Part 21

For had not my own good, pure, pious mother doubts and scruples almost as bitter? Did not she also live too often as if under a curse? Who or what has thrown this shadow on so many homes? Who that knows the interior of many convents dares to say they are holier than homes? Who that has lived with, or confessed many monks or nuns, can dare to say their hearts are more heavenly than those of husband or wife, father or mother? Alas! the questions of that priest are nothing new to me. But I dare not entertain them. For if monastic life is a delusion, to what have I sacrificed hopes which were so absorbing, and might have been so pure?

Regrets are burdens a brave man must cast off. For my little life what does it matter? But to see vice shamefully reigning in the most sacred places, and scruples, perhaps false, staining the purest hearts, who can behold these things and not mourn? Crimes a pagan would have abhorred atoned for by a few florins; sins which the Holy Scriptures scarcely seem to condemn, weighing on tender consciences like crimes! What will be the end of this chaos?

* * * * *

The next night I spent in the castle of an old knight in the Thuringian Forest, Otto von Gersdorf. He welcomed me very hospitably to his table, at which a stately old lady presided, his widowed sister.

"What is all this talk about Dr. Luther and his theses?" he asked; "only, I suppose, some petty quarrel between the monks! And yet my nephew Ulrich thinks there is no one on earth like this little Brother Martin. You good Augustinians do not like the Black Friars to have all the profit; is that it?" he asked laughing.

"That is not Dr. Luther's motive, at all events," I said; "I do not believe money is more to him than it is to the birds of the air."

"No, brother," said the lady; "think of the beautiful words our Chriemhild read us from his book on the Lord's Prayer."

"Yes; you, and Ulrich, and Chriemhild, and Atlantis," rejoined the old knight, "you are all alike; the little friar has bewitched you all."

The names of my sisters made my heart beat.

"Does the lady know Chriemhild and Atlantis Cotta?" I asked.

"Come, nephew Ulrich," said the knight to a young man who just then entered the hall from the chase; "tell this good brother all you know of Frauelein Chriemhild Cotta."

We were soon the best friends and long after the old knight and his sister had retired, Ulrich von Gersdorf and I sat up discoursing about Dr. Luther and his noble words and deeds, and of names dearer to us both even than his.

"Then you are Fritz!" he said musingly after a a pause; "the Fritz they all delight to talk of, and think no one can ever be equal to. You are the Fritz that Chriemhild says her mother always hoped would have wedded that angel maiden Eva von Schoenberg, who is now a nun at Nimptschen; whose hymn-book "Theologia Teutsch" she carried with her to the convent. I wonder you could have left her to become a monk," he continued; "your vocation must have been very strong."

At that moment it certainly felt very weak. But I would not for the world have let him see this, and I said, with as steady a voice as I could command, "I believe it was God's will."

"Well," he continued, "it is good for any one to have seen her, and to carry that image of purity and piety with him into cloister or home. It is better than any painting of the saints, to have that angelic, child-like countenance, and that voice sweet as church music, in one's heart."

"It is," I said, and I could not have said a word more. Happily for me, he turned to another subject and expatiated for a long time on the beauty and goodness of his little Chriemhild, who was to be his wife, he said, next year; whilst through my heart only two thoughts remained distinct, namely, what my mother had wished about Eva and me, and that Eva had taken my "Theologia Teutsch" into the convent with her.

It took some days before I could remove that sweet, guileless, familiar face, to the saintly, unearthly height in my heart, where only it is safe for me to gaze on it.

But I believe Ulrich thought me a very sympathizing listener, for in about an hour he said,--

"You are a patient and good-natured monk, to listen thus to my romances. However, she is your sister, and I wish you would be at our wedding. But, at all events, it will be delightful to have news for Chriemhild and all of them about Fritz."

I had intended to go on to Wittemberg for a few days, but after that conversation I did not dare to do so at once. I returned to the university of Tuebingen, to quiet my mind a little with Greek and Hebrew, under the direction of the excellent Reuchlin, it being the will of our Vicar-General that I should study the languages.

