For example, Luther amuses the company with the tale of a Spandau Provost who was a hermaphrodite, lived in a nunnery and bore a child;[857] with another, of a peasant, who, after listening to a sermon on the use of Holy Water as a detergent of sin, proceeded to put what he had heard into practice in an indecent fashion;[858] with another of self-mutilated eunuchs, in telling which he is unable to suppress an obscene joke concerning himself.[859] He entertains the company with some far from witty, indeed entirely tactless and indecent stories, for instance, about the misfortune of a concubine who had used ink in mistake for ointment;[860] of the Beghine who, when violence was offered her, refused to scream because silence was enjoined after Compline;[861] of a foolish young man’s interview with his doctor;[862] of an obscene joke at the expense of a person uncovered;[863] of a young man’s experience with his bathing dress;[864] of women who in shameless fashion prayed for a husband;[865] of the surprise of Duke Hans, the son of Duke George of Saxony, by his steward, etc.[866]

These stories, in Bindseil’s “Colloquia,” are put with the filthy verses on Lemnius,[867] the “Merdipoeta,” and form a fit sequence to the account of Lustig, the cook, and the substitute he used for sauces.[868]

These anecdotes are all related more or less in detail, but, apart from them, we have plentiful indelicate sayings and jokes and allusions to things not usually mentioned in society, sufficient in fact to fill a small volume.

Luther, for instance, jests in unseemly fashion “amid laughter” on the difference in mind and body which distinguishes man from woman, and playfully demonstrates from the formation of their body that his Catherine and women in general must necessarily be deficient in wit.[869] An ambiguous sally at the expense of virginity and the religious life, addressed to the ladies who were usually present at these evening entertainments, was received with awkward silence and a laugh.[870]

On another occasion the subject of the conversation was the female breasts, it being queried whether they were “an ornament” or intended for the sake of the children.[871] Then again Luther, without any apparent reason, treats, and with great lack of delicacy, of the circumstances and difficulties attending confinement;[872] he also enters fully into the troubles of pregnancy,[873] and, to fill up an interval, tells a joke concerning the womb of the Queen of Poland.[874]

In the Table-Talk Luther takes an opportunity of praising the mother’s womb and does so with a striking enthusiasm, after having exclaimed: “No one can sufficiently extol marriage.” “Now, in his old age,” he understood this gift of God. Every man, yea, Christ Himself, came from a mother’s womb.[875]

Among the passages which have been altered or suppressed in later editions from motives of propriety comes a statement in the Table-Talk concerning the Elector Johann Frederick, who was reputed a hard drinker. In Aurifaber’s German Table-Talk the sense of the passage is altered, and in the old editions of Stangwald and Selnecker the whole is omitted.[876]

Of the nature of his jests the following from notes of the Table-Talk gives a good idea: “It will come to this,” he said to Catherine Bora, “that a man will take more than one wife.” The Doctoress replied: “Tell that to the devil!” The Doctor proceeded: Here is the reason, Katey: a wife can have only one child a year, but the husband several. Katey replied: “Paul says: ‘Let everyone have his own wife.’ Whereupon the Doctor retorted: ‘His own,’ but not ‘only one,’ that you won’t find in Paul. The Doctor teased his wife for a long time in this way, till at last she said: ‘Sooner than allow this, I would go back to the convent and leave you with all the children.’”[877]

When the question of his sanction of Philip of Hesse’s bigamy and the scandal arising from it came under discussion, his remarks on polygamy were not remarkable for delicacy. He says: “Philip (Melanchthon) is consumed with grief about it.... And yet of what use is it?... I, on the contrary am a hard Saxon and a peasant.... The Papists could have seen how innocent we are, but they refused to do so, and so now they may well look the Hessian ‘in anum.’ ... Our sins are pardonable, but those of the Papists, unpardonable; for they are contemners of Christ, have crucified Him afresh and defend their blasphemy wittingly and wilfully. What are they trying to get out of it [the bigamy]? They slay men, but we work for our living and marry many wives.” “This he said with a merry air and amid much laughter,” so the chronicler relates. “God is determined to vex the people, and if it comes to my turn I shall give them the best advice and tell them to look Marcolfus ‘in anum,’” etc.[878] On rising from table he said very cheerfully: “I will not give the devil and the Papists a chance of making me uneasy. God will put it right, and to Him we must commend the whole Church.”[879] By such trivialities did he seek to escape his burden of oppression.

