DR. BEARD'S "MARTIN LUTHER."
Tins volume awakens keen regret that the author did not live to complete his work. Luther's life has often been written, both by those who held him in reverence as the Apostle of the Reformation, and by writers bitterly hostile. Janssen has recently written of the German Reformation with a fulness of learning which makes his work indispensable to every student of the period; but Janssen, notwithstanding his great historical knowledge, is a Roman Catholic controversialist first, and his treatment of Luther is neither magnanimous nor just. Luther's faults alone can be learned from his erudite but vindictive pages. Dr. Beard is fair to Luther, equally so to his antagonists ; and he does not even appear to have found difficulty in maintaining the attitude of an impartial observer.
• Martin Luther, and the Reformation in Germany until the Close of the Diet of Worms. By the late Charles Beard, B.A., LL.D. Edited by J. Frederick Smith. London : Regan Paul, Trench, and Co. 1938.
He is, indeed, rather too fond of reminding his readers that Luther and they belong to different planets, which is not quite so true as Dr. Beard imagined.
Dr. Beard is seen at his best in the preliminary chapters, which describe the condition of Germany in the sixteenth century, and contain an admirable account of some of Luther's so-called predecessors. The common mistake is avoided of regarding the Reformation as a mere continuation of the Renaissance. The scholars of the Italian Renaissance were the precursors of our modern way of looking at things ; but they had little if any spiritual kinship with Luther, who would have rejected their views of life with vehement abhorrence. Luther and they were at one, it is true, in their estimate of the Roman Church ; for the Italians, as Dr. Beard says, were, like some acolytes, too near the altar to have any reverence left for it; but their Pagan ideals were more repug- nant to Luther than the worst superstitions of monasticism. Even with the religious Humanists, such as Reuchlin and Erasmus, he had not much sympathy, notwithstanding the compliments sometimes exchanged. In Germany, as in England, the scholars of the Renaissance became hostile to the Reformation as soon as its real drift was perceived by them. And Luther, while willing to borrow Hebrew and Greek from the Humanists, steadily refused to make a cult of learning, or to subordinate theology to scholarship. The German Mystics are sometimes spoken of as precursors of Luther ; and he himself acknowledged his indebtedness to some of them, especially to the author of the Theologia Germanica. But the true Mystic abides in the region of beatific contemplation, letting the active world alone. "Mysticism," writes Dr. Beard, "does not argue; it cannot appeal to any external authority ; it broods, it meditates, it listens for the Divine voice. When that voice is heard, all others are necessarily silent—Church, Bible, opinions of men." No great religious movement, Dr. Beard adds, proceeds from Mysticism ; and the author of the "Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation," was of all men least disposed to rest inactive in its spiritual cloisters of Mysticism. The true precursors of Luther, although it may seem strange to say so, were neither the scholars of the Renaissance, nor the Mystics, but the great MediEeval Church- men and theologians. Like them, he believed in dogma, so earnestly that he wished to strip it of its scholastic form, and make it plain to all men, because it was necessary to all men. Vehemently as he inveighed against the corruptions of the Church, he believed in the Church with all his heart, and was as little disposed as St. Bernard to merge it in the State and the school.
Dr. Beard's account of Luther's life is clear and scholarly; the numerous references to original authorities will render the book most serviceable to students. But while nothing is con- cealed, and nothing wilfully omitted, the intensity of Luther's spiritual struggles, and his stormy elemental grandeur of character, are not sufficiently visible in Dr. Beard's quiet scholarly narrative. It is a Luther toned down to greater reasonableness and propriety that appears in Dr. Beard's pages,—not the Luther of Michelet, "an Aristophanic David, a union of Moses and Rabelais." The deficiency in the per- sonal portraiture would no doubt have been to some extent supplied in the later part of the work, where the author would have made quotations from Luther's personal letters, and from his table-talk.
Dr. Beard gives some useful sketches of Luther's con- temporaries, of Tetzel, who was perhaps not quite so bad as he is commonly painted ; of Aleander, the Papal Nuncio; and of the Willenberg theologian, Carlstadt. To the last,
justice has not been done ; for his vagaries in connection with the prophets of Zwickau, have been allowed to obscure his
merits as a thinker of unusual intellectual courage, who faced the most difficult problems of his time. According to Dr. Beard, Carlstadt had thought out the relation of the Bible to religions belief more completely than Luther, and was on the track of a more scientific theory.
The closing words which Luther uttered at the Diet of Worms have given rise to a literature of pamphlets and articles. In one very early authority Luther is represented as saying : "Here I stand ; I can do no other; God help me, Amen ! " In most of the contemporary accounts, his words are given : "God help me, Amen ! " The longer version has been rejected on internal as well as external grounds, as being theatrical, and unworthy of Luther. Dr. Beard does not attribute much importance t6 this criticism—rightly, as we think—but is disposed to follow the shorter version, although he throws out the suggestion that the words Hier stele id., may have been uttered, but imperfectly heard amid the tumult in which the Diet broke up. • Dr. Beard's closing remarks on the relations of the con- tending parties exhibit his tolerant and somewhat detached manner of regarding the Reformation, which is a strength but also a weakness, for it prevented him from fully measuring the force and grandeur of the religions passion which created the ecclesiastical revolution. He writes as follows :—
"Three centuries and a half have passed away since Pro- testantism, at the Diet of Augsburg, asserted its right to sepa- rate ecclesiastical organisation, and the Catholic Church still exists, almost unimpaired in power and splendour, if no longer able to put forth the old claim to universality. The impartial historian must admit that, however deep and inveterate were the practical corruptions which in part caused and justified Luther's revolt, she had within her a power of self-reformation, which in the latter part of the sixteenth century bore good fruit. Though her type of holiness is not Protestant, it is one that exercises a powerful attraction over some forms of character, and has a marvellous plastic force ; in all ages, even those of her moral degradation, she has been a prolific mother of saints. Many minds, weary of questioning the grounds of faith, gladly take refuge in the arms of authority ; her organised piety, her careful discipline, are inexpressibly grateful to spirits that feel them- selves incapable of self-guidance; the splendour of her ritual appeals to souls which are best approached through the medium of the senses. Perhaps no Church has completely abstained from interference with individual liberty ; but the authorita- tive Church and the voluntary assembly of free men will always continue to exist side by side, each uttering an eternal protest against the other, yet both necessary to supply the various religious wants of mankind. And each, perhaps, answers its end more perfectly because it lives in the presence of the other."
This view of the differences between Catholic and Protestant, now very common among cultivated men, certainly quenches the unholy fires of religious controversy; but does it not place those who hold it outside of the great Churches of Christendom ? A Catholic Church, whether as a historical society, or as a great spiritual confederation with common aims, becomes an impossible dream, if it is the eternal destiny of mankind to separate into two opposite religions camps. And we cannot even pray for its realisation, if it is whole- some as well as necessary that they should always continue in militant opposition to each other.
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