffs, which for centuries had even
dictated to kings and princes. He took with him an abhorrence of
the superstition and immorality of the Church at its fountain
head, which never left him. His real sentiments as he turned
away from Rome are probably expressed correctly in the words
of Dr. Dorner : "Luther returned home with his enthusiasm for
Rome cooled down, still without being conscious to himself of in
ward disaffection toward her, or of departure from the ways of
the Church."

98 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
III
In the life of Luther, prior to his excommunication in 1520,
there are three events of outstanding significance. The one is
associated with the meadow outside of Erfurt, where, as the
story runs, the lightning striking at his feet, he resolved to give
his life to religious pursuits and become a monk. The second is
connected with the Augustinian monastery inside the city gates.
There in his religious struggles he tried the medieval theory of
salvation by means of penitential works, through and through
from top to bottom, tested it out and discovered its inadequacy
and unscripturalness. The third of these events is associated
with the Castle Church at Wittenberg where he nailed up his
theses, proposing to discuss the unholy traffic in indulgences and
the effrontery with which it was being conducted by Tetzel,
famous for some time as a successful huckster of this order of
wares, which had been entrusted to him by the Elector Albert,
Archbishop of Mainz. The first was a scene connected with a
deeply religious young man's resolve ; the second a scene of the
earnest search of a deeply religious man for an answer to the
question, "What must I do to be saved" ; and the third a scene in
which this same deeply religious man asserts himself in a deci
sive action — in which the great reformer inaugurated the great
work of his life. "If God permit," said he, "I will put a hole in
Tetzel's drum," and history testifies that by the grace of God he
fulfilled his own prophecy with far-reaching and permanent con
sequences. For the next five years after his return from the visit to Rome
Luther lived the life of a hard-working professor of theolog}'
and a self-denying monastic. His home was in the Augustinian
cloister at Wittenberg, less than a mile from the Castle Church,
so called because it was part of the residence of his Electoral
Highness, Frederick of Saxony. He was still a devoted son and
servant of the Church, but he had felt the power of the new ap
prehension of how a man is justified before God. He did not yet
dream of separation from the Church, and quietly continued his
preaching and lectures on the books of the Bible to which he ad
dressed his fine powers of interpretation.
The sale of indulgences was the expedient hit upon by Pope
Leo X for the liquidation of old debts and the completion of St.

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 99
Peter's, and Germany, as he thought, presented the most promis
ing field for the prosecution of a profitable business. Here,
thought he and his counsellors, among the pious and sincere Ger
man peoples we may find a splendid field to sell passports to
heaven and vastly increase the papal resources. Luther was at
the height of his influence in Wittenberg, when the peddler Tet
zel made his way toward Saxony. Turning one day to Staupitz,
Brother Martin said with all the indignation of his great nature,
"I will declaim against this gross and profane error, write against
it, do all in my power to destroy it." Tetzel drove his trade after
a wonderful manner, even going so far as to grant indulgences
for sins that had not yet even been committed, possibly not even
thought of. The alleged object of the plenary indulgence was to
contribute to the completion of the Vatican Basilica, while its
boasted efficacy was to restore the purchaser to the grace of God
and completely exempt him from the pains of purgatory. There
were, however, minor forms of the papal blessing, producing
lesser favors. For the plenary indulgence confession and con
trition were affirmed to be necessary, while "the others could be
obtained, without contrition or confession, by money alone."
It can easily be imagined what a system this was in the hands
of an unscrupulous, low-minded and voluble salesman as he pro
claimed aloud the merits of his paper pardons. It was wonder
fully successful, and money flowed in from every quarter to find
its way into the papal treasure box at Rome. Half in joy and
half in complaint the bishops cried out against the weight of the
silver: "Hundred weights of German coin fly light as feathers
over the Alps, and no bearer of the heaviest burdens, not even
Atlas himself, can drag such heaps of money."
In 1517, when Tetzel came into the neighborhood of Witten
berg on the Saxon frontier, Luther found that the consciences of
many of his flock were being debauched and turned from the
right ways of the Lord. His spirit was stirred within him at this
shocking mockery of the claims of true repentance. This scan
dalous traffic in holy things aroused him to a high pitch of excite
ment. He felt the necessity of taking some decided step, as no
one else seemed disposed to interfere. He took counsel with God
and his own true heart, and with none besides. He was now ready
for his great mission. He went over the whole case against
Rome as he saw it, and the result was that on the eve of All

100 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Saints, when the relics, collected with great pains by Frederick
for his Castle Church, were being exposed to view and multitudes
were crowding in to gaze on them, Luther appeared among the
crowd and nailed upon the famous church door his ninety-five
theses on the doctrine of indulgences, which theses he proposed
to maintain in the University against all opponents, by word of
mouth or in writing. It was October 31, 1517, a day great in
the annals of the Christian Church and the future of the most
advanced peoples of the earth. It was the beginning of the storm
which lasted until the day of the Reformer's death, February
18, 1546. It reached even further, until one hundred and two
years later the peace of Westphalia terminated the long struggle
of the thirty years' war. That walk of Luther down the street
of the old town, passing the houses afterward occupied by Me
lanchthon and Lucas Cranach, on that October day was in its
consequences the most momentous ever made by any man, for it
inaugurated a new era in the history of mankind.
It did not occur to the Reformer that he was starting a public
movement against the teaching of the Church, but the posting of
the theses is usually regarded as the starting point of the Refor
mation. According to the custom of the time, the theses were
simply intended to be a challenge for the public discussion of the
subject of indulgences and their sale. In a day when there were
no newspapers or magazines the method adopted was one of the
ways of getting matters of timely interest discussed. To arrest
Tetzel's unhallowed hawking of the indulgences, to correct
abuses, and to bring about an improvement of religion — these
were among the purposes of Luther's challenge. There was
nothing revolutionary, not even anything extraordinary in what
he had done. Had some one told the Wittenberg professor and
preacher that the act of that now famous day would in later times
be looked upon as one of the decisive turning points in the history
of mankind, as the opening of a new era in the religious, social
and political development of the race, his astonishment would
have been unlimited.
But Luther had traveled farther toward the restoration of the
Pauline conception of salvation than he was aware. He had
struck at the core of an infamous evil, when, in his first thesis
lie declared, "Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ in saying, 'Re
pent Ye,' meant that the entire life of the believer should be peni-

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 101
tence," while in a succeeding thesis he declared that "the pope had
no power to forgive any guilt." In emphasizing the adequacy of
genuine repentance to secure remission of sins, in affirming that
the papal office in connection with the pardon of sins is declara
tive only, he was in reality dealing a blow at the foundation of
priestly mediation as it was affirmed in the unscriptural and un-
historical assumptions of the Roman hierarchy. True repentance
is an inward act of the soul, "a .change of mind," as in later writ
ings Luther so often reminded his adversaries, as he from time to
time led them back to the meaning of the Greek word. Unaware
as he was of the full import of his theses, he nevertheless em
bodied in them the main principles of the Reformation. The
very first words of the first of them, "Our Lord and Master Jesus
Christ," constitute an appeal to Christ's authority as the supreme
and final requirement and law for all believers.
No one was more surprised at the popular reception accorded
the theses than the author of them himself. They were too ac
ceptable to the widespread indignation at the abuse of indulgences
not to find rapid circulation. Instead of being confined to a small
circle of the learned, they elicited a warm reception and quick
ened interest among all classes of people. In fourteen days they
were being read and pondered all over Germany. Myconius, the
contemporary and earliest biographer of Luther, in writing of the
theses said that "in four weeks they had spread through Chris
tendom as though angels were the postmen." The excitement
produced was intense and widespread. Written in Latin, the
theses were soon translated into German and scattered broadcast
throughout the land. The interest grew and strengthened, and
sympathetic voices were heard on every side. At last the people
had found their champion, the man who had dared to speak and
voice their dissent and protest. "The reason why popular ex
citement was so quickly generated," said Prof. Hulme, "was that
the fuel was ready for the flame. The leader for whom Ger
many had long been waiting had appeared upon the scene."
Silence was no longer possible, and some attempts at refutation
on the part of the Church were undertaken. They were, how
ever, but mere echoes of an old medieval scholastic theology
presented in its most commercial and papistical aspects.
Tetzel at Frankfort-on-the-Oder continued to abuse and rave.
Hockstratten, Professor at Cologne, and head inquisitor of Ger-

102 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
many, demanded that the dangerous heretic at Wittenberg should
be sent to the flames. Sylvester Prierias, the general of the
Dominicans and censor of the press at Rome, published a reply,
and there were disputes and debates with Miltitz, Cajetan and
Eck, the chosen champions of the pope. But the die was cast.
Luther, the monk, had become Luther the Reformer. Intimida
tion, threatening, bribery and persuasion were all in vain. He
stubbornly refused to be convinced except upon the authority of
God's word, and boldly declared : "The more they rage, the more
I go forward." The whole of Germany had been surcharged
with indignation against Rome and the indulgences. A spark was
enough to set the whole land ablaze ; the theses kindled the fire,
and the Reformation under Luther began.
The times called for a man of the people, who, with a full
knowledge of the damage caused to religion by the abuses that
had fastened upon the Church, could help them regain their
rights and set them free from their manifold fetters. It is, ac
cordingly, not surprising that Luther's work was so heartily wel
comed by the popular judgment when we consider both the man
and the existing conditions. To meet the requirements imposed
by the conditions, to lead in the new work of mental and spiritual
emancipation, he was qualified with popular gifts as a preacher,
teacher and polemicist, united with a courage that feared not the
powers of the world, the Church or the devil.
Writing to Rome of a formerly good and devoted Catholic city,
but two years after the theses, a papal ambassador said that now,
of five men there were scarcely two who held fast in loyalty to
the papal See. The Church had been smitten with the blindness
of decay, and could not discern the signs of the times. Falsehood
had enfeebled her judgment and undermined her strength, and
she went staggering on her way in the midst of decimating forces
to her overthrow.
Luther was hailed more and more as the champion of the rising
national indignation and revolt. It was becoming more and more
manifest every day that the real and overshadowing questions
were Germany or Rome. German independence or hierarchical
bondage, and even more fundamental to both religion and civiliza
tion, Scripture or Church, conscience or authority; whether the
spiritual power has the right to rule in its own distinctive sphere
without hindrance from the secular power. During the trying

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 103
period extending from the nailing of the theses to 1520, during
which the Reformation was, step by step, progressing along the
evangelical way and to the proper co-ordination of soundly
Protestant principles into a system — a period full of excitement
and necessitating incessant studies — Luther did not relax in his
work at the university.
It is of interest to note something of his appearance during this
period. The Humanist Marcellanus, describing the young monk
on the occasion of the famous Leipzic disputation with Eck in
1519, when he attacked not only indulgences but also the doctrines
of the primacy of the pope and purgatory, says: "He was of
medium height. His face and whole body were as thin as a
skeleton, caused by long study and much care. His voice was
clear. His address bore every mark of great learning and ac
quaintance with the Bible. His bearing was friendly and attrac
tive. He was full of vitality, and calm and joyous amid the
threats of his enemies, as one would be who undertakes great
things with God's help. In controversy he was defiant and in
cisive, as a theologian ought to be."
IV
The year 1520 has very properly been called "the great year of
Reformation history." Shortly after the Leipzic disputation
Luther took occasion to reaffirm, and with more emphasis, the
position which he had taken when he confronted John Eck, the
most able of the defenders of the papal claims in his day. Early
in 1520, in the study of what was known as the "Donation of
Constantine" — one of the famous fraudulent treatises put forth
in the medieval period to bolster up papal claims — he reached the
conclusion, not only of the bogus character of the document, but
also the conviction that the whole papal dominion was built upon
falsehood. About the same time, also, he confessed that a better
acquaintance with the writings of Huss, who had been burned at
Constance one hundred and five years before, had assured him
that he himself, as well as Paul and Augustine, were genuine
Hussites, and had brought home to him the ominous and distress
ing fact that, along with Huss, evangelical truth had been con
demned and burned. He was now looked upon by his people as
a national hero, and he was coming to look upon his own work
as a national struggle for freedom from the papacy and all that

104 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
that system of ecclesiasticism represented. He was rapidly be
coming the mouthpiece and prophet of all those among his people
who were sighing under the yoke of papal tyranny, and yearning
for national and social liberty. In the constructive work he was
now about to undertake, Luther did not shift his position. From
the beginning his work was distinctively religious. His motives
were of the same order, and to the end of his life they remained
the same. The beginning of his struggle with Rome had grown
out of his own experience. But the more experience he had with
the representatives of the hierarchical machine and its machina
tions, and the more he studied the questions involved in his con
troversies, the clearer did he perceive that Rome ruled, not only
over the beliefs of the Church and over the conscience of the
people, but that she also had the dominating place in the whole of
the political and social life of the nation. The papacy he con
cluded was not only a Church, but a great world power.
No man ever stood more fully as the exponent of his nation's
hopes than did Luther at this time, or answered more nobly in
response to those hopes.
During this great year of 1520 he issued three powerful, and
to this day fundamental, revolutionary and reconstructive treat
ises of the highest importance. In August he put forth his ap
peal known as the "Address to the German Nobility." It was
an unsparing arraignment of abuses and a triumphant call to the
German people to enter upon the work of reforming the Church,
and to redress the grievances from which the land had long been
suffering. He struck a clear and loud note of national inde
pendence, and summoned the Christian powers of his country to
his aid. He reaffirmed, in brief and emphatic language, the great
truth that had begun to dawn upon him at Leipzic — that all Chris
tians are priests, and that the ministry is an office in the Church
and not a special order of men. It is an unscriptural assumption
that the laity constitute only a passive element in the Church, and
that the management of spiritual affairs belongs exclusively to
the clergy, who constitute the spiritual order, having been sealed
with an indelible character by the sacrament of ordination, and
being endowed with special prerogatives and immunities, which
place them in a class apart and distinct from all other men. The
claims of a special priesthood to stand between laymen and God
are worthless. All Christians belong to the spiritual order, the

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 105
distinction between priest and laymen being only official, the priest
being the representative of the people. God is accessible to men
without any artificial and unwarranted sacerdotal intervention.
"All Christians," said Luther in his appeal, "are truly of the
spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them save of
office only," and more, the pope has no monopoly in the interpreta
tion of Scripture or exclusive authority for summoning general
councils. This appeal was a firebrand thrown into the ranks of
the papal ecclesiastics. Written in their own tongue, wielded
with the unusual force of the great Luther, it reached the heart
of the German people, aroused them still further and increased
their hostility to the long-standing grievances against which they
were in a constantly increasing state of revolt.
The "Appeal to the Nobility" was followed at the beginning of
October, 1520, with another treatise, entitled "The Babylonish
Captivity of the Church." This was intended for the learned
classes and was accordingly written in Latin, but was immediately
translated and widely circulated. It was a polemical theological
document under the form of a critique of the Romish doctrine of
the Sacraments, as that doctrine was set forth in the scholas
tic theology. Their number had been exaggerated and their
efficacy made magical. Luther attacked with vigor this medieval
conception of the Sacraments, by means of which the Church ac
companies and controls the life of the Christian from the cradle
to the grave, bringing every important act and event in human
life under the power and authority of the priest, with the terrify
ing adjuncts of excommunication and interdict at his disposal
also. This pamphlet of far-reaching consequences was the
severest assault he had yet made on the pretensions of the Roman
Church. Its tone is that of great boldness, rising at times into a
ringing defiance. "Since the Bishop of Rome," says the Captiv
ity, "has ceased to be a bishop and has become a tyrant, I fear
absolutely none of his decrees, since I know that neither he nor
even a general council has any power to establish new articles of
faith." The Sacraments "were intended to be the seals to our
titles as free children of God; the pope uses them to keep us in
bondage from birth to death. The seven Sacraments are the
seven rings in the chain which yoke us to the Roman priesthood."
"The papacy is nothing else than the kingdom of Bablyon and of
very antichrist."

106 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Such was Luther's calmness and assurance during this tumultu
ous year of 1520 that he wrote, before it had closed, another
treatise in marked contrast with his other polemical works, which
were fierce onsets against Rome and intended to break down the
tyranny of the papacy. This was his tract entitled "Christian
Freedom," one of the most beautiful and widely treasured of his
writings. It sustains the double thesis, "A Christian man is the
most free lord of all and subject to none; a Christian man is the
most dutiful servant of all and subject to all." It is largely oc
cupied with the office of faith, which is declared to be the medium
of liberty as it is also the medium of justification. It is an illus
tration of the great paradox of Christian experience. The child
of God is free, because justified by faith and united to Christ his
living Lord and Head; he is a servant through love, because he
must bring his body into subjection to his regenerated spirit and
aid his fellow man. "'A Christian man does not live to himself,
but in Christ and in his neighbor, or else is no Christian; in
Christ by faith, in his neighbor by love."
The liberty of a Christian man sounds out the message of the
Epistle to the Galatians, which inspires this tract. True liberty
means not legalistic, Judaistic bondage to the law, but freedom in
the Gospel. It is an appeal for freedom in Christ, but not free
dom from Christ. It is a clear and tender setting forth of the po
sition of the child of God, who is free from all legal obligations
through faith, but a debtor to all goodness and all men through
love. It breathes the spirit of the Pauline conceptions of faith,
grace and love, never to be dissociated from good works as
their expression. It manifests the spirit of tranquillity and com
forting assurance in a period of angry controversy, and places its
author not only in the list of great Christian leaders, but also
among the saints and scriptural mystics of all ages. Prof. A. C.
McGiffirt calls this writing of Luther the most beautiful of all
his works and the one which contains the finest statement of his
Christian faith.
These three documents, which have been called the "Primary
Works of the Reformation," mark the crisis of the movement.
Appealing on the one hand to the national interests of the Ger
man people, and on the other hand to their reviving spiritual life,
they sounded the two most powerful chords then vibrating in the
nation. "They contain," says Ranke, the historian, "the revival

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 107
of the whole Reformation." They are marked at places by the
note of tumult and assault, but the dominant tone is constructive.
The note of victory sounds out in all of them. The freshness and
power with which the leading principles of Protestantism were
stated in them have likely never been equaled, certainly never
surpassed. These three documents of the date of 1520 contain
the negative and positive program of the Reformation.
Writing of them Dr. David Schaff has said, "Luther in his
three reformatory treatises written in 1520, 'The Appeal to the
German Nobles,' 'The Babylonish Captivity of the Church,' and
'The Freedom of the Christian Man,' set forth all the distinctive
doctrinal positions of the Reformation with a strength of convic
tion and ardor of expression never excelled since the days of St.
Paul." Says Kostlin, the biographer of the Reformer, "These
three treatises taken together are the chief reformatory writing of
Luther. In the first one he calls Christendom in general to the
battle against the outward abuses and pretensions of the pope and
of the class that boasted of being the only one possessing a spirit
ual and priestly character; in the second he exposes and also
breaks the spiritual bond whereby this class, through the so-called
means of grace, kept souls in bondage, while in the third he
reaches the most important and profound question pertaining to
the relation of the Christian soul to its God and Redeemer and
the way and nature of salvation. Here he lays explicitly and
firmly the strong foundation on which the Christian may build his
life and character, and of which no spiritual tyranny can rob
him." The man who best of all in his own and later generations repre
sented the German character was now standing as the masterful
leader at the head of a great Christian and national movement.
From the nailing up of the theses on the last day of October,
1517, to the close of 1520, Luther had traveled a long and trouble
some road, but it ended in the reassertion of doctrines that were
essential to the restoration of the Church to its apostolic ideals.
The year 1520 was memorable for one other incident. In Jan
uary of that year Eck went to Rome to secure Luther's condem
nation. His malicious but unwise devotion to his task was at
last rewarded, and the wily adversary of Luther in the famous
disputation at Leipzic was permitted to bring back to Germany a
papal fulmination against the Reformer. The bull of excommu-

108 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
nication was issued July 15, 1520, and after being published at
several other places a copy of it at length reached Germany in
October. It condemned forty-one propositions from the writ
ings of Luther, condemned to the flames all that he had written
containing these propositions, and declared the obstinate heretic
to be exposed to all the penalties befitting his case unless he
should recant in sixty days. But his case had been fully laid
before the people whom he had been addressing, and in their
sympathy and support he was strong. The bull was felt to be an
outrage upon the public opinion of the land and an insult to the
Elector Frederick, who took the position that Luther was not to
be condemned unheard, and that he should have a safe conduct
to and from any place accorded him for a hearing.
The rising spirit of German nationalism was finding in Luther's
successive steps rallying points for the expression of its energies.
As his correspondence shows, it was with no surprise or trepida
tion that the Reformer awaited the launching of the inevitable
document from Rome that would cut him off from the Church of
his fathers. When it came, his attitude was that of defiance.
Instead of candid and open discussion and some attempt at the
reformation of scandalous and acknowledged abuses in the
Church, the sole endeavor had been to silence him at any cost,
even of death, imprisonment or exclusion from salvation. Not
only was he being condemned unheard, but his enemy had become
his judge and executioner. His arraignment of abuses had
proven to be unanswerable, and the papal methods of dealing
with an earnest and able man's convictions had broken down of
their own ineffectiveness. The pope's answer to one of the sin
cere sons of the Church was that of suppression, and the method
drove Luther, the condemned heretic, to become Luther the
defiant and effective rebel. His wrath flamed up against a
Church that had proven itself to be incapable of reform and
seeking only to silence and destroy such as preached the Gospel.
It was something for one man, even though that man were
Luther, to defy the power which for a thousand years had been
supreme in Christendom, but that defiance was necessary if spirit
ual freedom and the Gosepl of free grace were once more to
come to men, of if even Rome herself were to be delivered from the
bondage of her own self-imposed abuses. In all their negotia
tions the papal nuncios had but one demand to make, and that wa«

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 109
silence, and in case that was declined, that the penalties for ob
stinate heresy should be inflicted. In the face of the serious situa
tion confronting him, however, the note of confident defiance
rings out in Luther's appeal. "I appeal," said he, "from the pope,
first, as an unjust, rash and tyrannical judge, who condemns me
without a hearing, and without giving any reasons for his judg
ment ; secondly, as a heretic and an apostate, misled, hardened and
condemned by the Holy Scriptures, who commands me to deny
that Catholic faith is necessary in the use of the Sacraments;
thirdly, as an enemy, an adversary, and antichrist and an op
pressor of Holy Scripture, who dares to set his own words in op
position to the Word of God ; fourthly, as a blasphemer, a proud
contemner of the Holy Church and of a legitimate council, who
maintains that a council is nothing of itself."
For some time bonfires had been made of Luther's writings in
compliance with the papal command, but this was an easy in
dustry at which the two parties could play, and he wanted to
show that he, too, could apply the torch to books which were in
capable of both physical suffering or resistance. To his spirit
of boldness and defiance the unconquerable monk now added the
additional offence of action. On the 10th day of December,
1520, at nine o'clock in the morning, in the presence of a large
gathering of professors, students and townspeople, near the
Elster gate of Wittenberg, he solemnly committed the bull of
excommunication, together with the papal decretals, the canon
law and some of the writings of Eck and Emser to the flames,
using words borrowed from Joshua's judgment of Achan, the
thief who had troubled Israel, "As thou, the pope, has vexed
the Holy One of the Lord, may the eternal fire vex thee."
Thus terminated the unity of western Christendom. It was a
bold and dramatic event which won not only the applause of the
youthful students, who had made something of a holiday festi
val out of a most significant event, but still further aroused the
enthusiasm of the German people. It was the irrevocable act
which forever severed Luther from the papacy. Henceforth
there was to be no compromise, and no truce in the battle begun
was possible. The spirit of independence, growing since the days
of Tauler and Huss, had asserted itself with a hitherto unrecog
nized vigor; was shaking off the incubus which had for cen
turies repressed it, and, defying the powers of the world, was

110 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
proclaiming religious liberty. When, near the Elster gate, Lu
ther kindled the fire that burned the bull, the decrees and the
canons, he added to another and greater fire — that of revolution
and reform — for both of which the materials were already at
hand. He at once regarded his excommunication as an emanci
pation from all the restraints of popery and monasticism, on the
very next day after the spectacular event warning his students in
the lecture-room against the Roman antichrist, and telling them
that it was high time to burn the papal chair with all its false
teachings and abominations.
We can hardly at this day exaggerate the significance of this
event. "We may infer from this document" — referring to the
papal bull of excommunication — says the older Dr. Schaff, "in
what a state of intellectual slavery Christendom would be at the
present time if the papal power had succeeded in crushing the
Reformation. It is difficult to estimate the debt we owe to
Martin Luther for freedom and progress."
V
Early in the next year, 1521, a demand was made upon Luther
for a still greater exhibition of his courage than that displayed
when he committed the bull of excommunication to the flames.
It was in this year that, in obedience to the imperial summons, he
made his appearance before the famous diet. On the 28th day of
January Charles V opened his first imperial diet of the sovereigns
and states of Germany at Worms, that historical town in the
Valley of the Rhine. On March 15th the Emperor sent a herald
to Luther, commanding him to appear there and give an account,
in person, of his books and doctrines. The case of the Reformer
was one of the principal matters demanding settlement at that
meeting. Aleander, the Vatican librarian and Greek scholar,
awaited Luther's coming with great anxiety, because of his in
creasing popularity among the German people. "There are here
so many Lutherans," he wrote to Eck; "that not only all men, but
even the sticks and the stones cry out, 'Luther!' " "Everybody is
against us," he dolefully informed Rome, "and these mad dogs are
well equipped with literature and arms, and well know how to
boast that they are no longer beasts without skill, like their fore
fathers, but that Italy has lost its hold on literature, and the Tiber
has flowed into the Rhine."

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 111
A promise of safe-conduct had accompanied the summons, but
notwithstanding, some of Luther's friends sought to dissuade him
from attempting the perilous journey to Worms, reminding him
of the fate of John Huss, who was burned at Constance in viola
tion of the safe-conduct which had been assured to him by the
Emperor Sigismund. But his determination was unalterably
taken, and from the first intimation of a summons by the Emperor
Luther regarded it as a call of God to bear witness to the truth,
and declared it to be his purpose to go to Worms even though he
should be taken there sick and at the risk of his life. Meeting on
the way repeated admonitions about what had come to PIuss at
Constance in 1415, Luther responded, "Though they should kindle
a fire all the way from Wittenberg to Worms, the flames of
which should reach to heaven, I would still appear before them in
the name of the Lord; I would enter the jaws of this behemoth
confessing the name of the Lord Jesus Christ."
The journey from Wittenberg to Worms was a triumphal pro
cession, even though it had been filled with the apprehensions of
his friends and the threats of foes. Along the way he had
preached and received a popular ovation. One of the priests of
the Roman Church reported that "when Luther entered a city the
people ran to meet him ; everybody wanted to see the wonderful
man who was so bold as to oppose himself against the pope and
the whole world." The nearer he came to the seat of the diet the
more were attempts made by the Romanists either to prevent his
coming, or, at least, to delay his arrival beyond the twenty-one
days of his safe-conduct. To the messenger who was sent by
Spalatin with the advice that he should not enter the city, his
answer was the memorable expression, not of bluster, but of his
charasteristic courage and trust in God: "I shall go to Worms
though there were as many devils there as there are tiles on the
roofs." Escorted by his friends and numbers of the Saxon noblemen,
who had gone out to meet him, Luther arrived at Worms on Sun
day morning, April 16th, at ten o'clock, preceded by the imperial
herald and followed by a group of gentlemen on horseback. As
he passed through the city so great was the crowd that pressed
to see the distinguished heretic that it was necessary to conduct
him through back courts to the house of the Knights of St. John,
where he was to be entertained during his momentous visit.

112 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
On the day after his arrival, April 17th, in the afternoon at four
o'clock, in charge of the imperial marshal, Luther was led through
circuitous side streets, in order to avoid the great crowds, to the
hall of the diet in the bishop's palace, where were assembled the
electors, the bishops, the reigning princes and the deputies from
the free cities of the German nation. At their head was the
young emperor, Charles V, who was twenty-one years of age the
previous February. He was elevated on a throne, with the three
ecclesiastical electors on the right, the three secular on the left,
his brother Frederick on a chair of state below the throne, and
nobles, knights and delegates around, the papal nuncio being in
front. Martin Luther was now thirty-seven years old. He was
admitted into the presence of this famous assembly at six o'clock.
But few contrasts in human history have been as marked. It
was that of a solitary monk, a lonely hero and confessor, slight of
figure, pale with recent illness and much study, with thoughtful-
ness and earnestness finely outlined in his candid German face,
facing an imposing representation of the highest forces in Church
and State, together with a great company of spectators in and
around the building and in the streets, anxiously awaiting the issue ;
one man, as it has been said, "encircled by the dark flashing line
of the mailed chivalry of Germany," facing legates of the pope,
archbishops, bishops, dukes, margraves, princes, counts, deputies
of imperial cities, ambassadors of foreign courts, and dignitaries
of every rank.
Some thought that at length he would be frightened, and would
temporize. But he showed in his attitude that the brave heart in
his former strong utterances had not been indulging in words of
empty braggadocio. Copies of the various books which he had
published were placed before him in the hall of the diet, and he
was asked two questions with reference to them — whether he
would acknowledge them as his own, and whether he would
recant their contents. To the first question, as to authorship, he
replied in the affirmative ; but as to the second and more moment
ous question of recantation, he modestly and humbly asked fur
ther time for consideration, inasmuch as the gravity of the issues
involved the salvation of the soul and the truth of the word of
God. Luther was somewhat overawed by the great assembly he
was facing, but the request for more time was based, not upon any
failure of his courage, but upon a profound sense of his responsi-

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 113
bility. He was granted until the next day to prepare his reply,
and when that day came — the greatest day in the reformer's great
career — all signs of timidity and hesitation had vanished. He
had taken time to meditate and pray.
It is well nigh impossible for people of this age to conceive
the courage which the task faced by Luther imposed. The ques
tion which he was called upon to answer was whether or not he
should submit to the judicial decision of the Church of Rome,
already pronounced. Could he, the son of an humble miner,
facing the world's pomp and power, maintain his independence?
Was he sure enough of himself to still affirm that his own deep
conviction of the truth of God's word was of more value than the
declarations of the great representative councils of Christendom,
which were generally believed to have reflected the power and
guidance of the Ploly Ghost? He stood unshaken in his cause.
Being taunted with dodging the questions at issue, he declared
boldly and in measured words which expressed his profound con
victions: "Since your imperial majesty wants a plain answer, I
shall give you a plain answer without horns or teeth. Unless I
am refuted and convinced by testimony of the Scriptures, I
neither can nor dare retract anything; for my conscience is cap
tive to God's word, and it is neither safe nor right to go against
conscience. I have no guide but the Bible, the word of God.
Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen."
It was the most heroic moment of his courageous life. There
had appeared a man who knew how to stand and be counted for
the truth, and in the face of the powers of the world. Plis stand
marked the opening of a freer, brighter and better age. "Setting
aside the scene where He, whose Name is above every name, wit
nessed a good confession before Pontius Pilate," says Prof.
Smith, "I know of no scene in human history so full of pathos
and power, so uplifting and grand in all its relations, as Luther,
when he stood before the Diet of Worms." It is, say Carlyle and
Froude, the finest scene in modern history. "If they burn you
now, they bum all the German princes with you," whispered one
of his friends as the council retired to consider. The diet was an
assembly before which Luther could not have hoped actually to
win his cause. The emperor, Charles V, with his inherited Span
ish traditions, fostered by his education, could not fairly estimate
and understand the Reformer. His assertion of the infallibility of

114 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
a General Council, and Luther's idea of the supremacy of the
Sacred Scriptures, could not be reconciled by any kind of diplom
acy, however sincere. Says Professor Hausrath, in his estimate
of Luther's attitude at this important crisis of his career: "He
penetrated deeper than the well-meaning politicians. The errors
in doctrine were to his mind inseparably connected with the
abuses in practice, just as theibad root with the foul fruit. If he
did not attack the former, he could not resist the latter. From
the doctrine of purgatory resulted the abuse of indulgences ; from
the sacrament of priestly ordination followed the servitude of the
laity; the erroneous doctrine of justification led to the whole
system of outward works and rites, which choked all living faith
and spiritual life. Just because he saw clearer than did his poli
tical patrons, he could not acquiesce to their wishes, and conse
quently all efforts to effect a compromise were doomed to failure
at the outset."
All negotiations now having failed to weaken the reformer's
determination, the ban of the empire was next pronounced against
him. On the 19th of April a message of the Emperor was read
to the diet in which, after giving his guarantee that Luther should
have a safe-conduct home, he said : "I am determined to proceed
against him as a manifest heretic." The Elector of Brandenburg
set up the old claim that faith was not to be kept with a heretic.
But he was promptly told that if Luther's life were taken there
would be blood for blood. So popular had the movement for
reform become, and so much of a national idol the Reformer, that
the land responded with the opinion that if he was harmed there
would be a convulsion which would overturn all authority. He
was ordered to quit Worms on April 26th, his safe-conduct pro
tecting him for twenty-one days, and no longer. At the end of
that time he was liable to be seized and destroyed as a pestilential
heretic. The ban under which he was placed was as strong and
decisive as the most violent of the papists could have wished.
After describing Luther as being guilty of inciting to schism, war,
murder, the utter ruin of the Christian faith, and, indeed, as
being the devil himself in the frock of a monk, the ban continued :
"For this reason, under pain of incurring the penalties due to the
crime of high treason, we forbid you to harbor the said Luther
after the appointed time shall be expired, to conceal him, to give
him food or drink, or to furnish him, by word or by deed, publicly

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 115
or secretly, with any kind of succor whatsoever. We enjoin
you, moreover, to seize him, or to cause him to be seized,
wherever you may find him, to bring him before us without any
delay, or to keep him in safe custody until you have learned from
us in what manner you are to act towards him and have received
the reward due to your labors in so holy a work. As for his
adherents, you will apprehend them, confine them, and confiscate
their property. His writings you will burn or utterly destroy in
any other manner."
So ended the Diet of Worms. The papal zealots thought that
by destroying the brave monk they could uproot and bring to
naught his work and teachings. Outlawed by Church and State,
condemned by the Pope, the Emperor and the universities, cast
out from society, and branded as an insolent and irreverent dis
turber of the Church, who had dared to strike at the most time-
honored institutions of Christendom and had set himself up as the
judge and censor of the Holy Catholic Church, he had, never
theless, lit an inextinguishable fire of religious faith and hope in
Germany. Branded and proscribed, and living from day to day
in the constant presence of death, he was more influential than all
his enemies. His name was already famous from the Baltic to
the Swiss lakes, and the people were gladly following him as their
leader and deliverer. His heroism had touched ten thousand
hearts, and the movement now inseparable from his name and
teachings had well-nigh ceased to need his advocacy.
Never since the days of the martyrs and the apostles had the
right of private judgment been so generally asserted and the
apostolic doctrine of the rights of conscience been so distinctly
reaffirmed. The Lutheran revolt had been merged into opposi
tion to Rome. In the case of the ban issued by the diet, for the
last time the empire had recognized its obligation to carry out
the decrees of the alleged successor of St. Peter fulminating
from his palace on the Tiber. Hutten cried: "I am becoming
ashamed of my fatherland." So general was the disapproval of
the edict that few were willing to pay any attention to it.
In his interpretation of the stand made by Luther at Worms,
Dr. Schaff says that "Luther's testimony before the diet is an
event of world historical importance and far-reaching effect. It
opened an intellectual conflict which is still going on in the civ
ilized world. He stood there as the fearless champion of the

116 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
supremacy of the word of God over the traditions of men, and
of the liberty of conscience over the tyranny of authority. For
this liberty all Protestant Christians, who enjoy the fruit of his
courage, owe him a debt of gratitude." Interpreting the same
great event, Bishop Creighton says that "In the records of human
heroism Luther's appearance before the Diet of Worms must
always rank high. The man is worthy of admiration, who, rather
than tamper with the integrity of his conscience, commits himself
boldly to an unknown future, trusting only to the help of God.
Luther had worked out his own principles, and he maintained
them in their full extent. He knew well enough the motives of
policy which made his action unwise ; but he did not shrink from
facing the exact issue. He boldly stated that religion was a mat
ter of the individual conscience, taught only by the Scriptures;
and that no human authority could devise any other sanction.
He knew that by this avowal he gave himself into the hands of his
enemies; he knew that he disappointed the schemes of purely
political partisans ; but regardless of all else, he spoke out the
'ruth which he believed." VI
But the issuing of an edict and the burning of books was not
the end of the troublesome scholar and monk. Providence did
not design that even upon his person should the edict be fulfilled.
When Luther was returning from Worms to Wittenberg, and
before the publication of the ban against him, a troop of knights,
disguised, fell upon him, and scattering his attendants, carried
him away into the Thuringian forest and placed him in the Wart
burg, the strongest of all the Elector's castles, the ancient home
of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, located on the heights overlooking
the beautiful Eisenach of his school days. Here he lived for ten
months away from the rage of his enemies, by whom it was feared
he might be taken and put to death. Here he was known as
"Junker George," the title given him by the jovial knights. To
the Reformer and the cause for which he was now standing this
Wartburg exile was profitable. After the busy whirl and violent
commotion in which so much of his life for four years had been
passed, and especially after the popular exaltation that had been
accorded him after his public appearance before the illustrious
gathering at Worms, he required solitude and retirement to regain

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 117
balance and poise, and to store up in his soul those supplies of
divine grace and strength he needed for the coming days of his
great conflict. He felt that he was a "strange prisoner, a captive
with and against my will."
But he was at this charming place tremendously active. To a
friend he wrote : "I am reading the Bible in Hebrew and Greek;
I am going to write a treatise in German on auricular confession ;
I shall continue the translation of the Psalms, and compose a
volume of sermons so soon as I receive what I want from Wit
tenberg. I am writing without intermission." During this period
of tranquillity and solitude there issued from his pen in rapid suc
cession a variety of writings. At Wittenberg the commanding
voice was silent, but the pen at the Wartburg was diligent. "For
nearly a whole year," says an historian, "he by turns instructed,
exhorted, reproved and thundered from his mountain retreat ; and
his amazed adversaries asked one another if there was not some
thing supernatural, some mystery, in this prodigious activity."
Interpreting the Wartburg experience and withdrawal, D'Aubigne
says : "Here God had been pleased to conduct Martin Luther to
a place of repose and peace. After having exhibited him on the
brilliant theater of Worms, where all the powers of the Re
former's soul had been strung to so high a pitch, he gave him the
secluded and humiliating retreat of a prison. God draws from
the deepest seclusion the weak instruments by which he purposes
to accomplish great things; and then, when he has permitted
them to glitter for a season with dazzling brilliancy on an illus
trious stage, he dismisses them again to the deepest obscurity.
* * * It was requisite that this great individual should fade
away, in order that the revolution then accomplishing might not
bear the stamp of an individual. It was necessary for the man
to retire, that God might remain alone to move by His Spirit upon
the deep waters of medieval darkness and to say, 'Let there be
light,' so that there might be light."
It was here that the industrious Reformer did his greatest and
most constructive service for the German people and the world,
in the translation of the Scriptures. Here were laid permanently
the foundations of Evangelical Christianity, for from this castle
and the seclusion of its friendly imprisonment, first in modern
times, there went forth the gospel in the language of the people.
Here Luther provided the strongest weapon of German Protest-

118 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
antism, through the pages of which God spoke anew to men in the
modern age. From this place there went forth the message of
Hebrew prophets and the recorded words of Jesus Himself which
had aforetime been spoken to the people of Galilee and Judea.
From here went forth that word of God from which men were
once more to learn the truth that it was not by means of monastic
self-righteousness and impositions, nor through the ministrations
of an exclusive priestly class, that man might become reconciled
to God, but through that faith which an apostle declares to be the
gift of God. Thence, also, went forth some of the Reformer's
keenest controversial writings, but chiefest of all, that peculiar
biblical inspiration which established the language of a great
people, gave them a word of authority that was supreme and
final, started a varied literature, and struck so deep into the
German intellect that even the ban of Duke George of Saxony
was but a ripple on the stream of its national influence. "Martin
Luther," says Professor Wilkinson, "is the founder of German
literary history. German literature dates its commencement
from the moment at which Luther's noble translation of the Bible
into his own mother tongue was first given to Germany. Above
everything else that proceeded from Luther's pen towers his
translation of the Old and New Testament Scriptures. It has
for nearly four centuries been to the German-speaking peoples all
that the King James' translation since the latter was given to the
world has been to the peoples who speak English."
His work here became the anticipation of the coming populari
zation of the Scriptures in other lands and other languages. In
England, for example, the effect of the circulation of the Bible in
the language of the people was the same as in Germany. "No
greater moral change," says Green in his Short History of the
English People, "ever passed over a nation than passed over Eng
land during the years which parted the middle of the reign of
Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. England
became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible. It
was as yet the one English book which was familiar to every
Englishman; it was read at churches and read at home, and
everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not
deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a startling
enthusiasm." Luther's sojourn in this "Patmos," as he styled the Wartburg,

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 119
marked the opening of a more constructive period in his career
than that which culminated in his appearance before the diet,
though its underlying principles remained the same. History
does not record a grander scene or a bolder act than Luther's ap
pearance at Worms. There he fought the tyranny which the
Church exercised over the consciences of believers, and routed
the papal marplots who contended for the bondage of the human
judgment. But at the Wartburg he attained his greatest literary
achievement. Books of devotion, controversial writings, tracts
for the times, sermons and letters, issued in quick succession.
Add to these his three treatises on "Private Confession," on the
"Abuse of Private Masses," and on "Monastic Vows," besides his
commentaries and epistles, and his self -accusation of laziness ap
pears as a somewhat strange autobiographical statement and con
fession. Here in his translation of the New Testament he gave
to the world, in the language of the common people, that which
really makes men free and independent of human authority, pro
viding an authority in the Bible, illumined by the Holy Spirit and
by sane grammatical interpretation. He here provided for his
people that which they read and loved, which not only dominated
and directed their religious and moral convictions, but which,
more than anything else, influenced their mode of thinking and
manner of expression.
The years that succeeded were busy with manifold tasks and
responsibilities. Luther set himself to the work of purifying the
service of the Church, to composing hymns for the use of the
people, which were received by them with unbounded enthusiasm,
and which, sung everywhere, in church, school and home, greatly
forwarded the good fight of the Reformation. In the matter of
popular education, also, the Reformer's influence was widely felt.
Realizing that ignorance was the blight of the land, and that in
consequence of it the people were kept in papal bondage, he urged
upon the magistrates and mayors of Germany the duty of main
taining schools for the education of the young. To remedy the
appalling religious ignorance that prevailed, he published his
Small Catechism, which, in its simple presentation of gospel
truth and strong, childlike faith, stands even to this day without a
parallel of its kind in the literature of the Christian world. At
no time in all the years of his busy life did Luther ambitiously
start out to do some great things, but at every time of crisis and

120 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
opportunity he faithfully responded to God's call to duty as it
came to him, and the great Reformation, with its restoration of
the pure Gospel, was the far-reaching result.
Until his death in 1546, along with his coadjutor and comple
ment, the younger, gentler, more learned but less heroic Me
lanchthon, Luther guided the course of German Protestantism
amid external opposition and internal controversy; while directly
or indirectly he also stimulated the progress of the Reformation
throughout Christendom.
While engaged in his literary labors at the Wartburg, unpleas
ant reports reached him about extravagant and fanatical tend
encies that were beginning to manifest themselves at Witten
berg. Carlstadt and some others, uncontrolled by the master
spirit of Luther, began to carry out to its natural consequences
the mere spirit of negation involved in some phases of the move
ment. The popular mind, aroused to a sense of the deception
which had been practiced upon it for centuries, began now to
break out into extreme expressions of hostility against the medie
val church system in its forms as well as its doctrines. Icono
clasm was engaged in its destructive work. Schoolmasters dis
missed their scholars, the university learning was disparaged, and
Wittenberg was rapidly sinking into the abode of fanatics. Leav
ing the Wartburg in March, 1522, against the remonstrances of
his friends, Luther hastened back to Wittenberg, where, resuming
his place in the pulpit, for eight successive days he reasoned with
the people out of the Scriptures. On the first Sunday after his
return he delivered his opinion on the principles which should
guide them in the great religious changes through which they
were passing. He preached about the reality of sin and salva
tion, the necessity of faith and love ; these, said he, being the main
things to be concerned about, and not mere novelties or changes
for their own sake. Earnestness of principle and moderation in
practice were the keynotes of this remarkable series of sermons,
listened to by crowds from day to day. He besought them to ab
stain from asserting their new-found liberty by rashly overturning
all that had hitherto maintained in the Church. He admonished
them from the Scriptures against that precipitate enthusiasm which
menaced the existing social order. They listened to his message
and common sense, the positive statement of the truth in love
proving to be the best refutation of error. Order was restored

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 121
at the seat of the new movement and radicalism checked. His
escape from his retreat at the Wartburg was at the risk of his
life. Duke Frederick had warned him not to expose himself.
Duke George of Leipzic might seize him. "But," said Luther,
"I'll go if it rains Duke Georges for nine days." Casting himself
upon the divine protection, he went back to Wittenberg, welcomed
by the people, who thought that he never would return. The
restoration of order, the expulsion of the heavenly prophets, the
installation of sane principles in the direction of worship and
ecclesiastical administration, all combined to justify both his faith
and his courage. His popular eloquence, his zeal, his courage and
capacity for leadership, were never more urgently needed, and
never more clearly manifest. "In sovereign sway and master-
dom" there was not his equal among the people. They were
aware that there was but one man among them who was strong
enough to check the rising tide of fanaticism and the oncoming
and dreaded revolutionary movements, and that man was Martin
Luther. In the subsequent days of the great Reformer's life there was
no abatement in his fidelity to his divinely imposed tasks, his
courage in conducting the good fight of the new movement, or of
his industry in the constructive work made necessary by the suc
cessive stages of its development. A large number of treatises
on different religious subjects followed in rapid succession.
Meanwhile, Luther's cause continued to gain new adherents and
its influence to spread. In the fall of 1522 the Emperor's
brother, Ferdinand, who succeeded him on the imperial throne,
wrote: "The cause of Luther is so rooted in the whole empire
that among a thousand persons today not one is free from it."
In the years from June, 1522 to 1525, the Lutheran teaching was
accepted by Albert, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who
transformed his dominions into a grand duchy, the beginning of
the kingdom of Prussia, while the bishops of Samland and
Livonia accepted the same faith. Distinguished German noble
men and cities espoused Luther's cause and called evangelical
ministers, among them being the cities of Zwickau, Altenburg,
Eisenach, Magdeburg, Frankfort, Nuremberg, Ulm, Strassburg
and Bremen. The evangelical cause made progress in Dantzic,
Sweden and Denmark. During all of this external growth the
Reformer was engaged in controversy, planting, building and re-

122 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
construction, in a period marked by transitions and changing
conditions. The Lutheran Reformation in religion, we are always to re
member, was by no means an isolated phenomenon in one separate
sphere. The rising spirit of nationalism was more and more tak
ing on definite form. The old feudal system of the Middle
Ages was slowly giving away to a new social structure, and the
common people were more and more coming into prominence as
compared with the princely classes. The accumulation of wealth
in the hands of a few brought about a more luxurious mode of
living. Hitherto unknown luxuries were imported and ostenta
tiously displayed by the wives and daughters of wealthy burghers.
There was also a wide and growing dissatisfaction among the
peasants and laborers, who were looking for an opportunity to
arise and shake off the oppressive yoke of feudalism and of land
servitude. Their position had become well nigh unbearable, and
repeatedly they had risen in revolt. In the years 1476, 1491, 1498
and 1503 they had rebelled against their rulers, but had been over
come, and were kept in suppression only by use of violent means.
The princes became more and more overbearing in their attitude
toward the peasants, and the knights became more and more op
pressive. The religious radicalism at Wittenberg which had been
restrained by Luther became the prelude of a more dangerous
radicalism in civil and social life, which involved the land in riot,
confusion and bloodshed. In the present religious convulsion the
peasantry saw another opportunity for revolt. A league was
formed in 1514; by 1524 the insurrection broke out publicly, and
by the spring of 1525 it was general. The movement had its
roots in crying abuses, and unquestionably received a strong im
petus from the Reformation, its advocates claiming to be carrying
out its principles to their logical consequences. If, men said, they
are made free by Christ, and purchased by His blood, why should
they be the bond-servants of men? If God's word is to be the
supreme authority in religious matters, why not in civil matters
as well? If the claims of the pope and the priests were to be
rejected because they were unscriptural, why should the unjust
demands of secular princes be obeyed ?
The peasants were largely sympathetic with the Protestant
movement, and pleaded the Bible as their justification in demand
ing liberty of conscience and freedom from civil oppression. The

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 123
work and influence of Luther had come to a critical juncture.
He had claimed a holy liberty for Christians, but these men were
perverting it into a most unholy and dangerous license. They
mistook spiritual liberty for carnal freedom. The great leader
of his people and reformer of the Church was now put upon trial
in a new direction. The unrest of the oppressed peasants had
nothing to do with the reformation of religion, nor did Luther's
teachings in any way occasion it. It is not surprising, however,
that the peasants saw in the new religious order the coming remedy
for their ancient wrongs, or that his enemies should take advan
tage of the deplorable situation to maintain that this was what
came of his teaching. But the charge that he was to blame for
the cruelties committed upon the peasants by their captors, and
that his teaching had incited their awful insurrection, was unjust
and absurd. He had severely reproved the victorious company of
the nobles for their cruelty against the peasants, but had not in
cited the peasants to violent revolution and rebellion against the
powers that be. He had shown that they were oppressed by the
exactions of Rome, but when they revolted against all authority
and rebelled against all exactions, he exhorted even their op
pressors to cut them down. He had encouraged the peasants to
press their claims, but had charged them to do so with modera
tion and obedience to duly constituted authority. But when he
had heard of unspeakable atrocities, saw the smoke of burning
castles and villages, and beheld the drunken and ferocious mob
nearing Wittenberg, his indignation was aroused and he burst out
in a violent manifesto against the "rapacious and murdering peas
ants." When they took to plundering monasteries, murdering
the nobles and playing reckless havoc, he could endure no longer
with patience. He studied the matter closely, and then took the
side of law and order.
No act in Luther's life has been more severely criticised, and
it had a bad effect on the Reformer himself and on his work. It
modified his confidence in the people and his own capacity to con
trol them. He was unjustly held responsible for the ruined
castles, the devastated fields, the ravaged villages, and all the un
told suffering that ensued from his deplorable reign of lawless
ness. Even Erasmus wrote : "Here you see the fruits of your
spirit." The princes accused him for having incited the peas
ants, and the peasants reproached him for having forsaken them

124 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
in their day of distress. The cause of the Reformation suffered
great injury, and was at once made responsible by the Romanists
for all the horrors that had come upon the land. Much as he
lamented the results of the lawless uprising, Luther never re
pented of having acted as he did in roundly denouncing the
princes for their exactions and counseling the peasant to be obedi
ent to their government. The voice of history has spoken out in
justification of the Reformer's course in this time of calamity to
his people and trial to himself. It has been said by a well-
accredited historian: "But the calm-minded Luther was wiser
than the fanatic multitudes. With heavy heart he took sides
against them. He saw clearly enough that all hope of success in
an effort for religious reform would be jeopardized if the cause
should be yoked with the schemes of Munzer." "The real great
ness of the Reformer appeared in the transaction; for he used his
influence with the nobles of the revolted districts to save the peas
ants from punishment." VII
It was during the Peasants' War, on June 13, 1525, that Luther
was married to Catherine von Bora, an escaped nun from the
cloister located near Grimma, in Saxony. The ex-friar at this
time was in his forty-second year and the ex-nun twenty-six.
Luther was glad rather than otherwise when his enemies de
nounced his conduct, and his friends never moved him from what
he believed to be his duty, entered upon in defiance of the teachr
ing of the medieval Church, but in entire harmony with the teach
ings of the Scriptures. By his marriage the Reformer protested
against the unnaturalness of the monastic ideal of withdrawal
from life and the ascetic hatred of the world. Of this important
event in his life Gustav Freytag says: "From that time the hus
band, the father, the citizen, became likewise the reformer of the
domestic life of his nation, a pattern for filial reverence, marriage,
the training of children, as well as for social family life — the very
blessings of this life on earth, of which Protestants and Catholics
may alike partake, have sprung from Luther's marriage."
In 1529 Luther prepared his two Catechisms, which grew out
of the Saxon Church visitations, from which he returned greatly
depressed because of his observations of the ignorance of the
people of the most rudimentary teachings of the Christian

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 125
religion. These manuals, intended to correct the evils of igno
rance and irreligion, soon became symbolical standards of doctrine
and Church teaching wherever the Lutheran Church had extended
its borders. In the same year he participated in the famous
Marburg colloquy, where he planted himself down squarely upon
the plain statement of the divine word, plainly construed, in con
trast with the rationalizing method of interpreting the Scriptures
employed by Zwingli, insisting upon the doctrine that the true
body and blood of Christ are received by the partakers of the
Lord's Supper, in and together with the bread and wine.
In 1530 we find the Reformer at the Coburg Castle during the
Augsburg Diet, from which place he kept up continual corre
spondence with Melanchthon, the scholarly "preceptor of Ger
many," who sought in the memorable confession presented there
to set forth the evangelical doctrines in elegant and vigorous Ger
man and in agreement with the orthodox doctrines of the one
Holy Christian Church. In that great confessional document the
conciliatory spirit and theological acumen of Melanchthon are
discovered in every line, and of which Prof. George P. Fisher
says that it "has obtained more currency and respect than any
other Protestant symbol." In 1534 he published the entire Bible in
German. In 1537, in the first month of the year, he drew up and
published the Smalcald Articles, a clear, concise and forcible pro
test of the new movement against all the abominations of the
papacy and its manifold departures from the simplicity that is in
Christ. For the fifteen or sixteen years that followed the Diet
at Augsburg the relation of the Emperor Charles V to the Prot
estants of Germany was largely that of political maneuvering,
the Emperor being restrained by the difficulties of his position
from any decisive steps toward the repression of the movement.
The Reformation cause, however, during all this time was con
stantly adding to its allies, and by the year 1540 counted nearly
the whole of northern Germany on its side.
In January, 1546, Luther went to Eisleben, the place of his
birth, to restore peace between the counts of Mansfeld, who
were in a state of dispute about certain privileges, rights and
revenues. Having contracted a severe cold on the journey, he
was taken sick and died where he was born, on February 18,
1546, in the sixty-third year of his age. His departure was in
peace and unshaken faith, among his last words being the thrice

126 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
repeated sentence, "Father into Thy hands I commend my spirit.
Thou hast redeemed me, Thou faithful God."
So ended the stormy but permanently influential life of the
Reformer ; so passed to his reward one of the greatest men of his
tory. The faithful laborer had come to his well-earned rest and
the victor to his crown. His body, worn out with excess of
labors, was carried back to Wittenberg, where it was laid to rest
in the Castle Church, upon the door of which he had nailed the
theses twenty-nine years before, inaugurating the most important
and vitalizing movement of the modern age. "By his word and
his pen alone," says Prof. Hausrath, "he had wrung Germany
from the mighty Emperor on' whose empire the 'sun never set.'
The professor whose salary was never more than five hundred
florins a year had bought out the owner of the whole treasure of
all the indulgences. Victor over Emperor and pope he died."
Luther had been transferred from the earthly scene of his
abundant labors, but dead he was not. To the Elector, Myconius,
he wrote these words, which are being fulfilled even now : "This
Dr. Martin Luther is not dead at all; he will not die, he cannot
die. Now he will be alive more than ever before."
There are historical figures who have dwindled with the lapse
of time. In their own day and place they seemed destined to an
immortality of fame and influence. There are other figures that
pass the way of all the earth, but keep on growing in impressive-
ness as the years go by. They were recognized as heroes while
they lived, but the full measure of their greatness was not then
discerned. To this latter class Luther has been deservedly as
signed by the most competent of interpreters. The more fully
the world comes to understand the benefits of the enduring prin
ciples which he affirmed and for which he contended in the day
of battle, the more is the estimate of his greatness augmented and
his name venerated.
It is not always an easy task to estimate the forces by means of
which men of Luther's order come to such splendid success and
reach conclusions so audacious for the age in which they lived
and wrought. That is a problem which the philosophers of his
tory have never yet solved. At this quadri-centennial of the
inauguration of the Lutheran movement in the sixteenth century,
could old John Trebonius, the schoolmaster of the olden times,
rise from his grave and contemplate the worked-out results of one

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 127
of his schoolboy's achievements in the earth, he would have even
more confidence in the modest wisdom of lifting his hat to the
youth committed to his tutelage. Coming forth from that ob
scurity which is constantly surprising men by its contributions to
the world's leadership, by the munificence and magnitude of its
gifts to lofty achievement, this man, one of the greatest among
historic names, assumed wondrous charges, accomplished per
manent results, and then left the world in amazement. When he
passed away at the age of sixty- two years, three months and eight
days, there had dawned in consequence of his life the new age of
Christendom. Resolute and fearless, he flung back the gates
which one hundred years before had successfully resisted John
Huss, and through those gates men are walking to this day in the
liberty of the sons of God and the enjoyment of that civil freedom
which has marked the enfranchisement of the leading peoples of
the earth.
If Italy rightly claims the priority in the revival of learning,
to the Germany of Luther's day of right belongs the first place in
the real work of the Reformation, and that priority it is not
difficult to explain. The opportunity of that land when Luther
came to his work was the result of a combination of many condi
tions. To that land there had first of all been transmitted from
Italy the quickening impulse of the intellectual awakening of the
Renaissance, which, turning at once into the channels of practical
activity and religious seriousness, did much to hasten reformation
in the sphere of Christian thinking, reorganization and restate
ment of beliefs. That country, too, was in a state of social dis
content and rising assertion of nationalism. For its rulers, who
might themselves be Englishmen or Spaniards, the land was only
a huge farm from which to reap revenues for fighting dynastic
wars and enlarging the resources of the pope. All those social
forces which were finally to break the notorious and age-long
dominion of the medieval Church were at hand. There was only
needed the man who could so interpret those forces as to cause
the land to be conscious of their strength, and tie them up with
what was the most fundamental need of the people, a revival of
personal religion. There were the increasing industrial independ
ence and the emergence of the middle class, the new learning
and the spirit for exploration by the highways of the sea, with the
consequent widening of commercial interests and the rise of large

128 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
cities as trade centers. Everywhere there were symptoms that
the old order of things was breaking up, and that the forces
manifested in industrial activities, educational reforms and the
rising spirit of revolt, were fighting their way to recognition and
victory. This general interest was favorable to any revolutionary
movement in any field and along any lines. Particularly favor
able was it to any movement in behalf of the reform of the
Church, for in Germany the ecclesiastical abuses of the time
flourished in their most exaggerated forms. The enormous
wealth of the clergy, the princely state of the great feudal pre
lates, the extortions practiced under the forms of innumerable
levies for all sorts of purposes, had for long time been cultivating
a spirit of impatience among the masses of the people and popu
lar hostility to the Church. In addition to all this, there was the
traditional antagonism between Germany and Rome, representing
the ancient rivalry between the empire and the papacy and reach
ing back to the memorable conflict between Henry IV and
Gregory VII in the eleventh century. The national sentiment,
mixed with some resentment, had much to do with Germany's
final revolt and repudiation of papal supremacy.
Many causes had thus been at work preparing the way for the
great movement of the sixteenth century. The hour was at hand,
and Luther came with the hour panoplied and equipped for that
leadership into which he was swept by providential currents, the
direction and the end of which no one at the moment perceived.
He unconsciously and without design on his part, precipitated a
crisis in the history of mankind. He stamped his tremendous
personality upon the whole movement, so that we always think of
him as the actual creator of the Reformation. The Church
ignored the cry of her own children, and heaven sent the man
who was capable of chastising her for her faithlessness. The
conditions he confronted demanded a reformer and not a revolu
tionist, although some revolutionary accidents were soon asso
ciated with the new movement, as the abuse and not the result
of the newly-revived doctrines. He met the conditions, and with
marvelous common sense he held the reins and kept the wheels
of progress from being dashed to pieces upon dangerous rocks,
sometimes concealed in the unreasoning hostility of his an
nounced enemies and sometimes in the radicalism of unbalanced
friends, revolutionary reconstructionists, and iconoclasts. Fac-

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 129
ing such conditions, this extraordinary man whom God had raised
up divided the clouds, which hung over medieval Europe and
darkened it, that the glorious Sun of Righteousness might shine
through, and men, ignorant, enslaved and lost, might once more
find their way back to the oracles of God and the source of sal
vation. In this great movement, primarily in the sphere of re
ligion, it was Luther who was called upon to voice the spirit and
tendencies of the age. While he lived he dominated this vast and
complicated movement for the reform of the Church and a re
affirmation of apostolic teaching — that movement, which, uniting
in itself all the hopeful features of the age, resulted in the seces
sion from the Church of Rome of the Teutonic peoples, who re
jected the medieval hierarchy and scholasticism and secured to
Protestantism the inalienable rights of the individual, emancipa
tion from priestcraft, the restoration of spiritual autonomy and
religious freedom.
This glorious achievement of Luther in the religious sphere
involved the demand for liberty in the political sphere. "The
Protestant Revolution," says Frederick Seebohm, "was but one
wave of the advancing tide of modern civilization. It was a
great revolutionary wave, the onward swell of which, beginning
with the refusal of reform at the Diet of Worms, produced the
Peasants' War and swept on through the revolt of the Nether
lands, the Thirty Years' War, the Puritan revolution in England
under Oliver Cromwell, the formation of the great independent
American republic, until it came to a head and broke in all the
terrors of the French Revolution." Thus Luther's contention for
religious beliefs and freedom involved political independence, the
just claim to an equal share in civil rights.
But in our search for the genesis of the Reformation move
ment we are always led back to religion. In the religious strug
gles, beliefs and affirmations of Luther we come upon that which
is fundamental, and any interpretation of the Reformer and his
work is inadequate which does not start with and affirm constantly
the primacy of that fact. He was mastered by a passion for re
ligion. He had a dominating perception of the infinite, and this
was so manifested to him through the Church, the Bible, and
Christ and His redemptive work, as well as his own personal ex
perience, that it not merely influenced him, but dominated his
whole character and controlled his whole life. This perception

130 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
of the infinite in his case, as in that of many another good and
great man, was not always accurate, for no conception of the
infinite is always accurate. But it was with Luther a real, a vital
and a controlling perception. The supernatural to this man was
no mere theory whereby to account for phenomena. God was for
him no mere hypothesis gotten up to explain the creation, co
ordination and direction of the universe. In the reverent con
sciousness of the supernatural he lived from year to year. God
in Christ was to him the great Companion, and this experience
must be understood if we would understand and rightly estimate
Luther's character. The faith in Immanuel, God with us, was
his master passion, and there was about it the note of constant and
triumphant assurance. In consequence of his study of the Scrip
tures and his own profound personal experience he had come to
hate with a perfect hatred, and fight with a passionate courage,
whatever he thought interposed itself as an obstacle between the
souls of the people and God. In his case the basal principle,
always that of the courageous fighter, the warm-hearted friend,
the practical reformer, the student and scholar, the Christian
disciple, and the devout soul, was religion.
As one reads the story of his life it requires but little penetra
tion to discover that he was possessed by one profound religious
principle, a single inspiring idea, which ran through the whole
movement which bears his impress, and which more than any
other force gave it direction, strength and triumph. Many other
influences were, no doubt, at work. The dawning life of national
feeling and of literary culture, all through the southern and
western nations of Europe, had their influence in promoting the
Reformation, but neither of them, or both combined, can be held
as adequate in accounting for Luther or his work. They served
to prepare the way, but nothing more.
Luther was a great religious leader because he knew so well
what religion was, and which was so real in his own life. He
was full of it, was possessed by it, he lived for it, and it made him
what he was and what he seemed to be in the eyes of the
generation of men before whom he passed his life. When he
talked and wrote of religion they somehow felt confidently as
sured that he knew what he was talking about and was attempting
to put in form for other people. In short, it is to be said that
Luther had overwhelming religious convictions, that they consti-

