CHAPTER X

HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION DOWN TO THE EDICT OF WORMS, 1521, AND LUTHER’S CONCEALMENT AT THE WARBURG. GENERAL AFFAIRS OF EUROPE TO THE DEATH OF LEO X, 1521.

 

 

THE Papacy reached the height of its power in the Pontificate of Boniface VIII. In the constitution known as Unam Sanctam he declared that the Church had two swords, a spiritual and a temporal one; the first to be wielded by the Church itself, the second for the Church by Kings and their soldiers, but only at its bidding and during its pleasure. And he laid down as a necessary article of faith, that every human being is subject to the Roman Pontiff. In accordance with these principles, he showed himself at the first Jubilee in 1300 dressed in the Imperial robes, whilst two swords, typical of those referred to, were carried before him. Early in the same century the Church had been strengthened by the establishment of the Mendicant Orders, of which the principal were the Dominicans, or Friar preachers, and the Franciscans, or Friars Minor, founded severally by St. Dominic of Castile, and St. Francis of Assisi, in the Pontificate of Honorius III (1216-27).

In this age the Roman Catholic Church established some novel doctrines. The doctrine of transubstantiation, by which the priest is supposed to work a constant miracle, was first formally and explicitly defined by the Fourth Lateran General Council (1215). The practice of auricular confession became recognized, and the influence of the Pope was also augmented by the dispensing power, which enabled him to release the greatest Sovereigns from an impolitic marriage. The Roman See, however, naturally lost much of its influence, as well in Italy as in the rest of Europe, by the removal of the Papal Court to Avignon, in 1305, where it remained more than seventy years. This was the period of the attacks on the Church by Italian writers, as well as by many in England in the reign of Edward III, and of the rise in that country of the Wiclifites, or Lollards.

The schism which ensued soon after the return of Gregory XI to Rome in 1376, was also most prejudicial to the Papacy. After the death of Gregory, through dissensions among the Cardinals, the tiara was claimed by a Pope and an Antipope. The Council of Pisa, assembled to decide this dispute, in 1409, only more embroiled the fray. It deposed both the rival Popes, Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, and elected Alexander V in their place; but as the deposed Popes found many adherents, the only result was three infallible heads of the Church instead of two, all at variance with one another. It became necessary, therefore, to appeal to another Council, which was assembled at Constance in 1414.

This assembly found something more to decide than the claims of these Pontiffs, whose quarrels had given birth to two separate projects of reform : one within the Church, the other without. A very considerable portion of the transmontane clergy who assembled at Constance were desirous of effecting a moderate reform; and as they agreed to vote by nations, and not per capita, or individually, which would have given a preponderance to the Italian clergy, they were enabled to carry some of their resolutions. They appointed a Reform Committee, whose resolutions might have eventually counteracted the more glaring abuses of the Papacy; and they made the famous declaration, that the authority of a General Council is superior to that of the Pope. It may well be doubted, however, whether the power of the Roman See could have been ever effectually broken without a reform of doctrine; and of this some of the ecclesiastics who were strenuous against the Papal abuses were the most violent opponents.

The more thorough movement from without, begun by Wycliffe, though arrested, was not suppressed. Many causes had hindered the success of that reformation. The times were not yet ripe for it : Wycliffe himself was scarcely of the true temper for a great reformer; and his attempt was damaged, first by the weakness of Richard II and then by the revolution which overthrew that King. Although Richard curbed the Papal power by passing an act of proemunire, he at the same time enacted statutes against the Lollards, forbade the teaching of their doctrines at Oxford, and suppressed their meetings in London. Thus he alienated at once the reformers and Romanists, and lost his throne to Henry of Lancaster, whose invasion was invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury in person. The reign of the Church was now firmly settled in England, and under Henry IV heresy was made a capital offence. But through the connection of Bohemia and England by the marriage of Richard with Anne of Bohemia, sister of King Wenceslaus, the doctrines of Wycliffe had spread to that country, and had taken root there before the preaching of Huss. Conrad Waldhauser and Militz had preached those doctrines towards the end of the fourteenth century; though Matthias of Janow, a canon of Prague Cathedral, who died in 1394, must be more especially regarded as the forerunner of Huss. The new doctrines received further impulse in Bohemia through Jerome of Prague, who had studied at Oxford. Some of the English Wiclifites also took refuge in that country; and we find among them one Peter Payne, who had been obliged to fly from Oxford on account of his principles, and was subsequently one of the Taborite deputies who attended the Council of Basle in 1433. Huss carried his tenets almost as far as Luther did afterwards. He appealed to the Scriptures as the only standard of faith, denounced indulgences, and held in 1412 a public disputation against them. His friend Jerome of Prague and others burnt, like Luther afterwards, the Papal bulls under the gallows, a description of which scene is still extant in the manuscript of a contemporary student. I fact, Luther's Reformation was only a reproduction of those of Wycliffe and Huss. The Hussite doctrines never penetrated over the frontier of Bohemia; they were, in fact, a sort of national reaction against German domination in that land. The Germans regarded the Bohemian Hussites with aversion, and a devastating war was for fifteen years carried on between them. At this time Bohemia was superior to Germany in literary culture. The University of Prague, the earliest in the Empire, was founded in 1350 by the Emperor Charles IV, and in 1408 is said to have contained 30,000 students and 200 professors. Of the students about 4,000 were Germans, who sided with the Pope; and when their privileges were curtailed in 1409 by King Wenceslaus, they quitted Prague and migrated to the newly founded University of Leipzig (1409).

The reforming party in the Council of Constance was principally led by French ecclesiastics, among whom three names are conspicuous above the rest; those of John Gerson, Nicholas of Clemanges, Rector of the University of Paris, and Peter d'Ailly, Cardinal-Bishop of Cambray. Clemanges had written before 1413 his lashing little work De corrupto Ecclesiae Estatu, which Michelet likens to Luther’s Babylonish Captivity. The object of these reformers, however, was merely to establish an ecclesiastical oligarchy in place of the absolute power of the Pope. They could never pardon Huss his attacks upon the hierarchy. They were his bitterest enemies; and it was for these attacks, rather than for their imputed heresies, that Huss and Jerome of Prague died. This judicial murder produced a reproachful letter to the Council signed by no fewer than 452 Bohemian nobles; to which the Fathers answered by summoning the subscribers before them, and on their non-appearance denouncing them as heretics. It is proof to how great an extent the Hussite doctrines had spread in Bohemia that the name of Bohemian became synonymous with heretic. The internal dissensions of the Hussites themselves alone prevented the establishment of a Reformation in that country. The tenets of the moderate party, called Calixtines or Utraquists, and subsequently the Prague Party, had been publicly adopted by the University of Prague; but, as commonly happens in all great revolutions, whether political or religious, their cause was injured by various extreme sects of desperate and dreaming fanatics, who produced the disorders which proved fatal to the cause.

The heaviest complaints made against Rome at the General Council of Constance were those of the English and the Germans. The latter, however, suffered most from Papal extortion; and they handed in a long list of grievances, which is important as displaying the state of the German Church at that time, and shows that Germany was ripe for a reformation. The Council, as the mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost, deposed Pope John XXIII (May 29th, 1415), and elected in his stead Cardinal Otho di Colonna, who assumed the name of Martin V. The small General Council which met at Basle in 1431, had likewise some important results. Eugenius IV, who now occupied the Papal chair, attempted, but without success, to divert it to some Italian city.

The opposition to the Pope at this Basilean Council, was led by two remarkable men, both of whom, however, subsequently changed their opinions: Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, a celebrated scholastic theologian, well known for his services to Greek classical learning and to German literature, and by Aeneas Sylvius, whom we have already had occasion to mention. This synod reasserted the decree of Constance, that the authority of a General Council is superior to that of the Pope. When Eugenius, on pretense of negotiating with the Greeks, decreed the transference to Ferrara of the Council of Basle, the latter declared the Pope's bull for that purpose null and void, suspended the Pope himself (January 24th, 1438), declared the Council of Ferrara a mere conventiculum, and cited the members to appear at Basle.

