Part 28 (1/2)

About his own bodily care and enjoyment, even with all his conviction of Christian liberty and his hostility to monkish scruples and sanct.i.ty, he cared very little. He was content with simple fare, and he would forget to eat and drink for days amid the press of work. His friends wondered how such a portly frame could be consistent with such a very meagre diet, and not one of his hostile contemporaries has ever been able to allege against him that he had belied by his own conduct the zeal with which he inveighed against the immoderate eating and drinking of his fellow-Germans; but he preserved his Christian liberty in this matter. In the evenings he would say to his pupils at the supper-table, 'You young fellows, you must drink the Elector's health and mine, the old man's, in a b.u.mper. We must look for our pillows and bolsters in the tankard.'

And in his lively and merry entertainments with his friends the 'cup that cheers' was always there. He could even call for a toast when he heard bad news, for next to a fervent Lord's Prayer and a good heart, there was no better antidote, he used to say, to care.

His physical sufferings were chiefly confined to the pains in his head, which never wholly left him, and which increased from time to time, with fresh attacks of giddiness and fainting. The morning was always his worst time. His old enemy, moreover--the stone--returned in 1548 with alarming severity. Some time since an abscess had appeared on his left leg, which seemed at the time to have healed.

Finding that a fresh breaking out of it seemed to relieve his head, his friend Ratzeberger, the Elector's physician, induced him to have a seton applied, and the issue thus kept open. His hair became white. He had long been speaking of himself as a prematurely old man, and quite worn out.

In spite of his sufferings he retained his peculiar bearing with head thrown back and upturned face. His features, especially the mouth, now showed more plainly even than in earlier life the calm strength acquired by struggles and suffering. The pathos which later portraits have often given to his countenance is not apparent in the earlier ones, but rather an expression of melancholy. The deep glow and energy of his spirit, which even Cranach's pencil has failed wholly to represent, seems to have found chief expression in his dark eyes. These evidently struck the old rector of Wittenberg, Pollich, and the legate Caietan at Augsburg; it was with these that, on his arrival at Worms, the legate Aleander saw him look around him 'like a demon'; it was these that 'sparkled like stars' on the young Swiss Kessler, so that he could 'hardly endure their gaze.' After his death, another acquaintance of his called them 'falcon's eyes'; and Melancthon saw in the brown pupils, encircled by a yellow ring, the keen, courageous eye of a lion.

This fire in Luther never died. Under the pressure of suffering and weakness, it only burst forth when stirred by opposition into new and fiercer flames. It became, indeed, more easily provoked in later life, and produced in him an irritation and restless impatience with the world and all its doings. His full and clear gaze was fixed on the Hereafter.

CHAPTER VIII.

LUTHER'S LAST YEAR AND DEATH.

The Emperor Charles, after concluding the peace of Crespy with King Francis, turned his policy entirely to ecclesiastical affairs. The Pope could no longer resist his urgent demand for a Council, and accordingly a bull, of November 1544, summoned one to a.s.semble at Trent in the following March. With regard to the Turks, the Emperor sought to liberate his hands by means of a peaceful settlement and concessions. He entered into negotiations with them in 1545, in which he was supported by an amba.s.sador from France. These led ultimately to the result that the Turks left him in possession, on payment of a tribute, of those frontier fortresses which he still occupied, and which they had previously demanded from him, and agreed to a truce for a year and a half. 'This is the way,'

exclaimed Luther, 'in which war is now waged against those who have been denounced so many years as enemies to the name of Christ, and against whom the Romish Satan has ama.s.sed such heaps of gold by indulgences and other innumerable means of plunder.'

Meanwhile the Elector John had commissioned his theologians to prepare the scheme of reformation which was to be submitted according to the decree of the Diet at Spires. On January 14,1545, they sent him a draft compiled by Melancthon. Luther headed with his own the list of signatures. It was a last great message of peace from his hand. The draft set forth clearly and distinctly the principles of the Evangelical Church; but expressed a hope that the bishops of the Catholic Church would fulfil the duties of their office, and promised them obedience if they accepted and furthered the preaching of the gospel in its purity. This was too moderate for the Elector. His chancellor Bruck, however, a.s.sured him that Luther and the others were agreed with Melancthon, though the doc.u.ment bore no evidence of 'Doctor Martin's restless spirit.'

Nor did Luther even here insist on that strong expression of opinion with regard to the Lord's Supper which he himself gave to the doctrine of Christ's Bodily Presence in the Sacrament. They only spoke briefly of the 'receiving the true Body and Blood of Christ,'

and of the object and benefit of this reception for the soul and for faith.

But Luther now unburdened his heart with redoubled energy and pa.s.sion against the Pope and the Popedom, of which no mention had been made in the draft. In January 1545 he learned of that Papal letter in which the Holy Father had protested to his son the Emperor, with pathetic indignation, against the decrees of the Diet at Spires. Luther at first took it seriously for a forgery--a mere pasquinade--until he was a.s.sured by the Elector of the genuineness of this and another and similar letter, and thus provoked to take public steps against it. He thought that, if the brief was genuine, the Pope would sooner wors.h.i.+p the Turks--nay, the devil himself--than ever dream of consenting to a reform in accordance with G.o.d's Word.

