CHAPTER VIII.

THE BULL OF EXCOMMUNICATION, AND LUTHER'S REPLY.

At Rome, the bull, now newly arrived in Germany, had been published as early as June 16. It had been considered, when at length, under the pressure of the influences described above, the subject was taken up in earnest, very carefully in the Papal consistory. The jurists there were of opinion that Luther should be cited once more, but their views did not prevail. As for the negotiations, conducted through Miltitz, for an examination of Luther before the Archbishop of Treves, no heed was now paid to the affair.

The bull begins with the words, 'Arise, O Lord, and avenge Thy cause.' It proceeds to invoke St. Peter, St. Paul, the whole body of the saints, and the Church. A wild boar had broken into the vineyard of the Lord, a wild beast was there seeking to devour &c. Of the heresy against which it was directed, the Pope, as he states, had additional reason to complain, since the Germans, among whom it had broken out, had always been regarded by him with such tender affection: he gives them to understand that they owed the Empire to the Romish Church. Forty-one propositions from Luther's writings are then rejected and condemned, as heretical or at least scandalous and corrupting, and his works collectively are sentenced to be burnt. As to Luther himself, the Pope calls God to witness that he has neglected no means of fatherly love to bring him into the right way. Even now he is ready to follow towards him the example of Divine mercy which wills not the death of a sinner, but that he should be converted and live; and so once more he calls upon him to repent, in which case he will receive him graciously like the prodigal son. Sixty days are given him to recant.

But if he and his adherents will not repent, they are to be regarded as obstinate heretics and withered branches of the vine of Christ, and must be punished according to law. No doubt the punishment of burning was meant; the bull in fact expressly condemns the proposition of Luther which denounces the burning of heretics.

All this was called then at Rome, and has been called even latterly by the Papal party, 'the tone rather of fatherly sorrow than of penal severity.' The means by which the bull had been brought about, made it fitting that Eck himself should be commissioned with its circulation throughout Germany, and especially with its publication in Saxony. More than this, he received the unheard of permission to denounce any of the adherents of Luther at his pleasure, when he published the bull.

Accordingly, Eck had the bull publicly posted up in September at Meissen, Merseburg, and Brandenburg. He was charged, moreover, by a Papal brief, in the event of Luther's refusing to submit, to call upon the temporal power to punish the heretic. But at Leipzig, where the magistrate, by order of Duke George, had to present him with a goblet full of money, he was so hustled in the streets by his indignant opponents, that he was forced to take refuge in the Convent of St. Paul, and hastened to pursue his journey by night, whilst the city officials rode about the neighbourhood with the bull. A number of Wittenberg students, adds Miltitz, made their appearance also at Leipzig, who 'behaved in a good-for-nothing way towards him.'

At Wittenberg, where the publication of the bull rested with the university, the latter notified its arrival to the Elector, and objected for various reasons to publish it, alleging, in particular, that Eck, its sender, was not furnished with proper authority from the Pope. Luther for the first time felt himself, as he wrote to Spalatin, really free, being at length convinced that the Popedom was Antichrist and the seat of Satan. He was not at all discouraged by a letter sent at this time by Erasmus from Holland to Wittenberg, saying that no hopes could be placed in the Emperor Charles, as he was in the hands of the Mendicant Friars. As for the bull, so extraordinary were its contents, that he wished to consider it a forgery.

Still the promise which Luther had given to his Augustinian brethren, only a few weeks before, under pressure from Miltitz, remained as yet unfulfilled. Nor did Miltitz himself wish the threads of the web then spun to slip from his fingers. Even at this hour, with the consent and at the wish of the Elector, an interview had been arranged between Miltitz and Luther at the Castle of Lichtenberg (now Lichtenburg, in the district of Torgau), where the monks of St. Antony were then housed. Just as Miltitz, as we have seen, had thought to be able to avert the bull by getting Luther to write a letter to the Pope, so now he promised the Elector still to conciliate the Pope by that means. Only the letter was to be dated back to the time, before the publication of the bull, when Luther first gave his consent to write it. Its substance was to be as then agreed upon; Luther, as Miltitz expressed it, was to 'eulogise the Pope personally in a manner agreeable to him,' and at the same time submit to him an historical statement of what he had done. Luther consented to publish a letter in these terms, in Latin and German, under date of September 6, and immediately gave effect to his promise.

It is hardly conceivable how Miltitz could still have nurtured such a hope. Neither his wish to ingratiate himself with the Elector Frederick, and to checkmate the plans of Eck whom he detested, nor his personal vanity and flippancy of character, are sufficient to account for it. He must have learnt from his own previous personal intercourse with the Pope, and his experiences of the Papal court, that Leo did not take up Church questions and controversies so gravely and so seriously as not to remain fully open all the time to influences and considerations of other kinds, and that around him were parties and influential personages, arrayed in mutual hostility and rivalry. He must have been strangely ignorant of the state of things at Rome. But as to Luther and his cause there was no longer any hesitation in that quarter.

In what sense Luther himself was willing to comply with the demand of Miltitz, the contents of his letter suffice to show. He makes it clear that nothing was further from his intention than to appease the angry Pontiff by any dexterous artifices or concealments. The assurance required from him, that he had no wish to attack the Pope personally, he construes in its literal terms, apart altogether from the official character and acts of Leo. And in fact against his personal character and conduct he had never said a word. But he takes this opportunity, at the same time, of speaking to him plainly, as a Christian is bound to do to his fellow-Christian; of repeating to him, face to face, the severest charges yet made by him against the Romish chair; of excusing Leo's own conduct in this chair simply and solely on the ground that he regarded him as a victim of the monstrous corruption which surrounded him, and of warning him once more against it as a brother.

