IMPRIMATUR
EDM. CAN. SURMONT,
Vic. Gen. Westmonasterii, die 12 Martii, 1917.
LUTHER
BY
HARTMANN GRISAR, S.J.
PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK
AUTHORISED TRANSLATION FROM THE GERMAN EY
E. M. LAMOND
EDITED BY
LUIGI CAPPADELTA
VOLUME VI
LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
BROADWAY HOUSE 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.G. 1917
A FEW PRESS OPINIONS OF VOLUMES I-V.
"His most elaborate and systematic biography ... is not merely a book to be reckoned with; it is one with which we cannot dispense, if only for its minute examination of Luther's theological writings." — The Athenasum (Vol. I).
"The second volume of Dr. Grisar's ' Life of Luther ' is fully as interesting as the first. There is the same minuteness of criticism and the same width of survey."
The Athenreum (Vol. II).
" Its interest increases. As we see the great Reformer in the thick of his work, and the heyday of his life, the absorbing attraction of his personality takes hold of us more and more strongly. His stupendous force, his amazing vitality, his super human interest in life, impress themselves upon us with redoubled effect. We lind him the most multiform, the most paradoxical of men. . . . The present volume, which is admirably translated, deals rather with the moral, social, and personal side of Luther's career than with his theology." — The Athenceum (Vol. III).
" Father Grisar has gained a high reputation in this country through the translation of his monumental work on the History of Rome and the Popes in the Middle Ages, and this first instalment of his ' Life of Luther' bears fresh witness to his unwearied industry, wide learning, and scrupulous anxiety to be impartial in his judgments as well as absolutely accurate in matters of fact." — Glasgow Herald.
" This ' Life of Luther ' is bound to become standard ... a model of every literary, critical, and scholarly virtue." — The Month.
"Like its two predecessors, Volume III excels in the minute analysis not merely of Luther's actions, but also of his writings ; indeed, this feature is the outstanding merit of the author's patient labours."— The Irish Times.
" This third volume of Father Grisar's monumental ' Life ' is full of interest for the theologian. And not less for the psychologist ; for here more than ever the aiithor allows himself to probe into the mind and motives and understanding of Luther, so as to get at the significance of his development."— The Tablet (Vol. III).
"Historical research owes a debt of gratitude to Father Grisar for the calm un biased manner in which he marshals the facts and opinions on Luther which his deep erudition has gathered."— The Tablet (Vol. IV).
" We have nothing but commendation for the translation." — The Tablet (Vol. V).
" Another volume of Father Grisar's ' Life of Martin Luther1 . . . confirms the belief that it will remain the standard ' Life,' and rank amongst the most valuable contribu tions to the history of the Reformation."— Yorkshire Post.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXXV. LUTHER'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SOCIETY AND EDUCATION (continued from Vol. F.)
pages 3-98
3. ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS AND HIGHER EDUCATION.
Luther's appeals on behalf of the schools ; polemical trend of his appeals ; his ideal of elementary education ; study of the Bible and the classics. The decline in matters educational after the introduction of the innovations ; higher education before Luther's day ; results achieved by Luther . pages 3-41
4. BENEVOLENCE AND RELIEF or THE POOR.
Organised charity in late mediseval times. Luther's attempts to arrange for the relief of the poor ; the " Poor- boxes " ; Bugenhagen's work ; the sad effects of the con fiscation of Church-property ; and of the doctrine that good works are valueless . wages 42-65
5. LUTHER'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS WORDLY CALLINGS.
Whether Luther's claim can stand that he was the first to preach the dignity of worldly callings ? His depreciation of the several classes of the nation due to his estrangement from them. Attitude towards the merchant-class. His Old- Testament ideas react on his theories about usury and interest ; his views on the lawfulness of permanent invest ments, etc. ........ pages 05-98
CHAPTER XXXVI. THE DARKER SIDE OF LUTHER'S
INNER LIFE. HIS AILMENTS . . . pages 99-186
1. EARLY SUFFERINGS, BODILY AND MENTAL.
Fits of fear, palpitations, swoons, nervousness ; his temptations no mere morbid phenomena . . pages 99-112
2. PSYCHIC PROBLEMS OF LUTHER'S RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT.
Temptations to despair. The shadow of pseudo-mysti cism. Temptations of the flesh . . . . pages 112-122
3. GHOSTS, DELUSIONS, APPARITIONS OF THE DEVIL.
The statements regarding Luther's intercourse with the beyond and his visions of the devil. The misunderstood reference to his disputation with the devil on the Mass. His belief in possession and exorcism . . . pages 122-140
vi CONTENTS
4. REVELATION AND ILLUSION. MORBID TRAINS OF THOUGHT.
His conviction that he was the recipient of a special revela tion ; his apparent withdrawals of this claim. His so-called " temptations " viewed by him as confirming his mission ; his persuasion that the Pope is Antichrist, that his opponents are all egged on by the devil and that no man on earth can compare with him. His tendency to self-contradiction ; his changeableness, his feverish polemics . . . pages 141-171
5. LUTHER'S PSYCHOLOGY ACCORDING TO PHYSICIANS AND HIS
TORIANS.
Whether Luther's mind was abnormal, or whether all his symptoms are to be explained by uric acid, or by degeneracy
pages 172-186
CHAPTER XXXVII. LUTHER'S LATER EMBELLISH MENT OF HIS EARLY LIFE . . . pages 187-236
1. LUTHER'S LATER PICTURE or HIS CONVENT-LIFE AND
APOSTASY.
The legend about his first appearance on the field of history. His supposed excessive holiness-by-works during his monastic days . . . . . . . . pages 187-205
2. THE REALITY. LUTHER'S FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY.
Inward peace and happiness in his monastic days ; his vows and their breach ; some peculiarities of his humility ; his feverish addiction to his work ; the facts around which his later legend grew ..... pages 205-229
3. THE LEGEND RECEIVES ITS LAST TOUCH ; HOW IT WAS USED.
Forged in the solitude of the Coburg. His characteristic passage from the " I " to the " we." His monkish " experi ence " useful to him ..... pages 229-236
CHAPTER XXXVIII. END OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. THE CHURCH-UNSEEN AND THE VISIBLE CHURCH-BY-LAW . . . . . pages 237-340
1. FROM RELIGIOUS LICENCE TO RELIGIOUS CONSTRAINT.
Freedom as Luther's early watchword. Intolerance towards Catholics, in theory, and in practice. Sanguinary threats against all papists ; the death-penalty pronounced against " sectarians " at home ; his justification : blasphemy must be put down. The people driven to the new preaching ; no freedom of conscience allowed : Luther's intolerance imitated by his friends . ... . pages 237-279
2. LUTHER AS JUDGE.
The pigheadedness and arrogance of all the "sectarians." None of them are sure of their cause ; none of them can work miracles pages 279-289
CONTENTS vii
3. THE CHURCH-UNSEEN, ITS ORIGIN AND EARLY HISTORY.
Luther's invisible Church ; her marks ; only the pre destined are members ; his shifting theory . . pages 290-308
4. THE CHURCH BECOMES VISIBLE. ITS ORGANISATION.
The Church materialises in Articles and a Ministry set up by Wittenberg with the sovereign as " emergency-bishop." The results of State-interference » . . pages 309-325
5. LUTHER'S TACTICS IN QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE CHURCH.
The Erfurt preachers at variance with the Town-Council. Luther shifts his ground in his controversies with the Catholics. How the Church, in spite of Christ's promises, contrived to remain plunged in error for over a thousand years. Luther's interpretation of Christ's words " On this rock " . . . . pages 325-340
CHAPTER XXXIX. END OF LUTHER'S LIFE pages 341-386
1. THE FLIGHT FROM WITTENBERG.
His depression gets the better of him and he leaves the town " for ever." Change of air sweetens his temper and he returns and resumes his work with new ardour . pages 341-351
2. LAST TROUBLES AND CARES.
Quarrels with the Swiss and with New Believers nearer home ; with the lawyers regarding clandestine marriages ; the State proves a cause of vexation on account of its inter ference in matters which concern the preachers. Luther's fears for the future ; encroachments of human reason ; the coming collapse of morals. .... pages 351-369
3. LUTHER'S DEATH AT EISLEBEN (1546).
Thoughts of death. His last visit to Mansfeld, to act as arbitrator between the Counts. The versions of his last moments ....... pages 370-381
4. IN THE WORLD or LEGEND.
The tale of Luther's suicide, of the disappearance of his body, etc. Who was responsible for the habit of concocting such stories . .... pages 381-386
CHAPTER XL. AT THE GRAVE . . . pages 387-462
1. LUTHER'S FAME AMONG THE FRIENDS HE LEFT BEHIND.
Extracts from the panegyrics and early biographies ; medals struck in his honour ; his epitaphs . . pages 387-394
2. LUTHER'S MEMORY AMONG THE CATHOLICS. THE QUESTION
OF His GREATNESS.
Luther's defiance of the whole world, whilst evoking their wonder, failed to secure the admiration of Catholics. Whether Luther's undoubted strength of will makes of him
viii CONTENTS
a " great man." The part played by other factors in the movement he inaugurated .... pages 394—407
3. LUTHER'S FATE IN THE FIRST STRUGGLES FOR HIS SPIRITUAL
HERITAGE.
Defeat of the Schmalkalden Leaguers. Osiandric, Majorite, Adi aphoristic, Synergistic and Cryptocalvinist controversies . . . • . . . . pages 407-423
4. MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF THE Two CAMPS. GROWING
STRENGTH OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
The Lutherans are induced to adopt the Formula of Concord as a counterblast against the Council of Trent. Catholic theology benefits by the new controversies ; the Church's religious life is deepened ; progress in catechetical instruction, in matters educational, Bible-study and Church-history . . .... pages 423-439
5. LUTHER AS DESCRIBED BY THE OLDEN " ORTHODOX "
LUTHERANS.
Their "mediaeval" attitude. Luther the "Prophet of the Germans," a New Elias and John the Baptist . pages 440-444
6. LUTHER AS SEEN BY THE PIETISTS AND RATIONALISTS.
Each in their own way make of Luther their forerunner and breathe into him their own ideals . . pages 444-448
7. THE MODERN PICTURE OF LUTHER.
The Romanticists ; liberal theologians ; independent historians ; the Janus-Luther, with one face looking back on the Middle Ages and the other turned to the coming world. Ritschl, E. M. Arndt. Luther the hero of Kultur ? Hous ton S. Chamberlain's picture of the " Political Luther." Conclusion . . . . . . pages 449-462
XLI. APPENDIX I. LUTHER'S WRITINGS AND THE EVENTS OF THE DAY, ARRANGED IN CHRONO LOGICAL ORDER . . . . . pages 465-495
XLIT. APPENDIX II. ADDITIONS AND EMENDATIONS
pages 496-516 1-2. LUTHER'S VISIT TO ROME.
The Scala Santa ; the General Confession : Oldecop's account of Luther's petition to be secularised ; the outcome for the Order of Luther's visit to Rome . . pages 496-497
3. LUTHER'S CONCEPTION OF "OBSERVANCE " AND HIS CONFLICT
WITH HIS BROTHER FRIARS .... pages 497-501
4. ATTACK UPON THE " SELF-RIGHTEOUS " . . pages 501-503
5. THE COLLAPSE OF THE AUGUSTINIAN CONGREGATION pages 503-504
6. THE TOWER INCIDENT . . . . . pages 504-510
7. THE INDULGENCE-THESES . . « . page 510
CONTENTS
IX
8. THE TEMPTATIONS AT THE WARTBURG . . . page 511
9. PRAYER AT THE WARTBURG .... pages 511-512
10. LUTHER'S STATE DURING HIS STAY AT THE COBURG . page 512
11. LUTHER'S MORAL CHARACTER . . . . pages 512-513
12. LUTHER'S VIEWS ON LIES . , pages 513-515
13. LUTHER'S LACK OP THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT . pages 515-516
14. Notes : Pope Alexander VI " the Marana " ; from Bishop
Maltitz's letters to Bishop Fabri . . . . page 516
General Index to the six volumes
pages 517-551
VOL. VI
SURVEY OF LUTHER'S WORK. HIS AILMENTS. HIS DEATH
VI.— B
LUTHER
CHAPTER XXXV (Continued) LUTHER'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SOCIETY AND EDUCATION
3. Elementary Schools and Higher Education Luther's Appeals on Behalf of the Schools
IN a pamphlet of 1524, on the need of establishing schools, Luther spoke some emphatic and impressive words.1
There could be nothing worse, he declared, than to abuse and neglect the precious souls of the little ones ; even a hundred florins was not too much to pay to make a good Christian of a boy ; it was the duty of the magistrates and authorities to whom the welfare of the town was confided to see to this, the parents being so often either not pious or worthy enough to perform this office, or else too unlearned or too much hampered by their business or the cares of their household. The well-being of a town was not to be gauged by its fine buildings, but rather by the learning, good sense, and honourable behaviour of the burghers ; given this the other sort of prosperity would never be lack ing. Luther dwells on the urgent need of studying languages and sees an act of Providence in the dispersion of the Greeks whose presence in the West had been the means of giving a fresh stimulus to the study of Greek, and even to the cultivation of other languages. Without schools and learn ing no men would be found qualified to rule in the ecclesi astical or even in the secular sphere ; even the management of the home and the duties of women to their families and households called for some sort of instruction.2
1 " An die Radherrn aller Stedte deutschea Lands das sie Christl. Schulen auffrichten und halten sollen." " Werke," Weim. ed., 15, p. 9 ft'. ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 170 ff.
2 Weim. ed., 15, pp. 30, 34, 35 f. ; Erl. ed., pp. 22, 173, 178, 180 f.
4 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
Owing to their innate leaning to savagery the German people, above all others, could ill afford to dispense with the discipline of the school. All the world calls us " German beasts " ; too long have we been German beasts, let us therefore now learn to use our reason.1
He speaks of the educational value not only of languages but of history, mathematics and the other arts, but above all of religion, which, now that the true Evangel is preached, must take root in the hearts of the young, but which could not be maintained unless care was taken to ensure a supply of future preachers.
He gives an excellent answer to the objection : " What is the good of going to school unless we are thinking of becom ing parsons ? " The wholesale secularisation of ecclesi astical benefices had resulted in a great falling off in the number of scholars, the parents often thinking too much of the worldly prospects of their children. Luther, however, points out that even the secular offices deserve to be filled with men of education. " How useful and called for it is, and how pleasing to God, that the man destined to govern, whether as Prince, lord, councillor or otherwise, should be learned and capable of performing his duty as becomes a Christian."2 te-«
• I't *
This booklet, which is of great interest for the history of the schools, was translated into Latin in the same year by Vincentius Obsopceus (Koch) and published at Hagenau, with a preface by Melanchthon.3 It also became widely known throughout Germany, being frequently reprinted in the original tongue. As the title shows, Luther addressed himself in the work " To the Councillors of all the town ships," viz. even to the Catholic magistrates among whom he stood in disfavour. He declares that it was a question of the " salvation and happiness of the whole German land. And were I to hit upon something good, even were I myself a fool, it would be no disgrace to anyone to listen to me."4
1 In such passages " beast " more often merely implies stupidity ; cp. " bete " in French. Hence it would be a mistake to think that Luther is here crediting the Germans with any actual " bestiality." Cp. below, p. 15 and above, vol. v., p. 534, n. 2.
2 Weim. ed., 15, p. 44 ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 189. 8 " De constituendis scholis," etc.
4 Weim. ed., 15, p. 53 ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 198.
THE SCHOOLS 5
In thus calling for the founding of schools Luther was but reiterating the admonition contained in his writing " To the German Nobility." Such exhortations were always sure to win applause, and served to recommend not only his own person but even, in the case of many, his undertaking as a whole.1 In his rules for the administration of the poor-box at Leisnig Luther had been mindful of the claims of the schools, nor did he forget them in the other regulations he drew up later. In his sermons, too, he also dwelt repeatedly on the needs of the elementary schools ; when complaining of the decay of charity he is wont to instance the straits, not only of the parsonages and the poor, but also of the schools. " Only reckon up and count on your fingers what here [at Wittenberg] and elsewhere those who bask in the Evangel give and do for it, and see whether, were it not for us who are still living, there would remain a single preacher or student. . . . Are there then no poor scholars who ought to be studying and exercising themselves in the Word of God ? " But " hoarding and scraping " are now the rule, so that hardly a town can be found " that collects enough to keep a schoolmaster or parson."2
Many wealthy towns had, however, to Luther's great joy, taken in hand the cause of the schools. Their efforts were to prove very helpful to the new religious system.
In the same year that the above writing appeared steps were taken atlMagdeburg for the promotion of education, and Cruciger, ^Luther's own pupil, was summoned from Wittenberg to assume the direction. Melanchthon and Luther repaired to Eisleben in 1525, where Count Albert of Mansfeld had founded a Grammar School. In some towns the Councillors carried out Luther's proposals, in others, where the town-council was opposed to the innovators and their schools, the burghers " set at naught the Council," as Luther relates, and erected " schools and parsonages " ; in other words, they established schools as the best means to further the new Evangel.3 At Nuremberg Melanchthon,
1 A schoolmaster of Zwickau remarked on the writing to the Councillors : " With this pamphlet Luther will win back the favour of many of his opponents." Kostlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 548.
3 Erl. ed., H2, pp. 390, 389.
^ 3 Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 519 f. ; Erl. ed., 172, p. 381, in "Das man Kinder," etc. The object of furthering the Evangel which is set forth in both this and the former writing is indicated by the very title of the first writing with its reference to " Christian " schools.
6 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
a zealous promoter of education, exerted himself for the foundation of a " Gymnasium " which was to serve as a model of the new humanistic schools of the Evangelicals, and which was generously provided for by the town. May 6, 1526, saw the opening of this new school. Learned masters were appointed, for instance, Melanchthon's friend Camer- arius, the poet Eobanus Hessus and the humanist Michael Roting. In 1530 Luther speaks of it in words meant to flatter the Nurembergers as " a fine, noble school," for which the " very best men " had been selected and appointed. He even tells all Germany, that " no University, not even that of Paris itself, was ever so well provided in the way of lecturers " ; it was in no small measure owing to this school that " Nuremberg now shone throughout the whole of Germany like a sun, compared with which others were but moon and stars."1
Yet it was certain disagreeable happenings at Nuremberg itself which led him to write in 1530 his second booklet in favour of the schools. In the flourishing commercial city there were many wealthy burghers who refused to send their children to the " Gymnasium," thinking that, instead of learning ancient languages, they would be more usefully occupied in acquiring other elements of knowledge more essential to the mercantile calling ; by so doing they had raised a certain feeling against the new school. Many were even disposed to scoff at all book-learning and roundly declared, as Luther relates, " If my son knows how to read and reckon then he knows quite enough ; we now have plenty German books," etc.2
In July of the above year, Luther, in the loneliness of the Coburg, penned a sermon having for its title " That children must be kept at school." The sermon grew into a lengthy work ; Luther himself was, later on, to bewail its long- windedness.3 This writing, taken with that of 1524, supplies the gist of Luther's teaching with regard to the schools.
1 Ib., p. 518=379, in the writing mentioned below. See, how ever, below, p. 36. 2 Ib., p. 519=380.
3 " Predigt, das man Kinder zur Schulen halten solle." Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 508 ff. ; Erl. ed., 172, p. 378 ff. As early as July 5, 1530, Luther wrote from the Coburg to Melanchthon that he was " medita ting " this writing and adds : " Mirum, si etiam anteafui tarn verbosus, ut nunc fieri mihi videor, nisi senectutis ista garrulitas sit." It is curious to hear him already speaking of his old age. When sending the finished work to Melanchthon on Aug. 24, 1530, he wrote : " Mitto hie sermonem
THE SCHOOLS 7
In the preface, printed before the body of the work, he dedicates the writing to the Nuremberg " syndic " or town-clerk, Lazarus Spengler, an ardent promoter of the new teaching. A town like Nuremberg, he there says, " must surely contain more men than merchants, and also others who can do more than merely reckon, or read German books. German books are principally intended for the common people to read at home ; but for preaching, governing and administering justice in both ecclesiastical and temporal sphere all the arts and languages in the world are not sufficient." Already in the preface he inveighs against those who assert that arithmetic and a knowledge of German were quite enough : These small-minded worshippers of Mammon failed to take into consideration what was essential for " ruling " ; both the civil and the ecclesiastical office would suffer under such a system. l
In this writing his style follows his mood, being now powerful, now popular and not seldom wearisome. He dwells longest on the spiritual office, expressing his fear, that, should the lack of interest in the schools become general, and the people continue so niggardly in providing for their support, there would result such a spiritual famine with regard to the Word of God, that ten villages would be left in the charge of a single parson. Passing on to the secular office he points out how the latter upholds the " temporal, fleeting peace, life and law. ... It is an excellent gift of God Who also instituted and appointed it and Who demands its preservation." Of this office "It is the work and glory that it makes wild beasts into men and keeps them in this state. . . . Do you not think that if the poor birds and beasts could speak and were able to see the action of the secular rule among men they would say : Dear fellows, you are no men but gods compared with us ; how secure you sit and live, enjoying all good things, whereas we are not safe from each other for a single hour as regards our life, our home or our food."2
" Such rule cannot continue, but must go to rack and ruin unless the law [the Roman law and the law of the land] is main tained. And what is to maintain it ? Fists and blustering cannot do so, but only brains and books ; we must learn to understand the wisdom and justice of our secular rule." Speaking of the lawyers' office for which the young must prepare themselves, he groups under it the " chancellors, clerks, judges, advocates, notaries and all others who are concerned with the law, not to speak of the great Johnnies who sport the title of Hofrat."3 On the calling of the physician he only touches lightly, showing that this "useful, consoling and health-giving" profession
de acholis, plane Lutheranum et Lutheri verbositate nihil auctorem suum negans, sed plane referens. Sic sum. Idem erit libellus de clavibua " (" Brief wechsel," 8, pp. 80, 204). The latter remark certainly applies to his long writing, " Von den Schliisseln," 1530 (Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 428 ff. ; Erl. ed., 31, p. 126 ff.).
