ὃ 48. LUTHER BURNS THE POPE’S BULL. 249
Several hundred students tarried at the fire, which had been kindled by a master of the university, some chanting the Te Deum, others singing funeral dirges on the papal laws; then they made a mock procession through the town, collected piles of scholastic and Romish books, and returning to the place of execution, threw them into the flames.
Luther, with Melanchthon, Carlstadt, and the other doctors and masters, returned home immediately after the act. He at first had trembled at the step, and prayed for light; but after the deed was done, he felt more cheerful than ever. He regarded his excommunication as an emancipation from all restraints of popery and monasticism. On the same day he calmly informed Spalatin of the event as a piece of news.! On the next day he warned the students in the lecture-room against the Romish Antichrist, and told them that it was high time to burn the papal chair with all its teachers and abominations.2. He publicly announced his act in a Latin and German treatise, “" Why the Books of the Pope and his Disciples were burned by Dr. Martin Luther.” He justified it by his duties as a baptized Christian, as a sworn doctor of divinity, as a daily preacher, to root out all unchristian doctrines. He cites from the papal law-books thirty articles and errors in glorification of the papacy, which deserve to be burned; and calls the whole canon-law “the abomination of desolation” (Matt. 24: 15) and antichristian (2 Thess. 2: 4), since the sum of its teaching was, that “ the Pope is God on
1“ Anno MDXX, decima Decembris, hora nona, exusti sunt Wittemberge ad orientalem portam, juxta S. Crucem, omnes libri Pape: Decretum, Decretales, Sext. Clement. Extravagant., et Bulla novissima Leonis X.: item summa Angelica [a work on casuistry by Angelus Carletus de Clavasio, or Chiavasso, d. 1495], Chrysoprasus [De predestinatione centurie sex, 1514] Eccii, et alia ejusdem autoris, Emseri, et quedam alia, que adjecta per alios sunt: ut videant incendiarii Papiste, non esse magnarum virium libros exurere, quos confutare non possunt. Hec erunt nova.’ De Wette, I. 532. Further details about the burning and the conduct of the students we learn from the report of an unnamed pupil of Luther: Excustionis antichristiana-
rum decretalium Acta, in the Erl. ed. of Op. Lat., V. 250-256. 2 Ranke, i, 307; Késtlin, i. 407; Kolde, i, 290.
950 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530.
earth, above all things, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and temporal; all things belong to the Pope, and no one dare ask, What doest thou?” Simultaneously with this tract, he published an exhaustive defense of all his own articles which had been condemned by the Pope, and planted himself upon the rock of God’s revelation in the Scriptures.
Leo X., after the expiration of the one hundred and twenty days of grace allowed to Luther by the terms of the bull, proceeded to the last step, and on the third day of January, 1521, pronounced the ban against the Reformer and his followers, and an interdict on the places where they should be harbored. But Luther had deprived the new bull of its effect.
The burning of the Pope’s bull was the boldest and most eventful act of Luther. Viewed in itself, it might indeed have been only an act of fanaticism and folly, and proved a brutum fulmen. But it was preceded and followed by heroic acts of faith in pulling down an old church, and building up a new one. It defied the greatest power on earth, before which emperors, kings, and princes, and all the nations of Europe bowed in reverence and awe. It was the fiery signal of absolute and final separation from Rome, and destroyed the effect of future papal bulls upon one-half of Western Christendom. - It emancipated Luther and the entire Protestant world from that authority, which, from a wholesome school of discipline for young nations, had become a fearful and intolerable tyranny over the intellect and conscience of men.
Luther developed his theology before the eyes of the public; while Calvin, at a later period, appeared fully matured, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. ‘Iam one of those,” he says, “among whom St. Augustin classed himself, who have gradually advanced by writing and teaching; not of those who at a single bound spring to perfection out of nothing.”