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 131
tuted the primary force in his life and work, and that these con
victions he knew how to communicate in popular form in either
speaking or writing to other people.
The living God, not a philosophical or mystical abstraction —
the manifest and gracious God who was revealed in Jesus Christ
— was a God to be reached immediately by every Christian : that
was at the basis of Luther's greatness and achievements. In this
one thing he was great and mighty, the one overmastering man
of his time, victoriously overcoming the history of a thousand
years in order to force his age and his country into new channels.
The rediscovered knowledge of God in the gospel of His grace
was the balance wheel of his life. What it means to have God in
Christ, what this God is, how He becomes related to us in Christ,
and how we can apprehend and hold on to Him — all that Luther
experienced and that he proclaimed. Casting himself on Christ
in confidence and trust — that was to Luther the sum of religion,
the vital thought and power of his life. It was his strong grasp
on the great things of religion that forces us to look for the real
origin of the Reformation deeper below the surface than in either
humanism or nationalism.
This it is which adds so much of abiding interest to the study
of Luther's personal religious experience and struggles until he
emerged from the bondage of the law into the freedom where
with Christ makes men free. His earlier conception of Chris
tianity was distinctively medieval. He had been taught to look
upon Christ as a new law-giver, even as a second Moses, who had
been sent from God to impose anew upon men the requirements,
restrictions and regulations of the law. To use his own words in
the "Table Talk" : "We were all taught that we must make satis
faction for our sins, and that Christ would demand on the day of
judgment how we had atoned for our guilt and how many good
works we had done." Of him Melanchthon says that "often,
when he thought on the anger of God, he was seized with a terror
so violent that he was well-nigh bereft of life" ; and Luther him
self says: "I wore out my body with vigils and fastings, and
hoped thus to satisfy the law and deliver my conscience from the
sting of guilt. Had I not been redeemed by the comfort of the
Gospel I could not have lived two years longer." He struggled
with doubt and terror, with remorse and shame. In his religious
difficulties he had fancied that he had seen demons and evil

132 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
spirits, and had held frequent contests with the chief adversary
himself. He had labored for purity of life, and had attained it
in the required self-repressive methods. He had lived as far as
possible above the allurements of the present. He was learned,
accomplished and creative. He had been a profound student of
the Scriptures, and had labored night and day to free his mind
from the shadows of human traditions and to hear and attend
only to the voice of the Gospel. Before he was prepared for his
real work he had to be led back to the assurance of Paul, that
"by grace ye are saved, through faith," and the truth that faith
is that response of the soul which trusts the love and accepts the
mercy of God. If the whole of Luther's religious history, from
his entrance into the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt in 1505 to
the publication of the Augsburg Confession in 1520, shows one
thing more clearly than any other, it is that the movement of
which he was the soul and center did not arise primarily from any
merely intellectual criticism of the doctrines of the medieval
Church. It was the self-torturing cry about his personal salva
tion that drove him into the monastery, he believing, in harmony
with the almost unanimous opinion of his age, that there, if any
where, he could find that peace which he sought after with such
desperation. VIII
If we are, accordingly, seeking, in a primary way, for the
genesis of the Lutheran movement of the sixteenth century, the
quadri-centennial of which we are celebrating this year of grace,
1917, we shall find it in the struggles of conscience and the re
sulting action of a German monk. A mendicant, an Augustinian
brother, had tortured himself with the question, "What must I do
to be saved?" When he had obtained the right and satisfactory
answer from the Scriptures the secret of that vitalizing move
ment in both religion and civilization was out. Judged by its
antecedent causes and its worked-out results, whatever may have
been its latent tendencies and ulterior consequences, it was pri
marily an event in the sphere of religion, as it was expressed in
one earnest man's search for the way of salvation. From this
point of view it must, first and prior to all speculation upon its
indirect and remote results, be contemplated. Before that move
ment began in Luther's experience, a vast institution, articulated

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 133
with unsurpassed human wisdom, had been interposed between
the individual and the objects of religious faith and hope.
Schleiermacher, the great German theologian and philosopher
— a man capable of marvelous thinking on the greatest of all sub
jects — never uttered a more fundamental truth and interpreta
tion of unregenerate human nature than when he said that "the
natural man is a born Catholic." By this he meant what may be
amply verified from the experience and observation of men who
have dealt much with other men on their religious side, that they
want to come into rightful relations with God by that which they
can do themselves. In their moral and religious struggles, as in
other things, most people do not desire to cut a small figure. It
is this that is at the basis of the conception of salvation held by
the medieval Church, in the bosom of which Luther had been
nourished, and to obedience to the directions and impositions of
which he had devoutly trusted for salvation from sin.
The first question with Luther was not, how may I reform the
Church , but how may I be saved and have assurance of my sal
vation ? In attempting to answer that question after the medieval
fashion, the struggles of conscience of the Reformer constitute
one of the most interesting and deeply suggestive chapters in
human biography. In man, heathen and Jew, there is a tendency
to make for himself a path back to God, without whom he cannot
exist, and in whom he must find rest, if rest is to be obtained.
Luther followed this humanly indicated path to its remotest end,
only to find a troubled conscience under a constantly increasing
burden of sin. If ever there was a man, a son of the Church,
who tried the medieval method of obtaining salvation, with its
multitudinous impositions, through and through, and from top tc
bottom, in his own personal struggles in the sphere of religion
that man was Martin Luther. He was in many respects one oi
the most paradoxical of all the great men of history. In him
there was an unique combination of depth, even bordering at
times on melancholy, but it was associated with a mother wit that
was exhaustless. He was a man fond of humor, much of which
he had in his own nature ; but notwithstanding this, he was in turn
bowed down under the burden of the consciousness of his own
sin. We must understand the character of the man when we attempt
an estimate of the Reformer's struggles of conscience in his

134 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
thorough testing out of that peculiar apprehension of the method
of attaining to peace with God taught by the Church of his day.
Inside that Erfurt monastery he applied himself with all the
force of his strong and candid nature, using every means that the
complicated penitential system of the Church had prescribed,
with much elaboration, to help him on his way of making him
self pious and a fit subject for the grace of God which procures
salvation. With blind obedience he submitted to the orders of
his superiors ; brought himself into subjection to the most rigorous
ecclesiastical statutes; diligently sought for the consolations he
was assured would be given by confession of his sins; exhausted
the complex system of expiations recommended by the Church ;
made full use of the sacraments, which were supposed to work
effectively in the most mechanical way ; and all the time looking in
vain for that tranquillity of soul which he was assured would ac^
company their faithful observance. But in spite of their failure
to confer that for which he most of all longed, he persevered in
the way marked out.
It is enough to say that the outcome of that struggle, when
at last he found his way into the presence of God, and knew by
his own personal experience that the living God was accessible to
every Christian, was the restoration to Christendom of the un
questioned teaching of the New Testament, with its manifold
consequences. In his conflicts to be free from the terrible dominion of sin he
was standing, without thinking of doing any such important
thing, for the cause of the rejected Apostle to the Gentiles. He
followed in the steps of St. Paul, who, from a Pharisee of the
Pharisees, became the strongest opponent of Jewish legalism. In
the severity of his struggles, Luther's sole motive was concern for
God's pardon. For this end he imposed all sorts of privations
willing to be dead to the world and buried from the sight of
men that he might, for himself, make sure of eternal life. His
one great quest was after the real method of winning the sense of
his soul's salvation. To this supreme object he was willing to run
counter to the judgment of father and friend, and sacrifice the
fairest prospect of life in its worldly aspects. He did not come
to the monastery in 1505 to study theology, much as he was de
voted to the teachings of Gabriel Biel, Thomas Aquinas and Will
iam of Occam, but he had come there to save his soul. He was

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 135
upon himself, mortified the flesh, practiced all those self-inflicted
torments which the Church of that period was so clever in invent
ing. The gloomy and intolerant monastic rigidity, the want of
sympathy for any other conception of life, took hold of his char
acter. His theological training had taught him that God's pardon
for sin could be had through the sacrament of penance, and he
was determined that no penitential exaction should remain un
tried. He was seeking after inward satisfaction, the sense of
spiritual tranquillity, and his devotion in the monastery was based
upon a direct aim at that much-sought result. He proceeded to
search for it by means of vehement ascetic practices. He
watched long and rigorously, together with his prayers and fast
ings. "Often on returning to his cell he knelt at the foot of the
bed, and remained there until daybreak." His asceticism,
mingled with the internal unrest and tumult of his mind, gave
him an unnatural strength, and he relates how that once for a
whole fortnight he neither ate, drank nor slept.
Under the stress of such severities his health gave way, and,
becoming pale and emaciated, he was brought near to death's
door. Not satisfied with the feeling of having done something to
atone for a fault, he wanted the feeling of having annihilated the
fault itself, and of having put himself exactly into his original
state as he was before the fault had been committed. In this way
Luther went on seeking, with all the eagerness of direct penitenial
effort, an absolutely clear conscience. But the pursuit was not
successful, and at the close of each successive stage of his peni
tential asceticism he found himself as discontented as when he
began. "At the foot of the altar, his hands clasped, his eyes full
of tears," he prayed for peace and found none. "One morning,
the door of his cell not being open as usual, the brethren became
alarmed; they knocked, and there was no reply. The door was
burst in, and Fra Martin was found stretched on the floor in a
state of ecstasy, scarcely breathing and well-nigh dead." Vexed,
wearied, harassed and faint, he was proving to the full the death-
working power of all attempts to justify oneself by means of
works carefully elaborated and minutely prescribed by the
Church. The last word of the Pelagianizing school of the Scholastics
was that a man must work out his own salvation, and Luther was
addressing himself to the task after the most approved medieval

136 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
fashion. What, in an earlier age, had tortured Augustine, the
greatest of the post-apostolic fathers, was now torturing and ter
rifying Luther. In the long history of the Church, if ever there
was a man who tried to find peace of soul and commend himself
to God by means of self-imposed austerities, that man was
Luther. Staupitz, the vicar-general of his monastic order, had
told him that true repentance began in the love of God, and bade
him to love the Saviour who had first loved him. But he did not
at once grasp the significance of the advice. The difficulty he
experienced in extricating himself from the meshes of the medie
val theology which he had zealously studied can only be appre
ciated by looking into that theology itself, wherein the Church
had changed the evangelical interpretation of repentance into a
mere round of exacting penitential exercises. It was a merely
legal system of justification, which required a round of works in
order to make the pardon of man complete.
This system found a support in the form of language used in
the Latin Vulgate. Repentance, in the Greek of the Gospel, is an
internal process, whereas, in the Vulgate, it is largely an external
process. At a critical incident in his youth Luther had become
possessed of an intolerable dread, believed that he had heard a
voice from heaven calling him to repent, and he promptly vowed
that he would henceforth give his life to asceticism and monastic
gloom. With the impulsive inconstancy of youth, he passed the
next evening with his youthful companions in the pleasures of
music and song, possibly anxious to see if he could drown in the
joys of the world the pains of a wounded spirit. The day after
he hastened to the convent of the Augustinians at Erfurt and
took the irrevocable vow of a monk. He had resolved, through
monastic seclusion and by means of the practice of the severest
austerities, to escape the consequence of sin and find peace of
conscience. In this place, apart from the world, he was the most faithful
of ascetics. All his early powers, all the exuberance of his
youthful and temperamental joyousness, the abundant capabil
ities of his fine intellect, were shut up in the narrow cell of a
monastic and wasted on the observance of unevangelical rites and
impositions. The result, as we have but indicated, was appalling.
He was weighed down by an ever-increasing consciousness of sin.
Despair and death seemed to be his only portion. His life became

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 137
a real agony, and at times he would sink down in his cell in a
deep swoon, from which he could only be aroused by the gentle
touch of a stringed instrument. The coming reformer of the
Church and most dominant personality in modern history was
trying to commend himself to God after the most approved order,
as that order was carefully prescribed by the medieval doctors of
religion. With him, at this time, the exactions of the hierarchy
had usurped the place of his personal Redeemer. In all these
doleful practices of self-abnegation, that he might give himself in
the most uninterrupted manner and under the most favorable con
ditions to the useless undertaking to which he was addressing
himself, he clothed his body in the white woolen shirt in honor of
the Virgin, assumed the black cowl and frock, tied with a leathern
girdle, undertook the most menial monastic offices to subdue his
pride — sweeping the floor, begging bread through the streets, and
submitting without a murmur to other ascetic severities, said
twenty-five pater-nosters, with the Ave Maria, in each of seven
appointed hours of prayer, regularly confessed his sins to the
priest at least once a week, solemnly promised to live until death
in poverty and chastity, and to render obedience to Almighty
God, to the Virgin Mary and to the prior of the monastery.
Writing in 1518, he tells us that no pen could describe the
mental anguish he endured. With his high cheek bones,
emaciated frame, gleaming eyes and look of settled despair, in
the performance of these pious exercises Luther presented an
aspect that was sad and forbidding. How long this famous, and,
in its outcome, influential struggle lasted is not certain. There
are indications that it endured for two years, during which the
sense of sin as an all-pervading principle, as a corruption of
human nature, as a state of alienation from God and of hostility
to God, weighed upon that fine mind and soul like an incubus
that brought him at times to the brink of utter despair. In re
ligious biography there are but few such accounts of the severity
of the conflict between the law of God and the law of sin.
But in spite of this melancholy and medieval state of mind, a
great development was taking place within Luther. He scourged
himself, but pursued his studies. In the midst of these agonizing
mental and spiritual conflicts he was thinking and praying himself
out of those inadequate and erroneous views of salvation which
had prevailed in the Church for a thousand years, which the

138 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
people had inherited from their forefathers with their very exist
ence, in which they had been educated and under which all their
faculties had been formed and moulded. The question agitating
him was one of vital importance to the whole Church and to all
men in their craving after reconciliation with God. It is so in
every age, but was of special significance then. The real ref
ormation of the Church could only be effected by the recovery of
the evangelical methods of attaining the grace of God which
passeth all understanding. But the difficulties in the way of that
recovery were almost insuperable. The Bible was but little read.
Luther himself was nearly twenty and a bachelor of arts before
he had ever seen a copy of the Scriptures. What he knew about
it had been gained from the liturgical practices of the Church.
At that time he was finely versed in Scotus, Aquinas and William
Occam, but as for the Bible he knew but little. But the difficul
ties were at last overcome in the experience of the greatest of the
Reformers. He grasped the significance of faith, of salvation by
grace and the right and scriptural way to find peace with God.
Then the secret of the Reformation was out.
IX
Luther by and by came to understand, through the influence of
his friend Staupitz and the New Testament, that according to
God's promise the righteousness of God might become man's
possession in and through Jesus Christ. Fellowship with God is
founded on personal trust of God. By and by the fact of the true
relation of the believing soul to God came to him suddenly with
all the force of a revelation, and his vexed and troubled conscience
was at rest. In his struggles Luther reached the conclusion that
some medium was necessary by means of which a man was to lay
hold of and appropriate to himself a perfect righteousness. That
medium, according to St. Paul, he discovered to be faith, the act
of commitment of oneself to Christ, by which he is assured of
that of which he most of all wants to be assured. The great
cardinal principle with Luther was the divine assurance of pardon
and reconciliation with God.
The Reformation of the sixteenth century began when, in this
pious monk, the soul demanding assurance of salvation found it
in the gratuitous justification of the sinner before God. Luther

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 139
never speaks more frequently of anything than of the change
which took place within him when he grasped the significance of
salvation by grace, when he learned once for all that assurance
and peace come not as the result of man's works, but as an ex
pression of the divine benignity. The attempt to commend him
self to God by means of austerities only saddened him, but when
he once apprehended the meaning of the words of Paul, "There
fore being justified by faith," he rejoiced in the freedom where
with Christ doth make men free. He perceived, as but few men
have in the fulness of its meaning, the content of the Gospel
which had been aforetime proclaimed with such clearness and
such strength by Paul, and which for the instruction and guidance
of the Church in all times has been written down in the Roman
and Galatian Epistles, "Therefore we hold that man became just
without the works of the law, through faith alone." When he
came to know that salvation was not a negotiable quantity, not
something for the pope to sell, but something rather that God
proposed to give, that it was not a human achievement but a di
vine bestowment, as something not of man but of God, he had
the longed-for spiritual tranquillity. When he saw that Christ
was not come as a law-giver so much as a Saviour ; that love, and
not wrath or justice, is the motive of His mission and work ; that
the forgiveness of sins through Him is a free gift, and that good
works are the fruit of faith, then he had a clue to the under
standing of the Bible. He then came to realize that he was some
thing more than a member of a vast ecclesiastical machine, some
thing more than a single factor in an external institution, even an
individual soul who was to deal directly with God through the
mediation of Christ. When once he grasped the evangelical con
ception of the forgiveness of sins, he swept away the barriers be
tween man and the free sovereign grace of God which the medie
val Church had so elaborately constructed.
His own theology was the outgrowth of his own personal
experience. He had to receive the peace of forgiveness as the
free gift of God before ever his voice was lifted up against the
dogma of the merit of good works. It was his firm grasp on the
Gospel of justification by faith, which in the last analysis was the
force that delivered from priestly domination and self-imposed
ascetic observances. Henceforth men came to know that they
could realize the true Christian life without either priest or

140 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
cloister, and that they could come into immediate access to God
in Christ and stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ doth
make men free.
Thus with Luther in his struggles of conscience all turned on
his discovery of the Gospel method of justification. The difficul
ties which he encountered in extricating himself from the meshes
of the medieval theology, to the study of which he had so dili
gently devoted himself, can only be appreciated by looking into
that theology itself in which the Church had changed the Gosepl
conception of repentance into a round of imposed penitential
exercises. It had been hardened down into a mere system of
legal justification, which required works in order to make the par
don of man complete. This discovery of the Gospel at the end of
his almost unprecedented spiritual struggles by Luther was the
greatest gift of the Reformation. It was the discovery of that
which more than anything else distinguishes Christianity from all
other religions 'on earth. That discovery restored the right of the
soul to answer directly to God ; the right proclaimed by Peter and
John when they defied the Sanhedrin with the exclamation,
"Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you
more than unto God, judge ye." For ages the right of Chris
tians to go unhindered to God had been denied and withheld by
the old Church, which had usurped all other authority, social and
civil. Luther broke the fetters and found not only soul freedom
but thereby also inaugurated the era of modern liberty and demo
cratic independence.
Thus, in his own personal religious experience, the beginning
of the Reformation meant for Luther a movement away from a
mechanical to an individual conception of salvation. It taught
men once again to seek an individual and personal relation to
God, maintaining that a man's relation to the Church was deter
mined primarily by his relation to Christ. That experience of the
Reformer was the nucleus about which was gathered all that was
most vital in the thought of that age— the return to the Bible, to
Augustine and to mysticism, the protest against the sophistries of
the scholastics and the corruptions of the Church, and the restor
ation of a simpler and more personal relation of the soul to God
in and through the mediation of Christ, the one and only and all
sufficient High Priest.
Luther was fitted to be the prophet of his age because he had

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 141
the most searching experience in what that age most of all
needed — personal religion as contrasted with corporate religion.
That experience bade every human mediator stand out of the
way. To a large extent it proclaimed the democracy of the saints
and prepared the way for the coming larger democracy and vir
tually for all the freedom we now enjoy. In his religious strug
gles Luther proclaimed a declaration of the independence of the
human mind and soul from the bondage of human authority.
Hitherto, in the medieval Church, the minister of Christ had been
enthroned in awful isolation beyond the reach of his brethren in
the same faith. But one of the very first results immediately
flowing from Luther's standpoint was an emphatic qualifying of
the mediatorial power of the hierarchy and its official priesthood.
If the individual can come directly to Christ, and in the exercise
of living faith in Him can find assurance of salvation, as did
Luther, then he is evidently released from any absolute depend
ence upon the priest. The mere apprehension of Christ in the
Sacrament gave him the personal assurance of the communication
of grace.
Along with this stand for independence it is well to remember
that it was his candid and unambiguous intellect, in alliance with
a positive and unambiguous faith, that made Luther always
strong, free and courageous. It was- his religious conscience, it
was the question of his soul's salvation, it was the inward craving
for assurance which gave him that high and godly disregard
which cared neither for pope, emperor, councils, nor any other
human authority, because his conscience was bound by God and
His word as the supreme authority.
This man could contend in the day of battle as but few men
have been able to contend. He could smite the apostasies of his
time with the mailed fist. Much of his capacity thus to strive.
when the issues were of fundamental importance, was due to the
fact that he had in him the simplicity and joyous trustfulness of
a little child, and bowed always with implicit and beautiful obedi
ence to the authority of the Highest. His acceptance of the Bible
as the infallible rule of faith and practice, the source of regen
erate character and of all man's heavenly hopes, was always clear
and undoubting. It was here that he made the grand discovery
which became the cornerstone of the new Protestant temple, the
"material principle" of the Reformation, that the just shall live

142 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVl/CENTURY
by faith — not by faith in self-righteous works, but in the merits
of our God and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Accordingly the most
constructive work of Luther's life, and to which he gave himself
with impetuous ardor, was to flood Germany with the Scriptures
in the strong and virile language of his people, to the creation of
which he was the chief contributor.
We have dwelt thus upon Luther's religious struggles chiefly
because this is the factor that is most fundamental in its import
ance in estimating his work, and the one most worthy of reaffir
mation and reinterpretation in the religious life of our day.
Neither the demands of ecclesiastical politics nor any critical
doubt of science became his starting point, but that which was
distinctly, profoundly and personally religious. It was a genuine
medieval fear of the wrath of God which drove this deeply re
ligious young man into the Augustinian monastery, where, in the
fierce struggle to attain to mental and spiritual tranquillity, he
tried the medieval system elaborated by the Church to give peace
to the troubled conscience, and experienced as but few men have
the inadequacy of the papal system of redemption, the highest
expression of which was monkish self-abnegation. Going back
to the fertile fields of the New Testament, he found release from
the oppressive weight that burdened his soul in the grace of God
and justification by faith alone. Grasping in all their comforting
and transforming significance these great evangelical truths, he
came early into conflict with the papal huckstering of indulgences
being carried on by the Dominican, John Tetzel. This conflict
precipitated his great work in the human leadership of one of the
few most important movements in the history of mankind — the
Lutheran Reformation. His inner religious life is the practical
exemplification of the Reformation doctrines, the deep sense of
sin, justification by faith alone, child-like trust and fidelity to the
word of God. In a true and proper co-ordination he grasped
these great fundamental truths more firmly than any man before
or since. Others have formulated them, but he gave them voice.
To his sound and evangelical apprehension of the Gospel, his
deep religious convictions, and the popularity of his gifts, Luther
added an industry in the application to his manifold tasks that has
not been surpassed. From the nailing up of the theses in 1517, on
to his death in 1546, he always had pressing work to do, and to
that work he addressed himself with a diligence and productivity

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 143
that are amazing. He had upon him the care of the Church, the
conduct of controversies, the training of preachers, translating the
Scriptures, writing pamphlets, books and commentaries, giving
counsel to princes and people, in addition to his much-loved work
of preaching, which he prosecuted at home and wherever he went
on Sundays and during the week. Both the quantity of his
writings and their immense circulation would be remarkable even
in our day, much more so in the sixteenth century, when the art
of printing was still in its infancy. In one year he wrote and
published 183 books and pamphlets, so busy was he with his pen.
He attacked the papacy, argued with bishops and cardinals, and
showed their errors in doctrine and practice. And all this in
addition to his work as professor and leader of many widely sep
arated minds. He was constantly bothered with the petty
scruples and small questions of inferior men who had associated
themselves in one way and another with his work. Letters from
all directions pressed for immediate decisions on different points
of faith and Church practice, while a multitude of tender con
sciences appealed from this and that part of the new order of
things in worship, each wanting an answer agreeable to the in
quirer or insurgent, as the case might be.
The first edition of his collected works (commenced in 1539 and
finished in 1558, twelve years after his death), numbers twelve
large folio volumes in the German language and seven volumes in
Latin. But these nineteen volumes contain only the smallest por
tion of his literary work. One of the modern editions of his
works, that known as the Erlangen edition, published from 1862
to 1865, fills sixty-seven large octavo volumes of German and
thirty-eight volumes of Latin writings. His sermons, letters,
controversial writings, tracts for the times, commentaries, books
of devotion, and theological discussions, present a variety and
range of subjects associated with but few names in the literary
history of mankind.
In addition to his academical posts, he was, by the appointment
of his patron, Staupitz, made visitor of the monasteries of his
province. In a letter to a friend he writes with a touch of
humor about his tasks and responsibilities: "I had need," says
he, "of two secretaries to keep up my correspondence ; pity my
unhappy fortune. I am conventual concionator, table preacher,
director of studies ; I am a vicar, or in few words, eleven priors

144 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
in one ; conservator of the ponds at Litzkau, pleader and assessor
at Torgau, Pauline reader and collector of Psalms ; add to all
these the assaults of the world, the flesh and the devil."
His strong sense of humor, his satirical vein, combined with his
deeply religious and poetical soul, present a strong combination of
literary qualities, which enabled him to produce the most diversi
fied writings of any man of his time. But all of them, widely dif
ferent as they were in their varied aspects, were used in the one
great service — the religious and moral regeneration of his people.
X
Luther was pre-eminently the Reformer. Beside him his con
temporaries in the good fight of reform can claim but the second
place. They were in a very large measure dependent upon him.
He was the Reformation, chiefly because he had experienced the
movement in his own soul, and all that he afterwards said, wrote
or did in Wittenberg, Worms and elsewhere was but the out
growth of that one primary struggle and experience. Out of his
great and commanding personality the Reformation proceeded as
a refreshing stream out of hidden springs in a great rock.
"If we compare Luther with the other reformers of the six
teenth century,' says Prof. David Schaff, "he appears as the pre
eminent leader of the Reformation. To say this is not to dis
parage the genius or the work of Calvin, Zwingli, Knox or
Latimer. But in two respects these men all followed Luther. In
point of time they spoke after he had spoken, and they added not
a single fundamental religious principle to those which he had
announced. Zwingli did not enter upon his work as a reformer
until several years after the theses were posted. Calvin was not
'converted' until 1533, sixteen years after the posting of the
theses. The Reformation in Scotland did not fully begin under
Knox's leadership until 1560, fourteen years after Luther was in
his grave. As for the English reformation, Luther's books were
being shipped into England in 1519 and 1520 'in vats full,'
whereas the first printed English New Testament, that of Will
iam. Tyndale, was not published till 1526, more than four years
after Luther's German translation had appeared. Cranmer was
first a Lutheran, and exerted himself to have England adopt the
Lutheran principles as stated in the Augsburg Confession of

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 145
1530. It was the Augustinian monk of Wittenberg who inau
gurated the movement and marked out the doctrinal path it should
take." These leaders of the movement to reform the Church
differed widely in temperament and in their approach to truth.
Luther was poetical and mystical, Zwingli was rationalizing and
practical. Luther looked at coming events through the medium
of faith; Zwingli through the medium of human understanding.
Luther was conservative in his attitude toward the past ; Zwingli
was iconoclastic, finding it easy to dissociate himself from the
past and to discard what had been. Luther came to the truth
of the doctrines of salvation through the medium of his personal
religious experience; Zwingli always under the influence of that
humanism of which he was enraptured.
Calvin differed from Luther in some important particulars.
He was not, as in the case of Luther, a peasant by birth, and
had no experience of poverty in his early life. In his personal
characteristics Calvin cannot compare with Luther in geniality of
temperament, in natural and popular eloquence, in imaginative
vision, in tenderness, humor and pathos, in that indefinable grace
which adorns all that it touches, and in that contact with the life
of humanity which made of the one a popular leader as con
trasted with more of the spirit of the recluse in the other. In
religion, the moving impulse with Luther was the sense of sin,
in Calvin it was the love of truth alike as an ideal and as reality.
Luther found in the Scriptures a way of escape from sin ; Calvin,
not only that, but an ideal social and civic state which men are
bound to realize here and now. Luther's passion was to believe
and teach the true way of salvation; Calvin, not only that, but
to build a system and a state in the image of the truth of God.
Luther's fundamental thought is justification by faith alone, or the
mode in which the guilty man may be made right with God ; with
Calvin it is the absoluteness and sufficiency of the will of God, as
the gracious will which purposes and achieves salvation.
In contrast with the vacillation and trimming of Erasmus,
Luther was steady, well poised, consistent and established. Eras
mus had no thought of being a martyr for the truth, and he says
so plainly. His cowardice reaches its culmination when he says
of himself: "I never taught any erroneous doctrines, that I
know of, and never will, nor will I be an associate or leader in
any tumults. Let others affect martyrdom; for my part I hold

146 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
myself unworthy of that honor." His constant efforts at neu
trality and negation led Luther to declare that "He will die like
Moses in the land of Moab." While vigorously attacking the
monks and satirizing the abuses of the Church, Erasmus was
afraid to side openly with the Reformer, who was willing to fol
low out to their final consequences the newly discovered truths of
the Gospel.
In one of his "Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography" Sir Janies
Stephen has summed up Erasmus as contrasted with Luther in
these words: "He belonged to that class of actors on the scene
of life who have always appeared as the harbingers of great
social changes; men gifted with the power to discern and the
hardihood to proclaim truths of which they want the courage to
encounter the infallible results ; who outrun their generation in
thought, but lag behind in action; players at the sport of reform,
so long as reform itself appears at an indefinite distance ; more
ostentatious than anxious for the well-being of mankind ; dream
ing that the dark page of history may hereafter become a fairy
tale, in which enchantment will bring to pass a glorious catas
trophe unbought by intervening strife, and agony and suffering;
and therefore overwhelmed with alarm when the edifice begins to
totter of which their own hands have sapped the foundation.
Erasmus was a reformer until the Reformation became a fearful
reality; a propagator of the Scriptures until men betook them
selves to the study and application of them ; depreciating the mere
outward forms of religion until they had come to be estimated at
their real value; in short, a learned, ingenious, benevolent,
amiable, timid, irresolute man, who, compelled to bear the re
sponsibility, resigned to others the glory of rescuing the human
mind from the bondage of a thousand years."
No two men could be more unlike at once in intellectual aspir
ation and moral temper than Luther and Erasmus. Luther
wanted dogmatic certainty in all matters of faith, while Erasmus,
latitudinarian and philosophical in religious opinion, was indif
ferent as to exact truth, was cautious, subtle, refined and
cowardly. Erasmus made his contribution to the flourishing rise
of letters and the right understanding of the Scriptures, but when
the day of battle came on he plainly showed that he had not the
courage, the candor or the consistency to become a reformer.
If covert and ingenious sarcasm, subtle point and pungent

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 147
dilemma could have overthrown the papal supremacy, then had
Erasmus been a valiant and successful reformer. But that pecul
iar medieval supremacy was elaborated with too much of human
wisdom to be overturned with that sort of weapons. The con
flict called for the hot temper, the fearless candor and that com
manding confidence in God and His Word which made of Luther
the man who trusted the truth to the final issue rather than juggle
with it at any point. Erasmus was strong in denial, but weak in
affirmation. He saw the necessity of the conflict, but was desti
tute of those elementary natural and spiritual forces which alone
can bring forth the grand creative deeds of history. Men like
Erasmus need apologists, whereas men like Luther trust God, do
what He sent them to do and are justified by their works.
That the Reformer was a primate among men in his personal
force, his mental endowments, his spiritual insight and capacity
as interpreter of truth and leader of men, is widely affirmed by
men of all varieties of religious views. In their places, one after
another, they rise to affirm the greatness of Luther in his place
and work among the sons of men. This is the eloquent testi
mony of Dollinger, the old Catholic, the fairest of Roman his
torians : "It was Luther's overpowering greatness and wonderful
many-sidedness of mind that made him the man of his age and
people. Nor was there a German who had such an intuitive
knowledge of his countrymen and was again so completely pos
sessed, not to say absorbed, by the national sentiment, as the
Augustinian monk of Wittenberg. The mind and spirit of the
Germans were in his hand what the lyre is in the hands of the
skilled musician. He gave them more than any man in Christian
days ever gave his people — language, popular manuals of instruc
tion, Bible, hymnology. All his opponents could offer in place of
it was insipid, colorless and feeble by the side of his transporting
eloquence. They stammered, he spoke. He alone has impressed
the indelible stamp of his mind on the German language and the
German intellect, and even those among us who hold him in re
ligious detestation as the great heresiarch and seducer of the
nation are constrained in spite of themselves to speak with his
words and think with his thoughts."
Thomas Carlyle, much of a cynic, but wonderful interpreter of
men and movements, says of this man : "I call this Luther a truly
great man — one of our most lovable and precious men. Great,

148 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
not as a hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain, so simple,
honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for
quite another purpose than being great. A right spiritual hero
and prophet ; once more, a true son of nature and fact, for whom
these centuries and many more that are to come yet, will be
thankful to heaven." In an eloquent and oft-quoted passage an
other strong writer has said, "Kings and emperors have made pil
grimages to the tomb of Luther, and nations cherish in their hearts
his imperishable name. Charles V, Frederick the Great, Peter of
Russia, WaUenstein, and, lastly, Napoleon, visited the spot where
the remains of the Reformer lie; and even these names, the
sound of which still shake the casements of the world, seem
but ciphers beside the dust of Martin Luther." This is the
estimate of the late Philip Schaff, the chieftain among Reformed
ecclesiastical historians : "Luther's greatness is not that of a
polished work of art, but of an Alpine mountain with towering
peaks, rough granite blocks, bracing air, fresh fountains, and
green meadows. * * * He roused by his trumpet voice the
Church from her slumber ; he broke the yoke of papal tyranny ;
he recognized Christian freedom ; he reopened the fountain of
God's holy Word to all the people, and directed the Christians to
Christ, their only Master. This is his crowning merit and his en
during monument." The calumnies which have been poured
forth against the memory of Luther have been vile, numerous and
vindictive, and diligently revamped from generation to generation.
They have all been met and vanquished by the famous Arch
deacon Julius Charles Hare, the author of the "Vindication of
Luther." This is his estimate: "To some readers it may seem
that I have spoken with exaggerated admiration of Luther. No
man ever lived whose whole heart and soul and life have been
laid bare as his have been to the eyes of mankind. Open as the
sky, bold and fearless as the storm, he gave utterance to all his
feelings, all his thoughts. * * * No man has ever been ex
posed to so severe a trial ; no man was ever placed in such dif
ficult circumstances, or assailed by such manifold temptations.
And how has he come out of the trial? Through the power of
faith, under the guardian care of his Heavenly Master, he was
enabled to stand through life; and still he stands, and will con
tinue to stand, firmly rooted in the love of all who really know
him." It is of Luther that the renowned Goethe speaks thus:

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 149
"We scarcely know what we owe to Luther, and the Reformation
in general. We are freed from the fetters of spiritual narrow-
mindedness; we have, in consequence of our increasing culture,
become capable of turning back to the fountain-head, and of com
prehending Christianity in its purity. We have again the courage
to stand with firm feet upon God's earth, and to feel ourselves in
our divinely endowed human nature.
"To Luther more than to any other man *since St. Paul, the
Church of Christ is indebted for its grasp of two essential prin
ciples; the first is the fact of justification, or forgiveness of sin,
by faith and not of works. The second is that the Divine Word
is supreme in all faith and practice, and in all organization of the
Church! More today than to any other man of eighteen hun
dred years men owe to Luther freedom of thought, of speech, of
conscience, of action ; the right to worship God according to what
conscience indicates." Many years ago one of the strongest
writers of his day in the London Ouarterly Review wrote these
graphic words of portrayal : "There is no second Mont Blanc ; the
present monarch would in that case doff his crown. So there are
no two Luthers. Luther is alone — alone in capacity at once to
dare and to do, alone in device and achievement, alone in hardi
hood and patience, alone in boundless resources and exhaustless
buoyancy, alone in the majesty of his self-reliance and in the gen-
ialness of his wide sympathies, alone in untiring industry and un
flagging perseverance, alone in lofty faith and never-clouded
hope. Such was the Luther of the Reformation, the quondam
(former) monk, the newly-awakened and , never-dying man."
Today no one who has noted the transitions from age to age, since
the period of the Reformation, will call in question the prophecy
of the late Dr. C. P. Krauth : "Four potentates ruled the mind of
Europe at the time of the Reformation, the Emperor, Erasmus,
the Pope and Luther. The Pope wanes, Erasmus is little, the
Emperor is nothing, but Luther abides as a power for all times.
His image casts itself upon the current of ages, as the mountain
mirrors itself in the river that winds at its foot — the mighty fixing
itself immutably upon the changing." Our country has known no
more accomplished historian than the late Prof. George P. Fisher,
of Yale, who says : "What is it in Luther that, after four hundred
years are gone, stirs the heart of the Protestant nations? It is
the great heart and the great mind, united together. * * *

150 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Plis catechisms, his sermons, his printed comments on portions of
Scripture, his spirit-stirring hymns, his controversial treatises and
tracts, productions, all of them, called out by the exigencies of
the time, and most effective for their ends, constitute a copious
literature." Of him, one historian, Hallam, says: "In the his
tory of the Reformation, Luther is incomparably the greatest
name," while another, Ridpath, says, "He was. regarded as the
exemplar and epitome of the Reformation. To him the other
leaders of Protestantism looked as to a general whose right it is
to command." Speaking of the great Reformer, Dr. Alfred
Plummer, the able author of the "Continental Reformation,"
says: "Luther's influence on religious and political ideas, on
literature, on social life, and on the map of Europe, has been
enormous, and this influence has been won largely without effort
on his part — through his massive character, through his sincerity,
earnestness, unselfishness, and above all these, through his splen
did courage. We may differ widely from some of his opinions,
but we live in a world which is a wiser and better world because
of Luther's work." Comparing him with the great Apostle to
the Gentiles, Dean Farrar, in his "Life of St. Paul," says that,
"As a reformer who altered the entire course of history, Luther
alone resembles him. What the Reformer did when he nailed
his theses to the door of the cathedral of Wittenberg, that St.
Paul did when he wrote his epistle to the Galatians. It was the
manifesto of emancipation ; it marked an epoch in history."
"Blessed be the day of Martin Luther's birth ! It should be a
festival second only to that of the nativity of Jesus Christ," says
Robert Southey, the crowned poet of England. And the Ameri
can, Edwin D. Mead, says : "Luther is the most influential and
significant man in the spiritual history of mankind since Christ."
The German Catholic scholar, Friedrich von Schlegel says: "I
think there are few, even of his own disciples, who appreciate
Luther highly enough." We give these citations, not as ex
pressions of hero worship, but as the sober estimate of the great
ness of the place of one of the outstanding spiritual heroes of
mankind. The German Reformation, especially in its beginnings, is but
little more than Luther's biography, and no man could have been
better fitted for the accomplishment of the mighty task which he
carried forward to such a successful issue. If the estimates of

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 151
such men as we have cited (and they could be multiplied almost
indefinitely) are fair and just, it may be doubted if any of the
religious leaders of the Christian Church since the days of St.
Paul were more richly endowed than he with gifts of the highest
order, and that peculiar co-ordination of qualifications which
fitted him for his great place in human history. If he was great
and industrious as a writer, he was equally great and tireless as
a preacher. The freshness of his thought, his grasp of the great
truths of the Gospel, his rare insight into the meaning of the
Scriptures, the simplicity and directness of his speech, together
with the mastery of his mother tongue, vivid imagery, sincerity,
earnestness, fervor and pathos, never failed to arrest and keep the
attention of the people who heard him. He who would under
stand the secret of Luther's spiritual greatness and masterful re
ligious influence may find the key to both in these words written
to one who suffered, and but a few months before his own death :
"God has given us His Son Jesus Christ, that we may daily think
of Him, for apart from Christ everything is misery and death,
but in Him is nothing but peace and joy."
In his attitude toward the truth there was an absolute destitu
tion of mental duplicity, and in its statement in language a mani
fest incapacity for ambiguity. When he took the oath of a
doctor of divinity, "I swear to defend the evangelical truth with
all my might," his conscience scorned mental reservation and he
felt a tremendous eternal obligation not to seek peace, like so
many other monks, by easy indifference, but to battle with fiery
impatience and indignation against all forms of error. Dissimula
tion and hypocrisy were not in him. He hated them with a
vehemence that was inexpressible. "If I despised the pope,"
he says, "as those men really despise him in their breasts who
praise him with their lips, I should have trembled lest the earth
should have instantly opened and swallowed me up alive, like
Korah and his company."
The difference between Luther and Leo X, the reigning pope
whom he encountered, was that the one was a reality and the
other a sham. Under the friar's cowl there throbbed an earnest
and sincere heart conscious of high responsibilities, afraid to
speak or act a lie, believing with all his soul that Christ was the
Son of the living God and that no man could be redeemed from
sin and death except by His intercession and merits. On the

152 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
other hand, under the Pope's triple tiara there was an accom
plished brain, but one that was false, insincere and unbelieving.
"Every age," whispers Leo to the friends about his throne,
"every age knows how useful this fable of Christ has been to us
and ours." It was the hollowness and profanity and luxury, the
beastly ignorance and scandals of the priesthood, that at last
aroused the reality that was in Luther's manhood, shocked him
into resistance and caused him to thunder out anathemas against
all dishonest and insincere deceivers of the people. His convic
tions reflected a strength of character that was exceptional in his
day. To him it seemed to be natural to hold the fortress of
truth with unconquerable tenacity. Had he been more amiable
and less heroic in decision, the Reformation in his hand would
doubtless have gone down in many a crisis when he seemed to
stand alone as its strong tower of strength.
Luther had, indeed, faults and weaknesses too manifest and
prominent to be concealed. His nature was too strong, some
times vehement, for uniform evenness and consistency. He com
mitted errors. He occasionally misjudged with deplorable con
sequences. He was combative and sometimes violent in his intol
erance toward error. His zeal for the faith ran at times into what
looked much like an unseemly passion, the steadfastness to his
convictions into apparent wilfulness and stubbornness, his abomi
nation for the shams and apostasies of the Church and its chief
representatives into disdain and abuse. But all candid men know
that Luther was governed by no mere considerations of policy,
but acted with a good conscience. Errors of opinion and con
duct, had they been tenfold greater than they were, would not
suffice to eclipse the brilliancy or permanency of his fame. His
greatness belongs to his character. He was great intellectually,
but that which most of all elicits continual enthusiasm at the
mention of his name is his heroism. Courage, conscientious
fidelity to the truth, obedience to the voice of God, the setting of
duty always before expediency — these are the factors that dom
inated a deeply religious nature and a peculiarly faithful em
bodiment of strong national traits. In himself he embodied the
chivalry, the patriotism, the lyric talent, the domestic affection
and the religious depth of the German mind and heart. His
words thrilled the men of his time, and today are in large part as
fresh and living and popular as when he lived. They made of

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 153
him, as the late Dean Farrar has affirmed, "The Reformer who
altered the entire course of history." XI
There are two classes of particularly influential men in the
world's history, the practical men who do things and the men who
propagate great ideas. Luther belonged primarily to the latter
class, at least in the beginning of his career as a reformer. His
mind was dominated by certain great and fundamental ideas, cer
tain basic truths in religion, and these he wished to make known
to the life of his day. The history of his people brings him be
fore us for the first time in his conspicuous work as a reformer,
in doing something that is specially practical. It is a scene of
action that confronts us at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. But
a careful study of his biography shows that even then the doc
trinal was dominating what he was doing. All he was and all he
did are rooted at last in his strong grasp on central principles and
his relentless adherence to them. He had a sublime faith in those
principles and in their power to work out all desirable and whole
some results. Fanatics and extremists sprang up on every side,
but Luther maintained through it all a serene confidence. Sorely
tried by their extravagances, he uniformly cast himself back on
the Word as the instrument for righting things. Carlstadt and
the image breakers at Wittenberg, Munzer, Stubner, the illum
inated prophets of Zwickau, the revolutionary peasants of Thur
ingia, the Anabaptists and their exaggerations, all of which served
to divert the Reformation from its regular and orderly course,
which disgraced it by monstrous associations, aroused the re
proaches of the papists and made the conservatives more cau
tious — all these troubled Luther and increased his burdens. But
this was his constant assurance, that while the storms might roar
and beat upon the ship, he knew that he was in the right path
and that all would come out well. Shallow, noisy men had taken
advantage of his. absence at the Wartburg and had gone off into
those excesses which were revealed to his own eyes, when, upon
his return to Wittenberg in 1522, he came into the town church
to see the fragmentary blocks of the old statuary that had adorned
that famous building strewn upon the floor. But all this scandal,
confusion and discord did not in any measure loosen his grip at

154 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
any time upon his great central truth of salvation by faith and the
associated doctrines of the New Testament.
He came to Worms in April, 1521, in the full assurance of
triumph, knowing that he had given a challenge that could not be
answered and demanding a proof that he knew could never be
given. He went away in the full assurance of an intellectual and
spiritual triumph for himself and an intellectual and spiritual
defeat for the representatives of the papacy, who had realized
their incapacity for answering his challenge. The ground of his
assurance at the beginning and at the ending was that he had a
living perception of the meaning of the Gospel of forgiveness
through Christ. This truth of justification by faith alone he saw
that the Lord and His apostles taught. It had the sanction of the
Scriptures, and for him there was no higher authority and no
human power that could dictate an interpretation different from
that which had brought life and light to his own soul. He stood
before men who were clever, active, shrewd and elegant, with a
powerful and strikingly religious mind. He stood before them
possessed of an intensity of religious belief and ardor to which
ordinary men had nothing comparable, and confuted them all be
cause of the momentum of his confidence in great and over
shadowing aspects of the truth. This it was, again, that marked
the real difference between Luther and his brilliant contemporary,
Erasmus, the lukewarm indifferentist and the time-serving vic-
time of his own vacillation.
Of all the great men of history no one is more paradoxical than
Luther. In the richness of his endowments, his many-sidedness,
his frankness in the communication of his experiences ; as man,
poet, musician, preacher, theologian; he seems not only provi
dentially chosen for the work to which God called him, but even
in the contradictions of his nature to have been qualified in every
way for his tasks. In a singular combination he had the qualities
which were needed to make a new world. He had force — the
force of a big nature, with vast depths of feeling and of tender
ness, combined with an intensity of personal conviction seldom
seen among men. He seems to stand up among the best of his
day and the ages preceding, a revelation of the strength and
beauty of the new world of truth, the embodiment of individual
force in his intellect, conscience and will. But this force was not
so individual as to separate him from his fellow-men. To them

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 155
he spoke, as if, gathering in himself all the passions and spirit
of his time, he felt and expressed all that most moved their
minds and hearts. Dealing truly with others, he also dealt truly
with himself. Few men have had so great self-knowledge,
and fewer still have expressed that self-knowledge with as much
freedom. He was always frank and simple, courageous and
truthful, but was utterly destitute of craftiness and cunning.
While he lived no man wielded such immense power, but with it
all vanity was not in him. Few men have been so open to the
attacks of his enemies, and no great man who has lived has it
been easier to attack and misrepresent than he, while at the same
time but few men have elicited such unstinted admiration and
affection from friends. Passion, indeed, was one of his strong
features, but it was always passion without dissimulation. No
man was more submissive to the divine Word and Power, but
in his relations to the powers of the world and the Church he
did not know what it was to hestitate or waver. He seems to
have been incapable of trimming, and there are no indications of
his ever in his controversial career having said to himself, "Shall
I say this or not ?" He was an agitator, but vastly more than an
agitator. He was a real agent of reconstruction. He had weight
and solidity, but these were always associated with practical
power. He could not only preach a theology, but did much to
establish and fix its metes and bounds. He led in one of the most
revolutionary movements in the history of mankind, and yet was a
conservative even to the extent of stubbornness. He was not the
founder of a Protestantism that had no respect for the past, the
marks of which were a rapacious and senseless iconoclasm. Step
by step in his religious development he became the antithesis of
Rome, but he did not advocate that the reformed Church should
cut off its continuity with the Church of Augustine and Anselm,
and much less with the Church of Paul. He was no leader of a
merely negative movement, but the positive leader in the reasser-
tion of living truths which found their basis only in the Word of
God. With him the right of private judgment was never inde
pendent of the frontiers established in the Scriptures. He did
something more than protest against the abuses of Romanism.
He also claimed and reasserted as its divine right the power of the
human mind under the guidance of the Holy Ghost to discern the
(ruths of the Bible.

156 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Thus the practical Reformer was essentially conservative and
moderate. To some who are acquainted only with his opinions
on isolated subjects, that may seem a surprising statement. But
anyone who impartially considers Luther's whole work as a Re
former will recognize the justice of the estimate. No religious
leader has been more careful to insist on the paramount im
portance and the sacred duty of holding with an immovable grasp
to what is of fundamental importance and of maintaining both
tolerance and charity where diversity is possible and desirable.
He is an example of an intense conservative summoned to a
radical reformation of Church doctrine and life. He obeyed the
apostolic injunction to hold fast that which is good and estab
lished, but he was so modern that today none of the reformers
and leaders of the Church since Paul appeals to that which is uni
versal in the heart of man as do the sermons and popular re
ligious writings of Luther. His spirit was sometimes extrava
gant and excessive, and in some of his writings one is startled
by the unmeasured violence of his language. But in his rude,
and at times boisterous, speech there was no resentment. He had
a temper that was rudely frank, and a tongue that was always
ready to say with promptness and boldness what the man back of
it believed, and an argumentative fervor that sometimes passed
beyond the frontiers of delicacy and good taste. But Luther's
coarseness in speech was that of his age rather than of the in
dividual. In his evidently enjoyed sallies at the follies of monk
ish superstition, the degeneracy of popes and cardinals and the
apostasies of the Church, there was no admixture of bitterness.
About Luther there was none of that covert and ingenious dis
simulation we may frequently find in Erasmus. He was blunt,
but never cynical in the day of battle. His speech was often
times strong, but not harsh. He could talk back, and it must be
confessed, when we remember some of the violence of his assail
ants, that he was frequently stimulated to exercise both his
privilege and his capacity. He was called at various times "the
most pernicious pest that ever attacked the flock of Christ," "a
poisonous serpent," "a wolf of hell," "a limb of Satan," a man
"rotten in mind" and "execrable in purpose."
He was humble, but down deep in his heart there was a spirit
of defiance, which, on occasion, rose up to assert itself against
such a classification of the bad things we have noted as defining

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 157
who and what the Reformer was, as well as against the emperor,
pope, cardinals and lesser prelates, who believed all of them and
more to be correct. Considering the many abusive and suggestive
names he was called, it is not entirely unexpected that in a rude
age as good a man as Luther said in reply some violent things,
and that he was not unsparing in even decking out some of his
opponents with long ears.
He had a brilliant and fertile gift of humor, but with it an
unique combination of depth, even bordering at times on mel
ancholy. His abounding mirth and happy flow of spirits were
always associated with a strong natural counter sadness. In
spite of his sometimes uproarious hilarity and his overflowing
and abounding mental energy, he was in turn bowed down under
the oppressive burden of the consciousness of his own sins. He
had his times of outburst of joy fulness and laughter, but also his
times of depression ; but even at such times, after he had emerged
into the light and liberty of the Gospel, he was tranquil and self-
possessed in his faith in God. It was such a combination of
geniality, sadness and sense of sin, along with his manifest faults
and weaknesses, that made Luther one of the most human among
all the great and good men of whom we have any knowledge.
Under all his capacity for wit and humor there lie great depths
of tenderness and sadness, a passionate unrest, and what has been
called his "unnamable melancholy." He had a glad heart and a
big one, but one that was also shadowed and saddened, as well as
one that felt unutterably the awful mystery of life and death.
But whether he spoke in seasons of gladness or sadness, his per
fect candor and frankness, together with his disregard of pos
sible consequence to himself, constantly commended him to thel
generous judgment of all who, from partisan considerations or
traditional prejudice, did not hate him with an unreasoning
hatred. Luther was the leader of a cause. That cause he had not only
to lead, but inspire, maintain and support. To his big task he
brought the resources of a strong and not always tranquil nature.
He could not have done what he did and push on to success the
cause associated with his name and leadership had he not been
endowed with a somewhat vehement nature and strong powers of
action. In it all he was a courageous hero, who was always ready
for battle, a man who ever did his fighting well, but whose ca-

158 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
pacity for contention was associated with the simplicity and trust
fulness of a little child.
He had unusual gifts for impressing the popular judgment and
leading the masses, but he never catered to popular favor, and
did not hesitate to risk personal popularity when the popular
judgment ran counter to his convictions, as in the case of the
peasants' uprising in 1525, when they appealed to him to sanction
and support their claims, set forth in the famous twelve articles
in which they recited their rights and their grievances. He re
buked the nobles for their rapacity and oppression and the peas
ants for their insubordination and license, and, at last, the fright
ful atrocities into which they were plunged. He was all in one
man a courageous, energetic, deeply religious and statesmanlike
leader, preacher and reformer, who could defy all man-made
authority, but who bowed in submission to the authority of the
Highest and sought to do whatever He commanded.
The state of the medieval Church in his day was calculated to
provoke and excite such a mind as Luther's to reyolt and arouse
him to deep indignation, but in the face of it all the sounds and
sights of nature all touch him, now with joy and now witk poetic
aspiration. Of all the reformers, we see in him alone, in the
fierce conflicts through which he passed, this elevated susceptibil
ity to natural grandeur and beauty. When other men, of fine
gifts, who were his contemporaries were rhyming and writing
verses, he kept quiet on that particular line, but when the rising
revolt against Rome called for popular religious song as one of
its effective adjuncts he was the man who became the real founder
of a new school of churchly and popular hymnody, unequaled for
richness and power in spiritual and devotional expression. His
love of music and nature and liberty, and above all his heroic
faith, inspire his noble hymns in which the note of triumph always
sounds out with a rapture of lyrical feeling and excellence rarely
equaled in hymnological productions. These beautiful and stir
ring utterances of the Reformer, escaping from him, as Heine
says, "like a flower making its way between rough stones, or a
moonbeam amid dark clouds," somehow serve to add grace and
grandeur to his rugged life and put the note of harmony and
joy into its battling discords.

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 159
XII
Luther became all the fashion in his day of triumph when
progress was the word. The young and aspiring intellect of the
day was mainly with him on the great and fundamental question
which the Lutheran movement soon brought to the front, viz., who
or what was to be the judge and arbiter in the controversies of
faith? He held the strong ground, and intellectual men soon
saw it to be so. They rallied about him to a degree that some
times serves to turn the heads of good and wise men. When he
was born the human mind was entering upon a new and myste
rious stage of its history. In his developing manhood, planting
himself down confidently upon ground he had taken, he became
the leading factor in that history. He was the leader of his age
and the counsellor of princes, but with it all he was destitute of
the airs of a great man, affected no station, courted no great men,
was one of the common people, and one of the plainest among
them ; a manly man who, in the midst of his masterful influence,
continued to radiate social heartiness and comfort, so that men
loved to be about him. Others may have surpassed him in some
of the fields of scholarship, but none of his contemporaries ap
proached him as a popular hero, and none was cast in so great
a mold. In contrast with his loved and accomplished coadjutor,
Philip Melanchthon, who was frequently dominated by his native
timidity and \racillation, he had the firmness and balance neces
sary for the successful issue of the new movement. Calvin was
cold and intellectual, systematic and legalistic; he was kind, genial
and sympathetic. This is a reflection of the Scotch preacher and
writer, the late Dr. John Watson, known in letters as "Ian Mac-
laren" : "No one can estimate how much Germany has gained
from Luther's genial and robust nature, or Scotland lost through
Calvin being a chronic invalid and Knox being a broken man."
He could be severe and denunciatory in his outbursts of indigna
tion when smiting with a mailed first the apostasies of his day, but
in him sympathy and warmth find full sway. He could fight, and
successfully, with men as varied as the serious but ordinary
Cajetan, the shy and convivial courtier, Miltitz, the brow-beating
and bustling Eck, and Aleandro, the papal nuncio and literary
star, but he was all heart, love and generosity to his friends. His
liberality was genial, but out of all proportion to his limited re-

160 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
sources. Wandering students, monks who had escaped from
their convents, and beggars of all kinds got what money he had,
and if he had no money, he gave away, it is said, the silver cups he
had received as presents, his generosity frequently becoming the
despair of 'Katie,' his patient and long-suffering wife."
In his domestic life he overflows with affection, warmth and
tenderness. He was fond of his "gracious dame Katherine,"
and had the greatest delight in his children. "I am sufficiently
contented," he writes, "for I have three noble children, which no
papist theologian has, and the three children are three kingdoms
which belong to me by inheritance more surely than Ferdinand's
Hungary, Bohemia and the Romish Kingdom." In his relations
to his family, whether we find him writing in rollicking fashion
to his wife, or giving a description of beautiful horses with silver
saddles to his "voracious, vivacious and loquacious" little boy
John, or in the agony of overpowering grief when falling upon his
knees at the death-bed of his favorite daughter, Magdalena, weep
ing and holding her in his arms and praying that God would re
ceive her, we are always seeing in Luther the same exuberant
and tender as well as energetic character. Few great men have
been honored and loved as Luther has been by his fellow-men
who knew his big heart, his candid and unambiguous intellect
and his inflexibility in righteous purpose. There have been more
tranquil, it may be, more complete or even more symmetrical
characters, but none that has been richer in the various factors of
human greatness. The manifold gifts with which he was en
dowed, together with that special mixture of character which is
always to be regarded as contributing to his dominating personal
ity, have continued from generation to generation to keep alive
discussions about him and his work, and induced wise men of
varied and sometimes contradictory religious positions and dif
fering tastes to continue to attempt to interpret both the man and
his work. He has been one of the chief characters in history to
arouse antagonism and to quicken defence. His enemies have
made him an object of special attack and his friends one of sym
pathetic vindication.
The number of truly great men is greatly restricted, but to this
number this man, with his honest and magnanimous nature,
swayed by a living faith and glowing earnestness, and moved by
a divine conviction, unquestionably belongs. As it has been ex-

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 161
pressed in the estimate of Bayard Taylor, he was "one of the crea
tive spirits of the race," "a man of great intention," "the only
Protestant leader whose heart was as big as his brain."
The sudden and critical turns in his career, the free play of all
his powers, his manly independence, his impulses, his music, his
humor, his words, his courage, his triumphs in many a crisis, and
his steadfast loyalty to his divine Lord and Redeemer, have
charmed the writers and readers of his life. He needs no official
canonization to give him an exalted place among the saints who
have adorned the Christian profession. A poor miner's son,
born, as he himself says, of a race of peasants, in his school days
singing at the gates of kindly disposed people ; later passing
through a religious struggle, scarcely equaled in human biography,
seeking for the real meaning of the Gospel, avowing his con
victions with unflinching fidelity, he stands today as the recog
nized leader of these modern times. As a personal factor in the
history of religion and civilization he has been adjudged by wise
and sagacious interpreters of historical forces as one of the most
commanding in the entire record of the progress of mankind.
Were the influence of the doctrines and principles he restored and
persistently and successfully reasserted subtracted from what is
most cherished in our day, the result would not only be depressing
but appalling.
One of the strongest tokens of the greatness of Luther's place
is found, in the continued estimates placed upon him by thought
ful and informed writers, in every generation since he lived. He
has been the most widely-interpreted man of modern times. Of
him Prof. Seeberg, of the University of Berlin, in our own days,
has said : "But in the midst of the dark forebodings of those days
appeared a man who had something practical to propose in the
face of all the vague possibilities. He trod like a giant through his
age, tramping to earth what a thousand years had held in venera
tion, but everywhere new life blossomed in his footsteps." Of
him also in recently published words Gustav Freytag says : "His
picture has the remarkable quality of becoming bigger and more
lovable the more closely it is approached." No finer words have
been spoken about Luther than those found in the estimate of
one of his latest biographers, Prof. Lindsay, Scotch Presbyterian,
who says: "History shows no other man with such kingly
power. This king among men was also the most human. He

162 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
had his fits of brooding melancholy, his times of jovial abandon
ment, when one can hear his great jolly laugh and his rich sono
rous voice caroling forth songs, his moods of the softest tenderness
with wife and children, and his abiding sense of companionship
with the eternal."
In the closing pages of his generally fair and always interesting
estimate of Luther, Prof. McGiffert says : "He was built on
no ordinary scale, this redoubtable German. He was of titanic
stature, and our common standards fail adequately to measure
him. But his life' lies open to all the world, as do few other lives
in history. To know it as we may is well worth an effort."
There are historic figures that have dwindled with the lapse of
time. In their own day and generation they filled a wide space,
made something of a stir and to their contemporaries seemed
destined to an immortality of fame and influence. But their ac
tivities were inspired by personal and selfish considerations and
ambitions. They stood for no great and abiding principles.
With the passage of the years they have become more and more
receding memories rather than permanent and growing forces in
the progress of the race.
There are other figures that grow in impressiveness with the
passage of the years. They may have been recognized as heroes
while they lived, but the full measure of their greatness was not
then discerned. These men, who wrought in a kind of sublime
self-forgetfulness, and were concerned the least of all about their
personal futures, who were stirred by the wrongs and apostasies
of their times, by cruel tyrannies and brazen impostures, had that
prophetic vision which looked beyond the present and saw the
brighter future, when great truths, for which they contended, but
which had been obscured, perverted or denied, for a time, and for
a long time as in the medieval Church, should come again to their
own. To this latter class belongs Luther, the hero of the Refor
mation. The most obvious indication of his greatness is his
fame. Far beyond the circle of scholars, of theologians, of the
learned class, beyond the pale of all the ecclesiastical bodies,
Luther is known, and his name is even more potential today than
when he was laid to rest in 1546 in the old church at Wittenberg,
where, in October, 1517, he inaugurated the great revolt and con
structive reformation of the Church and became the leader in the
modern era of the history of mankind, the greatest movement

CHIEF FACTOR IN THE MOVEMENT 163
since the beginning of the years of the Incarnation of the Son
of God.
In our attempt at an estimate and interpretation of this extraor
dinary man we have not encountered one who was perfect. He
had faults. To err is human. He lived in an age which en
couraged roughness of speech, and he must not be judged by the
standards of the better day which he himself inaugurated. But
take him all in all, and estimate him in the length and breadth, the
height and depth of what he was, and he ranks among the first
of the magnates of mankind. He threw off the spiritual despot
ism of the medieval hierarchy and challenged the false assump
tions of the popes and the councils. "He proclaimed," as has
been said by Mr. James Bryce, "that the individual spirit, while
it continued to mirror itself in the world spirit, had nevertheless
an independent existence as a center of self-issuing force, and
was to be in all things active rather than passive." It was given
to him to divide the clouds which had for a thousand years been
hanging over medieval Europe and darkening it, so that the
glorious Sun of Righteousness might shine through, and men who
were ignorant, enslaved and lost might find their way to God,
to salvation and liberty.

