THE POOR MAN'S GOSPEL.
(Contemporary Review, 1884.)
Ordinary histories concern themselves so little with the mass of the people, that prior to the French Revolution one might suppose the labouring classes of Europe resembled Issachar, who is described as a strong ass crouching down between two burdens—a strong ass who when it fell had only, as a truculent German ruler observed, to be whipped, and it slowly got up again, and went on dragging its load.
The reverse is the fact, for from the moment the Gospel of the kingdom of Heaven was proclaimed, a divine discontent set in; those who believed the message could no longer rest satisfied with things as they were, but by passive or active opposition did what in them lay to establish the reign of justice on earth. "This man," said the Scribes and Pharisees, "stirreth up the people;" and verily the charge was true.
St Chrysostom has in a few vigorous touches depicted the storm which the apostolic preaching aroused in the Roman world. What greater incentive to revolution than to proclaim a kingdom of righteousness among people so crushed by injustice as the inhabitants of the Roman Empire! Restrained for a time by a very decided apostolic injunction, and a firm belief in the immediate coming of the King to deliver His saints and establish His kingdom upon earth, the first believers refrained from social and political action; but when the hope of His second advent became more vague, and a sense of their ever-increasing numbers took possession of the Church, an agitation seems to have set in, which, like some great ground-swell, made the Roman Empire heave from one end to the other. Trembling and doubtful in what direction to turn the helm of State, the authorities at one moment caress the new influence and at another try to terrorize it. Marvellous edicts in favour of the weak, the mean, the miserable, alternate with a series of relentless persecutions against Christians; both lines of policy, alien to the haughty but tolerant spirit of ancient Rome, abundantly prove the truth of what I have advanced; but those who have penetrated further Into the subject affirm that there was at least one insurrection in Gaul that was distinctly Christian.
It is a horrible thing to reflect on the history of Christ's poor since His religion has been patronised by the ruling classes. Consider the way the Normans, those "born rulers," treated the peasantry. Their tyranny was so impossible to endure that the labourers began to confederate with a view to a common protection. Raoul, uncle of the young Duke of Normandy, sent out spies in every direction, and in one day arrested all the leaders. "Without any trial, without the slightest inquiry, he inflicted upon them mutilations or atrocious tortures; of some he put out the eyes, of others he cut off the hands or feet; some had their legs burned, others were impaled alive or had melted lead poured over them." And, according to a well-known passage in the "Saxon Chronicle" under the year 1137, the horrors the English poor suffered in "the castles filled with devils and evil men" equalled in atrocity the darkest crimes of which the Inquisition was ever imagined guilty.
An ancient drawing exists illustrating a legend called "The Vision of Henry I." Labouring men surround the king's bed, armed with scythes, spades, and pitchforks. The sleeper points with his bare finger upwards, as if he would indicate the only direction in which such clamourers are ever heard; but the peasants look determined. Their leader, a little man, holds up a charter; another, with a woe-begone face, dilates on the miseries they suffer; while a stolid young churl waits in the background, pitchfork in hand. A "coward conscience" has been the real cause of the long series of "reigns of terror" by which Christ's suffering poor have been kept, like trembling sheep, the perpetual prey of generation after generation of wolves.
But the oppressors, instead of repenting, thought to buy off the justice of Heaven as they could that of earth. The Christian clergy were admitted to the best half of the plunder, and became and have continued for ages fanatical supporters of power and property. The laity, however, alarmed at the rapidity with which the land was falling into the hands of the Church, and at the papal assumption of Universal Dominion, gave their support to a principle of which they did not see the meaning. Wiclif's doctrine of "Dominion" proved the axe laid to the root of the tree, not only of clerical but also of lay assumption. "Dominion," said Wiclif, "can in its highest and purest sense belong to God alone. He deals it out to men in their several stations and offices on condition of obedience to His commandments; mortal sin, therefore, breaks the link and deprives man of his authority. … Thus no one in a state of mortal sin has, in strict right, either priesthood or lordship, a principle which applies of course to every human being." There was nothing on which Wiclif wrote more fully than this same doctrine of Dominion, and it is clear that no part of his system had greater influence on the subsequent history of Europe.
To assert that Dominion was founded on Grace and depended on its preservation, was to cut at the root of hereditary right in political sovereignty, and of all those acquired and permanent rights upon which the hierarchies in Church and State are founded.
