Thomas Martin Lindsay

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Side by side with this flamboyant popular religion can be discerned another spiritual movement so unlike it, so utterly divergent from it in character and in aim, that it is surprising to detect its presence within the same areas and at the same period, and that we need scarcely wonder that it has been so largely overlooked. ”

“ The Christian who has true repentance has already received pardon from God altogether apart from an Indulgence and does not need it; and Christ demands this true repentance from everyone. (6) The Treasure of Merits has never been properly defined, and is not understood by the people; it cannot be the merits of Christ and the Saints, because these act without any intervention from the Pope; it can mean nothing more than that the Pope, having the power of the keys, can remit Satisfactions imposed by the Church; the true treasure of merits is the holy Gospel of the grace of God. ”

“ When we piece together references in correspondence to Luther's student life, recollections of his fellow-students, and scattered sayings of his own in after-life, we get upon the whole the idea of a very levelheaded youth, with a strong sense of the practical side of his studies, thoroughly respected by his professors, refusing to be carried away into any excess of humanist enthusiasm on the one hand or of physical dissipation on the other ”

“ That was what compelled him to enter the convent. The lurid fires of Hell and the pale shades of purgatory which are the constant background to Dante's Paradise were always present to the mind of Luther from boyhood. Could he escape the one and win the other if he remained in the world? He doubted it and entered the convent.
The Order of monks which Lutjier selected was the Augustinian Eremites. Their history was somewhat curious. Originally they had been formed out of the numerous hermits who lived solitary religious lives throughout Italy and Germany. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Thus in the opinion of Alexander of Hales, of Bonaventura, and above all of Thomas Aquinas, the real value of Indulgences is that they procure the remission of penalties after Contrition, Confession, and Absolution, whether these penalties have been imposed by the priest or not; and when the uncertainty of the imposed penalties is considered, Indulgences are most valuable with regard to the unimposed penalties; the priest might make a mistake, but God does not. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So far as the fight in dialectic had gone Eck was victorious; he had compelled Luther, as he thought, to declare himself, and there remained only the Bull of Excommunication, and to rid Germany of a pestilent heretic. He was triumphant. Luther was correspondingly downcast and returned to Wittenberg full of melancholy forebodings. ”

“ They went back to their old lives of mortifying the flesh, of devoting themselves to works of practical benevolence and of self-denying activity. As a consequence, they, and not the parish clergy, had become the trusted religious leaders of the people. Their chapels were thronged by the common folk, and the better disposed nobles and burghers took them for their confessors and spiritual directors. It was in vain that the Roman Curia proclaimed, by its Legates in Germany, the old doctrine that the benefits of religious acts do not depend upon the personal character of the administrators ”

“ The sturdy peasant adhered to his anti-clerical Christianity, and when his son told him that he had a clear call from God to the monastic life, the father suggested that it might have been a prompting from the devil. Once ordained, it was Luther's duty to say mass and to hear confessions, impose penance and pronounce absolution. He had no difficulties about the doctrines and usages of the Church; but he put his own meaning into the duties and position of a confessor. His own experience had taught him that man could never forgive sin ”

“ Hans Luther had been prospering; he was able to pay for his son's college expenses; Luther was no longer a "poor student," but was able to give undivided attention to his studies. The father meant the son to become a trained lawyer; and the lad of seventeen seems to have accepted without question the career marked out for him.
The University of Erfurt was in Luther's days the most famous in Germany. It had been founded in 1392 by the burghers, and academic and burgher life mingled there as nowhere else. ”

“ The modern mind is tempted to imagine intellectual difficulties, to think of the rents in the Church's theology which the criticisms of Occam and of Biel had produced, of the complete antagonism between the whole ecclesiastical mode of thinking and the enlightenment from ancient culture that humanism was producing, and Luther's doublings are frequently set down to the self-questioning which his contact with humanism in Erfurt had produced. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If documents granting Indulgences, published after the Sacrament of Penance had been formulated, be examined, it will be found that many of them, while proclaiming the Indulgence and its benefits, make no mention of the necessity of previous confession and priestly absolution; that others expressly assert that the Indulgence confers a remission of guilt (culpa) as well as penalty; and that very many, especially in the Jubilee times, use language which inevitably led intelligent laymen (Dante for example) to believe that the Indulgence remitted the guilt as well as the penalties of actual sins ”

