The claims Luther makes in respect of his labours on behalf of the worldly callings are even greater than his admirers would lead one to suppose. His actual words reveal their hyperbolical character, or rather untruth, by their very extravagance.

Luther we have heard say: “Such honour and glory have I by the grace of God, that, since the time of the Apostles no doctor … has confirmed and instructed the consciences of the secular estates so well and lucidly as I.”[189]—It was quite different with the “monks and priestlings”! They “damned both the laity and their calling.” These “revolutionary blasphemers” condemned “all the states of life that God instituted and ordained”; on the other hand, they extol their self-chosen and accursed state as though outside of it no one could be saved.[190]

The phantom of a Popish, monkish holiness-by-works never left him. In his Commentary on Genesis, though he holds that he has already taught the Papists more than they deserve on the right appreciation of the lower callings and labours, yet he once more informs them of his discovery, “that the work of the household and of the burgher,” such as hospitality, the training of children, the supervision of servants, “despised though they be as common and worthless,” are also well-pleasing to God. “Such things must be judged according to the Word [of God], not according to reason!… Let us therefore thank God that we, enlightened by the Word, now perceive what are really good works, viz. obedience to those in authority, respect for parents, supervision of the servants and assistance of our brethren.” “These are callings instituted by God.” “When the mother of a family provides diligently for her family, looks after the children, feeds them, washes them and rocks them in the cradle,” this calling, followed for God’s sake, is “a happy and a holy one.”[191]

Luther is never tired of claiming as his peculiar teaching that even the most humble calling—that of the maid or day-labourer—may prove a high and exalted road to heaven and that every kind of work, however insignificant, performed in that position of life to which a man is called is of great value in God’s sight when done in faith. He is fond of repeating, that a humble ploughman can lay up for himself as great a treasure in heaven by tilling his field, as the preacher or the schoolmaster, by their seemingly more exalted labours.

There is no doubt, that, by means of this doctrine, which undoubtedly is not without foundation, he consoled many of the lower classes, and brought them to a sense of their dignity as Christians. It is true that it was his polemics against monasticism and the following of the counsels of perfection which led him to make so much of the ordinary states of life and to paint them in such glowing colours. Nevertheless, we must admit that he does so with real eloquence and by means of comparisons and figures taken from daily life which could not but lend attraction to the truth and which differ widely from the dry, scholastic tone of some of his Catholic predecessors in this field.

He does not, however, really add a single fresh element to the olden teaching, or one that cannot be traced back to earlier times.

Either Luther was not aware of this, or else he conceals it from his hearers and readers. It would have been possible to confront him with a whole string of writers, ancient and mediæval, and even from the years when he himself began his work, whose writings teach the same truths, often, too, in language which leaves nothing more to be wished for on the score of impressiveness and feeling.[192] So many proofs, from reason as well as from revelation, had always been forthcoming in support of these truths that it is hard for us now to understand how the idea gained ground that Christians had forgotten them. Those who, down to the present day, repeat Luther’s assertions make too little account of this psychological riddle.

Here we shall merely add to what has already been brought forward a few further proofs from Luther’s own day.

Luther’s Pessimism Regarding Various Callings. The Peasants

When olden writers dealt with the relation between the Gospel and the worldly callings as a rule they pointed out with holy pride, that Christianity does not merely esteem every calling very highly but embraces them all with holy charity and cherishes and fosters the various states as sons of a common father. Nothing was so attractive in the great exponents of the Gospel teaching and renovators of the Christian people—for instance in St. Francis of Assisi—as their sympathy, respect and tenderness for every class without exception. The Church’s great men knew how to discover the good in every class, to further it with the means at their disposal and indulgently to set it on its guard against its dangers. They wished to place everything lovingly at the service of the Creator.

Had Luther in reality brought back to humanity the Gospel true and undefiled, as he was so fond of saying, then he should surely have striven, in the spirit of charity and good will, to make known its supernatural social forces to all classes of men, and to become, as the Apostle says, “All things to all men.”

Now, although Luther uses powerful words to describe the dignity of the different worldly callings, on the other hand, he tends at times to depreciate whole classes, this being especially the case when he allows his disappointment to get the better of him. Nor is the contempt openly expressed here counterbalanced by any sufficient recognition of the good, such as might have mollified his hearers and made them forget the ungracious abuse he thundered from his pulpit.

