Short Studies on Great Subjects

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Voice answered voice. The religious houses all Germany over were like
kennels of hounds howling to each other across the spiritual waste. If
souls could not be sung out of purgatory, their occupation was gone.

Luther wrote to Pope Leo to defend himself; Leo cited him to answer for
his audacity at Rome; while to the young laymen, to the noble spirits
all Europe over, Wittenberg became a beacon of light shining in the
universal darkness.

It was a trying time to Luther. Had he been a smaller man, he would have
been swept away by his sudden popularity--he would have placed himself
at the head of some great democratic movement, and in a few years his
name would have disappeared in the noise and smoke of anarchy.

But this was not his nature. His fellow-townsmen were heartily on his
side. He remained quietly at his post in the Augustine Church at
Wittenberg. If the powers of the world came down upon him and killed
him, he was ready to be killed. Of himself at all times he thought
infinitely little; and he believed that his death would be as
serviceable to truth as his life.

Killed undoubtedly he would have been if the clergy could have had their
way. It happened, however, that Saxony just then was governed by a
prince of no common order. Were all princes like the Elector Frederick,
we should have no need of democracy in this world--we should never have
heard of democracy. The clergy could not touch Luther against the will
of the Wittenberg senate, unless the Elector would help them; and, to
the astonishment of everybody, the Elector was disinclined to consent.
The Pope himself wrote to exhort him to his duties. The Elector still
hesitated. His professed creed was the creed in which the Church had
educated him; but he had a clear secular understanding outside his
formulas. When he read the propositions, they did not seem to him the
pernicious things which the monks said they were. 'There is much in the
Bible about Christ,' he said, 'but not much about Rome.' He sent for
Erasmus, and asked him what he thought about the matter.

The Elector knew to whom he was speaking. He wished for a direct answer,
and looked Erasmus full and broad in the face. Erasmus pinched his thin
lips together. 'Luther,' he said at length, 'has committed two sins: he
has touched the Pope's crown and the monks' bellies.'

He generously and strongly urged Frederick not to yield for the present
to Pope Leo's importunacy; and the Pope was obliged to try less hasty
and more formal methods.

He had wished Luther to be sent to him to Rome, where his process would
have had a rapid end. As this could not be, the case was transferred to
Augsburg, and a cardinal legate was sent from Italy to look into it.

There was no danger of violence at Augsburg. The townspeople there and
everywhere were on the side of freedom; and Luther went cheerfully to
defend himself. He walked from Wittenberg. You can fancy him still in
his monk's brown frock, with all his wardrobe on his back--an apostle of
the old sort. The citizens, high and low, attended him to the gates, and
followed him along the road, crying 'Luther for ever!' 'Nay,' he
answered, 'Christ for ever!'

The cardinal legate, being reduced to the necessity of politeness,
received him civilly. He told him, however, simply and briefly, that the
Pope insisted on his recantation, and would accept nothing else. Luther
requested the cardinal to point out to him where he was wrong. The
cardinal waived discussion. 'He was come to command,' he said, 'not to
argue.' And Luther had to tell him that it could not be.

Remonstrances, threats, entreaties, even bribes were tried. Hopes of
high distinction and reward were held out to him if he would only be
reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian, a poor peasant's
son--a miserable friar of a provincial German town--was prepared to defy
the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of Christendom.
'What!' said the cardinal at last to him, 'do you think the Pope cares
for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
_you_--_you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, No! and where will
you be then--where will you be then?'

Luther answered, 'Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty God.'

The Court dissolved. The cardinal carried back his report to his master.
The Pope, so defied, brought out his thunders; he excommunicated Luther;
he wrote again to the elector, entreating him not to soil his name and
lineage by becoming a protector of heretics; and he required him,
without further ceremony, to render up the criminal to justice.

