Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  But, a comparatively short time after, another was to come, who would assert that the world had long ago lost the Lamb of God, and who presumed to take upon himself the task of pointing Him out anew to all men and of making Him profitable to souls.

  In unison with Fathers and theologians, Biel sums up the mutual relations between the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacrifice on the Cross in the words: “Although Christ was once only offered visibly in the flesh, yet He is daily offered concealed under the appearances of bread and wine, though painlessly, for the Sacrifice of the Mass is the representation and memorial of the sacrifice consummated on the Cross and produces the same effects.”

  When describing more minutely its efficacy for the obtaining of grace and forgiveness of sins he dwells on the thought, that it has no quasi-magical effect, but acts “according to man’s preparation and capacity,” so that the Holy Sacrifice does not by any means blot out sin if man’s heart is still turned away from God: to souls that show themselves well-disposed it brings contrition and sorrow for sin and finally forgiveness. Unlike Baptism and Penance, it does not reconcile the soul with God directly, but only indirectly, by arousing the spirit of penance which leads to the wholesome use of the sacraments and appeases the anger of the Heavenly Father by the offering of His Son, and prevents Him withdrawing the help of His grace. Biel elucidates the idea of sacrifice, deals with the figurative sacrifices of the Old Testament, which found their fulfilment in the clean oblation (Mal. i. 10 f.) to be offered from the rising of the sun even to the going down, with the twofold efficacy of the Mass (“ex opere operato” and “ex opere operante”) and many other points which Luther unjustly attacks; with the lawfulness of private Masses, with or without any Communion of the faithful, with the advantage of Masses for the souls of the faithful departed, with Mass-stipends which he defends against the charge of simony, and with the practice of repeating silently certain portions of the Mass, an ancient usage for which he gives the reasons.

  “On the Corner-Mass.” Continuation of the Conflict.

  In his war against the Mass Luther was never to yield an inch. His “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse” was followed by fresh pronouncements and writings which bear witness to the intensity of his hatred.

  The occasion for another lengthy writing against the Mass and the hierarchy seems to have been furnished in 1533 by the religious conditions in the province of Anhalt, where the Princes, under pressure from their Catholic neighbours, had begun to tolerate the former worship and the saying of Mass. In Dec. of that year Luther published his booklet “Von der Winckelmesse und Pfaffen Weihe.”

  It was designed primarily as a protest against “the ecclesiastical jurisdiction and Ordination,” i.e. against the hierarchy and priesthood, and broadly hinted to the “bishops and priests” that their Order was doomed to destruction. At the Diet of Augsburg he declared his followers had “very humbly informed the Pope and the bishops, that we had no wish forcibly to infringe on their rights and authority in ecclesiastical matters, but that, so long as they did not compel us to any unchristian doctrines, we were quite ready to be ordained and governed by them, and even to assist them in their administration,” but his overtures having been rejected, nothing remained for him but to await the end of the priesthood when God should “in good time” so dispose. “God is wonderful”; He had “overthrown by His word” so much “papistical Mammon-service and idolatry”; “He would also be able to wipe away the rancid Chresam,” i.e. to make an end of the bishops and priests in whose ordination Chrism was used. Towards the end of the tract he returns to the attack on priestly ordination. He is determined “again to adjudge and commit to the Churches the call, or true ordination and consecration to the office of pastor.” The members of the Church must have the “right and authority to appoint people to the office,” and to entrust it to simple believers of blameless lives, even “without Chrism or butter, grease or lard.”

  The greater portion of the writing is, however, devoted to the “Corner-Mass,” i.e. the Mass generally, which according to the Catholic doctrine is equally valid whether celebrated by the priest alone in a lonely chapel or amid a concourse of faithful who unite their prayers with his and communicate. For reasons readily understood, Luther prefers to use the contemptuous term “Corner-Mass.”

  Towards the end he himself sums up the thoughts on the Mass which he has just submitted:

  He had the best grounds for “being affrighted,” that he and others “had once said the Corner-Mass so devoutly.” After the reasons he had advanced, everyone, particularly the Papists to-day, must be driven to despair at the frightful idolatry of the Mass; yet they “wantonly persist in their abomination.” “They pervert Christ’s ordinance, say their Mass not merely in disobedience to God, but also blasphemously and without any command, give the sacrament to no one but keep it for themselves alone, and, to make matters worse, are not even certain whether they are receiving merely bread and wine or the Body and Blood of Christ, because they do not follow Christ’s ordinance.”

  Here he plainly enough questions the presence of Christ under the consecrated elements in the “Corner-Mass” and has thus made a notable stride forward in his hostility.

  “Nor can anyone be certain,” so he continues his summing up, “whether they [the priests, in the Canon of the Mass] pronounce the Words [of institution] or not; hence no one is bound to believe their secret antics. Neither do they preach to anyone, though Christ commanded it.” In his opinion it was essential both that the words of institution should be spoken aloud, in order to stimulate faith, and that the service should include the preaching of the Word — minor matters, which, however, became of the greatest importance to him when once he had reduced it all to the status of a mere ceremonial of edification.

