It was not till the 25th of May that the edict against Luther was presented to a small number of members of the diet, after the elector of Saxony and many important members had left Worms. It threatened all Luther’s sympathisers with extermination, and practically proclaimed an Albigensian war in Germany. But few public documents prepared with so much care have proved so futile. The latter half of 1521 saw the silent spread of Lutheran opinions all over Germany. This was not unaccompanied with dangers. Every movement for reform carries within it the seeds of revolution, and Luther’s was no exception to the rule.
The revolution began in Wittenberg during Luther’s seclusion in the Wartburg. Andrew Boden of Carlstadt, a colleague of Luther’s in the university of Wittenberg, was strongly impressed with the contradiction which he believed to exist between evangelical teaching and the usages of medieval ecclesiastical life. He denounced monastic vows, a distinctive dress for the clergy, the thought of a propitiatory mass, and the presence of images and pictures in the churches. Zwilling, a young Augustinian Eremite, added his fiery denunciations. His preaching stirred the commonalty. Turbulent crowds invaded two of the churches and rioted inside. The excitement of the people was increased by the arrival of three men known in history as the Zwickau prophets. Melanchthon felt himself powerless to restrain the tumult. The magistrates of the town were won over and issued an ordinance which attempted to express in legislation the new evangelical ideas. Duke George of Saxony, a resolute opponent of the Reformation, threatened to make the diet interfere. Luther became alarmed, and, not without a private hint from the elector of Saxony, left his retreat and appeared among his townsmen. His presence and exertions restored order, and the conservative reformation resumed its quiet course. From this time onwards to the outbreak of the Peasants’ War (1525) Luther was the real leader of the German nation, and everything seemed to promise a gradual reformation without tumult.
The Peasants’ War ended this anticipation. From one point of view this insurrection was simply the last, the most widespreading and the most disastrous of these revolts, which had been almost chronic in Germany during the later decades of the 15th and earlier years of the 16th century and which had been almost continuous between 1503 and 1517. All the social and economic causes which produced them were increasingly active in 1524 and 1525. But it is undoubted that the religious revolt intensified the rebellion of the lower classes. Luther’s voice awoke echoes he never dreamt of. The times were ripe for revolution, and the message which spoke of a religious democracy could not fail to suggest the social democracy also. In his appeal to the Nobility of the German Nation he had stated with severe precision the causes of social discontent. Himself a peasant’s son and acquainted with the grievances under which the peasant lived, he had at various times formulated most of the demands which afterwards figured conspicuously in the Twelve Articles. The insurgents had good cause to regard him as a sympathiser. But Luther, rightly or wrongly, believed that of the two ways in which wrongs can be set right — the way of war and the path of peace — the latter is the only sure road in the long run. He did his best therefore to prevent the rising and risked his life among the infuriated peasants as readily as when he stood before the emperor and the diet. When the rebellion was at its height and Thomas Münzer had sent forth fiery proclamations urging the peasantry “not to let the blood cool on their swords,” Luther issued the pamphlet, which casts a stain on his whole life, in which he hounds on the ruling classes to suppress the insurgents with all violence. In the end the rebellion, formidable as it seemed for a few months, was crushed, and a heavier yoke was laid on the shoulders of the unfortunate peasants.
This year, 1525, saw the parting of the ways in the movement for reform. It ceased to be national and became ecclesiastical. It divided into three separate parts. One, guided by Luther himself, ended, after a long struggle with pope and emperor, in the establishment of evangelical churches under the rule of the secular authorities of the territories which adopted the Lutheran Reformation. Another, remaining true to the principles, doctrines, usages and hierarchy of the medieval church, dreamt only of a purification of moral life, and saw its end realised in the reforms of the council of Trent. The third, gathering together the more revolutionary impulses, expanded into that complex movement called Anabaptism — which spread over western Europe from England to Poland and from Scandinavia to northern Italy, and endured a long and sanguinary persecution at the hands of the civil authorities in most European countries. Its strength and popularity, especially among the artizan classes, have been very much underrated by most historians.
During the storm of the Peasants’ War (13th of June 1525) Luther married Catherine von Bora, the daughter of a noble but impoverished family belonging to Meissen. She had been a Cistercian nun in the convent of Nimtzch near Grimma — a convent reserved for ladies of noble birth. Luther’s writings, circulating through Saxony, had penetrated the convent walls and had convinced most of the inmates of the unlawfulness of monastic vows. Catherine and eight companions resolved to escape. Their relatives refused to aid them, and they applied to Luther. He entrusted the business to Leonhard Koppe of Torgau, and the rescue was safely carried out (4th of April 1523). The rescued nuns found places of refuge in the families of Wittenberg burghers. The elector John of Saxony (who had succeeded his brother Frederick) gave Luther the house which had served as the Augustinian Convent. The family gathered in this three-storeyed building, with its back windows looking over the Elbe and its front door opening on a great garden, was latterly Luther and his wife, their three sons and two daughters, Magdelena von Bora, Catherine’s aunt, two orphan nieces and a grandniece. At the beginning of his married life Luther must have been in straitened circumstances. He married a portionless nun. On to 1532 his salary was two hundred gulden annually (about £160 in present money); after 1532 the stipend was increased to £240 with various payments in kind — corn, wood, malt, wine, &c. — which meant a great deal more. The town added occasional gifts to enable Luther to entertain the great personages who came to consult him frequently. Princes made him presents in money. This enabled Luther to purchase from his wife’s brother the small estate of Zulsdorf. Catherine, too, was an excellent house-wife. She made the long-neglected garden profitable; kept pigs and poultry; rented other gardens; stocked a fishpond; farmed in a small way; and had her house full of boarders. Luther had a high opinion of her intelligence; she took rank among those consulted on all important occasions; in one letter to her, seldom quoted, he gives the fairest statement he ever made about the views of Zwingli on the Sacrament of the Supper.