“ At noon on All Saints' Day, Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church. It was an academic proceeding. A doctor in theology offered to hold a disputation, such was the usual term, for the purpose of explaining the efficacy of the Indulgence. The explanation had ninety-five heads or propositions, all of which "Doctor Martin Luther, theologian," offered to make good against all comers. The subject, judged by the numberless books which had been written upon it, was eminently suitable for debate; the propositions offered were to be matters of discussion ”

“ He expounded the Psalms; his aids are what are called the mystical passages in St Augustine and in Bernard, but what may be more properly termed those portions of their teaching in which they insist upon and describe personal religion. These thoughts simply push aside the ordinary theology of the day without staying to criticise it. We can discern in the germ what grew to be the main thoughts in the later Lutheran theology. Men are redeemed apart from any merits of their own; man's faith is trust in the verity of God and in the historical work of Christ. ”

“ If they neglected the work they were there to do, the clergy were accountable to the same temporal Powers which ruled the land. The statement that the Pope alone can interpret Scripture is a foolish one; the Holy Scripture is open to all, and can be interpreted by all true believers who have the mind of Christ and come to the Word of God humbly and really seeking enlightenment. When a Council is needed, every individual Christian has a right to do his best to get it summoned, and the temporal Powers are there to represent and enforce his wishes. ”

“ Pardon follows contrition and confession; how can I know that my contrition has gone deep enough; how can I be sure that my confession has been complete? At last Staupitz began to see where the difficulty lay, and made suggestions which helped him. The true mission of the medieval Church had been to be a stern preacher of righteousness. It taught, and elevated its rude converts, by placing before them ideals of saintly piety and of ineffable purity, and by teaching them that sin was sin in spite of extenuating circumstances. Luther was a true son of that medieval Church. ”

“ Luther began his work as a Reformer in an attack on what was called an Indulgence proclaimed in 1513 by Pope Leo X, farmed by Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, and preached by John Tetzel, a Dominican monk who had been commissioned by Albert to sell for him the "papal letters," as the Indulgence tickets were called. The money raised was to be devoted to the building of St Peter's Church in Rome, and to raise a tomb worthy of the great Apostle who, it was said, lay in a Roman grave. People had come to be rather sceptical about the destination of moneys raised by Indulgences ”

“ It was after Leipzig that the younger German humanists rallied round Luther to a man; the burghers saw that religion and liberty were not opposing but allied forces; that there was room for a common effort to create a Germany for the Germans. The feeling awakened gave new life to Luther ”

“ But if Luther was still unemancipated from his belief in relics, in the effect of pilgrimages, and in the validity of Indulgences for the remission of imposed penance, his sturdy German piety and his plain Christian morality turned his reverence of Rome into a loathing. The city he had greeted as holy, he found to be a sink of iniquity; its very priests were infidel, and openly scoffed at the sacred services they performed; the papal courtiers were men of depraved lives; the Cardinals of the Church lived in open sin ”

“ Luther felt himself in great perplexity. The Indulgence, and the addresses by which it was commended, he knew, were doing harm to poor souls; he got the letter of instructions given to Tetzel by his employer, the Archbishop of Mainz, and his heart waxed wroth against it. ”

“ The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had strenuous advocates; men and women formed themselves into confraternities that they might beseech her intercession with the strength that numbers give; and these confraternities spread all over Germany. The intercessory powers of the Virgin Mother became a more and more important element in the popular religion, and little books of devotion were in circulation-the Little Gospel, the Pearl of the Passion-which related with many a comment the words of Christ on the Cross to St John and to the Virgin. ”

“ In the Theses Luther makes six distinct assertions about Indulgences and their efficacy:— (1) Indulgence is and can only be the remission of a canonical penalty; the Church can remit what the Church has imposed; it cannot remit what God has imposed. (2) An Indulgence can never remit guilt; the Pope himself is unable to do this. (3) It cannot remit the divine punishment for sin-God keeps that in His own hands. (4) It has no application to souls in Purgatory; for penalties imposed by the Church can only refer to the living; death dissolves them ”