As early as 1527 twelve men and one woman, who had received baptism at each other’s hands, were beheaded.[894] Similar executions took place in 1530, 1532 and 1538.[895]

In 1539 the members of the Wittenberg High Court wrote concerning three Anabaptists then in prison at Eisenach: “If they do not recant or allow themselves to be reduced to obedience, it will be right and proper that they be put to death by the sword, on account of such blasphemy and because they have allowed themselves to be baptised elsewhere.” Of any seditious teaching there was no question in these proceedings.[896]

One Anabaptist, Fritz Erbe, who had only gone astray in matters of faith, was kept in jail from 1530 to 1541, when death set him free.[897] Hans Sturm and Peter Pestel, both of Zwickau, were harmless sectarians without any seditious leanings; the first was put in prison in 1529 and died there; the latter was beheaded on June 16, 1536.[898] Hans Steinsdorf and Hans Hamster, were condemned to death in 1538 as “stubborn blasphemers.”[899] In the ’forties Duke Henry of Saxony caused an Anabaptist to be burnt as a heretic at Dresden.[900]

Many a one amongst the new Doctors had begun, as a Protestant historian of Saxony points out,[906] “to claim for his conscience the same right” (as Luther), while “following other paths than Luther had trodden” (in his search after God). May not, indeed, must not, such a one, so ran the objection, follow his conscience, seeing that Luther himself tells us to consult our conscience? Yes, he may, is Luther’s reply, but, if he be truthful, then he will admit my plain interpretation of the Bible as the right one, for “I have floored and overcome all my foes on the sure groundwork of Holy Scripture.”[907]

Moreover, might not the Princes holding Popish views seize on the coercion taught by the Lutherans as a pretext for similar measures against the Lutherans in their territories?

No, replies Luther, they must not do so for they would be committing the same sin as the Kings of Israel when they “slew the true prophets”; but on account of the injustice of such slaughter, we are not to make nought of the law or refrain from stoning the false prophets. “Pious authorities will not punish anyone unless they see, hear, learn or know for certain that they are blasphemers.”[908]—Even should Kaiser Charles come and tell us, that he is convinced that “the doctrine of the Papists is true, and that he must therefore, in accordance with God’s command, use all his power to extirpate our heretical doctrines in his Empire,” we must answer, that: “We know he is not certain of this, and, in fact, cannot be certain.”[909]

But does this not come to much the same as imposing faith by some sort of compulsion?

No, is his answer. “The faith is not thereby forced on anyone, for he is free to believe what he pleases. He is only forbidden to indulge in that teaching and blaspheming whereby he seeks to rob God and Christians of their doctrine and Word, whilst all the while enjoying their protection and all temporal advantages. Let him go where there are no Christians and have things his way there.”[910]

But what—and this is the main objection—entitles Luther’s doctrine to be regarded as the standard of belief? This point Luther usually evaded. He says: Those heretics are to be punished “whose teaching is at variance with the public articles of the faith which are plainly grounded on Scripture and believed throughout the world by the whole of Christendom.”[915] “Such articles, common to the whole of Christendom, have already been sufficiently tested, examined, proved and determined by Scripture and by the confession of the whole of Christendom, confirmed by many miracles, sealed by the blood of the holy Martyrs, witnessed to and defended by the books of all the Doctors and are not now to become the prey of faultfinders or cavillers.”[916] A sharp answer, one very much to the point, was given by Bullinger of Zürich, who spoke of it as “truly laughable” that his opponent should suddenly appeal to the fact “of the Church having so long held this.” “If Luther’s argument, based on longstanding usage, be admitted, then is Popery quite in the right when it harps on the Church and her age. But then the whole of Luther’s own doctrine tumbles over, for his teaching is not that which the Roman Church has held for so long.”[917]—Nor is it easy to tell which points of doctrine Luther, in his elastic fashion, included among the articles “clearly founded on Scripture” and held unquestioningly by the whole of Christendom. His words occasionally presuppose that all divergent doctrines, not only those of the Sacramentarians and Anabaptists, but even those of the Papists, were to be punished by the authorities. If everyone is to be punished who teaches “that Christ has not died for our sins but that each one must himself make satisfaction for them,”[918] (a doctrine unjustly foisted on the Papists by Luther), or who “condemns the public ministry and draws the people away from it,” or who “insists that our baptism and preaching are not Christian and therefore that our Church is not the Church of Christ,”[919] etc.,—then many Catholics could not but fall victims to the sword of the authorities. How often did not Luther designate every specifically Catholic doctrine as rank “blasphemy,” and stigmatise every Catholic practice as idolatry? Blasphemy and idolatry were, however, according to him, to be rooted out by violence. Truly his words gave promise of an abundant harvest of persecution.

