The monks said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an account of his work; but it was true after all. The sceptical philosophy is the most powerful of solvents, but it has no principle of organic life in it; and what of truth there was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form before it was available for the reinvigoration of religion. He himself, in his clearer moments, felt his own incapacity, and despaired of making an impression on the mass of ignorance with which he saw himself surrounded.
'The stupid monks,' he writes, 'say mass as a cobbler makes a shoe; they come to the altar reeking from their filthy pleasures. Confession with the monks is a cloke to steal the people's money, to rob girls of their virtue, and commit other crimes too horrible to name! Yet these people are the tyrants of Europe. The Pope himself is afraid of them.'
'Beware!' he says to an impetuous friend, 'beware how you offend the monks. You have to do with an enemy that cannot be slain; an order never dies, and they will not rest till they have destroyed you.'
The heads of the Church might listen politely, but Erasmus had no confidence in them. 'Never,' he says, 'was there a time when divines were greater fools, or popes and prelates more worldly.' Germany was about to receive a signal illustration of the improvement which it was to look for from liberalism and intellectual culture.
We are now on the edge of the great conflagration. Here we must leave Erasmus for the present. I must carry you briefly over the history of the other great person who was preparing to play his part on the stage. You have seen something of what Erasmus was; you must turn next to the companion picture of Martin Luther. You will observe in how many points their early experiences touch, as if to show more vividly the contrast between the two men.
Sixteen years after the birth of Erasmus, therefore in the year 1483, Martin Luther came into the world in a peasant's cottage, at Eisleben, in Saxony. By peasant, you need not understand a common boor. Hans Luther, the father, was a thrifty, well-to-do man for his station in life—adroit with his hands, and able to do many useful things, from farm work to digging in the mines. The family life was strict and stern—rather too stern, as Martin thought in later life.
'Be temperate with your children,' he said, long after, to a friend; 'punish them if they lie or steal, but be just in what you do. It is a lighter sin to take pears and apples than to take money. I shudder when I think of what I went through myself. My mother beat me about some nuts once till the blood came. I had a terrible time of it, but she meant well.'
At school, too, he fell into rough hands, and the recollection of his sufferings made him tender ever after with young boys and girls.
'Never be hard with children,' he used to say. 'Many a fine character has been ruined by the stupid brutality of pedagogues. The parts of speech are a boy's pillory. I was myself flogged fifteen times in one forenoon over the conjugation of a verb. Punish if you will, but be kind too, and let the sugar-plum go with the rod.' This is not the language of a demagogue or a fanatic; it is the wise thought of a tender, human-hearted man.
At seventeen, he left school for the University at Erfurt. It was then no shame for a poor scholar to maintain himself by alms. Young Martin had a rich noble voice and a fine ear, and by singing ballads in the streets he found ready friends and help. He was still uncertain with what calling he should take up, when it happened that a young friend was killed at his side by lightning.
Erasmus was a philosopher. A powder magazine was once blown up by lightning in a town where Erasmus was staying, and a house of infamous character was destroyed. The inhabitants saw in what had happened the Divine anger against sin. Erasmus told them that if there was any anger in the matter, it was anger merely with the folly which had stored powder in an exposed situation.
Luther possessed no such premature intelligence. He was distinguished from other boys only by the greater power of his feelings and the vividness of his imagination. He saw in his friend's death the immediate hand of the great Lord of the universe. His conscience was terrified. A life-long penitence seemed necessary to atone for the faults of his boyhood. He too, like Erasmus, became a monk, not forced into it—for his father knew better what the holy men were like, and had no wish to have son of his among them—but because the monk of Martin's imagination spent his nights and days upon the stones in prayer; and Martin, in the heat of his repentance, longed to be kneeling at his side.
In this mood he entered the Augustine monastery at Erfurt. He was full of an overwhelming sense of his own wretchedness and sinfulness. Like St. Paul, he was crying to be delivered from the body of death which he carried about him. He practised all possible austerities. He, if no one else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed nights in the chancel before the altar, or on his knees on the floor of his cell. He weakened his body till his mind wandered, and he saw ghosts and devils. Above all, he saw the flaming image of his own supposed guilt. God required that he should keep the law in all points. He had not so kept the law—could not so keep the law—and therefore he believed that he was damned. One morning, he was found senseless and seemingly dead; a brother played to him on a flute, and soothed his senses back to consciousness.
It was long since any such phenomenon had appeared among the rosy friars of Erfurt. They could not tell what to make of him. Staupitz, the prior, listened to his accusations of himself in confession. 'My good fellow,' he said, 'don't be so uneasy; you have committed no sins of the least consequence; you have not killed anybody, or committed adultery, or things of that sort. If you sin to some purpose, it is right that you should think about it, but don't make mountains out of trifles.'
Very curious: to the commonplace man the uncommonplace is for ever unintelligible. What was the good of all that excitement—that agony of self-reproach for little things? None at all, if the object is only to be an ordinary good sort of man—if a decent fulfilment of the round of common duties is the be-all and the end-all of human life on earth.
The plague came by-and-by into the town. The commonplace clergy ran away—went to their country-houses, went to the hills, went anywhere—and they wondered in the same way why Luther would not go with them. They admired him and liked him. They told him his life was too precious to be thrown away. He answered, quite simply, that his place was with the sick and dying; a monk's life was no great matter. The sun he did not doubt would continue to shine, whatever became of him. 'I am no St. Paul,' he said; 'I am afraid of death; but there are things worse than death, and if I die, I die.'
Even a Staupitz could not but feel that he had an extraordinary youth in his charge. To divert his mind from feeding upon itself, he devised a mission for him abroad, and brother Martin was despatched on business of the convent to Rome.
Luther too, like Erasmus, was to see Rome; but how different the figures of the two men there! Erasmus goes with servants and horses, the polished, successful man of the world. Martin Luther trudges penniless and barefoot across the Alps, helped to a meal and a night's rest at the monasteries along the road, or begging, if the convents fail him, at the farm-houses.
He was still young, and too much occupied with his own sins to know much of the world outside him. Erasmus had no dreams. He knew the hard truth on most things. But Rome, to Luther's eager hopes, was the city of the saints, and the court and palace of the Pope fragrant with the odours of Paradise. 'Blessed Rome,' he cried, as he entered the gate—'Blessed Rome, sanctified with the blood of martyrs!'
Alas! the Rome of reality was very far from blessed. He remained long enough to complete his disenchantment. The cardinals, with their gilded chariots and their parasols of peacocks' plumes, were poor representatives of the apostles. The gorgeous churches and more gorgeous rituals, the pagan splendour of the paintings, the heathen gods still almost worshipped in the adoration of the art which had formed them, to Luther, whose heart was heavy with thoughts of man's depravity, were utterly horrible. The name of religion was there: the thinnest veil was scarcely spread over the utter disbelief with which God and Christ were at heart regarded. Culture enough there was. It was the