He was
justified when he cried out to the German bishops,
" You have procured a condemnation of my gospel,
but you have secretly accepted many of its
tenets.
justified when he cried out to the German bishops,
" You have procured a condemnation of my gospel,
but you have secretly accepted many of its
tenets.
Treitschke - 1915 - Germany, France, Russia, and Islam
LUTHER AND THE GERMAN NATION
(A Lecture given at Darmstadt on November 7,
1883)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
There are many among you who stood, not
many weeks ago, on the heights of the Niederwald,
when our venerable Emperor presided at the unveil-
ing of the statue representing Germania girt with
her sword; and you there had the privilege of
uniting with your compatriots from far and near
in a feeling of joy and thankfulness. For centuries
we Germans have been denied the luxury of join-
ing together in that happy and unenvious contem-
plation of our past which is the true life-blood of a
healthy people. The very victories which brought
about the unity of our Empire were the outcome
of the first great united act performed by the whole
nation since immemorial times. Glorious indeed
is the history of our nation, which has so often
given to this part of our globe the foremost figure
of the century, and has, in warfare, so often spoken
words of awakening or of reconciliation. Nearly
all our great men were, however, so inextricably
involved in the whirl of bewildering contrasts
227
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? 228 Luther and the German Nation
which disorganized our inner life that even to this
day they remain an enigma to great masses of the
people, and are looked upon merely as the pioneers
of a family, a party, or a creed -- ^not simply as
German heroes.
It was during the eighteenth century that the
last and greatest representative of the old-fash-
ioned unlimited monarchy held sway among us,
and now that we are able to judge of the extent of
his labours, the more enlightened among us have
begun to feel that he was fighting for Germany
when he waged war against Austria and the Holy
Roman Empire. But in spite of this King
Frederick, like his ancestor the Great Elector, will
ever remain the favourite of his Prussians, while
to the general mass of the Southern Germans he
will continue to be something of a stranger. A
century earlier we secured the religious peace of
Europe after a horrible war, but victory was pur-
chased at a fearful price, i. e. , the laying waste
of our ancient culture ; and almost the only lumin-
ous figure in all that sombre period, the hero
Gustavus Adolphus, was a foreigner. Moreover,
even his admirers must admit that his victorious
career terminated -- very favourably to us -- just
at the moment when his power began to be prejudi-
cial to our country.
The same limitations are to be observed even
in the commemorative festival which our Pro-
testant nation is thankfully celebrating this week.
It is not, unhappily, a festival in which all Ger-
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? Luther and the German Nation 229
mans will take part. Millions of our compatriots
are holding aloof in silence, or even in open dis-
approval. They are neither able nor willing
to imderstand that the Reformer of our Church
was the pioneer of the whole German nation on the
road to a freer civilization, and that in the State
and in Society, in our homes and in our centres
of learning, his spirit still breathes life into us.
Everyone who takes it upon himself to speak of
Luther must confess what is his own attitude
towards the great moral problems of the present
day. And the accusations of those who are un-
able to comprehend his greatness are as passion-
ate in tone to-day as if the Reformer still walked
in our midst.
Even during his life-time Martin Luther incurred
the penalty which awaits all great men, and
especially all great fighters: he was misunderstood.
During the early years of his public activity --
years so full of promise -- ^he was greeted by the
nation with a tempestuous joy such as has not been
seen again in Germany imtil our own time. In the
days when he first belled the cat, when, forced
forward by a lively conscience and the driving
power of untrammelled thought, he turned from
the paths of ancient orthodoxy to those of open
heresy; when he threw the Papal Bull into the
fire and gave that ringing call to the "Christian
nobility of the German nation," in which he
invited his Germans to reform the Church and the
State, root and branch; then it was that he stood
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? 230 Luther and the German Nation
revealed before the Emperor and the Empire
as the leader of the nation, a man as heroic in
aspect as the patron saint of his people, the warrior
Michael. Then it was that men sought to express
their joy in the words of the folk-song :
He showed himself at Worms,
All ready for the fray;
He silenced all his enemies,
And none could overcome him.
Then, also, it seemed as if the elemental forces
at work in a nation stirred to its depths -- the re-
ligious zeal of pious minds, the scientific curiosity
of the rising generation, the national hatred
of a knightly nobility for the foreign prelates,
the discontent of an oppressed peasantry -- were
about to unite in a mighty torrent impetuous
enough to sweep all Roman organizations and
influences out of our State and our Church. The
royal dignity of Germany was, however, still in
close bondage to the world-embracing policy of the
Holy Roman Empire. It can hardly have been
an accident that the crown was at that moment-
ous period worn by a stranger who could not
discern the beating of our heart, and whose only
answer to the acclamations with which the Germans
hailed the courageous frankness of their country-
man was a disdainful smile and the words, "Such
a man shall never make me a heretic. "
As soon as it became evident that the Emperor
had refused to listen to the voice of the nation, the
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? Luther and the German Nation 231
Reformer found ranged against him not only the
political strength of the Spanish World-Empire,
but also the immense moral force embodied in the
firm loyalty of our nation to the Emperor. Class-
hatred -- that mortal sin which has played so large
a part in our history -- now again made its appear-
ance. The nobility frittered away their hot-
blooded energy in the carrying on of aimless and
most unhappy feuds. The peasants interpreted
the gospel doctrine of Hberty in a material sense,
and plunged into a furious social war. Luther,
however, believed that his holy treasure had been
insulted, and poured all the vials of his wrath
upon the fools who sought to settle the problem
of the gospel with hammer and tongs. When
this horrible rising had been horribly punished by
a cruel nobility, the man who had been so lately
glorified by his compatriots found himself cursed
by the common people. In the meantime Eras-
mus, the first scholar of the century, had separated
himself from the Wittenberg party; Luther's
teacher, the mystic Staupitz, and the clever hu-
manists, Crotus Rubianus and Eobanus Hessus,
recoiled from him in terror. Their defection
made it clear that the new teaching would at
first have but a partial influence over the most
highly educated sections of the nation ; and as this
new doctrine freed the strong obstinacy as well
as the power of independent thought which char-
acterize the German character, its adherents
began to fritter away their strength in a highly
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? 232 Luther and the German Nation
dangerous manner. Undisciplined fanaticism and
quarrels about dogma broke their unity.
Luther, thus harassed and forsaken on all sides,
sought refuge among the German Princes. If his
last years were rich in great results, they were even
richer in painful disillusionments. He had begun
hoping that he might give new energies to Church
life in Christendom, or at least in his own nation.
Now he was forced to content himself with the
knowledge that small evangelical Churches had
gradually come into being in the territories of
the greater among the German temporal princes;
and he who watches, even superficially, the dawn
of day in history may consider it a merciful dis-
pensation of Providence that the Reformer, whom
over- work had quickly aged, should have died just
before the dissensions and aimless weaknesses of
the leaders in the Schmalkaldian War led to the
subjection of German Protestants to a foreign
rule. The glory of departed heroes is usually
exaggerated in the popular imagination; Luther,
on the contrary, appeared to his contemporaries a
lesser man than he really was. In those weary
decades of political inactivity and theological dis-
putes which followed upon the golden period of the
German Reformation, a little sect proceeded to
recreate Luther after its own image, as if he also
had been nothing but a zealous preacher of Bible
truths and a respectable father of a family, and as
if his aim had merely been to found a separate
Church called by the name of a sinful mortal. It
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? Luther and the German Nation 233
is only the historical science of our own day which
has succeeded in plucking up heart to comprehend
Luther in his entirety, Luther the epitome of his
century, in whose soul nearly all the new ideas of
the time were mightily re-echoed. We are far
enough removed from him in time to be able to
gauge the indirect consequences of his destructive
and constructive labours, to observe all the seeds
of a new culture which he sowed in German
soil with all the unconsciousness of genius, and to
realize with thankfulness how faithfully he kept
the promise thus made by him: " I was bom for my
Germans, and them will I serve. "
The joy of life has from the beginning possessed
the German soul; but side by side with this there
has always existed a meditative seriousness
which is painfully conscious of the transitory
nature of all earthly things. Undaunted courage
has always been accompanied in our national
character by a deep longing for deliverance from
the curse of sin. Of all the nations of Western
Europe, the ancient Germans alone had some
premonition, even in their heathen days, of the
future disappearance of this sinful race and of a
new world of purity and light which is to come.
