Luther Examined and Reexamined | Page 4

that he was "depraved in manners and in speech." He speaks of Luther's "ungovernable transports, riotous proceedings, angry conflicts, and intemperate controversies," of Luther's "contempt of all the accepted forms of human right and all authority, human and divine," of "his unscrupulous mendacity," "his perverse principles," "his wild pronouncements." He calls Luther "a lawless one," "one of the most intolerant of men," "a revolutionist, not a reformer." He says that Luther "attempted reformation and ended in deformation." He charges Luther with having written and preached "not for, but against good works," with having assumed rights to himself in the matter of liberty of conscience which "he unhesitatingly and imperiously denied to all who differed from him," with having "rent asunder the unity of the Church," with having "disgraced the Church by a notoriously wicked and scandalous life," with having "declared it to be the right of every man to interpret the Bible to his own individual conception," with "one day proclaiming the binding force of the Ten Commandments and the next declaring they were not obligatory on Christian observance," with having "reviled and hated and cursed the Church of his fathers."
These opprobrious remarks are only a part of the vileness of which the writer has delivered himself in his first chapter. His whole book bristles with assertions of Luther's inveterate badness. This coarse and crooked Luther, we are told, is the real Luther, the genuine article. The Luther of history is only a Protestant fiction. Protestants like Prof. Seeberg of Berlin, and others, who have criticized Luther, are introduced as witnesses for the Catholic allegation that Luther was a thoroughly bad man. We should like to ascertain the feelings of these Protestants when they are informed what use has been made of their remarks about Luther. Some of them may yet let the world know what they think of the attempt to make them the squires of such knights errant as Denifle and Grisar.
It is about ten years ago since the Jesuit Grisar began to publish his _Life of Luther,_ twice that time, since Denifle painted his caricature of Luther. Several generations ago Janssen, in his _History of the German Nation,_ gave the Catholic interpretation of Luther and the Reformation. Going back still further, we come to the Jesuit Maimbourg, to Witzel, and in Luther's own time to Cochlaeus and Oldecop, all of whom strove to convince the world that Luther was a moral degenerate and a reprobate. The book of Mgr. O'Hare, which has made its appearance on the eve of the Four-hundredth Anniversary of Luther's Theses, is merely another eruption from the same mud volcano that became active in Luther's lifetime. It is the old dirt that has come forth. Rome must periodically relieve itself in this manner, or burst. Rome hated the living Luther, and cannot forget him since he is dead. It hates him still. Its hatred is become full-grown, robust, vigorous with the advancing years. When Rome speaks its mind about Luther, it cannot but speak in terms of malignant scorn. If Luther could read Mgr. O'Hare's book, he would say: "Wes das Herz voll ist, des gehet der Mund ueber." (Matt. 12, 34: "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.")
Luther has done one thing which Rome will never pardon: he dared to attack the supreme authority of the Pope. He made men see the ignominious bondage in which cunning priests had ensnared them, and by restoring them to the liberty with which Christ had made them free Luther caused the papacy an irreparable loss. The papal system of teaching and government was so thoroughly exposed by Luther, and has since been so completely disavowed by a great part of professing Christians that Rome cannot practise its old frauds any longer. Men have become extremely wary of Rome. That is what hurts. The Catholic writer to whom we referred sums up the situation thus: Since Luther "all Protestant mankind descending by ordinary generation have come into the world with a mentality biased, perverted, and prejudiced." That is Rome's way of looking at the matter. The truth is: the world is forewarned, hence forearmed against the pleas of Rome. It pays only an indifferent attention to vilifications of Luther that come from that quarter, because it expects no encomiums and only scant justice for Luther from Rome. But it is the business of the teachers of Protestant principles in religion, particularly of the church historians of Protestantism, to take notice of the campaign of slander that is launched against Luther by Catholic writers at convenient intervals. It is not a task to delight the soul, rather to try the patience, of Christians. For in the study of the causes for these calumnies against a great man of history, and of the possible means