734 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 τὸ 15380.
trasts, and burst through the trammels of logic. He was a giant in public, and a child in his family; the boldest reformer, yet a conservative churchman; the eulogist of reason as the handmaid of religion, and the abuser of reason as the mistress of the Devil; the champion of the freedom of the spirit, and yet a slave of the letter; an intense hater of popery to the last, and yet an admirer of the Catholic Church, and himself a pope within his own church.!
Yet there was a unity in this apparent contradiction. He was a Seeker of the righteousness of works and peace of conscience as a Catholic monk, and he was a finder of the right eousness of faith as an evangelical reformer; just as the idea and pursuit of righteousness is the connecting link between the Jewish Saul and the Christian Paul. It was the same engine, but reversed. In separating from papal catholicism, Luther remained attached to Christian catholicism; and his churchly instincts were never suppressed, but only suspended to re-assert themselves with new and greater force after the revolutionary excesses of the Reformation.
His history naturally divides itself into three periods: the Roman-Catholic and monastic period, till 1517; the Protestant and progressive period, till 1525; the churchly, conservative, and re-actionary period, till 1546. But he never gave up his devotion to the free gospel, and his hatred of the Pope as the veritable Antichrist.’
1 Comp. the admirable description of Luther by Hase in his Kirchengesch. (11th ed., p. 400), and at the close of his Prot. Polemik. The Roman Catholic Mohler (Kirchengesch., III. 148) thinks that out of Luther’s writings might be drawn ‘‘the most glorious apology of the Catholic Church.’”? Harnack (1. c., Ὁ. 5) calls him ‘‘a sage without prudence; a statesman without politics; an artist without art; a man free from the world, in the midst of the world; of vigorous sensuality, yet pure; obstinately unjust (rechthaberisch ungerecht), yet concerned for the cause; defying authority, yet bound by authority; at once blaspheming and emancipating reason.”
2 An interesting parallel in this and other respects may be drawn by some future historian, between Luther and Bismarck, whose political influence upon Germany in the nineteenth century is as powerful as Luther’s ecclesiastical influence was in the sixteenth. Bismarck was originally an intense
§ 124. LUTHER'S PUBLIC CHARACTER. 735
Luther’s greatness is not that of a polished work of art, but of an Alpine mountain with towering peaks, rough granite blocks, bracing air, fresh fountains, and green meadows. His polemical books rush along like thunderstorms or turbid mountain torrents. He knew his violent temper, but never took the trouble to restrain it; and his last books against the Papists, the Zwinglians, and the Jews, are his worst, and exceed any thing that is known in the history of theological polemics. In his little tract against the Romish Duke Henry of Brunswick,! the word Devil occurs no less than a hundred and forty-six times.? At last he could not pray without cursing, as he confessed himself. He calls his mastery of the vocabulary of abuse his rhetoric. ‘“ Do not think,” he wrote to Spalatin, “that the gospel can be advanced without tumult, trouble, and uproar. You cannot make a pen of a sword. The Word of God is a sword; it is war, overthrow, trouble, destruction, poison; it meets the children of Ephraim, as Amos says, like a bear on the road, or like a lioness in the wood.”* We may admit that the club and sledge-hammer of this Protestant Hercules were necessary for the semi-barbarous Germans of his day. Providence used his violent temper as an instrument for the destruction of the greatest spiritual tyranny which the world ever saw. Yet his best friends were shocked and grieved at his rude personalities, and condem-
aristocrat, but became the boldest liberal, and ended as a conservative statesman, though without surrendering the creations of his genius. He defeated Catholic Austria and France, and protested that he would never go to Canossa; yet he met Pope Leo XIII. half way, and repealed the unjust May-laws in the interest of patriotism, without surrendering any religious principle. With all his faults, he is the greatest statesman and diplomatist of the century, and the chief founder of the Protestant German Empire.
1 He calls him Hanswurst, Jack Sausage.
2 So says ΠΟΙ ρον (Die Reform., 111. 265, note), who counted the number. He adds, that in Luther’s book on the Councils, the devils are mentioned fifteen times in four lines.
8 See the passages above, p. 657 sq., note 3.
* Comp. the comparison between Luther and Melanchthon, p. 193 sq.