In June, 1439, the latter Council condemned and deposed the Pope, and afterwards elected as his successor Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy (November 17th). Amadeus, though no ecclesiastic, had the odor of sanctity. He was Dean of the Knights of St. Maurice of Ripaille, a “hermitage” which he had founded near Thonon, on the southern shore of Lake Leman, and to which he had retired after his wife’s death in 1434. In this retreat, he repeated the canonical office seven times a day; but it is said that, instead of roots and spring water, the hermits of Ripaille enjoyed the best wine and the best viands that could be procured, whence the popular proverb faire ripaille, to denote a life of ease and dissipation.

Amadeus accepted the tiara, and under the title of Felix V lived nine years in Papal splendor at Basle, Lausanne, and Geneva, and nominated during his pontificate twenty-three Cardinals. He was as good as the average of Popes; indeed, a great deal better than many of his successors. He was not, however, recognized by any except a few feudal potentates, including the Swiss League; and when the Basle Council was dissolved in 1449, Felix renounced the tiara with more resignation than had been displayed by his priestly rivals.

The Council was overthrown through the treachery of Aeneas Sylvius, who made peace between Pope Eugenius and the Emperor Sigismund. Its object, like that of Constance, had been to establish in the Church a sort of republican hierarchy. These disputes were not without advantage to the French and German Churches, and especially to the former. A Pragmatic Sanction was drawn up by the National Council, which met at Bourges in 1438. The chief objects of this instrument were, to subject the Popes to periodical General Councils; to suppress annates and other payments, which drew so much French money to Rome; to establish the rights and liberties of the Gallican Church, and to secure to Chapters and Convents the free election of bishops and abbots. The right of the Prince to address his recommendations to the Chapter or Convent was recognized, a veto only being reserved to the Pope, in case of unworthiness or abuse. Appeals to Rome were forbidden, except after passing through the intermediate courts. Priests living in open concubinage, who were very numerous, were subjected to the loss of a quarter of their incomes.

Without, however, any regard to the substance of the Pragmatic Sanction, the mere promulgation by a royal Ordinance of the decrees of the Council of Bourges was an important fact, as establishing the right of the civil power to control ecclesiastical decisions. The Pragmatic Sanction, however, was abrogated in the reign of Francis I, as we have already related.

The Germans presented to the Council of Basle, as they had to that of Constance, a long list of grievances. The Papal power and its consequent abuses had made greater progress in Germany than in any other country, having been supported by the Electors and other Princes as a counterbalance to that of the Emperor. In spite of the Councils of Constance and Basle, the authority of the Pope stood very high in Germany down to the time of the Reformation; it gained great strength after Aeneas Sylvius, the crafty and able minister of Frederick III, became Pope Pius II. The Diets were now called Papal and Imperial; the Papal Legates appeared in them as in Sigismund's days, and sometimes opened them.

The attempt to make a stand against Rome during the Council of Basle, had proved of little avail. In 1439 a Diet assembled at Metz, and adopted the reformatory resolutions of the Basilean Council, twenty-six in number; making only those alterations which the peculiar situation of Germany required. They did not, however, make any practical application of the resolutions, and thus derived no benefit from them. The only result was the theoretical recognition of the superiority of a Council over the Pope. Subsequently, a sort of agreement was established between Germany and the Pope by the Roman Concordat of 1447, and by the Concordat of Vienna in the following year. Towards the close of the century, however, opposition to the Papacy reappeared, occasioned principally by the great sums remitted to Rome, which were estimated at 300,000 gulden per annum, without reckoning costs of suits at Rome, rents of prebends, &c. And we have seen that Maximilian, early in the next century, denounced in the most violent language the abuses of the Papal rule.

During the Council of Basle, England and Burgundy sided with the Pope. The former country as we have said, had already emancipated herself from the more flagrant abuses of the Roman tyranny. Castile, in the earlier ages of that Kingdom, was nearly independent of the Papal See, till Alfonso X (1252-1284), by publishing a code of law which incorporated great part of the Decretals, established the full jurisdiction of Rome. The benefices of Castile soon became filled with Italians, whilst Aragon and Navarre offered in this respect a favorable contrast. The Castilian Cortes, however, made a stand against Rome in the reign of Henry IV (1473), and Isabella subsequently maintained a more independent attitude. By a concordat of 1482, Sixtus IV conceded to the Spanish Sovereigns the right of nominating to the higher ecclesiastical dignities, though the Holy See still collated to the inferior ones, which were frequently bestowed on improper persons. Isabella sometimes obtained indulgences conferring the right of presentation for a limited period. Venice asserted her independence of the Papal power, and frequently opposed to it either the authority of the Patriarch of Aquileia or that of a General Council; while in Florence, the Medici commonly obeyed the Pope only so far as they chose.

The attempt to reform the Church within the Church had proved a failure; nothing could be effectual but a reformation from without, accompanied with a purification of her doctrines. The Councils of Constance and Basle were little more than a struggle for wealth and power between the Pope and hierarchy. With regard to their spiritual prerogatives the Popes came out victorious from the contest. In January, 1460, Pius II published a bull condemning all appeals to a General Council; and half a century later (1512), the noted Dominican friar, Thomas of Gaeta, declared the Church a born slave, that could do nothing even against the worst Pope but pray for him. He little dreamt that a great part of the Church was on the eve of emancipation.

The members partook of the corruption of the head. The vices and profligacy of the clergy had long been notorious, and were denounced even by those who regarded with indulgence the abuses of the Papacy. Constance, at the time of the Council, was filled with hundreds of players and jugglers; the handsomest courtesans of Italy there vied with one another in pride and extravagance. Nor were these amusements intended only for the knights, barons, and trades people who flocked thither in great numbers, but also for the assembled Fathers. In a sermon delivered before the Council of Siena—an adjournment of that of Pavia in 1423—the preacher, after a severe denunciation of clerical vices, added:

“The bishops are more voluptuous than Epicureans, and settle over the bottle the authority of Pope and Council”.

Yet this preacher was no reformer. He denounces the heathen philosophy as the source of all heresies, imputes the Bohemian revolt to Plato and Aristotle, and traces to the same source the fatalists who then abounded in Italy. The same charges are repeated in the sermons of Savonarola; who, besides denouncing the ambition, pride, simony, luxury, and unchastity of the priests and prelates, reproaches them also for their preference of profane over sacred learning, and for their addiction to fatalism, as shown by their blind submission to astrologers.

That these charges were not mere idle and invidious declarations may be established by documentary proofs. In England, the priests petitioned Parliament in 1449 to be pardoned for all rapes committed before June next, as well as to be excused from all forfeitures for taking excessive salaries, provided they paid the king a noble (6s. 8d.) for every priest in the Kingdom. The petition was granted, and the statute made accordingly. In 1455, the Archbishop of Canterbury issued an order denouncing the vices of his clergy, their gluttony, drunkenness, fornication, ignorance, pursuit of worldly lucre, &c. It appears from a decree of the eleventh session of the Fifth Council of the Lateran, that some ecclesiastics derived an income from the stews; and Innocent VIII found it necessary to renew by a bull, published in April, 1488, the constitution of Pius II, forbidding priests to keep butcheries, taverns, gaming-houses, and brothels, and to be the go-betweens of courtesans. It would be easy, were it necessary, to multiply this sort of evidence.

