I was but a child when I visited the Wartburg, in which Luther remained in concealment after the Diet of Worms.
I can remember how that I stood in the room where Luther had his fight with the Devil, and threw the ink-pot at him. I was puzzled even then. I was sure that Luther was in the right in breaking with the Papacy, but he went beyond that; he broke, as became evident in his own day, and as I learned later, with Christian morality. Passing as I did as a child superficially through different forms of religion, Zwinglian, Roman and Lutheran, I acquired repugnances without in any way knowing the why and the wherefore of these feelings, but possessing a groundwork of the sense of reverence for the things of God; it was on this account that insensibly from an early age I turned away from certain religious dogmas and observances, as I did instinctively from bad smells.
Mary Howitt, the Quaker, was in Dresden much about the same time as we were, or a little before (1841), and her opinion of religion in Saxony was very much the same as that which my father and mother formed, and as I did at a later period. She wrote in her autobiography: "The piety of the Moravians struck me forcibly, after the very little religious belief which we had met with amongst the Lutherans, whom we found full of sentiment and human affection, yet very cold in their love of Christ and His holy Faith. They had, in fact, become philosophised out of their religion. . . . Of the Catholics we knew but little. I had, however, from our first arrival in Germany, been much touched by the wayside shrines and crucifixes. They seemed to me like religious thoughts on the highway—true guide-posts to heaven."
How little influence religion has on morals among Lutherans may be judged by the statistics of one year, 1857, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin; in 200 parishes the illegitimate births numbered nearly one-third of the whole; in 100 parishes, they were one-half; in 79 all the births were illegitimate. The Lutheran doctrine of Free Justification by Faith only would seem to breed immorality.
Luther himself seriously believed that he had disputed with Satan in person. He gave a detailed account of the meeting, and repeatedly, as well, referred to it. He does not, however, specify where the encounter took place; but, from internal evidence, it
