Part 22

"But remember, dear mother," I said, "your fears when first Dr. Luther assailed Tetzel and his indulgences three years ago! And who has gained the victory there? Dr. Martin is the admiration of all good men throughout Germany; and poor Tetzel, despised by his own party, rebuked by the legate, died, they say, of a broken heart just after the great Leipsic disputation."

"Poor Tetzel!" said my father, "his indulgences could not bind up a broken heart. I shall always love Dr. Luther for writing him a letter of comfort when he was dying, despised and forsaken even by his own party. I trust that He who can pardon has had mercy on his soul."

"Read to us, Christopher," said our grandmother; "your mother would not shrink from any battle-field if there were wounds there which her hands could bind."

"No," said Gottfried, "the end of war is peace,--God's peace, based on His truth. Blessed are those who in the struggle never lose sight of the end."

Christopher read, not without interruption. Many things in the book were new and startling to most of us:--

"It is not rashly," Dr. Luther began, "that I, a man of the people, undertake to address your lord-ships. The wretchedness and oppression that now overwhelm all the states of Christendom, and Germany in particular, force from me a cry of distress. I am constrained to call for help; I must see whether God will not bestow his Spirit on some man belonging to our country, and stretch forth his hand to our unhappy nation."

Dr. Luther never seems to think _he_ is to do the great work. He speaks as if he were only fulfilling some plain humble duty, and calling other men to undertake the great achievement; and all the while that humble duty _is_ the great achievement, and he is doing it.

Dr. Luther spoke of the wretchedness of Italy, the unhappy land where the Pope's throne is set, her ruined monasteries, her decayed cities, her corrupted people; and then he showed how Roman avarice and pride were seeking to reduce Germany to a state as enslaved. He appealed to the young emperor, Charles, soon about to be crowned. He reminded all the rulers of their responsibilities. He declared that the papal territory, called the patrimony of St. Peter, was the fruit of robbery. Generously holding out his hand to the very outcasts his enemies had sought to insult him most grievously by comparing him with, he said,--

"It is time that we were considering the cause of the Bohemians, and re-uniting ourselves to them."

At these words my grandmother dropped her work, and fervently clasping her hands, leant forward, and fixing her eyes on Christopher, drank in every word with intense eagerness.

When he came to the denunciation of the begging friars, and the recommendation that the parish priests should marry, Christopher interrupted himself by an enthusiastic "vivat."

When, however, after a vivid picture of the oppressions and avarice of the legates, came the solemn abjuration:--

"Hearest thou this, O Pope, not most holy, but most sinful? May God from the heights of his heaven soon hurl thy throne into the abyss!" my mother turned pale, and crossed herself.

What impressed me most was the plain declaration:--

"It has been alleged that the Pope, the bishops, the priests, and the monks and nuns form the estate spiritual or ecclesiastical; while the princes, nobles, burgesses, and peasantry form the secular estate or laity. Let no man, however, be alarmed at this. _All Christians constitute the spiritual estate: and the only difference among them is that of the functions which they discharge._ We have all one baptism, one faith, and it is this which constitutes the spiritual man."

If this is indeed true, how many of my old difficulties it removes with a stroke! All callings, then, may be religious callings; all men and women of a religious order. Then my mother is truly and undoubtedly as much treading the way appointed her as Aunt Agnes; and the monastic life is only one among callings equally sacred.

When I said this to my mother, she said, "I as religious a woman as Aunt Agnes! No, Else! whatever Dr. Luther ventures to declare, he would not say that. I do sometimes have a hope that for His dear Son's sake God hears even my poor feeble prayers; but to pray night and day, and abandon all for God, like my sister Agnes, that is another thing altogether."

But when, as we crossed the street to our home, I told Gottfried how much those words of Dr. Luther had touched me, and asked if he really thought we in our secular calling were not only doing our work by a kind of indirect permission, but by a direct vocation from God, he replied,--

"My doubt, Else, is whether the vocation which leads men to abandon home is from God at all; whether it has either his command or even his permission."

But if Gottfried is right, Fritz has sacrificed his life to a delusion. How can I believe that? And yet if he could perceive it, how life might change for him! Might he not even yet be restored to us? But I am dreaming.

_October_ 25, 1520.

