1521-2]

Activity of Luther

163

and Duke George of Saxony and Charles V as much as the Elector Frederick. But there was a vast difference between such a recognition and the acknowledgement of Luther's doctrine of the unfree will, between the admission that the theory of good works had been grossly abused and the assertion that all good works were vain. The division thus initiated was deep and permanent, and whereas the practical aims of the Reformation have commanded a universal assent in theory and an ever-widening assent in practice, Luther's theology commanded only a sectional allegiance even among Reformers of his century and a decreasing allegiance in subsequent generations.

But Luther in spite of his repudiation of scholastic theology never got rid of the results of his scholastic training; he must have a complete and logical theory of the universe, and he sought it in the works of the great Father of the Church on whose precepts Luther's own Order had been professedly founded. St Augustine's views on the impotence of the human will had been adopted by the Church in preference to those of his antagonist Pelagius; but in practice their rigour had been mitigated by a host of beneficent dispensations invented to shield mankind from the inevitable effects of its helplessness in the face of original sin. These medieval accretions Luther swept away; he accepted with all its appalling consequences the doctrine of predestination and of the thraldom of mankind to sin, and did not hesitate to make God directly responsible for the evil as well as the good existing in the world. It is a singular phenomenon that a fervent belief in the impotence of the human will should have stimulated one of the most masterful wills which ever affected the destinies of mankind.

The evolution of this doctrine had been but one of the mental activities which occupied Luther during his enforced seclusion at the castle of Wartburg. His abduction had been preconcerted between himself and his friends at the Elector Frederick's Court on the eve of his departure from Worms; and the secret was so well kept that his followers commonly thought that he had been murdered by papal emissaries. Here in his solitude he was subjected to a repetition of those assaults of the devil which he had experienced in the Augustinian cloister. What assurance had he that he was right and the rest of the Church was wrong? But the faith that was in him saved him from his doubts of himself, and hard work prevented him from becoming a visionary. The news that Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz was intent on a fresh recourse to Indulgences provoked a remarkable illustration of Luther's influence; in spite of the efforts of well-wishers at the Saxon Court to keep him quiet, he presented an ultimatum to the Archbishop granting a respite of fourteen days within which Albrecht might retract and escape the perils of the Reformer's fulminations. The Primate of Germany replied with an abject submission. It was difficult to silence a man who wielded such an authority,

164

Luther's attitude towards the Scriptures

[1522-34

and commentaries on the Psalms and the Magnificat, sermons on the Gospels and Epistles for the year, a book on Confession, and an elaborate treatise condemning the validity of monastic vows, flowed with amazing rapidity from his pen. More important was his translation of the New Testament, on which he was engaged during the greater part of his captivity. The old error that versions of the Scriptures in the vernacular tongues were almost unknown before the Reformation has been often exposed, but it is not so often pointed out that these earlier translations were based on the Vulgate and thus reflected the misconceptions of the Church against which the Reformers protested. It was almost as important that translations into the vernacular should be based on original texts as that there should be translations at all, and from a critical point of view the chief merit of Luther's version is that he sought to embody in it the best results of Greek and Hebrew scholarship. But its success was due not so much to the soundness of its scholarship as to the literary form of the translation, and Luther's Bible is as much a classic as the English Authorized Version. If he did not create the Neuhochdeutsch which Grimm calls the " Protestant dialect," he first gave it extensive popular currency, and the language of his version, which was based on the Saxon Kanzleisprache, superseded alike the old Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch, which were then the prevalent German dialects. The first edition of the New Testament was issued in September, 1522, and a second two months later; the whole Bible was completed in 1534, and in spite of the facts that a Basel printer translated Luther's "outlandish words" into South German and that a Plattdeutsch version was also published, the victory of Luther's dialect was soon assured.

