A History of the Reformation Volume I Part 24

The ordinances were promulgated in many different ways. Most frequently, perhaps, the prince published and enacted them on his own authority like any other piece of territorial legislation. Sometimes he commissioned a committee acting in his name to frame and publish. In other cases they resulted from a consultation between the prince and the magistrates of one of the towns within his dominions. Sometimes they came from the councils and the pastors of the towns to which they applied. In other instances they were issued by an evangelical bishop. And in a few cases they are simply the regulations issued by a single pastor for his own parish, which the secular authorities did not think of altering.

Although they are independent one from another, they may be grouped in families which resemble each other closely.(383)

Some of the territories reached the consistorial system much sooner than others. If a princ.i.p.ality consisted in whole or in part of a secularised ecclesiastical State, the machinery of the consistorial court lay ready to the hand of the prince, and was at once adapted to the use of the evangelical Church. The system was naturally slowest to develop in the imperial cities, most of which at first preferred an organisation whose outlines were borrowed from the const.i.tution drafted by Zwingli for Zurich.

Once only do we find an attempt to give an evangelical Church occupying a large territory a democratic const.i.tution. It was made by Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, who was never afraid of the democracy. No German prince had so thoroughly won the confidence of his commonalty. The Peasants' War never devastated his dominions. He did not join in the virulent persecution of the Anabaptists which disgraced the Lutheran as well as the Roman Catholic States during the latter half of the sixteenth century. It was natural that Luther's earlier ideas about the rights of the Christian community (_Gemeinde_) should appeal to him. In 1526 (Oct.

6th), when the Diet of Speyer had permitted the organisation of evangelical Churches, Philip summoned a Synod at Homberg, and invited not merely pastors and ecclesiastical lawyers, but representatives from the n.o.bles and from the towns. A scheme for ecclesiastical government, which had been drafted by Francis Lambert, formerly a Franciscan monk, was laid before the a.s.sembly and adopted. It was based on the idea that the word of G.o.d is the only supreme rule to guide and govern His Church, and that Canon Law has no place whatsoever within an evangelical Church. Scripture teaches, the doc.u.ment explains, that it belongs to the Christian community itself to select and dismiss pastors and to exercise discipline by means of excommunication. The latter right ought to be used in a weekly meeting (on Sundays) of the congregation and pastor. For the purposes of orderly rule the Church must have office-bearers, who ought to conform as nearly as possible to those mentioned in the New Testament Scriptures. They are bishops (pastors), elders, and deacons; and the deacons are the guardians of the poor as well as ecclesiastical officials. All these office-bearers must remember that their function is that of servants, and in no sense lordly or magisterial. They ought to be chosen by the congregation, and set apart by the laying on of hands according to apostolic practice. A bishop (pastor) must be ordained by at least three pastors, and a deacon by the pastor or by two elders. The government of the whole Church ought to be in the hands of a Synod, to consist of all the pastors and a delegate from every parish. Such in outline was the democratic ecclesiastical government proposed for the territory of Hesse and accepted by the Landgrave.(384) He was persuaded, however, by Luther's strong remonstrances to abandon it. There is no place for the democratic or representative element in the organisation of the Lutheran Churches.

Chapter VII. The Lutheran Reformation Outside Germany.(385)

The influence of Luther went far beyond Germany. It was felt in England, France, Scotland, Holland, Poland, and Scandinavia. England went her own peculiar way; France, Holland, and Scotland, in the end, accepted the leaders.h.i.+p of Calvin; the Lutheran Reformation, outside Germany, was really confined to Scandinavia alone.

In these Scandinavian lands the religious awakening was bound up with political and social movements more than in any other countries. The reformation in the Church was, indeed, begun by men who had studied under Luther at Wittenberg, or who had received their first promptings from his writings; but it was carried on and brought to a successful issue by statesmen who saw in it the means to deliver their land from political anarchy, caused by the overweening independence and turbulence of the great ecclesiastical lords, and who were almost compelled to look to the large possessions of the Church as a means to replenish their exhausted treasuries without ruining the overburdened taxpayers.