The elector's power was limited. As yet, the quarrel was simply between
Luther and the Pope. The elector was by no means sure that his bold
subject was right--he was only not satisfied that he was wrong--and it
was a serious question with him how far he ought to go. The monk might
next be placed under the ban of the empire; and if he persisted in
protecting him afterwards, Saxony might have all the power of Germany
upon it. He did not venture any more to refuse absolutely. He temporised
and delayed; while Luther himself, probably at the elector's
instigation, made overtures for peace to the Pope. Saving his duty to
Christ, he promised to be for the future an obedient son of the Church,
and to say no more about indulgences if Tetzel ceased to defend them.

'My being such a small creature,' Luther said afterwards, 'was a
misfortune for the Pope. He despised me too much! What, he thought,
could a slave like me do to him--to him, who was the greatest man in all
the world. Had he accepted my proposal, he would have extinguished me.'

But the infallible Pope conducted himself like a proud, irascible,
exceedingly fallible mortal. To make terms with the town preacher of
Wittenberg was too preposterous.

Just then the imperial throne fell vacant; and the pretty scandal I told
you of, followed at the choice of his successor. Frederick of Saxony
might have been elected if he had liked--and it would have been better
for the world perhaps if Frederick had been more ambitious of high
dignities--but the Saxon Prince did not care to trouble himself with the
imperial sceptre. The election fell on Maximilian's grandson
Charles--grandson also of Ferdinand the Catholic--Sovereign of Spain;
Sovereign of Burgundy and the Low Countries; Sovereign of Naples and
Sicily; Sovereign, beyond the Atlantic, of the New Empire of the Indies.

No fitter man could have been found to do the business of the Pope. With
the empire of Germany added to his inherited dominions, who could resist
him?

To the new emperor, unless the elector yielded, Luther's case had now to
be referred.

The elector, if he had wished, could not interfere. Germany was
attentive, but motionless. The students, the artisans, the tradesmen,
were at heart with the Reformer; and their enthusiasm could not be
wholly repressed. The press grew fertile with pamphlets; and it was
noticed that all the printers and compositors went for Luther. The
Catholics could not get their books into type without sending them to
France or the Low Countries.

Yet none of the princes except the elector had as yet shown him favour.
The bishops were hostile to a man. The nobles had given no sign; and
their place would be naturally on the side of authority. They had no
love for bishops--there was hope in that; and they looked with no favour
on the huge estates of the religious orders. But no one could expect
that they would peril their lands and lives for an insignificant monk.

There was an interval of two years before the emperor was at leisure to
take up the question. The time was spent in angry altercation, boding no
good for the future.

The Pope issued a second bull condemning Luther and his works. Luther
replied by burning the bull in the great square at Wittenberg.

At length, in April 1521, the Diet of the Empire assembled at Worms, and
Luther was called to defend himself in the presence of Charles the
Fifth.

That it should have come to this at all, in days of such high-handed
authority, was sufficiently remarkable. It indicated something growing
in the minds of men, that the so-called Church was not to carry things
any longer in the old style. Popes and bishops might order, but the
laity intended for the future to have opinions of their own how far such
orders should be obeyed.

The Pope expected anyhow that the Diet, by fair means or foul, would
now rid him of his adversary. The elector, who knew the ecclesiastical
ways of handling such matters, made it a condition of his subject
appearing, that he should have a safe conduct, under the emperor's hand;
that Luther, if judgment went against him, should be free for the time
to return to the place from which he had come; and that he, the elector,
should determine afterwards what should be done with him.

When the interests of the Church were concerned, safe conducts, it was
too well known, were poor security. Pope Clement the Seventh, a little
after, when reproached for breaking a promise, replied with a smile,
'The Pope has power to bind and to loose.' Good, in the eyes of
ecclesiastical authorities, meant what was good for the Church; evil,
whatever was bad for the Church; and the highest moral obligation became
sin when it stood in St. Peter's way.

There had been an outburst of free thought in Bohemia a century and a
half before. John Huss, Luther's forerunner, came with a safe conduct to
the Council of Constance; but the bishops ruled that safe conducts could
not protect heretics. They burnt John Huss for all their promises, and
they hoped now that so good a Catholic as Charles would follow so
excellent a precedent. Pope Leo wrote himself to beg that Luther's safe
conduct should not be observed. The bishops and archbishops, when
Charles consulted them, took the same view as the Pope.