After the defeat of the peasants in 1525 he supported those princes favourable to his teaching at the expense of the peasants, so that the latter were loud in their complaints of him. In this connection, looking back at the overthrow of the Peasant Revolt, he wrote to those in power: “Who opposed the peasants more vigorously by word and writing than I? … and, if it comes to boasting, I do not know who else was the first to vanquish the peasants, or to do so most effectually. But now those who did the least claim all the honour and glory of it.”[204]

After the Peasant War he was so filled with hatred of the peasant class and so conscious of their dislike for himself personally, as to be hardly able to speak of them without blame and reproach. “The peasants do not deserve,” he says, “the harvests and fruits that the earth brings forth and provides.”

Of all classes the peasants around Wittenberg incurred his displeasure most severely. “They are all going to the devil,” he says when lamenting that, “out of so many villages, only one man taught his household from the Word of God”; with the young country folk “something” could be done, but the old peasants had been utterly corrupted by the Pope; this was also the complaint of the Evangelical deacons who came in touch with them.[205]—“I am very angry with the peasants,” he wrote in 1529, “who are anxious to govern themselves and who do not appreciate their good fortune in being able to sleep in peace owing to the help and protection of the rulers. You helpless, boorish yokels and donkeys,” he says to them, “will you never learn to understand? May the lightning blast you!—You have the best of it.… You have the Mark and yet are so ungrateful as to refuse to pray for the rulers or to give them anything.”[206]

As a matter of fact, however, the great ones did not wait for the peasants to “give” anything.

They oppressed the country people and plundered them. Melanchthon wrote, particularly after 1525, of the boundless despotism of the authorities over the people on the land. Since the overthrow of the social revolution very sad changes had taken place among the agriculturists. The violent “laying of the yokels” became a general evil, and, in place of the small holdings of the peasant class—the most virile and largest portion of the nation—arose the large estates of the nobles. Not merely where the horrors of war had raged, but even elsewhere, e.g. in the north-east of Germany, the peasant found himself deprived of his rights and left defenceless in the hands of the Junkers and knights.[207] “The reformation-age made his rights to his property and his standing more parlous than before.”[208]

What Luther says of serfdom, the oppression and abuse of which had led to the Peasant Rising, is worthy of record: “Serfdom,” he says, “is not contrary to Christianity, and whoever says it is tells a lie!”[209]—“Christ does not wish to abolish serfdom. What cares He how the lords or princes rule [in secular matters]?”[210]

He makes a strict application of this in his sermons on Genesis, where he even represents serfdom as a desirable state. Luther delivered these sermons in 1524 and they were printed from notes in 1527. In his preface he declares, that he was “quite willing” they should be published because they express his “sense and mind.” He relates in one passage how Abimelech had bestowed “sheep and oxen, men-servants and maid-servants” on Abraham (xx. 14), and then goes on to say of the people made over: “They too were all personal property like other cattle, so that their owners might sell them as they liked, and it would verily be almost best that this stage of things should be revived, for nobody can control or tame the populace in any other way.” Abraham did not set free the men-servants and maid-servants given him, and yet he was accounted amongst the “pious and holy” and was “a just ruler.” He proceeds: “They [the patriarchs] might easily have abolished it so far as they were concerned, but that would not have been a good thing, for the serfs would have become too proud had they been given so many rights, and would have thought themselves equal to the patriarchs or to their children. Each one must be kept in his place, as God has ordained, sons and daughters, servants, maids, husbands, wives, etc.… If compulsion and the law of the strong arm still ruled (in the case of servants and retainers) as in the past, so that if a man dared to grumble he got a box on the ear—things would fare better; otherwise it is all of no use. If they take wives, these are impertinent people, wild and dissolute, whom no one can use or have anything to do with.”[211]

The Psychological Background. Luther’s Estrangement from Whole Classes of Society

Both in Luther’s treatment of the peasants of his day and in his whole attitude to different classes of society, we find the traces of a profound and general depression which had seized upon him and which seems to accord ill with the sense of triumph one would have expected in him at the continued progress of his work, and at the apostasy from the Roman Church. Such expressions of dissatisfaction become more frequent as years go by and serve to some extent to explain and excuse his pessimism concerning the different classes.

This feeling had its origin, apart from other causes, in the fact that Luther little by little lost touch with whole classes of the people, while to many of the new conditions he remained a stranger. He, who had held in his hands the destiny of so many, was, in fact, becoming to a great extent isolated, particularly since the actual direction of the new Church had been taken out of his hands and vested in the princes or municipal authorities.

Not only did the rift which separated him from the peasants subsequent to 1525 become ever more pronounced, but he found hostility and dislike growing between himself and other classes of society.

