Chapter V. Family And Popular Religious Life in the Decades Before the

Reformation.(67)

§ 1. Devotion of Germany to the Roman Church.

The real roots of the spiritual life of Luther and of the other Reformers ought to be sought for in the family and in the popular religious life of the times. It is the duty of the historian to discover, if possible, what religious instruction was given by parents to children in the pious homes out of which most of the Reformers came, and what religious influences confronted and surrounded pious lads after they had left the family circle. Few have cared to prosecute the difficult task; and it is only within late years that the requisite material has been accumulated. It has to be sought for in autobiographies, diaries, and private letters; in the books of popular devotion which the patience of ecclesiastical archæologists is exhuming and reprinting; in the references to the pious confraternities of the later Middle Ages, and more especially to the _Kalands_ among the artisans, which appear in town chronicles, and whose constitutions are being slowly unearthed by local historical societies; in the police regulations of towns and country districts which aim at curbing the power of the clergy, and in the edicts of princes attempting to enforce some of the recommendations of the Councils of Constance and Basel; in the more popular hymns of the time, and in the sermons of the more fervent preachers; in the pilgrim songs and the pilgrim guide-books; and in a variety of other sources not commonly studied by Church historians.

On the surface no land seemed more devoted to the mediæval Church and to the Pope, its head, than did Germany in the half century before the Reformation. A cultivated Italian, Aleander, papal nuncio at the Diet of Worms, was astonished at the signs of disaffection he met with in 1520.(68) He had visited Germany frequently, and he was intimately acquainted with many of the northern Humanists; and his opinion was that down to 1510 (the date of his last visit) he had never been among a people so devoted to the Bishop of Rome. No nation had exhibited such signs of delight at the ending of the Schism and the re-establishment of the “Peace of the Church.” The Italian Humanists continually express their wonder at the strength of the religious susceptibilities of the Germans; and the papal Curia looked upon German devotion as a never-failing source of Roman revenue. The Germans displayed an almost feverish anxiety to profit by all the ordinary and extraordinary means of grace. They built innumerable churches; their towns were full of conventual foundations; they bought Indulgences, went on pilgrimages, visited shrines, reverenced relics in a way that no other nation did. The piety of the Germans was proverbial.

The number of churches was enormous for the population. Almost every tiny village had its chapel, and every town of any size had several churches. Church building and decoration was a feature of the age. In the town of Dantzig 8 new churches had been founded or completed during the fifteenth century. The “holy” city of Köln (Cologne) at the close of the fifteenth century contained 11 great churches, 19 parish churches, 22 monasteries, 12 hospitals, and 76 convents; more than a thousand Masses were said at its altars every day. It was exceptionally rich in ecclesiastical buildings, no doubt; but the smaller town of Brunswick had 15 churches, over 20 chapels, 5 monasteries, 6 hospitals, and 12 Beguine-houses, and its great church, dedicated to St. Blasius, had 26 altars served by 60 ecclesiastics. So it was all over Germany.

Besides the large numbers of monks and nuns who peopled the innumerable monasteries and convents, a large part of the population belonged to some semi-ecclesiastical association. Many were tertiaries of St. Francis; many were connected with the Beguines: Köln (Cologne) had 106 Beguine-houses; Strassburg, over 60, and Basel, over 30.

The churches and chapels, monasteries and religious houses, received all kinds of offerings from rich and poor alike. In those days of unexampled burgher prosperity and wealth, the town churches became “museums and treasure-houses.” The windows were filled with painted glass; weapons, armour, jewels, pictures, tapestries were stored in the treasuries or adorned the walls. Ancient inventories have been preserved of some of these ecclesiastical accumulations of wealth. In the cathedral church in Bern, to take one example, the head of St. Vincentius, the patron, was adorned with a great quantity of gold, and with one jewel said to be priceless; the treasury contained 70 gold and 50 silver cups, 2 silver coffers, and 450 costly sacramental robes decked with jewels of great value. The luxury, the artistic fancy, and the wealth which could minister to both, all three were characteristic of the times, were lavished by the Germans on their churches.

§ 2. Preaching.

On the other hand, preaching took a place it had never previously held in the mediæval Church. Some distinguished Churchmen did not hesitate to say that it was the most important duty the priest could perform—more important than saying Mass. It was recognised that when the people began to read the Bible and religious books in the vernacular, it became necessary for the priests to be able to instruct their congregations intelligently and sympathetically in sermons. Attempts were made to provide the preachers with material for their sermon-making. The earliest was the _Biblia Pauperum_ (the Bible for the _Pauperes Christi_, or the preaching monks), which collects on one page pictures of Bible histories fitted to explain each other, and adds short comments. Thus, on the twenty-fifth leaf there are three pictures—in the centre the Crucifixion; on the left Abraham about to slay Isaac, with the lamb in the foreground; and on the left the Brazen Serpent and the healing of the Plague. More scholarly preachers found a valuable commentary in the _Postilla_ of the learned Franciscan Nicolas de Lyra (Lira or Lire, a village in Normandy), who was the first real exegetical scholar, and to whom Luther was in later days greatly indebted.(69)

Manuals of Pastoral Theology were also written and published for the benefit of the parish priests,—the most famous, under the quaint title, _Dormi Secure_ (sleep in safety). It describes the more important portions of the service, and what makes a good sermon; it gives the Lessons for the Sunday services, the chief articles of the Christian faith, find adds directions for pastoral work and the cure of souls. It is somewhat difficult to describe briefly the character of the preaching. Some of it was very edifying and deservedly popular. The sermons of John Herolt were printed, and attained a very wide circulation. No fewer than forty-one editions appeared. Much of the preaching was the exposition of themes taken from the Scholastic Theology treated in the most technical way. Many of the preachers seem to have profaned their office in the search after popularity, and mingled very questionable stories and coarse jokes with their exhortations. The best known of the preachers who flourished at the close of the fifteenth century was John Geiler of Keysersberg (in Elsass near Colmar), the friend of Sebastian Brand, and a member of the Humanist circle of Strassburg. The position he filled illustrates the eagerness of men of the time to encourage preaching. A burgher of Strassburg, Peter Schott, left a sum of money to endow a preacher, who was to be a doctor of theology, one who had not taken monk’s vows, and who was to preach to the people in the vernacular; a special pulpit was erected in the Strassburg Minster for the preacher provided by this foundation, who was John Geiler. His sermons are full of exhortations to piety and correct living. He lashed the vices and superstitions of his time. He denounced relic worship, pilgrimages, buying indulgences, and the corruptions in the monasteries and convents. He spoke against the luxurious living of Popes and prelates, and their trafficking in the sale of benefices. He made sarcastic references to the papal decretals and to the quibblings of Scholastic Theology. He paints the luxuries and vices he denounced so very clearly, that his writings are a valuable mine for the historian of popular morals. He was a stern preacher of morals, but his sermons contain very little of the gospel message. As we read them we can understand Luther’s complaint, that while he had listened to many a sermon on the sins of the age, and to many a discourse expounding scholastic themes, he had never heard one which declared the love of God to man in the mission and work of Jesus Christ.

§ 3. Church Festivals.