1 Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 519 ; Erl. ed., 172, p. 381.
2 P. 554=401, 402. 3 Pp. 556, 559=403, 404.
8 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
demands the retention of the Latin schools, short of which it must fall into decay.
The following hint was a practical one : Seeing that, in Saxony alone, about 4000 men of learning were needed — what with chaplains, schoolmasters and readers — those who wished to study had good prospects of " great honours and emoluments since two Princes and three townships were all ready to fight for the services of one learned man." He urges that assistance should be given to poor parents out of the Church property so as to enable them to send their children to school, and that the rich should make foundations for this purpose.
In this writing, as in that of 1524, he addresses himself to the secular authorities and even demands that they should compel their subjects to send their children to school in order that the supply of capable men might not fail in the future. I consider, he says, " that the authorities are bound to force those under them to see to the schooling of their children, more particularly those just spoken of [the more gifted] ; for it is undoubtedly their duty to see to the upkeep of the above-mentioned offices and callings." If in time of war they could compel their subjects to render assistance and resist the enemy, much more had they the right to coerce them in respect of the children, seeing that this was a war against the devil who wished to despoil the land and the townships of able men, so as to be able " to cheat and delude them as he pleased."1
As regards the question whether all children were to be forced to go to school, in this writing Luther does not speak of any universal compulsion ; only " when the authorities see a capable lad "2 does he wish coercion to be applied to the parents. In his first writing on the schools likewise, he had not advocated universal compulsion but had merely pointed out that it was " becoming " that the authorities should interfere where the parents neglected their duty ;3 he does not say how they are to " interfere," but merely suggests that one or two " schoolmasters " should be pro vided whose salary should not be grudged.
" Hence it is incorrect," rightly remarks Kawerau, " to represent Luther as the harbinger of universal compulsory education."4
Fr. Lambert of Avignon, in his ecclesiastical regulations dating from 1526, indeed sought to establish national schools throughout Hesse, but his proposals were never
1 P. 586=420 f. 2 P. 587=421.
3 /&., 15, p. 34=22, p. 178.
4 " Reformation und Gegenroformation " (VV. Moller, " Lehrb. der KG."), 33, p. 437, No. 2.
THE SCHOOLS 9
enforced. It was only at the beginning of the 17th century that Wolfgang Ratke (Ratichius, fl635), a pedagogue educated in the Calvinistic schools, established the principle of universal education which then was incorporated in the educational regulations of Weimar in 1619.1 But the Thirty Years' War put an end to these attempts, and it was only in the 18th century that the principle of compulsory State education secured general acceptance, and then, too, owing chiefly to non-Lutheran influences.
Before entering further into the details of Luther's educational plans we must cast a glance at a factor which seems to permeate both the above writings.
Polemical Trend of Luther's Pedagogics
If we seek to characterise both the writings just spoken of we find that they amount to an appeal called forth by the misery of those times for some provision to be made to ensure a supply of educated men for the future. Frederick Paulsen describes them, particularly the earlier one, as nothing more than a " cry for help, wrung from Luther by the sudden, general collapse of the educational system which followed on the ecclesiastical upheaval."2 They were not dictated so much by a love for humanistic studies as such or by the wish to further the interests of learning in Germany, as by the desire to fill the secular-government berths with able, " Christian " men, and, above all, to provide preachers and pastors for the work Luther had commenced and for the struggle against Popery. The schools themselves were un obtrusively to promote the new Evangel amongst the young and in the home. Learning, according to Luther, as a Protestant theologian expressed it, was to enter " into the service of the Evangel and further its right understanding " ; " the religious standpoint alone was of any real interest to him."3
Melanchthon's attitude to the schools was more broad- minded. To some extent his efforts supplied what was wanting in Luther.4 His object was the education of the people, whereas, in Luther's eyes, the importance of the
1 Cp. Kawerau, ib,
2 " Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts," etc., I2, 1896, p. 197. 8 See below, p. 20, n. 3. 4 See above, vol. iii., p. 361.
10 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
schools chiefly lay in their being '* seminaria ecclesiarum," as he once calls them. With him their aim was too much the mere promoting of his specific theological interests, to the " preservation of the Church."1
According to Luther the first and most important reason for promoting the establishment of schools, was, as he points out to the " Councillors of all the Townships," to resist the devil, who, the better to maintain his dominion over the German lands, was bent on thwarting the schools ; " if we want to prick him on a tender spot then we may best do so by seeing that the young grow up in the knowledge of God, spreading the Word of God and teaching it to others."2 " The other [reason] is, as St. Paul says, that we receive not the grace of God in vain, nor neglect the accepted time." The " donkey-stables and devil-schools " kept by monks and clergy had now seen their day ; but, now that the " darkness " has been dispelled by the " Word of God," we have the " best and most learned of the youths and men, who, equipped with languages and all the arts, can prove of great assistance." " My dear, good Germans, make use of God's grace and His Word now you have it ! For know this, the Word of God and His grace is indeed here."3
In many localities preachers of the new faith were in request, moreover, many of the older clergy, who had passed over to Luther's side, had departed this life or had been removed by the Visitors on account of their incapacity or moral shortcomings. Those who had replaced them were often men of no education whatever. The decline of learning gave rise to many difficulties. Schoolmasters were welcomed not only as simple ministers but, as we have heard Luther declare, even as the candidates best fitted for the post of superintendent.4 How frequently people of but slight education were appointed pastors is plain from the lists of those ordained at Wittenberg from 1537 onwards ; amongst these we find men of every trade : clerks, printers, weavers, cobblers, tailors, and even one peasant. Seven years later, when the handi craftsmen had disappeared, we constantly find sextons and schoolmasters being entrusted with the ministerial office.5
1 " Colloq.," ed. Bindseil, 2, p. 15 : " Scholce crescentes verbi Dei aunt fructus," says Luther, " et ecclesiarum seminaria " ; if these are furthered, then, so God will, things will be in a better case (in Reben- stock : " Hcec si promoveantur, tune Deo volente, nostrum inceptum meliorem habebit progressum "). 76., p. 14 : Although the work of the schools was performed quietly, " attamen magnum fructum exhibent, ex quibus ecclesiae conservatio consistit . . . Inde collaborators et ludi- magistri vocantur ad ministerium ecclesice" — Cp. Mathesius, " Tisch- reden " (Kroker), p. 208 : " Wretched parsonages are not the place for schoolmasters " ; they deserve to be superintendents and to rule over others. /&., p. 213 on the importance of the schools.
a Weim. ed., 15, p. 29 f. ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 173.
3 /&., p. 35 f.= 175. * See also above, n. 1.
5 Proofs in G. Rietschel, " Luther und die Ordination," 2, 1889. Cp. Paulsen, p. 203.
THE SCHOOLS 11
This sad state of things must be carefully kept in mind if we are to understand the ideas which chiefly inspired the above writings, and as these have not so far been sufficiently empha sised we may be permitted to make some reference to them.
" We must have men," says Luther in his first writing, viz. that addressed to the councillors, " men to dispense to us God's Word and the sacraments and to watch over the souls of the people. But whence are we to get them if the schools are allowed to fall to ruin and other more Christian ones are not set up ? "l " Christendom has always need of such prophets to study and interpret the Scriptures, and, when the call comes, to conduct controversy."2 Similar appeals occur even more frequently in the other writing, viz. that dedicated by Luther to his friend at Nuremberg. Already in his first writing, Luther, as the ghostly counsellor of Germany " appointed " in Christ's name, boldly faces all other teachers, telling the Catholics, that what he was seeking was merely the " happiness and salvation " of the Fatherland.3 In the second he expressly states that it is to all the German lands that he their "prophet" is speaking : "My dear Germans, I have told you often enough that you have heard your prophet. God grant that we may obey His Word."4 So entirely does he identify the interests of his Church with those of the schools. Well might those many Germans who did not hold with him — and at that time Luther was an excommunicate outlaw — well might they have asked themselves with astonishment whence he had the right to address them as though he were the representative and mouthpiece of the whole of Germany. Such exhortations have, however, their root in his usual ideas of religion and in the anxiety caused by the urgent needs of the time.
At the Coburg the indifference, coldness and avarice of his followers appears to him in an even darker light than usual. He well sees that if the schools continue to be neglected as they have been hitherto the result will be a mere " pig sty," a " hideous, savage horde of * Tatters ' and Turks." Hence he fulminates against the ingratitude displayed towards the Evangel and against the stinginess which, though it had money for everything, had none to spare for the schools and the parsons ; the imagery to which he has recourse leaves far behind that of the Old Testa ment Prophets.
Here we have the real Luther whom, as he himself admits, though in a different sense, stands revealed in this writing penned at the Coburg. 6 " Is this not enough to arouse God's wrath ? . . . Verily it would be no wonder were God to open wide the doors and windows of hell and rain and hail on us nothing but devils, or were He to send fire and brimstone down from heaven and plunge us all into the abyss of hell like Sodom and Gomorrha . . . for they were not one- tenth as wicked as Germany is now."6
1 Weim. ed., 15, p. 47 f. ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 193.
2 76., p. 40=185. 3 Ib., p. 53=198.
4 Ib., 30, 2, p. 588= 172, p. 421 f. 6 See above, p. 6, ri. 3.
• Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 582 ; Erl. ed., 172, p. 418.
12 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
Has then Christ, the Son of God, deserved this of us, he asks, that so many care nothing for the schools and parsonages, and " even dissuade the children from becoming ministers, that this office may speedily perish, and the blood and passion of Christ be no longer of any avail."1 Here again his chief reason for maintain ing the schools is his anxiety : " What is otherwise to become of the ghostly office and calling."2 Only after he has considered this question from all sides and demonstrated that his Church's edifice stands in need not merely of " worked stones " but also of " rubble," i.e. both of clever men and of others less highly gifted,3 does he come in the second place to the importance of having learned men even in the secular office.
He had begun this writing with an allusion to the devil, viz. to " the wiles of tiresome Satan against the holy Evangel " ; he also concludes it in the same vein, speaking of the " tiresome devil," who secretly plots against the schools and thereby against the salvation of both town and country.4
The author goes at some length into the question of languages and declares that the main reason for learning them was a religious one.
Languages enable us "to understand Holy Scripture," he says, " this was well known to the monasteries and universities of the past, hence they had always frowned on the study of languages " ; the devil was afraid that languages would make a hole " which afterwards it would not be easy for him to plug." But the providence of God has outreached him, for, by " making over Greece to the Turks and sending the Greeks into exile, their language was spread abroad and an impetus was given even to the study of other tongues." And now, thanks to the languages, the Gospel has been restored to its " earlier purity." Hence, for the sake of the Bible and the Word of God, let us hark back to the languages. His excellent observations on the importance of the study of languages for those in secular authority, though perfectly honest, hold merely a secondary place. The chief use of the languages is as a weapon against the Papacy. " The dearer the Evangel is to us, the more let us hold fast to the languages ! "
So anxious is he to see the future schools thoroughly " Chris tian," i.e. Evangelical and all devoted to the service of his cause, that he expressly states that otherwise he " would rather that not a single boy learnt anything but remained quite dumb." Hence the earlier " universities and monasteries " must be made an end of. Their way of teaching and living " is not the right one for the young." " It is my earnest opinion, prayer and wish that these donkey-stables and devil-schools should either sink into the abyss or else be transformed into Christian schools. But now that God has bestowed His grace upon us so richly and provided us with so many well able to teach and bring up the young, we are actually in danger of flinging the grace of God to the winds."
1 Ib., p. 584=419. 2 P. 530=387.
3 Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 456 ; Erl. ed., 172, p. 398.
4 P. 586=421.
THE SCHOOLS 13
" I am of opinion that Germany has never heard so much of God's Word as now. . . . God's Word is a streaming downpour, the like of which must not be expected again."1
Hence the two writings differ but little from his usual polemical and hortatory works. They do not make of Luther the " father of the national schools," as he has been erroneously termed, because, what he was after was not the real education of the masses but something rather different ; still less do the booklets, with their every page reeking of the Word of God which he preached, make him the father of the modern undenominational schools.2
In fact, elementary schools as such have scarcely any place in these writings. What concerns him is rather the Latin grammar schools, and only as an afterthought does he passingly allude to the other schools in which children receive their first grounding.3
Luther's standpoint as to the Church's need of Grammar Schools is always the same, even when he speaks of them in the Table-Talk.
" When we are dead," he says for instance, " where will
1 76., 15, p. 36f.= 22, p. 181 f.
2 Cp. F. M. Schiele, in H. Delbriick, " Preuss. Jahrbiicher," 132, 1908, Art. " Luther und das Luthertum in ihrer Bedeutung fur die Gesch. der Schule und der Erziehung," p. 381 ff. P. 386 : " The principal motive with Melanchthon ... is the love of learning, Luther's motive [in the above writings] is to educate leaders for Christendom who shall deliver her from the unholy abominations of the olden days. . . . With this is connected the fact that for him ' government,' whether exercised by the sovereign, the bishop, or the father of the family, is a work of charity." P. 384 : According to Luther " the erection of schools must always remain a matter which concerns the Christian authorities." To those historians of education, who, according to Schiele, are wont to ask : " Was not Luther the father of the national schools ? " he replies : " The matter wears a different aspect when viewed in the light of history." He roundly describes as fabulous the supposed foundation of the national schools by Luther. " Nor do we find in Luther's schemes for the organisation of education the slightest trace of any tendency to the secularisation of the schools " (pp. 384, 381 f.). The last words are aimed at the friends of the secularised or undenominational schools of the present day.
3 In the Introduction to the Weimar edition of the writing " An die Radherrn " (15, 1899, p. 9 ff.) we read : " It is very characteristic of the reformer's attitude to the question of education in his day that he does not, as we might expect, give the preference to these German elementary schools in which we can see the beginnings of the national schools, but, whilst admitting their claims, insists emphatically on the need of a classic training." " To characterise the writing in question as ' of the utmost importance for the development of our elementary- school system ' (" Mon. Germ. Paedag." Ill, iii.) is to be unfair to it."
14 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
others be found to take our place unless there are schools ? For the sake of the Churches we must have Christian schools and maintain them."1—44 When the schools multiply, things are going well and the Church stands firm."2 — 4t By means of such cuttings and saplings is the Church sown and propagated."— "The schools are of great advantage in that they undoubtedly preserve the Churches."3
44 Hence a reformation of the schools and universities is also called for," so he writes in a memorandum, 4 immediately after having declared, that 4C it is necessary to have good and pious preachers ; all will depend on men who must be educated in the schools and universities."6
For this reason, viz. on account of the preparation they furnished, he even has a kind word for the schools of former days.
He recalls to mind, that, even in Popery 44 the schools supplied parsons and preachers." 4t In the schools the little boys learnt at least the Our Father and the Creed and the Church was wonderfully preserved by means of the tiny schools."6 — Of a certain hymn he remarks, that it was 44 very likely written and kept by some good schoolmaster or parson. The schools were indeed the all-important factor in the Church and the 4 ecclesia ' of the parson."7
1 Erl. ed., 62, p. 307. a Ib., p. 306.
3 Ib., p. 297 ; cp. p. 289.
4 Weim. ed., 19, p. 445 ; Erl. ed., 262, p. 7 : " Proposal how permanent order may be established in the Christian community."
6 Compare with this Luther's letter to Johann, Elector of Saxony (Nov. 22, 1526), advocating the Visitation ; Erl. ed., 53, p. 386 j" Briefe," 5, p. 406). Of the final articje of the Instructions for the Visitors (1538), which refers to the schools, Kostlin-Kawerau says, 2, p. 37 : " The chief point kept in view here, as in Luther's exhorta tions referred to above [in his writing to the Councillors], was the need of bringing up people sufficiently skilled to teach in the churches and to be capable also of ruling. Hence the regulations prescribed the erection of schools in which Latin should be taught."
6 Mathesius, " Tischreden," p. 311, a conversation dating from 1542-3 noted down by Heydenreich.
7 Ib., p. 332. It may be mentioned here that amongst the German universities, Erfurt, where he had received his own education, always held a high place in his memory. " The University of Erfurt," he once said in later years, " enjoyed so high a reputation that all others in comparison were looked upon as apologies for universities — but now," so he adds sadly, " its glory and majesty are a thing of the past, and the university seems quite dead." He extols the pomp and festivities that accompanied the conferring of the mastership and doctorate, and wishes that such solemnities were the rule everywhere. Erl. ed., 62, p. 287.
THE SCHOOLS 15
Luther's Educational Plans
When, in his exhortations, Luther so warmly advocated the study of Latin and of languages generally, he was merely keeping to the approved traditional lines. Although he values ancient languages chiefly as a means for the better understanding of Scripture, he is so prepossessed in their favour in " worldly matters " that he even praises Latin at the expense of German. He is particularly anxious that Latin works should be read ; among themselves the boys were to speak Latin. Recommending the study of tongues, he says : " If we make such a mistake, which God forbid, as to give up the study of languages, we shall not only lose the Gospel but come to such straits as to be unable to read or write aright either Latin or German." The education of earlier days had not only led men away from the Gospel owing to the neglect of languages, but " the wretched people became mere brutes, unable to read or write either Latin or German correctly, nay, had almost lost the use of their reason." It was statements such as these which drew from Friedrich Paulsen the exclamation : " Hence Christianity and educa tion, nay, even sound common sense itself, all depend on the knowledge of languages ! 5?1
Well founded as were Luther's demands for a Latin education, yet we find in him a notable absence of dis crimination between schools and schools.
Even in the preparatory schools he was anxious to see the study of languages introduced, and that for the girls too. Boys and girls, he says, ought to be instructed " in tongues and other arts and subjects." He was of opinion, that, in this way, it would be possible from the very first to pick out those best fitted to pursue the study of languages and to become later "schoolmasters, schoolmistresses or preachers."2 He even appeals to the example of olden Saints such as Agnes, Agatha and Lucy when urging that the more talented girls should receive a grounding in languages.3 " It would undoubtedly have been quite enough had the less ambitious children been taught merely to reckon, and to read and write German." " Luther's action in having as
1 " Gtesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts," I2, p. 198. 8 Weim ed., 15, p. 46 f. ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 192. 8 Cp. Kdstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 37.
16 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
many children of the people as possible taught languages . . . and his warfare against the use of German in the schools, whether in the towns, the villages, or the hamlets, was all very unpractical. . . . He had come to the con clusion that German schools, for one reason or another, were unsuited to be nurseries for the Church (' seminaria ecclesice '), hence his effort to transplant into the Latin grammar schools every sapling on which he could lay hands."1
The injunctions appended to Melanchthon's Visitation rules (1538), which were sanctioned and approved of by Luther, lay such stress on the teaching of languages that the humbler schools were bound to suffer. When dealing with " the schools " their only object seems to be the " upbringing of persons fit to teach in the churches and to govern." And this aim, moreover, is pursued onesidedly enough, for we read : " The schoolmasters are in the first place to be diligent to teach the children only Latin, not German, or Greek, or Hebrew, as some have hitherto done, thus overburdening the poor children's minds." The regulations then proceed to prescribe in detail the studies to be undertaken in the lowest form : "In order that the children may get hold of many Latin words, they are to be made to learn some words every evening, as was the way in the schools in former days." After the children have learnt to spell out the handbook containing the " Alphabet, the Our Father, Creed and other prayers they are to be set to Donatus and Cato ... so that they may thus learn a number of Latin words and gain a certain readiness of speech (* copia dicendi ')." Apart from this the lowest form is to be taught only writing and " music."
The next class was to learn grammar (needless to say Latin grammar) and to be exercised in ^Esop's Fables, the " Pedologia " of Mosellanus and the " Colloquia " of Erasmus, such of the latter being selected " as are useful for children and not improper." " Once the children have learnt ^Esop they are to be given Terence, which they must learn by heart." There is no mention made here of any selection, this possibly being left to the teacher ; in the case of Plautus, who was to follow Terence, this is expressly enjoined. — Of the religious instruction we read : Seeing it is necessary to teach the children the beginnings of a Godly, Christian life, " the schoolmaster is to catechise the whole [2nd] class, making the children recite one after the other the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments." The school master was to " explain " these and also to instil into the children such points as were essential for living a good life, such as the
1 Schiele (above, p. 13, n. 2), p. 389, where he adds : " What the children needed to fit them for household work they could as a matter of fact have learnt better from their parents or at the dame-school than in the Councillors' schools which Luther so extols." Cp. above, p. 7, Luther's statement : " German books are principally intended for the common people to read at home," etc.
