Luther Examined and Reexamined Part 12

These crude stories have now been censored out of existence. Catholics nowadays prefer to lie in a more refined and cultured manner about Luther's death: Luther committed suicide; he was found hanging from his bedpost one morning.

Comment is unnecessary.

Luther died peacefully in the presence of friends, confessing, Christ and a.s.serting his firm allegiance to the faith he had proclaimed with his last breath. The probable cause of his death was a stroke of paralysis. Luther began to feel pains in the chest late in the afternoon of February 17, 1546. He bore up manfully and continued working at his business for the Count of Mansfeld who had called him to Eisleben. After a light evening meal he sat chatting in a cheerful mood with his companions, and retired early, as was his custom in his declining years.

The pains in the chest became worse, and he began to feel chilly.

Medicaments were administered, and after a while he fell into a slumber, which lasted an hour. He awoke with increased pain and a feeling of great congestion, which caused the death-perspiration to break out. He was rapidly turning cold. All this time he was praying and reciting portions from the Psalms and other texts. Three times in succession he repeated his favorite text, John 3, 16. Gradually he became peaceful, and his end was so gentle that the bystanders were in doubt whether he had expired or was only in a swoon. They worked with him, trying to rouse him, until they were convinced that he had breathed his last. The Catholic apothecary John Landau, who had been called in while Luther was thought to be in a swoon, helped to establish the fact of his death.

28. Luther's View of His Slanderers.

Luther was the subject of gross misrepresentation and vile slander during his lifetime: At first he used to correct erroneous reports about himself, usually in his polemical writings, later he merely noted them with a brief and scornful comment, and finally ignored them altogether.

He relates that he had treated many slanderous publications of Eck, Faber, Emser, Cochlaeus, and many others with silent contempt. (18, 1991; 14, 331.) It was a physical impossibility for him to reply to all the misleading and vicious reports that were being circulated about him.

He was convinced that he must use his time and strength for more necessary matters. His friends in many instances relieved him of the unpleasant task. Moreover, after he had answered those who had first a.s.sailed him in the beginning of his public activity, he could afford to disregard many slanders, because they were mere repet.i.tions.

Luther was aware that he was probably the worst-hated man of his times.

He declares his belief that in the last hundred years there has not lived a man to whom the world was more hostile than to himself. (22, 1660.) Persons praising him, he says, are regarded as having committed a more grievous sin than any idolater, blasphemer, perjurer, fornicator, adulterer, murderer, or thief. (9, 553.) Anything that Luther has said, he observes, is denounced as coming from the devil; what Duke George (one of his fiercest enemies), Faber, or Bucer say or do is highly approved, (4, 1606.) Like Elijah, he was charged with having disturbed Israel: before he began preaching there was peace and quiet, now all is confusion. (9, 587.) He is held responsible for the Peasants' Revolt and the rise of the Sacramentarian sects. (22, 1602.) A laborer whom his wife had hired became drunk and committed murder; at once the rumor was spread that Luther kept a murderer as his servant. (21b, 2225.) What he writes is represented as having been inspired by envy, pride, bitterness, yea, by Satan himself; those, however, who write against him are regarded as being inspired by the Holy Ghost. (18, 2005.) He observes that beggars become rich, obtain favors from princes and kings, remunerative positions, honors, and bishoprics by turning against him.

(18, 2005.) Some attribute the election of Adrian VI as Pope to Luther (this Pope was believed to favor reforms: he did not last long); and Luther expects that he is helping Dr. Schmid to become a cardinal because he is opposing him. (19, 1347.) Dunces become doctors, knaves become saints, and the most besotted characters are glorified when they try their vile mouths and pens against Luther. (19, 1347.) The easiest way for any man to become a canonized saint even during his lifetime, though he were a person of the stripe of a Nero or Caligula, is by hating Luther. (18, 2005.) On the cover of the pamphlet containing his Sermon on the Sacrament Luther ordered a picture consisting of two monstrances printed; this was promptly explained to mean that he had adopted the Bohemian errors, for Hus had administered the Lord's Supper in both kinds. (19, 457.) Some pretended that they could see two geese in this picture; the meaning was plain: one of them signified Hus (Hus in Bohemian means goose), the other, Luther. (19, 458.)

