Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family Part 17

Near Heidelberg again I fancied myself once more in the Thuringian forest, especially as we rested in the convent of Erbach in the Odenwald. Again the familiar forests and green valleys with their streams were around me. I fear Else and the others will miss the beauty of the forest-covered hills around Eisenach, when they remove to Wittemberg, which is situated on a barren, monotonous flat. About this time they will be moving!

Brother Martin has held many disputations on theological and philosophical questions in the University of Heidelberg; but I, being only a novice, have been free to wander whither I would.

This evening it was delightful to stand in the woods of the Elector Palatine's castle, and from among the oaks and delicate birches rustling about me, to look down on the hills of the Odenwald folding over each other. Far up among them I traced the narrow, quiet Neckar, issuing from the silent depths of the forest; while on the other side, below the city, it wound on through the plain to the Rhine, gleaming here and there with the gold of sunset or the cold grey light of the evening.

Beyond, far off, I could see the masts of ships on the Rhine.

I scarcely know why, the river made me think of life, of mine and Brother Martin's. Already he has left the shadow of the forests. Who can say what people his life will bless, what sea it will reach, and through what perils? Of this I feel sure, it will matter much to many what its course shall be. For me it is otherwise. My life, as far as earth is concerned, seems closed,--ended; and it can matter little to any, henceforth, through what regions it pa.s.ses, if only it reaches the ocean at last, and ends, as they say, in the bosom of G.o.d. If only we could be sure that G.o.d guides the course of our lives as he does that of rivers!

And yet, do they not say that some rivers lose themselves in sandwastes, and others trickle meanly to the sea through lands they have desolated into untenantable marshes?

BLACK FOREST, _May_ 14, 1510.

Brother Martin and I are now fairly on our pilgrimage alone, walking all day, begging our provisions and our lodgings, which he sometimes repays by performing a ma.s.s in the parish church, or by a promise of reciting certain prayers or celebrating ma.s.ses on the behalf of our benefactors, at Rome.

These are, indeed, precious days. My whole frame seems braced and revived by the early rising, the constant movement in the pure air, the pressing forward to a definite point.

But more, infinitely more than this, my heart seems reviving. I begin to have a hope and see a light which, until now, I scarcely deemed possible.

To encourage me in my perplexities and conflicts, Brother Martin unfolded to me what his own had been. To the storm of doubt, and fear, and anguish in that great heart of his my troubles seem like a pa.s.sing spring shower. Yet to me they were tempests which laid my heart waste.

And G.o.d, Brother Martin believes, does not measure his pity by what our sorrows are in themselves, but what they are to us. Are we not all children, little children, in his sight?

"I did not learn my divinity at once," he said, "but was constrained by my temptations to search deeper and deeper; for no man without trials and temptations can attain a true understanding of the Holy Scriptures.

St. Paul had a devil that beat him with fists, and with temptations drove him diligently to study the Holy Scriptures. Temptations hunted me into the Bible, wherein I sedulously read; and thereby, G.o.d be praised, at length attained a true understanding of it."

He then related to me what some of these temptations were;--the bitter disappointment it was to him to find that the cowl, and even the vows and the priestly consecration, made no change in his heart; that Satan was as near him in the cloister as outside, and he no stronger to cope with him. He told me of his endeavours to keep every minute rule of the order, and how the slightest deviation weighed on his conscience. It seems to have been like trying to restrain a fire by a fence of willows, or to guide a mountain torrent in artificial windings through a flower-garden, to bind his fervent nature by these vexatious rules.

He was continually becoming absorbed in some thought or study, and forgetting all the rules, and then painfully he would turn back and retrace his steps; sometimes spending weeks in absorbing study, and then remembering he had neglected his canonical hours, and depriving himself of sleep for nights to make up the missing prayers.

He fasted, disciplined himself, humbled himself to perform the meanest offices for the meanest brother; forcibly kept sleep from his eyes wearied with study, and his mind worn out with conflict, until every now and then Nature avenged herself by laying him unconscious on the floor of his cell, or disabling him by a fit of illness.

But all in vain; his temptations seemed to grow stronger, his strength less. Love to G.o.d he could not feel at all; but in his secret soul the bitterest questioning of G.o.d, who seemed to torment him at once by the law and the gospel. He thought of Christ as the severest judge, because the most righteous; and the very phrase, "the righteousness of G.o.d," was torture to him.