'There is something in the office of a bishop,' Luther said, a year or
two later, 'which is dreadfully demoralising. Even good men change their
natures at their consecration; Satan enters into them as he entered into
Judas, as soon as they have taken the sop.'

It was most seriously likely that, if Luther trusted himself at the Diet
on the faith of his safe conduct, he would never return alive. Rumours
of intended treachery were so strong, that if he refused to go, the
elector meant to stand by him at any cost. Should he appear, or not
appear? It was for himself to decide. If he stayed away, judgment would
go against him by default. Charles would call out the forces of the
empire, and Saxony would be invaded.

Civil war would follow, with insurrection all over Germany, with no
certain prospect except bloodshed and misery.

Luther was not a man to expose his country to peril that his own person
might escape. He had provoked the storm; and if blood was to be shed,
his blood ought at least to be the first. He went. On his way, a friend
came to warn him again that foul play was intended, that he was
condemned already, that his books had been burnt by the hangman, and
that he was a dead man if he proceeded.

Luther trembled--he owned it--but he answered, 'Go to Worms! I will go
if there are as many devils in Worms as there are tiles upon the roofs
of the houses.'

The roofs, when he came into the city, were crowded, not with devils,
but with the inhabitants, all collecting there to see him as he passed.
A nobleman gave him shelter for the night; the next day he was led to
the Town Hall.

No more notable spectacle had been witnessed in this planet for many a
century--not, perhaps, since a greater than Luther stood before the
Roman Procurator.

There on the raised dais sate the sovereign of half the world. There on
either side of him stood the archbishops, the ministers of state, the
princes of the empire, gathered together to hear and judge the son of a
poor miner, who had made the world ring with his name.

The body of the hall was thronged with knights and nobles--stern hard
men in dull gleaming armour. Luther, in his brown frock, was led forward
between their ranks. The looks which greeted him were not all
unfriendly. The first Article of a German credo was belief in _courage_.
Germany had had its feuds in times past with Popes of Rome, and they
were not without pride that a poor countryman of theirs should have
taken by the beard the great Italian priest. They had settled among
themselves that, come what would, there should be fair play; and they
looked on half admiring, and half in scorn.

As Luther passed up the hall, a steel baron touched him on the shoulder
with his gauntlet.

'Pluck up thy spirit, little monk;' he said, 'some of us here have seen
warm work in our time, but, by my troth, nor I nor any knight in this
company ever needed a stout heart more than thou needest it now. If thou
hast faith in these doctrines of thine, little monk, go on, in the name
of God.'

'Yes, in the name of God,' said Luther, throwing back his head, 'In the
name of God, forward!'

As at Augsburg, one only question was raised. Luther had broken the
laws of the Church. He had taught doctrines which the Pope had declared
to be false. Would he or would he not retract?

As at Augsburg, he replied briefly that he would retract when his
doctrines were not declared to be false merely, but were proved to be
false. Then, but not till then. That was his answer, and his last word.

There, as you understand, the heart of the matter indeed rested. In
those words lay the whole meaning of the Reformation. Were men to go on
for ever saying that this and that was true, because the Pope affirmed
it? Or were Popes' decrees thenceforward to be tried like the words of
other men--by the ordinary laws of evidence?

It required no great intellect to understand that a Pope's pardon, which
you could buy for five shillings, could not really get a soul out of
purgatory. It required a quality much rarer than intellect to look such
a doctrine in the face--sanctioned as it was by the credulity of ages,
and backed by the pomp and pageantry of earthly power--and say to it
openly, 'You are a lie.' Cleverness and culture could have given a
thousand reasons--they did then and they do now--why an indulgence
should be believed in; when honesty and common sense could give but one
reason for thinking otherwise. Cleverness and imposture get on
excellently well together--imposture and veracity, never.

Luther looked at those wares of Tetzel's, and said, 'Your pardons are no
pardons at all--no letters of credit on heaven, but flash notes of the
Bank of Humbug, and you know it.' They did know it. The conscience of
every man in Europe answered back, that what Luther said was true.

