The
History of Protestantism |
Chapter 1 | . . . | PROTESTANTISM AND IMPERIALISM; OR, THE MONK
AND THE MONARCH. Dangers of Luther – Doubtful Aid – Death of Maximilian – Candidates for the Empire – Character of Charles of Spain – His Dominions – The Empire Offered to Frederick of Saxony – Declined – Charles of Spain Chosen – Wittemberg – Luther's Labors – His Appeal to the People of Germany – His Picture of Germany under the Papacy – Reforms Called for – Impression produced by his Appeal. |
Chapter 2 | . . . | POPE LEO'S BULL. Eck at Rome – His Activity against Luther – Procures his Condemnation – The Bull – Authorship of the Bull – Its Terms – Its Two Bearers – The Bull crosses the Alps – Luther's "Babylonish Captivity " – The Sacrament – His Extraordinary Letter to Pope Leo – Bull arrives in Wittemberg – Luther enters a NotVerdana Protest against it – He Burns it – Astonishment and Rage of Rome – Luther's Address to the Students. |
Chapter 3 | . . . | INTERVIEWS AND NEGOTIATIONS. A Spring-time – The New Creation – Three Circles – The Inner Reformed Doctrine-The MiddleMorality and Liberty – The Outer – The Arts and Sciences – Charles V. Crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle – Papal Envoy Aleander Labors to have the Bull executed against Luther – His Efforts with Frederick and Charles – Prospect of a War with France – The Emperor courts the Pope – Luther to be the Bribe – The Pope Won – The Court goes to Worms – A Tournament Interrupted – The Emperor's Draft – Edict for Luther's Execution. |
Chapter 4 | . . . | LUTHER SUMMONED TO THE DIET AT
WORMS. A Check – Aleander Pleads before the Diet – Protestantism more Frightful than Mahommedanism – Effect of Aleander's Speech – Duke George – The Hundred and One Grievances – The Princes Demand that Luther be Heard – The Emperor resolves to Summon him to the Diet – A Safe-conduct–Maunday-Thursday at Rome – The Bull In Caena Domini – Luther's Name Inserted in it – Luther comes to the Fulness of Knowledge – Arrival of the Imperial Messenger at Wittemberg – The Summons. |
Chapter 5 | . . . | LUTHER'S JOURNEY AND ARRIVAL AT
WORMS. Luther's Resolution – Alarm in Germany – The Reformer sets out – His Reception at Leipsic – Erfurt – Preaches – Eisenach – Sickness – Auguries of Evil – Luther's Courage – Will the Safe-conduct be respected? – Fears of his Friends – They advise him not to come on – His Reply – Enters Worms – Crowd in the Street – An Ill-omened Pageant – The Princes throng his Apartment – Night and Sleep. |
Chapter 6 | . . . | LUTHER BEFORE THE DIET AT
WORMS. Luther's Supplications – Conducted to the Diet – The Crowd – Words of Encouragement – Splendor of the Diet-Significance of Luther's Appearance before it – Chancellor Eccius – Luther asked touching his Books – Owns their Authorship – Asked to Retract their Opinions – Craves Time to give an Answer – A Day's Delay granted – Charles's First Impressions of Luther – Morning of the 18th of May – Luther's Wrestlings–His Weakness – Strength not his own – Second Appearance before the Diet – His Speech – Repeats it in Latin–No Retractation – Astonishment of the Diet – The Two Great Powers. |
Chapter 7 | . . . | LUTHER PUT UNDER THE BAN OF THE
EMPIRE. The Movement Widening – Rising of the Diet – The Draught of Beer – Frederick's Joy – Resolves to Protect Luther – Mortification of Papal Party – Charles's Proposal to Violate Safe-Conduct – Rejected with Indignation – Negotiations opened with Luther – He Quits Worms – The Emperor fulminates against him his Ban – The Reformel Seized by Masked Horsemen – Carried to the Wartburg. |
BOOK SIXTH
FROM
THE LEIPSIC DISPUTATION TO THE DIET AT WORMS, 1521.
CHAPTER 1
Back to
Top
PROTESTANTISM AND
IMPERIALISM; OR, THE MONK AND THE MONARCH.
Dangers
of Luther – Doubtful Aid – Death of Maximilian – Candidates for the Empire –
Character of Charles of Spain – His Dominions – The Empire Offered to Frederick
of Saxony – Declined – Charles of Spain Chosen – Wittemberg – Luther's Labors –
His Appeal to the People of Germany – His Picture of Germany under the Papacy –
Reforms Called for – Impression produced by his Appeal.
AMONG the actors that now begin to crowd the stage
there are two who tower conspicuously above the others, and fix the gaze of all
eyes, well-nigh exclusively, upon themselves. With the one we are already
familiar, for he has been some time before us, the other is only on the point of
appearing. They come from the opposite poles of society to mingle in this great
drama. The one actor first saw the light in a miner's cottage, the cradle of the
other was placed in the palace of an ancient race of kings. The one wears a
frock of serge, the other is clad in an imperial mantle. The careers of these
two men are not more different in their beginning than they are fated to be in
their ending. Emerging from a cell the one is to mount a throne, where he is to
sit and govern men, not by the force of the sword, but by the power of the Word.
The other, thrown into collision with a power he can neither see nor comprehend,
is doomed to descend through one humiliation after another, till at last from a
throne, the greatest then in the world, he comes to end his days in a cloister.
But all this is yet behind a veil.
Meanwhile the bulkier, but in reality
weaker power, seems vastly to overtop the stronger. The Reformation is utterly
dwarfed in presence of a colossal Imperialism. If Protestantism has come forth
from the Ruler of the world, and if it has been sent on the benign errand of
opening the eyes and loosing the fetters of long-enslaved nations, one would
have thought that its way would be prepared, and its task made easy, by some
signal weakening of its antagonist. On the contrary, it is at this moment that
Imperialism develops into sevenfold strength. It is clear the great Ruler seeks
no easy victory. He permits dangers to multiply, difficulties to thicken, and
the hand of the adversary to be made strong. But by how much the fight is
terrible, and the victory all but hopeless, by so much are the proofs
resplendent that the power which, without earthly weapon, can scatter the forces
of Imperialism, and raise up a world which a combined spiritual and secular
despotism has trodden into the dust, is Divine. It is the clash and struggle of
these two powers that we are now to contemplate. But first let us glance at the
situation of Luther.
Luther's friends were falling away, or growing
timid. Even Staupitz was hesitating, now that the goal to which the movement
tended was more distinctly visible. In the coldness or the absence of these
friends, other allies hastened to proffer him their somewhat doubtful aid. Drawn
to his side rather by hatred of Papal tyranny than by appreciation of Gospel
liberty and purity, their alliance somewhat embarrassed the Reformer. It was the
Teutonic quite as much as the Reformed element–a noble product when the two are
blended–that now stirred the German barons, and made their hands grasp their
sword-hilts when told that Luther's life was in danger; that men with pistoIs
under their cloak were dogging him; that Serra Longa was writing to the Elector
Frederick, "Let not Luther find an asylum in the States of your highness; let
him be rejected of all and stoned in the face of heaven;" that Miltitz, the
Papal legate, who had not forgiven his discomfiture, was plotting to snare him
by inviting him to another interview at Treves; and that Eck had gone to Rome to
find a balm for his wounded pride, by getting forged in the Vatican the bolt
that was to crush the man whom his scholastic subtlety had not been able to
vanquish at Leipsic.
There seemed cause for the apprehensions that now
began to haunt his friends. "If God do not help us," exclaimed Melanchthon, as
he listened to the ominous sounds of tempest, and lifted his eye to a sky every
hour growing blacker, "If God do not help us, we shall all perish." Even Luther
himself was made at times to know, by the momentary depression and alarm into
which he was permitted to sink, that if he was calm, and strong, and courageous,
it was God that made him so. One of the most powerful knights of Franconia,
Sylvester of Schaumburg, sent his son all the way to Wittemberg with a letter to
Luther, saying, "If the electors, princes, magistrates fail you, come to me. God
willing, I shall soon have collected more than a hundred gentlemen, and with
their help I shall be able to protect you from every danger."[1]
Francis of
Sickingen, one of those knights who united the love of letters to that of arms,
whom Melanchthon styled "a peerless ornament of German knighthood," offered
Luther the asylum of his castle. "My services, my goods, and my body, all that I
possess are at your disposal," wrote he. Ulrich of Hutten, who was renowned for
his verses not less than for his deeds of valor, also offered himself as a
champion of the Reformer. His mode of warfare, however, differed from Luther's.
Ulrich was for falling on Rome with the sword, Luther sought to subdue her by
the weapon of the Truth. "It is with swords and with bows," wrote Ulrich, "with
javelins and bombs that we must crush the fury of the devil." "I will not have
recourse to arms and bloodshed in defense of the Gospel," said Luther, shrinking
back from the proposal. "It was by the Word that the Church was founded, and by
the Word also it shall be re-established." And, lastly, the prince of scholars
in that age, Erasmus, stood forward in defense of the monk of Wittemberg. He did
not hesitate to affirm that the outcry which had been raised against Luther, and
the disturbance which his doctrines had created, were owing solely to those
whose interests, being bound up with the darkness, dreaded the new day that was
rising on the world [2] –a truth palpable and
trite to us, but not so to the men of the early part of the sixteenth
century.
When the danger was at its height, the Emperor Maximilian died
(January 12th, 1519).[3] This prince was
conspicuous only for his good nature and easy policy, but under him the Empire
had enjoyed a long and profound peace. An obsequious subject of Rome, the
Reformed movement was every day becoming more the object of his dislike, and had
he lived he would have insisted on the elector's banishing Luther, which would
have thrown him into the hands of his mortal enemies. By the death of Maximilian
at this crisis, the storm that seemed ready to burst passed over for the time.
Till a new emperor should be elected, Frederick of Saxony, according to an
established rule, became regent. This sudden shifting of the scenes placed the
Reformer and the Reformation under the protection of the man who for the time
presided over the Empire.
Negotiations and intrigues were now set on foot
for the election of a new emperor. These became a rampart around the Reformed
movement. The Pope, who wished to carry a particular candidate, found it
necessary, in order to gain his object, to conciliate the Elector Frederick,
whose position as regent, and whose character for wisdom, gave him a potential
voice in the electoral college. This led to a clearing of the sky in the quarter
of Rome.
There were two candidates in the field–Charles I. of Spain, and
Francis I. of France. Henry VIII. of England, finding the prize which he eagerly
coveted beyond his reach, had retired from the contest. The claims of the two
rivals were very equally balanced. Francis was gallant, chivalrous, and
energetic, but he did not sustain his enterprises by a perseverance equal to the
ardor with which he had commenced them. Of intellectual tastes, and a lover of
the new learning, wise men and scholars, warriors and statesmen, mingled in his
court, and discoursed together at his table. He was only twenty-six, yet he had
already reaped glory on the field of war. "This prince," says Muller, "was the
most accomplished knight of that era in which a Bayard was the ornament of
chivalry, and one of the most enlightened and amiable men of the polished age of
the Medici."[4] Neither Francis nor his
courtiers were forgetful that Charlemagne had worn the diadem, and its
restoration to the Kings of France would dispel the idea that was becoming
common, that the imperial crown, though nominally elective, was really
hereditary, and had now been permanently vested in the house of
Austria.
Charles was seven years younger than his rival, and his
disposition and talents gave high promise. Although only nineteen he had been
trained in affairs, for which he had discovered both inclination and aptitude.
The Spanish and German blood mingled in his veins, and his genius combined the
qualities of both races. He possessed the perseverance of the Germans, the
subtlety of the Italians, and the taciturnity of the Spaniards. His birth-place
was Ghent. Whatever prestige riches,extent of dominion, and military strength
could give the Empire, Charles would bring to it. His hereditary kingdom,
inherited through Ferdinand and Isabella, was Spain. Than Spain there was no
more flourishing or powerful monarchy at that day in Christendom. To this
magnificent domain, the seat of so many opulent towns, around which was spread
an assemblage of corn-bearing plains, wooded sierras, and vegas, on which the
fruits of Asia mingled in rich luxuriance with those of Europe, were added the
kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, Flanders and the rich domains of Burgundy; and
now the death of his grand-father, the Emperor Maximilian, had put him in
possession of the States of Austria. Nor was this all; the discovery of Columbus
had placed a new continent under his sway; and how large its limit, or how ample
the wealth that might flow from it, Charles could not, at that hour, so much as
conjecture. So wide were the realms over which this young prince reigned.
Scarcely had the sun set on their western frontier when the morning had dawned
on their eastern.
It would complete his glory, and render him without a
peer on earth, should he add the imperial diadem to the many crowns he already
possessed. He scattered gold profusely among the electors and princes of Germany
to gain the coveted prize.[5] His rival Francis was
liberal, but he lacked the gold-mines of Mexico and Peru which Charles had at
his command. The candidates, in fact, were too powerful. Their greatness had
well-nigh defeated both of them; for the Germans began to fear that to elect
either of the two would be to give themselves a master. The weight of so many
sceptres as those which Charles held in his hand might stifle the liberties of
Germany.
The electors, on consideration, were of the mind that it would
be wiser to elect one of themselves to wear the imperial crown. Their choice was
given, in the first instance, neither to Francis nor to Charles; it fell
unanimously on Frederick of Saxony.[6] Even the Pope was with
them in this matter. Leo X. feared the overgrown power of Charles of Spain. If
the master of so many kingdoms should be elected to the vacant dignity, the
Empire might overshadow the mitre. Nor was the Pope more favorably inclined
towards the King of France: he dreaded his ambition; for who could tell that the
conqueror of Carignano would not carry his arms farther into Italy? On these
grounds, Leo sent his earnest advice to the electors to choose Frederick of
Saxony. The result was that Frederick was chosen. We behold the imperial crown
offered to Luther's friend!
Will he or ought he to put on the mantle of
Empire? The princes and people of Germany would have hailed with joy his
assumption of the dignity. It did seem as if Providence were putting this strong
scepter into his hand, that therewith he might protect the Reformer. Frederick
had, oftener than once, been painfully sensible of his lack of power. He may now
be the first man in Germany, president of all its councils, generalissimo of all
its armies; and may stave off from the Reformation's path, wars, scaffolds,
violences of all sorts, and permit it to develop its spiritual energies, and
regenerate society in peace. Ought he to have become emperor? Most historians
have lauded his declinature as magnanimous. We take the liberty most
respectfully to differ from them.
We think that Frederick, looking at the
whole case, ought to have accepted the imperial crown; that the offer of it came
to him at a moment and in a way that, made the point of duty clear, and that his
refusal was an act of weakness.
Frederick, in trying to shun the snare of
ambition, fell into that of timidity. He looked at the difficulties and dangers
of the mighty task, at the distractions springing up within the Empire, and the
hostile armies of the Moslem on its frontier. Better, he thought, that the
imperial scepter should be placed in a stronger hand; better that Charles of
Austria should grasp it. He forgot that, in the words of Luther, Christendom was
threatened by a worse foe than the Turk; and so Frederick passed on the imperial
diadem to one who was to become a bitter foe of the Reformation.
But,
though we cannot justify Frederick in shirking the toils and perils of the task
to which he was now called, we recognize in his decision the overriding of a
Higher than human wisdom. If Protestantism had grown up and flourished under the
protection of the Empire, would not men have said that its triumph was owing to
the fact that it had one so wise as Frederick to counsel it, and one so powerful
to fight for it? Was it a blessing to primitive Christianity to be taken by
Constantine under the protection of the arms of the first Empire? True, oceans
of blood would have been spared, had Frederick girded on the imperial sword and
become the firm friend and protector of the movement. But the Reformation
without martyrs, without scaffolds, without blood! We should hardly have known
it. It would be the Reformation without glory and without power.
Not its
annals only, but the annals of the race would have been immensely poorer had
they lacked the sublime spectacles of faith and heroism which were exhibited by
the martyrs of the sixteenth century. Not an age in the future which the glory
of these sufferers will not illuminate!
Frederick of Saxony had declined
what the two most powerful sovereigns in Europe were so eager to obtain. On the
28th of June, 1519, the electoral conclave, in their scarlet robes, met in the
Church of St. Bartholomew, in Frankfort-on-the-Main, and[proceeded to the
election of the new emperor.
The votes were unanimous in favor of Charles
of Spain.[7] It was more than a year
(October, 1520) till Charles arrived in Germany to be crowned at
Aix-la-Chapelle; and meanwhile the regency was continued in the hands of
Frederick, and the shield was still extended over the little company of workers
at Wittemberg, who were busily engaged in laying the foundations of an empire
that would long outlast that of the man on whose head the diadem of the Caesars
was about to be placed.
The year that elapsed between the election and
the coronation of Charles was one of busy and prosperous labor at Wittemberg. A
great light shone in the midst of the little band there gathered together,
namely, the Word of God. The voice from the Seven Hills fell upon their ear
unheeded; all doctrines and practices were tried by the Bible alone. Every day
Luther took a step forward. New proofs of the falsehood and corruption of the
Roman system continually crowded in upon him. It was now that the treatise of
Laurentius Valla fell in his way, which satisfied him that the donation of
Constantine to the Pope was a fiction. This strengthened the conclusion at which
he had already arrived touching the Roman primacy, even that foundation it had
none save the ambition of Popes and the credulity of the people. It was now that
he read the writings of John Muss, and, to his surprise, he found in them the
doctrine of Paul–that which it had cost himself such agonies to learn–respecting
the free justification of sinners. "We have all," he exclaimed, half in wonder,
half in joy, "Paul, Augustine, and myself, been Hussites without knowing it![8] and he added, with deep
seriousness, "God will surely visit it upon the world that the truth was
preached to it a century ago, and burned?" It was now that he proclaimed the
great truth that the Sacrament will profit no man without faith, and that it is
folly to believe that it will operate spiritual effects of itself and altogether
independently of the disposition of the recipient. The Romanists stormed at him
because he taught that the Sacrament ought to be administered in both kinds, not
able to perceive the deeper principle of Luther, which razed the opus operatum
with all attendant thereon. They were defending the outworks: the Reformer, with
a giant's strength, was levelling the citadel. It was amazing what activity and
rigour of mind Luther at this period displayed. Month after month, rather week
by week, he launched treatise on treatise. These productions of his pen, "like
sparks from under the hammer, each brighter than that which prceceded it," added
fresh force to the conflagration that was blazing on all sides. His enemies
attacked him: they but drew upon themselves heavier blows. It was, too, during
this year of marvellously varied labor, that he published his Commentary upon
the Galatians, "his own epistle" as he termed it. In that treatise he gave a
clearer and fuller exposition than he had yet done of what with him was the
great cardinal truth, even justification through faith alone. But he showed that
such a justification neither makes void the law, inasmuch as it proceeds on the
ground of a righteousness that fulfils the law, nor leads to licentiousness,
inasmuch as the faith that takes hold of righteousness for justification,
operates in the heart to its renewal, and a renewed heart is the fountain of
every holy virtue and of every good work.