At Tuebingen I found Dr. Luther's theses the great topic of debate. Men of learning rejoiced in the theses as an assault on barbarism and ignorance; men of straightforward integrity hailed them as a protest against a system of lies and imposture; men of piety gave thanks for them as a defence of holiness and truth. The students enthusiastically greeted Dr. Luther as the prince of the new age; the aged Reuchlin and many of the professors recognized him as an assailant of old foes from a new point of attack.

Here I attended for some weeks the lectures of the young doctor, Philip Melancthon (then only twenty one, yet already a doctor for four years), until he was summoned to Wittemberg, which he reached on the 25th of August, 1518.

On business of the order, I was deputed about the same time on a mission to the Augustinian convent at Wittemberg, so that I saw him arrive. The disappointment at his first appearance was great. Could this little unpretending-looking youth be the great scholar Reuchlin had recommended so warmly, and from whose abilities the Elector Frederick expected such great results for his new university?

Dr. Luther was among the first to discover the treasure hidden in this insignificant frame. But his first Latin harangue, four days after his arrival, won the admiration of all; and very soon his lecture-room was crowded.

This was the event which absorbed Wittemberg when first I saw it.

The return to my old home was very strange to me. Such a broad barrier of time and circumstance had grown up between me and those most familiar to me!

Else, matronly as she was, with her keys, her stores, her large household, and her two children, the baby Fritz and Gretchen, was in heart the very same to me as when we parted for my first term at Erfurt, her honest, kind blue eyes, had the very same look. But around her was a whole new world of strangers, strange to me as her own new life, with whom I had no links whatever.

With Chriemhild and the younger children, the recollection of me as the elder brother seemed struggling with their reverence for the priest. Christopher appeared to look on me with a mixture of pity, and respect, and perplexity, which prevented my having any intimate intercourse with him at all.

Only my mother seemed unchanged with regard to me, although much more aged and feeble. But in her affection there was a clinging tenderness which pierced my heart more than the bitterest reproaches. I felt by the silent watching of her eyes how she had missed me.

My father was little altered, except that his schemes appeared to give him a new and placid satisfaction, in the very impossibility of their fulfilment, and that the relations between him and my grandmother were much more friendly.

There was at first a little severity in our grandmother's manner to me, which wore off when we understood how much Dr. Luther's teaching had done for us both; and she never wearied of hearing what he had said and done at Rome.

The one who, I felt, would have been entirely the same, was gone for ever; and I could scarcely regret the absence which left that one image undimmed by the touch of time, and surrounded by no barriers of change.

But of Eva no one spoke to me, except little Thekla, who sang to me over and over the Latin hymns Eva had taught her, and asked if she sang them at all in the same way.

I told her yes. They were the same words, the same melodies, much of the same soft, reverent, innocent manner. But little Thekla's voice was deep and powerful, and clear like a thrush's; and Eva's used to be like the soft murmuring of a dove in the depth of some quiet wood--hardly a voice at all--an embodied prayer, as if you stood at the threshold of her heart, and heard the music of her happy, holy, child-like thoughts within.

No, nothing could ever break the echo of that voice to me.

But Thekla and I became great friends. She had scarcely known me of old. We became friends as we were. There was nothing to recall, nothing to efface. And Cousin Eva had been to her as a star or angel in heaven, or as if she had been another child sent by God out of some beautiful old legend to be her friend.

Altogether, there was some pain in this visit to my old home. I had prayed so earnestly that the blank my departure had made might be filled up; yet now that I saw it filled, and the life of my beloved running its busy course, with no place in it for me, it left a dreary feeling of exile on my heart. If the dead could thus return, would they feel anything of this? Not the holy dead, surely. They would rejoice that the sorrow, having wrought its work, should cease to be so bitter--that the blank should, not, indeed, be filled (no true love can replace another), but veiled and made fruitful, as time and nature veil all ruins.