The diet of Speyer (1526) saw Germany divided into a Protestant and a Romanist party. After much debate a compromise was arrived at, which foreshadowed the religious peace of Augsburg of 1555. It was resolved that the Word of God should be preached without disturbance, that indemnity should be given for past offences against the edict of Worms, and that meanwhile each state should live religiously as it hoped to answer for its conduct to God and the emperor. The Lutherans interpreted this to mean the right to frame ecclesiastical regulations for various principalities and to make changes in public worship. Luther busied himself in simplifying the service, in giving advice, anxiously sought for, about the best modes of organising ecclesiastical affairs. In the diet held at Speyer in 1529 a compact Roman Catholic majority faced a weak Lutheran minority. The emperor declared through his commissioners that he abolished “by his imperial and absolute authority” the clause in the ordinance of 1526 on which the Lutherans had relied when they began to organize their territorial churches. The majority of the diet supported the emperor in this, and further proceeded to decree that no ecclesiastical body was to be deprived of its revenues or authority. This meant that throughout all Germany medieval ecclesiastical rule was to be upheld, and that none of the revenues of the medieval church could be appropriated for Protestant uses. On this a portion of the Protestant minority drafted a legal protest, in which the signers declared that they me
ant to abide by the decision of the diet of 1526 and refused to be bound by that of 1529. From this protest came the name Protestant.
A minority in such a case could only maintain their protest if they were prepared to defend each other by force in case of an attack. Three days after the protest had been read, many of the protesting cities and states concluded “a secret and particular treaty,” and Philip of Hesse, the ablest statesman among the Protesters, saw the need for a general union of all evangelical Christians in the empire. The difficulties in the way were great. The Saxons and the Swiss, Luther and Zwingli, were in fierce controversy about the true doctrine of the sacrament of the Supper. Luther was a patriotic German who was for ever bewailing the disintegration of the Fatherland; Zwingli was full of plans for confederations of Swiss cantons with South German cities, which could not fail to weaken the empire. Luther had but little trust in the “common man”; Zwingli was a thorough democrat. When Luther thought of the Swiss reformer he muttered as Archbishop Parker did of John Knox— “God keep us from such visitations as Knox hath attempted in Scotland; the people to be orderers of things.” Above all Luther had good grounds for believing that at the conference at Memmingen friends of Zwingli had helped to organize a Peasants’ War and to link the social revolution to the religious awakening. All these suspicions were in Luther’s mind when he consented very half-heartedly to meet Zwingli at a conference to be held in Philip of Hesse’s castle at Marburg. The debate proceeded as such debates usually do. Zwingli attacked the weakest part of Luther’s theory — the ubiquity of the body of Christ; and Luther attacked Zwingli’s exegesis of the words of the institution. Neither sought to bring out their points of agreement. Yet the conference did good; it showed that the Protestants were agreed on all doctrinal points but one. If union was for the present impossible, there were hopes for it in the future.
In 1530 the emperor Charles, resolved to crush the Reformation, himself presided at the diet. The Protestant divisions were manifest. Three separate confessions were presented to the emperor — one from Zwingli, one by the theologians of the four cities of Strassbourg, Constance, Lindau and Memmingen (Confessio Tetrapolitana), and the Augsburg Confession, the future symbol of the Lutheran church. The third was the most important, and the emperor seriously set himself to see whether it might not be made the basis of a compromise. He found that reconciliation was hopeless. Thereupon the diet resolved that the edict of Worms was to be enforced against Luther and his partizans; that the ecclesiastical jurisdictions were to be preserved; and that all the church property taken possession of by the Lutheran princes was to be restored; and that in all cases of dispute the last court of appeal was to be the Imperial Court of Appeals. The last provision meant that the growing Protestantism was to be fought by harrassing litigation — nicht fechten sondern rechten was the phrase.
Luther was not present at the diet nor at the negotiations. He was still an outlaw according to imperial ideas. Melanchthon took his place as leader.