It was now, too, that Luther
published his famous appeal to the emperor, the princes, and the people of
Germany, on the Reformation of Christianity [9] This was the most graphic,
courageous, eloquent, and spirit-stirring production which had yet issued from
his pen. It may be truly said of it that its words were battles. The sensation
it produced was immense. It was the trumpet that summoned the German nation to
the great conflict.
"The time for silence," said Luther, "is past, and
the time to speak is come." And verily he did speak.
In this manifesto
Luther first of ail draws a most; masterly picture of the Roman tyranny. Rome
had achieved a three-fold conquest. She had triumphed over all ranks and classes
of men; she had triumphed over all the rights and interests of human society;
she had enslaved kings; she had enslaved Councils; she had enslaved the people.
She had effected a serfdom complete and universal. By her dogma of Pontifical
supremacy she had enslaved kings, princes, and magistrates. She had exalted the
spiritual above the temporal in order that all rulers, and all tribunals and
causes, might be subject to her own sole absolute and irresponsible will, and
that, unchallenged and unpunished by the civil power, she might pursue her
career of usurpation and oppression.
Has she not, Luther asked, placed
the throne of her Pope above the throne of kings, so that no one dare call him
to account? The Pontiff enlists armies, makes war on kings, and spills their
subjects' blood; nay, he challenges for the persons of his priests immunity from
civil control, thus fatally deranging the order of the world, and reducing
authority into prostration and contempt.
By her dogma of spiritual
supremacy Rome had vanquished Councils. The Bishop of Rome claimed to be chief
and ruler over all bishops. In him was centered the whole authority of the
Church, so that let him promulgate the most manifestly erroneous dogma, or
commit the most flagrant wickedness, no Council had the power to reprove or
depose him. Councils were nothing, the Pope was all. The Spiritual supremacy
made him the Church: the Temporal, the World.
By her assumed sole and
infallible right of interpreting Holy Scripture, Rome had enslaved the people.
She had put out their eyes; she had bound them in chains of darkness, that she
might make them bow down to any god she was pleased to set up, and compel them
to follow whither she was pleased to lead–into temporal bondage, into eternal
perdition.
Behold the victory which Rome has achieved! She stands with
her foot upon kings, upon bishops, upon peoples! All has she trodden into the
dust.
These, to use Luther's metaphor, were the three walls behind which
Rome had entrenched herself.[10] Is she threatened with the
temporal power? She is above it. Is it proposed to cite her before a Council?
She only has the right to convoke one. Is she attacked from the Bible? She only
has the power of interpreting it. Rome has made herself supreme over the throne,
over the Church, over the Word of God itself! Such was the gulf in which Germany
and Christendom were sunk. The Reformer called on all ranks in his nation to
combine for their emancipation from a vassalage so disgraceful and so
ruinous.
To rouse his countrymen, and all in Christendom in whose breasts
there yet remained any love of truth or any wish for liberty, he brought the
picture yet closer to the Germans, not trusting to any general portraiture,
however striking. Entering into details, he pointed out the ghastly havoc the
Papal oppression had inflicted upon their common country.
Rome, he said,
had ruined Italy; for the decay of that fine land, completed in our day, was
already far advanced in Luther's. And now, the vampire Papacy having sucked the
blood of its own country, a locust swarm from the Vatican had alighted on
Germany. The Fatherland, the Reformer told the Germans, was being gnawed to the
very bones. Annats, palliums, commendams, administrations, indulgences,
reversions, incorporations, reserves–such were a few, and but a few, of the
contrivances by which the priests managed to convey the wealth of Germany to
Rome. Was it a wonder that princes, cathedrals, and people were poor? The wonder
was, with such a cormorant swarm preying upon them, that anything was left. All
went into the Roman sack which had no bottom. Here was robbery surpassing that
of thieves and highwaymen, who expiated their offences on the gibbet. Here were
the tyranny and destruction of the gates of hell, seeing it was the destruction
of soul and body, the ruin of both Church and State. Talk of the devastation of
the Turk, and of raising armies to resist him! there is no Turk in all the world
like the Roman Turk.
The instant remedies which he urged were the same
with those which his great predecessor, Wicliffe, a full hundred and fifty years
before, had recommended to the English people, and happily had prevailed upon
the Parliament to so far adopt. The Gospel alone, which he was laboring to
restore, could go to the root of these evils, but they were of a kind to be
corrected in part by the temporal power. Every prince and State, he said, should
forbid their subjects giving annats to Rome. Kings and nobles ought to resist
the Pontiff as the greatest foe of their own prerogatives, and the worst enemy
of the independence and prosperity of their kingdoms.
Instead of
enforcing the bulls of the Pope, they ought to throw his ban, seal, and briefs
into the Rhine or the Elbe. Archbishops and bishops should be forbidden, by
imperial decree, to receive their dignities from Rome. All causes should be
tried within the kingdom, and all persons made amenable to the country's
tribunals. Festivals should cease, as but affording occasions for idleness and
all kinds of vicious indulgences, and the Sabbath should be the only day on
which men ought to abstain from working. No more cloisters ought to be built for
mendicant friars, whose begging expeditions had never turned to good, and never
would; the law of clerical celibacy should be repealed, and liberty given to
priests to marry like other men; and, in fine, the Pope, leaving kings and
princes to govern their own realms, should confine himself to prayer and the
preaching of the Word. "Hearest thou, O Pope, not all holy, but all sinful? Who
gave thee power to lift thyself above God and break His laws? The wicked Satan
lies through thy throat.–O my Lord Christ, hasten Thy last day, and destroy the
devil's nest at Rome. There sits ' the man of sin,' of whom Paul speaks, 'the
son of perdition.'"
Luther well understood what a great orator [11] since has termed "the
expulsive power of a new emotion." Truth he ever employed as the only effectual
instrumentality for expelling error. Accordingly, underneath Rome's system of
human merit and salvation by works, he placed the doctrine of man's inability
and God's free grace. This it was that shook into ruin the Papal fabric of human
merit. By the same method of attack did Luther demolish the Roman kingdom of
bondage. He penetrated the fiction on which itwas reared. Rome takes a man,
shaves his head, anoints him with oil, gives him the Sacrament of orders, and so
infuses into him a mysterious virtue. The whole class of men so dealt with form
a sacerdotal order, distinct from and higher than laymen, and are the divinely
appointed rulers of the world.
This falsehood, with the grievous and
ancient tyranny of which it was the corner-stone, Luther overthrew by
proclaiming the antagonistic truth. All really Christian men, said he, are
priests. Had not the Apostle Peter, addressing all believers, said, "Ye are a
royal priesthood"? It is not the shearing of the head, or the wearing of a
peculiar garment, that makes a man a priest. It is faith that makes men priests,
faith that unites them to Christ, and that gives them the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit, whereby they become filled with all holy grace and heavenly power. This
inward anointing–this oil, better than any that ever came from the horn of
bishop or Pope–gives them not the name only, bnt the nature, the purity, the
power of priests; and this anointing have all they received who are believers on
Christ.
Thus did Luther not only dislodge the falsehood, he filled its
place with a glorious truth, lest, if left vacant, the, error should creep back.
The fictitious priesthood of Rome–a priesthood which lay in oils and vestments,
and into which men were introduced by scissors and the arts of
necromancy–departed, and the true priesthood came in its room. Men opened their
eyes upon their glorious enfranchisement. They were no longer the vassals of a
sacerdotal oligarchy, the bondsmen of shavelings; they saw themselves to be the
members of an illustrious brotherhood, whose Divine Head was in
heaven.
Never was there a grander oration. Patriots and orators have, on
many great and memorable occasions, addressed their fellow-men, if haply they
might rouse them to overthrow the tyrants who held them in bondage. They have
plied them with every argument, and appealed to every motive. They have, dwelt
by turns on the bitterness of servitude and the sweetness of liberty.
But
never did patriot; or orator address his fellow-men on a geater occasion than
this–rarely, if ever, on one so great. Never did orator or patriot combat so
powerful an antagonist, or denounce so foul a slavery, or smite hypocrisy and
falsehood with blows so terrible. And if orator never displayed more eloquence,
orator never showed greater courage. This appeal was made in the face of a
thousand perils. On these Luther did not bestow a single thought. He saw only
his countrymen, and all the nations of Christendom, sunk in a most humiliating
and ruinous thraldom, and with fearless intrepidity and Herculean force he
hurled bolt on bolt, quick, rapid, and fiery, against that tyranny which was
devouring the earth. The man, the cause, the moment, the audience, all were
sublime.
And never was appeal more successful. Like a peal of thunder it
rang from side to side of Germany. It sounded the knell of Roman domination in
that land. The movement was no longer confined to Wittemberg; it was
henceforward truly national. It was no longer conducted exclusively by
theologians. Princes, nobles, burghers joined in it. It was seen to be no battle
of creed merely; it was a struggle for liberty, religious and civil; for rights,
spiritual and temporal; for the generation then living, for all the generations
that were to live in the future; a struggle, in fine, for the manhood of the
human race.
Luther's thoughts turned naturally to the new emperor. What
part will this young potentate play in the movement? Presuming that it would be
the just and magnanimous one that became so great a prince, Luther carried his
appeal to the foot of the throne of Charles V. "The cause," he said, "was worthy
to come before the throne of heaven, much more before an earthly potentate."
Luther knew that his cause would triumph, whichever side Charles might espouse.
But though neither Charles nor all the great ones of earth could stop it, or rob
it of its triumph, they might delay it; they might cause the Reformation's path
to be amid scaffolds and bloody fields, over armies vanquished and thrones cast
down. Luther would much rather that its progress should be peaceful and its
arrival at the goal speedy. Therefore he came before the throne of Charles as a
suppliant; trembling, not for his cause, but for those who he foresaw would but
destroy themselves by opposing it. What audience did the monk receive? Tho
emperor never deigned the doctor of Wittemberg a reply.
CHAPTER 2
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POPE LEO'S
BULL.
Eck at Rome – His Activity against Luther – Procures his
Condemnation – The Bull – Authorship of the Bull – Its Terms – Its Two Bearers –
The Bull crosses the Alps – Luther's "Babylonish Captivity " – The Sacrament –
His Extraordinary Letter to Pope Leo – Bull arrives in Wittemberg – Luther
enters a NotVerdana Protest against it – He Burns it – Astonishment and Rage of
Rome – Luther's Address to the Students.
WE have almost lost sight of Dr. Eck. We saw him,
after his disputation with Luther at Leipsic, set off for Rome. What was the
object of his journey? He crossed the Alps to solicit the Pope's help against
the man whom he boasted having vanquished. He was preceded by Cardinal Cajetan,
another "conqueror" after the fashion of Eck, and who too was so little
satisfied with the victory which he so loudly vaunted that, like Eck, he had
gone to Rome to seek help and find revenge.
In the metropolis of the
Papacy these men encountered greater difficulties than they had reckoned on. The
Roman Curia was apathetic. Its members had not yet realised the danger in its
full extent. They scouted the idea that Wittemberg would conquer Rome, and that
an insignificant monk could shake the Pontiff's throne. History exhibited no
example of any such astounding phenomenon. Great tempests had arisen in former
ages. Rebel kings, proud heresiarchs, and barbarous or heretical nations had
dashed themselves against the Papal chair, but their violence had no more
availed to overturn it than ocean's foam to overthrow the rock.
The
affair, however, was not without its risks, to which all were not blind. It was
easy for the Church to launch her ban, but the civil power must execute it. What
if it should refuse? Besides there were, even in Rome itself, a few moderate men
who, having a near view of thedisorders of the Papal court, were not in their
secret heart ill-pleased to hear Luther speak as he did. In the midst of so many
adulators, might not one honest censor be tolerated? There were also men of
diplomacy who said, Surely, amid the innumerable dignities and honors in the
gift of the Church, something may be found to satisfy this clamorous monk. Send
him a pall: give him a red hat. The members of the Curia were divided. The
jurists were for citing Luther again before pronouncing sentence upon him: the
theologians would brook no longer delay,[1] and pleaded for instant
anathema.
The indefatigable Eck left no stone unturned to procure the
condemnation of his opponent. He labored to gain over every one he came in
contact with. His eloquence raised to a white heat the zeal of the monks. He
spent hours of deliberation in the Vatican. He melted even the coldness of Leo.
He dwelt on the character of Luther–so obstinate and so incorrigible that all
attempts at conciliation were but a waste of time. He dwelt on the urgency of
the matter; while they sat in debate in the Vatican, the movement was growing by
days, by moments, in Germany. To second Eck's arguments, Cajetan, so ill as to
be unable to walk, was borne every day in a litter into the council-chamber.[2] The doctor of Ingolstadt
found another, and, it is said, even a more potent ally. This was no other than
the banker Fugger of Augsburg. He was treasurer of the indulgences, and would
have made a good thing of it if Luther had not spoilt his speculation. This
awoke in him a most vehement desire to crush a heresy so hurtful to the Church's
interest–and his own.
Meanwhile rumors reached Luther of what was
preparing for him in the halls of the Vatican. These rumors caused him no alarm;
his heart was fixed; he saw a Greater than Leo. A very different scene from Rome
did Wittemberg at that moment present. In the former city all was anxiety and
turmoil, in the latter all was peaceful and fruitful labor. Visitors from all
countries were daily arriving to see and converse with the Reformer. The halls
of the university were crowded with youth the hope of the Reformation. The fame
of Melanchthon was extending; he had just given his hand to Catherine Krapp, and
so formed the first link between the Reformation and domestic life, infusing
thereby a new sweetness into both. It was at this hour, too, that a young Swiss
priest was not ashamed to own his adherence to that Gospel which Luther
preached. He waited upon the interim Papal nuncio in Helvetia, entreating him to
use his influence at head-quarters to prevent the excommunication of the doctor
of Wittemberg. The name of this priest was Ulrich Zwingli. This was the first
break of day visible on the Swiss mountains.
Meanwhile Eck had triumphed
at Rome. On the 15th of June, 1520, the Sacred College brought their lengthened
deliberations to a close by agreeing to fulminate the bull of excommunication
against Luther. The elegancies or barbarisms of its style are to be shared
amongst its joint concoctors, Cardinals Pucci, Ancona, and Cajetan.[3]
"Now," thought the
Vulcans of the Vatican, when they had forged this bolt, "now we have finished
the business. There is an end of Luther and the Wittemberg heresy." To know how
haughty at this moment was Rome's spirit, we must turn to the bull itself.
The bull then goes on to condenm as scandalous,
heretical, and damnable, forty-one propositions extracted from the writings of
Luther. The obnoxious propositions are simple statements of Gospel truth. One of
the doctrines singled out for special anathema was that which took from Rome the
right of persecution, by declaring that "to burn heretics is contrary to the
will of the Holy Ghost."[5] After the maledictory
clauses of the bull, the document went on to extol the marvellous forbearance of
the Holy See, as shown in its many efforts to reclaim its erring son. To heresy
Luther had added contumacy. He 'had had the hardihood to appeal to the General
Council in the face of the decretals of Plus II. and Julius II.; and he had
filled up the measure of his sins by slandering the immaculate Papacy. The
Papacy, nevertheless, yearned over its lost son, and "imitating the omnipotent
God, who desireth not the death of a sinner," earnestly exhorted the prodigal to
return to the bosom of his mother, to bring back with him all he had led astray,
and make proof of the sincerity of his penitence by reading his recantation, and
committing all his books to the flames, within the space of sixty days. Failing
to obey this summons, Luther and his adherents were pronounced incorrigible and
accursed heretics, whom all princes and magistrates were enjoined to apprehend
and send to Rome, or banish from the country in which they happened to be found.
The towns where they continued to reside were laid under interdict, and every
one who opposed the publication and execution of the bull was excommunicated in
"the name of the Almighty God, and of the holy apostles, St. Peter and St.
Paul."[6]
These were haughty
words; and at what a moment were they spoken! The finger of a man's hand was
even then about to appear, and to write on the wall that Rome had fulfilled her
glory, had reached her zenith, and would henceforward hasten to her setting. But
she knew not this. She saw only the track of light she had left behind her in
her onward path athwart the ages. A thick veil hid the future with all its
humiliations and defeats from her eyes.
The Pope advanced with
excommunications in one hand and fiatteries in the other. Immediately on the
back of this terrible fulmination came a letter to the Elector Frederick from
Leo X. The Pope in this communication dilated on the errors of that "son of
iniquity," Martin Luther; he was sure that Frederick cherished an abhorrence of
these errors, and he proceeded to pass a glowing eulogium on the piety and
orthodoxy of the elector, who he knew would not permit the blackness of heresy
to sully the brightness of his own and his ancestors' fame [7] There was a day when these
compliments would have been grateful to Frederick, but he had since drunk at the
well of Wittemberg, and lost his relish for the Roman cistern. The object of the
letter was transparent, and the effect it produced was just the opposite of that
which the Pope intended. From that day Frederick of Saxony resolved with himself
that he would protect the Reformer.
