Short Studies on Great Subjects Part 10

The German wines he liked worse--for this point among others, which is curious to observe in those days. The great capitalist winegrowers, anti-Reformers all of them, were people without conscience and humanity, and adulterated their liquors. Of course they did. They believed in nothing but money, and this was the way to make money.

'The water they mix with the wine,' Erasmus says, 'is the least part of the mischief. They put in lime, and alum, and resin, and sulphur, and salt--and then they say it is good enough for heretics.'

Observe the practical issue of religious corruption. Show me a people where trade is dishonest, and I will show you a people where religion is a sham.

'We hang men that steal money,' Erasmus exclaimed, writing doubtless with the remembrance of a stomach-ache. 'These wretches steal our money and our lives too, and get off scot free.'

He settled at last at Basle, which the storm had not yet reached, and tried to bury himself among his books. The shrieks of the conflict, however, still troubled his ears. He heard his own name still cursed, and he could not bear it or sit quiet under it.

His correspondence was still enormous. The high powers still appealed to him for advice and help: of open meddling he would have no more; he did not care, he said, to make a post of himself for every dog of a theologian to defile. Advice, however, he continued to give in the old style.

'Put down the preachers on both sides. Fill the pulpits with men who will kick controversy into the kennel, and preach piety and good manners. Teach nothing in the schools but what bears upon life and duty.

Punish those who break the peace, and punish no one else; and when the new opinions have taken root, allow liberty of conscience.'

Perfection of wisdom; but a wisdom which, unfortunately, was three centuries at least out of date, which even now we have not grown big enough to profit by. The Catholic princes and bishops were at work with fire and f.a.ggot. The Protestants were pulling down monasteries, and turning the monks and nuns out into the world. The Catholics declared that Erasmus was as much to blame as Luther. The Protestants held him responsible for the persecutions, and insisted, not without reason, that if Erasmus had been true to his conscience, the whole Catholic world must have accepted the Reformation.

He suffered bitterly under these attacks upon him. He loved quiet--and his ears were deafened with clamour. He liked popularity--and he was the best abused person in Europe. Others who suffered in the same way he could advise to leave the black-coated jackdaws to their noise--but he could not follow his own counsel. When the curs were at his heels, he could not restrain himself from lashing out at them; and, from his retreat at Basle, his sarcasms flashed out like jagged points of lightning.

Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of a saint, 'They insulted the poor image so,' he said, 'it is a marvel there was no miracle. The saint worked so many in the good old times.'

When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics exclaimed that Antichrist would be born from such an incestuous intercourse. 'Nay,'

Erasmus said, 'if monk and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been legions of Antichrists these many years.'

More than once he was tempted to go over openly to Luther--not from a n.o.ble motive, but, as he confessed, 'to make those furies feel the difference between him and them.'

He was past sixty, with broken health and failing strength. He thought of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth.

'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?'

Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely tempted as he was, he could not.

With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily; but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.

He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of commonplace revolution, caused by the folly and wickedness of the authorities, but with no organising vitality in itself; and his chief distress, as we gather from his later letters, was at his own treatment. He had done his best for both sides. He had failed, and was abused by everybody.

Thus pa.s.sed away the last years of one of the most gifted men that Europe has ever seen. I have quoted many of his letters. I will add one more pa.s.sage, written near the end of his life, very touching and pathetic:--

'Hercules,' he said, 'could not fight two monsters at once; while I, poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin--rats, mosquitoes, bugs, and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name.

Every goose now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned, once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.

'They attack me now even for my Latin style, and spatter me with epigrams. Fame I would have parted with; but to be the sport of blackguards--to be pelted with potsherds and dirt and ordure--is not this worse than death?

'There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and I cannot, for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung with a desire to avenge my wrongs; but I say to myself, "Will you, to gratify your spleen, raise your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you at the font and fed you with the word of G.o.d?" I cannot do it. Yet I understand now how Arius, and Tertullian, and Wickliff were driven into schism. The theologians say I am their enemy. Why? Because I bade monks remember their vows; because I told parsons to leave their wranglings and read the Bible; because I told popes and cardinals to look at the Apostles, and make themselves more like to them. If this is to be their enemy, then indeed I have injured them.'

This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, and incessant toil had worn him to a shred. The clouds grew blacker. News came from England that his dear friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He had long ceased to care for life; and death, almost as sudden as he had longed for, gave him peace at last.

So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so many years; and dying heaped with undeserved but too intelligible anathemas, seeing all that he had laboured for swept away by the whirlwind.

Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without Erasmus, Luther would have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded--so much of him as deserved to succeed--in Luther's victory.

He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was true to itself; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into insincerity. He was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been brought to the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man who boasted louder of his courage.

And yet, in his special scheme for remodelling the mind of Europe, he failed hopelessly--almost absurdly. He believed, himself, that his work was spoilt by the Reformation; but, in fact, under no conditions could any more have come of it.

Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists already; and toleration and lat.i.tudinarianism are well enough when mind and conscience are awake and energetic of themselves.

When there is no spiritual life at all; when men live only for themselves and for sensual pleasure; when religion is superst.i.tion, and conscience a name, and G.o.d an idol half feared and half despised--then, for the restoration of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed different in kind from any which Erasmus possessed.

