“A great distinction,” Luther said in 1523, “must be made between a worldling and a Christian, i.e. between a Christian and a worldly man. For a Christian is neither man nor woman ... must know nothing and possess nothing in the world.... A prince may indeed be a Christian, but he must not rule as a Christian, and when he rules he does so not as a Christian but as a prince. As an individual he is indeed a Christian, but his office or princedom is no business of his Christianity.” This seems to him proved by his mystical theory that a Christian “must not harm or punish anyone or revenge himself, but forgive everyone and endure patiently all injustice or evil that befalls him.” The theory, needless to say, is based on his misapprehension of the Evangelical Counsels which he makes into commands.[206] On such principles as these, he concludes, it was impossible for any prince to rule, hence “his being a Christian had nothing to do with land and subjects.”[207]

For the same reason he holds that “every man on this earth” comprises two “practically antagonistic personalities,” for “each one has at the same time to suffer, and not to suffer, everything.”[208] The dualism which Luther here creates is due to his extravagant over-statement of the Christian law. The Counsels of Perfection given by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, with which Luther is here dealing (not to resist evil, not to go to law, etc., Mt. v. 19 ff.), are not an invitation addressed to all Christians, and if higher considerations or some duty stands in the way it would certainly denote no perfection to follow them. Luther’s misinterpretation necessarily led him to make a cleavage between Christian life and life in the world.

The dualism, however, in so far as it concerned the authorities had, however, yet another source. For polemical reasons Luther was determined to make an end of the great influence that the olden Church had acquired over public life. Hence he absolves the secular power from all dependence as the latter had itself sought to do even before his time. He refused to see that, in spite of all the abuses which had followed on the Church’s interference in politics during the Middle Ages, mankind had gained hugely by the guidance of religion. To swallow up the secular power in the spiritual had never been part of the Church’s teaching, nor was it ever the ideal of her enlightened representatives; but, for the morality of the great, for the observance of maxims of justice and for the improvement of the nations the principle that religion must not be separated from the life of the State and from the office of those in authority, but must permeate and spiritualise them was, as history proved, truly vital. Subsequent to Luther’s day the tendency to separate the two undoubtedly made unchecked progress. He himself, however, was not consistent in his attitude. On the contrary, he came more and more to desiderate the establishment of the closest possible bond between the civil authorities and religion—provided only that the ruler’s faith was the same as Luther’s. Nevertheless, generally speaking, the separation he had advocated of secular from spiritual became the rule in the Protestant fold.

“Lutheranism,” as Friedrich Paulsen said on the strength of his own observations in regions partly Catholic and partly Protestant, “which is commonly said to have introduced religion into the world and to have reconciled public worship with life and the duties of each one’s calling has, as a matter of fact, led to the complete alienation and isolation of the Church from real life; on the contrary, the older Church, despite all her ‘over-worldliness,’ has contrived to make herself quite at home in the world, and has spun a thousand threads in and around the fabric of its life.” He thinks himself justified in stating: “Protestantism is a religion of the individual, Catholicism is the religion of the people; the former seeks seclusion, the latter publicity. In the one even public worship bears a private character and appears as foreign to the world as the pulpit rhetoric of a Lutheran preacher of the old school; the [Protestant] Church stands outside the bustle of the workaday world in a world of her own.”[209]

Let us listen to Luther’s utterances at various periods on the dualism in the moral life of the individual: “The twin kingdoms must be kept wide asunder: the spiritual where sin is punished and forgiven, and the secular where justice is demanded and dealt out. In God’s kingdom which He rules according to the Gospel there is no demanding of justice, but all is forgiveness, remission and bestowal, nor is there any anger, or punishment, but nothing save brotherly charity and service.”[212]—“No rights, anger, or punishment,” this certainly would have befitted the invisible, spiritual Church which Luther had originally planned to set up in place of the visible one.[213]

“Christ’s everlasting kingdom ... is to be an eternal spiritual kingdom in the hearts of men by the preaching of the Gospel and by the Holy Spirit.”[214] “For your own part, hold fast to the Gospel and to the Word of Christ so as to be ready to offer the other cheek to the smiter, to give your mantle as well as your coat whenever it is a question of yourself and your cause.”[215] It is a strict command, though at utter variance with the civil law, in which your neighbour also is greatly concerned. In so far, therefore, you must resist. “Thus you manage perfectly to satisfy at the same time both the Kingdom of God and that of the world, both the outward and the inward; you suffer evil and injustice and yet at the same time punish evil and injustice; you do not resist evil, and yet at the same time you resist it; for according to the one you look to yourself and to yours, and, according to the other, to your neighbour and to his rights. As regards yourself and yours, you act according to the Gospel and suffer injustice as a true Christian; as regards your neighbour and his rights, you act in accordance with charity and permit no injustice.”[216]