Every step that Rome took in the
matter was marked by infatuation. She had launched her bull, and must needs see
to its being published in all the countries of Christendom. In order to this the
bull was put into the hands of two nuncios, than whom it would hardly have been
possible to find two men better fitted to render an odious mission yet more
odious. These were Eck and Aleander.
Eck, the conqueror at Leipsic, who
had left amid the laughter of the Germans, now re-crosses the Alps. He bears in
his hand the bull that is to complete the ruin of his antagonist. "It is Eck's
bull," said the Germans, "not the Pope's." It is the treacherous dagger of a
mortal enemy, not the axe of a Roman lictor [8] Onward, however, came the
nuncio, proud of the bull, which he had so large a share in fabricating–the very
Atlas, in his own eyes, who bore up the sinking Roman world. As he passed
through the German towns, he posted up the important document, amid the coldness
of the bishops, the contempt of the burghers, and the hootings of the youth of
the universities. His progress was more like that of a fugitive than a
conqueror. He had to hide at times from the popular fury in the nearest convent,
and he closed his career by going into permanent seclusion at Coburg.
The
other functionary was Aleander. To him was committed the task of bearing a copy
of the bull to the Archbishop of Mainz, and of publishing it in the Rhenish
towns. Aleander had been secretary to Pope Alexander VI., the infamous Borgia;
and no worthier bearer could have been found of such a missive, and no happier
choice could have been made of a colleague to Eck. "A worthy pair of
ambassadors," said some; "both are admirably suited for this work, and perfectly
matched in effrontery, impudence, and debauchery."[9]
The bull is slowly
travelling towards Luther, and a glance at two publications which at this time
(6th of October, 1520) issued from his pen, enables us to judge how far he is
likely to meet it with a retractation. The Pope had exhorted him to burn all his
writing: here are two additional ones which will have to be added to the heap
before he applies the torch. The first is The Babylonish Captivity of the Chuch.
"I denied," said Luther, owning his obligations to his adversaries, "that the
Papacy was of Divine origin, but I granted that it was of human right. Now,
after reading all the subtleties on which these gentry have set up their idol, I
know that the Papacy is none other than the kingdom of Babylon, and the violence
of Nimrod the mighty hunter [10] I therefore beseech all my
friends and all the booksellers to burn the books that I have written on this
subject, and to substitute this; one proposition in their place: The Papacy is a
general chase led by the Roman bishop to catch and destroy souls." These are not
the words of a man who is about to present himself in the garb of a penitent at
the threshold of the Roman See.
Luther next passed in review the
Sacramental theory of the Church of Rome. The priest and the Sacrament – these
are the twin pillars of the Papal edifice, the two saviours of the world.
Luther, in his Babylonish Captivity, laid his hands upon both pillars, and bore
them to the ground. Grace and salvation, he affirmed, are neither in the power
of the priest nor in the efficacy of the Sacrament, but in the faith of the
recipient. Faith lays hold on that which the Sacrament represents, signifies,
and seals–even the promise of God; and the soul resting on that promise has
grace and salvation. The Sacrament, on the side of God, represents the offered
blessing; on the side of man, it is a help to faith which lays hold of that
blessing. "Without faith in God's promise," said Luther, "the Sacrament is dead;
it is a casket without a jewel, a scabbard without a sword." Thus did he explode
the opus operatum, that great mystic charm which Rome had substituted for faith,
and the blessed Spirit who works in the soul by means of it. At the very moment
when Rome was advancing to crush him with the bolt she had just forged, did
Luther pluck from her hand that weapon of imaginary omnipotence which had
enabled her to vanquish men.
Nay, more: turning to Leo himself, Luther
did not hesitate to address him at this crisis in words of honest warning, and
of singular courage. We refer, of course, to his well-known letter to the Pope.
Some of the passages of that letter read like a piece of sarcasm, or a bitter
satire; and yet it was written in no vein of this sort. The spirit it breathes
is that of intense moral earnestness, which permitted the writer to think but of
one thing, even the saving of those about to sink in a great destruction. Not
thus did Luther write when he wished to pierce an opponent with the shafts of
his wit, or to overwhelm him with the bolts of his indignation. The words he
addressed to Leo were not those of insolence or of hatred, though some have
taken them for such, but of affection too deep to remain silent, and too honest
and fearless to flatter. Luther could distinguish between Leo and the ministers
of his government.
We need give only a few extracts from this
extraordinary letter: –
Luther next enters into some detail touching his communications with De Vio, Eck, and Miltitz, the agents who had come from the Roman court to make him cease his opposition to the Papal corruptions. And then he closes–
That he might not appear before the Pope
empty-handed, he accompanied his letter with a little book on the "Liberty of
the Christian." The two poles of that liberty he describes as faith and love;
faith which makes the Christian free, and love which makes him the servant of
all. Having presented this little treatise to one who "needed only spiritual
gifts," he adds, "I commend myself to your Holiness. May the Lord keep you for
ever and ever! Amen."
So spoke Luther to Leo–the monk of Wittemberg to
the Pontiff of Christendom. Never were spoken words of greater truth, and never
were words of truth spoken in circumstances in which they were more needed, or
at greater peril to the speaker. If we laud historians who have painted in
truthful colors, at a safe distance, the character of tyrants, and branded their
vices with honest indignation, we know not on what principle we can refuse to
Luther our admiration and praise. Providence so ordered it that before the final
rejection of a Church which had once been renowned throughout the earth for its
faith, Truth, once more and for the last time, should lift up her voice at
Rome.
The bull of excommunication arrived at Wittemberg in October, 1520.
It had ere this been published far and wide, and almost the last man to see it
was the man against whom it was fulminated. But here at last it is. Luther and
Leo: Wittemberg and Rome now stand face to face–Rome has excommunicated
Wittemberg, and Wittemberg will excommunicate Rome. Neither can retreat, and the
war must be to the death.
The bull could not be published in Wittemberg,
for the university possessed in this matter powers superior to those of the
Bishop of Brandenburg. It did, indeed, receive publication at Wittemberg, and
that of a very emphatic kind, as we shall afterwards see, but not such
publication as Eck wished and anticipated. The arrival of the terrible missive
caused no fear in the heart of Luther. On the contrary, it inspired him with
fresh courage. The movement was expanding into greater breadth. He saw clearly
the hand of God guiding it to its goal.
Meanwhile the Reformer took those
formal measures that were necessary to indicate his position in the eyes of the
world, in the eyes of the Church which had condemned him, and in the eyes of
posterity. He renewed his appeal with all solemnity from Leo X. to a future
Council.[11] On Saturday, the 17th of
November, at ten o'clock in the morning, in the Augustine convent where he
resided, in the presence of a notary public and five witnesses, among whom was
Caspar Cruciger, he entered a solemn protest against the bull. The notary took
down his words as he uttered them. His appeal was grounded on the four following
points:–First, because he stood condemned without having been heard, and without
any reason or proof assigned of his being in error. Second, because he was
required to deny that Christian faith was essential to the efficacious reception
of the Sacrament. Third, because the Pope exalts his own opinions above the Word
of God; and Fourth, because, as a proud contemner of the Holy Church of God, and
of a legitimate Council, the Pope had refused to convoke a Council of the
Church, declaring that a Council is nothing of itself.
This was not
Luther's affair only, but that of all Christendom, and accordingly he
accompanied his protest against the bull by a solemn appeal to the "emperor, the
electors, princes, barons, nobles, senators, and the entire Christian magistracy
of Germany," calling upon them, for the sake of Catholic truth, the Church of
Christ, and the liberty and right of a lawful Council, to stand by him and his
appeal, to resist the impious tyranny of the Pope, and not to execute the bull
till he had been legally summoned and heard before impartial judges, and
convicted from Scripture. Should they act dutifully in this matter, "Christ, our
Lord," he said, "would reward them with His everlasting grace. But if there be
any who scorn my prayer, and continue to obey that impious man, the Pope, rather
than God," he disclaimed all responsibility for the consequences, and left them
to the supreme judgment of Almighty God.
In the track of the two nuncios
blazed numerous piles–not of men, as yet, but of books, the writings of Luther.
In Louvain, in Cologne, and many other towns in the hereditary estates of the
emperor, a bonfire had been made of his works. To these many piles of Eck and
Aleander, Luther replied by kindling one pile. He had written his bill of
divorcement, now he will give a sign that he has separated irrevocably from
Rome.
A placard on the walls of the University of Wittemberg announced
that it was Luther's intention to burn the Pope's bull, and that this would take
place at nine o'clock in the morning of December 10th, at the eastern gate of
the town. On the day and hour appointed, Luther was seen to issue from the gate
of the university, followed by a train of doctors and students to the number of
600, and a crowd of citizens who enthusiastically sympathised. The procession
held on its way through the streets of Wittemberg, till, making its exit at the
gate, it bore out of the city–for all unclean things were burned without the
camp–the bull of the Pontiff.
Arriving at the spot where this new and
strange immolation was to take place, the members of procession found a scaffold
already erected, and a pile of logs laid in order upon it. One of the more
distinguished Masters of Arts took the torch and applied it to the pile. Soon
the flames blazed up. At this moment, the Reformer, wearing the frock of his
order, stepped out from the crowd and approached the fire, holding in his hand
the several volumes which constitute the Canon Law, the Compend of Gratian, the
Clementines, the Extravagants of Julius II., and other and later coinages of the
Papal mint. He placed these awful volumes one after the other on the blazing
pile.
It fared with them as if they had been common things. Their
mysterious virtue did not profit in the fire. The flames, fastening on them with
their fierce tongues, speedily turned these monuments of the toil, the genius,
and the infallibility of the Popes to ashes. This hecatomb of Papal edicts was
not yet complete. The bull of Leo X. still remained. Luther held it up in his
hand. "Since thou hast vexed the Holy One of the Lord," said he, "may
everlasting fire vex and consume thee."[12] With these words he flung
it into the burning mass. Eck had pictured to himself the terrible bull, as he
bore it in triumph across the Alps, exploding in ruin above the head of the
monk. A more peaceful exit awaited it. For a few moments it blazed and crackled
in the flames, and then it calmly mingled its dust with the ashes of its
predecessors, that winter morning, on the smouldering pile outside the walls of
Wittemberg.[13]
The blow had been
struck. The procession reformed. Doctors, masters, students, and townsmen, again
gathering round the Reformer, walked back, amid demonstrations of triumph, to
the city.
Had Luther begun his movement with this act, he would but have
wrecked it. Men would have seen only fury and rage, where now they saw courage
and faith. The Reformer began by posting up his "Theses"–by letting in the light
upon the dark pIaces of Rome. Now, however, the minds of men were to a large
extent prepared. The burning of the bull was, therefore, the right act at the
right time. It was felt to be the act, not of a solitary monk, but of the German
people–the explosion of a nation's indignation. The tidings of it traveled fast
and far; and when the report reached Rome, the powers of the Vatican trembled
upon their seats. It sounded like the Voice that is said to have echoed through
the heathen world at our Savior's birth, and which awoke lamentations and
wailings amid the shrines and groves of paganism: "Great Pan is
dead!"
Luther knew that one blow would not win the battle; that the war
was only commenced, and must be followed up by ceaseless, and if possible still
mightier blows. Accordingly next day, as he was lecturing on the Psalms, he
reverted to the episode of the bull, and broke out into a strain of impassioned
eloquence and invective. The burning of the Papal statutes, said he, addressing
the crowd of students that thronged the lecture-room, is but the sigal, the
thing signified was what they were to aim at, even the conflagration of the
Papacy. His brow gathered and his voice grew more solemn as he continued:
The burning of the Pope's bull marks the closing of one stage and the opening of another in the great movement. It defines the fullness of Luther's doctrinal views; and it was this matured and perfected judgment respecting the two systems and the two Churches, that enabled him to act with such decision–a decision which astounded Rome, and which brought numerous friends around himself. Rome never doubted that her bolt would crush the monk. She had stood in doubt as to whether she ought to launch it, but she never doubted that, once launched, it would accomplish the suppression of the Wittemberg revolt. For centuries no opponent had been able to stand before her. In no instance had her anathemas failed to execute the vengeance they were meant to inflict. Kings and nations, principalities and powers, when struck by excommunication, straightway collapsed and perished as if a vial of fire had been emptied upon them. And who was this Wittemberg heretic, that he should defy a power before which the whole world crouched in terror? Rome had only to speak, to stretch out her arm, to let fall her bolt, and this adversary would be swept from her path; nor name nor memorial would remain to him on earth. Rome would make Wittemberg and its movement a reproach, a hissing, and a desolation. She did speak, she did stretch out her arm, she did launch her bolt. And what was the result? To Rome a terrible and appalling one. The monk, rising up in his strength, grasped the bolt hurled against him from the Seven Hills, and flung it back at her from whom it came.
CHAPTER 3
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INTERVIEWS AND
NEGOTIATIONS.
A Spring-time – The New Creation – Three Circles – The
Inner Reformed Doctrine-The MiddleMorality and Liberty – The Outer – The Arts
and Sciences – Charles V. Crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle – Papal Envoy Aleander
Labors to have the Bull executed against Luther – His Efforts with Frederick and
Charles – Prospect of a War with France – The Emperor courts the Pope – Luther
to be the Bribe – The Pope Won – The Court goes to Worms – A Tournament
Interrupted – The Emperor's Draft – Edict for Luther's
Execution.
FROM the posting of the "Theses" on the doors of the
Schloss Kirk of Wittemberg, on October 31st, 1517, to the burning of the Pope's
bull on December 10th, 1520, at the eastern gate of the same town, are just
three years and six weeks. In these three short years a great change has taken
place in the opinions of men, and indeed in those of Luther himself. A blessed
spring-time seems to have visited the world. How sweet the light! How gracious
the drops that begin to fall out of heaven upon the weary earth! What a gladness
fills the souls of men, and what a deep joy breaks out on every side, making
itself audible in the rising songs of the nations, which, gathering around the
standard of a recovered Gospel, now "come," in fulfilment of an ancient oracle,
"unto Zion with singing! "
The movement we are contemplating has many
circles or spheres. We trace it into the social life of man; there we see it
bringing with it purity and virtue. We trace it into the world of intellect and
letters; there it is the parent of rigour and grace–a literature whose bloom is
fairer, and whose fruit is sweeter than the ancient one, immediately springs up.
We trace it into the politics of nations; there it is the nurse of order, and
the guardian of liberty. Under its aegis there grow up mighty thrones, and
powerful and prosperous nations. Neither is the monarch a tyrant, nor are the
subjects slaves; because the law is superor to both, and forbids power to grow
into oppression, or liberty to degenerate into licentiousness. Over the whole of
life does the movement diffuse itself. It has no limits but those of society–of
the world.
But while its circumference was thus vast, we must never
forget that its center was religion or dogma–great everlasting truths, acting on
the soul of man, and effecting its renewal, and so restoring both the individual
and society to right relations with God, and bringing both into harmony with the
holy, beneficent, and omnipotent government of the Eternal. This was the pivot
on which the whole movement rested, the point around which it
revolved.
At that center were lodged the vital forces–the truths. These
ancient, simple, indestructible, changeless powers came originally from Heaven;
they constitute the life of humanity, and while they remain at its heart it
cannot die, nor can it lose its capacity of reinvigoration and progress. These
life-containing and life-giving principles had, for a thousand years past, been
as it were in a sepulcher, imprisoned in the depths of the earth. But now, in
this gracious spring-time, their bands were loosed, and they had come forth to
diffuse themselves over the whole field of human life, and to manifest their
presence and action in a thousand varied and beautiful forms.
Without
this center, which is theology, we never should have had the outer circles of
this movement, which are science, literature, art, commerce, law, liberty. The
progress of a being morally constituted, as society is, must necessarily rest on
a moral basis. The spiritual forces, which Luther was honored to be the
instrument of once more setting in motion, alone could originate this movement,
and conduct it to such a goal as would benefit the world. The love of letters,
and the love of liberty, were all too weak for this. They do not go deep enough,
nor do they present a sufficiently high aim, nor supply motives strong enough to
sustain the toil, the self-denial, the sacrifice by which alone the end aimed at
in any true reformation can be attained. Of this the history of Protestantism
furnishes us with two notable examples. Duke George of Saxony was a prince of
truly national spirit, and favored the movement at the first, because he saw
that it embodied a resistance to foreign tyranny. But his hatred to the doctrine
of grace made him, in no long time, one of its bitterest enemies. He complained
that Luther was spoiling all by his "detestable doctrines," not knowing that it
was the doctrines that won hearts, and that it was the hearts that furnished
swords to fight the battle of civil liberty.
The career of Erasmus was a
nearly equally melancholy one. He had many feelings and sympathies in common
with Luther. The Reformation owes him much for his edition of the Greek New
Testament.[1] Yet neither his refined
taste, nor his exquisite scholarship, nor his love of liberty, nor his
abhorrence of monkish ignorance could retain him on the side of Protestantism;
and the man who had dealt Rome some heavy blows, when in his prime, sought
refuge when old within the pale of Romanism, leaving letters and liberty to care
for themselves.
We turn for a little while from Luther to Charles V.,
from Wittemberg to Aix-la-Chapelle. The crown of Charlemagne was about to be
placed on the head of the young emperor, in the presence of the electoral
princes, the dukes, archbishops, barons, and counts of the Empire, and the
delegates of the Papal See. Charles had come from Spain to receive the regalia
of empire, taking England in his way, where he spent four days in attempts to
secure the friendship of Henry VIII., and detach his powerful and ambitious
minister, Cardinal Wolsey, from the interests of the French king, by dangling
before his eyes the brilliant prize of the Papal tiara. Charles was crowned on
the 23rd of October, in presence of a more numerous and splendid assembly than
had ever before gathered to witness the coronation of emperor.