His natural foes are those who in their “peculiar wisdom” “seek to teach something besides Christ and beyond our preaching.”[920] Hence he was fond of insisting that Christ was slaying the Papacy through him, and of rejecting all who “make a great pother” and “claim to know something new.” They come, and, like Carlstadt, want to “seize upon the prize and poach upon my preserves.” Had not Carlstadt come along “with the fanatics, Münzer and the Anabaptists, all would have gone well with my undertaking.”[921] These men want to “darken the sun of the Evangel” so that the world “may forget all that has hitherto been taught by us.”[922]

“They want to have nothing to do with me,” he complains of the fanatics, “and I want to have nothing to do with them. They boast that they have nothing from me, for which I heartily thank God; I have borrowed even less from them, for which, too, God be praised.”[923] The rupture with the Swiss came about because they “wished to be first.”[924]

In all these dissensions he finds many a one saying to the Christians: “I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin.” And yet he alone had the right to call himself the “great Doctor” “to whom God first revealed His Word to preach.”[925]

It is true that this has been confidently asserted by Protestants, but the text of this sermon, known only through Aurifaber’s Notes, does not justify such an inference.[926] In it the preacher is not treating of the attitude of the Christian authorities towards heresy, but is only showing how the faithful and the preachers must behave, surrounded as they are by wicked folk, by Anabaptists and sectarians. The occasion for speaking of this was supplied by the Sunday Gospel of the Tares, Matt. xiii. 24-30, which grow up together with the wheat in God’s field, and which the Lord wishes to be left undisturbed until the Day of Judgment. Hence he explains how this must be understood, the local conditions probably supplying him with a particular reason for doing so, seeing that, in the County of Mansfeld, there must still have been some Catholics and that the Jews stood in favour. The greater part of the Sermon on the Tares is devoted to describing the passions and lusts which Christians must fight against in their own hearts with patience and perseverance. It is only towards the end that he speaks of the wickedness rampant in the world. He refutes the opinion of those, who “would have a Church in which there is no evil but where all are prudent and pious, and pure and holy”; thus “the Anabaptists, Münzer and such like, wish to root out and put to death everything that is not holy.” Hence “how are we to suffer the heretics and yet not to suffer them? How am I to act? If I tear up or root out the tares in one place then I spoil the wheat [according to the Parable], and the weeds will still grow up again elsewhere. Thus if I root out one heretic, yet the same devil-sown seed springs up again in ten other places.” Hence we must look to it that we do not make matters worse by violence and suppression. “Papists and Jews will ever be with us.” “You will not succeed in this world in entirely separating the heretics and false Christians from the just.” “Look to it that you remain master in your own household; see to it, you preachers, parsons and hearers [it is only to these that he is addressing himself, not to the State authorities], that heretics and seditious men, such as Münzer was, do not rule or dominate; grumble in a corner, that indeed they may do, but that they should mount the rostrum, get into the pulpit or go up to the altar, that, so far as in you lies, you must not allow.” Care must be taken that the “pulpit and the Sacrament are kept undefiled.” “By human might and power we cannot root them out, or make them different. For, in this point, they are often far superior to us, can get themselves a following, draw the masses to them, and, on the top of it all, they have on their side the prince of this world, viz. the devil.”

