existing abuses, and to their desire for a pure, scriptural, and spiritual religion. "Ho, ho! "exclaimed
Dr. Fleck, "the man has come who will do the thing." Reuchlin thanked God that "the monks have
now found a man who will give them such full employment that they will be glad to let me spend
my old age in peace."^197
But, on the other hand, the Theses were strongly assailed and condemned by the episcopal
and clerical hierarchy, the monastic orders, especially the Dominicans, and the universities, in fact,
by all the champions of scholastic theology and traditional orthodoxy. Luther himself, then a poor,
emaciated monk, was at first frightened by the unexpected effect, and many of his friends trembled.
One of them told him, "You tell the truth, good brother, but you will accomplish nothing; go to
your cell, and say, God have mercy upon me."^198
The chief writers against Luther were Tetzel of Leipzig, Conrad Wimpina of
Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and the more learned and formidable John Eck of Ingolstadt, who was at
first a friend of Luther, but now became his irreconcilable enemy. These opponents represented
three universities and the ruling scholastic theology of the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas.
But they injured their cause in public estimation by the weakness of their defence. They could
produce no arguments for the doctrine and practice of indulgences from the Word of God, or even
from the Greek and Latin fathers, and had to resort to extravagant views on the authority of the
Pope. They even advocated papal infallibility, although this was as yet an open question in the
Roman Church, and remained so till the Vatican decree of 1870.
Luther mustered courage. In all his weakness he was strong. He felt that he had begun this
business in the name and for the glory of God, and was ready to sacrifice life itself for his honest
conviction. He took comfort from the counsel of Gamaliel. In several letters of this period he
subscribed himself Martinus Eleutherios (Freeman), but added, vielmehr Knecht (rather, Servant):
he felt free of men, but bound in Christ. When his friend Schurf told him, "They will not bear it;"
he replied, "But what, if they have to bear it?" He answered all his opponents, directly and indirectly,
in Latin and German, from the pulpit and the chair, and through the press. He began now to develop
his formidable polemical power, especially in his German writings. He had full command over the
vocabulary of common sense, wit, irony, vituperation, and abuse. Unfortunately, he often resorted
to coarse and vulgar expressions which, even in that semi-barbarous age, offended men of culture
and taste, and which set a bad example for his admirers in the fierce theological wars within the
Lutheran Church.^199
(^197) The prophetic dream of the Elector, so often told, is a poetic fiction. Köstlin discredits it, I. 786 sq. The Elector Frederick dreamed,
in the night before Luther affixed the Theses, that God sent him a monk, a true son of the Apostle Paul, and that this monk wrote something
on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg with a pen which reached even to Rome, pierced the head and ears of a lion (Leo), and
shook the triple crown of the Pope. Merle d’Aubigné relates the dream at great length as being, "beyond reasonable doubt, true in the
essential parts." He appeals to an original MS., written from the dictation of Spalatin, in the archives of Weimar, which was published in
- But that MS., according to the testimony of Dr. Burkhardt, the librarian, is only a copy of the eighteenth century. No trace of such
a dream can be found before 1591. Spalatin, in his own writings and his letters to Luther and Melanchthon, nowhere refers to it.
(^198) Albert Krantz of Hamburg, who died Dec. 7, 1517. Köstlin, I. 177.
(^199) He said of Tetzel, that he dealt with the Bible "wie die Sau mit dem Habersack" (as the hog with the meal-bag); of the learned
Cardinal Cajetan, that he knew as little of spiritual theology as "the donkey of the harp;" he called Alveld, professor of theology at Leipzig,
"a most asinine ass," and Dr. Eck "Dreck:" for which he was in turn styled luteus, lutra, etc. Such vulgarities were common in that age,
but Luther was the roughest of the rough, as he was the strongest of the strong. His bark, however, was much worse than his bite, and
beneath his abusive tongue and temper dwelt a kind and generous heart. His most violent writings are those against Emser (An den
Emserschen Steinbock), King Henry VIII., Duke Henry of Brunswick (Wider Hans Wurst), and his last attack upon popery as "instituted