Short Studies on Great Subjects Part 11

Till we are seven years old, we do nothing but eat and drink and sleep and play; from seven to twenty-one we study four hours a day, the rest of it we run about and amuse ourselves; then we work till fifty, and then we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give G.o.d a tenth of our time: and yet we think that with our good works we can merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two hours; I have been at meals three hours; I have been idle four hours!

Ah, enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord!'

A perpetual struggle. For ever to be falling, yet to rise again and stumble forward with eyes turned to heaven--this was the best which would ever come of man. It was accepted in its imperfection by the infinite grace of G.o.d, who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the intention for the deed--who, when there is a sincere desire to serve Him, overlooks the shortcomings of infirmity.

Do you say such teaching leads to disregard of duty? All doctrines, when petrified into formulas, lead to that. But, as Luther said, 'where real faith is, a good life follows, as light follows the sun; faint and clouded, yet ever struggling to break through the mist which envelopes it, and welcoming the roughest discipline which tends to clear and raise it.

'The barley,' he says, in a homely but effective image--'the barley which we brew, the flax of which we weave our garments, must be bruised and torn ere they come to the use for which they are grown. So must Christians suffer. The natural creature must be combed and threshed. The old Adam must die, for the higher life to begin. If man is to rise to n.o.bleness, he must first be slain.'

In modern language, the poet Goethe tells us the same truth. 'The natural man,' he says, 'is like the ore out of the iron mine. It is smelted in the furnace; it is forged into bars upon the anvil. A new nature is at last forced upon it, and it is made steel.'

It was this doctrine--it was this truth rather (the word doctrine reminds one of quack medicines)--which, quickening in Luther's mind, gave Europe its new life. It was the flame which, beginning with a small spark, kindled the hearth-fires in every German household.

Luther's own life was a model of quiet simplicity. He remained poor. He might have had money if he had wished; but he chose rather, amidst his enormous labour, to work at a turning-lathe for his livelihood.

He was sociable, cheerful, fond of innocent amus.e.m.e.nts, and delighted to encourage them. His table-talk, collected by his friends, makes one of the most brilliant books in the world. He had no monkish theories about the necessity of abstinence; but he was temperate from habit and principle. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordinary meal; and he was once four days without food of any sort, having emptied his larder among the poor.

All kinds of people thrust themselves on Luther for help. Flights of nuns from the dissolved convents came to him to provide for them--naked, shivering creatures, with scarce a rag to cover them. Eight florins were wanted once to provide clothes for some of them. 'Eight florins!' he said; 'and where am I to get eight florins?' Great people had made him presents of plate: it all went to market to be turned into clothes and food for the wretched.

Melancthon says that, unless provoked, he was usually very gentle and tolerant. He recognised, and was almost alone in recognising, the necessity of granting liberty of conscience. No one hated Popery more than he did, yet he said:--

'The Papists must bear with us, and we with them. If they will not follow us, we have no right to force them. Wherever they can, they will hang, burn, behead, and strangle us. I shall be persecuted as long as I live, and most likely killed. But it must come to this at last--every man must be allowed to believe according to his conscience, and answer for his belief to his Maker.'

Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he wrote like an apostle--sometimes like a raving ribald.

Doubtless, Luther could be impolite on occasions. When he was angry, invectives rushed from him like boulder rocks down a mountain torrent in flood. We need not admire all that; in quiet times it is hard to understand it.

Here, for instance, is a specimen. Our Henry the Eighth, who began life as a highly orthodox sovereign, broke a lance with Luther for the Papacy.

Luther did not credit Henry with a composition which was probably his own after all. He thought the king was put forward by some of the English bishops--'Thomists' he calls them, as men who looked for the beginning and end of wisdom to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

'Courage,' he exclaimed to them, 'swine that you are! burn me then, if you can and dare. Here I am; do your worst upon me. Scatter my ashes to all the winds--spread them through all seas. My spirit shall pursue you still. Living, I am the foe of the Papacy; and dead, I will be its foe twice over. Hogs of Thomists! Luther shall be the bear in your way--the lion in your path. Go where you will, Luther shall cross you. Luther shall leave you neither peace nor rest till he has crushed in your brows of bra.s.s and dashed out your iron brains.'