To such a people the glad tidings from Jerusalem
were peculiarly acceptable, and the marvellous
buildings of our old cathedrals sufficiently testify
to the piety and the earnestness with which the
Germans received the new faith. It should,
nevertheless, be observed that the Christian
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? 234 Luther and the German Nation
doctrine had assumed a form in Rome which,
on its arrival in our midst, never entirely recom-
mended itself to us. All ages, peoples, and coun-
tries seemed to be united in the great community
of saints which bound the Church militant here
below to the Church expectant of the poor souls
in Purgatory and the Church triumphant of the
saints in Heaven. From the treasury of good
works laid up by the saints the Church dealt forth
remission of sins to the faithful, through the
medium of a ruling priesthood, whose members
were empowered by the spiritual gifts of ordina-
tion to change bread and wine into the Body
and Blood of the Saviour. Outside the Church
was no salvation; she embraced and hallowed
the life of every Christian from the cradle to the
bier, from baptism to extreme unction. The con-
ception was indeed a great and wonderful one.
The wisdom and piety of many holy persons
and a rare talent for ruling men had built up the
wonderful structure throughout many centuries.
Each stone stood firmly cemented to its fellow,
and the inevitable and logical sequence of one
dogma upon another gave the Christian no choice
between submission and heresy. But the close
logic of the Romans had never quite satisfied the
German mind; the living conscience of our people
could never find peace in means of grace supplied
by the Church and in prescribed good works alone.
As early as the fourteenth century the German
territories rang with the Kyrie eleisons of the sect
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? Luther and the German Nation 235
of Flagellants, and ever louder and more despair-
ing -- almost as heartrending as in the earliest days
of Christian history -- grew the cry of the sinful
creature pleading for reconciliation with its Creator.
Further, the bellicose and practical mind of the
Germans was bewildered by the teaching of the
old Church. This beautiful world offered so
many laurel wreaths of honour, and so many
elevated pleasures to men of energy, and yet
all these were to be of no account in comparison
with the higher sanctity of dedicated men, of
priests and monks who had renounced everything
that binds men to one another by human ties, and
who despised not only the infinite happiness, but
also the sacred duties of married life. Walther
von der Vogelweide, the greatest of our mediaeval
poets, pondered sadly over this dark riddle, com-
plaining that "One and the same heart can never,
alas! receive God's grace in form of riches and in
form of honour. "
And this priestly hierarchy, which kept itself
so immeasurably above the obedient multitude,
which so greatly scorned all worldly activities, had
long been the prey of a shameless worldliness which
caused secular persons to regard its members as a
race of hypocrites. The clergy owned the wealth-
iest third of Germany, always formed a majority
and carried all motions in the Reichstag, and
exerted a political influence which was looked upon
by the Germans as a kind of foreign rule. This
latter idea was due to the knowledge that the
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? 236 Luther and the German Nation
Church was ruled by the Pope and his Italian
prelates; and all the wealth of intellect, wit, and
culture which hobnobbed together in the ante-
rooms of the Vatican, all the masterpieces of the
chisel and the brush which the sun of Papal favour
brought into being, could not console our nation
for the fact that the mistress of Christendom
was the most profligate city of the earth. It was
in vain that the Germans had sought, at the
councils of the fifteenth century, to reform the
abuses in the Church. When Luther appeared
the nation was in a dangerous state of ferment,
the prey of conflicting emotions. On the one hand
were the pious persons, consumed by scruples, and
taking painful stock of their sins and their good
works, and contemplating the popular pictures
of the Dance of Death with holy terror; on the
other stood the sensuous lovers of life, full of
energy and high spirits, rejoicing in crude jests
and delighted to mock at the caricature of a
world turned upside down. But to whichever class
they belonged, all Germans united in hating the
foreign yoke.
The actual setting free of Germany was the
direct outcome of an internal conflict waged in
an honest German conscience. Luther drew from
his very humility suflicient strength to endow him
with the utmost boldness. In his youth a passion-
ate anxiety respecting the salvation of himself
and his brothers had driven him to leave father
and mother, in order to storm heaven from his
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? Luther and the German Nation 237
cell by means of all the torments of monkish pen-
ances. Nothing, however, could drown the cry of
his soul, " My sin, my sin, my sin, " and at last the
truth of the saying of the apostle about justi-
fication by faith was revealed to him in all its light-
giving splendour. He now began to realize what
was meant by the iisTavota of Paul, by the con-
version of the inner man. Humbly confessing
the insufficiency of human merit, he resigned him-
self in faith to the mercies of the living God,
and he dared to live according to this his new
creed. The entire divergence between Roman and
German feeling stands revealed to us when we com-
pare these interior battles of Luther's with the
spiritual conflicts later experienced by Ignatius
Loyola, the champion of the old Church after its
revival. The Spaniard puts an end to his suffer-
ings by resolving never again to touch the wound
of his soul ; the German finds peace only when his
mind is convinced of the truth of his beliefs and all
doubts have been banished by the irrefutable testi-
mony of personal experience.
Quite unconscious of the incalculable effect
which his action will have on others, Luther now
sets out on his campaign against the ugly abuses
prevalent in a worldly Church, and then God leads
him on as if he were an old blind horse. Every
decisive thought that enters his mind further con-
vinces him that God does not desire compulsory
service, and that no one can sit in judgment over
the human conscience but God alone. Hardly
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? 238 Luther and the German Nation
three years after the beginning of the quarrel
about indulgences he breaks loose from the re-
stricted morality of the Middle Ages in that mighty
hymn of Gospel liberty, the book concerning the
freedom of the Christian soul. He there proclaims
that the Christian is subject to no one in matters
of faith, and that for that very reason he is the
servant of all, pledged in loving service to the
least of his brethren. Good works can never
make a man holy, but a good man must by his
very nature perform good works. His conception
of what moral life should be is at the same time
broader and stricter than that of his predecessors.
It has a direct affinity with the war waged by
Jesus against the rigid legal conventionality of the
Pharisees, and is based on the axiom that the centre
of gravity in the moral world is the conscience of
man. This discovery at once leads to a realiza-
tion of the priesthood of the laity, and the idea of
a free Church which is content to let the outward
forms of church life be carried away with all
things human on the stream of time. Such a con-
ception makes it possible to contrast the words,
"On this rock will I build My Church" -- words
most grossly misunderstood -- with these other
words of which the meaning has vital application,
"Where two or three are gathered together in My
name, there am I in the midst of them. "
Luther's action certainly amounted to a revolu-
tion, and as religious belief has its roots in the
inmost recesses of the heart of the nation, its
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? Luther and the German Nation 239
effects on existing institutions were more far-
reaching than any poHtical upheaval has been
in modem history. It is certainly not a sign of
evangelical courage when many well-meaning
Protestants seek to deny or conceal this fact. So
incredibly bold a course could only have been
adopted by a man filled with all the native energy
and unquenchable fire of German defiance. The
whole of the old order in the moral world which had
been held sacred during a thousand years, the long
chain of venerable traditions which had held the
life of Christendom together, were shattered at a
blow. Indeed, we can even sympathize with the
Alsatian Mumer, the opponent of the Reformer,
who cried out at the sight of this colossal ruin :
All books are lies,
The saints have deceived us,
Our teachers all are blind.