When Eric was crowned King of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in 1397, the a.s.sembled n.o.bles, representative of the three kingdoms, agreed to the celebrated Union of Kalmar, which declared that the three lands were to be for ever united under one sovereign. The treaty was purely dynastic, its terms were vague, and it was never very effective. Without going into details, it may be said that the king lived in Denmark, and ruled in the interests of that country; that he also may be said to have ruled in Norway; but that in Sweden his authority was merely nominal, and sometimes not even that. In Denmark itself, monarchical government was difficult.

The Scandinavian kings.h.i.+p was elective, and every election was an opportunity for reducing the privileges, authority, and wealth of the sovereign, and for increasing those of the n.o.bles and of the great ecclesiastics, who, being privileged cla.s.ses, were freed from contributing to the taxation.

In 1513, Christian II., the nephew of the Elector of Saxony, and the brother-in-law of the Emperor Charles V. (1515), came to the throne, and his accession marks the beginning of the new era which was to end with the triumph of the Reformation in all three countries. Christian was a man of great natural abilities, with a profound sense of the miserable condition of the common people within his realms, caused by the petty tyrannies of the n.o.bles, ecclesiastical and secular. No reigning prince, save perhaps George, Duke of Saxony, could compete with him in learning; but he was cruel, partly from nature and partly from policy. He had determined to establish his rule over the three kingdoms whose nominal king he was, and to free the commonalty from their oppression by breaking the power of the n.o.bles and of the great Churchmen. The task was one of extreme difficulty, and he was personally unsuccessful; but his efforts laid the foundation on which successors were able to build securely.

He began by conquering rebellious Sweden, and disgraced his victory by a treacherous ma.s.sacre of Swedish notables at Stockholm (1520),-a deed which, in the end, led to the complete separation of Sweden from Denmark.

After having thus, as he imagined, consolidated his power, he pressed forward his schemes for reform. He took pains to encourage the trade and agriculture of Denmark; he patronised learning. He wrote to his uncle (1519), Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, to send him preachers trained by Luther; and, in response to his appeal, received first Martin Reinhard, and then Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt. These foreigners, who could only address the people through interpreters, did not make much impression; but reformation was pushed forward by the king. He published, on his own authority, two sets of laws dealing with the n.o.bles and the Church, and subjecting both to the sovereign. He enacted that all convents were to be under episcopal inspection. Non-resident and unlettered clergy were legally abolished. A species of kingly consistorial court was set up in Copenhagen, and declared to be the supreme ecclesiastical judicature for the country; and appeals to Rome were forbidden. It can scarcely be said that these laws were ever in operation. A revolt by the Jutlanders gave a rallying point to the disaffection caused by the proposed reforms.

Christian fled from Denmark (1523), and spent the rest of his life in exile or in prison. His law-books were burnt.

The Jutlanders had called Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, Christian's uncle, to the throne, and he was recognised King of Denmark and of Norway in 1523. He had come to the kingdom owing to the reaction against the reforms of his nephew, but in his heart he knew that they were necessary.

He promised to protect the interests of the n.o.bles, and to defend the Church against the advance of Lutheran opinions; but he soon endeavoured to find a means of evading his pledges. He found it when he pitted the n.o.bles against the higher clergy, and announced that he had never promised to support the errors of the Church of Rome. At the National a.s.sembly (_Herredag_) at Odense he was able to get the marriage of priests permitted, and a decree that bishops were in the future to apply to the king and not to the Pope for their Pallium. The Reformation had now native preachers to support it, especially Hans Tausen, who was called the Danish Luther, and they were encouraged by the king. At the _Herredag_ at Copenhagen in 1530, twenty-one of these Lutheran preachers were summoned, at the instigation of the bishops, and formal accusations were made against them for preaching heresy. Tausen and his fellows produced a confession of faith in forty-three articles, all of which he and his companions offered to defend. A public disputation was proposed, which did not take place because the Romanist party refused to plead in the Danish language. This refusal was interpreted by the people to mean that they were afraid to discuss in a language which everyone understood.

