730 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530.
§ 124. Luther's Public Character, and Position in History.
In 1883 the four hundredth anniversary of Luther’s birth was celebrated with enthusiasm throughout Protestant Christendom by innumerable addresses and sermons setting forth his various merits as a man and a German, as a husband and father, as a preacher, catechist, and hymnist, as a Bible translator and expositor, as a reformer and founder of a church, as a champion of the sacred rights of conscience, and originator of a mighty movement of religious and civil liberty which spread over Europe and across the Atlantic to the shores of the Pacific. The story of his life was repeated in learned and popular biographies, in different tongues, and enacted on the stage in the principal cities of Germany.! Not only Lutherans, but Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians, united in these tributes to the Reformer. The Academy of Music in New York could not hold the thousands who crowded the building to attend the Luther-celebration arranged by the Evangelical Alliance in behalf of the leading Protestant denominations of America.”
Such testimony has never been borne to a mortal man. The Zwingli-celebration of the year 1884 had a similar char-
1 See the Lit. on p. 104. The martyr-Emperor, Frederick III., as crown prince, representing his venerable father, Emperor William I. of Germany, was the leading figure in the celebration at Wittenberg, Sept. 12-14, 1883, and gave it a national significance. The Luther-celebration produced several Luther-dramas, by Henzen (1883), Devrient (7th ed. 1888), Herrig (9th ed. 1888), and Triimpelmann (2nd ed. 1888). Comp. G. A. Erdmann, Die Lutherfestspiele, Wittenberg, 1889.
2 The meeting of the Evangelical Alliance of the U.S., then under the management of Drs. Prime and Schaff (Presbyterians), was the most representative and impressive Luther celebration in America; it was addressed by Hon. John Jay (Episcopalian), Dr. Phillips Brooks (Episcopalian), Dr. Wm. M. Taylor (Congregationalist), Bishop Simpson (Methodist), Dr. Krotel (Lutheran), Dr. Crosby (Presbyterian). The music was furnished by the New York Oratorio Society. The Evangelical Alliance issued also an invitation to the Protestant churches in the United States, to celebrate Luther’s birthday by sermons on the Reformation.
§ 124, LUTHER’S PUBLIC CHARACTER. 731
acter, and extended over many countries in both hemispheres, but would probably not have been thought of without the preceding Luther-celebration.
And indeed Luther has exerted, and still exerts, a spiritual power inferior only to that of the sacred writers. St. Augustin’s influence extends wider, embracing the Roman Catholic church as well as the Protestant; but he never reached the heart of the common people. Luther is the only one among the Reformers whose name was adopted, though against his protest, as the designation and watchword by the church which he founded. He gave to his people, in their own vernacular, what no man did before or since, three fundamental books of religion, — the Bible, a hymn-book, and a catechism. He forced even his German enemies to imitate his language in poetry and prose. So strong is the hold which his Bible version has upon the church of his name, that it is next to impossible to change and adapt it to modern learning and taste, although he himself kept revising and improving it as long as he lived.!
Luther was the German of the Germans, and the most vigorous type of the faults as well as the virtues of his nation.? He is the apostle of Protestant Germany, fully as much as Boniface is the apostle of Roman Catholic Germany, and surpasses him vastly in genius and learning. Boniface, though an Anglo-Saxon by birth, was more a Roman than a German; while in Luther the Christian and the German were one, and joined in opposition to papal Rome. All schools of Lutheran divines appeal to his authority: the extreme orthodox, who out-Luther Luther in devotion to the letter; the moderate or middle party, who adhere only to
1 The Probebibel, so-called, of 1883, though prepared by a company of able scholars appointed by various German States, is a timidly conservative revision, does not touch the Erasmian text, and allows innumerable inaccuracies to stand from respect to Luther’s memory; and yet even this revision revises too much for the Lutherans of strict orthodoxy. His popularity is a hinderance to progress,
2 See H. v. Treitschke’s eloquent address, Luther und die deutsche Nation, Berlin, 1883 (29 pages).