The Age of the Reformation Part 8

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SECTION 4. THE GROWTH OF PROTESTANTISM UNTIL THE DEATH OF LUTHER

Certain states having announced that they would not be bound by the will of the majority, the question naturally came up as to how far they would defend this position by arms. [Sidenote: March 6, 1530]

Luther's advice asked and given to the effect that all rebellion or forcible resistance to the const.i.tuted authorities was wrong. Pa.s.sive resistance, the mere refusal to obey the command to persecute or to act, otherwise contrary to G.o.d's law, he thought was right but he discountenanced any other measures, even those taken in self-defence.

All Germans, said he, were the emperor's subjects, and the princes should not s.h.i.+eld Luther from him, but leave their lands open to his officers to do what they pleased. This position Luther abandoned a year later, when the jurists pointed out to him that the authority of the emperor was not despotic but was limited by law.

The Protest and Appeal of 1529 at last aroused Charles, slow as he was, to the great dangers to himself that lurked in the Protestant schism.

Having repulsed the Turk and having made peace with France and the pope he was at last in a position to address himself seriously to the religious problem. Fully intending to settle the trouble once for all, he came to Germany and opened a Diet at Augsburg [Sidenote: June 20, 1530] to which were invited not only the representatives of the various states but a number of leading theologians, both Catholic and Lutheran, all except Luther himself, an outlaw by the Edict of Worms.

The first action taken was to ask the Lutherans to state their position and this was done in the famous Augsburg Confession, [Sidenote: June 25] read before the Diet by the Saxon Chancellor Bruck. It had been drawn up by {117} Melanchthon in language as near as possible to that of the old church. Indeed it undertook to prove that there was in the Lutheran doctrine "nothing repugnant to Scripture or to the Catholic church or to the Roman church." Even in the form of the Confession published 1531 this Catholicizing tendency is marked, but in the original, now lost, it was probably stronger. The reason of this was not, as generally stated, Melanchthon's "gentleness" and desire to conciliate all parties, for he showed himself more truculent to the Zwinglians and Anabaptists than did Luther. It was due to the fact that Melanchthon [Sidenote: Melanchthon] was at heart half a Catholic, so much so, indeed, that Contarini and others thought it quite possible that he might come over to them. In the present instance he made his doctrine conform to the Roman tenets to such an extent that (in the lost original, as we may judge by the Confutation) even transubstantiation was in a manner accepted. The first part of the Confession is a creed: the second part takes up certain abuses, or reforms, namely: the demand of the cup for the laity, the marriage of priests, the ma.s.s as an _opus operatum_ or as celebrated privately, fasting and traditions, monastic vows and the power of the pope.

But the concessions did not satisfy the Catholics. A Refutation was prepared by Eck and others, and read before the Diet on August 3.

Negotiations continued and still further concessions were wrung from Melanchthon, concessions of so dangerous a nature that his fellow-Protestants denounced him as an enemy of the faith and appealed to Luther against him. Melanchthon had agreed to call the ma.s.s a sacrifice, if the word were qualified by the term "commemorative," and also promised that the bishops should be restored to their ancient jurisdictions, a measure justified by him as a blow at turbulent sectaries but one also most {118} perilous to Lutherans. On the other hand, Eck made some concessions, mostly verbal, about the doctrine of justification and other points.

That with this mutually conciliatory spirit an agreement failed to materialize only proved how irreconcilable were the aims of the two parties. [Sidenote: September 22] The Diet voted that the Confession had been refuted and that the Protestants were bound to recant. The emperor promised to use his influence with the pope to call a general council to decide doubtful points, but if the Lutherans did not return to the papal church by April 15, 1531, they were threatened with coercion.

[Sidenote: League of Schmalkalden]

To meet this perilous situation a closer alliance was formed by the Protestant states at Schmalkalden in February 1531. This league constantly grew by the admission of new members, but some attempts to unite with the Swiss proved abortive.

On January 5, 1531, Ferdinand was elected King of the Romans--the t.i.tle taken by the heir to the Empire--by six of the electors against the vote of Saxony. Three months later when the time granted the Lutherans expired, the Catholics were unable to do anything, and negotiations continued. [Sidenote: July 23, 1532] These resulted in the Peace of Nuremberg, a truce until a general council should be called. It was an important victory for the Lutherans, who were thus given time in which to grow.

The seething unrest which found expression in the rebellion of the knights, of the peasants and of the Anabaptists at Munster, has been described. One more liberal movement, which also failed, must be mentioned at this time. It was as little connected with religion as anything in that theological age could be. [Sidenote: Lubeck, 1533-35]

The city of Lubeck, under its burgomaster George Wullenwever, tried to free itself from the influence of Denmark and at the same time to get a more popular {119} government. In 1536 it was conquered by Christian III of Denmark, and the old aristocratic const.i.tution restored. The time was not ripe for the people to a.s.sert its rights in North Germany.

