CHAPTER II

Luther in the Wartburg—Object of his Captivity—Agonies—Sickness—Labour of Luther—On Confession—To Latomus—Walks.

Meanwhile Knight George (this was Luther’s name in the Wartburg) lived solitary and unknown. “If you saw me,” wrote he to Melancthon, “you would take me for a knight, and would scarcely be able to recognise me.” Luther at first took some repose, enjoying a leisure which he had never tasted till this time. He moved freely within the fortress, but could not go beyond its walls.³ All his wants were supplied, and he had never been better treated. Many thoughts filled his soul, but none could trouble him. He cast his eyes alternately to the surrounding forests, and raised them towards heaven—“A singular captive!” exclaimed he, “captive both with and against my will.”⁵

Writing to Spalatin, he says, “Pray for me; your prayers are the only thing I want. I give myself no concern with all that is said and done with regard to me in the world. At length I am at rest.” … This letter, as well as several others of the same period, is dated from the isle of Patmos. Luther compared the Wartburg to the celebrated island to which the anger of the emperor Domitian banished the apostle John. The Reformer reposed amid the dark forests of Thuringia from the violent struggles which had agitated his soul. Here he studied Christian truth, not for disputation, but as a means of regeneration and life. The commencement of the Reformation behoved to be polemical; new times demanded new exertions. After rooting up the thorns and brambles, it was necessary to sow the seed peacefully in men’s hearts. Had Luther been obliged incessantly to fight new battles, he could not have accomplished a lasting work in the Church. By his captivity he escaped a danger which might perhaps have destroyed the Reformation—that of always attacking and destroying, without ever defending and building up. This humble retreat produced a result still more precious. Raised as it were upon a pedestal by his countrymen, he was within a step of the abyss, and a moment of giddiness might have sufficed to throw him headlong into it. Some of the first agents in the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland were dashed to pieces against the rock of spiritual pride and fanaticism. Luther was a man very subject to the infirmities of our nature, and he did not entirely escape these dangers. Still the hand of God delivered him from them for a time, by suddenly withdrawing him from intoxicating triumphs, and consigning him to the depth of an unknown retreat. His soul there communed with itself near to God; it was there bathed in the waters of adversity; his sufferings, his humiliations, constrained him at least for a time to walk with the humble, and the principles of the Christian life thenceforth were developed in his soul with new energy and freedom.

Luther’s quiet was not of long duration. Seated on the walls of the Wartburg, he spent whole days absorbed in profound meditation. Sometimes the Church presented herself to his mind, and displayed all her miseries before him. At other times turning his eye upwards with hope towards heaven, he exclaimed, “How, O Lord, couldst thou have made all men in vain!” (Psalms 89:47) At other times, again abandoning this hope, he was downcast and exclaimed, “Alas, there is no one, in the last day of His wrath, who can stand as a wall before the Lord to save Israel!…”

Then returning to his own destiny, he feared lest he should be accused of having abandoned the field of battle, and the idea afflicted his soul. “I would far rather,” said he, “be laid on burning coals than stagnate here half dead.”²

Next transporting himself in imagination to Worms and Wittemberg to the midst of his enemies, he regretted that he had yielded to the counsels of his friends, instead of remaining in the world, and offering his breast to the fury of men. “Ah,” said he, “there is nothing I desire more than to present myself before my cruel enemies.”⁴

Still some sweet thought arose, and gave a truce to these agonies. All was not torment to Luther; from time to time his agitated spirit found some degree of calmness and consolation. After the assurance of divine aid, his greatest solace in his grief was the remembrance of Melancthon. “If I perish,” wrote he to him, “the gospel will lose nothing; you will succeed me as Elisha did, with a double measure of my spirit.” But calling to mind Philip’s timidity, he cried to him aloud, “Minister of the word, guard the walls and towers of Jerusalem until the adversary strike you. We are still standing alone on the field of battle: after me they will next assail you.”⁶ The thought of this last attack which Rome was going to make on the rising Church threw him into new anxiety. The poor monk, a solitary prisoner, had violent wrestling with himself. But suddenly he obtained a glimpse of his deliverance. It occurred to him that the attacks of the papacy would arouse the nations of Germany, and that the soldiers of the gospel, proving victorious, would surround the Wartburg and give liberty to the prisoner. “If the pope,” said he, “lays hands on all who are for me, there will be a commotion in Germany; the more haste he makes to crush us, the more speedy will be the end both of him and his. And I … will be restored to you. God awakening many minds, and stirring up the nations. Let our enemies only seize our cause in their arms and try to strangle it; it will grow under their grasp, and come forth ten times more formidable.” But sickness brought him down from those heights to which his courage and his faith had elevated him. He had already suffered much at Worms, and his illness increased in solitude. He could not digest the food of the Wartburg, which was somewhat less homely than that of his convent: it was necessary to return to the poor fare to which he had been accustomed. He passed whole nights without sleep. Anguish of mind was added to bodily suffering. No work is accomplished without pain and self-denial. Luther, alone upon his rock, endured in his powerful nature a passion which the emancipation of humanity rendered necessary. “Seated at night in my chamber,” says he, “I sent forth cries like a woman in travail—torn, wounded, and bleeding.”