That this is no exaggeration may be seen by an inquiry into the causes of the great Hussite war in Bohemia. Nothing is more certain than that John Huss was the champion of Wiclif's doctrine in Bohemia, and especially of that on Dominion. "If," he said before the Council of Constance, "a bishop or a prelate is in mortal sin, he is no longer pope, bishop, or prelate; still more, if a king is in mortal sin, he is not truly a king before God." The phrase was hardly out of his mouth than the prelates rose, crying: "Call the king, this concerns him." Huss was made to repeat his words. Sigismund listened, and stolidly remarked that no one was without sin; the Cardinal of Cambrai, whose wits were sharper, cried: "What, is it not enough for you to overthrow the Church? do you wish to attack kings?" All saw that the doctrine was revolutionary. "Away with such a fellow; it is not fit that he should live." The Bohemian people, who had also understood its import, uttered a cry of indignation, and their great general, John Zizka, resolved to avenge their martyr.
The enthusiasm of the Bohemian peasants who flocked to his banner was so intense that the learned of the time could find no better explanation for the phenomenon than a conjunction of the stars. It soon appeared, however, to be no question of astrology, but the piled-up force of the Christian conscience, suddenly delivered by Wiclif's doctrine, seeking to sweep out of Bohemia the falsehoods of feudalism. In a little time, therefore, the war became a civil one, and, under the names of Utraquists and Taborites, was opened up the old strife between the oppressors and the oppressed.
To the wonderful camp on Mount Tabor the peasants came in thousands, bringing with them in great waggons their aged parents, their wives and children, and all their household goods. They believed that a new era was about to open, in which there would be no more crimes nor abominations, no more lies nor perfidies, where there would no longer be different ranks or dignities among men, where property would be abolished, and the human race delivered for ever from work, misery, and hunger; where the difference between the learned and the ignorant would cease, for all would equally be disciples of the Saviour, and the Eternal Truth would shine upon all; where the wicked would repent of their wickedness, so that the Bible and the Atonement would no longer be necessary, since all mankind would be saved.
It would be difficult to exceed the thoroughness of the doctrine of equality as held by the Taborites. It far exceeded that of the later French revolutionists, for it taught that a woman was equal to a man. Grace elevated all to the same level. The movement was so universal that the wealthy classes were in dismay. In 1421 the Commune of Prague, under their leader, John of Zelew, obtained a majority in the city council. "Noble city of Prague," wrote a chronicler, "it was not the lower classes who formerly governed thee. Now the citizens, the best known by their birth, their riches, and their virtues, are put to death or exiled, while tailors, shoemakers, working men of all kinds, fill the council; strangers even are found there; peasants, who have come from no one knows where." However, the wealthy and virtuous class knew how to deal with such adversaries. Allying themselves with a portion of the Radicals, they obtained the majority at the next elections. John of Zelew was then invited to a conference with the council; he went, and found himself caught in a trap; he and his ten companions being executed there and then.
The civil war went on until the decisive battle of Lepau, when the people were thoroughly defeated; their great captain, Procopius Magnus, a former monk, fell surrounded by his officers, and nearly the whole of his army. A few hundred fugitives, made prisoners during the next few days, were traitorously burnt.
Thus the lords of Bohemia came out victorious from this great struggle, and the fetters were bound tighter than ever on the necks of the people. In place of the equality of all human beings, and the emancipation of women proclaimed by the Taborites, the Catholic and Utraquist oligarchy based their parliament on the suffrages of a few hundred families; even the ancient customs of the old Bohemian nobility were gradually set aside in favour of such ideas as an "eldest son," as "the captivity" of a married woman to her husband, and as the right of a brother to dispose of his sisters either in marriage or in a convent.
The people, politically ruined, turned for consolation to the source which had inspired all their efforts, and He in whom they had trusted did not leave them comfortless. A poor man, Peter of Chilcicky, received a view of Christian truth than which few ever approached nearer the spirit and teaching of the discourses by the Lake of Gennesaret.
Chilcicky was opposed to all dogma, all power, all war. "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself," was the essence of his teaching. He objected to every attempt to defend the Truth by the sword. The Gospel, he said, could only conquer by Love. The Church must disembarrass itself from all power, all wealth, from every tie which binds it to the earth. Power both in Church and State was of pagan origin, and therefore no Christian man could accept any public charge or power. Equality ought so to prevail among Christians in the presence of good, of faith, of charity, that they cannot recognise royalty, nor public functions, nor any titles, nor distinctions. In religious matters the laws emanating from Pope or Emperor were not obligatory. "I have already said," he wrote in the "Sit'viry" (the Net of the Faith), "that class distinctions are the body of Antichrist, as well as these municipalities and these coats-of-arms where one feels the inspiration of Satan."
The people, he taught, ought not to pay either taxes, tribute, dues, interest, nor to perform the forced labour. The true Christian, however, cannot demand justice from the Royal Courts, or seek their protection. To do so is to put one's confidence and hope in a man, and to seek to be avenged by force. To support outrages with resignation, to suffer persecution, and to forget them, such is the duty of every religious man. In his view, war was murder, and its continuance had the effect of turning a whole people into a nation of assassins. He wished that criminals should not be punished but converted, and the severest penalty he would admit was banishment from the country.
