§ 81. LUTHER AND TETZEL. 153
best means of information, and charged him with avarice, dishonesty, and sexual immorality.’
Tetzel traveled with great pomp and circumstance through Germany, and recommended with unscrupulous effrontery and declamatory eloquence the indulgences of the Pope to the large crowds who gathered from every quarter around him. He was received like a messenger from heaven. Priests, monks, and magistrates, men and women, old and young, marched in solemn procession with songs, flags, and candles, under the ringing of bells, to meet him and his fellowmonks, and followed them to the church; the papal bull on a velvet cushion was placed on the high altar, a red cross with a silken banner bearing the papal arms was erected before it, and a large iron chest was put beneath the cross for the indulgence money. Such chests are still preserved in many places. The preachers, by daily sermons, hymns, and | processions, urged the people, with extravagant laudations of the Pope’s bull, to purchase letters of indulgence for their | own benefit, and at the saine time played upon their sympathies for departed relatives and friends whom they might release from their sufferings in purgatory “as soon as the penny tinkles in the box.” 2
1“ Auch hatte er zwei Kinder.’? The letter of Miltitz is printed in Loscher, ITI. 20; in Walch, XV. 862; and in Kayser, l.c. 4 and 5. Tetzel’s champions try to invalidate the testimony of the papal delegate by charging him with intemperance. But drunkards, like children and fools, usually tell the truth; and when he wrote that letter, he was sober. Besides, we have the independent testimony of Luther, who says in his book against Duke Henry of Brunswick (Wider Hans Wurst, p. 50), that in 1517 Tetzel was condemned by the Emperor Maximilian to be drowned in the Inn at Innsbruck (“for his great virtue’s sake, you may well believe”), but saved by the Duke Frederick, and reminded of it afterwards in the Theses-controversy, and that he confessed the fact.
2 “* Sobald der Pfennig im Kasten klingt, Die Seel’ aus dem Fegfeuer springt.’’
Mathesius and Johann Hess, two contemporary witnesses, ascribe this sentence (with slight verbal modifications) to Tetzel himself. Luther mentions it in Theses 27 and 28, and in his book Wider Hans Wurst (Erl. ed. XXVI. 51).
154 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. AD. 1517 τὸ 1530.
The common people eagerly embraced this rare offer of salvation from punishment, and made no clear distinction between the guilt and punishment of sin; after the sermon they approached with burning candles the chest, confessed their sins, paid the money, and received the letter of indulgence which they cherished as a passport to heaven. But intelligent and pious men were shocked at such scandal. The question was asked, whether God loved money more than justice, and why the Pope, with his command over the boundless treasury of extra-merits, did not at once empty the whole purgatory for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s, or build it with his own money.
Tetzel approached the dominions of the Elector of Saxony, who was himself a devout worshiper of relics, and had great confidence in indulgences, but would not let him enter his territory from fear that he might take too much money from. his subjects. So Tetzel set up his trade on the border of Saxony, at Jiiterbog, a few hours from Witten-
| berg."
| There he provoked the protest of the Reformer, who had already in the summer of 1516 preached a sermon of warning against trust in indulgences, and had incurred the Elector’s displeasure by his aversion to the whole system, although he himself had doubts about some important questions con- ‘nected with it.
Luther had experienced the remission of sin as a free gift of grace to be apprehended by a living faith. This experience was diametrically opposed to a system of relief by means of payments in money. It was an irrepressible conflict of principle. He could not be silent when that barter was carried to the very threshold of his sphere of labor. As a preacher, a pastor, and a professor, he felt it to be his duty
1 Jiiterbog is now a Prussian town of about seven thousand inhabitants, on the railroad between Berlin and Wittenberg. In the Nicolai church, Tetzel’s chest of indulgences is preserved.