The greatness of the historical heroes lies in the
fact that they unite in themselves mental and
moral powers which seem to the common herd in-
compatible. Nothing could be more remarkable
than the courage of this simple man, who de-
scribed himself as a goose among swans, but yet
dared to enter the lists against the mightiest of
the political and moral powers of his time. No-
thing, moreover, could exceed his native modera-
tion. Never was he more bold than when he
lovingly warned the Wittenberg iconoclasts not to
let their "liberty be a cloak of offence. " With
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? 240 Luther and the German Nation
childlike confidence he builds upon the founda-
tion of God's Word alone. And his belief did
not deceive him, for when once the wild upheavals
occasioned by the Peasants' War and by the risings
of the Anabaptists had been mastered, the victory
of the Reformation in Germany was gained by
peaceful methods with the willing co-operation of
the people. In spite of all the uglier aspects of this
great movement, it was nevertheless character-
ized by that simple honesty and energy which
especially reveal themselves at moments of great
stress in our German history. The Reformation
presented our people with a form of Christian
belief which satisfied their craving for truth, and
was in harmony with the untamable independence
of the German character, just as the Roman
Church satisfies the logical aptitude and the
craving for beauty of the Latin races, and the
Orthodox Church satisfies the semi- Oriental sub-
missiveness of the Greco-Slavonic world. Luther's
word had infinite influence over a circle far wider
than that composed of his co-religionists.
He was
justified when he cried out to the German bishops,
" You have procured a condemnation of my gospel,
but you have secretly accepted many of its
tenets. " We are right to look upon him as a
benefactor of the old Church as well; for that
Church also was forced by him to gather her moral
strength together, and she did not remain inwardly
untouched by the heartfelt and soulful accepta-
tion of the faith which Luther gave back to
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? Luther and the German Nation 241
Christendom. A doctrine of indulgences as ma-
terial as that preached by Tetzel would now be
untenable on German soil, and it is certain that
to-day the thoughtful German Catholic stands
nearer to the German Protestant in his entire
conception of life than he stands to his Spanish
co-religionist.
In all the mighty transformations of our spiritual
life which have taken place since, the fundamental
idea of the Reformation, the free surrender of the
soul to God, has remained the immutable moral
ideal of the German. In the sphere of worldly
affairs it shows itself in the severe utterance of
Kant, who declared that nothing in the world
must be looked upon as good except a good inten-
tion. The same note is heard in the gentle song
of the angels who bear the soul of Faust to heaven :
"We can set free all those who never cease to
strive. " We have to thank the Reformation for
the vital and paternal relationship of the creeds
on which German civilization rests to-day; for
that broad tolerance which springs neither from
fear nor from indifference, but from a realization
that the world being as it is, the light of Divine
revelation is visible to human eyes only when broken
into many rays. No sixteenth century person --
not Luther himself -- could have understood what
we to-day call tolerance; still this long suffering
became possible only under the influence of Pro-
testant belief, which strikes at the roots of the
arrogant false belief in a Church which alone
16
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? 242 Luther and the German Nation
holds the keys of heaven. We have to thank the
Reformation for enabHng the German to think
both piously and independently, for permitting
not one of our great thinkers, however bold his
flight, from falling into the blasphemous mockery
of a Voltaire, and for causing the mortal sin of
hypocrisy to be almost unknown amongst us.
Herein lies the greatness of Protestantism; it
will not suffer a contradiction to exist between
thinking and willing, between religion and moral
life. It will not be gainsaid in its demand that
what a man beHeves that he shall openly confess
and openly follow. In Luther's day the Italians
greatly excelled our nation in art and science. In
the fourteenth century they were already able
to point to Petrarch, the first modem man, a
person who had elected to stand upon his own feet
and to pull the bandage from his eyes. And at the
time of the dispute in Germany on the subject of
indulgences, Machiavelli was writing two books
concerning the State in which he repudiated the
traditional beliefs of the Middle Ages far more
recklessly than Luther ever did. The Latins,
however, lacked the strength to take their own
ideas quite seriously ; they succeeded in dividing
their conscience, so that they were able to obey
a Church which they ridiculed. The Germans
dared to shape their lives in accordance with truths
which they had lately learnt to believe ; and since
the historical world is a world of the will, and
thought, not action, shapes the destinies of nations,
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? Luther and the German Nation 243
it may be said that the history of modem human-
ity begins, not with Petrarch or the artists of the
fifteenth century, but with Martin Luther. Europe
was in no way slow to reahze this fact. Only a
hundred and forty years after Luther's death the
German historian, Cellarius, asserted that towards
the close of the fifteenth century the Middle Ages
were closed and relegated to the background as a
period now passed away. The idea and the name
of the Middle Ages have since become indigenous
in most countries, and will so remain, although our
present-day vanity seeks in vain to point to the
French Revolution as the beginning of modem
history.
Like all true Germans, Luther always cherished
a deep sense of historical piety, and he delighted to
regard the great changes which he had brought
about in the Church as being merely a restoration
of the conditions which prevailed in Christendom
during the earliest periods of its existence. He
knew, however, that he had endowed the political
life of nations with an entirely new idea. He used
to say of the men of his youth that "No one either
taught or learnt, and that therefore no one knew
aught concerning temporal authority, whence
it was, what was its office or its work, or how it
might serve God. " The State had certainly never
received its due since the difficult question as to the
whereabouts of the boundary line between spiritual
and temporal power had arisen to vex the mind of
Christendom. The heathen world had been con-
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? 244 Luther and the German Nation
fronted with no such problem. During the first few
centuries of its career, the Church had had no deal-
ings with the State, because the latter was heathen ;
and when it obtained the upper hand in the Roman
Empire there gradually grew up the political system
of an ecclesiastical world-empire -- a system which
had a very close connection both with the organiza-
tion and with the dogma of the Church. According
to it, the whole life of Christendom appears as a
firmly compacted whole. Statecraft and political
economy, science and art, all human callings receive
the moral law governing their existence from the
hands of the Church. The Church is God's State,
but the earthly State is the kingdom of the flesh,
existing for no moral purpose, and only justified by
God when it places its strong arm at the service
of the judge of the world of States, namely, the
Pope. No vigorous mediaeval State had com-
pletely recognized these very arbitrary claims of
the Papacy. The ecclesiastical doctrine of a
world-empire had begun to lose its prestige among
scholars in the days of Dante, of Marsilius of
Padua, and of the courageous Ghibelline authors
who crowded round the Emperor Ludwig the
Bavarian. It could not be entirely overcome
until the bull was taken by the horns, and the
domination of the clergy brought to an end in
the Church itself.
Luther first smashed to atoms the dictum behind
which the Romanists entrench themselves: he
denied that "spiritual power is higher than tern-
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? Luther and the German Nation 245
poral power," and taught that the State is itself
ordained of God, and that it is justified in fulfilling
and indeed pledged to fulfil, the moral purposes of
its existence independently of the Church. The
State was thus declared to be of age ; and as it had
really attained its majority, and as the temporal
power everywhere received firm support from the
growing self-realization of the nations, this political
emancipation had almost a mightier and a more
far-reaching influence than the reformation of the
Church. All rulers, without exception, whether
Catholic or Protestant, repudiated the poHtical
suzerainty of the crowned priest. An obedience
such as that previously demanded of the temporal
powers by the Pope was no more thought of, and
before the close of Luther's century, Bodinus origi-
nated the idea of the sovereignty of the State with a
real display of scientific acumen. The theory was
an entirely new one, and, once discovered, it
became, and still continues to be, the common
property of all civilized men. In vain did the
Jesuits continue to dream of the world-empire of
the Church; the States of Europe, none the less,
formed themselves by degrees into a new and
free association, and built up for themselves a
universal code of national law, which was more
just than the former judgments of the Popes, and
had its roots in the common interests and the
sense of justice of the nations. Step by step
the modem State forced back the Church on her
spiritual territory. It deprived her of the admin-
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? 246 Luther and the German Nation
istration of justice, of the management of educa-
tion, and of the care of the poor, and proved by
the results that it is more competent to fulfil these
political duties than its predecessor had been.
Nothing reveals the innate healthiness of the
political ideas of the Reformation more completely
than the undeniable fact that the political develop-
ment of the Protestant States was throughout
effected with less effort and in a more peaceful
manner than that of the Catholic States.
The emancipation of the State from the tyranny
of ecclesiastical control nowhere brought with it so
rich and abiding a blessing as in Germany, for
nowhere had the old Church been more closely
interwoven with the State than in the Holy Roman
Empire and in the many ecclesiastical princedoms
supported by the imperial power. No one can
deny that the Reformation furthered the break-up
of the old Empire which had been threatening for so
long, and fanned, by means of religious hatred, the
flame of a political antagonism already in existence.