In Italy the vices of the clergy had produced a wide-spread atheism. Among the laity, the higher classes were almost universally skeptics, fatalists, and Epicureans, though the most consummate infidels were to be found among the clergy themselves. Skepticism was so rife that the Fifth Lateran Council thought it necessary to define, in its eighth session, that the soul of man is not only immortal, but also distinct in each individual, and not a portion of one and the same soul. Erasmus knew of his own knowledge that at Rome the most horrible blasphemies were uttered by the clergy, and sometimes in the very act of saying Mass; and he relates, among other things, an attempt made to prove to him, out of Pliny, that there is no difference between the souls of beasts and men. Such of the Italian ecclesiastics as prided themselves on the purity of their Latin style, were fearful of corrupting it by a study of the Bible. They altered the language of Scripture to that of Livy or Cicero; Jehovah became Jupiter Optimus Maximus; Christ, Apollo or Esculapius; the Virgin Mary, Diana. Cardinal John de' Medici, afterwards Leo X, was, if he had any religion at all, rather a pagan than a Christian, and he seems to have inoculated the Romans with his own opinions; for on the breaking out of a pestilence at Rome during the pontificate of his successor Adrian VI, a bullock was sacrificed on the ancient forum, with heathen rites, conducted by a Greek named Demetrius, to the great satisfaction of the people.

This very laxity of belief had, however, produced a sort of liberality. The Jews, who had been driven from other countries, were tolerated at Rome; and while Ferdinand the Catholic was burning heretics by thousands, no auto de fe was beheld in Italy. The College of Cardinals could assist at and enjoy the representation of Machiavelli’s comedy of Mandragola, a bitter satire upon the clergy. With all its vices and corruption, the Roman Court, at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, was the meeting-place of all the distinguished men of Europe, and must be regarded as the center of European civilization, as well as in a great degree of European politics. The Popes viewed without apprehension the diffusion of opinions which they shared themselves; for in Italy, learning and philosophy had produced only atheism and indifference, and it was not indifference and atheism that the Church had reason to fear. She was ignorant that, beyond the Alps, a race of men had sprung up whose acquirements were directed to trace to the fountain-head the origin and progress of their faith, and to examine the foundations on which was erected the vast superstructure of Papal power and usurpation. To the efforts of these men we must now advert.

 

REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL LEARNING.

From the fifth century to the fifteenth, education and the development of European intellect had been essentially guided by the clergy. In the houses of most religious orders heathen authors were forbidden; it was only the Benedictines, which order was fortunately the most numerous, that read and copied secular books, and to them principally we owe what we possess of Roman literature. It must be remembered, however, that if the monks copied, they also destroyed; and before the use of paper was known, would often rub out a Livy or a Tacitus, in order to fill the parchment with their own absurdities. These were the ages of the Scholastic philosophy and of a subtle and elaborate logic founded on the sayings of the Fathers, collected by Peter Lombard in his Liber Sententiarum, which formed the great arsenal of theological weapons. It rested, therefore on authority. Nobody would have thought of questioning its postulates; and hence the Scholastic philosophy was calculated to enslave the intellect, to bind it down to forms, and to prevent all original research. The result of the Scholastic system was an intellectual condition approaching to fatuity. “It cannot be denied”, observes Ranke, “that however ingenious, varied, and profound are the productions of the Middle Ages, they are founded on a fantastic view of the world little answering to the realities of things. Had the Church subsisted in full and conscious power, she would have perpetuated this state of the human intellect”. Fooldom stands out the prominent object of observation and ridicule in the literature which preceded the Reformation. The number of attacks on folly and fools is surprising. The Ship of Fools of Sebastian Brandt was imitated in England by Walter Mapes and Nigel Wireker. The Speculum Stultorum of the latter was printed more than half a dozen times before the end of the fifteenth Century.

Among writers of the same kind were Hammerlein, Michel Menot, Geiler von Kaisenberg, Hans Rosenblut, and others, especially Erasmus, the greatest of all. His Praise of Folly was adorned with wood-cuts by Hans Holbein; among which was one representing the Pope with his triple crown. Thus ridicule became one of the instruments of the Reformation. Ancient paganism had fallen before it through the attacks of Lucian, the Voltaire of antiquity, and it helped to destroy the paganism of modern Rome.

The revival of classical learning promoted, no doubt, the advent of the Reformation, though one of its first effects was to produce a race of pedants who caught the form rather than the spirit of antiquity. The results of the art of printing were also slow. At first it helped both parties, the friends and the enemies of light; the mystic and scholastic writers were multiplied ad infinitum, and for one Tacitus the libraries were inundated with copies of Duns Scotus and St. Thomas Aquinas, the great doctors of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. But towards the end of the fifteenth century the press began to tell on the other side, for common sense, though tardily, will at last prevail. Among the earliest who attacked the abuses of Rome was Nicholas Krebs, called also Cusanus (born 1401), who demonstrated the spuriousness of the decretals of Isidore of Seville. In his Conjectura de novissimis temporibus Cusanus foretold the Reformation, and by his tergiversation at the Council of Basle did what in him lay to falsify his own prediction.

Laurentius Valla, who flourished about the same time, in his declamation against the donation of Constantine, attacked in a tone as violent as Luther’s the corruption of the clergy and the temporal power of the Pope. But by far the greatest of all the classical philologists who took up their pens against the abuses of the Church was Erasmus. His edition of the Greek Testament, the first that appeared from the press (1516), served to usher in the Reformation. In the Paraclesis, or Exhortation, prefixed to it, he expresses a hope that the Gospels and St. Paul’s Epistles may be read in their native tongues by Scotch and Irish, Turks and Saracens; but though he could express this noble wish in his study and rail at monkish abuses, he was not disposed to attempt a reformation of them at the expense of his life or even of his personal comfort. He was the man of speculation, not of action; and his selfish and somewhat sensual nature excludes him from that class of men whose intrepidity has rendered them the benefactors of their kind.

Other laborers in the field were the restorers of Hebrew learning and of the study of the Old Testament. The Old Covenant was destined again to produce the New, or at all events to restore its purity and banish the idolatry of Rome. For many ages God the Father had not even had an altar. He was regarded as Jewish; and one of the characteristics of the Middle Ages was hatred of the unbaptized, whether Mahometan or Jew. The importance, however, attached by the early Reformers to the Hebrew Scriptures contributed to give the Reformation an occasional air of gloomy fanaticism. John of Wesel was one of the earliest restorers of Hebrew learning, whose treatise against Indulgences, published in 1450, handles the subject in a more exhaustive and uncompromising manner than even the theses of Luther.

Pico della Mirandola, whose learning has perhaps been overrated, was also a Hebrew student. His tract, entitled Adversus eos qui aliquot ejus propositiones theologicas carpebant, addressed to his friend, Lorenzo de' Medici, contains many principles of the subsequent reformers. Reuchlin, the pupil of Wesel and friend of Pico, was another distinguished Hebraist. Reuchlin maintained in his book De Verbo mirifico, that the Jews alone had known the Word of God. His literary quarrel with the monks of Cologne, in which he succeeded in rescuing piles of Hebrew literature from the flames to which they had been condemned by the Dominicans, is one of the most striking events that harbingered the Reformation (1509). Ulrich von Hutten lent the aid of his humor. His bantering Epistolae obscurorum Virorum written to ridicule the monks—which, in consequence, perhaps, of their bad Latin and palpable absurdities, were at first supposed by the monks themselves to proceed from their friends—served to cover them with ineffaceable ridicule.

 

RISE OF MARTIN LUTHER.

In this state of things Martin Luther arose. He was the son of a poor miner, and was born at Eisleben in Upper Saxony, November 10th, 1483. In his fourteenth year his parents put him to school at Magdeburg; and so extreme was his poverty, that while imbibing the rudiments of that learning which enabled him to shake the Papal throne and deprive it of half its subjects, he was obliged to eke out a scanty subsistence by singing and begging from door to door. He subsequently attended another school at Eisenach, and in 1501 entered the University of Erfurt. Here his progress in learning was rapid, but at the same time marked by a vigorous originality of mind. He began to regard with contempt the scholastic philosophy which formed the staple education of the time; while the study of the Bible made a deep impression on him. In 1503 he took his degree of Master in Philosophy. Symptoms of that morbid melancholy which often darkened the course of his future life had already begun to show themselves; which being increased by a severe illness and the sudden death by lightning of a friend named Alexis, whom he tenderly loved, he resolved to renounce the world, and in 1505 entered a convent of Augustinian or Austin friars at Erfurt. Here in 1507 he was ordained priest. Staupitz, Provincial of the order in those parts, perceived and encouraged his merit; and he was appointed successively Professor of Philosophy and of Theology in the University of Wittenberg, then recently founded by Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony. Here he lectured on the writings of Aristotle, but was often bold enough to controvert the doctrines of that philosopher.

