202 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1580.
the Word the Church was preserved; by the Word she will be restored. Antichrist, as he began without violence, will be crushed without violence, by the Word.”
Hutten was impatient. He urged matters to a crisis. Sickingen attacked the Archbishop and Elector of Trier (Treves) to force the Reformation into his territory ; but he was defeated, and died of his wounds in the hands of his enemies, May 7, 1522. Within one month all his castles were captured and mostly burnt by the allied princes; two of his sons were banished, a third was made prisoner. Luther saw in this disaster a judgment of God, and was confirmed in his aversion to the use of force.?
Hutten fled, a poor and sick exile, from Germany to Basel, and hoped to find a hospitable reception by Erasmus, his former friend and admirer; but he was coldly refused by the cautious scholar, and took bitter revenge in an unsparing attack on his character. He then went to Zurich, and was kindly and generously treated by Zwingli, who provided him with books and money, and sent him first to the hot bath of Pfeffers, and then to a quiet retreat on the island of Ufnau in the Lake of Zurich, under medical care. But he soon died there, of the incurable disease of his youth, in August, 1528, in the prime of life (thirty-five years and four months of age), leaving nothing but his pen and sword, and the lesson: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts” (Zech. 4: 6).
With Hutten and Sickingen the hope of a political reconstruction of Germany through means of the Reformation and physical force was destroyed. What the knights failed to accomplish, the peasants could still less secure by the general revolt two years later. But notwithstanding these checks, the Reformation was bound to succeed with spiritual weapons.
1 E. Miinch, Fr. v. Sickingen. Stuttgart, 1827 sqq. 3 vols. Strauss, l.c. p. 488. Ullmann, Franz v. Sickingen, Leipzig, 1872.
§ 43. LUTHER'S CRUSADE AGAINST POPERY. 203
§ 43. Luther's Crusade against Popery. 1520.
After the disputation at Leipzig, Luther lost all hope of a reformation from Rome, which was preparing a bull of excommunication.
Here begins his storm and pressure period,! which culminated in the burning of the Pope’s bull, and the protest at the Diet of Worms.
Under severe mental anguish he was driven to the conviction that the papacy, as it existed in his day, was an antichristian power, and the chief source and support of abuses in the Church. Prierias, Eck, Emser, and Alveld defended the most extravagant claims of the papacy with much learning, but without any discrimination between fact and fiction. Luther learned from the book of Laurentius Valla, as republished by Ulrich von Hutten, that the Donation of Constantine, by which this emperor conferred on Pope Sylvester and his successors the temporal sovereignty not only over the Lateran Palace, but also over Rome, Italy, and all the West, was a baseless forgery of the dark ages. He saw through the “devilish lies,” as he called them, of the canon law and the pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. “It must have been a plague sent by God,” he says (in his “ Address to the German Nobility”), “‘that induced so many people to accept such lies, though they are so gross and clumsy that one would think a drunken boor could lie more skillfully.” Genuine Catholic scholars of a later period have exposed with irrefragable arguments this falsification of history. His view of the Church expanded beyond the limits of the papacy, and took in the Oriental Christians, and even such men as Hus, who was burned by an cecumenical council for doctrines derived from St. Paul and St. Augustin. Instead of confining the Church, like the Romanists, to an external visible communion under the Pope, he regarded it now as a spiritual communion
1 Sturm- und Drangperiode is an expressive German phrase.