M ARTIN LUTHER.
IT is no wonder that the estimates of Luther differ so widely as they do. Even the keenest Roman Catholic must• often be bewildered by the passionate intensity of his faith, the unfathomable depth of his hope, the tenderness of hid love. Even the most ardent Protestant must be revolted by the fury of his controversial -language, his utter scorn for the notion that the will counts for anything in the religions life, the coarseness of his morality, the private sanction
which he gave to polygamy, his violent exaggeration of the contrast between nature and grace, and his exhortation to " sin.
strongly " that grace may the more abound. Yet Luther wins admiration from the most unexpected sources. No one could have been more heartily opposed to Luther's moral and religious philo-
sophy than Coleridge, yet almost everything Coleridge says of Luther is said in admiration. " Luther is, in parts," he said,. " the most evangelical writer I know, after the Apostles and Apostolic men ;" and qualified as this praise is, by the expression "in parts," nothing could be truer, though nothing could be falser, if it had been applied to the whole of Luther's teaching. Luther was at home in the circle of Scriptural ideas wherever his own strong personality had not revolted against those ideas, as few men have ever been at home in them, and there was a naieeto and a simplicity in his mode of expressing these ideas which hardly any other religious teacher has equalled. Again, Luther's words had a natural life of their own—hands and feet, as. he himself said of the words of the Bible,—which gives him a singular advantage in dealing with the spiritual life. Coleridge has well contrasted Luther with Erasmus, when he said, " Erasmus's paraphrase of the New Testament is clear and explanatory, but yeti cannot expect anything very deep from Erasmus. The only fit com- mentator on Paul was Luther—not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle, but almost as great a genius." Yet Luther undoubtedly more or less misunderstood St. Paul, when he explained his teaching, as he always did, in the sense of the positive predestination of the elect to eternal life, without any question of the part taken by the human will. "The law does not endure grace," said Luther, " and in its turn grace does not endure the law." No wonder that at the end of his life he had to make almost as great a fight on behalf of " the law," in order to save the best 'elven of civil society, as he had ever made against it in his theological ardour for the doctrine of justification by faith ; and no wonder that, hampered as he was by his own deeper teaching, his comparatively superficial struggle on behalf of "the law" was but vain. The truth is that Luther embodied a great insurrection on behalf of nature and grace against all the conventions of an artificial ecclesiastical system, and that every- thing which tended to mediate between nature and grace, every- thing which, like the Sacramental principle, pointed in the direc- tion of reconciling nature and grace, i.e., of making grace natural or nature gracious, was to Luther repulsive and artificial,—unless he thought he had for it some positive text, from the literal wording of which he could not escape. He could not
endure the discovery of anything like reason or adapta- tion to our nature, in revelation. He loved to exaggerate the paradoxes of nature and grace in their most unmitigated form, though he delighted, in a way, in both,—delighted in the earthliness of the earthly nature, and in the supernatural feat by which—that earthliness notwithstanding—human nature was to be redeemed. Some one the other day, writing in the -Times, said truly enough that any one who wants to see the repul- sive side of Luther should read his sermons upon Marriage. From those sermons one understands how Luther came to commit the worst act of his life,—the disgraceful theologi- cal sanction given to the Landgrave of Hesse to live in polygamy. For Luther took the lowest possible view of marriage, and denied its sacramental character ; indeed, he would probably have get rid of every Sacrament, if he had but seen how to dispute a few express commands of Christ. In justifying, for instance, marriage between Christians and people of the most anti-Christian faiths, he says, with his own peculiar rudeness, " Know that marriage is an outward bodily affair ('ein fiusserlich leiblich Ding '), like other worldly occupa- tions. As I may eat and drink, sleep, walk, ride, buy, speak, and trade with a heathen, Jew, Turk, or heretic, so, too, may I marry with him, and remain . married to him." Marriage to Luther was nothing but an outward transaction, in- volving no mutual transformation of the inner life by the persons joined iu marriage, at all. And just what he taught in relation to marriage, he taught in relation to the natural life generally. It had nothing to do with the spiritual life, except to stand over against it, and increase the wonder and marvel of it. Aud yet Luther was a man of tender affections, and often expressed himself with wonderful beauty concerning the domestic side of life. For example, he commented one day on the text, " Serve the Lord in fear, and rejoice with trembling," thus," There is no contradiction involved in this text, at. least for me. My little boy, John, does exactly this in respect of myself. But I cannot thus act towards God. If I am seated at table, and am writing or doing anything, John sings me a little song; if he sings too loud and I tell him of it, lie still sings on, but with some fear, and to himself as it were. God wills that we also should be constantly gay, but that our gaiety should be tempered with fear and reserve." And yet he could also say,— "Human nature is so corrupt that it does not even desire celestial things. It is like a new-born infant, who, although you may offer it all the wealth and pleasures of the earth, is heedless of everything save its mother's breast."
