Thomas Martin Lindsay

“ He had found that all his opponents had pursued one line of argument: the power to issue an Indulgence is simply one case of the universal papal jurisdiction; Indulgences are what the pope proclaims them to be, and to attack them is to attack the power of the pope; the pope represents the Roman church, which is actually the universal church, and to oppose the pope is to defy the whole church of Christ; whoever attacks such a long-established system as that of Indulgences is a heretic. ”

“ Luther had told the assembly of clergy, who met at Leitzkau in 1512 to discuss the affairs of the Church, that every true reformation must begin with individual men, and that it must have for its centre the regenerate heart, for its being an awakening faith, and for its inspiration the preaching of a pure Gospel. ”

“ In 1392 Gerson became doctor of theology, and in 1395, when Pierre d’Ailly was made bishop of Puy, he was, at the early age of thirty-two, elected chancellor of the university of Paris, and made a canon of Notre Dame. The university was then at the height of its fame, and its chancellor was necessarily a man prominent not only in France but in Europe, sworn to maintain the rights of his university against both king and pope, and entrusted with the conduct and studies of a vast crowd of students attracted from almost every country in Europe. ”

“ The insurgents had good cause to regard him as a sympathiser. But Luther, rightly or wrongly, believed that of the two ways in which wrongs can be set right—the way of war and the path of peace—the latter is the only sure road in the long run. He did his best therefore to prevent the rising and risked his life among the infuriated peasants as readily as when he stood before the emperor and the diet. ”

“ The Lutheran state churches of Denmark, Sweden and Norway have retained the episcopate. In all of them the king is recognized to be the summus episcopus or supreme authority in all ecclesiastical matters, but in Norway and Sweden his power is somewhat limited by that of parliament. The king exercises his ecclesiastical authority through a minister who superintends religion and education. The position and functions of the bishops vary in the different countries. In all the rite of ordination is in their hands. In Denmark they are the inspectors of the clergy and of the schools. ”

“ Still at the basis of the Indulgence, bad as it was, Luther thought that there was a great truth; that it is the business of the Church to declare the free and sovereign grace of God apart from all human satisfactions.
The practice of Indulgences was, in his days, universal and permeated the whole Church life of the times. A large number of the pious associations among laymen, which formed so marked a feature of the fifteenth century piety, were founded on ideas that lay at the basis of the practice of granting Indulgences. ”

“ Humanism had won an early entrance to the university; the anti-clerical teaching of John of Wessel, who had himself taught at Erfurt for fifteen years (1445–1460) , had left its mark on the place and was not forgotten. Hussite propagandists, even in Luther’s time, secretly visited the town and whispered among the students their anti-clerical Christian socialism. Papal legates to Germany seldom failed to visit the university and by their magnificence bore witness to the majesty of the Roman church. ”

“ Reform had been impossible, the Appeal says, because the walls behind which Rome lay entrenched had been left standing-walls of straw and paper, but in appearance formidable fortifications. If the temporal Powers demanded reforms, they were told that the Spiritual Power was superior and controlling. If the Spiritual Power itself was attacked from the side of Scripture, it was affirmed that no one could say what Scripture really meant but the Pope. If a Council was called for to make the reform, men were informed that it was impossible to summon a Council without the leave of the Pope. ”

“ It gave him a sense of freedom, and the feeling that life was something given by God to be enjoyed,—the same feeling that humanism, from its lower level, had given to so many of its disciples. For the moment however nothing seemed questionable. He was a faithful son of the Medieval Church, "the Pope's house," with its Cardinals and its Bishops, its priests, monks, and nuns, its masses and its relics, its Indulgences and its pilgrimages. All these external things remained unchanged. The one thing that was changed was the relation in which one human soul stood to God. ”

“ Meanwhile at Rome the pope had entrusted Eck and Prierias with the preparation of a bull (Exurge Domine) against Luther—a bull which followed the line of Eck’s charges at Leipzig. The reformer had been expecting it ever since the Disputation at Leipzig, and had resolved to answer it by one striking act which would impress the imagination of every man. He posted up a notice inviting the Wittenberg students to witness the burning of the bull (10th of December 1520) . Rome had shot its last ecclesiastical bolt. Nothing remained but an appeal to the secular power, and this was at once prepared. ”