Under the influence of the adverse wind blowing from Wittenberg many of the Humanists had given up their at one time enthusiastic friendship and turned against him. Catholic scholars who had once been disposed to favour the reform but had been disappointed in their hopes withdrew from him in increasing numbers. In other districts which had been recently Protestantised the country clergy remained faithful to the olden Church, as we see, for instance, from a letter of Luther’s dated Sep. 19, 1539, where he speaks of “over five hundred parsons, poisonous Papists,” who had “been left unexamined and now are raising their horns in defiance”—but who, he hopes, will soon be forcibly sent about their business.[212] In his own camp, again, there were Anabaptists and other sectarians; there were also theologians who refused to fall into line and either failed to preach on faith and works as harshly as he wished, or, running to the opposite extreme like the Antinomians, went much further than he himself. In the Saxon Electorate Luther felt grievously the decease of those Councillors, like Pfeffinger and Feilitzsch, who had been well disposed towards him, whose places were now taken by “greedy Junkers and skinflints, who looked upon the ecclesiastical revolution as a good opportunity for increasing their family estates and for running riot at others’ expense.”[213] Among the princes who had apostatised from the Church he also detected to his bitter vexation an ever-growing tendency to separate themselves from Wittenberg, partly owing to the influence of Zwinglianism, partly in consequence of their independent Church regulations. Such was, for instance, the action of Berlin, where the Protestant Elector, Joachim II of Brandenburg, declared in an address to his clergy: “As little as I mean to be bound to the Roman Church, so little do I mean to be bound to the Church of Wittenberg. I do not say: ‘credo sanctam Romanam’ or ‘Wittenbergensem,’ but ‘catholicam ecclesiam,’ and my Church here at Berlin or at Cöllen is just as much a true Christian Church as that of the Wittenbergers.”[214]

In the sermon Luther preached at Wittenberg on June 18, 1531, he pours forth the vials of his wrath on the nobles and peasants of the new faith. He was then doing duty for Bugenhagen, the absent pastor, and devoting himself to preaching, though he describes himself in a letter as “old, sickly and tired of life,” and elsewhere, alluding to his many employments, says: “I am not only Luther, but Pomeranus, Vicar-General, Moses, Jethro and I know not who else besides.”[215]

Thus the ill will gathering within him was poured forth, as occasion offered, on the various classes indiscriminately.

It seemed to him as though little by little the whole world was becoming a hostel of which the devil was the landlord and where wickedness and lust reigned supreme—above all because it was so slow to receive his preaching.[220] Even the supreme Court of Justice of the Empire became in 1541 a “devil’s whore,”[221] because the judges and imperial authorities were against him and stood for the old order of things. It was also at this time that his pent-up anger broke out against the Jews.[222] Here it will be sufficient to give a few new quotations.

After all that has been said it would be very rash to apply to Luther’s attitude towards the different callings and professions the words which St. Paul wrote of himself when considering humanity as a whole, i.e. of the power of God by which he had striven with endless patience and charity to bring home the Gospel to both Jew and Greek: “To the Greeks and to the barbarians, to the wise and to the foolish I am a debtor.” “I have become all things to all men in order to save all.”

The Merchant Class

The opening up of many previously unknown countries, the discovery of new trade routes, and the new industries called forth by new inventions brought about a sudden and quite unforeseen revival in trade and prosperity at the time of the religious schism. An alteration in the earlier ideas on political economy was bound to supervene. The upsetting of the mediæval notions which now could no longer hold and the uncertainty as to what to build on in future led to a deal of confusion in that period of transition.

What was chiefly needed in the case of one anxious to judge of things from their ethical and social side was experience and knowledge of the world joined with prudence and the spirit of charity. Annoyance was out of place; what was called for was a capacity to weigh matters dispassionately.

Among the Humanists there were some, who, because the new era of commerce turned men’s minds from learning, condemned it absolutely. Thus Eobanus Hessus of Nuremberg laments, that, there, people were bent on acquiring riches rather than learning; the world dreamt of nothing but saffron and pepper; he lived, as it were, among “empurpled monkeys” and would rather make his home with the peasants of his Hessian fatherland than in his present surroundings.[226]—What was Luther’s attitude towards the rising merchant class and its undertakings?