THE SCHOOLS 17
" fear of God, faith and good works." The schoolmaster was not to get the children into the habit of " abusing monks or others, as many incompetent masters do." Finally, it was also laid down that those Psalms which exhort to the " fear of God, faith and good works " were to be learnt by heart, especially Psalms cxii., xxxiv., cxxviii., cxxv., cxvii., cxxxiii. (cxi., xxxiii., cxxvii., cxxiv., cxxvi., cxxxii.), the Gospel of St. Matthew was also to be ex plained and perhaps likewise the Epistles of Paul to Timothy, the 1st Epistle of John and the Book of Proverbs.
In the 3rd class, in addition to grammar, versification, dialec tics and rhetoric had to be studied, the boys being exercised in Virgil and Cicero (the " Officia " and " Epistolce familiares "). " The boys are also to be made to speak Latin and the school masters themselves are as far as possible to speak nothing but Latin with them in order thus to accustom and encourage them in this practice."1
In his two appeals for the schools in 1524 and 1530 Luther is less explicit in his requirements than the regulations for the Visitation. According to him, apart from the language?, it is the text of Scripture which must form the basis of all the instruction.
Holy Scripture, especially the Gospel, was to be every where " the chief and main object of study." " Would to God that every town had also a school for girls where little maids might hear the Gospel for an hour a day, either in German or in Latin. . . . Ought not every Christian at the age of nine or ten to be acquainted with the whole of the Gospel ? Young folk throughout Christendom are pining away and being pitiably ruined for want of the Gospel, in which they ought always to be instructed and exercised."
" I would not advise anyone to send his child where Holy Scripture is not the rule. Where the Word of God is not con stantly studied everything must needs be in a state of corruption."2
In the event, the Bible, together with Luther's Catechism which had to be committed to memory, and the hymn-book, became the chief manuals in the Lutheran schools. On these elements a large portion of the young generation of Germany was brought up.
For the study of languages Luther, like Melanchthon, recom mended the " Disticha " ascribed to Cato and vEsop's Fables.
26, pp. '< >2; Erl.
2 Ib., 6, p. 462 ; Erl. ed., 21, p. 349 f., " An den Adel." VI.— c
18 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
"It is by the special mercy of God," he says, " that Cato's booklet and the Fables of ^Esop have been preserved in the schools."1 We shall describe elsewhere the efforts he himself made to expurgate the editions of ^Esop which had become corrupted by additions offensive to good morals. Various Latin classics which Humanists were wont to put in the hands of the scholars he characterised in his Table-Talk as unsuitable for school use. " It would be well that the books of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus and also Virgil's ' Priapeia ' were weeded out of the land and the schools, banished and expelled, for they contain coarse and shameless things such as the young cannot study with out grievous harm."2 Of the Roman writers (with the Greeks he is much less at home) he extols Cicero, Terence and Virgil as useful and improving. As a whole, however, Luther always remained " at heart a stranger to true Humanism. . . . Though not altogether inappreciative of elegance of style, he is far from displaying the enthusiasm of the Humanists."3 Although he shows himself fairly well acquainted with the writings of the three authors just mentioned, and though he owed this education to his early training, yet, in his efforts to belittle the olden schools, he complains, that " no one had taught him to read the poets and historians," but, that, on the other hand, he had been obliged to study the " devil's ordure and the philosophers."4
It must not be overlooked that he, like the Instructions for the Visitors, recommends that Terence and other olden dramatists should be given to the young to be read, and even acted, though, as he admits, they " sometimes contain obscenities and love stories." This advice he further emphasised in 1537 by declaring that a Protestant schoolmaster of Bautzen was in the right, when, regardless of the scandal of many, he had Terence's " Andria " performed. Luther agreed with Melanchthon in thinking that the picture of morals given in this piece was improving for the young ; also that the disclosure of the " cunning of women, particularly of light women," was instructive ; the boys would thus learn how marriages were arranged, and, after all, marriage was essential for the continuance of society : Even Holy Scrip ture contained some love stories. " Thus our people ought not to accuse these plays of immorality or declare that to read or act them was prohibited to a Christian."6
The regulations for the Protestant schools, in following Luther in this matter, merely trod in the footsteps of the older German Humanists, who had likewise placed Terence and Plautus in the hands of their pupils, On the contrary Jakob Wimpfeling, the " Teacher of Germany," was opposed to them and wished to see Terence banished from the schools in the interests of morality.
1 Erl. ed., 62, p. 458 f., " Tischreden."
2 16., p. 344.
3 Paulsen, ib., p. 204. O. Schmidt, " Luther's Bekanntschaft mit den Klassikern," Leipzig, 1883.
* " An die Radherrn," Weim. ed., 15, p. 46 ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 191 f. 5 Mathesius, " Tischreden," p. 431. Uttered in 1537 and noted by Lauterbach and Weller.
THE SCHOOLS 19
At a later date in the Catholic Grammar schools this author was on moral grounds forbidden to the more youthful pupils, and only read in excerpts.1
In his suggestions on the instruction to be given in the Latin schools (for in reality it was only of these that he was thinking) Luther classes with languages and other arts and sciences " singing, music and mathematics as a whole."2 Greek and Hebrew no less than Latin would also be in dispensable for future scholars. He further wished the authorities to establish " libraries " to further the studies ; not, however, such libraries as the olden ones, containing '; mad, useless, harmful, monkish books " — " donkey's dung introduced by the devil" — "but Holy Scripture in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and German, and any other languages in which it might have been published ; besides these the best and oldest commentaries in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and furthermore such books as served for the study of languages, for instance, the poets and orators," etc. 4i The most impor tant of all were, however, the chronicles and histories . . . for these are of wonderful utility in enabling us to understand the course of events, for the art of governing, as also for perceiving the wonderful works of God. Oh, how many fine stories we ought to have about what has been done and enacted in the German lands, of which we, sad to say, know nothing." In his appreciation of the study of history and of the proverbial philosophy of the people Luther was in advance of his day.
Owing to his polemics the judgment he passed on the olden libraries was very unjust ; the remaining traces of them and the catalogues which have been published of those that have been dispersed show that, particularly from the early days of Humanism, the better mediaeval collections of books had reached and even passed the standard Luther sets up in the matter of history and literature.
1 Cp. Janssen, " Hist, of the German People " (Engl. Trans.), 13, p. 166. — K. v. Raumer, " Gesch. der Padagogik," 1, Stuttgart, 1843, p. 272, says : " It seems to us incredible that the learning by heart and acting of plays so unchaste as those of Terence could fail to exert a bad influence on the morals of the young. ... If even the reading of Terence was questionable, how much more questionable was it when the pupils acting such plays identified themselves wholly with the events and personages of the drama." — Cp. above, vol. iii., p. 443 f., Melanchthon on the Roman condemnation of the school edition of Erasmus's " Colloquia." Luther condemned this book of his opponent in very strong language.
2 " An die Radherrn," etc., Weim. ed., 15, p. 46 ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 192.
20 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
Very modest, not to say entirely inadequate, is the amount of time Luther proposes that the children should daily spend in the schools. Of the lower schools, in which Latin was already to be taught, he says, it would be enough for " the boys to go to such a school every day for an hour or two and work the rest of their time at learning a trade, or doing whatever was required of them. ... A little girl, too, could easily find time to attend school for an hour daily and yet thoroughly perform her duties in the house." Only the " pick" of the children, those, namely, who gave good promise, were to spend " more time and longer hours " in study.1
From all the above it is plain that there is good reason for not accepting the extravagant statement that Luther's writings on education constitute the " charter of our national schools." Others have extolled him as the founder of the " Gymnasium " on account of his reference in these works to the Latin schools. But even this is scarcely true, for, in them, the author either goes beyond the field covered by the Gymnasium or else fails to reach it. The Protestant pastor, Julius Boehmer, says in the popular edition of Luther's works :2 " It will not do to regard the work ("An die Radherrn" ) as the 'Charter of the Gymnasium,' as has often been done, seeing that, as stated above, it is concerned with both the Universities and the lower-grade schools."3
As to attendance at the Universities, of which Luther also speaks, he asks the authorities to forbid the matriculation of any but the " clever ones," though among the masses " every fellow wanted a doctorate."4
What he says of the various Faculties at the Universities is also noteworthy. With the object of reforming philosophy and the Arts course he wishes that of all the writings of Aristotle, that blind heathen master, who had hitherto led astray the Universities, only the " Logica" " Rhetorica "
1 /6., p. 47=192.
2 " Martin Luthers Werke," Stuttgart und Leipzig, 1907, p. 231.
8 Before this Boehmer had said : " The importance of the lower schools, girl schools and national schools, was fully recognised. Luther's concern was, however, with higher education. ... It was not indeed his intention to promote classical studies as such, but he wished to see them harnessed to the service of the Gospel and to the furthering of its right understanding. Hence, though Luther had in view other classes besides the theologians, and though he advanced other motives in support of his plans, still it was the religious stand point which was the determining one."
4 Weim. ed., 6, p. 461 ; Erl. ed., 21, p. 350, " An den Adel."
THE SCHOOLS 21
and " Poetica " should be retained ; " the books : 4 Physi- coraw,' ' MetaphysicceJ l De anima ' and ' Ethicorum ' must be dropped " ; curiously enough these are the very works on which Melanchthon was later on to bestow so much attention. We know how hateful Aristotle was to Luther, because, in his heathen way, he teaches nothing of grace and faith, but, on the other hand, extols the natural virtues. Luther's impulsive and unmethodical mode of thought was also, it must be said, quite at variance with the logical mind of the Stagirite.
According to Luther " artistic education must be wholly rooted out as a work of the devil ; the very most that can be tolerated is the use of those works which deal with form, but even these must not be commented on or ex plained."1
" The physicians," he says, " I leave to reform their own Faculty ; I shall see myself to the lawyers and theologians ; and, first of all, I say that it would be a good thing if the whole of Canon Law from the first syllable to the last were expunged, more particularly the Decretals. We are told sufficiently in the Bible how to conduct ourselves in all matters." Secular law, so he goes on, has also become a " wilderness," and accordingly he is in favour of drastic reforms. " Of sensible rulers in addition to Holy Scripture there are plenty " ; national law and national usage ought certainly not to be subordinated to the Imperial common law, or the land " governed according to the whim of the individual. . . . Justice fetched from far afield was nothing but an oppression of the people." Theology, according to him, must above all be Biblical, though now everything is made to consist in the study of the Book of Sentences of the schoolman, Peter Lombard, and of his commentators, the Gospel in both schools and courts of justice being left " forlorn " in the dust under the bench.2
He rightly commends the Disputations, sometimes termed " circulates" held at the Universities by the students under the direction of their professor ; it pleased him well that the students should bring forward their own arguments, even though they were sometimes not sound ; for " stairs can only be ascended step by step." The Disputations, in his
1 Paulsen, " Gesch. des golehrten Unterrichts," I2, p. 185.
9 Weim. ed., 6, p. 462 ; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 347, 348, " An den Adel."
22 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
view, also accustomed young men to " reflect more dili gently on the subjects discussed."1
To conclude, we may say a few words concerning the incentives he uses when urging parents to entrust their children to the schools.
Here Luther considerably oversteps the limits. In one passage, for instance, he thinks it his right to threaten the parents with the worst punishments of hell should they refuse to allow gifted children to study, in order to place them later at the service of the pure Word of God, or of the Christian rulers, as though forsooth parents and children had no right in the sight of God to choose their own pro fession. " Tell me what hell can be deep and hot enough for such shameful wickedness as yours ? " "If you have a child who studies well, you are not free to bring him up as you please, nor to treat him as you will, but must bear in mind that you owe it to God to promote His two rules." Should the father refuse to allow the boy to become a preacher, he says, then, so far as in him lies, he was really consigning to hell all those whom the budding preacher might have assisted ; compared with such a crime against the common weal the " outbreaks of the rebellious peasants were mere child's play." This he says in a printed letter addressed in 1529 to the town commandant, Hans Metzsch of Wittenberg, which served as a prelude to his pamphlet " Das man Kinder zur Schulen halten solle."2 The writing is solely dictated by Luther's bitter annoyance at the dearth of pastors and the indifference displayed within his fold.
In this letter, as in both his works on the schools, Luther, whilst dealing with the excuses of the parents, at the same time throws some interesting sidelights on the decline in learning and its causes.
The Decline of the Schools Following in the Wake of the Innovations
In the above letter to Metzsch Luther briefly gives as follows the principal reason for the decay of learning :
1 Ib., Erl. ed., 62, p. 304 f., " Tischreden."
2 16., 63, p. 281 f. (" Briefe," 7, p. 73). Written in the middle of March, 1529, this served at the same time as a preface to the work by Justus Menius, " Oeconomia Christiana."
THE SCHOOLS 23
People were in the habit of saying, " If my son has learnt enough to gain his living then he is quite learned enough."1
The contempt for learned studies was " largely due to the strongly utilitarian temper of the age." " Owing in the first place to the flourishing state of the towns in the 13th and 14th century, and further to the influence of the great political upheaval which resulted from the discoveries and inventions of the day, a sober, practical spirit, directed solely to material gain, had been aroused throughout a wide section of the German nation. Preference was shown for the German schools where writing and reckoning were taught and which prepared children for the calling of the handicraftsman or the merchant."2 Against this tendency of the day Luther enters the lists particularly in his second work on the schools dedicated to the syndic of Nuremberg ; at the same time he deals, not in the best of tempers, with the objections advanced by the merchant and industrial classes.3 He speaks so harshly as almost to place in the same category those who refused to bring up their children " to art and learning " and those who turned them " into mere gluttons and sucking pigs, intent on food alone " (to Metzsch). " The world would thus become nothing but a pig-sty " ; these " gruesome, noxious, poisonous parents were bent on making simple belly servers of their children," etc.4
It is a question, however, whether the development of the material trend, so surprisingly rapid, with its destructive influence on study was not furthered by the religious revolu tion with which it coincided. Luther had sapped the respect which had obtained for the clerical life and for those callings which aimed at perfection, while at the same time, by belittling good works he loosened the inclinations of the purely natural man ; by his repudiation of authority he had produced an intellectual self-sufficiency or rather self-seeking, which, in the case of many, passed into mere material egotism, though, of course, Luther's work cannot be directly charged with the utilitarianism of the day.
What, however, made his revolt to contribute so greatly
1 76., p. 280.
2 Thus in the Introduction to Luther's " An die Radherrn," Weim. ed., 15, p. 9 f.
3 See above, p. 6. * Erl. ed., 63, p. 280 f.
24 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
to the decline of learning was its destruction of the wealth of clergy and monks, and its confiscation of so many livings and foundations established for educational purposes. By far the greater number of students had always consisted of such as wished to obtain positions in the Church among her secular clergy, or to become priests in some monastery. The ranks of these students had been thinned of late years now that the Catholic posts no longer existed, that the founda tions which formerly provided for the upkeep of students had disappeared and that an avalanche of calumny and abuse had descended on the monasteries, priests and monks.1 In addition to this there was the fear aroused in Catholic parents and pastors by the unhappy controversies on religion, lest the young should be infected in the higher schools these being so frequently hot-beds of the modern spirit, of hypercriticism and apostasy. Then, again, there was the distrust, springing from a similar motive, felt by the Catholic authorities for the centres of learning, and their niggardliness in making provision for them, an attitude which we meet with, for instance, in Duke George of Saxony. This was encouraged in the case of the rulers by the fear of social risings, such as they had experienced in the Peasant War, and which they laid to the charge of the new ideas on religion.
Among those favourable to Lutheranism the Wittenberg professor himself awakened a distaste for the Universities by telling them they must not allow their sons to study where Holy Scripture " did not rule " and " where the Word of God was not unceasingly studied."2 No one ever depreciated the Universities as much as Luther, who principally because their character was still Catholic, was never tired of calling them the " gates of hell," and places worse than Sodom and Gomorrha.3 Nor did he stop short at the condemnation of
1 Luther expressed this in his way as follows : Of all " the wiles of Satan " this, aimed at the holy Gospel, was perhaps the worst, for it suggested to men such dangerous ideas as these : Now that there is " no longer any hope for the monks, nuns or priestlings there is no need of learned men or of much study, but we must rather strive after food and wealth," " truly a masterpiece of diabolical art," for creating " in the German lands a wild, hideous mob of ' Tatters ' or Turks." Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 522 f. ; Erl. ed., 172, p. 383, Preface to the work on the schools (1530).
" Werke," ib., 6, p. 462=21, p. 349 f., " An den Adel."
8 The violence of the tone in which Luther speaks of the Universities in the writings which followed his "An den Adel," as the real strong-
THE SCHOOLS 25
their religious attitude. Luther's antagonism to the whole system of philosophy, which the Universities, following the example of Aristotle and the schoolmen, had been so criminal as to admit, to the liberty they allowed to crazy human reason in spiritual matters, and to their champion ship of natural truth and natural morality as the basis of the life of faith, all this, when carried to its logical con clusion, necessarily brought Lutheranism into fatal conflict with the learned institutions.
As Friedrich Paulsen points out : " Luther shared all the superstitions of the peasant in their most pronounced form ; the methods of natural science were strange to him and any scattering of the prevalent delusions he would have looked upon as an abomination."1 The latter part of the quotation certainly holds good in those cases where Luther fancied that Holy Scripture or his explanation of it was ever so slightly impugned. When, on June 4, 1539, the conversation at table turned on Copernicus and his new theory concerning the earth, of which the latter had been convinced since 1507, Luther appealed (just as later oppo nents of the theory were to do) to Holy Scripture, according to which " Josue bade the sun to stand still and not the earth." The new astronomer wants to prove that the earth moves. " But that is the way nowadays : whoever wishes to seem clever, pays no attention to what others do, but must needs advance some thing of his own ; and what he does must always be the best. The idiot is bent on upsetting the whole art of astronomy."2
Luther's condemnation of philosophy found a strong echo among the Pietists, who were an offshoot of Lutheranism, and even claimed to be its truest representatives. The loud de nunciations of Aristotle were, for instance, taken up by the theologian Zierold.3 But even from the common people who looked up to him we hear such sayings as the following : " What is the use of our learning the Latin, Greek and Hebrew tongues and other fine arts seeing we might just as well read in German the Bible and the Word of God which suffices for our salvation ? "
holds of the devil on earth, has perhaps never been equalled in any attack on these institutions either before or after his day. See passages in Janssen, ib., Engl. Trans., iii., passim. Some of the preachers of the pure Gospel, who soon sprang up in great numbers, went a step further : " The Word of God alone was sufficient and in order to under stand it what was required was, not learning, but the spirit." Paulsen, " Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts," I2, p. 185.
1 " Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts," I2, p. 177.
2 Erl. ed., 62, p. 319. The Note is by Lauterbach. Copernicus is not named, but is merely alluded to as " the new astrologer "= astronomer. His work " De orbium ccelestium revolutionibus," with its detailed proofs in support of the new theory of the heavens, appeared only in 1543, at Nuremberg.
3 Cp. for proofs H. Stephan, " Luther in den Wandlungen seiner Kirche," p. 35 f.
26 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
Luther was not at a loss for an answer. He says first : " Yes, I know, alas, that we Germans must always remain beasts and senseless animals." Then he falls back on his usual plea, viz. that languages " are profitable and advantageous " for a right understanding of Scripture ; he forgets that he has here to do with the common people, and that a critical or philosophical interpretation of the Bible was of small use to them. Such a thing might be profitable to those who were being trained for the ministry, though many even of the preachers themselves declared that the illumination from above sufficed, together with the reading of the Bible.1
Carlstadt was even opposed to the Wittenberg graduations because they promoted pride of learning and the worldly spirit instead of humble Bible faith. Melanchthon, at a time when he was still full of Luther's early ideas, i.e. in Feb., 1521, in a work written under the pseudonym of Didymus Faventinus, attempted to vindicate against Hieronymus Emser his condemnation of the whole philosophy of the universities ; physics as taught there consisted merely of monstrous terms and contradicted the teach ing of the Bible ; metaphysics were but an impudent attempt to storm the heavens under the leadership of the atheist Aristotle. " My complaint is against that wisdom by which you have drawn away Christians from Scripture to reason. Go on, he-goat," he says to Emser, " and deny that the philosophy of the schools is idolatry " ; your ethics is diametrically opposed to Christ ; at the Universities human reason had degraded the Church to Sodomitic vices. Nothing more wicked and godless than the Universities had ever been invented ; no pope, but the devil himself was their author ; this even Wiclif had declared, and he could not have said anything wiser or more pious. The Jews offered young men to Moloch, a prelude to our Universities where the young are sacrificed to heathen idols. 2
To such an extent had the darksome pseudo-mysticism which seethed in Luther's mind laid hold for a while upon his comrade — glaringly though it contradicted the humanistic tendency found in him both earlier and later.
If we look more closely into the decline of the schools, we shall find that it came about with extraordinary rapidity, a fact which proves it to have been the result of a movement both sudden and far-reaching.