In truth, Luther felt profoundly the attractions of the natural* life in the rude and coarse form in which a nature of gigantic force and of the homeliest possible breed would be sure to feel them, and lie felt equally powerfully the mystic solicitations of the supernatural life, and seemed to care not at all for a reconciliation between the two. He was raised up apparently to embody a protest against the elaborateness, the artificiality, the systematised casuistry, the technical subtleties, the empty theological discriminations of the degenerate Church of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; and most powerfully, if also most coarsely, he discharged his mission. Partly as the con- sequence of the contradiction ever surging up in his mind between nature and grace, his mind was always alive and bubbling up with wonder and awe. Hence, there is no table-talk in the world like his, the table-talk of a most natural man, to whom the-supernatural was, nevertheless, near and dear. Dr. Johnson's table-talk, indeed, surpasses it in wit, but falls far short of Luther's in the weight and massiveness of the subjects treated, and in the vividness of the natural feelings which these weighty and massive subjects elicit. We have often quoted before, and probably may often quote again, that striking saying of Luther's which brings out the contrast between the Roman system and the Lutheran revolt in all its force:—" We tell our Lord God, that if he will have his Church, he must uphold it, for we cannot uphold it ; and if we could, we should be the proudest asses under Heaven." The Roman conception of the Church was that of a mighty insti- tution, to which God had indeed promised indefectibility, but the indefectibility of which was to be produced through highly elabo- rate and artificial means,—through the checks and balances and delicate regulation of a most complex ecclesiastical machinery. Luther's conception of the Church was that of an association of men hearkening to and waiting upon the voice of God as best they could, and living by every word that proceeded out of his mouth. " The poor, miserable appearance of the Church, and the many crosses and failures and sects to which it is sub - jeeted, in order that it may be troubled by them, offend the worldly wise, for they let themselves dream that the Church is pure, holy, blameless, the dove of God, ct.c. And this, indeed, is true for God; with him, the Church has this dignity, but for the world she is like her bridegroom the Lord Christ, hacked and torn, despised, scoffed at and crucified." It was the attempt of Rome to elaborate a majestic ecclesiastical system, equal to all emergencies, almost as much as the gross failure of that attempt witnessed by the age in which Luther lived, that excited his displeasure. He felt to the very bottom the coarseness and weakness of human nature, and of the Church so far as it was human, and his delight in contemplating the marvels of divine grace only made him exaggerate that coarseness and weakness. In any other age, Luther would have rejected wholesale the Sacramental principle,—that principle which is, indeed, part of Christianity itself, though Luther did not perceive it, so intent was he on the profound contrast between the human beings to whom the Gospel came, and the God who gave the Gospel. As it was, though he retained two of the Sacraments, the whole tendency of his creed was to depreciate the earthen vessels in which the grace of God was to be received, till it almost came to this,—that God by a miracle promised to trans- form ultimately these vessels of dishonour into vessels of honour, but so long as they remained in this world, they must remain vessels of dishonour still, not so much as even effec- tually receiving God's grace into them, far less as being trans- muted by it into something nobler than themselves, but only as destined to be so transmuted whenever their terres- trial career came to an end. A mind of Luther's gigantic stature, which spent itself in exposing the technicalities, con- ventionalities, and artificialities of the Roman Catholic system, could not but produce a tremendous effect on the world, an effect partly good and partly evil,—good in a very high degree, so far as it brought men's minds back to God from the mere ecclesiastical machinery which had been confounded with the divine agency; profoundly mischievous, so far as it undermined men's faith in the possibility of true sanctification on earth, and left them to make their own compromise between the human works which were " filthy rags " at best, and the divine faith which reserved all its mightiest alchemy for another world. •
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