SECTION III
THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT
There are three great elements of human progress, the re
ligious, the intellectual and the productive; or, under different
terms, virtue, knowledge and industry.
History is something more than a mere record of historical
events, whether those events be intellectual, moral, social or po
litical. It is a phase of the universal process in which we live
and move and have our being, and of which we as men, created in
the image of God and as free moral agents, are a part. It is
the continuous stream of human life flowing ceaselessly on from
times even more ancient than those of which we have any writ
ten records. Whatever has contributed to the course of human
development, or has even come in contact therewith as an oppos
ing force, becomes a part of the subject-matter of history. Mr.
James Balfour, the distinguished English statesman and scholar,
has observed that the great movements which history records have
in every case been "irrational." In the use of this word he seems
to incline to the belief that such movements have come to life not
as the result of intellectual statement or appeal, but always in
obedience to forces at first so obscure, and, in the day of their
power, so complicated and diverse, that it is impossible to isolate
or name them, or in any way to co-ordinate them with man's
average behavior.
We may accept Mr. Balfour's generalization as expressive of
the impression which history makes upon an intelligent and
thoughtful observer, but this generalization must not be inter
preted as meaning that the leading events and crises in human
history have occurred without any display of reason, but only in
obedience to some force which was looked upon as a new element
that entered into the life of any particular age, an element not
always easily distinguished and interpreted in that particular age.
In its broader and nobler aspects, history is a long series of
struggles to elevate the character of mankind in all of its aspects.
religious, intellectual, social and political, rising sometimes to an
164

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 165
agony of aspiration and exertion, and that sometimes followed
by a period of relapse and retrogression, as is the case frequently
in the moral and religious struggles of individual men. The
periods of onward movement, and even those of reaction and
retrogression, serve to illuminate Browning's oft-quoted declara
tion of faith made in striking poetical form :
"God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world."
These movements are always sufficiently definite to indicate,
at least in broad outline, the sweep of God's steadily maturing
plan through the centuries. Bunsen's great conception of "God
in History" is not exclusively a Christian teacher's conception,
but is likewise that of representative historians. In the intro
duction to his "History of the United States," Bancroft, accord
ingly, could say that his object was, "as the fortunes of a nation
are not under the control of a blind destiny, to follow steps by
which a favoring Providence, calling our institutions into exist
ence, has conducted the country to its present happiness and
glory ;" while in his chapter on the Pilgrims he likewise recognizes
the divine factor in this way: "The mysterious influence of that
Power which enchains the destinies of States, overruling the de
cisions of sovereigns and the forethought of statesmen, often
deduces the greatest events from the least commanding causes."
Any adequate interpretation of history begins with the postulate
that God is, and that God is in history ordering, directing and
overruling. "We believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of
Heaven and Earth." We believe in "Immanuel," which being
interpreted means God with us. The existence of God and His
hand in the history of mankind does not depend upon the last
bright thought of the advanced new theologian, with his revised
interpretations expressed in the latest popular essays, for this is
the central fact of the universe and the most significant truth
known to the human mind. With the individual and with the
nations of the earth, life is from God. In the simple truth thai
God wills a life for a man or a nation are unfolded all the pos
sibilities of that life for the individual, and for the nation, which
in its assigned environment and in its given measure of time,
shall unfold itself in accordance with the plan of Him who always
"sees the end from the beginning." Holding, as we do as Chris-

166 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
tians, to such primary convictions concerning the existence of
God and His controlling and directing interest in our race, one of
our fundamental beliefs is that the real genius of human history
is the doctrine of divine Providence. If it requires mind to con
struct the universe, it is certainly a primary presumption that the
direction of the affairs of mankind will not be left to mindless-
ness. "History," as has been said by one of the fine interpreters
of the workings of the medieval mind, "is a living organism
whose parts have an inward, vital connection, each requiring and
completing the rest. All nations form but one family, having
one origin and one destiny, and all periods are but the several
stages of its life, which, though continually changing its form, is
also substantially one and the same."
If such reflections as these are correct, both the writers and the
readers of history form an unworthy estimate of its province if
they restrict it simply to the cause of the rise and fall of empires.
the factors in national prosperity or decline, to a presentation of
the absoluteness or adaptation of the various forms of government,
and to the contemplation of the evidences of growth and transition
among the peoples of mankind. The science of history, when
rightly understood, deals with something more than a simple nar
ration of occurrences and controversies, a record of human
progress or a triumphal eulogy pronounced on the growth of civ
ilization. They only estimate it aright in its true mission who see
in its transitions from stage to stage the successive pages in the
on-goings of that Providence, which is its informing spirit, and
which, without pause or failure, is constantly working out the
counsels of the divine will. If we would understand the history
of mankind aright, it is not enough that we follow in the wake of
battle in the world's decisive conflicts, listening to the triumphant
shouts of the conquerors and to the wail of the vanquished, or
that, like Hegel, we attempt a philosophical examination of the
causes of upheaval and readjustment among the peoples of the
earth, or that we regard it as a school for the study of human
biography, or that we look upon it as a mere chaos of incidents,
as a "mighty maze and all without a plan." We only apprehend
aright the true ideal of history when we discover God in it,
shaping its ends for His own mighty designs, bringing order out
of great confusions, resolving its complications into a manifest
unity and continually raising up men who are qualified to enter

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 167
the lists as the real leaders of their fellows along the pathways of
a continual progress.
The traditions of a nation are potent influences in the de
velopment of national character. The memory of its heroes who
have brought to it power and influence in the earth, of its prophets
of the higher spiritual life, as contrasted with that which is secu
lar and material; of its scientists and philosophers, who have in
terpreted nature and given direction to human thinking along
elevated lines; of its poets and philanthropists, who have sung
its songs and organized its charities; of its good and great men,
whq have brought it both honor and distinction; all these are
factors in a nation's education and aid us in forming an adequate
estimate of its career and destiny. But more potent than any or
all of these causes are those great movements which from time
to time arise in the progress of human events to stamp a new form
and superscription on the world. The sacred isolation of the
Hebrew commonwealth; the schools of philosophy of Greece; the
legal genius and militocracy of Rome; the invasion of the bar
barians, whereby the Germanic and Romanic elements of civiliza
tion were blended and the new peoples were brought under the
tutelage of the Church ; the crusades beginning in the closing years
of the eleventh century, whereby the stagnation of European
society was broken up and peoples of different civilizations were
brought into contact ; the Reformation under Luther, whereby the
Church was purified and the human mind emancipated from
medieval sacerdotal bondage; the French Revolution, a mighty,
and in some of its aspects, disastrous, struggle for political equal
ity; the rise and spread of the Mohammedan imposture; feu
dalism, with its mingling of barbarity and blessing; the advent of
the world's Redeemer; the invention of printing; the discovery of
America, which opened up a new field wherein were to be pre
sented conditions of social and political life such as the world had
not hitherto seen — all these were not only historical incidents, but
dominating influences in the formation of the character and the
direction of the nations of mankind. They all serve to show that
God is no meaningless factor in the progress of the race in its
upward movements, and that there are no blank pages in His
volumes of history.
Such views of God's relation to historical movements have led
the wise and sagacious interpreters of that science to look upon

168 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century — the
Quadri-Centennial of which the Protestant world is now cele
brating — as the most permanently influential and vitalizing move
ment in modern history, and Luther as its dominating figure, as
the man raised up of God to start the peoples of the earth along
paths leading back to the fertile fields of New Testament Chris
tianity and forward into the new and modern era in which we
now live. I
Unity in history implies that the life of the human race will be
the working out and the illustration of some great principle of
abiding importance. To the Christian thinker this principle is
the redemption of mankind by means of supernatural power, and
the direction of man's noblest energies, under the inspiration of
this principle of redemption, in science, art, politics and the or
ganization of society. To the non-Christian or the half-Christian
mind other universal principles in history are made to serve as the
basis of this unity.
The estimates and standards of the Christian are never purely
or chiefly naturalistic. "The Church," says the elder Dr. Schaff,
"is the continuation of the life and work of Christ on earth,
though never, indeed, so far as men in their present state are con
cerned, without a mixture of sin and error," and the primate
among the historians of the Church, Neander, expresses the same
thought: "Although Christianity can be understood only as
something which is above nature and reason, as something com
municated to them from a higher source, yet it stands in neces
sary connection with the essence of these powers and with their
mode of development ; otherwise, indeed, it could not be fitted to
elevate them to any higher stage ; otherwise, it could not operate
on them at all. And such a connection, considered by itself, we
must presume to exist in the works of God, in the mutual and
harmonious agreement of which is manifested the divine order
of the universe. The connection of which we now speak consists
in this : That what has by their Creator been implanted in the
essence of human nature and reason, can attain to its full realiza
tion by means of that higher principle, as we see it actually
realized in Him who is its source and in Whom is expressed the
original type and model after which humanity has to strive."

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 169
Thus God in man, which is the incarnation, becomes God in men
through the working of the Spirit in the body of Christ, which is
the Church. To the Christian philosopher and the simple and
humble disciple as well, the basal principle in the interpretation
of world movements and personal salvation alike, is the doctrine
of the divine incarnation and the supernatural redemption
wrought in the individual and in society through Christ, for with
both "there is none other name given among men" whereby both
individual and corporate salvation are to be attained.
There is a theory of the Reformation which regards that great
movement as nothing more than the self-assertion and influence
of a group of men of unusual mental and moral capacities. It is
a theory that rests upon the opinion of writers like Goethe, Car
lyle, Treitschke, Emerson, Canon Barry and others, and proceeds
upon the assumption that it is, after all that may be said, indi
viduals that create and stand for great movements and that his
tory is nothing more than the biography of a few great men.
Even so great and competent an historian as Leopold Von Ranke
looks with some favor upon this view. We have been treated by
Mr. Buckle, the able author of the "History of Civilization in
England" to a theory of history which aims to make it an exact
science, and to reduce all events under a law of causation. "In
regard to nature," says this ingenious but somewhat eccentric
writer, "events apparently the most irregular and capricious have
been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with
certain fixed and universal laws. This has been done because men
of ability, above all, men of patient, untiring thought, have studied
natural events with a view of discovering their regularity ; and
if human events were subjected to similar treatment we have a
right to expect similar results." In opposition to the view of
Buckle, who believed that the great events of history were de
termined by physical laws in which men had, so to speak, no part
and of which they are only the instruments, Von Ranke believes
that history is nothing more than the work of certain minds ful
filling more or less certain conditions, and each having a certain
peculiar sphere of influence. It has not been doctrines that have
overthrown the world, but the powerful personalities who be
came the incarnation of those doctrines. Great men are a
product of nations, and they do not appear save at a compara
tively' advanced stage of civilization." But in another place the

170 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
same writer goes to another extreme, asserting that "no one ha;
any right to speak of mistakes committed, opportunities lost, and
culpable omissions. Events rule men; they live their lives unde:
a sort of inevitable necessity ; they have on them the seal of fate."
In the light of history itself, and any adequate philosophy of his
tory, this "great men theory" is unsound. It is only when it is
superficially estimated that the good work of the Reformation is
regarded as the work of one great man or any group of men.
God undoubtedly raises up great men of powerful personality,
who, enlightened with clear apprehension, become teachers and
sages to their fellows, and persuade them to move along new and
higher lines of development, and thus to become helpers in the
carrying forward of the divine purposes.
But no genuine and permanent reformation ever springs forth
full grown from the brain and heart of any single great and good
man. It cannot be called into being by some mere herald of revolt
or by some self-willed enthusiast. If it be real and is to be per
manent it must express a common aspiration after things that are
both good and true, and assert itself as the deep and unappeased
hunger after spiritual manna, and come to matvirity and dominate
the people in consequence of its own internal energy and capacity
for assertion. Back of it there must be principles of abiding
value, truths of fundamental importance, which are always po
tential in times when men are feeling after mental and spiritual
certainty and tranquillity. Great men are just as much the
product of their times as they are forces to stimulate them. The
functions of the leaders lie chiefly in giving expression to, and
in wisely directing, movements of which they are merely a part
and by no means the creators. A skeptical attitude toward the
existing order of things, or mere revolt against the abuses of the
medieval Church, could never have united men as they soon be
came united around the standard of Luther. The Reformation
was something more than a revolt against abuses existing in the
Church of Rome in the year 1517. It was Protestant against
falsehood, but it was positive in its reaffirmation of New Testa
ment conceptions of the Christian religion. The battle waged by
the great leader of that movement was a conflict between two en
tirely different views of the religion of Christ. It was the asser
tion of a clear, consistent and intelligible conception of Chris
tianity as antithetical to another conception that is clear, consist-

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 171
ent and intelligible, and which was held by the Church of Rome.
If the principles contended for by Luther were correct then
Rome was fundamentally wrong. "The Lutheran Church," says
the late Dr. A. M. Fairbairn, "was organized by a body of beliefs
and in order to their realization. These beliefs were of a kind
that could not live under Catholicism, nor could it allow them to
live. They were throughout the negation of the right of a
sacerdotal institution to be, to hold any place or exercise any
function as between God and man." The Reformation was a
movement of reconstruction, a restoration of principles that had
been lost sight of, and a renovation by means of these principles
of what had already been established. The questions involved
were vastly greater than whether a man had his membership in a
pure or a corrupted Church. They went down to the root of
things, and dealt with the question, "What is the religion that is
called Christianity?" It was not only an assault upon the false,
and an effort at supplanting that which had become obsolete, but
an aggressive assertion of positive and scriptural principles. It
aimed by means of these to rectify that which had been perverted,
and at the driving out from the sacred places of the Church of
that which had been shown to be an useless, arrogant and un
necessary intruder. It sought to lead men back again to a belief
in New Testament doctrines, to a reassertion of the principles of
the Gospel in its unadorned simplicity, and to a reaffirmation of
the consistent teachings of Paul as contrasted with contradictory
and unwarranted decrees of councils and popes. It rejected
with firmness and energy that which, during a period of a thousand
years, had engrafted itself upon the life of the Church, which was
not of the Gospel of our Lord, and enlisted princes and nobles,
scholars and artists, peasants and barons, in the new movement
which marks the turning point from the medieval to the modern
period of human history.
In seeking for its origin we are not to regard the Lutheran
movement, begun in October, 1517, as having found its expression
only in protesting against something, and in particular, against
more or less of the religion taught by the Church of Rome, or
as having its beginnings in either personal or transient interests.
That would have represented essentially a merely negative atti
tude of mind. The great and permanently valuable affairs in the
history of men and the Church proceed from causes more pro-

172 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT' OF THE XVI CENTURY
found, from principles of perpetual validity and importance. In
the sixteenth century, before any real reform could take place,
three antecedent conditions were necessary, viz., a manifest need
for reform in established institutions; the necessity for that re
form must be popularly recognized, and the principles upon which
the new order was to be inaugurated must be rooted in the past.
Such being the conditions at that time, the dawn of the Reforma
tion was at hand.
Luther was a man of superb gifts. He was largely endowed
by nature, but he did not become so prodigiously effective in the
use of those gifts and endowments until he had once for all
planted himself down defiantly upon certain great truths clearly
taught in the Scriptures which had been amply validated in his
own experience, and until he had broken into God's liberty and by
faith had become a prophet of the Most High. With due allow
ance for the evolutionary process of human development, and
recognition of the forces at work, Prof. Preserved Smith, a great
and sympathetic Luther scholar, has shown clearly that the cour
age of this one great man made the Reformation possible. "If
some such crisis was inevitable he, at least, determined its time,
and to a large extent its method." His profoundly religious
nature, sturdy personality, great moral courage, indomitable will ;
his loyalty to conscience, as Smith says it, his "gift of seeing the
essence of things and revealing what he saw," his warm heart
and keen sense of humor, are constantly appearing before us in
clear relief as we contemplate the career of the great Reformer.
All these were fine adjuncts in his work. But all these kept in a
fine co-ordination, as they were in him, would not have made the
Reformation the greatest event in the world's history since the
opening of the year of the incarnation of the Son of God. "A
great part of his sublimity," says Horace Bushnell of Luther,
"lay in that awful robustness of nature that could be tremend
ously kindled by God's inspirations, burning on, still on, in a grand
volcanic conflagration of faculty, yet never consumed." And all
this is no doubt true of the great Reformer, but back of that
"sublimity" lay the germinal thought and experiences out of
which his work sprang, and which are vividly exhibited in his
life, and are constantly giving strength and color to all that he
did. Reformers are always thinkers, and out of formulated and
unambiguous thinking on great and vital principles came the

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 173
Reformation. About these Luther was not only brave enough to
think, but also courageous enough to say what he believed. In
isolated cases others had been thinking some of the same things,
but had hesitated to express them, or at least to co-ordinate their
thinking into anything like a consistent system. He uncovered
ancient principles and readjusted laws that had been misapplied,
and in consequence an artificial piece of ecclesiasticism was
demolished. The Reformation came in a period in which the agencies of
restoration, destruction and discovery were all put into a proper
co-operation, and accordingly the past four hundred years have
constituted an epoch of unsurpassed, and as we fervently believe,
of permanent progress and renewal.
This is the reason why Christendom today is pronouncing the
name of Luther not only with admiration, but with the pro
foundest feelings that can stir the human heart. The significance
of his name, however, and the innumerable celebrations held in
honor of the four hundreth anniversary of the great work he
inaugurated with his theses, lies in the fact that he represented
more than any one man the principles which have given true
Protestantism its existence and made it the greatest permanent
factor in modern civilization. He became the leading spirit in
that mighty upheaval of human thought, which was more than a
revival of letters, although that revival was one of its powerful
adjuncts. With the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the
Turks in 1453 there ensued a dispersion of Greek scholars over
Western Europe. With them they carried a genius for the an
cient learning, and with the help of Petrarch, Agricola, Reuch
lin, Erasmus and others, they awakened a new and enthusiastic
appreciation of classic heroes and works. Schools and univer
sities sprang into life, and thus in a large degree the soil was
prepared for the good seed of the Gospel. But a literary revival
is not a reformation of religion, and in itself is not a proclama
tion of salvation.
Neither was this great movement an incidental result of the
invention of printing. True, the quickening influences of the
press had just then burst upon the world. Just at the right mo
ment this fine accessory of the new movement came in to afford
its help. In 1455 Gutenberg was enabled to send out into the
world from the press at Maintz the first printed Bible. In the

174 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
same year Reuchlin was born, and not long thereafter, probably in
1466, Erasmus, of Rotterdam. Together with the appearance in
type of such works as Boccaccio's Decameron and Greek Gram
mars, there appeared the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New
Testament in Latin and Greek. In many lands the desire for
knowledge was both created and fed. There was inspiration,
stimulus, and knowledge in the rapid appearance of books. But
books and pamphlets, which appeared in such rapid succession,
never could have made the Reformation.
Nor, again, is this movement so fraught with blessing to be
identified with the astonishing development at that time of the
vernacular tongues of Europe. Hitherto, indeed, Latin had been
the language of religion, of diplomacy, of science, of all com
munication between learned men in different countries of the
earth. The native speech of the great masses of the people in
each of the nations was rude, barbarous and wholly destitute of
information worthy of being recorded or taught. This deep and
deplorable ignorance was broken up when approved scholars be
gan to transfer their attainments out of the Latin into their
mother tongues, and were forced, in the process of breathing new
life and beauty into them, to make them the medium henceforth
for the intellectual as well as the moral elevation of their unedu
cated brethren. This supplanting of the old tongue of the Church
in worship was one of the most significant changes wrought in
Luther's work. The universal use of Latin had been one of the
deep marks of Catholic and European character of the old re
ligion. Henceforth worship became a privilege of the people to
be expressed in their own tongue. The theory of worship which
had prevailed in medieval Christendom was that the believer was
a passive spectator only in rites and ceremonies wrought for him
by priestly hands, an attendant at a sacrifice wrought through
sacerdotal intervention at the offering up of prayer and praise by
priestly lips. This was now rejected in the interest of the com
mon worship of the people. Expressions of adoration, thanks
giving, praise and supplication became henceforth functions of
the whole body of worshipers. The "mass" became a com
munion of the whole body of believers. The priest no longer
was looked upon as the only one to be entrusted with the offering
up of mysterious sacrifices, as the one and only mediator between
God and the worshiping believer. Placed on a level with other

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 175
members of the universal priesthood of believers, instead of a
mediator, necessary for another man's access to God, he became
the simple mouthpiece of the congregation, its recognized leader
in a worship conducted in the language of the people. But excel
lent and desirable, yea, even essential, as this transformation of
the European vernacular was, that was not the Reformation nor
its underlying cause.
Nor was this movement the offspring of the free cities of Ger
many and the struggles for national independence that were then
beginning to assert their influence in the regeneration and ennoble
ment of different peoples. Liberty is something great and glor
ious, but it is not efficacious in the restoration of correct religious
principles. Greece had liberty and rejoiced in its possession, and
that beyond measure, but liberty did not lead the peoples of
Greece to confession of sin, to outcries for holiness, to a recogni
tion of the only living God, and to the reconciliation of the soul
with Him by means of His infinite pardon and endless peace.
This great movement inaugurated by Luther was not the result of
the contemporary emancipation of men from intellectual and
civil bondage.
A variety of causes, it is true, contributed to the Reformation.
Experience teaches that neither individuals, nor groups of men,
nor nations or races of men, are uniformly controlled in their ac
tions by single or dissociated motives. A variety of contributing
causes was at work, acting differently and with varying degrees
of force in the production of that epoch-making movement. But
notable changes do not come to men or nations unless they are
based upon great and vital principles. Progress is, for the most
part due to the leaven of an idea, which, sometimes long half
dormant in the minds and hearts of cautious souls, at last breaks
forth with revolutionary power in the bold act of some courage
ous and qualified leader.
It has been noted with interest that great movements during
the Christian era have come about in periods that may be reckoned
approximately at four hundred years. During the earliest period
the Roman Empire held sway, but that was terminated in 395
A. D. There followed another four hundred years of contact
between Roman civilization and Germanic barbarism, when suc
cessive invasions from the north and east threatened for a time, as
it seemed, to crush out all civilization. But these two conflicting

176 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
forces clashed, struggled and coalesced until at the time of the
Great Charles, about 800 A. D., there came about as the result a
new and fairly homogeneous society, which, though rude and un
developed, contained some of the forces that looked forward
to national organization and religious reform. Upon the heels of
this there followed four hundred years of strife and turmoil, dur
ing which the Church was the single unifying force and the one
institution that conserved the factors which are permanent in
civilization, such as religion, education, the spirit of kindness,
commerce and building. By about 1200 A. D. "the land had
rest" in a measurable degree, and there followed another period
of new intellectual activity, educational organization, progress in
science and art, an increasing freedom of thought and its asser
tion in isolated examples, all of which were leading up to the
revival of learning and the Reformation of the sixteenth century.
Looking back today over the four hundred years that have ensued
since the nailing up of Luther's theses on the 31st of October,
1517, which has appropriately been called "the birthday of the
Reformation," we can form something of a true estimate of the
principles and forces that at that time entered into the making of
the modern era of human history. Back of the idealism and the
moral and spiritual dynamic which then enabled the people under
Luther's leadership to throw off the yoke of political and eccles
iastical tyranny, and the assertion of that freedom of thought and
purpose, were great and fundamental principles, especially in the
sphere of religion.
It may be said in all truth that no new forces entered the
ecclesiastical and civil institutions at the opening of the new era
inaugurated by Luther, but truths that had long been suppressed,
or at least subordinated, sprang into new life and reasserted them
selves as dominating and compelling forces which soon swept
Church and people along the lines of a new development. In
that period the most significant feature was the release and rein
statement of certain principles that possessed sufficient power to
transform the world of that day. No such movement has its
strength in falsehood, nor any more in mere negations, and no
victories of a genuine Protestantism in the future will be of any
real and permanent value which are not marked by a return to
those ennobling principles, which, since Luther's day, have been
connected with the best life of mankind.

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 177
II
The groundwork of this great movement was religion and
the primacy of its place among men. Its essence is not to be
found first of all in opposition to errors and abuses that had fast
ened themselves upon the medieval Church, but in the reasser
tion of positive truth. The attitude of Luther was constructive
and positive and not destructive and negative. That which is
worthy of the name of reformation, a movement such as carries
with it those factors which insure permanency, cannot be manu
factured by any kind of human ingenuity. It was not a matter
of human invention, for had it been it would not have endured
for four hundred years, and would have had no permanent in
fluence on the future of civilization. In its true sense, a reforma
tion is always the worked out result of regenerating forces and
powerful tendencies which have been for a long time at work in
human history, the outburst of spiritual forces that have long
been operating and whose energetic presence at last has reached
the point of restoration and reassertion. A genuine reformation
is the result of an urgent necessity, which, with persistency and
power, pushes to the front the deepest needs of an age and which
dominates the minds and hearts of earnest men with irresistible
power. In the last analysis that power which so promptly, when
the fulness of time had come, permeated the social structure of
the German people and gave expression to their deepest desires
and profoundest thoughts, was the Word of God in the hearts
of good men.
Speaking from the human side, the new power came with the
dominance and extension of a very simple idea based upon the
sacred Scriptures, viz., that men are to be reconciled to God
through faith, which is the unmerited gift of God. The prev
alence of that idea not only wrought for salvation from sin and
its entailments, but established a new sense of the dignity of man,
of individual responsibility and initiative. For hundreds of years
prior to Luther the dominant conception of the meaning of life
was this: That it meant to know and do the will of the rulers
in both the ecclesiastical and political spheres. To obey abso
lutely the voice of authority was looked upon as the supreme duty
and chief end of man, that authority being vested in the State
or the Church, and more frequently in the Church, when for long

178 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
periods it dominated the State, named its rulers and dictated its
policies. It was the work of Luther, by the force of his great
personality in combination with the assertion and insistence upon
certain great and enduring principles, fundamental alike in the
first, the fourth, the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, to break
the spell of this species of authority, to dare to defy it and to
lead men back to the essential vantage ground where their actions
were once more based upon the will of God made known through
His revealed Word, as interpreted and applied, not by pope or
council, but by every man who devoutly studies that Word under
the guidance of the Spirit of life and truth.
In its ultimate results there never has been a movement which
has contributed so largely to the emancipation of the human
mind from all superstitious terrors as the Reformation of the
Church in the sixteenth century. It had strength enough in the
principles upon which it was based to successfully reject an
immense proportion of the dogmatic and ritualistic conceptions,
that in the departure of the Church from the teachings of the
Scriptures, had almost covered the entire field of religion. It
was the changed attitude toward God and man in the one dis
tinctive sphere of religion which reversed many things that had
become established and set the world going on its new and
better way.
The new age was inaugurated by a contribution to the interpre
tation of the Gospel that still maintains its dominion over the most
enlightened portions of mankind. From its very beginnings it
was based upon certain positive and constructive principles of
thinking and teaching. Because of the character of these prin
ciples and their popularity among the most enlightened peoples
of the earth, the Protestant movement has taken its place among
the most memorable and far-reaching events in human history, as
the most important event since the days of the apostles, from the
time when St. John, the aged and beloved disciple of the Lord,
passed away in his sea-girt home in the TEgean. That movement
did great things and accomplished permanent results in religion
and civilization, not only in its negative aspects as a protest
against abuses that had grown up in the Church, but much more
in its positive aspects. It was a process of spiritual advance and
not retrogression, a re-proclamation of the Gospel, a giving back
of the Scriptures to the people in popular form, an assertion for

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 179
all men alike of the right to go at once and direct to God for par
don and life, to repair at once to the Chief Bishop and Shepherd
of souls for a forgiveness not mediated by an order of men, but
which, rejecting the monastic ideal of the Christian life, with its
seclusion and bodily self-abnegation, once more taught men that
every creature of God is good, and that nothing is to be despised
if received with thanksgiving.
That the chief of the Reformers had faults and was somewhat
subject to limitations, all will admit, but we cannot on that ac
count go back on the main verdict which history affirms and our
experience validates. Because of the vitality of the truths for
which he contended, the Reformation was a mighty movement of
the Spirit of God leading the Church forward to a fuller under
standing of the Gospel, and bringing to all who sincerely received
it the gift of spiritual enfranchisement. It implied the parting
of the roads and was a disclosure of the new conception of the
Christian Church. The unity of the Church must in the future
be consistent with the right of private judgment, instead of resting
on the authority of a hierarchy which claims an exclusive divine
right by the title of a presumed divine appointment.
One of the things alleged against Protestantism by Romanists,
and by some pseudo-Protestants even today, is that it is negative
and negative only ; that it consists in mere empty allegations that
this or that is not so, in exposing and denouncing error. But
such is not the case. Protestantism is not negative, but positive
in all of its triumphant aspects. It is primarily a witness for
and not merely a witness against. It has lived and grown power
ful, not in consequence of its negations, but in consequence of its
affirmations. The negative condition for such an event as the
Reformation had been fulfilled in disconnected assaults upon the
alarming corruptions of the Church, isolated reaffirmations of
single truths of the Gospel, the dismal failure of the reformatory
councils and the widespread clamor for a reformation of morals.
Something more and of greater account was necessary, and that
was the positive assertion of great and fundamental truths of
religion and their co-ordination into a consistent system. The
firm conviction that salvation comes not from man but from God,
the fact that pardon of sin is not something negotiable, but a di
vine bestowment — this one truth, firmly grasped and affirmed,
made the Reformation not only possible but a matter of assured

180 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
success. Going back to the Scriptures as the pure Word of God,
in contrast with human teachings and traditions; the firm con
viction that perfect peace with God and true happiness cannot
spring from any human activity or works prescribed by the
Church, but from divine grace revealed in Christ and received by
a living faith; that the matter of primary concern was not so
much a matter of a man's relation to the Church as of his rela
tion to Christ ; that the most direct way to God was not through
the elaborate prescriptions of the Church, much confused with
human traditions, but through Christ the Redeemer and one all-
sufficient Mediator and His promised Spirit, Who maketh men
free and leadeth them into the truth and holiness — these are
truths which once firmly grasped and held made the new Lutheran
movement an assured historical fact.
Thus the Reformation was more than a reform, for it marked
the re-establishment of primitive Christianity. Its purpose was
not the destruction of the Church, but to lead the Church back
and place it anew upon the one abiding foundation of which
Jesus Christ was the chief cornerstone. The Reformers knew
that the existence and continued work of the Church demanded
the rearing of a new temple upon the old and tried foundation of
the apostles, martyrs, prophets and teachers of the one true
Church, made up of the congregation of souls who really and
truly believe in Christ, and among whom the Gospel is properly
taught and the sacraments rightly administered. That great
movement was a real re-establishment of Christianity in the world.
It reaffirmed the principles upon which the true Church had been
placed by its Head and His apostles at the beginning, and con
tinued its life by means of a resurrection of what had been to all
appearances dead and buried. In painful experiences men had
become aware that the existence and work of the Church de
manded that a new superstructure must be raised on the old rock
interpreted and elaborated in the Epistles of the New Testament.
Luther was no ruthless iconoclast who aimed at destruction, but
rather a most cautious reconstructionist, alwavs careful to plan
and work within the limits prescribed by the sacred Scriptures.
The objective foundation upon which to build was for him
Christ and the salvation conferred upon men by Him. To this
he added, with renewed emphasis, a long-lost and much-ignored
truth of a moral creation as the basis for the personal expression

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 181
of the Christian life. He reaffirmed the fact that the Church, if
it is to remain a Church at all, must start from a real regenera
tion. He kept the objective and subjective elements in religion
in proper co-ordination, properly relating the certainty within a
man to the certainty for a man. There was thus provided a
safeguard against mere mystical impressions and unstable opin
ions, the pit into which all certainty that is merely subjective is
always liable to fall.
Theology waited for renewal and regeneration until at last
Luther came, the needed successor of Paul and Augustine, who
led this queen of all the sciences back from its long exile from
the simplicity that was in Christ, and refounded it upon the great
truth that men are justified before God by faith alone. The Re
former's heart cried out for the living God, and as opportunity
came he studied the Word with rare diligence. Becoming a
university professor, he was deeply convinced of the supremacy
of the Bible over all the teachings and interpretations of men.
As he continued his study of the Scriptures this conviction deep
ened. The two biblical books which he selected for his first lec
tures at Wittenberg are those books of the New Testament which
are especially strong in their teaching that the sinner has im
mediate access to God, and that salvation is not of works but by
faith alone. All through his carefully constructed, and to this
day deeply interesting comments, one may discern the great man
struggling, in spite of himself, with the old medieval system of
salvation, and seems to hear him at times breaking forth in ex
clamations of rapture as he attains to his new apprehension of the
Gospel and experiences the newly found blessing of freedom in
Christ. More and more was he dominated by the Pauline con
ception of free grace, as he came step by step to discard Aquinas
and Aristotle, the chief among the authoritative teachers of the
Middle Ages, and as Augustine, the greatest of the post-apostolic
fathers, more and more became his chief human authority.
Another striking feature appears in Luther's university work
as Bible lecturer, in making Scripture to interpret Scripture,
thus establishing a principle which later the Reformers put into a
formula. When his adversaries, to prove their case, in discus
sions from 1518 to 1521 heaped up the customs of the Church,
the decretals of the popes and councils and quotations from the
fathers, he confidently appealed to the oracles of the living God,

182 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
drawing his proofs from the spiritual arsenal of the Word of
God. Another notable thing for his times, in Luther's study of
the Scriptures, was that he devoted himself with much diligence
to the study of the original languages, Greek and Hebrew. When
this capable young man had completed his university course as a
student he knew no Greek and very little, if any, Hebrew. For
centuries distinguished theologians and doctors of the Church had
known neither of these languages in which the original Scriptures
appeared. Neither Wiclif nor Huss, heralds of the coming Ref
ormation, knew Greek, and Thomas Aquinas, "the angelic doctor,"
Bonaventura, "the seraphic doctor," and Duns Scotus, "the subtle
doctor," had never entered this linguistic field. The study of
these biblical tongues had been introduced into Germany by
Erasmus and Reuchlin while Luther was yet a young man, and, in
keeping with its dominating stupidity in such matters, in the face
of strenuous opposition on the part of the Church. Largely by
his own unaided efforts the chief of the Reformers gained a
knowledge of these two languages as a part of his equipment for
his work, and from the year 1517 on, in his controversies with
the papal chieftains, he was able to point them to the original
text of the Bible, a province into which their ignorance, for the
most part, did not permit them to enter. In the linguistic and
exegetical contests of the day Luther always held the strong place
from which he could not be dislodged.
Especially was the doctrine of justification by faith, which
Luther had found in his careful study of the Scriptures, to be
wrought into his experience, for, as has been said by Prof. Lind
say, "The beginnings of the Reformation were not so much doc
trinal as experimental." Luther headed a reformation because
men felt and knew that he had, as he said, found a gracious God
by trusting in His grace as revealed to him in Jesus Christ. The
driving power of the whole movement, as we have seen earlier,
was a great religious experience kept in a true co-ordination with
the Word of God. "If thou holdest faith," said Luther, "to be
simply a thought concerning God, then that thought is as little
able to give eternal life as ever a monkish cowl could give it."
Such was not the Reformer's conception of that faith which saves.
For him, on the one side, there stood the Father, revealing Him
self in sending down to us His promises, which are yea and amen
in Christ Jesus ; and on the other side, there are the hearts of

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 183
men ascending in faith to God, receiving, accepting and resting on
the promises of Him who always gives Himself in those promises.
For modern Christianity he had done what Augustine, in an
earlier age, had done for medieval Christianity. From the accre
tions of a thousand years of blighting sacerdotalism it was his
mission to call the Church back to what had been ignored or
destroyed, back to that immediate communion between the per
sonality that is human and the God and Father of our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ, who is divine. He made war upon that
system which, in effect, stands between the sinful yet trustful soul
and the Lord who hath redeemed it at a great price, and through
faith in Whom it is granted reconciliation and peace. He assailed
the imposition of penances and penalties of priestly invention and
exaction. He made a break with the old ecclesiastical order, and
there arose new churches not from it but entirely independent
of it. He planted those scriptural principles that gradually grew
into a freedom of religious thought, which would never have come
to the world had Christendom gone on under the dominance and
direction of one great and all-comprehensive ecclesiastical control.
The most valuable principle in the doctrinal system of Augustine,
the doctrine of the necessity of grace in salvation, was practically
suppressed until its reassertion by Luther. In his progress from
stage to stage of his break with the papacy, he was forced more
and more into open hostility to the fundamental principles of the
sacerdotal theology, because the refutation of their conclusions
depended upon the destruction of their premises. In two sermons
preached in 1518 he swept away the whole system of canonical
penitence, while in another series of propositions issued for public
disputation he approaches very closely to his great foundation
principle of justification by faith in his repudiation of the neces
sity of sacerdotal intervention between God and man for the re
mission of sins. His position then taken would lead logically to
the breaking down of all the spiritual machinery of confession,
penitential exercises, absolution and excommunication, on which
the whole temporal and spiritual authority of the hierarchy de
pended. In another sermon on excommunication, preached about
the same time, Luther reveals the mental transition through which
he was passing and the inevitable struggle into which he had been
thrust between his efforts to attain to freedom from the law and
the long-cultivated habit of obedience to ecclesiastical authority.

184 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
These and many other phases of the spiritual development tak
ing place in Luther were indications big with meaning. In the
initial stages of his break with Rome he might have deceived
himself as to the consequences of his attitude, but the leaders
of the papacy labored under no delusion. They could observe the
signs of the times, and could perceive the end to which the prin
ciples asserted in succession by the Reformer were leading.
They discovered that his defiance involved a rift down deep and
permanent in western Christendom. As the spectators gazed
wonderingly at his bold act of defiance of all the powers of both
heaven and earth, as they supposed, on that 10th day of De
cember, 1520, when, surrounded by magistrates, students, pro
fessors and citizens of the town, near the Elster gate at Witten
berg, he burned the papal bull and decretals, they may not have
grasped the full significance of what was transpiring. But on
that fateful ceremony hung great consequences. The bold Re
former had burned the bridges, and henceforth retreat was not
only impracticable but impossible. Not only had he become a
preacher of damnable doctrines, an advocate of condemned here
sies, and a turbulent schismatic, but he had defied the old hier
archy which had been consolidated through a thousand years of
historical vicissitudes, and in that act had made a return to Rome
impossible. It soon became manifest that the movement was not
to be retarded, much less arrested, by edicts of condemnation and
papal acts of excommunication. That conflict of freedom and
faith with supersition and tyranny was based upon principles so
scriptural and invincible that the usual papal methods of repres
sion were no longer available for effective service. Luther's own
experience was the nucleus about which was gathered all that was
most vital in the thought of the age — the return to the Bible, to
Augustine and to Mysticism; the protest against the sophistries
of the schoolmen and against the corruption of the Church, and
the restoration of a simpler and more individual relation of the
soul to God. That great man was fitted to be the prophet of his
age, because, first of all, he had the most searching experience in
what that age most needed — personal religion.

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 185
III
In her condemnation of the Reformation the Church of Rome
has been rabid, untruthful and persistent in the face of rejoinders
that have been historically unanswerable, and satisfactory to
all reasonable and fair-minded people. In her eyes that move
ment, led by Luther, was nothing more than an impious heresy,
leading men on to an abyss of Pantheism, Materialism and Athe
ism, tending to overthrow the very foundations of human society.
She has contended that the principles upon which that movement-
was based are revolutionary, dangerous and not to be tolerated.
She has asserted that it was a wicked error to admit Protestants
to equal political privileges with Romanists, and that to coerce
them and suppress them is a sacred duty. As recent a pope as
Gregory XVI has denounced freedom of conscience as an insane
folly, and the freedom of the press a pestilential error which is
not to be endured. No pope since Gregory has reversed or dis
sented from the judgment of his alleged infallible predecessor.
At first the Church looked upon Luther as nothing but a vulgar,
insubordinate and quarrelsome monk, a pestilential disturber of
things established by ecclesiastical authority, an inconspicuous
upstart to be easily suppressed. In the centuries which have
passed since the day that he was laid to rest in the old church
at Wittenberg, where he inaugurated his great movement,
the villification that has been poured out upon him and his work
has been so bitter as to have become ludicrous in some of its
aspects. It has been declared that his father was not the hus
band of his mother, but a wicked and designing scoundrel, who
had deluded her; that after ten years' struggling with his con
science he had become an open and declared atheist; that he
denied the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; that he had
composed hymns in honor of drunkenness, a vice to which he was
unrestrainedly addicted; that he had blasphemed the Bible, and
especially the writings of Moses ; that he was insincere, not him
self believing a word that he preached; that he had called the
Epistle of James nothing more than an epistle of straw; and,
above all, that the Reformation was no work of his, but in reality
was due to certain astrological causes, to a certain malignant ar
rangement of the stars. Rome kept on in the mistake that the
movement was nothing more than a casual outbreak, failing to

186 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF, THE XVI CENTURY
discern that it was, in fact, the culmination of forces that for
hundreds of years had been at work in Europe, and which had
all been anticipations of Luther.
But notwithstanding all this abuse, misinterpretation and blun
dering of Rome, those regenerative and world-uplifting prin
ciples set forth by the Reformer became very soon the cause of
the emancipation of the human mind from ignorance, the citizen
from tyranny, the Christian believer from priestcraft, and the
soul from every form of spiritual thraldom. They had in them
the popular appeal, and became at once the cause of a general
change in intellectual and spiritual conditions, in the processes
and tone of human life. There sprang up an expression of
freedom, joyfulness and independence hitherto unknown. There
were great changes in the actual conditions of life, which once
more brought fresh power and courage to men and altered their
attitude toward ultimate questions about God and man's relation
to Him. There sprang up a belief in the possibility of a spiritual
and divine life even beyond the pale of ecclesiastical forms and
prescription. Radical social changes were inaugurated, and
these led on to yet newer and larger developments. Very soon
Luther's masterful and concrete grasp of things became more
and more manifest, and that served much to fill the whole move
ment with glowing life and irresistible attraction. He succeeded
in transferring the religious problem, in all its essentials, to the
immediate personal life of the individual, there working it out in
its full scope in the sphere which had been usurped by the
Church, with its sacerdotal machinery and catalogues of good
works. The chief characteristic of the new life among the
people was freedom, so that Melanchthon could exclaim, "in the
end, Christianity is freedom." This freedom was not something
that came as a gift of nature, but from the favor and gift of God.
It was a liberty, not of the man in himself, but of the "Christian
man," a liberty under which we are no longer oppressed and com
pelled by legal enactments, but impelled by motives which induce
men to do good of their own accord. It was the kind of free
dom unto which a man attains when he passes out from the
minute and detailed requirements of the Levitical code into the
freedom of Paul's man in the Epistle to the Galatians. It was
a freedom from works — not as though works could in any sense
be dispensed with by free men in Christ, but in the sense that they

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 187
do not bring the gift of salvation — a freedom in which we are
not emancipated from works, but from the ascription of saving
value to works. Everything that in any way obscured the work
of Christ and weakened trust in the efficacy of grace alone, was
compelled to stand aside. Ceremonies of the Church were to be
regarded as subject to change and adaptability from time to time,
while to look upon them as essentials to salvation was to diminish
our dependence on the divine benignity expressed in the gifts of
God's grace. The spiritual was exalted above the sensuous in
religion, and in consequence the externalism of the ancient papal
hierarchy, which expressed religion in a vast structure outside
the soul, was shaken out of its usurped place of supremacy.
At the inauguration of the Reformation the times were full of
new forces, intellectual and moral, political, social and economic.
These forces were everywhere at work, tending to make religion
the birthright and possession of the common man as well as of a
special priest-caste among men to which the transmission of the
blessings of salvation had been entrusted. But what gave its
popularity to the movement was the strong appeal made by these
distinctively religious principles to the popular mind and heart.
These gave it its peculiar democratic tone and made of it a
mighty force of liberation and the dawn of the new day.
Mistakes have been indulged in regarding the popularity of
pre-Lutheran efforts at reform. We are sometimes reminded
of the fact that the medieval absoluteness of the papal claims had
been questioned and even assailed, both in its dogmatic teachings
and hierarchical claims, long before Luther was born. By one
of the philosophical historians we have been reminded that "they
who endeavor to trace all modern negations to the Reformation
ignore, or affect to ignore, the fact that in the ninth century
Scotus Erigena denied eternal punishment; that in the twelfth
century Abelard declared the teachings of the Greeks to be su
perior to the Old Testament ; that in the thirteenth century scores
of Catholics refused to believe in the miraculous conception of
the Virgin and the resurrection of Christ; that two hundred
years before the Reformation, when the Holy See was at the
height of its power, St. Thomas and Duns Scotus found them
selves obliged to prove with all the arts of logic the need of a
revelation and the credibility of Scripture." The great French
critic, Taine, writes much in harmony with what we have just

188 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
cited from Weber. "One hundred and thirty years before
Luther they said that the pope was not established by Christ, that
pilgrimages and image worship were akin to idolatry, that
external rites were of no importance, that priests ought not to
possess temporal wealth, and that the confessional has not power
of absolving from sin." Without giving endorsement to the
theological bias indicated by both, it may be said that these claims
of Taine and Weber are historical and true. Others before his
day had spoken words that were as true and brave as those
spoken by Luther. Others had refused, even for life itself, to
give up the truth which they were glad to believe and confess.
Others had from time to time made what has well been called the
"grand refusal," and had gone courageously and triumphantly to
the stake. But these were the advanced souls who confessed the
truth and protested against the abuses of the medieval Church.
In the troublous times that were leading up to the irrepressible
conflict of the sixteenth century there were those who stood up in
their own time and place, and, as the heralds of revolt, defied the
power and the terror, the prestige, the fascination and the
grandeur of the medieval Church. They were the advance her
alds of the great army that was then organizing to march under
the banner of freedom and light. The mystic, who was seeking
only the inward assurance of divine love, was uttering his testi
mony in the obscure places of the earth. We read of mothers
who were burned alive for teaching their little children the Lord's
prayer in their mother tongue ; of children who were compelled
with their own hand to light the fagot of their own father's
martrydom; of gentlewomen who refused to cease singing their
sweet hymns of patience and trust as they lay in the pit where
they were condemned to be burned alive.
There were those who helped forward the cause of reform by
demonstrating the difficulty of the regeneration of the papal
system from within. There were others who stimulated the
desire for the moral betterment of the clergy. There were others
still who fixed in the minds of the thousands the thought that
was destined by and by to bear much fruit in the early history of
the German Reformation, the thought that there was in a General
Council of the Church an authority superior to that of the pope,
and which might be invoked at any time if the exigencies in the
life of the Church were sufficiently urgent. There were brilliant

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 189
opponents of the papal claims. In the twelfth and thirteenth cen
turies Marsilius of Padua, one of the keenest sighted among the
antagonists of papal usurpation, anticipated in his contentions
much that was later embodied in the real Reformation — the uni
versal priesthood of believers, the sole authority of the Scrip
tures, the human origin of the papacy and the power of rulers to
control ecclesiastical appointments. In his writings this Italian
publicist and author of the Defensor Pacis, in his views of the
popes, of the people and of religious liberty, was a forerunner of
modern organized expressions of democracy in both Church and
state. He was sufficiently sound in his doctrinal and admin
istrative discussions as to have influenced Luther.
Arnold of Brescia, the preaching monk, the disciple of Abelard,
the opponent of St. Bernard in the doctrine of the Hildebrandine
polity, was undoubtedly put to death in the twelfth century for
criticising the tyranny of the Roman court. He employed his
eloquence against the papal theory of government, advocated the
return of the clergy to something of its primitive simplicity by
having each state confiscate their property and introduce the vol
untary method of support. He even advocated that the pope,
the honored but presumptuous occupant of the seat of St. Peter,
should be reduced to the same level. Arnold had kindled the
spirit of republicanism in Rome which served to drive Lucius,
another man of advanced views, from the Holy City, and made
of him a wanderer in towns and a refugee in castles, while he
was vainly expecting restoration at the hands of the Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa, who had been called "the Xerxes of the
Middle Ages." Arnold himself was banished by Pope Hadrian
IV and the nobles, while Rome, in punishment for giving even
a small measure of sympathy to his views, was placed under
the interdict. The papal religion triumphed speedily over liberty,
for Arnold was ordered into exile, while Frederick Barbarossa,
coming to Rome to be crowned, had the brave heretic seized,
secured his excommunication from the Church and at last had
him put to death by both hanging and burning.
It is also true that John Wiclif in England, one hundred and
thirty years before Luther, was expressing doubt about tran
substantiation. He had long been a student and professor at
Oxford, where he ranked as the ablest schoolman of his day.
Like a true patriot, he opposed papal encroachments in England,

190 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
and denied the rights of temporal rule, taxation and amassing of
property by the papacy, the prelates and the monks. The true
Church he declared to be composed of the invisible number of the
predestinate. In that true Church he affirmed the Scriptures to
be the fundamental law, while later he declared Christ to be the
only head of the Church, and that the pope, unless he be one of
the predestinate who rule in the spirit of the Gosepl, is the vicar
of Antichrist. In 1381 he startled his countrymen by declaring
the doctrine of transubstantiation to be an error to be condemned.
He further denied the infallibility of the Roman Church in mat
ters of faith, rejected the necessity of auricular confession, criti
cized the doctrine of purgatory, pilgrimages, worship of saints,
and veneration of relics as unscriptural, and maintained that the
Bible speaks of no other offices than priests and deacons as neces
sary for the Church. But though sympathized with by many in
positions of influence, the views of Wiclif did not gain any wide
acceptance or attain to any organized permanency. He quietly
passed to his eternal rest at Lutterworth in 1384, but the bigotry
of the papacy again displayed itself when, in 1415, the Council of
Constance declared him to be a stiff-necked heretic and placed
him under the ban of the Church. Not only was it decreed that
Wiclif 's books should be burned, but that the same judgment
should be visited on his bones. About a dozen years later the
impotent malice of the papacy found expression in the command
of Pope Martin V that the order of the council should be carried
out, when the reformer's bones were dug up and burned and the
ashes cast into the Swift, which flows through Lutterworth. This
was an amazing example of ecclesiastical stupidity, even for bad
times, but it became a symbol of final triumph :
"The Avon to the Severn runs,
The Severn to the sea;
And far as ocean throws her waves
On lands of chapels and of graves
Shall Wiclif's doctrine be."
In consequence of the Emperor Sigismund's infamy, and by
order of the Council of Constance, as a reward for the evangeli
cal character of his sermons, preached in the Bethlehem Chapel
in the city of Prague, in Bohemia, John Huss calmly heard his
sentence. Stripped of his priestly garments, and with a mitre of

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 191
paper on his head on which devils were painted, and bearing the
inscription, "A ringleader of heretics," he was burned at the stake
on the green slopes of the Lake of Constance, on July 6, 1415.
His books had already been burned at the gate of the town
church, and to add to the diabolism of the occasion the bad work
was consummated when the ashes of the martyr were carefully
collected and thrown into the Rhine.
The Dominican preacher, Jerome Savonarola, was a great
moral, political and religious reformer, but his love of liberty
brought upon him persecution and at the last the crown of
martyrdom. In 1483, the very year in which Martin Luther was
born, and nine years before the discovery of America, this strange
man, honest, eloquent in speech and gifted with an insight which
led to prophetic utterances, made his appearance in Florence,
and Lorenzo the Magnificent expressed his surprise that such an
eloquent and practical friar had come to town. The times were
evil, especially so in Florence, and the reformer soon had struggles
on every hand. The Church of San Marco was too small to ac
commodate the people who crowded in to hear the wonderful
preacher. In the history of the pulpit no preacher's voice has
been more commanding and no message more courageous. The
opposition, ever on the increase, now began to organize for ef
fective demonstration. Savonarola arraigned the iniquities of the
city and the rulers. The pope demanded his surrender and
threatened to interdict the city. The brave preacher was advised
to be more discreet and not to excite the people.
In reply to the advice he said, "I attack only crime and in
justice, and the earliest preachers did nothing less." Surmising
who had sent those giving the advice he said further, "Go tell
Lorenzo that he would do well to repent, for God will call him
to judgment. Tell him that I am a stranger and he is a citizen ;
but I shall remain and he shall go." In 1492, when Lorenzo was
dying at his country home, after receiving the sacrament he
sent for the reformer. It is said that the friar abjured him to
rely on the mercy of God for his salvation and to restore all un
just gains. To this the dying man assented, when the bold
preacher said, "and now, one thing more; give back to Florence
her liberty." Lorenzo silently turned his face to the wall, when
Savonarola left him. The incident shows the fundamental dif
ferences between men.

192 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Jerome held advanced views on the matter of papal supremacy
and infallibility and the seven sacraments. Still he did not re
nounce mariolatry, the mass and other unscriptural papal doc
trines. He still adhered to the Romish Church. In recent years
he has been canonized, and thus accorded a place in the list of
approved and duly qualified saints. He was an Augustinian who
believed strongly in the Pauline theology. Of faith he spoke
much in the terms of Luther. "Faith," said he, "alone justifies;
that is, makes righteous in the sight of God, without the works
of the law." While in prison he wrote a commentary on the
fifty-first Psalm, which Luther published in 1514 with words of
praise. There followed in quick succession the threatened interdict,
the mob, the riot, the false charges (among these being the glor
ious one that he taught justification by faith), the tortures and the
condemnation, without a fair hearing, at the hands of the bitterest
enemies. Before the Signoria in Florence, for lashing the sins
of the Roman hierarchy and arraigning the wickedness of an
apostate city, Savonarola was hanged on a gallows, his body
burned and the ashes thrown into the Arno. He was only forty-
six, but he had done the. work of many more years and had suf
fered the woes of a generation. His mighty voice had been
stilled, but the truths he had so bravely affirmed, like the current
of the river into which his ashes had been cast, flowed on into
the mighty ocean of the swiftly oncoming historic events.
But these men were in no wide sense successful in their re
formatory movements. It is a mistake to look upon them in any
considerable degree as popular idols among even the people, not
to say anything of the bigoted and brutal hostility of the ruling
classes. Although the papacy was sinking under the weight of
its own unscriptural but mighty claims, and had become a
source of countless abuses and even a cause of schism, there was
as yet no popular uprising to support the claims of the valiant
pre-reformation reformers. True it is that the field of the new
age was alive with growths, and that the nations of Europe were
astir with new enterprises, and becoming more and more dom
inated by new forces. The people of all ranks and classes were
in fear, or in hope, of great and impending changes, but the prin
ciples of a perfect reformation, as to their developments and
proper co-ordination, were reserved for a later day, when the

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 193
people should be prepared to accord them a wider acceptance and
popularity. It was well said by a Dutch historian two hundred
years ago, in writing of the gradual progress of reform, even near
to the close of the medieval period : "That the wonderful work
of reformation was small and of very little account, apparently,
in its beginnings, and yet it hath been advanced with wonderful
progress, will, I believe, be denied with none that have with at
tention and due consideration read the history of its first rise,
since God, the beginner and author of this glorious work, pro
ceeding by steps and degrees, used therein such singular wisdom
and prudence that, every circumstance duly considered, instead of
censuring any part thereof, we shall be obliged to cry out, 'Thou, O
Lord, knowest the right times and seasons to open the eyes of the
people and to make them capable of Thy truth.' " The successive
reforms undertaken by such men as Peter Waldo, John of Wesel,
John Wessel, John Wiclif, John Huss, Jerome of Prague and
others, were often partial, and, apparently, ephemeral and local,
and were in their scope by no means perfect or free from many
of the errors of the old system. But to the discerning man it is
apparent that their local and ephemeral character was more in
appearance than in reality. Although the chief promoters of
these reforms, from time to time, perished, and often without
seeing "the travail of their souls," the strong hand of authority
covering their names with reproach ; although for a time the voice
of their testimony seemed to have been stifled, such was not the
end of it, for it lived on, and was like the "bread cast upon the
waters," which was "found after many days," to become the
strength and power of those who came after to "fight the good
fight of faith," and to succeed in a larger way in the reaffirma
tion and re-establishment of "the faith once for all delivered to
the saints." The proclamation of the truth by such men did not
fall to the ground. It had in it an irrepressible influence, and be
came, in a considerable sense, a platform for future reformers to
stand upon in the days when they found the hearts of increasing
numbers prepared to rally to the standard of truth that seemed
for a time to be trodden under foot.
But we are in far greater danger of exaggerating the popular
ity of pre-Lutheran reforms and reformers than we are of under
rating them. One brave man in Germany, England, Bohemia,
France, or in Rome itself, stood out for spiritual freedom, and

194 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
a few only followed him. A little reforming sect would spring
up, but it was yet easy for some usurping king or papal lord to
stamp it out with a small company of merciless dragoons, or to
drive it into mountain fastnesses with sword and fire. Forces of
various orders were easily at command that could speedily make
it appear that men, like these we have cited, had "labored in vain
and wrought no deliverance in the earth." The people were not
for Wiclif, Huss and Savonarola, but they were with Luther,
whose theses came one hundred and two years after the burning
of Huss, twenty years after the martyrdom of Savonarola and one
hundred and thirty-three years after the death of Wiclif. The
appeal of the principles we have named above became irresistible.
In spite of the prohibition of unauthorized printing by the edict
of Worms in 1521, Germany was flooded with books, pamphlets,
and leaflets insisting upon freedom and popularizing the conten
tions of the Reformer, who had come, not in advance of his age,
but in the "fulness of time" to create an age. A public opinion
was created which prevented the execution of papal bans and
edicts. The campaign, started with the ninety-five theses in 1517,
had so aroused the popular interest that within four years it had
become irresistible. The elder Dr. Schaff declares that "Luther
was by far the most original, fertile and effective controversialist
and pamphleteer of his age. He commanded the resources of
genius, learning, courage, eloquence, wit, humor, irony and ridi
cule, and had, notwithstanding his many physical infirmities, an
astounding power of work. He could express the deepest
thoughts in the clearest and strongest language, and had an
abundant supply of juicy and forcible epithets. His very oppo
nents had to imitate his German speech if they wished to reach
the masses and hit the nail on the head."
But notwithstanding the ability and fertility of Luther, and this
resourcefulness in the use of learning, wit, humor and sarcasm,
his work would have failed, even in his day, had it not been for
the popular estimate placed by the masses upon the principles for
which he was standing fast. The same class of common people
who jeered at John Huss when he was enveloped in sheets of
flame at Constance, in July, 1415, defied the emperor and the
pope, and were clamoring for approval for Luther at Worms in
1521. The great mass of people in 1415 thought that Huss was
getting what he deserved, but in 1521 they were determined that

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 195
Luther should be both heard and protected. There were but few
to sympathize with Savonarola when he ascended the scaffold at
Florence in 1498, but in 1521, when the word had spread that
harm had likely come to Luther from the pope's men when on
his way from Worms to Wittenberg, there was a tidal wave of
indignation and resentment that swept over the land from the
shores of the Baltic to the Swiss Lakes.
Before the man whose word should kindle the land into a
flame could speak, the forces which were at work to overthrow
the absolute tyranny of the Middle Ages had to gain popularity,
not with single isolated reformers — brave, courageous and valiant
in their day and place — not only in little sects and brotherhoods,
but in large circles of society. There came trial, enmity and per
secution, but more and more leaders and people ranged them
selves on Luther's side, and in Germany and other lands the
movement for freedom in thought, worship and life swept on
apace. Not only in the primary way of popularizing in literary
form certain great principles and co-ordinating them into a con
sistent theological system, was Luther the leader of the Reforma
tion; but also by translating the Bible from the original text, by
urging popular education, by introducing popular church song
among the people and catechetical instruction among the chil
dren, and by advocating other large matters which we associate
with the movement, was he in the forefront in giving a wide
popularity and acceptance to truly democratic principles in both
religious and civic life and organization. In the good fight of
that great day he brought in the era of not only freedom from the
pope, but also freedom from the tyranny of the state. The pop
ularity of these principles serves, in a large measure, to account
for their rapid spread when the time was fully come. Starting
at Wittenberg, in Germany, the movement spread to Switzerland.
It extended to Holland and crossed over to England and Scotland.
The new views completely replaced the old in Denmark, Sweden
and Norway. In Hungary it divided the population. In France
it promised well for a time, but met with royal disfavor, and in
bloody persecutions was almost blotted out. In Spain and Italy it
encountered the brutalities of the inquisition and was soon
crushed. This extensive spread of the uprising shows, not only
how widely the religious dissatisfaction prevailed, but also the
strong hold the new views had obtained among the people. The

196 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
reformers had no thought of constituting a new church. Their
purpose was to bring the Church, already more than amply
organized, back to the charter of the New Testament, and plant
it once more securely upon the foundation of the apostles and
prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone.
The reformers no more created truth than Columbus created the
American continent. What they sought was to open up once
more to their countrymen the Bible and make known what they
found therein. To Luther it was given to be the leader in
this new movement and to state its leading biblical principles.
This he did with an honesty and success rarely equaled in the
annals of human leadership, giving to his people, according to the
Catholic historian, Dollinger, what no other man ever gave to a
people — the Bible, the catechism and the hymn book. For death
there is but one remedy, and that is life. When once death has
come and life has gone, nature knows nothing of its return.
Life never comes back again to the house it has deserted. But
above nature there is a power of God that can give life. There
is One who has said that "in the time that now is the dead shall
hear the voice of the Son of man, and they that hear shall live."
It was this life to which the great Reformer led men back in his
day that remade the world. It was this that made him victorious
in the good fight for Protestantism, which was, as later history
has abundantly demonstrated, the fight for truth, for freedom and
for righteousness. IV
The ferment which had been going on in men's minds was cer
tain to lead to an effort at emancipation, though no one could
exactly forecast when it might burst forth or what character it
might assume. When Luther, asserting certain great and living
principles, led men back to the rich fields of truth revealed in the
New Testament, Latin Christianity found itself involved in a
death struggle, in which the great piece of ecclesiastical ma
chinery, which had been so patiently built up upon a basis both
unscriptural and unhistorical and through centuries of time, was
at last threatened with destruction. The cry for renewal of the '
Church's life, and the continued assaults upon the abuses which
had for so long a time been tolerated, had done much to alter the

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 197
whole situation, not only outside but inside the Church. The
laxity which had been tolerated in the tenth century, for example,
was no longer to be regarded with allowance even in Rome itself,
and the utterances of the orthodox were to be judged by stand
ards somewhat in advance of those hitherto in use. Freedom,
and even license, of speech had been allowed when it was once
shown that the heresies of the thirteenth century had ceased to
be dangerous. There had been reformers in the Church who
had expressed their indignation at its corruptions in safety, while
the big and powerful worldly organism called the Church only
smiled with amused contempt. But the time came with Luther
when that attitude could no longer be tolerated. If such a time
was to pass never to return, and the Church, which was now
battling for its existence with half of Europe threatening revolt,
be forced to abandon its good-natured indifference toward heresies
it could, if necessary, easily suppress, then the minds of men
must be led back to see what the true Church of Christ really is.
They must be led to contemplate it once more as a divine ideal
as contrasted with a vast human organization, which one of the
dogmaticians of the Romish Church declared to be "as tangible as
the Republic of Venice." If there was to be any permanent re
form, someone must come who would assail the supremacy of
the papal ecclesiastical monarchy over the Western Church and
overthrow its pretentious and arrogant claims. It early became
one of the features of Luther's work to contend so vigorously an4
successfully against the extravagant claims of the medieval
hierarchy that, as a consequence, men once more might be
brought into direct and personal relation to God. He overturned
old and venerable falsehoods in order that he might establish the
eternal verities of the Word of God. The Church of Rome had
long ignored the royal priesthood of believers, and had introduced
the law as a schoolmaster expressing itself in an elaborate
ecclesiastical organization. But the leaven of the Gosepl as the
religion of God's pardoning love, as of God's working, and not
merely of man's winning, continued among men and by and
by began to work effectively. Medieval Catholicism had come to
be an externally guaranteed knowledge of God and salvation. It
had developed a carefully articulated system necessary for an
externally conferred salvation. Intellectually the Church had
been transformed. From being a congregation of the saints, a

198 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
brotherhood of good men, who are one because of a faith which
is also a life in Christ, the Church had become a school in which
any man may be guaranteed against error in doctrine and assured
of salvation by placing himself absolutely into the care of the
visible Church and implicitly obeying its requirements. "Cathol
icism," says Professor Sohm, "arises from the desire of the
natural man to make religion external. It is the natural religion
of the natural man. But the natural man is precisely the problem
of every redeeming idea and influence which has ever entered
the world. Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, all higher religions, as
Harnack says, have passed through a similar stage, setting up a
legally fixed tradition as a divine ecclesiastical order. Even
orthodox Protestantism has not escaped." "Not priests impose
it on guileless laity, but the laity create the authoritative priests
and the ecclesiastical Church order." To conform the Church
to this conception in the Middle Ages it had been transubstan
tiated into a legalistic, worldly kingdom, with the angry God of
the Law on the throne and Christ transformed into a stern and
unrelenting judge. The official Church was exalted above the
Bible, and the pope, the alleged head of the Church, was univer
sally feared as the lord and master whom all Christians must
believe and obey. The priest became the supernaturally equipped
functionary, set apart by God, and wielding the power of Christ.
who had transferred His authority to him. The bishop had been
clothed by divine law with the right to the unlimited and un
qualified obedience of the faithful, while the state could only
claim a limited and qualified allegiance of the citizen. Should
the two powers at any time come into conflict, according to the
claim of the carefully elaborated ecclestiastical conception of
dominion, divine law, of course, must over-ride human law, the
Church as the divine institution necessarily becoming the arbiter
whose authority the state is bound to respect in its particular
sphere. The ancient and once powerful dominion of Rome had passed
away. During the period of its dissolution the Church had grown
stronger as the state had grown weaker. Rome perished, but
Christianity had survived the wreck of the empire. In the
break-up of the old order the Church alone lived. It had sub
dued and then absorbed the barbarian hordes that swept down
from the north and the east, and so became the center around

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 199
which the new order was to be crystalized. The Church that
organized the new society became, by right, the dominating force,
and so remained for centuries. But it must be confessed that,
in spite of all its unscriptural claims and departure from the law
of righteousness for long periods of its history, being admin
istered mostly by men who did err when they most claimed to
be above error, the Latin Church preceding the Reformation
served Europe well in many aspects of those troublous times.
Its supremacy was the supremacy of law, if it was not always the
law of God. Its idea of law was a religious idea. It was born
of the belief that God must have an order, and that this idea
must be revealed and realized in the visible Church, which was the
society that was to express the divine will.
There is a form of religious romanticism that has painted for
us a medieval period in the history of the Church full of seraphic
sweetness and light, without even the appearance of a cloud. But
it is an entirely inadequate and prejudiced portrayal. There is
the dark side of the history of the Church in this period that has
been presented in terrible distinctness alike by saints and sinners,
by doctors of the Church of Rome and heresiarchs who antag
onized Rome. Medieval iniquities were upon the same scale as
medieval virtues, and there was in all that was contemporary a
blending of light with much darkness, and of darkening supersti
tion with a real saintliness in character.
But in all fairness we are not to judge that age by the standards
of our own. There were forces at work in that time that were
debasing and depressing, but there were other forces that were
uplifting and silently at work in anticipation of a better age
that was ahead, when a man should come to be the leader whose
feet were shod with iron and brass, and who was to prove
himself, with vast significance for these later times, as mightier
than the wisdom of medieval theology and wiser than the rulers
of the medieval Church. "It would be an ungracious and a fool
ish thing," says Prof. Schaff, "for this generation, the heir of
twice as many centuries of Christian schooling as were the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to boast as though Christian
charity and morality and devotion to high aims had waited until
now to manifest themselves." Resting, as it did, upon the
morality of self-renunciation, the social state of that period was
superior to the preceding time in all that makes up civilization in

200 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the higher sense of that word. That age, is indeed, disgraced by
the conspicuous badness of some of the alleged successors of St.
Peter, but that badness is relieved by the exemplary virtue of
some others. There were then pontifical scoundrels who dis
graced manhood as well as the papal tiara, emblematic of the
unscriptural claim to temporal, spiritual and purgatorial author
ity, but there were others who were vastly better than their times
and a contradiction of their unwarranted claims. Against a
Stephen VII, guilty of the brutal indecency of dragging the body
of his dead predecessor through the streets, might be set Leo VII,
a man holy in life and humble in spirit ; against John XII, accused
publicly of homicide, perjury, sacrilege and incest, of drinking
wine in honor of the devil, and of invoking, in his pontifical
gambling, the aid of Jupiter, Venus and other pagan gods and
goddesses, may be set John X, a good man, zealous for the restor
ation of discipline in the Church and the deliverance of his sub
jects from the Saracen invader. If it was the time of John
XXIII, who had at one time been a pirate on the high seas, and
who never was reformed from the scandalous profanity of his
piratical days, and who was deposed by the Council of Constance
— the one creditable thing to be set down to the credit of that
council — it was likewise the time of the virtuous and learned
Sylvester II, who was a fitting successor of the learned, virtuous
and severe Gregory V.
In attempting to estimate the permanent worth of the contribu
tion made by this age to future civilization and progress there has
frequently been error and exaggeration, into which it has been
abundantly easy to fall. There is the error and exaggeration,
on the one side, of unduly depreciating that age of thought and
action mingled with superstition, an error to which some Prot
estant writers have been most addicted. On the other hand, we
encounter the error and exaggeration of magnifying that age
overmuch and extolling it as the "age of faith," with the tacit
implication that all which has come after has been an age of
unbelief — an error into which papal apologists and writers almost
uniformly fall. There is much to explain and account for both
excesses. With all of the unwarranted claims made by and for the
Church, which so much needed to be led back or driven back to
New Testament ideals, it is a grave mistake to regard this period

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 201
under consideration as a time of depressing stagnation only, if
not of positive retrogression. It was a period in the history of
the human race filled with a long series of movements, changes
and developments in the state of European society which were
destined to have an abiding influence on the centuries to follow.
The power of the emperor and the power of the priests — these
two keynotes sum up the history of the ancient world from
Constantine to the Reformation. Notwithstanding the fact that
in this period there was so much that was selfish, venal, earthly
and sensual ; in spite of the abuses that had been accumulating
through centuries and culminating in the papacy from Sixtus IV
to Leo X, other forces were at work which have entered largely
into the life of the most enlightened and progressive peoples of
our day. Questions raised by the intellectual refinements of
scholasticism, and others about fastings and ceremonialism, ap
peared to the popular mind to be immeasurably more important
than what we should now call the fundamental principles of right
and wrong. But in the midst of all the triviality and superstition
there can be no question that in most respects the religious
agencies were operating for good. There were bishops who were
worldly, wicked and apostate, but there were others who were
sincerely striving to be true shepherds of the flock of Christ.
There were unworthy cardinals, abbots and priests, but all did
not fall before the temptations offered by the sinecures and ben
efices of the Church. A rising spirit of freedom was constantly
manifesting itself in one way or another. Let it be remembered
that it was Duns Scotus, known as the "subtle doctor," a scho
lastic of the thirteenth century, who anticipated the inductive
method of Bacon and Newton, thus forming a communicating
link between the schools of ancient and modern philosophy. For
administrative purposes, the ideal of the Middle Ages was the
union of the Church and the state. But in the twelfth century
men like Andius and Arnold of Brescia taught, and with much
acceptance, that the Church was suffering from its union with
the state. True it is that there were disintegrating forces at
work, but there were other forces that were highly constructive,
and there was passing over the minds of men one of those changes
which we can neither define nor wholly account for. There were
obscuring shadows a-plenty, but there were also anticipations of
the dawn of that new day in the splendor of which we live.