In his case it was not merely the injury done to the schools and to “Christian” posterity, and the ever growing luxury that prejudiced him against commerce, but, above all, the constant infringement of the principles of morality, which, according to him, was a necessary result of the new economic life and its traffic in wares and money. He exaggerated the moral danger and failed entirely to see the economic side of the case. We do not find in him, says Köstlin-Kawerau, “a sufficient insight into the existing conditions and problems,”[227] nevertheless he did not shrink from the harshest and most uncharitable censure.

It was his deliberate intention, so he says, “to give scandal to many more people on this point by setting up the true doctrine of Christ.” This we find in a letter he wrote after the Leipzig Disputation when putting the finishing touch to his first works on usury (1519).[228] Because no attention was paid to his “Evangelical” ideas on usury he came to the conclusion that, “now, in these days, clergy and seculars, prelates and subjects are alike bent on thwarting Christ’s life, doctrine and Gospel.”[229] Hence he must once again vindicate the Gospel. He, however, distorts the Christian idea by making into strict commands what Christ had proposed as counsels of perfection. There is reason to believe that the mistake he here makes under the plea of zeal for the principles of the Gospel is bound up not merely with his antipathy to the idea of Evangelical Counsels,[230] but also with his older, pseudo-mystic tendency and with his conception of the true Christian. We cannot help thinking of his fanciful plan of assembling apart the real Christians when we hear him in these very admonitions bewailing that “there are so few Christians”; if anyone refused to lend gratis it was “a sign of his deep unbelief,” since we are assured that by so doing “we become children of the Most High and that our reward is great. Of such a consoling promise he is not worthy who will not believe and act accordingly.”[231]

In any case it was a quite subjective and unfounded application of Holy Scripture, when, in his sermon on usury, he makes the following the chief point to be complied with:

“Christian dealings with temporal possessions,” he there says, “consist in three things, in giving for nothing, lending free of interest and lovingly allowing our belongings to be taken from us [Matt. v. 40, 42; Luke vi. 30]; for there is no merit in your buying something, inheriting it, or gaining possession of it in some other honest way, since, if this were piety, then the heathen and Turks would also be pious.”[232]

This extravagant notion of the Christian’s duties led to his rigid and untimely vindication of the mediæval prohibition of the charging of interest, of which we shall have to speak more fully later. It also led him to assail all commercial enterprise.

Greatly incensed at the action of the trading companies he set about writing his “Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher” (1524).

In his remarks we often find interesting thoughts on the economic conditions; we see the remarkable range of his intellect and occasionally we may even wonder whence he had his vast store of information. It is also evident, however, that the other work with which he was overwhelmed did not leave him time to digest his matter. Often enough he is right when he stigmatises the excesses, but on the whole he goes much too far. As Frank G. Ward says: “Because he was incapable of passing a discriminating judgment on the abuses that existed he simply condemned all commerce off-hand.”[237] He was too fond of scenting evil usury everywhere. A contemporary of his, the merchant Bonaventura Furtenbach, of Nuremberg, having come across one of Luther’s writings on the subject, possibly his “Von Kauffshandlung,” remarked sarcastically: “Were I to try to write a commentary on the Gospel of Luke everyone would say, you are not qualified to do so. So it is with Luther when he treats of the interest on money; he has never studied such matters.”[238] A Hamburg merchant also made fun of Luther’s economics, and, as the Hamburg Superintendent Æpinus (Johann Hock) reported, quoted the instance of the Peripatetician Phormion, who gave Hannibal a scholastic lecture on the art of war, for which reason it is usual to dub him who tries to speak of things of which he knows nothing, a new Phormion.[239]

In his “An den Adel” Luther had shown himself more reticent, though even here he inveighs against interest and trading companies, and says: “I am not conversant with figures, but I cannot understand how, with a hundred florins, it is possible to gain twenty annually.… I leave this to the worldly wise. I, as a theologian, have only to censure the appearance of evil concerning which St. Paul says [1 Thess. v. 22] ‘from all appearance of evil refrain!’ This I know very well,” he continues, speaking from the traditional standpoint, “that it would be much more godly to pay more attention to tilling the soil and less to trade.” Yet, even in this writing, he goes so far as to say: “It is indeed high time that a bit were put in the mouth of the Fuggers and such-like companies.”[240]

More and more plainly he was, however, forced to realise that it was not within his power to check the new development of commerce; he, nevertheless, stuck by his earlier views. He was also, and to some extent justifiably, shocked at the growing luxury which had made its way into the burgher class and into the towns generally in the train of foreign trade. Instead of “staying in his place and being content with a moderate living,” “everyone wants to be a merchant and to grow rich.”[241]