History of the Reformation. Thomas M. Lindsay

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СКАЧАТЬ doctorem. His followers were no longer contented with a study of the classical authors. Eobanus Hessus, crowned “poet-king” of Germany, abandoned his Horace for the Enchiridion of Erasmus and the Holy Scriptures. Justus Jonas (Jodocus Koch of Nordlingen) forsook classical Greek to busy himself with the Epistles to the Corinthians. The wicked satirist, Curicius Cordus, betook himself to the New Testament. They did this out of admiration for Erasmus, “their father in Christ.” But when Luther appeared, when they read his pamphlets circulating through Germany, when they followed, step by step, his career, they came under the influence of a new spell. The Erasmici, to use the phrases of the times, diminished, and the Martiniani increased in numbers. One of the old Erfurt circle, Johannes Crotus Rubeanus, was in Rome. His letters, passed round among his friends, made no small impression upon them. He told them that he was living in the centre of the plague-spot of Europe. He reviled the Curia as devoid of all moral conscience. “The Pope and his carrion-crows” were sitting content, gorged on the miseries of the Church. When Crotus received from Germany copies of Luther's writings, he distributed them secretly to his Italian friends, and collected their opinions to transmit to Germany. They were all sympathetically impressed with what Luther said, but they pitied him as a man travelling along a very dangerous road; no real reform was possible without the destruction of the whole curial system, and that was too powerful for any man to combat. Yet Luther was a hero; he was the Pater Patriæ of Germany; his countrymen ought to erect a golden statue in his honour; they wished him God-speed. When Crotus returned to Germany and got more in touch with Luther's work, he felt more drawn to the Reformer, and wrote enthusiastically to his friends that Luther was the personal revelation of Christ in modern times. So we find these Humanists declaring that Luther was the St. Paul of the age, the modern Hercules, the Achilles of the sixteenth century.

      No Humanist circle gave Luther more enthusiastic support than that of Nürnberg. The soil had been prepared by a few ardent admirers of Staupitz, at the head of whom was Wenceslas Link, prior of the Augustinian-Eremites in Nürnberg, and a celebrated preacher. They had learned from Staupitz that blending of the theology of Augustine with the later German mysticism which was characteristic of the man, and it prepared them to appreciate the deeper experimental teaching of Luther. Among these Nürnberg Humanists was Christopher Scheurl, a jurist, personally acquainted with Luther and with Eck. The shortlived friendship between the two antagonists had been brought about by Scheurl, whose correspondence with Luther began in 1516. Scheurl was convinced that Luther's cause was the “cause of God.” He told Eck this. He wrote to him (February 18th, 1519) that all the most spiritually minded clergymen that he knew were devoted to Luther; that “they flew to him in dense troops, like starlings”; that their deepest sympathies were with him; and that they confessed that their holiest desires were prompted by his writings. Albert Dürer expressed his admiration by painting Luther as St. John, the beloved disciple of the Lord. Caspar Nützel, one of the most dignified officials of the town, thought it an honour to translate Luther's Ninety-five Theses into German. Lazarus Sprengel delighted to tell his friends how Luther's tracts and sermons were bringing back to a living Christianity numbers of his acquaintances who had been perplexed and driven from the faith by the trivialities common in ordinary sermons. Similar enthusiasm showed itself in Augsburg and other towns. After the Leipzig Disputation, the great printer of Basel, Frobenius, became an ardent admirer of Luther; reprinted most of his writings, and despatched them to Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Italy, England, and Spain. He delighted to tell of the favourable reception they met with in these foreign countries—how they had been welcomed by Lefèvre in France, and how the Swiss Cardinal von Sitten had said that Luther deserved all honour, for he spoke the truth, which no special pleading of an Eck could overthrow. The distinguished jurist Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg said that Luther was an “angel incarnate,” and while he deprecated his strong language against the Pope, he called him the “Phœnix among Christian theologians,” the “flower of the Christian world,” and the “instrument of God.” Zasius was a man whose whole religious sympathies belonged to the mediæval conception of the Church, yet he spoke of Luther in this way.