The Church itself, recognising the fondness of the people for all kinds of scenic display, delighted to gratify the prevailing taste by magnificent processions, by gorgeous church ceremonial, by Passion and Miracle Plays. Such scenes are continually described in contemporary chronicles. The processions were arranged for Corpus Christi Day, for Christmas, for Harvest Thanksgivings, when the civic fathers requested the clergy to pray for rain, or when a great papal official visited the town. We hear of one at Erfurt which began at five o’clock in the morning, and, with its visits to the stations of the Cross and the services at each, did not end till noon. The school children of the town, numbering 948, headed the procession, then came 312 priests, then the whole University,—in all, 2141 persons,—and the monks belonging to the five monasteries followed. The Holy Sacrament carried by the chief ecclesiastics, and preceded by a large number of gigantic candles, occupied the middle of the procession. The town council followed, then all the townsmen, then the women and maidens. The troop of maidens was 2316 strong. They had garlands on their heads, and their hair flowed down over their shoulders; they carried lighted candles in their hands, and they marched modestly looking to the ground. Two beautiful girls walked at their head with banners, followed by four with lanterns. In the centre was the fairest, clad in black and barefoot, carrying a large and splendid cross, and by her side one of the town councillors chosen for his good looks. Everything was arranged with a view to artistic effect.(70)

The Passion and Miracle Plays(71) were of great use in instructing the people in the contents of Scripture, being almost always composed of biblical scenes and histories. They were often very elaborate; sometimes more than one hundred actors were needed to fill the parts; and the plays were frequently so lengthy that they lasted for two or three days. The ecclesiastical managers felt that the continuous presentation of grave and lofty scenes and sentiments might weary their audiences, and they mixed them with lighter ones, which frequently degenerated into buffoonery and worse. The sacred and severe pathos of the Passion was interlarded with coarse jokes about the devil; and the most solemn conceptions were profaned. These Mysteries were generally performed in the great churches, and the buildings dedicated to sacred things witnessed scenes of the coarsest humour, to the detriment of all religious feeling. The more serious Churchmen felt the profanation, and tried to prohibit the performance of plays interlarded with rude and indecent scenes within the churches and churchyards. Their interference came too late; the rough popular taste demanded what it had been accustomed to; sacred histories and customs coming down from a primitive heathenism were mixed together, and the people lost the sense of sacredness which ought to attach itself to the former. The Feast of the Ass, to mention one, was supposed to commemorate the Flight to Egypt. A beautiful girl, holding a child in her lap, was seated on an ass decked with splendid trappings of gold cloth, and was led in procession by the clergy through the principal streets of the town to the parish church. The girl on her ass was conducted into the church and placed near the high altar, and the Mass and other services were each concluded by the whole congregation braying. There is indeed an old MS. extant with a rubric which orders the priest to bray thrice on elevating the Host.(72) At other seasons of popular licence, all the parts of the church service, even the most solemn, were parodied by the profane youth of the towns.(73)

All this, however, tells us little about the intimate religious life and feelings of the people, which is the important matter for the study of the roots of the great ecclesiastical revolt.

When the evidence collected from the sources is sifted, it will be found that the religious life of the people at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries is full of discordant elements, and makes what must appear to us a very incongruous mosaic. If classification be permissible, which it scarcely is (for religious types always refuse to be kept distinct, and always tend to run into each other), one would be disposed to speak of the simple homely piety of the family circle—the religion taught at the mother’s knee, the _Kinderlehre_, as Luther called it; of a certain flamboyant religion which inspired the crowds; of a calm anti-clerical religion which grew and spread silently throughout Germany; of the piety of the praying-circles, the descendants of the fourteenth century Mystics.

§ 4. The Family Religious Life.

The biographies of some of the leaders of the Reformation, when they relate the childish reminiscences of the writers, bear unconscious witness to the kind of religion which was taught to the children in pious burgher and peasant families. We know that Luther learned the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. He knew such simple evangelical hymns as “Ein kindelein so lobelich,”(74) “Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist,” and “Crist ist erstanden.” Children were rocked to sleep while the mothers sang:

“Ach lieber Heere Jhesu Christ Sid Du ein Kind gewesen bist, So gib ouch disem Kindelin Din Gnod und ouch den Segen den. Ach Jhesu, Heere min, Behüt diz Kindelin.

Nun sloff, nun sloff, min Kindelin, Jhesus der sol din bülli sin, Der well, daz dir getroume wol Und werdest aller Tugent vol. Ach Jhesus, Heere min, Behüt diz Kindelin.”(75)

These songs or hymns, common before the Reformation, were sung as frequently after the break with Rome. The continuity in the private devotional life before and after the advent of the Reformation is a thing to be noted. Few hymns were more popular during the last decade of the fifteenth century than the “In dulci Jubilo” in which Latin and German mingled. The first and last verses were:

“In dulci jubilo, Nun singet und seid froh! Unsers Herzens Wonne Leit in præsepio, Und leuchtet als die Sonne Matris in gremio. Alpha es et O, Alpha es et O!

Ubi sunt gaudia? Nirgends mehr denn da, Da die Engel singen Nova cantica, Und die Schellen klingen In regis curia. Eya, wär’n wir da, Eya, wär’n wir da!”

This hymn continued to enjoy a wonderful popularity in the German Protestant churches and families until quite recently, and during the times of the Reformation it spread far beyond Germany.(76) In the fifteenth-century version it contained one verse in praise of the Virgin:

“Mater et filia Du bist, Jungfraw Maria. Wir weren all verloren Per nostra crimina, So hat sy uns erworben Celorum gaudia. Eya, wär’n wir da, Eya, wär’n wir da!”

which was either omitted in the post-Reformation versions, or there was substituted:

“O Patris charitas, O Nati lenitas! Wir weren all verloren Per nostra crimina, So hat Er uns erworben Cœlorum gaudia. Eya, wär’n wir da, Eya, wär’n wir da.”(77)

Nor was direct simple evangelical instruction lacking. Friedrich Mecum (known better by his Latinised name of Myconius), who was born in 1491, relates how his father, a substantial burgher belonging to Lichtenfels in Upper Franconia, instructed him in religion while he was a child. “My dear father,” he says, “had taught me in my childhood the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Creed, and constrained me to pray always. For, said he, ‘Everything comes to us from God alone, and that _gratis_, free of cost, and He will lead us and rule us, if we only diligently pray to Him.’ ” We can trace this simple evangelical family religion away back through the Middle Ages. In the wonderfully interesting Chronicle of Brother Salimbene of the Franciscan Convent of Parma, which comes from the thirteenth century, we are told how many of the better-disposed burghers of the town came to the convent frequently to enjoy the religious conversation of Brother Hugh. On one occasion the conversation turned upon the mystical theology of Abbot Giaocchino di Fiore. The burghers professed to be greatly edified, but said that they hoped that on the next evening Brother Hugh would confine himself to telling them the _simple words of Jesus_.

The central thought in all evangelical religion is that the believer does not owe his position before God, and his assurance of salvation, to the good deeds which he really can do, but to the grace of God manifested in the mission and the work of Christ; and the more we turn from the thought of what we can do to the thought of what God has done for us, the stronger will be the conviction that simple trust in God is that by which the pardoning grace of God is appropriated. This double conception—God’s grace coming down upon us from above, and the believer’s trust rising from beneath to meet and appropriate it—was never absent from the simplest religion of the Middle Ages. It did not find articulate expression in mediæval theology, for, owing to its enforced connection with Aristotelian philosophy, that theology was largely artificial; but the thought itself had a continuous and constant existence in the public consciousness of Christian men and women, and appeared in sermons, prayers, and hymns, and in the other ways in which the devotional life manifested itself. It is found in the sermons of the greatest of mediæval preachers, Bernard of Clairvaux, and in the teaching of the most persuasive of religious guides, Francis of Assisi. The one, Bernard, in spite of his theological training, was able to rise above the thought of human merit recommending the sinner to God; and the other, Francis, who had no theological training at all, insisted that he was fitted to lead a life of imitation simply because he had no personal merits whatsoever, and owed everything to the marvellous mercy and grace of God given freely to him in the work of Christ. The thought that all the good we can do comes from the wisdom and mercy of God, and that without these gifts of grace we are sinful and worthless—the feeling that all pardon and all holy living are free gifts of God’s grace, was the central thought round which in mediæval, as in all times, the faith of simple and pious people twined itself. It found expression in the simpler mediæval hymns, Latin and German. The utter need for sin-pardoning grace is expressed and taught in the prayer of the _Canon of the Mass_. It found its way, in spite of the theology, even into the official agenda of the Church, where the dying are told that they must repose their confidence upon Christ and His Passion as the sole ground of confidence in their salvation. If we take the fourth book of Thomas à Kempis’ _Imitatio Christi_, it is impossible to avoid seeing that his ideas about the sacrament of the Supper (in spite of the mistakes in them) kept alive in his mind the thought of a free grace of God, and that he had a clear conception that God’s grace was freely given, and not merited by what man can do. For the main thought with pious mediæval Christians, however it might be overlaid with superstitious conceptions, was that they received in the sacrament a _gift_ of overwhelming greatness. Many a modern Christian seems to think that the main idea is that in this sacrament one _does_ something—makes a profession of Christianity. The old view went a long way towards keeping people right in spite of errors, while the modern view does a great deal towards leading them wrong in spite of truth.

