Page images
PDF
EPUB

of interest to the noblest of the land. When he first answered the question of Dr. Eck (not the hero of the Leipsic disputation), it was thought that his voice trembled, but he soon recovered himself, and having acknowledged that the twenty volumes which lay on the table were his, he asked for time before replying to the demand that he should retract the doctrines taught in them. This reasonable request was granted, and he was bidden to appear again at the same hour on the following day.

And now the powers of darkness were for a moment permitted to distress the champion of the faith. On the morning of the second day: 'He felt as if he were forsaken. A horror of great darkness filled his soul: he had come to Worms to perish... 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foe, and the gloomy anticipation of friend, as ineffectual to move him as ocean's spray to overturn the rock, had been withdrawn.' At least, so for a brief time it seemed, and the strong man became weak as others. In that hour Luther poured out his soul unto God in one of the most marvellous prayers ever recorded. His faith had not failed him, for he prayed; and his prayer is that of heroic trust, though clothed at times in the language of doubt, almost of despair. 'Lord God,' he cried, 'dost Thou not hear? My God, art Thou dead!' But soon the cloud passed, and the Lord Himself strengthened him, and at the time appointed, Luther stood before the Diet with a courage and firmness worthy of St. Paul. His defence, pronounced first in Latin and then in German, was marked by a bravery, modesty and fearlessness, which only faith in God could have given. He positively refused to retract unless convinced of error, in which case he would be the first, he said, to burn his books. The Diet, however, had not met to argue, but to command. 'Will you, or will you not retract?' cried the Chancellor of Trêves. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture, or by the clearest reasoning,' Luther answered, I cannot, and will not retract.' And then, gazing upon the Emperor, princes, prelates and nobles around him, he cried in words which ever since that hour have rung through Christendom: 'HERE I STAND, I CAN NO OTHER; GOD HELP ME! AMEN.' Many a heart in that august assembly secretly echoed that grand Amen, and even his foes were for a time appalled and confounded. At length the Chancellor rose and told him that if he would not retract he would be treated as an 'incorrigible heretic.' 'May God be my helper: for I can retract nothing,' was the brief reply.*

[ocr errors]

* D'Aubigné's History of the Reformation.

After this he was ordered to withdraw for a time. On being again summoned, it was found that his resolution could not be shaken, and the Diet was adjourned till the following day, when, it was announced, the Emperor's decision would be given.

Luther returned with his friends to his hotel. As he talked with them, a messenger arrived from Duke Eric, of Brunswick, a Roman Catholic, bearing a silver flagon of Eimbeck beer. Luther was touched by this token of friendliness; and, having enquired who sent it, said, 'As this day Duke Eric has remembered me, so may our Lord Jesus Christ remember him in the hour of his last struggle.' Not long after, as the aged Duke lay dying, this prayer was brought to his recollection; for, bidding a page read to him from the Bible, the lad took up the sacred volume and read, surely not by chance: 'Whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in My Name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward.'

The Emperor sent a written message to the Diet on the following day declaring that to stay such impiety as Luther's he would sacrifice his kingdoms, treasures, friends, body, blood, soul and life;' and threatened the heretic and his adherents with direst vengeance. Some of the Popish members urged the Emperor to violate the safeconduct granted to Luther, but Charles was not willing-and, indeed, hardly dared-to stoop to so mean and so perilous an action. Duke George of Saxony-no friend of Luther's-declared, too, that the princes of Germany would not suffer a safe-conduct to be violated.' So Luther 'departed from among them' as safely as Paul left the Areopagus. After various private and ineffectual attempts to induce the Reformer to yield, he was ordered to leave Worms in twenty-one days, an order which he was very willing to obey. Shortly after his departure he was placed under the ban of the empire by an imperial edict in which he was described as 'in truth not a man, but Satan himself under the form of a man and dressed in a monk's frock;' and was said to have 'collected into one stinking slough all the vilest heresies of past times,' and to have 'added to them new ones of his own.'

On his way home, Luther was arrested, by previous arrangement, by four or five masked horsemen, who carried him off, with show of violence, to the Castle of the Wartburg, which stands upon a lofty hill overlooking the little town of Eisenach.

Here Luther spent about a year. His enemies wondered what had become of him, for the story of his capture, under various forms,

* D'Aubigné.

spread soon and wide, but none-save his more intimate friendsknew the facts of the case. 'Knight George'-for this was his present title-served the cause of the Reformation far more effectually with his pen in this retirement than he could have done with his voice in the midst of the strife of tongues, for here he began his great work of translating the Scriptures into plain, idiomatic German-a labour more fruitful of good than even his bold confession before the Diet of Worms. Some of his friends, to whom the secret had been disclosed, would come to the Castle at night, and in the mornings he regularly conducted service in the chapel and preached the Word of God. The altar at which he ministered, and the pulpit from which he preached, still remain;' as also does the study in which he spent so many hours, and where he had, not unfrequently, fierce conflicts with the devil, in one of which he is said to have hurled his inkstand at the head of his foe. There is nothing

improbable in the world-known story, for Luther had firm faith in the personality of Satan, and was very likely, in one of his fits of nervous depression or excitement, to see his spiritual foe in bodily shape.