His writings drew around him a crowd of disciples at Chelcice, and afterwards at Kunvald (1457). They called themselves Brethren of the Law of Christ, or the United Brethren. Soon they spread into Moravia, into Silesia, into Brandenburg, and into Poland. Without any apparent means their agents travelled everywhere; their poverty, obscurity, democratic sympathies, assisting their object to an extent money and organising energy can never attain.
II.
In Sebastian Brandt's once popular book, "The Ship of Fools," the first edition of which appeared in 1494, the author complains "of the arrogance and pride of the rude men of the country." Nothing can more forcibly set forth the rise of the people in the fifteenth century than the tirade of this excellent imperial councillor. The Crusades, the renascence of pagan learning, the rise of commerce, and the discovery of new worlds, the invention of printing and of gunpowder, and even the Black Death, all fought like the stars in their courses against feudalism. If in the midst of the revolution caused by these important events, the serf not only dragged his head out of the collar, but sometimes became grasping and usurious, who was to blame but the society that set him the example?
Side by side with Brandt's satire on "the rude men of the country," one ought to study what the legists say of the condition of these rude men while these changes were going on, a condition which continued in some countries for centuries later. In his "Histoire des Paysans," M. Eugène Bonnemère quotes Renaudon as naming no less than ninety-seven seignorial rights which the lords in various places claimed as due from the enfranchised serfs. These exactions varied from pettifogging claims on the honey that the villein's bees extracted from the lord's flowers, on the rain-water that ran down the ruts of the roads, or for the dust the herds made in going from one pasture to another, until they reached what was nothing but organised pillage in the right called De prise de gîte et de pouvoirie. What the lords left, the clergy took; there was hardly a circumstance in life out of which the latter did not extract a fee.
Under such a load of exactions it is not surprising that the French peasants thought freedom no boon, and that their king, Louis X. (1315), had to goad them by insults and taxes to accept his generous offers to permit them to purchase their enfranchisement by "paying a sufficient recompense for the emoluments which their continuance in servitude was able to bring him or his successors." This system of exaction, instead of lessening, grew heavier with each generation. The discovery of gunpowder so altered mediaeval warfare that a different mode of fortification had to be adopted, the expense of which was extracted from the villein. A sense of the terrible debt owing to the peasants, the ages of wrong during which they had been treasuring up their wrath, rendered the lord afraid to put arms into their hands; he was therefore obliged to employ mercenaries, a class of professional fighters who were the scourge of Europe.
If we want to realize the condition of the labouring classes in these last days of feudalism, we ought to read the complaint of the poor commons and labourers of France given by Monstrelet, in his Chronicles, commencing with a doleful Hélas! hélas! hélas! hélas! and in which they cry to all the classes above them to regard their visages si pitieux et si palles, and their limbs which are no longer able to sustain them. As they go from house to house every one tells them God will provide. "Alas!" they cry, "we are not dogs but Christians, and in God we are all brothers!"
Little chance had the labourer in making his appeal on such grounds. For if the agonies of feudalism had rendered its " rude men of the country" "insolent," and changed some of the trembhng "gaspers" into greedy "graspers," it had produced in the wealthier classes a kind of delirium. A glance at the fashions of the age is sufficient. A bal masqué in a lunatic asylum, a congregation of fiends; such is the effect of its civil and military costume. Brandt says:—
"Some theyr neckes charged with colers and chaynes,
As golden withythes : theyr fingers full of ringes,
Theyr neckes naked : almost to the raynes,
Theyr sleeves blasinge like a cranys winges."
Add to this, tight-fitting hose coming up over the haunches, the two halves of the body being of different and incongruous colours, Absolom-like curls, surmounted by a jaunty hat with a peacock's feather, shoes snouted with a metal pike, a finger long, looking upwards, and ugliness inconceivable, wearing over them a clog also snouted and piked, these courtiers of the fifteenth century looked more like great winged insects than men. Every one, says Brandt, dressed above their station, and many mortgaged their land or sold it outright to keep up these outrageous fashions.
The military costume seemed expressly devised to terrorize. The helmets were in some cases arranged so as to give their wearers the appearance of a grimacing monster; in others a horrifying effect was produced by surmounting them with all kinds of outrageous forms, coloured brilliantly, and rendered dazzling by long mantlets streaming and curling. There is a battle by Uccello in the Louvre, in which the head-dresses of the combatants dance about on the black background like great Chinese lanterns. The whole harness was in keeping: if the feet did not look like a ponderous wedge, they took the form of a vulture's claw.