All these things combine to show us how there was a simple evangelical faith among pious mediæval Christians, and that their lives were fed upon the same divine truths which lie at the basis of Reformation theology. The truths were all there, as poetic thoughts, as earnest supplication and confession, in fervent preaching or in fireside teaching. When mediæval Christians knelt in prayer, stood to sing their Redeemer’s praises, spoke as a dying man to dying men, or as a mother to the children about her knees, the words and thoughts that came were what Luther and Zwingli and Calvin wove into Reformation creeds, and expanded into that experimental theology which was characteristic of the Reformation.

When the printing-press began in the last decades of the fifteenth century to provide little books to aid private and family devotion, it is not surprising, after what has been said, to find how full many of them were of simple evangelical piety. Some contained the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and occasionally a translation or paraphrase of some of the Psalms, notably the 51st Psalm. Popular religious instructions and catechisms for family use were printed. The Catechism of Dietrich Koelde (written in 1470) says: “Man must place his faith and hope and love on God alone, and not in any creature; he must trust in nothing but in the work of Jesus Christ.” The _Seelenwurzgartlein_, a widely used book of devotion, instructs the penitent: “Thou must place all thy hope and trust on nothing else than on the work and death of Jesus Christ.” The _Geistliche Streit_ of Ulrich Krafft (1503) teaches the dying man to place all his trust on the “mercy and goodness of God, and not on his own good works.” Quotations might be multiplied, all proving the existence of a simple evangelical piety, and showing that the home experience of Friedrich Mecum (Myconius) was shared in by thousands, and that there was a simple evangelical family religion in numberless German homes in the end of the fifteenth century.

§ 5. A superstitious Religion based on Fear.

When sensitive, religiously disposed boys left pious homes, they could not fail to come in contact with a very different kind of religion. Many did not need to quit the family circle in order to meet it. Near Mansfeld, Luther’s home, were noted pilgrimage places. Pilgrims, singly or in great bands, passed to make their devotions before the wooden cross at Kyffhäuser, which was supposed to effect miraculous cures. The Bruno Quertfort Chapel and the old chapel at Welfesholz were pilgrimage places. Sick people were carried to spots near the cloister church at Wimmelberg, where they could best hear the sound of the cloister bells, which were believed to have a healing virtue.

The latter half of the fifteenth century witnessed a great and widespreading religious revival, which prolonged itself into the earlier decades of the sixteenth, though the year 1475 may perhaps be taken as its high-water mark. Its most characteristic feature was the impulse to make pilgrimages to favoured shrines; and these pilgrimages were always considered to be something in the nature of satisfactions made to God for sins. With some of the earlier phenomena we have nothing here to do.

The impetus to pilgrimages given after the great Schism by the celebration in 1456 of the first Jubilee “after healing the wounds of the Church”; the relation of these pilgrimages to the doctrines of Indulgences which, formulated by the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century, had changed the whole penitential system of the mediæval Church, must be passed over; the curious socialist, anti-clerical, and yet deeply superstitious movement led by the cowherd and village piper, Hans Böhm, has been described. But one movement is so characteristic of the times, that it must be noticed. In the years 1455-1459 all the chroniclers describe great gatherings of children from every part of Germany, from town and village, who, with crosses and banners, went on pilgrimage to St. Michael in Normandy. The chronicler of Lübeck compares the spread of the movement to the advance of the plague, and wonders whether the prompting arose from the inspiration of God or from the instigation of the devil. When a band of these child-pilgrims reached a town, carrying aloft crosses and banners blazoned with a rude image of St. Michael, singing their special pilgrim song,(78) the town’s children were impelled to join them. How this strange epidemic arose, and what put an end to it, seems altogether doubtful; but the chronicles of almost every important town in Germany attest the facts, and the contemporary records of North France describe the bands of youthful pilgrims who traversed the country to go to St. Michael’s Mount.

During these last decades of the fifteenth century, a great fear seems to have brooded over Central Europe. The countries were scourged by incessant visits of the plague; new diseases, never before heard of, came to swell the terror of the people. The alarm of a Turkish invasion was always before their eyes. Bells tolled at midday in hundreds of German parishes, calling the parishioners together for prayer against the incoming of the Turks, and served to keep the dread always present to their minds. Mothers threatened their disobedient children by calling on the Turk to come and take them. It was fear that lay at the basis of this crude revival of religion which marks the closing decades of the fifteenth century. It gave rise to an urgent restlessness. Prophecies of evil were easily believed in. Astrologers assumed a place and wielded a power which was as new as it was strange. The credulous people welcomed all kinds of revelations and proclamations of miraculous signs. At Wilsnack, a village in one of the divisions of Brandenburg (Priegnitz), it had been alleged since 1383 that a consecrated wafer secreted the Blood of Christ. Suddenly, in 1475, people were seized with a desire to make a pilgrimage to this shrine. Swarms of child-pilgrims again filled the roads—boys and girls, from eight to eighteen years of age, bareheaded, clad only in their shirts, shouting, “O Lord, have mercy upon us”—going to Wilsnack. Sometimes schoolmasters headed a crowd of pilgrims; mothers deserted their younger children; country lads and maids left their work in the fields to join the processions. These pilgrims came mostly from Central Germany (1100 from Eisleben alone), but the contagion spread to Austria and Hungary, and great bands of youthful pilgrims appeared from these countries. They travelled without provisions, and depended on the charity of the peasants for food. Large numbers of these child-pilgrims did not know why they had joined the throng; they had never heard of the _Bleeding Host_ towards which they were journeying; when asked why they had set out, they could only answer that they could not help it, that they saw the red cross at the head of their little band, and had to follow it. Many of them could not speak, all went weeping and groaning, shivering as if they had a fit of ague. An unnatural strength supported them. Little boys and girls, some of them not eight years old, from a small village near Bamberg, were said to have marched, on their first setting forth, all day and the first night the incredible distance of not less than eighty miles! Some towns tried to put a stop to these pilgrimages. Erfurt shut its gates against the youthful companies. The pilgrimages ended as suddenly as they had begun.(79)

Succeeding years witnessed similar astonishing pilgrimages—in 1489, to the “black Mother of God” in Altötting; in 1492, to the “Holy Blood” at Sternberg; in the same year, to the “pitiful Bone” at Dornach; in 1499, to the picture of the Blessed Virgin at Grimmenthal; in 1500, to the head of St. Anna at Düren; and in 1519, to the “Beautiful Mary” at Regensburg.

Apart altogether from these sporadic movements, the last decades of the fifteenth century were pre-eminently a time of pilgrimages. German princes and wealthy merchants made pilgrimages to the Holy Land, visited the sacred places there, and returned with numerous relics, which they stored in favourite churches. Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, to be known afterwards as the protector of Luther, made such a pilgrimage, and placed the relics he had acquired in the Castle Church (the Church of All Saints) in Wittenberg. He became an assiduous collector of relics, and had commissioners on the Rhine, in the Netherlands, and at Venice, with orders to procure him any sacred novelties they met with for sale.(80) He procured from the Pope an Indulgence for all who visited the collection and took part in the services of the church on All Saints’ Day; for it is one of the ironies of history that the church on whose door Luther nailed his theses against Indulgences was one of the sacred edifices on which an Indulgence had been bestowed, and that the day selected by Luther was the yearly anniversary, which drew crowds to benefit by it.(81)

A pilgrimage to the Holy Land was too costly and dangerous to be indulged in by many. The richer Germans made pilgrimages to Rome, and the great pilgrimage place for the middle-class or poorer Germans was Compostella in Spain. Einsiedeln, in Switzerland, also attracted yearly swarms of pilgrims.