² Then, interrupting his complaints, and impressed with the thought that his sufferings were benefits from God, he gratefully exclaims, “Thanks be rendered unto thee, O Christ, in that thou hast been pleased not to leave me without the precious relics of thy holy cross!” He soon becomes indignant at himself, and exclaims, “Infatuated, hardened creature that I am! How grievous! I pray little, I wrestle little with the Lord, I do not groan for the church of God.⁴ Instead of being fervent in spirit, my passions only are inflamed; I remain in sloth, sleep, and indolence.” Then, not knowing to what this state should be ascribed, and accustomed to expect every thing from the affection of his brethren, he exclaims, in the desolation of his soul, “O, my friends, is it because you forget to pray for me that God is thus estranged from me!”

Those about him, as well as his friends at Wittemberg and in the Elector’s court, were uneasy and alarmed at this state of suffering. They trembled to think, that a life snatched from the scaffold of the pope and the sword of Charles V, should sadly wane and vanish away. Can the Wartburg be destined to be the tomb of Luther? “I fear,” said Melancthon, “that the grief which he feels for the church will be his death. A torch has been kindled by him in Israel: if it is extinguished what hope will be left us? Would to God I were able, at the cost of my miserable life, to detain in the world one who is its brightest ornament.” “O, what a man!” he exclaims, as if he were on the borders of the tomb, “we have not duly appreciated him.”

What Luther called the unbecoming indolence of his prison was labour almost above man’s utmost strength. “I am here every day,” said he, (14th May,) “in idleness and luxury, (referring, doubtless, to his fare, which at first was not quite so coarse as he had been accustomed to.) I read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek: I am going to write a discourse in German on auricular confession: I will continue the translation of the Psalms, and compose a collection of sermons as soon as I get from Wittemberg what I require. I write without intermission;” and yet these were only a part of Luther’s labours. His enemies thought that if he was not dead, at all events, his voice would not again be heard: but their joy was of short duration, and the world was not left long in doubt whether he were alive. A multitude of writings, composed in the Wartburg, appeared in rapid succession, and the cherished voice of the Reformer was every where received with enthusiasm. Luther published at once works fitted to edify the Church and polemical treatises, which interrupted the too hasty joy of his enemies. For nearly a year he instructed, exhorted, rebuked, and thundered from his mountain top, and his adversaries, confounded, asked whether there were not some supernatural mystery in this prodigious activity. “He could not rest,” says Cochlœus. The only mystery was, the impudence of the partisans of Rome: They hastened to avail themselves of the Edict of Worms to give a mortal blow to the Reformation, while Luther, condemned, placed under the ban of the empire, and shut up in the Wartburg, stood forth to defend sound doctrine as if he had been still free and victorious. It was in the confessional especially that the priests strove to rivet the chains of their deluded parishioners, and accordingly confession was the object of Luther’s first attack. “They found,” says he, “on the words of St. James, ‘Confess your sins one to another.’ Singular confession! He says, ‘one to another,’ whence it should follow, that confessors ought also to confess to their penitents; that every Christian should, in his turn, be pope, bishop, priest, and that the pope himself should confess to all.”

Scarcely had Luther finished this small work, than he began another. Latomus a theologian of Louvain, already celebrated for his opposition to Reuchlin and Erasmus, had attacked the views of the Reformer. In twelve days Luther’s refutation was ready, and it is one of his master-pieces. He vindicates himself from the charge of wanting moderation. “The moderation of the age,” says he, “is to bend the knee before sacrilegious pontiffs, impious sophists, and address them as gracious lord! excellent master! Then when you have done so, you may put to death whomsoever you please; overturn the world, nay, you will still be a moderate man. Far from me be this moderation. I like better to be frank and deceive nobody. The shell, perhaps, is hard, but the kernel is sweet and tender.”

Luther’s health continuing to decline, he thought of quitting the Wartburg. But how was he to do it? To appear in public was to risk his life. The back of the mountain on which the fortress stood was traversed by numerous paths, the sides of which were bordered with tufts of strawberries. The massy gate of the castle was opened, and the prisoner ventured, not without fear, stealthily to gather some of the fruit. He became bolder by degrees, and began to survey the surrounding country in his knight’s dress, and attended by a guard of the castle, a blunt but trustworthy man. One day having entered an inn he threw aside his sword, which encumbered him, and ran towards some book which happened to be lying. Nature was stronger than prudence. His attendant trembled fearing that a proceeding so unusual in a warrior would be regarded as a proof that the doctor was not a true knight. On another occasion the two warriors descended into the convent of Reichardsbrunn, where Luther had slept a few months before, on his way to Worms.³ Suddenly a friar allowed a sign of surprise to escape from him. Luther is recognised. His attendant perceives it, and, dragging him off in all haste, they gallop away far from the convent, before the poor friar has time to recover from his astonishment. The chivalric life of the doctor occasionally partook strongly of the theological. One day the nets are prepared, the gates of the fortress are thrown open, and the dogs with long flapping ears rush forth. Luther had wished to taste the pleasures of the chace. The hunters soon become animated, the dogs dart along, and drive the brown hares among the brush-wood. In the midst of the turmoil the chevalier George, standing motionless, had his mind filled with serious thoughts; at the sight of the objects around him his heart is bursting with grief. “Is it not,” said he, “an image of the devil who arouses his dogs, in other words, the bishops, those messengers of antichrist, and hounds them on in pursuit of poor souls.”⁵ A young hare had just been caught, and Luther, happy to save it, wraps it carefully in his cloak, and places it under a bush. Before he proceeds many steps the dogs scent out the poor creature and kill it. Luther attracted by the noise, utters a cry of grief,—“O pope!” says he, “and thou Satan! it is thus you strive to destroy even those souls which have been already saved from death”