[Sidenote: May 1534]

The growth of Protestantism was at times a.s.sisted by force of arms.

Thus, Philip of Hesse restored the now Protestant Duke Ulrich of Wurttemberg, who had been expelled for his tyranny by the Swabian League fifteen years before. This triumph was the more marked because the expropriated ruler was Ferdinand, King of the Romans. If in such cases it was the government which took the lead, in others the government undoubtedly compelled the people to continue Catholic even when there was a strongly Protestant public opinion. Such was the case in Albertine Saxony,[1] whose ruler, Duke George, though an estimable man in many ways, was regarded by Luther as the instrument of Satan because he persecuted his Protestant subjects. When he died, his brother, [Sidenote: April, 1539] the Protestant Henry the Pious, succeeded and introduced the Reform amid general acclamation. Two years later this duke was followed by his son, the versatile but treacherous Maurice. In the year 1539 a still greater acquisition came to the Schmalkaldic League in the conversion of Brandenburg and its Elector Joachim II.

[Sidenote: Philip of Hesse, 1504-67]

Shortly afterwards the world was scandalized by the bigamy of Philip of Hesse. This prince was utterly spoiled by his accession to the governing power at the age of fifteen. Though he lived in flagrant immorality, his religion, which, soon after he met Luther at Worms, became the Evangelical, was real enough to make his sins a burden to conscience. Much attracted {120} by the teachings of some of the Anabaptists and Carlstadt that polygamy was lawful, and by Luther's a.s.sertion in the _Babylonian Captivity_ that it was preferable to divorce, [Sidenote: 1526] he begged to be allowed to take more wives, but was at first refused. His conscience was quickened by an attack of the syphilis in 1539, and at that time he asked permission to take a second wife and received it on December 10, from Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer. His secret marriage to Margaret von der Saal [Sidenote: March 4, 1540] took place in the presence of Melanchthon, Bucer, and other divines. Luther advised him to keep the matter secret and if necessary even to "tell a good strong lie for the sake and good of the Christian church." Of course he was unable to conceal his act, and his conduct, and that of his spiritual advisers, became a just reproach to the cause. As no material advantages were lost by it, Philip might have reversed the epigram of Francis I and have said that "nothing was lost but honor." Neither Germany nor Hesse nor the Protestant church suffered directly by his act. [Sidenote: 1541] Indeed it lead indirectly to another territorial gain. Philip's enemy Duke Henry of Brunswick, though equally immoral, attacked him in a pamphlet. Luther answered this in a tract of the utmost violence, called _Jack Sausage_.

Henry's rejoinder was followed by war between him and the Schmalkaldic princes, in which he was expelled from his dominions and the Reformation introduced.

[Sidenote: 1541]

Further gains followed rapidly. The Catholic Bishop of Naumburg was expelled by John Frederic of Saxony, and a Lutheran bishop inst.i.tuted instead. About the same time the great spiritual prince, Hermann von Wied, Archbishop Elector of Cologne, became a Protestant, and invited Melanchthon and Bucer to reform his territories. One of the last gains, before the Schmalkaldic war, was the Rhenish Palatinate, under {121} its Elector Frederic III. [Sidenote: 1545] His troops fought then on the Protestant side, though later he turned against that church.

The opportunity of the Lutherans was due to the engagements of the emperor with other enemies. In 1535 Charles undertook a successful expedition against Tunis. The war with France simmered on until the Truce of Nice, intended to be for ten years, signed between the two powers in 1538. In 1544 war broke out again, and fortune again favored Charles. He invaded France almost to the gates of Paris, but did not press his advantage and on September 18 signed the Peace of Crepy giving up all his conquests.

Unable to turn his arms against the heretics, Charles continued to negotiate with them. The pressure he brought to bear upon the pope finally resulted in the summoning by Paul III of a council to meet at Mantua the following year. [Sidenote: June 2, 1536] The Protestants were invited to send delegates to this council, and the princes of that faith held a congress at Schmalkalden to decide on their course.

[Sidenote: February 1537] Hitherto the Lutherans had called themselves a part of the Roman Catholic church and had always appealed to a future oec.u.menical or national synod. They now found this position untenable, and returned the papal citation unopened. Instead, demands for reform, known as the Schmalkaldic Articles, were drawn up by Luther. The four princ.i.p.al demands were (1) recognition of the doctrine of justification by faith only, (2) abolition of the ma.s.s as a good work or _opus operatum_, (3) alienation of the foundations for private ma.s.ses, (4) removal of the pretentions of the pope to heads.h.i.+p of the universal church. As a matter of fact the council was postponed.