Lutheranism made rapid progress among all cla.s.ses of the population.

On Frederick's death there was a disputed succession, which resulted in civil war. In the end Frederick's son ascended the throne as Christian III., King of Denmark and Norway (1536). The king, who had been present at the Diet of Worms, and who had learned there to esteem Luther highly, was a strong Lutheran, and determined to end the authority of the Romish bishops. He proposed to his council that bishops should no longer have any share in the government, and that their possessions should be forfeited to the Crown. This was approved of not merely by the council, but also at a National a.s.sembly which met at Copenhagen (Oct. 30th, 1536), where it was further declared that the people desired the holy gospel to be preached, and the whole episcopal authority done away with. The king asked Luther to send him some one to guide his people in their ecclesiastical matters.

Bugenhagen was despatched, came to Copenhagen (1537), and took the chief ecclesiastical part in crowning the king. Seven superintendents (who afterwards took the t.i.tle of bishops) were appointed and consecrated. The Reformation was carried out on conservative Lutheran lines, and the old ritual was largely preserved. Tausen's Confession was set aside in favour of the Augsburg Confession and Luther's Small Catechism, and the Lutheran Reformation was thoroughly and legally established.

The Reformation also became an accomplished fact in Norway and Iceland, but its introduction into these lands was much more an act of kingly authority.

After the ma.s.sacre of Swedish notables in Stockholm (Nov. 1520), young Gustaf Ericsson, commonly known as Gustaf Vasa, from the _vasa_ or sheaf which was on his coat of arms, raised the standard of revolt against Denmark. He was gradually able to rally the whole of the people around him, and the Danes were expelled from the kingdom. In 1521, Gustaf had been declared regent of Sweden, and in 1523 he was called by the voice of the people to the throne. He found himself surrounded by almost insuperable difficulties. There had been practically no settled government in Sweden for nearly a century, and every great landholder was virtually an independent sovereign. The country had been impoverished by long wars.

Two-thirds of the land was owned by the Church, and the remaining third was almost entirely in the hands of the secular n.o.bles. Both Church and n.o.bles claimed exemption from taxation. The trade of the country was in the hands of foreigners-of the Danes or of the Hanse Towns. Gustaf had borrowed money from the town of Lubeck for his work of liberation. The city was pressing for repayment, and its commissioners followed the embarra.s.sed monarch wherever he went. It was hopeless to expect to raise money by further taxation of the already depressed and impoverished peasants.

In these circ.u.mstances the king turned to the Church. He compelled the bishops to give him more than one subsidy (1522, 1523); but this was inadequate for his needs. The Church property was large, and the king planned to overthrow the ecclesiastical aristocracy by the help of the Lutheran Reformation.

Lutheranism had been making progress in Sweden. Two brothers, Olaus and Laurentius Petri, sons of a blacksmith at Orebro, had been sent by their father to study in Germany. They had meant to attend the University of Leipzig; but, attracted by the growing fame of Luther, they had gone to Wittenberg, and had become enthusiastic disciples of the Reformer. On their return to Sweden (1519) they had preached Lutheran doctrine, and had made many converts-among others, Laurentius Andreae, Archdeacon at Strengnas. In spite of protests from the bishops, these three men were protected by the king. Olaus Petri was especially active, and made long preaching tours, declaring that he taught the pure gospel which "Ansgar, the apostle of the North, had preached seven hundred years before in Sweden."