More and more burning words from Dr. Luther. To-day we have been reading his new book on the Babylonish Captivity. "God has said," he writes in this, "'Whosoever shall believe and be baptized shall be saved.' On this promise, if we receive it with faith, hangs our whole salvation. If we believe, our heart is fortified by the divine promise; and although all should forsake the believer, this promise which he believes will never forsake him. With it he will resist the adversary who rushes upon his soul, and will have wherewithal to answer pitiless death, and even the judgment of God." And he says in another place, "The vow made at our baptism is sufficient of itself, and comprehends more than we can ever accomplish. Hence all other vows may be abolished. Whoever enters the priesthood or any religious order, let him well understand that the works of a monk or of a priest, however difficult they may be, differ in no respect in the sight of God from those of a countryman who tills the ground, or of a woman who conducts a household. God values all things by the standard of faith. And it often happens that the simple labour of a male or female servant is more agreeable to God than the fasts and the works of a monk, because in these faith is wanting."

What a consecration this thought gives to my commonest duties! Yes, when I am directing the maids in their work, or sharing Gottfried's cares, or simply trying to brighten his home at the end of the busy day, or lulling my children to sleep, can I indeed be serving God as much as Dr. Luther at the altar or in his lecture-room? I also, then, have indeed my vocation direct from God.

How could I ever have thought the mere publication of a book would have been an event to stir our hearts like the arrival of a friend! Yet it is even thus with every one of those pamphlets of Dr. Luther's. They move the whole of our two households, from our grandmother to Thekla, and even the little maid, to whom I read portions. She says, with tears, "If the mother and father could hear this in the forest!" Students and burghers have not patience to wait till they reach home, but read the heart-stirring pages as they walk through the streets. And often an audience collects around some communicative reader, who cannot be content with keeping the free, liberating truths to himself.

Already, Christopher says, four thousand copies of the "Appeal to the Nobility" are circulating through Germany.

I always thought before of books as the peculiar property of the learned. But Dr. Luther's books are a living voice,--a heart God has awakened and taught, speaking to countless hearts as a man talketh with his friend. I can indeed see now, with my father and Christopher, that the printing press is a nobler weapon than even the spears and broadswords of our knightly Bohemian ancestors.

WITTEMBERG, _December_ 10, 1520.

Dr. Luther has taken a great step to-day. He has publicly burned the Decretals, with other ancient writings, on which the claims of the court of Rome are founded, but which are now declared to be forgeries; and more than this, he has burnt the Pope's bull of excommunication against himself.

Gottfried says that for centuries such a bonfire as this has not been seen. He thinks it means nothing less than an open and deliberate renunciation of the papal tyranny which for so many hundred years has held the whole of western Christendom in bondage. He took our two boys to see it, that we may remind them of it in after years as the first great public act of freedom.

Early in the morning the town was astir. Many of the burghers, professors, and students knew what was about to be done; for this was no deed of impetuous haste or angry vehemence.

I dressed the children early, and we went to my father's house.

Wittemberg is as full now of people of various languages as the tower of Babel must have been after the confusion of tongues. But never was this more manifest than to-day.

Flemish monks from the Augustine cloisters at Antwerp; Dutch students from Finland; Swiss youths, with their erect forms and free mountain gait; knights from Prussia and Lithuania; strangers even from quite foreign lands,--all attracted hither by Dr. Luther's living words of truth, passed under our windows about nine o'clock this morning, in the direction of the Elster gate, eagerly gesticulating and talking as they went. Then Thekla, Atlantis, and I mounted to an upper room, and watched the smoke rising from the pile, until the glare of the conflagration burst through it, and stained with a faint red the pure daylight.

Soon afterwards the crowds began to return: but there seemed to me to be a gravity and solemnity in the manner of most, different from the eager haste with which they had gone forth.

"They seem like men returning from some great Church festival," I said.

"Or from lighting a signal-fire on the mountains, which shall awaken the whole land to freedom," said Christopher, as they rejoined us.

"Or from binding themselves with a solemn oath to liberate their homes, like the Three Men at Gruetly," said Conrad Winkelried, the young Swiss to whom Atlantis is betrothed.

"Yes," said Gottfried, "fires which may be the beacons of a world's deliverance, and may kindle the death-piles of those who dared to light them, are no mere students' bravado."

"Who did the deed, and what was burned?" I asked.

"One of the masters of arts lighted the pile," my husband replied, "and then threw on it the Decretals, the false Epistles of St. Clement, and other forgeries, which have propped up the edifice of lies for centuries. And when the flames which consumed them had done their work and died away, Dr. Luther himself, stepping forward, solemnly laid the Pope's bull of excommunication on the fire, saying amidst the breathless silence, 'As thou hast troubled the Lord's saints, may the eternal fire destroy thee.' Not a word broke the silence until the last crackle and gleam of those symbolical flames had ceased, and then gravely but joyfully we all returned to our homes."

