CHAPTER IV.

LUTHER AND THE GERMAN REFORMATION, TO THE DIET OF AUGSBURG, 1530.

GERMANY, including the Netherlands and Switzerland, was the centre, the principal theatre, of the Reformation. It is not without truth that the Germans claim, as the native characteristic of their race, a certain inwardness, or spirituality in the large sense of the term. This goes far to explain the hospitable reception which the Germanic tribes gave to Christianity, and the docility with which they embraced it.1 They found in the Christian religion a congenial spirit. The German spirit of independence, or love of personal liberty, is a branch of this general habit of mind. Germany began its existence as a distinct nation in a successful resistance to the attempt of the clergy to dispose of the inheritance of Charlemagne.2 It was the Germans who prevented his monarchy from being converted into an ecclesiastical State. On the field of Fontenay the forces of the Franks were separated into two hostile divisions, the one composed predominantly of

1 "Es war das Christenthum nichts was dem Deutschen fremd und widerwärtig gewesen wäre, vielmehr bekam der deutsche Charakter durch das Christenthum nur die Vollendung seiner selbst; er fand sich in der Kirche Christi selbst, nur gehoben, verklärt und geheiligt." Vilmar, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, p. 7. Tacitus says of the ancient Germans, that they conceived it unworthy of the gods to be confined within walls, or to be represented by images; and that the head of a family exercised a priestly function. Germania, cc. ix., x. Grimm finds in the descriptions of Tacitus the complete germ of Protestantism - "den vollen keim des Protestantismus." Deutsche Mythologie, p. xliii. For like views from a French writer, see Taine, Art in the Netherlands, pp. 32. 33, 64. The Saxons resisted the Gospel, because it was forced on them by a conqueror.

* Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte, i. 10 seq.

the German element, which planted itself on the German traditional law for regulating the succession; the other of the Roman element that had the support of the ecclesiastics. Mysticism, the product of a craving for a religion of less show and more heart, had, as we have seen, its stronghold, in the latter part of the medieval period, in Germany. The triumph of the Papacy had been due to the division between the emperor and the great vassals; not to any deep-seated fondness for a foreign and ecclesiastical supremacy. It was natural that the Reformation, which was an uprising against clerical usurpation and in favor of a more inward and spiritual worship, should spring up in Germany. A German philosopher has dwelt with eloquence upon the fact that while the rest of the world had gone out to America, to the Indies, in quest of riches and to found an earthly empire encircling the globe, on which the sun should never set, a simple monk, turning away from the things of sense and empty forms, was finding Him whom the disciples had once sought for in a sepulchre of stone. Hegel attributes the inception and success of the Reformation to this "ancient and constantly preserved inwardness of the German people," in consequence of which they are not content to approach God by proxy, or put their religion outside of them, in sacraments and ceremonies, in sensuous, imposing spectacles.1 A German historian has made substantially the same assertion respecting the genius of the German people: "One peculiar characteristic for which the German race has ever been distinguished is their profound sense of the religious element, seated in the inmost depths of the soul; their readiness to be impelled by the discordant strifes of the external world and unfruitful human ordinances, to seek and find God in the deep recesses of their own hearts, and to experience a hidden life in God springing forth in opposition to barren conceptions of the abstract intellect

1 Hegel, Phil. der Geschichte; Werke, ix. 499 seq.

LUTHER THE HERO OF THE REFORMATION.

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that leave the heart cold and dead, a mechanism that converts religion into a round of outward ceremonies." 1

Unquestionably the hero of the Reformation was Luther. Without him and his powerful influence, other reformatory movements, even such as had an independent beginning, like that of Zwingle, might have failed of success. As far as we can judge, they would have produced no wide-spread commotion and led to no enduring results. It has been said, with truth, of Luther, that "his whole life and character, his heart and soul and mind, are identified and one with his great work, in a manner very different from what we see in other men. Melancthon, for instance, may easily be conceived apart from the Reformation, as an eminent divine, living in other ages of the Church, as the friend of Augustine or the companion of Fénelon. Even Calvin may be separated in thought from the age of the Reformation, and may be set among the Schoolmen, or in the council chamber of Hildebrand or of Innocent, or at the Synod of Dort, or among Crom⚫well's chaplains." "But Luther apart from the Reformation would cease to be Luther." 2

He was born in 1483, at the very time when Columbus was struggling to obtain the means of prosecuting that voyage which resulted in the discovery of a new world. It is a marked historical coincidence, which has more than once been pointed out, that the reform of the Christian religion should be simultaneous with the opening of new regions of the globe, into which Christianity was to be carried. Luther's family, before his birth,

1 Neander, v. 81.

* Archdeacon Hare, Vindication of Luther against his recent English Assailants, p. 2.