Accordingly, he composed his pamphlet 'Against the Popedom at Rome, inst.i.tuted by the Devil.' In this his 'restless spirit' spoke out once more with all its strength; he poured out the vials of his wrath in the plainest and most violent language--more violent than in any of his earlier writings--against the Antichrist of Rome. The very first word gives the Pope the t.i.tle of 'the most h.e.l.lish Father.'

Luther is not surprised that to him and his Curia the words 'free Christian German Council' are sheer poison, death, and h.e.l.l. But he asks him, what is the use of a Council at all if the Pope arrogates to himself beforehand, as his decrees fulminate, the right of altering and tearing up its decisions. Far better to spare the expense and trouble of such a farce, and say, 'We will believe and wors.h.i.+p your h.e.l.ls.h.i.+p without any Councils.' The piece of arch-knavery practised by the Pope in himself announcing a Council against Emperor and Empire was, in fact, nothing new. The Popes from the very first had practised all kinds of devilish wickedness, treachery, and murder against the German Emperors. Luther recalls to mind how a Pope had caused the n.o.ble Conradin to be executed with the sword. Paul III., in his admonition to his 'son' the Emperor Charles, referred in pious strain to the example of Eli, the high-priest, who had been punished for not rebuking his sons for their sins. Luther now points him to his own, the Pope's natural son, whom the Pope was so anxious to enrich; he asks if Father Paul then had nothing to punish in him. It was well known what tricks Paul himself, with his insatiable maw, was playing together with his son with the property of the Church. Further, he puts before the Pope his cardinals and followers, who forsooth needed no admonition for their detestable iniquities. But his dear son Charles, it seemed, had wished to procure for the German Fatherland a happy peace and unity in religion, and to have a Christian Council, and, finding he had been made a fool of by the Pope for four-and-twenty years, sat last to convene a national Council. This was his sin in the eyes of the Pope, who would like to see all Germany drowned in her own blood: the Pope could not forgive the Emperor for thwarting his horrible design. Luther dwells at length on such reflections in his introduction, and then says 'I must now stop, for my head is too weak, and I have not yet come to what I meant to say in this treatise.' This was the three points, as follow: Whether, indeed, it was true that the Pope was the head of Christendom; that none could judge and depose him; and that he had brought the Holy Roman Empire to the Germans, as he boasted so arrogantly he had done. On these points he then proceeds to enlarge once more with a wealth of searching proof. On the last point we hear him speak once more as a true German. He wished that the Emperor had left the Pope his anointing and coronation, for what made him truly Emperor was not these ceremonies, but the election of the princes. The Pope had never yielded a hairsbreadth to the Empire, but, on the contrary, had plundered it immoderately by his lying and deceit and idolatry.

The book concludes thus: 'This devilish Popery is the supreme evil on earth, and the one that touches us most closely; it is one in which all the devils combine together. G.o.d help us! Amen.'

Cranach published a series of sketches or caricatures, controversial and satirical, against the Popedom, some of which are cynically coa.r.s.e, one of them representing to his countrymen the murder of Conradin, the Pope himself beheading him, and another a German Emperor with the Pope standing on his neck. Luther added short verses to these pictures. But he disapproved of one of Cranach's caricatures, as insulting to woman.

We have seen already what degree of importance Luther attached to a Council appointed by the Pope. The Protestants could not, of course, consent to submit to the one at Trent. On the other hand, their demand that the Council must be a 'free' and a 'Christian' one in their sense of the terms was an impossibility for the Emperor and the Catholics; for it meant not only their independence of the Pope--which he could never a.s.sent to--but also a free reversion to the single rule and standard of Holy Scripture, with a possible rejection of tradition and the decrees of previous Councils. The Emperor thereupon granted something for appearance sake to the Protestant States by arranging another conference on religion to be held at Ratisbon in January 1546. He told the Pope, in June 1545, that he could not engage to make war on the Protestants for at least another year. The Council was opened in December 1545, without the Protestants taking any part in it.

While all this was going on, the newly-opened rupture between Luther and the Swiss remained unhealed. In the spring of 1545 Bullinger published a clever reply to his 'Short Confession.' It could, however, effect no reconciliation, for, mild as was its language in comparison with the violence of Luther's, it made too much merit of this mildness, while, as Calvin, for example, accused the author, it imputed more to Luther than common fairness justified, took him to task for his manner of speaking, and contributed nothing to an understanding in point of dogma. From the impression produced by this letter upon Luther, fears were entertained again for Melancthon, who had continued to maintain a friendly correspondence with Bullinger; and Melancthon himself felt very anxious about the result. But not one harsh or suspicious or unkind word was uttered by Luther. He only wished to answer the Zurichers briefly and to the point, for he had written, he said, quite enough on the subject against Zwingli and Oecolampadius, and did not want to spoil the last years of his life with arrogant and idle chatter. He only inserted afterwards in a series of theses, with which he replied in the late summer of that year to a fresh condemnation p.r.o.nounced against him by the theologians of Louvain, an article against the Zwinglians, declaring that they and all those who disgraced the Sacrament by denying the actual bodily reception of the true Body of Christ were undoubtedly heretics and schismatics from the Christian Church. This doctrinal antagonism was sufficient even now, when the test of actual war was imminent, to keep the Swiss excluded from the League of Schmalkald.