Guide-books were written for the benefit of these pious travellers, and two of them, the most popular, have recently been reprinted. They are the _Mirabilia Romæ_ for Roman pilgrims, and the _Walfart und Strasse zu Sant Jacob_ for travellers to Compostella. These little books had a wonderful popularity. The _Mirabilia Romæ_ went through nineteen Latin and at least twelve German editions before the year 1500; it was also translated into Italian and Dutch. It describes the various shrines at Rome where pilgrims may win special gifts of grace by visiting and worshipping at them. Who goes to the Lateran Church and worships there has “forgiveness of all sins, both guilt and penalty.” There is “a lovely little chapel” (probably what is now called the Lateran Baptistry) near the Lateran, where the same privileges may be won. The pilgrim who goes with good intention to the High Altar of St. Peter’s Church, “even if he has murdered his father or his mother,” is freed from all sin, “guilt as well as penalty,” provided he repents. The virtues of St. Croce seem to have been rated even higher. If a man leaves his house with the intention of going to the shrine, even if he die by the way, all his sins are forgiven him; and if he visits the church he wins a thousand years’ relief from Purgatory.(82)

Compostella in Spain was the people’s pilgrimage place. Before the invention of printing we find traces of manuscript guides to travellers, which were no doubt circulated among intending pilgrims, and afterwards the services of the printing-press were early called in to assist. In the Spanish archives at Simancas there are two single sheets, one of which states the numerous Indulgences for the benefit of visitors at the shrine of St. James, while the other enumerates the relics which are to be seen and visited there. It mentions thirty-nine great relics—from the bones of St. James, which lay under the great altar of the cathedral, to those of St. Susanna, which were interred in a church outside the walls of the town.(83) These leaflets were sold to the pilgrims, and were carried back by them to Germany, where they stimulated the zeal and devotion of those who intended to make the pilgrimage. Our pilgrim’s guide-book, the _Walfart und Strasse zu Sant Jacob_,(84) deals almost exclusively with the road. The author was a certain Hermann Künig of Vach, who calls himself a _Mergen-knecht_, or servant of the Virgin Mary. The well-known pilgrim song, “Of Saint James” (_Von Sant Jacob_), told how those who reached the end of their journey got, through the intercession of St. James, forgiveness from the guilt and penalty (_von Pein und Schuldt_) of all their sins; it tells the pilgrims to provide themselves with two pairs of shoes, a water-bottle and spoon, a satchel and staff, a broad-brimmed hat and a cloak, both trimmed with leather in the places likeliest to be frayed, and both needed as a protection against wind and rain and snow.(85) It charges them to take permits from their parish priests to dispense with confession, for they were going to foreign lands where they would not find priests who spoke German. It warns them that they might die far from home and find a grave on the pilgrimage route. Our guide-book omits all these things. It is written by a man who has made the pilgrimage on foot; who had observed minutely all the turns of the road, and could warn fellow-pilgrims of the difficulties of the way. He gives the itinerary from town to town; where to turn to the right and where to the left; what conspicuous buildings mark the proper path; where the traveller will find people who are generous to poor pilgrims, and where the inhabitants are uncharitable and food and drink must be paid for; where hostels abound, and those parts of the road on which there are few, and where the pilgrims must buy their provisions beforehand and carry them in their satchels; where sick pilgrims can find hospitals on the way, and what treatment they may expect there;(86) at what hostels they must change their money into French and Spanish coin. In brief, the booklet is a mediæval “Baedeker,” compiled with German accuracy for the benefit of German pilgrims to the renowned shrine of St. James of Compostella. This little book went through several editions between 1495 and 1521, and is of itself a proof of the popularity of this pilgrimage place. In the last decades of the fifteenth century there arose a body of men and women who might be called professional pilgrims, and who were continually on the road between Germany and Spain. A pilgrimage was one of the earliest so-called “satisfactions” which might be done vicariously, and the Brethren of St. James (_Jacobs-Brueder_) made the pilgrimage regularly, either on behalf of themselves or of others.

Many of these pilgrims were men and women of indifferent character,(87) who had been sent on a pilgrimage as an ecclesiastical punishment for their sins. The _Chronicles of the Zimmer Family_(88) gives several cases of criminals, who had committed murder or theft or other serious crimes between 1490 and 1520, who were sent to Santiago as a punishment. Even in the last decades of the fifteenth century, when the greater part of the pilgrims were devout in their way, it was known only too well that pilgrimages were not helpful to a moral life. Stern preachers of righteousness like Geiler of Keysersberg and Berchtold of Regensburg denounced pilgrimages, and said that they created more sins than they yielded pardons.(89) Parish priests continually forbade their women penitents, especially if they were unmarried, from going on a pilgrimage. But these warnings and rebukes were in vain. The prevailing terror had possessed the people, and they journeyed from shrine to shrine seeking some relief for their stricken consciences.

A marked characteristic of this revival which found such striking outcome in these pilgrimages was the thought that Jesus was to be looked upon as the Judge who was to come to punish the wicked. His saving and intercessory work was thrust into the background. Men forgot that He was the Saviour and the Intercessor; and as the human heart craves for someone to intercede for it, another intercessor had to be found. This gracious personality was discovered in the Virgin Mother, who was to be entreated to intercede with her Son on behalf of poor sinning human creatures. The last half of the fifteenth century saw a deep-seated and widely-spread craving to cling to the protection of the Virgin Mother with a strength and intensity hitherto unknown in mediæval religion. It witnessed the furthest advance that had yet been made towards what must be called Mariolatry. This devotion expressed itself, as religious emotion continually does, in hymns; a very large proportion of the mediæval hymns in praise of the Virgin were written in the second half of the fifteenth century—the period of this strange revival based upon fear. Dread of the Son as Judge gave rise to the devotion to the Mother as the intercessor. Little books for private and family devotion were printed, bearing such titles as the _Pearl of the Passion_ and the _Little Gospel_, containing, with long comments, the words of our Lord on the cross to John and to Mary. She became the ideal woman, the ideal mother, the “Mother of God,” the _mater dolorosa_, with her heart pierced by the sword, the sharer in the redemptive sufferings of her Son, retaining her sensitive woman’s heart, ready to listen to the appeals of a suffering, sorrowful humanity. We can see this devotion to the Virgin Mother impregnating the social revolts from Hans Böhm to Joss Fritz. The theology of the schools followed in the wake of the popular sentiment, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was more strictly defined and found its most strenuous supporters during the later decades of this fifteenth century.

The thought of motherly intercession went further; the Virgin herself had to be interceded with to induce her to plead with her Son for men sunk in sin, and _her_ mother (St. Anna) became the object of a cult which may almost be said to be quite new. Hymns were written in her praise.(90) Confraternities, modelled on the confraternities dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, were formed in order to bring the power of the prayers of numbers to bear upon her. These confraternities spread all over Germany and beyond it.(91) It is almost possible to trace the widening area of the cult from the chronicles of the period. The special cult of the Virgin seems to have begun, at least in its extravagant popular form, in North France, and to have spread from France through Germany and Spain; but so far as it can be traced, this cult of St. Anna, “the Grandmother,” had a German origin, and the devotion manifested itself most deeply on German soil. Even the Humanist poets sang her praises with enthusiasm, and such collectors of relics as Frederick of Saxony and the Cardinal Archbishop of Mainz rejoiced when they were able to add a thumb of St. Anna to their store. Luther himself tells us that “St. Anna was his idol”; and Calvin speaks of his mother’s devotion to the saint. Her name was graven on many a parish church bell, and every pull at the ropes and clang of the bell was supposed to be a prayer to her to intercede. The Virgin and St. Anna brought in their train other saints who were also believed to be the true intercessors. The three bells of the church in which Luther was baptized bore the following inscriptions carved deeply in the brass:—“God help us; Mary have mercy. 1499.” “Help us Anna, also St. Peter, St. Paul. 1509.” “Help us God, Mary, Anna, St. Peter, Paul, Arnold, Stephan, Simon. 1509.” The popular religion always represented Jesus, Mecum (Myconius) tells us, as the stern Judge who would convict and punish all those who had not secured righteousness by the intercession of the saints or by their own good works.