Having
fallen prostrate on the cathedral floor and said his prayers, Charles was led to
the altar and sworn to keep the Catholic faith and defend the Church. He was
next placed on a throne overlaid with gold. While mass was being sung he was
anointed on the head, the breast, the armpits, and the palms of his hands. Then
he was led to the vestry, and clothed as a deacon. Prayers having been said, a
naked sword was put into his hand, and again he promised to defend the Church
and the Empire. Sheathing the sword, he was attired in the imperial mantle, and
received a ring, with the scepter and the globe. Finally, three archbishops
placed the crown upon his head; and the coronation was concluded with a
proclamation by the Archbishop of Mainz, to the effect that the Pope confirmed
what had been done, and that it was his will that Charles V. should reign as
emperor.[2]
Along with the
assemblage at Aix-la-Chapelle came a visitor whose presence was neither expected
nor desired–the plague; and the moment the coronation was over, Charles V. and
his brilliant suite took their departure for Cologne. The emperor was now on his
way to Worms, where he purposed holding his first Diet. The rules of the Golden
Bull had specially reserved that honor for Nuremberg; but the plague was at
present raging in that town also, and Worms was chosen in preference. In the
journey thither the court halted at Cologne, and in this ancient city on the
banks of the Rhine were commenced those machinations which culminated at the
Diet of Worms.
The Papal See had delegated two special envoys to the
imperial court to look after the affair of Luther, Marino Caraccioli, and
Girolamo Aleander.[3]
This matter now
held the first place in the thoughts of the Pope and his counsellors. They even
forgot the Turk for the time. All their efforts to silence the monk or to arrest
the movement had hitherto been in vain, or rather had just the opposite effect.
The alarm in the Vatican was great. The champions sent by Rome to engage Luther
had one after another been discomfited. Tetzel, the great indulgence-monger,
Luther had put utterly to rout. Cajetan, the most learned of their theologians,
he had completely baffled. Eck, the ablest of their polemics, he had vanquished;
the plausible Miltitz had spread his snares in vain, he had been outwitted and
befooled; last of all, Leo himself had descended into the arena; but he had
fared no better than the others; he had been even more ignominiously handled,
for the audacious monk had burned his bull in the face of all
Christendom.
Where was all this to end? Already the See of Rome had
sustained immense damage. Pardons were becoming unsaleable. Annats and
reservations and first-fruits were, alas! withheld; holy shrines were forsaken;
the authority of the keys and the ancient regalia of Peter was treated with
contempt; the canon law, that mighty monument of Pontifical wisdom and justice,
which so many minds had toiled to rear, was treated as a piece of lumber, and
irreverently thrown upon the buring pile; worst of all, the Pontifical thunder
had lost its terrors, and the bolt which had shaken monarchs on their thrones
was daringly flung back at the thunderer himself. It was time to curb such
audacity and punish such wickedness.
The two envoys at the court of the
emperor left no stone unturned to bring the matter to an issue. Of the two
functionaries the more zealous was Aleander, who has already come before us. An
evil prestige attached to him for his connection with the Papal See during the
most infamous of its Pontificates, that of Alexander VI.; but he possessed great
abilities, he had scholarly tastes, indefatigable industry, and profound
devotion to the See of Rome. She had at that hour few men in her service better
able to conduct to a favorable issue this difficult and dangerous negotiation.
Luther sums up graphically his qualities. "Hebrew was his mother-tongue, Greek
he had studied from his boyhood, Latin he had long taught professionally. He was
a Jew,[4] but whether he had ever
been baptised he did not know. He was no Pharisee, however, for certainly he did
not believe in the resurrection of the dead, seeing he lived as if all perished
with the body. His greed was insatiable, his life abominable, his anger at times
amounted to insanity. Why he seceded to the Christians he knew not, unless it
were to glorify Moses by obscuring Christ.[5]
Aleander opened the
campaign with a bonfire of Luther's writings at Cologne. "What matters it," said
some persons to the Papal delegate, "to erase the writing on paper? it is the
writing on men's hearts you ought to erase. Luther's opinions are written
there." "True," replied Aleander, comprehending his age, "but we must teach by
signs which all can read."[6]
Aleander, however,
wished to bring something else to the burning pile–the author of the books even.
But first he must get him into his power. The Elector of Saxony stood between
him and the man whom he wished to destroy. He must detach Frederick from
Luther's side. He must also gain over the young emperor Charles. The last ought
to be no difficult matter.
Born in the old faith, descended from an
ancestry whose glories were entwined with Catholicism, tutored by Adrian of
Utrecht, surely this young and ambitious monarch will not permit a contemptible
monk to stand between him and the great projects he is revolving! Deprived of
the protection of Frederick and Charles, Luther will be in the nuncio's power,
and then the stake will very soon stifle that voice which is rousing Germany and
resounding through Europe! So reasoned Aleander; but he found the path beset
with greater difficulties than he had calculated on meeting.
Neither zeal
nor labor nor adroitness was lacking to the nuncio. He went first to the
emperor. "We have burned Luther's books," he said [7] –the emperor had permitted
these piles to be kindled–" but the whole air is thick with heresy. We require,
in order to its purification, an imperial edict against their author." "I must
first ascertain," replied the emperor, "what our father the Elector of Saxony
thinks of this matter."
It was clear that before making progress with the
emperor the elector must be managed. Aleandor begged an audience of Frederick.
The elector received him in the presence of his counsellors, and the Bishop of
Trent. The haughty envoy of the Papal court assumed a tone bordering on
insolence in the elector's presence. He pushed aside Caraccioli, his
fellow-envoy, who was trying to win Frederick by flatteries, and plunged at once
into the business. This Luther, said Aleander, is rending the Christian State;
he is bringing the Empire to ruin; the man who unites himself with him separates
himself from Christ. Frederick alone, he affirmed, stood between the monk and
the chastisement he deserved, and he concluded by demanding that the elector
should himself punish Luther, or deliver him up to the chastiser of heretics,
Rome [8]
The elector met the
bold assault of Aleander with the plea of justice. No one, he said, had yet
refued Luther; it would be a gross scandal to punish a man who had not been
condemned; Luther must be summoned before a tribunal of pious, learned, and
impartial judges.[9]
This pointed to the
Diet about to meet at Worms, and to a public hearing of the cause of
Protestantism before that august assembly. Than this proposal nothing could have
been more alarming to Aleander. He knew the courage and eloquence of Luther. Hie
dreaded the impression his appearance before the Diet would make upon the
princes. He had no ambition to grapple with him in person, or to win any more
victories of the sort that Eck so loudly boasted. He knew how popular his cause
already was all over Germany, and how necessary it was to avoid everything that
would give it additional prestige. In his journeys, wherever he was known as the
opponent of Luther, it was with difficulty that he could find admittance at a
respectable inn, while portraits of the redoubtable monk stared upon him from
the walls of almost every bedroom in which he slept. He knew that the writing of
Luther were in all dwellings from the baron's castle to the peasant's cottage.
Besides, would it not be an open affront to his master the Pope, who had
excommunicated Luther, to permit him to plead his cause before a lay assembly?
Would it not appear as if the Pope's sentence might be reversed by military
barons, and the chair of Peter made subordinate to the States-General of
Germany? On all these grounds the Papal nuncio was resolved to oppose to the
uttermost Luther's appearance before the Diet.
Aleander now turned from
the Elector of Saxony to the emperor. "Our hope of conquering," he wrote to the
Cardinal Julio de Medici, "is in the emperor only."[10] In the truth or falsehood
of Luther's opinions the emperor took little interest. The cause with him
resolved itself into one of policy. He asked simply which would further most his
political projects, to protect Luther or to burn him? Charles appeared the most
powerful man in Christendom, and yet there were two men with whom he could not
afford to quarrel, the Elector of Saxony and the Pontiff. To the first he owed
the imperial crown, for it was Frederick's influence in the electoral conclave
that placed it on the head of Charles of Austria. This obligation might have
been forgotten, for absolute monarchs have short memories, but Charles coutd not
dispense with the advice and aid of Frederick in the government of the Empire at
the head of which he had just been placed. For these reasons the emperor wished
to stand well with the elector.
On the other hand, Charles could not
afford to break with the Pope. He was on the brink of war with Francis I., the
King of France. That chivalrous sovereign had commenced his reign by crossing
the Alps and fighting the battle of Marignano (1515), which lasted three
days–"the giant battle," as Marshal Trivulzi called it.[11] This victory gained
Francis I. the fame of a warrior, and the more substantial acquisition of the
Duchy of Milan. The Emperor Charles meditated despoiling the French king of this
possession, and extending his own influence in Italy. The Italian Peninsula was
the prize for which the sovereigns of that age contended, seeing its possession
gave its owner the preponderance in Europe. This aforetime frequent contest
between the Kings of Spain and France was now on the point of being resumed. But
Charles would speed all the better if Leo of Rome were on his side.
It
occurred to Charles that the monk of Wittemberg was a most opportune card to be
played in the game about to begin. If the Pope should engage to aid him in his
war with the King of France, Charles would give Luther into his hands, that he
might do with him as might seem good to him. But should the Pope refuse his aid,
and join himself to Francis, the emperor would protect the monk, and make him an
opposing power against Leo. So stood the matter. Meanwhile, negotiations were
being carried on with the view of ascertaining on which side Leo, who dreaded
both of these potentates, would elect to make his stand, and what in consequence
would be the fate of the Reformer, imperial protection or imperial
condemnation.
In this fashion did these great ones deal with the cause of
the world's regeneration. The man who was master of so many kingdoms, in both
the Old and the New Worlds, was willing, if he could improve his chances of
adding the Dukedom of Milan to his already overgrown possessions, to fling into
the flames the Reformer, and with him the movement out of which was coming the
new times. The monk was in their hands; so they thought. How would it have
astonished them to be told that they were in his hands, to be used by him as his
cause might require; that their crowns, armies, and policies were shaped and
moved, prospered or defeated, with sole reference to those great spiritual
forces which Luther wielded! Wittemberg was small among the many proud capitals
of the world, yet here, and not at Madrid or at Paris, was, at this hour, the
center of human affairs.
The imperial court moved forward to Worms. The
two Papal representatives, Caraccioli and Aleander, followed in the emperor's
train. Feats of chivalry, parties of pleasure, schemes of ambition and conquest,
occupied the thoughts of others; the two nuncios were engrossed with but one
object, the suppression of the religious movement; and to effect this all that
was necessary, they persuaded themselves, was to bring Luther to the stake.
Charles had summoned the Diet for the 6th of January, 1521. In his circular
letters to the several princes, he set forth the causes for which it was
convoked. One of these was the appointment of a council of regency for the
government of the Empire during his necessary absences in his hereditary kingdom
of Spain; but another, and still more prominent matter in the letters of
convocation, was the concerting of proper measures for checking those new and
dangerous opinions which so profoundly agitated Germany, and threatened to
overthrow the religion of their ancesters.[12]
Many interests,
passions, and motives combined to bring together at Worms, on this occasion, a
more numerous and brilliant assemblage than perhaps had ever been gathered
together at any Diet since the days of Charlemagne. It was the emperor's first
Diet. His youth, and the vast dominions over which his scepter was swayed, threw
a singular interest around him. The agitation in the minds of men, and the
gravity of the affairs to be discussed, contributed further to draw
unprecedented numbers to the Diet. Far and near, from the remotest parts, came
the grandees of Germany. Every road leading to Worms displayed a succession of
gay cavalcades. The electors, with their courts; the axchbishops, with their
chapters; margraves and barons, with their military retainers; the delegates of
the various cities, in the badges of their office; bands of seculars and
regulars, in the habits of their order; the ambassadors of foreign States–all
hastened to Worms, where a greater than Charles was to present himself before
them, and a cause greater than that of the Empire was to unfold its claims in
their hearing.
The Diet was opened on the 28th of January, 1521. It was
presided over by Charles–a pale-faced, melancholy-looking prince of twenty,
accomplished in feats of horsemanship, but of weak bodily constitution.
Thucydides and Machiavelli were the authors he studied. Chievres directed his
councils; but he does not appear to have formed as yet any decided plan of
policy. "Charles had chiefly acquired from history," says Muller, "the art of
dissimulating, which he confounded with the talent of governing."[13] Amid the splendor that
surrounded him, numberless affairs and perplexities perpetually distracted him;
but the pivot on which all turned was the monk of Wittemberg and this religious
movement. The Papal nuncios were night and day importuning him to execute the
Papal bull against Luther. If he should comply with their solicitations and give
the monk into their hands, he would alienate the Elector of Saxony, and kindle a
conflagration in Germany which all his power might not be able to extinguish.
If, on the other hand, he should refuse Aleander and protect Luther, he would
thereby grievously offend the Pope, and send him over to the side of the French
king, who was every day threatening to break out into war against him in the Low
Countries, or in Lombardy, or in both.
There were tournaments and
pastimes on the surface, anxieties and perplexities underneath; there were
feastings in the banquet-hall, intrigues in the cabinet. The vacillations of the
imperial mind can be traced in the conflicting orders which the emperor was
continually sending to the Elector Frederick. One day he would write to him to
bring Luther with him to Worms, the next he would command him to leave him
behind at Wittemberg. Meanwhile Frederick arrived at the Diet without
Luther.
The opposition which Aleander encountered only roused him to yet
greater energy–indeed, almost to fury. He saw with horror the Protestant
movement advancing from one day to another, while Rome was losing ground.
Grasping his pen, he wrote a strong remonstrance to the Cardinal de Medici, the
Pope's relative, to the effect that "Germany was separating itself from Rome;"
and that, unless more money was sent to be scattered amongst the members of the
Diet, he must abandon all hope of success in his negotiations,[14] Rome listened to the cry
of her servant. She sent not only more ducats, but more anathemas. Her first
bull against Luther had been conditional, inasmuch as it called on him to
retract, and threatened him with excommunication if, within sixty days, he
failed to do so. Now, however, the excommunication was actually inflicted by a
new bull, fulminated at this time (6th January, 1521), and ordered to be
published with terrible solemnities in all the churches of Germany.[15] This bull placed all
Luther's adherents under the same curse as himself; and thus was completed the
separation between Protestantism and Rome. The excision, pronounced and sealed
by solemn anathema, was the act of Rome herself.
This new step simplified
matters to both Aleander and Luther, but it only the more embroiled them to the
emperor and his councillors. The politicians saw their path less clearly than
before. It appeared to them the wiser course to stifle the movement, but the new
ban seemed to compel them to fan it. This would be to lose the Elector even
before they had gained the Pope; for the negotiations with the court of the
Vatican had reached as yet no definite conclusion. They must act warily, and
shun extremes.
A new device was hit upon, which was sure to succeed, the
diplomatists thought, in entrapping the theologians of Wittemberg. There was at
the court of the emperor a Spanish Franciscan, John Glapio by name, who held the
office of confessor to Charles. He was supple, plausible, and able. This man
undertook to arrange the matter [16] which had baffled so many
wise heads; and with this view he craved an interview with Gregory Bruck, or
Pontanus, the councillor of the Elector of Saxony. Pontanus was a man of
sterling integrity, competently versed in theological questions, and sagacious
enough to see through the most cunning diplomatist in all the court of the
emperor. Glapio was a member of the reform party within the Roman pale, a
circumstance which favored the guise he now assumed. At his interview with the
councillor of Frederick, Glapio professed a very warm regard for Luther; he had
read his writings with admiration, and he agreed with him in the main. "Jesus
Christ,[17] he said, heaving a deep
sigh, "was his witness that he desired the reformation of the Church as ardently
as Luther, or any one." He had often protested his zeal on this head to the
emperor, and Charles sympathised largely with his views, as the world would yet
come to know.
From the general eulogium pronounced on the writings of
Luther, Glapio excepted one work–the Babylonish Captivity. That work was not
worthy of Luther, he maintained. He found in it neither his style nor his
learning.
Luther must disavow it. As for the rest of his works, he would
propose that they should be submitted to a select body of intelligent and
impartial men, that Luther should explain some things and apologise for others;
and then the Pope, in the plenitude of his power and benignity, would reinstate
him. Thus the breach would be healed, and the affair happily ended.[18] Such was the little
artifice with which the wise heads at the court of Charles hoped to accomplish
so great things. They only showed how little able they were to gauge the man
whom they wished to entrap, or to fathom the movement which they sought to
arrest. Pontanus looked on while they were spreading the net, with a mild
contempt; and Luther listened to the plot, when it was told him, with feelings
of derision.
The negotiations between the emperor and the court of the
Vatican, which meanwhile had been going on, were now brought to a conclusion.
The Pope agreed to be the ally of Charles in his approaching war with the French
king, and the emperor, on his part, undertook to please the Pope in the matter
of the monk of Wittemberg. The two are to unite, but the link between them is a
stake. The Empire and the Popedom are to meet and shake hands over the ashes of
Luther. During the two centuries which included and followed the Pontificate of
Gregory VII., the imperial diadem and the tiara had waged a terrible war with
each other for the supremacy of Christendom. In that age the two shared the
world between them–other competitor there was none. But now a new power had
risen up, and the hatred and terror which both felt to that new power made these
old enemies friends. The die is cast. The spiritual and the temporal arms have
united to crush Protestantism.
The emperor prepared to fulfill his part
of the arrangement. It was hard to see what should hinder him. He had an
overwhelming force of kingdoms and armies at his back. The spiritual sword,
moreover, was now with him.
If with such a combination of power he could
not sweep this troublesome monk from his path, it would be a thing so strange
and unaccountable that history might be searched in vain for a parallel to
it.