Bravery, honesty, veracity, these were the qualities which were
needed--which were needed then, and are needed always, as the root of
all real greatness in man.

The first missionaries of Christianity, when they came among the heathen
nations, and found them worshipping idols, did not care much to reason
that an image which man had made could not be God. The priests might
have been a match for them in reasoning. They walked up to the idol in
the presence of its votaries. They threw stones at it, spat upon it,
insulted it. 'See,' they said, 'I do this to your God. If he is God, let
him avenge himself.'

It was a simple argument; always effective; easy, and yet most
difficult. It required merely a readiness to be killed upon the spot by
the superstition which is outraged.

And so, and only so, can truth make its way for us in any such matters.
The form changes--the thing remains. Superstition, folly, and cunning
will go on to the end of time, spinning their poison webs around the
consciences of mankind. Courage and veracity--these qualities, and only
these, avail to defeat them.

From the moment that Luther left the emperor's presence a free man, the
spell of Absolutism was broken, and the victory of the Reformation
secured. The ban of the Pope had fallen; the secular arm had been called
to interfere; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would
bear. The emperor himself was an unconscious convert to the higher
creed. The Pope had urged him to break his word. The Pope had told him
that honour was nothing, and morality was nothing, where the interests
of orthodoxy were compromised. The emperor had refused to be tempted
into perjury; and, in refusing, had admitted that there was a spiritual
power upon the earth, above the Pope, and above him.

The party of the Church felt it so. A plot was formed to assassinate
Luther on his return to Saxony. The insulted majesty of Rome could be
vindicated at least by the dagger.

But this, too, failed. The elector heard what was intended. A party of
horse, disguised as banditti, waylaid the Reformer upon the road, and
carried him off to the castle of Wartburg, where he remained out of
harm's way till the general rising of Germany placed him beyond the
reach of danger.

At Wartburg for the present evening we leave him.

The Emperor Charles and Luther never met again. The monks of Yuste, who
watched on the deathbed of Charles, reported that at the last hour he
repented that he had kept his word, and reproached himself for having
allowed the arch-heretic to escape from his hands.

It is possible that, when the candle of life was burning low, and spirit
and flesh were failing together, and the air of the sick room was thick
and close with the presence of the angel of death, the nobler nature of
the emperor might have yielded to the influences which were around him.
His confessor might have thrust into his lips the words which he so
wished to hear.

But Charles the Fifth, though a Catholic always, was a Catholic of the
old grand type, to whom creed and dogmas were but the robe of a regal
humanity. Another story is told of Charles--an authentic story this
one--which makes me think that the monks of Yuste mistook or maligned
him. Six and twenty years after this scene at Worms, when the then
dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his
rest--and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel
for an enemy who has proved too strong for them--a passing vicissitude
in the struggle brought the emperor at the head of his army to
Wittenberg.

The vengeance which the monks could not inflict upon him in life, they
proposed to wreak upon his bones.

The emperor desired to be conducted to Luther's tomb; and as he stood
gazing at it, full of many thoughts, some one suggested that the body
should be taken up and burnt at the stake in the Market Place.

There was nothing unusual in the proposal; it was the common practice of
the Catholic Church with the remains of heretics who were held unworthy
to be left in repose in hallowed ground. There was scarcely, perhaps,
another Catholic prince who would have hesitated to comply. But Charles
was one of nature's gentlemen; he answered, 'I war not with the dead.'

LECTURE III.

We have now entered upon the movement which broke the power of the
Papacy--which swept Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England,
Scotland, into the stream of revolution, and gave a new direction to the
spiritual history of mankind.

You would not thank me if I were to take you out into that troubled
ocean. I confine myself, and I wish you to confine your attention, to
the two kinds of men who appear as leaders in times of change--of whom
Erasmus and Luther are respectively the types.

On one side there are the large-minded latitudinarian philosophers--men
who have no confidence in the people--who have no passionate
convictions; moderate men, tolerant men, who trust to education, to
general progress in knowledge and civilisation, to forbearance, to
endurance, to time--men who believe that all wholesome reforms proceed
downwards from the educated to the multitudes; who regard with contempt,
qualified by terror, appeals to the popular conscience or to popular
intelligence.

