from fear that he might take too much money from his subjects. So Tetzel set up his trade on the
border of Saxony, at Jüterbog, a few hours from Wittenberg.^186
There he provoked the protest of the Reformer, who had already in the summer of 1516
preached a sermon of warning against trust in indulgences, and had incurred the Elector’s displeasure
by his aversion to the whole system, although he himself had doubts about some important questions
connected with it.
Luther had experienced the remission of sin as a free gift of grace to be apprehended by a
living faith. This experience was diametrically opposed to a system of relief by means of payments
in money. It was an irrepressible conflict of principle. He could not be silent when that barter was
carried to the very threshold of his sphere of labor. As a preacher, a pastor, and a professor, he felt
it to be his duty to protest against such measures: to be silent was to betray his theology and his
conscience.
The jealousy between the Augustinian order to which he belonged, and the Dominican order
to which Tetzel belonged, may have exerted some influence, but it was certainly very subordinate.
A laboring mountain may produce a ridiculous mouse, but no mouse can give birth to a mountain.
The controversy with Tetzel (who is not even mentioned in Luther’s Theses) was merely the
occasion, but not the cause, of the Reformation: it was the spark which exploded the mine. The
Reformation would have come to pass sooner or later, if no Tetzel had ever lived; and it actually
did break out in different countries without any connection with the trade in indulgences, except
in German Switzerland, where Bernhardin Samson acted the part of Tetzel, but after Zwingli had
already begun his reforms.
§ 32. The Ninety-five Theses. Oct. 31, 1517.
Lit. in § 31.
After serious deliberation, without consulting any of his colleagues or friends, but following
an irresistible impulse, Luther resolved upon a public act of unforeseen consequences. It may be
compared to the stroke of the axe with which St. Boniface, seven hundred years before, had cut
down the sacred oak, and decided the downfall of German heathenism. He wished to elicit the truth
about the burning question of indulgences, which he himself professed not fully to understand at
the time, and which yet was closely connected with the peace of conscience and eternal salvation.
He chose the orderly and usual way of a learned academic disputation.
Accordingly, on the memorable thirty-first day of October, 1517, which has ever since been
celebrated in Protestant Germany as the birthday of the Reformation, at twelve o’clock he affixed
(either himself or through another) to the doors of the castle-church at Wittenberg, ninety-five Latin
Theses on the subject of indulgences, and invited a public discussion. At the same time he sent
notice of the fact to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, and to Bishop Hieronymus Scultetus, to whose
diocese Wittenberg belonged. He chose the eve of All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1), because this was one
(^186) Jüterbog is now a Prussian town of about seven thousand inhabitants, on the railroad between Berlin and Wittenberg. In the Nicolai
church, Tetzel’s chest of indulgences is preserved.