The work of the Reformation had not stood still whilst Luther lay in hiding. But, as so often happens in revivals of religion, in some cases liberty became licence. Certain fanatical teachers came from Zwickau to Wittemberg and were in danger of destroying the Church of God there. Luther felt that he must throw himself into the thick of the fight, so he left his hiding-place, and soon, by his firmness, piety and common-sense, checked the disorders. On leaving the Wartburg he addressed to the Elector of Saxony a characteristic letter, in which, after announcing his intention of going to Wittemberg, he says: Now Duke George, with whom your Highness frightens me, is yet much less to be feared than a single devil. If that which is passing at Wittemberg were taking place at Leipsic, I would immediately mount my horse to go thither, although (may your Highness pardon these words) for nine whole days together it were to rain nothing but Duke Georges, and each one nine times more furious than he is. What is he thinking of in attacking me? Does he take Christ my Lord for a man of straw?'

[ocr errors]

This letter is dated Ash Wednesday, 1522. In September of the same year the first edition of Luther's New Testament was published at Wittemberg, and was sold for about half-a-crown. Not twelve months later the first martyrs of the Reformation laid down their lives for the faith at Antwerp. Luther was deeply moved: 'Christ is gathering some fruits of our preaching, and is creating new martyrs,' he said. He wrote, too, at this time his Martyrs' hymn, which was sung far and wide through Germany and the Netherlands,

'Flung to the heedless waves,
Or on the waters cast,
The martyrs' ashes, watched,
Shall gathered be at last;
And from that scattered dust,
Around us and abroad,
Shall spring a plenteous seed
Of witnesses for God.*

"The Father hath received
Their latest living breath;

And vain is Satan's boast

Of victory in their death;

Still, still, though dead, they speak,

And, trumpet-tongued, proclaim
To many a wakening land

The One availing Name.'

Our fast diminishing space warns us that we must glance but briefly at the events of the remaining years of Luther's life. In 1525 he was married to Catharine von Bora, who had formerly been a nun, and with her he lived happily till death for a season parted them. Of Luther's home-life we purpose speaking in a subsequent paper, so pass over this eventful moment, only noticing how completely it marked the separation from the Church of Rome of the one-time Augustinian monk.

In June, 1526, the first Diet of Spires met. Its deliberations resulted in the decision that in matters of religion every State should act according to its own judgment, and as it should be able to answer to God and the Emperor, till a general Council should decide the great questions in dispute. In 1529 a second Diet assembled at Spires, which revoked the decision of the former-a resolution which called forth the famous protest of the Reforming princes and deputies, from which the name PROTESTANT was derived. A year later the famous Diet of Augsburg was held under the presidency of Charles himself. The Reformed members took Melancthon with them, but it was thought wiser for Luther to remain near at hand in Coburg Castle, but not to enter Augsburg during the time the Emperor was there, which would have been indeed needlessly to defy the imperial ban under which he still lay. Melancthon drew up with consummate skill the Protestant Confession, and Luther was in constant communication with his friends. The Confession was signed by the Protestant members of the Diet, the first signature being that of John the Constant,' Elector of Saxony, who claimed, in spite of Melancthon's desire that the ministers of the Word and not the

[ocr errors]

* Wherever Aleander,' said Erasmus, raises a pile, there he seems to have been sowing heretics.'

6

princes should appear in this matter, thus to bear his witness to the truth. God forbid,' he cried, 'that you should exclude me from confessing my Lord! My electoral hat and my ermine are not so precious to me as the Cross of Jesus Christ.' The Confession was read in the Diet, and the Romish party drew up a voluminous 'refutation,' which, however, little helped their cause. The result was that an imperial edict was issued commanding the Protestant princes to return to their allegiance to the Pope. But the Emperor's hands were too full to permit him to enforce it,and the storm once again passed over.

Luther spent his time at Coburg Castle in earnest labour and anxious prayer, but now and again his habitual playfulness breaks out in his letters, as, for instance, in his account of the Diet of Jackdaws. 'The noble lords,' he writes, 'who constitute our councils of state, run, or rather sail, through the air. In the morning, at an early hour, they go out to battle, armed with their invincible beaks; and whilst they are engaged in pillaging, destroying and devouring all that comes in their way, I am delivered for the time being from their everlasting songs of victory. In the evening they return in triumph, fatigue closes their eyes, but their slumbers are light and refreshing as those of a conqueror. Some days since I penetrated into their palace, in order to survey the pomp of their empire. The unhappy wretches were in a state of great fright. They imagined that I had come to destroy the results of their industry. When I saw that I alone caused such trepidations in all those heroes, I clapped my hands and threw my hat into the air, amply avenged by being enabled thus to mock their alarms. All this must not be looked on as mere trifling. Thus will be seen trembling and crouching under the Word of God those harpies who are now crying aloud and Romanizing at Augsburg.'

The remaining years of Luther's life were passed in diligent toil, chiefly in confirming the churches, and in efforts to preserve peace. Early in 1546 he went to Eisleben to compose one of the many quarrels of the Count of Mansfeld. His mission was successful; but fatal illness seized him, and on February the 18th he fell asleep, commending his soul to God. Thus the most wonderful and fruitful life that had been lived since St. Paul received the unfading crown, closed in the little German town in which it had begun so humbly sixty-two years before. He was buried in the Schloss-Kirke, Wittemberg, to the door of which he had nailed his famous theses.

Thus Luther died peacefully and was buried honourably in spite, as he himself would have said, of Emperor, Pope, and Devil. It has not often happened that a great reformer has thus safely braved the cruel power of Rome: Savonarola, Huss, Zwingli, Latimer, and thousands more sealed their testimony with their blood, for God knows

« EelmineJätka »