Gustaf brought Olaus to Stockholm (1524), and made him town-clerk of the city; his brother Laurentius was appointed professor of theology at Upsala; Laurentius Andrew was made Archdeacon of Upsala and Chancellor of Sweden. When the bishops demanded that the Reformers should be silenced, Olaus challenged them to a public disputation. The challenge was refused; but in 1524 a disputation was arranged in the king's palace in Stockholm between Olaus and Dr. Galle, who supported the old religion. The conference, which included discussion of the doctrines of Justification by Faith, Indulgences, the Ma.s.s, Purgatory, and the Temporal Power of the Pope, had the effect of strengthening the cause of the Reformation. In 1525, Olaus defied the rules of the mediaeval Church by publicly marrying a wife. The same year the king called for a translation of the Scriptures into Swedish, and in 1526 Laurentius Petri published his New Testament. A translation of the whole Bible was edited by the same scholar, and published 1540-1541. These translations, especially that of the New Testament, became very popular, and the people with the Scripture in their hands were able to see whether the teaching of the preachers or of the bishops was most in accordance with the Holy Scriptures.

There is no reason to believe that the king did not take the side of the Lutheran Reformation from genuine conviction. He had made the acquaintance of the brothers Petri before he was called to be the deliverer of his country. But it is unquestionable that his financial embarra.s.sment whetted his zeal for the reformation of the Church in Sweden. Matters were coming to a crisis, which was reached in 1527. At the Diet in that year, the Chancellor, in the name of the king, explained the need for an increased revenue, and suggested that ecclesiastical property was the only source from which it could be obtained. The bishops, Johan Brask, Bishop of Linkoeping, at their head, replied that they had the Pope's orders to defend the property of the Church. The n.o.bles supported them. Then Gustaf presented his ultimatum. He told the Diet plainly that they must submit to the proposals of the Chancellor or accept his resignation, pay him for his property, return him the money he had spent in defence of the kingdom, and permit him to leave the country never to return. The Diet spent three days in wrangling, and then submitted to his wishes. The whole of the ecclesiastical property-episcopal, capitular, and monastic-which was not absolutely needed for the support of the Church was to be placed in the hands of the king. Preachers were meanwhile to set forth the pure gospel, until a conference held in presence of the Diet would enable that a.s.sembly to come to a decision concerning matters of religion. The Diet went on, without waiting for the conference, to pa.s.s the twenty-four regulations which made the famous Ordinances of Vesteras, and embodied the legal Reformation. They contained provisions for secularising the ecclesiastical property in accordance with the previous decision of the Diet; declared that the king had the right of vetoing the decisions of the higher ecclesiastics; that the appointment of the parish clergy was in the hands of the bishops, but that the king could remove them for inefficiency; that the pure gospel was to be taught in every school; and that auricular confession was no longer compulsory.

While the Ordinances stripped the Swedish Church of a large amount of its property and made it subject to the king, they did not destroy its episcopal organisation, nor entirely impoverish it. Most of the monasteries were deserted when their property was taken away. The king knew that the peasantry scarcely understood the Reformed doctrines, and had no wish to press them unduly on his people. For the same reason the old ceremonies and usages which did not flagrantly contradict the new doctrines were suffered to remain, and given an evangelical meaning. The first evangelical Hymn-book was published in 1530, and the Swedish "Ma.s.s"

in 1531, both drafted on Lutheran models. Laurentius Andreae was made Archbishop of Upsala (1527), and a National Synod was held under his presidency at Orebro (1528), which guided the Reformation according to strictly conservative Lutheran ideals. Thus before the death of Gustaf Vasa, Sweden had joined the circle of Lutheran Churches, and its people were slowly coming to understand the principles of the Reformation. The Reformation was a very peaceful one. No one suffered death for his religious opinions.