These "hollow devils" did not express the character of every one who shut himself up in them, but they were typical of a ruling class, who wished to make the world believe that at a push they were all capable of atrocities such as those committed by the bastard of Vauru, who, commanding for the Dauphin at Meaux, had an elm near the moat of that city on which were always swinging from eighty to a hundred corpses, mostly insurgent peasants.
III.
At the very time that Savonarola began to withstand Lorenzo d'Medici, telling him that the Lord spares no one, and has no fear of the princes of the earth, the first drops of the coming storm fell in Germany. The opening act of the great rising of the German peasants occurred in 1491, at Kempten, in Suabia. Two years later their famous league of the Bundschuh was formed. The adoption of a peasant's shoe as their cognisance was a stroke of genius, full of humour and the most touching truth. The confederate peasants held nocturnal meetings on the summit of the Hungersberg, one of the highest mountains in the Vosges. In 1502, the Bundschuh appeared in the See of Spire, where seven thousand peasants rose, declaring that they wished to be as free as the Swiss. Both these risings failed through treachery, and their leaders were executed.
In a short time the insurrection broke out again at Lehn, not far from Freiburg in Bavaria. Its leader selected emissaries among the wandering mendicants, who induced the peasants of Elsass, of the Mark of Baden, of the Black Forest, and of a great part of Suabia, to declare for the Bundschuh. They held their meetings in the valley of the Kinzig, an affluent of the Rhine in Wiirtemburg, and issued a manifesto in which their complaints and their demands touching the woods, pasture-lands, hunting-grounds, and fisheries were clearly stated. However, they too were put down, and their leaders, with the exception of the chief, who escaped, suffered death.
It was in the realm of the dissolute Duke Ulrich of Wurtemburg that the next revolutionary society was formed. The confederates admitted into their society only working men, day labourers, and small proprietors, as they feared the middle classes more than the great nobles. All of a sudden six thousand peasants appeared in arms in the valley of Rems. Duke Ulrich, finding his threat to whip them home had no effect, obtained the support of the middle classes by certain concessions and then fell on the peasants. He gave up entire communes to be pillaged by the lansquenets, who burnt the cottages, violated the women, and compelled the men to choose between kneeling abjectly, or having their legs cut off with a scythe. Any one who knew of a member of the Society of Poor Conrad and did not denounce him, were he father or brother, was to be put to death.
This happened in 1510; before ten years had passed away Luther, like another Prospero, had said the word that unchained the storm. It was one of those propitious moments when the powerful seem to have the making of a new world in their own hands. Ulrich von Hutten and his friend Franz von Sickingen, vainly attempting to seize the opportunity, were defeated; both died soon after, Sickingen of his wounds, Hutten apparently of chagrin.
The cause of justice which these great men had tried to make that of Germany fell once more into the hands of the poor and ignorant. A few months after Hutten's death the peasants formed the confederation called the Evangelical Brotherhood.
Not far from the borders of Bohemia is the little town of Zwickau. Here, during Luther's confinement in the Wartburg, arose the sect of the Anabaptists. This movement, which puzzled and infuriated Luther, and through his treatment of which he finally lost the greater part of his influence, is not difficult to understand. Luther had hailed the Bible as a charter of deliverance from the tyranny of Roman superstition; the Anabaptists hailed the doctrine of the inward teaching of the Holy Spirit as a deliverance from the oppression of Lutheran teaching. Both were steps in the assertion of individual liberty, both were fraught with danger, but especially that of the Anabaptists, because it was the profounder, the more universal truth. Luther by his roughness hardened the hearts of these seekers after truth, and turned mysticism into fanaticism, and a desire for justice into a cry for vengeance. He had delivered the people from the priests, but now he wanted to hand them over to the custody of the theologians. They cried out by the voice of the Anabaptists that they would have neither the one nor the other, but that they would be guided by the Spirit of God, for in that alone would there be liberty.
The founders of Anabaptism were Nicholas Storch and Max Thomas, variously described, but who probably were cloth-makers; Max Stubner, at one time a student lodging with Melanchthon, and Thomas Münzer.