If, as is but natural, we ask, how Christ came so strictly to enjoin what was almost impossible, Luther replies that He gave His command only for Christians, and that real Christians were few in number: “In point of fact Christ is speaking only to His dear Christians [when He says, ‘that Christians must not go to law,’ etc.], and it is they alone who take it and carry it out; they make no mere Counsel of it as the Sophists do, but are so transformed by the Spirit that they do evil to no one and are ready willingly to suffer evil from anyone.” But the world is full of non-Christians and “them the Word does not concern at all.”[217] Worldlings must needs tread a very different way: “All who are not Christians belong to the kingdom of the world and are under the law.” Since they know not the command “Resist not evil,” “God has given them another government different from the Christian estate, and the Kingdom of God.” There ruleth coercion, severity, and, in a word, the Law, “seeing, that, amongst a thousand, there is barely one true Christian.” “If anyone wished to govern the world according to the Gospel ... dear heart, what would the result be! He would be loosening the leashes and chains of the wild and savage beasts, and turning them astray to bite and tear everybody.... Then the wicked would abuse the Christian freedom of the Gospel and work their own knavery.”[218]

Luther clung to the very end of his life to this congeries of contradictory theories, which he advocated in 1523, in his passionate aversion to the ancient doctrine of perfection. In 1539 or 1540 he put forth a declaration against the “Sophists” in defence of his theory of the “Counsels,” directed more particularly against the Sorbonne, which had insisted that the “consilia evangelica,” “were they regarded as precepts, would be too heavy a burden for religion.”[219] “They make out the Counsels,” he says, “i.e. the commandments of God, to be not necessary for eternal life and invite people to take idolatrous, nay, diabolical vows. To lower the Divine precepts to the level of counsels is a horrible, Satanic blasphemy.” As a Christian “you must rather forsake and sacrifice everything”; to this the first table of the Law (of Moses, the Law of the love of God) binds you, but, on account of the second table (the law of social life), you may and must preserve your own for the sake of your family. As a Christian, too, you must be willing to suffer at the hands of every man, “but, apart from your Christian profession, you must resist evil if you wish to be a good citizen of this world.”[220]

“Hence you see, O Christian brother,” he concludes, “how much you owe to the doctrine which has been revived in our day, as against a Pharisaical theology which leaves us nothing even of Moses and the Ten Commandments, and still less of Christ.”

“This,” he says, “is the ‘Summa Summarum’ of a truly Christian life, to know that in Christ you have a Gracious God ready to forgive you your sins and never to think of them again, and that you are now a child of everlasting happiness, reigning with Christ over heaven and earth.”

It is true he hastens to add, that, from this saving faith, works of morality would “assuredly” flow.[224]

“Assuredly”? Since Albert Ritschl it has been repeated countless times that Luther did no more than “assert that faith by its very nature is productive of good works.” As a matter of fact “he is wont to speak in much too uncertain a way of the good works which follow faith”; with him “faith” is the whole man, whereas the Bible says: “Fear God and keep His commandments [i.e. religion plus morality]; this is the whole man.”[225]

Luther’s one-sided insistence on a confiding, trusting faith in God, at the cost of the moral work, has its root in his theory of the utter depravity of man and his entire lack of freedom, in his low esteem for the presuppositions of morality, in his conviction that nature is capable of nothing, and, owing to its want of self-determination, is unable on its own even to be moral at all. If we desire, so he says frankly, to honour God’s sublime majesty and to humble fallen creatures as they deserve, then let us recognise that God works all in all without any possibility of any resistance whatsoever on man’s part, God’s action being like to that of the potter on his clay. Just as Luther was unable to recognise justification in the sense in which it had been taught of yore, so also he entirely failed to appreciate the profounder conception of morality.

His strictures on morality—which had ever been esteemed as the voluntary keeping of the Law by man, who by a generous obedience renders to God the freedom received—point plainly to the cause of his upheaval of the whole field of dogma. At the outset he had set himself to oppose self-righteousness, but in doing so he dealt a blow at righteousness itself; he had attacked justice by works, but justice itself had suffered; he declared war on the wholly imaginary phantom of a self-chosen morality based on man-made ordinances and thereby degraded morality, if he did not indeed undermine its very foundations.