On one occasion he said he was going to ask the Elector to give orders that everybody should “fill themselves with drink”; then perhaps they would abandon this vice, seeing that people were always ready to do the opposite of what was commanded; what gave rise to this speech on drinking was the arrival of three young men, slightly intoxicated, accompanied by a musical escort. The visitors interrupted the conversation, which had turned on the beauty of women.[880]

Many of Luther’s letters, as well as his sermons, lectures and Table-Talk, bear sad witness to his unseemly language. It may suffice here to mention one of the most extraordinary of these letters, while incidentally remarking, that, from the point of view of history, the passages already cited, or yet to be quoted, must be judged of in the light of the whole series, in which alone they assume their true importance. In a letter written in the first year of his union, to his friend Spalatin, who though also a priest was likewise taking a wife, he says: “The joy at your marriage and at my own carries me away”; the words which follow were omitted in all the editions (Aurifaber, De Wette, Walch), Enders being the first to publish them from the original. They are given in the note below.[881]

In his work “Vom Schem Hamphoras” against the Jews he revels in scenes recalling that enacted between Putiphar’s wife and Joseph, though here it is no mere temptation but actual mutual sin; the tract contains much else of the same character.[884] In the notorious tract entitled “Wider Hans Worst,” which he wrote against Duke Henry of Brunswick (1541), he begins by comparing him with a “common procuress walking the street to seize, capture and lead astray honest maidens”;[885] he gradually works himself up into such a state of excitement as to describe the Church of Rome as the “real devil’s whore”; nay, the “archdevil’s whore,” the “shameless prostitute” who dwells in a “whores’ church” and houses of ill-fame, and compared with whom, as we have already heard him say elsewhere, “common city whores, field whores, country whores and army whores”[886] may well be deemed saints. In this work such figures of speech occur on almost every page. Elsewhere he describes the motions of the “Roman whore” in the most repulsive imagery.[887]

The term “whore” is one of which he is ever making use, more particularly in that connection in which he feels it will be most shocking to Catholics, viz. in connection with professed religious. Nor does he hesitate to use this word to describe human reason as against faith. In such varied and frenzied combinations is the term met with in his writings that one stands aghast. As he remarked on one occasion to his pupil Schlaginhaufen, people would come at last to look upon him as a pimp. He had been asked to act as intermediary in arranging a marriage: “Write this down,” he said, “Is it not a nuisance? Am I expected to provide also the women with husbands? Really they seem to take me for a pander.”[888]

According to Lauterbach’s Diary, for instance, Luther discoursed in 1538 on the greatness of God and the wisdom manifest in creation; in this connection he holds forth before the assembled company on the details of generation and the shape of the female body. He then passes on to the subject of regeneration: “We think we can instruct God ‘in regenerationis et salvationis articulo,’ we like to dispute at great length on infant baptism and the occult virtue of the sacraments, and, all the while, poor fools that we are, we do not know ‘unde sint stercora in ventre.’”[889] Over the beer-can the conversation turns on temperance, and Luther thereupon proposes for discussion an idea of Plato’s on procreation;[890] again he submits an ostensibly difficult “casus” regarding the girl who becomes a mother on the frontier of two countries;[891] he relates the tale of the woman who “habitu viri et membro ficto” “duas uxores duxit”;[892] he dilates on a “marvellous” peculiarity of the female body, which one would have thought of a nature to interest a physician rather than a theologian.[893] He also treats of the Bible passage according to which woman must be veiled “on account of the angels” (1 Cor. xi. 11), adding with his customary vulgarity: “And I too must wear breeches on account of the girls.”[894] When the conversation turned on the marriage of a young fellow to a lady of a certain age he remarked, that at such nuptials the words “Increase and multiply” ought not to be used; as the poet says: “Arvinam quaerunt multi in podice porci,” surely a useless search.[895] The reason “why God was so angry with the Pope” was, he elsewhere informs his guests, because he had robbed Him of the fruit of the body. “We should have received no blessing unless God had implanted our passions in us. But to the spark present in both man and wife the children owe their being; even though our children are born ugly we love them nevertheless.”[896]—He then raises his thoughts to God and exclaims: “Ah, beloved Lord God, would that all had remained according to Thine order and creation.” But what the Pope had achieved by his errors was well known: “We are aware how things have gone hitherto.” “The Pope wanted to enforce celibacy and to improve God’s work.” But the monks and Papists “ ... are consumed with concupiscence and the lust of fornication.”[897]—Take counsel with someone beforehand, he says, “in order that you may not repent after the marriage. But be careful that you are not misled by advice and sophistry, else you may find yourself with a sad handful ... then He Who drives the wheel, i.e. God, will jeer at you. But that you should wish to possess one who is pretty, pious and wealthy, nay, my friend ... it will fare with you as it did with the nuns who were given carved Jesus’s and who cast about for others who at least were living and pleased them better.”[898]