" The immediate effect of the Wittenberg preaching," wrote in 1908 the Protestant theologian F. M. Schiele in the " Preussische Jahrbucher " of Berlin, in a strongly worded but perfectly true account of the situation, "was the collapse of the educational system which had flourished throughout Germany ; the new zeal
1 Weim. ed., 15, p. 36 ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 180 f., " An die Radherrn."
2 " Didymi Faventini pro M. Luthero ad versus Thomam Placen- tinum oreiio," " Corp. ref.," 1, pp. 286-358, particularly p. 343. Cp. Paulsen, ib., p. }.86f,
THE SCHOOLS 27
for Church reform, the growth of prosperity, the ambition in the burghers, the pride and fatherly solicitude of the sovereigns who were ever gaining strength, had resulted in the foundation on all sides of school after school, university after university. Students flocked to them in multitudes, for the prospects of future gain were good. Scholasticism provided a capable teaching staff, Humanism a brilliant one. Humanism also set up as the new ideal of education a return to the fountain-head and the repro duction of ancient civilisation by means of original effort on similar lines. Wide tracts of Germany lay like a freshly sown field, and many a harvest seemed to be ripening. Then, suddenly, before it was possible to determine whether the new crops con sisted of wheat or of tares, a storm burst and destroyed all prospects of a harvest. The upheaval that followed in the wake of the Reformation, and other external causes which coincided with it, above all the reaction among the utilitarian-minded laity against the unpopular scholarship of the Humanists emptied the class rooms and lecture halls. . . . Now all is over with the priestlings ; why then should we bind our future to a lost and despised cause ? . . . Nor was this merely the passing result of a misapprehension of Luther's preaching, for it endured for scores of years."1
As to the common opinion among Protestants, viz. that " Luther's reformation gave a general stimulus to the schools and to education generally," Schiele dismisses it in a sentence : " The alleged ' stimulus ' is seen to melt away into nothing."2
Eobanus Hessus, a Humanist friendly to Luther, who lectured at Erfurt University, was so overcome with grief at sight of the decline that was making itself felt there that, in 1523, he composed an Elegy on the decay of learning entitled " Captiva " and sent it to Luther. The melancholy poem of 428 verses was printed in the same year under the title " Circular letter from the sorrowful Church to Luther." Luther replied, praising the poem and assuring the sender that he was favourably disposed towards the humanistic studies and practices. He even speaks as though still full of the expectation of a great revival ; his depression is, how ever, apparent from the very reasons he gives for his hopes : " 1 see that no important revelation of the Word of God has ever taken place without a preliminary revival and expan sion of languages and erudition." The present decline
1 " Preuss. Jahrbucher," 132, 1908 (see above, p. 13, n. 2), p. 381 f. The author safeguards himself by remarking that the above account contains " nothing new." In Janssen, " Hist, of the German People," vol. xiii., this subject is dealt with in full.
2 P. 382. In the " Archiv fur Kulturgesch.," 7, 1909, p. 120, Schiele's art. is described as " an excellent piece of criticism."
28 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
might, however, he thought, be traced to the former state of things when they did not as yet possess the " pure theology."1
But Hessus had complained, and with good reason, of the evil doings of the new believers, instances of which had come under his notice at Erfurt, and which had caused many to declare sadly : " We Germans are becoming even worse barbarians than before, seeing that, in consequence of our theology, learning is now going to the wall."2 At Erfurt the Lutheran theology had won its way to the front amidst tumults and revolts since the day when Crotus had greeted Luther on his way to Worms with his revolutionary dis course.3 Since then there had been endless conflicts of the preachers with the Church of Rome and amongst themselves. Some were to be met with who inveighed openly against the profane studies at the Universities, and could see no educa tive value in anything save in their own theology and the Word of God. Attendance at the University had declined with giant strides since the spread of Lutheranism. Whereas from May 1520 to 1521 the names of 311 students had been entered, their number fell in the following year to 120 and in 1522 to 72 ; five years later there were only 14.
Hessus wrote quite openly in 1523 : "On the plea of the Evangel the runaway monks here in Erfurt have entirely suppressed the fine arts . . . our University is despised and so are we."
His colleague, Euricius Cordus, a learned partisan of Luther, expresses himself with no less disgust concerning the state of learning and decline of morals among the students.4 " All those who have any talent," we read in the Academic Year-Book in 1529, " are now forsaking barren scholarship in order to betake themselves to more re munerative professions, or to trade."5
As at Erfurt, so also at other Universities, a rapid diminution in the number of students took place during those years. " It has been generally remarked," a writer who has made a special study of this subject says, " that in the German Universities in the 'twenties of the 16th century
1 To Eobanus Hessus, March 29, 1523, " Briefe," 4, p. 118.
2 Hessus had told Luther of this complaint, as is evident from the latter's reply.
3 For a detailed account see above, vol. ii., p. 336 ff.
4 Janssen, Engl, Trans., xiii., p. 258. 5 Ib.
THE SCHOOLS 29
a sudden decrease in the number of matriculations becomes apparent." He proves from statistics that at the University of Leipzig from 1521 to 1530 the number of those studying dropped from 340 to 100, at the University of Rostock from 123 to 33, at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder from 73 to 32 and, finally, at Wittenberg from 245 to 174.1 The attendance at Heidelberg reached its lowest figure between 1521 and 1565, " this being due to the religious and social movements of the Reformation which proved an obstacle to study." Of the German Universities generally the following holds good : " The religious and social disturbances of the Reformation brought about a complete interruption in the studies. Some of the Universities were closed down, at others the hearers dwindled down to a few."2
"The Universities, Erfurt, Leipzig and the others stand deserted," Luther himself says as early as 1530, gazing from the Coburg at the ruins, " and likewise here and there even the boys' schools, so that it is piteous to see them, and poor Wittenberg is now doing better than any of them. The foundations and the monasteries, in my opinion, are probably also feeling the pinch."3 He speaks at the same time of the decline of the Grammar schools and the lower-grade schools which also to some extent shared the fate of the Universities.
In the Catholic parts of Germany the clergy schools and monastic schools suffered severely under the general calamity, as Luther had shrewdly guessed. Nor was the set-back confined to the Universities, but even the elementary schools suffered.
It was practically the universal complaint of the monas teries, so Wolfgang Mayer, the learned Cistercian Abbot of Alderspach in Bavaria, wrote in 1529, that they were unable to continue for lack of postulants ; "in consequence of the Lutheran controversy the schools everywhere are standing empty and no one is willing any longer to devote himself to study. The clerical and likewise the religious state is
1 Luschin v. Ebengreuth, " Gfitt. Gel. Anz.," 1892, p. 826 f., in a review of Hofmeister, " Die Matrikel der Universitat Rostock," Part II., 1891. Cp. Janssen, ib., p. 266.
2 F. Eulenburg, " tJber die Frequenz der deutschen Universitaten in friiherer Zeit," " Jahrbiicher f. Nationaldkonomie u. Statistik," 3. Vol. 13, 1897, pp. 461-554, 494, 525. Janssen, ib.
8 Weim. ed., 30, 2, p. 550 ; Erl. ed., 172, p. 399, " Das man Kinder zur Schulen halten solle."
30 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
despised by all and no one is inclined to offer himself for this life." " Oh, God who could ever have anticipated the coming of such a time ! Everything is ruined, everything is in confusion, and there is nothing but sunderings, splits and heresies everywhere ! " Yet these words come from the same author, who, in 1518, in the introduction to his Annals of Alderspach, had been so enthusiastic about the state of learning in Germany and had said : " Germany is richly blessed with the gifts of Minerva and disputes the palm in the literary arena with the Italians and the Greeks." Whereas, between the years 1460-1514 no less than eighty brethren had entered Alderspach, Mayer, in his thirty years of office as Abbot, clothed only seventeen novices with the habit of St. Bernard, and, of these, five broke their vows and left the monastery. He expresses his fear that soon his religious house will be empty and ascribes the lack of novices largely to the fate which had overtaken the schools owing to the innovations.1
" Throughout the whole of the German lands," as Luther himself admits : " No one will any longer allow his children to learn or to study."2 At the same time contemporaries bitterly bewailed the wildness of the students who still remained at the Universities. With regard to Wittenberg itself we have grievous complaints on this score from both Luther and Melanchthon.3
The disorder in the teaching institutions naturally had a bad effect on the education of the people, so that Luther's efforts on behalf of the schools may readily be understood. The ecclesiastical Visitors of the Saxon Electorate had been forced to adopt stern measures in favour of the country schools. The Elector called to mind Luther's admonitions, that he, as the " principal guardian of the young," had authority to compel such towns and villages as possessed the means, to maintain schools, pulpits and parsonages, just as he might compel them to furnish bridges, high roads and footpaths. . . . "If, moreover, they have not the means," so Luther had said, "there are the monastic lands
1 N. Paulus, " Wolfgang Mayer, Ein bayerischer Zisterzienserabt des 16. Jahrh." ("Hist. Jahrb.," 1894, p. 575 f?.), p. 587 f. from MS. notes.
2 Weim. ed., 15, p. 28 ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 171 f., " An die Radherrn."
3 Cp. on Wittenberg, Janssen, Engl. Trans., xiii., 286 and below, xxxix, 1.
THE SCHOOLS 31
which most of them were bestowed for this very purpose."1 But in spite of the measures taken by the Elector and the urgent demands of the theologians for State aid, even in towns like Wittenberg the condition of the intermediate educational institutions was anything but satisfactory. In the case of his own sons Luther had grudgingly to acknow ledge that he was " at a loss to find a suitable school."2 He accordingly had recourse to young theologians as tutors.
The disappointment of the Humanists was keen and their lot a bitter one. They had cherished high hopes of the dawn of a new era for classical studies in Germany. Many had rejoiced at the alliance which had at first sprung up between the Humanist movement and the religious revolu tion, believing it would clear the field for learning. They now felt it all the more deeply seeing that the age, being altogether taken up with arid theological controversies and the pressing practical questions of the innovations, had no longer the slightest interest in the educational ideals of antiquity. The violent changes in every department of life which the religious upheaval brought with it could not but be prejudicial to the calm intellectual labours of which the Humanists had dreamed ; the prospect of Mutian's " Beata tranquillitas " had vanished.
Mutian, at one time esteemed as the leader of the Thur- ingian Humanists, retired into solitude and died in the utmost poverty (1526) after the Christian faith had, as it would appear, once more awakened in him. Eminent lawyers among the Humanists, Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg and Christopher Scheurl of Nuremberg, openly detached themselves from the Wittenbergers. Scheurl, who had once waxed so enthusiastic about the light which had dawned in Saxony, now declared confidentially to Catholic friends that Wittenberg was a cesspool of errors and intellectual dark ness.3 The reaction which the recognition of Luther's real aims produced in other Humanists, such as Willibald Pirk- heimer, Crotus Rubeanus, Ottmar Luscinius and Henricus Glareanus, has already been referred to.4 It is no less true
1 Erl. ed., 53, p. 387. See above, vol. v., pp. 582, 590.
2 Kostlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 483.
3 Cp. Chr. Scheurl, " Briefbuch, ein Beitrag zur Gesch. der Ref.," ed. Soden and Knaake, 2, 1872, pp. 127, 132, 138, 177. See also Kostlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 790 (p. 653, N. 2).
4 Cp. for the change in Humanism, above, vol. ii., p. 38 ff., etc.
32 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
of the Humanists favourable to the Church than of those holding Lutheran views, that German Humanism was nipped in the bud by the ecclesiastical innovations. As Paulsen says : " Luther usurped the leadership [from the Humanists] and theology [that of the Protestants] drove the fine arts from the high place they had just secured ; at the very moment of their triumph the Humanists saw the fruits of victory snatched from their grasp."1
The event of greatest importance for the Humanists was, however, Erasmus's open repudiation of Luther in 1523, and his attack on that point so closely bound up with all intel lectual progress, viz. Luther's denial of free-will.
Quite independent of this attack were the many and bitter complaints which the sight of the decline of his beloved studies drew from Erasmus : " The Lutheran faction is the ruin of our learning."2 " We see that the study of tongues and the love of fine literature is everywhere growing cold. Luther has heaped insufferable odium on it."3 He regrets the downfall of the schools at Nuremberg : " All this laziness came in with the new Evangel."4 He wished to have nothing more to do with these Evangelicals, he declares, because, through their doing, scholarship was everywhere being ruined. " These people [the preachers] are anxious for a living and a wife, for the rest they do not care a hair."5
In the above year, 1523, at the beginning of his public estrangement with Erasmus, Luther had written : " Erasmus has done what he was destined to do ; he has introduced the study of languages and recalled us from godless studies (4 a sacrilegis studiis '). He will in all likelihood die like Moses, in the plains of Moab [i.e. never see the Promised Land]. He is no leader to the higher studies, i.e. to piety " ; in other words, unlike Luther, he was not able to lead his followers into the land of promise, where the enslaved will rules.6
Luther's use of the term " sacrilega studio, " invites us to cast a glance on the state of education before his day.
Gesch. des gelehrten Unterrichts," I2, p. 177.
Opp.," 3, col. 777 : " Lutherana factio . . . perdit omnia studio, nos ra."
/&., col. 915 : "... intolerabili degravavit invidia." Ib., col. 1089 : " Tantam ignamam invexit hoc novum evangelium." Ib., col. 1069 : "Amant viaticum et uxorem, cetera pili non faciunt." To CEcolampadius, June 20, 1523, " Briefe," 4, p. 164.
THE SCHOOLS 38
Higher Education before Luther's Day
The condition of the schools before Luther, as described in our available sources, was very different from what Luther pictured to his readers in his works.
According to Luther's polemical writings, learning in earlier days could not but be sacrilegious because Satan " was corrupt ing the young " in " his own nests, the monasteries and clerical resorts " ; " he, the prince of this world, gave the young his good things and delights ; the devil spread out his nets, established monasteries, schools and callings, in such a way that no boy could escape him."1 With this fantastic view, met with only too frequently in Luther under all sorts of shapes, goes hand in hand his wholesale reprobation and belittling of the olden methods and system of education. The professors at the close of the Middle Ages were only able, according to Luther, to " train up profligates and greedy bellies, rude donkeys and blockheads ; all they could teach men was to be asses and to dishonour their wives, daughters and maids." " People studied twenty or forty years and yet at the end of it all knew neither Latin nor German." " Those ogres and kidnappers " set up libraries, but they were filled ** with the filth and ordure of their obscene and poisonous books " ; " the devil's spawn, the monks and the spectres of the Universities " when conferring doctorates decked out " great fat loutish donkeys in red and brown hoods, like a sow pranked out with gold chains and pearls." " The pupils and professors were as mad as the books on which they lectured. A jackdaw does not hatch out doves nor can a fool beget wise offspring."
It is in his " An die Radherrn," the object of which was to raise the standard of education, that we find such coarse language.
What is of more importance is that Luther seems here to be seeking to conceal the decline in learning which he had brought about, and to lay the blame solely on the olden schools. If the corruption had formerly been so great then some excuse might be found for the ruin which had followed his struggle with the Church. — Such an excuse, however, does not tally with the facts.
That, on the contrary, education, not only at the Univer sities, but also in the Latin schools, which Luther had more particularly in view, was in a flourishing condition and full of promise before it was so rudely checked by the religious disturbances which emptied all the schools, has been fully confirmed to-day by learned research. " The increased attendance at the Universities in the course of the 15th and the commencement of the 16th century is a very rapid one," writes Franz Eulenburg. " Hence the decline in the
1 Weim. ed., 15, p. 29 ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 172, " An die Radherrn."
VI. — D
34 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
'twenties of the latter century is all the more noticeable."1 " At the beginning of the 16th century," says Friedrich Paulsen, " everyone of any influence or standing, strength or courage, devoted himself to the new learning : prelates, sovereigns, the townships and, above all, the young " ; but, shortly after the outbreak of the ecclesiastical revolution, " everything became changed."2
What had contributed principally to a salutary revival had been the sterling work of the older Humanists. Eminent and thoroughly religious men of the schools — men like Alexander Hegius and his pupils and successors Rudolf von Langen, Ludwig Dringenberg, Johannes Murmellius and, particularly, Jakob Wimpfeling, who, on account of his epoch-making pedagogic work, was called the teacher of Germany — zealously made their own the humanistic ideal of making of the classics the centre of the education of the young, and of paving the way for a new intellectual life, by means of the instruction given in the schools.3 An attempt was made to combine classical learning with devotion to the old religion and respect for the Church. They also strove to carry out — though not always successfully — the task which was assigned to the schools by the Lateran Council held under Leo X ; the aim of the teacher was to be not merely to impart grammar, rhetoric and the other sciences, but at the same time to instil into those committed to their charge the fear of God and zeal for the faith.4 The sovereigns and the towns placed their abundant means at the disposal of the new movement and so did the Church, which at that time was still a wealthy organisation.
The number of the schools and scholars in itself proves the interest taken by the nation in the relative prosperity of its education.
To take some instances from districts with which Luther must have been fairly well acquainted : Zwickau had a flourishing Latin school which, in 1490, numbered 900 pupils divided into four classes. In 1518 instruction was given there in Greek and Hebrew, and bequests, ecclesiastical and secular, for its maintenance continued to be made. The town of Brunswick had two Latin schools and, besides, three schools belonging to religious communities. At Nuremberg, towards the close of the
1 Work cited above, p. 29, n. 2 (p. 525). 2 /&., p. 260.
3 Janssen, " Hist, of the German People " (Engl. Trans.), 1, p. 68 ft
* Raynald., " Annal. eccles.," a. 1514, n. 29.
THE SCHOOLS 85
15th century, there were several Latin schools controlled by four rectors and twelve assistants ; a new " School of Poetry " was added in 1515 under Johann Cochlseus. Augsburg also had five Church schools at the commencement of the 16th century, and besides this private teachers with a humanistic training were engaged in teaching Latin and the fine arts. At Frankfurt- on-the-Main there were, in 1478, three foundation schools with 318 pupils ; the college at Schlettstadt in Alsace numbered 900 pupils in 1517 and Geiler of Kaysersberg and Jakob Wimpfeling were both educated there. At Gorlitz in Silesia, at the close ot the 15th century, the number of scholars varied between 500 and 600. Emmerich on the lower Rhine had, in 1510, approximately 450 pupils in its six classes, in 1521 about 1500. Miinster in Westphalia, owing to the labours of its provost, Rudolf von Langen, became the focus and centre of humanistic effort, and, subsequent to 1512, had also its pupils divided into six classes. l
The " Brothers of the Common Life " established their schools over the whole of Northern Germany. Their institutions, with which Luther himself had the opportunity of becoming acquainted at Magdeburg, sent out some excellent schoolmasters. The schools of these religious at Deventer, Zwolle, Liege and Louvain were famous. The school of the brothers at Liege numbered in 1521 1600 pupils, assorted into eight classes.
In the lands of the Catholic princes many important grammar- schools withstood the storms of the religious revulsion, so that Luther's statements concerning the total downfall of education cannot be accepted as generally correct, even subsequent to the first decades of the century.
Nor were even the elementary schools neglected at the close of the Middle Ages in most parts of the German Empire. Fresh accounts of such schools, in both town and country, are con stantly cropping up to-day in the local histories. Constant efforts for their improvement and multiplication were made at this time. About a hundred regulations and charters of schools either in German, or in Dutch, dating from 1400-1521 have been traced. The popular religious handbooks were zealous in advocating the education of the people.2 Luther himself tells us it was the custom to stir up the schoolmasters to perform their duty by saying that " to neglect a scholar is as bad as to seduce a maid."3
Luther's Success
Did Luther, by means of the efforts described above, succeed in bringing about any real improvement in the schools, particularly the Latin schools ? The affirmative
1 Cp. Janssen (Engl. Trans.), xiii., 9 ff. 2 Ib., i., p. 25 ff.
3 Weim. ed., 15, p. 33 ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 177, " An die Radherrn " : " When I was young there was a saying in the schools : ' Non minus est negligere scholar em quam corrumpere virginem.' This was said in order to frighten the schoolmasters."
36 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
cannot be maintained. At least it was a long time before the reform which he desiderated came, and what reform took place seems to have been the result less of Luther's exhortations than of Melanchthon's labours.
On the whole his hopes were disappointed. The famous saying of Erasmus : " Wherever Lutheranism prevails, there we see the downfall of learning,"1 remained largely true throughout the 16th century, in spite of all Luther's efforts.
Schiele says : Where Melanchthon's school-regulations for the Saxon Electorate were enforced without alteration, Latin alone was taught, " but neither German nor Greek nor Hebrew," that the pupils might not be overtaxed. Instruction in history and mathematics was not insisted on at all. Bugenhagen added the rudiments of Greek and mathematics. Only about twenty years after Luther's " An die Radherrn " do we hear something of attempts being made to improve matters in the Lutheran districts. As a rule all that was done even in the large towns was to amalga mate several moribund schools and give them a new charter. " Even towns like Nuremberg and Frankfurt were unable, in spite of the greatest sacrifices, to introduce a well-ordered system into the schools. The two most eminent, practical pedagogues of the time, Camerarius and Micyllus, could not check the decline of their council schools."2
Nuremberg, the highly praised home of culture, may here be taken as a case in point, because it was to the syndic of this city that Luther addressed his second writing, praising the new Protestant gymnasium which had been established there (above, p. 6). Yet, in 1530, after it had been in existence some years, this same syndic, Lazarus Spengler, sadly wrote : " Are there not any intelligent Christians who would not be highly distressed that in a few short years, not Latin only, but all other useful languages and studies have fallen into such contempt ? Nobody, alas, will recognise the great misfortune which, as I fear, we shall soon suffer, and which even now looms in sight."3 In the Gymnasium, which
1 " Ubicunque regnat Luther anismus, ibi litterarum est interitus. Et tamen hoc gemis hominum maxime litteris alitur. Duo tantum qucerunt, censum et uxorem. C cetera prcestat illis evangelium, i.e. potestatem vivendi ut volunt." To Pirkheimer, 1528, from Basle. " Opp.," 3, col. 1139. 2 Schiele, ib., p. 391.