Luther's Bible became the most effective weapon in the armoury. of the German Reformers, and to the infallibility of the Church they and later Protestants opposed the infallibility of Holy Scripture. But this was a claim which Luther himself never asserted for the Bible, and still less for his own translation. His often-quoted remark that the Epistle of St James was an "epistle of straw," should not be separated from Luther's own qualification that it was such only in comparison with the Gospel of St John, the Pauline Epistles, and some other books of the New Testament. But his references to that Epistle and to the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation show a very independent attitude towards the Scriptures. Wherever the words of the Canonical Books seemed to conflict with those of Christ, he preferred the latter as an authority, and further difficulties he left to individual interpretation. Let each man, he writes, hold to what his spirit yields him; and he confessed that he could not reconcile himself to the Book of Revelation. He was in fact supremely eclectic in respect to the Scriptures and to the doctrines he deduced from them; he gave the greatest weight to those Books and to those passages which appealed

1521]

Carlstadt and Zwilling

165

most strongly to his own individuality, while he neglected those which, like St James' Epistle, did not suit his doctrines. But he could hardly refuse a like liberty to others, and was thus soon involved in a struggle with Reformers who like himself started from the denial of the authority of the Roman Church, but pressed further than he did his own arguments on the freedom of the will and the weight attaching to Scripture.

Luther's seclusion at the Wartburg did not allay the intellectual ferment at Wittenberg or impair the influence it exercised over the rest of Germany. At Wittenberg both the University and the town defied alike the papal Bull and the imperial Edict. Scholars flocked to the University from all quarters, and it became the metropolis of the reforming movement. Melanchthon forsook the Clouds of Aristophanes to devote himself to the Epistles of St Paul; and his Loci Communes formed one of the most effective of Lutheran handbooks. But he lacked the force and decision of character to lead or control the revolutionary tendencies which were gathering strength, and Luther's place was taken by his old ally Carlstadt. Carlstadt's was one of those acute intellects which earn for their possessors the reputation of being reckless agitators because they are too far in advance of their age; and the doubts which he entertained of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and of the identity of the Gospels, as they then existed, with their original form, were considered to be evidence of the instability of his character rather than of the soundness of his reasoning faculties. He was not, however, free from personal vanity or jealousy of Luther, and his rival's absence afforded him the opportunity of appearing as the leader of the movement. Declining an invitation from Christian II to Denmark, he united with Gabriel Zwilling in an attempt to destroy what Luther had left of the papal system. He attacked clerical celibacy in a voluminous treatise, demanding that marriage should be made compulsory for secular priests and optional for monastics. He denounced the whole institution of monachism, and pronounced the adoration of the Eucharist and private masses to be sinful. On December 3, 1521, there was a riot against the Mass, and the University demanded its. abolition throughout the country. The Town Council refused its concurrence in this request, but on Christmas-Day Carlstadt administered the Sacrament of the Altar in both elements, omitting the preparatory confession, the elevation of the Host, and the "abominable canon,' which implied that the celebration was a sacrifice. Zwilling next inveighed against the viaticum and extreme unction as being a financial trick on the part of the priests, and entered upon an iconoclastic campaign, inviting his hearers to burn the pictures in churches and to destroy the altars.

Reminiscences of Hussite doctrine may have predisposed the Saxon population living on the borders of Bohemia in favour of Carlstadt's proceedings, and he was now reinforced by the influx from Zwickau of

166

The Anabaptists

[1521-2 Nicolaus Storch, Thomas Münzer, Marcus Stübner, and their followers, whose views were of a distinctively Hussite, or rather Taborite, tendency. These prophets believed themselves to be under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit, and their immediate intercourse with the source of all truth rendered them independent of any other guidance, even that of the Scriptures. The free interpretation of the Bible which seemed a priceless boon to Luther, was a poor thing to men who believed themselves to be at least as much inspired as its writers. From their repudiation of infant baptism, on the grounds that a sacrament was void without faith, and that infants could not have faith, they were afterwards called Anabaptists, but they also held the tenets of the later Fifth Monarchy men in England. Like Luther they believed in the unfree will, but they carried the doctrine to greater lengths, and unlike him they found inspiration in the Apocalypse. They asserted the imminence of a bloody purification of the Church, and they endeavoured to verify their prophecy by beginning with the slaughter of their opponents at Zwickau. The plot was, however, discovered, and Storch, Münzer, and Stübner fled to Wittenberg.