Strong expressions; but the times were not gentle. The prelates whom he supposed himself to be addressing were the men who filled our Smithfield with the reek of burning human flesh.

Men of Luther's stature are like the violent forces of Nature herself--terrible when roused, and in repose, majestic and beautiful. Of vanity he had not a trace. 'Do not call yourselves Lutherans,' he said; 'call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been crucified for the world?'

I mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns were the expression of the very inmost heart of the German people. 'Music' he called 'the grandest and sweetest gift of G.o.d to man.' 'Satan hates music,' he said; 'he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.'

He was extremely interested in all natural things. Before the science of botany was dreamt of, Luther had divined the principle of vegetable life. 'The principle of marriage runs through all creation,' he said; 'and flowers as well as animals are male and female.'

A garden called out bursts of eloquence from him; beautiful sometimes as a finished piece of poetry.

One April day as he was watching the swelling buds, he exclaimed:--

'Praise be to G.o.d the Creator, who out of a dead world makes all alive again. See those shoots how they burgeon and swell. Image of the resurrection of the dead! Winter is death--summer is the resurrection.

Between them lie spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and change. The proverb says--

Trust not a day Ere birth of May.

Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our daily bread.'

'We are in the dawn of a new era,' he said another time; 'we are beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in Adam's fall. We are learning to see all round us the greatness and glory of the Creator. We can see the Almighty hand--the infinite goodness--in the humblest flower. We praise Him--we thank Him--we glorify Him--we recognise in creation the power of His word. He spoke and it was there.

The stone of the peach is hard; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it when the time comes. An egg--what a thing is that! If an egg had never been seen in Europe, and a traveller had brought one from Calcutta, how would all the world have wondered!'

And again:--

'If a man could make a single rose, we should give him an empire; yet roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are scattered in profusion over the world, and no one regards them.'

There are infinite other things which I should like to tell you about Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what more I have to say to a single matter--for which more than any other he has been blamed--I mean his marriage.

He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of celibacy. The person whom he married had been a nun, and as such had taken a vow of celibacy also.

The marriage was unquestionably no affair of pa.s.sion. Luther had come to middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed; and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical usage, or else he considered that the circ.u.mstances of the time required it of him.

Let us see what those circ.u.mstances were. The enforcement of celibacy on the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, both iniquitous in itself, and productive of enormous immorality. The impurity of the religious orders had been the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Luther himself was impressed with profound pity for the poor men, who were cut off from the natural companionship which nature had provided for them--who were thus exposed to temptations which they ought not to have been called upon to resist.

The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously complicated the problem. Germany was covered with friendless and homeless men and women adrift upon the world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do; and advice was of little service without example.

The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such persons. They might have lived together in concubinage, and no one would have thought much about it. Their marriage was regarded with a superst.i.tious terror as a kind of incest.

Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the natural and healthy state in which clergy as well as laity were intended to live. Immorality was hateful to him as a degradation of a sacrament--impious, loathsome, and dishonoured. Marriage was the condition in which humanity was at once purest, best, and happiest.

For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He had borne the injustice of his lot, when the burden had been really heavy. But time and custom had lightened the load; and had there been nothing at issue but his own personal happiness, he would not have given further occasion to the malice of his enemies.

But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to him to guide them--guide them by precept, or guide them by example. He had satisfied himself that the vow of celibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him and them--that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him--that it was no use to tell others that they might marry, unless he himself led the way, and married first. And it was characteristic of him that, having resolved to do the thing, he did it in the way most likely to show the world his full thought upon the matter.

That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt whatever.

'We may be able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'

He asked n.o.body's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the moderate respectable people--the people who thought like Erasmus--those who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the world's opinion--such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the whole world in my way.'

Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent.

She was an ordinary, unimaginative body--plain in person and plain in mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance--but a decent, sensible, commonplace Haus Frau.

The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect, and ended with steady affection.

The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving G.o.d thanks.

He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their adventures together.

'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals, where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she ought not to be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask me.

'"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the brother of the Margrave?"'

She was an odd woman.

'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and seldom?'