200 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1550.
iniquity, and says that for centuries no genuine successor of Peter had sat on his chair in Rome, but successors and imitators of Simon Magus, Nero, Domitian, and Heliogabalus.
As a remedy for these evils, he advises, not indeed the abolition of the papacy, but the withdrawal of all financial support from Germany, a reduction of the clerical force, and the permission of clerical marriage; by these means, luxury and immorality would at least be checked.
It is characteristic of the church of that age, that Hutten was on terms of intimacy with the first prelate of Germany, even while he wrote his violent attacks on Rome, and received a salary, and afterwards a pension, from him. But he lauded Albrecht to the skies for his support of liberal learning. He knew little of, and cared less for, doctrinal differences. His policy was to fight the big Pope of Rome with the little Pope of Germany, and to make the German emperor, princes, and nobles, his allies in shaking off the degradmeg yoke of foreign tyranny. Possibly Albrecht may have indulged in the dream of becoming the primate of an independent Catholic Church of Germany.
Unfortunately, Hutten lacked moral purity, depth, and weight. He was frank, brave, and bold, but full of conceit, a restless adventurer, and wild stormer; able to destroy, but unable to build up. In his twentieth year he had contracted a disgusting disease which ruined him physically, and was used by his Roman opponents to ruin him morally. He suffered incredibly from it and from all sorts of quack remedies, for ten years, was attacked by it again after his cure, and yet maintained the vigor and freshness of his spirit.1
Hutten hailed the Wittenberg movement, though at first only as “a quarrel between two hot-headed monks who are
1 He himself speaks very frankly of his Morbus Gallicus, or Malum Francic and its horrible effects, without asserting his innocence. Strauss discusses it fully with a belief in his guilt, yet pity for his sufferings and admiration for his endurance. ‘‘ Er hatte,’’ he says (U. v. H., p. 241), ““ den Jugendfehler, dessen wir ihn schuldig achten, in einem Grade zu biissen, —
§ 42. ULRICH VON HUTTEN AND LUTHER. 201
shouting and screaming against each other,” and hoped “ that they would eat each other up.” After the Leipzig disputation, he offered to Luther (first through Melanchthon) the aid of his pen and sword, and, in the name of his noble friend the knight Franz von Sickingen, a safe retreat at Ebernburg near Kreuznach, where Martin Bucer, Johann Cicolampadius, and other fugitives from convents, and sympathizers with reform, found a hospitable home. He sent him his books with notes, that he might republish them.
But Luther was cautious. He availed himself of the literary and political sympathy, but only as far as his theological and religious position allowed. He respected Reuchlin, Erasmus, Crotus, Mutian, Pirkheimer, Hutten, and the other humanists, for their learning and opposition to monkery and priestcraft; he fully shared the patriotic indignation against Romish tyranny: but he missed in them moral earnestness, relivious depth, and that enthusiasm for the pure gospel which was his controlling passion. He aimed at reformation, they at illumination. He did not relish the frivolous satire of the Epistole obscurorum virorum; he called them silly, and the author a Hans Wurst (Jack Sausage); he would grow indignant, and weep rather than laugh, over the obscurantism and secret vices of the monks, though he had as keen a sense of the ridiculous as Crotus and Hutten. He deprecated, moreover, the resort to physical force in a spiritual warfare, and relied on the power of the Word of God, which had founded the Church, and which must reform the Church. His letters to Hutten are lost, but he wrote to Spalatin (Jan. 16, 1521): “You see what Hutten wants. I would not have the gospel defended by violence and murder. In this sense I wrote to him. By the Word the world was conquered; by
welcher selbst des unerbittlichsten Sittenrichters Strenge in Mitleid verwandeln muss. . . . Man weiss nicht was schrecklicher ist, die Beschreibung die uns Hutten von seinem Zustande, oder die er uns von den Quélereien macht, welche von unverstdndigen <Aerzten als Curen tiber ihn verhingt wurden.’