But the holy dead would revisit earth from a home, a father's house; and that the cloister is not, nor can ever be.

Yet I would gladly have remained at Wittemberg. Compared with Wittemberg, all the world seemed asleep. There it was morning, and an atmosphere of hope and activity was around my heart. Dr. Luther was there; and, whether consciously or not, all who look for better days seem to fix their eyes on him.

But I was sent to Mainz. On my journey thither I went out of my way to take a new book of Dr. Luther's to my poor priest Ruprecht in Franconia. His village lay in the depths of a pine forest. The book was the Exposition of the Lord's Prayer in German, for lay and unlearned people. The priest's house was empty; but I laid the book on a wooden seat in the porch, with my name written in it, and a few words of gratitude for his hospitality. And as I wound my way through the forest, I saw from a height on the opposite side of the valley a woman enter the porch, and stoop to pick up the book, and then stand reading it in the door-way. As I turned away, her figure still stood motionless in the arch of the porch, with the white leaves of the open book relieved against the shadow of the interior.

I prayed that the words might be written on her heart. Wonderful words of holy love and grace I knew were there, which would restore hope and purity to any heart on which they were written.

And now I am placed in this Augustinian monastery at Mainz in the Rhineland.

This convent has its own peculiar traditions. Here is a dungeon in which, not forty years ago (in 1481), died John of Wesel--the old man who had dared to protest against indulgences, and to utter such truths as Dr. Luther is upholding now.

An aged monk of this monastery, who was young when John of Wesel died, remembers him, and has often spoken to me about him. The inquisitors instituted a process against him, which was earned on, like so many others, in the secret of the cloister.

It was said that he made a general recantation, but that two accusations which were brought against him he did not attempt in his defence to deny. They were these: "That it is not his monastic life which saves any monk, but the grace of God;" and "That the same Holy Spirit who inspired the Holy Scriptures alone can interpret them with power to the heart."

The inquisitors burned his books; at which, my informant said, the old man wept.

"Why," he said, "should men be so inflamed against him? There was so much in his books that was good, and must they be all burned for the little evil that was mixed with the good? Surely this was man's judgment, not God's--not His who would have spared Sodom at Abraham's prayer, for but ten righteous, had they been found there. O God," he sighed, "must the good perish with the evil?"

But the inquisitors were not to be moved. The books were condemned and ignominiously burned in public; the old man's name was branded with heresy; and he himself was silenced, and left in the convent prison to die.

I asked the monk who told me of this, what were the especial heresies for which John of Wesel was condemned.

"Heresies against the Church, I believe," he replied. "I have heard him in his sermons declare that the Church was becoming like what the Jewish nation was in the days of our Lord. He protested against the secular splendours of the priests and prelates--against the cold ceremonial into which he said the services had sunk, and the empty superstitions which were substituted for true piety of heart and life. He said that the salt had lost its savour; that many of the priests were thieves and robbers, and not shepherds; that the religion in fashion was little better than that of the Pharisees who put our Lord to death--a cloak for spiritual pride, and narrow, selfish bitterness. He declared that divine and ecclesiastical authority were of very different weight; that the outward professing Church was to be distinguished from the true living Church of Christ; that the power of absolution given to the priest was sacramental, and not judicial. In a sermon at Worms, I once heard him say he thought little of the Pope, the Church, or the Councils, as a foundation to build our faith upon. 'Christ alone,' he declared, 'I praise. May the word of Christ dwell in us richly!'"

"They were bold words," I remarked.

"More than that," replied the aged monk; "John of Wesel protested that what the Bible did not hold as sin, neither could he; and he is even reported to have said, 'Eat on fast days, if thou art hungry.'"

"That is a concession many of the monks scarcely need," I observed. "His life, then, was not condemned, but only his doctrine."

"I was sorry," the old monk resumed, "that it was necessary to condemn him; for from that time to this, I never have heard preaching that stirred the heart like his. When he ascended the pulpit, the church was thronged. The laity understood and listened to him as eagerly as the religious. It was a pity he was a heretic, for I do not ever expect to hear his like again."

