876 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530.
making pilgrimages to holy shrines, observing the festivals of the Roman calendar, and conforming to the seven sacraments which accompanied them at every step of life from the cradle to the grave. The bishops were still in charge of their dioceses, and unmarried priests and deacons performed all the ecclesiastical functions. The convents were still occupied by monks and nuns, who went through their daily devotions and ascetic exercises. The outside looked just as before, while the inside had undergone a radical change.
This was the case even in Saxony and at Wittenberg, the nursery of the new state of things. Luther himself did not at first contemplate any outward change. He labored and hoped for a reformation of faith and doctrine within the
Catholic Church, under the lead of the bishops, without ἃ...
division ; but he was now cast out by the highest authorities, and came gradually to see that he must build a new structure on the new foundation which he had laid by his writings and by the translation of the New Testament.
The negative part of these changes, especially the abolition of the mass and of monasticism, was made by advanced radicals among his disciples, who had more zeal than discretion, and mistook liberty for license.
While Luther was confined on the Wartburg, his followers were like children out of school, like soldiers without a captain. Some of them thought that he had stopped half way, and that they must complete what he had begun. They took the work of destruction and reconstruction into their own inexperienced and unskillful hands. Order gave way to confusion, and the Reformation was threatened with disastrous failure. |
The first disturbances broke out at Erfurt in June, 1521, shortly after Luther’s triumphant passage through the town on his way to Worms. Two young priests were excommunicated for taking part in the enthusiastic demonstrations. This created the greatest indignation. Twelve hundred stu-
§ 65. PROTESTANT RADICALISM. 377
dents, workmen, and ruffians attacked and demolished in a few days sixty houses of the priests, who escaped violence only by flight.
The magistrate looked quietly on, as if in league with the insurrection. Similar scenes of violence were repeated during the summer. The monks under the lead of the Augustinians, forgetting their vows, left the convents, laid aside the monastic dress, and took up their abode among the people _ to work for a living, or to become a burden to others, or to preach the new faith.
Luther saw in these proceedings the work of Satan, who was bringing shame and reproach on the gospel.? He feared that many left the cloister for the same reason for which they had entered, namely, from love of the belly and carnal freedom.’
During these troubles Crotus, the enthusiastic admirer of Luther, resigned the rectorship of the university, left Erfurt, and afterwards returned to the mother Church. The Peasants’ War of 1525 was another blow. Eobanus, the Latin poet who had greeted Luther on his entry, accepted a call to Niirnberg. The greatest celebrities left the city, or were disheartened, and died in poverty.
From this time dates the decay of the university, once the flourishing seat of humanism and patriotic aspirations. It never recovered its former prosperity.
1 Kampschulte, /.c., II. 117 sqq., gives a full account of this Pfaffensturm and its consequences.
2 See his letters to Melanchthon and Spalatin, in De Wette, 11. 7 sq., 31. To the latter he wrote: ‘‘ Erfordie Satanas suis studiis nobis insidiatus est, ut nostros mala fama inureret, sed nihil proficiet: non sunt nostri, qui hee faciunt.”’
8 Letter to Lange, March 28, 1522, in De Wette, II. 175.
878 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530.
§ 66. Zhe Revolution at Wittenberg. Carlstadt and the New Prophets.
See Lit. in § 65.
In Wittenberg the same spirit of violence broke out under the lead of Luther’s older colleague, Andreas Carlstadt, known to us from his ill success at the Leipzig disputation. He was a man of considerable originality, learning, eloquence, zeal, and courage, but eccentric, radical, injudicious, ill-balanced, restless, and ambitious for leadership.
He taught at first the theology of medieval scholasticism, but became under Luther’s influence a strict Augustinian, and utterly denied the liberty of the human will.
He wrote the first critical work on the canon of the Scriptures, and anticipated the biblical criticism of modern times. He weighed the historic evidence, discriminated between three orders of books as of first, second, and third dignity, putting the Hagiographa of the Old Testament and the seven Antilegomena of the New in the third order, and expressed doubts on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. He based his objections to the Antilegomena, not on dogmatic grounds, as Luther, but on the want of historical testimony ; his opposition to the traditional canon was itself traditional ; he put ante-Nicene against post-Nicene tradition. This book on the canon, however, was crude and premature, and passed out of sight.
He invented some curious and untenable interpretations of Scripture, e.g., of the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper. He referred the word “this,” not to the bread, but to the body of Christ, so as to mean: “I am now ready to offer this (body) as a sacrifice in death.” He did not, how-
1 Libellus de Canonicis Scripturis, Wittenb. 1520; also in German: Welche Biicher heilig und biblisch seind. Comp. Weiss, Hinleitung in’s N. T. (1886), p. 109, and Reuss, Histoire du Canon (1863), 357 sqq. (Hunier’s translation, p. 336 sq.)