Born exactly three centuries before the terrible year of Vengeance, Münzer is the Prophet of Revolution. As his birthplace, the Hartz Mountains, it is only when seen in the gathering storm, or when, the damp mist of fanaticism ascending, the great spectre of insurrection surged above a nature supposed to be the peculiar abode of diabolic influence, that Münzer appears grand. Yet this thorny, irritable, restless man had, as his native hills, a head of granite and a heart full of precious ore. He loved truth, justice, and the Cause of the Poor with a passionate vindictiveness which rendered him guilty of the very errors he most detested. His father had been hanged by the Graf von Stolberg, for what reason does not appear. Nor are we told how he came to be a priest and a reformer. He was at first a follower of the Wittenberg school, but finding Luther's doctrine of inspiration too narrow, he set up the standard of revolt The idea of a permanent inspiration led him to study the works of Joachim of Calabria, who in the Middle Age had been regarded as a prophet. They taught a doctrine which was afterwards mysteriously described as "the Eternal Gospel." It spoke of the reign of the Holy Spirit when the letter of human erudition would pass away and the Spirit would himself write His words on men's hearts, so that a true society of brothers and sisters would arise, the godly among men becoming the organ of the Spirit; such words as priests and clergy would no longer be heard. This doctrine worked on Münzer like the interior fires in a volcanic land. The mingled ore and dross soon burst forth in destructive lava. Münzer preached a social revolution.
And he was but a type of Germany itself, for the whole land was soaked with this same doctrine and believed implicitly in it. The various sects in the Catholic Church reproached each other with it, their guilt with reference to it being very much in proportion to the light and heat of their evangelic faith. The Franciscans were probably the most inclined to believe with Joachim of Calabria, and although the old and the new sects were often bitter foes, there was at bottom a profound unity in the work of the Franciscans, the Lollards, the Beghards, and the Hussites. It was through their common influence that Germany was so saturated by a doctrine which was no other than that of the Eternal Gospel, and which after all is no misnomer.
For in reality this Eternal Gospel is but the quintessence of the Bible. And at this very moment (1522–3) Luther's translations of the New Testament and of the Pentateuch had appeared and were being widely made known to a people who, up till then, had only seen the "Biblia Pauperum," a sort of picture-book of Christian Doctrine.
When the seething heart of Germany heard, as something almost new, of the constitution and laws of the free Commonwealth which Moses founded, it must have responded to the cry of the Psalmist: "I rejoice at thy word as one that findeth great spoil." For it was great spoil indeed to find that God's Word gave them the right to a far happier and nobler society than that in which they groaned. The Pentateuch told them of a state of which the Author was no other than the Eternal Himself, where every man was free, and where each family had its inalienable right in the land.
In the New Testament they learnt that those among whom this divine commonwealth had been founded had proved unworthy, and another people had been chosen, taken from among all nations. No words could exceed in strength those of the New Testament when it spoke of the honour and privilege of this elect race. Foreknown, predestinated, regenerated, justified, a chosen generation, an holy nation, a peculiar people, kings and priests unto God, it was they who were finally to reign on the earth.
The writings of Luther and other of the reformers, disseminated far and wide in the form of little tracts or booklets illustrated with cuts by Cranach, had taught thousands of poor men that this high honour was assured to those who exercised repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We must be dull indeed if we cannot imagine the elevation of spirit such a faith would produce in any man. The children of generations of downtrodden serfs needed a strong tonic to enable them to struggle with the descendants of those who had been their masters for ages, and who still possessed all the wealth, power, and culture of this world.
As in every movement, there were two sections—the one moderate, averse to the sword, wishing to conquer by endurance; the other, extreme and eager to proclaim the war. In its original and final phases Anabaptism, with the exception of its maintenance of the ordinances, very closely resembled the views of the Society of Friends. But at this crisis the moderate party was gradually drawn into the vortex and supported the insurrection.
Certain Anabaptist confessions of faith give us an idea of the beliefs of the two sections of the popular party. That of the most peaceable may be gathered from the principles taught by Gabriel, who was a disciple of Jacob Hutter, founder of the Herrnhutter, who was a disciple of Nicholas Storch, the first of the mystics of Zwickau. The points of the Gabrielist confession of faith were:—an elect people ordained to reign over the earth that they may extirpate evil; community of goods; no alliance with the unregenerate, either in worship or marriage; adult baptism; the Lord's Supper, a fraternal communion and memorial of Christ's death; faith, a gift of God; no compulsion in matters of faith; prayer worthless unless inspired; capital punishment, pleadings in courts of law, oaths, and all absolute power incompatible with the Christian faith.
Of the views of the more extreme party we have a summary by Melanchthon, their enemy. He describes them as teaching that sin is not in infants; that they do not need any baptism; that innate weakness is not sin, sin only existing when a reasonable man tolerates and favours his weaknesses; that every infant, no matter whether it be Turk or Pagan, enters heaven without baptism, for all that God has made is good; that a Christian who rules by the sword can neither be prince nor regent, nor exert any authority whatever; that Christians recognise as their superiors only those who are servants of the Word of God; that a Christian ought to possess no property, but live in fraternity and community, as did the apostolic society; that there can be no marriage between one who has faith and one who has not, such a marriage being prostitution.