Simon Lemnius, the Humanist, who, owing to his satirical epigrams on the Wittenberg professor—whom he had known personally—was inexorably persecuted by the latter, wrote, in his “Apology,” about 1539, the following description of Luther’s life and career. This and the whole “Apology,” was suppressed by the party attacked; the later extracts from this writing, published by Schelhorn (1737) and Hausen (1776), passed over it in silence, till it was at last again brought to light in 1892: “While Luther boasts of being an evangelical bishop, how comes it that he lives far from temperately? For he is in the habit of overloading himself with food and drink; he has his court of flatterers and adulators; he has his Venus [Bora] and wants scarcely anything which could minister to his comfort and luxury.”[901] “He has written a pamphlet against me, in which, as both judge and authority, he condemns and mishandles me. Surely no pastor would arrogate to himself such authority in temporal concerns. He deprives the bishops of their temporal power, but himself is a tyrant; he circulates opprobrious and quite execrable writings against illustrious Princes. He flatters one Prince and libels another. What is this but to preach revolt and to pave the way for a general upheaval and the downfall of our States?... It is greatly to be feared, that, should war once break out, first Germany will succumb miserably and then the whole Roman Empire go to ruin. Meanwhile Luther sits like a dictator at Wittenberg and rules; what he says must be taken as law.”[902]

By the Anabaptists Luther’s and his followers’ “weak life” was severely criticised about 1525. Here we refer only cursorily to the statements already quoted,[903] in order to point out that these opponents based their theological strictures on a general, and, in itself, incontrovertible argument: “Where Christian faith does not issue in works, there the faith is neither rightly preached nor rightly accepted.”[904] In Luther they were unable to discern a “spark of Christianity,” though his “passionate and rude temper” was evident enough.[905] “The witless, self-indulgent lump of flesh at Wittenberg,” Dr. Luther, was not only the “excessively ambitious Dr. Liar, but also a proud fool,”[906] whose “defiant teaching and selfish ways” were far removed from what Christ and His Apostles had enjoined. In spite of the manifest spiritual desolation of the people Luther was wont to sit “with the beer-swillers” and to eat “sumptuous repasts”; he had even tolerated “open harlotry” on the part of some of the members of the University although, as a rule, he “manfully opposed” this vice.[907]

Catholic censors were even stronger in their expression of indignation. Dungersheim of Leipzig, in spite of his polemics an otherwise reliable witness, though rather inclined to rhetoric, in the fourth decade of the century reproached him in his “Thirty Articles” for leading a “life full of scandal”; he likewise appeals to some who had known him intimately, and was ready, if necessary, “to relate everything, down to the circumstances and the names.”[908] As a matter of fact, however, this theologian never defined his charges.

From the Duchy of Saxony, too, came the indignant voice of bluff Duke George, whom Luther had attacked and slandered in so outrageous a fashion: “Out upon you, you forsworn and sacrilegious fellow, Martin Luther (may God pardon me), public-house keeper for all renegade monks, nuns and apostates!”[909] He calls him “Luther, you drunken swine,” you “most unintelligent bacchant and ten times dyed horned beast of whom Daniel spoke in chapter viii., etc.”[910] Luther had called this Prince a “bloodhound”; he is paid back in his own coin: “You cursed, perjured bloodhound”; he was the “arch-murderer,” body and soul, of the rebellious peasants, “the biggest murderer and bloodhound ever yet seen on the surface of the globe.”[911] “You want us to believe that no one has written more beautifully of the Emperor and the Empire than yourself. If what you have written of his Imperial Majesty is beautiful, then my idea of beauty is all wrong; for it would be easy to find tipsy peasants in plenty who can write nine times better than you.”[912]

From the theologian Ambrosius Catharinus we hear some details concerning Luther’s private life.

