Meantime the Knight George, for by that name Luther was called in the Wartburg, lived solitary and unknown. “If you were to see me,” wrote he to Melancthon, “you would take me for a soldier, and even you would hardly recognize me.” Luther at first indulged in repose, enjoying a leisure which had not hitherto been allowed him. He wandered freely through the fortress, but could not go beyond the walls. All his wishes were attended to, and he had never been better treated. A crowd of thoughts filled his soul; but none had power to trouble him. By turns he looked down upon the forests that surrounded him, and raised his eyes towards heaven. “A strange prisoner am I,” exclaimed he, “captive with and against my will!”HRSCV3 312.2

“Pray for me,” wrote he to Spalatin; “your prayers are the only thing I need. I do not grieve for any thing that may be said of me in the world. At last I am at rest.” This letter, as well as many others of the same period, is dated from the island of Patmos. Luther compared the Wartburg to that celebrated island to which the wrath of Domitian in former times had banished the Apostle John.HRSCV3 312.3

In the midst of the dark forests of Thuringia the reformer reposed from the violent struggles that had agitated his soul. There he studied christian truth, not for the purpose of contending, but as a means of regeneration and life. The beginning of the Reformation was of necessity polemical; new times required new labors. After cutting down the thorns and the thickets, it was requisite to sow the Word of God peaceably in the heart. If Luther had been incessantly called upon to fight fresh battles, he would not have accomplished a durable work in the Church. Thus by his captivity he escaped a danger which might possibly have ruined the Reformation,—that of always attacking and destroying without ever defending or building up.HRSCV3 312.4

This humble retreat had a still more precious result. Uplifted by his countrymen, as on a shield, he was on the verge of the abyss; the least giddiness might have plunged him into it headlong. Some of the first promoters of the Reformation both in Germany and Switzerland, ran upon the shoal of spiritual pride and fanaticism. Luther was a man very subject to the infirmities of our nature, and he was unable to escape altogether from these dangers. The hand of God, however, delivered him for a time, by suddenly removing him from the sphere of intoxicating ovations, and throwing him into an unknown retreat. There his soul was wrapt in pious meditation at God’s footstool; it was again tempered in the waters of adversity; its sufferings and humiliation compelled him to walk, for a time at least, with the humble; and the principles of a christian life were thenceforward evolved in his soul with greater energy and freedom.HRSCV3 312.5

Luther’s calmness was not of long duration. Seated in loneliness on the ramparts of the Wartburg, he remained whole days lost in deep meditation. At one time the Church appeared before him, displaying all her wretchedness; at another, directing his eyes hopefully towards heaven, he could exclaim: “Wherefore, O Lord, hast thou made all men in vain?” (Psalm 89:48.) And then, giving way to despair, he cried with dejection: “Alas! there is no one in this latter day of his anger, to stand like a wall before the Lord, and save Israel!”HRSCV3 312.6

Then recurring to his own destiny, he feared lest he should be accused of deserting the field of battle; and this supposition weighed down his soul. “I would rather,” said he, “be stretched on coals of fire, than lie here half-dead.”HRSCV3 312.7

Transporting himself in imagination to Worms and Wittenberg, into the midst of his adversaries, he regretted having yielded to the advice of his friends, that he had quitted the world, and that he had not presented his bosom to the fury of men. “Alas!” said he, “there is nothing I desire more than to appear before my cruelest enemies.”HRSCV3 313.1

Gentler thoughts, however, brought a truce to such anxiety. Everything was not storm and tempest for Luther; from time to time his agitated mind found tranquillity and comfort. Next to the certainty of God’s help, one thing consoled him in his sorrows; it was the recollection of Melancthon. “If I perish,” wrote he, “the Gospel will lose nothing: you will succeed me as Elisha did Elijah, with a double portion of my spirit.” But calling to mind Philip’s timidity, he exclaimed with energy: “Minister of the Word! keep the walls and towers of Jerusalem, until you are struck down by the enemy. As yet we stand alone upon the field of battle; after me, they will aim their blows at you.”HRSCV3 313.2

The thought of the final attack Rome was about to make on the infant Church, renewed his anxieties. The poor monk, solitary and a prisoner, had many a combat to fight alone. But a hope of deliverance speedily dawned upon him. It appeared to him that the assaults of the Papacy would raise the whole German nation, and that the victorious soldiers of the Gospel would surround the Wartburg and restore the prisoner to liberty. “If the pope,” said he, “lays his hand on all those who are on my side, there will be a disturbance in Germany; the greater his haste to crush us, the sooner will come the end of the pope and his followers. And I I shall be restored to you. God is awakening the hearts of many, and stirring up the nations. Only let our enemies clasp our affair in their arms and try to stifle it; it will gather strength under their pressure, and come forth ten times more formidable.”HRSCV3 313.3

But sickness brought him down from those high places on which his courage and his faith had placed him. He had already suffered much at Worms; his disease increased in solitude. He could not endure the food at the Wartburg, which was less course than that of his convent; they were compelled to give him the meager diet to which he had been accustomed. He passed whole nights without sleep. Anxieties of mind were superadded to the pains of the body. No great work is ever accomplished without suffering and martyrdom. Luther, alone upon his rock, endured in his strong frame a passion that the emancipation of the human race rendered necessary. “Seated by night in my chamber I uttered groans, like a woman in travail; torn, wounded, and bleeding” then breaking off his complaints, touched with the thought that his sufferings are a blessing from God, he exclaimed with love: “Thanks be to Thee, O Christ, that thou wilt not leave me without the precious marks of thy cross!” But soon, growing angry with himself, he cried out: “Madman and hard-hearted that I am! Woe is me! I pray seldom, I seldom wrestle with the Lord, I groan not for the Church of God! Instead of being fervent in spirit, my passions take fire; I live in idleness, in sleep, and indolence!” Then, not knowing to what he should attribute this state, and accustomed to expect everything from the affection of his brethren, he exclaimed in the desolation of his heart: “O my friends! do you then forget to pray for me, that God is thus far from me?”HRSCV3 313.4