The decision of the diet compelled the Protestant princes to face the new and alarming situation. They met in conference in mid-winter at the little town of Schmalkald, and laid the foundations of what became the powerful Schmalkald League, which effectually protected the Protestants of Germany until it was broken up by the intrigues of the imperial party. From the time of the formation of this league, Luther retired gradually from the forefront of a reformation movement which had become largely political, and busied himself with reforms in public worship and suggestions for an organization of the polity of the Evangelical church. In this work his natural conservatism is apparent, and he contented himself with such changes as would make room for the action of evangelical principles. He disclaimed the right of suggesting a common order of worship or a uniform ecclesiastical polity; and Lutheran ritual and polity, while presenting common features, did not follow one common use. It may be said generally that while Luther insisted on a service in the vernacular, including the singing of German hymns, he considered it best to retain most of the ceremonies, the vestments and the uses of lights on the altar, which had existed in the unreformed church, while he was careful to explain that their retention might be dispensed with if thought necessary. To the popular mind the great distinction between the Lutheran and the medieval church service, besides the use of the vernacular and the supreme place assigned to preaching, was that the people partook of the cup in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; and the Lutheran service became popularly distinguished from the Reformed because it retained, while the Reformed did away with, most of the medieval ceremonies and vestments (see Lutherans). The variations in the details of the polity of the Lutheran churches were very numerous, but they all preserved the same distinctive principles. Two conceptions lay at the basis — the thought of the spiritual priesthood of all believers and the belief that the state was a divine ordinance, that the magistracy might represent the whole body of believers and that discipline and administration might be exercised through courts constituted somewhat like the consistorial courts of the medieval bishops, their members being appointed by the magistracy.
The last years of Luther’s life were spent in incessant labour disturbed by almost continuous ill-health. He was occupied in trying to unite firmly together the whole evangelical movement; he laboured to give his countrymen a good system of schools; he was on the watch to defeat any attempt of the Roman Curia to regain its hold over Germany; and he was the confidential adviser of a large number of the evangelical princes. Luther’s intimacy with his own elector, first John, then John Frederick, helped to give him the place accorded to him by the princes. The chiefs of the Houses of Anhalt and Lüneburg, Duke Henry of Saxony, Joachim II. of Brandenburg, Albert of Brandenburg and the counts of Mansfeld, were among Luther’s most devoted supporters and most frequently sought his advice. Princely correspondence was not always pleasant. It took its most disagreeable form when Philip of Hesse besieged Luther with requests to give his sanction to taking a second wife while his first was still alive. Luther’s weakness brought the second great blot on his career. The document sanctioning the bigamy of the landgrave was signed by Martin Bucer, Luther and Melanchthon, and is a humiliating paper. It may be thus summarized. According to the original commandment of God, marriage is between one man and one woman, and this original precept has been confirmed by our Lord; but sin brought it about that first Lamech, then the heathen, and then Abraham, took more than one wife, and this was permitted under the law. We are now living under the Gospel, which does not give prescribed rules for the external life and has not expressly prohibited bigamy. The law of the land expresses the original commandment of God, and the plain duty of the pastorate is to denounce bigamy. Nevertheless, the pastorate, in single cases of the direst need and to prevent worse, may sanction bigamy in a purely exceptional way. Such a bigamous marriage is a true marriage in the sight of God (the necessity being proved), but it is not a true marriage in the eye of public law and custom. Such a marriage and the dispensation for it ought to be kept secret; if it is made known, the dispensation becomes eo ipso invalid and the marriage is mere concubinage. The principle which underlies this extraordinary paper is probably the conception that the Protestant church has the same dispensing power which the medieval church claimed, but that it was to be exercised altogether apart from fees of any kind.
In his later years Luther became more tolerant on the sacramental question which divided him from the South German cities, although he never departed from his strong opposition to the supposed views of Zwingli himself. He consented to a conference, which, as he was too ill to leave home, met at Wittenberg (May-June 1536). After prolonged discussion the differences were narrowed to one point — the presence of the body of Christ extended in space in the sacrament of the Supper. It was agreed in the Wittenberg Concord to leave this an open question. Thus North and South Germany were united. It is possible that had Luther lived longer his followers might have been united with the Swiss. He repeatedly expressed an ad
miration for Calvin’s writings on the subject of the sacrament; and Melanchthon believed that if the Swiss accepted Calvin’s theory of the Supper, the Wittenberg Concord could be extended to include them. But the Consensus Tigurinus, which dates the adhesion of the Swiss to the views of Calvin, was not signed until 1549, when Luther was already dead.
Year by year Luther had been growing weaker, his attacks of illness more frequent and his bodily pains more continuous. Despite the entreaties of wife and elector he resolved to do what he could to end some trifling dispute about inheritance which threatened the peace of the House of Mansfeld. He left Wittenberg in bitterly cold weather on the 23rd of January 1546, and the journey was tedious and hazardous. He was accepted as arbiter and his decision brought an end to the strife. He preached in Eisleben (February 14) with all his old fervour; but suddenly said quietly: “This and much more is to be said about the Gospel; but I am too weak and we will close here.” These were his last words in the pulpit. On the 16th and 17th the deeds of reconciliation were signed and Luther’s work was done. The end came swiftly. He was very ill on the evening of the 17th; he died on the early morning of the 18th of February 1546 in his sixty-third year.
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 915