"Children," said our grandmother, "you have done well; yet you are not the first that have defied Rome."

"Nor perhaps the last she will silence," said my husband. "But the last enemy will be destroyed at last; and meantime every martyr is a victor."

XVII.

Eva's Story.

I have read the whole of the New Testament through to Sister Beatrice and Aunt Agnes. Strangely different auditors they were in powers of mind and in experience of life; yet both met, like so many in His days on earth, at the feet of Jesus.

"He would not have despised me, even me," Sister Beatrice would say. "Poor, fond creature, half-witted or half-crazed they call me; but He would have welcomed me."

"_Does_ He not welcome you?" I said.

"You think so? Yes, I think--I am sure he does. My poor broken bits and remnants of sense and love, He will not despise them. He will take me as I am."

One day when I had been reading to them the chapter in St. Luke with the parables of the lost money, the lost sheep, and the prodigal, Aunt Agnes, resting her cheek on her thin hand, and fixing her large dark eyes on me, listened with intense expectation to the end; and then she said,--

"Is that all, my child? Begin the next chapter."

I began about the rich man and the unjust steward; but before I had read many words,--

"That will do," she said in a disappointed tone.

"It is another subject. Then not one of the Pharisees came after all! If I had been there among the hard, proud Pharisees--as I might have been when he began, wondering, no doubt, that he could so forget himself as to eat with publicans and sinners--if I had been there, and had heard him speak thus, Eva, I must have fallen at his feet and said, 'Lord, I am a Pharisee no more--I am the lost sheep, not one of the ninety and nine--the wandering child, not the elder brother. Place me low, low among the publicans and sinners--lower than any; but only say thou camest also to seek me, even _me_.' And, child, he would not have sent me away! But, Eva," she added, after a pause, wiping away the tears which ran slowly over her withered cheeks, "is it not said anywhere that one Pharisee came to him."

I looked, and could find it nowhere stated positively that one Pharisee had abandoned his pride, and self-righteousness, and treasures of good works, for Jesus. It seemed all on the side of the publicans. Aunt Agnes was at times distressed.

"And yet," she said, "I _have_ come. I am no longer among those who think themselves righteous, and despise others. But I must come in behind all. It is I, not the woman who was a sinner, who am the miracle of his grace; for since no sin so keeps men from him as spiritual pride, there can be no sin so degrading in the sight of the pure and humble angels, or of the Lord. But look again, Eva! Is there not one instance of such as I being saved?"

I found the history of Nicodemus, and we traced it through the Gospel from the secret visit to the popular teacher at night, to the open confession of the rejected Saviour before his enemies.

Aunt Agnes thought this might be the example she sought, but she wished to be quite sure.

"Nicodemus came in humility, to learn," she said. "We never read that he despised others, or thought he could make himself a saint."

At length we came to the Acts of the Apostles, and there, indeed, we found the history of one, "of the straitest sect a Pharisee," who verily thought himself doing God service by persecuting the despised Nazarenes to death. And from that time Aunt Agnes sought out and cherished every fragment of St. Paul's history, and every sentence of his sermons and writings. She had found the example she sought of the "Pharisee who was saved"--in him who obtained mercy, "that in him first God might show forth the riches of his long-suffering to those who thereafter, through his word, should believe."

She determined to learn Latin, that she might read these divine words for herself. It was affecting to see her sitting among the novices whom I taught, carefully spelling out the words, and repeating the declensions and conjugations. I had no such patient pupil; for although many were eager at first, not a few relaxed after a few weeks' toil, not finding the results very apparent, and said it would never sound so natural and true as when Sister Ave translated it for them in German.

I wish some learned man would translate the Bible into German. Why does not some one think of it? There is one German translation from the Latin, the prioress says, made about thirty or forty years ago; but it is very large and costly, and not in language that attracts simple people. I wish the Pope would spend some of the money from the indulgences on a new translation of the New Testament. I think it would please God much more than building St. Peter's.

Perhaps, however, if people had the German New Testament they would not buy the indulgences; for in all the Gospels and Epistles I cannot find one word about buying pardons; and, what is more strange, not a word about adoring the Blessed Virgin, or about nunneries or monasteries. I cannot see that the holy apostles founded one such community, or recommended any one to do so.

Indeed there is so much in the New Testament, and in what I have read of the Old, about not worshipping any one but God, that I have quite given up saying any prayers to the Blessed mother, for many reasons.