Not that this state of distress was continual with him. At times he gloried in his obedience, and felt that he earned rewards from G.o.d by performing the sacrifice of the ma.s.s, not only for himself, but for others. At times, also, in his circuits, after his consecration, to say ma.s.s in the villages around Erfurt, he would feel his spirits lightened by the variety of the scenes he witnessed, and would be greatly amused at the ridiculous mistakes of the village choirs; for instance, their chanting the "Kyrie" to the music of the "Gloria."

Then, at other times, his limbs would totter with terror when he offered the holy sacrifice, at the thought that he, the sacrificing priest, yet the poor, sinful Brother Martin, actually stood before G.o.d "without a Mediator."

At his first ma.s.s he had difficulty in restraining himself from flying from the altar--so great was his awe and the sense of his unworthiness.

Had he done so, he would have been excommunicated.

Again, there were days when he performed the services with some satisfaction, and would conclude with saying, "O Lord Jesus, I come to thee and entreat thee to be pleased with whatsoever I do and suffer in my order; and I pray thee that these burdens and this straitness of my rule and religion may be a full satisfaction for all my sins."

Yet then again, the dread would come that perhaps he had inadvertently omitted some word in the service, such as "enim" or "aeternum," or neglected some prescribed genuflexion, or even a signing of the cross; and that thus, instead of offering to G.o.d an acceptable sacrifice in the ma.s.s, he had committed a grievous sin.

From such terrors of conscience he fled for refuge to some of his twenty-one patron saints, or oftener to Mary, seeking to touch her womanly heart, that she might appease her Son. He hoped that by invoking three saints daily, and by letting his body waste away with fastings and watchings, he should satisfy the law, and shield his conscience against the goad of the driver. But it all availed him nothing. The further he went on in this way, the more he was terrified.

And then he related to me how the light broke upon his heart; slowly, intermittently, indeed; yet it has dawned on him. His day may often be dark and tempestuous; but it is day, and not night.

Dr. Staupitz was the first who brought him any comfort. The Vicar-General received his confession not long after he entered the cloister, and from that time won his confidence, and took the warmest interest in him. Brother Martin frequently wrote to him; and once he used the words, in reference to some neglect of the rules which troubled his conscience, "Oh, my sins, my sins!" Dr. Staupitz replied, "You would be without sin, and yet you have no proper sins. Christ forgives true sins, such as parricide, blasphemy, contempt of G.o.d, adultery, and sins like these. These are sins indeed. You must have a register in which stand veritable sins, if Christ is to help you. You would be a painted sinner, and have a painted Christ as a Saviour. You must make up your mind that Christ is a real Saviour, and you a real sinner."

These words brought some light to Brother Martin, but the darkness came back again and again; and tenderly did Dr. Staupitz sympathize with him and rouse him--Dr. Staupitz, and that dear aged confessor, who ministered also so lovingly to me. Brother Martin's great terror was the thought of the righteousness of G.o.d, by which he had been taught to understand his inflexible severity in executing judgment on sinners.

Dr. Staupitz and the confessor explained to him that the righteousness of G.o.d is not _against_ the sinner who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, but _for_ him--not against us to condemn, but for us to justify.

He began to study the Bible with a new zest. He had had the greatest longing to understand rightly the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, but was always stopped by the word "righteousness" in the first chapter and seventeenth verse, where Paul says the righteousness of G.o.d is revealed by the gospel. "I felt very angry," he said, "at the term, 'righteousness of G.o.d;' for, after the manner of all the teachers, I was taught to understand it in a philosophic sense, of that righteousness by which G.o.d is just and punisheth the guilty. Though I had lived without reproach, I felt myself to be a great sinner before G.o.d, and was of a very quick conscience, and had not confidence in a reconciliation with G.o.d to be produced by any work or satisfaction or merit of my own. For this cause I had in me no love of a righteous and angry G.o.d, but secretly hated him, and thought within myself, Is it not enough that G.o.d has condemned us to everlasting death by Adam's sin, and that we must suffer so much trouble and misery in this life? Over and above the terror and threatening of the law, must he needs increase by the gospel our misery and anguish, and, by the preaching of the same, thunder against us his justice and fierce wrath? My confused conscience ofttimes did cast me into fits of anger, and I sought day and night to make out the meaning of Paul; and at last I came to apprehend it thus: Through the gospel is revealed the righteousness which availeth with G.o.d--a righteousness by which G.o.d, in his mercy and compa.s.sion, justifieth us; as is it written, '_The just shall live by faith._' Straightway I felt as if I were born anew; it was as if I had found the door of Paradise thrown wide open. Now I saw the Scriptures altogether in a new light--ran through their whole contents as far as my memory would serve, and compared them--and found that this righteousness was the more surely that by which he makes us righteous, because everything agreed thereunto so well. The expression, 'the righteousness of G.o.d,' which I so much hated before, became now dear and precious--my darling and most comforting word. That pa.s.sage of Paul was to me the true door of Paradise."