202 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
To make effective the forces of righteousness that had not be
come entirely extinct during the Middle Ages what was re
quired was not so much a change of constitution, but an inspiring
co-ordination and consolidation of those principles which were
rooted deeply in the religious life of the people, and which had
been generated always by the gospel of salvation through grace.
A work was needed which neither princes nor kings, bishops
nor popes, could accomplish, but God alone, working through
His Word and some man of faith and leadership. A work of
both restoration and readjustment was the one commanding need
at the close of the medieval period. That work could be done
only and effectively when the individual soul would be awakened
by the voice of the truth as taught by Jesus and Paul, and which,
once more finding entrance, could purify the Christian Church
and society. That truth which had proven itself to be more
powerful than Teutonic or Slavic barbarisms — which neither
imperialism, barbarism nor ecclesiastical corruption could subdue
or expel — proved itself once more to possess stupendous forces,
spiritual and civic, which were capable of organizing great states,
producing literature, of fashioning and maintaining great re
ligious establishments, and of putting certain impulses into so
ciety whose influences are today unspent.
But giving all due credit to the Church of that period, and
the contribution it made to the civilization of the times, it had
gone astray from the ways of the Lord, and needed to be brought
back from its perversions and usurpations and worldly ideals, and
once more planted on the basis where it had been founded by its
Head and His apostles. It had to be dethroned as a vast political
machine, such as it had come to be, and reinstated as the Bride
of Christ, constituted of all who, in all places and dominions,
in sincerity and truth believe in Christ and trust to His merits
and grace for salvation.
The Church is an institution for the salvation of souls. It
had from the beginning been entrusted by its Lord and Head with
the administration of the means of grace. But it had, during the
medieval period, taken on an elaborate legal system. In conse
quence of the intermixture and interchange of the Old and New
Testament dispensations, together with the introduction into the
Church of elements of heathenism, alien and uncongenial features
were early introduced into its life. Later still, in the sympathetic

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 203
and reciprocal relations that were established between Christian
ity and the imperial throne, and the introduction of masses of
untutored and unregenerate barbarians into the Church, and by
means of methods that were purely external, coercive and alien
to all true methods of Christian propagandism, other evils were
admitted. In consequence of the introduction of such extra-
scriptural elements into the life of the Christian community there
arose a Church over which the spirit of the Gospel did not exert
exclusive control, and in which the principles of the earthly
kingdom were accorded a dominion not warranted in the un
mistakable teachings of the New Testament. Men came to look
upon the minister of religion as a new representation of the re
vived and reinstated Levitical priesthood. Its representatives
were looked upon as endowed with a peculiar "character," im
parted at the administration of the sacrament of ordination, that
had associated with it miraculous powers and judicial authority
that gave this priest caste power not only over the souls of men
but over their bodies as well. This power and authority that
these men were affirmed to possess was held to have been trans
mitted through a professed "apostolical succession" of bishops,
whose claims had no kind of foundation in the Scriptures or the
organization of the early Church, and which had, in the course
of the history of the Church, been subjected to a long series of
jolting contradictions, extending from the time of Leo "the
Great" to that of Leo X. These bishops possessed even greater
authority than the ordinary priests over whom they held exten
sive powers of jurisdiction, while yet above them there were
placed one grade of the hierarchical extension after another, until
it reached its culmination in the primacy of the pope, who was
claimed to be the official successor of St. Peter, to whom there
had been attributed a supposed particular distinction and author
ity in the company of the first apostles of the Lord, who reigned
as the vicar of Christ, the lord over kings and the vicegerent of
heaven. He was the real head of the "body of Christ." having,
in its departure from the plain teaching of the New Testament,
been elevated to that totally unwarranted distinction by the
apostate Church.
From top to bottom the Church was a carefully constructed
and well-regulated machine, provided with an elaborate system
of ecclesiastical courts that were governed by an exact legal code,

204 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the canon law, and whose decrees it often became the business of
the state, usually in alliance with or subjection to the Church,
to enforce.
Salvation through faith in Christ alone was supplanted by the
righteousness of ecclesiastically imposed good works. A man's
relation to Christ was determined by his relation and obedience
to the visible Church. The legalism of the Old Testament once
more came to the front to supplant that freedom from the law
and liberty in Christ for which Paul contended in the conflict of
opinions that soon emerged in the history of the early Church.
The beautiful and grace-communicating sacrament of the supper
instituted by our Lord gave place, in conformity to the decrees of
the Church councils (made up in some instances, for the most
part, of bad men), to the mass, looked upon as a continually re
peated offering up of the sacrifice of Christ, our one and all-
sufficient High Priest, together with the shocking crudities of
transubstantiation. The gospel of grace was transformed into
that heresy, so agreeable to the natural man, of salvation by
means of what man can do himself, by that which will throw him
into the forefront. The Church, by law, had changed the Pauline
conception of freedom in Christ into a system of external pre
cepts. That the papacy had performed some notable service in
times past we are not disposed to deny, but in the main its in
fluence has been to corrupt and pervert for its own ends the faith
once for all delivered to the saints. It has changed the Church
from a spiritual organism of faith, uniting all true believers in
Jesus Christ, into a worldly organization, with a man for its
visible head and with all the marks and insignia of the kingdoms
of this world. It came to be regarded, as an organization, as
essential to Christianity, the visible Church and the kingdom of
God being looked upon as identical. The works of the Pseudo
Dionysius, the Areopagite, with their supposed revelation of the
heavenly hierarchy, after which the earthly hierarchy was pre
sumably modeled, succeeded in imposing on the minds of the
credulous the belief that the Church as an institution, in the form
in which it then existed and now exists, was the divinely instituted
ark of safety, outside of which there was no salvation. In the
end, accordingly, Christianity became a mere form of govern
ment, and everything in it and of it must be interpreted from
that point of view. The monastic vow of obedience was char-

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 205
acteristic of the entire system, and from that fact the whole
complex arrangement of ascetical practices got its particular kind
of value. The penitential system of the Church, too, was reduced
to a mere matter of administration. The ritual was observed as an
"office" of the Church, and all of its features had official validity
when observed with the end of doing what the Church requires.
Official authority was necessary to give validity to any act of
worship. The virtues and graces which appear in the lives of
men issue also from the administrative sacramental acts of the
Church. Even mental acts of the Church were viewed, not so
much as the utterances of that which is the truth and for truth's
sake, but as the authoritative enactments of the Church, to which
the intellect must humbly bow in unquestioning submission. In
fact, it was the Church which exercised authority not only over
the natural life of men, but also continued its jurisdiction and
authority even beyond the frontiers of this present life into the
world to come, and terminating only at the last judgment.
The priesthood had become the active Church and the laity but
passive recipients. For a period of one thousand years, extending
from 200 A. D. to 1200 A. D., the people had been gradually dis
possessed of their privileges and rights. They had, in conse
quence of the usurpation of the priesthood, been gradually pre
vented from doing their proper duty and service as members of
the Church. Participation in the administration of discipline had
been entirely removed from their hands. Even Pope Leo the
Great, conscientious and thorough-going autocrat as he was, had
once declared that "he who is to preside over all should be
elected by all." But this permission was withdrawn, though in
some cases as late as the eleventh century laymen continued to
cast their votes in the election of bishops. At times this voting
was done in an irregular and even violent manner. An instance
of this may be found in the case of Ambrose, the Governor of
Milan, who was only an unbaptized layman in the Church, and
who, while trying to quell a tumult which had arisen in the con
gregation over the election of a bishop, was himself chosen for
the position by a loud and tumultuous acclamation of the people.
Another instance may be found in the case of the great Augustine,
who, while quietly sitting as a visitor in the church at Hippo, in
the midst of a sermon by Valerius, the pastor, was eagerly called
upon by the congregation then and there to become the assistant

206 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
pastor, and, in the face of his protestations and tears, was con
strained to accept the office. But even these outbursts of popular
expression of democracy in the Church afforded the ecclesiastics
of the day something of a reason, and more of a pretext, for
taking all such privileges out of the hands of the people. All
such rights were afterwards universally denied them, and, the
priesthood having become the active Church, they were reduced
to subjects and mere passive recipients.
The idea of organized Christianity as a Church to be governed
by priests under the control and direction of the pope, the chief
of all priests, was completed and perpetuated in world-wide enter
prise by the Church of Rome.
In addition, that Church had developed the doctrine about pains
and penalties of the future life into a carefully elaborated system
of moral and political terrorism and revenue, so that the financial
side of the dogma of purgatory overshadowed all else. Not
Peter, nor Paul, nor David, nor Abraham, nor even Jehu, the son
of Nimshi. to say nothing of the Lord and Head of the Church,
could have been conceived of as having given sanction to a theory
of salvation as mercenary as that taught by the Church, and which
aroused the indignant revolt of Luther when it was coarsely pro
pounded by Tetzel. Now, if there was to be any hope of reform,
it was not only expedient but necessary that in the fulness of
time this old temple of ecclesiasticism, unchristian and worldly in
type and organization, should be destroyed, that men might no
longer feel, when far away from some sacred mountain or city or
shrine, that they were in consequence away from God. When
Luther came upon the stage it was necessary that a humanly insti
tuted priesthood should be stripped of its sanctity and unwar
ranted claims, so that every one of God's children once again
might rejoice in the freedom and blessedness of immediate access
into the presence of God the Father, solely upon the basis of the
atoning work of the world's Redeemer and the sufficiency of His
priestly intercession.
This medieval Church, against the pretensions and abuses of
which the reformers revolted and contended, presented these three
main conceptions : That of the papal monarchy, that of the sacer
dotal system and that oi the inquisition. The papacy insisted
that it must be regarded as the final arbiter in all things human.
By the famous bull of Pope Boniface VIII, issued in 1302, the

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 207
pope has authority over two swords, the one religious and the
other secular, and it is declared to be "altogether necessary for
salvation that every human being be subject to the Roman pon
tiff," a somewhat queer and contradictory assertion, it must be
confessed, in view of the oft-repeated words of the only Lord
and Head of the Church, that "he that believeth in Me hath
everlasting life." And this large claim made by Boniface, in his
famous bull, known as unam sanctum, was reaffirmed by Leo X,
in the sixteenth century, and that only six months before the
nailing up of Luther's theses. The sacramental system, too, as
we have seen, placed the priest at the gate of heaven and vested
him with authority to open or close. Without his sacerdotal
mediation no man could enter therein. The sacraments which
he dispensed work magically, containing and conferring salva
tion by a virtue inherent in themselves, and without the applica
tion of which there is no grace or salvation. By means of the
methods of the inquistion the Church took away the right of
private judgment in matters of religion, making lawful the ex
communication and death of all who dissent from the dogmas of
the Church, who decline to retract and submissively return from
their attitude of profane insult and rebellion.
Before there could be any permanent reform in the Church
these three conceptions of the papal Church must be overthrown.
They were overthrown by the reformers, who opposed to them
the appeal to the open Bible and its central teaching, that justifi
cation is by faith alone, that every man has a right to go imme
diately to the throne of grace to find mercy and obtain help in
every time of need, and that to every man must be accorded the
privilege of untrammeled thinking in the sphere of religion. The
new Church had to be led back from the apostasies of the old
and placed upon the basis of restored principles drawn entirely
from the Scriptures. "The two governments, spiritual and tem
poral, are not to be thrown together and mingled one with
another," as said the Augsburg Confession. To the Church be
longs spiritual authority, and spiritual authority alone; to the
state temporal authority, and temporal authority alone. The
Catholic distinction between bishops and pastors or ordinary
ministers had arisen by human ordinance only. Hence neither
Peter, nor any other minister o>f the Word, may ascribe unto
himself any authority or supremacy over the churches, for St.

208 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Paul teaches that the Church is more than the ministers, and
that the keys, i. e., the spiritual authority, is not given unto one
man alone but to the whole Church. By the old view, religion
had been identified with the papal system, and the often im
moral will of the Church had been enforced on men and states as
the will of God. But under the new view no polity was able to
command conscience or coerce reason. Religion could not be
come an organized political unity without ceasing to be religious.
These new principles of the Church soon became victorious
principles. They soon demonstrated their capacity as construc
tive forces creating conditions best fitted to make religion a
living moral power in the state, and to force the state to stand
in its proper relation to religion, and showing that the surest note
of the Christian Church is that it shall be working in Christ's way
for Christ's ends. V
Because of the fundamental importance of one of the prin
ciples of all true Protestantism, that known as the universal
priesthood of believers, it is fitting that the character and im
portance of that doctrine be the subject of further remark.
With justification by faith and the sole authority of the Scrip
tures, the two great principles of the Lutheran movement, there is
always to be associated this other doctrine that marks the an
tithesis of Lutheranism and Romanism. Men soon began to ask
the question whether the Church was only a sort of ecclesiastical
judicatory or a real communion of the saints ; whether the Church
created the ministry or the ministry the Church; whether the
benefits of the Gospel are tied up to a priestly order and the
blessings that order claims to control, or whether it is bound to
the Word of God. It was one of the features of Luther's work
that he led in the restoration of that which had long been for
gotten and denied by the Church of Rome, the indefeasible right
of personality in religion, popularly known as the universal priest
hood of believers — the social principle of the Reformation in con
trast with the religiously privileged rank of the priesthood. This
hierarchical and unscriptural claim must be rejected. Recog
nition and respect of the individual is one of the marks of a true
Christianity. By precept and example our Lord restored the
worth and place of the common man. The papal policy in the

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 209
Middle Ages blotted out all individuality, making of men mere
automatons, destroying individual conscience and substituting
the control and direction of the priest, through the tyranny of the
private confessional. The business of every abject subject in
the ecclesiastical dominion was to loyally obey the laws and en
actments of the pope, to believingly accept the doctrines approved
at Rome and fortified by a presumptuous claim for infallibility.
The medieval conception of the Church was always and every
where sacerdotal. In its idea the relations of the individual to
God was always subordinated to his relation to the priest, as
in the older Judaistic conception of religion. In the Romish
hierarchy the pope occupied the place and bore the name of the
"sovereign pontiff," the "pontifix maximus," which, in the older
time under Augustus, belonged to the official head of the Roman
religion. Then, as now, the ministers of religion formed a
hierarchy and a caste endowed with religious privileges which
elevated them above the people. The regularity of the priesthood
even was necessary to the efficacy of the administration of the
functions and blessings of religion.
The Roman Catholic system even to this day is the rule of
society by a sacerdotal class, which is one of the most pronounced
characteristics of the system. The guidance of the conscience
of individuals and of the policy of nations, so far as their policy
may be regarded as touching the province of morals and re
ligion, is relegated to a body of priests, or, according to the de
crees of the Vatican Council of 1870, to the head, who is the
pope. To this body of ecclesiastics there has been committed
the right to decide upon questions of the highest moment. It is
the rule of a limited ecclesiastical aristocracy, which admits to its
ranks none whom it chooses to exclude, and which assumes the
exalted prerogative of pronouncing upon questions of truth and
duty, and of conveying or withholding the blessings of salvation.
Romanism is to this day a corporate conception of the Christian
religion. It is a system in which man approaches God very
much the same way as the pagan approached the gods — simply
as a member of the state.
It was one of the principles of Protestantism to deny this
prerogative. It broke down the wall of separation between priest
and layman. It accorded to the laity the full right to determine
for themselves those questions over which the clergy had claimed

210 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
an exclusive jurisdiction, and once more declared, with the sov
ereign voice of truth, that the heavenly good offered in the
Gospel is accessible to the humblest soul without the intervention
of any mediatorial priesthood. It was the Reformation that led
them once more into the right ways of the Lord in this emancipa
tion of the laity from clerical rule. The movement led men
back to the reassertion of the spiritual priesthood of all believers ;
to an insistence that no mediating priesthood besides that of the
one all-sufficient High Priest, Jesus Christ, could longer be tol
erated ; that no human mediator could be allowed to stand between
the soul and God, and that no individual believer in the Gospel
or son of the Church could shift his responsibility of confessing
and defending the truth to the most elaborately constituted hier
archical corporation and perversion of the true doctrine of the
Church, as that doctrine is properly defined in the New Testa
ment and later stated as "the congregation of the saints in which
the Gospel is properly taught and the sacraments rightly admin
istered." The question was whether every Christian man has an
individual responsibility to God and all equal rights in the com
munion of saints, or whether they were to submit to the bondage
of a worldly legalism expressed in papal traditions and controlled
by medieval canon law. The reformers broke through the
artificial restrictions of the canon law and once more confessed
the truth that "for the true unity of the Church it is enough to
agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administra
tion of the sacraments," and showed that the only true apostolic
succession, that of the faith once for all delivered unto the saints,
was the important thing to maintain, while the unscriptural relic
of a merely mechanical suggestion had to go. Faith makes Chris
tians, and Christians make the Church. In contrast with the
Roman idea that the Church was an institution to save souls,
Luther set forth the idea that it was an assembly of believing
Christians — that it was not so much an institution as an associa
tion. His hammer not only broke the chain that bound the
Bible to the convent altar, but also that which bound the
laity in a bondage enforced by priests and other ecclesiastical
chieftains. The work of Luther has been criticized by the representatives
of Anglican tractarianism as a "deformation" — a movement
which sent the evangelical Church in Germany adrift from its

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 211
moorings of historical continuity with the past. But such super
ficial critics are blind to the fact that the Reformation of the
Church in Europe in the sixteenth century was a necessary move
ment towards a fresher and fuller realization of personal relation
ship with God as the birthright of every Christian soul. Access
to God had been choked rather than assisted by the very chan
nels through which it had been designed that communion with
God should be maintained. Men had to be taught once more that
grace was not something that could be detached, as it were, from
God, who, as some imperial personage directly inaccessible, was
dwelling far away in the secluded center of some great and
august heavenly court. The sacerdotal mind and practice is in
variably disastrous to spiritual religion, and if pure and undefiled
religion was to be saved to the world it was necessary that men
should once more be taught that God, through Christ, was so
near to them that an intervention of the priest was an imperti
nence and an affront ; that the New Testament conception of the
universal priesthood of believers should supplant the predatory
priesthood of the old Church. The whole story of the medieval
priesthood is summed up in Luther's story of his own experience
while a schoolboy at Magdeburg. It was in that city that he
saw in a church, as an altarpiece, the painting of a ship "wherein
was no layman, not even a prince or a king ; there was no one but
the pope, with his cardinals and bishops at the prow, with the
Holy Ghost hovering over them, while priests and monks were
at the sides with their oars. Thus they went sailing heavenward.
The laymen were swimming along in the water around the ship.
Some of them were drowning, some were pulling themselves up
to the ship by ropes, which the monks moved by pity, threw out
to them. And there was no cardinal, nor bishop, nor monk, nor
priest in the water, but laymen only." The picture made a
powerful impression upon the receptive mind of the young
student, an impression from which he never seemed to have
escaped. It presented not only the unscripturalness but the in
ordinate selfishness and absurd restrictions of priestcraft. It is,
accordingly, not surprising that the reformers early insisted upon
the restoration of this principle to its rightful place in the teach
ing and life of the Church. This cardinal principle of the Ref
ormation flowed directly from the biblical principle and experi
ence of justification by faith. In this there is a vital relation.

212 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
The Bible clearly teaches that Christ's people are all "kings and
priests unto the most high God"; that they constitute "a royal
priesthood," and when Christ made atonement for the sins of
the world upon the cross "the veil of the temple was rent in
twain," symbolizing that the individual soul is to be brought
henceforth into direct contact with God in Christ, without any
human or angelic mediators; that Christ Himself is the only
mediator ; that in Him each believer is reconciled to God through
the simple act of faith, and that thus there is no need of a
hierarchy of priests as a special class or order to mediate between
God and man ; that the ministry, even, does not constitute a
special order of men, but, like other Christians, belong to the
universal priesthood, needing pardon and salvation on the same
terms ; that this ministry is only a divinely instituted office in the
Church, the function of the members of that office being to preach
the word and administer the sacraments.
When Luther stood up and defied the Church of his day he took
his stand upon his inalienable rights as a man — upon rights
which Christ Himself had recognized, and to which He had
appealed. The Church said to him : "You are not fit to decide
in matters of faith for yourself, and must believe what the Church
tells you to believe) You cannot approach God directly and for
yourself; you must draw near to Him through the Church, and
access is mediated by the priesthood." To all that Luther's an
swer was clear, defiant and invincible. He said : "Get quit of
the pope, get rid of the priests, rid of all that stands between the
individual soul and God. Let God and the soul stand face to
face. Let God and the soul know and be known to each other.
Plere, in this immediate knowledge given by God, I stand ; I can
do no other ; God help me, for God commands me." His watch
word, that summed up his belief, was justification by faith —
that faith which signified a face-to-face knowledge of God, and
that justification that meant peace in the conscience when God's
voice is heard, reverenced, believed and obeyed. That was the
cry that wakened Germany and called its people back to newness
of life.
In August, 1520, there appeared what is known as "The Ad
dress to the German Nobility." It is an unsparing arraignment
of the abuses of the Church, and a ringing appeal to the German
nation to take in hand the reformation of Christianity because

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 213
the priests of religion had become unmindful of their duty. In
one of the notable passages in that writing the Reformer ex
presses his views on this subject. "There is no difference," says
he, "among Christians save of office alone. We are all Chris
tians by a higher consecration than pope or bishop can give.
The bishop's consecration is just as if, in the name of the whole
congregation, he took one member out of the community and
commanded him to exercise the power for the rest, in the same
way as if ten co-heirs as king's sons were to choose one from
among them to rule over their inheritance; they would all of
them still remain kings and have equal power, although one is
ordered to govern. If a little company of Christian laymen were
taken prisoners and carried away to a desert, and had not among
them a priest consecrated by a bishop, and were there to agree
to elect one of them, married or unmarried, and were to order
him to baptize, to celebrate the mass, to absolve and to preach,
this man would be as truly a priest as if all the bishops and all
the popes had consecrated him. A priest, therefore, in Chris
tendom should be nothing but an official ; as long as he holds his
office he has precedence over others ; if he be deprived of it, he is
a peasant and citizen like the rest. A cobbler, a smith, a peasant,
every man, has the office and function of his calling, and yet all
alike are consecrated priests and bishops, and every man in his
work must be useful and beneficial to the rest."
Upon nothing did Luther continue to insist more stubbornly
than this great truth, that the real spiritual estate consists of the
whole body of believers in Jesus Christ, and they are spiritual
because Jesus has made all His followers priests to God and to
Christ. He insists that it is foolish to say that the pope alone
can interpret Scripture, and that if that were true, where is the
need of the Scriptures at all ? In that event, he says, "let us burn
them and content ourselves with the unlearned gentlemen at
Rome, in whom the Holy Ghost alone dwells, who, however, can
dwell in pious souls only. If I had not read it, I could never have
believed that the devil should have put forth such follies at Rome
and find a following."
The importance of this principle of the Lutheran movement
has been widely recognized and its deep significance emphasized.
"The universal priesthood of Christians," says Luthardt, "is a
great truth, for whose rediscovery and recognition we are in-

214 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
debted to the Reformation, and from whose admission no misuse
that may be made of it must be allowed to deter us. It is based
upon the Reformation perception that, though the individual is
brought to faith in Jesus Christ by the ministrations of the
Church, his faith is not to stop at the stage of dependent nonage,
but to advance to independent certainty of that salvation, the
knowledge of which he owes to the Church. Every believer is a
priest, i. e., he has through Christ direct access to God in Christ,
and it is at once his privilege and his duty to offer to God the
gifts and sacrifices of his prayers and life. This is the first and
also the chief meaning of the universal priesthood. It is, how
ever, true that this does not exhaust it. For as the Old Testa
ment priest returned from the sanctuary, where he had been
offering prayers, to bless the people, so, too, it is the privilege
and duty of the New Testament priest, i. e., of the Christian, to
be a blessing to others, by those works of love which prove the
reality of his faith."
One of the most accomplished and qualified theologians of
our own Church and day, in writing of this doctrine, has said that
"never since the first days of Christianity had religion been made
so much a personal relation to God instead of an institutional
conformity ; an individual consciousness of riches in God by faith
instead of what a visibly organized Church would grant to man.
The right and duty of direct approach to God without the inter
vention of a priesthood was regained from the position of the
freedom of the Christian which faith in Christ vouchsafes. The
right of the personality to possess what he had in his mind, soul
and experience, as against a dominating Church, the freedom of
the individual as against organization — this was a great step in the
progress of Christian humanity."
Considering, now, its fundamental importance in itself and
in its applications, it is not surprising, influenced as he always
was by his rare insight into the truths of the Scriptures, that
Luther should have grappled as he did with the dogmas lying at
the roots of sacerdotalism, and that Christendom, in consequence,
became involved in a conflict where quarter could neither be
asked nor given. From his day to ours this is the rock on
which all attempts at reunion of a genuine Protestantism with all
sacerdotal expressions of Christianity have been wrecked and will
continue to be wrecked. It is this principle which has delivered

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 215
men from the vague fear of the clergy, and which, under Luther's
influence, incited them to arise in their might and assist in the
Reformation so much needed.
The papal system had answered man's search for God by bid
ding him leave it to the ordained officials, but the reinstatement
of this principle in the life of the Church once more, as it were,
ushered man straight into the presence of his Creator, with no
human intermediary to come between man and his highest good.
It once more bade every human mediator stand out of the way,
and God was again heard saying to men as Fie had once said to
Ezekiel, "Stand upon thy feet and I will speak to thee."
The man who stands where only Christ should stand, between
man and God, obscures faith and hides God behind his office and
his rites. The Reformation was a great attempt to escape from
what was in fact a pagan element which had been introduced into
Christianity, and to get back into a purer and nobler, because a
more primitive, aspect of the Christian religion. It was a revolt,
in the last analysis, of the people against the hierarchy. A few
simple religious truths opened the way to yet larger liberties.
These principles under Luther's leadership established the
democracy of the saints, and prepared the way for the coming of
the larger democracy and virtually for all the liberty we now
enjoy. VI
The incomparably great questions of human life are those
which relate to the existence, the character, the government and
providence of God, and to man as created in God's image and
considered as the creature of His power and the subject of His
law. The questions which thus pertain to God and man, and to
the relationships existing between the two, will always emerge
as the supreme questions to every one who will properly and
candidly consider them. He will, of necessity, be driven to look
upon them as the questions of deepest and widest interest, con
fronting all men with an imperative summons to serious thinking
and action. It is, accordingly, the gravity of the questions and
interests involved which makes of the problem of authority in
religion a matter of such vital concern, the really "burning ques
tion" of these and all earlier times. "Truth," said an English
philosopher, "is the most unbending and uncompliable, the

216 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
most necessary, firm, immutable and adamantine thing in the
world. Of no sort of truth may this be as persistently affirmed
as of the truth which is distinctively religious." In consequence
of this truthful affirmation it may be said that, notwithstanding
the protracted assertions made in behalf of notoriously objection
able hypotheses, proclaimed to be within the limits of liberty
allowed to scholarship and opinion, it is a matter of the gravest
concern in the sphere of religion whether the question as to
what is to be looked upon as indisputable be answered after the
fashion of the Unitarian mystic, James Martineau; the gifted
pervert from Anglicanism to Romanism, John Henry Newman,
or of those evangelicals who postulate and believe in a divinely
inspired revelation from God such as we have in the Bible,
consisting of the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments. The free inquiry that had been developed in Europe in con
nection with the revival of learning could not be smothered by
mere external authority, and hence it is not surprising that this
principle in modern times has been weakened, and that the unrea
soning docility and blind deference to ecclesiastical dominance
which characterized the life of the Middle Ages should have be
come greatly limited. Whether it be the tendency of a reac
tionary movement to swing to an opposite extreme, or whatever
may be the cause, certain it is that since the early Protestants
disallowed the functions claimed by the Church of Rome in the
good fight of the Reformation, there has been, in wide circles, a
growing and wide-spread aversion to authority in the field of re
ligion. It is an inadmissible assumption, however, that true
Christianity consists merely of a collection of dogmas arbitrar
ily demanding assent on merely external grounds and affirmations
of authority, and that it coerces conviction and duty by the asser
tion of certain terrors and punishments in case of non-acceptance.
This is to mistake the entire genius of the Christian religion. On
this question of authority in religion there are two extremes.
There is the merely external view that would rest everything on
the mere word of authority, and giving no value to any proof
but that of miracles, regarding all human judgment as to the
truth and worth of Christian doctrines as of no account. The
other extreme is to be found in the rationalistic or mystical posi
tion that nothing is to be received except that which commends

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 217
itself to the human understanding or that which is felt to be true.
The right position — that which is apostolic in character and which
was reaffirmed at the Reformation — is neither of these.
One of the theories regarding the origin of the movement,
that of Guizot, asserts that it was primarily an insurrection
against authority. In the judgment of that able interpreter of
civilization it was an effort to deliver the human reason from the
bonds of authority; "an insurrection of the human mind against
the absolute power of the spiritual order." It was not an acci
dent, the result of some casual circumstance, nor a squabble be
tween rival monks, as the pope alleged, in which an Augustinian
fell to assailing certain practices of a Dominican. The one in
fluential cause was the dominant desire of the human mind for
freedom. Free thought and inquiry are the legitimate product
and the real intent of the movement. Such is the interpretation
of Guizot. In entire harmony with this theory of the author of
"Civilization in Europe," Romanists have also always maintained
that Luther's assault on the hierarchy in the sixteenth century
broke up the foundations of faith in western Europe, and for
this he deserves to be held in eternal infamy and have the chief
place among the heresiarchs who have vexed the Church. The
right of private judgment is, in the opinion of such writers, the
chief glory of Protestantism. Thus it comes that the champions
of Romanism and the supporters of free thought are practically
agreed in attributing to Luther and Protestantism a large measure
of the responsibility for that form of modern unbelief which is
distrustful of everything supernatural. It has been affirmed that
free inquiry and revolt against authority were thus marks of the
Reformation, and that, therefore, those who, in the exercise of
the right of private judgment in matters of religion, have lost
their faith in Christianity, have a right to claim Luther as one
of the great leaders in the movement which has terminated in
their emancipation from all religious authority and the abrogation
of every species of supematuralism.
But it is a gross perversion and an entire misapprehension of
the spirit of that epoch-making movement to characterize the
Reformation as a revolt against all authority in matters of re
ligious belief and practice, and a nullification of all standards in
the matters pertaining to man's higher nature and thought. It
was a revolt against an arrogant and presumptuous hierarchy

218 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
which claimed to be the permanent incarnation of Christ, the body
of the Lord, the organ of the Holy Spirit, equally with Scripture,
able to guide to God, and assuming to be alone competent to
determine the meaning of God's revealed and inspired Word.
That movement in the sixteenth century was a rout of papal mar
plots, not, in the name of freedom, from all authority, but for the
restoration of the only one safe rule of faith and practice. It
was the restoration of an authority which was believed by devout
and. holy and learned men to be true against an authority that
had been found to be false, arbitrary and unethical. It was not
a struggle on behalf of the competency of the individual Chris
tian man, without a revelation from God, to answer the most
solemn and awful questions concerning himself, his duty and his
destiny, so much as a struggle of the competence and right of the
individual Christian to recognize for himself the voice of God
when God speaks in His Word, and to understand the divine
meaning of that Word. It was not so much a revolt against
authority as it was against usurpation. The particular kind of
authority which was now claimed for the Scriptures was a very
different thing from that which had been exercised over men since
the days of the consolidation of the hierarchy, with its unwar
ranted claims to direct the thinking and control the consciences of
men. It was the authority of a father over his children as con
trasted with the authority of a master over his slaves. Faith
and freedom were reconciled in the recognition of this new idea
of authority, for faith was the highest act of freedom, and
because the soul recognized for itself in God's divinely inspired
rule of faith and practice a divine majesty and glory and word
of truth, it yielded its obedience and its trust. Let it be under
stood, then, that no right-thinking or ethically sound man is
eager to claim intellectual freedom to such an extent as to
abrogate all authority in any sphere. Such was never the
attitude of the reformers. As to the source and seat of that
authority there have been three chief answers ; that of the Roman
ist, who locates it in the Church ; that of the Rationalist, who finds
it in the human reason, and that of the real Protestant evan
gelical, who finds it in the Word of God as the only infallible
rule of faith and practice.
A favorite method of describing the theological or doctrinal
principles which gave distinctive shape to the Reformation is to

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 219
classify them under two heads, the one of which is known as the
"formal" and the other as the "material" principle of the move
ment. This was the classification made by the well-known his
torian, the late Dr. Dorner, in his great work entitled the "His
tory of Protestant Theology." But back of both of these prin
ciples we find that fundamental impulse which must inspire every
genuine revival of religion, such as the Reformation was, and
that is the earnest desire of the human soul to come near to
God, the yearning to come into rightful relations with Him who
has revealed himself for salvation in our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ. Both the formal and material principles are united
in and spring out of this desire after God, and that salvation
which is the gift of the divine benignity. All of the reformers
believed that in His divinely inspired Word God was speaking to
His people even as He had spoken to them in earlier days by the
mouth of prophets and apostles. In their estimate of religion the
people, who, having the Bible in their own hands, translated into
a language which they understood out of the original languages,
the Hebrew and the Greek, in which that revelation had been
expressed, could hear God speaking to them, and to that Word
they could resort for instruction, warning and admonition, for en
lightenment in times of ignorance, for fellowship with the Highest
and strength for daily living. They taught that in the Bible all
believers could hear God speaking to them directly and authori
tatively, and that He could be heard by all who had the Bible in
their hands. The Reformation doctrine of the Scriptures thus
expresses in the most certain way the fulfilment of the yearning
for entrance into the presence of God, which is the underlying
and primary principle, not merely of the Lutheran Reformation,
but of every revival of religion that, in the unrestricted use of that
word, has had any permanent influence among men. The great
work accomplished in that movement was not the result of some
genius, or profound philosopher, or far-seeing statesman. It was
not brought about by Luther's rare endowments, his courage, and
his great moral force. We may appraise his gifts as being im
mensely greater than those of any of the valiant defenders of the
truth since the days of St. Paul. The most exalted estimate of
the Reformer as an unsurpassed moral force, when there was so
much of wit and sagacity, ingenuity, cunning and treachery ar
rayed against him, does not explain his success. That success is

220 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
traceable to but one force, that inherent in the revealed Word of
God, through which the Holy Spirit worketh when and where it
pleaseth Him. No man knew that better than Luther himself.
"God's Word," says he, "has been my sole study and concern, the
sole subject of my preaching and writing. Other than this, I
have done nothing in the matter. This same Word has, while I
slept or made merry, accomplished this great thing." It was
this truth revealed in the sacred Scriptures that was powerful
enough to call men from death and lead them back to the true
source of life, from which at last they were once more to obtain
the reassuring answer given to the insistent cr)' of men : Who
shall give us the truth, the final and authoritative expression of
truth, in the great matter of the soul's salvation and the recovery
of men to rightful relations with God, and restored peace and
reconciliation? The very first words of Luther's work as a re
former make this appeal to the Scriptures, for the opening words
of the theses nailed on the Wittenberg Church door are these :
"When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said," while the con
clusion contains the same appeal in these words : "I am not so
senseless as to be willing that the Word of God should be made
to give place to fables devised by human reason" — an appeal
that in that day and generation of papal authority and usurpation
sounded strangely. In the matters of religion no man has author
ity to speak for God, for the Scripture is the only source of doc
trine, and upon that to the last the Reformer stubbornly insisted,
for at the end, in the last sermon preached at Wittenberg, he said :
"I shall swerve not one finger's breadth from the mouth of the
Lord who said, 'Hear ye Him.' "
This principle found its best-known public expression in the
courageous and defiant answer made by Luther in April, 1521, to
the Imperial Diet assembled at Worms, when the Emperor,
Charles V, had demanded that he should retract. To this de
mand the brave Reformer made this famous reply : "Since your
Imperial Majesty, Electoral and Princely Graces, demand a
simple, artless and true answer, I shall give one which shall have
neither horns nor teeth. Unless I am overcome and convinced by
proofs of the Holy Scriptures, or by manifestly clear grounds and
reasons — for I believe neither the pope nor the councils alone —
because it is an open and known fact that they have often erred
and opposed each other, and I am convinced by those passages

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 221
adduced and introduced by me (and my conscience is bound in
God's Word) I can or will recant nothing, since it is neither safe
nor advisable to do aught against conscience. Here I stand, I can
not do otherwise. Gold help me ! Amen."
In view of the great principles involved it is not surprising that
wise and sagacious interpreters of history and the entire Prot
estant world should have come to think that four o'clock on the
afternoon of April 18, 1521, was one of the world's most decisive
hours, and that Frederick of Saxony should have exclaimed,
"How grandly did Brother Martin speak before the Emperor
and the estates of the Empire!" That battle ended in victory
over papal tyranny, not only, but led men back once more from
the unwarranted and often contradictory decrees of councils and
popes to the clear teaching of the Word of God, which each man
was to read with his own and not another's eyes, and to which
they were to bow in all matters of faith and practice. Hence
forth men were to be released from all authority of the merely
external institutions of religion. No man on earth has the right
to tell another man who is a Christian what he must do to please
God, or to promise him salvation, for God has done both, and that
in an authoritative revelation. Luther rose to utter a solemn pro
test against every practice that ran counter to that. Accused of
breaking the laws of the Church, he uniformly pointed to the
Scriptures, and proved that the laws of the Church are the com
mandments of men. Being asked to compromise, he declared
that there could be no compromise with the truth of the Word of
God. The battles of the Reformation were largely won by this
constant and insistent appeal to Holy Scripture. In Luther's
thinking, that Word is primarily the promises of God in the
Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. On this language his own ex
planation or comment is this : "One thing and one thing only is
necessary for Christian life, righteousness and liberty. That one
thing is the most holy Word of God, the Gospel of Christ.
* * * The soul can do without all things except the Word of
God, and where this is not, there is no help for the soul in any
thing else whatsoever. * * * Nor was Christ sent into the
world for any other ministry than that of the Word. * * *
You ask, what is this Word of God and how shall it be used, since
there are so many words of God ? I answer, the Apostle explains
that in Romans 1. The Word is the Gospel of God concerning

222 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
His Son, Who was made flesh, suffered, rose from the dead and
was glorified through the Spirit Who sanctifies." Because the
Word of God is the promise of salvation through Christ, Luther
can call it "the Word of life, of truth, of light, of peace, of
righteousness, of salvation, of joy, of liberty, of wisdom, of
power, of grace, of glory and of every blessing." He can say,
"the soul can do without everything except the Word of God."
He can declare, "Through faith alone, without works, the soul is
justified by the Word of God."
The Church of Rome had set up other standards of authority,
all of them purely human, such as tradition, the teaching of the
Church fathers, the decisions of councils, and all of them co
ordinate with the Bible. But for Luther and from his day for all
Protestants, the authority that is purely religious is the authority
of that Word which is the means by which we come to faith, the
one means by which we are brought into contact with Christ and
instructed in the significance and meaning of His life. Thus the
Lutheran Reformation provided again the occasion for laying
the foundation stone of Christianity and the reaffirmation of the
fundamental principle that the Word of God is the ultimate
ground of appeal in all religious questions and the final arbiter in
all doctrinal contentions and differences ; as the Lutheran Formula
of Concord says, "the only rule and measure according to which
all doctrines and all leaders ought to be judged."
At the time of the Reformation and for centuries before, the
Church of Rome had drifted to the place where it placed the
decisions of popes and the contradictory decrees of councils above
the plain and simple meaning of the Bible as received and inter
preted by the enlightened private judgment of every Christian.
Against this usurpation in the sphere of religious authority Luther
lifted the standard of revolt, demanding with all the urgency and
importunity of his earnest nature and forceful leadership that the
Bible alone should henceforth be open to the mind and heart of
every man. It was through his influence that that book became
popular, and an established authority for daily life in a sense
that was neither legalistic nor ascetic. He insisted that the Bible
was perspicuous, and that the reader can for himself discover
its teachings about what is necessary for salvation; that it tells
him everything that it is essential for him to know in the domain
of Scripture, which is that of religion and redemption. Men

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 223
once more were taught that which had long been obscured, that it
was to the Bible, and not to popes, councils and a graduated
prelatical system that men were to look for all necessary informa
tion about God, Christ, salvation and eternal life. By means of
preaching, which for hundreds of years had been pushed into the
background, when it had not been entirely neglected, the Refor
mation, at a time when religion had become external and legal, re
opened these sources of religious life and from those sources
streams have flowed forth from that day to ours.
Along with the restoration of the Bible to its rightful place in
the sphere of authority came the demand for an appreciation
of its popular exposition. The new movement had something to
assert and expound as well as something to deny. If it discarded
one interpretation of Christianity, it espoused another. Deeply
rooted, as we have seen it to be, in the experience, first of all, of
one great soul and in subjective impulses and convictions, it
owed its origin to the direct contact of the mind with the Scrip
tures. It was there that it found alike its source and its regula
tive norm. It was not a new phase of merely natural religion,
but had its fountain head in the writings of prophets and apostles,
those holy men of old who were inspired by the Holy Ghost.
The new valuation of faith as the essence of religion it was
which brought this about. That Word the new phase of Chris
tian development affirmed to be God's means to produce faith, and
accordingly that must be preached in popular form and faithfully
explained. The great events and achievements of that mighty revolution
were largely the work of preachers who expounded it to the
popular mind and heart, and in the language of the people. It
was by means of the Word of God appealing to the heart through
the intelligence of earnest men who believed, loved and taught
that Word, that the best and most enduring work of the Reforma
tion was done. There was at that time a special call for faith,
a demand for some definite appeal to conscience, and the deepen
ing and widening of the knowledge of Christians. The means de
pended upon by the chief of the reformers, especially for the
awakening of a robust faith and the energy of Christian activity,
was the quickening message of the Gospel. His theory of that
Word of life and salvation, his profound confidence in its power,
mightily reacted upon preaching, giving it at once a new spirit,

224 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
new potency and new forms. The relation between the Reforma
tion and preaching, increasingly insisted upon in Christian as
semblies for worship, in contrast with the celebration of the
mass, which had hitherto occupied the chief place in worship, may
be adequately described as one of mutual dependence, aid and
guidance. Because of what the Bible was in itself, and the
primacy of the place assigned it, a distinctly new epoch in the
history of the pulpit and its triumphs meets us now, the greatest
and most fruitful epoch since the fourth century, the period of
John Chrysostom "of the golden mouth," and the great Cappa-
docian preachers, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, his brother,
and Gregory Nazianzen, his chosen friend. "The age of the
Reformation," says Christlieb, "makes the deepest cleft, the sharp
est turning point, in the historical development of Christian
preaching, as to contents and form, spirit and character." It is
true that the reformers used other means to promote the good
work that is historically identified with their names. In fact,
every legitimate means of advancing their cause, such as the use
of the press, and of correspondence, both private and public,
teaching, personal influence, discussion and debate, seem to have
been used, but none the less, it remains true that the chief instru
ment in their hands, and diligently used, was the preaching of
the divinely inspired word of God, the one and only decisive
judge and standard.
In that men were once more to find the only source of the
saving doctrine. In such matters no one is to speak with author
ity save God only, and when He speaks through His Word that,
and that alone, is the truth not to be added to nor subtracted
from by the pope, the councils, or any other organization, and
not to be supplemented by decrees, traditions, or citations from
apostolic or post-apostolic fathers. In Luther's view, especially,
it was an unalterable divine ordination that spiritual life and sal
vation, and the faith which lays hold upon them, are bound up
with the use of the Word of God and of the Sacraments, as de
riving all their efficacy from that Word, and instituted by the
Head of the Church Himself.
Viewed from any standpoint, the Reformation was a revival
of that which was distinctively biblical in Christianity. "To the
law and to the testimony" was its constant appeal. Scripture,
said the great leader of the new movement, is our one authentic

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 225
and trustworthy source of the knowledge of the revelation of God
in Christ; and he had the best grounds for refusing to admit
the co-ordinate, not to say superior, authority of an alleged apos
tolic tradition, whose original scope was unknown, which had
been exposed to the changing influences of the passing centuries
of papal history, and which, especially in later periods, he well
knew not to have been honestly administered. The Church of
Rome had dethroned the Word of God from its supremacy, and
virtually withheld the vernacular Bible from Christendom. The
teaching of the hierarchy was supposed to mean that it is the
authority of the Church which gives the Bible the value of the
Word of God, the position being emphatically maintained that
the Church itself derives its authority from God alone. It had
been overlooked that the Bible is the Word of God because, as it
stands, it is God's supreme gift, and is perfectly suited for the
doing of the work to which it had been divinely designed in the
economy of salvation. It was the primary work of the Reforma
tion to restore the Word of God, in contrast to such erroneous
teaching, to its rightful position, to reinstate it as the formal prin
ciple of Christianity, to make it once more the determinative fac
tor in the Church's doctrine, in the regulation of her practice, in
the teaching of her ministry and in the homes of her people.
This objective principle, made so prominent in the period of the
Reformation, once more gave to the Bible its supremacy over
ecclesiastical tradition as a co-ordinate rule of faith, remanded
to its rightful place the teaching of the Church as subordinate
to the Word of God, and once more gave to men the inspired his
tory of redemption, the inspired source of religious truth, and
the inspired standard and test of such truth, reviving once more
the idea that men can get from the Bible not only information
about God, but fellowship with God; not merely knowledge
about religion, but communion with the Highest; not only new
truth about divine things, but an actual quickening of the divine
life in man.
That movement went forward on the assumption that it was
inconceivable that God, who dwelleth in perfect light, and in
whom is no darkness at all, should have doomed the soul of man
to the dreary prospect of endless doubt and uncertainty growing
out of a disputable standard of authority in religion. It affirmed
that however men may differ respecting the teachings of the

226 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Scriptures, there can be no dispute about this, that the soul was
created to know the truth and as finding enduring peace and
satisfaction in that knowledge. Up to the time of the Reforma
tion, in the long course of papal development, the voice of the
Church had been regarded as final in all matters of belief, and
a practical infallibility, even in advance of the famous Vatican
Council's decree of 1870, had been attributed to its decisions.
When the Church principle about that authority began to be
questioned, and was finally set aside, it became necessary to
reinstate another source of authority, to which all men alike
could go in search of that absolute truth which God had com
municated to men.
Luther's revolt was against a Church which had intrenched
itself behind the arrogant assumption that the Bible was only a
"deposit" in the hands of the episcopally constituted hierarchy,
and that to it alone belonged the right of determining what was
the meaning of the revelation given in the Bible. He made the
first emphatic protest against the appeal of Irenaeus to tradition,
the priority of which was guaranteed by the episcopate, and
against the claim of Augustine regarding the divine prerogatives
of the episcopate to teach infallible truth. He stood in a majesty
unsurpassed, confronting the world which had been and that
which was to be. It made no difference that he stood alone,
opposed by all the revered traditions of Latin Christianity—
traditions that ran so far back that they seemed almost to be
coeval with Christianity itself. He stood there alone before his
age with an uplifted Bible, and the truth which he read therein
so corresponded with his inner experience that it made no dif
ference, as he said, though a thousand Augustines, or a thousand
Cyprians, or a thousand councils were against him.
All genuine Protestantism, from the very beginning, not only
respected tradition, but also affirmed that creeds are to be re
ceived because they have the warrant of Holy Scripture, and not
because they are given on the authority of the Church. Luther's
perpetual challenge was this : "If you will not refute me by the
Word of God, here I stand," while Calvin's supreme and solemn
answer, when he was preaching, lecturing, journeying and formu
lating a theological system and making catechisms, when disease
was disputing his life at every inch, was in the words with
which he uniformly closed his addresses and sermons : "If God's

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 227
Word be on our side, who can be against us?" It was in the
constant reiteration of this truth in the controversies of the times
that this distinctive and fundamental principle of Protestantism,
the formal principle of the Reformation, was reached, and the
traditional belief in the authority of the Roman Church over
thrown for large sections of western Christendom.
In our day, in much of the critical and theological discussion,
we need a return to the safe and sound principle of the place
and doctrine of the Scriptures maintained in the time of the
Reformation. In the somewhat specious use of the term, "the
Christian consciousness," there have grown up some serious de
partures from that proper co-ordination of Word and experi
ence meant by Luther whenever he talked about the self-evidenc
ing power of divine truth. The danger in the use of the term
"Christian consciousness" lies in the way of introducing into it,
or imposing upon it, one's own conception of what the term ought
to contain, the latter becoming elastic, even almost pliant, beneath
the touch of the interpreter. "The Christian consciousness," says
the late Professor Stearns, whose early death caused wide-spread
sorrow in theological circles, "has its importance and its inalien
able rights. But whether it be the consciousness of the individual
or the collective consciousness of the Church, it is human and
subject to error, and it must be measured and judged by the
standard of the Bible." Good men, even, can lay no rightful
claim to an illumination such as the supernatural inspiration of
the Lord's apostles, and the entire history of the Church has
made it plain that to trust to any inner illumination or "Christian
consciousness," or "experience," or any other merely subjective
test of Christian truth, has ended in a reaction to unbelief, in
fanaticism or ecclesiastical anarchy. There can be no Christian
consciousness of which the Scriptures have not been, through the
influence of the Holy Spirit sent into the world to teach and lead
men, the source and rule. It is only by means of the Word of
the living God that we are able to attain to that consciousness and
correctly understand and interpret it. A fine statement of the
evangelical position on this subject has been given by the late Dr.
Charles Hodge, the great Princeton theologian. "There is," says
he, "a norm of conviction more intimate and irresistible than
that which arises from the inward teaching of the Spirit. All
saving faith rests on His testimony or demonstrations (1 Cor.

