The Pictures of German Life Throughout History. Gustav Freytag

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СКАЧАТЬ our sins, in love and patience; that Christ should sometimes repel upright people with severity, and at others receive adulterers, publicans, and murderers,--about all this, the wisdom of man becomes foolishness. He complained in these words to his ghostly counsellor, Staupitz: "Dear doctor, our Lord God does indeed deal terribly with us; who can serve Him when He deals such blows on all?" To which the answer was: "How could He otherwise bow down the stiff-necked?" This ingenious argument was of no comfort to the youth. In his earnest strivings to find the incomprehensible God, he tormented himself in searching out all his thoughts and dreams. Every ebullition of youthful blood, every earthly thought, appeared to him a shocking iniquity; he began to despair, and wrestled with himself in endless prayer, fasting, and mortification. On one occasion the brothers were obliged to break into his cell, where he had been lying the whole day in a state not far removed from insanity. Staupitz observed with warm sympathy the agitation and torments of his soul, and endeavoured, though only by rough consolation, to give it rest. Once when Luther had written to him, "Oh my sins! my sins! my sins!" his ghostly counsellor answered him: "You wish to be without sin, and yet have no real sins. Christ is the forgiver of mortal sins, such as the murder of parents, &c., &c. If you would have the help of Christ, you must have mortal sins to record, and not come to Him with such trifles and peccadilloes, making a sin out of every little infirmity."

      The way in which Luther raised himself out of this despair decided the whole tenour of his life. The God whom he served appeared then as a God of terror, whose anger was only to be appeased by the means of grace given by the old Church, especially by continual confession, for which endless forms and directions were given, which were but cold and empty to the spirit. By the prescriptions of the Church and the practice of so-called good works, young Luther had not attained the feeling of true reconciliation and inward peace. At last a sentence from his spiritual adviser pierced him like an arrow: "There is no true repentance that does not begin by the love of God; the love of God, and the reception of it in the soul, does not follow, but precedes the means of grace enjoined by the Church." This teaching which came from Tauler's school became for him the foundation of a new, genial, and moral relation with God; it was a holy discovery to him. The change in his own spirit was the main point for which he must labour; repentance, penance, and expiation must proceed from the inward feelings of the heart. It was by his own efforts alone that man could raise himself to God. For the first time he experienced what direct prayer was. In the place of a distant God, whom hitherto he had sought in vain, by hundreds of forms and childish confessions, he beheld the image of an all-loving protector, with whom he could hold communion at every hour, whether in joy or sorrow, before whom he could lay every grief and doubt, who incessantly sympathized with, and cared for him, and, like a good father, either granted or denied the requests of his heart. Thus he learned to pray, and how ardent his prayers became! Now he was able to live in tranquillity, being daily and hourly in communion with his God, whom he had at last found; his intercourse with the Highest became more confidential than with those dearest to him on earth. When he poured out his whole soul before Him, he obtained rest, holy peace, and a feeling of inexpressible happiness; he felt himself a portion of God, and this sense of intimate communion with Him he preserved during the whole remainder of his life. He needed no longer the distant paths of the old Church; with his God in his heart he could defy the whole world. He already ventured to believe, that teaching must be false which laid such great weight on works of penance; that besides these there remained only cold satisfaction and ceremonious confession; and when later he learned from Melancthon that the Greek word for penance, "Metanoia," denotes literally "a change of heart," it appeared to him as a wonderful revelation. On this foundation was built that confidence of faith, with which he brought forward the words of Scripture in opposition to the prescriptions of the Church.

      It was in this way that Luther, whilst still in the monastery, attained to inward freedom. The whole of his later teaching, his struggle against the indulgences, his unshaken firmness, and his method of scriptural exposition, all rest on the inward process by which as a monk he had found his God; and one may truly say that the new period of German history began with Luther's cloister prayers. Life soon placed him under its hammer, to harden the pure metal of his soul.

      Luther unwillingly took the Professorship of Dialectics in the new university of Wittenberg, in 1508; he would rather have taught that new theology which he already began to consider the truth. It is known that in the year 1510 he went to Rome on the business of his order; how devoutly and piously he lingered in the holy city, and with what dismay he was seized on observing the heathenish character of the people of Rome, and the worldliness and corrupt morals of the ecclesiastics. But deeply as he was shaken by the depravity of the hierarchy, he felt that his whole life was still enclosed in it; out of it there was nothing: The exalted idea of the Roman Catholic Church, and its triumphant reign of 1500 years, fettered even the most powerful minds; and when the German in the dress of a Romish priest, and in danger of his life, contemplated the ruins of ancient Rome, and stood in amazement before the gigantic pillars of the temples, which, according to tradition, had once been destroyed by the Goths little did the valiant man from the mountains of the old Hermunduren then think, that it would be his own fate to destroy the temples of the Rome of the middle ages, more completely than the brethren of his ancestors had done in the olden time. Luther returned from Rome still a faithful son of the great Mother, holding all heretical proceedings, as for example those of the Bohemians, in detestation. He sympathized warmly in Reuchlin's dispute with the Cologne inquisitor, and about 1512 had sided with the Humanitarians. But even then he began to find something in their teaching which separated him from them. When some years later he was at Gotha, he did not visit the worthy Mutianus Rufus, though he wrote him a very civil letter of excuse. Soon after, he was much wounded by the coldness and worldly tone of Erasmus's dialogues, in which theological sinners are turned into ridicule. The profane worldliness of the Humanitarians did not suit the earnest faith of Luther; it aroused that pride which had already taken root in his soul, and caused him afterwards to wound the sensitive Erasmus in a letter intended to be conciliatory. Even the form of literary moderation adopted by Luther at this time, gives us the impression of being wrung by the pressure of Christian humility from a stubborn spirit.

      He felt himself already strong and secure in his faith: in 1506 he wrote to Spalatinus, who was the connecting link between him and the Elector, Frederic the Wise, that the Elector was of all men most knowing in secular wisdom, but in things pertaining to God and the salvation of souls, he was struck with sevenfold blindness.

      Luther had reason for the opinion here expressed, for the domestic disposition of this sober-minded prince showed itself in his anxiety to provide for his home the means of grace bestowed by the old Church. Amongst other things he had a particular fancy for relics, and Staupitz, vicar-general of the Augustine monks in Germany, was at that time engaged in collecting these treasures for the Elector. This absence of his superior was very important to Luther, for he had to fill his place. He was already a man of high repute in his order; but though a professor at Wittenberg, he continued to reside in his monastery, and generally wore his monk's dress. He visited the thirty monasteries of his congregation, deposed priors, delivered strong rebukes on account of lax discipline, severely admonished criminal monks, and had become in 1517 a man of fully developed character and commanding powers; yet he still preserved somewhat of the trusting simplicity of the monastic brother.

      Thus, when he had affixed the Theses against Tetzel to the church door, he writes confidingly to the Archbishop Albrecht of Maintz, the protector of the trader in indulgences. Full of the popular faith in the good sense and the good will of the governing powers, Luther thought--he often said so later--nothing was necessary but to represent straightforwardly to the princes of the Church the injurious effects and immorality of these malpractices.^[27] But how childish did this zeal of the monk appear to the smooth and worldly prince of the Church! That which had roused such deep indignation in the upright man, had from the archbishop's point of view long been a settled question. The sale of indulgences was a much lamented evil in the Church, but unavoidable, as are to politicians many regulations not good in themselves, but necessary to preserve some great interests. The greatest interest of the archbishops and the guardians of the Romish Church was their dominion, which was to be won and maintained by such means of acquiring money. The СКАЧАТЬ