3 C. Hagen, " Deutschlands literarische und religiose Verhaltnisse im Reformationszeitalter," 32, 1868, p. 197. Janssen, ib., xiii., p. 100.
THE SCHOOLS 37
he had so much at heart, instruction was given free owing to the rich foundations, nevertheless but very few pupils were found to attend it. Eobanus Hessus, who was to have lent his assistance to promoting the cause of Humanism, left the town again in 1533. When Hessus before this complained to Erasmus that he had given offence to the town by his complaints of the low standard to which the school had fallen (above, p. 32), the latter replied in 1531, that he had received his information from the learned Pirkheimer and other friends of the professors there. He had indeed written that learning seemed to be only half alive there, in fact, at its last gasp, but he had done so in order by publishing the truth to spur them on to renewed zeal. " This I know, that at Liege and Paris learning is flourishing as much as ever. Whence then comes this torpor ? From the negligence of those who boast of being Evangelicals. Besides, you Nurembergers have no reason to think yourselves particularly offended by me, for such complaints are to be heard from the lips of every honest man of every town where the Evangelicals rule."1 Camerarius, whom Melanchthon wished to be the soul of the school, turned his back on it in 1535 on account of the hopeless state of things. J. Poliander said in 1540 : In Nuremberg, that populous and well-built city, there are rich livings and famous professors, but owing to the lack of students the institution there has dwindled away. " The lecturers left it, which caused much disgrace and evil talk to the people of Nuremberg, as everybody knows."2 When Melanchthon stayed for a while at Nuremberg in 1552 by order of the Elector, the Gymnasium was a picture of desolation. In the school regulations issued by the magistrates the pupils were reproached with contempt of divine service, blasphemy, persistent defiance of school discipline, etc., and with be ing " barbarous, rude, wild, wanton, bestial and sinful." Camerarius even wrote from Leipzig advising the town- council to break up the school.3
There is no doubt that in other districts where Lutheran- ism prevailed Latin schools were to be found where good discipline reigned and where masters and pupils alike
1 " Opp.," 3, col. 1363 aq.
2 M. Toppeu, " Die Grundung der Universitat Kdnigsberg," etc., 1844, p. 78. Janssen, ib.y p. 101. 3 Janssen, ib., p. 102.
38 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
worked with zeal ; the records, however, have far more to say of the decline.
Many statements of contemporaries well acquainted with the facts speak most sadly of the then conditions. Melanchthon complained more and more that shortsighted Lutheran theo logians stood in the way of the progress of the schools. Camer- arius, in a letter to George Fabricius, rector of Meissen, said in 1555 that it was plain everything was conspiring for the destruc tion of Germany, that religion, learning, discipline and honesty were doomed. As one of the principal causes he instances " the neglect and disgust shown for that learning, which, in reality, is the glory and ornament of man." "It is looked upon as tom foolery and a thing fit only for children to play with." " Educa tion, and life in general, too, has become quite other from what we were accustomed to in our boyhood." Of the Catholic times he speaks with enthusiasm : " What zeal at one time inspired the students and in what honour was learning held ; what hardships men were ready to endure in order to acquire but a modicum of scholarship is still to-day a matter of tradition. Now, on the other hand, learned studies are so little thought of owing to civil disturbances and inward dissensions that it is only here and there that they have escaped complete destruction."1
What he says is abundantly confirmed by the accounts of the failure of educational effort at Augsburg, Esslingen, Basle, Stuttgart, Tubingen, Ansbach, Heilbronn and many other towns.
The efforts made were, however, not seldom ill-advised. If it be really a fact that the Latin " Colloquia " of Erasmus, which Luther himself had condemned for its frivolity, " played a principal part in the education of the schoolboys,"2 then, indeed, it is not surprising that the results did not reach expectations. The crude polemics against the olden Church and the theological controversies associated with the names of Luther and Melanch thon, which penetrated into the schools owing to the squabbles of the professors and preachers, also had a bad effect. Again education was hampered by being ever subordinated to the interests of a " pure faith " which was regarded as its mainstay, but which was itself ever changing its shape and doctrines.3
" The form of education required for future ministers," says Schiele, " became the chief thing, and education as such was consequently obliged to take a back seat." " At the Universities it was only theology that flourished," the olden Hellenists died out and the young were, in many places, only permitted to attend the " orthodox " Universities. Among the Lutherans " the Latin schools were soon no longer able to compete with the colleges of the Jesuits and the Calvinists. Not a single Lutheran rector or master of note is recorded in the annals of the history of education. It is true that the so-called Kuster-sehools spread
1 Cp. Dollinger, " Die Ref.," 1, p. 483 ff. ; 2, p. 584 ff.
2 For proofs soe Jarissen (Engl. Trans.), xiii., p. 71 ff.
3 " Preuss. Jahrb.," loc. cit., p. 392.
THE SCHOOLS 39
throughout the land simultaneously with the spread of orthodoxy. But when we see how the orthodpx clergy despised their cate chetical duties as of secondary importance, and hastened to delegate them as far as possible to the Kiister [parish-clerk], it becomes impossible for us to regard such schools as a proof of any interest in education on the part of the orthodox, rather the contrary. How otherwise can we explain, even when we take into account the unfavourable conditions of the age, that, a hundred years after Luther's day, far fewer people were able to read his writings than at the time when he first came forward. x
In the elementary schools which gradually came into being the parish-clerk gave instruction in reading and writing, and, in addition, tried to teach the catechism by reciting it aloud and making the children repeat it after him. The earliest definite regulations which imposed this duty on the clerk in addition to the catechism were those issued by Duke Christopher of Wiirtemberg in 1559, who also devoted his attention to the founding of German schools. The latter, however, were not intended for the smaller villages, nor did they receive any support from the " poor box." Nor did all the children attend the schools kept by the clerk. The school regulations issued by the Protestant Duke were in themselves good, but their effect was meagre.2 In the Saxon Electorate it was only in 1580 that the parish-clerks of the villages were directed to keep a school.3
Finally, to come to the Protestant Universities ; it was only in the latter part of the 16th century that the attend ance, which, as we saw above, had fallen so low, began once more to make a better show.
In 1540 Melanchthon expressed himself as satisfied with the condition of learning which prevailed in them.4 But among others whose opinion was less favourable we find Luther's friend Justus Jonas, who, two years before this, in 1538, wrote, that, since the Evangel had begun to make its way through Germany, the Universities were silent as the
1 Ib., p. 393.
2 Janssen, ib., p. 43. Schiele, ib., p. 593.
3 Schiele, ib., p. 390.
4 He even says : " Academics nunc quidem Dei beneficio omni genere doctrinarum ftorent." " Corp. ref.," 3, p. 1068. Bishop Julius Pflug informed Pope Paul III, in a letter in which he gives him a vivid picture of the needs of the country in order to determine him to active assistance : " Scholce Lutheranorum cum privatce turn publicce florent, nostrce frigent plane ac iacent." " Epistolae Mosellani," etc., p. 150 sq. Kawerau, " Reformation und Gegenreformation "3, (Moller, " Lehrb. der KG.," 3, p. 437.
40 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
grave.1 The testimony of Rudolf Walther, a Swiss, who had visited many German Universities and been on terms of intimacy with eminent Protestant theologians, must also receive special attention. In 1568 he wrote — though his words may perhaps be somewhat discounted by his own theological isolation — " The German Universities are now in such a state that, to say nothing of the conceit and carelessness of the professors and the impudent immorality which prevails, they are in no way remarkable. Heidelberg, however, is praised more than the others, for the attacks which menace her on all sides do not allow this University to slumber."2
Heidelberg was the chief educational centre of those who held Calvinistic views. Since 1580 the attendance at the University had notably increased owing to the influx of students from abroad. Towards the close of the century, with Wittenberg and Jena, it headed the list of the Univer sities of the new faith in respect of the number of matricula tions. Jena, like its sister Universities of Marburg, Konigs- berg and Helmstadt, had been founded as a seminary of Protestant theology and at the same time of Roman law, which served to strengthen the absolutism of the princes. Since the appointment of Flacius Illyricus in 1557 it had become a stronghold of pure Lutheranism. The theological squabbles within the bosom of Protestantism, here as in the other Universities, were, however, disastrous to peace, and any healthy progress. Characteristic of the treatment meted out to the professors by Protestant statesmen of a different opinion, even when they were not summarily dismissed, is the discourse of the Saxon Chancellor, Christian Briick, to the professors of the theological Faculty at Jena in 1561 : " You black, red and yellow knaves and rascals ! A plague
1 G. Steinhausen, " Gesch. der deutschen Kultur," Leipzig and Vienna, 1904, p. 515. There we read (p. 514) in the description of the education given by the Protestant Universities that it was " rendered sterile " by the new theology. " The intellectual leaders of the time became more and more Court theologians. It is noteworthy that many of the edicts and regulations begin with an improving theological preface. . . . What had become of the intellectual revival of the first decades of the 16th century ? " Eobanus Hessus had prophesied in 1523 that the new theology would bring in its train a worse barbarism than that which had been overthrown, and already in 1524 he had been obliged to speak of the " New Obscurantists."
2 Ddllinger, " Die Ref.," I2, p. 509.
THE SCHOOLS 41
upon you all you shameless scamps and rebels ! Would that you were knocked on the head, disgraced and blinded ! "*
The University of Wittenberg now registered the largest number of students. Although on Luther's first public appearance crowds of students had been attracted by the fame of his name, yet these decreased to such an extent that between 1523 and 1533 not a single theological degree was conferred. About 1550, however, the Faculties again numbered about 2000 students, thanks chiefly to Melanch- thon. In 1598 the number is even given as exceeding 2000. Throughout the whole of the century, from the beginning of the ecclesiastical schism, a considerable percentage of students had poured in from abroad. Of the wantonness of the Wittenberg students of the various Faculties, contemporaries as well as official documents wax so eloquent that the University would seem to have enjoyed an unenviable notoriety in this respect among the Protestant educational establishments.2 The fact that, as just men tioned, the students were largely recruited from other countries must be taken into account. Wittenberg suffered more than the other Universities from the quarrels which, according to Luther, tore to pieces Protestant theology. What was said in a sermon in 1571 on the words " Peace be with you " is peculiarly applicable to Wittenberg : " Only see what quarrelling and envy, hatred, and persecution, and expulsion there has been, and still is, among the professors at Wittenberg, Jena, Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, Konigsberg and indeed all the Universities which really should be flourishing in the light of our beloved Evangel ; it would indeed be a great and heavenly work of God if all the young men at these Universities did not fall into such vices, and even become utterly corrupted."3
1 M. Hitter, " Matthia Flacii Illyrici Leben " 2, 1725, p. 106 Janssen, ib., p. 265.
2 For proofs see Janssen, ib., p, 286 ff.
3 16., p. 295.
42 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
4. Benevolence and Belief of the Poor
Luther's attitude towards poor relief, which ever since the rise of Protestantism has been the subject of extravagant eulogies, can only be put in its true light by a closer examina tion of the state of things before his day.1
At the Close of the Middle Ages
Indications of the provision made by the community for relief of the poor are found in the Capitularies of Charles the Great, indeed even in the 6th century in the canons of a Council held at Tours in 567. Corporate relief of the poor, later on carried out by means of the guilds, and the care of the needy in each particular district undertaken by unions of the parishes, were of a public and organised character. It has been justly remarked concerning the working of the mediaeval institutions : " The results achieved by our insurance system were then attained by means of family support, corporations, village clubs and unions of the lords of the manors. . . . Such organised relief of the poor made any State relief unnecessary. The State authorities con cerned themselves only negatively, viz. by prohibiting mendicancjr and vagabondage."2 Private benevolence occupied the first place, since the very nature of Christian charity involves love of our neighbour. Its work was mainly done by means of the ecclesiastical institutions and the monasteries. Special arrangements also were made, under the direction of the Church, to meet the various needs, and such were to be found in considerable numbers both in large places and in small ; all, moreover, was carried out on the lines of a careful selection of deserving cases and a wise control of expenditure.
The share taken by the Church in the whole work of charity was, generally speaking, a guarantee that the work was managed conscientiously.
Though among both monks and clergy scandalous instances of greed and self-seeking were not wanting, yet
1 On the contrast between mediaeval and Lutheran charity, see above, vol. iv., p. 477 ff., and Janssen, " Hist, of the German People " (Engl. Trans.), vol. xv., pp. 425-526.
2 Adolf Bruder, art. " Armenpflege," " Staatslexikon der Gorres- gesellschaft."
POOR RELIEF 43
there were many who lived up to their profession and were zealous in assisting in the development of works of charity. The mendicant Orders, by the very example of the poverty prescribed by their rule, helped to combat all excessive avarice ; their voluntary privations taught people how to endure the trials of poverty and they showed their gratitude for the alms bestowed on them by their labours for souls in the pulpit and in the school, and by doing their utmost to promote learning.
Every Order was exhorted by its Rule to fly idleness and to perform works of neighbourly charity.
There are plentiful sermons and works of piety dating from the close of the Middle Ages which prove how the faithful were not only urged to be charitable to the needy, but also to obey God's command and to labour, this exhortation referring particularly to the poor themselves, who were not unnecessarily to become a burden to others. Again and again are the words of the Bible emphasised : "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread," and " Whoever will not work neither let him eat " (Gen. iii. 19 ; 2 Thes. iii. 10).
In spite of this, lack of industrial occupation, the difficulty and even sometimes the entire absence of public super vision, and, in part also, the ease with which alms were to be had, bred a large crop of beggars, who moved about from place to place and who, in late mediaeval times, became a perfect plague throughout the whole of Germany. Hence all the greater towns in the 15th century and early years of the 16th issued special regulations to deal with the poor. In the matter of these laws for the regulation of charity the city-fathers acted independently, strong in the growing consciousness of their standing and duties. Lay Guardians of the Poor were appointed by the magistrates and poor- boxes were established, the management of which devolved on the municipal authorities. The Catholic Netherlands set an excellent example in this respect by utilising the old hospital regulations and, with their help, drawing up new and independent organisations. Antwerp, Brussels, Louvain, Mechlin, Ghent, Bruges, Namur and other towns already possessed a well-developed system of poor relief.
" The admirable regulations for the relief of the poor at Ypres " (1525), to which reference is so often made, " a work of social
44 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
reform of the first rank " (Feuchtwanger), sprang from such institutions, and these, in turn, were by Charles V in 1531 made the basis of his new Poor Law for the whole of the Netherlands. The Ypres regulations declared, that, according to the divine command, everyone is obliged to gain his living as far as he can. All begging was strictly prohibited, charitable institutions and private almsgiving were not allowed to have their way unchecked, admission of strangers was made difficult and other salutary restrictions were enforced, yet, on the other hand, Christian charity towards those unable to earn a living was warmly welcomed and set in the right channels.1
In the Netherlands, Humanism, which had made great progress in Erasmus's native land, co-operated in the measures taken, and it was here that the important " De subventions pauperum " of Juan Ludovico de Vives, a friend of Erasmus, of Pope Hadrian IV and of Sir Thomas More, and a zealous opponent of Lutheranism, was published in 1526.
In the Catholic towns of Germany, particularly in the south, it was not merely the stimulus of Humanism but still more the economic and political development which, towards the end of the Middle Ages and during the transition to modern times, led to constant fresh efforts in the domain of the public relief of the poor. The assistance of the poor was, in fact, at that time " one of the principal social questions, poor relief being identical with social politics. To provide for the sick members of the guilds, for the serf incapable of work, for the beggar in the street, for the guest in the hostel, for the poor artisan to whom the city magistrates gave a loan free of interest, for the burgher who received cheap grain from the council, all this was, to give freely, to bestow alms and to perform works well pleasing to God."2
The gaping rift in the German lands and the chaotic conditions which accompanied the transition from the agrarian to the commercial system of economy were naturally not favourable to the peaceful work of alleviating poverty. It was, however, eventually to the advantage of the towns to form themselves into separate administrations, able to safeguard their own charitable institutions by means of an efficient police system. Thus the town councils took over what had been formerly to a great extent the function of the Church, but this they did without any animosity towards her. They felt themselves to be acting as beseemed " Christian authorities." They were encouraged in this by that interference, in what had once been the domain of the Church, of the territorial princes and the cities, which had become the rule in the 15th century. The more or less extensive suzerainty
1 F. Ehrle, " Beitrage z. Gesch. u. Reform der Armenpflege," 1881 ; do. " Die Armenordnungen von Niirnberg (1522) und von Ypern (1525)," "Hist. Jahrb.," 9, 1888, p. 450 ff. Ratzinger, "Gesch. d. kirchl. Armenpflege "2, 1884, p. 442 ff. Janssen, p. 431.
2 L. Feuchtwanger, " Gesch. der sozialen Politik und des Armen- wesens im Zeitalter der Reformation" ("Jahrb. fur Gesetzgebung, " etc., ed. G. Schmoller, N.F. 32, 1908, p. 168 ff. (I), and 33, 1909, p. 191 ff (II), I, p. 169.
POOR RELIEF 45
in Church matters which had prevailed even previous to the religious schism in Saxony, Brandenburg and many of the Imperial cities may be called to mind. In towns such as Augs burg, Nuremberg, Strasburg and Ratisbon the overwhelming increase which had taken place in the class which lived from hand to mouth, called for the prohibitive measures against beggary and the other regulations spoken of above.
At Augsburg the town council issued orders concerning the poor-law system in 1459, 1491 and 1498. Those of 1491 and 1498 sought to regulate and prevent any overlapping in the distribu tion of the municipal doles, the " holy alms which are com passionately given and bestowed daily in many different parts and corners of the city " ; to these were subjoined measures for enforcing strict supervision of those who received assistance and for excluding the undeserving ; whoever was able to work but refused to do so was shut out, in order that the other poor people might not " be deprived of their bodily sustenance." A third and still better set of poor-law regulations appeared in 1522. They provided for a stricter organisation of the distribution of the monies, and made the supervision of those in receipt of help easier by the keeping of registers of the poor and by house to house visitations. Beggars at the church doors were placed under special control. No breach with the ecclesiastical traditions of the past is apparent in the rules of 1522, in spite of the influence of the religious innovations in this town. From the civil standpoint, however, they, like the poor laws generally drawn up at the close of the Middle Ages, display a " thorough knowledge of the conditions and are true to a well-tried tradition of communal policy." The principal author of this piece of legislation was Conrad Peutinger, the famous lawyer and statesman who since 1497 had been town clerk. He died greatly esteemed in 1547, after having done more to further than to check the religious innovations in his native town by his uncertain and vacillating behaviour.
From the Nuremberg mendicancy regulations Johannes Janssen quotes certain highly practical enactments which belong to the latter half of the 14th century. The so-called " meat and bread foundations," which had been enriched by the Papal Indulgences granted to benefactors, were not available for any public beggars, but only for the genuine poor. In 1478 the town council issued a more minute mendicant ordinance. Here we read : " Almsgiving is a specially praiseworthy, virtuous work, and those who receive alms unworthily and unnecessarily lay a heavy burden of guilt on themselves." Those allowed to beg were also obliged at least " to spin or perform some other work according to their capacity." Beggars from foreign parts were only permitted to beg on certain fixed days in the year. Conrad Celtes, the Humanist, in his work on Nuremberg printed in 1501, boasts of the ample provision for widows and orphans made by the town, the granaries for the purpose of giving assistance and other arrangements whereby it was distinguished above all other
46 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
towns ; families of the better class who had met with misfortunes received yearly a secret dole to tide them over their difficult time. l
New regulations concerning the poor, more comprehensive than the former, appeared at Nuremberg in 1522. These deal with the actual needs and are in close touch with the maxims of govern ment and old traditions of the Imperial cities. In them all the earlier charitable, social and police measures are codified : the restriction of begging, the management of the hospitals, the provision of work and tools, advances to artisans in difficulties, granaries for future famines, the distribution of alms, badges for privileged beggars, etc. The whole is crowned by the Bible text, so highly esteemed in the Catholic Middle Ages : " Blessed is he that hath pity on the poor and needy, for the Lord will deliver him in the evil day." " Our salvation," so we read when mention is made of the relief funds, "rests solely in keeping and perform ing the commandments of God which oblige every Christian to give such help and display such fraternal charity towards his neighbour."2 At Nuremberg the new teaching had already taken firm footing yet the olden Catholic conception of the meritorious character of almsgiving is nevertheless recognisable in the regula tions of 1522.3
At Strasburg a new system, dating from 1523, for regulating the distribution of the " common alms " was established in harmony with the great traditions of the 15th century, and above all with the spirit and labours of the famous Catholic preacher Geiler of Kaysersberg (fl510). Janssen has given us a fine series of witnesses, from Geiler's sermons and writings, of the nature at once religious and practical of his exhortations to charity.4 Charity, he insists, must show itself not merely in the bestowal of temporal goods ; it is concerned above all with the " inward and spiritual goods, the milk of sound doctrine, and instruction of the unlearned, the milk of devotion, wisdom and consolation." He repeatedly exhorts the authorities to stricter regulations on almsgiving.