Luther would not have been human if incidents like these had not caused him pain. Occasionally he would give vent to his grief, but his manly courage, too, would soon a.s.sert itself, and he would expose the hollowness, insincerity, and futility of the lying tales that were spread about him. At a public meeting in Campo Flore he was cursed, sentenced to death, and burned in effigy. (21a, 174.) He has read offensive reports about himself, and puts them down with the calm declaration: There is not a man that writes against Luther without having to resort to horrible and manifest lies. (19, 583.) He is sure that he has not had an opponent who in an argument would stick to the point; they all had to evade the issue. (22, 658.) Shameful falsehoods are canva.s.sed about him at the court of King Ferdinand (15, 2623); Luther comforts himself with the reflection that others have suffered the same vilification before him, for instance, Wyclif, Hus, and others (5, 308). Besides, he is able to understand that the real reason why the papists regard him as such a perverse and untractable person is because they are utterly perverse themselves. (4, 1499.)

But his sweetest comfort is in reflecting that it is his preaching which has brought his manifold afflictions upon him. Poor Luther is always wrong: the Sacramentarians and Anabaptists hate him worse than they hate the Pope, and the Pope hates him worse than he hates other heretics, because they all fight against the Gospel which Luther preaches. (22, 1015.) If I were to keep silent, he says, or preach as I used to do, concerning indulgences, pilgrimages, adoration of the saints, purgatory, the carnival of the Ma.s.s, I could easily keep the favor and friendship of the great. (8, 569.) But for the sake of the true doctrine and those who profess it,--whom his opponents wish to suppress, Luther is willing to suffer hatred, persecution, calumnies, and everything else that his enemies may devise against him. (5, 587.) What have I done, he exclaims, to deserve the enmity of the Pope and his rabble, except that I have preached Christ? (8, 569.) He is convinced from the papists' own confession that he is being persecuted for no other reason than because he is preaching the Gospel. (8, 399.}

Knowing the reason why he is hated, Luther glories in his tribulations.

Duke George, he says, calls me a desperate, low-bred, perjured knave: I shall consider those ugly names my emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. (19, 457.) He would fear that there must be something wrong about his teaching if the people whom he knows would not fight against him: if these people do not condemn his doctrine, his doctrine cannot be acceptable to G.o.d. (10, 351.) He prefers to have them rage against him.

Their violence shall not disturb him greatly, because he has championed the Lord's cause, and that, in all sincerity, without malice toward any person. (21a, 301.) . Let the papists exhaust themselves in slanders against him: he knows he has the Scriptures on his side, and they have the Scriptures against them. (5, 310.) They intend to grind Luther to pieces, not a hair of him is to remain; he knows that they will not be able to harm a hair on his head. (8, 119.)

Thus Luther thought and spoke of his detractors and defamers. Such was his comfort and his courage in the face of base calumnies and undeserved hatred. Those who know him best will continue to love him, and admire him the more for the enemies he has made.

If the reader of this book has had the sensation of a traveler in a storm-tossed vessel, he has experienced mentally what Luther faced in dread reality during almost the whole of his agitated life. He had to weather many a squall, and storm, and hurricane. Outwardly his life seems a continuous hurly-burly. Yet there is in this man's heart a great and holy calm. The tumult of his life is all on the surface. He reminds one of the lines in Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Hymn":

When winds are raging o'er the upper ocean, And billows wild contend with angry roar, 'T is said, far down beneath the wild commotion, That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore.

Far, far beneath, the noise of tempest dieth, And silver waves chime ever peacefully, And no rude storm, how fierce soe'er it flieth, Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea.

We have had glimpses of the hidden depths in Luther's mind: his thought reaches down to the lowest depths of human misery, and then goes deeper still towards the limits of G.o.d's rescuing love and conquering grace which human mind has never reached. For these divine profundities no plummet will ever sound. He who could surrender himself wholly to the study of the greatness and beauty of Luther's constructive thought would enjoy a spiritual luxury and be drawn into that sublime and solemn peace of G.o.d which pa.s.ses all understanding. He would behold this strenuous man; who has been shown mostly in his working-clothes in these pages, in his holiday-attire, with that Sabbath in his heart which occurs wherever Christ is the loved and adored object of the thinker's contemplation.