The Pictures of German Life Throughout History. Gustav Freytag

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ or the councils alone, but only in the witness of the Holy Scripture and the convictions of his own reason. He had now become a free man, but the papal interdict and the ban of the empire hung over him; he was inwardly free, but he was free like the wild beast of the forest, with the bloodthirsty hounds giving tongue after him. He had now arrived at the acme of his life: the powers against which he had revolted, and even the thoughts which he had excited in the people, began now to work against his life and doctrines.

      It appears that already at Worms, Luther was warned that he must disappear for a time. The habits of the Franconian knights, among whom he had many faithful adherents, gave rise to the idea of carrying him off by armed men. The Elector Frederic planned the abduction with his confidential advisers; yet it was quite in the style of this Prince to arrange that he himself should not know the place of his confinement, that in case of necessity he might be able to affirm his ignorance. It was not easy to make this plan acceptable to Luther, for his valiant heart had long overcome all earthly fear, and with ecstatic pleasure, in which there was much enthusiasm and some humour, he watched the attempts of the Romanists who wished to take away his life; this, however, was under the disposal of another and higher power, which spoke through his mouth.^[36] He unwillingly submitted; but however cleverly the abduction was arranged, it was not easy to keep the secret. In the beginning, Melancthon was the only one of the Wittenbergers who knew the place of Luther's concealment; but Luther was not the man to accommodate himself, even to the most well-meaning intrigue, and soon messengers were actively passing to and fro between the Wartburg and Wittenberg, so that whatever circumspection was employed in the care of the letters, it was difficult to prevent the spreading of reports. Luther in the castle, learned what was going on in the great world sooner than the Wittenbergers; he received accounts of all the news of his university, and endeavoured to raise the courage of his friends and to guide their politics. It is touching to see how he tried to strengthen Melancthon, whose unpractical nature caused him to feel bitterly the absence of his stronger friend. "Things must go on without me," Luther writes to him. "Only take courage and you will no longer need me; if, when I come out, I cannot return to Wittenberg, I must go out into the world. You are the men to maintain, without me, the cause of the Lord against the devil." His letters are dated from the "aerial regions," from "Patmos," from the "wilderness," "from among the birds who sing sweetly among the branches, and praise God day and night with all their powers." Once he endeavoured to be cunning: writing to Spalatinus, he enclosed a crafty letter, saying, that it was believed without foundation that he was at Wartburg. That he was living among faithful brothers, and that it was remarkable no one thought of Bohemia; it concluded with a not ill-natured thrust at Duke George of Saxony, his keenest enemy. This letter, Spalatinus, with pretended negligence, was to lose, that it might come into the hands of his enemies; but in such diplomacy Luther was by no means consistent, for no sooner was his lion nature roused by any intelligence, than he made a hasty decision to burst forth to Erfurt or Wittenberg. He bore with difficulty the tedium of his residence; he was treated with the greatest consideration by the commander of the castle, and this care showed itself chiefly, as was then the custom, in providing him with the best food and drink. The good living, the absence of excitement, the fresh air on horseback, which the theologian enjoyed, worked both on soul and body. He had brought with him from Worms, a bodily ailment from which arose hours of dark despondency, which made him incapable of work.

      Two days successively he went out hunting; but his heart was with the poor hares and partridges, which were hunted by a host of men and dogs into a net. "Innocent little creatures! thus do the papists hunt." To preserve the life of a little hare he concealed it in the sleeve of his coat; then came the hounds and broke the limbs of the little animal within the protecting coat. "Thus does Satan gnash his teeth against the souls I seek to save." Luther had enough to do to defend himself and his from Satan; he had thrown off all the authorities of the Church, and now stood shuddering alone, only one thing remained to him, the Scriptures. The old Church had been continually expounding Christianity; traditions which were concurrent with the Scriptures, councils and decrees of the Pope, had kept the faith in constant agitation. Luther placed in its stead the word of Scripture, which while it brought deliverance from a wilderness of erroneous soulless conceptions, gave threatenings of other dangers. What was the Bible? There were about two centuries between the oldest and the newest writings of the holy book. The New Testament itself was not written by Christ, nor even always by those who had received his holy teaching from himself; it had been compiled long after his death, portions of it might have been delivered incorrectly; all was written in a foreign language that Germans could with difficulty understand. Expounders of the greatest discernment were in danger of interpreting falsely if not enlightened by the grace of God as the Apostles had been. The old Church had brought to its assistance that sacrament which gave to the priest's office this enlightenment; indeed the holy father assumed so much of the omnipotence of God, that he considered himself in the right even where his will was contrary to the Scripture. The reformer had nothing but his weak human understanding and his prayers.

      It was indeed imperative that Luther should use his reason, for a certain degree of criticism upon the Holy Scriptures was necessary. He did not set an equal value upon all the books of the New Testament: it is known that he had doubts about the Revelations of St. John, and he did not much value the Epistle of St. James; but objections to particular parts never disturbed his faith in the whole; his belief in the verbal inspiration of the Holy Scriptures (with the exception of a few books) could not be shaken; they were to him what was dearest on earth, the groundwork of his whole knowledge; he was so thoroughly imbued with their spirit, that he lived as it were under their shadow. The more deeply he felt his responsibility, the more intense was the ardour with which he clung to the Scriptures.^[37] A powerful instinct for what was rational and judicious helped him over many dangers; his penetration had nothing of the hair-splitting sophistry of the old teachers; he despised unnecessary subtleties, and with admirable tact he left undecided what appeared to him not essential. But if he was not to become a frantic or godless man, nothing remained to him but to ground his new doctrines on the words which were spoken and written fifteen hundred years before him, and he fell in some case into what his opponent Eckius called "Black-letter style."

      Under these restraints his method was formed. If he had a question to solve, he collected all the passages in Scripture which appeared to him to contain an answer; he examined each passage to understand their mutual bearing, and thus arrived at his conclusions. By this mode of proceeding, he brought the Scriptures within the compass of an ordinary understanding; for example, in the year 1522, he undertook, out of the Holy Scriptures, to place marriage on a new moral foundation; he severely criticised the eighteen reasons given by ecclesiastical law, forbidding and dissolving marriages, and condemned the unworthy favouring of the rich in preference to the poor.

      It was this same system which made him so pertinacious in his transactions with the Reformers in the year 1529, when he wrote on the table before him: "This is my body;" and looked gloomily on the tears and outstretched hands of Zwinglius. Never had that formidable man shown more powerful convictions, convictions won in vehement wrestling with his doubts and the devil. It may be considered by some as an imperfect system; but there was a genial strength in it, that made his own view more available to the cultivation and heart-cravings of his time, than even he himself anticipated.

      Besides these great trials, the proscribed monk at the Wartburg was exposed to smaller temptations: he had long, by almost superhuman spiritual activity, overcome, what great self-distrust led him to consider as merely sensual inclinations; still nature stirred powerfully in him, and he many times begged of his dear Melancthon to pray for him concerning this.

      It happened providentially, that just at this time at Wittenberg the restless spirit of Karlstadt took up the subject of the marriage of priests, in a pamphlet in which he decided that vows of celibacy were not binding upon priests and monks. The Wittenbergers were in general agreed on this question, especially Melancthon, who was perfectly unbiassed, as he himself had never entered into holy orders, and had been married two years.

      Thus a web of thoughts and moral problems was cast from the outer world upon Luther's soul, the threads of which enclosed the whole of СКАЧАТЬ