A short visit to Rome, in 1510, on business connected with his order afforded Luther a glimpse of the state of religion and the manners of its ecclesiastical professors in the capital of Christendom; and he used to say in after life that he would not have missed the sight for a thousand florins. Rome was then beginning to clothe herself in all the magnificence of modern art: the vast basilica of St. Peter was rising from its foundations; Raphael and Michael Angelo were adorning her churches and palaces with their masterpieces; yet neither her treasures of modern art, nor the monuments of her former grandeur, seem to have excited any emotions of surprise or delight in the mind of Luther, who had no relish for anything but the religious questions in which he was absorbed. He treasured up the impressions of wonder and disgust with which he beheld the lives of the clergy; at seeing the warlike Pontiff Julius II parading the streets on his white charger, and the priests performing with careless indifference and ill-concealed atheism the most sacred functions of their calling. Thus forewarned against the abuses of the Church by ocular inspection as well as by his own study and the opinions of those learned and enlightened men who had begun to assail them, Luther needed only an adequate occasion to call him forth as a reformer; and this was afforded by the unblushing effrontery of the Romish clergy in the traffic of indulgences.

Indulgences were at first merely a remission of punishments ordered to repentant sinners by the Church, and in this view their origin is lost in antiquity. If a penitent showed symptoms of reformation his canonical penance might be mitigated, or its term shortened: or it might be commuted altogether to works of charity and exercises of piety. In this latter form the crusades gave a great impulse to indulgences; Pope Urban II, in the Council of Clermont (1096), having promised a plenary indulgence to all who took part in the first crusade. Indulgences were afterwards extended to those who took arms against European heretics; and afterwards, by Boniface VIIL, in 1300, to those who celebrated the Jubilee at Rome. The chief sources of the abuse of indulgences were the doctrine of Purgatory, established in the tenth century, and the invention by Halesius in the thirteenth century of the spiritual treasure of the Church, consisting of the infinitely superabundant merits of the Redeemer, and in a lower degree the superabundant merits of all the Saints, which the Church, and especially the Pope, its head, could apply by way of satisfaction to those who had fallen away from Divine grace, but were now repentant and absolved.

The doctrine of indulgences was erected into an article of faith by a bull of Pope Clement VI, in 1343. In the earlier times the privilege of granting these pardons was exercised with an endurable moderation. They could be partially dispensed by bishops as well as by the Pope; nor was a money payment always exacted for them, but some act of piety or charity, as the giving of alms, or a pilgrimage to Rome or to some holy place. But in process of time, when the income of the Roman See began to decline, the Popes became more and more alive to the pecuniary profit that might be derived from the sale of indulgences, which, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, they had completely monopolized. No pains were taken to conceal the fact that the sale of indulgences was regarded as one of the ordinary sources of Papal revenue; nay, the traffic was considered so legitimate, that the grant of an indulgence was sometimes solicited from the Pope by temporal Princes when they wanted to raise money. Thus, Elector Frederick III of Saxony obtained an indulgence grant from the Pope in order to erect a bridge over the Elbe at Torgau with the proceeds.

In 1508 Pope Julius II opened a sale of indulgences in Hungary, but was moderate enough to take only one third of the produce for the building of St. Peter’s, leaving the remainder to defray the expenses of the Venetian war. The trade became at length so profitable as to excite the envy of the civil magistrate, and induce him to claim a share of the profits. In 1500 the Imperial government would allow the Papal Legate to issue indulgences in Germany only on condition of receiving a third of the produce. The Pope’s agents openly disposed of the privilege by auction, and sometimes threw dice for it in taverns over their drink. The scandalous way in which the traffic was conducted had already occasioned many complaints in France, Portugal and Spain, in which last country it had been opposed by Cardinal Ximenes himself, in 1513. Germany was the chief place for this “fair of souls”, where the produce was farmed by the Fuggers, the rich merchants and bankers of Augsburg, just as if it had been a tax on leather or an excise upon wine. In vain had the practice been held up to ridicule before the time of Luther by the wits of Nuremberg, then the literary center of Germany; the German money still flowed abundantly towards Rome, where it was called Peccata Germanorum, or the “sins of the Germans”.

The extravagant expenditure of Leo X, who was reproached after his death with having spent the revenues of three Popes—namely, that of his predecessor Julius II, his own, and his successor’s—led him to raise money in every possible way, without any regard to the dignity of the Holy See. In the Concordat with Francis I he had sacrificed the spiritual claims of the Church for the sake of worldly profit; he had endeavored to wring large sums from Europe under pretense of a crusade; and he now pushed the lucrative and commodious trade of indulgences with more vigor than ever. Commissaries were appointed to collect the revenue arising from it, the chief of whom, Arcimboldi, a Milanese doctor of laws, and Apostolic prothonotary and referendary, had a commission extending over the greater part of Germany, including Denmark and Sweden. It was in the first of these countries, however, that he was most successful. A Lübeck chronicle of the year 1516 complains bitterly of Arcimboldi’s ill-gotten gains, part of which he had laid out in silver kettles and frying-pans—a piece of luxury unheard of even among Princes. He was accompanied by a man of business, named Anthony de Wele, who collected the cash; but this factotum was strangled one night in a brothel at Lübeck, and his body thrown down a privy.

It was, however, the proceedings under another commission, granted by the Pope to Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Metz and Magdeburg, and Primate of Germany, which brought the Pope’s agents into collision with Luther. Albert was a young prelate fond of pomp and pleasure, and with great taste for building; habits which had plunged him into debt, and had compelled him to borrow from the Fuggers 30,000 florins to pay the fees for his pallium; a sum which it seemed impossible to raise in his already well-drained dominions. To this needy Elector one John Tetzel offered his services, a Dominican friar, and native of Leipzig, who had been already engaged in the traffic under Arcimboldi. Tetzel and his myrmidons were men notoriously infamous; they did not scruple to help themselves from what passed through their hands; and the Apostolic controller at Metz refused to have anything to do with them. But Albert's need was pressing; Tetzel’s merits as a clever and unscrupulous agent were great; he promised a goodly harvest, and a contrivance was adopted to prevent him from reaping more than his due share of it. The keys of the chests containing the contributions of the faithful were deposited in the hands of the Fuggers, in whose presence or that of their clerks the chests were to be opened; when, after deducting all expenses of collection, a portion of the proceeds was to be placed to the credit of the Pope and the balance to that of the collectors.

Albert’s episcopal principalities of Magdeburg and Halberstadt were first selected as the scene of Tetzel’s operations; where the pulpits were tuned, and the clergy instructed to recommend the benefits which he offered. Tetzel went about in a coach with three horses provided for him by the Fuggers. When he entered a town the Papal bull under which he acted was carried before him on a splendid cushion; then followed a procession of priests and friars, magistrates and burgesses, teachers and scholars; and the rear was brought up by a motley crowd, singing hymns and carrying banners and wax tapers. In this way Tetzel proceeded to church. After service he opened his market, painted the torments of Purgatory in the darkest colors, expatiated on the virtue of indulgences, and inculcated that as soon as the price of one rang in the box, the liberated soul ascended at once to heaven. For those who were more anxious about their own state than that of their departed friends he had wares of another kind; pardons available for all possible or even impossible sins, whether already perpetrated or to be committed hereafter: which he absolved without any reference to the irksome conditions of repentance and amendment prescribed by the Church.