In the first place, I am much more sure that our Lord can hear us always than his mother, because he so often says so. And I am much more sure he can help, because I know all power is given to him in heaven and in earth.

And in the next place, if I were quite sure that the Blessed Virgin and the saints could hear me always, and could help or would intercede, I am sure also that no one among them--not the Holy Mother herself--is half so compassionate and full of love, or could understand us so well, as He who died for us. In the Gospels, he was always more accessible than the disciples. St. Peter might be impatient in the impetuosity of his zeal. Loving indignation might overbalance the forbearance of St. John the beloved, and he might wish for fire from heaven on those who refused to receive his Master. All the holy apostles rebuked the poor mothers who brought their children, and would have sent away the woman of Canaan; but he tenderly took the little ones into his arms from the arms of the mothers the disciples had rebuked. His patience was never wearied; He never misunderstood or discouraged any one. Therefore I pray to Him and our Father in heaven alone, and _through_ Him alone. Because if he is more pitiful to sinners than all the saints, which of all the saints can be beloved of God as he is, the well-beloved Son? He seems everything, in every circumstance, we can ever want. Higher mediation we cannot find, tenderer love we cannot crave.

And very sure I am that the meek Mother of the Lord, the disciple whom Jesus loved, the apostle who determined to know nothing among his converts save Jesus Christ, and him crucified, will not regret any homage transferred from them to Him.

Nay, rather, if the blessed Virgin, and the holy apostles have heard how, through all these years, such grievous and unjust things have been said of their Lord; how his love has been misunderstood, and he has been represented as hard to be entreated,--He who entreats sinners to come and be forgiven;--has not this been enough to shadow their happiness, even in heaven?

A nun has lately been transferred to our convent, who came originally from Bohemia, where all her relatives had been slain for adhering to the party of John Huss, the heretic. She is much older than I am, and she says she remembers well the name of my family, and that my great-uncle, Aunt Agnes' father, died a _heretic_! She cannot tell what the heresy was, but she believes it was something about the blessed sacrament and the authority of the Pope. She had heard that otherwise he was a charitable and holy man.

Was my father, then, a Hussite?

I have found the end of the sentence he gave me as his dying legacy:--"God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, _that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life_." And instead of being in a book not fit for Christian children to read, as the priest who took it from me said, it is in the Holy Scriptures!

Can it be possible that the world has come round again to the state it was in when the rulers and priests put the Saviour to death, and St. Paul persecuted the disciples as heretics?

NIMPTSCHEN, 1520.

A wonderful book of Dr. Luther's appeared among us a few weeks since, on the Babylonish Captivity; and although it was taken from us by the authorities, as dangerous reading for nuns, this was not before many among us had become acquainted with its contents. And it has created a great ferment in the convent. Some say they are words of impious blasphemy; some say they are words of living truth. He speaks of the forgiveness of sins being free; of the Pope and many of the priests being the enemies of the truth of God; and of the life and calling of a monk or nun as in no way holier than that of any humble believing secular man or woman,--a nun no holier than a wife or a household servant!

This many of the older nuns think plain blasphemy. Aunt Agnes says it is true, and more than true; for, from what I tell her, there can be no doubt that Aunt Cotta has been a lowlier and holier woman all her life than she can ever hope to be.

And as to the Bible precepts, they certainly seem far more adapted to people living in homes than to those secluded in convents. Often when I am teaching the young novices the precepts in the Epistles, they say,--

"But sister Ave, find some precepts for us. These sayings are for children, and wives, and mothers, and brothers, and sisters; not for those who have neither home nor kindred on earth."

Then if I try to speak of loving God and the blessed Saviour, some of them say,--

"But we cannot bathe his feet with tears, or anoint them with ointment, or bring him food, or stand by his cross, as the good women did of old. Shut up here, away from every one, how can we show him that we love him?"

And I can only say, "Dear sisters, you are here now; therefore surely God will find some way for you to serve him here."

But my heart aches for them, and I doubt no longer, I feel sure God can never have meant these young, joyous hearts to be cramped and imprisoned thus.

Sometimes I talk about it with Aunt Agnes; and we consider whether, if these vows are indeed irrevocable, and these children must never see their homes again, the convent could not one day be removed to some city where sick and suffering men and women toil and die; so that we might, at least, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit and minister to the sick and sorrowful. That would be life once more, instead of this monotonous routine, which is not so much death as mechanism--an inanimate existence which has never been life.

_October_, 1520.

Sister Beatrice is very ill. Aunt Agnes has requested as an especial favour to be allowed to share the attending on her with me. Never was gentler nurse or more grateful patient.