228 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
11:4). This inward teaching produces a conviction which no
sophistries can obscure and no arguments can shake. It is
founded on consciousness, and you might as well argue a man
out of belief in his existence as out of confidence that what he
is thus taught of God is true. Two things, however, are always
to be borne in mind. First, that this inward teaching or demon
stration of the Spirit is confined to truths objectively revealed in
the Scriptures. * * * And, second, this experience is de
picted in the Word of. God. The Bible gives us, not only the
facts concerning God and Christ, ourselves and our relations to
our Maker and Redeemer, but also records the legitimate effects
of those truths on the minds of believers."
A better and more satisfying statement is that given by one of
the best accredited theological and historical scholars of this coun
try now living, Dr. Henry E. Jacobs. Speaking of Christian ex
perience, Dr. Jacobs says that while it is "an important element in
the interpretation of doctrines, in so far as it declares the presence
and power of the Holy Spirit in applying God's Word, it must
constantly be tested and adjusted by the Holy Scripture. The
spiritual sense of believing men is not to be depreciated (1 Cor.
2:15, He that is spiritual judgeth all things), nevertheless it is
always to be recognized by its complete subjection to Holy
Scripture (1 John 4:1-2; Gal. 1:8; Acts 17:11). A true and
normal faith is one that holds implicitly and exclusively to the
revelation of God contained in the Holy Scriptures. It is a
faith that lives in communion with Christ, but Christ in the
heart of the believer and Christ in His Word are always one
and the same."
If such statements as these of Drs. Hodge, Jacobs, Stearns
and a multitude of others that might be cited, are true and cor
rect reflections of the Reformation principle of the relation that
must be maintained between Word and experience, then the
"Christian consciousness," which Dr. Francis L. Patton has de
nominated as "that compound of Hegel and Schleiermacher,"
must be looked upon as the importation into the religious thought
of our country of a dubious and discredited source of authority
in religion — the exaltation to an unwarranted and dangerous
place in many of our schools and churches of a truth over
emphasized by Schleiermacher, the great German scholar and
thinker, the man who opened up a new era in the history of re-

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 229
ligious thinking. He did not invent the "Christian conscious
ness," but in calling renewed attention to its existence and im
portance, came to look upon it as an independent source of
theology, making it the task of systematic theology to reduce its
contents to order and unity, without regard to the Scriptures, and
with the result of producing a merely subjective theology, based
on pious feelings, in many respects, particularly in its later de
velopment, not only defective but arbitrary. In recent years,
especially since the introduction and wide acceptance in some
churches and schools of this theory, its inadequacy and danger
ous features have been shown to be many.
True Protestantism, from its beginnings in the sixteenth cen
tury, has welcomed criticism of a serious character, believing
that such criticism must ultimately help to a better understanding
of the Divine Word. It asks no franking privileges, and shrinks
from no fair and legitimate use of critical apparatus. From its
opening controversies on, it has not assumed to be true because
it has been an unquestionably useful factor in both evangeliza
tion and civilization. It expects to prove its claims, and chal
lenges the candid and honest critical investigation of its Scrip
tures, in which men have found the revelation of that "faith
once for all delivered to the saints."
There is but one frontier which it sets up, beyond which
professed Christian men should not even want to pass in the
use of critical methods. That frontier is this, that the critical
spirit shall not be allowed to falsify what has already been veri
fied in human experience ; that it shall not start with the assump
tion, as so many destructive critics of our day do, that the super
natural in our religion is to be at once disallowed because it can
not be a matter of knowledge. This was the quiet assumption
of that school of German criticism of the New Testament which,
forced back from position to position upon the very person of
our Lord, and more and more hemmed in after the death of its
Master, was outwardly broken, which since has fallen to pieces
and now exists no more, not even at Tubingen, the once powerful
seat of its vaunting assumptions. True and permanently valu
able criticism will never dissociate itself from that Reformation
principle of the experience of good men of that divine mercy
coming through the application of the written Word. In this
always lies the one final and complete refutation of the un-

230 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
scientific assumption of Baur and his school. It is this that
guarantees first-hand knowledge of the truth. "Only the man,"
says Professor Stearns in his strong work entitled "The Evi
dence of Christian Experience," "only the man who comes to the
experience of the Bible and its phenomena with that first-hand
knowledge of the truth of its great facts and doctrines which
comes from personal experience is competent to enter upon these
critical and historical investigations, and likely to find a satis
factory solution of them. What we complain of is that these in
vestigations have been so largely carried on by men who have
distinctly repudiated the Christian experience, and have come to
the subject with naturalistic presuppositions. And still more
do we complain that Christian scholars often allow themselves
blindly to follow such men when their own standpoint, if they
could only understand it, is altogether different. When, how
ever, the evidence of Christian experience has been given its
proper place, the way is opened for the fullest and freest investiga
tion of the historical and critical questions relating to the Bible.
It is not the Christian who has the witness in himself and knows
what he believes, who is timid about subjecting the Bible to the
tests of criticism. Such a Christian has no fear that the Bible
will suffer by dealing thus with it, but is convinced that what
ever new facts may be discovered concerning it will only serve
to bring out more fully the divine claim of the precious Book
to truth and authority."
The test in this matter is the absence of hypotheses and pre
sumptions that are destructive to revelation and antagonistic to
spiritual religion. For us, as for Luther, the great original cer
tainty which attests all religious truth is not the authority of the
Church, nor that located in the processes of the human reason,
but that Word of God which, however different may be its forms
of expression, is able to attest itself to the hearts of men as the
veritable Word of God by itself and its divine power. The
Romanist has alleged that Protestants put a book between the soul
and God, but this they forget, that the book is so written, explain
it how you will, that those who read it devoutly forget the book
and are brought to rejoice in the vision of God. In fulfillment
of His promise His spirit guided the apostles, not only in preach
ing the Gospel to the people of the time, but in putting on record
all that was necessary for the guidance of the Church in the

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 231
ages to come. These records of apostolic doctrine have been, in
the providence of God, marvelously preserved, and if, availing
ourselves of all helps toward the understanding of the Scriptures,
we ultimately rely on the Spirit Who guided the apostles into
the truth in their teaching, we shall be guided into truth in the
understanding of what they teach, and be led into the experience
of the wisdom and power of God unto salvation.
Whenever the impression prevails that the truth of God's Word
is problematical, that it deals with mere pious opinions rather
than with vitalizing Christian doctrines and facts, it is no longer
the Word of a King that has power, and jts magisterial note of
authority has been silenced. No matter how carefully the mod
ern critical inquest may be guarded, if once the anti-supernatural
hypotheses are granted standing room, and myth is introduced in
order to explain miracle; if the withholding of faith in the Word
as supreme is to be justified by an appeal to philosophical or
philological reasons, then the gates are open to unbelief, the
idolatry of reason and scholastic criticism, and then cometh the
deluge. If hypotheses that have been affirmed in the name of the
"accepted results" of alleged scholarship, that the Psalter is
simply a monument of the church consciousness during the cen
turies immediately preceding Christ; that Job and Jonah are
only similitudes of the people of Israel ; that the name of Samuel
is enigmatical, and that the book which bears his name is un
doubtedly of Maccabean origin and contains no Messianic traces ;
that Ecclesiastes is nothing but a record of doubts and unbelief
rather than pious faith, and marked by cold, skeptical philosophy
and tempered with pessimism ; that the pathetic fifty-third chapter
of Isaiah is nothing more than a prophetical dirge of Jeremiah
used for Christian purposes; that the prayer of Solomon (2
Chron. 6) is a literary fiction; that the song of Hannah is the
work of some unknown redactor; that the story of Joshua is
due to a misunderstanding — if such revoluntiary hypotheses are
maintainable, can we any longer predicate the supreme authority
of the Bible, or any longer revert with confidence to the Reforma
tion principle of the Word of God as the means of grace, effica
cious for life and salvation? Certain it is that no heresy ever yet
became orthodoxy which has dealt with the Scriptures after this
fashion. Principal Fairbairn has given expression to the singular
and striking harmony in all the factors entering into the dis-

232 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
cussion of this phase of our subject. In his great book, "The
Place of Christ in Modern Theology," he says: "Without God
the Church has no head and no end, the Word no truth and no
function, the reason no goal to reach and no object to revere;
without the Church the Word has no medium to live in ; without
the Word the Church has no truth to live by." It is certainly
the business of the Church to keep in active touch with approved
results of modern critical methods. It is not, however, called
upon to retreat before unproved and audacious hypotheses de
structive at once to both real scholarship and faith. No Chris
tian may despise true science, for it is the gift of God, but not
everything is true science and culture which have been arrogantly
claimed for both. The Church is not called upon to shun legiti
mate criticism that is both veracious and candid, but it is to be
watchful lest some sophisticated Barabbas be thrust upon it
instead of the Lord from glory. VII
Under whatever varieties of form it has appeared during its
history of four hundred years, and notwithstanding the variety of
opinion that has maintained among its leaders, all true Protestant
ism has been distinguished as a system of belief by two primary
principles. These are the one just discussed, the exclusive
authority of the Scriptures, and the other, justification by faith
alone. Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, once said
that it was the business of philosophy to answer three questions :
(1) "What may I know?" (2) "What ought I to do?" and (3)
"For what may I hope?" Attempts of philosophy to answer
these questions summarize all ,that the world has done on that
subject from Plato to Herbert Spencer, Bergson and Eucken.
But these questions of the philosopher are all anticipated and
stated with equal clearness thousands of years before Kant had
made Koenigsberg, where he passed his life, famous. In one of
the oldest books in the canon of the sacred Scriptures, the book
which Carlyle called the grandest book ever written by man, Job
cries out (1) "Oh, that I knew where I might find him"; (2)
"How shall a man be just or right before God?" and (3) "If a
man die shall he live again?" The philosopher's questions are
but echoes of those of the patriarch, the man of Uz, "who was

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 233
perfect and upright, one that feared God and eschewed evil."
One of these questions pertains to salvation, the restoration of
man to rightful relations with God — the principle round which
the Protestant discussions revolved, and out of which they orig
inally sprang. The Augsburg Confession, the mother confession
of Protestantism, deals in the second article already with the sad
fact, which a bitter experience had forced upon the reformers,
and which had been fully established by the experience of the
Church at large, of the impotence of human nature in spiritual
things and of its consequent inability to obtain forgiveness, peace
or holiness by means of its own efforts or sacrifices. It was the
work, especially of Luther, to lead men back once more to the
real remedy for this bankruptcy of human powers and to reaffir
mation of the true grounds of reconciliation with God. The
Lutheran theology, says Principal Fairbairn, "is essentially a soteri-
ology, a science of the Redeemer's person and work, profoundly
conscious of man's sin and the grace by which he is saved." The
controversy waged by the reformers with the papal hierarchy did
not so much relate to those branches of theology on which the
ancient councils of the Church have spoken. The Apostles' Creed,
together with those of Nicea, of 325 A. D., and of Chalcedon, of
451 A. D., were accepted by both Romanists and Protestants. In
respect to the Trinity and the deity of our Lord both parties
stood on common ground. On the subject of anthropology, or
what is designated by that word, the doctrine of sin, the reformers
went back to Paul and Augustine, while the Romanists were less
hostile to the modifications of the British monk Pelagius. But it
was in their profound sense of sin and its dominion over the
human will, of man's natural inability to come into rightful re
lations with God, that the real issue at once came to be made
and the basis of a truly Protestant theology was laid. The real
point of difference between the two parties, the one around which
all others very soon ranged themselves, was the vital question as
to how the soul, burdened with self-condemnation, is to obtain
the forgiveness of sins and be brought back into peaceful reunion
with God in the character of a reconciled father as contrasted
with the aspect of a stern and implacable judge and lawgiver.
A profound regulative principle was found by Luther in his
study of the Scriptures, and especially in his personal experience
of the truth. It has been termed in Protestant theology the

234 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
"material principle" of the Reformation; the principle that sin
ful man is justified before God out of pure grace for Christ's
sake through faith. In the teachings, injunctions, services and
ceremonies of the Church, he had sought for this good in vain.
He found it in the doctrine of gratuitous pardon, a pardon that
waits for nothing but acceptance on the part of the soul — the
belief, the trust, the faith of the penitent. The Church had been
teaching for centuries that faith and good works are co-ordinate
sources of justification, and then laid the chief stress on good
works. That Luther came to deny, claiming upon the basis of
both Scripture teaching and experience that we are justified by
faith alone, meaning by this that the only way the sinner can
obtain salvation is through the grace of God in Christ Jesus.
Everything of the nature of merit or satisfaction on the part
of the offender is precluded by the utterly gratuitous nature of
the gift, by the sufficiency of the Redeemer's expiation. Every
claim that works for merit on the side of the offender as the
ground of forgiveness was looked upon as a disparagement of
the Redeemer's mercy and of the adequacy of His expiatory
office. Man cannot merit his salvation, for Christ has done that.
All the sinner can do is to accept Christ. He is saved, as St.
Paul has declared, "by grace alone, lest any man should boast."
In order to be saved he must appropriate this grace of Christ, and
this he does through faith. Just as soon as he believes in Christ
he is justified; that is, he is released from the guilt of sin. This
is justification by faith, which Luther, recalling what he himself
had experienced, declared to be "the article of a standing or fall
ing Church." Faith thus laying hold of a free pardon and re
uniting the soul with God, becomes the fountain of a new life of
holiness, a holiness which is produced not out of fear and homage
to law, but which springs from gratitude and filial sentiments. To
justify signifies, not to make a man righteous but to treat him as
though he were righteous, to deliver him from the accusation of
the law by the bestowal of a pardon which is not to be regarded
as in any sense an achievement, but as a bestowment. Faith is
not some meritorious work to be rewarded, but something that
apprehends the good and unmerited gift of God — the hand that
is stretched out to take that which is freely bestowed. This is
justification by faith, which at once became the great central doc
trine of the Lutheran movement. It was the cardinal principle

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 235
of the new interpretation of the Gospel. It soon came to be
looked upon as the substance of the Christian religion. It placed
the center of the Christian life in the experience of forgiveness,
out of which the evidences of Christian character and victories
over temptation were to grow as legitimate and expected fruits.
Thus the Reformation did not take its start so much in Luther's
head as in his heart. To him the greatest of all questions was
what must I do to be saved? How can I obtain forgiveness of
sins and become just before God? He had been told, as we have
seen, that the way to insure his salvation was by the way of obe
dience to the commandments of the Church and by securing the
intercession of the saints. In his efforts along this proscribed
and burdensome line he had tried until amost driven to despair in
his efforts to appease an angry God and make amends for his sins.
Not until he had grasped this great central truth of the Gospel,
"the just shall live by faith," did the troubled conscience of the
great man find rest, and no sooner did this blessed truth shine
upon his soul than he began to preach and confess it before others.
It at once became the heart of all his teaching and preaching.
the burden of all his sermons, the silver thread that ran through
all his writings, the dominating force of the renewed life of the
Church. It was not by an accident nor by an ecclesiastical de
cree that this doctrine became the regulative principle of Luth
eran theology. Not only was it taught in the New Testament
in unmistakable prominence, but it had been wrought out in the
unusual experience of the greatest of the reformers. He had
diligently sought assurance of salvation by acts of penance, by
the deeds of the law, and by works of imposed righteousness.
But all his efforts had proven vain. Being too earnest and sin
cere to be satisfied with mere outward works, he craved for an
inner assurance which could only be wrought through faith in
Christ. This assurance was given him when he clearly recog
nized the great truth that "the just shall live by faith," that
Christ had wrought a perfect righteousness for man, and made
complete atonement for sin; therefore, only by accepting Christ
and His merit could inner certainty be obtained. Thus it has
come about that all the credal statements of genuinely evangelical
churches continue to this day to confess that Christ is true God
and true man in one person, who is "the only propitiator and
mediator ordained between God and man, the only Saviour, the

236 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
only High Priest and Advocate before God." This experience
of Luther was wrought in and through the Word of God, and,
accordingly, if that Word is, as we have seen, to be regarded as
the "formal principle" of the Reformation and justification by
faith the "material principle," we can see how the two are so
beautifully co-ordinated in the Lutheran apprehension of the
Gospel. Organically and vitally they belong together. Without
the Bible the doctrine of justification by faith could not be
known. By means of the Scriptures the Holy Spirit brings jus
tification and salvation into human experience. The objective
truth taught in the Bible, according to Lutheran theology, espe
cially, must become subjective in the Christian experience. Thus
are the Bible and the doctrine of Christian assurance indissolubly
bound together. In times of legalistic preaching and teaching,
in a time when we are so frequently reminded, in a revived
Socinianism, of "salvation by character," the Protestant Churches
need to be constantly called to reassert and proclaim with un
mistakable definiteness and without any ambiguity their great
and vital doctrine of justification by faith alone and salvation by
grace alone without the deeds of the law. This restoration of
rightful relations with God can thus only be effected by faith,
just as it is rendered impossible by unbelief. This is the bond
which connects the soul with Christ, so that being now in Christ
Jesus the soul is partaker of the virtue of all that Christ has
done, and heir to the fulness of all that He is. He that refuses
to believe remains outside of Christ, while he that consents to
believe is in Christ Jesus and is reconciled to God the Father.
This is the condition of salvation according to the Scriptures.
From the beginning to the end of the Evangel of God, from the
call of Abraham in Genesis to the last invitation of the Spirit
recorded in the Revelation of St. John, on this subject the divine
testimony is clear and unmistakable.
Jesus Christ was to Luther, first of all, not as he was to the
schoolmen, the second person of the Trinity, but the Saviour
from sin. He had come to look at Jesus Christ primarily from
the standpoint of his own sin and needs. What he needed was
not what he had done or what he could do, but what Christ had
done, and from the moment he apprehended that truth the Re
former's whole horizon changed. Life became to him a new thing,
and he understood that henceforth his chief business in religion

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 237
was to accept in gratitude the grace and mercy of God, and not
to go on striving in penitential exercises to work out his own sal
vation, thus attempting an impossible thing. To use a modern
word of some of the theologians, Jesus Christ henceforth had for
him the value of God reconciling the world unto Himself. His
grasp of this great truth it is which gives such an abiding value
to some of his characteristic words. "To know Jesus," for an
example, he says, "in the true way means to know that He died
for us. There are many of you who say Christ is a man of this
kind ; He is God's son, was born of a pure virgin, became man,
died, rose again from the dead and so forth ; that is all nothing.
But when we truly say that He is Christ, we mean that He was
given for us without any works of ours ; that without any merits
of ours He has won for us the Spirit of God, and has made us
Children of God, so that we might have a gracious God, might
with Him become lords over all things in heaven and on earth,
and besides, might have eternal life through Christ — that is faith,
and that is true knowledge of Christ."
In the consideration of this principle of the Reformation, it is
not to be affirmed that the Church of Rome did not assign to faith
a large share in bringing men back into a right attitude toward
God. But this faith consisted in man's assent to certain proposi
tions concerning divine things stated authoritatively by the
Church, and being a part of divine grace, this faith is communi
cated to man exclusively through the channels of the seven
Romish sacraments, the absolute control of which is in the hands
of the priesthood. Rome did not deny access to God, but did in
Luther's day, and does yet, make that access indirect. It holds
with us that God is in Christ, but it makes the priest a necessary
mediator between the soul and Christ. Unlike the Protestant
pastor and preacher who stands in his place pointing the soul to
Christ to hear His word, the priest professes to act in behalf of
Christ, receiving confession and pronouncing absolution, the error
of it ?H being continually aggravated by the multiplication of in
termediaries and intercessors, and by the imposition of rites and
ceremonies as means of obtaining salvation. According to the
teaching of Romanism, salvation was something restricted to the
members of a certain closed corporation; that, except in certain
very special cases, the blessing of being right before God was
confined to the members of the visible Church, of which the pope

238 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
was the one and only official head. Thus a man's relation to
Christ was determined by his relation to the Church, and the
chief matter of concern came to be obedience in the use of the
prescribed steps for becoming a full and duly certified member of
the corporation in which certain men, set apart by the sacrament
of ordination, were authorized to declare officially that the se
curity of the salvation they have to offer is guaranteed by their
own sacerdotal word. The Church held that salvation was de
pendent upon the obedient accomplishment of a certain routine
of outward acts, the meeting at certain prescribed times and
places of certain enjoined ecclesiastical requirements. The road
to heaven was marked out with the definiteness of the old Leviti-
cal Code, through a multitude of prescribed ceremonials. The
Council of Trent maintained that at least six other acts on man's
part were equally necessary for justification, faith being only the
first and most fundamental. These were fear, hope, love, pen
itence or purpose of receiving the sacrament, and beginning a life
of obedience. Men busied themselves in climbing up the rounds
of a ladder of man's construction that was supposed to end in
heaven at the top of the exacting ascent. Everything in re
ligion was officially classified and numbered. It was all a matter
of prescription and classification in the great matter of salvation.
"The life of the believer," as has been so well said, "had become
in some way separated from the life of Christ, and his virtue, in
stead of being a stream flowing forth from the throne of God,
and descending upon the earth, had come to be regarded by him as
a pyramid upon earth, which he had to build up step by step,
that from the top of it he might reach the heavens. It was not
possible to measure the waves of the water of life, but it was per
fectly possible to measure the bricks of the tower of Babel; and
gradually, as the thoughts of men were withdrawn from their
Redeemer and fixed upon themselves, the virtues began to be
squared, and counted, and classified, and put into separate heaps
of firsts and seconds; some things being virtuous cardinally and
other virtues being virtuous only north-northwest. It is very
curious to bring into close relation the words of the apostles
and some of the writers of the fifteenth century touching sanctifi
cation. For instance, hear first St. Paul to the Thessalonians :
'Thy very God of peace sanctify you wholly ; and I pray God your
whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless until the

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 239
coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you,
who also will do it.' And then the following part of a prayer
from a manuscript of the fifteenth century: 'May He (the Holy
Spirit) govern the five senses of my body; may He cause me to
embrace the Seven Works of Mercy, and firmly to believe and
observe the Twelve Articles of the Faith, and the Ten Com
mandments of the Law, and defend me from the Seven Mortal
Sins, even to the end.' "
In contrast to all this Judaizing legalism in religion, the re
formers properly understood by faith a gift of God's grace which
leads men to repentance and creates in the heart trust in God and
obedience to the divine will ; that a trusting heart sets men right
before God and inevitably leads to good works. Now Luther
had tried all this through and through. He had in all sincerity,
consuming zeal and punctilious diligence, performed all the re
quired fasts and vigils, had done the most menial services and had
humbly obeyed all that the Church prescribed in order to attain
its assurance of salvation and forgiveness. But all had been
done in vain. The depth of his nature and piety, his penetration
into the mystery of godliness, made him go deeper in his search
for the way of peace and salvation. With a good and real man's
dread of shams and a great man's love of standing on realities,
he pushed on back of the Church's word that he was forgiven in
his painful search for the experience of pardon. Pushing on back
of the priestly absolution given him, he sought for something in
his own private and personal experience that would assure him
that, without external mediations, there was between him and
God established that reconciliation and peace which passeth all
understanding. Not satisfied with the Church's official assur
ance that all was well, he craved the divine assurance to be found
only in an acceptance of certain great facts which the New Testa
ment had revealed, and in the belief that God Himself was freely
offering forgiveness to all upon the one condition of repentance
and faith. The secret of his masterful place as teacher, preacher,
leader, reformer and constructive theologian was out when
Luther discovered in the midst of his spiritual struggles that he
himself could never do anything to deserve salvation, but that he
must accept it as a free and unmerited gift. Delivered from the
bondage of medieval conceptions of salvation, he became aware
that he had entered into fellowship with God, that he had come

240 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
to deal directly with Christ, his adorable Lord and Saviour. Not
in consequence of an elaborately articulated ceremonialism, but
by personal dealing with his ever-living Redeemer had he come to
spiritual tranquillity. He found that routine extemalism could
not secure salvation. His despair of ever achieving salvation by
merit at last set him to searching for another method of being
saved. Pie found a Bible, and there at once ensued a rediscovery
of what Paul had taught and elaborated with such masterful
argument centuries before. Coming upon such declarations as
these: "That he might himself be just and the justifier of him
that hath faith in Jesus;" "we reckon, therefore, that a man is
justified by faith apart from the works of the law," and "but to
to him that worketh not but believeth on Him that justifieth the
ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness," the sins from
which he sought for deliverance no longer filled his soul with
terror. The truth revealed to St. Paul at last flashed upon
Luther, that the divine mercy transcends all the heights and
depths of human hope, that the weakest and guiltiest of our race
may receive absolution from the very lips of God and have access
by Christ into that grace wherein all saintly souls have stood. It
was this gospel which Luther preached and which came to the
heart of Europe like the light of a new day after a dark and
desolate night of tempest and storm, making all who received
it glad with an inexpressible joy.
Roman Christianity had gradually been shaped into ceremonial,
ascetic and sacerdotal forms until at last the Roman element in it
had become supreme and the Christian subordinate. The Ref
ormation, as in a sense also monasticism and mysticism, was a
revolt against the corporate conception of salvation and a plea for
personal religion not entirely dependent upon the offices of the
Church. More and more for centuries Rome had set forth obe
dience to the Church as the comprehensive ideal of duty, and
summed up all sin as the crime of disobedience. Now at the end
of the long night of these depressing errors, men once more heard
a gospel that was worth preaching, that of direct access to God,
not for saints alone, but for sinners as well, that they may be as
sured of the forgiveness of sin and inspired with strength to sin
no more. To all the hesitating questions that might be raised
this gospel had but one comprehensive and assuring reply — you
may trust God and trust Him perfectly and trust Him now; that

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 241
through Christ we have grace, righteousness and the remission of
sins. This Gospel, at once new but old, was the gracious procla
mation, in consequence of which the cloud was suddenly lifted.
The face of God was revealed as gracious and propitious to
them through Christ, and they were only asked to love him, and
for their Saviour's sake to try to do His will and to live in faith
and trust towards Him, and in love towards their neighbor. It
was that glad gospel that once more began on earth the develop
ment of a characteristic type of free, confident, generous, ener
getic and childlike Christianity.
In consequence of this new apprehension of the Gospel, there
came about a great change in the whole outlook and standpoint
of the Christian Church. This new conception of Christ and of
God in Christ, of sin, forgiveness and assurance altered the whole
face of Christianity. The gulf between God and man was
bridged. The priest, who was without warrant interposed be
tween God and man, became an impertinence, and the old
methods of approach to God, through the saints and indulgences,
became as rubbish and had to be cast away. There sprang up in
the Church a living faith in Jesus Christ as the Saviour of man,
the source of grace, righteousness and hope for the life that now
is and that which is to come. The new principle of salvation be
came the source of all that was best in modern life. The grace
of God in Jesus Christ had come again to men, and there sprang
up a quickened and more intelligent devotion to the Person of the
Lord, Son of God, Son of man and Saviour of the world. De
liverance at last had come from a conception of salvation that
makes the sinner fall into the hands of man rather than into the
hands of the all-merciful and all-sufficient God. The Church had
at last emerged from the book of Leviticus, with its minute
legalistic requirements into the New Testament Epistle to the
Hebrews, in which we have the chief blessing of the Christian
dispensation represented as access to God, and the contrast pre
sented between immediacy of approach in Christ and the way in
which, under the old dispensation, it was fenced and cumbered
by the intervention of a human priesthood. Augustine, the
greatest of the post-apostolic fathers, and Luther, the greatest of
the reformers, both alike rested upon the fundamental religious
assumption of the free grace of God, as constituting the one
saving power for man. But they parted company in their con-

242 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
ceptions of how that grace was to be obtained. Augustine's views
held him to subject himself humbly to the Church, and to become
the chief exponent of the theory that outside the visible Church
there was no salvation. Luther, on the other hand, transferring
the emphasis from the mechanicalism of the sacramental system
to the truths and provisions of the Christian Gospel, and rejecting
that which he had come to regard as the chief offence against
true religion, the Judaizing doctrine of human merit, that which
had thrown doubt on the sufficiency of Christ's work and thus
creating a feeling of religious insecurity, soared aloft with an in
comparable fervor of faith to the very heart of God and grasped
once more the significance of the salvation that found its source
in the divine mercy. Faith became for him what it was for
Paul, what it was in the words of Christ our Lord and Saviour,
that power which enables a man to throw himself into the arms of
the Almighty with Whom all things are possible. Men were
once more brought back to a confident, steadfast trust reaching
into the unseen, into that joyful sense of assurance that since
Luther's day has been the religious ideal of Protestantism.
VIII
This Lutheran doctrine of justification entered at once upon
an important and influential career. It was impressed deeply
and fixedly upon the peoples of northern Europe and upon a
theological posterity. It is difficult to over-estimate the power of
a doctrine which brings to a point and concentrates in one
definite and comprehensive principle a whole mass of vague
thought and inclination existing in human nature. With a basis
of that kind, and an even stronger basis in the Scriptures, this
great doctrine at once laid marvelous hold upon the minds of
multitudes, penetrated them, and became at once their central and
informing principle in religion. It went forward, being the com
fort and stay, the one Christian creed and religious strength of
many minds. The more it is studied the more will it be found
in all the controversies of the Reformation period to be funda
mental, and that almost all the errors of the Roman Church, and
of the sacerdotalism which is in essential agreement with it,
arise from failure to accept without reserve this central truth of
the New Testament.

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 243
From the very beginning the theologians of the old Church
fully understood the far-reaching consequences of the Re
former's insistence upon the newly revived doctrine of justifica
tion by faith alone. Luther might deceive himself as to .the ex
tent of his acceptance of this Pauline conception of salvation,
but the Roman Curia labored under no such delusion. The fa
mous historian of the Council of Trent, Paul Sarpi, says that
"all the errors of Martin Luther were resolved into one point —
justification; for this denies the efficacy of the sacraments, the
authority of priests, the purgatory, the sacrifice of the mass and
all other remedies for the remission of sins. Therefore, he that
will establish the body of Catholic doctrine must first overthrow
this heresy of justification by faith alone." That Luther suc
ceeded so fully where others had failed was not expected, but
the reason of his success is indicated in the answer given by the
able Cardinal John Henry Newman, who went over from Angli
canism to Rome, when he says of him that "he adopted a doc
trine, original, specious, fascinating, persuasive, powerful,
against Rome, and wonderfully adapted, as if prophetically, to
the genius of the times. He found Christians in bondage to their
works and observations ; he released them by his doctrine of
faith." This famous writer, in his "Lectures on Justification,"
says that it was Luther's wish to extirpate all notions of human
merit ; next to give peace and satisfaction to the troubled con
science." A noble end this, certainly, to be attained, and that he
succeeded in the undertaking, the same strong writer, in harmony
with the Pauline interpretation on the same subject, indicates in
these words : "Luther's view of the Gospel covenant met both the
alleged evils against which it was provided. For if Christ has
obeyed the law instead of us, it follows that every believer has
at once a perfect righteousness, yet not his own. That it is not
his own precludes all boasting; that it is perfect precludes all
anxiety. The conscience is unladen without being puffed up."
The vitality of this great doctrine as a reformatory principle
soon became manifest after a long and dismal catalogue of
failures. How unspeakable these corruptions in teaching and
living were we have already seen. The measures proposed to
reform the Church by Councils at Pisa, Constance, Basel and
the Lateran had all signally failed. Even Cardinal Bellarmine
had dolefully declared that "religion was almost dead," and the

244 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
fairest historian Rome has ever had, in the person of Von Doel-
linger, has said that "the last hope of the Reformation of the
Church was carried to the grave." None of the measures pro
posed went to the root of the growths that had troubled Israel,
none had proven themselves effective enough to give direction
and strength and triumph to any of these efforts to heal the hurt
of the Church. Even men like Colet, More and Erasmus
imagined that there might be a humanistic regeneration and ex
orcism of evils that had fastened themselves upon the Body of
Christ, which might in turn lead to the removal of abuses, to a
moral quickening and to a new and more ethical interpretation of
the dogmas of the Church. But this humanistic dream was dis
pelled when the real Reformation came to pass. When Luther
at Worms, in 1521, refused to retract what he had written, he
planted himself down upon the principle of the supremacy of
the human conscience. This principle insisted upon, effected
much that was essential to any real reform in the Church. It
cut up, for example, by the roots the doctrine that there is any
justifiable and scriptural distinction between clergy and laity, be
tween the religious and the secular life. The Reformer's whole
attitude found its highest expression in his doctrine of justifica
tion, which, according to his understanding of St. Paul, as we have
seen, meant that man needs no external process by means of
which he is to attain to the pardon of sins. He was able to
grasp the great truth that God is revealed in the absolute self-
surrender of Christ, and that through faith we may have His
righteousness imparted to us; that the believer through faith be
comes united to God and has the assurance of liberation from
sin. He set aside all the traditions of the Church as despotic
over the religious consciousness of the individual, and yet
affirmed that man can only find his true self in direct union with
God in Christ. Scholasticism on the one hand, and monasticism
on the other, had crushed out the element of individualism in the
Church. A vast system of traditionalism covered every phase of
thought and every sphere of society, leaving no room for any
fresh and healthy individual life. The shadow of ecclesiastical
authority rested on everything, and imposed its arbitrary re
straints. The individual was nothing, the Church was every
thing. Within the Church there was no mental or spiritual
freedom.

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 245
But Luther's doctrine of justification stood for a revival of
individualism, a reassertion of Christian personality, for the
truth that righteousness could not begin in what a corporation
required of a man, but in a divine bestowment upon a man in his
personal relations to God. It was the reality of this personal
freedom in Christ that, in the final list of the causes of reform,
more than all else gave impulse and triumph to the Reforma
tion. It laid hold upon the great heart of the German people and
moved it profoundly. More effective than councils or human
ism, this principle made a living way for itself among the na
tions, and carried with it liberty and strength. It "shook the
ancient cathedrals to their inmost shrines," and brought moral
renovation to Europe. It showed itself to be of God and power
ful with the might of God. Professor Rudolph Sohm has ex
pressed the judgment warranted by his fine capacity for inter
preting the movement: "The face of the whole world was
changed by the Reformation, with its doctrine of justification by
faith alone. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, so shalt thou be
saved, thyself and thy whole house; that is the complete, the
whole divine Gospel, that can neither be added to nor taken
away from."
One of the secrets of the primacy of Luther's influence as
leader of the people, reformer of the Church, and as theologian,
is to be found in the fact that he so strongly grasped this prin
ciple not only, but passed through the evangelical experience
of justification. When he came to define what the Gospel was
he rose above the level of mere intellectualism and moralism.
He advanced beyond Romanism, with its perpetuated Jewish and
Hellenic ideas, and produced a rift in western Christendom
which could not be passed over, and recognized, as others of his
contemporaries did not, that the points of antithesis between the
two apprehensions of the Gospel were so wide and deep that
they could not be reconciled — which accounts for the fact that he
was never sympathetic with any of the numerous proposals of
compromise. He discovered that the Church was not to be really
reformed by the elimination of current superstitions, the correc
tion of flagrant abuses, and the rejection of unwarranted claims ;
that the cure of the ills of the Church was not to be found in
mere criticism of its unscriptural dogmas or the change of its
organization. Remedies of this kind had been tried and found

246 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
inadequate always by medieval reformatory sects, reforming
councils (that were not reformatory at all), Mystics and Human
ists. It is the Catholic historian, Gasquet, who says : "The most
zealous sons of the Church never hesitated to attack this or that
abuse and point out this or that spot, desiring to make the edifice
of God's Church, as they understood it, more solid, more useful
and more like Christ's ideal. Before 1517 or 1521 no one, at this
period, ever dreamed of wishing to change the basis of the Chris
tian religion as it was then understood." But these pre-Lutheran
efforts at reform, as we have seen, were ineffective, because they
went not to the root of the trouble in dealing with the hurt of
Israel. Romanism was, as we have seen, the product of an unique con
ception of God and salvation, and upon that basis it had for a
thousand years been building up and consolidating its mighty
superstructure of ecclesiasticism. That conception was the
formative idea in its worship, its polity, its doctrines and its
morality. Upon that basis it had built up a vast and complicated
hierarchy that never could have been reformed by critics, philos
ophers, theologians or ecclesiastics, but only by a great prophet,
a qualified leader, a courageous spirit, who had found in the
depth of his own experience the God who was a God of grace.
and a fellowship that was the fellowship of faith. Luther
having experienced this in his own life, became the heaven-
anointed leader of a real and abiding reformation. He was, it
is true, excommunicated in 1520, but he had in fact become sep
arated from Rome earlier, because, in the depths of his own
profound religious life, he had already gone beyond it so far that
he could not retrace his steps and recant without stultifying his
higher and better nature and trampling upon his deepest convic
tions. The result of it all was not simply a protest, with some
phases of resulting ecclesiastical reform, but an intellectual,
moral, political, social and religious transformation and recon
struction of society, which were so far-reaching in their influence
that a new era in the history of mankind was inaugurated. No
real reform was effected until one big and sincere soul had passed
through the evangelical experience of sin, atonement, forgiveness,
faith and justification, and the initial stages of sanctification.
Centuries before, the Gospel, as a distinct message of redemp
tion, had won its way into the Roman Emipre in the face of a

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 247
multitude of religions and cults which had the sanction of an
alleged divine origin and centuries of tradition behind them. It
then had something to offer which the world longed for and had
not hitherto received from the old cults. Its message of grace
and power then differentiated it from all other religions. It
was reserved for Luther again, in his day, to grasp anew, with
all the intensity of a Paul and an Augustine, the idea that re
demption through Christ was something more than the driving
away of evil passions and vices — a deliverance from death, and
an assurance of eternal life — that it was, first of all, a joyous
forgiveness of sins. It was this which gave the movement from
its inception its note of triumph and its unique and world-
conquering power.
There never has been a day when this principle of the Lutheran
Movement of the sixteenth century, which has shown not only
its scripturalness, but its vitality and effectiveness as a corrective
agency and reforming power, together with other sacred and
lofty principles, needed to be more clearly understood, defended
and maintained, than today. We would reproduce, in proof of
fliis, the strong words of a writer and leader of recognized dis
tinction in our own day. President Butler, of Columbia Univer
sity, holds the lesson of the Reformation for our day to be a new
emancipation of the individual. He says :
"To recall to the mind of the twentieth century the signficance
of the great movement known as the Reformation is valuable
public service. The modern mind is threatened, as was the mind
of the sixteenth century, with the dominance of a philosophy of
life and of religion which operates to minimize the functions and
the freedom of the individual, and to make each individual
merely a cog in the wheel of a powerful and dominating group.
The pious zeal and the individual's everlasting desire for ex
pression and for responsibility, which were foreshadowed in
European history by St. Dominic and St. Francis, as well as by
Roger Bacon, and which later found such an epoch-making voice
in Martin Luther, need to find new expression today. The
tyranny which threatens in the twentieth century is not the
tyranny of any Church, but the tyranny of a majority in the state,
a majority so constituted that it is not content with guiding
the ordinary business of government, but which seeks to conform
to a single narrow type the occupations, the gains, the amuse-

248 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
ments and the mode of living of every individual. If the world
needed a religious and philosophical reformation in the sixteenth
century, in order to emancipate the individual, surely it needs a
social and political reformation in the twentieth century for the
same purpose." IX
What has been said in the foregoing gives us the reason why
Luther, in all the steps of his progress as theologian and re
former, assigned such a primacy to faith. He gave the world a
new valuation of religion as faith, reinstated the conception that
Christianity in its inmost, vital element, is faith. Underlying all
he said and did was the idea of the sovereignty of faith. For
him faith was man's real life toward God, that attitude of the
soul by which alone he had any standing and acceptance with
God. Whatever the Christian life may be in its various mani
festations, it is all the outgrowth of faith. The Reformer recog
nized that there were two kinds of faith. One was that by which
men believe what they are told to believe — a kind of knowledge
rather than faith — a mere mental assent to certain statements and
facts as true, while the other was a kind of faith which is a
trust in God, a casting of one's self upon Him for help, believing
without doubt that He will fulfill His promises. Faith accord
ing to the medieval theology was an effort of man to know and
see God. Luther recognized this kind of faith as legitimate, but
calls it worthless because it gives us nothing. It is the other and
real kind of faith which gives us the assurance of a loving God,
who makes us to see His love in Jesus Christ. This true faith
cannot be secured by effort, for it is the gift of God. It is im
portant to note that the practical demands of the religious life
were the impelling power in Luther's experience, both in its
genesis and growth, and in its application to the problems of
his age. He so estimated faith. In the medieval theology the
emphasis had been placed on external things, on the doing of
good works, on the observance of laws. Even some of the radi
cals among the reformers were influenced by the same error, for
Carlstadt and men of like mind soon fell into the fallacy of re
forming people by means of iconoclasm practiced on church
buildings more than by means of accent upon the principle of
faith in the hearts of the people. The emphasis was shifted by

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 249
both Romanists and radicals from what God does in man by
means of faith, which is God's gift, to what man himself does.
The greatness of Luther's place as preacher and reformer, and
his abiding influence in the world to this hour, is due to the fact
that he had learned anew the meaning of that great word, faith,
and had come to recognize in it the vital principle of religion, the
real essence of the Christian revelation in the Gospel.
Prof. Voigt, one of our own most accomplished theologians,
has given to it a fine and inclusive statement in these words :
"He (Luther) never formally defined faith in technical terms,
but in the greatest variety of representations he shows its source,
its possessions, its power, its effects. He realized in his own ex
perience that it is the work of God in the human soul; it is the
regeneration of the Holy Spirit; it lays hold of Christ and all
God has promised to men in His grace; it is man's freedom and
redemption from the powers of evil, the devil, death and sin; it
is the life of the soul in God; it is the spring of love and all
•good works. 'If you believe, you have. If you do not believe,
you do not have.' So he sententiously declared that religion and
all its blessings are included in faith. This was a new under
standing of Christianity from its very heart. Those, who, in
earlier centuries, like Augustine and Bernard, had come nearest
to it, still had missed it. This valuation of religion as faith
made it intensely personal. It brought man face to face with
God, and not only to the Church, with its doctrines and require
ments. It showed to souls that yearned for God the true and
only way to come to Him and live in Him. All in religion is of
faith because all is grace." What the Reformer had learned was
to trust God courageously and count all things of but little
moment as compared with this, the greatest principle in re
ligion. "Out of a complex system of expiations, good deeds and
comfortings, of strict statutes and uncertain appointments of
grace, out of magic and blind obedience," says Prof. Harnack,
"Luther led religion forth and gave it a strenuously concentrated
form. The Christian religion is the living assurance of the liv
ing God who has revealed Himself and opens His heart in Christ
— nothing more." *
It was a vital part of this fundamental experience that the liv
ing God who had manifested Himself in Christ was accessible
to every Christian. The Church and its sacraments had really

250 LLTHERAX MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CEXTURY
becooie die soul's saviours, having nsmped the primal place of
faith. The rightful order of importance bad to be restored, and
again Harnack says: "Rising above all anxieties and terrors,
above all ascetic devices, above all directions of theology, above
all interventions of hierarchy and sacraments, Luther ventured
to lay hold of God himself in Christ, and in this act of faith,
winch he recognized as God's work, his whole being obtained
stability and firmness, nay. even a personal joy and certainty
which no medieval Christian had ever possessed*" This fact of
God's giving the believer power to cast htmsrif directly and un
reservedly on God for salvation once more placed the accent in
religion in the right place, on the inner things, on the disposition
of a man's heart, on the way he thinks of God and Christ. The
constant emphasis placed on this by Luther has led to some mis-
tmderstanding. It has been alleged, especially by high Anglicans,
to be one-sided and contrary to Scripture and reason, and even
to savor of unethical anfiimmiaiiism It is well, accordingly, to
hear what Luther himself says in his explanation of the Creed.
There are two ways of believing. One way is to believe about
God, as I do when I believe that whai is said of God is true,
just as I do when I believe what is said about the Turk, die
devil or helL This faith is knowledge or observation, rather than
faith. The other way is to believe in God, as I do when I not
only believe that what is said about Him is true, but put my
trust in Him, surrender mt-flf to Tfim and malrp bold to have
dealings with Him, believing without doubt that He will be to me
and do to me just what is said of Him. * * * This faith,
which is hfe or death and dares to believe that God is what He
is said to be. is the only faith that makes a man a Christian.
* This faith no false and evil heart can have, for it is a
living faith. * * * Wherefore the word m is rightly used;
and it is carefully to be noted that we may not say, T befieve
God the Father," or "about the Father," but "•in God the Father,
in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Ghost." This faith we should render
to no one but God Therefore we confess the divinity of Jesus
Christ and of the Holy Ghost when we believe in them, even as
we believe in the Father: and just as our faith in all three Per
sons is one and the same faith, so the three Persons are one and
the same God"
In his great treatise on ""Christian Liberty." one of the three

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 251
"Primary Works" of 1520, the most central in its significance of
all of Luther's writings, he again says : "The inward man can
not be justified, made free and be saved by any outward work or
dealing whatsoever, and works, whatever their character, have
nothing to do with this inward man. On the other hand, only
ungodliness and unbelief of heart, and no outward work, make
him guilty and a damnable servant of sin. Wherefore it ought to
be the first concern of every Christian to lay aside all trust in
works, and more and more to strengthen faith alone and
through faith to grow in knowledge, not of works, but of Christ
Jesus, Who suffered and rose for him." And this faith which
leads men thus to throw themselves on God is no mood of mere
mystical abandonment, no losing of one's self in mere abstract con
templation, or pietistic introspection, or pious meditation. It is,
as Luther was never weary of saying, our very life; not simply
God within us, but God impelling us to all good activities in
spheres of Christian usefulness. By means of it not only do
men secure the forgiveness of their sins, but are by this life prin
ciple of religion also inspired to that righteousness which finds
expression in good works. Hear Luther again in speaking of
this subject: "It is a living, busy, active, powerful thing, this
faith; it is impossble for it not to do us good continually. It
never asks whether good works are to be done; it has done them
before there is time to ask the qusetion ; and it is always doing
them." In his "Treatise on Good Works" once more the fruitful
pen of the reformer is found saying: "Everyone can note and
tell for himself when he does what is good, or not good ; for if
he finds his heart confident that it pleases God, the work is good,
even if it were so small a thing as picking up a straw. If con
fidence is absent, or if he doubts, the work is not good, though
it were to raise all the dead and the man were to give himself to
be burned. * * * Faith as the chief work, and no other
work, has given us our name of Christians (believer in Christ) ;
for all other works a heathen, a Turk, a sinner may also do, but
to trust firmly that he pleases God is possible only for a Chris
tian who is enlightened and strengthened by grace." The very
First Commandment means, "Since I alone am God, thou shalt
place all thy confidence, trust and faith in Me alone and on no
one else." "Having a God" is "to trust Him with the heart, and
look to Him for all good, grace and favor, whether in works or

252 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
in sufferings, in life or death, in joy or sorrow." * * * "This
faith * * * is the true fulfilling of the First Command
ment." * * * "So faith is the very highest and best work,
from which all others must proceed." Elsewhere he calls it
"the captain of good works."
"Lo! thus must thou form Christ within thyself and see how
in Him God holds before thee and offers thee His mercy without
any previous merits of thine own, and from such a view of His
grace must thou draw faith and confidence of the forgiveness of
thy sins. Faith, therefore, does not begin with works, neither
do they create it, but it must spring and flow from the blood,
wounds and death of Christ. If thou see in these that God is so
kindly affectioned toward thee that He gives His Son for thee,
then thy heart also must in turn grow sweet and kindly affec
tioned toward God, and so thy confidence must grow out of pure
good-will and love — God's love toward thee and thine toward
God." Thus this conception of what is the vital principle of Chris
tianity became the soul of the Reformation. No matter what
Luther was writing about, we always find him assigning the
primacy to faith. This resting of the heart upon Christ was a
very simple but at the same time a very comprehensive matter.
So completely does it dominate the life of a real Christian that
he cannot do a Christian act or think a Christian thought without
it. His conception of faith it was which led to his view regard
ing the Scriptures. It made the Word of God to him a personal
and not a merely dogmatic or legalistic revelation. To him God
was speaking in the Bible even as he would have spoken to his
fellow-men. The chief function of these Scriptures was to bring
Christ to him and to all men, and as Jesus is the full revelation
of God, the chief end of the Bible must be to bring God near to
every believer.
These Scriptures became to Luther the record and portrayal of
blessed spiritual experiences of the past, such as he had now
experienced in his own life. Hence his eagerness to translate the
Bible into the language of the common people that they, too,
might know at first hand the way of salvation and have repro
duced in their lives the same experience of communion and fel
lowship with God. He perceived, as but few men have, in the
fulness of its meaning, the content of the Gospel, which had been

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 253
of old time proclaimed with such clearness, and strength by St.
Taul, and which for the instruction and guidance of the Church
in all times, has been written down, especially in the Epistles to
the Romans and Galatians. It is no exaggeration to say that
for a long and desolate period these great writings of the Apostle
were not fully understood. It was Luther's mind, gradually dis
entangled from traditional conceptions that had grown up
through long centuries of perversion and misunderstanding, that
was to learn anew the meaning of Scripture faith. Indeed, the
debt which the Christian world owes to Luther is so great and
so varied that it is difficult to conceive it in its full extent, or to
exhibit it in all its length and breadth. But certainly one of the
principal occasions of that indebtedness is the fact that the chief
of the Reformers succeeded in restoring to Christendom once more
the presence and principles of the great Apostle of the Gentiles.
The struggle between what is known as Jewish Christianity
and Gentile Christianity was the chief ground of division in the
minds and sympathies of the early Church. That struggle be
tween two apprehensions of Christianity has not entirely subsided
even in our day, when we sometimes encounter the remains of a
Puritanic and work-righteousness aspect of religion among ultra
Protestant sects. In the controversy of his day pertaining to
freedom from the exactions of the Jewish law, Paul seemed to
have the best of it, but his triumph was not of long duration.
During his life-time he achieved a leading position in the Church
at Rome in a city which, from force of circumstances, after
wards became the center of Christianity. But what influence
the apostle had won there soon passed away in the presence of
the energy, persistency and popularity of the reintroduced sacer
dotalism of the ancient Jewish dispensation. By tradition and
by theory Rome was equally the seat of Paul and Peter, but the
latter soon ascended to a primacy that has no adequate basis in
either Scripture, history or in the comparative gifts or influence
of the two apostles. Paul at Rome was soon retired into the
background, his latest appearance, according to tradition, having
been in the capacity of a ghost, when, at the famous and decisive
battle of Chalons, fought in 451 A. D., to resist the efforts of
Attila the Hun to establish an anti-Christian empire upon the
ruins of Rome, the chief of the apostles stood by the side of Leo
the Great, the real founder of the papacy, to assist in frightening

254 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
away the plundering pagan from his diabolical enterprise in one
of the most important contests recorded in history. Petrinism
had triumphed ovej Paulinism, and the great writer of the
Epistle to the Romans was scarcely remembered except in the
study chambers of the scholastics and the hermitages of the
mystics. But the time at last came for a revival of interest in
Paul, and to Luther was accorded the memorable honor of being
the advocate of the apostle's doctrines, and henceforth his chief
strength was found in the circumstances that he stood upon the
basis of the great writings of the New Testament.
The whole of the indulgence controversy, which precipitated
the Reformation movement, came about because that infamous
traffic was conducted in contravention to the plain teachings of
the Scriptures about sin, grace, forgiveness, salvation, and jus
tification. The ends sought were purely sordid, but the basis of
the business was theological. It has been alleged that Luther did
not attack indulgences themselves, but only their abuse. It was
the abuse that was the immediate point of his criticism, but he
knew that he was bringing the system itself into question. He
saw very clearly that anything that conflicted with the doctrine of
the forgiveness of sins solely because of the merits of Christ, and
annulled the duty of Christian charity, must be radically wrong.
Indulgences were a compound of truth and error. In the prac
tice of the early Church they grew out of one of the features of
Church discipline. The indulgence theory had its beginnings a
thousand years before Luther's day, and continued to pervade
the whole penitential system of the later medieval Church, and
had done so from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Ac
cording to the teaching of the Church in its earlier history when
persons had been guilty of mortal sin, before they could be re
stored to God's favor, they must not only humbly and sorrow
fully confess their sins to the priest, but also perform certain
works of penance indicated authoritatively by the Church.
Sometimes it was fasting and vigils, and sometimes self-lacera
tion and self-torture, but always self-denial of some order. This
-vas declared to be necessary as a satisfaction for their sins.
\Vhen our Lord underwent the sacrifice of the cross more merit
resulted than was necessary to save those who had lived on the
earth up to that time. This superabundant merit was further
increased from the life of Mary, the mother of Christ, and it is

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 255
still further and constantly being augmented by those saints
whose lives have been such as to enable them to earn merit more
than sufficient for their own salvation. This store of super
erogatory merit is in the keeping of the Church and can be dis
pensed by means of indulgences, at the discretion of the pope, the
vicar of Christ on earth. These indulgences were granted for
prayers, pilgrimages and other good works, while later the pen
alties were more frequently remitted by the Church on condition
of the payment of a sum of money. In the conduct of the
traffic in these indulgences the old innocent words of penance,
confession and satisfaction took on new meanings. The theory
of indulgences, it is said, has never yet been authoritatively de
fined by the Church. Originally an indulgence meant the remis
sion of the penitential discipline, which, even when a sin was for
given, was deemed necessary for its expiation. Later on it took
the form of commutation, almsgiving to the poor, money pay
ments for religious or charitable purposes, pilgrimages and other
pious works being substituted for regular canonical penalties.
For a long time they were issued sparingly and care was exer
cised concerning them. Their enormous multiplication followed,
along with many other abuses, what is known as the "Great
Western Schism." They were no longer proofs of repentance,
but penalties of sin. The beginning of the business which called
out Luther's revolt is well known ; how that Pope Leo X, in need
of money for many purposes, and more especially the building of
his splendid new cathedral of St. Peter's, in Rome, determined to
obtain it by a liberal granting of indulgences to penitent sinners.
"The indulgence," says Professor Fisher, in his "History of the
Reformation," was a simple bargain, according to which, on
the payment of a stipulated sum, the individual received a full
discharge from the penalties of sin, and procured the release of
a soul from the flames of purgatory. The forgiveness of sin was
offered in the market for money."
The whole system had long been a scandal to the devout. It
is enough to say that in the way in which he served his papal
master, the pope, Tetzel signally exhibited the impostures and
abuses of the whole indulgence theory. Coarse, vulgar and
brazen, he carried on the business with a swing, hawking his
commodities in churches, public streets, taverns and ale houses,
like those spirited dealers in meretricious trinkets to be en-

256 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
countered today in the streets of almost any city or town. At
a cross set up in the market place, from which the pope's arms
were suspended, the auctioneer extolled the merits of his goods,
the crowd in the meantime standing about with a mixture of fun
and business, very much like a crowd that may now-a-days be
encountered at a country fair. His methods, as Dr. McGiffert
observes, were those of the modern traveling evangelist. This
was the usual form of Tetzel's address to the crowds who flocked
about him, as reported by the historian D'Aubigne:
"Indulgences are the most precious and the most noble of
God's gifts. The cross (pointing to the red cross, which he
carried with him) has as much efficacy as the very cross of Jesus
Christ. Come, and I will give you letters, all properly sealed,
by which even the sins you intend to commit may be pardoned.
There is no sin so great that an indulgence cannot remit. Reflect
then, that, by means of these letters, you can, once in your life,
in every case except four, which are reserved for the Apostolic
See, and afterwards in the article of death, obtain a plenary re
mission of all your penalties and all your sins. But, more than
this," said Tetzel, "indulgences avail not only for the living but
the dead. Priest ! noble ! merchant ! wife ! youth ! maiden ! do
you not hear your parents and your other friends who are dead,
and who cry from the bottom of the abyss: 'We are suffering
horrible torments ! a trifling alms would deliver us ; you can give
it, and you will not!' At the very instant," continued Tetzel,
"that the money rattles at the bottom of the chest, the soul escapes
from purgatory and flies liberated to heaven."
In his strong denunciation directed at this abomination we
discover one of Luther's marked characteristics, which among
others indicate his bigness. His indignation became fierce when
he discovered that his own people had been buying the in
dulgences and using them as a cloak and excuse for gross of
fences against the moral law. But in Luther there was no re
sentment and his denunciation was never personal, and hearing
later that the Dominican huckster, Tetzel, had become seriously
sick, he wrote him a tender, sympathetic and comforting letter,
commending him to the mercy and grace of God, who was
abundantly able to save. The violence of his language was
never personal with his most odious opponents, but was directed
against the abuses and apostasies represented by them.

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 257
Many rejoiced that at last one man had been bold enough to
declaim against what he called a "gross and profane error,"
while earnest souls were made glad that the vital truths about
sin, repentance, confession and forgiveness had been so clearly
stated and boldly published. Erasmus, at this stage, bold enough
to at least indulge in a reflection, said: "I observe that the
more genuine their piety and the purer their morals, the less are
men opposed to Luther. The world was weary of a doctrine so
full of puerile fables, and thirsted for that pure and living water
which springs from the veins of the evangelists and apostles."
The preamble to the theses set forth in the academic usage of the
day what Luther, at this stage of his work as reformer, contem
plated. "From a desire," says he, "to elicit the truth the following
theses will be maintained at Wittenberg under the presidency of
the Rev. Father Martin Luther, of the order of Augustines,
master of arts, master and lecturer in theology. He asks that
such as are not able to dispute verbally with him will do so in
writing. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen." The
grossness and iniquity of this business, that without design made
Luther a reformer, is apparent in the schedule of prices affixed
to the indulgences. Every sin was on the tariff save heresy
alone. Among the relatively cheap ones we may note:
Absolution for him who has carnal connection with mother,
sister or other kinswoman, 5 gr.
For him who deflowers a virgin, 6 gr.
For the killing of a layman by a layman, 5 gr.
From the more expensive luxuries of a too exuberant and
swift life may be noted these :
Annulling or putting off a vow of pilgrimage to the Holy
Sepulchre and other holy places, 18 gr.
And among the indulgences, a general dispensation for life,
25 gr.
In 1482 the Paris theologians had condemned this pecuniary
poetry : Soon as the coin in the chest doth ring,
Souls out of purgatory spring.
Kings, archbishops and princes were to give twenty-five

258 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Rhenish gold gulden; abbots, counts and barons, ten; people
with incomes of five hundred gulden were to give six; the next
class, one; poorer ones, one-half, or one-quarter, or even less.
The poor could beg till they had the price. Upon payment a re
ceipt was given, quite business-like ; in fact, the thing was called
'"The Holy Business." There was a regular price list; perjury
and robbing a church cost nine ducats, murder eight ducats, etc.
Dispensations for marriage within the prohibited degrees, the
most expensive of all the holy luxuries for sale and usually in
dulged in by monarchs only, were rated at from three hundred to
six hundred ducats, according to circumstances. The system
was marvelously fruitful, and it is accordingly no matter of sur
prise that the audacious Reformer was met with one aim and
policy by the ecclesiastical chieftains whose resources of ducats
and gulden had been imperiled. Some were for mild sup
pression; others for fierce suppression, but all were for sup
pression without delay. "It is high treason," exclaimed Hoch-
straten, the inquisitor of Cologne, "against the Church to have
such a heretic alive for another hour. Erect instantly the scaffold
for him."
The general view of those in power, even when less violently
expressed, was essentially the same. But there were others who
were more considerate in their judgment, and who, with a better
forecast of coming events, with more moderation discussed the
signs of the times. The shepherd of the Wittenberg flock, the
bishop of Brandenburg, discovered nothing heretical in them,
while Albert Krantz, of Hamburg, said: "You speak the truth,
good brother, but you'll not do anything; back to your cell and
pray, 'God have mercy upon me !' " At Steinlausig Prior Fleck
told his Franciscans, "There is a man who will do it!" and he
wrote Luther: "Venerable Doctor, proceed! Press forward!
These papal abuses always displeased me, too," etc. Germany's
greatest artist of all times, Albrecht Durer, sent his approval
from Nurnberg. Kaiser Maximilian told Frederick's counselor,
Pfeffinger, Luther's theses were not to be despised, and the
Elector would better take care of him, for he might some day be
useful against the prelates. If Sylvester Prierias, the pope's
confessor and master of the papal palace, in giving an expert
opinion of the theses, expressed his resources as an expert in
scurrilous personal abuse, even denouncing Luther's father as a

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 259
dog, for biting was the habit of dogs, and calling the Reformer
himself a leper with a nose of iron, a head of brass, and like
billingsgate, there were others, who, with more of serious-mind-
edness, sensed the situation and discovered that Rome had at
last found its match and had encountered a foe difficult to
deal with.
But this was the great truth : the significance of the theses was
to be found in their doctrinal teachings on the old subjects of sin
and salvation. In them for the first time in a thousand years the
evangelical doctrine of a free and gratuitous remission of sins
had been sounded out in statements publicly professed and
heralded to the world. Listen to the note of St. Paul once more
sounded out in the theses: "When our Lord and Master Jesus
Christ says, 'Repent,' he means that the whole life of believers
upon earth should be a constant and perpetual repentance."
"Still our Lord does not mean to speak solely of internal repen
tance; internal repentance is null if it produce not externally
every kind of mortification of the flesh." "The commissaries of
indulgences are in error when they say that by the papal in
dulgences a man is delivered from every punishment and is
saved." "They preach mere human follies who maintain that
as soon as the money rattled in the strong box the soul flies out
of purgatory." "Those who fancy themselves sure of salvation
by indulgences will go to perdition along with those who teach
them so." "Every true Christian, whether dead or alive, par
ticipates in all the blessings of Christ, or of the Church, by God's
gift, and without a letter of indulgence." "The true and
precious treasure of the Church is the Holy Gospel of the glory
and grace of God."
That the indulgence represented a different and antithetical
aspect of religion is manifest in these words, taken from a copy
in common use at the time: "I, in virtue of the Apostolic
power committed to me absolve thee from all ecclesiastical cen
sures, judgments and penalties that thou mayest have merited ;
and further, from all excesses, sins and crimes that thou mayest
have committed, however great and enormous they may be
and of whatever kind. I efface all the stains of weakness and
all traces of the shame that thou mayest have drawn upon thyself
by such actions. I remit the pains that thou wouldst have had
to endure in purgatory."

260 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
At the time of the publication of the theses Tetzel was at
Frankfort on the Oder, pressing his sales with archiepiscopal en
dorsement. He fulminated with rage and alarm, and tried to
offset their effort with frenzied harangues and publicly abusing
the bold propositions, but all in vain. With no desire at this
time to separate himself from the Church, loyal to the pope and
laboring and praying only for the reformation of the Church,
Luther had fired the opening gun in the most significant conflict
of modern times. In the progress of the disputations that en
sued, he could not help advancing step by step, as the logic of his
adversaries forced him to recur to the fundamental principles of
sacerdotal medieval theology, since the refutation of their con
clusions depended so largely on the destruction of their premises.
"Thunder," as has been said, "was now everywhere breeding in
the air. Strong men were rising up on both sides, either in de
fense of principles or from motive of policy." Though Luther
himself could not fully understand it, this indulgence contro
versy was the inception of a mighty revolution. The words of
Froude, the great English historian, correctly interpret the sig
nificance of his attitude: "The spark kindled the powder which
was lying everywhere, ready to explode. That one act opened
the lips of Germany, and from all parts there rose instantly the
cry of denunciation against the Church administration. Eras
mus, best of witnesses for her, himself standing apart from the
movement, testified to the universal delight at what Luther had
done. Kings, princes, bishops, priests, some even among the
monks themselves, equally applauded. A brave man at last had
been found to utter the thoughts of them all. There was no
question of teaching them any new doctrine or breaking the unity
of Christendom. All honest men knew that the indulgences were
a scandal which it was impossible to defend."
X
It would be a contradiction of well-known facts of history to
deny the strong influence exercised on the Lutheran movement
of the sixteenth century by the intellectual and social forces
that were contemporary with that movement. There was then, as
we have seen, a great awakening in the mental life and political
activity of Europe, and it is but truth to say that the movement

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 261
inaugurated by Luther in the nailing up of his theses was much
influenced by both.
But however much that movement may have been aided by
these factors, its primary and dominant cause is to be found
always in the new religious convictions above noted, and which
were then taking such deep root in the hearts of men. It was,
as we have seen, first and above all, a return to the fountain of
life opened up in the sacred Scriptures, and a revival of spiritual
life. The longing for closed fellowship with God and a more
assured peace, that had been so prominent in the spiritual con
flicts of Luther, were present to a greater or less degree in thou
sands of good and devout men and women around him. The re
sults of his long-continued personal religious struggles may all be
summed up in a few brief phrases : That right and duty are for
all ; that there is no longer a privileged religious order, or eccles
iastical usages which can exempt men from moral obligations ;
that in matters of duty and religion all men are equal. He had,
at the beginning, no idea or faintest desire of bringing his views
into great publicity. He had quietly and unostentatiously ex
pounded them to his students at Wittenberg, and preached them
to his parishioners from the pulpit in the same town. When he
exposed the abuses of the indulgence traffic being conducted
among his own people he had only meant to serve the Church,
and that only by pointing out in an academical debate1 the danger
in these abuses. The attempt to intimidate and browbeat him
into subjection by an assertion of ecclesiastical officialism aroused
his manly spirit, led him to further investigation, and by and by
to the conviction that he had a cause to plead for the Church
and for the truth as it is in Christ. The Church attempted, by
methods of cajolery, threat, argument, and, finally excommuni
cation, to suppress him. But supporters sprang up on every
hand, until by and by a new Church system, a new development
of religious culture, was the outcome.
Protestantism and Romanism do not differ so much as varieties
of one and the same religion, but as two distinct religions,
because of the diverse and, so frequently, antithetical ways in
which they define what is at the basis of all religion—a man's re
lation to God and the duties depending upon that relation.
At its best, Lutheranism stands for the power of personal
religion, for the spiritual freedom of the individual as answer-

262 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
able, in the final issue, to his Maker alone. It further stands
for the prophetic Word of God as the dynamic which alone can
vitalize the ritual of the priest, make efficacious the sacraments of
the Church, and by means of which alone the Holy Ghost can
work where and when it pleases Him in effecting man's restora
tion to rightful relations with God. The true Protestant wit
ness stands for the Word of God, which, not being bound, has
borne such splendid witness to the truth of evangelicalism and
the liberty wherewith Christ doth make men free. It has always
warned its own disciples, and many times not without cause, of
the deadness of the letter, excepting as it expresses and mediates
the efficacious working of the third Person of the adorable
Trinity. It was, as we have seen, the sense of sin and the experience
of salvation which determined Luther's conception of Christ as
a Saviour. He had something of the Pauline experience of sin
and came, accordingly, to the Pauline conception of a Saviour
needed and actualized. With him the necessity for and the doc
trine of the atonement were not based simply on Scripture pas
sages, but the Scripture passages received their proper value be
cause he had actually experienced what those passages revealed
as possible and that which they described. The atonement was a
revelation to Paul and to Luther of something that was deeply
rooted in God's nature and man's need. Luther grasped the
scriptural conception of man's inability to save himself, whether
by mental culture or moral effort; came to know that a real sal
vation was an act of God in Christ to be appropriated by faith.
In our day, the point of departure of all liberal theories from the
evangelical conception of salvation is found, not so much in
radical literary hypotheses and canons, as in its conception of a
Saviour and of salvation.
Thus it is not from the scientific or social conscience that the
informational movement of the sixteenth century proceeded. It
was a distinctly religious development. The form it took in
Luther was due, as Kostlin, his biographer and interpreter, de
clares, to his direct and mighty grasp, his intuition and his unify
ing view of religious truth. In his apprehension of the truth and
interpretation of it, he had what amounted almost to genius,
a balance of judgment in keeping the various aspects and applica
tions of the truth in such a proper co-ordination that a real and

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 263
permanent Protestantism was the result. In their prosecution
of the work of reform the men who forsook his way were soon
found resorting to compulsion and physical force, rooting out
heresy to supplant it with their own religio-political views propa
gated with fire and sword. Such fell an easy prey to anabaptism
and its excesses, to socinianism, to enthusiasm and rationalism,
sacramentarianism and spiritualism, secularism and political
methods. By the soundness of his principles and the sanity of
his methods the chief of the reformers not only reformed Chris
tendom, but incidentally led the whole world into new channels
of liberty, knowledge and culture, and this mighty work was ac
complished without a weapon save the Word of God only and
the principles that by fair interpretation are deduced there
from. Dr. Philip Schaff has said, and with justice, that "It is impos
sible to reduce the fundamental difference between Protestantism
and Romanism to a single formula without doing injustice to one
or the other. Nor should we forget that there are legalistic and
Romanizing tendencies in Protestantism." But ignoring the ex
ceptions and looking only at the prevailing character and various
aspects of the two systems, there are strong points of divergence.
In the development of Protestantism in its early history, not only
did the primary principles soon become manifest, but a goodly
number of secondary and inferential principles, all of which
served to show the irreconcilable opposition between Romanism
and Protestantism of every shade. It would be easy to show that
the principle which assumes one form in our vindication of the
right to private judgment, another form in the contention for the
authority of the Holy Scriptures, and yet another form in the
doctrine of justification by faith, is implied and actively present
in every one of the controversies between the two apprehensions
of the Gospel and the Church. The antithesis between the one
and the other is manifest at many points.
The Romanist believed in the authority of the Church, while
with the Protestant the center of gravity was liberty; the one
yielding his conscience absolutely to the priest, while the other
subordinated his to God alone. In a terse and comprehensive
statement of Dr. Schaff we have it all: "Freedom in Christ is
the ultimate root of evangelical Protestantism, while bondage in
the law is the essence of Romanism, and freedom from Christ

264 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the essence of Rationalism." The Romanist believed in the pope
as the official and visible representative of Christ on earth, and
in the hierarchy, which was the depository and administrator of
all truth ; the Protestant looks upon all men as equal before God,
regards the ministry as an office in the Church and not the
Church itself, and calls the Church "the congregation of the saints
and true believers." The Romanist insists that all authority is
to be found in the one visible Church of which the pope is the
head, while the Protestant always harks back to the inspired
Word of God, the only source and norm of spiritual truth, and
that not supplemented by any verdict of human reason or pre
tended immediate revelations. The Romanist, content with the
teaching of the Church, was willing to leave the interpretation of
the Bible solely in the hands of the Church; the Protestant held
that it was diligently and reverently to be studied by all as the
Word of God, multiplying its translations and seeking to give it
to all the peoples of the earth in their own language. Romanism
was chiefly concerned to make known to men what their relation
to the Church must be in order to insure salvation ; Protestantism
was more concerned about making known the fulness of the mes
sage of God, who for Jesus' sake pardons and saves sinful men.
The Romanist held that the merits of Christ could be made ours
only through the sacraments, and that these were dependent in
their administration upon a sacerdotal class of men duly ordained
and being in an alleged "apostolical succession." The Protestant,
on the other hand, estimated the two sacraments instituted by
our Lord as divine appointments, that they are real channels of
divine grace, but attaching to them no efficacy because admin
istered by priestly hands, and holding that the merits of Christ
were bestowed upon the soul only in response to sincere and
humble faith. According to Rome the Church was not exclu
sively a religious organization, but was something of an ecclesias
tical state. Protestantism rediscovered the true and spiritual char
acter of the kingdom of God on earth, with its loving Father and
merciful and gracious Saviour. Romanism sought God through
a succession of mediators, the priest, the saints and Mary, the
Holy Virgin; while Protestantism affirmed that there was but
one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. The
one of these forms of the Christian religion teaches that a man's
relation to Christ is determined by his relation to the Church,

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 265
while the other declares that his relation to the Church is deter
mined always by his relation to Christ.
Thus the two systems stood in absolute and irreconcilable opposi
tion, one being the embodiment of individual liberty and direct
responsibility to God, while the other was the assertion of un
limited priestly authority and the demand for silent and sub
missive obedience to Church authority. That the Roman Catholic
Church in some of the aspects of its teaching and organization
makes a powerful appeal to vast multitudes of people in indis
putable. That it is a mighty organization for doing in an external
way what is essentially an inward work of grace in the believer's
soul, is not to be successfully controverted. It presents to the
inquirer an imposing system. He comes to her seeking salvation,
and she offers him a refuge, a visible fold of Christ, an organiza
tion out of which is no salvation, but within which the believer,
who, as a faithful child, yields himself to her guidance, has as
sured to him his own personal salvation. She guarantees on the
ground of obedience that she will see him through. In the
performance of all her offices for the soul that Church begins at
birth, and readily offers her services to the end, covering the entire
round of a man's life with a system of mechanically working sac
raments, and even reaching beyond the frontiers of this earthly
life, teaching that the prayers of good men on earth, and espe
cially the offering of the divine sacrifice of the mass, will avail
to even abridge purgatorial sufferings.
The claims are imposing, and the appeal is powerful. But
when the inquirer asks for the proofs he finds himself at once
lost in a maze of unscriptural claims and of bad and irrelevant
reasoning. The Romish method of proof has ended in such a mass
of artificiality and inconsistency, even with itself, that it consti
tutes an argument against its own unwarranted claims. In con
trast, every expression of a genuinely Protestant faith presents
the claims of a religion that is at once scriptural, reasonable, per
sonal and spiritual. In carrying out these principles different
Churches have arrived at different results as regards details of
organization and doctrinal emphasis ; but all Churches true to the
principles of the Reformation have accepted the decrees of Nicea
and Chalcedon, the Augustinian representation of the theory of
the necessity of divine grace in salvation, and the evangelical doc
trine of justification by faith alone; while they reject papal

266 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
authority and an exclusive priesthood, mariolatry, saint worship
and image adoration, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass,
the withholding of the cup from the laity, and all but two sacra
ments, indulgence, purgatory and prayer for deliverance of the
dead therefrom, monasticism, compulsory celibacy, obligatory con
fession, and the use of Latin in public worship.
Some have seen in this great Lutheran movement of the six
teenth century nothing more than a revolt of the laity against the
clergy, of Teutonic people against the Latin, of the kingdoms of
Europe against the universal monarchy of the pope. Some have
seen in it nothing more than the bursting forth of a long re
pressed spirit of revolt against the luxury of prelates and the
abuses of ecclesiastical power. All these, indeed, to some extent
it was, but our study of its fundamental and its secondary prin
ciples has shown it to be something more profound and fraught
with mightier consequences than any or all of these interpreta
tions. Let us recall here the words of James Bryce, the author
of the "Holy Roman Empire." "It was," says he, "in its essence
the assertion of the principle of individuality; that is to say, of
true spiritual freedom. Hitherto the personal consciousness had
been a faint and broken reflection of the universal; obedience
had been held as the first of religious duties ; truth had been con
ceived as a something external and possible, which the priesthood,
who were its stewards, were to communicate to the passive lay
men, and whose saving virtue lay, not in its being felt and known
by him to be truth, but in a purely formal and unreasoning
acceptance." The result of the introduction of the principles herein dis
cussed was that all this was reversed. The visible Church and
the priesthood lost that magisterial importance which had hitherto
belonged to both, and instead of longer being the depository of
all religious truth and the guardian of traditional growths, the
source and dispenser of religious life, the arbiter of eternal hap
piness or misery, a large part of western Christendom at least
became an association of Christian people, "the congregation of
the saints," the "blessed company of all faithful people," organ
ized for the expression of mutual sympathy, for the better at
tainment of common ends, and most of all for the orderly and
becoming administration of the means of grace. The honors and
powers which had been conferred upon the Church by its Head

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT 267
and Founder, and which are necessary for the full manifestation
of the glory of the kingdom of God on earth, and of which it had
been stripped by the papal hierarchy, were once more restored
to it.
These are critical times, and even those whose hearts are
loyal to Protestant principles may sometimes grow faint. But
in the presence of dangers that menace the fair inheritance of
faith and freedom which we have had passed on to us by our
Protestant ancestors, we may still have faith in God and the
vitality of His truth, and ask for but one comprehensive privilege
— that of preaching the glorious Gospel of the blessed God,
demonstrated in the conflicts of past days not only to be the
power of God unto salvation, but mighty in the overthrow of
principalities and powers and the pulling down of strongholds.
There stands in the old town of Wittenberg, in Germany,
where Luther posted his famous theses on the church, in 1517, a
solid monument, on the base of which are engraven the Re
former's own words :
"If it be man's work it dies;
If it be God's work it lives."
The history of the Reformation and its principles is written
in that inscription even unto this day. What was man's work
then has passed, and what is man's work now is passing. But
the truth that was and is of God then and now endures, and be
fore that truth in the age we have had under contemplation the
magnificent medieval Church began swiftly to wane, and the
Church of the Reformation, with its rising vigor, came in. The
impulse toward reform, which had been inspired by disappoint
ment and shame at the vain pretensions, empty claims and mani
fold apostasies of the spiritual chieftains of the medieval Church,
had not been lost, but at last, inspired by the truth, rose up to
smite the evils of the times and to push on the future progress
of mankind.