After various improvements had been introduced in the poor law at Strasburg subsequent to 1500, the magistrates — the clergy and the monasteries not having shown themselves equal to their task — issued a new enactment, though even this relied to a great extent on the help of the clergy. The regulations of Augsburg and Nuremberg were the most effectual. It was only later, after the work of Capito, Bucer and Hedio at Strasburg, that, together with the new spirit, changes crept into the traditional poor-law system of the town.
All the enactments, dating from late mediaeval times prior to the religious innovations, for the poor of the other great
1 " De origine, situ, moribus et institutis Norimbergse," cap. 12.
2 Reprint of the Regulations of 1522 according to the oldest revision, in Ehrle, " Die Armenordnungen," p. 459 ff. For the passage " Our salvation," etc., see p. 467.
3 Ehrle, ib., p. 477 f. Feuchtwanger, ib., I., p. 184.
4 Janssen, ib., xv., p. 439 ff.
POOR RELIEF 47
German towns, for instance, of Ratisbon (1523), Breslau (1525) and Wiirzburg (1533) are of a more or less similar character. Thus, thanks to the economic pressure, there was gradually evolved, in the centres of German prosperity and commercial industry, a sober but practical and far- sighted poor-law system.1
It was not, indeed, so easy to get rid of the existing disorders ; to achieve this a lengthy struggle backed by the regulations just established would have been necessary. Above all, the tramps and vagabonds, who delighted in idleness and adventure and who often developed dangerous proclivities, continued to be the pest of the land. The cause of this economic disorder was a deep-seated one and entirely escapes those who declare that beggary sprang solely from the idea foisted on the Church, viz. that " poverty was meritorious and begging a respectable trade."
Luther's Efforts. The Primary Cause of their Failure
The spread of Lutheranism had its effect on the municipal movement for the relief of the poor, nor was its influence all for the good.
In 1528 and 1529 Luther twice published an edition of the booklet " On the Roguery of the False Beggars " (" Liber vagatorum "), a work dating from the beginning of the 16th century ; in his preface to it he says, that the increase in fraudulent vagrancy shows " how strong in the world is the rule of the devil " ; " Princes, lords, town-magistrates and, in fact, everybody " ought to see that alms were bestowed only on the beggars and the needy in their own neighbourhood, not on "rogues and vagabonds " by whom even he himself (Luther) had often been taken in. Everywhere in both towns and villages registers should be kept of the poor, and strange beggars not allowed without a " letter or testimonial."2
He was, however, not always so circumspect in his demands and principles. In a passage of his work " An den Adel " he makes a wild appeal, which in its practicability falls short of what had already been done in various parts of Germany. The only really new point in it is, that, in order to make an end of begging and poverty, the mendicant
1 Feuchtwanger, ib., p. 182. For all the towns mentioned above see Janssen, loc. cit.
2 Weim. ed., 26, p. 639 ; Erl. ed., 63, p. 270.
48 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
Orders should be abolished, and the Roman See deprived of their collections and revenues. Of the ordinary beggars he says, without being sufficiently acquainted with the state of the case, that they " might easily be expelled," and that it would be an " easy matter to deal with them were we only brave and in earnest enough." To the objection that the result of violent measures would be a still more niggardly treatment of the poor he replied in 1520 : "It suffices that the poor be fairly well provided for, so that they die not of hunger or cold." With a touch of communism he exagger ates, at the expense of the well-to-do and those who did no work, an idea in itself undoubtedly true, viz. that work is man's portion : " It is not just that, at the expense of another's toil, a man should go idle, wallow in riches and lead a bad life, whilst his fellow lives in destitution, as is now the perverted custom. ... It was never ordained by God that anyone should live on the goods of another."1
In itself it could only have a salutary effect when Luther goes on to speak, as he frequently does, against begging among the class whose duty it was to work with their hands, and when he attempts both to check their idleness and to rouse a spirit of charity towards the deserving.2 He even regards the Bible text, " Let there be no beggar or starving person amongst you," as universally binding on Christians. Only that he is oblivious of the necessary limitations when he exclaims : "If God commanded this even in the Old Testament how much more is it incumbent on us Christians not to let anyone beg or starve ! "3
The latter words refer to those who are really poor but quite willing to work (a class of people which will always exist in spite of every effort) ; as for those who " merely eat " he demands that they be driven out of the land. This he does in a writing of 1526 addressed to military men ; here he divides "all man's work into two kinds," viz. " agricultural work and war work." A third kind of work, viz. the teaching office, to which he often refers elsewhere, is
1 76., 6, p. 450f.= 21, p. 335 f.
2 Cp., for instance, the passage in the Church-Postils, Erl. ed., 142, p. 391 : " The whoje \vorld is full of idle, faithless, wicked knaves, among the day labourers, lazy handicraftsmen, servants, maids, to say nothing of the greedy, work-shy beggars," etc.
3 Weim. ed., 6, p. 42; Erl. ed., 162, p. 87. (Longer) Sermon on Usury, 1520.
POOR RELIEF 49
here passed over in silence. " As for the useless people," he cries, " who serve neither to defend us nor to feed us, but merely eat and pass away their time in idleness, [the Emperor or the local sovereign] should either expel them from the land or make them work, as the bees do, who sting to death the drones that do not work but devour the honey of the others."1 His unmethodical mind failed to see to what dire consequences these hastily penned words could lead.
With the object of alleviating poverty he himself, however, lent a hand to certain charitable institutions, which, though they did not endure, have yet -their place in history. Such were the poor-boxes of Wittenberg, Leisnig, Altenburg and some other townships. This institution was closely bound up with his scheme of gathering together the " believing Christians " into communities apart. These communities were not only to have their own form of divine worship and to use the ecclesiastical penalties, but were also to assist the poor by means of the common funds in a new and truly Evangelical fashion.
The olden poor-law ordinances of mediaeval times had been revised at Wittenberg and embodied in the so-called " Beutelordnung."2 Carlstadt and the town-council, under the influence of Luther's earlier ideas, substituted for this on Jan. 24, 1522, a new " Order for the princely town of Wittenberg " ; at the same time they reorganised the common funds.3 These regulations Luther left in force, when, on his return from the Wartburg, he annulled the rest of Carlstadt's doings ; the truth is, that they were not at variance even with his newer ideals.
In 1523 he himself promoted a similar but more highly developed institution for the relief of the poor in the little Saxon town of Leisnig on the Freiberg Mulde ; this was to be in the hands of the community of true believers into which the inhabitants had formed themselves at the instiga tion of the zealous Lutheran, Sebastian von Kotteritz. At Altenburg also, doubtless through Luther's doing, his friend Wenceslaus Link, the preacher in that town, made a some what similar attempt to establish a communal poor-box. In
1 /&., 19, p. 654f.=22, p. 281 in "Ob Kriegsleutte auch ynn seligen Stande seyn kxinden."
2 Barge, " Andreas Karlstadt," 2, p. 559 f.
3 E. Sehling, " Die evang. Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrh.," 1, 1. p. 696 ff.
VI. — E
50 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
many other places efforts of a like nature were made under Lutheran auspices.
How far such undertakings spread throughout the Protes tant congregations cannot be accurately determined. We know, however, the details of the scheme owing to our still having the rules drawn up for Leisnig.1
According to this the whole congregation, town-councillors, aldermen, elders and all the inhabitants generally, were to bind themselves to make a good use of their Christian freedom by the faithful keeping of the Word of God and by submitting to good discipline and just penalties. Ten coffer-masters were to be appointed over the " common fund " and these were three times a year to give an account to the " whole assembly thereto con vened." Into this fund was to be put not merely the revenue of the earlier institutions which hitherto had been most active in the relief of the poor, viz. the brotherhoods and benevolent associations, as also that of most of the guilds, and, moreover, the whole income drawn by the parish from the glebes, pious founda tions, tithes, voluntary offerings, fines, bridge dues and private industrial concerns. Thus it was not merely a relief fund but practically a trust comprising all the wealth of the congregation, which chiefly consisted in the extensive Church property it had annexed. In keeping with this is the manner in which the income was to be apportioned. Only a part was devoted to the relief of the poor, i.e. to the hospital, orphanage and guest-houses. Most of the money was to go to defray the stipend of the Lutheran pastor and his clerk, to maintain the schools and the church, and to allow of advances being made to artisans free of interest ; the rest was to be put by for times of scarcity. The members of the congregation were also exhorted to make contributions out of charity to their neighbour.
The scheme pleased Luther so well that he advised the printing of the rules, and himself wrote a preface to the published text in which he said, he hoped that " the example thus set would prove a success, be generally followed, and lead to a great ruin of the earlier foundations, monasteries, chapels and all other such abominations which hitherto had absorbed all the world's wealth under a show of worship."
Hence here once more his chief motive is a polemical one, viz. his desire to injure Popery.
He invites the authorities on this occasion to " lay hands on " such property and to apply to the common fund all that remained over after the obligations attaching to the property had been complied with, and restitution made to such heirs of the donors as demanded it on account of their poverty. In giving this advice he was anxious, as he says, to disclaim any responsibility in the event of " such property as had fallen vacant being plundered
1 Ib., p. 596 ff. ; also " Luthers Werke," Weim. ed., 12, p. 11 ff. ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 112 ft'. On Leisnig cp. above, vol. v., p. 136 ff.
POOR RELIEF 51
owing to the estates changing hands and each one laying hold on whatever he could seize." " Should avarice find an entry what then can be done ? It must not indeed be given up in despair. It is better that avarice should take too much in a legal way than that there should be such plundering as occurred in Bohemia. Let each one [i.e. of the heirs of the donors] examine his own conscience and see what he ought to take for his own needs and what he should leave for the common fund ! "1
The setting up of such a " common fund " was also suggested in other Lutheran towns as a means of introducing some sort of order into the confiscation of the Church's property. The direct object of the funds was not the relief of the poor. This was merely included as a measure for palliating and justifying the bold stroke which the innovators were about to take in secularising the whole of the Church's vast properties.
This, however, makes some of Luther's admonitions in his preface to the regulations for the Leisnig common fund sound somewhat strange, for instance, his injunction that everything be carried out according to the law of love. " Christian charity must here act and decide ; laws and enactments cannot settle the difficulties. Indeed I write this counsel only out of Christian charity for the Christians." Whoever refuses to accept his advice, he says at the conclusion, may go his own way ; only a few would accept it, but one or two were quite enough for him. " The world must remain the world and Satan its Prince. I have done what I could and what it was my duty to do." He was half conscious of the unpractical character of his proposals, yet any failure he was determined to attribute to the devil's doing.
His premonition of failure was only too soon realised at Leisnig. The new scheme could not be made to work. The magistrates refused to resign the rights they claimed of disposing of the foundations and similar charitable sources of revenue or to hand over the incomings to the coffer-masters, for the latter, they argued, were representatives, not of the congregation but of the Church. Hence the fund had to go begging. Luther came to words with the town-council, but was unable to have his own way, even though he appealed to the Elector.2 He lamented in 1524 that the example of Leisnig had been a very sad one, though, as the first of its kind,3 it should have served as a model. Of Tileman Schnabel, an ex-Augustinian and college friend of Luther's at Erfurt, who had been working at Leisnig as preacher and " deacon," Luther wrote, that he would soon find himself
1 Ib., pp. llff., 14=106ff., 110.
2 Kostlin-Kawerau, 1, p. 551.
3 It was the first to be established with so much pomp and circum stance.
52 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
obliged to leave if he did not wish to die of hunger. " Inci dents such as these deprive the parsonages of their best managers. Maybe they want to drive them back to their old monasteries."1
Thus the parochial fund of Leisnig, which some writers have extolled so highly, really never came into existence. It lives only in the directions given by Luther.
So ill were parson and schoolmaster cared for at Leisnig, in spite of all the Church property that had been sequestered, that, according to the Visitation of 1529, the preacher there had been obliged to ply a trade and gain a living by selling beer. In 1534, so the records of the Visitations of that date declare, the schoolmaster had for five years been paid no salary.
Link, the Altenburg preacher, was also unsuccessful in his efforts to carry out a similar scheme. He complained as early as 1523, in a writing entitled " Von Arbeyt und Betteln," that this Christian undertaking had so far " not only not been furthered but had actually gone backward " in spite of all his efforts from the pulpit. He, too, addresses himself to the " rulers " and reminds them that it is their duty " to the best of their ability to provide for the poverty of the masses."2
To Luther's bitter grief and disappointment Wittenberg (see above, p. 49) also furnished anything but an encouraging example. Here the incentive to the introduction of the common fund by Carlstadt had been the resolve of the town council " to seize on the revenues of the Church, the brother hoods and guilds and divert them into the common fund, to be employed for general purposes, and for paying the Church officials. ... No less than twenty-one pious guilds were to be mulcted."3 Yet the Wittenberg measures were so little a success, in spite of all Luther's efforts, that in his sermons he could not sufficiently deplore the absence of charity and prevalence of avarice and greed amongst both burghers and
1 To Spalatin, Nov. 24, 1524, " Brief wechsel," 5, p. 72 f.
2 Cp. Ehrle, " Die Armenordnungen," etc. (" Hist. Jahrb.," 9, 1888), p. 475. The Altenburg regulations are no longer extant.
3 Feuchtwanger, " Jahrb. f. Gesetzgebung," etc., I., p. 173. He quotes the enthusiastic words written on this occasion by the Witten berg student Ulscenius : " O factum apostolicum, fervet hodie in Wittenbergensium cordibus Dei et proximi dilectio ardentissima" etc., and remarks : We may take in conjunction with this statement the libertinism which actually prevailed in the town at the end of 1521.
POOR RELIEF 53
councillors.1 The Beutelordnung continued indeed in existence, but merely as an administrative department of the town council.
It is not surprising therefore that Luther gave up for the while any attempt at putting into practice the Leisnig project elsewhere ; his scheme for assembling the true Christians into a community had also perforce to betake itself unto the land of dreams. Only in his " Deudsche Messe " of 1526 does the old idea again force itself to the front : " Here a general collection for the poor might be made among the congregation ; it should be given willingly and distributed amongst the needy after the example of St. Paul, 2 Cor. ix. . . . If only we had people earnestly desirous of being Christians, the manner and order would soon be settled.5'2
Subsequent to 1526, however, Bugenhagen drafted better regulations and poor laws for Wittenberg and other Protes tant towns, founded this time on a more practical basis. (See below, p. 57 f.)
Luther, nevertheless, continued to complain of the Wittenbergers. The indignation he expresses at the lack of all charitable endeavours throughout the domain of the new Evangel serves as a suitable background for these complaints.
Want of charity and of neighbourly love was the primary and most important cause of the failure of Luther's efforts.
" Formerly, when people served the devil and outraged the Blood of Christ," he says in 1530 in " Das man die Kinder zur Schulen halten solle " (see above, p. 6), " all purses were open and there was no end to the giving, for churches, schools and every kind of abomination ; but now that it is a question of founding true schools and churches every purse is closed with iron chains and no one is able to give." So pitiful a sight made him beg of God a happy death so that he might not live to see Germany's punishment : " Did my conscience allow of it I would even give my help and advice so as to bring back the Pope with all his abominations to rule over us once more."3
What leads him to such admissions as, that, the Christians, " under the plea of freedom are now seven times worse than they were under the Pope's tyranny," is, in the first place,
1 Cp. below.
2 Weim. ed., 19, p. 74 ff. ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 231.
3 Ib., 30, 2, p. 584 f.= 172, p. 419 f.
54 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
his bitter experience of the drying up of charity, which now ceases to care even for the parsonages and churches. Under the Papacy people had been eager to build churches and to make offerings to be distributed in alms among the poor, but, now that the true religion is taught, it is a wonder how everyone has grown so cold. — Yet the people were told and admonished that it was well pleasing to God and all the angels, but even so they would not respond. — Now a pastor could not even get a hole in his roof mended to enable him to lie dry, whereas in former days people could erect churches and monasteries regardless of cost. — " Now there is not a single town ready to support a preacher and there is nothing but robbery and pilfering amongst the people and no one hinders them. Whence comes this shameful plague ? ' From the doctrine,' say the bawlers, ' which you teach, viz. that we must not reckon on works or place our trust in them.' This is, however, the work of the tiresome devil who falsely attributes such things to the pure and wholesome teaching," etc.1
He is so far from laying the blame on his teaching that he exclaims : What would our forefathers, who were noted for their charity, not have done " had they had the light of the Evangel which is now given to us " ? Again and again he comes back to the contrast between his and older times : " Our parents and forefathers put us to shame for they gave so generously and charitably, nay even to excess, to the churches, parsonages and schools, foundations, hospitals," etc.2 — "Indeed had we not already the means, thanks to the charitable alms and foundations of our forefathers, the Gospel itself would long since have been wiped out by the burghers in the towns, and the nobles and peasants in the country, so that not one poor preacher would have- enough to eat and drink ; for we refuse to supply them, arid, instead, rob and lay violent hands on what others have given and founded for the purpose."3
To sum up briefly other characteristic complaints which belong here, he says : Now that in accordance with the true Evangel we are admonished " to give without seeking for honour or merit, no one can spare a farthing."4 — No one now will give, and, " unless we had the lands we stole from the Pope, the preachers would have but scant fare " ; they even try " to snatch the morsels out of the parson's mouth." The way in which the " nobles and officials " now treat what was formerly Church property amounts to " a devouring of all beggars, strangers and poor widows ; we may indeed bewail this, for they eat up the very marrow of the bones. Since they raise a hue and cry against
the Papists let them also not forget us Woe to you
peasants, burghers and nobles who grab everything, hoard and scrape, and pretend all the time to be good Evangelicals."5
1 See Dollinger, " Die Ref.," 1, p. 303 ff.
2 Erl. ed., 142, p. 391. Church Postils. 3 /&., p. 389.
4 Weim. ed., 32, p. 409 ; Erl. ed., 43, p. 164. Expos, of Mat. vi. 6 Ib., Erl. ed., 44, p. 356. Sermons on Mat. xviii.-xxiii. — For similar statements see the passage in the last Note and Erl. ed., 23,
POOR RELIEF 55
He is only too well acquainted with the evils of mendicancy and idleness, and knows that they have not diminished but rather increased. Even towards the end of his life he alludes to the "innumerable wicked rogues who pretend to be poor, needy beggars and deceive the people " ; they deserve the gallows as much as the " idlers," of whom there are " even many more " than before, who are well able to work, take service and support them selves, but prefer to ask for alms, and, " when these are not esteemed enough, to supplement them by pilfering or even by open, bare faced stealing in the courtyards, the streets and in the very houses, so that I do not know whether there has ever been a time when robbery and thieving were so common."1
Finally he recalls the enactments against begging by which the " authorities forbade foreign beggars and vaga bonds and also idlers." This brings us back to the attempts made, with the consent of the authorities in the Lutheran districts, to obviate the social evils by means similar to those adopted at Leisnig.
A Second Stumbling Block : Lack of Organisation
It was not merely lack of charity that rendered nugatory all attempts to put in force regulations such as those drafted for Leisnig, but also defects in the inner organisation of the schemes. First, to lump all sorts of monies intended for different purposes into a single fund could prove nothing but a source of confusion and diminish the amount to be devoted directly to charitable purposes ; this, too, was the effect of keeping no separate account of the expenditure for the relief of the poor.
Then, again, the intermingling of secular and spiritual which the arrangement involved was very unsatisfactory. We can trace here more clearly than elsewhere the quasi- mystic idea of the congregation of true believers which retained so strong a hold on Luther's imagination till about 1525. With singular ignorance of the ways of the world he wished to set up the common fund on a community based on faith and charity in which the universal priesthood was supposed to have abolished all distinction between the spiritual and secular authorities, nay, between the two very
S. 317 ; also above, vol. iv., passim. Cp. also Luther's statements i Janssen, " Hist, of the German People," xv., p. 465 ff. ; Dollinger, " Die Ref.," 2, p. 215, 306, 349.
1 Erl. ed., 23, 313 f. " An die Pfarherrn wider den Wucher." 1539.
56 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
spheres themselves. He took for granted that Evangelical rulers would be altogether spiritual simply because they possessed the faith ; faith, so he seemed to believe, would of itself do everything in the members of the congregation ; under the guidance of the spirit everything would be " held in common, after the example of the Apostles," as he says in the preface of the Leisnig regulations. But what was possible of accomplishment owing to abundance of grace in Apostolic times was an impossible dream in the 16th century. " The old ideal of an ecclesiastical commonwealth on which, according to the preface, Luther wished to construct a kind of insurance society for the relief of the poor, could not subsist for a moment in the keen atmosphere of a workaday world where men are what they are."1
Hence the latest writer on social politics and the poor law, from whom the above words are taken, openly expresses his wonder at the " Utopian, religio-communistic foundation on which the Wittenberg and Leisnig schemes, and those drawn up on similar lines, were based," at the " Utopian efforts " with their " absurd system of expenditure," which, owing to their " fundamental defects and the mixing of the funds, were doomed sooner or later to fail." This " travesty of early Christianity " tended neither to promote the moral and charitable sense of the people nor to further benevolent organisation. " Any rational policy of poor law " was, on the contrary, shut out by these early Lutheran institutions ; the relief of the poor was thereby placed on an * ' eminently unstable basis " ; the poor-boxes only served " to encourage idleness." " Not in such a way could the modern poor-law system, based as it is on impersonal, legal principles, be called into being."