[Sidenote: April 19, 1539]

Failing to reach a permanent solution by this method, Charles was again forced to negotiate. The {122} Treaty of Frankfort agreed to a truce varying in length from six to fifteen months according to circ.u.mstances. This was followed by a series of religious conferences with the purpose of finding some means of reconciling the two confessions. [Sidenote: Religious Colloquies] Among the first of these were the meetings at Worms and Hagenau. Campeggio and Eck were the Catholic leaders, Melanchthon the spokesman for the Lutherans.

[Sidenote: 1540-1] Each side had eleven members on the commission, but their joint efforts were wrecked on the plan for limiting the papal power and on the doctrine of original sin. When the Diet of Ratisbon was opened in the spring of 1541 a further conference was held at which the two parties came closer to each other than they had done since Augsburg. The Book of Ratisbon was drawn up, emphasizing the points of agreement and slurring over the differences. Contarini made wide concessions, later condemned by the Catholics, on the doctrine of justification. Discussion of the nature of the church, the power of the pope, the invocation of saints, the ma.s.s, and sacerdotal celibacy seemed likely to result in some _modus vivendi_. What finally shattered the hopes of union was the discussion of transubstantiation and the adoration of the host. As Contarini had found in the statements of the Augsburg Confession no insuperable obstacle to an understanding he was astonished at the stress laid on them by the Protestants now.

[Sidenote: 1542]

It is not remarkable that with such results the Diet of Spires should have avoided the religious question and have devoted itself to more secular matters, among them the grant to the emperor of soldiers to fight the Turk. Of this Diet Bucer wrote "The Estates act under the wrath of G.o.d. Religion is relegated to an agreement between cities. . . . The cause of our evils is that few seek the Lord earnestly, but {123} most fight against him, both among those who have rejected, and of those who still bear, the papal yoke." At the Diet of Spires two years later the emperor promised the Protestants, in return for help against France, recognition until a German National Council should be called. For this concession he was sharply rebuked by the pope. [Sidenote: 1545] The Diet of Worms contented itself with expressing its general hope for a "Christian reformation."

[Sidenote: 1545]

During his later years Luther's polemic never flagged. His last book, _Against the Papacy of Rome, founded by the Devil_, surpa.s.sed Cicero and the humanists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of its invective against "the most h.e.l.lish father, St. Paul, or Paula III"

and his "h.e.l.lish Roman church." "One would like to curse them," he wrote, "so that thunder and lightning would strike them, h.e.l.l fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them"--and so on for page after page. Of course such lack of restraint largely defeated its own ends. The Swiss Reformer Bullinger called it "amazingly violent," and a book than which he "had never read anything more savage or imprudent." Our judgment of it must be tempered by the consideration that Luther suffered in his last years from a nervous malady and from other painful diseases, due partly to overwork and lack of exercise, partly to the quant.i.ties of alcohol he imbibed, though he never became intoxicated.

Nevertheless, the last twenty years of his life were his happiest ones.

His wife, Catherine von Bora, an ex-nun, and his children, brought him much happiness. Though the wedding gave his enemies plenty of openings for reviling him as an apostate, [Sidenote: June 13, 1525] and though it drew from Erasmus the scoffing jest that what had begun as a tragedy ended as a comedy, it {124} crowned his career, symbolizing the return from medieval asceticism to modern joy in living. Dwelling in the fine old friary, entertaining with lavish prodigality many poor relatives, famous strangers, and students, notwithstanding unremitting toil and not a little bodily suffering, he expanded in his whole nature, mellowing in the warmth of a happy fireside climate. His daily routine is known to us intimately through the adoring a.s.siduity of his disciples, who noted down whole volumes of his _Table Talk_.

[Sidenote: Death and character of Luther]

On February 18, 1546, he died. Measured by the work that he accomplished and by the impression that his personality made both on contemporaries and on posterity, there are few men like him in history.

Dogmatic, superst.i.tious, intolerant, overbearing, and violent as he was, he yet had that inscrutable prerogative of genius of transforming what he touched into new values. His contemporaries bore his invective because of his earnestness; they bowed to "the almost disgraceful servitude" which, says Melanchthon, he imposed upon his followers, because they knew that he was leading them to victory in a great and worthy cause. Even so, now, many men overlook his narrowness and bigotry because of his genius and bravery.

His grandest quality was sincerity. Priest and public man as he was, there was not a line of hypocrisy or cant in his whole being. A sham was to him intolerable, the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Reckless of consequences, of danger, of his popularity, and of his life, he blurted out the whole truth, as he saw it, "despite all cardinals, popes, kings and emperors, together with all devils and h.e.l.l." Whether his ideal is ours or not, his courage in daring and his strength to labor for it must command our respect.