SECTION IV
SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS
It is now four hundred years since the brave monk of Witten
berg, defying the ecclesiastical and imperial powers and following
his own convictions regarding religion and duty, nailed his im
mortal theses upon the door of the old Castle Church. We who
are now living are far enough down the track of the centuries
which have ensued since that act to fairly estimate its deep sig
nificance, inasmuch as we have shared so largely in the new
world of faith, of social advancement and Christian civilization
that was then begun. True, we are still in the mid-process of
the great movement which had its inception with the theses, and
dwell amid many yet unsettled questions of faith and church life
and organization, as well as amid currents and counter-currents
in social and civic life; but we are, nevertheless, able to make
such an induction into the facts involved, and so read them in
connection with Christian history, that we can plainly discern in
the events of that day, not merely a strife of doctrines, but a
most important step in the whole growth of Christian civilization.
We are able to discern in the Reformation of the Church then
inaugurated, the ripe fruit of struggles that had preceded and a
fact bound up with all that was best in the future. We now
know more than any generation which has preceded us has known
about the place and work of that epoch-making movement in the
Providence of Him who is the inception of all good things and
who knows the end from the beginning.
Hitherto we have endeavored to discover some of the causes
which made that movement under Luther a necessity, if the
Church and civilization were to be saved ; to give something of an
interpretation of the chief among the personal forces that gave it
scope and direction; and then to disclose some of the primary
principles which lay at its foundation and the causes which
shaped its growth. The task that now lies before us is to in
dicate, in a fragmentary way only, some of the manifold results
of that movement as they soon began to manifest themselves in
268

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 269
the sixteenth century, and as they have reached to our own day,
and shall yet reach and influence all later times. What greater
attestation of divine approval could there be than the work ac
complished from its beginnings to this hour by that greatest
movement in the history of religion since the day of Pentecost?
It found Europe dead, and reinvigorated it with life; it saw
Christendom languishing in the stupor of medievalism, but quick
ened it into the light of the new and better day then at hand.
That the soil had to a large extent been prepared, and the age
made ready by various forces that had long been at work, does
not detract from the glory of the man who co-ordinated those
forces and struck the decisive blow.
To the question regarding the results of this movement, how
ever, it must be said various and discordant answers have been
given. They have been pronounced "bad and only bad," as was
to be expected, by the bigoted papist; "disappointing," by some
alleged Protestants of the "High" Anglican order, and "insig
nificant," according to the interpretation of modern rationalistic
radicals. Even in our own day of ample tolerance for all sorts
of antithetical views in the sphere of religion, in a period when
much of the thinking on theological lines has been smitten by the
spirit of negation, neutrality and compromise, the reigning pope,
Benedict XV, so late as November, 1914, has had the old-time
papal prejudice to refer to Protestants as "the emissaries of
Satan, who set up pestilential pulpits, and, like Luther and Calvin,
by diabolical machinations commit abominable robbery of the
peoples' faith and seek their perdition."
But notwithstanding these misinterpretations, partial views and
outbursts of individual papalism, the history of the Protestant
influence, with scarce an exception, is the history of the enter
prise, discovery, arts, science, invention, learning and philan
thropy which have been the best expression of modern civiliza
tion. It would be hard to show one great movement in the past
three hundred years, that has been attended with marked and
permanent success, and which has effected widely the welfare of
mankind, that had its origin in the Church of Rome, or from any
people dominated by its teachings. Not to the peoples under the
control of its ancient hierarchical system are to be set down such
achievements as the great political reforms of England, the
colonization of America and the consolidation of the Germanic

270 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
peoples and their marvelous development down to the great war,
together with the progress and organization of popular education
and the conquest of nature inaugurated by modern science.
Achievements along all these lines are to be credited to the
emancipated energy, the wider intelligence, the individual
strength of conviction, and that moral energy which Protestant
ism set free as factors contributing most largely to the advance
ment of mankind.
In answer to all that has been alleged against the Reformation,
because of some of the abuses that early sprang up in its wake,
it may be said that the habits of centuries, which were deeply
rooted in the medieval system, were not to be unlearned in a few
years, and that the new ideas then coming to the front and
struggling into existence and activity, would sometimes work not
only imperfectly, but even frantically, in the hands of enthusiasts
and radicals. Much of that which may be classified as radical
and iconoclastic in that period was not any legitimate fruitage of
Protestant teaching, but an inheritance from the old system of
Roman imperialism and ecclesiasticism. The sudden emergence
of a people from restraints to which they had long been accus
tomed, and which the reformers had come to regard as unneces
sary, is frequently attended by some moral loss and excessive
measures. In a time of revolt, revolution and reconstruction,
such as the period of the Reformation furnishes us, the risks
that some discordant elements of radicalism and false mysticism
will come to the front with impudent and self-righteous assertive-
ness, must be taken, otherwise stagnation would ensue and the
world would be dominated by a dead and unprogressive con
servatism. In the period in which the good fight of the Reformation was
being waged, the truth and true Christian life had become so
tied up with a worldly and wicked hierarchy that the truth could
not prevail, and the real Gospel was well-nigh forgotten. Great
doctrines antithetical to those proclaimed by that hierarchy, and
which have been proved to be such influential factors in modem
religion and civilization, were then being framed into speech.
Men were then emerging from the powerful and forbidding do
minion of the penitential system of the Church of Rome into the
liberty of the sons of God, leaving behind them the exactions of
the canon law, the bewildering labyrinth of patristic opinion, con-

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 271
ciliar decretals and the burdensome exactions of the priestly
caste. The transition was great, and in some cases abrupt. It
is accordingly not surprising that there sprang up at once in the
new movement strong antagonisms, misinterpretations, excesses,
and mental and spiritual hostility when this fruitful period was
estimated as to its immediate products and worked-out results.

It is not a matter of surprise that the advocates of the old
medieval system of Church life, doctrine and organization should
have denounced the Lutheran movement, pronouncing it, when it
saw some of its extravagant results, as they appeared, to be
a dangerous species of individualism and an unguarded and un
balanced display of subjectivism. From small beginnings, as we
have seen, the hierarchical idea had taken possession of the
Church, and the tyranny of the old system which was later as
sailed by Luther became established as a matter of divine author
ity over the minds and conscience, as it claimed, of all men. The
Reformation, with its emphasis on inward holiness, which in
spired a new ideal of the Christian life, and its rightful insistence
upon the fact that a man's relation to the Church was determined
by his relation to Christ, ran counter from its beginning and at
many points to the official judgments that were handed down by
the big ecclesiastical organism on matters of faith and practice.
Monasticism, that unnatural conception of the Christian life,
which for centuries had been presented as the highest expression
of piety, no longer controlled as it once did the minds of aspiring
youth, while the asceticism commended by the Church, with its
ideal of flight from the world, had ceased to be longer looked
upon by multitudes with that respect and veneration once ac
corded it. These and other factors in the life of the Church
which had been brought together into a great and powerful
ecclesiastical organism, were passing into a state of distrust and
aroused hostility.
"Truth does not regard consequences" was a noble saying about
that which is always endowed with capacity to overcome in the
final issue. But history furnishes many instances in which the
consequences have been something of a test of the truth, and in
some of which the perversions of the truth have proved to be

272 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
embarrassing. In fact, it may be said that history is a long
series of struggles to elevate the character of mankind in all of
its aspects, religious, intellectual, social and political. But
scarcely any step has been made in this upward movement that
has not been embarrassed and retarded by the eccentricities, radi
calism and excesses of some of its advocates and mistaken
friends. The Reformation was in none of its aspects a wild and
unregulated rebellion. Had it been that it would early in its his
tory have broken itself to pieces and been completely swept
away. There were no lawless elements concealed in any of its
fundamental principles. It was based upon no radical methods
of procedure. Luther, its leader, did nothing in mere revolt
against authority, but everything for the sake of the truth. He
realized, as did none of the contemporaries, that to cast off the
yoke of Rome, intolerant and insufferable as that yoke had been,
was a perilous undertaking, and he accordingly always proceeded
with caution and conservatism. He was no advocate of that li
cense which is born of self-will, and the liberty he advocated
was always the child of law. His appeal was always to an
authority, objective, sane and safe, and which through all of its
history has conserved mental balance and obedience to attested
principles. But every good thing is followed by its counterfeits,
and sometimes by a train of impostures instead of expositions.
Medicine has its expression many times in quackery, and freedom
has not infrequently been perverted to the lawless purposes of
anarchy. The very best things have been proven liable to per
version and violent abuse. But the excesses of the French revo
lution, for example, do not brand liberty as immoral and neces
sarily dangerous, because in that movement in the closing years
of the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth cen
turies disastrous and irreligious features were associated with it
under the guise of a devotion to liberty and its blessings.
Any line of revolt against long-established modes of thinking
and plans of organization in any sphere brings to the front the
restless enthusiast and unreasoning radical who mistrust a man
like Luther, who not only dreamed dreams, but was withal a
practical and far-seeing statesman. That he could not go all the
way with the extremists of his day led them to regard him as
but a half-way reformer. His wisdom and poise, however, have
been amply justified in the light of history. Such a movement

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 273
as that which he headed, and started, so far as he was concerned,
all unconsciously, which Guizot suggestively called "a great in
surrection of human intelligence," was destined from its very be
ginning to quicken currents and counter-currents of mental ac
tivity and a variety of reformatory methods. In any period the
pulling down of worn-out institutions brings perplexity and some
times even reproach. Every great clash of human opinion is
certain to be accompanied by some wild and unregulated out
bursts, and every revolution calls out the uncontrolled and the
uncontrollable, such as Nicholas Storch, Andrew von Carlstadt,
Marcus Stiibner, Gabriel Zwilling, the Zwickau prophets, as
they were called — people who combined inward mysticism with
practical radicalism, who boasted of visions, dreams and direct
communications with God and the angel Gabriel, who disparaged
the written Word and the regular ministry, rejected infant bap
tism, and predicated the overthrow of the existing order of things
and the near approach of a democratic millennium.
The history of the Reformation is one of enduring glory, but of
transient shame if we consider fanatical expressions as belonging
to the substance of it, instead of mere incidental deflections from
it. The great instrument of political progress is generally al
lowed to be liberty, but that good word in both religion and civic
life and organization is not responsible for some evil things in
both spheres that have been perpetrated in its name. It is a
gross perversion when certain outbursts of radicalism and enorm
ities perpetrated by fanatical sectaries in the period of the Ref
ormation, who took the Old Testament for their Gospel instead of
the New, are seized upon by its enemies to cast discredit upon
that remarkably fruitful movement. In every reformatory
movement certain radical forces are released which serve to
either drive the newly won truth to wild extremes, or, by distort
ing it in various applications in other and totally alien fields,
afford its enemies an opportunity to cast discredit upon it, by
charging that it is fraught with dangerous and disastrous tend
encies. This soon began to be the ill- fortune of the Lutheran
Reformation, which was forced to fight for its life against the
radical tendencies both in the Church and the state, and which,
in turn, afforded the polemicists of Rome their chance to pervert
the facts. They persistently refused to have any regard for the
fundamental difference between Luther's teachings about the

274 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Gospel and what it is, the sphere and relation of the Church and
the state, and the position of those unregulated enthusiasts who
soon parted company with the Reformer, and who antagonized
him and his teaching no less bitterly than did the papists them
selves. It is not to be denied that as the Reformation advanced
it caused more and more of a popular upheaval, and a more per
vasive influence, that affected every department of life. The
proclamation of the freedom of the Christian man, in opposition
to Rome's long-time tyranny over the soul and conscience, not
being rightly apprehended by some, and in consequence misap
plied, induced fanatical and impatient spirits to put the reforma
tory principles into practice in violent and legalistic ways, con
fusing essentials with non-essentials, turning the Gospel into a
species of law, disregarding weak consciences and employing
force to accomplish their ends.
Luther's positions had been taken with caution and were firmly
grounded and carefully guarded, the distinction always being
made between essentials and non-essentials, the Word being in
voked constantly as the only power and authority. With the as
surance that with that Word alone the ultimate result must lie,
time must be allowed for some principles to ripen into their legiti
mate fruitage, and in the meantime love must be exercised and
a tender regard maintained for weak consciences. But this
method of Luther, which trusted the truth to work its own
changes, was too slow, too gradual and too destitute of spectacu
lar features to appeal to the impatient spirits of the fanatics who
endangered the good work of reform by their destructive zeal,
thereby turning a reformation into a revolution and demonstrat
ing that a beneficent movement may be undone by being over
done, and that freedom is liable to great abuse in a time of change
when old things are made to pass, and when that freedom is
limited to the external phases of life.
The extent to which some of these abuses were carried will ap
pear in the citation of a few facts drawn from the delusions and
»rrors of the Anabaptists, as well as from the violent speech of,
,uch leaders as Thomas Munzer, who led in a war for com-
nunism of the most immoral sort, which was ended by the battle
)f Frankenhausen in 1525, when Munzer was beheaded, not as a
heretic but as a rebel. It was his custom to inflame the much-
abused peasants by such appeals as this : "Thomas Munzer, serv-

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 275
ant of God, against the wicked : Be pitiless ; heed not the groans
of the impious; rouse up the towns and villages, above all, the
miners of the mountains ! On ! On ! while the fire is burning, and
the hot sword reeking with slaughter. Kill all the proud ones.
While they reign over you it is no use to talk of God." Such
violent speech, associated uniformly but unfairly by its enemies
with the Reformation, greatly hindered the good work and proved
hurtful to all wholesome aspects of religion. In her delusion
one poor woman, it is related by a contemporary, at the bidding of
the angel Gabriel, invited all her neighbors to a feast. The table
was set and the company assembled at the appointed hour, when
the woman began to pray with all her might, comforting, by turns,
the guests, who as yet saw no preparation for the feast, with the
assurance that it was the intention of the angels to bring the food,
even as the Lord had once miraculously fed Israel with manna.
But the angelic provision came not, and finally, at a late hour in
the evening, the deluded, hungry and at last undeceived neigh
bors, left dejected and disappointed, and with hunger unrelieved.
The poor woman had apprehended the promise of the Lord in
the most literal sense, when he said, "Ask and it shall be given
unto you," until at last both she and her guests found themselves
with wants unsatisfied and the Scriptures wrested to the humilia
tion and exasperation of both.
There were others who took the same literal signification to
"become like little children." In order to indicate their concep
tion of child-likeness some of the adult Anabaptists might be
seen in the streets skipping about in juvenile fashion and clapping
their hands, while others would join in a childish dance, or seating
themselves on the ground engage in some game, or roll and
tumble with each other in the dust of the highway. Still others
played with dolls, or dragged fir cones that had been strung to
gether on a thread along the ground after them. One of these
brethren, in his deluded effort at exemplification of the Lord's
injunction, sat for a long time on the bank of the Rhine, after
the fashion of a little boy, building little heaps of sand, and then
taking water from the stream in the hollow of his hand let it
trickle through the sand heaps. When asked for a reason for
this queer conduct on the part of a full-grown man, he replied
that he was trying to obey his Saviour's command to become a
little child. But this religious delusion expressed itself in ways

276. LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
vastly more extravagant than these ludicrous performances,
melancholy as they are when viewed as aspects of religious
extravagance. It sometimes manifested itself in even dangerous
forms. It assumed sometimes an antinomian type, and there
were those who concealed the basest sins of the flesh behind the
most profuse expressions of piety. But even this was not the
limit of this prodigal method of expressing religious devotion.
The story is told of Hans Schucker, a man of eighty, who
dwelt with his family in a lonely farmhouse near St. Gall, in
Switzerland. In this family all manner of religious extravagance
had been talked and practiced. On the 8th of February, 1526,
one of the younger brothers of the family, called Leonard, ad
dressed Thomas, an elder brother, thus : "It is the will of our
Heavenly Father that thou shouldst strike my head off." In the
presence of the brothers and sisters of the family Thomas be
sought the Lord that he might receive a will for the task, but was
not made aware of any answer to his prayer. The two brothers
then exclaimed together, "Thy will, O Father, be done." Leon
ard kneeled down, when Thomas seized a sword and in an instant
the head of the murdered brother fell at his feet. After the
commission of this horrible act, the fanatical murderer took his
lute and praised the Lord for the successful issue of his work,
after which he delivered himself up to a magistrate, all the time
obstinately insisting that it was not he, but God through means of
him, who had done the foul deed.
These and other excesses followed when radicals, fanatics, and
xinbalanced revolutionists, who thought that Luther had stopped
half way and that they must complete what he had begun, took
the matter of destruction and reconstruction into their own un
skilled and inexperienced hands. In consequence, order was dis
placed by confusion and the Reformation threatened with dis
astrous failure. Both Rome and liberalists have always been
glad to enlarge upon such outbursts of the new Protestant rad
icalism and set them down to the discredit of the new movement.
But the principles set forth by Luther were not the exciting cause
of these commotions and excesses. It is undeniable that there is
a large democratic element in Christianity, and much that has
been falsely placed to, the discredit of the Reformation is due
entirely to an attempt to take that demorcary in too literal and
material a sense. In times of commotion it has always been

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 277
difficult to draw the line where disavowal and destruction are to
end and toleration and reconstruction begin. But one thing is
always to be set down to the credit of Luther. It is that not
withstanding his natural earnestness and vehemence he always
maintained his poise and balance, and was never the man to go to
aimless extremes, always asserting the right of Christian free
dom in matters non-es.sential, and maintaining that one who
claimed to be an inspired prophet and came with alleged revela
tions and inspiration must either be ordinarily called to account
by Church authority or prove his divine commission by miracles.
Radicalism with its unhappy accompaniments was not of the
Reformer, nor yet of his principles. Following his career, we
discover not only that it is one of heroism, and one in which step
after step is taken with unhesitating confidence, but a career, also,
in which its conservative instincts are constantly asserting their
power. The principles of the new movement were in no sense
responsible, for example, for the Peasants' War. That ill-fated
enterprise would have taken place even if the Protestant doc
trines, which have been blamed for its excesses, had never been
preached at all. It was caused by age-long abuses, for which the
princes of Germany, as a consequence of their extortions and
tyranny, were chiefly responsible. The abuses brought about
under the leadership of men like Munzer, and which were con
temporaneous with the Protestant innovation, of course were to
be deprecated. But the new principles are not to be blamed, as
they have been by papists and latitudinarians, for the perversions
and reckless activities of lunatics who thought they heard in the
voice of men of the Munzer order the tocsin calling them to
plunder, destruction, lawlessness and bloodshed.
Speaking of excesses in periods of religious reform and revo
lution, reminds us of the fact that times long after the period of
the Reformation were not destitute of such outbursts. A hun
dred years and more after that great movement Puritanism in
England, for example, as an austere reaction against frivolity,
pushed Sabbath keeping to its extreme, reprobating even the most
innocent domestic recreations and changing a day of rest and re
freshment into one of alternate periods of abstinence and reli
gious worship, with sermons three hours in length and long extem
porary prayers measured by the hour glass and fashioned entirely
at the will of the leader. Ministers began to teach that to throw

278 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
a bowl on Sunday or to do any servile work was as great a sin as
murder; that to make a feast or dress a wedding dinner on that
day was as bad as for a father to cut his child's throat; and
even that the ringing of more bells than one as a summons to
attend church was "as great a sin as might be."
A glance at several selections from a typical list of offences in
the times of the Puritans will show how varied were the re
sponsibilities of an officer of the law: "Robert Terry for pro
faning the Sabbath day by catching eels"; "Richard Court for
coming irreverently into the church, never removing his hat till
he cometh to this seat" ; "Robert Brown to misstepping up our
usual way on going the perambulation of our parish"; "Thomas
Giles for not sending his servant to be catechized." The well-
known "Blue Code" was a satire, but there was some basis of
fact in the regulations of the times for such a bit of legislation
as that which forbade reading the common prayer, keeping Chris-
mas day or saints' days, making mince pies or playing on any
instrument, except the drum, the trumpet or the Jew's harp,
which instruments were supposed to have something of a biblical
flavor about them. To bathe on Sunday was a sin, and by some
was regarded as of questionable propriety at any time, a boy
being reported once to have been struck dead while indulging in
that carnal amusement on the Sabbath. Every outward demon
stration of good spirits was a sort of sin to be as far as possible
suppressed. Certain recreations were rigorously forbidden.
The festivities of New Year and Shrovetide, of May and
Michaelmas, were looked upon as reprehensible. The Christmas,
Easter and Whitsuntide festivals, with other holy days, were
abolished by the ordinance of 1647.
Unreasonable interferences with the Christian observances of
good and devout people produced popular tumults. As an ex
ample, the mayor of Canterbury insisted upon a market being
held on Christmas day, with the result that people who on that
clay desired to attend divine worship in the cathedral were
roughly handled. The discontent which was thus produced burst
out in open revolt, and the military was called in to put an end
to the uproar, in consequence of which several people were com
mitted to prison.
In his search for a scriptural warrant for things permitted
the Puritan obtained some queer results. Ladies had their

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 279
sober and stinted diversions in the parlor and the garden, and
gentlemen had theirs at home and in the field, but all measured
out sparingly and by Scripture line and rule. The Word of God,
said these stern Puritan licensers, permitted shooting according
to Samuel 1:18; musical concerts, according to Nehemiah 7:67;
putting forth riddles, according to Judges 14:12; hunting of wild
beasts, according to Canticles 2:15; searching out or the contem
plation of the works of God, according to 1 Kings 4:33. The
Puritan, too, played at bowls, billiards and shuffleboard, but
would not touch cards, except to burn them.
In the bestowing of names upon his children, he also showed
something of an excess. "Edification" was the factor to be made
prominent in the selection of names. Accordingly, the Puritan
parishes became full of little Hepzibahs, Jehoshophats, Meheta-
bels and Nahums, to say nothing of such compound titles as
"Hold the truth," "Fight against Sin," "Know God," "Faint
Not," and "Be Faithful," together with an extensive use of Chris
tian graces and theological terminology, such as "faith," "hope,"
"charity," "providence," "preserved," etc.
In the calling of harsh names, too, these Puritan saints were
as advanced as Luther and his contemporaries. Archbishop Wil
liam Laud was especially hated by these zealots for simplicity.
Laud, it must be said in the interest of veracity, was not the most
amiable of ecclesiastics, but he hardly deserved the measure of
aversion that is indicated in the abusive and suggestive names
applied to him by the Puritans, among them being such as these:
"arch piety," "arch wolf," "arch agent of the devil," "Beelze
bub himself become archbishop and the devil's most triumphant
arch to adorn his Satanic victories." In one pamphlet after
another this martinet of an archbishop was abused for his birth,
ridiculed for his size and called in turn, as the case seemed to the
Puritan taste to require, "dirt," "filth" and "poison."
It has been affirmed that the prevention of cruelty to animals
was not the motive of the Puritan in his commendable efforts at
the abolition of the highly popular diversion of bear baiting. In
his essay on John Milton Macaulay pays a generous and deserved
tribute to the nobler side of Puritanism. But in his History of
England he contributes this judgment about this aspect of Puri
tan character: "The Puritan hated bear baiting, not because it
gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the specta-

280 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
tors. Indeed, he generally contrived to employ the double pleas
ure of tormenting both spectators and bear." In his intolerable
interference with private and social life, and his efforts at legis
lating uprightness and piety into people, willing or unwilling,
the Puritan traveled far, and as was inevitable the time of reac
tion came on apace. There was clearly a destitution of the sense
of humor among a people who could decree officially that "no
person shall be employed but such as the House is satisfied of his
real goodliness" ; that books in the royal libraries which contained
pictures of Jesus or Mary should be destroyed by burning; that
sculpture or graces should be destroyed or rechiseled ; that public
amusements of all sorts should be discontinued ; that bear baiting,
jumping the rope, wrestling matches, horse racing, stage acting,
puppet shows and ball playing should be counted as criminal of
fences and severely punished; that sports on the village green
should be accounted scandalous and every May pole be hewn
down; that Christmas should be converted into a day of fasting
and prayer ; and that all men should keep it, as Macaulay says,
"in humbly bemoaning the great national sin which they and their
fathers had so often committed on that day by romping under the
mistletoe, eating boar's head, and drinking ale flavored with
roasted apples." It was not sumptuary legislation that the Puri
tan so much indulged in as trying to legislate men into piety. ,
The outward emblems of sanctity, according to the dramatists of
the restoration, came to be plainness in dress, short hair, un
starched linen, pine benches and wooden bottom chairs, a talking
through the nose, a showing of the whites of the eyes, and calling
little children by such names as Assurance, and Patience, and
Praise God, and Tribulation.
Luther has been much reflected upon by writers of various
orders, and with ample justification, for his use of strong and
abusive speech. But in all fairness it may be said that he was
not more resourceful in this respect than representative contro
versialists in the contests between the Calvinists and Arminians
in England in the eighteenth century. That controversy is long
dead, but the temper in which it was conducted reminds us very
much of the stormy speech sometimes indulged in by Luther and
his papal contemporaries. We are somewhat amazed at the spec
tacle of two deeply religious men, one of whom had written
"Rock of Ages Cleft for Me," a hymn .which the Church of

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 281
Christ will sing until earthly hymns are no longer needed, and
the other, in himself, the greatest single evangelizing force in the
eighteenth century, cudgeling each other with the temper and
language of angry fishwives.
In one of the theological tilts over election and predestination,
Toplady declared John Wesley to be guilty of "Satanic shame-
lessness" and accused him of "acting the ignoble part of a lurk
ing, sly assassin," of "uniting the sophistry of a Jesuit with the
authority of the pope," and of sinking the discussion "to the level
of an oyster woman." Wesley was in turn called "a designing
wolf," "a lying apostle of the foundry," "an old fox," "Pope
John," "little John," "a dealer in stolen wares," "a gray-headed
enemy of all righteousness," "a venal profligate," "an apostate
miscreant," declared to be "holy and sly, one who could pilfer and
lie." In a pamphlet published in 1749, entitled "The Enthusiasm
of Methodists and Papists Compared," George Lavington, the
bishop of Exeter, calculated (if he did not deliberately intend)
to countenance the absurd calumny that Wesley and Whitefield
were papists in disguise. In his reply Wesley declined to discuss
further until this Christian bishop could show at least "a little
heathen honesty," while Lavington, in a rejoinder, which was not
a reply, declared what his protagonist had said to be "a medley
of chicanery, sophistry, prevarication, evasion, pertness, conceit-
edness, scurrility, sauciness and effrontery." In his reply to this
Wesley declared the Exeter bishop, who does seem to have been
equally careless of both truth and courtesy, to have displayed the
"temper of a merry Andrew," while he concluded his onsets with
Toplady by declining "to have any further controversy with a
chimney-sweep." We have introduced these chapters from the later history of
the Church to show that even extravagance in speech and custom
in the sphere of religious controversy were not all terminated in
the era of the Lutheran movement in Germany.
II
But face to face with discordant and depreciating answers that
have been given to the question as to the result of the Reforma
tion, such as that given by its pronounced foes, that it was "bad
and only bad," or that of its lukewarm friends, that it was "dis-

282 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
appointing," or the estimate of modern radicals, that those results
were "insignificant," we are warranted in giving some fair esti
mate of the real life of that movement. Certain it was that in
the reformed Germany, and the new-born Switzerland, and in
Huguenot France and the heroic "low countries," a new world
had arisen. There came to pass a household purity that was
grave and sweet, an education in university and common school,
a social thrift and a noble freedom which Europe had not hitherto
known. Henceforth, it was impossible for the Latin Church to
remain uninfluenced and to avoid some efforts at reformation
and reconstruction. Rome, with its imperial antecedents and
traditions reaching back beyond the Christian era, had now at
last ceased to be the sole mistress of the conscience of western
Christendom, while Wittenberg and Geneva had been advanced to
central places in the sphere of independent religious life and
thinking. The ferment engendered in men's minds was certain
to lead on to changes in the ancient hierarchy itself, even though
no one could foretell just what or how deep they might be.
Luther came, and Latin Christianity found itself involved in a
death struggle in which the theocracy, patiently built up through
the labor of centuries was threatened with destruction. Even
Spain, in which the Church and the state were more firmly
united and more solidly organized than elsewhere, did not wholly
escape the infection of the new views and ideals. The old
Church, still bitterly intolerant of any sort of heterodoxy, was
forced to reform itself in head and members, and at last to throw
off her long-time indifference to laxity of morals, which had not
been corrected by the invasion of the neopaganism of the Renais
sance in the center of its power and authority at Rome. It was
left to the reaction of schism, and the rise of the Protestant com
munions in the face of the old Church, to bring to pass in Rome
itself that reform of discipline and morals which three reforma
tory councils had found it impossible to effect. The Church was
driven to a realization of her danger. If it stood still the Ref
ormation would sweep it away. She was forced, willingly or un
willingly, as the case may have been, to impose a moral change
upon herself. She was at least driven to insist that never again
in the chair of St. Peter should be seen atheists, men who poi
soned other men to make places of holy advancement for them
selves, thieves, murderers, blasphemers, pirates and adulterers,

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 283
but men, who, if they were sometimes found, as was to be ex
pected, considering the infirmities of human nature, incompetent
to deal with the perplexing problems that fell to their official
hands, were yet of such personal uprightness of intention and
conduct as to command profound respect. Had the Lutheran
movement produced no other result than this, it would have been
an unspeakable blessing to the world and of incalculable, though
unrecognized, benefit to the hierarchy itself.
For the purposes of reform, to which he had been driven by
the new spirit that had arisen, the pope accordingly summoned
the Council of Trent in the year 1545. Its first sessions were
held in January, 1546, and when it closed in 1563 it had estab
lished the doctrinal system which still expresses the beliefs of the
Roman Church. A definite bulwark was thus raised against
Protestantism, and able scholars came to the defence of the long,
massive line of walls the old Church had builded up for its own
defence. During the three periods of the council, extending
over eighteen years, Catholic dogma was formulated, under the
influence of papal legates, and in the form that maintains to this
day. Romanism is really of a later date than the Evangelical doc
trinal systems, having been set forth expressly as a counter-poise
to the Lutheran and Reformed apprehensions of the Gospel. In
that council, too, much plain speaking was indulged in by some
from among the more zealous of the assembled fathers. The
monstrous declension of the Church, the secular spirit that dom
inated the clergy, the greed of the Curia, the ignorance, laziness
and lewdness of the secular clergy and the corruption of the
monastic orders — in short, the degeneracy and apostasy of the
official ranks, were by them laid at the door of the Church.
Thus one of the points in the general historical significance of
the Lutheran movement is to be found in its direct influence upon
the old Latin Church itself. A primary result of the Protestant
revolt was a reformed Catholicism, at least in its religious as
pects. By positive action or by apathy the papacy had hitherto
rendered ineffective every effort, whether of individuals or of
councils, to correct even the gravest abuses that afflicted the
Church. But the great reform movement at last forced the
big ecclesiastical organism to take notice, and she became
aroused to a realization of her true position and peril, and the
wholesome results at once became manifest in a variety of ways.

284 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
In intellectual matters, and in its attitude toward scientific and
other forms of advancement, the Church made no concessions,
but stubbornly decided to remain a medieval institution in a mod
ern world, made so by the new forces that had entered in the
path of the great religious revival, The counter-reformation, ac
cordingly, was not a matter of intellectual emancipation so much
as a moral reformation. That frivolous laxity which had vaunted
itself in the court of Leo X was at an end. There was a change
of spirit, which became manifest during the pontificates of Adrian
VI, Clement VII and Paul III. Rome had been compelled to
listen to the voice of Luther and to abandon much that was a
depreciation of Christ as the Redeemer and Saviour and Example
of mankind. Certainly she had been improved by her contact
. with the Protestant forces, and now manifests a sincerity she did
not exhibit in the days when Erasmus uttered his pleasantries
and Rabelais laughed his scorn at money-grasping pontiffs and
indifferent and dissolute priests.
One of the immediate results, therefore, of the work of the
Reformation was an improved Romanism. Looking more widely
over the field of modern history, we can now see that the Protes
tant revolt meant the introduction of a new spirit into the world,
and the liberation of new and transforming forces, from which
the papal system, with all its self-sufficiency and unwarranted
claims, could not escape and by which it was unconsciously
effected. Turning our attention to the results of the Protestant move
ment in the sphere of the ethical life of the people, we are at once
confronted with the old charge of the Romanist that the imme
diate effect was a relaxation of the restraints of religion and a
consequent increase of immorality. Indeed, the reformers them
selves, who, no doubt, expected too much of suddenness and
thoroughness in the transformation to be wrought, made some
frank confessions of disappointment and discouragement at the
moral outcome of some of their work. "Germany is," as was said
by Amsdorf, a Lutheran superintendent, "as it were, drowned in
gluttony, drunkenness, avarice and luxury." That the re
action that came after the preaching of the freedom of the Chris
tian man and other fundamental principles of the new move
ment, produced some pernicious results was to have been ex
pected. The Church of Rome had endeavored to include in its

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 285
scheme of religion the entire round of a man's life, including
everything from birth to death, in its inclusive grasp, control and
direction. Men could neither be born, baptized, married, conduct
business, die or be buried without the intrusion and control of the
Church. To release men from all this kind of ecclesiastical
supervision and control, and call them back into the liberty where
with Christ makes men free, could not be expected to be unat
tended with some outburst of freedom from the law, that did
not always express itself in harmony with the highest ethical
standards. Leaven does not all at once permeate the mass into
which it is introduced, and salvation and its fruits cannot be
forced suddenly on men. That salvation is a bestowment from
above, but that character which ensues is something of a matter
of habit and growth. It is, too, as unjust to cite instances of
coarseness and rudeness, met with among some Protestant and
Romanists of that day, as disproving the moral efficacy of the
Reformation, as it would be unjust today to allege — as is fre
quently done — that the Church has failed in its task because ex
amples of downright heathenism in life are to be found in Chris
tian lands, and even under the shadow of great and imposing
churches. The ascetic life was the highest ideal of Christian excellence in
the medieval Church. But few, relatively, could live this life,
and these were looked upon as the highest and most venerated ex
ponents of Christian living. It was one of the effects of the
Protestant movement to supplant this type of religion, and to re
instate what was more in harmony with the New Testament
representation under our Lord's own figures of "the salt of the
earth" and the "light of the world." The new view contemplated
the Gospel as a renovating and purifying influence among men.
It stood for contact with the world, and not withdrawal from the
world. The followers of Christ were not to retreat from the
world, but to transform it by their presence and contact. The
kingdom of God on this earth was not to be made up of ghostly
coenobites, who had voluntarily segregated themselves from the
world in order to attain to holiness, but of men and women not
indifferent to the labors and pleasures that legitimately belong to
life, but infusing into all things a spirit of religious devotion and
dedication, not only to their Lord, but to the welfare of their
brethren. This ascetic type of religion, with its exploitation of

286 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
self-abnegation, interposes a gulf between religion and the affairs
of the world, between things natural and supernatural. It ab
jures family life, art, science, amusement, trade and commerce,
and all things that should experience a quickening, and at the
same time elevating, power from contact with the Gospel. The
compulsory rule of celibacy stigmatized the divine institution of
marriage, and cast reproach upon the dearest domestic relations
of fatherhood, motherhood and childhood, always looking upon
such relations as belonging to an inferior condition of sanctity and
religion. Conscience, which is the faculty of deciding between
right and wrong, was at that time placed entirely in the keeping
of the priest.
Now the Reformation reversed all this, and set new estimates
and forces at work ; and in such a period of overturning and un-
settlement moral relations sometimes meet with reverses. It is
not to be set down to the discredit of the newly introduced prin
ciples that they did not at once overcome all moral abuses, which
were inevitable when men were once more relieved from that
spirit of implicit faith and unquestioning obedience to ecclesiasti
cal authority that was destructive of all individuality. The ad
missions of disappointment on the part of some of the reformers
were the confessions of men, for the most part, who were dis
heartened because the movement they had espoused did not at
once effect sweeping and incontrovertible reforms in all direc
tions. It has been said that "oftentimes it is the friends of a
movement or an institution who are its most exacting critics."
They expect more from it than has been accomplished or could
reasonably have been looked for.
The sixteenth century was a time in which we might expect
an increase of immorality. In extirpating false ideals in religion,
the individual found himself in a process of liberation from the
power of those feudal and ecclesiastical bonds which had been
so strong, but which for generations had been gradually dimin
ishing. The individual man was in process of emancipation and
enlargement, and oftentimes these made for license as well as lib
erty. In such a time of revived individualism and spiritual up
heaval, when human affairs are agitated by the introduction of
new and tempestuous forces, the pendulum frequently swings to
the other extreme, loosing forces of lawlessness and unrighteous
ness, with the effect of a relaxation of public morals.

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 287
After all that may be said, the question is simply this : "When
the principles of the Reformation came into active operation did
they not exert a beneficial influence over morals ?" That they did
exert such an influence is made manifest by the history of the
new principles, and by any comparison that may be instituted be
tween countries dominated by those principles with those dom
inated by the principles of the old faith and church order. The
religious and moral rejuvenation of persons, as well as of nations
and the Church, was the real aim of that movement. That this
design was in great measure accomplished is abundantly mani
fest in the history of the past four hundred years, during which
many abuses perilous to good morals have been done away with,
and many domestic and public virtues called into being. Many
lovely traits of humanity, much of bravery and exaltation of
mind, enthusiasm for truth and right, have been developed side
by side with human passions, and in victory over them. Even
cloisters which have been abolished as useless have been replaced
by beneficent institutions and humane associations.
History verifies in a multitude of ways the statement of
Pfleiderer in his "The Development of Christianity." In refer
ring to Luther he says : "But the founder of the Protestant min
ister's home, the loving father of the family, the host who joked
gaily with his guests, released the Protestant world from the un-
naturalness of Catholic monasticism and from ascetic hatred of
the world. He became the creator of the Protestant morality, in
that he freed the temporal, moral life in family and vocation, in
state and society, from the Catholic blemish of unholiness, and
reinstated them in their dignities and rights as God willed. As
Goethe says: 'Through Luther we have recovered the courage
to stand on God's earth with a firm foot and to feel ourselves
God-given human natures.' " Thus the Reformation was an
ethical as well as an intellectual revolt against medievalism. It
rejected the moral ideal that had maintained for hundreds of
years, and set up another in its place. That ideal had, as we have
seen, been ascetic. The monastic was the highest expression of a
good life. Celibacy was more conducive to holiness than mar
riage, and virginity than chastity. It was a reversal of the divine
order indicated in man's creation and nature. The road to per
fection lay through a multitude of prescriptions for the subjuga
tion of the flesh. Piety was to find its expression in long fasts,

288 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
scourgings, coarse and painful clothing, sleeping on a hard and
uncomfortable bed, and frequent prayer vigils through the hours
of the night. But this expression of the moral life, as we have
seen in an earlier chapter, had completely broken down. It pro
duced some saints after that particular type of saintliness, but a
fearful mass, also, of deliberate licentiousness, appalling degen
eracy and monastic scandals that were frequent and grievous.
The Reformation inherited the sins of that kind of an age. It
arose, in part, out of the dissolution of morals in which the
medieval type of Christianity had ended, and with which it had
more or less successfully to cope. As crowning all, it is sufficient
to say in its behalf that the new movement headed by Luther
wrought a vast emancipation of the conscience from ecclestiasti-
cal tyranny, not only, but that it imparted an immense moral
energy to the human mind throughout the Europe of that and
succeeding times. Ill
The spiritual awakening of the sixteenth century was almost
as much a revival of education as a revival of religion. That
movement was, as we have seen, an insurrection against the ab
solute power of the spiritual order — a great endeavor to liberate
the human understanding, and a vast effort in behalf of freedom
for the human mind. Accordingly, we discover in this move
ment almost as much of an upheaval in the sphere of the intellect
as in that of the spirit. Prior to the fifteenth and the early
sixteenth century most of the education was abstract and theo
retical. It was, for the most part, a work of memory and the
dogmatic disputation of ancient texts, with Aristotle as the chief
master and great authority. Before the invention of printing
books were few in number, and what there were, were largely in
the hands of the clergy. Latin was the language of the Church,
as it is yet today, and also the language of most of the books,
which were in consequence unintelligible to the mass of men.
For this reason education was religious rather than secular, the
pupils, for the most part, being those who were in preparation
for the priesthood. The emphasis in the beliefs of the age was
disproportionate, being placed upon things supernatural rather
than upon things natural, on theology rather than on science, to
ward which there was a pronounced spirit of hostility. Truth

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 289
was to be accepted on the authority of the Church, rather than
as the result of individual research. It was a period of intel
lectual stagnation, during which learning was neglected.
Of course, the Renaissance — the arousing of Christendom by
means of the revival of Greek learning after the fall of Constan
tinople — did much to quicken intellectual activity, which was
helped, also, by that group of significant events — the discovery of
America, the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and the in
vention of printing. There had come, along with the Reforma
tion in religion, a general atmosphere favoring the right of the
individual to think and speak for himself, and a consequent
quickening of intellectual activity and education. From the very
beginning the spirit of Protestantism favored universal educa
tion. It was a necessity created by the new principles. If the
right of private judgment is guaranteed, and the lay Christian is
to read and interpret the Scriptures and to take part in the ad
ministration of the affairs of the Church, he dare not, for the
sake of his own soul and the great interests involved, remain an
illiterate blockhead. Knowledge, intellectual balance and en
lightenment are necessary adjuncts of the Protestant system,
and soon after the inauguration of Luther's work, accordingly,
emphasis was placed upon the various aspects of the training of
childhood. The weight of personal responsibility for the culture
of his own intellectual and spiritual nature, which Protestantism
in a large sense imposes upon each individual, makes the training
of the mind something of a matter of universal concern. This is
no doubt one of the underlying reasons why in Protestant, as
contrasted with Roman Catholic countries, so much more has
been done for the popular instruction of all the people.
And more than this, the free circulation and popular use of the
Bible in the language of the people, which is a feature of the re
ligious and intellectual life of Protestant lands, has proved to be
an instrument of intellectual as well as religious improvement,
producing effects which have been of immeasurable value. The
popular use of the sacred Scriptures has always exerted an in
fluence on the popular mind and heart and conscience which it
would be difficult to exaggerate. Aside from its use as the only
infallible rule of faith and practice, and as man's guide to heaven,
the study of its biography, history, poetry, ethics and as a rule of
faith, has afforded a mental discipline of a high order. It has

290 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
stimulated that breadth and refinement of intellect found in no
land untouched by its influence, and which no agency ever yet
employed by the Church of Rome has been able to produce. It
is one of the most gratifying and striking results of the Lutheran
movement of the sixteenth century that the same influences
which promoted so much the growth of national language and
literature, also did so much to open the gates of knowledge to the
people by fostering education and schools. In Italy and the rest
of the south of Europe the influence of the Renaissance was
aristocratic and aesthetic, the prestige of the Hellenic ideas hav
ing an almost heathenizing effect on the Church. Among the
Teutonic peoples of the north it was different, the reaction as
suming a democratic type, the people crying out against the
profligacy of the priests and the abuses of the Church, the revival
of learning at once forming an alliance with the reformation of
religion. The Bible having been made accessible to the people in both
theory and in fact by means of Luther's principles and transla
tion, the next problem was that of instructing them so that they
might be able to understand it; and accordingly Luther's
thoughts were promptly turned toward education and its relation'
to state as well as Church. The platform of education which he
formulated was one of the very first of the new era. The plan
reflected some of the limitations of the age, but was far in ad
vance of anything contemporary. In this matter, as in others,
Luther became the master spirit at Wittenberg, and with him
Melanchthon was in full accord. The chief of the reformers
has been rightly regarded as "the father and founder of popular
education." He himself declared that if he were not a preacher
he would choose to be a schoolmaster, and to him, at least in
part, the noble calling of the teacher owes the dignity which be
longs to it and the exalted estimate placed upon it. His appeal
for the establishment of schools has been pronounced "the most
important educational treatise ever written." In 1524 he wrote
his address to the aldermen of all the German cities in behalf of
Christian schools. He declares that "for the maintenance of
civil order and the proper regulation of the home, society needs
accomplished and well-trained men and women. Such men are
to come from boys and such women from girls." He lays great
stress on the languages, calling them "the scabbard in which the

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 291
Word of God is sheathed, the casket in which this jewel is en
shrined, the cask in which this wine is kept, the chamber in
which this food is stored." One of the first results of Luther's
visitation of the churches was the founding of something like a
universal common school system for all Germany. The educa
tion of boys and girls — not merely those from the upper and
burgher classes, but of the whole people — was an end for which
he untiringly strived. His primary concern was for the spiritual
emancipation of his countrymen, but he at once discerns that for
the spread, acceptance and permanent influence of the new views
they must be proclaimed and defended by Gospel preachers and
enlightened and godly rulers. These, he saw, could never be
secured without the aid of schools, and for their acceptance and
practice among the common people educational uplift was an es
sential factor. In his appeal of 1520 to the "German nobility,"
he proposed that a number of the useless convents be restored
to their primary use, which was the education of boys and girls.
His correspondence is full of the expressed desire to see good
and sound education spreading throughout Germany. "Remem
ber," says he, in one of his striking epigrams, "the devil much
prefers blockheads and drones." He pleaded with all the earnest
ness of a Christian and patriot for a minimum of education for
every child, and showed, also, how good high schools for girls as
well as boys can be established by using many needless ecclesias
tical foundations for that purpose.
Much that he said on this subject has a modern tone in it, and
is an anticipation of much that now maintains. He believed that
the state should not only support and control the school system,
but that it should likewise make attendance at such schools com
pulsory. "In my judgment," says he, "there is no outward of
fense that in the sight of God so heavily burdens the world and
deserves such heavy chastisement as the neglect to educate chil
dren. * * * Your children are not so entirely your own
that you can withhold them from God. He will have justice,
and they are more His than yours. For the sake of the Church
we must have and maintain Christian schools. Young pupils and
students are the seed and source of the Church. When schools
prosper the Church remains righteous and her doctrine pure.
There is nothing more necessary than to educate men who are to
succeed us and govern. If we were dead, whence should come

292 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
our successors, if not from the school?" "I maintain that civil
authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send
their children to school." "Wherever the Government sees a
promising boy, let him be sent to school. If the father is poor,
let the child be aided with the property of the Church. The rich
should make bequests to such objects." "The welfare of a city
does not consist alone in great treasures, firm walls, beautiful
houses and abundant munitions of war; indeed, where all these
are found, and reckless fools come into power, the city sustains
the greatest injury. But the highest welfare, safety and honor
of a city consists in able, learned, wise and cultivated citizens who
can secure/ preserve and utilize every treasure and advantage."
Melanchthon was accustomed to say, "every good theologian and
interpreter of the heavenly doctrine must be first a linguist, then
a dialectician and finally a witness."
In harmony with such educational views, Protestantism created
new universities and reorganized old ones, so that the present
state of higher education as well as that of the more popular
order is due to the Protestant spirit. "Protestant Germany," it
has been truly said, "is still building on the educational founda
tions laid by Melanchthon more than three hundred and fifty
years ago," while there is much in the spirit of the Church of
Rome that adds force to a declaration of Treitschke, made upon
the basis of his own personal experience at the University of
Freiburg: "It is impossible to speak of academic liberty in an
institution controlled by the Roman Church." That Church in
sists, by means of the confessional, on superintending the lives
and secrets of all ranks and conditions of men, women and
children. With a similar educational comprehension she insists
on educating the young and the old, and that training of the mind,
in its primary, intermediate and higher departments, must all be
committed to the recognized officials of the Church. The theo
logical and pedagogical conceptions of Rome are not conducive to
the free investigation of truth for its own sake and on the as
sumption that truth is one, and that all truth is catholic and
should be sought after for itself alone.
The other reformers, with scarcely an exception, exerted them
selves in behalf of the schools as nurseries of religion and virtue,
realizing, as they seemed to do, that a real and permanent reform
must spring from the people. Zwingli, Calvin and Knox, in their

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 293
respective countries, had an interest in the schools equaled only
by their interest in religion. These men, with the Wittenberg
reformers, anticipated by the space of three hundred years our
modern law of compulsory school attendance, their teaching, too,
clearly favoring a gradual emancipation of secular education,
especially in the higher schools, from too much sectarian con
trol. Thus it is obvious that the best educational influences and
systems and all the provisions for intellectual culture among the
most enlightened peoples of the earth were created by the men
raised up of God as the leaders in the great Reformation move
ment. In forceful language the ex-president of Harvard Uni
versity writes of the origin of that intellectual freedom mani
fested (sometimes in exaggerated forms, it must be said) in
that land in which the Reformation had its origin. "No think
ing," says he, "has been so wide, so deep, so unfettered, so free
as German thinking. Two great doctrines which had sprung
from the German Protestant Reformation had been developed by
Germans from seed they planted in Germany. The first was the
doctrine of universal education, developed from the Protestant
conception of individual responsibility; and the second was the
great doctrine of civil liberty — liberty in industries, in society, in
government, liberty with order, under law. This academic free
dom meant to the Germans emancipation from tradition and prej
udice as well as from authority, whether governmental or eccles
iastical. The Teutonic peoples set higher value on truth in
speech, thought and action than any other people. They love
truth; they seek it; they woo it. America is more indebted to
Germany than to any other nation, because the range of German
research has been wider than any other nation."
Thus, again, do we see that the Lutheran movement was not
only an uprising of religious convictions, a demand that each man
should himself look up to the eternal, realizing his personal re
sponsibility and claiming without intervention the divine for
giveness and grace, but it was also the beginning of a great era
of popular enlightenment. The Renaissance was intellectual and
artistic, a means of culture for but the few; the Reformation
was religious and popular in all of its aspects and worked out
results. When Luther gave the Bible to the people in their own
language along with the principles of the new movement which
he had inaugurated, and demanded that every man should have

294 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the faculty of reading them given to him, he awoke a thirst for
knowledge in the people which very soon took shape in the form
of popular education and popular power. In the Middle Ages
the ecclesiastical schools were designed chiefly for candidates for
the priesthood. The parochial schools were intended to fit the
young for Church membership. The burgher schools were in
tended for the artisan and commercial classes of the cities, while
knightly education was training for chivalry. Thus the laboring
and poorer classes of the people were left to toil on in ignorance
and want, remaining always in a dependent and servile condition,
their lives being unillumined and uncompensated by any kind of
intellectual pleasures. But the Reformation swept away many
of the pedagogical follies of the monks, the unreal philosophy of
education, and the sophistries prevalent on this as on other sub
jects. Erasmus laughed to scorn the absurdities which had been
provided as the mental aliment of the preceding centuries. But
the darkness passed away, not so much because men mocked at.
the darkness, but because a real and true light had arisen to dispel
that darkness with the true and inexhaustible "Light of the
World." Thus in the important sphere of education has the Reformation
in religion shown itself to be of immense value to human prog
ress, breaking the fetters of the past and giving the course of
human development a new direction. Well might our great his
torian Bancroft say in words that have been oft quoted, "We
boast of our common schools. Calvin was the father of popular
education, the inventor of the free system of schools." What
was true of Calvin was even in a larger sense true of Luther,
for Calvin was but eight years of age when Luther nailed up his
theses, and the great Genevan reformer and systematizer con
stantly in his career expressed his indebtedness to and depend
ence on the more popular leader at Wittenberg.
IV
The pulpit has been not only the chief instrument in the spread
of the message of salvation, but a great factor in civilization. It
has exercised in the past and still continues to exercise, after all
deductions have been made, a wide influence not only upon the
minds and hearts of countless individuals, but also upon social,

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 295
civil and industrial life as well. Preaching is one of the forces
which has contributed much to the building of nations and the
culture of great and influential peoples.
One of the most valuable results of the Reformation was its
influence on this important factor in the life of the Church and
the revival of apostolic Christianity. To this feature of the new
movement, more, perhaps, than to any other, did it owe its
strength and influence. By means of preaching Luther and his
contemporaries instructed, persuaded and fired the people with
enthusiasm1 for pure religion and aroused them to revolt against
the abuses of the Church, and by means of the same agency ani
mated them in their break from the domination of Rome.
During the medieval period there was not such a dearth of
preaching as has been sometimes represented by writers not
always fair minded in estimating the value of all the forces at
work in that era. Yet good preachers, even when most numer
ous in that age, were the exceptions to the rule. In general the
clergy did not preach. In the darkest hour of that time there
had never entirely failed men who had the gifts to preach and
fidelity in the use of their gifts, but the Reformation brought
with it as one of its adjuncts, formidable and popular, a great
outburst of preaching such as had not been since the close of the
apostolic age of the Church. During the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries the pulpit of the Latin Church may be accurately de
scribed as having passed into such a state of decadence that
preaching as a Church institution and agency had almost become
non-existent. The forces of decline were, for the most part, in
the ascendant. Toward the close of the thirteenth century the
great representatives of the scholastic type of preaching had
passed away. They were succeeded by a class of imitators who
made the use of that method ridiculous. Of their work it has
been said: "The wearisome divisions, the tedious refinements,
the useless distinctions and vapid subtleties made up only a gal
vanized corpse, or a dancing skeleton as in some puppet show,
instead of a live and vigorous body." It may be recalled that in
his "Praise of Folly" Erasmus satirizes this style of preaching
and illustrates the degeneracy with which it had been smitten.
He tells how that, in the first place, the preacher would begin with
an invocation borrowed from the poets, then would have an ex
ordium of some far-fetched and extravagant nature drawn ivory

296 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the River Nile, or Bel and the dragon, or signs of the zodiac, or
squaring the circle, or from the elements of grammar, or forced
etymologies and the forms of words, all artificial and pedantic to
a high degree. The third stage would be that, which, in the old
rhetoric was called "narration," or the "statement of the case,"
and here the text of Scripture would be given or slightly alluded
to. The fourth part — the main part of the discourse — would in
troduce almost a new person, for here our scholastic becomes a
mighty theologian and propounds the most wonderful theological
subtleties, touching on things found in neither heaven nor earth,
and to tickle the ears of the hearers, would adduce the great doc
tors, the "subtle," the "irrefragable," the "seraphic" and the like;
and then would come syllogisms and corollaries and all sorts of
scholastic fooleries. Finally, there would be the fifth act, in
which the preachers show the greatest art by bringing as applica
tion and illustration some fable or legend — the more marvelous
and absurd the better — which they proceed to interpret "alle-
gorically, tropologically and anagogically." This caustic descrip
tion of Erasmus is not overdone in its portrayal of a time when
ardent logicians went to absurd lengths in hair-splitting and friv
olous disputation.
Throughout the whole of the medieval period there are many
indications that preaching had declined to the level of the burles
que, the sensational and the pedantic. It is incredible what irrever
ence, absurdity and even indecency were perpetrated in the name
of the pulpit. "Even some of the better preachers," it has been
said, "men with really serious aims and personally of excellent
character, were not free from such faults, and in the hands of
less able and serious men, it became a shame and a disgrace,
which no amount of special pleading can justify, and the bad
taste of the age can only palliate." Much of the preaching was
of the grotesque and pedantic order. In an Easter sermon
Gabriel Barletta, by far the most famous Italian preacher of the
fifteenth century, next to Savonarola, of whom it was said, "if
one doesn't know how to preach like Barletta he doesn't know
how to preach at all," discoursed thus : "After His resurrection
the Lord was looking for a messenger to carry the good news
to His mother. A number offered themselves. Adam said let me
go, because I was the cause of evil. No, you won't do because
you are too fond of figs and might stop in the road. Abel said,

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 297
let me go. No, you might meet Cain, and he would kill you.
Then Noah would undertake the business. No, you drink too
freely. John the Baptist couldn't go because he wore hairy
clothes, and the penitent robber was rejected because his legs were
broken, and more of the same order. In one of his sermons this
same famous preacher tells this story : "A certain priest in cele
brating the mass observed a woman who freely wept and seemed
much moved as he intoned the service. The service being ended,
the priest asked the woman the cause of her emotion, when she
told him that it was his voice, which reminded her so tenderly of
her recently deceased donkey." That a man of real talent, and
usually a man of serious aims, should have indulged in such
trifling and irreverence is a fair indication of the stage of de
generacy reached by preaching for a long period in the history of
the pulpit. Of the orderly explanation and enforcement of the
Word of God there was none in this kind of homiletic trifling and
pedantry. Even in the sermons of a man like Gregory the Great,
who attached much importance to preaching, and left a book on
the subject, may be encountered exegesis of the most extravagant
order. He sometimes found not merely three, but as many as
seven senses in the same text of Scripture — senses historical,
moral, spiritual, mystical, analogic, anagogic, and so on through
the various orders of meaning. He dealt, too, with such ques
tions as why the angel at the grave of Christ sat on the right
hand instead of the left, and what was the significance of the
one hundred and fifty-three fishes caught by Peter. This was
the period, too, when all sorts of homiletical helps abounded.
Much predigested food of this order was provided for customers
then, as there are customers now, for that kind of goods. The
vast apparatus of this species that was constructed in that period
in the history of the puplit is another evidence of the prostration
of the work of preaching, and of the absence of concern on the
part of the Church to remedy the fault. Such brain-saving de
vices were plentiful, some of the more serious of which might
have been legitimate and useful if wisely used, and when they
were not perverted into snares for the weak and temptation to the
lazy. The happy, and certainly enticing, title to such as were
attracted to that class of wares, of one such contribution to
homiletical literature was this— "Sleep Well Sermons." In a
brief introduction, suggestive of mental tranquillity, this is said :

298 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
"Here, happily, begin the Sunday sermons with expositions of
the Gospels through this year, quite well known and useful to all
priests, pastors and chaplains, which are also called by the other
title of Sleep Well, or, Sleep Without Care, for this reason, that
without much study they may be appropriated and preached to
the people." One outline will serve as a specimen of the skill
displayed by the benevolently disposed author of the sleep easy
method of help for the hard pressed homiletician. The text is
Mark 6 :48, "The wind was contrary to them," and this is the plan
of treatment: "There are four spiritual winds which are con
trary to us and move on the sea of this world: (1) the east wind
blows when a man reflects on the sorrowful condition in which
he entered this world; (2) the west wind blows when he reflects
on bitter death; (3) the south wind, when he thinks of eternity;
(4) the north wind, when he thinks of the terrors of the last
judgment." Such was the character of most of the preaching in a period
when the doctrines of the Church had become corrupted, when
the interpretation of the Word of God had become strained, alle-
gorically and otherwise bad; a time when ecclesiastical legends
and tales abounded in great variety, and pedantic and scholastic
excesses and ludicrous refinements were widely prevalent. If
men were to be saved by the foolishness of preaching a new
note must once more be heard and all this reversed, and that de
mand for preaching that had all along come from the people
rather than the Church must once more be heeded.
Sacerdotalism is not conducive to good preaching. The medi
eval Church had thrust the sacraments, with the theory of their
mechanical efficacy, into the foreground and relegated preaching
to the friars. Even most of the popes reserved themselves for
official benedictions and sacramental grace. For centuries before
the Reformation this priestly conception of the ministry was in
the ascendant and preaching in a state of decline. To save men
by the externalism of the one was much easier than to bring the
appeal of the Gospel to the understanding, hearts and consciences
of men by means of the preached Word. It is an easy thing to
make a priest, but a prophet is sent of God. From its very be
ginning, and in harmony with its genius, Protestantism has been
a preaching religion, and during its entire history, and in har
mony with its genius, it has assembled the people together to

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 299
hear the Word rightly preached and to properly observe the sac
raments. From its beginnings in the earth the open Bible has
been its textbook, while its saving facts and doctrine of redemp
tion have been pressed home upon the people by men called of
God and set apart by the laying on of hands, and always with
salutary and uplifting influences. One of the finest results of the
Reformation was the re-instatement of preaching. It was at
once a revival of biblical preaching, as contrasted with the re
cital of fabulous stories about saints and martyrs; of contro
versial preaching directed against the sinuous errors and prac
tical evils of the times; and of the joyous proclamation of the
doctrines of divine grace and justification by faith alone. "The
resolution then accomplished in the cultus was deeper and more
extensive than any changes in organization," says Prof. Allen in
"Christian Institutions." "The accretions of religious symbolism
from the fifth century, together with the philosophy which in
spired them, had lost their meaning and their attraction."
From the beginning of his reformatory work Luther displayed
his rare gifts as a preacher, and to the prosecution of that work
he brought a tireless devotion and diligence. In the history of
the Christian pulpit the chief of the reformers has always been
assigned by unbiased judgment the place of a primate. As a
preacher he stands in the front rank of those, who, by means of
the ministry of God's Word, have moulded the characters and
destinies of men. Among all his other duties and achievements
as a scholar, theologian, a writer and an unfaltering leader, he
was first of all and chiefly a great preacher, who created in this
important phase of the religious history of his time a new epoch.
In this work we marvel at the fruitfulness of his mind and the
number of sermons preached by him. For years he filled every
Sunday the pulpit in the old Stadt-Kirche, that still stands in the
old town square at Wittenberg, besides conducting regular Sun
day services with the monks and in later years with his family,
his "Hausgemeinde," as he called it, and which included all the
guests and servants about the place. When away from home he
was called upon continually to expound the Scriptures. He was
heard with eagerness and profit by the people always, as they
listened to a preacher who knew that the first merit in a sermon
was that it could be understood. During the troubles created by
Carlstadt he preached at Orlamunde at a time when the whole

300 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
population was in the fields harvesting, but who left their work
and assembled in the Church to hear a preacher, who, no matter
what was the text, was always sure to get around in his sermon
again to that great doctrine of grace which he had finally got hold
of after sore conflict in the Erfurt Monastery — the doctrine of
saving merit made over once for all to every believer in Christ,
the doctrine that faith is not a mere belief in propositions, but a
trust in, and a personal fellowship with, a crucified Lord. At
Zwickau, whither he had gone shortly after returning from the
Wartburg in order to counteract the influence of the heavenly
prophets, an immense assembly of people came together to hear
him. He preached in the use of the vigorous mother tongue of
his people, which he had done so much to create, from a window
in the city hall to over twenty-five thousand people, who crowded
the market place of the town, and a little later he addressed an
audience that filled the castle court.
As a leader in the restoration of scriptural preaching, Luther
was eminent in a combination of excellent qualities. He had in
a rare degree that commanding fulness of being which is of such
immense service to the preacher. His love for humanity, his fine
natural gifts and character, his strong intellect and imagination,
his happy temperament, combined with courage and honesty, his
learning and knowledge of the Bible and theology, his subordina
tion of rhetoric to the great purpose served by preaching, his
sturdy straight-forwardness, added to his spiritual power in the
experience of divine grace and his overwhelming earnestness of
conviction that he had and must proclaim the Gospel of God,
present a combination of factors that could not fail to make of
him one of the greatest preachers in all time, and a chosen instru
ment in the reinstatement of the function of Christian preaching
to its rightful place in the Christian Church. He believed, and
therefore he spoke out of the fulness of his experience and con
victions, out of his sense of duty to God and his fellowmen, and
out of love to both, and without the fear of man before his eyes.
The late Dr. Dale, the greatest theological preacher of his day
in England — preaching for forty-five years in one pulpit, which
he made famous — in his "Laws for Common Life" pays a great
tribute to the Reformer as a teacher sent of God and qualified to
lead the people back once more to a new estimate of the great
ness and dignity of the Christian preacher's place and office. Of

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 301
him Dr. Dale says: "He had a fiery and passionate hatred of
falsehood and of sin ; a dauntless courage in the assertion of the
claims of truth and righteousness. He had a boundless faith and
a boundless joy in God. His joy was of a masculine kind and
made him stronger for his work. His faith was of a masculine
kind and relieved him from worrying doubts and fears about his
soul's affairs. Pie had his gloomy times, his conflicts with prin
cipalities and powers in dismal and solitary places ; but he had no
morbid dreams about the sanctity of misery, nor did he suppose
that the ever-blessed God finds any satisfaction in the self-inflicted
sufferings of his children. His massive face and robust form
were the outward and visible signs of the vigor and massiveness
of his moral and religious character. He was a man and did not
try to be anything else. God made him a man ; what was he that
he should quarrel with God's work ? He had flesh and blood ; he
could not help it. He ate heartily and enjoyed seeing his friends
at dinner. He married a wife and loved her; and he loved God
none the less. He liked music and songs as well as preaching
and sermons. He could laugh as well as preach. He had a
genial humor as well as deep devotedness. He was a brave man,
strong and resolute, with abounding life of all kinds ; a saint of a
type with which for many evil centuries Christendom had been
unfamiliar."