But he who can heal wounds is thereby entitled
to give them. From the well of Protestantism
alone could this sickly kingdom draw the waters
of youth. It was only when our State again
became true like its Church, when it rejected the
claims of the Holy Roman Empire, now proved ill-
founded, when it placed its episcopal lands under
worldly jurisdiction, that it again became able to
move with the times.
Luther never drew these last conclusions him-
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? Luther and the German Nation 247
self. He quailed at the thought of civil war;
"Germany," he said, ''would be devastated three
times over before we could establish a new form of
government. " He knew that he was not a states-
man, and he had all the national respect for the
majesty of the Empire and the aristocracy of
Austria. He had to combat many doubts before
he could make up his mind to sanction opposition
to imperial encroachments which had after all
been sanctioned under the old regime. The nature
of things, and the common sense of history finally
brought about conditions which were bound to
arise sooner or later in the home of the Re-
formation. The ecclesiastical States of Germany
gradually collapsed without hope of redemption,
until finally, at the beginning of our own century,
the last mouldy ruins of the Roman theocracy were
secularized and the Holy Roman Empire abolished.
It was only at this point, when our State honestly
CwSpoused the cause of its own secular existence,
that the site was levelled for a new edifice. And
even in this last salutary stage in our history the
Reformer played his part by means of a deed of
which he was unable to perceive the ultimate
consequences. On Luther's advice Albert of
Brandenburg, the Grand Master of the Teutonic
Order, decided to discard the white mantle with the
black cross, to repudiate the false chastity of the
monks, and to found a true and knightly dominion
which should seek to be acceptable to God and the
world without the aid of tinsel and false names.
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? 248 Luther and the German Nation
Thus it was that Prussia, a land belonging to the
Order, a colony of Germany as a whole, was turned
into a secular duchy and saved from the greed of
its Polish neighbour. Luther wrote with gratitude :
"Behold a miracle! With all sails spread, the
Gospel speeds through Prussia. " He did not
dream what other greater miracles our nation
should behold in his outlying Eastern province.
It was from this district, which was snatched from
the old Church and stood or fell with Protestant-
ism, that the military greatness of our modern
history emerged to reveal itself in world-famed
battles, and it was also out of Prussia that grew up,
in the fullness of time, the new State of Germany,
which refuses to be either holy or Roman, but
desires, in the words of the Reformer, to be a
secular kingdom, a German kingdom, without
tinsel and false appellations.
It has been seen that the unity of the German
State dates from the day when the last ecclesiasti-
cal State disappeared from German soil. It is
also to the battles of the Reformation that we
owe that priceless moral link which sufficed to hold
us together, almost unaided, during the days of our
national dismemberment: I mean our new lan-
guage. The feat of subjecting the Northern Ger-
mans to the yoke of the High German language --
a task which even the magic of our chivalrous
poetry had failed to accomplish -- was only
achieved when the Wartburg had for the second
time become dear to our people. You will remem-
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? Luther and the German Nation 249
ber that it was from this fair spot, beloved of the
Minnesingers, that proceeded the first books of
the German Bible; for in this German Bible we
find the Sacred Scriptures most faithfully trans-
lated by a rehgious genius of like mind with the
authors; yet his work is so truly German, so
entirely permeated with the breath of our German
spirit, that it would be hard for us to-day to imagine
God's Word in any other form. Like the Italians,
we received our literary language at a definite
moment of time and at the hands of a single man.
The very nature of genius demands, however, that
only that which is necessary and simply natural
shall be aimed at. Dante made no deliberate
innovations, but merely ennobled and gave fresh
inspiration to the popular idiom of his native
Tuscany. Luther in like manner merely sought
to be understood by every one of his com-
patriots, so that God might speak German to
the German nation. It was for this reason that he
used the Middle German which all understood,
and which was already the official language used
by the authorities in all localities where High and
Low Germans were united under one ruler, in the
State of the Teutonic Order, and in the chancellor-
ies of the Liitzelburg Emperors and of the Saxon
Electors.
It will be seen, then, that all sections of the
nation gave or received something in their com-
mon work for the Reformation. Protestantism
received firm political support from the North;
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? 250 Luther and the German Nation
but it was Upper Germany which contributed the
mighty language which was from thenceforth
to hold moral sway over evangelical Germany.
These districts of Southern and Middle Germany
have from time immemorial been the warm cradle
of our poetry, and also of our linguistic develop-
ment. And this High German was the language of
Luther's own home. Its accents had been dear to
him from earliest childhood, and he had heard
them from the lips of the people in the mines at
Mansfeld, the quarry-men employed by his dear
father. Goethe alone has rivalled him in his com-
mand over language; but, notwithstanding this
eloquence, he remains the most "popular" of all
our writers. His works combine in themselves
elements usually believed to be incompatible.
They show deep thought, close compression of
matter, all-compelling argument, and an immense
prodigality of magnificent words, so that the
reader seems to hear the heartfelt accents of the
preacher himself. Their gift to the imaginative
is immense, and the meditative are left with endless
food for thought. This language of freedom and
truth, born as it was in the midst of wars, cannot
deny the tokens of its origin to this day. It is a
language created to voice mighty wrath, to sport
and jest, to storm the pinnacles of thought, to
gently whisper the inmost secrets of the heart.
But let a man once seek to drive or coerce our
mother tongue to hide its meaning, to make treach-
erous and biting salHes, or even to pander to an
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? Luther and the German Nation 251
uneducated craving for the charming and the
piquant, and he will get but little from it; such a
person will find himself obliged to go and beg at the
table of strangers.
More than a hundred years elapsed before this
new German, which shed a glory over the hymns
and sermons of the Evangelical Church, became
the common property of our people. Learning
then became popular and worldly in its turn, and
our ancestors saw the fulfilment of the saying
which Ulrich von Hutten had proclaimed aloud
to the world in the very first days of the nation's
rapturous hope: ''Formerly the priests alone were
learned; now God has given skill to all to read
and understand. " About the middle of the six-
teenth century a sad and paralyzing influence
descended on the Lutheran branch of German
Protestantism, for little beside the solemn strains
of the evangelical hymns was left to remind men
what the original spirit of the Reformation had
been, and ambitious theologians, in the old and the
new Church alike, sought to determine the direc-
tion and limitations of study. It was only the
heroic courage of the vigorous sister church in the
Netherlands, and the struggle of the Calvinists
there against Spain, that preserved a degenerate
Lutherism from certain destruction. Not until we
experienced the miseries of the Thirty Years' War
did we realize the real trend of affairs. The
Pietists of Halle roused once again in our people
the vital spirit of the gospels, the spirit of brotherly
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? 252 Luther and the German Nation
love, which sought to make the evangelical life a
reality, and which the barren and unprofitable
quarrels of the last few decades had obscured.
Pufendorf drove the theologians out of the domain
of political science; Thomasius was the first to dare
to speak German from a German professorial
chair. And on the soil thus prepared there at once
grew up our new learning and our new poetry, free
from all the harshness consequent on a religious
bias, fundamentally worldly, far bolder in its con-
ceptions than any theories ever sanctioned by
Luther, but still perfectly Protestant. All the
leaders of this new learning were Protestants.
The new ideal of humanity could proceed only from
the autonomy of the conscience won for us by
Luther. The Bavarian Jesuits were horrified
on hearing the "Lutheran German" of this new
culture, but none the less it continued its peace-
ful march of victory even through Catholic
Germany, until it had at last drawn all things
German into the fresh stream of its ideals. And
we may recognize with pride to-day that even the
champions of Rome from among our countrymen
long ago learnt ''Lutheran German," and that
they fight against us with swords forged on our
own anvils.
Honest worldly activity did not receive any
moral justification until the Church's activities
were entirely limited to spiritual matters. This
period saw the solution of the riddle which had
seemed insolvable to the mediaeval poet; riches
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? Luther and the German Nation 253
and honour were now found to be perfectly com-
patible with the grace of God. Eternity itself
now entered the sphere of the believer's material
life, and he began to feel that he could and must do
service by means of his handiwork. Even the
soldiers received from Luther the comfortable
assurance that they too would be in a state of
salvation if they sought to perform their hard
duties faithfully. But as soon as it was seen that
a Church could exist without clergy, it became
impossible for the clergy even in purely Catholic
countries, to persist in claiming to be the highest
order in the social scale.