These two summaries of the Anabaptist faith, as held in the sixteenth century, give a very good idea of its spirit. But they are undoubtedly imperfect, and are rather to be regarded as accentuating the points of their witness than as giving a full account of their creed. What they held in common with other Christians was not the least important part of their faith. For Anabaptism was simply the outcome in the sixteenth century of that undercurrent of Christian faith and Christian tradition which had probably never ceased among the oppressed and suffering classes since it first flowed from the heart and the lips of the Divine Man who appeared in the form of a poor and unlettered Carpenter of Nazareth.
In this very doctrine of a permanent inspiration, the Anabaptists were manifestly of the same faith as Thomas à Kempis, Francis of Assisi, and Joachim of Calabria, while they appear in nearly all particulars the direct descendants of the Brethren of the Unity, the Taborites and the Lollards.
This faith, which had been filtering into the hearts of the poor and suffering European people for fifteen centuries, and which had burst forth time after time to renovate the established and visible Church, was now working with such power that the people felt courage enough to demand justice. A manifesto appeared in the form of Twelve Articles, setting forth the popular griefs. The first Article claimed the right to elect their own pastors; the second an arrangement of the tithes in the spirit of their institution in the Old Testament; the third is a good specimen of the scope and spirit of the whole:—
"In the third place, it has been the custom until now to oblige us to be bondsmen, which is a miserable state of things, seeing that Christ, by His oblivion-making blood, has released and ransomed the lowest shepherd as well as the mightiest potentate, none being excepted. Therefore it is written in the Scriptures that we are free, and we will be free. Not that we will have no magistrates; that is not what God has taught us. We are bound to live according to the law, and not in wantonness: to love the Lord our God, and in our neighbours to recognise Him; to do to them all we would have done to ourselves, as our God in the Supper has commanded us in a parting word."
By the fourth it is affirmed to be contrary to justice and charity that the poor should have no right to take game or catch birds or fish in the streams. They add, that in conformity with the Gospel, those who have bought such rights ought to receive an indemnity. The fifth claims the woods and forests as the property of the commune; the sixth complains of the aggravation of the services demanded—the peasants would serve as their fathers according to the Word of God; the seventh requires strict maintenance of the agreements having reference to rent and taxes; the eighth suggests a tribunal of arbitration to settle differences between the lords and the peasants; the ninth demands impartiality in justice and the maintenance of old customs; the tenth, that fields and pasture-lands taken unjustly from the commune be restored; that the tax on the goods of deceased persons should cease, as weighing heavily on widows and orphans; and, finally, the twelfth declares that they will give up any of the Articles proved not to accord with the Gospel and the Word of God.
This manifesto appealed so directly to the Christian conscience of the land, which Luther had done more than any before him to awaken, that all Germany—kings, nobles, peasants, friends, and enemies—looked to him to take the position of arbiter.
He cannot be accused of wanting courage at this supreme moment, or of being untrue to his calling. He rebuked the tyranny of the lords, affirming that they had no one to thank for the terrible eruption which threatened Germany but their own luxury and pride. "You are," he said, "as secular authorities, butchers and blood-suckers of the poor people. You sacrifice everything to your outrageous pride, until the people cannot and will not endure you any longer." To the people he spoke more tenderly, admitting the justice of many of their claims, but assuring them that they would be terribly in the wrong if in the name of the Gospel and as Christian men they thought of revolt. "The Christian," he said, "is a martyr; it is his business to endure all wrongs; cease, then, to talk about Christian right, and say rather that it is natural right you vindicate; for the Christian religion commands you to suffer [in 'all things and to complain only to God."
So far Luther was right; both among Catholics and Heretics, among peasants as well as among princes, all kinds of evil had come from confusing the laws of the visible world with those of the kingdom of Heaven. But he himself shows how deeply this error is implanted in Christendom, since throughout his remonstrance he falls into the same mingling of the two spheres. To introduce into this great social and political struggle one of the laws of the kingdom of Heaven the most opposed to the laws of Nature; "Resist not evil, but if a man strike thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other also;" to quote texts enforcing Christian patience on men enduring a load of injustice, which had crushed the life out of them and their ancestors for ages; to cry, "To suffer, to suffer, the cross, the cross, behold what the law of Christ teacheth," was to show that the great Doctor of the Bible had not himself understood its teaching, but was still enthralled in mediaeval confusions.
The doctrine of Grace, which he as well as all great Christian teachers in every age have proclaimed, ought to have made it clear to him that these admonitions of the New Testament were only intended for those who have received grace to understand and obey them; and that to represent them as binding on other men is the surest way of destroying all their influence in the world. His remonstrance, therefore, instinct as it is with a fervent desire for the glory of God, the peace of Germany, and the welfare of its oppressed people, really proposed that the sword of justice should be sheathed, and that the greatest criminals should be left unpunished, simply because they were the masters. It was endorsing, at a supreme crisis in European history, Wiclif's frightful paradox, "God must serve the Devil." Anabaptism of the fiercer type was the reply to this monstrous proposition, and is another instance of the truth of the words, " By thine own sins will I correct thee."