8 Melancthon states that Luther's mother often said that while she remembered with certainty the day and hour, she could not remember the year of his birth; but his brother, James, an honest and upright man, said that it was 1483. Vita M. Lutheri, ii. Some are of opinion, in view of recently discovered evidence, that it was 1484. See Studien u. Kritiken (Oct. 1871).

The coincidence of the great geographical discoveries with the access of

had removed to Eisleben from Möhra, a village in the Thuringian Forest, near the spot where Boniface, the apostle of Germany, had first preached the Gospel.1

"I am a peasant's son," he says; "my father, my grandfather, my great grandfather were thorough peasants (rechte Bauern)." His domestic training was well meant, but rough and austere. He was severely punished for slight offenses, both at home and by his teachers. At school he was chastised fifteen times, in one forenoon, for trivial or imaginary infractions of law. Having spent a year at school at Magdeburg, he was sent to the Franciscan school at Eisenach, where he sang at the doors of the principal citizens, after the old German custom, for the means of support. Destined for the legal

profession, he pursued, at the University of Erfurt, the Nominalist logic and the classics, and made a beginning in the study of Aristotle. He was twenty years old and had taken the Bachelor's degree when it happened that, while he was looking one day at the books in the Erfurt library, he casually took up a copy of the Latin Bible. It was the first time in his life that he had ever taken the sacred volume in his hands.2 Struck with surprise at the richness of its contents, compared with the extracts which he had been wont to hear in the Church services, he read it with eagerness and intense delight. This hour was an epoch in his existence. Deep religious anxieties that had haunted him from childhood, moved him, two years later, against the will of his father, to forsake the legal profession and enter the Augustinian convent, where

light respecting the Gospel and with the revival of learning, is noticed by the French Reformer, Lefèvre, Correspondance des Reformateurs dans les Pays de la Langue Française, par A. L. Herminjard (1866) i. 94.

1 A copious writer upon the earlier portion of the life of Luther is Jürgens, Luther von seiner Geburt bis zum Ablass-streite, 1483-1517. 3 vols. (1846).

2 Mathesius, Historien von d. Ehrwürdigen M. Luther, p. 3 (ed. 1580). This honest chronicler shows how grossly defective was the religious instruction given to youth by reference to his own case. The passage may be read in Marheinecke, Geschichte d. deutschen Reformation, i. 6.

LUTHER AT WITTENBERG.

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he became a monk and a priest. It is worthy of remark that the only two books that he carried into the convent were his Plautus and Virgil. Here he remained until he was called to the newly founded University of Wittenberg. The Elector of Saxony had established this university, giving to the professors charge over the principal Church and the enjoyment of its incomes; his idea being not only to organize a place of instruction, but to collect a learned body, to which, in difficult and doubtful questions, he might, according to the prevailing custom, resort for counsel. Here, to quote another's words, we find the poor miner's boy who, having "become a young Doctor, fervent and rejoicing in the Scriptures, well versed in his Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, and Gerson, familiar with all the subtle theological and philosophical controversies of the day, was already spoken of honorably in wider circles, as a good, clever thinker, as a victorious assailer of the supremacy of Aristotle; took a lively interest in the struggles of the Humanists against the ancient barbarism; was esteemed by the most celebrated champions of the freedom of science; was exalted by the approbation of his colleagues, of the students that flocked to his lectures in a word, was advancing with rapid steps to the highest honors of literary renown.' This was the situation of Luther when the event occurred that gave character to the remainder of his career.

Here we must pause to consider the religious experience of Luther; for whoever would explore the causes of history must look beneath the surface of events at the spiritual life of men. His earlier conception of Christianity is condensed in one expression, that he had looked upon Christ as a lawgiver, a second Moses, only that the former was a legislator of more awful rigor. "We were

1 Hundeshagen, Der deutsche Protestantismus, p. 13. (Quoted by Hare, p. 295 seq.). An idea of Luther's influence, as well as of his multiplied employments, may be gathered from one of his early letters, De Wette, i. 41.