What Möhler says of the reformers and their tendency to set aside the commands of morality applies in particular to Luther and his passionate campaign. It is true he writes, that “the moral freedom they had destroyed came to involve the existence of a freedom from that moral law which concerns only the seen, bounded world of time, but fails to apply in the eternal world, set high above all time and space. This does not mean, however, that the reformers were conscious of what lay at the base of their system; on the contrary, had they seen it, had they perceived whither their doctrines were necessarily leading, they would have rejected them as quite unchristian.”[226]

The following reflection of the famous author of “Catholic Symbolism” may also be set on record, the better to safeguard against misapprehension anything that may have been said, particularly as it touches upon a matter to which we repeatedly have had occasion to allude.

“No one can fail to see the religious element in Protestantism,” he says, “who calls to mind the idea of Divine Providence held by Luther and Melanchthon when they started the work of the Reformation.... All the phenomena of this world [according to it] are God’s own particular work and man is merely His instrument. Everything in the history of the world is God’s invisible doing which man’s agency merely makes visible. Who can fail to see in this a truly religious outlook on all things? All is referred back to God, Who is all in all.... In the same way the Redeemer also is all in all in the sense that He and His Spirit are alone active, and faith and regeneration are solely due to Him.”[227]

Möhler here relates how, according to Luther, Staupitz had said of the new teaching at its inception, “What most consoles me is that it has again been brought to light how all honour and praise belong to God alone, but, to man, nothing at all.” This statement is quite in keeping with the vague, mystical world of thought in which Staupitz, who was no master of theology or philosophy, lived. But it also reflects the impression of many of Luther’s contemporaries who, unaware of his misrepresentation of the subject, were attracted by the advantage to religion and morality which seemed to accrue from Luther’s effort to ascribe all things solely to God.

He himself, for instance, once declared that he would “assume no authority or right to coerce, for I neither have nor desire any such. Let him rule who will or must; I shall instruct and console consciences as far as I am able. Who can or wants to obey, let him do so; who won’t or can’t, let him leave it alone.”[228]

He would act “by way of counsel,” so he teaches, “as in conscience he would wish to serve good friends, and whoever likes to follow his advice must do so at his own risk.”[229] “He gives advice agreeably to his own conscience,” writes Luthardt in “Luthers Ethik,” “leaving it to others to accept his advice or not on their own responsibility.”[230]

Nor can one well argue that the requisite sanction for the new moral rules was the general sanction found in the Scriptural threats of Divine chastisements to overtake transgressors. The question is whether the Law laid down in the Bible or written in man’s heart is really identical with Luther’s. Those who were unable of themselves to prove that this was the case were ultimately (so Luther implies) to believe it on his authority and conform themselves to his “Evangelical consciousness”; thus, for instance, in the matter of religious vows, held by Luther to be utterly detestable, and by the Church to be both permissible and praiseworthy.

“Conscience is death’s own cruel hangman,” so he told Spalatin; from Ambrose and Augustine the latter should learn to place all his trust not in conscience but in Christ.[236] It scarcely needs stating that here he is misapplying the fine sayings of both these Fathers. They would have repudiated with indignation the words of consolation which not long after he offered the man suffering from remorse of conscience, assuring him that he was as yet a novice in struggling against conscience, and had hitherto been “too tender a sinner”; “join yourself to us real, big, tough sinners, that you may not belittle and put down Christ, Who is the Saviour, not of small, imaginary sinners, but of great and real ones”; thus it was that he, Luther, had once been consoled in his sadness by Staupitz.[237] Here he is applying wrongly a perfectly correct thought of his former Superior. Not perhaps quite false, but at any rate thoroughly Lutheran, is the accompanying assurance: “I stand firm [in my conscience] and maintain my attitude, that you may lean on me in your struggle against Satan and be supported by me.”

