Part 18

Our house has become rather a gathering place of late; partly, I think, on account of my father's blindness, which always insures that there will be some one at home.

It seems that Dr. Luther attacks the old methods of teaching in the universities, which makes the older professors look on him as a dangerous innovator, while the young delight in him as a hero fighting their battles. And yet the authorities Dr. Luther wishes to re-instate are older than those he attacks. He demands that nothing shall be received as the standard of theological truth except the Holy Scriptures. I cannot understand why there should be so much conflict about this, because I thought all we believed was founded on the Holy Scriptures. I suppose it is not; but if not, on whose authority? I must ask Gottfried this one day when we are alone.

The discussion to-day was between Dr. Andrew Bodenstein, Archdeacon of Wittemberg, Dr. Luther, and Dr. Jodocus of Eisenach, called Trutvetter, his old teacher. Dr. Carlstadt himself, they said, seemed quite convinced; and Dr. Jodocus is silenced and is going back to Erfurt.

The enthusiasm of the students is great. The great point of Dr. Luther's attack seems to be Aristotle, who was a heathen Greek. I cannot think why these Church doctors should be so eager to defend him; but Herr Reichenbach says all the teaching of the schools and all the doctrine of indulgences are in some way founded on this Aristotle, and that Dr. Luther wants to clear away everything which stands as a screen between the students and the Bible.

Ulrich von Gersdorf said that our doctor debates like his uncle, Franz von Sickingen, fights. He stands like a rock on some point he feels firm on; and then, when his opponents are weary of trying to move him, he rushes suddenly down on them, and sweeps them away like a torrent.

"But his great secret seems to be," remarked Christopher, "that he believes every word he says. He speaks, like other men work, as if every stroke were to tell."

And Gottfried said, quietly, "He is fighting the battle of God with the scribes and Pharisees of our days; and whether he triumph or perish, the battle will be won. It is a battle, not merely against falsehood, but for truth, to keep a position he has won."

"When I hear him," said Ulrich, "I wish my student days over, and long to be in the old castle in the Thuringian Forest, to give everything good there a new impulse. He makes me feel the way to fight the world's great battles is for each to conquer the enemies of God in his own heart and home. He speaks of Aristotle and Augustine; but he makes me think of the sloth and tyranny in the castle, and the misery and oppression in the peasant's hut, which are to me what Aristotle and the schoolmen are to him."

"And I," said Christopher, "when he speaks, think of our printing press, until my daily toil there seems the highest work I could do; and to be a printer, and wing such words as his through the world, the noblest thing on earth."

"But his lectures fight the good fight even more than his disputations," remarked Gottfried. "In these debates he clears the world of the foe; but in his explanations of the Psalms and the Romans, he carries the battle within, and clears the heart of the lies which kept it back from God. In his attacks on Aristotle, he leads you to the Bible as the one source of truth; in his discourses on justification by faith he leads you to God as the one source of holiness and joy."

"They say poor Dr. Jodocus is quite ill with vexation at his defeat," said Christopher; "and that there are many bitter things said against Dr. Luther at Erfurt."

"What does that matter," rejoined Ulrich, "since Wittemberg is becoming every month more thronged with students from all parts of Germany, and the Augustinian cloister is already full of young monks, sent hither from various convents, to study under Dr. Luther? The youth and vigour of the nation are with us. Let the dead bury their dead."

"Ah, children," murmured the grandmother, looking up from her knitting, "that is a funeral procession that lasts long. The young always speak of the old as if they had been born old. Do you think our hearts never throbbed high with hope, and that we never fought with dragons? Yet the old serpent is not killed yet. Nor will he be dead when we are dead, and you are old, and your grandchildren take their place in the old fight, and think they are fighting the first battle the world has seen, and vanquishing the last enemy."

"Perhaps not," said Gottfried; "but the last enemy will be overcome at last, and who knows how soon?"

WITTEMBERG, _October_, 1513.

It is a strong bond of union between Herr Reichenbach and me, our reverence and love for Dr. Luther.

He is lecturing now on the Romans and the Psalms, and as I sit at my spinning-wheel, or sew, Gottfried often reads to me notes from these lectures, or tells me what they have been about. This is a comfort to me also, because he has many thoughts and doubts which, were it not for his friendship with Dr. Luther, would make me tremble for him. They are so new and strange to me; and as it is I never venture to speak of them to my mother.

He thinks there is great need of reformations and changes in the Church. He even thinks Christopher not far from right in his dislike of many of the priests and monks, who, he says, lead lives which are a disgrace to Christendom.

But his chief detestation is the sale of indulgences, now preached in many of the towns of Saxony by Dr. Tetzel. He says it is a shameless traffic in lies, and that most men of intelligence and standing in the great cities think so. And he tells me that a very good man, a professor of theology--Dr. John Wesel,--preached openly against them about fifty years ago at the University of Erfurt, and afterwards at Worms and Mainz; and that John of Goch and other holy men were most earnest in denouncing them.