This revival of religion, crude as it was, and based on fear, had a distinct effect for good on a portion of the clergy, and led to a great reformation of morals among those who came under its influence. The papal Schism, which had lasted till 1449, had for one of its results the weakening of all ecclesiastical discipline, and its consequences were seen in the growing immorality which pervaded all classes of the clergy. So far as one can judge, the revival of religion described above had not very much effect on the secular clergy. Whether we take the evidence from the chronicles of the time or from visitations of the bishops, the morals of the parish priests were extremely low, and the private lives of the higher clergy in Germany notoriously corrupt. The occupants of episcopal sees were for the most part the younger brothers of the great princes, and had been placed in the religious life for the sake of the ecclesiastical revenues. The author of the _Chronicles of the Zimmer Family_ tells us that at the festive gatherings which accompanied the meetings of the Diet, the young nobles, lay and clerical, spent most of their time at dice and cards. As he passed through the halls, picking his way among groups of young nobles lying on the floor (for tables and chairs were rare in these days), he continually heard the young count call out to the young bishop, “Play up, parson; it is your turn.” The same writer describes the retinue of a great prelate, who was always accompanied to the Diet by a concubine dressed in man’s clothes. Nor were the older Orders of monks, the Benedictines and their offshoots, greatly influenced by the revival. It was different, however, with those Orders of monks who came into close contact with the people, and caught from them the new fervour. The Dominicans, the great preaching Order, were permeated by reform. The Franciscans, who had degenerated sadly from their earlier lives of self-denial, partook of a new life. Convent after convent reformed itself, and the inmates began to lead again the lives their founder had contemplated. The fire of the revival, however, burnt brightest among the Augustinian Eremites, the Order which Luther joined, and they represented, as none of the others did, all the characteristics of the new movement.

These Augustinian Eremites had a somewhat curious history. They had nothing in common with St. Augustine save the name, and the fact that a Pope had given them the rule of St. Augustine as a basis for their monastic constitution. They had originally been hermits, living solitary lives in mountainous parts of Italy and of Germany. Many Popes had desired to bring them under conventual rule, and this was at last successfully done. They shared as no other Order had done in the revival of the second half of the fifteenth century, and exhibited in their lives all its religious characteristics. No Order of monks contained such devoted servants of the Virgin Mother. She was the patron along with St. Augustine. Her image stood in the chapter-house of every convent. The theologians of the Augustinian Eremites vied with those of the Franciscans in spreading the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. They did much to spread the cult of the “Blessed Anna.” They were devoted to the Papacy. One of their learned men, John of Palz, one of the two professors of theology in the Erfurt Convent when Luther entered it as a novice, was the most strenuous defender of the doctrine of Attrition and of the religious value of Indulgences. With all this their lives were more self-denying than those of most monks. They cultivated theological learning, and few Universities in Germany were without an Augustinian Eremite who acted as professor of philosophy or of theology. They also paid great attention to the art of preaching, and every large monastery had a special preacher who attracted crowds of the laity to the convent chapel. Their monasteries were usually placed in large towns; and their devout lives, their learning, and the popular gifts of their preachers, made them favourites with the townspeople. They were the most esteemed Order in Germany.

These last decades of the fifteenth century were the days of the resuscitation of the mendicant Orders and the revival of their power over the people. The better disposed among the princes and among the wealthier burghers invariably selected their confessors from the monks of the mendicant Orders, and especially from the Augustinian Eremites. The chapels of the Franciscans and of the Eremites were thronged, and those of the parish clergy were deserted. The common people took for their religious guides men who shared the new revival, and who proved their sincerity by self-denying labours. It was in vain that the Roman Curia published regulations insisting that every parishioner must confess to the priest of the parish at least once a year, and that it explained again and again that the personal character of the ministrant did not affect the efficacy of the sacraments administered by him. So long as poorly clad, emaciated, clean-living Franciscan or Eremite priests could be found to act as confessors, priests, or preachers, the people deserted the parish clergy, flocked to their confessionals, waited on their serving the Mass, and thronged their chapels to listen to their sermons. These decades were the time of the last revival of the mendicant monks, who were the religious guides in this flamboyant popular religion which is so much in evidence during our period.

§ 6. A non-Ecclesiastical Religion.

The third religious movement which belongs to the last decades of the fifteenth and the earlier decades of the sixteenth century was of a kind so different from, and even contrary to, what has just been described, that it is with some surprise that the student finds he must recognise its presence alongside of the other. It was the silent spread of a quiet, sincere, but non-ecclesiastical religion. Historians usually say nothing about this movement, and it is only a minute study of the town chronicles and of the records of provincial and municipal legislation that reveals its power and extent. It has always been recognised that Luther’s father was a man of a deeply religious turn of mind, although he commonly despised the clergy, and thought that most monks were rogues or fools; but what is not recognised is that in this he represented thousands of quiet and pious Germans in all classes of society. We find traces of the silent, widespreading movement in the ecclesiastical legislation of German princes, in the police regulations, and in the provisions for the support of the poor among the burghers; in the constitutions and practices of the confraternities among the lower classes, and especially among the artisans in the towns; and in the numerous translations of the Vulgate into the vernacular.

The reforms sketched by the Councils of Constance and of Basel had been utterly neglected by the Roman Curia, and in consequence several German princes, while they felt the hopelessness of insisting on a general purification of the Church, resolved that these reforms should be carried out within their own dominions. As early as 1446, Duke William of Saxony had published decrees which interfered with the pretensions of the Church to be quite independent of the State. His regulations about the observance of the Sunday, his forbidding ecclesiastical courts to interfere with Saxon laymen, his stern refusal to allow any Saxon to appeal to a foreign jurisdiction, were all more or less instances of the interference of the secular power within what had been supposed to be the exclusive province of the ecclesiastical. He went much further, however. He enacted that it belonged to the secular power to see that parish priests and their superiors within his dominions lived lives befitting their vocation—a conception which was entirely at variance with the ecclesiastical pretensions of the Middle Ages. He also declared it to be within the province of the secular power to visit officially and to reform all the convents within his dominions. So far as proofs go, it is probable that these declarations about the rights of the civil authorities to exercise discipline over the parish priests and their superiors remained a dead letter. We hear of no such reformation being carried out. But the visitation of the Saxon monasteries was put in force in spite of the protests of the ecclesiastical powers. Andreas Proles would never have been able to carry out his proposals of reform in the convents of the Augustinian Eremites but for the support he received from the secular princes against his ecclesiastical superiors in Rome. The Dukes Ernest and Albrecht carried out Duke William’s conceptions about the relation of the civil to the ecclesiastical authorities in their ordinances of 1483, and the Elector Frederick the Wise was heir to this ecclesiastical policy of his family.

The records of the Electorate of Brandenburg, investigated by Priebatsch and described by him in the _Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte_(92) testify to the same ideas at work there. A pious prince like Frederick II. of Brandenburg removed unworthy Church dignitaries and reinstituted them, thus taking upon himself the oversight of the Church. Appeals to Rome were forbidden under penalties. Gradually under Frederick and his successors there arose what was practically a national Church of Brandenburg, which was almost completely under the control of the civil power, and almost entirely separated from Roman control.