Thus does he direct Spalatin, “who was tormented by remorse, to comfort himself against his conscience.”[238]

“To comfort oneself against one’s conscience,” such is the task which Luther, in many of his writings, proposes to the believer. Indeed, in his eyes the chief thing of all is to “get the better of sin, death, hell and our own conscience”; in spite of the opposition of reason to Luther’s view of Christ’s satisfaction, we must learn, “through Him [Christ] to possess nothing but grace and forgiveness,” of course, in the sense taught at Wittenberg.[239]

A former brother monk, Link, the apostate Augustinian of Nuremberg, Luther also encourages, like Spalatin the fallen priest, to kick against the prick of conscience: “These are devil’s thoughts and not from us, which make us despair,” they must be “left to the devil,” the latter always “keeps closest to those who are most pious”; to yield to such despairing thoughts “is as bad as giving in and leaving Satan supreme.”[240]

When praising the “sole” help and consolation of the grace of Christ he does not omit to point out, directly or otherwise, how, “when in despair of himself,” and enduring frightful inward “sufferings” of conscience, he had hacked his way through them all and had reached a firm faith in Christ minus all works, and had thus become a “theologian of the Cross.”[241]

Even at the commencement of the struggle, in order to encourage wavering followers, he allowed to each man’s conscience the right to defy any confessor who should forbid Luther’s writings to such of his parishioners who came to him: “Absolve me at my own risk,” they were to say to him, “I shall not give up the books, for then I should be sinning against my conscience.” He argues that, according to Rom. xiv. 1, the confessor might not “urge them against their conscience.” Was it then enough for a man to have formed himself a conscience, for the precept no longer to hold? His admonition was, however, intended merely as a counsel for “strong and courageous consciences.” If the confessor did not prove amenable, they were simply to “go without scruple to the Sacrament,” and if this, too, was refused them then they had only to send “Sacrament and Church” about their business.[242] Should the confessor require contrition for sins committed, this, according to another of his statements, was a clear attack on conscience which does not require contrition for absolution, but merely faith in Christ; such a priest ought to have the keys taken out of his hands and be given a pitchfork instead.[243]

Quite early in his career he also gave the following instruction to those of the clergy who were living in concubinage on how to form their conscience; they were “to salve their conscience” and take the female to their “wedded wife,” even though this were against the law, fleshly or ghostly. “Your soul’s salvation is of more account than any tyrannical laws.... Let him who has the faith to take the risk follow me boldly.” “I will not deceive him,” he adds apologetically, but at least he had “the power to advise him regarding his sins and dangers”; he will show them how they may do what they are doing, “but with a good conscience.”[244] For as Luther points out in another passage, even though their discarding of their supposed obligation of celibacy had taken place with a bad conscience, still the Bible-texts subsequently brought forward, read according to the interpretation of the new Evangelist, avail to heal their conscience.[245] At any rate, so he tells the Teutonic Knights when inviting them to break their vow of chastity: “on the Word of God we will risk it and do it in the teeth of and contrary to all Councils and Churches! Close eyes and ears and take God’s Word to heart.”[246] Better, he cries, go on keeping two or three prostitutes than seek of a Council permission to marry![247]

These were matters for “those to risk who have the faith,” so we have heard him say. In reality all did depend on people’s faith ... in Luther, on their conviction that his doctrine and his moral system were right.

Of himself Luther repeats again and again, that his knowledge and conscience alone sufficed to prove the truth of his position;[251] that he had won this assurance at the cost of his struggles with conscience and the devil. Ulenberg, the old writer, speaking of these utterances in his “Life of Luther,”[252] says that his hero mastered his conscience when at the Wartburg, and, from that time, believed more firmly than ever that he had gained this assurance by a Divine revelation (“cœlesti quadam revelatione”), for which reason he had then written to his Elector that he had received his lead solely from heaven.[253]

In matters of conscience wherever the troublesome “Law” comes in we can always trace the devil’s influence; we “must come to grips with him and fight him,”[254] only the man who has been through the mill, as he himself had, could boast of having any certainty: “The devil is a juggler. Unless God helps us, our work and counsel is of no account; whether we turn right or left he remains the Prince of this world. Let him who does not know this just try. I have had some experience of this. But let no one believe me until he too has experienced it.”[255]

Not merely in the case of his life-work in general, but even in individual matters of importance, the inward struggles and “agonies” through which he had passed were signs by which to recognise that he was in the right. Thus, for instance, referring to his hostile action in Agricola’s case, Luther says: “Oh, how many pangs and agonies did I endure about this business. I almost died of anxiety before I brought these propositions out into the light of day.”[256] Hence it was plain, he argued, how far he was from the palpable arrogance displayed by his Antinomian foe, and how evidently his present conduct was willed by God.