It was now the beginning of February. The day was to be devoted to a
splendid tournament. The lists were already marked out, the emperor's tent was
pitched; over it floated the imperial banner; the princes and knights were
girding on their armor, and the fair spectators of the show were preparing the
honors and prizes to reward the feats of gallantry which were to signalise the
mimic war, when suddenly an imperial messenger appeared commanding the
attendance of the princes in the royal palace. It was a real tragedy in which
they were invited to take part. When they had assembled, the emperor produced
and read the Papal brief which had lately arrived from Rome, enjoining him to
append the imperial sanction to the excommunication against Luther, and to give
immediate execution to the bull. A yet greater surprise awaited them. The
emperor next drew forth and read to the assembled princes the edict which he
himself had drawn up in conformity with the Papal brief, commanding that it
should be done as the Pope desired.
CHAPTER 4
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LUTHER SUMMONED TO
THE DIET AT WORMS.
A Check – Aleander Pleads before the Diet –
Protestantism more Frightful than Mahommedanism – Effect of Aleander's Speech –
Duke George – The Hundred and One Grievances – The Princes Demand that Luther be
Heard – The Emperor resolves to Summon him to the Diet – A
Safe-conduct–Maunday-Thursday at Rome – The Bull In Caena Domini – Luther's Name
Inserted in it – Luther comes to the Fulness of Knowledge – Arrival of the
Imperial Messenger at Wittemberg – The Summons.
YET the storm did not burst. We have seen produced
the Pope's bull of condemnation; we have heard read the emperor's edict
empowering the temporal arm to execute the spiritual sentence; we have only a
few days to wait, so it seems, and we shall see the Reformer dragged to the
stake and burned. But to accomplish this one essential thing was yet lacking.
The constitution of the Empire required that Charles, before proceeding further,
should add that "if the States knew any better course, he was ready to hear
them." The majority of the German magnates cared little for Luther, but they
cared a good deal for their prescriptive rights; they hated the odious tyranny
and grinding extortions of Rome, and they felt that to deliver up Luther was to
take the most effectual means to rivet the yoke that galled their own necks. The
princes craved time for deliberation. Aleander was furious; he saw the prey
about to be plucked from his very teeth. But the emperor submitted with a good
grace. "Convince this assembly," said the politic monarch to the impatient
nuncio. It was agreed that Aleander should be heard before the Diet on the 13th
of February.
It was a proud day for the nuncio. The assembly was a great
one: the cause was even greater. Aleander was to plead for Rome, the mother and
mistress of all churches: he was to vindicate the princedom of Peter before the
assembled puissances of Christendom. He had the gift of eloquence, and he rose
to the greatness of the occasion. Providence ordered it that Rome should appear
and plead by the ablest of her orators in the presence of the most august of
tribunals, before she was condemned. The speech has been recorded by one of the
most trustworthy and eloquent of the Roman historians, Pallavicino [1]
The nuncio was more
effective in those parts of his speech in which he attacked Luther, than in
those in which he defended the Papacy. His charges against the Reformer were
sweeping and artful. He accused him of laboring to accomplish a universal ruin;
of striking a blow at the foundations of religion by denying the doctrine of the
Sacrament; of seeking to raze the foundations of the hierarchy by affirming that
all Christians are priests; of seeking to overturn civil order by maintaining
that a Christian is not bound to obey the magistrate; of aiming to subvert the
foundations of morality by his doctrine of the moral inability of the will; and
of unsettling the world beyond the grave by denying purgatory. The portion of
seeming truth contained in these accusations made them the more dangerous. "A
unanimous decree," said the orator in closing his speech, "from this illustrious
assembly will enlighten the simple, warn the imprudent, decide the waverers, and
give strength to the weak... But if the axe is not laid at the root of this
poisonous tree, if the death-blow is not struck, then... I see it overshadowing
the heritage of Jesus Christ with its branches, changing our Lord's vineyard
into a gloomy forest, transforming the kingdom of God into a den of wild beasts,
and reducing Germany into that state of frightful barbarism and desolation which
has been brought upon Asia by the superstition of Mahomet.[2] I should be willing," said
he, with consummate art, "to deliver my body to the flames, if the monster that
has engendered this growing heresy could be consumed at the same stake, and
mingle his ashes with mine." [3]
The nuncio had
spoken for three hours. The fire of his style, and the enthusiasm of his
delivery, had roused the passions of the Diet; and had a vote been taken at that
moment, the voices of all the members, one only excepted, would have been given
for the condemnation of Luther.[4] The Diet broke up,
however, when the orator sat down, and thus the victory which seemed within the
reach of Rome escaped her grasp.
When the princes next assembled, the
fumes raised by the rhetoric of Aleander had evaporated, and the hard facts of
Roman extortion alone remained deeply imprinted in the memories of the German
barons. These no eloquence could efface. Duke George of Saxony was the first to
present himself to the assembly. His words had the greater weight from his being
known to be the enemy of Luther, and a hater of the evangelical doctrines,
although a champion of the rights of his native land and a foe of ecclesiastical
abuses, he ran his eye rapidly over the frightful traces which Roman usurpation
and venality had left on Germany. Annats were converted into dues;
ecclesiastical benefices were bought and sold; dispensations were procurable for
money; stations were multiplied in order to fleece the poor; stalls for the sale
of indulgences rose in every street; pardons were earned not by prayer or works
of charity, but by paying the market-price of sin; penances were so contrived as
to lead to a repetition of the offence; fines were made exorbitant to increase
the revenue arising from them; abbeys and monasteries were emptied by
commendams, and their wealth transported across the Alps to enrich foreign
bishops; civil causes were drawn before ecclesiastical tribunals: all which
"grievous perdition of miserable souls" demanded a universal reform, which a
General Council only could accomplish. Duke George in conclusion demanded that
such should be convoked.
To direct past themselves the storm of
indignation which the archbishops and abbots [5] saw to be rising in the
Diet, they laid the chief blame of the undeniable abuses, of which the duke had
presented so formidable a catalogue, at the door of the Vatican. So costly were
the tastes and so luxurious the habits of the reigning Pope, they hinted, that
he was induced to bestow Church livings not on pious and learned men, but on
jesters, falconers, grooms, valets, and whosoever could minister to his personal
pleasures or add to the gaiety of his court. The excuse was, in fact, an
accusation.
A committee was appointed by the Diet to draw up a list of
the oppressions under which the nation groaned.[6] This document, containing
a hundred and one grievances, was presented to the emperor at a subsequent
meeting of the Diet, together with a request that he would, in fulflment of the
terms of the capitulation which he had signed when he was crowned, take steps to
effect a reformation of the specified abuses.
The Diet did not stop here.
The princes demanded that Luther should be summoned before it. It were unjust,
they said, to condemn him without knowing whether he were the author of the
incriminated books, and without hearing what he had to say in defense of his
opinions.[7] The emperor was compelled
to give way, though he covered his retreat under show of doubting whether the
books really were Luther's. He wished, he said, to have certainty on that point.
Aleander was horror-struck at the emperor's irresolution. He saw the foundations
of the Papacy shaken, the tiara trembling on his master's brow, and all the
terrible evils he had predicted in his great oration, rushing like a devastating
tempest upon Christendom. But he strove in vain against the emperor's resolve,
and the yet stronger force behind it, in which that resolve had its birth–the
feeling of the German people.[8] It was concluded in the
Diet that Luther should be summoned. Aleander had one hope left, the only
mitigating circumstance about this alarming affair, even that Luther would be
denied a safe-conduct.
But this proposal he was ultimately unable to
carry,[9] and on the 6th of March,
1521, the summons to Luther to present himself within twenty-one days before the
Diet at Worms was signed by the emperor. Enclosed in the citation was a
safe-conduct, addressed "To the honorable, our well-beloved and pious Doctor
Hartin Luther, of the order of Augustines,"[10] and commanding all
princes, lords, magistrates, and others to respect this safe-conduct under pain
of the displeasure of the Emperor and the Empire.
Gaspard Sturm, the
imperial herald, was commissioned to deliver these documents to Luther and
accompany him to Worms.[11]
The fiat has gone
forth. It expresses the will and purpose of a Higher than Charles. Luther is to
bear testimony to the Gospel, not at the stake, but on the loftiest stage the
world can furnish. The master of so many kingdoms and the lords of so many
provinces must come to Worms, and there patiently wait and obediently listen
while the miner's son speaks to them.[12] While the imperial herald
is on his way to bring hither the man for whom they wait, let us turn to see
what is at that moment taking place at the opposite poles of
Christendom:
Far separated as are Rome and
Wittemberg, there is yet a link binding together the two. An unseen Power
regulates the march of events at both places, making them advance by equal
steps. What wonderful harmony under antagonism! Let us turn first to Rome. It is
Maunday-Thursday. On the balcony of the Metropolitan Cathedral, arrayed
for one of the grand ceremonies of his Church, sits the Pope. Around him stand
attendant priests, bearing lighted torches; and beneath him, crowding in silence
the spacious area, their knees bent and their heads uncovered, are the assembled
Romans. Leo is pronouncing, as the wont is before the festival of Easter, the
terrible bull In Coena Domini.
This is a very ancient bull. It has
undergone, during successive Pontificates, various alterations and additions,
with the view of rendering its scope more comprehensive and its excommunications
more frightful. It has been called "the pick of excommunications." It was wont
to be promulgated annually at Rome on the Thursday before Easter Sunday, hence
its name the "Bull of the Lord's Supper." The bells were tolled, the cannon of
St. Angelo were fired, and the crowd of priests that thronged the balcony around
the Pope waved their tapers wildly, then suddenly extinguished them; in short,
no solemnity was omitted that could add terror to the publication of the
bull–superfluous task surely, when we think that a more frightful peal of
cursing never rang out from that balcony, from which so many terrible
excommunications have been thundered. All ranks and conditions of men, all
nationalities not obedient to the Papal See, are most comprehensively and
energetically cursed in the bull In Coena Domini. More especially are heretics
of every name cursed. "We curse," said the Pope, "all heretics Cathari,
Patarins, Poor Men of Lyons, Arnoldists, Speronists, Wickliffites, Hussites,
Fratricelli;"–" because," said Luther, speaking aside, "they desired to possess
the Holy Scriptures, and required the Pope to be sober and preach the Word of
God." "This formulary," says Sleidan, "of excommunication coming afterwards into
Luther's hands, he rendered it into High Dutch, besprinkling it with some very
witty and satirical animadversions."[13]
This year a new
name had been inserted in this curse, and a prominent place assigned it. It was
the name of Martin Luther. Thus did Rome join him to all those witnesses for the
truth who, in former ages, had fallen under her ban, and many of whom had
perished in her fires. Casting him out of the Roman pale irrevocably, she united
him with the Church spiritual and holy and catholic.
At the same moment
that Rome fulfils and completes her course, Luther fulfils and completes his. He
has now reached his furthest point of theological and ecclesiastical
advancement. Step by step he has all these years been going forward, adding
first one doctrine, then another, to his store of acquired knowledge; and at the
same time, and by an equal process, has he been casting off, one after another,
the errors of Romanism. The light around him has been waxing clearer and ever
clearer, and now he has come to the meridian of his day. In his cell he was made
to feel that he was utterly fallen, and wholly without power to save himself.
This was his first lesson. The doctrine of a free justification–salvation by
grace–was next revealed to him. As he stood encompassed by the darkness of
despair, caused by the combined sense of his utter ruin and his utter inability,
this doctrine beamed out upon him from the page of Scripture. The revelation of
it was to him the very opening of the gates of Paradise. From these initial
stages he soon came to a clear apprehension of the whole of what constituted the
Reformed system–the nature and end of Christ's obedience and death; the office
and work of the Holy Spirit; the sanctification of men by the instrumentality of
the Word; the relation of good works to faith; the nature and uses of a
Sacrament; the constituent principle of the Church, even belief in the truth and
union to Christ. This last, taken in connection with another great principle to
the knowledge of which he had previously attained, the sole infallible authority
of Scripture, emancipated him completely from a thraldom which had weighed
heavily upon him in the earlier stages of his career, the awe, even, in which he
stood of Rome as the Church of Christ, and the obedience which he believed he
owed the Pontiff as head of the Church. The last link of this bondage was now
gone. He stood erect in the presence of a power before which the whole of
Christendom wellnigh still bowed down. The study of Paul's Epistles and of the
Apocalypse, and the comparison of both with the history of the past, brought
Luther about this time to the full and matured conviction that the Church of
Rome as it now existed was the predicted "Apostacy," and that the dominion of
the Papacy was the reign of Antichrist. It was this that broke the spell of
Rome, and took for him the sting out of her curse. This was a wonderful
training, and not the least wonderful thing in it was the exact coincidence in
point of time between the maturing of Luther's views and the great crisis in his
career. The summons to the Diet at Worms found him in the very prime and
fullness of his knowledge.
On the 24th of March the imperial herald,
Gaspard Sturm, arrived at Wittemberg, and put into the hands of Luther the
summons of the emperor to appear before the Diet at Worms.
CHAPTER 5
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LUTHER'S JOURNEY AND ARRIVAL AT
WORMS.
Luther's Resolution – Alarm in Germany – The Reformer sets out
– His Reception at Leipsic – Erfurt – Preaches – Eisenach – Sickness – Auguries
of Evil – Luther's Courage – Will the Safe-conduct be respected? – Fears of his
Friends – They advise him not to come on – His Reply – Enters Worms – Crowd in
the Street – An Ill-omened Pageant – The Princes throng his Apartment – Night
and Sleep.
"WILL he come?" asked the members of the Diet of one
another, when they had determined to summon Luther before them. The only man who
did not hesitate a moment on that point was Luther himself. In the citation now
in his hand he beheld the summons of a Greater than the emperor, and straightway
he made ready to obey it. He knew that in the assembly before which he was to
appear there was but one man on whom he could fully rely, the Elector Frederick.
His safe-conduct might be violated as that of John Huss had been. In going to
Worms he might be going to the stake. His opponents, he knew, thirsted for his
blood, still not for a moment did he permit fear to make him waver in his
resolution to go to Worms. There he should be able to bear testimony to the
truth, and as to all beyond, it gave him no concern. "Fear not," he wrote to
Spalatin, the elector's secretary, "that I shall retract a single syllable. With
the help of Christ, I will never desert the Word on the battle-field." [1] "I am called," said he to
his friends, when they expressed their fears; "it is ordered and decreed that I
appear in that city. I will neither recant nor flee. I will go to Worms in spite
of all the gates of hell, and the prince of the power of the air." [2]
The news that
Luther had been summoned to the Diet spread rapidly through Germany, inspiring,
wherever the tidings came, a mixed feeling of thankfulness and alarm. The
Germans were glad to see the cause of their country and their Church assuming
such proportions, and challenging examination and discussion before so august an
assembly. At the same time they trembled when they thought what might be the
fate of the man who was eminently their nation's representative, and by much the
ablest champion of both its political and its religious rights. If Luther should
be sacrificed nothing could compensate for his loss, and the movement which
promised to bring them riddance of a foreign yoke, every year growing more
intolerable, would be thrown back for an indefinite period. Many eyes and
hearts, therefore, in all parts of Germany followed the monk as he went his
doubtful way to Worms.
On the 2nd of April the arrangements for his
departure were completed. He did not set out alone. Three of his more intimate
friends, members of the university, accompanied him. These were the courageous
Amsdorff– Schurff, professor of jurisprudence, as timid as Amsdorff was bold,
yet who shrank not from the perils of this journey–and Suaven, a young Danish
nobleman, who claimed, as the representative of the students, the honor of
attending his master.
Most tender was the parting between Luther and
Melancthon. In Luther the young scholar had found again his country, his
friends, his all. Now he was about to lose him. Sad at heart, he yearned to go
with him, even should he be going to martyrdom. He implored, but in vain; for if
Luther should fall, who but Philip could fill his place and carry on his work?
The citizens were moved as well as the professors and youth of the university.
They thronged the street to witness the departure of their great townsman, and
it was amidst their tears that Luther passed out at the gate, and took his way
over the great plains that are spread out around Wittemberg.
The imperial
herald, wearing his insignia and displaying the imperial eagle, to show under
what guardianship the travelers journeyed, came first on horseback; after him
rode his servant, and closing the little cavalcade was the humble wagon which
contained Luther and his friends. This conveyance had been provided by the
magistrates of Wittemberg at their own cost, and, provident of the traveller's
comfort, it was furnished with an awning to shade him from the sun or cover him
from the rain.[3]
Everywhere, as they
passed along, crowds awaited the arrival of the travelers. Villages poured out
their inhabitants to see and greet the bold monk. At the gates of those cities
where it was known that Luther would halt, processions, headed by the
magistrates, waited to bid him welcome. There were exceptions, however, to the
general cordiality. At Leipsic the Reformer was presented with simply the
customary cup of wine, as much as to say, "Pass on."[4] But generally the
population were touched with the heroism of the journey. In Luther they beheld a
man who was offering himself on the altar of his country, and as they saw him
pass they heaved a sigh as over one who should never return. His path was
strewed with hints and warnings of coming fate, partly the fears of timid
friends, and partly the menaces of enemies who strove by every means in their
power to stop his journey, and prevent his appearance at the Diet.
His
entrance into Erfurt, the city where he had come to the knowledge of the truth,
and on the streets of which he had begged as a monk, was more like that of a
warrior returning from a victorious campaign, than a humble doctor going to
answer a charge of heresy. Hardly had he come in sight of its steeples, when a
numerous cavalcade, composed of the members of the senate, the university, and
two thousand burghers,[5] met him and escorted him
into the city. Through streets thronged with spectators he was conducted to the
old familiar building so imperishably associated with his history, the convent
of the Augustines. On the Sunday after Easter he entered its great church, the
door of which he had been wont, when a friar, to open, and the floor of which he
had been wont to sweep out; and from its pulpit he preached to an overflowing
crowd, from the words so suitable to the season, "Peace be unto you" (John
20:19). Let us quote a passage ofhis sermon. Of the Diet–of the emperor, of
himself, not a word: from beginning to end it is Christ and salvation that are
held forth.