The towns also interfered in what had hitherto been believed to be within the exclusive domain of the ecclesiastical authorities. They recognised the harm which the numerous Church festivals and saints’ days were doing to the people, and passed regulations about their observance, all of them tending to lessen the number of the days on which men were compelled by ecclesiastical law to be idle. When Luther pleaded in his _Address to the Nobility of the German Nation_ for the abolition of the ecclesiastical laws enforcing idleness on the numerous ecclesiastical holy days, he only suggested an extension and wider application of the police regulations which were in force within his native district of Mansfeld.

This non-ecclesiastical feeling appears strongly in the change of view about Christian charity which marks the close of the fifteenth century.

Nothing shows how the Church of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had instilled the mind of Jesus into the peoples of Europe like the zeal with which they tried to do their duty by the poor, the sick, and the helpless. Institutions, founded by individuals or by corporations, for the purpose of housing the destitute abounded, and men and women willingly dedicated themselves to the service of the unfortunate.

“The Beguins crowned with flapping hats, O’er long-drawn bloodless faces blank, And gowns unwashed to wrap their lank Lean figures,”(93)

were sisters of mercy in every mediæval town. Unfortunately the lessons of the Church included the thought that begging was a Christian virtue; while the idea that because charity is taught by the law of Christ, its exercise must be everywhere superintended by ecclesiastics, was elevated to a definite principle of action, if not to something directly commanded by the law of God. The Reformation protested against these two ideas, and the silent anticipation of this protest is to be found in the non-ecclesiastical piety of the close of the fifteenth century.

The practice of begging, its toleration and even encouragement, was almost universal. In some of the benevolent institutions the sick and the pensioners were provided from the endowment with all the necessaries of life, but it was generally thought becoming that they should beg them from the charitable. The very fact of begging seemed to raise those who shared in it to the level of members of a religious association. St. Francis, the “imitator of Christ,” had taught his followers to beg, and this great example sanctified the practice. It is true that the begging friars were always the butt of the satirists of the close of the fifteenth century. They delighted to portray the mendicant monk, with his sack, into which he seemed able to stuff everything: honey and spice, nutmegs, pepper, and preserved ginger, cabbage and eggs, poultry, fish, and new clothes, milk, butter, and cheese; cheese especially, and of all kinds—ewe’s milk and goat’s milk, hard cheese and soft cheese, large cheeses and small cheeses—were greedily demanded by these “cheese hunters,” as they were satirically called. On their heels tramped a host of semi-ecclesiastical beggars, all of them with professional names—men who begged for a church that was building, or for an altar-cloth, or to hansel a young priest at his first Mass; men who carried relics about for the charitable to kiss—some straw from the manger of Bethlehem, or a feather from the wing of the angel Gabriel; the Brethren of St. James, who performed continual and vicarious pilgrimages to Compostella, and sometimes robbed and murdered on the road; the Brethren of St. Anthony, who had the special privilege of wearing a cross and carrying a bell on their begging visits. These were all ecclesiastical beggars. The ordinary beggars did their best to obtain some share of the sanctity which surrounded the profession; they carried with them the picture of some saint, or placed the cockle-shell, the badge of a pilgrim, in their hats, and secured a quasi-ecclesiastical standing.(94) Luther expressed not merely his own opinion on this plague of beggars in his _Address to the Nobility of the German Nation_, but what had been thought and partially practised by quiet laymen for several decades. Some towns began to make regulations against promiscuous begging by able-bodied persons, provided work for them, seized their children, and taught them trades—all of which sensible doings were against the spirit of the mediæval Church.

The non-ecclesiastical religious feeling, however, appears much more clearly when the history of the charitable foundations is examined. The invariable custom during the earlier Middle Ages was that charitable bequests were left to the management of the Church and the clergy. At the close of the fifteenth century the custom began to alter. The change from clerical to lay management was at first probably due mainly to the degeneracy of the clergy, and to the belief that the funds set apart for the poor were not properly administered. The evidences of this are to be found in numerous instances of the civic authorities attempting, and successfully, to take the management of charitable foundations out of the hands of ecclesiastical authorities, and to vest them in lay management. But this cannot have been the case always. We should rather say that it began to dawn upon men that although charity was part of the law of Christ, this did not necessarily mean that all charities must be placed under the control of the clergy or other ecclesiastical administrators. Hence we find during the later years of the fifteenth century continual instances of bequests for the poor placed in the hands of the town council or of boards of laymen. That this was done without any animus against the Church is proved by the fact that the same testator is found giving benefactions to foundations which are under clerical and to others under lay management. Out of the funds thus accumulated the town councils began a system of caring for the poor of the city, which consisted in giving tokens which could be exchanged for so much bread or woollen cloth, or shoes, or wood for firing, at the shops of dealers who were engaged for the purpose. How far this new and previously unheard of lay management, in what had hitherto been the peculiar possession of the clergy, had spread before the close of the fifteenth century, it is impossible to say. No archæologist has yet made an exhaustive study of the evidence lying buried in archives of the mediæval towns of Germany; but enough has been collected by Kriegk(95) and others to show that it had become very extensive. The laity saw that they were quite able to perform this peculiarly Christian work apart from any clerical direction.

Another interesting series of facts serves also to show the growth of a non-ecclesiastical religious sentiment. The later decades of the fifteenth century saw the rise of innumerable associations, some of them definitely religious, and all of them with a religious side, which are unlike what we meet with earlier. They did not aim to be, like the praying circles of the Mystics or of the _Gottesfreunde, ecclesiolæ in ecclesia_, strictly non-clerical or even anti-clerical. They had no difficulty in placing themselves under the protection of the Church, in selecting the ordinary ecclesiastical buildings for their special services, and in employing priests to conduct their devotions; but they were distinctively lay associations, and lived a religious life in their own way, without any regard to the conceptions of the higher Christian life which the Church was accustomed to present to its devout disciples. Some were associations for prayer; others for the promotion of the “cult” of a special saint, like the confraternities dedicated to the Virgin Mother or the associations which spread the “cult” of the Blessed Anna; but by far the largest number were combinations of artisans, and resembled the workmen’s “gilds” of the Roman Empire.

Perhaps one of the best known of these associations formed for the purpose of encouraging prayer was the “Brotherhood of the Eleven Thousand Virgins,” commonly known under the quaint name of _St. Ursula’s Little Ship_. The association was conceived by a Carthusian monk of Cologne, and it speedily became popular. Frederick the Wise was one of its patrons, his secretary, Dr. Pfeffinger, one of its supporters; it numbered its associates by the thousand; its praises were sung in a quaint old German hymn.(96) No money dues were exacted from its members. The only duty exacted was to pray regularly, and to learn to better one’s life through the power of prayer. This was one type of the pious brotherhoods of the fifteenth century. It was the best known of its kind, and there were many others. But among the brotherhoods which bear testimony to the spread of a non-ecclesiastical piety none are more important than the confraternities which went by the names of _Kalands_ or _Kalandsgilden_ in North Germany and _Zechen_ in Austria. These associations were useful in a variety of ways. They were unions for the practice of religion; for mutual aid in times of sickness; for defence in attack; and they also served the purpose of insurance societies and of burial clubs. It is with their religious side that we have here to do. It was part of the bond of association that all the brethren and sisters (for women were commonly admitted) should meet together at stated times for a common religious service. The brotherhood selected the church in which this was held, and so far as we can see the chapels of the Franciscans or of the Augustinian Eremites were generally chosen. Sometimes an altar was relegated to their exclusive use; sometimes, if the church was a large one, a special chapel. The interesting thing to be noticed is that the rules and the modes of conducting the religious services of the association were entirely in the hands of the brotherhood itself, and that these laymen insisted on regulating them in their own way. Luther has a very interesting sermon, entitled _Sermon upon the venerable Sacrament of the holy true Body of Christ and of the Brotherhoods_, the latter half of which is devoted to a contrast between good brotherhoods and evil ones. Those brotherhoods are evil, says Luther, in which the religion of the brethren is expressed in hearing a Mass on one or two days of the year, while by guzzling and drinking continually at the meetings of the brotherhood, they contrive to serve the devil the greater part of their time. A true brotherhood spreads its table for its poorer members, it aids those who are sick or infirm, it provides marriage portions for worthy young members of the association. He ends with a comparison between the true brotherhood and the Church of Christ. Theodore Kolde remarks that a careful monograph on the brotherhoods of the end of the fifteenth century in the light of this sermon of Luther’s would afford great information about the popular religion of the period. Unfortunately, no one has yet attempted the task, but German archæologists are slowly preparing the way by printing, chiefly from MS. sources, accounts of the constitution and practices of many of these Kalands.