Opposite to these are the men of faith--and by faith I do not mean
belief in dogmas, but belief in goodness, belief in justice, in
righteousness, above all, belief in truth. Men of faith consider
conscience of more importance than knowledge--or rather as a first
condition--without which all the knowledge in the world is no use to a
man--if he wishes to be indeed a man in any high and noble sense of the
word. They are not contented with looking for what may be useful or
pleasant to themselves; they look by quite other methods for what is
honourable--for what is good--for what is just. They believe that if
they can find out that, then at all hazards, and in spite of all present
consequences to themselves, that is to be preferred. If, individually
and to themselves, no visible good ever came from it, in this world or
in any other, still they would say, 'Let us do that and nothing else.
Life will be of no value to us if we are to use it only for our own
gratification.'

The soldier before a battle knows that if he shirks and pretends to be
ill, he may escape danger and make sure of his life. There are very few
men, indeed, if it comes to that, who would not sooner die ten times
over than so dishonour themselves. Men of high moral nature carry out
the same principle into the details of their daily life; they do not
care to live unless they may live nobly. Like my uncle Toby, they have
but one fear--the fear of doing a wrong thing.

I call this faith, because there is no proof, such as will satisfy the
scientific enquirer, that there is any such thing as moral truth--any
such thing as absolute right and wrong at all. As the Scripture says,
'Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.' The forces of nature pay
no respect to what we call good and evil. Prosperity does not uniformly
follow virtue; nor are defeat and failure necessary consequences of
vice.

Certain virtues--temperance, industry, and things within reasonable
limits--command their reward. Sensuality, idleness, and waste, commonly
lead to ruin.

But prosperity is consistent with intense worldliness, intense
selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of
human character--self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love
of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause--these have no
tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even
necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way,
the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them.
High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and
the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchednesses of all kinds which for
ever prevail among mankind--the shortcomings in himself of which he
becomes more conscious as he becomes really better--these things, you
may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being
particularly happy.

If you see a man happy, as the world goes--contented with himself and
contented with what is round him--such a man may be, and probably is,
decent and respectable; but the highest is not in him, and the highest
will not come out of him.

Judging merely by outward phenomena--judging merely by what we call
reason--you cannot prove that there is any moral government in the world
at all, except what men, for their own convenience, introduce into it.
Right and wrong resolve themselves into principles of utility and social
convenience. Enlightened selfishness prescribes a decent rule of conduct
for common purposes; and virtue, by a large school of philosophy, is
completely resolved into that.

True, when nations go on long on the selfish hypothesis, they are apt to
find at last that they have been mistaken. They find it in bankruptcy of
honour and character--in social wreck and dissolution. All lies in
serious matters end at last, as Carlyle says, in broken heads. That is
the final issue which they are sure to come to in the long run. The
Maker of the world does not permit a society to continue which forgets
or denies the nobler principles of action.

But the end is often long in coming; and these nobler principles are
meanwhile _not_ provided for us by the inductive philosophy.

Patriotism, for instance, of which we used to think something--a
readiness to devote our energies while we live, to devote our lives, if
nothing else will serve, to what we call our country--what are we to say
of that?

I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought of patriotism.
He said he thought it was a compound of vanity and superstition; a bad
kind of prejudice, which would die out with the growth of reason. My
friend believed in the progress of humanity--he could not narrow his
sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I could but say to
myself, 'Thank God, then, we are not yet a nation of philosophers.'

A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write fine books, and
review articles and such like, but at the bottom of him he is a poor
caitiff, and there is no more to be said about him.

So when the air is heavy with imposture, and men live only to make
money, and the service of God is become a thing of words and ceremonies,
and the kingdom of heaven is bought and sold, and all that is high and
pure in man is smothered by corruption--fire of the same kind bursts out
in higher natures with a fierceness which cannot be controlled; and,
confident in truth and right, they call fearlessly on the seven
thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal to rise and stand
by them.

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