It has sometimes been affirmed, or at least assumed, that toler
ation and indifferentism are synonymous, or at least correlated,
terms, by which it always seems to be meant that those whose
faith is of the unambiguous and unhesitating order are sure to
persecute dissentients from their views. If men of this order
have the means at hand their attitude, it is assumed, will be that
of intolerance toward such as maintain other views than those
held by them, and that they will use repressive measures even to
the extent of persecution. On the other hand, it has been as
sumed that doubt, especially in the sphere of religion, has been
conducive to breadth, candor and toleration. This assumption is
the one chief defect in Hartpole Lecky's otherwise valuable
work on "Rationalism in Europe," and the same unhistorical as
sumption is not entirely absent from the writings of Mr. Froude.
There are some modern writers who are such ardent and thor-

302 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
ough-going advocates of toleration in general, that they have gone
so far as to say that no "exclusive" religion, such, for example,
as Roman Catholicism, ought to be tolerated, because in the name
of consistency it is committed to the suppression of all dissent
from its officially declared views whenever it has the power. The
theory herein advocated is a fine example of the intolerance and
inconsistency of liberalism; and evidence that skepticism in re
ligion is always biased and interested, and that it springs out of a
desire, conscious or unconscious, as the case may be, to overthrow
that which the general mind of mankind has found to be true and
upon which it rests with confidence as a basis of truth. It is a
mistake to assume that the resort to persecuting methods has
always been found to be based on religious principles, or that it is
always true that the religions which are commonly regarded as
the most dogmatic and exclusive have always been the most in
tolerant or the most persecuting in either principle or practice.
Taking the word toleration, then, as not meaning indifference to
truth, in no proper sense is there any ground, either of abstract
reasoning or historical evidence, for alleging that it is incompatible
with genuine religious beliefs unambiguously stated and uncom
promisingly advocated. As a matter of fact, the chief forms of
intolerance and persecution recorded in history have sprung much
more from social and political than from distinctively religious
motives. Instead of intolerance being a religious duty, as some
of the Reformers and the Church of Rome taught, the principle
of toleration comes to us commended by all the best and the
earliest traditions of the Christian Church, as well as by unmis
takable affirmations of Luther, in a period of almost universal
intolerance. One of the inestimable blessings of the Reformation was the
demand for the liberty of every man to serve God according to
the dictates of his own conscience. That movement, in one of its
most important aspects, was a great act of emancipation from
spiritual tyranny and a vindication of the sacred rights of con
science in matters of religious belief. That was one of the lead
ing issues in the Diet of Worms in 1521, when Luther made his
famous stand in what has been regarded as one of the sublimest
contests in behalf of the right of every man to think for himself
in the grave concerns of the human soul; the assertion of that
liberty of conscience, which, as Froude has said, made "the ap-

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 303
pearance of Luther before the Diet on this occasion one of the
finest — perhaps it is the very finest — scenes in human history."
That right was asserted by all of the reformers, but not prac
ticed by all of them. But notwithstanding the inconsistency that
sometimes marked the conduct of some of the very men who
claimed and exercised the right of protest in the name of con
science and of revolt against the established ecclesiasticism of the
day, the Reformation was a grand act of emancipation from
spiritual tyranny, and an effectual vindication of the sacred rights
of conscience in matters of religious belief. The early documents
of that movement are full of brilliant declarations of the rights
of conscience. It could hardly have been otherwise, for only by
an appeal to such rights could the leaders of that movement
justify their own attitude towards a religious system which, until
the time came that they assailed it, had commanded the assent of
the nations of Europe.
In this important contribution of the movement Luther oc
cupied the foremost position among the reformers. He clearly
foresaw the far-reaching effects that were involved in his protest
against Rome, and during the stormy period of protest, discussion
and defiance extending from 1517 to 1521, he was the fearless
champion of the right of men to follow their own consciences
and think for themselves in the great concerns of religion. He
has furnished some of the noblest utterances against coercion in
matters of conscience — declarations which affirm almost every es
sential feature of the modern theory on the subject. In 1529, in
his "Sermon on Excommunication," distinguishing between in
ward and outward church communion, he declared that of the
first none can be deprived "by any man, be he bishop or pope, yea,
not by angels or by any creature, but only by God Himself." He
draws a sharp line between the temporal power, which he declares
to be confined to the body and worldly goods, and that spiritual
government which belongs with God only. He defended the
rights of conscience against kings and princes as strongly as
against popes and other ecclesiastics. In 1523, writing in his
book on "Temporal Authority and How Far Obedience Is Due
to It," he says : "Worldly rule has laws which do not extend fur
ther than our body and goods, and what is external upon earth,
for over souls God can and will suffer no one to rule, save Him
self alone. Beloved, we are not baptized into the name of kings,

304 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
princes or nobles, but into the name of Christ and God only ; we
are not called after kings and princes or mobs; we are called
Christians. No one can or ought to command the soul, except
him who can show it the way to heaven. But that can no man
do, but God only. Therefore, in matters which concern the salva
tion of souls, nothing but God's Word ought to be taught or re
ceived." Again he says, "But the thoughts and mind of man can
be opened to no one but God ; wherefore, it is futile and impossible
to command or by force to compel anyone to believe so or so."
"There wants another grip for that; force avails nothing."
* * * "It is at a man's own risk what he believes, and he
must see for himself that he believes rightly. For just as little as
another can go for me to heaven or hell, can he for me believe
or disbelieve ; and just as little as he can open or shut heaven or
hell for me, can he drive me to belief or unbelief * * * for
belief is a free work ; thereto can no man be compelled."
In his book on "Secular Authority" he deals with the limita
tions of the civil values in respect to religious matters, denying to
them any part in the suppression of heresy — a remarkable position
to be taken when but very few men had escaped the ideas that
had come down as a heritage from the preceding ages, and at a
time when most men looked upon the state as the guardian of
both tables of the law and expected it to punish religious as well
as civil wrong-doing. There were times when the Reformer
called upon the Government to use strong measures against men
who were in revolt against the civil authorities ; times also when
he urged such authorities to crush out some of the troublesome
sects that were subverting the laws of the land and disturbing
their neighbors by their blasphemies and unbridled fanaticism.
But even in such instances there went forth, also, a plea for
mercy and exemption from great hardship. "Because," he said,
"no one can be forced to believe by such means, since he is still
able to believe exactly as he pleases. Only teaching and blas
phemy, should be forbidden, since by such methods he would rob
God and Christians of Word and doctrine, turning to their own
ill the protection and worldly advantage that their society affords
him." In 1528 he wrote concerning the Anabaptists, whom he
opposed with all the energy of his strong nature : "I do not ap
prove it, and truly regret that such miserable people are being
wretchedly murdered, burned and brutally destroyed. Each one

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 305
should be allowed to believe what he will. If he holds a false
belief he is sufficiently punished by the eternal fires of hell. Why
should temporal torments be added so long as he only errs in
faith, and does not also foment rebellion or otherwise withstand
authorities? Dear God, how does it happen that one errs and
falls into the snare of the devil? He should be restrained and
opposed by the Scriptures and God's Word." Of Luther's atti
tude on this subject our American historian, Bancroft, has said :
"Luther repelled the use of violence in religion; he protested
against propagating reforms by persecution, and with a wise mod
eration he maintained the sublime doctrine of freedom of con
science." He knew that the most that force could do was to
produce an external conformity. "For the miserable, blind people
do not see what a quite futile and impossible thing they undertake.
For however straitly they command, however stoutly they rage,
they cannot bring people further than to follow them with mouth
and hand; the heart they cannot compel, should they even tear
at it. For true is the proverb, 'thoughts are toll-free.' " "I have
little love for condemnations to death," he further says. "Look
at the Jews and the papists. The Mosaic law commanded that
false prophets should be slain, and they ended by killing almost
none but blameless and holy prophets. Heresy is a spiritual
thing, which cannot be hewn down with an axe, or burned with
any fire, or drowned with any water. Over the souls of men
God can and will have no one rule save Himself alone. We
should overcome heretics with books, not with fire. If there
were any skill in overcoming heretics with fire, the executioner
would be the most learned doctor in the world." In the "Baby
lonian Captivity" of 1520, he writes: "I cry aloud in behalf of
liberty of conscience," while again he implored his prince "not to
imbrue his hands in the blood of those new prophets of Zwickau."
In 1523 he protested against the cruel treatment of the Jews, as
if they were dogs and not human beings, advising kindness and
charity as the best means of converting them. One of the charges
set forth against him in the bull of excommunication, which
served to rend asunder western Christendom, was that he had
taught that "to burn heretics is against the will of God." The
Reformer's view on this subject, about which there has been
much misunderstanding and the dissemination of much misrepre
sentation, could not be stated in more unmistakable language

306 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
than this : "I will preach, I will talk in private, I will write, but
I will not constrain anyone, for faith is a voluntary act. Let no
heretic be restricted with force. We have a right to speak, but
none whatever to compel. If I resort to force what do I gain?
Cramped uniformity and hypocrisy. But there will be no hearty
sincerity, no faith, no love."
But in spite of these and other lofty ideas of toleration ad
vocated so unmistakably by Luther, and which, it will be ob
served, cover almost the whole theoretical ground of religious
liberty and the rights of conscience, some of the most melancholy
chapters in some periods of Protestant history have been written
in contradiction of these ideas. In the long march of human
progress nothing has been of slower growth than that tolerance
contemplated in the views of Luther, even he himself in some in
stances, and in a moderate degree, feeling obliged to depart from
them. In this, as in other matters, the position of the leader of
the Reformation movement was in many respects difficult and
painful. Not always was he able to confine Protestantism to its
own protest. Much that has been claimed, especially in this
country, by older historical writers in behalf of Puritanism has
no basis in fact. In England in the seventeenth century all par
ties when persecuted advocated liberty of conscience, and all
parties when in power exercised intolerance, but in different de
grees. It mattered not who was in power, Independent, Presby
terian or Anglican, fire and sword, fines, pillories, slitting noses,
cropping of ears and cheek burnings, depositions and disabilities,
made it very unpleasant for those who elected to dissent. Neither
Cromwell, Cartwright or Laud were shining exponents of Lu
ther's views. For a period of twenty years, from 1640 to 1660,
Puritanism ruled England in an earnest and excited period of
that country's history. It saved the rights of the people in a
conflict against the oppression of tyrannical rulers, but it punished
intolerance with intolerance, enforcing Puritan in place of Episco
pal uniformity and with a measure of cruelty not surpassed by
the hated Anglican. The Puritan colonies in this country, it is
true, were democratic, but so far from recognizing liberty of
conscience, they explicitly rejected it as implying a godless skepti
cism. Neither Anglicanism or Puritanism in the England of the
seventeenth century had learned by suffering this principle, in
herent in the very genius of Protestantism.

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 307
The early Puritan and Episcopalian colonists in America had
imbibed the views upon this subject that prevailed beyond the sea.
Tenaciously they clung to their false ideals until by sheer force of
circumstances they were compelled reluctantly to give them up.
True, the Puritans sought and obtained freedom to worship God,
but they never dreamed of extending the same liberty to others.
What they wanted was a state in which their own peculiar
religious views should be the law for all. They were in search of
a land where they could be and do what the Anglican Church was
and did in England. In churchmen the Puritan condemned the
requirement that others should conform to Episcopal views. In
themselves it seemed a just and holy desire to force on others
Puritan views of life and duty, because — so they reasoned — they
stood for truth, and the Church of England for error. The great
truths of the right of private judgment, and that spiritual truth
must not and cannot be enforced by physical power, never seemed
to find lodgment in the Puritan mind. The fact that it never was
supposed that toleration was to be extended to those who were
not Puritans is one of the things that help to explain the glaring
inconsistency between some of Cromwell's utterances and much
of his conduct. But he had to work with a people whose co-oper
ation was indispensable to him, and who thought that liberty of
conscience was a heinous sin. One fanatic said that if the devil
had his choice whether the hierarchy and liturgy should be estab
lished in the kingdom or toleration granted, the devil would choose
toleration. Another said that to let men serve God according to
their own consciences was to cast out one devil that seven more
might enter.
The teaching of leading Puritans in Massachusetts on religious
liberty are all in one line. Mr. Cobb, the author of "The Rise of
Religious Liberty in America," quoting from "Force and Felt,"
writes: "To the early leaders of Massachusetts, especially the
religious leaders, toleration of dissent from the established order
of religious worship was as sedition in the state and sin against
God." John Cotton declared that "it was toleration that made the
world anti-Christian." "Polipiety," or variety of sects, says Na
thaniel Wood, "is the greatest impiety in the world," and he fur
ther declares : "He that is willing to tolerate an unsound opinion,
that his own may be tolerated, will, for a need, hang God's Bible

308 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
at the devil's girdle." So late as 1673, the President of Harvard
College said in an election sermon: "I look upon unbounded
toleration as the first-born of all abominations." In 1635 Roger
Williams, pastor of the Salem Church, was banished because he
had denounced the existing theocracy and the interference of
magistrates with religious matters, while in 1659 the observance
of Christmas was made a punishable offence.
It is due the Puritan and his memory, however, to say in this
connection that the same spirit of intolerance was displayed in
Virginia and New York by the Episcopalians and the Dutch.
To this question of Puritanism, as to many other questions,
there were two sides, one of serious estimate and another of bur
lesque and travesty. And time tries both sides. The Puritan was
narrow, and his narrowness can be easily explained. The weak
ness of the Puritan was the weakness of his age. In his essay on
William Laud, Dean Hodges says that "sometimes the saints hated
the saints. There were good men on both sides, as there are
heroes on both sides in all wars. But it was hard for the good
men who were on the one side to believe that the good men on the
other side were good; they always seemed to them to be the
enemies of right." In a time of which this could be affirmed the
Puritan lived and wrought, in spite of his canting intolerance, for
some fundamental principles that were deeply rooted in the Lu
theran Reformation of the sixteenth century. In this was his real
contribution to free government.
But notwithstanding the recurrence of such contradictions even
in Protestantism itself, there has been such a constant reversion to
the real and underlying principles of the movement, that they have
overmastered the deplorable contradictions, until the spirit of
toleration is one of the worked-out results of the great movement
of the sixteenth century in all lands dominated by its principles.
In isolated instances the principle of toleration inherent in gen
uine Protestantism has, no doubt, been disallowed; but the prin
ciple has so triumphed that intolerance has disappeared from
among the most enlightened people of the earth, and that never
to be reinstated.
The primary fact that man is free before God, and should be
untrammeled in his access to God, could not be so abstracted as
to have no kind of application to a man's civil and social rela
tions. When Luther projected the thought into modern civiliza-

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 309
tion that the Bible, interpreted by private judgment and not by
papal authority, should be the supreme standard of faith and
practice among men ; that the Church derived its authority from
the Bible and not the Bible from the Church ; then he uttered the
thoughts which have given us our free institutions, free thinking,
free press, free schools, free Bible, free Church, and freedom of
scientific inquiry, and all the best expressions of the civilization in
the benefits of which it is our privilege to live. By virtue of its
being a return to the teachings of Christ the Reformation accom
plished even more than it contemplated. Mr. Lecky has said that
"toleration is created by skepticism, and belong to askeptical age."
Post-Reformation history disproves the assertion. Where re
ligion is made a matter of conscience, and not of the magistrate,
toleration is necessary, and, in harmony with this historical fact,
whenever Protestantism has attempted to coerce conscience by
punishing religious dissent with sword and fagot it has been
illogical and inconsistent with its own genius and principles.
When Luther, on the threshold of the Reformation, declared
that "it is against the Holy Ghost that heretics should be burned,"
and when later Leo X, following the teaching of both Augustine
and Aquinas, denounced that position of Luther in the bull of
excommunication, it was the spirit of medievalism clashing with
the spirit of modern times in a struggle that was not to cease
until the victory of the new principle had been fully assured in
the tolerance of modern times.

VI
The Reformation under Luther, as we have seen, began with
the discovery that salvation is a free gift of God to men
through Jesus Christ, and that this gift is appropriated directly
by faith, and not by means of the intervention of any human
mediator. He placed the emphasis in theology on the atonement,
and the churches which bear the impress of his teaching through
out the world to this day are monuments as notable as the ecu
menical creeds to the invincible resistance of a child of God to
any kind of sacerdotalism, which, in effect, stands between the
sinful and yet trustful soul and the Saviour through Whom it is
reconciled to God, and in consequence brought into a state of
spiritual tranquillity. He revolted, as we have seen, against

310 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the imposition of penance and payments, or the interposition
of any priestly caste or order with its accompaniments of
ritual and sacrifice, and once more led men back to the great
truth that the Christian soul could never find real and abiding
spiritual rest until, in the urgency of its needs and the claims of
its dignity, it could come at once with its own voice and its own
plea into the Father's house. Luther, in a large sense, became
the true successor of Paul and Augustine. The reform associated
with his name and work was occupied primarily with the be-
stowment of the divine life; with the question, how can the
blessed gift of the forgiveness of sin be transferred as a matter
of fact and personal experience to the erring and evil souls of
men? These were primary considerations, as we have observed,
in the great revival of the sixteenth century. It wrought for the
spiritual emancipation of men, making all equal before God. But
in its further development it has wrought also for temporal
emancipation, the making of all men equal with each other, the
restoration to all of an equal share in the conduct of human af
fairs, the right of the individual to the enjoyment of life, liberty
and happiness simply and solely as a human being on terms of
equality with all other persons under the regulation of right
eousness. Never before has the genesis of democracy and the real mean
ing and significance of the word and its justification and possibil
ities been the subjects of as much interest as today. Much of
the discussion called out by the quadri-centennial celebration of
the Reformation, in this and other lands, was addressed to an
examination of the sources of freedom in all of its aspects and
applications. In such discussions there has been a striking
agreement among qualified writers regarding the relation of the
great religious awakening of the sixteenth century to the sub
ject. As we have seen, the animating principle at the heart of
that great movement was an honest desire for a reformation of
the Church which had so sadly fallen away from the Gospel of
the Lord and His apostles. To this end the efforts of all the
reformers were primarily directed. But associated with these
efforts at what was a distinctly religious reformation, there were
certain social, political and economic results which were not di
rectly sought, but which have, in the years that have succeeded,
profoundly affected civilization in all of its aspects. In most re-

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 311
spects the modern world dates from the posting of Luther's theses,
which act was a real declaration of independence more than two
centuries and a half before that made by our fathers at Philadel
phia in 1776. The movement inaugurated by that act was the
first of that series of progressive democratic revolutions which
transformed the medieval into the modern world. The beating
heart of that great movement was the assertion of the rights of
the individual conscience against the usurpations and encroach
ments of a great organized expression of ecclestiastical tyranny.
Its method then was an appeal to the people against the privileges
and assumptions of a hierarchy aspiring to world dominion in
matters both secular and religious. It brought about the emanci
pation of the intellect, and that led inevitably to liberty of con
science. Freedom of religious belief, it very soon became mani
fest, involved to a large degree political independence and the
just claim of the people to a larger share in the exercise of their
civil rights. The Lutheran revolt very soon changed the aspect
of affairs and the attitude of the Church of Rome. Before 1517
independence of thought and speech could be condoned as a mat
ter of but small consequence, very much like the license which
an absolute sovereign can allow a contented people in a time of
peace. But after the outbreak in Germany had gathered head
way, the Church perceived that it was facing a new enemy. It
was virtually obliged to declare a state of siege and invoke mar
tial law for the suppression of mental insubordination. Luther
was pre-eminently a religious character, and his great funda
mental work was accomplished in the sphere of religion, but his
influence reached far beyond the frontiers of that which was dis
tinctly religious in both teaching and action. The world today is
a freer world to live in and to work in, a world of larger oppor
tunity and more confident hope, in consequence of Luther's fol
lowing his own conscience and his insistence upon the right of
other men to do the same thing. He was the unconscious herald
of the democracy of today. It is for this reason that not only
the theologian, but also the political and literary historian, in
terpret the Reformation as one of the greatest blessings ever be
stowed upon mankind.
On the 31st of October, 1517, Luther nailed his theses on the
church door at Wittenberg, thereby challenging the clergy, the
university and the pope to say why Christian people should not

312 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
reassert their scriptural freedom. That was the opening of a
movement that emancipated the more virile races of Europe from
subjection to what had come to be an intolerable ecclesiastical
bondage. That was the first line of the great battle of the six
teenth century, and civil freedom soon followed in the wake of
the newly-proclaimed soul freedom. Absolution in the Church
was the outer line of defence, behind which absolution in the
state felt itself safe. Ecclesiastical autocracy was the chief ad
junct of civil autocracy. That line of defence once broken down,
popular expressions of government in Church and state were cer
tain to ensue. On either side of royalty in Europe at that time
stood the bishop, with his prelatical pretensions, and nearer to
the crown than either castle, knight or peasant.
In arranging, on one occasion, for a great Luther pageant a
German agnostic of distinction in his country was asked how he
came to take so much interest in honoring a man who had trans
lated the Bible into the language of his people. To the inquiry
the agnostic replied: "I do not care a fig for Luther's religion.
It is the political revolution that he inaugurated that we liberals
celebrate." He thereby expressed a totally inadequate view, of
the great Reformation movement. Luther was primarily the
champion of that freedom which the Gospel asserts to be the
right of every child of God, and which, in the final analysis, is
the only foundation of all expressions of civil freedom.
VII
It would be unhistorical to affirm that there were no expres
sions of the democratic spirit prior to the Lutheran Reformation.
The seeds of democracy are manifest in certain facts and teach
ings that are discoverable in the Middle Ages. But these expres
sions of what we regard as one of the permanent factors in civili
zation were largely individual, isolated and uninfluential. Accord
ingly, if we are searching for the genesis of democracy, for the
fundamental principles which have made it possible, we must get
back further than some interpreters of the subject are wont to go.
We must get back of the conflict at Runnymede between the
barons of England and King John ; back of the great charter of
rights, and of the long parliament; back of Hampden, Pym and
Milton; back of the Puritan conflict and the English common-

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 313
wealth; back of the migration of Pilgrim and Puritan to
America; back of the Lutheran Reformation in the sixteenth
century. We must get back in that search for origins even to
the vitalizing teachings of the New Testament. John Stuart Mill
once said to the husband of George Eliot: "A great crisis in
the history of liberty seems to me to have come at the cross of
Jesus of Nazareth." This brilliant writer on liberty, who knew
so much about so many subjects, Christianity excepted, seemed
to discern in this grand fact in human history the meeting place
of the great forces of the past and the greater forces of the
future. Democracy received its inspiration out of the teachings
and death of our Lord. It was born out of the thought that be
fore God, and as the subject of a divinely provided and gracious
redemption, all men were absolutely equal. Because in that
period there were men who believed in the Lord and were striv
ing at least to apprehend the significance of his teachings, are
we able to discern in the Middle Ages some expressions of the
now widely dominant principle of democracy.
The course of events in the Roman Empire had been toward
the continual aggrandizement of the imperial class and power.
The representative despotism of Augustus was at last succeeded
by the oriental despotism of Diocletian. The senate sank more
and more into a powerless assembly of imperial nominees, and the
spirit of Roman freedom wholly passed away with stoicism.
Christianity early in its history assumed the character of a strong,
disciplinary institution, which proved itself to be a good training
school for the nations in their infancy and youth, when the magis
terial factor was needed. Hence we have the legalistic, monarch
ical development growing out of the unscriptural claims of the
medieval hierarchy, which for a thousand years affected for good
or evil both the Church and the world. It ruled the spirits of
men as absolutely as the old Rome ruled their temporal fortunes.
From the fifth century until the Reformation the history of the
Church is the history of the power of the papacy, of the decline
of that power, and of numerous indications of popular revolt
against its supreme sway. But notwithstanding the unscriptural
claims in Church organization and the monarchical absolutism of
the papacy, in proportion as the nations were trained in the school
of the Church they came more and more to assert their inde
pendence of the hierarchy, and to develop a national spirit and a

314 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
literature in their own language. Starting with the assertion of
man's moral liberty and responsibility, the very postulates of
many of her doctrines, the Church poured into the nations,
crushed and degraded by imperialism, a new vitality, while by
her self-made constitution, her elected rulers, her deliberative
councils, she did much, although at times without so intending,
to keep alive the free democratic traditions of an earlier time
which Caesarism had almost strangled, and did much to train
the barbarian tribes which entered her fold in the principles and
exercise of that liberty that subsequently led to revolt and refor
mation. It proclaimed loudly the doctrine of a career for talent
in distinction from the entailed career of feudalism without tal
ent, and the Church was the only institution in which a poor boy
had a free chance. Her religious houses, too, were so many
little republics scattered up and down Europe, while her councils
were the only deliberative assemblies of the time.
Pope Gregory VII was certainly one of the most autocratic
of the papal chieftains, as he was unquestionably the ablest and
one of the most constructive, but his election was something of
a forecast of popular government. The funeral rites of Alex
ander II, his predecessor, who had died only a day before, were
being conducted in the Church of St. John Lateran, where Hilde
brand, as archdeacon, was taking his appointed post in the solemn
rites, when suddenly there was a great multitude of the Roman
clergy and people in the church and without who cried, "Hilde
brand shall be our pope." That strong-willed leader and dicta
tor, in a large sense, of the papacy shrank from the immense
responsibility of the task to which he was being called by the
people. In vain did he rush to the pulpit and endeavor to calm
the tumult. The members of the sacred college hastily consulted
together, and with one accord confirmed the popular choice.
This once poor boy, the son of a carpenter, who in his pontificate
achieved the enfranchisement of the papacy from imperial con
trol, was in sympathy with the people, and maintained the cause
of the poor against the violence of a military aristocracy. Pope
after pope and council after council had fulminated against
simony and incontinence; but what was peculiar and of sig
nificance in the conduct of Gregory was his appeal to the faithful
at large, his making the people executors of his reformatory
papal decrees. His appeal involved severity and hardship. By

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 315
his mandate married priests were required instantly to renounce
their wives or to renounce the priesthood, while married bishops
who disobeyed were to be degraded from office. But in all of his
inexorable demands Gregory's appeal was made to the popular
mind. Many of the great ecclesiastics of the time had come from
the ranks of the people, and men for the most part true to their
democratic instincts were often found to be the inflexible sup
porters of right against might, and by their attitude in the affairs
of the Church had shown how that a representative system might
be introduced into the state.
The significance of the famous controversy between Philip the
Fair of France and Pope Boniface VIII, consists in this, that it
was the first of a series of national protests which never ceased
until the nations of western Europe had accomplished their eman
cipation from external influence, whether ecclesiastical or im
perial, and the modem world was born, in which the nations
stand in their freedom and independence before God, answerable
only to Him and the people.
There were also many utterances of the time ominously demo
cratic in tone. Foremost among the threatening and somewhat
revolutionary productions of the first half of the fourteenth
century, for example, was a book entitled "Defensor Pacis." It
had for its author a physician of Padua known as Marsilio. No
later hand has traced back with finer historic tact the mundane
conditions which first made possible and then favored the growth
of hierarchical ideas and monarchical assumptions, and none has
searched out with a more pitiless logic the weak places in the
armor of both. Marsilio's book was a philosophical examina
tion of the principles of government and of the nature and limits
of sacerdotal power. Its democratic tendency was evident in its
demonstration that the exposition of the law of Christianity rests
not with the pope nor any other priest, but with a general and
representative council. It rejected the papal political preten
sions, and asserted that the pope, even, had no right to attempt to
coerce human thinking. In its view of Church government it ad
vocated rule by representation, subjecting to a criticism often
most acute and damaging much that had hitherto been assumed
as historically certain. Neander called this work of Marsilio "an
epoch-making" book. It was certainly far in advance of the age.
It was, indeed, an anticipation of popular government, and in

316 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
some considerable degree of the Declaration of Independence
and the Federal Constitution. Even in the darkest time of the
old medieval Caesarism the idea of the supremacy of law as the
guarantee of popular and personal freedom was frequently as
serting itself.
Let us remember that it was June, 1215, three hundred and
two years before Luther's theses, that the barons of England,
at Runnymede, too feeble to resist individually, finally formed an
association to resist in common, thereby forcing John Lackland,
beaten by the King of France, to swear a solemn oath that in the
future he would respect all the rights of the freemen in his king
dom, thereby granting to them significant and far-reaching con
cessions. These assertions of the democratic principle were not tri
umphant in that age, but they were there, an anticipation of the
Protestant revolt under Luther, of the thirty years' war, of the
English revolution, the settlement of the American continent, for
the most part by Protestant peoples, and the establishment here
of the world's largest example of popular government.
VIII
But after all that may be said about such isolated and unor
ganized assertions and manifestations of the spirit of democracy,
it was reserved for the Protestant movement of the sixteenth
century to assert and co-ordinate those principles which have
made the expression of that spirit effective in organized religious
and civic life. The religious revolt in which Protestantism was
born has for the first time in the history of mankind made
democracy a dominating world force. Involving as it does in the
most momentous of all concerns the assertion of the rights of
the individual, we should expect that Protestantism would be
favorable to liberty. During its long history it has fostered a
habit of mind which is incompatible with a patient endurance of
tyranny at the hands of any civil power, or of unquestioning
docility and obedience to any officialism in the form of eccles
iastical superiors. Any expression of that form of Christian
faith which constantly inspires a lively sense of personal rights
can hardly fail to bring with it, eventually at least, a corre
sponding respect for the rights of others and a disposition to se
cure those rights in the forms of government and legislation.

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 317
The splendid achievement in the religious sphere of winning
back for men their freedom in Christ at once involved the de
mand for liberty in the political sphere. Prior to the days of the
Reformation there was but little discussion in Europe regard
ing theories of government. The strong men usually made
the laws and the weak ones acquiesced. We have noted how
that, in the social, scientific and literary spheres, the way had
been prepared for the economic, religious and political revolutions
of the sixteenth and later centuries. But when these various
forces had been liberated and set to working in proper alliance,
the dominion of that traditionalism which had engrafted itself
upon the medieval Church, with its restrictive and always re
actionary influences, was thrown off, and a new age was at hand,
marked not only by religious reform, but by the formation of
independent national states. One thing had been made certain,
viz., that the era of universal temporal and spiritual sovereignty
was outgrown, that the centripetal forces were no longer capable
of holding those of the centrifugal order in check. The old
centralization of the medieval period, largely as a consequence of
the restoration of the democracy of the saints, had given way to
the decentralization of the new era now at hand.
To the religious reformation that had come about in the
Church was due the assertion and spread of those principles
which lie at the foundation of a true doctrine of human rights, a
true conception of liberty, and of a true definition of the scope
and limits of civil authority. Human rights, according to the
principles enunciated by Luther, are not to be regarded as the
mere products of the naturalistic evolution of the instincts of
felf-preservation and self-protection, nor as the results of some
imaginary social contract, nor as the arbitrary bestowment of the
divine will. They are more deeply rooted in principles that are
religious, essential and everlasting — principles that, if they were
necessary in the past for the attainment of civil liberty, are now
necessary to its preservation.
The elements of democracy are discernible in the assertion of
the autonomy of the Church, the right of Christian people to
govern themselves, under the sole headship of Christ, and also
in the proclamation of the parity of the clergy against the dis
tinctions of the prelatical hierarchy and the participation of the
laity in the government and discipline of the Church.

318 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Luther struck a powerful blow for democracy, little as he him
self at the time realized its full consequences, when, in his ad
dress to the nobility in 1520, he broke down a wall that separated
clergy and laity, the spiritual and the temporal estates, and de
clared that all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and that
there is no difference among them save of office only. In that
famous "primary work" he demolished the wall behind which
arrogant and presuming ecclesiastics had taken shelter, and which
no one hitherto had dared to storm. The nobles were told that
they were equally priests with popes and bishops, and equally re
sponsible as Christians for the welfare and direction of the
Church. This, in some degree, explains how it could happen
that, when Luther came before the imperial diet in April, 1521,
the German princes refused simply to execute the papal judg
ment, as they were required to do by the canon law, insisting upon
looking into the matter for themselves; and further, why that
when the imperial ban had been added to that of his holiness,
the pope, it was not and could not be enforced in many of the
German states. The spirit of popular revolt was rising to as
sert itself, and the princes were becoming aware of their own
independent strength and capacity for asserting their own rights.
Through all the writings of Luther there runs a steady current
of thought, which becomes more and more defined as we ap
proach the decisive year of 1526, and on to 1529, when at Speyer
the elector of Saxony and other princes, together with fourteen
cities, made their memorable protest to the effect that the doctrine
of the priesthood of believers should find expression in the out
ward organization of the Church; that all true Christians have
inalienable and indefeasible rights and duties which they share
equally, and that in the body of Christian people is to be found
the source of all authority and organization.
When men came to judge for themselves, and act independently
in Church affairs, they were no longer likely to manifest a slavish
spirit in the political sphere. That religious liberty, which is fun
damentally the right of the individual Christian to his own in
terpretation of what the Holy Scriptures teach as to faith and
duty, was a great factor from the hour of its reinstatement in not
only religious, but civil liberty also.
Thus the Reformation heritage is a heritage of freedom, per
haps its most easily and most commonly observed feature. On

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 319
its very forefront is written the right of private judgment — the
right to think for one's self in religion, and to worship God ac
cording to the dictates of one's own conscience. The rights of
men in civil government, it very soon became clear in the six
teenth century, were inherent in the great movement headed by
Luther, and have been developed since that time. At the prob
lem of how to make men free religiously, politically and indus
trially we are still working; and liberty to think in religion now,
as in earlier times, leads the way to liberty to think in all other
matters. Prof. Lavelaye, of the University at Liege, has de
clared, after long special study given to his theme: "The prin
ciple of political and religious freedom, and that of the sovereignty
of the people, issue logically from the Reformation. It has
everywhere been its natural fruit. The Reformation everywhere
incited to energetic demands for natural rights — freedom, tolera
tion, equality and popular sovereignty."
Guizot offers as an adequate characterization of the Reforma
tion this statement: "It was an insurrection of the human
mind against absolute power in the spiritual order." His subse
quent analysis makes important distinctions, which vindicate its
aims and results in the main, but which fail to single out the ful
crum of its whole spiritual leverage on society. That fulcrum
is discovered in the statement of the great Scotch scholar and
apologist, the late Dr. James Orr, a thinker of deeper penetra
tion into the underlying causes of modern progress than Guizot.
Dr. Orr says : "The sinner, penitent for his sins, has the right of
free access to God without intervention of priest, Church, sacra
ment or anything else to stand between him and his Maker, and
God freely forgives and accepts everyone laying hold on His
promise in the Gospel, without works, satisfaction or merits of
his own, but solely on the ground of Christ's atoning death and
perfect righteousness, to which faith cleaves as the only ground
of its confidence."
Thus it has come to pass that a reinstatement among the
peoples of Europe of the evangelical conception of the doctrine
of salvation — that which was primarily religious in its character
—has had important bearings, not only on religious life and doc
trines, but also on the constitutional history of great peoples.
Religious convictions in the sixteenth century have worked out
vast civic results among the best peoples of the earth. Borgeand

320 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
has shown that modern democracy is the child of the Reforma
tion, that the two hammers used to break the authority of the
medieval Church were freedom of inquiry and the priesthood of
all believers; that these two principles contained in them the
germs of the political revolution which in our time has come to
pass. These truths made the community the visible center of the
Church, and the people the principal factor in social life.
Matters had moved forward with great rapidity from the days
when Huss and Wiclif had been the exponents of the rising spirit
of revolt. In the last half of the fourteenth century Wiclif had
held that the Church had no right to interfere in secular matters,
but only in such matters as involved morals and the dogmas of
the Church. He advanced, step by step, until he was prepared
to repudiate transubstantiation, to the declaration that papal in
dulgences were futile, and to the affirmation that the Bible was
all-sufficient as a rule of faith and practice.
The pope, too, encountered difficulties of various kinds with
his own children. In 1521, as an example of his troubles, he
named Henry VIII, of England, the "Defender of the Faith,"
and soon after this much-married and honored son of the Church
proceeded to divorce one wife in defiance of the "Holy Father"
of Christendom, because he was stubbornly set upon wedding a
younger and more attractive woman. Francis I, another son of
the Church, declared to be "the most Christian king," makes an
alliance with the detested and troublesome Turk, while yet an
other, Charles V, said to be "the most Catholic of monarchs,"
sacks Rome and imprisons the pope. And when, in 1521, Luther
stood before the "Holy Roman Empire" at the Diet of Worms,
that historic scene which was one of the most impressive in the
annals of mankind, great contrasts were presented — that, for
example, between solidarity and individualism, that between
authority and liberty, and that between an arrogant ecclesiasti-
cism and the true religion taught by our Lord and His apostles.
Some changes had been brought about since, in humble submis
sion to Rome's claim to temporal as well as spiritual sovereignty,
Henry II, one of the greatest of English monarchs, did penance
at the tomb of Becket, and there submitted meekly to a flogging
administered by monks ; and from the day when we read of a
German emperor humbly holding the stirrup for Pope Gregory
VII to mount his horse, while the same renowned and self-willed

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 321
successor of Peter and proclaimed "vicar of Christ" compelled
Henry IV, of Germany, to wait for three days, while standing in
the Alpine snows and clad only in the scant garments of a peni
tent, before being admitted to the castle of Canossa to ask for
absolution. The struggle for freedom was long and eventful
from the day that the theses were posted on the Wittenberg
church door, and attended with receding tides of victory and
defeat. But with the peace of Westphalia in 1648 Protestantism
and its inherent principles of progress at last had triumphed over
ultramontanism, stagnation and repression. In consequence of
the long and memorable war of thirty years, the conflicting claims
and legal rights of Catholic royalists and Protestant principles
were at last adjusted. Religious liberty, with all that it involved
for the future freedom of mankind, had at last gained legal recog
nition and was placed upon impregnable foundations. It drew
a final line of demarcation between the two views of the Chris
tian religion which divided Europe. Germany had been deci
mated, the losses of the civic population being almost incredible.
The moral decadence was appalling. Physically, the land could
have suffered no more. But one inestimable advantage had been
achieved, whatever else had been lost — Protestantism, with all
that ensued for Germany from the fact, had been saved. The
peace of Westphalia, which marked the close of the first great
era in the history of Protestantism, had the force of a definite
proclamation that the religious reformation and revolution of
the sixteenth century was to hold its ground. Europe, at the end
of that disastrous struggle to maintain the right of the new views
to live, had subscribed to a justification of Protestantism.
IX
But the principles and expressions of freedom noted above
made their progress in the face of the principles and the hostile
attitude of the papacy. The habit of mind which the Roman
Catholic training tends to produce leads to servility on the part
of the subject toward the ruler, and, especially where an alliance
is maintained between the Church and the state, between the sov
ereign and the priest. The papal theory is based upon the false
assumption that men's minds are to be subject to clerical su
premacy, and the clerical power of the medieval Church was

322 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
never the sincere advocate of liberty of conscience. What the
great popes of the Middle Ages aimed at was not liberty of
conscience for the people, but a vast imperial dominion for them
selves and the clergy, a dominion having very little that was re
ligious in it, but always using religion as the instrument of its
power. The medieval theory of the Church and the empire was
based upon the supposition that the emperor and all his subjects
were Christians and members of the one Holy Catholic and apos
tolic Church. The theory of the relation of the one to the other
may be stated after the interpretation given by James Bryce, the
author of the valuable historical monograph called "The Holy
Roman Empire." "Christendom forms one great whole, in which
there are two chief functionaries, the pope and the emperor, each
in his own way its head. Both of these powers are instituted by
God, the one being ordained to rule over men's bodily and the
other over their spiritual interests. Both spring from the old
Roman Empire, which, having become Christian, was at once an
empire and a church. In one sense the Church enfolds the em
pire ; in another, the empire enfolds the Church. The two forms
must support each other, the one being necessary to the other.
The- emperor is to sanction the pope's election, and the pope
crowns the emperor. The emperor is to protect the pope and the
clergy and the courts of the Church, and these are all to support
the authority of the emperor over his subjects." This was the
theory, which, while it did not wholly correspond to the fact, had
much in it, considered as an ideal, that was sound.
But the Church early began to encroach upon the sphere of the
secular power and soon altogether ceased to be a spiritual power.
It became an earthly kingdom upholding itself by spirtual sanc
tions. In this secularizing program it came to be further held
that all temporal jurisprudence was bound to frame its decrees
with deference to the superior ecclesiastical power. Thus a vast
ecclesiastical jurisdiction arose, the rival and often the master of
the imperial and national jurisdictions, and by and by claiming
to have supreme and autocratic authority over all things. Instead
of the idealism of the "Holy Roman Empire," we have two rival
temporal powers, each aspiring, though on different grounds, to
universal dominion. In his controversy with Frederick II, Pope
Innocent IV says that Christ has given to the pope not only the
pontifical, but also the regal power, having committed to St.

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 323
Peter and his successors the reins both of the earthly and the
heavenly empire, as is sufficiently shown by the plurality of the
keys; while at the jubilee of the year 1300 Boniface VIII, clad
in imperial robes, seated on a throne, and crowned with the dia
dem, laying his hand on his half-drawn sword, said to the pil
grims: "Ego, Ego Sum Imperator." Thus at last the vicar of
Christ, the successor of the fisherman Peter, had come to be the
ruler of the world. The Church became more and more hierarchi
cal in its organization. It recognized and jealously guarded a
"spiritual order" of popes, cardinals and priests, in distinction
from the "secular order" of kings, princes and peasants. All of
the authority came down from above, and the laity had neither
voice nor hand in the affairs of the Church. It was strictly a gov
ernment by the priestly classes and one that was highly despotic
in spirit. In Luther's day, in the period of this ecclesiastical im
perialism, the citizen of the state had no kind of liberty in his re
ligious faith and convictions. He was expected to believe as the
state, under the superior direction of the pope, required him to
believe. Thus only could he believe and not otherwise. In har
mony with such unwarranted and unhallowed claims and assump
tions, the Church of Rome always has been the natural ally and
supporter of arbitrary principles of government. The prevailing
sentiment, the instinctive feeling, in that Church, is that the body
of the people are incapable of thinking for themselves in the
great concerns of religion, and that to entrust them with such
prerogatives as private judgment, freedom of conscience, freedom
of faith, would at once imperil the stability of ecclesiastical con
trol. In all such matters, the whole medieval history, even down
to the time of the Reformation, is the history of the growth of
despotic authority and of the centralization of power, always ex
pressing itself in that worst form of bondage in the world — that
which suppresses freedom of intellect, conscience and faith.
It is true that the Church of Rome has shown a remarkable
capacity to accommodate itself to any of the various types of
political society. Her doctors have at times preached an extreme
theory of popular rights and sovereignty of the people. While
the state is subordinate to the Church any form of government
may be tolerated. That religious persecution has sometimes
darkened the history of some forms of Protestantism, and that
some of the leaders in the period of the Reformation failed

324 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
sometimes to recognize distinctly the principle of liberty of con
science, must be admitted. That occasionally Protestants have
favored despotism and that Roman Catholics sometimes have
been known to advocate the sovereignty of the people, does not
change the innermost nature and tendency of the two systems of
Romanism and Protestantism. History abundantly verifies the
proposition that Protestantism is favorable to civil and religious
freedom, and thus promotes the attainment of the multiplied ad
vantages which freedom brings in its train. Protestantism from
its beginning has held to liberty as its center of gravity, while in
Romanism that center has always been authority. The great
spirits of Protestantism have never been content simply to protest
without going on to affirm and confess. They have not only
claimed the freedom to think for themselves, but the right to be
lieve, to contend for and to formulate their beliefs in unam
biguous confessions of faith. It is a simple fact of history that
wherever the principles of the Reformation have been allowed to
work themselves out to their logical conclusions, there has come
freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of worship and
of conscience. In lands that have been dominated by Rome it
has not been so as long as the Church was permitted to dominate
and maintain her influence and carry out her principles. In this
day wherever statesmen of the Catholic faith in Catholic coun
tries have favored free government they have been opposed by
the Roman hierarchy, and wherever they have succeeded in estab
lishing free institutions it has been in the face of the opposition
of their ecclesiastical superiors. That is the natural outcome of
the autocratic conception of the power of the papacy. History
furnishes its own long commentary on how thoroughly the old
hierarchy, which reaches from Leo the Great to Benedict XV,
has made effective its repressive and autocratic principles.
The long and heroic endurance of the German people in the
fearful struggle of the thirty years' war, the long and successful
struggle for independence in the Netherlands, the conflict which
established English liberty against the despotic influence of the
House of Stuart, the establishment of the American republic, are
events so intimately connected with Protestantism, and so de
pendent upon it, that they are not only indications of the true
spirit and genius of the principles of the Reformation, but also
show what fearful struggles were required to break the power of

SOME OF THE1 ATTAINED RESULTS 325
papal dominion and enable men to walk in that liberty which is the
inalienable right of mankind — that liberty of conscience and
worship which so late as the time of Pius IX, in an address to
all bishops, has been branded as an error to be abhorred and
shunned as the contagion of a pestilence.
Speaking of the contrasts between Catholicism and Protes
tantism, Luthardt declares that "the difference consists in opposite
mental tendencies ; and these again have their roots in opposite
views of religion." "The opposite mental tendencies are often
designated as authority and liberty. The former advocates legit
imacy ; the latter the rights of historical progress." There can be
no religion without a Church. There can be no Church without
a government. There can be no government without a sovereign
power, which definitely and without appeal sets the limits to all
controversy and debate, which defines the frontier beyond which
liberty of opinion and the rights of the individual conscience may
not pass. This is the mental attitude of the papal system. Popes
may come and popes may go, but this attitude remains the same.
The weapons of excommunication and interdict, once all power
ful, are now largely rendered ineffective. The Roman thunder
bolt, used with such autocratic brutality by Gregory VII, is now
silenced, and never again shall any sovereign travel in humiliation
to Canossa. In every modern nation the Roman Catholic Church
is confronted with civil and political institutions and laws which
she is powerless to assail and which she cannot sincerely accept.
But her mental attitude goes on unchanged, the logical outcome
of which always must be an absolute government, a hierarchy
which oppresses the conscience, which is the hard and fast enemy
of all free and spontaneous inspiration, the promulgator of out
worn dogmas and unscriptural claims, and having for its official
head a man who arrogates to himself the sovereign right to com
mand the conscience, and in the doing of which he is assumed
to be unerring. It is, accordingly, no matter of surprise to find a
man such as Hartpole Lecky — a man far removed from Luthardt
in his theological views — as he contemplates this unchanged
mental attitude of the papacy, declaring that the Catholic Church
cannot possibly harmonize with the new views of freedom, be
gotten by the spirit and teachings of the Reformation. "It is,"
says he, "contrary to her genius, to her traditions and to her
teaching; resting upon the principle of authority, she instinctively

326 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
assimilates with those forms of government that must foster
habits of mind she inculcates. Intensely dogmatic in her teach
ing, she naturally endeavors to arrest by the hand of power the
circulation of what she believes to be error, and she, therefore,
allies herself with the political system under which alone such
suppression is possible. Asserting as the very basis of her teach
ing the binding authority of the past, she cannot assent to political
doctrines which are in fact a direct negation of the uniform
teaching of the ancient Church."
This interpretation of such a qualified historian as Lecky is
based upon a thorough knowledge of papal principles and their
application in the affairs of the state. The doctrine that the theo
logical system of the Church is to be received in the bulk and
solely on the authority of the Church has never been conducive
to popular aspirations of any kind among the people. Romanism
has always sought, in harmony with its age-long principles, to
shut out the modern world of thought from the spiritual life of
the nations, and to bring back the pre-Reformation circle of ideas.
The rigid unchangeableness of its principles and its stern adher-
ance to them through all the stormy years of its history has at
least this merit, that it has been imposing to both unbelievers and
Protestants. It has always shown a remarkable flexibility of
method, but at all times and in all places it acts according to the
same unalterable maxims and magisterial principles.
Protestantism, however, on the other hand, in all of its true
expressions has shown a natural bias toward liberty and de
mocracy. Special circumstances have occasionally modified, but
seldom or never altogether reversed, the tendencies of the funda
mental principles of both Romanism and Protestantism. The
principles embodied in the two systems have been the masterful
influences in the production of types of civilization. In conse
quence of these benefits of the Reformation, the contrast between
Catholic and Protestant civilization has been so evident that it
has been the subject of frequent reflection. Where Rome has
held undisputed sway most true are Macaulay's well-known and
striking words, when in his History of England he draws his
famous historic comparison, a verification of the memorable
words of Albert I, upon his accession to the throne of England:
"Entirely to the intellectual and moral forces does a nation owe
the fruitfulness of its prosperity." Macaulay said: "The love-

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 327
liest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule,
been sunk in poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual
torpor, while Protestant countries, once proverbial for sterility
and barbarism, have been turned by skill and industry into gar
dens, and can boast of a long list of heroes and statesmen, philos
ophers and poets. Whoever, knowing what Italy and Scotland
naturally are, and what, four hundred years ago they actually
were, shall now compare the country around Rome with the
country around Edinburgh, will be able to form some judgment
as to the tendency of papal domination. The descent of Spain,
once the first among the monarchies, to the lowest depths of
degradation; the elevation of Holland, in spite of many natural
disadvantages, to a position such as no commonwealth so small
has ever reached, teach the same lesson. Whoever passes in
Germany from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant principality, in
Switzerland from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant canton, in
Ireland from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant county, finds that
he has passed from a lower to a higher grade of civilization. On
the other side of the Atlantic the same law prevails. The Prot
estants of the United States have left far behind them the Roman
Catholics of Mexico, Peru and Brazil. The Roman Catholics of
lower Canada remain inert, while the whole continent around
them is in a ferment with Protestant activity and enterprise.
The French have doubtless shown an energy and intelligence
which, even when misdirected, have justly entitled them to be
called a great people. But this apparent exception, when ex
amined, will be found to confirm the rule, for in no country that
is called Roman Catholic has the Roman Catholic Church, during
several generations, possessed so little authority as in France."
In their habits, principles, hopes and the character of their peoples
India and China are what they are as the result of paganism.
Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, the Central and South
American states have become what they are largely because of
the dominance of Romanism. It is hardly possible to conceive
of England, Scotland, Wales, Germany, Switzerland, Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and the states of North America dis
sociated from their Protestantism, which has made of these
peoples the most progressive on the earth, the leaders among the
nations in the promotion of the highest and noblest factors in
civilization. The Reformation somehow did succeed in restoring

328 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
a spirit that for centuries had been lost to the Church, and in con
sequence of that restoration gave a new tone and direction to
civilization. In his interesting work on the Reformation, in which he em
phasizes as the greatest of all gifts the liberating spirit which that
movement poured out over the world, Prof. Henry C. Vedder
says : "The Reformation is important for us today, not so much
for what is immediately accomplished, as for what it made pos
sible. The new ideals which it offered have ever since ruled the
world." Interpretations might be multiplied almost indefinitely, and all
in the same line, evidencing that throughout Christendom what
ever advance has been made in knowledge, in freedom and in the
arts of life has been made in spite of the principles of the papacy,
and as the direct results of the new principles of the freedom of
conscience, liberty of private judgment, the sole authority of the
Scriptures and the priesthood of all believers, contended for by
Luther and containing logical implications which have led to far-
reaching results not even anticipated by the greatest of the re
formers. In the political as in the spiritual emancipation of
Europe in the sixteenth century, Luther was the pioneer. He
came teaching that "God has ordained two governments among
the children of Adam — the reign of God under Christ, and the
reign of the world under the civil magistrate, each with its own
laws and rights. Over the soul God can and will allow no one to
rule but Himself. Civil government is confined to external and
civil affairs."
It is of this great declaration of emancipation that Dr. Philip
Schaff says that, "It sounds almost like a prophetic anticipation
of the American separation of Church and state," while the dis
tinguished English preacher, Dr. W. J. Dawson, has affirmed that
"The awakening of the democratic instinct in the religion of
Europe came through Luther."
Thus has it come to pass that the mightiest force which makes
for freedom is the soul in direct relationship with God. The
Reformation found the Roman hierarchy between the soul and
God, and hence its vast and complete domination of the world.
From ruler to peasant, the subjection was well-nigh absolute.
That great movement restored the rights of the soul to answer di
rectly to God, and the independence of man from despotic power

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 329
is found in that fact. Luther broke the fetters of that ecclesiasti-
cism which had usurped all authority — social, religious and civil —
and the era of modern freedom in its manifold aspects was in
augurated. How great a force the soul and its concerns were in
this movement is set forth in a striking passage in Green's "His
tory of the English People:" "The mighty strife of good and evil
within the soul, which had overawed the imagination of dram
atist and poet, became the one spiritual conception in the mind of
the Puritan. To him religion, in its deepest and innermost sense,
had to do, not with churches, but with the individual soul. It
was each Christian man who held in his power the issues of life
and death. It was in each individual conscience that the strife
was waged between heaven and hell. And it was in the creation
of such a temper as this that Puritanism gave its noblest gift to
English politics, and a gift hardly less noble to society at large
in its conception of equality. Their common calling, their com
mon brotherhood in Christ, annihilated in the minds of the Puri
tans that overpowering sense of social distinctions which char
acterized the age of Elizabeth."
Thus out of the deepest springs of the soul in its personal and
direct fellowship with, and accountability to> God, have sprung
those great conceptions of equality, brotherhood and liberty which
constitute the very trinity of human freedom. Liberating men
from spiritual bondage to Rome, and restoring them to the
authority of the Scriptures, started forces to work that were
fraught with vast consequences for all times and places.
X
The good fight waged for these victorious principles in the era
of the Reformation is never to be dissociated from the genius of
a particular people. Racial features of strength and assertive-
ness had much to do with the reception of those principles and
their propagation and co-ordination. They made their way even
in the face of strong and fanatical opposition with a group of na
tions, including the Germans, the Dutch, the Scandinavians and
the Anglo-Saxons, while their appeal to Latin and Slavonic
peoples, for the most part, fell upon deaf ears. It is a fact of
wide significance that the fundamental principles of the Lutheran
movement of the sixteenth century, and some implied features of

330 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
the movement, at once showed strong natural affinities with the
veracious Teutonic mind of that day, which very soon began to
show its impatience with the lies and frauds so widely dominant
when Luther was born in an humble Germanic home. The Teu
ton was industrious, honest and liberty-loving, and was possessed
of a keen sense of justice and humanity that rendered him not
well adapted to persuasion by physical force. Of this stock, it
has been said by a leading Scotch thinker and theologian, that it
is "naturally Protestant." "Partly by the very discipline of the
Church," says a distinguished English writer, "the Germanic
races arrived at moral independence and national consciousness,
and so outgrew the kind of authority by which they had been
trained." "With the growth of the sense of individual responsi
bility, a development of national individuality kept pace. Thence
grew the conviction that no corporation could represent the whole
of Christianity, with the result that before ever Protestantism
came into existence, its problem was already set. It was the
problem of finding room in religion for the autonomy of the in
dividual and the autonomy of the state."
The Saxon blood was not friendly to foreign dictation. "The
Latin races," says the late Dean Hulbert, of the University of
Chicago, "seem to like to be tyrannized over, and to be trodden
under foot, but the Teutonic peoples are made of better stuff."
Such a mental attitude produced a growing respect for the rights
of the individual, and the ampler room afforded for the unfolding
of his powers and for realizing his aspirations. It gave rise to
such ideals and achievements in the field of civil organization as
would have been impossible under the dominance of any other
attitude than that of the assertion of personal rights with re
spect to religion, the highest concern of man. The new views set
forth by Luther at once fostered a habit of mind among the Ger
man people that was incompatible with a patient endurance of
tyranny at the hands of the civil powers.
It was this mental attitude in the character of that people in
Luther's day, let it be noted, which especially qualified them for
taking the lead in the great work of the Reformation. Indeed,
that movement could not have been made successful among any
others of the contemporary peoples of Europe. The primary char
acter of Luther's views entered the Teutonic man and made his
thought anew. A serious and thinking people, who reasoned

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 331
slowly, they loved freedom, and were not content to be longer
cajoled with trifles, cheated by impositions, or subjected to op
pression. It was from such a people as this that Luther sprang,
and among which he set forth his evangelical principles and
fought his great battles. The influences of the new movement
very soon began to manifest themselves among the German
people. There was a marked contrast between pre-Lutheran
Germany and post-Lutheran Germany. In the former the rights
and voice of the people were very limited in scope. With the
beginning of the new religious movement a change set in. The
people had sprung suddenly into an atmosphere of independence.
There will be temporary evil, as has been said, when a house is
torn down, before the constructive work can be done upon the
house that is to take its place. As we have shown at another
place, the violations of law and order when the new liberty,
among a liberty-loving people, was made an "occasion of the
flesh," in outbreaks of both social and religious fanaticism, were
no proper part of the reformatory movement. The turbulence
of the agitator is a usual, if deplorable, adjunct of the breaking up
of an old order and the attempt to introduce and maintain a new
one. It was a departure from the real principle of the Reforma
tion that produced Zwickau "prophets," Munzerites, and other
disturbing factors among fanatics who were anxious to throw off
the restraints of law, both human and divine.
But in the face of all such temporary excesses the great truth
remains, that, as one consequence of men being invested with the
privilege of thinking for themselves, the new movement, with
all of its implied results, was invested with a momentum that was
resistless. Post-Lutheran Germany had ascended to a higher
plane, from which it was not to be dislodged by imperial man
dates or papal excommunications.
The necessity for a change was urgent. The Germany in
which the young son of old John Luther grew to manhood pre
sented melancholy aspects, even though it was about to assume
the leadership in a movement that was to divide the ages and
cause history to move in new channels. But notwithstanding the
importance of the movement that country was to foster and lead,
the Germany in which the young Luther pursued his studies in
the latter years of the fifteenth century was a pitiable land.
From the middle of that century on it was moving forward to a

332 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
crisis that, in its importance, can only be compared to the cru
sades and the French Revolution. The "Holy Roman Empire,"
which Voltaire had described as being neither "holy," nor
"Roman," nor an "empire," had come to be scarcely more than a
"barren ideality." It embraced but little territory beyond the
confines of Germany, which was only a huge farm, from which
the rulers, who might happen to be Englishmen or Spaniards,
might reap revenues for settling their personal quarrels and
fighting their little dynastic wars. The rulers of Germany were
not the actual, national sovereigns of a united country such as
were the rulers of France or England at that time, but were what
have been called "the fictitious heads of a fictitious state." At
that period the social condition of the land was even more chaotic
than the political situation. If the political organization of the
empire was weak, the internal administration was weaker still.
In addition to all this, it is impossible to exaggerate the deep
and widespread discontent with the condition of the Church,
which is so manifest in the writings of the early years of the six
teenth century. The whole of the people, from the rulers down-
to the humblest peasant, felt themselves unjustly used, and the
.subjects of base impostures. The clergy were denounced as both
immoral and inefficient. The estimate in which this degenerate
class was held is expressed by one devout writer, who declared
that young men are considered good enough for priests to whom
one would not entrust the care of a cow held in any kind of
esteem for her worth. The grudge of the land against the papal
court, as an example, found eloquent and significant expression
in the verses of its great minnesinger, Walther Von der Vogel-
weide. Three hundred years before Luther's day he had de
clared the pope to be making merry over the stupid Germans,
whom his holiness was systematically looting. "All their goods,"
the vicar of Christ is represented as saying, "will be mine; their
silver is flowing into my far-away chest; their priests are living
on poultry and wine, and leaving the silly laymen to fast." Sim
ilar sentiments may be found in German writers for many of the
following generations. Then, too, there was widespread dis
content with the financial administration of the Church. What
affected the people more, even, than the personal character of
the popes, or even the degeneracy of their own clergy nearer home,
was the fact that the burden of taxation was appalling, and that

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 333
the amounts required were becoming distressing impositions.
Bishops had to pay thousands of guldens when they were con
firmed in their positions, and some thousands more for the nar
row neck-band that 'was the badge of their office. The annates to be
paid by the lower clergy amounted regularly to half the income
of the first year. To these were to be added the extra payments
for special occasions, gifts that had to be distributed right and
left, and continual levies for crusades that never did any cru
sading, except on the resources of a plain people. The pope, too,
enjoyed the privilege of filling all the important benefices in Ger
many, and frequently appointed Italians, who drew the revenues
without ever performing any of the duties of the office. Fre
quently a single person held several church offices. Early in the
sixteenth century, as an example, the archbishop of Mayence was
at the same time the archbishop of Magdeburg and the bishop of
Halberstadt But by and by the unlettered Germany of those
days which preceded the revolt near at hand grew tired of all this.
She came to realize that Rome, which for ages had held the con
science strings of her devout people, was holding, also, the purse
strings ; that the resources of her own contributors were growing
thin that the land of Italy, beyond the Alps, might be crowned
with the arts and sciences and filled with palaces crowded with
creations of grace and color.
In Germany, accordingly, the land where, more than in any
other, there was widespread discontent combined with a yearning
for betterment, the conditions were such that Luther's appearance
was hailed with delight among a prepared people, and whose in
fluence throughout the nation left no class unaffected. The land
was waiting for its redemption, anxiously looking for the man
who was big enough and good enough to lead the people out
from their papal bondage and inaugurate a new epoch in the his
tory of mankind, by means of a reform in religion and a revolt
against the gigantic despotism that had fastened itself on the
Church and the state. The reformers, exuberant in the posses
sion of unexpected liberty, and confident in the belief that the
whole sacerdotal system would be speedily overthrown, were not
content to carry on a merely defensive warfare at home, but were
seeking allies everywhere, and were attacking the enemy in his
strongholds. German patriotism rallied to the support of Ger
man piety in this good fight for deliverance from the yoke of the