Brother Martin also told me of the peace the words, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins," brought to him, as the aged confessor had previously narrated to me; for, he said, the devil often plucked him back, and, taking the very form of Christ, sought to terrify him again with his sins.

As I listened to him, the conviction came on me that he had indeed drunk of the well-spring of everlasting life, and it seemed almost within my own reach; but I said--

"Brother Martin, your sins were mere transgressions of human rules, but mine are different." And I told him how I had resisted my vocation. He replied--

"The devil gives heaven to people before they sin; but after they sin, brings their consciences into despair. Christ deals quite in the contrary way, for he gives heaven after sins committed, and makes troubled consciences joyful."

Then we fell into a long silence, and from time to time, as I looked at the calm which reigned on his rugged and ma.s.sive brow, and felt the deep light in his dark eyes, the conviction gathered strength--

"This solid rock on which that tempest-tossed spirit rests is Truth!"

His lips moved now and then, as if in prayer, and his eyes were lifted up from time to time to heaven, as if his thoughts found a home there.

After this silence, he spoke again and said--

"The gospel speaks nothing of our works or of the works of the law, but of the inestimable mercy and love of G.o.d towards most wretched and miserable sinners. Our most merciful Father, seeing us overwhelmed and oppressed with the curse of the law, and so to be holden under the same, that we could never be delivered from it by our own power, sent his only Son into the world, and laid upon him the sins of all men, saying, 'Be thou Peter, that denier; Paul, that persecutor, blasphemer, and cruel oppressor; David, that adulterer; that sinner that did eat the apple in Paradise; that thief that hanged upon the cross; and briefly, be thou the person that hath committed the sins of all men, and pay and satisfy for them.' For G.o.d trifleth not with us, but speaketh earnestly and of great love, that Christ is the Lamb of G.o.d who beareth the sins of us all. He is just, and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus."

I could answer nothing to this, but walked along pondering these words.

Neither did he say any more at that time.

The sun was sinking low, and the long shadows of the pine trunks were thrown athwart our green forest-path, so that we were glad to find a charcoal-burner's hut, and to take shelter for the night beside his fires.

But that night I could not sleep; and when all were sleeping around me, I rose and went out into the forest.

Brother Martin is not a man to parade his inmost conflicts before the eyes of others, to call forth their sympathy or their idle wonder. He has suffered too deeply and too recently for that. It is not lightly that he has unlocked the dungeons and torture-chambers of his past life for me. It is as a fellow-sufferer and a fellow-soldier, to show me how I also may escape and overcome.

It is surely because he is to be a hero and a leader of men that G.o.d has caused him to tread these bitter ways alone.

A new meaning dawns on old words for me. There is nothing new in what he says, but it seems new to me, as if G.o.d had spoken it first to-day; and all things seem made new in its light.

G.o.d, then, is more earnest for me to be saved than I am to be saved!

"He so loved the world, that he gave his Son."

He loved not saints, not penitents, not the religious, not those who love him; but "the _world_," secular men, profane men, hardened rebels, hopeless wanderers and sinners!

He gave not a mere promise, not an angel to teach us, not a world to ransom us, but his Son--his Only-begotten!

So much did G.o.d love the world, sinners, me! I believe this; I must believe it; I believe in him who says it. How can I then do otherwise than rejoice?

Two glorious visions rise before me and begin to fill the world and all my heart with joy.