“ In the convent Luther set himself to find salvation. The last word of that Scotist theology which ruled at the close of the middle ages was that man must work out his own salvation, and Luther tried to do so in the most approved later medieval fashion by the strictest asceticism. He fasted and scourged himself; he practised all the ordinary forms of maceration and invented new ones, all to no purpose. His theological studies, part of the convent education, told him that pardon could be had through the Sacrament of Penance, and that the first part of the sacrament was sorrow for sin. ”

“ Staupitz showed Luther that the antinomy had been created by setting over against each other the righteousness of God and the sin and helplessness of man, and by keeping these two thoughts in opposition; then he explained that the righteousness of God, according to God's promise, might become the possession of man in and through Christ. Fellowship of man with God solved the antinomy; all fellowship is founded on personal trust; and faith gives man that fellowship with God through which all things that belong to God can become his. ”

“ This "Cult of the Blessed Anna" rapidly extended itself in ever-widening circles until there were few districts in Germany which had not their confraternities devoted to her service. Such was the prevailing enthusiastic popular religion of the last decades of the fifteenth century-the religion which met and surrounded a sensitive boy when he left his quiet home and entered the world. It had small connexion, save in the one point of the increased reverence paid to the Virgin, with the theology of the Schools, but it was the religious force among the people. ”

“ It was felt that Luther must be silenced. He was accordingly summoned to Rome. To obey would have meant death; to refuse in his own name would have been contumacy. But the peremptory summons could be construed as an attack on the university of Wittenberg, and both the elector of Saxony and the emperor Maximilian so regarded it. The result was that Pope Leo cancelled the summons, and it was arranged that Luther should appear before the papal Legate to the German Diet, Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajedtan, at Augsburg. ”

“ In these earlier years of his professoriate Luther undertook the duties of the preacher in the town church in Wittenberg. He became a great preacher, able to touch the conscience and bring men to amend their lives. Like all great preachers of the day who were in earnest he denounced prevalent sins; he deplored the low standard set by the leaders of the Church in principle and in practice; he declared that religion was not an easy thing; that it did not consist in externals; that both sin and true repentance had their roots in the heart ”

“ Luther was the greatest religious genius which the 16th century produced, and the roots of the movement in which he was the central figure must be sought for in the popular religious life of the last decades of the 15th and opening decades of the 16th centuries—a field which has been neglected by almost all his biographers. ”

“ He bewailed the fact that the current theology neglected to teach the supreme value of faith and of inward righteousness, that it encouraged men to seek to escape the due reward of sin by means of Indulgences, instead of exhorting them to practise that inward repentance which belongs to every genuine Christian life. It was at this stage of his own inward religious development that Luther felt himself forced to stand forth in public in opposition to the sale of Indulgences in Germany. ”

“ Pious parents, whether among the burghers or peasants, seem to have taught their children a simple evangelical faith. Martin Luther and thousands of children like him were trained at home to know the creed, the ten commandments, the Lord’s prayer, and such simple hymns as Ein Kindelein so lobelich, Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist and Crist ist erstanden; and they were taught to believe that God for Christ’s sake freely pardons sin. They learned that simple faith which Luther afterwards expounded in his Small Catechism and called the Kinderlehre. ”

“ The Reformation of the sixteenth century nad its birth and growth in a union of spiritual and secular forces such as the world has seldom seen at any other period of its history. On the secular side, the times were full of new movements, intellectual and moral, political, social, and economic; and spiritual forces were everywhere at work, which aimed at making religion the birthright and possession of the common man- whether king, noble, burgher, artisan, or peasant-as well as of the ecclesiastic, a possession which should directly promote a worthy life within the family and the State. ”

“ This doctrine of Attrition had not the undivided support of the theologians of the later medieval church; but it was taught by the Scotists and was naturally a favourite theme with the sellers of Indulgences. Nor were all theologians at one upon the whole theory of Indulgences. The majority of the best theologians held that Indulgences had nothing to do with the pardoning of guilt, but only with freeing from temporal penalties in this life or in purgatory. ”