(A Lecture given at Darmstadt on November 7,
1883)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
There are many among you who stood, not
many weeks ago, on the heights of the Niederwald,
when our venerable Emperor presided at the unveil-
ing of the statue representing Germania girt with
her sword; and you there had the privilege of
uniting with your compatriots from far and near
in a feeling of joy and thankfulness. For centuries
we Germans have been denied the luxury of join-
ing together in that happy and unenvious contem-
plation of our past which is the true life-blood of a
healthy people. The very victories which brought
about the unity of our Empire were the outcome
of the first great united act performed by the whole
nation since immemorial times. Glorious indeed
is the history of our nation, which has so often
given to this part of our globe the foremost figure
of the century, and has, in warfare, so often spoken
words of awakening or of reconciliation. Nearly
all our great men were, however, so inextricably
involved in the whirl of bewildering contrasts
227
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? 228 Luther and the German Nation
which disorganized our inner life that even to this
day they remain an enigma to great masses of the
people, and are looked upon merely as the pioneers
of a family, a party, or a creed -- ^not simply as
German heroes.
It was during the eighteenth century that the
last and greatest representative of the old-fash-
ioned unlimited monarchy held sway among us,
and now that we are able to judge of the extent of
his labours, the more enlightened among us have
begun to feel that he was fighting for Germany
when he waged war against Austria and the Holy
Roman Empire. But in spite of this King
Frederick, like his ancestor the Great Elector, will
ever remain the favourite of his Prussians, while
to the general mass of the Southern Germans he
will continue to be something of a stranger. A
century earlier we secured the religious peace of
Europe after a horrible war, but victory was pur-
chased at a fearful price, i. e. , the laying waste
of our ancient culture ; and almost the only lumin-
ous figure in all that sombre period, the hero
Gustavus Adolphus, was a foreigner. Moreover,
even his admirers must admit that his victorious
career terminated -- very favourably to us -- just
at the moment when his power began to be prejudi-
cial to our country.
The same limitations are to be observed even
in the commemorative festival which our Pro-
testant nation is thankfully celebrating this week.
It is not, unhappily, a festival in which all Ger-
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? Luther and the German Nation 229
mans will take part. Millions of our compatriots
are holding aloof in silence, or even in open dis-
approval. They are neither able nor willing
to imderstand that the Reformer of our Church
was the pioneer of the whole German nation on the
road to a freer civilization, and that in the State
and in Society, in our homes and in our centres
of learning, his spirit still breathes life into us.
Everyone who takes it upon himself to speak of
Luther must confess what is his own attitude
towards the great moral problems of the present
day. And the accusations of those who are un-
able to comprehend his greatness are as passion-
ate in tone to-day as if the Reformer still walked
in our midst.
Even during his life-time Martin Luther incurred
the penalty which awaits all great men, and
especially all great fighters: he was misunderstood.
During the early years of his public activity --
years so full of promise -- ^he was greeted by the
nation with a tempestuous joy such as has not been
seen again in Germany imtil our own time. In the
days when he first belled the cat, when, forced
forward by a lively conscience and the driving
power of untrammelled thought, he turned from
the paths of ancient orthodoxy to those of open
heresy; when he threw the Papal Bull into the
fire and gave that ringing call to the "Christian
nobility of the German nation," in which he
invited his Germans to reform the Church and the
State, root and branch; then it was that he stood
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? 230 Luther and the German Nation
revealed before the Emperor and the Empire
as the leader of the nation, a man as heroic in
aspect as the patron saint of his people, the warrior
Michael. Then it was that men sought to express
their joy in the words of the folk-song :
He showed himself at Worms,
All ready for the fray;
He silenced all his enemies,
And none could overcome him.
Then, also, it seemed as if the elemental forces
at work in a nation stirred to its depths -- the re-
ligious zeal of pious minds, the scientific curiosity
of the rising generation, the national hatred
of a knightly nobility for the foreign prelates,
the discontent of an oppressed peasantry -- were
about to unite in a mighty torrent impetuous
enough to sweep all Roman organizations and
influences out of our State and our Church. The
royal dignity of Germany was, however, still in
close bondage to the world-embracing policy of the
Holy Roman Empire. It can hardly have been
an accident that the crown was at that moment-
ous period worn by a stranger who could not
discern the beating of our heart, and whose only
answer to the acclamations with which the Germans
hailed the courageous frankness of their country-
man was a disdainful smile and the words, "Such
a man shall never make me a heretic. "
As soon as it became evident that the Emperor
had refused to listen to the voice of the nation, the
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? Luther and the German Nation 231
Reformer found ranged against him not only the
political strength of the Spanish World-Empire,
but also the immense moral force embodied in the
firm loyalty of our nation to the Emperor. Class-
hatred -- that mortal sin which has played so large
a part in our history -- now again made its appear-
ance. The nobility frittered away their hot-
blooded energy in the carrying on of aimless and
most unhappy feuds. The peasants interpreted
the gospel doctrine of Hberty in a material sense,
and plunged into a furious social war. Luther,
however, believed that his holy treasure had been
insulted, and poured all the vials of his wrath
upon the fools who sought to settle the problem
of the gospel with hammer and tongs. When
this horrible rising had been horribly punished by
a cruel nobility, the man who had been so lately
glorified by his compatriots found himself cursed
by the common people. In the meantime Eras-
mus, the first scholar of the century, had separated
himself from the Wittenberg party; Luther's
teacher, the mystic Staupitz, and the clever hu-
manists, Crotus Rubianus and Eobanus Hessus,
recoiled from him in terror. Their defection
made it clear that the new teaching would at
first have but a partial influence over the most
highly educated sections of the nation ; and as this
new doctrine freed the strong obstinacy as well
as the power of independent thought which char-
acterize the German character, its adherents
began to fritter away their strength in a highly
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? 232 Luther and the German Nation
dangerous manner. Undisciplined fanaticism and
quarrels about dogma broke their unity.
Luther, thus harassed and forsaken on all sides,
sought refuge among the German Princes. If his
last years were rich in great results, they were even
richer in painful disillusionments. He had begun
hoping that he might give new energies to Church
life in Christendom, or at least in his own nation.
Now he was forced to content himself with the
knowledge that small evangelical Churches had
gradually come into being in the territories of
the greater among the German temporal princes;
and he who watches, even superficially, the dawn
of day in history may consider it a merciful dis-
pensation of Providence that the Reformer, whom
over- work had quickly aged, should have died just
before the dissensions and aimless weaknesses of
the leaders in the Schmalkaldian War led to the
subjection of German Protestants to a foreign
rule. The glory of departed heroes is usually
exaggerated in the popular imagination; Luther,
on the contrary, appeared to his contemporaries a
lesser man than he really was. In those weary
decades of political inactivity and theological dis-
putes which followed upon the golden period of the
German Reformation, a little sect proceeded to
recreate Luther after its own image, as if he also
had been nothing but a zealous preacher of Bible
truths and a respectable father of a family, and as
if his aim had merely been to found a separate
Church called by the name of a sinful mortal. It
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? Luther and the German Nation 233
is only the historical science of our own day which
has succeeded in plucking up heart to comprehend
Luther in his entirety, Luther the epitome of his
century, in whose soul nearly all the new ideas of
the time were mightily re-echoed. We are far
enough removed from him in time to be able to
gauge the indirect consequences of his destructive
and constructive labours, to observe all the seeds
of a new culture which he sowed in German
soil with all the unconsciousness of genius, and to
realize with thankfulness how faithfully he kept
the promise thus made by him: " I was bom for my
Germans, and them will I serve. "
The joy of life has from the beginning possessed
the German soul; but side by side with this there
has always existed a meditative seriousness
which is painfully conscious of the transitory
nature of all earthly things. Undaunted courage
has always been accompanied in our national
character by a deep longing for deliverance from
the curse of sin. Of all the nations of Western
Europe, the ancient Germans alone had some
premonition, even in their heathen days, of the
future disappearance of this sinful race and of a
new world of purity and light which is to come.