What drove the Christian conscience into still more inextricable confusion was that Luther owed his extraordinary position to the fact that he had taught with unusual force the doctrine called "Evangelical," and had therefore intensified the idea that all who were not justified by faith were the thralls of Satan, more or less his instruments, and certainly doomed to perdition. Were Christians to obey such men—were they to allow their rulers to snatch the very Bread of Life out of their mouths, and so force them and their children into the kingdom of darkness? It was no want of charity to call rulers like Ulrich of Würtemberg, and Pope Alexander II., limbs of the devil. Could St Paul's admonitions not to resist the power refer to such? "The Eternal Gospel" offered a deliverance from this dilemma. It was not the letter of a former inspiration, but a present, ever-living, ever-teaching Spirit that was to be their guide. Besides, the last age of the world had come, the long-expected Vindicator of Divine Justice was at hand, and that time the Bible prophecies should be ushered in by a great war in which the saints should take the kingdom and possess it for ever and ever.
This idea of the "Reign of the Saints," this thought that the time was at hand when Christ would take unto Himself His great power and reign, and that His saints were to prepare the way by taking a two-edged sword in their hand and executing vengeance on the rulers of a doomed world, was the secret source of the strength of the great revolt which now ensued. Leaders arose, generally preachers or old soldiers; but every class in society was represented—the wealthy middle class by the desperado James Rohrbach, familiarly called Jacquet, the perpetrator of "the Terror at Weinsberg;" the higher class by the Chancellor Wendel Hipler, who was the statesman of the movement; and by the young noble, Florian Geyer van Geyersberg, its Bayard.
Who can touch pitch and not be defiled? The very spirit of Justice itself cannot work through human nature without the Spirit of Love having to weep over much outrageous injustice and many acts of desperate cruelty. No movement of this kind has ever taken place without the friends of Justice finding themselves allied with brigands and double-dyed traitors. If the commander-in-chief, Goetz, the Knight of the Iron-hand, cannot be thus stigmatized, he at least had no real sympathy with his army, and was only drawn into the movement by the hatred he shared in common with the German nobility against the clergy and the burgher class. Under the influence of leaders like Jacquet, the war became sanguinary; all the villagers were forced to join, and the peasant hordes ranged over Germany like a new invasion of Huns and Goths. From the French frontier to the Danube all Germany was up; there were at least a hundred thousand peasants in arms.
A moment of possible victory came when the peasant armies surrounded Seneschal Georg, the general of the troops of the Suabian Confederation; but it was lost, and quickly after the peasants were defeated in the battle of Boeblingen. The lords took signal vengeance, and in expiation of the "Terror," Weinsberg was set on fire. During four days and four nights a sea of flames rose towards heaven. Two thousand people saved themselves; but all else—women, children, cattle, and houses—fell a prey to the devastating elements. As a foreground, Jacquet and the Black Hofman, the Hecate of the war, underwent the agony of being slowly roasted.
Münzer was in despair, and his letters and his manifestoes are the wild curses of a man who knows that both he and his cause are lost. He met the German princes with eight thousand followers at Frankenhausen. At the end of an hour the battle was lost, and five thousand peasants lay dead or wounded on the field. Münzer was taken, and after being tortured was put to death. On the scaffold he exhorted the princes who were present to be good, just, and equitable to the poor and feeble, often to read the Bible, and especially the Book of Kings. "Do not think," he said, "this will last for ever. One day, unless you are enlightened, I shall be avenged. A man like me does not die."
But they took no heed of the prophet. The peasants were slaughtered by hecatombs. The Seneschal Georg travelled over the country accompanied by twelve executioners. From Ulm, where the citizens had foreseen the demand and had apprenticed persons to the executioner's art, the leader of its mercenaries ran through Suabia and Franconia, putting all to death who fell into his power. All who uttered the word "Gospel" he hanged; this hireling, Berthold Archelin by name, boasted that he had hung twenty peasants a day. No doubt the 'prentice hands made themost of the practice. The Margrave of Baireuth and Anspach travelled from village to village with moving gibbets. In order not to lose time, the Margrave generally seized the first hundred peasants and decapitated or blinded about twenty, cutting off the wrists of the others. But nothing, perhaps, gives a more terrible idea of the horrible brutality of the soldiery the German nobles employed to maintain their power than the fate of Münzer's wife, a poor young woman of humble birth. On the eve of becoming a mother, she was dragged into the camp of the Princes, to whom she had been surrendered by the inhabitants of Mulhouse. Exposed to every outrage, she asked for a weapon to kill herself. She was violated in the presence of the army and died on the spot.