The main thing therefore is that the heretics “should not rule in our Churches.”

But what are we to do against the tares, against the Papists and Sophists, against Cologne, Louvain and the devil’s other thistles? Of boils it holds good: “Let them swell until they burst. So too it is in secular and domestic government: Where [whether in the Town Council or among the servants] we cannot get rid of the wicked without harm or detriment, there we must put up with them until the time is ripe.”

In this much-discussed Sermon on the Tares Luther is very far from wishing to give the authorities directions as to how to treat the sectarians. On the contrary he makes it plain that some other line of action than that described by him must be followed even by the faithful and the preachers, and much more so by the Christian authorities, whenever the heretics come out of their “corner” and try to climb into the pulpit or mount the altar. What was to be done that the pulpit and the Sacrament might remain undefiled, he had already sufficiently explained elsewhere. Naturally, a sermon on the Gospel which tells us to leave the Tares until the harvest was scarcely the place for Luther to expound his severer theories on the treatment to be meted out to unbelievers and misbelievers, so that his silence here cannot be taken as a repudiation of the measures for which he so long had stood. At the close of the next sermon, the last he was ever to preach, addressing himself to the nobility, he speaks very harshly of the Jews. “If they refuse to be converted, then, as blasphemers, they deserve that we should not suffer or endure them among us.” “You Lords ought not to tolerate but rather expel them.” This duty he bases on his usual principle: “Were I to tolerate the man who dishonours, blasphemes and curses Christ my Master, I should be making myself a partaker in the sins of others.”

His system of coercing and punishing heretics he certainly never repudiated.

The Statutes of the Theological Faculty, probably drawn up in 1533 by Melanchthon with Luther’s approval,[939] made it strictly incumbent on the teachers to preach the pure doctrine in accordance with the Confession of Augsburg; in the event of any difference of opinion a commission of judges was to decide; “after that the false opinion shall no longer be defended; if anyone obstinately persists in so doing, he is to be punished with such severity as to prevent him any more spreading abroad his wicked views.”[940] “The same Luther,” says Paulsen of this, “who, twelve years before, had declared that his conscience would not allow of his conceding to Christendom assembled in Council the right to determine the formula of faith, now claimed for the Wittenberg faculty—for this is what it amounts to—the unquestionable right to decide on faith. From 1535 to the day of his death Luther was without a break Dean of this Faculty.”[941]

Again, subsequent to 1535, the preachers and pastors sent out or officially recommended by Wittenberg had to take the so-called “Ordination Oath” which had been suggested by the Elector in order to exclude false preachers. The ministers to be appointed within the Electorate, and likewise those destined to take up appointments elsewhere, had to submit at Wittenberg to a searching examination on doctrine; only after passing it and taking an oath as to the future could they receive their commission. The examination is referred to in the Certificate of Ordination. Thus, in the Certificate of Heinrich Bock (who was sent to Reval in Livonia) which is dated May 17, 1540, and signed by Luther, Bugenhagen, Jonas and Melanchthon, it is set forth that he had undertaken to “preach to the people steadfastly and faithfully the pure doctrine of the Gospel which our Church confesses.” It is also stated that he adheres to the “consensus” of the “Catholic Church of Christ,” and, for this reason, is recommended to the Church of Reval.[942] A similar Certificate for the schoolmaster Johann Fischer, who had received a call to Rudolstadt “to the ministry of the Gospel,” is dated a month earlier. His doctrine, so it declares, had been found on examination to be pure and in accordance with the Catholic doctrine of the Gospel as professed by the Wittenbergers; a promise had also been received from him to teach the same faithfully to the people; for this reason “his call has been confirmed by public ordination.”[943] Fischer had received the “diaconate.”