To such a people the glad tidings from Jerusalem
were peculiarly acceptable, and the marvellous
buildings of our old cathedrals sufficiently testify
to the piety and the earnestness with which the
Germans received the new faith. It should,
nevertheless, be observed that the Christian
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? 234 Luther and the German Nation
doctrine had assumed a form in Rome which,
on its arrival in our midst, never entirely recom-
mended itself to us. All ages, peoples, and coun-
tries seemed to be united in the great community
of saints which bound the Church militant here
below to the Church expectant of the poor souls
in Purgatory and the Church triumphant of the
saints in Heaven. From the treasury of good
works laid up by the saints the Church dealt forth
remission of sins to the faithful, through the
medium of a ruling priesthood, whose members
were empowered by the spiritual gifts of ordina-
tion to change bread and wine into the Body
and Blood of the Saviour. Outside the Church
was no salvation; she embraced and hallowed
the life of every Christian from the cradle to the
bier, from baptism to extreme unction. The con-
ception was indeed a great and wonderful one.
The wisdom and piety of many holy persons
and a rare talent for ruling men had built up the
wonderful structure throughout many centuries.
Each stone stood firmly cemented to its fellow,
and the inevitable and logical sequence of one
dogma upon another gave the Christian no choice
between submission and heresy. But the close
logic of the Romans had never quite satisfied the
German mind; the living conscience of our people
could never find peace in means of grace supplied
by the Church and in prescribed good works alone.
As early as the fourteenth century the German
territories rang with the Kyrie eleisons of the sect
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? Luther and the German Nation 235
of Flagellants, and ever louder and more despair-
ing -- almost as heartrending as in the earliest days
of Christian history -- grew the cry of the sinful
creature pleading for reconciliation with its Creator.
Further, the bellicose and practical mind of the
Germans was bewildered by the teaching of the
old Church. This beautiful world offered so
many laurel wreaths of honour, and so many
elevated pleasures to men of energy, and yet
all these were to be of no account in comparison
with the higher sanctity of dedicated men, of
priests and monks who had renounced everything
that binds men to one another by human ties, and
who despised not only the infinite happiness, but
also the sacred duties of married life. Walther
von der Vogelweide, the greatest of our mediaeval
poets, pondered sadly over this dark riddle, com-
plaining that "One and the same heart can never,
alas! receive God's grace in form of riches and in
form of honour. "
And this priestly hierarchy, which kept itself
so immeasurably above the obedient multitude,
which so greatly scorned all worldly activities, had
long been the prey of a shameless worldliness which
caused secular persons to regard its members as a
race of hypocrites. The clergy owned the wealth-
iest third of Germany, always formed a majority
and carried all motions in the Reichstag, and
exerted a political influence which was looked upon
by the Germans as a kind of foreign rule. This
latter idea was due to the knowledge that the
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? 236 Luther and the German Nation
Church was ruled by the Pope and his Italian
prelates; and all the wealth of intellect, wit, and
culture which hobnobbed together in the ante-
rooms of the Vatican, all the masterpieces of the
chisel and the brush which the sun of Papal favour
brought into being, could not console our nation
for the fact that the mistress of Christendom
was the most profligate city of the earth. It was
in vain that the Germans had sought, at the
councils of the fifteenth century, to reform the
abuses in the Church. When Luther appeared
the nation was in a dangerous state of ferment,
the prey of conflicting emotions. On the one hand
were the pious persons, consumed by scruples, and
taking painful stock of their sins and their good
works, and contemplating the popular pictures
of the Dance of Death with holy terror; on the
other stood the sensuous lovers of life, full of
energy and high spirits, rejoicing in crude jests
and delighted to mock at the caricature of a
world turned upside down. But to whichever class
they belonged, all Germans united in hating the
foreign yoke.
The actual setting free of Germany was the
direct outcome of an internal conflict waged in
an honest German conscience. Luther drew from
his very humility suflicient strength to endow him
with the utmost boldness. In his youth a passion-
ate anxiety respecting the salvation of himself
and his brothers had driven him to leave father
and mother, in order to storm heaven from his
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? Luther and the German Nation 237
cell by means of all the torments of monkish pen-
ances. Nothing, however, could drown the cry of
his soul, " My sin, my sin, my sin, " and at last the
truth of the saying of the apostle about justi-
fication by faith was revealed to him in all its light-
giving splendour. He now began to realize what
was meant by the iisTavota of Paul, by the con-
version of the inner man. Humbly confessing
the insufficiency of human merit, he resigned him-
self in faith to the mercies of the living God,
and he dared to live according to this his new
creed. The entire divergence between Roman and
German feeling stands revealed to us when we com-
pare these interior battles of Luther's with the
spiritual conflicts later experienced by Ignatius
Loyola, the champion of the old Church after its
revival. The Spaniard puts an end to his suffer-
ings by resolving never again to touch the wound
of his soul ; the German finds peace only when his
mind is convinced of the truth of his beliefs and all
doubts have been banished by the irrefutable testi-
mony of personal experience.
Quite unconscious of the incalculable effect
which his action will have on others, Luther now
sets out on his campaign against the ugly abuses
prevalent in a worldly Church, and then God leads
him on as if he were an old blind horse. Every
decisive thought that enters his mind further con-
vinces him that God does not desire compulsory
service, and that no one can sit in judgment over
the human conscience but God alone. Hardly
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? 238 Luther and the German Nation
three years after the beginning of the quarrel
about indulgences he breaks loose from the re-
stricted morality of the Middle Ages in that mighty
hymn of Gospel liberty, the book concerning the
freedom of the Christian soul. He there proclaims
that the Christian is subject to no one in matters
of faith, and that for that very reason he is the
servant of all, pledged in loving service to the
least of his brethren. Good works can never
make a man holy, but a good man must by his
very nature perform good works. His conception
of what moral life should be is at the same time
broader and stricter than that of his predecessors.
It has a direct affinity with the war waged by
Jesus against the rigid legal conventionality of the
Pharisees, and is based on the axiom that the centre
of gravity in the moral world is the conscience of
man. This discovery at once leads to a realiza-
tion of the priesthood of the laity, and the idea of
a free Church which is content to let the outward
forms of church life be carried away with all
things human on the stream of time. Such a con-
ception makes it possible to contrast the words,
"On this rock will I build My Church" -- words
most grossly misunderstood -- with these other
words of which the meaning has vital application,
"Where two or three are gathered together in My
name, there am I in the midst of them. "
Luther's action certainly amounted to a revolu-
tion, and as religious belief has its roots in the
inmost recesses of the heart of the nation, its
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? Luther and the German Nation 239
effects on existing institutions were more far-
reaching than any poHtical upheaval has been
in modem history. It is certainly not a sign of
evangelical courage when many well-meaning
Protestants seek to deny or conceal this fact. So
incredibly bold a course could only have been
adopted by a man filled with all the native energy
and unquenchable fire of German defiance. The
whole of the old order in the moral world which had
been held sacred during a thousand years, the long
chain of venerable traditions which had held the
life of Christendom together, were shattered at a
blow. Indeed, we can even sympathize with the
Alsatian Mumer, the opponent of the Reformer,
who cried out at the sight of this colossal ruin :
All books are lies,
The saints have deceived us,
Our teachers all are blind.
The greatness of the historical heroes lies in the
fact that they unite in themselves mental and
moral powers which seem to the common herd in-
compatible. Nothing could be more remarkable
than the courage of this simple man, who de-
scribed himself as a goose among swans, but yet
dared to enter the lists against the mightiest of
the political and moral powers of his time. No-
thing, moreover, could exceed his native modera-
tion. Never was he more bold than when he
lovingly warned the Wittenberg iconoclasts not to
let their "liberty be a cloak of offence. " With
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? 240 Luther and the German Nation
childlike confidence he builds upon the founda-
tion of God's Word alone. And his belief did
not deceive him, for when once the wild upheavals
occasioned by the Peasants' War and by the risings
of the Anabaptists had been mastered, the victory
of the Reformation in Germany was gained by
peaceful methods with the willing co-operation of
the people. In spite of all the uglier aspects of this
great movement, it was nevertheless character-
ized by that simple honesty and energy which
especially reveal themselves at moments of great
stress in our German history. The Reformation
presented our people with a form of Christian
belief which satisfied their craving for truth, and
was in harmony with the untamable independence
of the German character, just as the Roman
Church satisfies the logical aptitude and the
craving for beauty of the Latin races, and the
Orthodox Church satisfies the semi- Oriental sub-
missiveness of the Greco-Slavonic world. Luther's
word had infinite influence over a circle far wider
than that composed of his co-religionists.