And when I asked if the Pope did not sanction them, he said that to understand what the Pope is one needs to go to Rome. He went there in his youth, not on pilgrimage, but on mercantile business, and he told me that the wickedness he saw there, especially in the family of the reigning Pope, the Borgia, for many years made him hate the very name of religion. Indeed, he said it was principally through Dr. Luther that he had begun again to feel there could be a religion, which, instead of being a cloak for sin, should be an incentive to holiness.

He says also that I have been quite mistaken about "Reineke Fuchs;" that it is no vulgar jest-book, mocking at really sacred things, but a bitter, earnest satire against the hypocrisy which practices all kinds of sin in the name of sacred things.

He doubts even if the Calixtines and Hussites are as bad as they have been represented to be. It alarms me sometimes to hear him say these things. His world is so much larger than mine, it is difficult for my thoughts to follow him into it. If the world is so bad, and there is so much hypocrisy in the holiest places, perhaps I have been hard on poor Christopher after all.

But if Fritz has found it so, how unhappy it must make him!

Can really religious people like Fritz and Eva do nothing better for the world, but leave it to grow more and more corrupt and unbelieving, while they sit apart to weave their robes of sanctity in convents. It does seem time for something to be done. I wonder who will do it?

I thought it might be the Pope; but Gottfried shakes his head, and says, "No good thing can begin at Rome."

"Or the prelates?" I asked one day.

"They are too intent," he said, "on making their courts as magnificent as those of the princes, to be able to interfere with the abuses by which their revenues are maintained."

"Or the princes?"

"The friendship of the prelates is too important to them, for them to interfere in spiritual matters."

"Or the emperor?"

"The emperor," he said, "has enough to do to hold his own against the princes, the prelates, and the pope."

"Or the knights?"

"The knights are at war with the all world," he replied; "to say nothing of their ceaseless private feuds with each other. With the peasants rising on one side in wild insurrection, the great nobles contending against their privileges on the other, and the great burgher families throwing their barbarous splendour into the shade as much as the city palaces do their bare robber castles, the knights and petty nobles have little but bitter words to spare for the abuses of the clergy. Besides, most of them have relations whom they hope to provide for with some good abbey."

"Then the peasants!" I suggested. "Did not the gospel first take root among peasants?"

"_Inspired_ peasants and fishermen!" he replied, thoughtfully. "Peasants who had walked up and down the land three years in the presence of the Master. But who is to teach our peasants now? They cannot read!"

"Then it must be the burghers," I said.

"Each may be prejudiced in favour of his order," he replied, with a smile; "but I do think if better days dawn, it will be through the cities. There the new learning takes root; there the rich have society and cultivation, and the poor have teachers; and men's minds are brightened by contact and debate, and there is leisure to think and freedom to speak. If a reformation of abuses were to begin, I think the burghers would promote it most of all."

"But who is to begin it?" I asked. "Has no one ever tried?"

"Many have tried," he replied sadly; "and many have perished in trying. While they were assailing one abuse, others were increasing. Or while they endeavoured to heal some open wound, some one arose and declared that it was impossible to separate the disease from the whole frame, and that they were attempting the life of our Holy Mother the Church."

"Who, then, will venture to begin?" I said. "Can it be Dr. Luther? He is bold enough to venture anything; and since he has done so much good to Fritz, and to you, and to me, why not to the whole Church?"

"Dr. Luther is faithful enough, and bold enough for anything his conscience calls him to," said Gottfried, "but he is occupied with saving men's souls, not with reforming ecclesiastical abuses."

"But if the ecclesiastical abuses came to interfere with the salvation of men's souls," I suggested, "what would Dr. Luther do then?"

"We should see, Else," said Gottfried. "If the wolves attacked one of Dr. Luther's sheep, I do not think he would care with what weapon he rescued it, or at what risk."

XIII.

Eva's Story.

NIMPTSCHEN, 1517.

Great changes have taken place during these last three years in Aunt Cotta's home. Else has been married more than two years, and sends me wonderful narratives of the beauty and wisdom of her little Margarethe, who begins now to lisp the names of mother, and father, and aunts. Else has also taught the little creature to kiss her hand to a picture they have of me, and call it Cousin Eva. They will not adopt my convent name.

Chriemhild also is betrothed to the young knight, Ulrich von Gersdorf, who has a castle in the Thuringian Forest; and she writes that they often speak of Sister Ave, and that he keeps the dried violets still, with a lock of his mother's hair and a relic of his patron saint. Chriemhild says I should scarcely know him again, he is become so earnest and so wise, and so full of good purposes.