In the course of his trade Tetzel came to Jüterbock, a town near Wittenberg, and his proceedings were thus brought under the immediate notice of Luther. Nothing could be more calculated to excite the Augustinian monk’s indignation than that justification, the precious reward of a lively faith, should be procured for money! With characteristic vehemence he denounced these indulgences from the pulpit, and positively refused absolution to those who bought them. In order to alarm him, Tetzel, who was a member of the Dominican Inquisition, caused fires to be frequently lighted in the market-place, as a hint of the fate which might overtake the opponents of the Pope and his indulgences. So far, however, from frightening Luther, this proceeding served only to animate his courage; and, on the 31st of October, 1517, he posted on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg those memorable theses, which, though even Luther himself had then no conception of it, were in fact the beginning of the Reformation. On the following day he sent these theses, ninety-five in number, to the Elector Albert with a letter.

It was fortunate for Luther’s cause that he lived under such a Prince as the then Elector of Saxony. Frederick was, indeed, a devout Catholic; he had made a pilgrimage to Palestine, and had enriched All Saints’ Church at Wittenberg with relics for which he had given large sums of money. His attention, however, was now entirely engrossed by his new University, and he was unwilling to offer up to men like Tetzel so great an ornament of it as Dr. Martin Luther, since whose appointment at Wittenberg the number of students had so wonderfully increased as to throw the Universities of Erfurt and Leipzig quite into the shade. He was at variance too with the Elector Albert, and unwilling that he should extort the price of his pallium from Upper Saxony; and he therefore suffered Luther to take his own way. Frederick was quite able to protect him. He was completely master in his own dominions, and as one of the seven Electors was almost as much respected throughout Germany as the Emperor himself, who, besides his limited power, was deterred by his political views from noticing the quarrel. Luther had thus full liberty to prepare the great movement which was to ensue, by those vigorous sermons and treatises which showed him so well qualified to become its leader.

 

INDIFFERENCE OF LEO X.

The contempt entertained by Pope Leo X for the whole affair was also favorable to Luther; for Frederick might not at first have been inclined to defend him against the Court of Rome. Towards the end of 1517 Tetzel caused counter theses to be drawn up by Wimpina, a celebrated theologian of that period, which he published at the University of Frankfort-on-Oder. Silvester Prierias, a Dominican and majordomo of the Apostolic Palace, also published a reply, but so coarsely and unskillfully drawn up, that it did full as much harm to the cause of Rome as the attack of Luther. The Pope was indeed unfortunate in his advocates. Hoogstraaten, another Dominican, who had made himself ridiculous in his controversy with Reuchlin, also took part in the dispute, and earnestly pressed the Pope to commit Luther’s writings to the flames. But Leo, who was entirely given up to classical, it might almost be said to pagan, tastes and predilections, and regarded with aversion all theological disputes, turned a deaf ear to the suggestion of the officious friar; nay, he even affected to praise Brother Martin Luther as a man of a fine genius, and to regard the whole affair as a mere quarrel of envious monks. This last view was common enough in that age, and has since been frequently repeated, but without any adequate foundation. It was said that the Augustinians were offended at being deprived by the Dominicans of the profitable traffic in indulgences, and that they found a selfish champion in Luther; a charge, however, which is refuted, not only by Luther’s general character, but also by the fact that he was earnestly besought by the prior and sub-prior of his convent to desist from his attacks upon indulgences, as calculated to bring upon the Augustinian order the suspicion of heresy.

Luther, however, found a more formidable opponent in Dr. John Eck of Ingolstadt, a theologian of great learning and talent, with whom he had formerly been acquainted. In a book entitled Obelisks Eck pointed out the similarity between Luther's doctrines and those of the Bohemian heretics; and as the very name of Hussite was detested in Germany, this caused many to keep aloof who would otherwise have been disposed to join Luther. Luther's answer to this treatise, entitled Asterisks, contained such stinging remarks on Eck's learning and talents, that he never rested till he had engaged the Pope in the matter.

Luther was encouraged by George Spalatinus, a man of great influence, who was at once private secretary and Court preacher of the Elector Frederick: but above all he was supported by his principle that the Scriptures contain the sole rule of faith, and that their authority is far above that of all doctors of the Church, Papal bulls, or even decrees of Councils. At the same time Luther’s enthusiasm was tempered with an admirable discretion, and it was to the uncommon union of these qualities that he owed his subsequent success. Thus when, in March, 1518, several copies of Tetzel’s theses were brought to Wittenberg and publicly burnt by the students, Luther strongly expressed his disapprobation of that violent proceeding.

The Court of Rome at length became more sensible of the importance of Luther’s attacks, and in August, 1518, he was commanded either to recant, or to appear and answer for his opinions at Rome, where Girolamo Ghenucci, Bishop of Ascoli, had been appointed his judge. Luther had not as yet dreamt of throwing off his allegiance to the Roman See. In the preceding May he had addressed a letter to the Pope himself, stating his views in a firm but modest and respectful tone, and declaring that he could not retract them. The Elector Frederick, at the instance of the University of Wittenberg, which trembled for the life of its bold professor, prohibited Luther's journey to Rome, and suggested that the question should be decided in Germany by impartial judges. About the same time Maximilian, who was then presiding over the Diet at Augsburg, addressed a letter to the Roman Pontiff, requesting him to take effectual steps to extinguish the dangerous and pestilent doctrines then rife in Germany. Accordingly Leo bade his Legate at the Augsburg Diet forthwith to summon Luther to appear before him. On this occasion the Apostolic Legate in Germany was Cardinal Thomas di Vio, better known by the name of Cajetanus, derived from his native city of Gaeta; a prelate of such liberal opinions as even to have incurred a suspicion of heresy. His instructions were that, if Luther recanted, he was to be pardoned; if he persisted in his opinions, he was to be imprisoned till further orders; and if these proceedings did not produce the desired effect, then he and his followers were to be excommunicated, and all places that sheltered him laid under an interdict. Thus, in consonance with the Papal assumption of infallibility, the whole question was prejudged, and Luther’s writings were regarded as containing their own condemnation.

Luther set out for Augsburg on foot provided with several letters of recommendation from the Elector, and at Augsburg he got a safe conduct from the Emperor Maximilian. The latter, though averse to Luther’s heresies, seems to have regarded him as a person who might be useful in his quarrels with the Pope, and had recommended him to Frederick as one of whom there might some time or other be need. Luther appeared before Cajetanus, October 12th, at whose feet he fell; but it was soon, apparent that no agreement could be expected. The Cardinal and Luther started from opposite premises. Deep in the traditionary lore of the Church, Cajetanus drew all his arguments from the schoolmen, which the Wittenberg professor answered by appealing to the Scriptures; and thus the more they discussed the matter the wider and more irreconcilable became their divergence. Luther’s offer to appeal to the Universities of Basle, Freiburg, Louvain, and Paris, was regarded as an additional insult to the infallible Church. Cajetanus, who had at first behaved with great moderation and politeness, grew warm, demanded an unconditional retraction, forbade Luther again to appear before him till he was prepared to make it, and threatened him with the censures of the Church.

The fate of Huss stared Luther in the face, and he determined to fly. His patron Staupitz procured him a horse, and on the 20th of October, Langemantel, a magistrate of Augsburg, caused a postern in the walls to be opened for him before day had well dawned. Enveloped in his monk’s frock, so inconvenient for an equestrian, Luther rode that day between thirty and forty miles without drawing bridle, and then, weary and almost fainting, sunk to sleep on a heap of straw. On the following day he resumed his journey, and reached Wittenberg in safety on the 31st of October, the anniversary of the publication of his theses.

Cajetanus now wrote to the Elector Frederick complaining of Luther’s refractory departure from Augsburg, and requiring either that he should be sent to Rome or at least be banished from Saxony. Frederick was long undecided as to the course he should pursue, and so uncertain were Luther’s prospects that he made preparations for his departure, and even took leave of his Germany than was dreamt of at Rome, and Miltitz found with astonishment that Tetzel could not quit Leipzig with safety. The Papal envoy saw the necessity for conciliation. Having obtained an interview with Luther at Altenburg, Miltitz persuaded him to promise that he would be silent, provided a like restraint were placed upon his adversaries. On this occasion all theological disputes were avoided, for which, indeed, Miltitz would probably not have been qualified. Luther was even induced to address a letter to the Pope, in which, in humble terms, he expressed his regret that his motives should have been misinterpreted, and solemnly declared that he did not mean to dispute the power and authority of the Pope and the Church of Rome, which he considered superior to everything except Jesus Christ alone. In the same letter, however, he plainly intimated that his writings and tenets had already spread so widely, and penetrated so deeply in Germany, that it would no longer be possible to revoke them.