The fortunes of the Swedish Church were somewhat varied under the immediate successors of Gustavus. His ill-fated son showed signs of preferring Calvinism, and insisted on the suppression of some of the ecclesiastical festivals and some of the old rites which had been retained; but these attempts ended with his reign. His brother and successor, Johan III., took the opposite extreme, and coquetted long with Rome, and with proposals for reunion,-proposals which had no serious result. When Johan died in 1592, his son and successor, who had been elected King of Poland, and had become a Roman Catholic, aroused the fears of his Swedish subjects that he might go much further than his father. The people resolved to make sure of their Protestantism before their new sovereign arrived in the country. A Synod was convened at which both lay and ecclesiastical deputies were present. The members first laid down the general rule that the Holy Scriptures were their supreme doctrinal standard, and then selected the Augsburg Confession as the Confession of the Swedish Church. Luther's Small Catechism, which had been removed from the schools by King Johan III., was restored. This meeting at Upsala settled for the future the ecclesiastical polity of Sweden. The country showed its attachment to the stricter Lutheranism by adopting the Formula of Concord in 1664.

Chapter VIII. The Religious Principles Inspiring The Reformation.(386)

-- 1. The Reformation did not take its rise from a Criticism of Doctrines.

The whole of Luther's religious history, from his entrance into the convent at Erfurt to the publication of the Augsburg Confession, shows that the movement of which he was the soul and centre did not arise from any merely intellectual criticism of the doctrines of the mediaeval church, and that it resulted in a great deal more than a revision or reconstruction of a system of doctrinal conceptions.(387) There is no trace of any intellectual difficulties about doctrines or statement of doctrines in Luther's mind during the supreme crisis of his history. He was driven out of the world of human life and hope, where he was well fitted to do a man's work, by the overwhelming pressure of a great practical religious need-anxiety to save his soul. He has himself said that the proverb that doubt makes a monk was true in his case. He doubted whether he could save his soul in the world, and was therefore forced to leave it and enter the convent.

He had lost whatever evangelical teaching he had learnt in childhood or in Frau Cotta's household at Eisenach. He had surrendered himself to the popular belief, fostered by the whole penitential system of the mediaeval Church, that man could and must make himself fit to receive the grace of G.o.d which procures salvation. The self-torturing cry, "Oh, when wilt thou become holy and fit to obtain the grace of G.o.d?" (_O wenn will tu einmal fromm werden und genug thun du einen gnadigen Gott kriegest?_), drove him into the convent. He believed, and the almost unanimous opinion of his age agreed with him, that there, if anywhere, he could find the peace he was seeking with such desperation.

Inside the convent he applied himself with all the force of a strong nature, using every means that the complicated penitential system of the Church had provided to help him, to make himself pious and fit to be the receptacle of the grace of G.o.d. He submitted to the orders of his superiors with the blind obedience which the most rigorous ecclesiastical statutes demanded; he sought the comforting consolations which confession was declared to give; he underwent every part of the complex system of expiations which the mediaeval Church recommended; he made full use of the sacraments, and waited in vain for the mysterious, inexplicable experience of the grace which was said to accompany and flow from them. He persevered in spite of the feeling of continuous failure. "If a monk ever reached heaven by monkery," he has said, "I would have found my way there also; all my convent comrades will bear witness to that."(388) He gave a still stronger proof of his loyalty to the mediaeval Church and its advice to men in his mood of mind; he persevered in spite of the knowledge that his comrades and his religious superiors believed him to be a young saint, while he knew that he was far otherwise, and that he was no nearer G.o.d than he had been before he entered the monastery, or had begun his quest after the sense of pardon of sin. The contrast between what his brethren thought he must be and what his own experience told him that he was, must have added bitterness to the cup he had to drink during these terrible months in the Erfurt convent. He says himself:

"After I had made the profession, I was congratulated by the prior, the convent, and the father-confessor, because I was now an innocent child coming pure from baptism. a.s.suredly, I would willingly have delighted in the glorious fact that I was such a good man, who by his own deeds and without the merits of Christ's blood had made himself so fair and holy, and so easily too, and in so short a time. But although I listened readily to the sweet praise and glowing language about myself and my doings, and allowed myself to be described as a wonder-worker, who could make himself holy in such an easy way, and could swallow up death, and the devil also, yet there was no power in it all to maintain me.