From all this it may be seen that there was in these last decades of the fifteenth and in the earlier of the sixteenth centuries the growth of what may be called a non-ecclesiastical piety, which was quietly determined to bring within the sphere of the laity very much that had been supposed to belong exclusively to the clergy. The _jus episcopale_ which Luther claimed for the civil authorities in his tract on the _Liberty of the Christian Man_, had, in part at least, been claimed and exercised in several of the German principalities and municipalities; the practice of Christian charity and its management were being taken out of the hands of the clergy and entrusted to the laity; and the brotherhoods were making it apparent that men could mark out their religious duties in a way deemed most suitable for themselves without asking any aid from the Church, further than to engage a priest whom they trusted to conduct divine service and say the Masses they had arranged for.

The appearance of numerous translations of the Scriptures into the vernacular, unauthorised by the officials of the mediæval Church, and jealously suspected by them, appears to confirm the growth and spread of this non-ecclesiastical piety. The relation of the Church of the Middle Ages, earlier and later, to vernacular translations of the Vulgate is a complex question. The Scriptures were always declared to be the supreme source and authority for all questions of doctrines and morals, and in the earlier stages of the Reformation controversy the supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures was not supposed to be one of the matters in dispute between the contending parties. This is evident when we remember that the _Augsburg __ Confession_, unlike the later confessions of the Reformed Churches, does not contain any article affirming the supreme authority of Scripture. That was not supposed to be a matter of debate. It was reserved for the Council of Trent, for the first time, to place _traditiones sine Scripto_ on the same level of authority with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Hence, many of the small books, issued from convent presses for the instruction of the people during the decades preceding the Reformation, frequently declare that the whole teaching of the Church is to be found within the books of the Holy Scriptures.

It is, of course, undoubted that the mediæval Church forbade over and over again the reading of the Scriptures in the Vulgate and especially in the vernacular, but it may be asserted that these prohibitions were almost always connected with attempts to suppress heretical or schismatic revolts.(97)

On the other hand, no official encouragement of the reading of the Scriptures in the vernacular by the people can be found during the whole of the Middle Ages, nor any official patronage of vernacular translations. The utmost that was done in the way of tolerating, it can scarcely be said of encouraging, a knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures was the issue of Psalters in the vernacular, of Service-Books, and, in the fifteenth century, of the _Plenaria_—little books which contained translations of some of the paragraphs of the Gospels and Epistles read in the Church service accompanied with legends and popular tales. Translations of the Scriptures were continually reprobated by Popes and primates for various reasons.(98) It is also unquestionable that a knowledge of the Scriptures in the vernacular, especially by uneducated men and women, was almost always deemed a sign of heretical tendency. “The third cause of heresy,” says an Austrian inquisitor, writing about the end of the thirteenth century, “is that they translate the Old and New Testaments into the vulgar tongue; and so they learn and teach. I have heard and seen a certain country clown who repeated the Book of Job word for word, and several who knew the New Testament perfectly.”(99) A survey of the evidence seems to lead to the conclusion that the rulers of the mediæval Church regarded a knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures with grave suspicion, but that they did not go the length of condemning entirely their possession by persons esteemed trustworthy, whether clergy, monks, nuns, or distinguished laymen.

Yet we have in the later Middle Ages, ever since Wiclif produced his English version, the gradual publication of the Scriptures in the vernaculars of Europe. This was specially so in Germany; and when the invention of printing had made the diffusion of literature easy, it is noteworthy that the earliest presses in Germany printed many more books for family and private devotion, many more _Plenaria_, and many more editions of the Bible than of the classics. Twenty-two editions of the Psalter in German appeared before 1509, and twenty-five of the Gospels and Epistles before 1518. No less than fourteen (some say seventeen) versions of the whole Bible were printed in High-German and three in Low-German during the last decades of the fifteenth and the earlier decades of the sixteenth century—all translations from the Vulgate. The first was issued by John Metzel in Strassburg in 1466. Then followed another Strassburg edition in 1470, two Augsburg editions in 1473, one in the Swiss dialect in 1474, two in Augsburg in 1477, one in Augsburg in 1480, one in Nürnberg in 1483, one in Strassburg in 1485, and editions in Augsburg in 1487, 1490, 1507, and 1518. A careful comparison of these printed vernacular Bibles proves that the earlier editions were independent productions; but as edition succeeded edition the text became gradually assimilated until there came into existence a German Vulgate, which was used indiscriminately by those who adhered to the mediæval Church and those who were dissenters from it. These German versions were largely, but by no means completely, displaced by Luther’s translation. The Anabaptists, for example, retained this German Vulgate long after the publication of Luther’s version, and these pre-Reformation German Bibles were to be found in use almost two hundred years after the Reformation.(100)

Whence sprang the demand for these vernacular versions of the Holy Scriptures? That the leaders of the mediæval Church viewed their existence with alarm is evident from the proclamation of the Primate of Germany, Berthold of Mainz, issued in 1486, ordering a censorship of books with special reference to vernacular translations of the Scriptures.(101) On the other hand, there is no evidence that these versions were either wholly or in great part the work of enemies of the mediæval Church. The mediæval _Brethren_, as they called themselves (Waldenses, Picards, Wiclifites, Hussites, etc., were names given to them very indiscriminately by the ecclesiastical authorities), had translations of the Scriptures both in the Romance and in the Teutonic languages as early as the close of the thirteenth century. The records of inquisitors and of councils prove it. But there is no evidence to connect any of these German versions, save, perhaps, one at Augsburg, and that issued by the Koburgers in Nürnberg, with these earlier translations. The growing spread of education in the fifteenth century, and, above all, the growth of a non-ecclesiastical piety which claimed to examine and to judge for itself, demanded and received these numerous versions of the Holy Scriptures in the vulgar tongue.(102) The “common man” had the word of God in his hands, could read, meditate, and judge for himself. The effect of the presence of these vernacular Scriptures is apt to be exaggerated.(103) The Humanist, Conrad Celtes, might threaten the priests that the Bible would soon be seen in every village tavern; but we know that in these days of early printing a complete Bible must have been too expensive to be purchased by a poor man. Still he could get the Gospels or the Epistles, or the Psalter; and there is evidence, apart from the number of editions, that the people were buying and were studying the Scriptures. Preachers were exhorted to give the meaning of the passages of Scripture read in Church to prevent the people being confused by the different ways in which the text was translated in the Bibles in their possession. Stories were told of peasants, like Hans Werner, who worsted their parish priests in arguments drawn from Scripture. The ecclesiastical authorities were undoubtedly anxious, and their anxiety was shared by many who desired a reformation in life and manners, but dreaded any revolutionary movement. It was right that the children should be fed with the Bread of Life, but Mother Church ought to keep the bread-knife in her hands lest the children cut their fingers. Some publishers of the translations inserted prefaces saying that the contents of the volumes should be understood in the way taught by the Church, as was done in the _Book of the Gospels_, published at Basel in 1514. But in spite of all a lay religion had come into being, and laymen were beginning to think for themselves in matters where ecclesiastics had hitherto been considered the sole judges.