On leaving Altenburg, Miltitz proceeded to pay a visit to Tetzel at Leipzig, and found him in the Pauline Convent, which he durst not quit for fear of the people. Here Miltitz upbraided him severely for his conduct in the sale of indulgences, which he said had caused all the evil consequences which followed, and so alarmed Tetzel with threats of calling him to an account, that his death, which took place soon after, was ascribed to fear and vexation. Miltitz then returned to Rome, flattering himself that he had settled this weighty business by his skillful conduct. But though he had achieved a temporary success, he was far from being a discreet negotiator. He frequently got fuddled with wine, when he would blab out secrets respecting the Pope and the Roman Curia which were very damaging, and were subsequently made use of at the Diet of Worms.

The Emperor Maximilian was now dead, and the Elector Frederick had assumed the vicariat of that part of Germany which was governed by Saxon law, a circumstance necessarily favorable to the Reformation, especially as the Pope, wishing to conciliate Frederick for the ensuing election, forbore to fulminate any sentence of excommunication against Luther. Charles’s obligations to Frederick for the Imperial Crown also induced him to treat the Lutherans with forbearance for some time after his accession. Another motive disposed him the same way. We have seen that Ferdinand the Catholic had rendered the Spanish Inquisition an engine of government, detested by his subjects and regarded with a jealous eye by Rome. In the disturbances which took place in Spain after Charles’s accession, the Cortes of Aragon had prevailed upon Leo X to issue briefs, by which the constitution of that tribunal was greatly altered, and its proceedings brought nearer to the forms of common law; and Charles, annoyed by this circumstance, sent an ambassador to Rome in the spring of 1520 to procure a revocation of the briefs. The affair of Luther was at that time creating much anxiety and debate in the Roman Consistory; and in a letter of May 12th, 1520, we find the ambassador advising his master to go into Germany and show some favor “to a certain Martin Luther” who by his discourses gave much trouble to the Roman Court; and this method of annoying and opposing the Pope was accordingly adopted by the Emperor.

 

DISPUTATION AT LEIPZIG.

The truce effected by Miltitz lasted only a few months. It was broken by a public disputation to which Dr. Eck challenged Bodenstein, a Leipzig professor, better known by the name of Carlstadt, which was held in that town at the very time of the Imperial election. It was permitted by Duke George of Saxony, who regularly attended, a zealous opponent of the Lutherans, in whose dominions Leipzig lay. This disputation, in which Luther took part, began in the Pleissenburg, June 27th, 1519, and lasted nineteen days. It had the usual fate of all such discussions, and served only still further to embroil the question. The animosity displayed on both sides was so great, that watchmen armed with partisans were stationed in the inns to prevent fights between the students attached to different sides; each party claimed the victory, and the students of Leipzig and Wittenberg came to blows about the conclusion, though the greater part of them had fallen asleep during the argument. In the opinion of the majority, however, Eck carried off the palm. He was precisely suited for such an arena; a big burly man with a stentorian voice, a prodigious memory, vast learning, great readiness, and an inexhaustible flow of words. Melanchthon admits the admiration which he excited, and on the whole, the discussion rather draped Luther for a time. The Elector Frederick was somewhat shaken by a letter addressed to him by Eck, till he was reassured by another from Erasmus in favor of Luther.

Erasmus, who confesses that he had not read Luther’s books, was induced to take his part from disgust at the cry raised against himself by the monk party. The Leipzig disputation was preceded and followed by a host of controversies. The whole mind of Germany was in motion, and it was no longer with Luther alone that Rome had to contend. All the celebrated names in art and literature sided with the Reformation; Erasmus, Ulrich von Hutten, Melanchthon, Lucas Cranach, Albert Dürer, and others. Hans Sachs, the Meistersanger of Nuremberg, composed in Luther's honor the pretty song called “The Wittenberg Nightingale”. Silvester von Schaumburg and Franz von Sickingen invited Luther to their castles in case he were driven from Saxony; and Schaumburg declared that a hundred more Franconian knights were ready to protect him. Luther, however, always protested his aversion to the use of physical force, and fortunately there was no occasion to resort to it, as the Elector Frederick became daily more convinced that his doctrines were founded in Scripture. In a letter which he addressed to the Papal Curia, April 1st, 1520, Frederick in vain endeavored to open its eyes to the new state of things in Germany, and pointed out that any attempt to put down Luther by mere force, and without refuting his doctrines, could end in nothing but disturbance and detriment to the authority of the Church.

Meanwhile Luther had made great strides in his opinions since the publication of his theses. From a mere objector against indulgences he had begun to impugn many of the essential doctrines of the Romish Church; and so far from any longer recognizing the paramount authority of the Pope, or even of a General Council, he was now disposed to submit to no rule but the Bible. The more timid spirits were alarmed at his boldness, and even Frederick himself exhorted him to moderation. It must be acknowledged, indeed, that Luther sometimes damaged his cause by the intemperance of his language; an instance of which is afforded by the remarkable letter which he addressed to Leo X, April 6th, 1520, as a dedication to his treatise De Libertate Christiana, which is filled with the coarsest abuse of the Roman Court, while the Pope himself is treated with a sarcastic irony. Allowance, however, must be made for the manners of the times. Luther, as a modern writer has observed, was certainly well grounded in all the slang of Eisleben; but his rude and ponderous battle-axe cut the knot on which the more polished but feebler sword of Erasmus or Melanchthon would have failed to make an impression.

The letter just alluded to was, perhaps, the immediate cause of the famous bull “Exurge Domine”, which Leo fulminated against Luther, June 15th, 1520. The bull, which is conceived in mild terms, formally condemned forty-one propositions extracted from Luther’s works, allowed him sixty days to recant, invited him to Rome, if he pleased to come, under a safe conduct, and required him to cease from preaching and writing, and to burn his published treatises. If he did not conform within the above period he was condemned as a notorious and irreclaimable heretic; all Christian Princes and Powers were required to seize him and his adherents, and to send them to Rome; and all places that gave them shelter were threatened with an interdict.

The bull was forwarded to Archbishop Albert of Metz; but in North Germany great difficulty was found in publishing it. The Germans were disgusted that Eck, who had been very officious in procuring the bull, should be appointed as Papal Legate to superintend the execution of it; a man who, besides being the personal enemy of Luther, was not of sufficient rank and consequence for such a post; and at Leipzig Eck found it necessary to take refuge in the same convent that had before protected Tetzel. The Emperor seized the opportunity to push his negotiations respecting the Spanish Inquisition, and plainly told the Papal Nuncio that he should be willing to gratify the Pope in the matter of the bull, provided that His Holiness in return would desist from supporting his enemies. Leo accepted these conditions. The Grand Inquisitor in Spain was instructed no longer to support the demands of the Aragonese Cortes; and at length, in January, 1521, the Pope agreed to cancel the briefs which he had issued respecting the Inquisition. Thus Charles's view of the great religious question which was agitating Germany was made subservient to the interests of his government in Spain; whilst the Pope, on his side, was ready to sacrifice the Spaniards in order to crush an enemy in Germany.

The bull was a poor, wordy composition, dark in its philosophy, obsolete in its theology, with magniloquent but unmeaning apostrophes to Christ, Peter, Paul, and all the Saints. Hutten published it with notes and an appendix, in which he turned it into ridicule. Its effect upon Luther was to make him write more daringly. Almost simultaneously with the bull had appeared his Appeal to the Emperor and German Nobles (June 23rd, 1520) , in which he rejected the notion that the priesthood is a distinct and privileged order in the State, and advocated the marriage of priests. In the course of the summer he published his treatise on the Mass, and another on the Babylonish captivity of the Church. In these works he denied the sacrifice of the Mass, censured the withholding of the cup, and reduced the seven sacraments of the Church to three—Baptism, Penance, and the Lord’s Supper.

