A Short History of Germany by Ernest Henderson

Author:Ernest Henderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ozymandias Press

MARTIN LUTHER AND THE EMPEROR CHARLES V

THE AGE BEING FULLY RIPE for revolution, all that was needed was a leader fearless, overbearing it might be, but strong enough to win the respect of friend and foe alike. Such a one was the monk Martin Luther, a man who had fought such struggles with his own conscience that at times in the monastery at Erfurt he would fall on the ground and remain in a swoon for hours. To use his own language, he had “suffered such great and hellish pain as no tongue could tell and no pen describe”; he had reached a condition of such utter despair as to make him recoil before every image of Christ, seeing in it the devil in person. The strength of such a nature lay in its conservatism; it would take much to destroy its creeds and ideals, but the process once begun had to go on at any cost, even to the bitter end.

An experience of great moment for the future had been a journey to Rome in the interest of his order, a journey which he made on foot, relying on the hospitality of monasteries. He had long been anxious to go, expecting to find there more holiness than in other places. He intended to make a grand confession of all the sins he had ever committed in his whole life. He once said himself, later, that he was in those days a “most mad papist, so drunken, so drowned in the papal dogmas” as to be willing to slay the Pope’s detractors. The consecrated priest, so he thought, was to the ordinary Christian as the morning star to the flame of a candle. On reaching the city which was the home of his beloved saints, he fell on his knees with a “hail, holy Rome!” He ran round among the churches like a ,mad saint”; he was sorry his father and mother were still alive, so simple a matter would it have been to release them from purgatory. He began to mount the scala santa on his knees with prayers and contrition; but there kept ringing in his ears the words “the just shall live by faith,” and he desisted before he reached the top. His was indeed a rude awakening! He heard priests at the altar make brasphemous witticisms in Latin; he was himself once told when performing mass to hurry and send back her son to the mother of God!

The sale of papal indulgences in the neighborhood of Wittenberg brought about the crisis of Martin Luther’s life. It was not the institution itself that aroused his wrath so much as the particular attendant circumstances. The Archbishop of Mainz, that same Albert of Brandenburg who possessed such a quantity of relics, had borrowed a large sum of money from the banking house of Fugger, to pay for his pallium; but was allowed to set aside for repayment of this debt a portion of the indulgence money collected in his diocese.

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