Those who were around him, as well as his friends at Wittenberg and at the elector’s court, were uneasy and alarmed at this state of suffering. They feared lest they should see the life they had rescued from the flames of the pope and the sword of Charles V decline sadly and expire. Was the Wartburg destined to be Luther’s tomb? “I fear,” said Melancthon, “that the grief he feels for the Church will cause his death. A fire has been kindled by him in Israel; if he dies, what hope will remain for us? Would to God, that at the cost of my own wretched life, I could retain in the world that soul which is its fairest ornament!—Oh! what a man!” exclaimed he, as if already standing on the side of his grave; “we never appreciated him rightly!”HRSCV3 313.5

What Luther denominated the shameful indolence of his prison was a task that almost exceeded the strength of one man. “I am here all the day,” wrote he on the 14th of May, “in idleness and pleasures (alluding doubtless to the better diet that was provided him at first). I am reading the Bible in Hebrew and Greek; I am going to write a treatise in German on Auricular Confession; I shall continue the translation of the Psalms, and compose a volume of sermons, so soon as I have received what I want from Wittenberg. I am writing without intermission.” And yet this was but a part of his labors.HRSCV3 313.6

His enemies thought that, if he were not dead, at least they should hear no more of him; but their joy was not of long duration, and there could be no doubt that he was alive. A multitude of writings, composed in the Wartburg, succeeded each other rapidly, and the beloved voice of the reformer was everywhere hailed with enthusiasm. Luther published simultaneously works calculated to edify the Church, and polemical tracts which troubled the too eager exultation of his enemies. For nearly a whole year, he by turns instructed, exhorted, reproved, and thundered from his mountain-retreat; and his amazed adversaries asked one another if there was not something supernatural, some mystery, in this prodigious activity. “He could never have taken any rest,” says Cochloeus.HRSCV3 313.7

But there was no other mystery than the imprudence of the partisans of Rome. They hastened to take advantage of the edict of Worms, to strike a decisive blow at the Reformation; and Luther, condemned, under the ban of the empire, and a prisoner at Wartburg, undertook to defend the sound doctrine, as if he were still victorious and at liberty. It was especially at the tribunal of penance that the priests endeavoured to rivet the chains of their docile parishioners; and accordingly the confessional was the object of Luther’s first attack. “They bring forward,” said he, “these words of St. James: Confess your faults to one another. Singular confessor! his name is One Another. Whence it would follow that the confessors should also confess themselves to their penitents; that each Christian should be, in his turn, pope, bishop, priest; and that the pope himself should confess to all!”HRSCV3 314.1

Luther had scarcely finished this tract when he began another. A theologian of Louvain, by name Latomus, already notorious by his opposition to Reuchlin and Erasmus, had attacked the reformer’s opinions. In twelve days Luther’s refutation was ready, and it is a masterpiece. He clears himself of the reproach that he was wanting in moderation. “The moderation of the day,” said he, “is to bend the knee before sacrilegious pontiffs, impious sophists, and to say to them: Gracious lord! Excellent master! Then, when you have so done, you may put any one you please to death; you may even convulse the world, and you will be none the less a man of moderation Away with such moderation! I would rather be frank and deceive no one. The shell may be hard, but the kernel is soft and tender.”HRSCV3 314.2

As Luther’s health continued feeble, he thought of leaving the place of his confinement. But how could he manage it? To appear in public would be exposing his life. The back of the mountain on which the fortress stood was crossed by numerous footways, bordered by tufts of strawberries. The heavy gate of the castle opened, and the prisoner ventured, not without fear, to gather some fruit. By degrees he grew bolder, and in his knight’s garb began to wander through the surrounding country, attended by one of the guards of the castle, a worthy but somewhat churlish man. One day, having entered an inn, Luther threw aside his sword, which encumbered him, and hastily took up some books that lay there. His nature got the better of his prudence. His guardian trembled for fear this movement, so extraordinary in a soldier, should excite suspicions that the doctor was not really a knight. At another time the two comrades alighted at the convent of Reinhardsbrunn, where Luther had slept a few months before on his road to Worms. Suddenly one of the lay-brothers uttered a cry of surprise. Luther was recognized. His attendant perceived it, and dragged him hastily away; and already they were galloping far from the cloister before the astonished brother had recovered from his amazement.HRSCV3 314.3

The military life of the doctor had at intervals something about it truly theological. One day the nets were made ready—the gates of the fortress opened—the long-eared dogs rushed forth. Luther desired to taste the pleasures of the chase. The huntsmen soon grew animated; the dogs sprang forward, driving the game from the covers. In the midst of all this uproar, the Knight George stands motionless: his mind is occupied with serious thoughts; the objects around him fill his heart with sorrow. “Is not this,” says he, “the image of the devil setting on his dogs—that is, the bishops, those representatives of Antichrist, and urging them in pursuit of poor souls?” A young hare was taken: delighted at the prospect of liberating it, he wrapped it carefully in his cloak, and set it down in the midst of a thicket; but hardly had he taken a few steps before the dogs scented the animal and killed it. Luther, attracted by the noise, uttered a groan of sorrow, and exclaimed: O pope! and thou, too, Satan! it is thus ye endeavour to destroy even those souls that have been saved from death!”HRSCV3 314.4

Chapter 1

Chapter 3