He was
justified when he cried out to the German bishops,
" You have procured a condemnation of my gospel,
but you have secretly accepted many of its
tenets. " We are right to look upon him as a
benefactor of the old Church as well; for that
Church also was forced by him to gather her moral
strength together, and she did not remain inwardly
untouched by the heartfelt and soulful accepta-
tion of the faith which Luther gave back to
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? Luther and the German Nation 241
Christendom. A doctrine of indulgences as ma-
terial as that preached by Tetzel would now be
untenable on German soil, and it is certain that
to-day the thoughtful German Catholic stands
nearer to the German Protestant in his entire
conception of life than he stands to his Spanish
co-religionist.
In all the mighty transformations of our spiritual
life which have taken place since, the fundamental
idea of the Reformation, the free surrender of the
soul to God, has remained the immutable moral
ideal of the German. In the sphere of worldly
affairs it shows itself in the severe utterance of
Kant, who declared that nothing in the world
must be looked upon as good except a good inten-
tion. The same note is heard in the gentle song
of the angels who bear the soul of Faust to heaven :
"We can set free all those who never cease to
strive. " We have to thank the Reformation for
the vital and paternal relationship of the creeds
on which German civilization rests to-day; for
that broad tolerance which springs neither from
fear nor from indifference, but from a realization
that the world being as it is, the light of Divine
revelation is visible to human eyes only when broken
into many rays. No sixteenth century person --
not Luther himself -- could have understood what
we to-day call tolerance; still this long suffering
became possible only under the influence of Pro-
testant belief, which strikes at the roots of the
arrogant false belief in a Church which alone
16
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? 242 Luther and the German Nation
holds the keys of heaven. We have to thank the
Reformation for enabHng the German to think
both piously and independently, for permitting
not one of our great thinkers, however bold his
flight, from falling into the blasphemous mockery
of a Voltaire, and for causing the mortal sin of
hypocrisy to be almost unknown amongst us.
Herein lies the greatness of Protestantism; it
will not suffer a contradiction to exist between
thinking and willing, between religion and moral
life. It will not be gainsaid in its demand that
what a man beHeves that he shall openly confess
and openly follow. In Luther's day the Italians
greatly excelled our nation in art and science. In
the fourteenth century they were already able
to point to Petrarch, the first modem man, a
person who had elected to stand upon his own feet
and to pull the bandage from his eyes. And at the
time of the dispute in Germany on the subject of
indulgences, Machiavelli was writing two books
concerning the State in which he repudiated the
traditional beliefs of the Middle Ages far more
recklessly than Luther ever did. The Latins,
however, lacked the strength to take their own
ideas quite seriously ; they succeeded in dividing
their conscience, so that they were able to obey
a Church which they ridiculed. The Germans
dared to shape their lives in accordance with truths
which they had lately learnt to believe ; and since
the historical world is a world of the will, and
thought, not action, shapes the destinies of nations,
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? Luther and the German Nation 243
it may be said that the history of modem human-
ity begins, not with Petrarch or the artists of the
fifteenth century, but with Martin Luther. Europe
was in no way slow to reahze this fact. Only a
hundred and forty years after Luther's death the
German historian, Cellarius, asserted that towards
the close of the fifteenth century the Middle Ages
were closed and relegated to the background as a
period now passed away. The idea and the name
of the Middle Ages have since become indigenous
in most countries, and will so remain, although our
present-day vanity seeks in vain to point to the
French Revolution as the beginning of modem
history.
Like all true Germans, Luther always cherished
a deep sense of historical piety, and he delighted to
regard the great changes which he had brought
about in the Church as being merely a restoration
of the conditions which prevailed in Christendom
during the earliest periods of its existence. He
knew, however, that he had endowed the political
life of nations with an entirely new idea. He used
to say of the men of his youth that "No one either
taught or learnt, and that therefore no one knew
aught concerning temporal authority, whence
it was, what was its office or its work, or how it
might serve God. " The State had certainly never
received its due since the difficult question as to the
whereabouts of the boundary line between spiritual
and temporal power had arisen to vex the mind of
Christendom. The heathen world had been con-
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? 244 Luther and the German Nation
fronted with no such problem. During the first few
centuries of its career, the Church had had no deal-
ings with the State, because the latter was heathen ;
and when it obtained the upper hand in the Roman
Empire there gradually grew up the political system
of an ecclesiastical world-empire -- a system which
had a very close connection both with the organiza-
tion and with the dogma of the Church. According
to it, the whole life of Christendom appears as a
firmly compacted whole. Statecraft and political
economy, science and art, all human callings receive
the moral law governing their existence from the
hands of the Church. The Church is God's State,
but the earthly State is the kingdom of the flesh,
existing for no moral purpose, and only justified by
God when it places its strong arm at the service
of the judge of the world of States, namely, the
Pope. No vigorous mediaeval State had com-
pletely recognized these very arbitrary claims of
the Papacy. The ecclesiastical doctrine of a
world-empire had begun to lose its prestige among
scholars in the days of Dante, of Marsilius of
Padua, and of the courageous Ghibelline authors
who crowded round the Emperor Ludwig the
Bavarian. It could not be entirely overcome
until the bull was taken by the horns, and the
domination of the clergy brought to an end in
the Church itself.
Luther first smashed to atoms the dictum behind
which the Romanists entrench themselves: he
denied that "spiritual power is higher than tern-
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? Luther and the German Nation 245
poral power," and taught that the State is itself
ordained of God, and that it is justified in fulfilling
and indeed pledged to fulfil, the moral purposes of
its existence independently of the Church. The
State was thus declared to be of age ; and as it had
really attained its majority, and as the temporal
power everywhere received firm support from the
growing self-realization of the nations, this political
emancipation had almost a mightier and a more
far-reaching influence than the reformation of the
Church. All rulers, without exception, whether
Catholic or Protestant, repudiated the poHtical
suzerainty of the crowned priest. An obedience
such as that previously demanded of the temporal
powers by the Pope was no more thought of, and
before the close of Luther's century, Bodinus origi-
nated the idea of the sovereignty of the State with a
real display of scientific acumen. The theory was
an entirely new one, and, once discovered, it
became, and still continues to be, the common
property of all civilized men. In vain did the
Jesuits continue to dream of the world-empire of
the Church; the States of Europe, none the less,
formed themselves by degrees into a new and
free association, and built up for themselves a
universal code of national law, which was more
just than the former judgments of the Popes, and
had its roots in the common interests and the
sense of justice of the nations. Step by step
the modem State forced back the Church on her
spiritual territory. It deprived her of the admin-
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? 246 Luther and the German Nation
istration of justice, of the management of educa-
tion, and of the care of the poor, and proved by
the results that it is more competent to fulfil these
political duties than its predecessor had been.
Nothing reveals the innate healthiness of the
political ideas of the Reformation more completely
than the undeniable fact that the political develop-
ment of the Protestant States was throughout
effected with less effort and in a more peaceful
manner than that of the Catholic States.
The emancipation of the State from the tyranny
of ecclesiastical control nowhere brought with it so
rich and abiding a blessing as in Germany, for
nowhere had the old Church been more closely
interwoven with the State than in the Holy Roman
Empire and in the many ecclesiastical princedoms
supported by the imperial power. No one can
deny that the Reformation furthered the break-up
of the old Empire which had been threatening for so
long, and fanned, by means of religious hatred, the
flame of a political antagonism already in existence.
But he who can heal wounds is thereby entitled
to give them. From the well of Protestantism
alone could this sickly kingdom draw the waters
of youth. It was only when our State again
became true like its Church, when it rejected the
claims of the Holy Roman Empire, now proved ill-
founded, when it placed its episcopal lands under
worldly jurisdiction, that it again became able to
move with the times.
