§ 48. LUTHER BURNS THE POPE’S BULL. 251
He called the Pope the most holy and the most hellish father of Christendom. He began in 1517 as a devout papist and monk, with full faith in the Roman Church and its divinely appointed head, protesting merely against certain abuses; in 1519, at the Leipzig disputation, he denied the divine right, and shortly afterwards also the human right, of the papacy ; a year later he became fully convinced that the papacy was that antichristian power predicted in the Scriptures, and must be renounced at the risk of a man’s salvation.
There is no doubt that in all these stages he was equally sincere, earnest, and conscientious.
Luther adhered to the position taken in the act of Dec. 10, 1520, with unchanging firmness. He never regretted it fora moment. He had burned the ship behind him; he could not, and he would not, return. To the end of his life he regarded and treated the Pope of Rome in his official capacity as the very Antichrist, and expected that he soon would be destroyed by spiritual force at the second coming of Christ. At Schmalkalden in 1537 he prayed that God might fill all Protestants with hatred of the Pope. One of his last and most violent books is directed “Against the Papacy at Rome, founded by the Devil,” Wittenberg, 1545.1 He calls Paul III. the ** Most hellish Father,” and addresses him as “ Your Hellishness,” instead of “ Your Holiness.” He promises at the close to do still better in another book, and prays that in
1 Wider das Papstthum zu Rom, vom Teufel gestiftet (in the ἘΠ]. ed., XXVI. 108-228). A rude wood-cut on the title-page represents the Pope with long donkey-ears going into the jaws of hell, while demons are punching and jeering at him. Luther calls the Pope (p. 228) ‘‘ Papstesel mit langen Eselsohren und verdammtem Liigenmaul.’? The book was provoked by two most presumptuous letters of Pope Paul III. to the Emperor Charles V., rebuking him for giving rest to the Protestants at the Diet of Speier, 1544, till the meeting of a general council, and reminding him of the terrible end of those who dare to violate the priestly prerogatives. King Ferdinand, the Emperor’s brother, read the book through, and remarked, ‘‘ Wenn die bosen Worte heraus waren, so hatte der Luther nicht tibel geschrieben.’’ But not a few sincere friends of Luther thought at the time that he did more harm than good to his own cause by this book.
952 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530,
case of his death, God may raise another one “a thousandfold more severe; for the devilish papacy is the last evil on earth, and the worst which all the devils with all their power could contrive. God help us. Amen.” Thus he wrote, not under the inspiration of liquor or madness, as Roman historians have suggested, but in sober earnest. His dying words, as reported by Ratzeburger, his physician, were a prediction of the approaching death of the papacy : —
“‘Pestis eram vivus, moriens tua mors ero Papa.”’
From the standpoint of his age, Luther regarded the Pope and the Turk as “the two arch-enemies of Christ and his Church,” and embodied this view in a hymn which begins, —
“ Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort Und steur’ des Papst’s und Tiirken Mord.” 1
This line, like the famous eightieth question of the Heidelberg Catechism which denounces the popish mass as an “accursed idolatry,” gave much trouble in mixed communities, and in some it was forbidden by Roman-Catholic magistrates. Modern German hymn-books wisely substitute ‘all enemies,” or “enemies of Christ,” for the Pope and the Turk.
In order to form a just estimate of Luther’s views on the papacy, it must not be forgotten that they were uttered in the furnace-heat of controversy, and with all the violence of his violent temper. They have no more weight than his equally sweeping condemnation of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.