"You have never heard Dr. Luther preach?" I said.

"Doctor Luther who wrote those theses they are talking so much of?" he asked. "Do the people throng to hear his sermons, and hang on his words as if they were words of life?"

"They do," I replied.

"Then," rejoined the old monk softly, "let Dr. Luther take care. That was the way with so many of the heretical preachers. With John of Goch at Mechlin, and John Wesel whom they expelled from Paris, I have heard it was just the same. But," he continued, "if Dr. Luther comes to Mainz, I will certainly try to hear him. I should like to have my cold, dry, old heart moved like that again. Often when I read the holy Gospels John of Wesel's words come back. Brother, it was like the breath of life."

The last man that ventured to say in the face of Germany that man's word is not to be placed on an equality with God's, and that the Bible is the only standard of truth, and the one rule of right and wrong--this is how he died!

How will it be with the next--with the man that is proclaiming this in the face of the world now?

The old monk turned back to me, after we had separated, and said, in a low voice--

"Tell Dr. Luther to take warning by John of Wesel. Holy men and great preachers may so easily become heretics without knowing it. And yet," he added, "to preach such sermons as John of Wesel, I am not sure it is not worth while to die in prison. I think I could be content to die, if I could _hear_ one such again! Tell Dr. Luther to take care; but nevertheless, if he comes to Mainz I will hear him."

The good, then, in John of Wesel's words, has not perished, in spite of the flames.

XVI.

Else's Story.

WITTEMBERG, _July_ 13, 1520.

Many events have happened since last I wrote, both in this little world and in the large world outside.

Our Gretchen has two little brothers, who are as ingenious in destruction, and seem to have as many designs against their own welfare, as their uncles had at their age, and seem likely to perplex Gretchen, dearly as she loves them, much as Christopher and Pollux did me. Chriemhild is married, and has gone to her home in the Thuringian Forest. Atlantis is betrothed to Conrad Winkelried, a Swiss student. Pollux is gone to Spain, on some mercantile affairs of the Eisenach house of Cotta, in which he is a partner; and Fritz has been among us once more. That is now about two years since. He was certainly much graver than of old. Indeed he often looked more than grave, as if some weight of sorrow rested on him. But with our mother and the children he was always cheerful.

Gretchen and Uncle Fritz formed the strongest mutual attachment, and to this day she often asks me when he will come back; and nothing delights her more than to sit on my knee before his picture, and hear me tell over and over again the stories of our old talks in the lumber-room at Eisenach, or of the long days we used to spend in the pine forests, gathering wood for the winter fires. She thinks no festival could be so delightful as that; and her favourite amusement is to gather little bundles of willow or oak twigs, by the river Elbe, or on the Dueben Heath, and bring them home for household use. All the splendid puppets and toys her father brings her from Nueremberg, or has sent from Venice, do not give her half the pleasure that she finds in the heath, when he takes her there, and she returns with her little apron full of dry sticks, and her hands as brown and dirty as a little wood-cutter's, fancying she is doing what Uncle Fritz and I did when we were children, and being useful.

Last summer she was endowed with a special apple and pear tree of her own, and the fruit of these she stores with her little fagots to give at Christmas to a poor old woman we know.

Gottfried and I want the children to learn early that pure joy of giving, and of doing kindnesses, which transmutes wealth from dust into true gold, and prevents these possessions which are such good servants from becoming our masters, and reducing us, as they seem to do so many wealthy people, into the mere slaves and hired guardians of _things_.

I pray God often that the experience of poverty which I had for so many years may never be lost. It seems to me a gift God has given me, just as a course at the university is a gift. I have graduated in the school of poverty, and God grant I may never forget the secrets poverty taught me about the struggles and wants of the poor.