"Philosophers, doctors, and writers," said the preacher,
"have endeavored to teach men the way to obtain everlasting life, and they have
not succeeded. I will now tell it to you.
"There are two kinds of
works–works not of ourselves, and these are good: our own works, they are of
little worth. One man builds a church; another goes on a pilgrimage to St. Iago
of Compostella, or St. Peter's; a third fasts, takes the cowl, and goes
bare-foot; another does something else. All these works are nothingness, and
will come to naught, for our own works have no virtue in them.
But I am
now going to tell you what is the true work. God has raised one Man from the
dead, the Lord Jesus Christ, that he might destroy death, expiate sin, and shut
the gates of hell. This is the work of salvation.
"Christ, has
vanquished! This is the joyful news! and we are saved by his work, and not by
our own... Our Lord Jesus Christ said, 'Peace be unto you! behold my hands'–that
is to say, Behold, O man! it is I, I alone, who have taken away thy sins, and
ransomed thee; and now thou hast peace, saith the Lord."[6]
Such was the Divine
wisdom which Luther dispensed to the men of Erfurt. It was ill their city that
he had learned it; and well might he have added what the centurion said of his
liberty: "With a great sum have I obtained this knowledge, which now I freely
give to you."
Traversing ground every foot-breadth of which was familiar
as forming the scene of his childhood, he came soon after to Eisenach, the city
of the good "Shunammite." It must have called up many memories. Over it towered
the Wartburg, where the Reformer was to open the second stage of his career,
although this was hidden as yet. At every step his courage was put to the test.
The nearer he drew to Worms the louder grew the threats of his enemies, the
greater the fears of his friends. "They will burn you and reduce your body to
ashes, as they did that of John Huss," said one to him. His reply was that of a
hero, but it was clothed in the grand imagery of the poet. "Though they should
kindle a fire," said he, "all the way from Worms to Wittemberg, the flames of
which reached to heaven, I would walk through it in the name of the Lord, I
would appear before them, I would enter the jaws of this Behemoth, and confess
the Lord Jesus Christ between his teeth."
All the way from Eisenach to
Frankfort-on-the Maine, Luther suffered from sickness.[7] This however produced no
faintness of spirit. If health should serve him, well; but if not, still his
journey must be performed; he should be carried to Worms in his bed. As to what
might await him at the end of his journey he bestowed not a thought. He knew
that he who preserved alive the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace still lived.
If it was His pleasure he would, despite the rage of his foes, return safe from
Worms; but if a stake awaited him there, he rejoiced to think that the truth
would not perish with his ashes. With God he left it whether the Gospel would be
better served by his death or by his life, only he would rather that the young
emperor should not begin his reign by shedding his blood; if he must die, let it
be by the hands of the Romans.
The Roman party had hoped that the monk
would not dare set foot within the gates of Worms.[8] They were told that he was
on the road, but they did not despair by intrigues and menaces to make him turn
back. They little knew the man they were trying to affright. To their dismay
Luther kept his face steadfastly toward Worms, and was now almost under its
walls. His approaching footsteps, coming nearer every hour, sounded, as it were,
the knell of their power, and caused them greater terror than if a mighty army
had been advancing against them.
Whispers began now to circulate in Worms
that the Diet was not bound to respect the safe-conduct of a heretic. This talk
coming to the ears of Luther's friends gave them great uneasiness. Was the
perfidy of Constance to be repeated? Even the elector shared in the prevalent
alarm; for Spalatin sent to Luther, who was now near the city, to say to him not
to enter.
Fixing his eyes on the messenger, Luther replied, "Go and tell
your master that even should there be as many devils in Worms as tiles on the
house-tops, still I will enter it."[9] This was the sorest
assault of all, coming as it did from one of his most trusted friends; but he
vanquished it as he had done all previous ones, and what remained of his journey
was done in peace.
It was ten o'clock in the morning of the 16th of
April, when the old towers of Worms rose between him and the horizon. Luther,
says Audin, sitting up in his car, began to sing the hymn which he had composed
at Oppenheim two days before, "A strong Tower is our God."[10] The sentinel on the
look-out in the cathedral tower, descrying the approach of the cavalcade,
sounded his trumpet. The citizens were at dinner, for it was now mid-day, but
when they heard the signal they rushed into the street, and in a few minutes
princes, nobles, citizens, and men of all nations and conditions, mingling in
one mighty throng, had assembled to see the monk enter. To the last neither
friend nor foe had really believed that he would come. Now, however, Luther is
in Worms.
The order of the cavalcade was the same as that in which it had
quitted Wittemberg. The herald rode first, making way with some difficulty
through the crowded street for the wagon in which, shaded by the awning, sat
Luther in his monk's gown,[11] his face bearing traces of
his recent illness, but there was a deep calm in the eyes whose glance Cardinal
Cajetan liked so ill at Augsburg.
The evil auguries which had haunted the
monk at every stage of his journey were renewed within the walls of Worms.
Pressing through the crowd came a person in grotesque costume, displaying a
great cross, such as is carried before the corpse when it is being borne to the
grave, and chanting, in the same melancholy cadence in which mass is wont to be
sung for the dead, this doleful requiem–
Those who arranged this ill-omened pageant may have
meant it for a little grim pleasantry, or they may have intended to throw
ridicule upon the man who was advancing single-handed to do battle with both the
temporal and spiritual powers; or it may have been a last attempt to quell a
spirit which no former device or threat had been able to affright. But whatever
the end in view, we recognize in this strange affair a most fitting, though
doubtless a wholly undesigned, representation of the state and expectancies of
Christendom at that hour. Had not the nations waited in darkness– darkness deep
as that of those who dwell among the dead–for the coming of a deliverer? Had not
such a deliverer been foretold? Had not Huss seen Luther's day a century off,
and said to the mourners around his stake, as the patriarchs on their deathbed,
"I die, but God will surely visit you?"
The "hundred years" had revolved,
and now the deliverer appears. He comes in humble guise–in cowl and frock of
monk. He appears to many of his own age as a Greater appeared to His, "a root
out of a dry ground."
How can this poor despised monk save us? men asked.
But he brought with him that which far transcends the sword of conqueror–the
Word, the Light; and before that Light fled the darkness. Men opened their eyes,
and saw that already their fetters, which were ignorance and superstition, were
rent. They were free.
The surging crowd soon pushed aside the bearer of
the black cross, and drowned his doleful strains in the welcome which they
accorded the man who, contrary to the expectation of every one, had at last
entered their gates. Luther's carriage could advance at only a slow pace, for
the concourse on the streets was greater than when the emperor had entered a few
days previously. The procession halted at the hotel of the Knights of Rhodes,
which conveniently adjoined the hall of the Diet. "On descending from his car,"
says Pallavicino, "he said bravely, 'God will be for me.'"[13]
This reveals to us
the secret of Luther's courage.
After his recent illness, and the fatigue
of his journey, now continued for fourteen days, the Reformer needed rest. The
coming day, too, had to be thought of; eventful as the day now closing had been,
the next would be more eventful still. But the anxiety to see the monk was too
great to permit him so much as an hour's repose. Scarcely had he taken
possession of his lodgings when princes, dukes, counts, bishops, men of all
ranks, friends and foes, besieged his hotel and crowded into his apartments.
When one relay of visitors had been dismissed, another waited for admission. In
themidst of that brilliant throng Luther stood unmoved. He heard and replied to
all their questions with calmness and wisdom. Even his enemies could not
withhold their admiration at the dignity with which he bore himself. Where has
the miner's son acquired those manners which princes might envy, that courage
which heroes might strive in vain to emulate, and where has he learnt that
wisdom which has seduced, say some– enlightened, say others–so many thousands of
his countrymen, and which none of the theologians of Rome have been able to
withstand? To friend and foe alike he was a mystery. Some revered him, says
Pallavicino, as a prodigy of knowledge, others looked upon him as a monster of
wickedness; the one class held him to be almost divine, the other believed him
to be possessed by a demon.[14]
This crowd of
visitors, So varied in rank and so different in sentiments, continued to press
around Luther till far into the night. They were now gone, and the Reformer was
left alone. He sought his couch, but could not sleep. The events of the day had
left him excited and restless. He touched his lute; he sang a verse of a
favourite hymn; he approached the window and opened the casement. Beneath him
were the roofs of the now silent city; beyond its walls, dimly descried, was the
outline of the great valley through which the Rhine pours its floods; above him
was the awful, fathomless, and silent vault. He lifted his eyes to it, as was
his wont when his thoughts troubled him.[15] There were the stars,
fulfilling their courses far above the tumults of earth, yet far beneath that
throne on which sat a greater King than the monarch before whom he was to appear
on the morrow. He felt, as he gazed, a sense of sublimity filling his soul, and
bringing with it a feeling of repose. Withdrawing his gaze, and closing the
casement, he said, "I will lay me down and take quiet rest, for thou makest me
dwell in safety."
CHAPTER 6
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LUTHER BEFORE THE
DIET AT WORMS.
Luther's Supplications – Conducted to the Diet – The
Crowd – Words of Encouragement – Splendor of the Diet-Significance of Luther's
Appearance before it – Chancellor Eccius – Luther asked touching his Books –
Owns their Authorship – Asked to Retract their Opinions – Craves Time to give an
Answer – A Day's Delay granted – Charles's First Impressions of Luther – Morning
of the 18th of May – Luther's Wrestlings–His Weakness – Strength not his own –
Second Appearance before the Diet – His Speech – Repeats it in Latin–No
Retractation – Astonishment of the Diet – The Two Great
Powers.
NEXT morning–Wednesday, the 17th of April–at eight
o'clock, the hereditary Marshal of the Empire, Ulrich von Pappenheim, cited
Luther to appear, at four of the afternoon, before his Imperial Majesty and the
States of the Empire. An important crisis, not only in the life of Luther, but
also in the history of that Reformation which he had so recently inaugurated,
was fast approaching, and the Reformer prepared himself to meet it with all the
earnestness that marked his deeply religious nature. He remained all forenoon
within doors, spending most of the time in prayer. His supplications and the
moans that accompanied them were audible outside his chamber door. From kneeling
before the throne of the Eternal God, with whom lay the issues of the coming
strife, Luther rose up to stand before the throne of Charles. At four the
Marshal of the Empire, accompanied by a herald, returned, and Luther set out
with them to the Diet. But it was no easy matter to find their way to the
town-hall, where the princes were assembled. The crowd in the streets was
greater than on the previous day.
Every window had its group of faces;
every house-top had its cluster of spectators, many of whom manifested
considerable enthusiasm as they caught sight of the Reformer. The marshal with
his charge had proceeded but a little way, when he found that he would never be
able to force a passage through so dense a multitude. He entered a private
dwelling, passed out at the back door and conducting Luther through the gardens
of the Knights of Rhodes, brought hint to the town-hall; the people rushing down
alleys, or climbing to the roofs, to catch a glimpse of the monk as he passed on
to appear before Charles.
Arrived at the town-hall they found its
entrance blocked up by a still denser crowd. The soldiers had to clear a way by
main force. In the vestibule and ante-chambers of the hall every inch of space,
every recess and window-sill was occupied by courtiers and their friends, to the
number of not less than 5,000–Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and other
nationalities.
As they were elbowing their way, and were now near the
door at which they were to be ushered into the presence of the Diet, a hand was
laid upon Luther's shoulder. It was that of the veteran George Freundsberg,
whose name was a synonym with his countrymen for gallantry. He had ere this been
in many a hard fight, but never, he felt, had he been in so hard a one as that
to which the man on whose shoulder his hand now rested was advancing. "My monk,
my good monk," said the soldier, "you are now going to face greater peril than
any of us have ever encountered on the bloodlest field; but if you are right,
and feel sure of it, go on, and God will fight for you."[1] Hardly had these words
been uttered, when the door opened, and Luther passed in and stood before the
august assembly.
The first words which reached his ear after he had
entered the Diet, whispered to him by someone as he passed through the throng of
princes to take his place before the throne of Charles, were cheering: "But when
they deliver you up, take no thought how or what you shall speak, for it shall
be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak;" while other voices said,
"Fear not them that can kill the body, and after that have no more that they can
do." Thus were the hopes which he expressed when he alighted at his hotel-door
fulfilled. God was with him, for this was His voice.
The sudden
transition from the uneasy crowd to the calm grandeur of the Diet had its effect
upon him. For a moment he seemed intimidated and bewildered. He felt all eyes
suddenly turned upon him; even the emperor scrutinised him keenly. But the
agitation of the Reformer quickly passed, and his equanimity and composure
returned. Luther advanced till he stood in front of the throne of Charles.
Let us take a nearer view of the scene as it now
presented itself to the eyes of Luther. Chief in this assemblage of the powers
spiritual and temporal of Christendom, sat the emperor. He wore the Spanish
dress, his only ornaments being the usual ostrich-plume, and a string of pearls
circling his breast, from which depended the insignia of the Golden Fleece. A
step lower than the imperial platform, on a chair of state, sat his brother,
Archduke Ferdinand. On the right and left of the throne were the six electors of
the Empire–the three ecclesiastical electors on the emperor's right, and the
three secular electors on his left. At his feet sat the two Papal nuncios–on
this side Caraccioli, and on that Aleander. On the floor in front of the
imperial seat was the table at which were the clerks and Dr. Eccius, who
interrogated Luther, and who is not to be confounded with the Dr. Eck with whom
the Reformer held the disputation at Leipsic. From the table extending backwards
to the wall were rows of benches, which were occupied by the members of the
Diet, princes, counts, archbishops, and bishops, the deputies of the towns and
the ambassadors of foreign States. Here and there at various points of the hall
were stationed guards, with polished armor and glittering halberds.
The
sun was near his setting. His level rays, pouring in at the windows and falling
in rich mellow light on all within, gave additional splendor to the scene. It
brought out in strong relief the national costumes, and variously coloured
dresses and equipments, of the members of the Diet. The yellow silken robes of
the emperor, the velvet and ermine of the electors, the red hat and scarlet gown
of the cardinal, the violet robe of the bishop, the rich doublet of the knight,
covered with the badges of his rank or valor, the more sombre attire of the city
deputy, the burnished steel of the warrior– all showed to advantage in the
chastened radiance which was now streaming in from the descending luminary. In
the midst of that scene, which might have been termed gay but for its
overwhelming solemnity, stood Luther in his monk's frock.
John Eck or
Eccius, Chancellor of the Archbishop of Treves,[3] and spokesman of the Diet,
rose in deep silence, and in a sonorous voice repeated, first in Latin and then
in German, the following words: "Martin Luther, his sacred and invincible
Majesty has cited you before his throne, with advice and counsel of the States
of the Holy Roman Empire, to answer two questions. First, do you acknowledge
these books," pointing with his finger to a pile of volumes on the table, "to
have been written by you? Secondly, are you prepared to retract and disavow the
opinions you have advanced in them?[4]
Luther was on the
point of owning the author-ship of the books, when his friend Schurf, the
jurist, hastily interposed. "Let the titles of the books be read," said
he.
The Chancellor Eck advanced to the table, and read, one after
another, the titles of the volumes–about twenty in all.[5]
This done, Luther
now spoke. His bearing was respectful, and his voice low. Some members of the
Diet thought that it trembled a little; and they fondly hoped that a
retractation was about to follow.
The first charge he frankly
acknowledged.
Nothing could have been more wise or more becoming in
the circumstances. The request for delay, however, was differently interpreted
by the Papal members of the Diet. He is breaking his fall, said they–he will
retract. He has played the heretic at Wittemberg, he will act the part of the
penitent at Worms. Had they seen deeper into Luther's character, they would have
come to just the opposite conclusion. This pause was the act of a man whose mind
was thoroughly made up, who felt how unalterable and indomitable was his
resolve, and who therefore was in no haste to proclaim it, but with admirable
self-control could wait for the time, the form, the circumstances in which to
make the avowal so that its full and concentrated strength might be felt, and it
might appear to all to be irrevocable.
The Diet deliberated. A day's
delay was granted the monk. Tomorrow at this time must he appear again before
the emperor and the assembled estates, and give his final answer. Luther bowed;
and instantly the herald was by his side to conduct him to his hotel.
The
emperor had not taken his eyes off Luther all the time he stood in his presence.
His worn frame, his thin visage, which still bore traces of recent illness, and,
as Pallavicino has the candor to acknowledge, "the majesty of his address, and
the simplicity of his action and costume," which contrasted strongly with the
theatrical airs and the declamatory address of the Italians and Spaniards,
produced on the young emperor an unfavorable impression, and led to a
depreciatory opinion of the Reformer.
"Certainly," said Charles, turning
to one of his courtiers as the Diet was breaking up, "certainly that monk will
never make a heretic of me." [7]
Scarcely had the
dawn of the 18th of April (1521) broke, when the two parties were busy preparing
for the parts they were respectively to act in the proceedings of a day destined
to influence so powerfully the condition of after-ages. The Papal faction, with
Aleander at its head, had met at an early hour to concert their measures.[8] Nor was this wakeful
activity on one side only. Luther, too, "prevented the dawning, and
cried."
We shall greatly err if we suppose that it was an iron firmness
of physical nerve, or great intrepidity of spirit, that bore Luther up and
carried him through these awful scenes; and we shall not less err if we suppose
that he passed through them without enduring great suffering of soul. The
services he was destined to perform demanded a nature exquisitely strung, highly
emotional, as well as powerfully reflective, with a full complement of the
truest sympathies and tenderest sensibilities. But such a constitution renders
its possessor, to a proportional extent, liable to the access of tormenting
anxieties and gloomy forecastings. There were moments in which Luther gave way
to these feelings. That they did not crush him, was owing to an influence higher
far than his natural powers, which filled his soul and sustained him till the
crisis had passed. The sweet, gracious, omnipotent Spirit of God descended upon
him, and shed a divine serenity and strength into his mind; but so sweetly and
gently did it infuse itself into, and work along with, his own natural
faculties, that Luther was sensible of the indwelling influence only by his
feeling that–to use Melancthon's beautiful words–"he was more than himself." He
was also made sensible of this by the momentary withdrawal at times of this
upholding power.[9] Then he was again simply
himself weak as other men; and difficulties would of a sudden thicken around
him, and dangers would all at once rise like so many giants in his path, and
threaten him with destruction. So did it befall him on the morning of this
eventful day. He felt as if he were forsaken. A horror of great darkness filled
his soul; he had come to Worms to perish.