And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all that Luther did; it would be to tell you all the story of the German Reformation. I want you rather to consider the kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his character how he came to achieve what he did.

You remember that the Elector of Saxony, after the Diet of Worms, sent him to the Castle of Wartburg, to prevent him from being murdered or kidnapped. He remained there many months; and during that time the old ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions of Germany were burning like a North American forest. The monasteries were broken up; the estates were appropriated by the n.o.bles; the monks were sent wandering into the world. The bishops looked helplessly on while their ancient spiritual dominion was torn to pieces and trodden under foot. The Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, and several more of the princes, declared for the Reformation. The Protestants had a majority in the Diet, and controlled the force of the empire. Charles the Fifth, busy with his French wars, and in want of money, dared not press questions to a crisis which he had not power to cope with; and he was obliged for a time to recognise what he could not prevent. You would have thought Luther would have been well pleased to see the seed which he had sown bear fruit so rapidly; yet it was exactly while all this was going on that he experienced those temptations of the devil of which he has left so wonderful an account.

We shall have our own opinions on the nature of these apparitions. But Luther, it is quite certain, believed that Satan himself attacked him in person. Satan, he tells us, came often to him, and said, 'See what you have done. Behold this ancient Church--this mother of saints--polluted and defiled by brutal violence. And it is you--you, a poor ignorant monk, that have set the people on to their unholy work. Are you so much wiser than the saints who approved the things which you have denounced?

Popes, bishops, clergy, kings, emperors--are none of these--are not all these together--wiser than Martin Luther the monk?'

The devil, he says, caused him great agony by these suggestions. He fell into deep fits of doubt and humiliation and despondency. And wherever these thoughts came from, we can only say that they were very natural thoughts--natural and right. He called them temptations; yet these were temptations which would not have occurred to any but a high-minded man.

He had, however, done only what duty had forced him to do. His business was to trust to G.o.d, who had begun the work and knew what He meant to make of it. His doubts and misgivings, therefore, he ascribed to Satan, and his enormous imaginative vigour gave body to the voice which was speaking in him.

He tells many humorous stories--not always producible--of the means with which he encountered his offensive visitor.

'The devil,' he says, 'is very proud, and what he least likes is to be laughed at.' One night he was disturbed by something rattling in his room; the modern unbeliever will suppose it was a mouse. He got up, lit a candle, searched the apartment through, and could find nothing--the Evil One was indisputably there.

'Oh!' he said, 'it is you, is it?' He returned to bed, and went to sleep.

Think as you please about the cause of the noise, but remember that Luther had not the least doubt that he was alone in the room with the actual devil, who, if he could not overcome his soul, could at least twist his neck in a moment--and then think what courage there must have been in a man who could deliberately sleep in such a presence!

During his retirement he translated the Bible. The confusion at last became so desperate that he could no longer be spared; and, believing that he was certain to be destroyed, he left Wartburg and returned to Wittenberg. Death was always before him as supremely imminent. He used to say that it would be a great disgrace to the Pope if he died in his bed. He was wanted once at Leipsic. His friends said if he went there Duke George would kill him.

'Duke George!' he said; 'I would go to Leipsic if it rained Duke Georges for nine days!'

No such cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. The single one there was would have gladly been mischievous if he could; but Luther outlived him--lived for twenty-four years after this, in continued toil, re-shaping the German Church, and giving form to its new doctrine.

Sacerdotalism, properly so called, was utterly abolished. The corruptions of the Church had all grown out of one root--the notion that the Christian priesthood possesses mystical power, conferred through episcopal ordination.

Religion, as Luther conceived it, did not consist in certain things done to and for a man by a so-called priest. It was the devotion of each individual soul to the service of G.o.d. Ma.s.ses were nothing, and absolution was nothing; and a clergyman differed only from a layman in being set apart for the especial duties of teaching and preaching.

I am not concerned to defend Luther's view in this matter. It is a matter of fact only, that in getting rid of episcopal ordination, he dried up the fountain from which the mechanical and idolatrous conceptions of religion had sprung; and, in consequence, the religious life of Germany has expanded with the progress of knowledge, while priesthoods everywhere cling to the formulas of the past, in which they live, and move, and have their being.

Enough of this.

The peculiar doctrine which has pa.s.sed into Europe under Luther's name is known as Justification by Faith. Bandied about as a watchword of party, it has by this time hardened into a formula, and has become barren as the soil of a trodden footpath. As originally proclaimed by Luther, it contained the deepest of moral truths. It expressed what was, and is, and must be, in one language or another, to the end of time, the conviction of every generous-minded man.

The service of G.o.d, as Luther learnt it from the monks, was a thing of desert and reward. So many good works done, so much to the right page in the great book; where the stock proved insufficient, there was the reserve fund of the merits of the saints, which the Church dispensed for money to those who needed.

'Merit!' Luther thought. 'What merit can there be in such a poor caitiff as man? The better a man is--the more clearly he sees how little he is good for, the greater mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of having deserved reward.'

'Miserable creatures that we are!' he said; 'we earn our bread in sin.