Here they joined hands with Carlstadt and Zwilling. Even Melanchthon was impressed by their arguments, and the Elector Frederick, mindful of Gamaliel's advice, refused to move against them. Early in 1522 iconoclastic riots broke out; priestly garments and auricular confession were disused; the abolition of the mendicant Orders was demanded, together with the distribution of the property of the religious corporations among the poor. The influence of Taborite dogma was shown by the agitation for closing all places of amusement and the denunciation of schools, universities, and all forms of learning as superfluous in a generation directly informed by the Holy Ghost. The Wittenberg schoolmaster, Mohr, himself besought parents to remove their children from school; students began to desert the University, and the New Learning seemed doomed to end in the domination of fanatical ignorance based on the brute force of the mob.

In the Edict of Worms Luther had been branded rather as a revolutionary than as a heretic, and the burden of the complaints preferred against him by the Catholic humanists was that his methods of seeking a reformation would be fatal to all order, political or ecclesiastical. They painted him as the apostle of revolution, a second Catiline; and the excesses at Wittenberg might well make them think themselves prophets. The moment was a crucial one; it was to decide whether or not the German Reformation was to follow the usual course of revolutions, devour its own children, and go on adopting ever extremer views till the day of reaction came. Of all the elements in revolt from Rome, Luther and his school were the most conservative, and upon the question whether he would prevail against the extreme faction depended the success or failure of the German Reformation.

1522]

Luther returns to Wittenberg

167

The initial proceedings of Carlstadt had vexed Luther's soul, but he was violently antipathetic to the Zwickau enthusiasts. He vehemently repudiated their appeal to force in order to regenerate the Church. He recalled the fact that by spiritual methods alone he had routed Tetzel and his minions and defied with impunity both Emperor and Pope. He probably foresaw that the Reformation would be ruined by its association with the crude social democracy of Münzer and Storch, but in any case his personal instincts would alone have been sufficient to make him hostile; and when he had made up his mind to a course, no considerations of prudence or of his own safety could deter him from pursuing it. Braving the ban of the Empire and disregarding the Elector's stringent commands he left the Wartburg and reappeared at Wittenberg on March 6, 1522. His action required at least as much courage as his journey to Worms, and the demonstration of his influence was far more striking. In a course of eight sermons he rallied almost the whole of the town to his side. Zwilling confessed his errors; Carlstadt, Münzer, and Stübner soon departed to labour in other fields, and most of the work of destruction was repaired. Luther himself retained his cowl and lived in the Augustinian monastery, and scope was afforded for every man's scruples regarding the Mass; in one church it was celebrated with all the old Catholic rites, in another the Eucharist was administered in one or in both forms according to individual taste, and in a third the bread and the wine were always given to the laity.

Luther had vindicated the conservative character of the Reformation as he conceived it; he had checked the swing of the pendulum in one direction, and had thereby moderated the force of its recoil; but he could not prevent it from swinging back altogether. It had gone too far for that under the impetus supplied by himself, and a reaction based upon real conviction was slowly developing itself and coming to the rescue of the storm-tossed Catholic Church. The first force to react under the antagonism produced by the rejection of Catholic dogma was the humanist movement. The body was shattered, and some of its members joined the doctrinal Reformers; but the majority, including the great leader of the movement, took up a more and more hostile position. When Luther was thought to have been killed, many turned to Erasmus as Luther's successor. “Give ear, thou knight-errant of Christ," wrote Dürer, "ride on by the Lord Christ's side; defend the truth, reach forth to the martyr's crown.' But that was a crown which Erasmus never desired; still less would he seek it in a cause which threatened to ruin his most cherished designs. Theology, he complained, bade fair to absorb all the humanities; and the theology of Luther was as hateful to him as that of Louvain. The dogmas, which appealed to men of the iron cast of Luther and Calvin, repelled cultured men of the world like Erasmus ; for scholars and artists are essentially aristocratic in temperament and firmly attached to that doctrine of individual merit which Luther and