It was not the thought that he
would be condemned and led to the stake that shook the Reformer on the morning
of his second appearance before the Imperial Diet. It was something more
terrible than to die–than to die a hundred times. The crisis had come, and he
felt himself unable to meet it. The upholding power which had sustained him in
his journey thither, and which had made the oft-repeated threat of foe, and the
gloomy anticipation of friend, as ineffectual to move him as ocean's spray is to
overturn the rock, had been withdrawn. What will he do? He sees a terrible
catastrophe approaching; he will falter before the Diet; he will wreck his
cause; he will blast the hopes of future ages; and the enemies of Christ and the
Gospel will triumph.
Let us draw near to his closet-door, and hear his
groans and strong cryings! They reveal to us the deep agony of his
soul.
He has already been some considerable while engaged in prayer. His
supplication is drawing to a close.
Then comes an interval of silence. Again we hear his voice. His wrestlings once more become audible.
This is one of those solemn points in history where
the seen touches the unseen; where earth and heaven meet; where man the actor
below, and the Great Actor above, come both together, side by side upon the
stage. Such points in the line of history are rare; they occur only at long
intervals, but they do occur. The veil is rent; a hand is stretched out; a light
breaks in as from a world separated indeed from that on which the terrestrial
actors are placed, yet lying at no great distance from it, and the reader of
history at such moments feels as if he were nearing the very precincts of the
Eternal Throne, and walking on mysterious and holy ground.
Luther now
rises from his knees, and in the calm reigning in his soul feels that already he
has received an answer to his prayer. He sits down to arrange his thoughts, to
draft, in outline, his defense, and to search in Holy Scripture for passages
wherewith to fortify it. This task finished, he laid his left hand upon the
sacred volume, which lay open on the table before him, and raising his right
hand to heaven, he swore to remain ever faithful to the Gospel, and to confess
it, even should he have to seal his confession with his blood. After this the
Reformer experienced a still deeper peace.
At four of the clock, the
grand marshal and the herald presented themselves. Through crowded streets, for
the excitement grew greater with each passing hour, was the Reformer conducted
to the town-hall. On arriving in the outer court they found the Diet in deep
deliberation. When Luther should be admitted no one could say. One hour passed,
then another;[11] the Reformer was still
standing amid the hum and clamor of the multitude that filled the area. So long
a delay, in such circumstances, was fitted to exhaust him physically, and to
ruffle and distract him mentally.
But his tranquillity did not for a
moment forsake him. He was in a sanctuary apart, communing with One whom the
thousands around him saw not. The night began to fall; torches were kindled in
the hall of the assembly. Through the ancient windows came their glimmering
rays, which, mingling with the lights of evening, curiously speckled the crowd
that filled the court, and imparted an air of quaint grandeur to the
scene.
At last the door opened, and Luther entered the hall. If this
delay was arranged, as some have conjectured, by Aleander, in the hope that when
Luther presented himself to the Diet he would be in a state of agitation, he
must have been greatly disappointed. The Reformer entered in perfect composure,
and stood before the emperor with an air of dignity. He looked around on that
assembly of princes, and on the powerful monarch who presided over them, with a
calm, steadfast eye.
The chancellor of the Bishop of Treves, Dr. Eck,
rose and demanded his answer. What a moment! The fate of ages hangs upon it. The
emperor leans forward, the princes sit motionless, the very guards are still:
all eager to catch the first utterances of the monk.
He salutes the
emperor, the princes, and the lords graciously. He begins his reply in a full,
firm, but modest tone.[12] Of the volumes on the
table, the authorship of which he had acknowledged the day before, there were,
he said, three sorts. There was one class of his writings in which he had
expounded, with all simplicity and plainness, the first principles of faith and
morals. Even his enemies themselves allowed that he had done so in a manner
conformable to Scripture, and that these books were such as all might read with
profit. To deny these would be to deny truths which all admit–truths which are
essential to the order and welfare of Christian society.
In the second
class of his productions he had waged war against the Papacy. He had attacked
those errors in doctrine, those scandals in life, and those tyrannies in
ecclesiastical administration and government, by which the Papacy had entangled
and fettered the conscience, had blinded the reason, and had depraved the morals
of men, thus destroying body and soul. They themselves must acknowledge that it
was so. On every side they heard the cry of oppression. Law and obedience had
been weakened, public morals polluted, and Christendom desolated by a host of
evils temporal and spiritual. Should he retract this class of his writings, what
would happen? Why, that the oppressor would grow more insolent, that he would
propagate with greater licence than ever those pernicious doctrines which had
already destroyed so many souls, and multiply those grievous exactions, those
most iniquitous extortions which were impoverishing the substance of Germany and
transferring its wealth to other countries. Nay, not only would the yoke that
now weighs upon the Christian people be rendered heavier by his retractation, it
would become in a sense legitimate, for his retractation would, in the
circumstances, be tantamount to giving this yoke the sanction of his Serene
Majesty, and of all the States of the Empire. He should be the most unhappy of
men. He should thus have sanctioned the very iniquities which he had denounced,
and reared a bulwark around those very oppressions which he had sought to
overthrow. Instead of lightening the burden of his countrymen he should have
made it ten-fold heavier, and himself would have become a cloak to cover every
kind of tyranny.
There was a third class of his writings in which he said
he had attacked those persons who put themselves forward as the defenders of the
errors which had corrupted the faith, the scandals which had disgraced the
priesthood, and the exactions which had robbed the people and ground them into
the dust. These individuals he may not have treated with much ceremony; it may
be that he had assailed them with an acrimony unbecoming his ecclesiastical
profession; but although the manner may have been faulty, the thing itself was
right, and he could not retract it, for that would be to justify his adversaries
in all the impieties they had uttered, and all the iniquities they had
done.
But he was a man, he continued, and not God, and he would defend
himself not otherwise than Christ had done. If he had spoken evil or written
evil, let them bear witness of that evil. He was but dust and ashes, liable
every moment to err, and therefore it well became him to invite all men to
examine what he had written, and to object if they had aught against it. Let him
but be convinced from the Word of God and right reason that he was in error, and
he should not need to be asked twice to retract, he would be the first to throw
his books into the flames.[13]
In conclusion, he
warned this assembly of monarchs of a judgment to come: a judgment not beyond
the grave only, but on this side of it: a judgment in time. They were on their
trial. They, their kingdoms, their crowns, their dynasties, stood at a great
Bar. It was to them the day of visitation; it was now to be determined whether
they were to be planted in the earth, whether their thrones should be stable,
and their power should continue to flourish, or whether their houses should be
razed, and their thrones swept away in a deluge of wrath, in a flood of present
evils, and of eternal desolation.
He pointed to the great monarchies of
former ages–to Egypt, to Babylon, to Nineveh, so mighty in their day, but which,
by fighting against God, had brought upon themselves utter ruin; and he
counselled them to take warning by these examples if they would escape the
destruction that overtook them. "You should fear," said he, "lest the reign of
this young and noble prince, on whom (under God) we build such lofty
expectations, not only should begin, but should continue and close, under the
most gloomy auspices. I might speak of the Pharaohs, of the Kings of Babylon,
and those of Israel, whose labors never more effectually contributed to their
own destruction, than when they sought by counsels, to all appearance most wise,
to strengthen their dominion. 'God removeth mountains and they know it not who
overturneth them in his anger.'"
Having thus spoken, Luther sat clown and
rested for a few minutes. He then rose once more, and repeated in Latin what he
had said in German. The chancellor had made request that he do so, chiefly for
the emperor's sake, who understood German but imperfectly. Luther spoke with
equal facility and unabated animation in the second as in the first delivery of
his address. He had occupied in all two hours.[14]
To their amazement,
the princes found that a change had somehow come over the scene. Luther no
longer stood at their bar–they had come suddenly to stand at his. The man who
two hours before had seemed to them the accused, was now transformed into the
judge–a righteous and awful judge–who, unawed by the crowns they wore and the
armies they commanded, was entreating, admonishing, and reproving them with a
severe but wholesome fidelity, and thundering forth their doom, should they
prove disobedient, with a solemnity and authority before which they trembled.
"Be wise, ye kings." What a light has the subsequent history of Europe shed upon
the words of Luther! and what a monument are the Popish kingdoms at this day of
the truth of his admonition!
At the conclusion of Luther's address Dr.
Eck again rose, and with a fretted air and in peevish tones [15] said, addressing Luther:
Unmoved, Luther replied:
And then, looking round on the assembly, he said–and the words are among the sublimest in history–
These words still thrill us after three centuries.
The impression which they made on the princes was overpowering, and a murmur of
applause, as emphatic as the respect due to the imperial presence permitted,
burst out in the Diet. Not from all, however; its Papal partisans were dismayed.
The monk's NO had fallen upon them like a thunderbolt. From that hall that NO
would go forth, and travel throughout Christendom, and it would awaken as it
rolled onward the aspirations of liberty, and summon the nations to rise and
break the yoke of Rome. Rome had lost the battle. After this it mattered
absolutely nothing what her champions in the Diet might do with Luther. They
might burn him, but to what avail? The fatal word had already been spoken; the
decisive blow had been struck. A stake could neither reverse the defeat they had
sustained, nor conceal, although it might enhance, the glory of the victory that
Luther had won. Grievous, inexpressibly grievous, was their mortification. Could
nothing be done?
Luther was bidden withdraw for a little; and during his
absence the Diet deliberated. It was easy to see that a crisis had arisen, but
not so easy to counsel the steps by which it was to be met. They resolved to
give him another opportunity of retracting. Accordingly he was called in, led
again in front of the emperor's throne, and asked to pronounce over again–now
the third time–his YES or NO. With equal simplicity and dignity he replied that
"he had no other answer to give than that which he had already given." In the
calmness of his voice, in the steadfastness of his eye, and in the leonine lines
of his rugged German face, the assembly read the stern, indomitable resolve of
his soul. Alas! for the partisans of the Papacy. The No could not be recalled.
The die had been cast irrevocably.
There are two Powers in the world, and
there are none other greater than they. The first is the Word of God without
man, and the second is conscience within him. These two Powers, at Worms, came
into conflict with the combined forces of the world. We have seen the issue. A
solitary and undefended monk stood up as the representative of conscience
enlightened and upheld by the Word of God. Opposed to him was a power which,
wielding the armies of emperors, and the anathemas of Popes, yet met utter
discomfiture. And so has it been all along in this great war.
Victory has
been the constant attendant of the one power, defeat the as constant attendant
of the other. Triumph may not always have come in the guise of victory; it may
have come by the cord, or by the axe, or by the fiery stake; it may have worn
the semblance of defeat; but in every case it has been real triumph to the
cause, while the worldly powers which have set themselves in opposition have
been slowly consumed by their own efforts, and have been undermining their
dominion by the very successes which they thought were ruining their
rival.
CHAPTER 7
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Top
LUTHER PUT UNDER THE
BAN OF THE EMPIRE.
The Movement Widening – Rising of the Diet – The
Draught of Beer – Frederick's Joy – Resolves to Protect Luther – Mortification
of Papal Party – Charles's Proposal to Violate Safe-Conduct – Rejected with
Indignation – Negotiations opened with Luther – He Quits Worms – The Emperor
fulminates against him his Ban – The Reformel Seized by Masked Horsemen –
Carried to the Wartburg.
OUR line of narration has, hitherto, been in the main
continuous. We have followed the current of Protestant development, which has
flowed so far within well-defined channels. But now we have reached the point
where the movement notably widens. We see it branching out into other countries,
and laying hold on the political combinations and movements of the age. We must
therefore ascend, and take a more extensive survey of the stage of Christendom
than we have as yet had occasion to do, noting the marvellously varied forms,
and the infinitely diversified results, in which Protestantism displays itself.
It is necessary to mark not only the new religious centers it is planting, but
the currents of thought which it is creating; the new social life to which it is
giving birth; the letters and arts of which it is becoming the nurse; the new
communities and States with which it is covering Christendom, and the career of
prosperity it is opening to the nations, making the aspect of Europe so unlike
what it has been these thousand years past.
But first let us succinctly
relate the events immediately following the Diet of Worms, and try to estimate
the advance the Protestant movement had made, and the position in which we leave
it at the moment when Luther entered into his "Patmos."
"The Diet will
meet again to-morrow to hear the emperor's decision," said Chancellor Eck,
dismissing the members for the night. The streets through which the princes
sought their homes were darkened but not deserted. Late as the hour was, crowds
still lingered in the precincts of the Diet, eager to know what the end would
be. At last Luther was led out between two imperial officers. "See, see," said
the bystanders, "there he is, in charge of the guard!. .. Are they taking you to
the prison?" they shouted out. "No," replied Luther, "they are conducting me to
my hotel." The crowd instantly dispersed, and the city was left to the quiet of
the night. Spalatin and many friends followed the Reformer to his lodgings. They
were exchanging mutual congratulations, when a servant entered, bearing a silver
jug filled with Eimbeck beer. Presenting it to the doctor, the bearer said, "My
master invites you to refresh yourself with this draught." "Who is the prince,"
asked Luther, "who so graciously remembers me?" It was the aged Duke Eric of
Brunswick, one of the Papal members of the Diet. Luther raised the vessel to his
lips, took a long draught, and then putting it down, said, "As this day Duke
Eric has remembered me, so may the Lord Jesus Christ remember him in the hour of
his last struggle." Not long after this, Duke Eric of Brunswick lay dying.
Seeing a young page standing by his bedside, he said to him, "Take the Bible,
and read in it to me." The page, opening the Bible, read out these words:
"Whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong
to me, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward.[1] Duke Eric was refreshed in
his turn. When his heart and strength were failing him a golden cup was put to
his lips, and he drank therefrom a draught of the Water of Life.
The
Elector Frederick was overjoyed at the appearance Luther had made before the
Diet. The force and pertinency of his matter, the eloquence of his words, his
intrepid yet respectful bearing, had not only delighted the sovereign of Saxony,
but had made a deep impression on the princes of the Diet. From that hour many
of them became attached friends of Luther and the Reformation. Some of them
openly avowed their change of sentiment at the time; in others the words of
Luther bore fruit in after-years. Frederick was henceforward more resolved than
ever to protect the Reformer; but knowing that the less his hand was seen in the
matter, the more effectually would he further the cause and shield its champion,
he avoided personal intercourse with the Reformer.[2] On one occasion only did
the two men meet.
The mortification of the Papal party was extreme. They
redoubled their activity; they laid snares to entrap the Reformer. They invited
him to private conferences with the Archbishop of Treves; they submitted one
insidious proposal after another, but the constancy of the Reformer was not to
be overcome. Meanwhile Aleander and his conclave had been closeted with the
emperor, concocting measures of another kind. Accordingly, at the meeting of the
Diet next day, the decision of Charles, written in his own hand,[3] was delivered and read. It
set forth that after the example of his Catholic ancesters, the Kings of Spain
and Austria, etc., he would defend, to the utmost of his ability, the Catholic
faith and the Papal chair. "A single monk," said he, "misled by his own folly,
has risen against the faith of Christendom. To stay such impiety, I will
sacrifice my kingdom, my treasures, my friends, my body, my blood, my life, and
my soul.[4] I am about to dismiss the
Augustine Luther. I shall then proceed against him and his adherents as
contumacious heretics, by excommunication, by interdict, and by every means
calculated to destroy them."
But the zeal of Charles had outrun his
powers. This proscription could not be carried out without the consent of the
States. The announcement of the emperor's decision raised a storm in the Diet.
Two parties instantly declared themselves. Some of the Papal party, especially
the Elector of Brandenburg, demanded that Luther's safe-conduct should be
disregarded, and that the Rhine should receive his ashes, as it had done those
of John Huss a century before.[5] But, to his credit, Louis,
Elector Palatine, expressed instant and utter abhorrence of the atrocious
proposal. True, he said, Huss was burned at the stake, but ever since calamity
has never ceased to pursue Germany. We dare not, said he, erect a second
scaffold. He was joined by Duke George, whose repudiation of the proposed infamy
was the more emphatic that he was Luther's avowed enemy. That the princes of
Germany should for a moment entertain the purpose of violating a safe-conduct,
was a thing he held impossible. They never would bring such a stain upon the
honor of the Fatherland; nor would they open the reign of the young emperor with
such an evil augury.[6] The Bavarian nobles,
though mostly Papal, also protested against the violation of the public faith.
The proposition met with the fate it deserved; it was expelled the Diet with
scorn and indignation.
The extreme men of the Papal party would, without
hesitation, have planted the Reformer's stake, but what would have been the
result? A civil war in Germany the very next day. The enthusiasm of all classes
was immense. Even Dean Cochlaeus and Cardinal Pallavicino assure us that there
were hundreds of armed men in Worms itself, ready to unsheathe the sword and
demand blood for blood. Only a dozen miles away, in his strong castle of
Ebernburg, "the refuge of the Righteous," was the valorous Sickingen, and the
fiery knight Hutten, at the head of a corps of men-at-arms amounting to many
thousands, ready to descend on Worms, should Luther be sacrificed, to hold a
reckoning with all those who were concerned in his death. From the most distant
cities of Germany men watched, their hands on their sword-hilts, to see what
would happen at Worms. The moderate men among the Papal members of the Diet were
well aware that to violate the safe-conduct, would simply be to give the signal
for outbreak and convulsion from one end of Germany to the other.