He tells him to his face that he himself, the Holy Father, must acknowledge that the Papal see was more wicked and shameful than any Sodom, Gomorrah, or Babylon; that God's wrath had fallen upon it without ceasing; that Rome, which had once been the gate of heaven, was now an open jaw of hell. Most earnestly he warns Leo against his flatterers,—the 'ear-ticklers' who would make him a God. He assures him that he wishes him all that is good, and therefore he wishes that he should not be devoured by these jaws of hell, but on the contrary, should be freed from this godless idolatry of parasites, and be placed in a position where he would be able to live on some smaller ecclesiastical preferment, or on his own patrimony. As for the historical retrospect which Miltitz wanted, and which Luther briefly appends to this letter, all that the latter says in vindication of himself is, that it was not his own fault, but that of his enemies, who had driven him further and further onward, that 'no small part of the unchristian doings at Rome had been dragged to light.'

[Illustration: Fig. 23.—TITLE-PAGE, slightly reduced, of the original Tract 'On the Liberty of a Christian Man.' The Saxon swords are represented above, and the arms of Wittenberg below.]

Luther sent with this letter, as a present to the Pope, a pamphlet entitled 'On the Liberty of a Christian Man.' This is no controversial treatise intended for the great struggle of churchmen and theologians, but a tract to minister to 'simple men.' For their benefit he wished to describe compendiously the 'sum of a Christian life'; to deal thoroughly with the question, 'What was a Christian? and how he was to use the liberty which Christ had won and given to him.' He premises as an axiom that a Christian is a free lord over all things, and subject to nobody. He considers, first of all, the new, inner, spiritual man, and asks what makes him a good and free Christian. Nothing external, he says, can make him either good or free. It does not profit the soul if the body puts on sacred vestments, or fasts, or prays with the lips. To make the soul live, and be good and free, there is nothing else in heaven or on earth but the Holy Scriptures, in other words, God's Word of comfort by His dear Son Jesus Christ, through Whom our sins are forgiven us. In this Word the soul has perfect joy, happiness, peace, light, and all good things in abundance.

And to obtain this, nothing more is required of the soul than what is told us in the Scriptures, namely, to give itself to Jesus with firm faith and to trust joyfully in Him. At first, no doubt, God's command must terrify a man, seeing that it must be fulfilled, or man condemned; but when once he has been brought thereby to recognise his own worthlessness, then comes God's promise and the gospel, and says, Have faith in Christ, in Whom I promise thee all grace; believe in Him, and thou hast Him. A right faith so blends the soul with God's word, that the virtues of the latter become her own, as the iron becomes glowing hot from its union with the fire. And the soul becomes joined to Christ as a bride to the bridegroom; her wedding-ring is faith. All that Christ, the rich and noble bridegroom possesses, He makes His bride's; all that she has, He takes unto Himself. He takes upon Himself her sins, so that they are swallowed up in Him and in His unconquerable righteousness. Thus the Christian is exalted above all things, and becomes a lord; for nothing can injure his salvation; everything must be subject to him and help towards his salvation; it is a spiritual kingdom.

And thus all Christians are priests; they can all approach God through Christ, and pray for others.' Who can comprehend the honour and dignity of a Christian? Through his kingship he has power over all things, through his priesthood he has power over God, for God does what he desires and prays for.'

But the Christian, as Luther states in his second axiom, is not only this new inner man. He has another will in his flesh, which would make him captive to sin. Accordingly, he dare not be idle, but must work hard to drive out evil lusts and mortify his body. He lives, moreover, among other men on earth, and must labour together with them. And as Christ, though Himself full of the Kingdom of God, for our sake stripped Himself of His power and ministered as a servant, so should we Christians, to whom God through Christ has given the Kingdom of all goodness and blessedness, and therewith all that is sufficient to satisfy us, do freely and cheerfully for our heavenly Father whatever pleases Him, and do unto our neighbours as Christ has done for us. In particular, we must not despise the weakness and weak faith of our neighbour, nor vex him with the use of our liberty, but rather minister with all we have to his improvement. Thus the Christian, who is a free lord and master, becomes a useful servant of all and subject to all.

But he does these works, not that he may become thereby good and blessed in the sight of God; he is already blessed through his faith, and what he does now he does freely and gratuitously. Luther thus sums up in conclusion: 'A Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour; in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love. Through faith he rises above himself in God, from God he descends again below himself through love; and yet remains always in God and in godlike love.'

This tract was a remarkable pendant to Luther's remarkable letter to the Pope. His Holiness, so he wrote to him in his dedication, might taste from its contents what kind of occupation the author would rather, and might with more profit, be engaged in, if only the godless Papal flatterers did not hinder him. And in fact the Pope could plainly see from it how Luther lived and laboured, with his inmost being, in these profound but simple ideas of Christian truth, and how he was inwardly compelled and delighted to represent them in their noble simplicity. The whole tone and tenor of this dedication, so tranquil, fervent, and tender, shows further what profound peace reigned in the soul of this vehement champion of the faith, and what happiness the excommunicated heretic found in his God. Next to Luther's Address to the German Nobility and his Babylonian Captivity, this tract is one of the most important contributions of his pen to the cause of the Reformation. It is clear from its pages that when Luther wrote his letter, at the request of Miltitz, to the Pope, he had no thought of making peace with the Papacy, or of even a moment's truce in the campaign.