Luther never drew these last conclusions him-
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? Luther and the German Nation 247
self. He quailed at the thought of civil war;
"Germany," he said, ''would be devastated three
times over before we could establish a new form of
government. " He knew that he was not a states-
man, and he had all the national respect for the
majesty of the Empire and the aristocracy of
Austria. He had to combat many doubts before
he could make up his mind to sanction opposition
to imperial encroachments which had after all
been sanctioned under the old regime. The nature
of things, and the common sense of history finally
brought about conditions which were bound to
arise sooner or later in the home of the Re-
formation. The ecclesiastical States of Germany
gradually collapsed without hope of redemption,
until finally, at the beginning of our own century,
the last mouldy ruins of the Roman theocracy were
secularized and the Holy Roman Empire abolished.
It was only at this point, when our State honestly
CwSpoused the cause of its own secular existence,
that the site was levelled for a new edifice. And
even in this last salutary stage in our history the
Reformer played his part by means of a deed of
which he was unable to perceive the ultimate
consequences. On Luther's advice Albert of
Brandenburg, the Grand Master of the Teutonic
Order, decided to discard the white mantle with the
black cross, to repudiate the false chastity of the
monks, and to found a true and knightly dominion
which should seek to be acceptable to God and the
world without the aid of tinsel and false names.
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? 248 Luther and the German Nation
Thus it was that Prussia, a land belonging to the
Order, a colony of Germany as a whole, was turned
into a secular duchy and saved from the greed of
its Polish neighbour. Luther wrote with gratitude :
"Behold a miracle! With all sails spread, the
Gospel speeds through Prussia. " He did not
dream what other greater miracles our nation
should behold in his outlying Eastern province.
It was from this district, which was snatched from
the old Church and stood or fell with Protestant-
ism, that the military greatness of our modern
history emerged to reveal itself in world-famed
battles, and it was also out of Prussia that grew up,
in the fullness of time, the new State of Germany,
which refuses to be either holy or Roman, but
desires, in the words of the Reformer, to be a
secular kingdom, a German kingdom, without
tinsel and false appellations.
It has been seen that the unity of the German
State dates from the day when the last ecclesiasti-
cal State disappeared from German soil. It is
also to the battles of the Reformation that we
owe that priceless moral link which sufficed to hold
us together, almost unaided, during the days of our
national dismemberment: I mean our new lan-
guage. The feat of subjecting the Northern Ger-
mans to the yoke of the High German language --
a task which even the magic of our chivalrous
poetry had failed to accomplish -- was only
achieved when the Wartburg had for the second
time become dear to our people. You will remem-
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? Luther and the German Nation 249
ber that it was from this fair spot, beloved of the
Minnesingers, that proceeded the first books of
the German Bible; for in this German Bible we
find the Sacred Scriptures most faithfully trans-
lated by a rehgious genius of like mind with the
authors; yet his work is so truly German, so
entirely permeated with the breath of our German
spirit, that it would be hard for us to-day to imagine
God's Word in any other form. Like the Italians,
we received our literary language at a definite
moment of time and at the hands of a single man.
The very nature of genius demands, however, that
only that which is necessary and simply natural
shall be aimed at. Dante made no deliberate
innovations, but merely ennobled and gave fresh
inspiration to the popular idiom of his native
Tuscany. Luther in like manner merely sought
to be understood by every one of his com-
patriots, so that God might speak German to
the German nation. It was for this reason that he
used the Middle German which all understood,
and which was already the official language used
by the authorities in all localities where High and
Low Germans were united under one ruler, in the
State of the Teutonic Order, and in the chancellor-
ies of the Liitzelburg Emperors and of the Saxon
Electors.
It will be seen, then, that all sections of the
nation gave or received something in their com-
mon work for the Reformation. Protestantism
received firm political support from the North;
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? 250 Luther and the German Nation
but it was Upper Germany which contributed the
mighty language which was from thenceforth
to hold moral sway over evangelical Germany.
These districts of Southern and Middle Germany
have from time immemorial been the warm cradle
of our poetry, and also of our linguistic develop-
ment. And this High German was the language of
Luther's own home. Its accents had been dear to
him from earliest childhood, and he had heard
them from the lips of the people in the mines at
Mansfeld, the quarry-men employed by his dear
father. Goethe alone has rivalled him in his com-
mand over language; but, notwithstanding this
eloquence, he remains the most "popular" of all
our writers. His works combine in themselves
elements usually believed to be incompatible.
They show deep thought, close compression of
matter, all-compelling argument, and an immense
prodigality of magnificent words, so that the
reader seems to hear the heartfelt accents of the
preacher himself. Their gift to the imaginative
is immense, and the meditative are left with endless
food for thought. This language of freedom and
truth, born as it was in the midst of wars, cannot
deny the tokens of its origin to this day. It is a
language created to voice mighty wrath, to sport
and jest, to storm the pinnacles of thought, to
gently whisper the inmost secrets of the heart.
But let a man once seek to drive or coerce our
mother tongue to hide its meaning, to make treach-
erous and biting salHes, or even to pander to an
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? Luther and the German Nation 251
uneducated craving for the charming and the
piquant, and he will get but little from it; such a
person will find himself obliged to go and beg at the
table of strangers.
More than a hundred years elapsed before this
new German, which shed a glory over the hymns
and sermons of the Evangelical Church, became
the common property of our people. Learning
then became popular and worldly in its turn, and
our ancestors saw the fulfilment of the saying
which Ulrich von Hutten had proclaimed aloud
to the world in the very first days of the nation's
rapturous hope: ''Formerly the priests alone were
learned; now God has given skill to all to read
and understand. " About the middle of the six-
teenth century a sad and paralyzing influence
descended on the Lutheran branch of German
Protestantism, for little beside the solemn strains
of the evangelical hymns was left to remind men
what the original spirit of the Reformation had
been, and ambitious theologians, in the old and the
new Church alike, sought to determine the direc-
tion and limitations of study. It was only the
heroic courage of the vigorous sister church in the
Netherlands, and the struggle of the Calvinists
there against Spain, that preserved a degenerate
Lutherism from certain destruction. Not until we
experienced the miseries of the Thirty Years' War
did we realize the real trend of affairs. The
Pietists of Halle roused once again in our people
the vital spirit of the gospels, the spirit of brotherly
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? 252 Luther and the German Nation
love, which sought to make the evangelical life a
reality, and which the barren and unprofitable
quarrels of the last few decades had obscured.
Pufendorf drove the theologians out of the domain
of political science; Thomasius was the first to dare
to speak German from a German professorial
chair. And on the soil thus prepared there at once
grew up our new learning and our new poetry, free
from all the harshness consequent on a religious
bias, fundamentally worldly, far bolder in its con-
ceptions than any theories ever sanctioned by
Luther, but still perfectly Protestant. All the
leaders of this new learning were Protestants.
The new ideal of humanity could proceed only from
the autonomy of the conscience won for us by
Luther. The Bavarian Jesuits were horrified
on hearing the "Lutheran German" of this new
culture, but none the less it continued its peace-
ful march of victory even through Catholic
Germany, until it had at last drawn all things
German into the fresh stream of its ideals. And
we may recognize with pride to-day that even the
champions of Rome from among our countrymen
long ago learnt ''Lutheran German," and that
they fight against us with swords forged on our
own anvils.
Honest worldly activity did not receive any
moral justification until the Church's activities
were entirely limited to spiritual matters. This
period saw the solution of the riddle which had
seemed insolvable to the mediaeval poet; riches
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? Luther and the German Nation 253
and honour were now found to be perfectly com-
patible with the grace of God. Eternity itself
now entered the sphere of the believer's material
life, and he began to feel that he could and must do
service by means of his handiwork. Even the
soldiers received from Luther the comfortable
assurance that they too would be in a state of
salvation if they sought to perform their hard
duties faithfully. But as soon as it was seen that
a Church could exist without clergy, it became
impossible for the clergy even in purely Catholic
countries, to persist in claiming to be the highest
order in the social scale.