" No system of poor law has ever had less claim to be placed at the head of a new development than this one [of Leisnig]."2
The years 1525 and 1526 brought the turning point in Luther's attitude towards the question of poor relief, particularly owing to the effect of the Peasant War on his views of society and the Church.
The result of the war was to bring the new religious system into much closer touch with the sovereigns and
1 Feuchtwanger, II. (see above, p. 44, n. 2), p. 192.
2 Ib., pp. 197, 180, 177 f., 176.
POOR RELIEF 57
" thus practically to give rise to a theocracy."1 In spite of the changes this produced, Luther's schemes for providing for the poor continued to display some notable defects.
For all " practical purposes Luther threw over the principle of the universal priesthood which the peasants had embraced as a socio-political maxim, and, by a determined effort, cut his cause adrift from the social efforts of the day. ... He worked himself up into a real hatred of the mob, of ' Master Omnes,' the ' many- headed monster,' and indeed came within an ace of the socio political ideas of Machiavelli, who advised the rulers to treat the people so harshly that they might look upon those lords as liberal who were not extortionate." After the abrogation of episcopal authority and canon law, of hierarchy and monasteries " there came an urgent call for the establishment of new associa tions with practical aims and for the construction of the skeleton of the new Christian community ; we now hear no more of that ideal community of true believers which, thanks to its heartfelt faith, was to carry on the social work of preventing and alleviating poverty."
The whole of the outward life of the Church being now under the direction of the Protestant sovereign, the system of poor relief began to assume a purely secular character, having nothing but an outward semblance of religion. The new regulations were largely the work of Bugenhagen, who was a better organiser than Luther. The many enactments he was instrumental in drafting for the North German towns embody necessary provisions for the relief of the poor.
Officials appointed by the sovereign or town-council directed, or at least supervised, the management, while the " deacons," i.e. the ecclesiastical guardians of the fund, were obliged to find the necessary money and, generally, to bear all the odium for the meagreness and backwardness of the distribution. The members of the congregation had practi cally no longer any say in the matter. The parish's share in the relief of the poor was made an end of even before it had lost the other similar rights assigned to it by Luther, such as that of promulgating measures of discipline, appoint ing clergy, administering the Church's lands, etc. Just as the organisation of the Church was solely in the hands of the authorities to the complete exclusion of the congrega tions, so poor relief and the ecclesiastical regulations on which it was based became merely a government concern.
1 The quotations here and in what follows are from Feucbtwanger.
58 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
What Bugenhagen achieved, thanks to the ecclesiastical regulations for poor relief, for which he was directly or indirectly responsible, gave " good hopes, at least at first, of bringing the difficult social problem of those days nearer to a solution." At any rate they were a " successful attempt to bring some order into the whole system of relief, by means of the authorities and on a scale not hitherto attempted by the Church."1 It is true that he, like those who were working on the same lines, e.g. Hedio, Rhegius, Hyperius, Lasco and others, often merely transplanted into a new soil the rules already in vogue in the Catholic Netherlands and the prosperous South German towns. Hedio of Strasburg, for instance, translated into German the entire work of Vives, the opponent of Lutheranism, and exploited it practically and also sought to enter into epistolary com munication with Vives. The prohibition of mendicancy, the establishment of an independent poor-box apart from the rest of the Church funds, and many other points were borrowed by Bugenhagen and others from the olden Catholic regulations.
Such efforts were in many localities supplemented by the kindliness of the population and, thanks to a spirit of Christianity, were not without fruit.
As, however, everybody, Princes, nobles, townships and peasants, were stretching out greedy hands towards the now defenceless possessions of the olden Church, a certain reaction came, and the State, in the interests of order, saw fit to grant a somewhat larger share to the ecclesiastical authorities in the administration of Church property and relief funds. The Lutheran clergy and the guardians of the poor were thus allowed a certain measure of free action, provided always that what they did was done in the name of the sovereign, i.e. the principal bishop. The new institu tions created by such men as Bugenhagen soon lost their public, communal or State character, and sank back to the level of ecclesiastical enterprises. Institutions of this stamp had, however, " been more numerous and better en-
1 Feuchtwanger, II., p. 197. He quotes from the compilation of A. L. Richter, " Die evang. Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrh.," and Sehling (above, p. 49, n. 3) Bugenhagen's " Ordnungen " subsequent to those set up for Wittenberg in 1527. Cp. in K. A. Vogt, " Bugen hagen," 1367, p. 101 ff., on £he latter's " Von den Christen-loven," etc., 1526, \
POOR RELIEF 59
dowed in the Middle Ages and were so later in the Catholic districts."
Owing in part to a technical defect in the Protestant regulations, dishonesty and carelessness were not excluded from the management and distribution of the poor fund, the administration falling, as a matter of course, into the hands of the lowest class of officials. Catholics had good reason for branding it as a " usury and parson's box."1 The reason why, in Germany, Protestant efforts for poor relief never issued in a satisfactory socio-political system capable of relieving the poor and thus improving the condition of both Church and State, lay, not merely in the economic difficulties of the time, but, " what is more important, in the social and moral working of the new religion and new piety which Luther had established."2
Influence of Luther's Ethics. Robbery of Church Property Proves a Curse
Not only had the Peasant Rising and the reprisals taken by the rulers and the towns brought misery on the land and hardened the hearts of the princes and magistrates, not only had the means available for the relief of the poor been diminished, first by the founding of new parishes in place of the old ones, which had in many cases been supported by the monasteries and foundations, secondly, by the demands of Protestants for the restitution of many ecclesiastical benefices given by their Catholic forefathers, thirdly, by the drying up of the spring of gifts and donations, but " the common fund, which had been swelled by the shekels of the Church, had now to bear many new burdens and only what remained — which often enough was not much — was employed for charitable purposes." In the same way, and to an even greater extent, must the Lutheran ethics be taken into account. Luther's views on justification by faith alone destroyed " that impulse of the Middle Ages towards open-handed charity." This was " an ethical defect of the Lutheran doctrine " ; it was only owing to his " utter ignorance of the world " that Luther persisted in believing that faith would, of itself and without any " law,"
1 Cp. Janssen, xv., p. 456 f.
2 Feuchtwanger, ib., II., p. 206.
60 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
beget good works and charity.1 " It was a cause of wonder and anxiety to him throughout his life that his assumption, that faith would be the best ' taskmaster and the strongest incentive to good works and kindliness,' never seemed to be realised. . . . The most notable result of Luther's doctrine of grace and denial of all human merit was, at least among the masses, an increase of libertinism and of the spirit of irresponsibility."2
The dire effects of the new principles were also evident in the large and wealthy towns, the exemplary poor-law regulations of which we have considered above. After the innovations had made their way among them we hear little more of provisions being made against mendicancy, for the promotion of work and for the relief of poverty. Hence, as regards these corporations . . . the change of religion meant, according to Feuchtwanger, " a decline in the quality of their social philanthropy." (Cp. above, vol. iv., p. 477 ff.)
From some districts, however, we have better reports of the results achieved by the relief funds. In times of worst distress good Christians were always ready to help. Much depended on the spirit of those concerned in the work. In general, however, the complaints of the preachers of the new faith, including Melanchthon, wax louder and louder.3 They tell us that the patrimony of the poor was being carried off by the rapacity of the great or disappearing under the hands of avaricious and careless administrators, whilst new voluntary contributions were no longer forthcoming. We find no lack of those, who, like Luther's friend Paul Eber, are given to noting the visible, palpable consequences of the wrong done to the monasteries, brotherhoods and churches.4
1 Cp. ib., p. 214. 2 Ib., p. 212.
3 In his instruction against the Anabaptist doctrines (Wittenberg, 1528, D 3b) Melanchthon says : " Never have the people shown themselves more unfriendly and malicious towards the parsons and ministers of the Church than now. Some who wish to be thought very Evangelical seize upon the property given to the parsons, pulpits, schools and churches, and without which we should end by becoming heathen. The common people and the mob refuse to pay the parson his dues," etc.
4 See Janssen, ib., xv., p. 480, n. 1, where the touching complaint of Eber's is quoted, viz. that the ministers of the Church were stripped and left to starve. He prophesies that future times will show how " little blessing spoliation brought those who warmed and fed them selves on Church property." It was everywhere worst in the villages and small towns.
POOR RELIEF 61
A long list of statements from respected Protestant contem poraries is given by Janssen, who concludes : " The whole system of poor relief was grievously affected by the seizure and squandering of Church goods and of innumerable charitable bequests intended not only for parochial and Church use but also for the hospitals, schools and poor-houses."1 The testimonies in question, the frankness of which can only be explained by the honourable desire to make an end of the crying evil, come, for instance, from Thomas Rorarius, Andreas Musculus, Johann Winistede, Erasmus Sarcerius, Ambrose Pape and the General Superintendent, Cunemann Flinsbach.2 They tend to show that the new doctrine of faith alone had dried up the well-spring of self-sacrifice, as indeed Andreas Hyperius, the Marburg theo logian, Christopher Fischer, the General Superintendent, Daniel Greser, the Superintendent, Sixtus Vischer and others state in so many words.
The incredible squandering of Church property is proved by official papers, was pilloried by the professors of the University of Rostock, also is clear from the minutes of the Visitations of Wesenberg in 1568 and of the Palatinate iu-^556 which bewail " the sin against the property set aside for God and His Church."3 And again, " The present owners have dealt with the Church property a thousand times worse than the Papists," they make no conscience of " selling it, mortgaging it and giving it away." Princes belonging to the new faith also raised their voice in protest, for instance, Duke Barnim XI in 1540, Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg in 1540 and Elector Johann George, 1573. But the sovereigns were unable to restrain their rapacious nobles. " The great Lords," the preacher Erasmus Sarcerius wrote of the Mansfeld district in 1555, " seek to appropriate to themselves the feudal rights and dues of the clergy and allow their officials and justices to take forcible action. . . . The revenues of the Church are spent in making roads and bridges and giving banquets, and are lent from hand to hand without hypothecary security."4 The Calvinist, Anton Prsetorius, and many others not to mention Catholic contemporaries, speak in similar terms.
Of the falling off in the Church funds and poor-boxes in the 16th century in Hesse, in the Saxon Electorate, in Frankfurt-on- the-Main, in Hamburg and elsewhere abundant proof is met with in the official records, and this is the case even with regard to Wurtemberg in the enactments of the Dukes from 1552 to 1562, though that country constituted in some respects an exception ;5 at a later date Duke Johann Frederick hazarded the opinion that the regulations regarding the fund " had fallen into oblivion."
The growth of the proletariate, to remedy the impoverishment of which no means had as yet been discovered, was in no small measure promoted by Luther's facilitation of marriage.
1 Ib., xv., p. 477. 2 Ib., p. 469 ff.
3 Ib,, p. 481 ft'. 4 For proofs see Janssen, ib.
5 G. Kawerau, " Lehrb. der KG.," 3, ed. W. Moller, 3rd ed., 1907, p. 434, with a reference to the works of Bossert.
62 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
Luther himself had written, that " a boy ought to have recourse to matrimony as soon as he is twenty and a maid when she is from fifteen to eighteen years of age, and leave it to God to provide for their maintenance and that of their children."1 Other adherents of the new faith went even further, Eberlin of Giinsburg simply declared : "As soon as a girl is fifteen, a boy eighteen, they should be given to each other in marriage." There were others like the author of a " Predigt iiber Hunger- und Sterbejahre, von einem Diener am Wort " (1571), who raised strong objections against such a course. Dealing with the causes of the evident increase of " deterioration and ruin " in " lands, towns and villages," he says, that " a by no means slight cause is the countless number of lightly contracted marriages, when people come together and beget children without knowing where they will get food for them, and so come down themselves in body and soul, and bring up their children to begging from their earliest years." " And I cannot here approve of this sort of thing that Luther has written : A lad should marry when he is twenty, etc. [see above]. No, people should not think of marrying and the magistrates should not allow them to do so before they are sure of being able at least to provide their families with the necessaries of life, for else, as experience shows, a miserable, degenerate race is produced."2
What this old writer says is borne out by modern sociologists. One of them, dealing with the 16th and 17th centuries, says : " These demands [of Luther and Eberlin] are obviously not practicable from the economic point of view, but from the ethical standpoint also they seem to us extremely doubtful. To rush into marriage without prospect of sufficient maintenance is not trusting God but tempting Him. Such marriages are extremely immoral actions and they deserve legal punishment on account of their danger to the community." " Greater evil to the world can scarcely be caused in any way than by such marriages. Even in the most favourable cases such early marriages must have a deteriorating influence on the physical and intellectual culture of posterity."3
Owing to the neglect of any proper care for the poor the plague of vagabondage continued on the increase. Luther's zealous contemporary, Cyriacus Spangenberg, sought to counteract it by reprinting the Master's edition of the " Liber vagatorum." He says : " False begging and trickery has so gained the upper hand that scarcely anybody is safe from imposture." The Superintendent, Nicholas Selnecker, again republished the writing with Luther's preface in 1580, together with some lamentations of his own. He
1 Weim. ed., 10, 2, p. 303 f. ; Erl. ed., 162, p. 541 (in 1522).
2 Cp. Janssen, ib., xv., p. 501.
3 O. Jolles, " Die Ansichten der deutschen nationaltfkonomischen Schriftsteller des 1C. und 17. Jahrh. iiber Bevolkerungswesen" ("Jahrb. f. Nationalftkonomie u. Statistik," N.F. 13, 1886, p. 196). Janssen, ib.
POOR RELIEF 63
complains that " there are too many tramps and itinerant scholars who give themselves up to nothing but knavery," etc.1
Adolf Harnack is only re-echoing the complaints of 16th century Protestants when he writes : " We may say briefly that, alas, nothing of importance was achieved, nay, we must go further : the Catholics are quite right when they assert that they, not we, lived to see a revival of charitable work in the 16th century, and, that, where Lutheranism was on the ascendant, social care of the poor was soon reduced to a worse plight than ever before."2 The revival in Catholic countries to which Harnack refers showed itself particularly in the 17th century in the activity of the new Orders, whereas at this time the retrograde movement was still in progress in the opposite camp. " For a long time the Protestant relief system produced only insignificant results." It was not till the rise of Pietism and Rationalism, i.e. until the inauguration of the admirable Home Missions, that things began to improve. But Pietism and Rationalism are both far removed from the original Lutheran orthodoxy."3
Some Recent Excuses
It has been remarked in excuse of Luther and his want of success, that, " with merit and the hope of any reward, there also vanished the stimulus to strive after the attain ment of salvation by means of works," and that this being so, it was " not surprising " that charity — the selfless fruit of faith — was wanting in many ; " for new, albeit higher moral motives, cannot at once come into play with the same facility as the older ones which they displace ; there comes a time when the old motives have gone and when the new ones are operative only in the case of a few ; the leaven at first only works gradually." The history of the spread of " the higher motives of morality " not only at the outset of Christianity but at all times, shows, however, as a rule these to be most active under the Inspiration of the Divine
1 Janssen, ib., xv., p. 505. Feuchtwanger must have been familiar with all this though he never quotes Janssen. He says (p. 214) : " Only one who was unfavourable to the reformation would judge Protestant ism by the fruits of its first two centuries."
2 " Reden und Aufsatze," 2, 1904, p. 52, in the lecture " Die evan- gelisch-soziale Aufgabe im Lichte der Gesch. der Kirche."
3 F. Schaub, " Die kath. Caritas und ihre Gegner," 1909, p. 45.
64 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
Spirit at the time when first accepted. Nor does the com parison with the leaven in the passage quoted apply to a state of decline and decay, where, for a change to be effected, outside and entirely different elements were needed. We are told that the new motives could not at once take effect, but, where the delay extends over quite a century and a half, the blame surely cannot be laid on the shortness of the time of probation.
Again, when we hear great stress laid on the fact that Luther at least paved the way for State relief of the poor and, thus, far outstrode the mediaeval Church, one is justified in asking, whether in reality State relief of the poor, with compulsory taxation, non-intervention of Chris tian charity, or individual effort, or without any morally elevating influence, is something altogether ideal ; whether, on the other hand, voluntary charity, as practised par ticularly by associations, Orders or ecclesiastics, does not deserve a much higher place and take precedence of, or at least stand side by side with, the forced " charity " of the State. Even to-day Protestantism is seeking to reserve a place for voluntary charitable effort. Considerations as to the value of mere State charity would, however, carry us too far. We must refer this matter to experts.1
That, before Luther's day, the authorities took a reason able and even larger share in the relief of the poor than he himself demanded, is evident from what has been said above (p. 43 ff.).
As a matter of fact, judging by what has gone before, the assertion that the system of State relief of the poor was originated by Luther or by Protestantism calls for con siderable " revision." " The reformation," so the socio logical authority we have so frequently quoted says, " created neither the communal nor the governmental
1 See the excellent work by Sehaub, p. 14 ff., quoted in the previous Note, where it is stated, that, under present conditions, private charity certainly does not suffice and that, therefore, State relief is necessary ; yet the latter is always merely subsidiary, because what is assumed by real Christian charity, i.e. self-sacrifice, and individual care, can only be realised in private relief of the poor ; the State, on the other hand, has its efficient compulsory taxation (" caritas coacta ") and its own bureaucratic means of carrying out its work ; in any case the State must not monopolise any branch of poor relief, and public and private charity ought to be in close touch. These remarks may serve to assist in the right appreciation of the historical movement described above.
THE SECULAR ESTATE 65
system of poor relief."1 This he finds borne out by the different schemes for the relief of the poor contained in the old ecclesiastical constitutions. It is true, he says, that, " according to the idea in vogue, the origin of our present Poor Law " can be traced back directly " to the Reformation. Nevertheless, the changes that took place in the social care of the poor subsequent to Luther's day, though certainly 44 far-reaching enough," were " exclusively negative " ;2 owing to his exertions the Church property and that set aside for the relief of the poor was secularised, and the previous free-handed method of distribution ceased ; all further growth of legislation on the subject in the prosperous and independent townships was effectually hindered ; out of the mass of property that passed into alien hands only a few scraps could be spared by the secular rulers and handed over to the ministers for the benefit of the poor.
This was no State-regulation of poor relief as we now understand it. Still, the way was paved for it in so far as the props of the olden ecclesiastical system of relief had been felled and had eventually to be replaced by something new. In this sense it may be said that Luther's work tc paved the way " for the new conditions.3
5. Luther's Attitude towards Worldly Callings
An attempt has been made to prove the truth of the dictum so often met with on the lips of Protestants, viz. that " Luther was the creator of those views of the world and life on which both the State and our modern civilisation rest," by arguing, that, at least, he made an end of contempt for worldly callings and exalted the humbler as well as the higher spheres of life at the expense of the ecclesiastical and monastic. What Luther himself frequently states concern ing his discovery of the dignity of the secular callings has elsewhere been placed in its true light (and the unhistoric accounts of his admirers are all in last resort based on his). This was done in the most suitable place, viz. when dealing with " Luther and Lying," and with his spiteful caricature of the mediaeval Church.4 Still, for the sake of completeness, the claims Luther makes in this respect, and some new
1 Feuchtwanger, II., p. 194. 2 /&., pp. 212, 214.
3 Cp. ib., p. 214. * Vol. iv., p. 127 ff.
VI.— F
66 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
proofs in refutation of them, must be briefly called to mind in the present chapter. It is not unusual for his admirers to speak with a species of awe of Luther's achievements in this respect :
" One of the most Momentous Achievements of the Reformation "
The claims Luther makes in respect of his labours on behalf of the worldly callings are even greater than his admirers would lead one to suppose. His actual words reveal their hyperbolical character, or rather untruth, by their very extravagance.
Luther we have heard say : " Such honour and glory have I by the grace of God, that, since the time of the Apostles no doctor . . . has confirmed and instructed the consciences of the secular estates so well and lucidly as I."1 — It was quite different with the " monks and priestlings " ! They " damned both the laity and their calling." These " revo lutionary blasphemers " condemned " all the states of life that God instituted and ordained " ; on the other hand, they extol their self -chosen and accursed state as though outside of it no one could be saved.2
The phantom of a Popish, monkish holiness-by-works never left him. In his Commentary on Genesis, though he holds that he has already taught the Papists more than they deserve on the right appreciation of the lower callings and labours, yet he once more informs them of his discovery, " that the work of the household and of the burgher," such as hospitality, the training of children, the supervision of servants, " despised though they be as common and worth less," are also well-pleasing to God. " Such things must be judged according to the Word [of God], not according to reason ! . . . Let us therefore thank God that we, en lightened by the Word, now perceive what are really good works, viz. obedience to those in authority, respect for parents, supervision of the servants and assistance of our brethren." " These are callings instituted by God." "When the mother of a family provides diligently for her family, looks after the children, feeds them, washes them and rocks
1 Erl. ed., 31, p. 236. " Verantwortung der auffgelegten Auffrur," 1533. Above, vol. v., p. 59. * Ib., p. 239 f .
WORLDLY CALLINGS 67
them in the cradle," this calling, followed for God's sake, is " a happy and a holy one."1
Luther is never tired of claiming as his peculiar teaching that even the most humble calling — that of the maid or day- labourer — may prove a high and exalted road to heaven and that every kind of work, however insignificant, performed in that position of life to which a man is called is of great value in God's sight when done in faith. He is fond of repeating, that a humble ploughman can lay up for himself as great a treasure in heaven by tilling his field, as the preacher or the schoolmaster, by their seemingly more exalted labours.