On the strength of hearsay reports, picked up, so it would appear, from some of the visitors to the Council of Trent in 1546 and 1547, this Italian, who was often over-ardent both in attack and defence, wrote in the latter year his work: “De consideratione praesentium temporum libri quattuor.” Here he says: “Quite reliable witnesses tell me of Luther, that he frequently honoured the wedding feasts of strangers by his presence, went to see the maidens dance and occasionally even led the round dance himself. They declare that he sometimes got up from the banquets so drunk and helpless that he staggered from side to side, and had to be carried home on his friends’ shoulders.”[913]

As an echo of the rumours current in Catholic circles we have already mentioned elsewhere the charges alleged in 1524 by Ferdinand the German King, and related by Luther himself, viz. that he “passed his time with light women and at playing pitch-and-toss in the taverns.”[914] We have also recorded the vigorous denunciation of the Catholic Count, Hoyer of Mansfeld, which dates from a somewhat earlier period; this came from a man whose home was not far from Luther’s, and to whose character no exception has been taken. Hoyer wrote that whereas formerly at Worms he had been a “good Lutheran,” he had now “found that Luther was nothing but a knave,” who, as the way was at Mansfeld, filled himself with drink, was fond of keeping company with pretty women, and led a loose life, for which reason he, the Count, had “fallen away altogether.”[915] The latter statements refer to a period somewhere about 1522, i.e. previous to Luther’s marriage. With regard to that critical juncture in the year 1525 some consideration must be given to what Bugenhagen says of Luther’s marriage in his letter to Spalatin, which really voices the opinion of Luther’s friends at Wittenberg: “Evil tales were the cause of Dr. Martin’s becoming a married man so unexpectedly.”[916] The hope then expressed by Melanchthon, that marriage would sober Luther and that he would lay aside his unseemliness,[917] was scarcely to be realised. Melanchthon, however, no longer complains of it, having at length grown resigned. Yet he continued to regret Luther’s bitterness and irritability: “Oh, that Luther would only be silent! I had hoped that as he advanced in years his many difficulties and riper experience would make him more gentle; but I cannot help seeing that in reality he is growing even more violent than before.... Whenever I think of it I am plunged into deep distress.”[918]

Leo Judæ, one of the leaders of the Swiss Reformation, and an opponent of Wittenberg, “accuses Luther of drunkenness and all manner of things; such a bishop [he says] he would not permit to rule over even the most insignificant see.” Thus in a letter to Bucer on April 24, 1534, quoted by Theodore Kolde in his “Analecta Lutherana,”[919] who, unfortunately, does not give the actual text. According to Kolde, Leo Judæ continues: “Even the devil confesses Christ. I believe that since the time of the Apostles no one has ever spoken so disgracefully (‘turpiter’) as Luther, so ridiculously and irreligiously. Unless we resist him betimes, what else can we expect of the man but that he will become another Pope, who orders things first one way then another (‘fingit et refingit’), consigns this one to Satan and that one to heaven, puts one man out of the Church and receives another into it again, until things come to such a pass that he acts as Judge over all whilst no one pays the least attention to him?” With the exception of rejecting infant baptism, so Kolde goes on, Luther appeared to Judæ no better than Schwenckfeld, with whom Bucer would have nought to do; Judæ proceeds: “Not for one hundred thousand crowns would I have all evangelical preachers to resemble Luther; no one could compare with him for his wealth of abuse and for his woman-like, impotent agitation; his clamour and readiness of tongue are nowhere to be equalled.”[920]

Powerful indeed is the rhetorical outburst of Zwingli in a letter to Conrad Sam the preacher of Ulm, dated August 30, 1528: “May I be lost if he [Luther] does not surpass Faber in foolishness, Eck in impurity, Cochlæus in impudence, and to sum it up shortly, all the vicious in vice.”[921]

Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor, attacks Luther in his “Warhafften Bekanntnuss” of 1545 in reply to the latter’s “Kurtz Bekentnis”: “The booklet [Luther’s] is so crammed with devils, unchristian abuse, immoral, wicked, and unclean words, anger, rage and fury that all who read it without being as mad as the author must be greatly surprised and astonished, that so old, gifted, experienced and reputable a man cannot keep within bounds but must break out into such rudeness and filth as to ruin his cause in the eyes of all right-thinking men.”[922]