The slaughter of the sheep did not end with the first few months of vengeance. Four years after the battle of Frankenhausen, Charles V. issued a decree, ordaining that every Anabaptist, no matter of what sex or age, must be put to death either by the sword or by fire, or by any other means, and without any previous judicial inquiry. After this, Anabaptist martyrdoms are continually occurring. In more than one case the victims were undoubtedly Christians of the highest order. George Wagner, who suffered at Munich, was a man of such irreproachable conduct that even "the prince was dolorously affected at having to send him to the stake." His wife, holding her children in her arms, threw herself on her knees, and begged him with sobs to let them save his life. But he, "turning his eyes towards Heaven, said, 'My Father, many things here below are dear to me. I love my wife, I love my children, my friends, my life; but Thou art still more dear than wife, children, friends, or life. Nothing shall separate me from Thy love. I am Thine, body and soul. I am ready to die for Thee and the truth: Thou alone art the life.'" Another was Balthasar Hübmeier, who was burned at Vienna, in 1528; his wife, who encouraged him at the stake, being drowned three days afterwards in the Danube. Hübmeier, a pupil of Dr Eck, and one time Professor of Catholic Theology at Ingolstadt, is believed to have been the first who taught the principle of universal religious liberty. In this he was centuries before his age, and of course far in advance of all "the Reformers," who, to quote the words of Dr Schaff, in his "History of the Creeds," "felt the extermination of the Anabaptists necessary for the salvation of the churchly Reformation and of social order." Luther, who showed more heart than Melanchthon, writes to his brother-in-law: — "It is a lamentable thing that they should finish up in this way with these poor people. But what is to be done? God intends that it may spread a terror in the people. Otherwise, Satan would do worse than the princes do now."
IV.
God intends that it may spread a terror in the people. Here is the secret of the long and doleful history of Christendom, ending after nineteen centuries in its people being almost entirely alienated from that which the Churches teach as the Gospel.
Poor people, it is sometimes said with surprise, believe they will go to heaven simply because they have suffered so much on earth. What is this but faith in the Justice of God?
This obstinate belief in a final reign of Justice, the last consolation of the poor and the oppressed, was the secret of the great uprising we have been considering, and this was why they hailed with such joy the first proclamation of the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven.
When the outcasts of Jerusalem found that the chief object that Jesus Christ had was to proclaim a reign of Justice, and to establish it on earth; when they saw that with Him the advantage of individuals was only regarded as it helped to establish or illustrate the kingdom of Heaven; when they found that in pursuit of this object He was not afraid to rebuke offenders—however pious, respectable, or highly placed—faith in God and man once more rose in their hearts, and in their unwonted joy they made the streets of Jerusalem resound with the cry: "Blessed is the King that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest!"
Such a view of the Gospel will not, I am conscious, appeal to a society like ours, based on the idea that every individual necessarily seeks his own advantage. What consoles the oppressed people is not the promise of personal profit, even when it takes the form of eternal felicity, but the certainty that Justice will be vindicated.
And because this Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven is not preached in England, Christians have not recognised that the primary object of their calling is that they should at all cost devote themselves to bringing about the reign of Justice on earth.
To do so would doubtless involve the same results it has always done. For injustice is to so great a degree the basis of our society, and the progress of injustice is so rapid, that to make any real stand against it will certainly lead to the charge of stirring up the people, and possibly to a fate similar to His against whom this accusation was first brought.
In the fourteenth century there was no book more popular than "The Vision of Piers Plowman." The Individual Christian, the poor hard-working Man, Human Nature, the Church, are all represented in the character of Piers Plowman, and, by a profoundly Christian thought, Jesus Christ in His suffering and humiliation is so identified with Piers Plowman that the poet cannot distinguish who it is he beholds. In the nineteenth passus he falls into a dream during Mass:—
"'And sodeynly me mette
That Piers the Plowman
Was peynted al blody,
And com in with a cros
Before the comune people.
And right lik in all thynges
To oure lord Jhesus.
'And thanne called I Conscience,
To kenne me the sothe;
Is this Jhesus the justere quod I,
That Jews did to dethe?
Or is it Piers the Plowman
Who peynted Hym so rede?
'Quod Conscience and kneeled tho,
This arn Piers armes
Hise colours and his cote armure
Ac he that cometh so blody
Is Christ with his cross,
Conquerour of Christene.'"
This is the faith that has ever lain dormant in the heart of the people, the faith that found voice and action in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and again in our own times. If that faith is mute to-day, it is because there is no heart in the suffering poor. The rich have taken from them their one little ewe lamb—the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, and have offered them in its place a changeling they do not care to accept.