The room in which I write now, with its carpets, pictures, and carved furniture, is very different from the dear bare old lumber-room where I began my Chronicle; and the inlaid ebony and ivory cabinet on which my paper lies is a different desk from the piles of old books where I used to trace the first pages slowly in a childish hand. But the poor man's luxuries will always be the most precious to me. The warm sunbeams, shining through the translucent vine-leaves at the open window, are fairer than all the jewel-like Venetian glass of the closed casements which are now dying crimson the pages of Dr. Luther's Commentary, left open on the window-seat an hour since by Gottfried.

But how can I be writing so much about my own tiny world, when all the world around me is agitated by such great fears and hopes?

At this moment, through the open window, I see Dr. Luther and Dr. Philip Melancthon walking slowly up the street in close conversation. The hum of their voices reaches me here, although they are talking low. How different they look, and are; and yet what friends they have become! Probably, in a great degree, because of the difference. The one looks like a veteran soldier, with his rock-like brow, his dark eyes, his vigorous form, and his firm step; the other, with his high, expanded forehead, his thin worn face, and his slight youthful frame, like a combination of a young student and an old philosopher.

Gottfried says God has given them to each other and to Germany, blessing the Church as he does the world by the union of opposites, rain and sunshine, heat and cold, sea and land, husband and wife.

How those two great men (for Gottfried says Dr. Melancthon is great, and I know that Dr. Luther is) love and reverence each other! Dr. Luther says he is but the forerunner, and Melancthon the true prophet; that he is but the wood-cutter clearing the forest with rough blows, that Dr. Philip may sow the precious seed; and when he went to encounter the legate at Augsburg, he wrote, that if Philip lived it mattered little what became of him.

But _we_ do not think so, nor does Dr. Melancthon. "No one," he says, "comes near Dr. Luther, and indeed the heart of the whole nation hangs on him. Who stirs the heart of Germany--of nobles, peasants, princes, women, children--as he does with his noble, faithful words?"

Twice during these last years we have been in the greatest anxiety about his safety,--once when he was summoned before the legate at Augsburg, and once when he went to the great disputation with Dr. Eck at Leipsic.

But how great the difference between his purpose when he went to Augsburg, and when he returned from Leipsic!

At Augsburg he would have conceded anything, but the truth about the free justification of every sinner who believes in Christ. He reverenced the Pope; he would not for the world become a heretic! No name of opprobrium was so terrible to him as that.

At Leipsic he had learned to disbelieve that the Pope had any authority to determine doctrine, and he boldly confessed that the Hussites (men till now abhorred in Saxony as natural enemies as well as deadly heretics) ought to be honoured for confessing sound truth. And from that time both Dr. Luther and Melancthon have stood forth openly as the champions of the Word of God against the Papacy.

Now, however, a worse danger threatens him, even the bull of excommunication which they say is now being forged at Rome, and which has never yet failed to crush where it has fallen. Dr. Luther has, indeed, taught us not to dread it as a spiritual weapon, but we fear its temporal effects, especially if followed by the ban of the empire.

Often, indeed, he talks of taking refuge in some other land; the good Elector, even himself, has at times advised it, fearing no longer to be able to protect him. But God preserve him to Germany!

_June_ 23, 1520.

This evening, as we were sitting in my father's house, Christopher brought us, damp from the press, a copy of Dr. Luther's Appeal to His Imperial Majesty, and to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, on the Reformation of Christendom. Presenting it to our grandmother, he said,--

"Here, madam, is a weapon worthy of the bravest days of the Schoenbergs, mighty to the pulling down of strongholds."

"Ah," sighed our mother, "always wars and fightings! It is a pity the good work cannot be done more quietly."

"Ah, grandmother," said my father, "only see how her burgher life has destroyed the heroic spirit of her crusading ancestors. She thinks that the Holy Places are to be won back from the infidels without a blow, only by begging their pardon and kissing the hem of their garments."

"You should hear Catherine Krapp, Dr. Melancthon's wife!" rejoined our mother; "she agrees with me that these are terrible times. She says she never sees the doctor go away without thinking he may be immured in some dreadful dungeon before they meet again."