PROTESTATION.
I, Martin Luther, Doctor, of the Order of Monks at Wittenberg, desire to testify publicly that certain propositions against pontifical indulgences, as they call them, have been put forth by me. Now although, up to the present time, neither this most celebrated and renowned school of ours nor any civil or ecclesiastical power has condemned me, yet there are, as I hear, some men of headlong and audacious spirit, who dare to pronounce me a heretic, as though the matter had been thoroughly looked into and studied. But on my part, as I have often done before, so now too I implore all men, by the faith of Christ, either to point out to me a better way, if such a way has been divinely revealed to any, or at least to submit their opinion to the judgment of God and of the Church. For I am neither so rash as to wish that my sole opinion should be preferred to that of all other men, nor so senseless as to be willing that the word of God should be made to give place to fables devised by human reason.
ὃ 33. THE THESES-CONTROVERSY. 1518. 167
§ 33. The Theses-Controversy. 1518.
LUTHER’S Sermon vom Ablass und Gnade, printed in February, 1518 (Weimar ed. I. 239-246; and in Latin, 317-324); Kurze Erklarung der Zehn Gebote, 1518 (I. 248-256, in Latin under the title Instructio pro Confessione peccatorum, p. 257-265); Asterisci adversus Obeliscos Eckii, March, 1518 (I. 278-316); Freiheit des Sermons papstlichen Ablass und Gnade belangend, June, 1518, against Tetzel (I. 380-393); Resolutiones disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute, August, 1518, dedicated to the Pope (I. 522-628). Letters of LUTHER to Archbishop Albrecht, Spalatin, and others, in De Wette, I. 67 sqq.
TETZEL’S Anti-Theses, 2 series, one of 106, the other of 50 sentences, are printed in LoscuErR’s Ref. Acta, I. 505-514, and 518-523. Ecxk’s Obelisci, ibid. III. 333.
On the details of the controversy, see JURGENS (III. 479 sqq.), KOSTLIN (I. 175 sqq.), KoLDE (I. 126 sqq.), BRATKE, and DIECKHOFF, as quoted in ὃ 31.
The Theses of Luther were a tract for the times. They sounded the trumpet of the Reformation. They found a hearty response with liberal scholars and enemies of monastic obscurantism, with German patriots longing for emancipation from Italian control, and with thousands of plain Christians waiting for the man of Providence who should give utterance to their feelings of indignation against existing abuses, and to their desire for a pure, scriptural, and spiritual religion. «ο΄, ho!” exclaimed Dr. Fleck, “ the man has come who will do the thing.” Reuchlin thanked God that “the monks have now found a man who will give them such full employment that they will be glad to let me spend my old age in peace.” !
1 The prophetic dream of the Elector, so often told, is a poetic fiction. KO6stlin discredits it, I. 786 sq. The Elector Frederick dreamed, in the night before Luther affixed the Theses, that God sent him a monk, a true son of the Apostle Paul, and that this monk wrote something on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg with a pen which reached even to Rome, pierced the head and ears of a lion (Leo), and shook the triple crown of the Pope. Merle d’ Aubigné relates the dream at great length as being, ‘‘ beyond reasonable doubt, true in the essential parts.’”’ He appeals to an original MS., written from the dictation of Spalatin, in the archives of Weimar, which was published in 1817. But that MS., according to the testimony of Dr. Burkhardt, the librarian, is only a copy of the eighteenth century. No trace of such a dream can be found before 1591. Spalatin, in his own writings and his letters to Luther and Melanchthon, nowhere refers to it.
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168 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 τὸ 1580.
But, on the other hand, the Theses were strongly assailed and condemned by the episcopal and clerical hierarchy, the monastic orders, especially the Dominicans, and the universities ; in fact, by all the champions of scholastic theology and traditional orthodoxy. Luther himself, then a poor, emaciated monk, was at first frightened by the unexpected effect, and many of his friends trembled. One of them told him, “You tell the truth, good brother, but you will accomplish nothing ; go to your cell, and say, God have mercy upon me.” !
The chief writers against Luther were Tetzel of Leipzig, Conrad Wimpina of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and the more learned and formidable John Eck of Ingolstadt, who was at
\ first a friend of Luther, but now became his irreconcilable
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‘enemy. ‘These opponents represented three universities and the ruling scholastic theology of the Angelie Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas. But they injured their cause in public estimation by the weakness of their defence. They could produce no arguments for the doctrine and practice of indulgences from the Word of God, or even from the Greek and Latin fathers, and had to resort to extravagant views on the authority of the Pope. They even advocated papal infallibility, although this was as yet an open question in the Roman Church, and remained so till the Vatican decree of 1870.
Luther mustered courage. In all his weakness he was strong. He felt that he had begun this business in the name and for the glory of God, and was ready to sacrifice life itself for his honest conviction. He took comfort from the counsel of Gamaliel. In several letters of this period he subscribed himself Martinus Eleutherios (Freeman), but added, wielmehr Knecht (rather, Servant): he felt free of men, but bound in Christ. When his friend Schurf told him, “They will not bear it;” he replied, “But what, if they have to bear it?”? He answered all his opponents, directly and indirectly,
1 Albert Krantz of Hamburg, who died Dec. 7, 1517, Kostlin, I. 177.