      It is perhaps difficult for us now to comprehend the state of mind which longed for the new and yet clung to the old, which made the two Nürnberg families, the Ebners and the Nützlers, season the ceremonies at their family gathering to celebrate their daughters taking the veil with speeches in praise of Luther and of his writings. Yet this was the dominant note in the vast majority of the supporters of Luther in these earlier years.

      Men who had no great admiration for Luther personally had no wish to see him crushed by the Roman Curia by mere weight of authority. Even Duke George of Saxony, who had called Luther a pestilent fellow at the Leipzig Disputation, had been stirred into momentary admiration by the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, and had no great desire to publish the Bull within his dominions; and his private secretary and chaplain, Jerome Emser, although a personal enemy who never lost an opportunity of controverting Luther, nevertheless hoped that he might be the instrument of effecting a reformation in the Church. Jacob Wimpheling of Strassburg, a thoroughgoing mediævalist who had manifested no sympathy for Reuchlin, and his friend Christopher of Utenheim, Bishop of Basel, hoped that the movement begun by Luther might lead to that reformation of the Church on mediæval lines which they both earnestly desired.

      Perhaps no one represented better the attitude of the large majority of Luther's supporters, in the years between 1517 and 1521, than did the Prince, who is rightly called Luther's protector, Frederick the Elector of Saxony. It is a great though common mistake to suppose that Frederick shared those opinions of Luther which afterwards grew to be the Lutheran theology. His brother John, and in a still higher degree his nephew John Frederick, were devoted Lutherans in the theological sense; but there is no evidence to show that Frederick ever was.

      Frederick never had any intimate personal relations with Luther. At Spalatin's request, he had paid the expenses of Luther's promotion to the degree of Doctor of the Holy Scriptures; he had, of course, acquiesced in his appointment to succeed Spalatin as Professor of Theology; and he must have appreciated keenly the way in which Luther's work had gradually raised the small and declining University to the position it held in 1517. A few letters were exchanged between Luther and Frederick, but there is no evidence that they ever met in conversation; nor is there any that Frederick had ever heard Luther preach. When he lay dying he asked Luther to come and see him; but the Reformer was far distant, trying to dissuade the peasants from rising in rebellion, and when he reached the palace his old protector had breathed his last.

      The Elector was a pious man according to mediæval standards. He had received his earliest lasting religious impressions from intercourse with Augustinian Eremite monks when he was a boy at school at Grimma, and he maintained the closest relations with the Order all his life. He valued highly all the external aids to a religious life which the mediæval Church had provided. He believed in the virtue of pilgrimages and relics. He had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and had brought back a great many relics, which he had placed in the Church of All Saints in Wittenberg, and he had agents at Venice and other Mediterranean ports commissioned to secure other relics for his collection. He continued to purchase them as late as the year 1523. He believed in Indulgences of the older type—Indulgences which remitted in whole or in part ecclesiastically imposed satisfactions—and he had procured two for use in Saxony. One served as an endowment for the upkeep of his bridge at Torgau, and he had once commissioned Tetzel to preach its virtues; the other was to benefit pilgrims who visited and venerated his collection of relics on All Saints' Day. But it is clear that he disliked Indulgences of the kind Luther had challenged, and had small belief in the good faith of the Roman Curia. He had prevented money collected for one plenary Indulgence leaving the country, and he had forbidden Tetzel to preach the last Indulgence within his territories. His sympathies were all with Luther on this question. He was an esteemed patron of the pious society called St. Ursula's Schifflein. He went to Mass regularly, and his attendances became frequent when he was in a state of hesitation or perplexity. When he was at Köln (November 1520), besieged by the papal nuncios to induce him to permit the publication of the Bull against Luther within his lands, Spalatin noted that he went to Mass three times in one day. His reverence for the Holy Scriptures must have created a bond of sympathy between СКАЧАТЬ