Luther’s valuable life was preserved for the church for twenty-four years after his return to Wittemberg. In these years, he first had to build, which he found more difficult than to destroy; and then protect, extend, uphold, and perpetuate his infant establishment.32 He had to provide against the rapacity of the secular arm, without making ecclesiastics rich; he had to obtain learned instructors of the people, without feeding hives of drones; he had to make the untaught into teachers; and abolish pomp without violating decency. Often, he was at a loss what to advise; and often he was obliged to adopt what was only second-best in his own eyes. The press was the great weapon of his warfare, and of his culture. His publications extended to a vast variety of subjects, and it may be truly said that he had thought and knowledge, matter and weight, for all. We are to remember that he was all this while like a vessel living in a storm. He was not only an excommunicated man (he had excommunicated in return), but an outlaw under the ban of the empire, whom anybody that dared might have seized and delivered up to justice. Is this not the man whom the Lord holds with His right hand, keeps as the apple of His eye, and spreads a table for in the midst of his enemies? Psa 17.8; 23.5
Nor were his professed enemies his worst. The slow caution of the elector, the timidity of his coadjutors, the madness of the people, fleshly heat assuming the name and garb of religious fervour, the lust of change — every body must be somebody — envy, debate, clamour, and his own native obstinacy, were more enemies to him than the Eckiuses and the Aleanders, the Conclave and the Emperor!
The character of Luther is sufficiently obvious from this mere hint at his history. Magnanimous, capacious, abstinent, studious, disinterested, intrepid, wise, ‘He feared God; he feared none else.’ Early in life he had been made to drink deep into the knowledge of his own wickedness, accountableness, lostness, and impotency. Melancthon tells of him, that while he was deeply reflecting on the astonishing instances of divine vengeance, so great an alarm would suddenly affect his whole frame, as almost to frighten him to death.
‘I was once present when, through intense exertion of mind in the course of an argument respecting some point of doctrine, he was so terrified as to retire to a neighbour’s chamber, place himself on the bed, and pray aloud, frequently repeating these words: “He has enclosed all under sin, that he might have mercy on all.”‘ Gal 3.22
This sensibility of conscience prepared him for a trembling reception of the divine word. We have seen how the Lord threw it in his way. For a considerable time, it spoke only terrors to him. “THEREIN is the righteousness of God revealed,” Rom 1.17 stirred him up to blasphemy. At length, the Lord had pity on him and opened his eyes, and showed him that the righteousness of God spoken of there, is not His own essential righteousness, which renders Him the hater and punisher of iniquity, but a substance which He has provided to invest sinners with. And thus, this very expression which had proved a stumbling-block to him, became his entrance into Paradise. In the process of time, the Lord revealed the mystery of this righteousness somewhat more distinctly to him. He showed him that the Lord Jesus Christ was in his own person this righteousness; and that to enter into Him, and to put Him on by faith, was to be righteous before God; that the merit of Christ was complete for justification; that nothing was to be added, or could be added to it, by a sinner; and that it was received by faith alone.
Thus far, the Lord gave him clearness of sight, though not fulness; and He gave it speedily. After and beyond this, He left Luther to blunder, yes, to the end of his days. Now, therefore, “it having pleased God, who had separated him from his mother’s womb, and called him by his grace, to reveal his Son in him, he straightway did not confer with flesh and blood;” Gal 1.15-16 “he could not help but speak the things which he had heard and seen;” 1Joh 1.3 “he was ready not only to be bound, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” Act 21.13 33
God gave three special endowments to this chosen witness, which are the characteristics of his testimony: great knowledge of Scripture, great talent for abstruse and elaborate argumentation, and a singular felicity in addressing the common people. 34
To illustrate the first of these, his whole works may be appealed to, if his translation of the Bible is not proof enough. For the second, his disputations with Eckius, Latomus, and Erasmus, especially the treatise which follows. For the last, all his numerous tracts and sermons, particularly his address to the common people upon the outbreak of the rustic war. 35 His commentary on the Galatians furnishes specimens of the three.
Such was the man, whom the Lord raised up, called forth and employed, as the most prominent, active, and efficacious of his blessed workfellows, in accomplishing the Reformation! But how strange it is that man will look only at half of God, and only at the surface of that half, when His whole self stands revealed; and when it is the very aim and contrivance of His operation to effect that complete display! The Reformation was God’s act — an act inferior only to those of Calvary and of the Red Sea, for manifesting his mighty hand and his outstretched arm. He accomplished it by doing all in all that Luther did, and all in all that Luther’s enemies did — by working in Charles as well as in the Elector; in Leo as well as Luther; in Cajetan, Campeggio, Prierias, Hogostratus, and the whole train of yelping curs and growling mastiffs, who were for baiting and burning the decriers of Babylon, as in Jonas, Pomeranus, and Melancthon.
Indeed, if we were to estimate this transaction aright, as a displayer of God, we must inspect not only the evil workers both visible and invisible, as well as the good, but we must mark the steps by which He prepared for his march, and the combinations with which He conducted it. We must see Constantinople captured by the infidel,36 and the learned of the East shed abroad throughout Christendom; we must see the barbarian imbibing a taste for letters, and the art of printing facilitating the means of acquiring them; we must see activity infused into many and various agents, and that activity excited by various and conflicting interests.
We must see rival princes, and vassals previously bowed down to the earth, now beginning to ask a reason of their governors; we must see a domineering Charles, a chivalrous Francis, a lustful and rapacious Henry, a cannonading Solyman, a dissipated Leo, a calculating Adrian, a hesitative Clement — German freedom, Italian obsequiousness, Castilian independence, Flemish frivolity, Gallic loyalty, Genoa’s fleet and Switzerland’s mercenaries, Luther’s firmness, Frederic’s coldness, Melancthon’s dejectedness, and Carolstadt’s precipitancy — made, stirred and blended by God as a sort of moral chaos, out of which, in the fulness of his own time, He commands knowledge, liberty, and peace to spring forth upon His captives in Babylon.
Luther describes himself, we have seen, as a rough controversialist: controversy was his element; from his first start into public notice, his life was spent in it. I hope my reader has learned not to despise, or even to dread controversy. It has been from the beginning, the Lord’s choice weapon for the manifestation of his truth; just as evil has been his own great developer. What are Paul’s and John’s Epistles, but controversial writings? What was the Lord’s whole life and ministry, but a controversy with the Jews? Luther well knew its uses, and he had tasted its peaceable fruits: it stirs up inquiry; it stops the mouth of the gainsayers; it roots and grounds the believers. Still, there were three out of his many, from which he would gladly have been spared, for they were maintained against former friends. In the first of these, he was all in the right, but not without question; in the second, he was all in the wrong, without question; in the third, he was all in the right, without question —without question, I mean, not as respects any public trial which has been held, and judgment given, but before the tribunal of right reason.
‘Andreas Bodenstenius Carolstadt, unheard, unconvicted, banished by Martin Luther.’ — What! Had Luther become a persecutor? Did he who should have been a martyr himself, make martyrs of others? Not so; but he was charged with doing so, and had appearances against him! Honest Carolstadt — there is some question whether he truly deserves this name — was a turbulent man. He had no hearty relish for Luther’s ‘broken WITHOUT HANDS;’ though a learned man, and still a professor at Wittemberg, he let it be known that he despised learning; and having placed