  He boldly concludes. “It is also impossible that they [the Popish sayers of Masses] can be right in their faith.” For, as already demonstrated, “one and the same man could not believe aright and yet knowingly rage against the Word of God. Hence they can neither pray, nor offer thanks in such a way as to be acceptable to God. And, finally, over and above these abominations and crimes, they actually dare to offer to God this sacrament (if what is disgraced by so much blasphemy and abomination can be called a sacrament) and to barter and sell it to other Christians for money.”

  The book on the “Winckelmesse” is celebrated for the disputation between Luther and the devil which it describes. The devil sets forth the proofs against the Mass with marvellous skill, and, by his reproaches, drives the quondam monk into desperate straits. Here Luther is describing the deep remorse of conscience which he will have it he had to endure on account of his Masses. He is, however, merely using a literary artifice when he introduces the devil as the speaker; of this there will be more to say later. Here, in addition to a letter, which so far has received but little attention, in which he himself furnishes the key to the form in which he casts his argument, we may mention the fact that Luther’s first draft of his writing on the “Winckelmesse,” which has recently been examined, gives a portion of the devil’s arguments against the Mass and without any reference to the devil, as the author’s own; only later on was the devil made the spokesman for Luther’s ideas. We can see that it was only as the work proceeded that there occurred to Luther the happy thought of making the devil himself speak, not so much to reveal to the world the worthlessness of the Mass, as to cast if possible poor Luther into despair, because of his former Mass-sayings, and to reveal the utter perversity of the Papists, who, far from being in despair, actually boasted of the Mass.

  Luther expected great things from his ruthless attack and from the scene in which the devil appears. It would be, so he fancied, a “test of the wisdom and power of the Papacy.” His friend Jonas, in a letter of Oct. 26, 1533, speaking of the yet unpublished “Winckelmesse,” calls it a real “battering-ram” to be used against the Papacy; it was long since the Professor had been heard speaking in such a way of the Mass, the Pope and the priests. Th
ose of the preachers who were fallen priests rejoiced at the advice they found in the book for the quieting of their consciences when tempted by the devil, and at its hint that they should rub their anointed hands with soap and lye the better to obliterate the mark of the Beast.

  The writing was translated by Jonas into Latin, but his rendering was a very free and rhetorical one.

  The interest it aroused was increased by the negative attitude which Luther seemed to assume towards the Real Presence. To many of his followers Luther seemed to come to an opinion not far removed from the Zwinglian denial of the Presence. Luther learned that Prince Johann of Anhalt and others had expressed their anxiety lest the booklet “should be understood as though I agreed with the fanatics and enemies of the Sacrament.” Hence he at once issued a fresh writing entitled: “A Letter of D. Mart. Luther to a good friend concerning his book on the Corner-Masses” (1534).

  To attack the Sacrament and the Real Presence was, he there declared, far from his thoughts. I shall prove “that I do not hold, nor ever shall hold to all eternity, with the wrong doctrine of the foes of the Sacrament — or to speak quite plainly — with that of Carlstadt, Zwingli and their followers.” But by this he stood: “Whoever, like the Papists, did not celebrate the Sacrament according to the ordinance of Christ, had no right to say Christ was there”; “a counterfeit florin, struck contrary to the King’s order, can never be a good one.” “May God bestow on all pious Christians such a mind, that, when they hear the Mass spoken of, they quake with fear and cross themselves as they would at the sight of some abomination of the devil.”

  Johann Cochlæus at once replied to the “Winckelmesse” with an appeal to the correctness of ecclesiastical tradition. In the same year he published Innocent the Third’s “De sacro altaris mysterio” and Isidore of Sevilla’s “De ecclesiasticis officiis.” These venerable witnesses of Christian antiquity had, he declared, “a better claim to be believed than Luther’s furies.” In addition to this he also wrote a popular theological defence in the vernacular “On the Holy Mass and Priestly ordination” (Leipzig, 1534). In this writing he begins by emphasising the claims of ecclesiastical tradition and the teaching office of the Church: “The Church understands Scripture far better and more surely, thanks to the Holy Spirit promised by Christ and duly sent her, than Luther does by his evil spirit.” He laid down the principle which he urged was the only true and reliable guide in the controversies of the age: Hold fast to the teaching of the Church rather than to the subjective interpretations of the Bible, which are often so divergent. He was not, however, altogether happy in his choice of expressions, for instance, when he exclaims: “Bible hither, Bible thither!” for this might well have given the impression, that, on his side, small account was made of the Bible. In reality this was merely his way of retorting on Luther’s: “Tradition hither, Tradition thither.” The theologian, who elsewhere is careful to set its true value on the Bible, seeks in this way to brand the tricks played with the Bible; similar phrases then in use were the one we already know, “Bible, Babble, Bubble,” and Luther’s own sarcastic saying: “The Bible is a heresy-book.”

  Cochlæus not only brought forward, in support of the Mass, besides Holy Scripture, that tradition which Luther had treated so scornfully, but also replied to his opponent’s perversions and charges on all the other counts. Of the grievous disorders which Luther said had come under his notice during his stay in Rome, what Cochlæus says is much to the point: “It is quite possible, that, among so many thousands from all lands, there may have been some such desperate villains. But it is not seemly that Luther on that score should seek to calumniate pious and devout monks and priests and make the people distrustful of them.”