And little Thekla writes that she also understands something of Latin. Else's husband has taught her; and there is nothing Else and Gottfried Reichenbach like so much as to hear her sing the hymns Cousin Eva used to sing.

They seem to think of me as a kind of angel sister, who was early taken to God, and will never grow old. It is very sweet to be remembered thus; but sometimes it seems as if it were hardly me they were remembering or loving, but what I was or might have been.

Would they recognize Cousin Eva in the grave, quiet woman of twenty-two I have become? For whilst in the old home Time seems to mark his course like a stream by growth and life, here in the convent he seems to mark it only by the slow falling of the shadow on the silent dial--the shadow of death. In the convent there is no growth but growing old.

In Aunt Cotta's home the year expanded from winter into spring, and summer, and autumn--seed-time and harvest--the season of flowers and the season of fruits. The seasons grew into each other, we knew not how or when. In the convent the year is sharply divided into December, January, February, March, and April, with nothing to distinguish one month from another but their names and dates.

In our old home the day brightened from dawn to noon, and then mellowed into sunset, and softly faded into night. Here in the convent the day is separated into hours by the clock.

Sister Beatrice's poor faded face is slowly becoming a little more faded; Aunt Agnes's a little more worn and sharp; and I, like the rest, am six years older than I was six years ago, when I came here; and that is all.

It is true, fresh novices have arrived, and have taken the irrevocable vows, and fair young faces are around me; but my heart aches sometimes when I look at them, and think that they, like the rest of us, have closed the door on life, with all its changes, and have entered on that monotonous pathway to the grave whose stages are simply growing old.

Some of these novices come full of high aspirations for a religious life. They have been told about the heavenly Spouse, who will fill their consecrated hearts with pure, unutterable joys, the world can never know.

Many come as sacrifices to family poverty or family pride, because their noble parents are too poor to maintain them suitably, or in order that their fortunes may swell the dower of some married sister.

I know what disappointment is before them when they learn that the convent is but a poor, childish mimicry of the world, with its petty ambitions and rivalries, but without the life and the love. I know the noblest will suffer most, and may, perhaps, fall the lowest.

To narrow, apathetic natures, the icy routine of habit will more easily replace the varied flow of life. They will fit into their harness sooner, and become as much interested in the gossip of the house or the order, the election of superiors, or the scandal of some neighbouring nunnery, as they would have become in the gossip of the town or village they would have lived in, in the world.

But warm hearts and high spirits--these will chafe and struggle, and dream they have reached depths of self-abasement, or soared to heights of mystical devotion, and then awake, with bitter self-reproaches, to find themselves too weak to cope with some small temptation, like Aunt Agnes.

These I will help all I can. But I have learned, since I came to Nimptschen, that it is a terrible and perilous thing to take the work of the training of our souls out of God's hands into our own. The pruning-knife in his hands must sometimes wound and seem to impoverish; but in ours it cuts, and wounds, and impoverishes, and does _not_ prune. We can, indeed, inflict pain on ourselves; but God alone can make pain healing, or suffering discipline.

I can only pray that, however mistaken many may be in immuring themselves here, Thou who art the Good Physician wilt take us, with all our useless self-inflicted wounds, and all our wasted, self-stunted faculties, and as we are and as thou art, still train us for thyself.

The infirmary is what interests me most. Having secluded ourselves from all the joys and sorrows and vicissitudes of common life, we seem scarcely to have left anything in God's hands, wherewith to try our faith and subdue our wills to his, except sickness. Bereavements we cannot know who have bereaved ourselves of all companionship with our beloved for evermore on earth. Nor can we know the trials either of poverty or of prosperity, since we can never experience either; but, having taken the vow of voluntary poverty on ourselves, whilst we can never call anything individually our own, we are freed from all anxieties by becoming members of a richly-endowed order.

Sickness only remains beyond our control; and, therefore, when I see any of the sisterhood laid on the bed of suffering, I think--

"_God has laid thee there!_" and I feel more sure that it is the right thing.

I still instruct the novices; but sometimes the dreary question comes to me--

"For _what_ am I instructing them?"

Life has no future for them--only a monotonous prolonging of the monotonous present.

I try to feel, "I am training them for eternity." But who can do that but God, who inhabiteth eternity, and sees the links which connect every moment of the little circles of time with the vast circumference of the everlasting future?

But I do my best. Catharine von Bora, a young girl of sixteen, who has lately entered the convent, interests me deeply. There is such strength in her character and such warmth in her heart. But alas! what scope is there for these here?

Aunt Agnes has not opened her heart in any way to me. True, when I was ill, she watched over me as tenderly as Aunt Cotta could; but when I recovered, she seemed to repel all demonstrations of gratitude and affection, and went on with that round of penances and disciplines, which make the nuns reverence her as so especially saintly.

