The Pictures of German Life Throughout History. Gustav Freytag
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and laymen. Who was there to punish the young nobleman who maltreated the peasants? who to defend the poor citizen against the powerful family unions of the rich counsellors? Hard was the labour of the German peasant from morning till evening, through summer and winter; pestilence was quickly followed by famine and hunger: the whole system of the world seemed in confusion, and earthly life devoid of love. The only hope of deliverance from misery, was in God; before Him all earthly power, whether of Emperor or Pope, was weak and insignificant, and the wisdom of man was transitory as the flower of the field. By his mercy men might be delivered from the miseries of this life, and compensated by eternal happiness for what they had suffered here; but how were they to obtain this mercy? by what virtues could weak men hope to gain the endless treasure of God's favour? Man had been doomed from the time of Adam to will the good and do the evil. Vain were his highest virtues; inherited sin was his curse; and if he obtained mercy from God, it was not by his own merits.[19]
These were the questions that then struggled within the agonized hearts of men. But from the holy records of Scripture, which had only been a dark tradition to the people, went forth the words; Christ is love. The ruling Church knew little of this love; in it God was kept far from the hearts of men: the image of the Crucified One was concealed behind countless saints, who were all made necessary as intercessors with a wrathful God. But the great craving of the German nature was to find itself in close connection with the Almighty, and the longing for the love of God was unquenchable. But the Pope maintained that he was the only administrator of the inexhaustible merits of Christ; and the Church also taught, that by the intercession of saints for the sins of men, an endless treasure of good works, prayers, fasts, and penances were made available for the blessing of others; and all these treasures were at the disposition of the Pope, who could dispense them to whom he chose, as a deliverance from their sins. Thus, when believers united together in a pious community, the Pope was able to confer on such a brotherhood the privilege of passing over from one to the other, the merits of the saints, the surplus of prayers and masses, as well as of good works done for the Church.
In the year 1530, Luther complained that the number of these communities was countless.[20] An example will show how rough and miserable their mechanism was, and the "Brotherhood of the Eleven Thousand Virgins," called "St. Ursula's Schifflein," is selected, because the Elector, Frederick the Wise, was one of the founders and brothers. The collection of spiritual treasures given by statute to enable the brotherhood to obtain eternal happiness, amounted to 6,455 masses, 3,550 entire psalters, 200,000 rosaries, 200,000 Te Deum Laudamus, 1,600 Gloria in excelsis Deo. Besides this, 11,000 prayers for the patroness St. Ursula, and 630 times 11,000 Paternosters and Ave Marias; also 50 times 10,000 Paternosters and Ave Marias for 10,000 knights, &c.; and the whole redeeming power of these treasures was for the benefit of the members of the brotherhood. Many spiritual foundations and private persons had gained to themselves especial merit by their great contributions to the prayer treasures. At the revival of the society, the Elector Frederick had presented a beautiful silver Ursula. A layman was entitled to become a member of the brotherhood if he once in his life had repeated 11,000 Paternosters and Ave Marias: if he repeated daily thirty-two, he gained it in a year, if sixteen, in two, and if eight, in four years: if any one was hindered by marriage, sickness, or business, from completing this number of prayers, he was enabled to enter by having eleven masses read for him; and so on. Yet this brotherhood was one of the best, for the members had not to pay money; it was to be a brotherhood of poor people who wished only to assist each other to heaven by mutual prayer; and we maintain that these brotherhoods were the most spiritual part of the declining Church of the middle ages.
The indulgences, on the other hand, were the foulest spot in its diseased body. The Pope, as administrator of the inexhaustible treasure of the merits of Christ, sold to believers, drafts on this store in exchange for money. It is true that the Church itself had not entirely lost the idea that the Pope could not himself forgive sins, but only remit the penances the Church prescribed; those, however, who held these views, individuals of the university and worthy village priests, were obliged to be careful that their teaching should not come into open collision with the business of the seller of indulgences. For what did the right teaching of their own Church signify to the papists of the sixteenth century? It was money that they craved for their women and children, their relatives, and princely houses. There was a fearful community of interests between the bishops and the fanatical members of the mendicant orders. Nothing had made Huss and his tenets so insupportable to them as the struggle against the sale of indulgences: the great Wessel had been driven out of Paris into misery for teaching repentance and grace; and it was the sellers of indulgences who caused the venerable Johannes Vesalia to die in the prison of a monastery at Mayence, he who first spoke the noble words, "Why should I believe what I know?"
It is known how prevalent the traffic in indulgences became in Germany in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and how impudently the reckless cheating was carried on. When Tetzel, a well-fed haughty Dominican, rode into a city with his box of indulgences, he was accompanied by a large body of monks and priests: the bells were rung; ecclesiastics and laymen met him, and reverentially conducted him to the church; his great crucifix, with the holes of the nails, and the crown of thorns, was erected in the nave, and sometimes the believers were allowed to see the blood of the Crucified One trickling down the cross. Church banners, on which were the arms of the Pope with the triple crown, were placed by the cross; in front of it the cursed box, strongly clamped with iron, and near these on one side, a pulpit from which the monk set forth with rough eloquence the wonderful powers of his indulgences, and showed a large parchment of the Pope's with many seals appended to it. On the other side was the pay table, with indulgence tickets, writing materials, and money baskets; there the ecclesiastical coadjutors sold to the thronging people everlasting salvation.[21]
Countless were the crimes of the Church, against which all the wounded moral feelings of the Germans were roused. The opposition spread all over Germany; but the man had not yet appeared, who, by a fearful inward struggle, discerning all the griefs and longings of the people, was preparing to become the leader of his nation, which would in his determined character, see with enthusiasm its own mind embodied. For two years he had been teacher of natural philosophy and dialects in the new university of Wittenberg, and was still lying in the dust of the Roman plains, looking with pious enthusiasm at the towers of the holy city appearing on the verge of the horizon. In the mean while we may learn from the experiences of a Latin scholar, what was working in the souls of the people.
Frederick Mecum (Latinized into Myconius[22]) was the son of honest citizens of Lichtenfelds, in Upper Franconia, and was born in 1491. When thirteen years of age, he went to the Latin school of the then flourishing city of Annaberg, where he experienced what we propose giving in his own words. In 1510 he went into a monastery, and as a Franciscan he was one of the first, most zealous, and faithful followers of the Wittenberg professors. He left his order, became a preacher at the new church in Thuringia, and finally pastor and superintendent at Gotha, where he established the Reformation, and died in 1546. The connecting link between him and Luther was of a very peculiar nature; he was not only his most intimate friend in many relations of private life, but there was a poetry in his connection with him which spread a halo round his whole life. Seven years before Luther began the Reformation, Myconius saw in a dream the vision of that great man, who calmed the doubts of his excited heart; enlightened by his dream, the faithful, pious German discovered in him the great friend of every future hour. But another circumstance gives us an interest in the narrator. However unlike, this gentle, delicately organized man may appear to his daring friend, there was a striking similarity in the youthful life of both, and much which is unknown to us of Luther's youth may be explained in what Myconius relates of his own. Both were poor scholars from a Latin school; both were driven by their inward struggles and youthful enthusiasm into a monastery, and found there only new doubts, greater struggles, and years of torment and anxious uncertainty instead of that peace for which they so passionately longed. To both was the shameless Tetzel the rock of offence, which stirred up their minds, and determined the whole course of their future life: finally, both died in the same year,--Myconius seven weeks after Luther, having five years before, been restored to life from a mortal illness by Luther's letter of invocation.[23] Few of Frederick Myconius' works have been printed: besides theological essays, he wrote a chronicle of his own time in German,