When even a small temptation came from sin or death I fell at once, and found that neither baptism nor monkery could a.s.sist me; I felt that I had long lost Christ and His baptism. I was the most miserable man on earth; day and night there was only wailing and despair, and no one could restrain me."(389)

He adds that all he knew of Christ at this time was that He was "a stern judge from whom I would fain have fled and yet could not escape."

During these two years of anguish, Luther believed that he was battling with himself and with his sin; he was really struggling with the religion of his times and Church. He was probing it, testing it, examining all its depths, wrestling with all its means of grace, and finding that what were meant to be sources of comfort and consolation were simply additional springs of terror. He was too clear-sighted, his spiritual senses were too acute, he was too much in deadly earnest, not to see that none of these aids were leading him to a solid ground of certainty on which he could base his hopes for time and for eternity; and he was too honest with himself to be persuaded that he was otherwise than his despair told him.(390)

At length, guided in very faltering fas.h.i.+on by the Scriptures, especially by the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans, by the Apostles' Creed, and by fellow monks, he (to use his own words) came to see that the righteousness of G.o.d (Rom. i. 17) is not the righteousness by which a righteous G.o.d punishes the unrighteous and sinners, but that by which a merciful G.o.d justifies us through faith (not _just.i.tia, qua dens justus est et peccatores injustosque punit_, but that _qua nos deus misericors justificat per fidem_).(391) By _faith_, he says. What, then, did he mean by "faith"?

He replies:

"There are two kinds of believing: first, a believing about G.o.d which means that I believe that what is said of G.o.d is true. This faith is rather a form of knowledge than a faith. There is, secondly, a believing in G.o.d which means that I put my trust in Him, give myself up to thinking that I can have dealings with Him, and believe without any doubt that He will be and do to me according to the things said of Him. Such faith, _which throws itself upon G.o.d_, whether in life or in death, alone makes a Christian man."(392)

The faith which he prized is that religious faculty which "throws itself upon G.o.d"; and from the first Luther recognised that faith of this kind was a direct gift from G.o.d. Having it we have everything; without it we have nothing. Here we find something entirely new, or at least hitherto unexpressed, so far as mediaeval theology was concerned. Mediaeval theologians had recognised faith in the sense of what Luther called _frigida opinio_, and it is difficult to conceive that they did not also indirectly acknowledge that there must be something like trust or _fiducia_; but faith with them was simply one among many human efforts all equally necessary in order to see and know G.o.d. Luther recognised that there was this kind of faith, which a man begets and brings to pa.s.s in himself by a.s.sent to doctrines of some sort. But he did not think much of it. He calls it worthless because it gives us nothing.

"They think that faith is a thing which they may have or not have at will, like any other natural human thing; so when they arrive at a conclusion and say, 'Truly the doctrine is correct, and therefore I believe it,' then they think that this is faith. Now, when they see and feel that no change has been wrought in themselves and in others, and that works do not follow, and they remain as before in the old nature, then they think that the faith is not good enough, but that there must be something more and greater."(393)

The real faith, the faith which is trust, the divine gift which impels us to throw ourselves upon G.o.d, gives us the living a.s.surance of a living G.o.d, who has revealed Himself, made us see His loving Fatherly heart in Christ Jesus; and that is the Christian religion in its very core and centre. The sum of Christianity is-(1) G.o.d manifest in Christ, the G.o.d of grace, accessible by every Christian man and woman; and (2) unwavering trust in Him who has given Himself to us in Christ Jesus,-unwavering, because Christ with His work has undertaken our cause and made it His.

The G.o.d we have access to and Whom we can trust because we have thrown ourselves upon Him and have found that He sustains us, is no philosophical abstraction, to be described in definitions and argued about in syllogisms. He is seen and known, because we see and know Christ Jesus.

"He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." For with Luther and all the Reformers, Christ fills the whole sphere of G.o.d; and they do not recognise any theology which is not a Christology.

The faith which makes us throw ourselves upon G.o.d is no mood of mere mystical abandonment. It is our very life, as Luther was never tired of saying. It is G.o.d within us, and wells forth in all kinds of activities.