  In his familiar conversations Luther repeatedly reveals the psychological side of his attack on the Mass.

  He said in 1540: “From the earliest years [of the revolt against the Church] I was grievously tempted by the thought: ‘If the Mass is really the highest form of Divine worship, then, Good God, how wickedly have I behaved, towards God!’” He sought to stifle the voice of conscience, which he called a temptation, by insisting still more strongly on the worthlessness of the Mass. “But this is quite certain,” he says, “the Mass is Moasim.” Moasim, according to Dan. xi. 38, was the idol to be set up by Antichrist, in the letters of whose name, according to Luther, we find the word “Mass”; this idol, he says, was honoured with “silver, gold and precious stones,” because the Mass helps to bring in such great wealth.

  “From the Mass,” he said in the same conversation, “came every sort of ungodliness, it was an ‘abominanda abominatio,’ and yet it was held in such honour.” — In another conversation in the same year we hear him say: “the Canon was looked upon as so sacred that to attack it was like attacking both heaven and earth. When first I wrote against the Mass and against the Canon I could hardly hope that people would agree with me.... But when my writing [the ‘Sermon on the New Testament, i.e. the Mass,’ 1520] was published, I found that many had shared my temptation; they thanked me for deliverance from their terror.”

  In Luther’s efforts to deliver himself and others “from their terror” and to convince himself that “this is quite certain,” lies the sole explanation of his wild statements that his former saying of Mass — though undoubtedly done in good faith, and, at first, even with pleasure and devotion — was his worst sin, and that he would rather have “kept a bawdy house or been a robber than to have blasphemed and traduced Christ for fifteen years by the saying of Masses,” and, again, that “no tongue can tell the abomination of the Mass, nor can any heart believe its wickedness. It would not have been astonishing had God destroyed the world on account of the Mass, as He will without a doubt soon do by fire.” The Mass embodies a “pestilential mistake of the self-righteousness of the opus operatum.” In the Popish Mass an ignorant priest, who does not even know Latin, takes it on himself to blot out the sins of others.

  Equally evident, according to the Table-Talk, was the pestilent side of the Mass as a pecuniary concern. It is on this account that Luther is fond of calling it the foundation of Popery, as though the Papacy were erected on wealth. His historical knowledge of the actual facts is as great here as it is when, in his Table-Talk, he makes private Masses originate in the time of Pope Gregory I († 604).

  Incidentally he describes quite frankly one way in which he had endeavoured to overthrow the Mass: At first it had seemed to him impossible to achieve its fall because its roots were so deeply imbedded in the human heart. “But when once the Sacrament is received under both kinds, the Mass will not stand much longer.” — We have already had occasion to describe the underhand measures he recommended in the warfare against the Mass (Vol. ii., f.).

  In part at least, he could congratulate himself on the success of his unholy efforts. “If our Lord God allows me to die a natural death, He will be playing a nasty trick on the Papists, because they will have failed to burn the man who has thus brought the Mass to nought.”

  Denunciation of the Mass naturally occupies a place in Luther’s Articles of Schmalkalden. Since the latter were incorporated in the “Symbolic Books” of the Lutheran Evangelical Church and figure in the Book of Concord with the three oldest Œcumenical Creeds, the Confession of Augsburg, etc., as writings “recognised and accepted as godly truths by our blessed forefathers and by us,” condemnation of the Mass became as much a traditional canon within the Protestant fold as Luther himself could have desired.

  In the Schmalkalden Articles we find, after the first article on Justification by Faith alone, a second article on the office and work of Jesus Christ which declares: “That the Mass among the Papists must be the greatest and most frightful abomination” because it is “in direct and violent opposition” to the first article, according to which the Lamb of God alone delivers man from sin, not “a wicked or pious minister of the Mass by his work.” The Mass is a “work of men, yea, of wicked knaves,” a source “of unspeakable abuses by the buying and
selling of Masses,” defended by the Papists only because they “know very well, that if the Mass falls, the Papacy too must perish.” Over and above all this, that dragon’s tail, which is the Mass, has produced much filth and vermin and many forms of idolatry: First of all Purgatory; for the execrable market of Masses for the dead produced that “devilish spectre” of Purgatory. Secondly, “on account of it evil spirits have performed much trickery by appearing as the souls of men”; the devils “with unspeakable roguery” demanded Masses, etc. “Thirdly, pilgrimages, whereby people ran after Masses, forgiveness of sins, and the Grace of God, for the Mass ruled everything” and caused men to run after “hurtful, devilish will-o’-the-wisps.” “Fourthly, the brotherhoods” with their Masses, etc., are also “contrary to the first article of the Atonement.” “Fifthly, the holy things” (relics) were also “supposed to effect forgiveness of sin as being a good work and worship of God like the Mass.” “Sixthly, here belong also the beloved Indulgence” in which “Judas incarnate, i.e. the Pope, sells the merits of Christ.” — Hence even Indulgences are made out to be one of the unhappy consequences of the Mass!