Next to his earnestness he owed his success to a {125} wonderful gift of language that made him the tongue, as well as the spear-point, of his people. [Sidenote: His eloquence] In love of nature, in wonder, in the power to voice some secret truth in a phrase or a metaphor, he was a poet. He looked out on the stars and considered the "good master-workman" that made them, on the violets "for which neither the Grand Turk nor the emperor could pay," on the yearly growth of corn and wine, "as great a miracle as the manna in the wilderness," on the "pious, honorable birds" alert to escape the fowler's net, or holding a Diet "in a hall roofed with the vault of heaven, carpeted with the gra.s.s, and with walls as far as the ends of the earth." Or he wrote to his son a charming fairy-tale of a pleasant garden where good children eat apples and pears and cherries and plums, and where they ride on pretty ponies with golden reins and silver saddles and dance all day and play with whistles and fifes and little cross-bows.

Luther's character combined traits not usually found in the same nature. He was both a dreamy mystic and a practical man of affairs; he saw visions and he knew how to make them realities; he was a G.o.d-intoxicated prophet and a cool calculator and hard worker for results. His faith was as simple and pa.s.sionate as his dogmatic distinctions were often sophistical and arid. He could attack his foes with berserker fury, and he could be as gentle with a child as only a woman can. His hymns soar to heaven and his coa.r.s.e jests trail in the mire. He was touched with profound melancholy and yet he had a wholesome, ready laugh. His words are now brutal invectives and again blossom with the most exquisite flowers of the soul--poetry, music, idyllic humor, tenderness. He was subtle and simple; superst.i.tious and wise; limited in his cultural sympathies, but very great in what he achieved.

[1] Saxony had been divided in 1485 into two parts, the Electorate, including Wittenberg, Weimar and Eisenach, and the Duchy, including Leipzig and Dresden. The former was called after its first ruler Ernestine, the latter Albertine.

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SECTION 5. THE RELIGIOUS WAR AND THE RELIGIOUS PEACE

[Sidenote: The Schmalkaldic War, 1546-7]

Hardly had Luther been laid to rest when the first general religious war broke out in Germany. There had been a few small wars of this character before, such as those of Hesse against Bamberg and Wurzburg, and against Wurttemberg, and against Brunswick. But the conflicts had been successfully "localized." Now at last was to come a general battle, as a foretaste of the Thirty Years War of the next century.

It has sometimes been doubted whether the Schmalkaldic War was a religious conflict at all. The emperor a.s.serted that his sole object was to reduce rebellious subjects to obedience. Several Protestant princes were his allies, and the territories he conquered were not, for the most part, forced to give up their faith. Nevertheless, it is certain that the fundamental cause of the strain was the difference of creed. A parallel may be found in our own Civil War, in which Lincoln truly claimed that he was fighting only to maintain the union, and yet it is certain that slavery furnished the underlying cause of the appeal to arms.

It has recently been shown that the emperor planned the attack on his Protestant subjects as far back, at least, as 1541. All the negotiations subsequent to that time were a mere blind in disguise his preparations. For he labored indefatigably to bring about a condition in which it would be safe for him to embark on the perilous enterprise.

Though he was a dull man he had the two qualities of caution and persistence that stood him in better stead than the more showy talents of other statesmen. If, with his huge resources, he never did anything brilliant, still less did he ever take a gambler's chance of failing.

{127} The opportune moment came at last in the spring of 1546. Two years before, he had beaten France with the help of the Protestants, and had imposed upon her as one condition of peace that she should make no allies within the Empire. In November of the same year he made an alliance with Paul III, receiving 200,000 ducats in support of his effort to extirpate the heresy.

Other considerations impelled him to attack at once. The secession of Cologne and the Palatinate from the Catholic communion gave the Protestants a majority in the Electoral College. Still more decisive was it that Charles was able at this time by playing upon the jealousies and ambitions of the states, to secure important allies within the Empire, including some of the Protestant faith. First, Catholic Bavaria forgot her hatred of Austria far enough to make common cause against the heretics. Then, two great Protestant princes, Maurice of Albertine Saxony and John von Kustrin--a brother of Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg--abandoned their coreligionists and bartered support to the emperor in return for promises of aggrandizement.

[Sidenote: January 1546]

A final religious conference held at Ratisbon demonstrated more clearly than ever the hopelessness of conciliation. Whereas a semi-Lutheran doctrine of justification was adopted, the Protestants prepared two long memoirs rejecting the authority of the council recently convened at Trent. And then, in the summer, war broke out. At this moment the forces of the Schmalkaldic League were superior to those of its enemies. But for poor leaders.h.i.+p and lack of unity in command they would probably have won.