Luther still continued, in the face of menaces, to trust in G.o.d, his Helper hitherto, and he found in the latest signs of the times still more convincing proof of the End, which seemed to be at hand. In the miserable oppression of the Germano-Roman Empire by the Turks he saw a sign of its approaching downfall, as also in the impotence displayed by the Imperial Government even in small matters of administration. There was no longer any justice, any government; it was an Empire without an Empire; and he rejoiced to believe that with the end of this Empire the last day--the day of salvation--was approaching.

But more painful and hara.s.sing to him than even the threats of the Romanists and the attacks upon his teaching, which his own words, he was convinced, had long since refuted, was the condition of Wittenberg and the university. It was a favourite reproach against him of the Catholics that his doctrine yielded no fruits of strict morality. Notwithstanding all the rebukes which he had uttered for years, we hear of the old vices still rampant at Wittenberg--the vices of gluttony, of increasing intemperance and luxury, especially at baptisms and weddings; of pride in dress and the low-cut bodices of ladies; of rioting in the streets; of the low women who corrupted the students; of extortion, deceit, and usury in trade; and of the indifference and inability of the authorities and the police to put down open immorality and misdemeanours. Things of which there were growing complaints at that time in the German towns and universities became intolerable to the aged Reformer, who had no longer the power to bring his whole influence to bear upon his own fellow-townsmen.

In the summer of 1545 he was tortured again by his old enemy the stone.

On Midsummer day his tormentor--as he wrote to a friend--would have done for him had G.o.d not willed it otherwise. 'I would rather die,' he adds, 'than be at the mercy of such a tyrant.'

A few weeks later he sought refreshment for mind and body in a journey. He first travelled with his colleague Cruciger by way of Leipzig to Zeitz, where Cruciger had to settle a dispute between two clergymen. On the road he was cordially received by several acquaintances, and that did him good. At Zeitz he took part in the proceedings. He was anxious to proceed farther, to Merseburg, for his friend there, George of Anhalt, had seized the opportunity to send him a pressing invitation, in order to receive from him his consecration. But the painful experiences he had made at Wittenberg pursued him on his travels, and were aggravated by much that he heard about his own town. On July 28 he wrote from Zeitz to his wife, saying, 'I should be so glad not to return to Wittenberg; my heart is grown cold, so that I don't care about being there any longer.... So I will roam about and rather beg my bread than vex my poor remaining days with the disorderly doings at Wittenberg, with my hard and precious labour all lost.' He actually wished that they should sell the house and garden at Wittenberg, and go and live at Zulsdorf. The Elector, he said, would surely leave him his salary at least for one year more, near as he was to the close of his fast-waning life, and he would spend the money in improving his little farm. He begged his wife, if she would, to let Bugenhagen and Melancthon know this.

The excitement, however, as might be hoped, was only temporary. To quiet his emotion, the university at once sent Bugenhagen and Melancthon to him, the Wittenberg magistrate sent the burgomaster, and the Elector his private physician Ratzeberger. The Elector also reminded him in a friendly manner that he ought to have apprised him beforehand of his intention to take this journey, to enable him to provide an escort and defray his expenses. The Wittenberg theologians, sent as deputies to Merseburg, had now arrived there, and met Luther on August 2, at the solemn consecration of George.

Luther stayed with his host for a couple of days, during which he preached in the neighbouring town of Halle, and was here presented by the town-council with a cup of gold. This journey improved his health. After having paid a visit to the Elector, at his desire, at Torgau, he returned on the l6th of the month to Wittenberg, where an attempt was now being made to put down, by an ordinance of police, the immorality he had denounced.

He now resumed his lectures, in which he was still busily engaged with the Book of Genesis, and which he brought at length to an end on November 17. He also preached at Wittenberg several times in the afternoons, it being unadvisable for him to do so any longer in the mornings on account of his health. He further occupied himself in writing a sequel to his first book against the Papacy, and at the same time meditated a letter against the Sacramentarians.

The autumn of this year brought with it a matter from Mansfeld, having nothing indeed to do with religion or doctrine, but which called him away from Wittenberg. The Counts of Mansfeld had long been quarrelling among themselves about certain rights and revenues, especially in connection with Church patronage. Luther had already entreated them earnestly in G.o.d's name to come to a peaceful agreement. They now at length agreed so far as to invite his mediation, and obtained permission from the Elector, who, however, would rather have seen Luther spared this trouble. Luther all his life had cherished a warm and grateful affection for this his early home; whilst labouring for his great Fatherland of Germany, he called Mansfeld his own special fatherland. Wearied as he was, he resolved to serve his home once more.