As early as 1535 we read of the solemn ordination of a certain Johann (Golhart?), “examined by us and publicly ordained in the presence of our Church with prayers and hymns.” He was “ordained and confirmed by order of our sovereign,” having been called and chosen as “assistant minister” at Gotha by the local congregation headed by their pastor Myconius.[944]

“In Luther’s case it is impossible to speak of liberty of conscience or religious freedom.” “The death-penalty for heresy rested on the highest Lutheran authority.”[946] According to Köhler there can be no doubt that prosecution for heresy among the Protestants was practically Luther’s doing. “The views of the other reformers on the persecution and bringing to justice of heretics were merely the outgrowth of Luther’s plan, they contributed nothing fresh.”[947] The same writer is of opinion that the question, whether Luther would have approved of the execution of Servetus “must undoubtedly be answered in the affirmative.”[948] “It is certain that Luther would have agreed to the execution of Servetus; heresy as heresy is according to him deserving of death.”[949] One observation made by Köhler is significant enough, viz. “that, when the preaching of the Word proved ineffectual against the heretics,” Luther had recourse to the intervention of the secular authorities.[950]

“That Luther in principle regarded the death penalty in the case of heretics as just, even where there was no harm done to the ‘regna mundi,’” says Wappler, “is plain from the advice given by him on Oct. 20, 1534, to Prince Johann of Anhalt in reply to his inquiry concerning the attitude to be adopted towards the Anabaptists at Zerbst.” “The fact is, that from the commencement of 1530 the reformers cease to make any real distinction between the two classes of heretics [the seditious ones and those who merely taught false doctrines]. Heretics who merely ‘blasphemed’ were always regarded by them, at least where they remained obdurate, as practically guilty of sedition, and, consequently, as deserving the death penalty.” “The principal part in this was played by Luther, Melanchthon being merely the draughtsman of the memoranda in which Luther’s ideas on the question of heretics were reduced to a certain system.”[952] “The many executions, even of Anabaptists who are known to have not been revolutionaries and who were put to death on the strength of the declarations of the Wittenberg theologians, refute only too plainly all attempts to deny the clear fact, viz. that Luther himself approved of the death penalty even in the case of such as were merely heretics.”[953]

Wappler, after showing how Luther’s wish was, that everyone who preached without orders should be handed over to “Master Hans,” adds: “And what he said, was undoubtedly meant in earnest; shortly before this, on Jan. 18, 1530, as Luther had doubtless learned from Melanchthon, at Reinhardsbrunn near Gotha, six such persons had been handed over to Master Hans, i.e. to the executioner, and duly executed.” Wappler regards it as futile to urge that: “Luther could not prevent executions taking place in the Saxon Electorate”; it is wrong to put the blame on Melanchthon rather than on Luther for the putting to death of heretics.[954]

Speaking of the execution of Peter Pestel at Zwickau, the same author[955] declares that it was “a sad sign of the unfortunate direction so early [1536] taken by the Lutheran reformation that its representatives should allow this man, who had neither disseminated his doctrine in his native land nor rebaptised … to die a felon’s death.” “Even contempt of the outward Word,” he says, “carelessness about going to church and contempt of Scripture—in this instance contempt for the Bible as interpreted by Luther—was now regarded as ‘rank blasphemy,’ which it was the duty of the authorities to punish as such. To such lengths had the vaunted freedom of the Gospel now gone.”[956] The introduction of the Saxon Inquisition (See above, vol. v., 593) leads him to remark: “The principle of evangelical freedom of belief and liberty of conscience, which Luther had championed barely two years earlier, was here most shamefully repudiated, particularly by this lay inquisition, and yet Luther said never a word in protest.”[957]

In 1874 W. Maurenbrecher expressed it as his opinion that “Luther’s tolerance in theory as well as in practice amounted to this: The Church and her ministers were to denounce such as went astray in the faith, whereupon it became the duty of the secular authorities to chastise them as open heretics.”[958] In 1885 L. Keller declared: “It merely displays ignorance of the actual happenings of that epoch, when many people, even to-day, take it for granted that such executions and the wholesale persecution of the Anabaptists were only on account of sedition, and that the reformers had no hand in these things.”[959] “Luther indeed demands toleration,” says K. Rieker, “but only for the Evangelicals; he demands freedom, but merely for the preaching of the Evangel.”[960] According to Adolf Harnack “one of the Reformer’s most noticeable limitations was his inability either fully to absorb the cultural elements of his time, or to recognise the right and duty of unfettered research.”[961]