Johann Agricola, at one time Luther’s confidant and well acquainted with all the circumstances of his life, but later his opponent on the question of Antinomianism, left behind him such abuse of Luther that, as E. Thiele says, “it is difficult to believe such language proceeds, not from one of Luther’s Roman adversaries, but from a man who boasts of having possessed his special confidence.” He almost goes so far, according to Thiele, as to portray him as a “drunken profligate”; he says, “the pious man,” the “man of God (‘vir Dei’),” allowed himself to be led astray by the “men of Belial,” i.e. by false friends, and was inclined to be suspicious; he bitterly laments the scolding and cursing of which his works were full. One of his writings, “Against the Antinomians” (1539), was, he says, “full of lies”; in it Luther had accused him in the strongest terms and before the whole world of being a liar; it was “an abominable lie” when Luther attributed to him the statement, that God was not to be invoked and that there was no need of performing good works. When Luther’s tract was read from the pulpit even the Wittenbergers boggled at these lies and said: “Now we see what a monk is capable of thinking and doing.” Agricola also describes Luther’s immediate hearers and pupils at Wittenberg as mere “Sodomites,” and the town as the “Sister of Sodom.”[923] Such is the opinion of this restless, passionate man, who bitterly resented the wrong done him by Luther. (See vol. v., xxix. 3.)

By his wife Luther was father to five children, viz. Hans (1526), Magdalene (1529), Martin (1531), Paul (1533) and Margaret (1534).

The paternity of another child born of a certain Rosina Truchsess, a servant in his house, has also been ascribed to him, it being alleged that his references to this girl are very compromising.[926] The latter assertion, however, does not hold good, if only we read the passages in an unprejudiced spirit; at most they prove that Luther allowed his kindliness to get the better of his caution in receiving into his house one who subsequently proved herself to be both untruthful and immoral, and that, when by her misconduct she had compromised her master and his family, he was exceedingly angry with her. It is incorrect to say that Rosina ever designated Luther as the father of her baby.

The second child was one named Andreas, of whom Luther is said to have spoken as his son. This boy, however, has been proved to have been his nephew, Andreas Kaufmann, who was brought up in Luther’s family. Only through a mistake of the editor is he spoken of in the Table-Talk as “My Enders” and “My son”; later a fresh alteration of the text resulted in: “filius meus Andreas.”[927]

The third child was said to have been referred to in the Table-Talk as an “adulter infans,” in a passage where mention is made of its having been suckled by Catherine during pregnancy. In Aurifaber’s Table-Talk (1569 edition) “adulterum infantem” is, however, a misprint for “alterum infantem,” which is the true reading as it appears in the first (1568) edition. It is true that the passage in question mentions of two of Luther’s own children, that his wife was already with child before the first had been weaned.[928]

A letter which Luther wrote to his wife from Eisleben shortly before the end of his life, when he was staying at the Court of the Count of Mansfeld, has been taken as an admission of immorality: “I am now, thanks be to God, in a good case were it not for the pretty women who press me so hard that I again go in fear and peril of unchastity.”[929] What exactly means this reference to unchastity? As a matter of fact, after having partially recovered from his malady, he is here seeking to allay his wife’s anxiety by adopting a jesting tone, though perhaps exception might be taken to the nature of his jest. That what he says was intended as a joke is plain also from the superscription of the letter, addressed to the “Pork dealer,” an allusion to her purchase of a garden close to the Wittenberg pig-market. In the letter he explains humorously to his anxious wife (this too has been taken seriously), that his catarrh and giddiness had been wholly caused by the Jews, viz. by a cold wind raised up against him by them or their God (he was just then engaged in a controversy with the Jews).—The superscriptions of the various letters to Catherine and the jesting remarks they contain have also been taken far too tragically. Luther was wont to address her as deeply-learned dame, gracious lady, holy and careful lady, most holy Katey, Doctoress, etc., also as My Lord Katey and Gracious Lord Katey. It may be that the latter appellations refer to a certain haughtiness peculiar to her; but it would be to misunderstand him entirely to see in this or even in the name “Kette” = chain, which he applies to her now and then, an involuntary admission that he was bound by the fetters of a self-willed wife. We have seen how he once spoke of her in a letter previous to his marriage as his “mistress” (Metze), which has led careless controversialists to fancy that Luther quite openly had admitted that she was “his concubine” (vol. ii., p. 183). At any rate, not only was Luther’s language unseemly in many of his letters and in his intercourse with his Wittenberg circle, but this license of speech seems even to have infected the ladies of the party, at least if we may credit Simon Lemnius who, on the strength of what he had seen at Wittenberg, says that the wives of Luther, Justus Jonas and Spalatin vied with each other in indecent stories and confidences.[930] Thus we cannot take it amiss if the Catholics of that day, to whose ears came such rumours—doubtless already magnified—were too ready to credit them and to give open expression to their surmises. An instance of this is what Master Joachim von der Heyden wrote, in 1528, to Catherine Bora, viz. that she had lived with Luther before their marriage in shameful and open lewdness—as was said.[931]