334 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
oppressor. The land that for centuries had stood at the right
hand of the chair of St. Peter, ready to assail the unfaithful or to
defend against the unbeliever, was waiting for the man who was
qualified to place himself at the head of the larger and freer
thinking of his time, and direct it into channels that would at
once abandon and conserve — the man who could make his appeal
not only in the name of religion, but also in that of public order
and national independence and prosperity.
XI
In the progress of this attempt at interpreting the Lutheran
movement of the sixteenth century, much has been said about the
personality of Luther and the primacy of his place and influence.
Much, of course, in the nature of the case, would be expected in
such a discussion about the place and commanding influence of
one of the most masterful men in human history, to whom, under
God, the world in our day owes so many of its blessings. So
much of the whole social and political fabric of our time is, in
large measure, the fruit of his life and work, and so much of
our political liberty, and to a great extent the free institutions
which we enjoy, are traceable to his work and teaching, that
it is not surprising that men of widely divergent religious views
and even contradictory principles should have so uniformly
agreed in their interpretations of the place and influence of
Luther. It will serve our purpose to fortify all that we have
said by adducing here the testimony of some of the great interpre
ters of the men, the forces and the measures which have so largely
entered into the advance of both Christianity and civilization. To
advance and reform religion was the dominating motive of the
reformer and leader of the great movement associated forever
with his name. But great and good men have been glad in turn
to rise in their places to recognize the vastness of his influence,
not only in the sphere of religion, but in that of freedom and all
other spheres of wholesome activity. These estimates of the
Reformer all serve to confirm what Prof. Walker has said in
his recent "History of the Christian Church." "He is one of the
few men of whom it may be said that the history of the world
was profoundly altered by his work."
"I beg," says John Calvin, the great systematizer in the field

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 335
of reformed theology, "I beg that you may consider what a great
man Luther is ; with what gifts he has been endowed ; with what
power, with what steadfastness, with what learning, he has been
fighting against the kingdom of anti-Christ, and for the propaga
tion of the true doctrine of our salvation."
D'Aubigne, the distinguished reformed historian, pays him this
tribute: "Luther was the first to proclaim the great principles of
humanity and religious liberty. He was far beyond his own age,
and even beyond many of the reformers, in toleration."
In his delightful volume entitled "The Continental Reforma
tion," the distinguished Anglican scholar and historian, Dr. Al
fred Plummer, declares that "Luther's influence on religious and
political ideas, on literature, on social life, and on the map of
Europe, has been enormous, and this influence has been won —
largely without effort on his part — through his massive char
acter ; through his sincerity, earnestness, unselfishness ; and, above
all these, through his splendid courage. We may differ widely
from some of his opinions, but we live in a world which is a
wiser and better world because of Luther's work."
An American scholar, one of Luther's most interesting and
sympathetic interpreters and biographers, Prof. Preserved Smith.
says : "His career marks the beginning of the present epoch, for
it is safe to say that every man in western Europe and in America
is leading a different life today from what he would have led, and
is another person altogether from what he would have been, had
Martin Luther not lived. For the most important fact in modern
history is undoubtedly the great schism of which he was the
author, the consequences of which are still unfolding and will
continue to unfold for many a century to come."
Such interpretations of the place and work of Luther have not
been confined to such as have shared in, or even measurably shared
in, his own robust theological views, for it is James Freeman
Clarke, leader among the Unitarian forces of this country, who
affirms that Luther "was the real author of liberty of thought.
the giant founder of modern civilization, the restorer to our times
of pure Christianity; a hero, growing more and more the mark
of reverence through the succeeding generations."
Even the Roman Catholic historian Michelet says : "Luther
has been the restorer of liberty, and if we exercise in all its plen
itude at this day this highest privilege of human intelligence, it

336 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
is to Luther we are indebted for it ; to whom do I owe the power
of publishing what I am even now writing, except to this libera
tor of modern thought?"
James Anthony Froude, the great historian, was an Englishman
who knew much of the factors that have entered into the making
of modern history. He has had much to say about Luther and
his influence, expressing the comprehensive judgment that, but
for the influence of his commanding personality, the whole world
would be thinking differently now. "Luther," said Mr. Froude,
"was one of the grandest men that ever lived on earth. Never
was anyone more loyal to the light that was in him, braver, truer
or wider-minded in the noblest sense of the word. The share of
the work which fell to him Luther accomplished most perfectly."
"The reformers were men of note and distinction, who played a
great part for good or evil on the stage of the world. If we
except the Apostles, no body of human beings ever printed so
deep a mark into the organization of society, and if there be any
value or meaning in history at all, the lives, the actions, the char
acter of such men as these can be matters of indifference to none
of us. No man is what he would have been if Martin Luther
had not been born."
In all that he had to say of the Reformer and his work
Froude was always in sympathy with the interpretation of Fred
erick the Great : "Had Luther done nothing else than liberate
the princes and the people from the servile bondage under which
the dominion of the Roman papacy held them, he would deserve
to have a monument erected as the liberator of his country."
Writing in the Nineteenth Century for April, 1884, Principal
John Tullock, who has been among the ablest interpreters of the
whole group of sixteenth century reformers, says : "All modern
Christian liberty may be said to be the outcome of the protest
taken at Spires and Augsburg by the evangelical members of the
German empire. That attitude of these Christian princes and
others was again only possible in the light of the great struggle
which had been maintained during the twelve previous years by
one man. The Diet of Worms and Luther's memorable words
there alone explain the subsequent diets at Spires and Augsburg.
The courage of a single man as he faced, on that great occasion,
the mailed chivalry of Germany — a pale and slight figure as yet
without any of the brave rotundity of his later years — gave the

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 337
courage which inspired the famous protest, and laid the founda
tion of all Christian and ecclesiastical liberties. The voice of God
uttered itself in Luther, that the mass of lies which had become
identified with medieval Christendom should no longer continue.
The voice was heard in many lands, and there were many who
arose to help the German monk, and carry forward the great
work, but that Reformation became possible in England and Scot
land as well as Germany, and that Protestantism after many
struggles was able to receive a footing in Europe, was, owing
in large part, as it has been said, 'to the intense personal convic
tion and contagious faith of one man — Martin Luther.' "
In the later years of its history England has had but few
statesmen and historians the equal of James Bryce, viscount and
former ambassador of his country at Washington. "The Refor
mation," says he, "erected the standard of civil as well as re
ligious liberty. It was in its essence the assertion of the prin
ciple of individuality, that is to say, of true spiritual freedom.
Hitherto the personal consciousness had been a faint and broken
reflection of the universal; obedience had been held the first of
religious duties, truth had been conceived as something external
and positive, which the priesthood, who were its stewards, were
to communicate to the passive laymen, and whose saving virtue
lay not in being felt and known by him to be the truth, but in a
purely formal and unreasoning acceptance."
In an address made in 1883 in the Academy of Music in New
York, at the celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the
birth of Luther, another, and an American statesman, the Hon.
John Jay, said : "No country has more reason than this republic
to recall with joy the blessings Luther assisted to secure for the
world, in emancipating thought and conscience, and impressing
the stamp of Christianity upon modern civilization. Although
America had not been discovered by Columbus when Luther was
born, Luther's far-reaching influence, which today is felt from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, helped to people our northern continent
with the colonists who laid the foundation of its future liberties
on the truths of the Bible."
In an address before the Massachusetts Historical Society, de
livered on the four hundredth anniversary of Luther's birth, the
Hon. Robert C. Winthrop said: "We come today to recognize
Martin Luther as, beyond all other men, the instrument of God

338 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
in giving the impulse by thought, word and act, to that world
wide movement which resulted not merely in the reformation of
Europe, but in all that we Americans now enjoy, and all that we
rejoice in being. Pilgrim and Puritan, Cavalier and Roundhead,
Huguenot and Quaker, yes, and Roman Catholic also, con
sciously or unconsciously, all alike felt that impulse."
In his now famous patriotic address at Bunker Hill, June 17,
1843, Daniel Webster, great among the statesmen and orators of
all lands, said: "The Reformation of Luther broke out, kindling
up minds of men afresh, leading to new habits of thought, and
awakening in individuals energies before unknown even to them
selves. The religious controversies of this period changed so
ciety as well as religion; indeed, it would be easy to prove, if this
occasion were proper for it, that they changed society to a con
siderable extent where they did not change the religion of the
state. They changed man himself, in his modes of thought,
consciousness of his own powers, and his desire of intellectual
attainment. * * * This love of religious liberty drawing
after it, or bringing along with it, as it always does, an ardent
devotion to the principle of civil liberty also, was the powerful
influence under which character was formed and men trained."
In full harmony with all that has been adduced, and much
more that might be, from other than Lutherans, what has been
said by later writers might be added almost without limit. It is
all, we may say, in entire harmony with what has been affirmed
(and very recently) by one of our distinguished university presi
dents, who, with his eye upon present needs as well as past
achievements, said:
"America is peculiarly indebted to the Reformation, for that
was the great crisis in the emancipation of the human spirit from
the control of human authority. America needs today a fresh in
fusion of the temper of the Reformation, for that enfranchise
ment of the human spirit was accomplished through a clear and
controlling recognition of God's presence and of His authority
speaking through the conscience."
"It is often forgotten," says the late Prof. Thomas Lindsay,
Scotch theologian and historian, who has written so much of
Luther and the German Reformation, "that the sixteenth cen
tury, in which Luther was the most outstanding figure, saw the
beginnings of our present social life in almost everything, from

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 339
our way of looking at politics and our modes of trade to our
underclothing." The late Dr. Charles Briggs, conspicuous in his day as a
somewhat negative theologian, but who, happily, in his later years
returned more and more to conservative views, especially on the
great and fundamental doctrine of the incarnation, used these
discriminating words in speaking of the Reformation :
"Luther wielded the sword of the Spirit. He grasped the
truth with all his strength and made it a part of his own being.
The truth of God swayed him with irresistible power. Es
sential and vital truths and great unities made him their spokes
man. He impressed these so deeply upon the Germanic world
that they characterize the modern age, and will never be effaced."
In the long history of the American pulpit, two of the most
conspicuous and deservedly venerated names are those of the
late Dr. William Taylor and Phillips Brooks, the one a famous
expositor in the pulpit, the other a splendid Christian idealist.
The former has said that "it was the merit of Luther that he set
free the Word of God; and because that is a divine agent and
touches the mainsprings of individual, social and national life,
his influence has gone farther and struck deeper than that of any
other man in modern history." And the latter: "It was the
sense of the divine commission and the profoundness of the
struggle that created Luther, who shook the throne of the Caesars
and made Europe anew. He is the prophet and priest of human
nature at once. To take Luther out of the Reformation is to take
the sun out of the sunshine."
Among the living, one of the brightest and sanest among pres
ent day preachers is Dr. Charles Jefferson, who, in speaking of a
Reformation lesson for the twentieth century, said this: "With
men's faces turned toward the future, the question immediately
arose : Can a man accept the new facts which he finds ? Can he
embrace the new truths which he arrives at? Can he confess
the new principles which have been revealed to him by the experi
ence of his soul ? The question was settled at the Diet of Worms.
It was settled by Martin Luther. He had found out some things
which he believed to be true, and believing them to be true he
published them ; having published them, he was ready to defend
them. But they contradicted what had been declared by the past.
In past councils the Church had spoken, and its decrees could not

340 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
be changed. The advocate of liberty met the assembled hosts of
authority. The electors and the princes and the great emperor
himself were all present. Over their heads there rose rank above
rank, representatives of the most august and mighty hierarchy
known to history. Bishops, archbishops, patriarchs, cardinals —
the whole culminating in the baptized Caesar, the bishop of Rome.
The hierarchy says to the young man, 'Recant,' and his answer is,
T will not recant unless I am convinced by clear argument.' All
human history has been different since the Diet at Worms. Ever
since then the mind has been free."
In a quadri-centennial address, pointing to our national flag
standing nearby, Dr. E. H. Mullins, easily the first Baptist theo
logian now living in this country, said : "In its essence the con
test made by Luther was for the fundamental things for which
that flag stands. Luther," says he further, "must be placed be
side those who are fighting for religious and political democracy
in these days. God's justifying grace alone explains the man.
In the providence of God, he was the first successful champion
of the right of every man to direct access to the Saviour without
any intermediary. Every great war waged in the world since
Luther initiated the Reformation of the sixteenth century, merely
has been a repetition of the conflict that Luther had in his day,
the conflict of democracy against autocracy."
Judging from all that we have seen and heard, the most influ
ential American Methodist of our day is Dr. James M. Buckley,
the distinguished editor for many years of the Christian Advocate,
now living in the retirement of his old age. Of Luther and his
relation to our country he has said: "Luther fought the battle
of civil and religious liberty for us and all men. There are
strong grounds for our American respect for the great name
of Luther. * * * No better qualities were ever transferred
to this country than came over with the families, who, either
willingly or by force, had derived their theology and religious
experience from Luther. * * * The Lutheran theology's
general influence has been pure and helpful to our general re
ligious development. As a nation, then, we have ample reason to
revere the memory of Luther. * * * He has been our heroic
Protestant as fully as if he had been born on our shores, for his
children came hither, and have helped us to fight all our battles
and rear this new western civilization."

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 341
Another of the strong writers and thinkers of the same Church,
the Rev. Dr. Leech, says in one of his fine essays:
"By this man, more than by any other man for eighteen cen
turies, our own century drinks the living waters of Christianity
at its fountain source. To Luther, more than to any other man
since St. Paul, the Church of Christ is indebted for its grasp of
two essential principles: The first is the fact of justification, or
forgiveness of sin, by faith and not of works. The second is
that the Divine Word is supreme in all faith and practice, and in
all organizations of the Church. More today, than to any other
man of eighteen hundred years, men owe to Luther freedom of
thought, of speech, of conscience, of action ; the right to worship
God according to what conscience dictates."
Widely recognized as one of the leading figures in English
Christianity today, and one of its most stimulating thinkers, is Dr.
Peter Forsyth. Speaking of the Reformation in his book en
titled, "Rome, Reform and Reaction," Dr. Forsyth says : "Free
dom took a new meaning for the world and for nations as men
were set free by faith and started on a new moral career.
* * * When the kingdom of God and his righteousness were
sought by faith in Christ, all else seemed added. Luther taught
men and convinced men anew what true religion, true Chris
tianity was, and in its wake came science, and the modern state
with its civic and municipal life and social rights. * * *
Luther, I reiterate, rediscovered Paul and the New Testament.
He gave back to Christianity the Gospel, and he restored Chris
tianity to religion. But in giving us back the old he brought to
pass the new age. He magnified the individual to himself, and so
he opened a new world to the world. * * * The ideal (of
Catholicism) is an outgrown paganism, which the Reformation
first broke. * * * The old pagan idea did not really receive
its death-blow till the Reformation. The new age, the new
human career, then first broke out of the old faith when Luther
brought that faith to light. Assisi was well, but it did not do
what had to be done, and what was done at Wittenberg, Worms
and Wartburg."
Such expressions of judgment given by great and good men,
such estimates of the place, work and permanent influence of
one of the best of men, and given with such uniformity, could be
given at greater length. Even when accorded to a man as great

342 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
as Luther, they afford a rare exhibition of appreciation of one
who had been mighty enough in his day to have been more power
ful than emperor and pope combined. "By his word and his pen
alone," says Prof. Hausrath, "he had wrung Germany from the
mighty emperor on whose empire the sun never set. The profes
sor, whose salary was never more than four hundred florins a
year, had bought out the owner of the whole treasure of all the
indulgences ; victor over emperor and pope, he died."
XII
In estimating the rock whence we have been hewn and the hole
of the pit whence we have been digged, as a free and independent
people, we are liable to stop short and fail to come to the real
source of that which we prize as among our inestimable blessings.
Jesus Christ, after all that may be said by philosophers, historians
and statesmen, is the author of liberty in a far profounder and
more significant sense than even most good men realize. A great
and comprehensive emancipation is indicated in the words, "If,
therefore, the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."
Christ, it is true, did not come into the world primarily to promote
civil and political liberty. His mission is first of all a mission of
redemption. He came to set men free from the bondage of sin,
and unless He has become the author of liberty to us in this sense,
we occupy the position and play the part of slaves, even though
we live in America and enjoy all the rights and privileges of
American citizens. The Gospel not only brings to men the glad
news that emancipation from sin is possible, but also points to
One who actually achieves that emancipation. Herein lies
Christ's chief significance as the author of liberty, while the
liberty we have been contemplating is an unquestionable by
product of His career among men and His wonderful teaching.
Accordingly, if we want to read the chapter of growing religious
liberty, of popular intelligence, of civil freedom, of developing
commerce and invention, we must go back to the lands which, in
the struggles of the sixteenth century, stopped to listen to the
messages of Luther and Calvin, Zwingli and Beza, Latimer and
Knox, the reverberations of which were later heard in this land,
at that time but newly discovered and opened up to the coming
of new peoples dominated by Reformation principles. In the old

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 343
lands beyond the sea there was not room enough for that old
conflict which had arisen in the eleventh century between the
pope and the emperor as to who should really be in the ascendant
in the new European edifice, the lay or the ecclesiastical suzerain,
and which was to be fought out to its final issue in the sovereignty
of a free and independent people.
As we turn the pages of the early history of this country we
see that men had contemplated it simply as a fine territory for
exploitation and commercial aggrandizement. The trader sought
to pre-empt it for his own. The hunter for gold traversed its
vast stretches, ascended its rivers, crossed mountain ranges; and
while the land contained treasures of surpassing magnitude, it
kept back its secret until the new principles set forth by Luther in
old lands in central Europe should contest their right to be
affirmed and live alongside of that powerful ecclesiastical ma
chine that had met in successful encounter so many forms of op
position, and which was so venerable that it reached back to the
times of Leo the Great and Gregory, one of his successors, also
called the Great.
On this new continent, as its Anglo-Saxon history developed,
the papal Spaniard crept up from the south and the Bourbon of
the same faith crept down from the north, the one co-operating
with the other to hem in the feeble Protestant colonies which
had been planted between the Alleghenies and the Atlantic, and
staking down their claims with a line of forts extending from
Canada to Mexico. But the two most powerful nations of the
then known world failed in their combination against the pioneers
of popular government and the friends of an open Bible, who had
drawn their inspiration from Luther's theses of 1517, his mem
orable stand at Worms in 1521, and the protesting princes at
Speyer in 1529.
In his recent book, entitled "The Foundations of Religion in
America," Dr. Charles L. Thompson says that "a straight line
reaches from Cape Cod to Wittenberg and Geneva," and affirms
that Luther and Calvin let loose the two great principles — man's
true relation to God, and men's relation to each other — which
were destined to reform the world after the pattern of Christian
democracy." Thus the principles of the Reformation contended for by
Luther have worked out the finest and most complete results for

344 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
civil liberty and organized democracy on the American continent.
The essential principles of that movement underlie the civil as
well as the religious life of this great republic, in which they were
destined to have their highest development. In our day it seems
almost incredible that a little more than four hundred years ago
civilized man was ignorant of the existence of this vast continent,
on which, as we are wont to believe, problems of human history
are yet to be, and we fondly hope, successfully, dealt with. It
is undoubtedly true that this continent was originally discovered
by hardy, sea-faring Northmen about the year 1000 of our era.
But the fact of that discovery was somehow wrested back from
the knowledge of mankind, because, as it seemed, the "fulness of
time" had not yet come for its settlement and development, so
that 1492 A. D., marks the real date of the continent's disclosure,
when Christopher Columbus found the new world. His explora
tions permanently opened up the land to the incoming thousands,
and to the enterprise and enlargement that have come with our
expanding civilization. On that October morning of 1492, when
Columbus sighted the shores of this new world, when this coun
try was about to be brought out of the oblivion of ages, a little
boy less than ten years of age was attending a village school in
an inconspicuous place known as Mansfeld, in Saxony, and who,
twenty-five years later was to start the world along the pathway
which led men into the new era and the new world of the modern
period of history; who also in the course of his great work was
finally to reaffirm those principles which inspired our fathers, and
which found expression in the Declaration of Independence and
the Federal Constitution.
Unquestionably the finest and best results for civil liberty, re
sulting from the principles contended for in the period of the
Reformation, have been attained on the American continent. It
is worth while to recall here the words of Dr. John William
Draper, the author of "The Intellectual Development of Europe,"
who says that "the Reformation broke down unity ; it gave liberty
to masses of men grouped together in sufficient numbers to in
sure their position ; it is now, invisibly but irresistibly, making
steps never to be stayed until there is an absolute emancipation
for man. Great revolutions are not often accomplished without
much suffering and many crimes. It might have been supposed
before the event, perhaps it is supposed by many who are not to

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 345
live among the last results, that this decomposition of religious
faith must be to the detriment of personal and practical piety.
Yet America, in which, of all countries, the Reformation at the
present moment is farthest advanced, should offer to thoughtful
men much encouragement. Its cities are filled with churches
built by voluntary gifts ; its clergy are voluntarily sustained, and
are in all directions engaged in enterprises of piety, education and
mercy. What a difference between their private life and that of
ecclesiastics before the Reformation ! Not as in the old times does
the layman look upon them as the cormorants and curse of so
ciety; they are his faithful advisers; his honored friends, under
whose suggestion and supervision are instituted educational estab
lishments, colleges, hospitals, whatever can be of benefit to men
in this life, or secure for them happiness in the life to come."
The discovery of this country was not the result of an acci
dent. It was not the outcome of a combination of fortuitous cir
cumstances, as some discoveries seem to have been. It came
about, manifestly and unmistakably, under the superintending
providence of the God of our fathers, the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ. In that great and significant fact we dis
cover not only the evidence of God's works, but also of God's
purposes, towards which all His works are slowly tending, a
luminous testimony to the truth of what the Bible so repeatedly
affirms about the Divine Will as a controlling force in the move
ments of human history. The case of Benjamin Franklin is not
that of an isolated observer, when he declared that what he had
seen in our war for independence had satisfied him of the active
participation of God in human history, and had shattered his
deism forever into pieces. Columbus had died in ignorance of
the real grandeur and significance of his discovery of 1492, be
lieving that he had only been the agent in opening up a new path
way to the lands of opulence in the Far East; but that great
event filled the world with wonder and delight. To the mind of
the intelligent inquirer it opened up a field of new and boundless
investigation; to mere adventurers it offered hitherto unknown
opportunities, while to commercial enterprise it was an invitation
to enter new and promising fields for enlargement and wealth.
The peoples of the old lands beyond the Atlantic awaited with in
tense eagerness further developments. That discovery had come
at a time when great changes in the aspects of spiritual life, the

346 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
revival of nationalism and the assertion of the spirit of inde
pendence, were in progress, and when greater changes in the
hopes and aspirations of men and nations were anticipated. New
forms of government, civil and ecclesiastical, were being pro
posed and devised, while the seeds of free institutions, so promi
nent now among the most advanced peoples of the earth, were
being scattered broadcast, were germinating in generous soil and
bearing fruit, of which our own republic is the best and fairest
example on the earth. The chief significance attaching to the
discovery of Columbus was that he had, under God, come upon a
land which was destined to afford a new opportunity for liberty —
an opportunity to be embraced by peoples who were to bring with
them those fruitful and emancipating principles reaffirmed by
Luther in his contest with the papacy and the empire in the six
teenth century.
In much of the discussion of the genesis of our civil institu
tions in this country, there has been a stopping short of the real
causes that have contributed to their true origin and source.
Those causes contributing to the establishment of our free insti
tutions antedate the settlement made by English gentlemen at
Jamestown in 1607, or that of the "Pilgrim Fathers" at Plymouth
in 1620, or that made by the Puritan at Salem in 1628, and who
in the past has frequently been accorded more than was due him
in estimating the sources of our freedom. Those sources reach
back to great religious truths we have already considered —
truths revived and reaffirmed by the reformers ; principles which
caused men to be abased only before God, and which led them
to burst shackles imposed by an arrogant hierarchy and a tryanni-
cal absolutism. The nailing of the theses to the church door in
Wittenberg was the first impulse given to those sentiments of
true freedom which have culminated in those cherished institu
tions which, in this land, are our birthright and inheritance. It
was on this continent, in this new world, and by reason of the
antecedents, character and objects contemplated by the first real
settlers, that these great religious, social and political principles
of the Reformation found a wider and more favorable sphere —
in a word, their true and proper home. Our history, more than
that of any other people, presents their development and realiza
tion, and has given us that individualism and self-reliance, that
enterprise and energy, which in religion, civil affairs and com-

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 347
nierce have been characteristic of us as a people. The men and
women who, fleeing from persecution, that, unmolested, they
might enjoy liberty of conscience and political freedom, laid the
foundations of our government, were true Protestants, disciplined
in the struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
"They brought with them into the new world," says De Tocque-
ville, "a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than
by styling it a democratic and republican religion. They con
tributed powerfully to the establishment of a democracy and a
republic; and from the earliest settlement of the emigrants,
politics and religion contracted an alliance that has never been
dissolved." "Who can foretell," says Villers, another Frenchman, writing
when our republic was yet in its infancy, "who can tell us all
that may result in the two worlds from the example of the
American? What new position would the world assume if this
example were followed? And without doubt it will be to the
end. Thus a Saxon monk will have changed the face of the
whole world." "The Reformation," the same writer further
says, "introduced a new order of things. Powerful republics
were founded. Their principles, still more powerful than their
aims, were introduced into all nations, and hence arose great
revolutions." The God of the nations somehow hid this continent from the
knowledge of the world until He could open up all its scope to the
freedom and faith of gathered peoples from lands dominated by
Protestant principles, to be a nation to His honor and praise.
Those principles were brought to this land by men who had be
lieved in and contended for them beyond the sea, and who em
bodied them in the Declaration of Independence and in the Consti
tution of the United States. It is, accordingly, not surprising
that so many competent historians, statesmen and scholars have
been fond of tracing the priceless blessings of liberty and the
rights of conscience and worship which the American people
enjoy to the direct and indirect influences of the truths and prin
ciples proclaimed by Luther four hundred years ago. A govern
ment such as ours could not have originated under those papal
principles and powers which had their chief center in the south
of Europe. The Reformation came from the rugged thinking of
the more democratic nations of northern Europe. The uniform-

348 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
ity of informed opinion on this subject is something noteworthy.
Writing of the Reformation, Robertson, the biographer of Charles
V, says : "It was one of the greatest and most interesting revolu
tions recorded in history — a revolution in the sentiments of man
kind the greatest as well as the most beneficial that has happened
since the publication of Christianity. It rescued one part of
Europe from the papal yoke and mitigated its rigor in the other."
"Had there been no Luther," says Froude, "the English, the
German and the American people would be thinking differently,
acting differently — would be altogether different men and women
from what they are." And George Bancroft, our own histor
ian, says that "Our national organization counts Christianity
among its sources ; it was essentially imbued with the spirit of the
Reformation which rose in Germany with Luther."
The intense and passionate sense of sin, and the greatness of
that redemption which has been provided by the gratuitous
mercy of God, are not more marked as features of Luther's own
personal experience than is the striking consensus of informed
judgment that the traces of that one commanding mind of the
sixteenth century are to be discovered to this day in the move
ments and finest influences of the modern world, and particularly
in the founding and progress of this great nation. Like the
heathen prophet, when from the height of Pisgah he looked down
on the fair and ordered camp of Israel, men have been impelled
to say of this great people : "Surely the Lord their God is with
them, and the shout of a king is among, them."
One of the great Reformer's best biographers has said : "That
the principles of Martin Luther are the fundamental principles
of our American republic, there can be no question." "Who can
doubt," says Prof. George P. Fisher, "that the United States of
America are, not indeed wholly, but in great part, indebted for
their position, as contrasted with that of Mexico and the political
communities of South America, to this expansion of the power
of the individual, which is the uniform and legitimate fruit of
Protestant principles?" Lossing has said: "Out of the princi
ples of Luther have been evolved the representative government,
the free institutions, and the liberty, equality and fraternity
which are the birthright of every American citizen." And in the
same line Dr. Dorchester has declared : "In the Lutheran Refor
mation a new people was begotten, with new ideas, invested with

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 349
loftier prerogatives and aims, and intended by Providence to
found in the new world a great Christian republic, one of the
mightiest agencies in human progress."
England, the land of the great Charter of Rights contended for
successfully in 1215 at Runnymede, the land of the Puritan, of
Oliver Cromwell, the long Parliament and the Commonwealth;
the land of Pym, Hampden and John Milton — England did not
originate, but was only instrumental in transplanting those prin
ciples of liberty which have brought forth so abundantly in this
new land. In his famous speech, made at Bunker Hill, in 1843,
from which we have already quoted, Daniel Webster said:
"The spirit of commercial and foreign adventure on the one hand,
and on the other, the assertion and maintenance of religious
liberty, having their source in the Reformation, and this love of
religious liberty drawing after it or bringing along with it, as it
always does, an ardent devotion to the principle of civil liberty
also, were the powerful influences under which character was
formed and men trained for the great work of introducing Eng
lish civilization, English law, and, what is more than all, Anglo-
Saxon blood, into the wilderness of North America."
In an able essay on the "Foundation of the American Colonies,"
in which the view is maintained that the success of the war for
the independence of the American colonies was perhaps in itself
a gain to Great Britain as well as to this country, Professor Gold-
win Smith says : "The American colonies are the offspring of
humanity at a more advanced stage and in a nobler mood. They
arose from discontent, not with exhausted pastures, but with in
stitutions that were waxing old and a faith that was ceasing to be
divine. They are monuments of that vast and various move
ment of humanity, the significance of which is but half expressed
by the name of the Reformation."
It was no less of a preacher and patriot than Henry Ward
Beecher who affirmed that "our civil liberty is the result of the
open Bible which Luther gave us."
In 1883, in a memorable address by a distinguished English
bishop on the occasion of the celebration of the four hundredth
anniversary of the birth of Luther, it was said : "The free mil
lions of the United States may well rise up and do Luther honor
by cherishing his example, pondering his history, and maintaining
his creed" ; while a noted Unitarian scholar, who was a graduate

350 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
of Harvard, said that "To Martin Luther above all men we
Anglo-Americans are indebted for national independence and
mental freedom !" Charles Dudley Warner is quoted by Dr. Pre
served Smith as having said that "Every man in western Europe
and in America is leading a different life today from what he
would have led had Martin Luther not lived," while a great
Frenchman has declared that "The republic of America is a
corollary of the Reformation."
These expressions of opinion regarding the genesis of Amer
ican institutions are not in harmony with the theory that has
sometimes been advocated, that those institutions find their origin
in a period following Luther. The birth of the Lutheran move
ment in Europe marked also the birth of our liberties. They arose
as the harvest of that sowing when, as Calvin said, "The pure
Gospel was restored" by the "Apostle at Wittenberg."
In his recent book, entitled "The Religious Foundations of
America," Dr. Charles L. Thompson, with a true insight into the
genius of American history, says that "the Reformation of re
ligion in the sixteenth century determined the subsequent history
of Europe and shaped the American republic. The stroke of
Luther's hammer on the Wittenberg door was Thor's hammer to
shatter the ecclesiasticism of the Dark Ages and break open a
path of religious life and hope which brought on the new day of
all following centuries. It broke the shackles which held men
to a dead formalism and released the spirit of inquiry by which
the world came to its charter of religious liberty." Of the chief
of the reformers and the relation to his work to liberty, he
further says: "At whatever stage of his career we regard him
he is easily one of the most interesting — as always one of the most
commanding— figures of history. Whether a seeking soul and
climbing the stairway in Rome, or with leonine daring confronting
the powers of an empire at Worms, or trumpet-tongued proclaim
ing to great universities or to the common people the new gospel
of spiritual and intellectual liberty, he was— under God — the
maker of a new Europe, and through Europe the foundation
builder of civil and religious freedom in America."
Another of our recent historians is Professor Carl Becker. In
his book entitled "Beginnings of the American People," he says:
"The origin of New England is inseparably connected with the
Protestant Reformation, that many-sided movement of which no

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 351
formula is adequate to convey the full meaning." "The Ref
ormation," he goes on, "was far more than resistance to Rome.
It did not cease when the king triumphed over the pope. The
dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant re
ligion was as incompatible with the royal as with priestly author
ity. It was generally true that Protestantism was the result of a
middle class revolt against the existing regime, a denial of
established standards in politics and morality, the determined at
tempt to effect a transvaluation of all customary values."
XIII
There are no blind forces even in nature and its processes.
There are discoverable, always, in that sphere of investigation the
evidences of design and wonderful adjustment. And so in his
tory the observant student, as he contemplates the manifest dis
plays of wise design, may well say in the words of the Scrip
tures: "The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the
whole earth." Schlegel, one of the leading writers on the philos
ophy of history, has said that no such philosophy can be con
structed, save by the recognition of a providential purpose which
pervades all events and links them together in unity.
In the revelations of providential dealings in the Bible the de
signs of Providence are not left to be judged of by our fallible
human sagacity, but are often so clearly revealed as to show us
the meaning of things obscure and the real working of things
sometimes apparently antagonistic. Not only athesim, which is
the denial of God, and Deism, which eliminates God from the
management of God's world, but the much exploited agnostic
scheme of our day — which ignores God or treats Him as the
eternal why, to which no man has replied; the infinite enigma,
which no sphinx has solved — deal deadly blows not only at re
vealed religion, but likewise at human liberty and civilization.
Dissociated from the divine oversight and direction of the God
of nature, not only, but the God of history as well, the story of
men and their movements leads us only into a maze in which we
blindly grope about without design or plan or end in view. To
thoughtful minds there are always manifest the marks of an in
finitely wise design in the timeliness of the great events in history,
in the fact that such great and important events have occurred

352 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
opportunely at the fulness of time, that they came at the long-
prepared moment before which or after which they would have
failed of their purposed result. The arguments in behalf of the
theory of wise design in creation to be found in the pages of
Paley's evidences, and of the Bridgewater treatises of a past
period in the history of apologetics, are hardly more impressive
and conclusive than the fact of the divine opportuneness of the
discovery of this land and its settlement by European peoples, as
well as other great events in our history.
The discovery and settlement of this country have an import
ance far beyond that which belongs to them as incidents in the
records of Anglo-Saxon peoples. The chief significance attach
ing to those events is found in the transference to this new world
of all that was best in the ideas and traditions of liberty which
had been handed down from the matured civilizations of the past.
There was a manifest fitness of time in the discovery of America
in the fact that this mystery, hidden from the ancient world, and
dreamed of only in the visions of poets and philosophers, should
not have been disclosed until the dawn before the sunrise of the
sixteenth century. Discovered one hundred years earlier, the
new world could hardly have been a new world, but only a
reproduction on this new continent of the old world with its
effete institutions, customs, oppressive ecclesiasticism and tyran
nical statecraft. But Providence seems to have kept the most
valuable thing in the new world from notice until a fit and quali
fied people should be prepared to occupy it. God, in His wise
plans and designs, seems to have kept back the whole continent
from discovery until the peoples of Europe had contended for the
principles embodied in Protestantism and had reached that stage
of social development at which they were competent to become
successful emigrants and the founders of new states.
The discoverers of this country were Roman Catholics, and in
consequence papal governments promptly claimed the results of
the discoveries. The new land was taken possession of in the
name of their faith and their sovereigns. They had come, as we
have seen, largely impelled by a secular impulse. The horizon of
enterprise had been greatly widened, and the spirit of maritime
adventure had been aroused. The Italians held the highway of
the Mediterranean to commerce with India through Asia Minor,
the Red Sea, the Caucasus and Persia, and new ocean pathways se

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 353
to the Far East were eagerly sought. Seeking thus an aqueous
highway to the opulent lands of the East, these papal mariners
found a new world in the West and claimed it as their own. But
twenty-five years after the discovery of this land by Columbus,
which he regarded to his dying day as the other side of India,
Luther, passing the dragon-guarded portals of that vast hierarchy
which had been consolidating for a thousand years, and which,
through all its vicissitudes, had endured from the days of Leo I
to Leo X, had roused the world of his day with the cries of
reformation and revolution. There was not room enough on the
old continent for the antagonistic principles that had been quick
ened into new life and energy to fight out the great contests that
were enkindled, and singularly enough there followed the emi
gration of the peoples of separate religions to this land. They
came, both Romanist and Protestant.
In the discovery and early settlement of the North American
continent, the discerning man would at once have said, this land
will be a Spanish colony, and its religion will be dictated from
Rome. Nothing could have withstood, he would have said, the
devotion of religious leaders who were ready to crown their
ambitions with martyrdom. As late as the middle of the six
teenth century the historical prophet would have declared that
this country was assuredly destined to be dominated by a Spanish
civilization, that it would become what Mexico and South
America are to this day. The greatest of modern geographers
has said that "the best book on natural theology is a physical
geography," meaning thereby that national history has been
shaped in no small degree by the conformation of continents and
the disposition of islands. On this the geographer only echoes
the words of Moses, who said: "When the Most High divided
to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of
Adam, He set the bounds of the people, according to the number
of the children of Israel." The Almighty, in the far-reaching
counsels of the divine wisdom, had His plans for the American
continent even before there was an American people.
If ever the hand of God was evident in national history it was
in the time of the real colonization of this country, the character
of the colonists, the inspiring purposes which brought them here
and the religious principles that dominated them. The doctrines
that had remade the intellectual and moral life of Europe, which

354 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
had been stated and formulated in the north and not the south of
that continent, were back of the migration of strong peoples who
came hither. They came not from the shores of the southern
Mediterranean, but from the more rugged regions of England,
the Rhine and the North Sea. For a long period it seemed that
this country was to belong to Rome, and that it was destined to be
dominated by medieval papal conceptions. The most powerful
nation of Europe then was not England or Germany, but France.
In the year 1611, the king of that country, Louis XIII, gave to
the Jesuits all the territory stretching from the St. Lawrence to
Florida. There ensued a struggle between despotism and free
dom for the possession of a continent. The sublime scheme of
conquest matured in the minds of French statesmen and eccles
iastics contemplated a long line of military posts and mission
stations, stretching along the course of great rivers and reaching
from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to that of the Mississippi.
Explorers, traders and priests pressed their way up great rivers,
into and across the regions of our great inland lakes, and thence
on into the vast and resourceful interior valley, setting up the ban
ners and the cross of the papal dominion and claiming the whole
vast and promising region in the name of their king and the pope.
Under the intrepid leadership of explorers like La Salle and
Joliet, the Jesuit missionary priests, like Father Marquette, a
plan of temporal and spiritual empire had been magnificently
conceived, sagaciously planned and was being heroically pursued.
The hardy courage of the French explorers, the devoted lives and
martyr deaths of those French Jesuit missionaries, the account of
which is told in the charming pages of Francis Parkman, are not
surpassed in the history of Christian conquest. Backed by a
powerful nation and the papal hierarchy, directed by a statesman
like Richelieu and a pope like Gregory XV, the valley of the
Mississippi was explored and every foot of it claimed for France
and Rome. From Niagara to Fort Duquesne, and from the
Straits of Mackinaw to the mouth of the great river, garrisons
were stationed, and the priest was in control. In marked con
trast with this gigantic scheme were the feeble plantations of the
English colonists along the Atlantic seaboard, without common
organization or mutual sympathy, and of diverse creeds and aims.
Thus it seemed that three great nations were in a state of
rivalry regarding the possession of the new world. Spain had

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 355
extended her dominions along the southern borders of the conti
nent and far up into the interior and along the shores of the
western Pacific. France had established her outpost from Que
bec to the Mississippi. The Pilgrim, the Puritan, the Dutch, the
Swede, the Quaker and the German had not yet come. Only a
little company of English gentlemen were settled on the James
River and a few Dutch sailors were building huts on Manhattan
Island. To one who should have regarded events with the eye
that sees only the things that are visible and tangible, the cause
of Protestantism in the new world would have appeared hopeless.
It seemed probable that Spanish priests and soldiers would hold
the southern half of North America and equally probable that
the lilies of France would control the northern half. It seemed
inevitable, if the forces of Romanism in Spain and France should
combine, that the Protestant settlements on the James, on Man
hattan Island, and in New England should be ground to dust
between upper and nether millstones.
But these magnificent schemes of territorial expansion and re
ligious propagandism failed. God's plans are not man's plans,
and the divine Omniscience scanned the future of this land with
an unerring wisdom. In the divine counsels this continent was to
be reserved for the open Bible and republican institutions. It
was to be dominated at the beginnings by principles that came
from Wittenberg and Geneva, rather than by those which bore the
stamp of Rome. The white lilies of France and the castles of
Spain faded from the banners and were replaced by better em
blems. The two most powerful nations of the then known world
lost out in their fight to subdue the pioneers of popular govern
ment and the friends of a free and open Bible. Not even the
historical pages of the Old Testament disclose more clearly a
divine purpose and leadership than does American history in the
early years of the seventeenth century, when the French colonies
languished and Canada fell under British rule, and when later, in
the vicissitudes of war, the Mississippi Valley was transferred to
the American republic by the Louisiana purchase.
The strange and romantic fact about the conflicts from 1609,
as has been pointed out, is that even the American Indian seems
to have been a providential factor; that these primitive people,
whom all the parties regarded with suspicion and hatred, should
have had a place in determining that not France but England and

356 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
Holland should control American destiny. In the critical times
of those early conflicts, the powerful Iroquois nation, the deadly
enemy of France, became the ally of the Dutch, so that thus
indirectly the little Protestant company on Manhattan Island had
some share in the fall of Quebec, and the destruction of French
claims in the new world. John Fiske says: "Had the Iroquois
been the allies of the French it would in all probability have been
Louis XIV and not Charles II who would have taken New Am
sterdam from the Dutch. Had the Iroquois not been the deadly
enemy of the French, Louis XIV could almost certainly have
taken New York from the English." So strangely did God pro
tect His great purpose for this continent that with all its resources
it was held in reserve for ages, that within its ample borders a
new order in the political life of man might here be inaugurated.
That which in the first instance was only an exploring expedition,
undertaken for finding a new passage to the Orient, became the
determining event which should shape the world's greatest ad
venture in behalf of free government and free religion.
It was out of Europe, rent asunder by disputes about the greatest
and most interesting questions, that the serious-minded settlers
of this country came. For the most part they came from the
communities and the classes which had passed through the fires
kindled by Luther's theses in 1517, and his memorable stand at
Worms in 1521. In 1555, at the end of his long and troublous
reign, and dejected over the failure of his cherished plans,
Charles V abdicated the throne of Spain in behalf of his son,
Philip II. Soon after his accession Philip undertook to crush
our Protestantism in Holland. Bigoted, narrow, unscrupulous
and remorseless in purpose, he determined to signalize his reign
by restoring both papal and imperial authority in the Netherlands,
placing the execution of the task in the hands of the brutal and
merciless Duke of Alva. The story of the struggle of that heroic
people for life, liberty and their homes, conducted under the
leadership and inspiration of William of Orange, is one of the
most thrilling in the annals of the human race. In the face of
their burning homes and ruined cities, the horrors of the stake,
the dungeon, famine and starvation, the stout-hearted burghers
and peasantry of the low countries stood for conscience and free
dom until at last they won their national independence and the
blessings of religious liberty.

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 357
Scarcely had that struggle died away when the famous Thirty
Years' War burst upon Protestant Germany. It was during this
struggle for the principles of the Reformation, that Gustavus
Adolphus, the "Lion of the North," came down from Sweden
with his brave countrymen, at a time when Germany was crushed
and bleeding under the tread of the imperial armies led by the
papal generals, WaUenstein and Tilly. The brave Swede suc
ceeded in reviving the crushed and bleeding hopes of Protestant
ism, even though his valuable life went out amid the smoke and
carnage of the field of Lutzen, November 6, 1632.
While the Reformation movement was thus fighting for its life
on the continent of Europe, it had crossed the channel and was
steadily making its impress upon England. Then ensued the
struggles leading up to the execution of Charles the Stuart and
the establishment of the Commonwealth.
It was only after the successful issue of these far-reaching
struggles in behalf of Protestant principles set forth and formu
lated in the century preceding, that the real colonization of this
country began in earnest. It is possible that had all North
America been settled before the time of Cromwell, the feebleness
of the early reformed faith and life of the Church could not have
withstood the old faith, and successfully resisted its prestige and
power. This, however, is certain, that the Declaration of Inde
pendence and the Federal Constitution never would have been
written had not Luther nailed his theses upon the church door
and made his valorous stand at Worms for principles which were
back of, and under, and in, the conflicts of Holland, Germany and
England in the next century. God in His far-reaching provi
dence put Christianity on a new trial here along with the perse
cuted seekers after liberty, and the result was the establishment
of a democratic republic upon a large scale. The first thing
Protestantism did on this continent was the republic itself. Our
civil heritage from the Reformation is the republic inspired by
Protestant ideas of liberty and shaped after patterns of govern
ment found in the Protestant churches. The Reformation did
not contend for liberty in the first instance, but for evangelical
truth, but wherever that form of truth triumphed, liberty tri
umphed also. It is of vast historical significance that the first
men to die on this continent for the sake of conscience and re
ligious liberty were those who laid down their lives in behalf of

358 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
those Protestant principles which made the republic possible.
Bancroft tells us that outside of Mexico the very first colony in
North America was the Protestant colony planted by that great
Frenchman of indomitable patience and steadfastness, Admiral
Coligny, and that Jesuit priests stained the soil of the new world
with the blood of these colonists solely for the reason that they
were adherents of the principles and doctrines of the Lutheran
Reformation. In France the new movement had encountered
enemies in the court, the church and the majority of the people, and
those who became adherents of the new faith were compelled to
face peculiarly difficult problems. The faith they confessed was
intolerable to the ruler of the land, while the duty their con
sciences demanded of them the state declared to be a duty that
could not be permitted. Distressed over the condition of his
countrymen of the same faith, Coligny resolved, if possible, to
find an asylum for his people in the new world, where they might
enjoy religious liberty. ' He accordingly sought an interview with
Catherine, the regent of the young King Charles IX. The au
dience being granted, before her he laid the desires of his suffer
ing countrymen. His appeal was granted in the name of the
young king and a charter given under the conditions of which
Coligny was authorized to establish a colony in that part of the
new world we now know as the state of Florida. Three vessels
were speedily fitted out, and on the 18th of February, 1562, loaded
with French Protestants, they set sail for the West. Taking pos
session of the land in the name of their young king, they estab
lished a colony on the St. John's River.
Only a few days after the arrival of these colonists they saw
five ships coming in from the sea. Being anchored within speak
ing distance of the Protestant ships, among other questions asked
by the members of the invading squadron was this one: "Are
you Catholics or Lutherans?" To this inquiry this answer was
returned: "We are Lutherans of the new religion." Upon the
inquiry being made as to who the invaders were, the ominous an
swer was returned : "I am Pedro Menendez, commander of this
armament, which belongs to Philip II, King of Spain. I have
come hither to destroy and hang all the Lutherans I can find,
either on land or sea, according to my orders received from the
king, which are so precise as to deprive me of the power of saving
anyone whatsoever ; and these orders I shall execute to the lettef.

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 359
but if I shall meet with any Catholic on board your vessels, he
shall be treated with good treatment; as for the heretics they
shall die." Menendez and his merciless Spaniards fell upon those
French Protestants, who had come to this land more than half a
century before the landing of the Pilgrims or the Salem settle
ment of the Puritans, and no one was spared upon whom they
could lay their hands. Men, women and children were cruelly
murdered, and over the bodies of some of the men who had been
hanged from some of the trees, was placed this inscription,
"Hung, not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans." This was the
first shedding of blood for conscience and freedom in religion on
the American continent.
When we contemplate, scrutinize and compare all the signal
events of the history of the peoples who have come hither to
this goodly land and their subsequent development, we find that
we are face to face with the manifest leadership of the Lord of
Hosts, and we are again, if we are devout and discerning, ready
to exclaim with the heathen prophet when he looked down from
Pisgah on the ordered tents of Israel : "Surely the Lord their
God is with them, and the shout of a king is among them!"
When the secrets of the history of this great people are laid bare,
and we discover that God was in the conditions and antecedents
of it, that one by one He raised up the great men of it, that He
controlled the critical events of it, brought out the high result of
it, and wrought it in with the great purpose toward which He
was leading on the whole world, then we are able to discern that
"key of knowledge" that unlocks the secrets of all history, and
which especially in this our study of the Protestant movement
of the sixteenth century has made plain to us the hand of God in
American history. There is something more discoverable in our
history than that gross materialism that declares our destiny to
have been controlled solely by conditions of soil and climate and
the habitual food of the people. The comprehensive truth, which
includes all these and more, is that which is set forth through all
the pages of the Old Testament, that "the earth is the Lord's, and
He is governor among the nations."
Mr. Mallock somewhere says: "In the infinite hush of space
there is that one sound — the tides of human history, like the
moaning of the homeless sea." But any survey of the provi
dential factor in the settlement and ordering of this continent

360 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
shows plainly that the history of this great people has been
neither chartless nor homeless. Perhaps the most significant event
in the modern era has been the peopling of the new world and
the maturing of the spirit of nationality within all the borders of
this northern continent. Here not only religion, but likewise our
democracy and our civic institutions, owe much to Luther. As
Prof. Preserved Smith has said in an article in the January,
1918, number of the Bibliotheca Sacra: "There never was a more
essentially democratic message than that of the excellence of the
humblest Christian and the perfect equality of all before God" —
truths restated and successfully reaffirmed by Luther. "No spe
cial pleading by partisans of Rome can ever shut out from candid
inquirers the fact that the principles dating from the apostolic
era of Christianity and reaffirmed by Luther in the sixteenth
century started this great and powerful republic on its way among
the greatest peoples of the earth."
When we congratulate ourselves because of the liberties we en
joy, we are at least liable to forget their relation to antecedent
movements — that, which is never denied by competent historians,
democracy as we know it is not only rooted and grounded in
Christianity, but that it was started on its triumphant way in
modern times by the reaffirmation in the Lutheran movement of
the sixteenth century of the principles we have considered. We
are accustomed to rehearse with a warranted pride certain great
and outstanding historical facts in our nation's history, but we
sometimes are unmindful of the fact that some of the most con
spicuous of them never would have occurred had it not been for
the successful issue of conflicts of an earlier time.
Three of the greatest documentary possessions of the English
speaking people are, first, the Great Charter of Rights extorted
from the unwilling hands of King John by the barons of England
at Runnymede, July 19, 1215. The Great Charter guaranteed
to Englishmen rights of which they had long been deprived. It
laid the foundations of the freedom of the common people, for it
compelled the crown to promise that right or justice be not sold,
or refused, or delayed ; that no freeman be imprisoned or out
lawed, or deprived of his goods, or otherwise punished, except
by the judgment of his peers, according to the known laws and
other rights which date back almost eight hundred years, to Simon
De Montfort and his brave companions, who so bravely resisted

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 361
a dangerous despot and won those liberties which English freemen
have carried wherever they have settled. In their claim, fre
quently made, that this was a victory of Rome in behalf of
human rights, it is always forgotten by papal historians that the
reigning pope of the time, the powerful Innocent III, championed
the cause of the king, who was his vassal, against the cause of
the barons ; that he called a council, annulled the Magna Charta,
issued a manifesto against the barons, and ordered the bishops
to excommunicate them.
The second of these great documents, and one in which we
have special pride, is the Declaration of Independence, signed at
Philadelphia by representatives of the thirteen American colonies,
then in revolt against the tyranny of the British crown, July 4,
1776. It was because of the fact that certain rights contended
for by the barons and embodied in the Great Charter were denied
to the American colonists that those men in 1776 resolved to
sever the bonds that bound them to England, and to declare that
henceforth a few feeble colonies along the Atlantic seaboard
ought of right to be free and independent states. It was not the
first time that a rebellious people had set up for themselves, and
that men tired of an oppressive monarchy had launched a new
republic. But it was the time when it was done with unparalleled
success. Those revolutionary fathers preferred success to hang
ing, and they pushed their preference with marvelous wisdom
and tremendous determination. They were given one of the
greatest opportunities of the ages and were thoroughly equal
to it, doing courageously, wisely and permanently the right thing
at the right time. In the stately rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson,
in the famous declaration, we observe the spirit of the barons of
Runnymede. Nearly ninety years later than the declaration made at Phila
delphia, and nearly seven hundred years after the Great Charter,
standing amid the graves of fallen heroes on a famous Pennsyl
vania battlefield, in a few marvelous sentences, Abraham Lin
coln stated the principles which lay at the root of our great
Civil War — that government of the people, by the people and
for the people might not perish from the earth. If competent his
torians and interpreters are correct, that declaration never would
have been made, and that famous speech of the nation's most
loved President would have been unsaid, had it not been for the

362 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
successful conflict waged for the popular principles of the uni
versal priesthood of all believers and the right of private judg
ment two hundred and fifty and three hundred and fifty years
earlier in the stirring days of the Lutheran Reformation.
Our people recite with pride the lines which tell of the resist
ance of our fathers and their contention for their rights :
"By the rude bridge that spanned the flood
They flung their flag to April's breeze;
Here once the embattled farmer stood
And fired the shot heard round the world."
They are moved by the inscription of the famous words of
Captain Parker at Lexington, words which memorialize those
loyal "minute men" who had been sleeping at nights with guns in
the corners of their rooms:
"Stand your ground ;
Don't fire unless fired upon,
But if they mean to have war
Let it begin here."
They are fond of reciting the story of the famous ride of Paul
Revere, the man who deserves his honor and his fame, and of
the far less-known patriot, Newman, the man who hung out the
signal lantern in the belfry of the old North Church, when the
patriot who had "Watched with eager search,
The belfry tower of that old
North Church"
knew that it was time for him to ride.
"He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns;
The fate of a nation was riding that night,
And the spark struck out by that steed in his flight
Kindled the land into flame with its heat."
But if men have interpreted events correctly, if such historians
as Carlyle and Froude and others are right, the words of Captain
Parker never would have been said. The shot "heard round the
world" would never have been fired, and the famous ride of Paul
Revere never have been made or thought of as a signal to call alert
and prepared patriots to arms, had it not been for earlier conflicts

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 363
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Germany, Holland,
France and England.
These incidents in our national history, which so warm our
hearts and stimulate our devotion, at the last hark back to one
heroic man, who, in the sixteenth century, made the break with
Rome, flung down the first gage of battle, took the brunt of the
deadliest storm ever encountered by any single man ; who, whether
studied as reformer, theologian, preacher or organizer, stands in
a place that is unique and solitary ; who has left the stamp of his
great personality clearly marked on all that is best in modern his
tory, and who, in the fundamental principles for which he con
tended, has issued the greatest of all proclamations of emancipa
tion from bigotry, superstition and bondage.

XIV
Our study of the great movement of the sixteenth century has
led us to view it as many-sided in its aspects and as fraught with
consequences of vast importance for the years which have fol
lowed. The leaders in that movement had indeed to face the
task of combating the errors and abuses of the papacy. In their
time the classes and orders in the Church which should have
wrought for righteousness were largely and deeply touched with
evil. But even then in the face of the manifold evils of the day
there were examples of sterling and devout piety. Those re
formers wrought in a period marked by love of ostentation and
of worldly pomp which led to ruinous extravagance. There were
vast accretions of puerility, tradition and superstition to be en
countered. Friars, monks, priests, prelates and even popes, the
so-called vicars of Christ and alleged vicegerents of God, were
debased in idleness, dissoluteness, covetousness, hypocrisy, hard
ness of heart, extravagance and unwarranted and unscriptural
assumptions. The popes in succession were accustomed to fill
high places of dignity and ecclesiastical benefices with men whose
chief qualification was a supposed willingness to do obedience to
their superiors. These reformers, too, did their work in a time
of gross ignorance, in a period when we read of clergy who did
not know either Scripture, liturgy, creed or the Lord's Prayer,
many of whom could not even read, and whose chief accomplish-

364 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
ments seem to have been excess in drinking, gluttony in eating,
and driving geese to pasture.
They led in a revolt against abuses and a reformation of morals
among debased peoples. But this was only a part, and by no
means the most important part, of the work allotted them by the
real Head of the Church, their divine Lord and Saviour. The
chief responsibility laid upon them, and which lay behind and
beneath all controversies, was in the appropriation of the saving
truths of the Scriptures. In the work of refuting error they
would never nave been permanently successful, much less would
they have been sustained in the performance of it, had they not
entered into the possession and confession of positive truth drawn
from the Word of God. Their chief work, as we have seen at
every step in the progress of this study, is to be found in the fact
that tha,t work was a reaffirmation, in forms called forth by the
errors of the Romish Church, of all those great evangelical prin
ciples set forth in the early age of the Church by Christ and His
apostles. In emphasizing the dominant idea that the relation be
tween the invisible spirit of man and the invisible God was im
mediate rather than mediate they made a vast contribution, not
only to religion, but to the liberation of the human mind from
priestly bondage, and did much for its elevation and ennoblement
in every sphere of its activity. In restoring the truths and rights
of an evangelical type of Christianity, Luther not only brought
about a great religious revival, but also wrought many incidental
results of vast and wholesome influence. He not only dealt a
gigantic blow against Rome, but even rescued that ancient Church
from disasters which were inevitable. The burden of that move
ment was man's justification and restoration to rightful relations
to God. It was a reassertion of the power of apostolical Chris
tianity, and on that basis the movement at once assumed an atti
tude of conservative progress. It at once emphasized the dif
ference between two apprehensions of the Gospel, showing the
pronounced difference between the two churches, differences con
sisting not simply in certain specific doctrines, but in a more fun
damental difference in their whole conception of Christianity. It
created once more freedom of access to God's Holy Word, the
one incorrupted fountain of religious truth, the only infallible
standard of faith and practice. It liberated men from a multi
tude of doctrinal and practical corruptions, which had for cen-

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 365
turies been engrafting themselves upon the Church. It main
tained that all men should not only have freedom of access to
God, but freedom of person and conscience. It inaugurated po
litical freedom from papal tyranny and gave an impulse to civil
liberty, which at once made itself felt in all the countries of
Europe, and which in due time became the corner-stone of the
great American Republic. It sought to break the control of the
Church over the state, and to make all citizens equal before the
law. Its proclamation of the emancipation of the soul in
augurated what was a new era in the history of mankind. Under
its influence man once more stood forth before God in his re
ligious rights, and from the heart of what were distinctively his
rights of this order there soon emerged his civil rights. Of
Luther's nailing the theses on the church door at Wittenberg on
that famous eve of All Saints' Day, in 1517, it has been said that
it was the beginning of the movement which changed the poli
tical map of Europe. Certain it is that that one act started new
trains of religious thinking, and developed new methods in edu
cation, which have given character to the world's best and most
enlightened type of religion of the last four hundred years, and
which laid the foundations of all the present freedom of thought,
freedom of speech and breadth of education.
These great changes were made by men who were not perfect.
They were inaugurated by men who were very human. The
world today venerates Luther, while it does not deify him. The
Reformer's most ardent and sympathetic friends do not deny that
he had faults and made mistakes. Of him the late Dr. Krauth
has said : "The world knows his faults. He could not hide what
he was. His transparent candor gave his enemies the material
of their misrepresentation, but they cannot blame his infirmities
without bearing witness to the nobleness which made him care
less of appearance in a world of defamers. For himself, he had
as little of the virtue of caution as he had, towards others, of the
vice of dissimulation. Living under thousands of jealous and
hating eyes, in the broadest light of day, the testimony of enemies
but fixes the result : that his faults were those of a nature of the
most consummate grandeur and fulness, more precious than the
virtues of the common great." But in estimating the faults even
of such epoch-making men, we are to judge them by the age in
which they lived and wrought. Mr. Lecky lays down a maxim

366 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
which we would do well to remember: "The men of each age
must be judged by the ideal of their own age and country, and
not by the ideal of ours."
But whatever, in the way of calumny and reproach, may be
alleged against the men who were the leaders in effecting the great
change in Europe in the sixteenth century, this must always be
set down to their credit: they were by no means strangers to
the old medieval system against which their forerunners in the
good work of reformation had lifted up their voices. They were
sons of the Church, trained and cherished in her own bosom, and
until they spoke their message of reform honored and admired
her. That age contains in the list of its great ones no greater
names in the field of scholarship and capacity for popular leader
ship, nor any that have left upon their times a more lasting im
pression, nor any who have affected more permanently and profit
ably subsequent times. They were the products of the best uni
versity training available in Europe, combined with the best ex
pression of monastic piety. They wrote, preached and published,
and in it all contended for the "faith once for all delivered unto
the saints," making their generation notable for its heroism, and
abiding in its influence and power. If they went out from a great
ecclesiastical organism it was because, in consequence of its apos
tasies and its abuses, its intolerance and its short-sightedness, it
forced them from its portals. They had the limitations imposed
upon men always by their times ; they differed from each other,
and those differences were accentuated by the spirit of the day in
which they lived, but when all that can be said is said — and
much that is adverse and unwarranted has been said — those men
are among the best accredited among the leaders of mankind, and,
in the judgment of the best and wisest of men, are accorded a
place among the primates of the great and good of the earth.
They were necessary in their protests and affirmations, if the
fruitful work of Christianity in the upbuilding of its supreme
future was to be conserved. Their spirit was that of John
Tauler. who, in one of his Advent sermons, quotes a text which,
it is said, nobody since has even been able to find, but which, to
the great mystic, was manifestly precious : "God leadeth the right
eous by a narrow path, into a broad highway, until they come to
a wide open place."
The recognized chieftain among them spoke words that were

SOME OF THE ATTAINED RESULTS 367
at once tender and powerful, and which wrought great changes
in the Christendom of his day and since, and which, because he
did not speak them with the same courage and consistency, made
his distinguished contemporary, the gifted Erasmus, to lag behind
and become a negligible factor in the conflict he had done so much
to promote in its opening stages. And it is inspiring to re
member, even at this clay and among the worked-out results, that
the principles for which these men contended in the day of battle
have been the principles which have inspired the most advanced
peoples of the earth in the times of stress that tried men's souls.
They were the impelling influence with the brave men who fol
lowed Gustavus Adolphus, the devout king of the Swedes, the
"Lion of the North," and the dispirited Protestants of Germany
on that fatal 6th of November, 1632, when the brave leader fell
wounded unto death on the critical field of Lutzen. Those prin
ciples, too, put inspiration into the hearts and arms of the gallant
and long-suffering peoples in the low countries in their, at last,
successful conflict with the cruel and rapacious Duke of Alva, the
military representative of brutal Spain. The same principles, in
turn, also fired the Huguenots of France when hunted to their
fastnesses in the Cevennes, or when chased to death by the fierce
imperial dragonnades, and also impelled those persecuted saints
who dwelt in the valleys of the Vaudois and the Austrian Tyrol.
They were also found in the migration of Pilgrims and Puritans,
who came to these shores with the robust conviction that kingdom
after kingdom might perish, that powerful dynasties might pass
and the most venerable institutions of the earth might be sub
verted, but that the Word of the Lord should endure forever, and
that the foundations of righteousness were among the things that
could not be shaken.
Those principles have been so vital that they justify words
used by a famous English preacher in a sermon preached in 1844,
in St. Paul's, London, that the Lutheran Reformation was "the
third great birth of time." When Mendelssohn, a century ago,
wrote his wonderful symphony of the Reformation he made the
famous "Ein Feste Burg" his theme and its well-known tune the
motif of his entire production. The instruments crash and shriek
and moan around the central theme, which, like a scarlet thread,
runs through the web and woof of the composition. As the end
approaches it grows louder and more obvious, and when it is

368 LUTHERAN MOVEMENT OF THE XVI CENTURY
finally reached all the hundreds of instruments together break
forth in the triumphant rendering of the great Reformer's won
derful and famous choral, "the Marseillaise of the Reformation."
It is even so with that great movement. It runs like a scarlet
thread through all the history of these modern times, great in
their manifold achievements. And as the ages approach the final
consummation of all things, it will more and more be seen that
God was in and over and with him, when, four hundred years
ago, he moved an unknown monk to nail ninety-five theses upon
the door of the Castle Church in the old town of Wittenberg,
Germany.

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