In Saxony, so H. Barge, Carlstadt’s biographer, complains, “the police-force was mobilised for the defence of pure doctrine”; “and Luther played the part of prompter” to the intolerant Saxon government.[962] “Luther’s harsh, violent and impatient ways” and their “unfortunate” outcome are admitted unreservedly by P. Kalkhoff, another Luther researcher.[963] G. Lœsche calls Paulus’s studies on Strasburg a “Warning against the edifying sentimentality of Protestant make-believe.”[964] Luther “demanded freedom for himself alone and for his doctrine,” remarks E. Friedberg, “not for those doctrines, which he regarded as erroneous.”[965] Neander, the Protestant Church-historian, speaking of Luther’s views in general as given by Dietrich, says they “would justify all sorts of oppression on the part of the State, and all kinds of intellectual tyranny, and were in fact the same as those on which the Roman Emperors acted when they persecuted Christianity.”[966]

Two quotations from Catholic authors may be added. The above passage from Köhler reads curiously like the following statement of C. Ulenburg, an olden Catholic polemic; writing in 1589 he said: “When Luther saw that his disciples were gradually falling away from him and, acting on the principle of freedom of conscience, were treating him as he had previously treated the olden Church, he came to think of having recourse to coercion against such folk.”[967]

“Historically nothing is more incorrect,” wrote Döllinger in his Catholic days, “than the assertion that the Reformation was a movement in favour of intellectual freedom. The exact contrary is the truth. For themselves it is true, Lutherans and Calvinists claimed liberty of conscience as all men have done in every age, but to grant it to others never occurred to them so long as they were the stronger side. The complete suppression and extirpation of the Catholic Church, and in fact of everything that stood in their way, was regarded by the reformers as something entirely natural.”[968]—Luther’s principles, aided by the arbitrary interference of the secular power in matters of faith, especially where Catholics were concerned, led both in his age and in the following, “to a despotism” “the like of which,” as Döllinger expresses it, “had not hitherto been known; the new system as worked out by the theologians and lawyers was even worse than the Byzantine practice.”[969]

For instance, we have the wish he expressed, that God would send King Henry VIII a “valiant murderer to make an end of him,”[971] and, again, his warm approval of Calvin’s execution of the heretic Michael Servetus in 1554 (a “pious and memorable example for all posterity”)[972]. He himself wrote about that time a special treatise in defence of the use of the sword against those who spread erroneous doctrines.[973]

With regard to Melanchthon A. Hänel says: To Protestantism “religious freedom was denied at every point.” When Melanchthon wrote to Calvin in praise of the execution of Servetus, his letter, according to Hänel, “was not, as has been imagined, dictated by the mere passion of the moment, but was the harsh consequence of a harsh doctrine.”[974] It must be admitted, remarks the Protestant theologian A. Hunzinger, “that Melanchthon was wont to lose no time in having recourse to fire and sword. This forms a dark blot on his life. Many a man fell a victim to his memorandum, who certainly had no wish to destroy the ‘regna mundi.’”[975]

In consequence of the precipitate and often brutal intervention of the authorities against real or alleged heretics Melanchthon had afterwards abundant reason to regret his appeal to the secular power. He himself, as early as Aug. 31, 1530, had foretold, “that, later, a far more insufferable tyranny would arise than had ever before been known,” viz. the tyranny due to the interference of the Princes in whose hands the power of persecution had been laid. Hence his exclamation: “If only I could revive the jurisdiction of the bishops! For I see what sort of Church we shall have if the ecclesiastical constitution is destroyed.”[976] As we know, he was anxious gradually to graft the old ecclesiastical constitution on Luther’s congregations.