Short Studies on Great Subjects Part 7

Tetzel bayed defiance; the Dominican friars took up the quarrel; and Hochstrat of Cologne, Reuchlin's enemy, clamoured for fire and f.a.ggot.

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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d.'

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 n.o.bles 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 a.s.sembled 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 pa.s.sed.

A n.o.bleman 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 n.o.bles--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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d.'

'Yes, in the name of G.o.d,' said Luther, throwing back his head, 'In the name of G.o.d, 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.