Miltitz, who had not given up all hopes of mediation, had another interview with Luther at Lichtenberg, in the middle of October, and succeeded in persuading him to write to the Pope. In this letter Luther, while protesting that he did not mean to say anything against the Pope's person or the Catholic Church, gave vent to many coarse and unwelcome truths; and a little after he published his tract Against the Bull of the Antichrist, in which he met the Pope with his own weapons, handing him over to Satan with his bull and all his decretals, in case he persisted in his wrath.

During this crisis of his history Luther’s fate entirely depended on the Elector Frederick. In the autumn the Papal Legates, Aleander and Caraccioli, met that Prince at Cologne, where he was awaiting the Emperor's return from Aix-la-Chapelle, and, in conformity with a Papal brief with which they were provided, entreated him either to punish Luther or to send him prisoner to Rome. On this occasion Frederick consulted Erasmus, who happened to be likewise at Cologne. Erasmus remained in his former favorable opinion of Luther; he censured indeed his violent language, but admitted that he had laid his finder on many abuses. “Luther”, he observed, “has erred in two things: in touching the crown of the Pontiff and the stomachs of the monks”. Frederick, in his answer to the Legates, adopted the advice of Erasmus, which coincided entirely with his own opinion; he proposed that before Luther’s books were burnt he should first be judged by a council of learned and trustworthy men, and his doctrines condemned by authority of Scripture.

Luther continued to enjoy at Wittenberg all his former freedom, and proceeded to make still bolder attacks on the Pope’s authority. On the 17th of November he published a formal appeal against the bull to a General Council, which, besides that it was couched in terms of the most virulent abuse against the Pope, was an act that had been declared heretical by Pius II and Julius II. On December 10th, Luther consummated his rebellion by taking that final step which rendered it impossible for him to recede. On the bank of the Elbe, outside the Elster Gate of Wittenberg, under an oak which has now disappeared through age, but whose place the piety of a later generation has supplied with another, Luther, in presence of a large body of professors and students, solemnly committed with his own hands to the flames the bull by which he had been condemned, together with the body of canon law, and the writings of Eck and Emser, his opponents; at the same time exclaiming, “As thou hast vext the holy one of the Lord, so may the eternal fire vex and consume thee”.

On January 3rd, 1521, Luther and his followers were solemnly excommunicated by Leo, and an image of him, together with his writings, was committed to the flames; but the only feeling excited in Luther by this act was one of satisfaction at being delivered from obedience to the Pope. At the Diet of Worms, which was held soon after, the Emperor having ordered that Luther's books should be delivered up to the magistrates to be burnt, the States represented to him the uselessness and impolicy of such a step, pointing out that the doctrines of Luther had already sunk deep into the hearts of the people; and they recommended that he should be summoned to Worms and interrogated whether he would recant without any disputation. But they also demanded that the abuses of the See of Rome, by which the German nation was oppressed, should be reformed; and, as on some previous occasions, they handed in a list of 101 grievances, in which the tricks and maladministration of the Roman Court in general, and of Leo X in particular, were denounced in the bitterest terms; so that the tone of the paper resembled Hutten’s books or Luther’s Appeal to the German Nobles. Even Duke George of Saxony, a zealous champion of the Romish Church, submitted twelve particular complaints. Thus, on the eve of Luther's trial, all Germany recognized the need of a reformation, though their demands referred to matters of practice rather than of doctrine.

In compliance with the advice of the States, the Emperor issued a mandate, dated March 6th, 1521, summoning Luther to appear at Worms within twenty-one days. It was accompanied with a safe conduct, and similar instruments were likewise granted by the Princes through whose dominions Luther was to travel. A herald called “Germany” was appointed to escort him; and the Elector of Saxony instructed the Bailiff and Council of Wittenberg to provide him with a guard where necessary, and to take care that nothing disagreeable befell him on the way. Thus Luther, only a few years previously an obscure friar at Erfurt, had become, by the boldness of his opinions, an object of solicitude to all Europe. So great was the dread he had now begun to inspire at Rome, that the Pope, as if doubtful of the efficacy of his previous fulmination, included him in the bull In Cena Domini, ordinarily read out every Maundy Thursday, in which heretics of all sorts, as the Arnoldites, Wiclifites, and others, were comprehended.

Luther’s journey was a kind of triumphal procession. He was accompanied by Justice Jonas, afterwards Provost of Wittenberg, by Nicholaus von Amsdorf, Peter von Schwaven, a Danish nobleman, and Jerome Schtirf, a jurist of Wittenberg. The coach in which he travelled was given him by the town of Wittenberg. At Weimar, Duke John furnished him with money to defray his travelling expenses. At Erfurt, the scene of his former cloister life, forty of the principal inhabitants on horseback, and a much larger number on foot, met him at a distance of nine or ten miles, and escorted him into the town. In spite, however, of his enthusiastic reception many trembled for his life; and at Oppenheim he received an admonition from his friend Spalatin not to proceed to Worms lest he should meet the fate of Huss. Luther replied in his emphatic way, “Huss has been burnt, yet the truth has not been consumed with him: go I will, be there as many devils in Worms as there are tiles upon the house-tops”.

He arrived at Worms on the 16th of April. It was noon, and the inhabitants were at dinner; but when the watchman on the tower of the Cathedral gave the signal with his trumpet, everybody rushed out to see the famous friar. He sat in an open carriage in the habit of an Augustinian; before him rode the herald in his tabard, displaying the Imperial eagle; and in this way he was escorted to his lodgings by a large body of nobles and a crowd of citizens.

In the afternoon of the following day he was conducted into the presence of the Diet by Count Pappenheim, hereditary Imperial marshal, who walked before him, accompanied by the herald. As he was about to enter, the celebrated captain, George Frunsberg, tapped him on the shoulder, exclaiming: “Little monk, little monk! thou art doing a more daring thing than I or any other captain e'er ventured on in the hottest encounter. But if thou art confident in thy cause, go on, in God’s name, and be of good cheer, for He will not forsake thee”.

Luther at first seemed overawed by the splendor and majesty of the assembly before which he appeared, and to cool observers, especially foreigners, his bearing did not answer the expectations formed of him. In a low and scarcely audible voice he acknowledged himself the author of the books whose titles were read to him, and on being asked whether he would retract them, he requested time for consideration. Many thought he would recant.

The impression which he made on the Emperor was far from favorable, and he remarked that he should never be converted by such a man. But Luther’s hesitation and embarrassment were a mere temporary weakness. On the morrow he had recovered all his wonted confidence and courage; and though he admitted in his interrogation that he had written with unbecoming virulence, he refused to retract any of his opinions, unless refuted by the evidence of Scripture : adding, “I cannot make an unconditional surrender of my faith, either to the Pope or to General Councils, nor can I act against my conscience. Here stand I, I cannot do otherwise. God help me, Amen”.

The Emperor delivered his written judgment, April 19th. Its purport was, that as the haughty doctrine of Luther struck a blow at all constituted authority, the Emperor, agreeably to his illustrious descent and his German feelings, would use all his endeavors to uproot the heresy. He expressed his regret at having so long delayed this work. At present Luther might depart in virtue of his safe conduct, but in all other respects he would be treated as a heretic. It was now the duty of the States to come to a Christian resolution on the subject.

Luther has himself given a detailed account of the proceedings at this Diet. A letter to Lucas Cranach is characteristic: “thought”, says Luther, “that the Caesarian Majesty would have summoned half a hundred doctors, and so have confuted the monk; but all that passed was:

-Are these books thine?

-Yes.

-Wilt thou retract them?

-No.

-Then begone!