Sometimes I look with longing to the smoke and lights in the village we can see among the trees from the upper windows of the convent. I know that each little wreath of smoke comes from the hearth of a home where there are father and mother and little children; and the smoke wreaths seem to me to rise like holy clouds of incense to God our Father in heaven.

But the alms given so liberally by the sisterhood are given at the convent-gate, so that we never form any closer connection with the poor around us than that of beggars and almoners; and I long to be their _friend_.

Sometimes I am afraid I acted in impatient self-will in leaving Aunt Cotta's home, and that I should have served God better by remaining there, and that, after all, my departure may have left some little blank it would not have been useless to fill. As the girls marry, Aunt Cotta might have found me a comfort, and, as "Cousin Eva," I might perhaps have been more of a help to Else's children than I can be to the nuns here as Sister Ave. But whatever might have been, it is impatience and rebellion to think of that now; and nothing can separate me from God and his love.

Somehow or other, however, even the "Theologia Germanica," and the high, disinterested communion with God it teaches, seemed sweeter to me, in the intervals of an interrupted and busy life, than as the business of this uninterrupted leisure. The hours of contemplation were more blessed for the very trials and occupations which seemed to hinder them.

Sometimes I feel as if my heart also were freezing, and becoming set and hard. I am afraid, indeed, it would, were it not for poor Sister Beatrice, who has had a paralytic stroke, and is now a constant inmate of the infirmary. She speaks at times very incoherently, and cannot think at any time connectedly. But I have found a book which interests her; it is the Latin Gospel of St. Luke, which I am allowed to take from the convent library and translate to her. The narratives are so brief and simple, she can comprehend them, and she never wearies of hearing them. The very familiarity endears them, and to me they are always new.

But it is very strange that there is nothing about penance or vows in it, or the adoration of the blessed Virgin. I suppose I shall find that in the other Gospels, or in the Epistles, which were written after our Lady's assumption into heaven. Sister Beatrice likes much to hear me sing the hymn by Bernard of Clugni, on the perpetuity of joy in heaven:[8]--

Here brief is the sighing, And brief is the crying, For brief is the life! The life there is endless, The joy there is endless, And ended the strife.

What joys are in heaven? To whom are they given? Ah! what? and to whom? The stars to the earth-born, "Best robes" to the sin-worn, The crown for the doom!

O country the fairest! Our country the dearest, We press towards thee! O Sion the golden! Our eyes are now holden, Thy light till we see:

Thy crystalline ocean, Unvexed by commotion, Thy fountain of life; Thy deep peace unspoken, Pure, sinless, unbroken,-- Thy peace beyond strife:

Thy meek saints all glorious, Thy martyrs victorious, Who suffer no more; Thy halls full of singing, Thy hymns ever ringing Along thy safe shore.

Like the lily for whiteness, Like the jewel for brightness, Thy vestments, O Bride! The Lamb ever with thee, The Bridegroom is with thee,-- With thee to abide!

We know not, we know not, All human words show not, The joys we may reach; The mansions preparing, The joys for our sharing, The welcome for each.

O Sion the golden! My eyes are still holden, Thy light till I see; And deep in thy glory, Unveiled then before me, My King, look on thee!

[Footnote 8:

Hic breve vivitur, hic breve plangitur, hic breve fletur, Non breve vivere, non breve plangere, retribuetur. O retributio! stat brevis actio, vita perennis, O retributio! coelica mansio stat lue plenis, etc. etc., etc.]

_April_, 1517.

The whole of the Augustinian Order in Saxony has been greatly moved by the visitation of Dr. Martin Luther. He has been appointed Deputy Vicar-General in the place of Dr. Staupitz, who has gone on a mission to the Netherlands, to collect relics for the Elector Frederic's new church at Wittemberg.

Last April Dr. Luther visited the Monastery of Grimma, not far from us; and through our Prioress, who is connected with the Prior of Grimma, we hear much about it.

He strongly recommends the study of the Scriptures and of St. Augustine, in preference to every other book, by the brethren and sisters of his Order. We have begun to follow his advice in our convent, and a new impulse seems given to everything. I have also seen two beautiful letters of Dr. Martin Luther's, written to two brethren of the Augustinian Order. Both were written in April last, and they have been read by many amongst us. The first was to Brother George Spenlein, a monk at Memmingen. It begins, "In the name of Jesus Christ." After speaking of some private pecuniary matters, he writes:--

"As to the rest, I desire to know how it goes with thy soul; whether, weary of its own righteousness, it learns to breathe and to trust in the righteousness of Christ. For in our age the temptation to presumption burns in many, and chiefly in those who are trying with all their might to be just and good. Ignorant of the righteousness of God, which in Christ is given to us richly and without price, they seek in themselves to do good works, so that at last they may have confidence to stand before God, adorned with merits and virtues,--which is impossible. Thou, when with us, wert of this opinion, and so was I; but now I contend against this error, although I have not yet conquered it.