and assailed his cause in a poetical satire: "Vom grossen lutherischen Narren wie ihn Doctor Murner
beschworen hat, 1522."^404
CHAPTER IV.
THE GERMAN REFORMATION FROM THE DIET OF WORMS
TO THE PEASANTS’ WAR, a.d. 1521–1525.
§ 60. A New Phase in the History of the Reformation.
At Worms, Luther stood on the height of his protest against Rome. The negative part of his
work was completed: the tyranny of popery over Western Christendom was broken, the conscience
was set free, and the way opened for a reconstruction of the Church on the basis of the New
Testament. What he wrote afterwards against Rome was merely a repetition and re-affirmation.
On his return to Wittenberg, he had a more difficult task before him: to effect a positive
reformation of faith and discipline, worship and ceremonies. A revolution is merely destructive
and emancipative: a reformation is constructive and affirmative; it removes abuses and corruptions,
but saves the foundation, and builds on it a new structure.
In this home-work Luther was as conservative and churchly as he had been radical and
unchurchly in his war against the foreign foe. The connecting link between the two periods was
his faith in Christ and the ever-living word of God, with which he began and ended his public
labors.
He now raised his protest against the abuse of liberty in his own camp. A sifting process
was necessary. Division and confusion broke out among his friends and followers. Many of them
exceeded all bounds of wisdom and moderation; while others, frightened by the excesses, returned
to the fold of the mother Church. The German nation itself was split on the question of the old or
new religion, and remains, ecclesiastically, divided to this day; but the political unification and
reconstruction of the German Empire with a Protestant head, instead of the former Roman-Catholic
emperor, may be regarded as a remote result of the Reformation, without which it could never have
taken place. And it is a remarkable providence, that this great event of 1870 was preceded by the
Vatican Council and the decree of papal infallibility, and followed by the overthrow of the temporal
power of the Pope and the political unification of Italy with Rome as the capital.
(^404) Newly edited by H. Kurz, Zürich, 1848. Janssen makes much use of this poem (II. 123-128, 190, 415, 416). Murner thus describes
the Protestant attack on the sacraments:—
"Die Mess, die sol nim gelten
Im Leben noch im Tod.
Die Sacrament sie schelten,
Die seien uns nit Not.
Fünf hont sie gar vernichtet,
Die andern lon sie ston,
Dermassen zugerichtet,
Dass sie auch bald zergon."
Of Luther’s doctrine of the general priesthood of the laity he says:—
"Wir sein all Pfaffen worden,
Beid Weiber und die Man,
Wiewol wir hant kein Orden
Kein Weihe gnomen an"