Oh, we blind Germans! how foolish are we to allow the Romanists to make such miserable fools and apes of us”.

The Emperor’s decision was variously received. The zealous Papists praised it; among the majority of the people it excited great sympathy for Luther, and the deep impression his doctrines had made was unmistakably manifested. Unseemly placards were posted in the streets, such as, “Woe to the land whose King is a child!”, while the threats of Hutten, Sickingen, and other friends of Luther, alarmed the opponents of the Reformation. “The Germans are everywhere so addicted to Luther”, says Tunstall in a letter to Wolsey from Worms, “that rather than he shall be oppressed by the Pope’s authority, a hundred thousand of the people will sacrifice their lives”.

Attempts were privately made by some of the Electors to bring Luther to more moderate sentiments. To the Archbishop of Treves, who had asked him to point out some way in which the matter might be accommodated, he answered in the words of Gamaliel : “If it is the work of men, it will perish; but if it comes from God, you cannot overthrow it. I will rather yield up my body and life, than abandon God's true and manifest word”.

There were some, as the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, who proposed to violate Luther’s safe-conduct; but this step was rejected by the Emperor and by the majority of the Princes. In fact, Louis V, Elector Palatine, and the Landgrave Philip of Hesse, were on the point of declaring themselves in favor of the Reformation. Sickingen also was close at hand with a large force. Charles V, towards the close of his life, during his retirement at Yuste, is said to have expressed regret at having observed Luther’s safe-conduct; but if he did so he must have forgotten the circumstances attending the Diet. The anecdote is at variance with another, which represents Charles to have replied to a demand for Luther’s arrest by saying: “No! I will not blush like my predecessor Sigismund”; which Emperor is said to have exhibited that token of shame when violating the safe-conduct he had granted to Huss. On the 26th of May, Luther was outlawed by an edict antedated on the 8th, in order that it might appear to have been sanctioned by the whole Diet, though passed in the Emperor’s private apartments, after several of the Electors and other Princes had departed. This famous decree, known as the Edict of Worms, was drawn up by Aleander, the Papal Legate, and being filled with abuse of Luther, had more the form of a Papal bull than an Imperial edict. It declared Luther a heretic, and ordained that whoever sheltered him, printed or published his books, or bought or read them, should incur the same penalty of outlawry. So great was Aleander’s anxiety to get this document completed, that he brought it to the Emperor for signature on a Sunday, when he was in church with all his court.

Luther had quitted Worms on the 26th of April, and arrived safely at Eisenach, preaching once or twice by the way, though expressly forbidden to do so. He was everywhere well received, even at the convents in which he rested. Near Altenstein he was suddenly surrounded by horsemen in disguise, who took him out of his carriage, and placing him on horseback led him through a wood for some hours, till at length, near midnight, they brought him to the Wartburg, a castle within a mile of Eisenach, and formerly a residence of the Landgraves of Thuringia. This friendly capture had been arranged with Luther by the Elector Frederick, who was apprehensive that when the ban of the Empire should be published he might have some difficulty in sheltering the proscribed monk in his dominions. It was generally believed that Luther had been murdered, and for a long while nobody but Frederick knew what was become of him.

 

REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND.

At the same time with the Lutheran Reformation, but quite independently of it, another was proceeding in some of the Swiss Cantons, conducted by Huldreich, or Ulrich, Zwingli. Of a poor but ancient family, Zwingli was born, January 1st, 1484, at Wildenhausen, in the County of Toggenburg, then belonging to the Abbot of St. Gallen, one of those elevated regions where fruit and vegetables refuse to grow, and where green meadows are surrounded by towering Alpine peaks. His father, who had been Ammann of the district, destined Ulrich, one of several sons, for the Church; and with this view he completed his education at Vienna and Basle. In 1506 he was appointed to the parochial cure of Glarus, which he had held ten years. Like Luther, Zwingli early formed the determination of taking the Scriptures for his only rule of faith, and, in order to read them in the original, learnt Greek without a master, copying with his own hand the whole of St. Paul's epistles in that language.

This period of his life was, however, diversified by participation in the warlike expeditions of the Swiss Confederates; he was present with his community at the battle of Marignano, and subsequently bound himself to the Pope’s service by accepting a pension. He now opposed all military service under the French flag, and being thus brought into collision with the higher classes, he found himself compelled temporarily to abandon his cure. At this period Theobald, Baron of Geroldseck, offered him an asylum at Einsiedeln, the celebrated Benedictine monastery of Canton Schwyz, where the shrine of our Lady of the Hermits still attracts thousands of pilgrims; and in the autumn of 1516 he was installed in the curacy of Pfeffikon.

In 1518 Bernardin Samson, a Milanese Franciscan, began to preach indulgences in Switzerland. This man was even more shameless than Tetzel. It was one of his boasts that, during eighteen years, his commission had brought into the Apostolic treasury as many hundred thousand ducats. Zwingli, like Luther, zealously denounced this traffic, denying' the existence of Purgatory, and consequently the utility of Masses for the dead. It was in this year that he accepted the office of preacher at Zurich, the chief city in the Swiss Confederacy which declined the military service of France. Here he was assisted by Bullinger; and as the Bishop of Constance, in whose diocese Zurich lay, was also at that time an opponent of Papal abuses, though he afterwards combated the new doctrines, the Reformation began to spread apace in Switzerland.

In 1520 the magistracy of Zurich published its first reformatory edict, that nothing should be preached except what could be proved to be the word of God; but it was not till 1524 that they obtained sufficient strength and confidence to alter the outward forms of worship, to abolish images, processions, relics, and other Popish usages, and to permit the administration of the Lord’s Supper in both kinds. In Switzerland, as in the rest of Germany, these reforms were the result of a more enlightened state of public opinion, to which the abode of Erasmus at Basle had not a little contributed; and under these influences the Reformation soon spread to Schaffhausen, Basle, and Bern.

We cannot follow the Swiss Reformation step by step. It will suffice to say that by the year 1521 Zwingli’s doctrines had been established, not only in the four Cantons already mentioned, but had also taken root in Neufchatel, Vaud, Geneva, Solothurn, the Thurgau, Baden, St. Gallen, and other places. Zwingli was even a bolder innovator than Luther. It has been remarked that while Luther wished to retain in the Church all that is not expressly contrary to Scripture, Zwingli aimed at abolishing all that cannot be supported by Scripture. Their views respecting the Eucharist in particular were essentially different. Luther retained the Catholic dogma of the real presence, though in a somewhat modified and indeed not very intelligible form—Consubstantiation instead of transubstantiation; while Zwingli, like Carlstadt, interpreting the words of institution figuratively, held that no change whatever took place in the elements, but that they were mere symbols, to be taken in remembrance of Christ’s death. This difference gave rise to a bitter controversy between the two reformers; and Luther, with his usual violence, denounced Zwingli and his followers with every mark of aversion as Sacramentaries.

It will appear in the sequel how this difference damaged the cause of the Reformation by preventing the union of the Zwinglian and Lutheran Churches; but we must here content ourselves with merely indicating these subjects of dispute, the detail of which belongs properly to ecclesiastical history. Another great difference between Zwingli and Luther, which may perhaps be accounted for from the nature of the governments under which they lived, was, that Zwingli extended his views to political as well as religious reform, while Luther disclaimed all interference in affairs of State. Zwingli wished to modify the constitution of the Swiss Confederacy; he did not decline an appeal to arms for such an object; and a premature and inconsiderate resort to them was the cause not only of his own death, but also of a reaction against the Reformation in Switzerland.

We shall here mention by anticipation that the five Catholic Cantons, Schwyz, Uri, Unterwalden, Lucern, and Zug, after their battle and victory at Kappel, in which Zwingli lost his life (October, 1531), maintained the advantage which they had achieved; and after a war of less than two months the articles of a peace signed at Haglingen, November 24th, gave them the upper hand in the Confederacy. Thus a stop was put to the further progress of the Reformation in Switzerland, and even a Catholic reaction was partially effected.