Nor
could Charles be blind to so great a danger. Had he violated the safe-conduct,
his first would probably have been his last Diet; for the Empire itself would
have been imperilled. But if we may trust historians of name,[7] his conduct in this matter
was inspired by nobler sentiments than these of self-interest. In opposing the
violation of the plighted faith of the Empire, he is reported to have said that
"though faith should be banished from all the earth, it ought to find refuge
with princes." Certainly a kingly sentiment, well becoming so powerful a
potentate, but there was not wanting a little alloy in its gold. War was then on
the point of breaking out between him and the King of France. Charles only half
trusted the Pope, and even that was trusting him a little too much. The Pope had
just concluded a secret treaty with both kings,[8] Charles and Francis,
pledging his aid to both, with, of course, the wise reservation of giving it
only to the one by aiding whom he should, as future events might show, most
effectually aid himself. This double-handed policy on the part of Leo, Charles
met by tactics equally astute. In the game of checking the Pope, which he found
he must needs play, he judged that a living Luther would be a more valuable
counter than a dead one. "Since the Pope greatly feared Luther's doctrine," says
Vetteri, "he designed to hold him in check with that rein."[9]
The result of so
many conflicting yet conspiring circumstances was that Luther departed in peace
from those gates out of which no man had expected ever to see him come alive. On
the morning of the 26th April, surrounded by twenty gentlemen on horseback, and
a crowd of people who accompanied him beyond the walls, Luther left Worms.[10] His journey back was
accomplished amid demonstrations of popular interest more enthusiastic even than
those which had signalised his progress thither. A few days after he was gone,
the emperor fulminated his "edict" against him, placing him beyond the pale of
law, and commanding all men, whenever the term of Luther's safe-conduct expired,
to withhold from him food and drink, succor and shelter, to apprehend him and
send him bound to the emperor. This edict was drafted by Aleander, and ratified
at a meeting of the Diet which was held, not in the hall of assembly, but in the
emperor's own chamber. The Elector Frederick, the Elector Palatine, and many
others, had ere this left Worms. The edict was dated the 8th of May, but in
point of fact the imperial signature was appended to it on the 26th of May, as
Pallavicino tells us, in the cathedral church of Worms, after the celebration of
high mass; the design of the ante-dating being, the same writer says, to give to
the edict the appearance of carrying with it the authority of a full Diet.[11] This edict was more
discursive than such documents usually are. Its style, instead of being formal
and stately, was figurative and rhetorical. It opened with a profusion of
epithets meant to be descriptive of the great heretic of Wittemberg; it ran on,
in equally fertile vein, in an enumeration of the heresies, blasphemies, and
vices into which he had fallen, and the crimes to which he was inciting the
People– "schism, war, murder, robbery, incendiarism"–and it foretold in alarming
terms the perdition into which he was dragging society, and the ruin that
impended unless his "furious rage" should be checked. The edict reached its
climax in the startling affirmation that "this man was not a man, but Satan
himself under the form of a man, and dressed in a monk's frock."[12]
So spake Charles
the Fifth to the electors, princes, prelates, and people of his Empire. Luther
had entered Worms with one sword hanging over his head–the anathema of the Pope;
he quits it with two unsheathed against him, for now to the Pope's
excommunication is added the emperor's ban.
Meanwhile the Reformer was
going on his way. It was now the ninth day (May 4th) since he set out from
Worms. He had traversed the mountains of the Black Forest. How grateful, after
the stirs and grandeurs of Worms, their silent glades, their fir-embowered
hamlets, their herds quietly pasturing, the morning shooting its silvery shafts
through the tall trees, and the evening with its shadows descending from the
golden west!
The pines were getting fewer, the hills were sinking into
the plain; our traveler was nearing Eisenach; he was now on ground familiar to
him from boyhood. At this point of the journey, Schurf, Jonas, and Sauven left
him and went on to Wittemberg, taking the high road that leads eastward over the
plain by Elgurt. Amsdorff alone remained with him. The doctor and his companion
struck northward to the town of Mora to visit his grandmother, who still
survived. He passed the next day in the refreshing quiet of this little place.
The following morning he resumed his journey, and had reached a lonely spot near
the Castle of Altenstein, when a troop of horsemen, wearing masks and completely
armed, rushed suddenly upon him. The wagon in which he sat was stopped, the
waggoner thrown to the ground, and while one of the masks laid firm hold of
Amsdorff, another pulling Luther hastily out of the car, raised him to the
saddle, and grasping his horse's bridle-rein, plunged quickly with him into the
forest of Thuringia.
All day long the troop of horsemen wandered hither
and thither in the wood, their purpose being to defy pursuit. When night fell
they began to ascend a mountain, and a little before midnight they came under
the walls of a castle that crowned its summit [13] The drawbridge was let
down, the portcullis raised, and the cavalcade passing in, the troopers
dismounted in the rocky court of the castle. The captive was led up a single
flight of steps, and ushered into an apartment, where he was told he must make a
sojourn of unknown length, and during it must lay aside his ecclesiastical
dress, attire himself in the costume of a knight, which lay ready to his hand,
and be known only by the name of Knight George.
When morning broke, and
Luther looked from the casement of his apartment, he saw at a glance where he
was. Beneath him were the forest glades, the hamlets, and all the well-known
scenes that adjoin Eisenach; although the town itself was not in view. Farther
away were the plains around Mora, and bounding these was the vast circle of the
hills that sweep along on the horizon.[14] He could not but know that
he was in the Castle of the Wartburg, and in friendly keeping.
Thus
suddenly the man on whom all eyes were fixed was carried off, as if by a
whirlwind, no one knew whither; nor could any one in all Germany,save his
captors, toll whether he was now dead or alive. The Pope had launched his bolt,
the emperor had raised his mailed hand to strike, on every side destruction
seemed to await the Reformer; at that moment Luther becomes invisible. The Papal
thunder rolls harmlessly along the sky–the emperor's sword cleaves only the
yielding air.
Strangely have the scenes been shifted, and thestage has
become suddenly dark. But a moment ago the 'theater was crowded with great
actors, emperors, princes, ecclesiastical dignitaries, and ambassadors. Powerful
interests were in conflict, and mighty issues were about to be decided. The
thunder of a fearful ban had just pealed forth, the sword of the emperor had
left its scabbard, matters were hurrying to a crisis, and the crash of some
terrible catastrophe seemed to be impending. All at once the action is arrested,
the brilliant throng vanishes, a deep silence succeeds the tumult and noise, and
we have time to meditate on what we have seen, to revolve its lessons, and to
feel in our hearts the presence and the hand of that Great Ruler who "sits King
upon the floods."
Book 7 Index
FOOTNOTES
VOLUME FIRST
BOOK SIXTH
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK SIXTH- CHAPTER 1
[1] Seckendorf, lib. 1., sec. 27, p. 111.
[2] Sleidan, bk. 1., p. 21.
[3] Ibid., p. 13.
[4] MullerUniv. Hist., bk. 19, sec. 1.
[5] Robertson, Hist. Charles V., bk. 1., p. 83.
[6] Sleidan, bk. 1., p. 18.
[7] After the election the ambassadors of Charles offered a large sum of money to the Elector Frederick; he not only refused it, but commanded all about him to take not a farthing. (Sleidan, bk. 1., p. 18.)
[8] L. EPP., 2., p. 452.
[9] Sleidan, bk. 1., p. 31.
[10] Seckendorf, lib. 1., sec. 28, p. 112.
[11] Dr. Chalmers.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK SIXTH- CHAPTER 2
[1] Polano, 1., p. 9.
[2] Pallavicino, lib. 1., cap. 20.
[3] Pallavicino, lib. 1., cap. 20.
[4] Sleidan, bk. 2., p. 35.
[5] Art. 33 of the bull condemns this proposition:– "Haereticos comburi est contra voluntatem Spiritus." (Bullarium Romanum, tom. 1., p. 610; Luxemburg, 1742.)
[6] Sarpi, livr. 1., p. 28; Basle, 1738. Sleidan, bk 1 p.35
[7] Sleidan, bk. 1., p. 32.
[8] Pallavicino, lib. 1. cap. 20, p. 81.
[9] D'Aubigne, vol. 2., p. 135.
[10] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 28, p. 112. Sleidan, bk. 2, p. 36.
[11] Lath. Opp., 2: 315; Jenae.
[12] Seckendorf, lib. l, sec. 31, p. 121.
[13] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 22.
[14] Luth. Opp. (Lat.) 2, 123. D'Aubigne, 2 152.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK SIXTH- CHAPTER 3
[1] Published, privately in 1515; publicly in 1516. He thus, as Gerdesius says, exhibited the foundation and rule of all reformation. (Hist. Renovati Doctrinoeque Reformata, tom. 1, p. 147.)
[2] Sleidan, bk. 2, p. 37.
[3] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 23.
[4] Pallavicino informs us that Aleander was born of a respectable family in Friuli.
[5] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 34, p. 125.
[6] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 23, pp. 91, 92.
[7] Ibid., p. 89. Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 34, p. 124.
[8] Seckendorf, lib. 1 sec. 34, p, 125
[9] Ibid
[10] Pallavicino, lib. 1., cap. 24, p. 93.
[11] Muller, Univ. Hist. vol. 2, pp. 406, 420.
[12] Robertson, Hist. Charles V, bk.2
[13] Muller, Univ. Hist., vol. 3, p. 32
[14] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 25, pp. 95, 96: "Il gran seguito di Martino; 1' alienazione del popolo d'Alemagna dalla Corte di Roma… e il rischio di perdere la Germania per avarizia d' una moneta."
[15] This bull is engrossed in Bullarum, Jan., 1521, under the title of Decret. Romannm Pontificem.
[16] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 24, p. 93.
[17] Weimar State Papers: apud D'Aubigne, vol. 2, p. 192.
[18] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 37, p. 143.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK SIXTH- CHAPTER 4
[1] See Aleander's speech in Pallavicino, bk. 1, chap. 25, pp. 98-108.
[2] "Onde vvengadella Germania per la licenziosa Eresia di Lutero cio ch' e avvenuto dell' Asia per la sensuale Superstizione di Macometto." (Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 25.)
[3] Pallavicino, lib. 1., cap. 25, p. 97. Seckendorf has said that Pallavicino invented this speech and put it into the mouth of Aleander. Some Protestant writers have followed Seckendorf. There is no evidence in support of this supposition. D'Aubigne believes in the substantial authenticity of the speech. Pallavicino tells us the sources from which he took the speech; more especially Aleander's own letters, still in the library of the Vatican.
[4] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 26, p. 108: "la maggior partede raunati concorreva nella sentenza d' estirpar l' Eresia Luterana."
[5] The progress which the reforming spirit had made, even among the German ecclesiastics, may be judged of from the indifference of many who were deeply interested in the maintenance of the old system. "Even those," complained Eck, "who hold from the Pope the best benefices and the richest canonries remained mute as fishes; many of them even extolled Luther as a man filled with the Spirit of God, and called the defenders of the Pope sophists and flatterers." (D'Aubigne.)
[6] The important catalogue has been preserved in the archives of Weimar. (Seckendorf.p.328; apud D'Aubigue, vol. 2, p. 203.)
[7] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 26, p. 108.
[8] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 38, p. 150. Varillas says that Charles had a strong desire to see Luther.
[9] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 26, p. 109.
[10] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 38, p. 151
[11] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 26, p. 109.
[12] "It may perhaps appear strange," says Moaheim, "and even inconsistent with the laws of the Church, that a cause of a religious nature should be examined and decided in the public Diet. But it must be considered that these Diets in which the archbishops, bishops, and even certain abbots had their places, as well as the princes of the Empire, were not only political assemblies, but also provincial councils for Germany, to whose jurisdiction, by the ancient canon law, such causes as that of Luther properly belonged." (Eccl. Hist., cent. 16, bk. 4, sec. 1, ch. 2.)
[13] Sleidan, bk. 3, p. 42.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK SIXTH- CHAPTER 5
[1] L.Epp., 1 574. D'Aubigne, 2, 208.
[2] Luth. Opp., 1, 987.
[3] Maimbourg has obligingly provided our traveler with a magnificent chariot and a guard of a hundred horsemen. There is not a particle of proof to show that this imposing cavalcade ever existed save on the page of this narrator. The Canon of Altenburg, writing from Worms to John, brother of Frederick the Elector, April 16th, 1521, says: "To- day Mr. Martin arrived here in a common Saxon wagon." (Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 39, p. 152.)
[4] Letter of Canon of Altenburg to John of Saxony.
[5] Letter of Warbeccius, Canon of Altenburg. (Secken-dorf, lib. 1, sec. 39, p. 152 – Additio.)
[6] Luth. Opp. (L) 12:485. D'Aubigne 2: 224-226.
[7] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 39, p. 152.
[8] Letter of Canon of Altenburg to John of Saxony. (Seckendorf.)
[9] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 39, p. 152. "These words," says Seekendorf, "were remembered by many. They were repeated by Luther himself, a little while before his death, at Eisleben." He added, "I know not whether I would be as courageous now."
[10] Audin, 2, p. 90. The common opinion is that this hymn, "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott," was composed some years later. Audin's supposition, however, has great inherent probability, and there are some facts which seem to support it. The combined rhythm and strength of this hymn cannot be transferred to a translation.
[11] "I entered Worms in a covered wagon and my monk's gown." said Luther afterwards. (Luth. Opp. 17, 587.)
[12] "Lo, thou art come, O thou greatly desired one, whom we have waited for in the darkness of the grave." (M. Adam, Vita Lutheri, p. 118.)
[13] "E nello smontar di carozza disse forte: Iddio sard por me." (Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 26, p. 109.)
[14] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 26, p. 109.
[15] Worsley, vol. 1, p. 230.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK SIXTH- CHAPTER 6
[1] Seckendort, lib. 1, sec. 42, p. 156.
[2] D'Aubigne, vol. 2, p. 237.
[3] A learned man," says Pallavicino, "a Catholic, and an intimate friend of Aleander's."
[4] Luth. Opp. (L) 17, 588. D'Aubigne, vol. 2, p. 238. 1045
[5] Pallavicino tells us that these had been collected by the industry of Aleander.
[6] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 26, p. 110.
[7] "Costui certamente non mi farebbe mai diventar Eretico." (Pallavicino, lib. 1, p. 110.)
[8] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 27, p. 110.
[9] Seckendorf (lib. 1, p. 156) gives extracts from Luther's letters to Spalatin, descriptive of his feelings at Worms, which prove this.
[10] "This prayer," says D'Aubigne, "is to be found in a collection of documents relative to Luther's appearance at Worms, under No. 16, in the midst of safe-conducts and other papers of a similar nature. One of his friends had no doubt overheard it, and has transmitted it to posterity. In our opinion, it is one of the most precious documents in all history." (Hist. Reform., vol. 2, p. 243.)
[11] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 41, p. 154.
[12] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 41, p. 154.
[13] Sarpi, Hist. Conc. Trent., tom. 1, pp, 32, 33; Basle, 1738.
[14] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 27, p. 111. Pallavicino, who has given Aleander's speech before the Diet at such great length, and in such eloquent phrase, has devoted scarcely more than half a page to Luther's. The effect of Aleander's address evaporated in a week: Luther's has been stirring men these three centuries, and its influence is still powerful for good. For the disparity of the two reports, however, we do not blame the historian of the Council of Trent. His narrative, he tells us, was compiled from original documents in the Vatican Library, and especially the letters of Aleander, and it was natural perhaps that Aleander should make but short work with the oration of his great opponent. We have Luther's speech from German sources. It is given with considerable fullness by D'Aubigne, who adds, "This speech, as well as all the other expressions we quote, is taken literally from authentic documents. See L. Opp. (L) 17, 776–780." (D'Aubigne, vol 2, p. 248, foot-note.)
[15] Sleidan, bk. 3, p. 44.
[16] Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott belle mir. Amen."
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK SIXTH- CHAPTER 7
[1] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 44, Additio 1, p. 160.
[2] Ibid., lib. 1, sec. 42, Additio 1, p. 157.
[3] Cochlaeus, p. 32. Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 27, p. 111.
[4] Pero aver egli statuito d' impiegar i regni, i tesori, gli amici, il corpo, il sangue la vita, e lo spirito." (Pallavicino, lib. 1, p. 112.) How affecting these words when one thinks of what now is the condition of the kingdom, the treasures, and the royal house of Spain!
[5] Sleidan, bk. 3, p. 44. Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 44, p.160. Polano, Hist. Counc. Trent, bk. 1, p. 14; Lond., 1629.
[6] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 44, Additio 1, p. 160.
[7] Seckendorf (quoting from Altingius), lib. 1, sec. 44, Additio 1:Pallavicino denies that it was proposed to violate the safe-conduct. He founds his denial upon the silence of Aleander. But the Papal nuncio's silence, which is exceedingly natural, can weigh but little against the testimony of so many historians.
[8] The imperial proscription of Luther is said to have been dated on the same day on which the treaty with the Pope was concluded. (Ranke, Hist. of the Popes, vol. 1, p. 65; Bohn's edit., Lond., 1847.)
[9] Sommario della Storia d' Italia. (Ranke, vol. 1, p. 66.)
[10] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 28, p. 114.
[11] Pallavicino, lib. 1, cap. 28, p. 117. Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 42, p. 158.
[12] "Nicht ein Mensch, sondern als der bose Fiend in Gestalt eines Menschen mit angenommener Monsch-skutten."–Luth. Opp. (L) 17:598.
[13] Seckendorf, lib. 1, sec. 44, p. 159. L. Epp., 2:3.
[14] The author has surveyed the scene from the same window, and he describes it as he saw it, and as it must have been daily seen by Luther. The hill of the Wartburg is a steep and wooded slope on all sides, save that on which the window of Luther's chamber is placed. On this side a bare steep runs sheer down to almost the foot of the mountain.