Life of Luther. Julius Köstlin
observances, imposed by the priest, and by prayer, alms, fasting, and other acts of mortification. For him who was not forgiven, remained hell; for him who had not expiated his sins, at least the fear and pains of purgatory. Such was and still is the teaching of the Catholic Church.
Thus Luther was now summoned and directed to pursue methodically the painful work of self-examination, which had oppressed him even before he entered the convent, and to use all the means of grace here offered to him. But the more he searched into his life and thoughts, the more transgressions of God's will he found, and the more grievously did they afflict his conscience. It was not, indeed, as might have been imagined with a strong young man like himself, a question of any sensual appetites, stimulated all the more by the restraints of the convent. It was with the passions of anger, hatred, and envy against his brethren and fellow-creatures, that he had to reproach himself. Those who disliked him accused him in particular of self-conceit, and of letting his temper break out too easily. Faults of that description, in thought, word, or deed, were to his own conscience as deadly sins, though to the priest who listened to him at confession, they seemed too trifling to call for enumeration. To these were added a number of smaller offences against the ordinances of the Church and the convent, with reference to outward observances and forms of worship, prayers, and so on, all of which, insignificant as they must seem to us, the Church was accustomed to treat as grievous sins. Finally, there arose in his mind a constant restlessness, which made him look for sins where none in reality existed. What he had said once before about washing one's hands, that it only made them become fouler, he had now to experience for himself. His contrition made him feel pain and fear in abundance, but not so as to enable him to say to himself that it purged the evil in the sight of God. Absolution was pronounced over him again and again, but who ever gave him any assurance that he had fulfilled its conditions, and therefore could really confide in its efficacy? As for acts of penance, he willingly performed them, and, indeed, did far more in the way of prayer, fasting, and vigil than either the rules of the convent demanded or his father-confessor enjoined. His body, from his hardy training as a child, was well prepared for such austerities, but in spite of that, he had for a long while to suffer from their results. Luther, in later years, could well bear witness of himself that he had caused his own body far more pain and torture with those practices of penance than all his enemies and persecutors had caused to theirs.
What leisure remained, after his other monastic duties were over, he devoted most industriously to the study of theology. He read, in particular, the writings of the later Scholastic theologians, with whom he had partly occupied himself during his philosophical course. Of some of these, such as the Englishman Occam, in particular, whose acuteness of reasoning he especially admired, there were writings which, in reference to questions of external Church polity, might have led him even then into paths of his own, if his mind had been disposed for it. These writings were directed against the absolute power of the Pope in the Church, and against his aggressions in the territory of Empire and State. But any such aim was very far removed from the monastic Order to which Luther had devoted himself, and from the theologians who were here his teachers. Palz, whom we have mentioned already, had especially distinguished himself by his glorification of the Papal indulgences. Moreover, the whole Order, and the German convents belonging to it in particular, were indebted to the Pope for various acts of favour. Nor was Luther himself less careful to hold firmly to the ordinances of the hierarchy, than to avail himself of the means of salvation offered by the Church.
What at all times in his theological studies enlisted his warmest personal interest was the difficult question, how sinners could obtain everlasting salvation. And all that he came to read on that subject in the writings of those theologians, and to hear from his learned teachers in the convent, served only to increase his fruitless inward wrestlings, and his anxiety and sense of need. The great father of the Church, from whom his Order was named, and to whom their rules were ascribed, had once, on the ground of his own experiences of the struggle with sin and the flesh, laid down with great force, and in a triumphant controversy with his opponents, the doctrine that, as the Apostle says, salvation depends not on the conduct of man, but on the grace of God, not on the will of man, but on the willingness of God to pardon, Who alone transforms the sinner, and grants him the power and the will for good. But any knowledge or understanding of this theology of Augustine was as strange to his own Order as to the Scholastics. It was taught, indeed, that heaven was too high for man to attain to otherwise than by the grace of God. But it was also taught that the sinner, by his own natural strength, both could and ought to do enough in God's sight to earn that grace which would then help him further on the way to heaven. He who had thus obtained that grace, it was said, felt himself enabled and impelled to do even more than God's commands require. Reference to the bitter passion and death of the Saviour was not omitted, it is true, by the theologians with whom Luther had to do, and frequently, as, for example, by his teacher Palz, was impressed on Christian hearts in words full of feeling. But the chief stress was laid, not on the redeeming love on which man could rest his confident assurance, but on the necessity of offering oneself to Him who had offered Himself for man, and of submitting even to the pains of death, in imitation of Him, and to pay the penalty of sin. In this way, again and again, Luther saw before him claims on the part of God which he could never hope to satisfy. His sorest trial was caused by the thought that God Himself should have the will to let him fail after all his fruitless efforts, and finally be numbered with the lost. And it was just with the later Scholastics that he found, not indeed a theory according to which God had simply predestined a part of mankind to perdition, but a general conception of God which would represent Him as a Being not so much of holy love, as of arbitrary, absolute will.
Luther spent two years in the convent amidst these strivings and inward sufferings. His spiritual life, as it was called, of strict discipline and asceticism was quoted in other convents as a model for imitation. Now and then, indeed, he felt himself puffed up with a sense of superior sanctity—'a proud saint,' as he afterwards called himself. But humility was the ruling temper of his mind. Frequently, in after life, he described his condition as a warning to others. Thus he speaks of the disciples of the law, who try by their own works, by constant labour, by wearing shirts of hair, by self-scourging, by fasting, by every means, in short, to satisfy the law. Such a one, he tells us, he himself had been. But he had also learned by experience, he adds, what happens when a man is tempted, and death or danger frightens him; how he despairs, nay, would fly from God as from the devil, and would rather that there were no God at all. So great became his inward sufferings, that he thought both body and soul must succumb. Thus he tells us later on, when speaking of the torments of purgatory, of a man, who doubtless was himself, how he had often endured such agony, only momentary it is true, but so hellish in its violence, that no tongue could express nor pen describe it; that, had it lasted longer, even for half an hour, or only five minutes, he must have died then and there, and his bones have been consumed to ashes. He himself saw afterwards in these pains, visitations of a special kind, such as God does not send to everyone. But they served him then as a proof, and one of universal application, that that school of the law, as he called it, would bring no real holiness either to others or himself, but must teach a man to despair of himself and of any claims or merits of his own. And, indeed, as we know from all that had gone before, it was not simply the external barrenness of the regulations of Church and convent, or a sense of imperfect fulfilment on his part, that caused his restlessness of conscience; what gave him the deepest anxiety and harassed him the most were those very inward stirrings, which revealed to him his opposition to God's eternal demands, the fulfilment of which he thought indispensable for reconciliation to God.
His experiences at the convent led him to the perception of those principles which formed the groundwork of his preaching as a Reformer. From his exemplary conduct there, and his wonderful and active conversion, he was compared to St. Paul. In quite another sense he resembled the great Apostle. The latter, when a Pharisee, had laboured to justify himself before God by the law and the prophets. 'O wretched man that I am,' Luther there must have exclaimed of himself, and afterwards looking back on his experiences, have counted all as 'dung and loss' in order to be justified rather by faith through the grace of God and the Saviour, and to become free and holy.
Just as, meanwhile, inside the Catholic Church, the laws, dogmas, and School theories relating to the means of salvation, were never able to supplant entirely the thought of the simple testimony of the Bible,