There is no doubt, that, by means of this doctrine, which undoubtedly is not without foundation, he consoled many of the lower classes, and brought them to a sense of their dignity as Christians. It is true that it was his polemics against monasticism and the following of the counsels of perfection which led him to make so much of the ordinary states of life and to paint them in such glowing colours. Nevertheless, we must admit that he does so with real eloquence and by means of comparisons and figures taken from daily life which could not but lend attraction to the truth and which differ widely from the dry, scholastic tone of some of his Catholic predecessors in this field.
He does not, however, really add a single fresh element to the olden teaching, or one that cannot be traced back to earlier times.
Either Luther was not aware of this, or else he conceals it from his hearers and readers. It would have been possible to confront him with a whole string of writers, ancient and mediaeval, and even from the years when he himself began his work, whose writings teach the same truths, often, too, in language which leaves nothing more to be wished for on the score of impressiveness and feeling.2 So many proofs, from reason as well as from revelation, had always been forthcoming in support of these truths that it is hard for us now to understand how the idea gained ground that Chris-
1 " Opp. lat. exeg.," 4, pp. 202-204.
2 Cp. N. Paulus, " Die Wertung der weltlichen Berufe im MA.,'* ("Hist. Jahrb.," 1911, pp. 725-755). "Similar testimony," Paulus says, p. 740, " dating from the close of the Middle Ages is to be found in abundance." He lays particular stress on the witness of monks and friars.
68 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
tians had forgotten them. Those who, down to the present day, repeat Luther's assertions make too little account of this psychological riddle.
Here we shall merely add to what has already been brought forward a few further proofs from Luther's own day.
Andreas Proles (fl503), Vicar General of the Saxon Augustinian Congregation and founder of the reformed branch which Luther himself joined on entering the monastery, reminds the working classes in one of his sermons of the honour, the duty, and the worth of work. " Since man is born to labour as the bird to fly, he must work unceasingly and never be idle." He warmly exhorts the secular authorities to prayer, but reminds them still more emphatically of the requirements and the dignity of their calling : " The life of the mighty does not consist in parade but in ruling and discharging their duties towards their people." He praises voluntary chastity and clerical celibacy, but also points out powerfully that the married state " is for many reasons honour able and praiseworthy in the sight of God and all Christians."1
Gottschalk Hollen, the preacher of Westphalia, was also an Augustinian. In his sermons published at Hagenau in 1517 he displays the highest esteem for the worldly callings. Those classes who worked with their hands did not seem to him in the least contemptible, on the contrary the Christian could give glory to God even by the humblest work ; ordinary believers frequently allowed their calling to absorb them in worldly things, but these are not evil or blameworthy. In a special sermon on work he represents such cares as a means of attaining to ever lasting salvation. He insists everywhere on a man's performing the duties of his calling and will not allow of their being neglected for the sake of prayer or of out-of-the-way practices, such as pilgrimages. 2
Just before Luther made his public appearance two German works of piety described the dignity and the honour of the work ing state and at the same time insisted on the obligation of labour. They speak of the secular callings as a source of moral and religious duty and the foundation of a happy life well pleasing to God.
The " Wyhegertlin," printed at Mayence in 1509, says : " When work is done diligently and skilfully both God and man take pleasure in it, and it is a real good work when skilful artisans contribute to God's glory by their handicraft, by beautiful
1 Sermon on Marriage in his " Sermones dominicales," Leipzig, 1530, Bl. J. 4a, LI. Q 2b. Paulus, ib., p. 741.
2 Of pilgrimages in particular, Luther is fond of saying, that the monks enjoined them at the expense of the duties of a man's calling. Cp., for instance, the passage cited above, p. 67, n. 1 (p. 203) : " Mater familias . . . non faciat, quce in papatu solent, ut discurrat ad templa," etc. For the passages from Hollen see Paulus, ib., p. 740, and Fl. Land- mann, " Das Predigtwesen in Westfalen in der letzten Zeit des MA.," 1900, p. 179 f.
WORLDLY CALLINGS 69
buildings and images of every kind, and soften men's hearts so that they take pleasure in the beautiful, and regard every art and handicraft as a gift of God for the profit, comfort and edification of man." — " For seeing that the Saints also worked and laboured, so shall the Christian learn from their example that by honourable labour he can glorify God, do good and, through God's mercy, save his own soul."1
In an " Ermanung " of 1513, which also appeared at Mayence, we read : "To work is to serve God according to His command and therefore all must work, the one with his hands, in the field, the house or the workshop, others by art and learning, others again as rulers of the people or other authorities, others by fighting in defence of their country, others again as ghostly ministers of Christ in the churches and monasteries. . . . Who ever stands idle is a despiser of God's commands."2
These instances must suffice. Though many others could be quoted, Protestants will, nevertheless, still be found to repeat such statements as the following : " Any appreciation of secular work as something really moral was impossible in the Catholic Church." " The Catholic view of the Church belittled the secular callings." " The ethical appreciation of one's calling is a signifi cant achievement of the reformation on which rests the present division of society." Luther it was who " discovered the true meaning of callings . . . which has since become the property of the civilised world." " The modern ethical conception of one's calling, which is common to all Protestant nations and which all others lack, was a creation of the reformation," etc.
Others better acquainted with the Middle Ages have argued, that, though the olden theologians expressed themselves correctly on the importance of secular callings, yet theirs was not the view of the people. — But the above passages, like those previously quoted elsewhere, do not hail from theologians quite ignorant of the world, but from sermons and popular writings. What they reflect is simply the popular ideas and practice.
That errors were made is, of course, quite true. That, at a time when the Church stood over all, the excessive and ill- advised zeal of certain of the clergy and religious did occasionally lead them to belittle unduly the secular callings may readily be admitted ; what they did furnished some excuse for the Lutheran reaction.
What above all moved Luther was, however, the fact that he himself had become a layman.
To assert that even the very words " calling " or " vocation " in their modern sense were first coined by him is not in agreement with the facts of the case.
On the contrary, Luther found the German equivalents already current, otherwise he would probably not have introduced them into his translation of the Bible, as he was so anxious to adapt
1 Janssen, " Hist, of the German People " (Engl. Trans.), 2, p. 9 f. Paulus, ib., p. 749.
2 Janssen, ib. Paulus, ib.y p. 748.
70 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
himself to the language in common use amongst the people so as to be perfectly understood by them. x It is true that Ecclus xi. 22, in the pre-Lutheran Bible, e.g. that of Augsburg dating from 1487, was rendered : " Trust God and stay in thy place," whereas in Luther's — and on this emphasis has been laid — we read : " Trust in God and abide by thy calling." All that can be said is, how ever, that Luther's translation here brings out the same meaning rather better. That the word wras not coined by Luther, but was common with the people, is clear from what Luther himself says incidentally when speaking of 1 Cor. vii. 20, where the word vocatio (K\i)<ris) is used of the call to faith. " And you must know," he writes, " that the word ' calling ' does not here mean the state to which a man is called, as when we say your calling is the married state, your calling is the clerical state, etc., each one having his calling from God. It is not of such a calling that the Apostle here speaks," etc. The expression " as we say " shows plainly that Luther is speaking of a quite familiar term which there was no need for him to invent when translating Ecclus. xi. 22. Much less did he, either then or at any time, invent the " conception of a calling."
Luther's Pessimism Regarding Various Callings. The Peasants
When olden writers dealt with the relation between the Gospel and the worldly callings as a rule they pointed out with holy pride, that Christianity does not merely esteem every calling very highly but embraces them all with holy charity and cherishes and fosters the various states as sons of a common father. Nothing was so attractive in the great exponents of the Gospel teaching and renovators of the Christian people — for instance in St. Francis of Assisi — as their sympathy, respect and tenderness for every class without exception. The Church's great men knew how to discover the good in every class, to further it with the means at their disposal and indulgently to set it on its guard against its dangers. They wished to place everything lovingly at the service of the Creator.
Had Luther in reality brought back to humanity the Gospel true and undented, as he was so fond of saying, then he should surely have striven, in the spirit of charity and good will, to make known its supernatural social forces to all classes of men, and to become, as the Apostle says, " All things to all men."
1 Cp. Paulus, ib., p. 750 ff., and H. Pesch, " Lehrb. der National- dkonomie," 2, 1909, p. 726.
WORLDLY CALLINGS 71
Now, although Luther uses powerful words to describe the dignity of the different worldly callings, on the other hand, he tends at times to depreciate whole classes, this being especially the case when he allows his disappointment to get the better of him. Nor is the contempt openly expressed here counterbalanced by any sufficient recognition of the good, such as might have mollified his hearers and made them forget the ungracious abuse he thundered from his pulpit.
He speaks bitterly of the common people, the proletariate of to-day, to which, according to him, belonged all the lower classes in the towns. Although himself of low extraction he displays very little sympathy for the people. " We must not pipe too much to the mob, for they are fond of raging. . . . They have no idea of self-restraint or how to exercise it, and each one's skin conceals five tyrants."1 " A donkey must taste the stick and the mob must be ruled by force ; of this God was well aware, hence in the hands of the authorities He placed, not a fox's brush, but a sword."2
He only too frequently accuses the artisan and merchant class, as a whole, of cheating, avarice and laziness. At Wittenberg they may possibly have been exceptionally bad, yet he does not speak sufficiently of their less blameworthy side.
For the soldiers, it is true, he has friendly words of apprecia tion of their calling ; it was for them that he wrote in 1526 a special work, where he replied in the affirmative to the question contained in the title : " Can even men-at-arms be in a state of grace ? " Yet even here he does not shrink from bringing forward charges against their calling : "A great part of the men-at-arms are the devil's own and some of them are actually crammed with devils. . . . They imagine themselves fire-eaters because they swear shamefully, perpetrate atrocities, and curse and defy the God of Heaven."3
Of the nobles he says in 1523, wishing to promote more frequent marriages between them and those of lower birth :4 " Must all princes and nobles who are born princes and nobles remain for ever such ? What harm is there if a prince takes a burgher's daughter to wife and contents himself with a burgher's modest dowry ? Or, why should not a noble maid give her hand to a burgher ? In the long run it will not do for the nobles always to intermarry with nobles. Although we are not all equal in the sight of the world yet before God we all are equal, all of us children of Adam, creatures of God, and one man as good as
1 Weim. ed., 19, p. 635 ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 259. " Ob Kriegsleutte auch ynn seligen Stande seyn kunden ? " 1526.
2 Ib., 18, p. 394= 242, p. 324. " Sendebrieff von dem harten Buchlin widder die Bauren," 1525.
3 Ib., 19, p. 659=22, p. 287.
« Ib., 10, 2, p. 157=28, p. 200.
72 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
another." These words certainly do not express any lively con viction of the importance of the existing distinctions of rank for society.
It is perfectly true, that, occasionally, Luther has words of praise and recognition for the good qualities of the " fine, pious nobles," if only on account of those who were inclined to accept his teaching. But far more often he trounces them unmerci fully because they either failed to respond or were set on thwarting him. The language in which he writes of them sometimes becomes unspeakably coarse. " They are called nobles and « von so-and-so.' But merd also comes ' von ' the nobles and might just as well boast of coming from their noble belly, though it stinks and is of no earthly use. Hence this too has a claim to nobility." Then follows his favourite saying : " We Germans are Germans and Germans we shall remain, i.e. swine and senseless brutes."1
The rulers and the great ones of the Empire were the first to win his favour. The writing " An den Adel," the first of his so-called " reformation writings," he addresses to the nobles in the hope of thus attaining his aims by storm. When, however, he was disappointed, and they refused to meet him half-way, he abused the princes and all the secular authorities in Germany and wrote : " God Almighty has made our princes mad " ; " such men were formerly rated as knaves, now we are obliged to call them obedient, Christian princes." To him they were " fools," simply because they were against him and thus belonged to the multitude who " blasphemed " the Divine Majesty.2
After the defeat of the peasants in 1525 he supported those princes favourable to his teaching at the expense of the peasants, so that the latter were loud in their complaints of him. In this connection, looking back at the overthrow of the Peasant Revolt, he wrote to those in power : " Who opposed the peasants more vigorously by word and writing than I ? . . . and, if it comes to boasting, I do not know who else was the first to vanquish the peasants, or to do so
1 /&., p. 631=255. He speaks before this of nobles, who, after the peasant risings, had gone too far in their revenge. — Luther inveighs in the strongest language against the way in which the nobles oppressed the poor " burghers, unhappy pastors and preachers," and says : " Here the lion has caught a mouse and fancies he has overcome the dragon. Germany is now full of such nobles and Junkers, who stink out the beer-houses and draw their steel only on the poor, wretched, defenceless people ; such are the nobles. Out on such abandoned people ! We Germans are indeed swine and savage beasts, and have no noble thoughts or courage in us, as the world too thinks ! " This in the Commentary on the Four Psalms of Consolation, 1526. Weim. ed., 19, p. 604 f. ; Erl. ed., 38, p. 439 f.
2 Weim. ed., 11, p. 246 f. ; Erl. ed., 22, p. 62 f. " Von welltlicher Uberkeytt," 1523, Preface. — Cp. what was said, above, vol. ii., p. 205 f., etc.
THE PEASANTS 73
most effectually. But now those who did the least claim all the honour and glory of it."1
After the Peasant War he was so filled with hatred of the peasant class and so conscious of their dislike for himself personally, as to be hardly able to speak of them without blame and reproach. " The peasants do not deserve," he says, " the harvests and fruits that the earth brings forth and provides."
Of all classes the peasants around Wittenberg incurred his displeasure most severely. " They are all going to the devil," he says when lamenting that, " out of so many villages, only one man taught his household from the Word of God " ; with the young country folk " something " could be done, but the old peasants had been utterly corrupted by the Pope ; this was also the complaint of the Evangelical deacons who came in touch with them.2 — " I am very angry with the peasants," he wrote in 1529, " who are anxious to govern themselves and who do not appreciate their good fortune in being able to sleep in peace owing to the help and protection of the rulers. You helpless, boorish yokels and donkeys," he says to them, " will you never learn to under stand ? May the lightning blast you ! — You have the best of it. . . . You have the Mark and yet are so ungrateful as to refuse to pray for the rulers or to give them any thing."3
As a matter of fact, however, the great ones did not wait for the peasants to " give " anything.
They oppressed the country people and plundered them. Melanchthon wrote, particularly after 1525, of the boundless despotism of the authorities over the people on the land. Since the overthrow of the social revolution very sad changes had taken place among the agriculturists. The violent " laying of the yokels " became a general evil, and, in place of the small holdings of the peasant class — the most virile and largest portion of the nation — arose the large estates of the nobles. Not merely where the horrors of war had raged, but even elsewhere, e.g. in the north-east of Germany, the peasant found himself deprived of his rights and left defence-
1 Weim. ed., 19, p. 278 f. ; Erl. ed., 65, p. 43. " Widder den Rad- schlag der Meintzischen Pfafferey," 1526 (not published by him on account of his sovereign's prohibition).
2 " Colloq.," ed. Bindseil, 1, p. 175.
3 Weim. ed., 28, p. 520 ; Erl. ed., 36, p. 175.
74 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
less in the hands of the Junkers and knights.1 " The reformation-age made his rights to his property and his standing more parlous than before."2
What Luther says of serfdom, the oppression and abuse of which had led to the Peasant Rising, is worthy of record : " Serfdom," he says, " is not contrary to Christianity, and whoever says it is tells a lie ! "3 — " Christ does not wish to abolish serfdom. What cares He how the lords or princes rule [in secular matters] ? "*
He makes a strict application of this in his sermons on Genesis, where he even represents serfdom as a desirable state. Luther delivered these sermons in 1524 and they were printed from notes in 1527. In his preface he declares, that he was " quite willing " they should be published because they express his " sense and mind." He relates in one passage how Abimelech had bestowed " sheep and oxen, men-servants and maid-servants " on Abraham (xx. 14), and then goes on to say of the people made over : " They too were all personal property like other cattle, so that their owners might sell them as they liked, and it would verily be almost best that this stage of things should be revived, for nobody can control or tame the populace in any other way." Abraham did not set free the men-servants and maid servants given him, and yet he was accounted amongst the " pious and holy " and was " a just ruler." He proceeds : " They [the patriarchs] might easily have abolished it so far as they were concerned, but that would not have been a good thing, for the serfs would have become too proud had they been given so many rights, and would have thought themselves equal to the patriarchs or to their children. Each one must be kept in his place, as God has ordained, sons and daughters, servants, maids, husbands, wives, etc. ... If compulsion and the law of the strong arm still ruled (in the case of servants and retainers) as in the past, so that if a man dared to grumble he got a box on the ear — things would fare better ; otherwise it is all of no use. If they take wives, these are impertinent people, wild and dissolute, whom no one can use or have anything to do with."5
1 Cp. Janssen, " Hist, of the German People," xv., p. 137 ff.
2 K. J. Fuchs, " Die Epochen der deutschen Agrargesch." (" Allg. Ztng.," 1898, Suppl. 70).
3 Weim. ed., 16, p. 244 ; Erl. ed., 35, p. 233 (1524-26). * 76., 33, p. 659=48, p. 385 (1530-32).
5 lb., 24 p. 367 f.=33, p. 389 f.
DISAPPOINTED HOPES 75
The Psychological Background. Luther1 s Estrangement from Whole Classes of Society
Both in Luther's treatment of the peasants of his day and in his whole attitude to different classes of society, we find the traces of a profound and general depression which had seized upon him and which seems to accord ill with the sense of triumph one would have expected in him at the continued progress of his work, and at the apostasy from the Roman Church. Such expressions of dissatisfaction become more frequent as years go by and serve to some extent to explain and excuse his pessimism concerning the different classes.
This feeling had its origin, apart from other causes, in the fact that Luther little by little lost touch with whole classes of the people, while to many of the new conditions he remained a stranger. He, who had held in his hands the destiny of so many, was, in fact, becoming to a great extent isolated, particularly since the actual direction of the new Church had been taken out of his hands and vested in the princes or municipal authorities.
Not only did the rift which separated him from the peasants subsequent to 1525 become ever more pronounced, but he found hostility and dislike growing between himself and other classes of society.
Under the influence of the adverse wind blowing from Wittenberg many of the Humanists had given up their at one time enthusiastic friendship and turned against him. Catholic scholars who had once been disposed to favour the reform but had been disappointed in their hopes withdrew from him in increasing numbers. In other districts which had been recently Protestantised the country clergy re mained faithful to the olden Church, as we see, for instance, from a letter of Luther's dated Sep. 19, 1539, where he speaks of " over five hundred parsons, poisonous Papists," who had " been left unexamined and now are raising their horns in defiance " — but who, he hopes, will soon be forcibly sent about their business.1 In his own camp, again, there were Anabaptists and other sectarians ; there were also theologians who refused to fall into line and either failed to
1 To the Elector Johanri Frederick, Erl. ed., 55, p. 239 ; " Brief - wechsel," 12, p. 246.
76 LUTHER'S SOCIAL WORK
preach on faith and works as harshly as he wished, or, running to the opposite extreme like the Antinomians, went much further than he himself. In the Saxon Electorate Luther felt grievously the decease of those Councillors, like Pfeffinger and Feilitzsch, who had been well disposed towards him, whose places were now taken by " greedy Junkers and skinflints, who looked upon the ecclesiastical revolution as a good opportunity for increasing their family estates and for running riot at others' expense."1 Among the princes who had apostatised from the Church he also detected to his bitter vexation an ever-growing tendency to separate themselves from Wittenberg, partly owing to the influence of Zwinglianism, partly in consequence of their independent Church regulations. Such was, for instance, the action of Berlin, where the Protestant Elector, Joachim II of Brandenburg, declared in an address to his clergy : "As little as I mean to be bound to the Roman Church, so little do I mean to be bound to the Church of Wittenberg. I do not say : ' credo sanctam Romanam ' or ' Wittenbergensetn,' but ' catholicam ecclesiamS and my Church here at Berlin or at Collen is just as much a true Christian Church as that of the Wittenbergers."2
In the sermon Luther preached at Wittenberg on June 18, 1531, he pours forth the vials of his wrath on the nobles and peasants of the new faith. He was then doing duty for Bugenhagen, the absent pastor, and devoting himself to preaching, though he describes himself in a letter as " old, sickly and tired of life," and elsewhere, alluding to his many employments, says : " I am not only Luther, but Pomer- anus, Vicar-General, Moses, Jethro and I know not who else besides."3
In this sermon the Gospel of Dives and Lazarus recalls to his mind the fact that, in the Saxon Electorate, he and his preachers were being treated very much as Lazarus, whom the rich man left lying at his gate and who had to get his fill of the