§ 7. The “Brethren.”

There was another type of religious life and pious association which existed, and which seems in one form or other to have exercised a great influence among the better class of artisans, and more especially among the printers of Augsburg, Nürnberg, and Strassburg.

It is probable that this type of piety had at least three roots.

(_a_) We can trace as far back as the closing years of the thirteenth century, in many parts of Germany, the existence of nonconformists who, on the testimony of inquisitors, lived pious lives, acted righteously towards their neighbours, and believed in all the articles of the Christian faith, but repudiated the Roman Church and the clergy. Their persecutors gave them a high character. “The heretics are known by their walk and conversation: they live quietly and modestly; they have no pride in dress; their learned men are tailors and weavers; they do not heap up riches, but are content with what is necessary; they live chastely; they are temperate in eating and drinking; they never go to taverns, nor to public dances, nor to any such vanities; they refrain from all foul language, from backbiting, from thoughtless speech, from lying and from swearing.” The list of objections which they had to usages of the mediæval Church are those which would occur to any evangelical Protestant of this century. They professed a simple evangelical creed; they offered a passive resistance to the hierarchical and priestly pretensions of the clergy; they were careful to educate their children in schools which they supported; they had vernacular translations of the Scriptures, and committed large portions to memory; they conducted their religious service in the vernacular, and it was one of the accusations made against them that they alleged that the word of God was as profitable when read in the vernacular as when studied in Latin. It is also interesting to know that they were accused of visiting the leper-houses to pray with the inmates, and that in some towns they had schools for the leper children.(104) They called themselves the _Brethren_. The societies of the _Brethren_ had never died out. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were continually subject to local and somewhat spasmodic persecutions, when the ecclesiastical could secure the aid of the secular authorities to their schemes of repression, which was not always possible. They were strongly represented among the artisans in the great cities, and there are instances when the civic authorities gave them one of the churches of the towns for their services. The liability to intermittent persecution led to an organisation whereby the _Brethren_, who were for the time being living in peace, made arrangements to receive and support those who were able to escape from any district where the persecution raged. These societies were in correspondence with their brethren all over Europe, and were never so active as during the last decades of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth century.

(_b_) As early as the times of Meister Eckhart (d. 1327), of his disciples Tauler (d. 1361) and Suso (d 1366), of the mysterious “Friend of God in the Oberland” and his associates (among them the Strassburg merchant Rulman Merswin (d. 1382)), and of the Brussels curate John Ruysbroeck (d. 1381), the leaders of the mediæval Mystics had been accustomed to gather their followers together into praying circles; and the custom was perpetuated long after their departure. How these pious associations continued to exist in the half century before the Reformation, and what forms their organisation took, it seems impossible to say with any accuracy. The school system of the _Brethren __ of the Common Lot_, which always had an intimate connection with the _Gottesfreunde_, in all probability served to spread the praying circles which had come down from the earlier Mystics. It seems to have been a custom among these _Brethren of the Common Lot_ to invite their neighbours to meet in their schoolrooms or in a hall to listen to religious discourses. There they read and expounded the New Testament in the vernacular. They also read extracts from books written to convey popular religious instruction. They questioned their audience to find out how far their hearers understood their teaching, and endeavoured by question and answer to discover and solve religious difficulties. These schools and teachers had extended all over Germany by the close of the fifteenth century, and their effect in quickening and keeping alive personal religion must have been great.

(_c_) Then, altogether apart from the social and semi-political propaganda of the Hussites, there is evidence that ever since the circulation of the encyclic letter addressed by the Taborites in November 1431 to all Christians in all lands, and more especially since the foundation of the _Unitas Fratrum_ in 1452, there had been constant communication between Bohemia and the scattered bodies of evangelical dissenters throughout Germany. Probably historians have credited the Hussites with more than their due influence over their German sympathisers. The latter had arrived at the conclusion that tithes ought to be looked upon as free-will offerings, that the cup should be given to the laity, etc., long before the movements under the leadership of Wiclif and of Huss. But the knowledge that they had sympathisers and brethren beyond their own land must have been a source of strength to the German nonconformists.

Our knowledge of the times is still too obscure to warrant us in making very definite statements about the proportionate effect of these three religious sources of influence on the small communities of _Brethren_ or evangelical dissenters from the mediæval Church which maintained a precarious existence at the close of the Middle Ages. There is one curious fact, however, which shows that there must have been an intimate connection between the Waldenses of Savoy and France, the _Brethren_ of Germany, and the _Unitas Fratrum_ of Bohemia. They all used the same catechism for the instruction of their children in divine things. So far as can be ascertained, this small catechism was first printed in 1498, and editions can be traced down to 1530. It exists in French, Italian, German, and Bohemian. The inspiration drawn from the earlier Mystics and _Gottesfreunde_ is shown by the books circulated by the _Brethren_. They made great use of the newly discovered art of printing to spread abroad small mystical writings on personal religion, and translations of portions of the Holy Scriptures. They printed and circulated books which had been used in manuscript among the Mystics of the fourteenth century, such as the celebrated _Masterbook_, single sermons by Tauler, Prayers and Rules for holy living extracted from his writings, as well as short tracts taken from the later Mystics, like the _Explanation of the Ten Commandments_. It is also probable that some of the many translations of the whole or portions of the Bible which were in circulation in Germany before the days of Luther came from these praying circles. The celebrated firm of Nürnberg printers, the Koburgers, who published so many Bibles, were the German printers of the little catechism used by the _Brethren_; and, as has been said, the Anabaptists, who were the successors of these associations, did not use Luther’s version, but a much older one which had come down to them from their ancestors.

The members of these praying circles welcomed the Lutheran Reformation when it came, but they can scarcely be said to have belonged to it. Luther has confessed how much he owed to one of their publications, _Die deutsche Theologie_; and what helped him must have benefited others. The organisation of a Lutheran Church, based on civil divisions of the Empire, gave the signal for a thorough reorganisation of the members of these old associations who refused to have anything to do with a State Church. They formed the best side of the very mixed and very much misunderstood movement which later was called Anabaptism, and thus remained outside of the two great divisions into which the Church of the Reformation separated. This religious type existed and showed itself more especially among the artisans in the larger towns of Germany.

It must not be supposed that these four classes of religious sentiment which have been found existing during the later decades of the fifteenth and the early decades of the sixteenth centuries can always be clearly distinguished from each other. Religious types cannot be kept distinct, but continually blend with each other in the most unexpected way. Humanism and Anabaptism seem as far apart as they can possibly be; yet some of the most noted Anabaptist leaders were distinguished members of the Erasmus circle at Basel. Humanism and delicate clinging to the simple faith of childhood blended in the exquisite character of Melanchthon. Luther, _after_ his stern wrestle with self-righteousness in the convent at Erfurt, believed that, had his parents been dead, he could have delivered their souls from purgatory by his visits to the shrines of the saints at Rome. The boy Mecum (Myconius) retained only so much of his father’s teaching about the _free_ Grace of God that he believed an Indulgence from Tetzel would benefit him if he could obtain it without paying for it. There is everywhere and at all times a blending of separate types of religious faith, until a notable crisis brings men suddenly face to face with the necessity of a choice. Such a crisis occurred during the period we call the Reformation, with the result that the leaders in that great religious revival found that the truest theology after all was what had expressed itself in hymns and prayers, in revivalist sermons and in fireside teaching, and that they felt it to be their duty as theologians to give articulate dogmatic expression to what their fathers had been content to find inarticulately in the devotional rather than in the intellectual sphere of the mediæval religious life.

Such was the religious atmosphere into which Luther was born, and which he breathed from his earliest days. Every element seems to have shared in creating and shaping his religious history, and had similar effects doubtless on his most distinguished and sympathetic followers.