instincts in such passages of the Old Testament and his fear lest such pleasure were sinful in the sight of God. Then, too, the stern and unforgiving character of God, as depicted in the Old Testament, caused him. intense anxiety. According to Köstlin:

Disquieting questions, moreover, now arose in his mind, so sorely troubled with temptation; and his subtle and penetrating intellect, so far from being able to solve them, only plunged him deeper in distress. Was it then really God's will, he asked himself, that he should become actually purged from sin, and thereby be saved? Was not the way to hell or the way to heaven already fixed for him immutably in God's will and decree, by which everything is determined and preordained? And did not the very futility of his endeavors hitherto prove that it was the former fate that hung over him? He was in danger of going utterly astray in his conception of such a God. Expressions in the Bible such as those which speak of serving Him with fear became to him intolerable and hateful. He was seized at times with fits of despair such as might have tempted him to blaspheme God. It was this that he afterwards referred to as the greatest temptation he had experienced while young."

He also had a great and significant fear of death. He accidentally ran the point of his rapier into his leg, cutting one of the larger arteries, and causing the limb to swell subcutaneously. In his terror of death he called upon the Blessed Virgin to help him. That night his terror was renewed when the wound broke open afresh, and again he invoked the Mother of God. Köstlin goes on to tell us that Luther was terribly distressed, a few months after he had taken his degree of M.A., by the sudden death of one of his friends, who was struck dead by lightning at his very side, as the tradition has come down to us.

Well might the thought even then have occurred to him, while so disturbed in his mind and overpowered by feelings of sadness, whether it would not be better to seek his cure in the monastic holiness recommended by the Church, and to renounce altogether the world and all the success he had hitherto aspired to. The young Master of Arts, as he tells us himself in later years, was indeed a sorrowful man. Returning [from his home] on July 2, [1505], the feast of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary, he was already near Erfurt, when, at the village of Stotternheim, a terrific storm broke over his head. A fearful flash of lightning darted from heaven before his eyes. Trembling with fear, he fell to the earth, and exclaimed, Help, Anna, beloved Saint! I will be a monk. A few days after, when quietly settled again at Erfurt, he repented having used these words. But he felt he had taken a vow, and that, on the strength of that vow, he had obtained a hearing. . . . The Luther of later days declared that his monastic vow was a compulsory one, forced from him by terror and the fear of death. But, at the same time, he never doubted that it was God who urged him."

▾ Ibid., p. 37.

8

* Ibid., pp. 38-9.

In his larger work Köstlin goes more into detail concerning Luther's state of sadness and his fear of death, but the facts given in his smaller work as quoted above are sufficient for our purpose.

We have not space to follow him through the year of his novitiate, but his mental doubts and fears were just as strong in the cloister as they had been before his entrance. In fact, he became more introspective than ever, and the more he subjected his thoughts and actions to his self-dissection, the more transgressions of God's will he found, and the more grievously did they afflict his conscience. His mind became unstable and full of exaggerated thinking. He looked for sins in his most innocent actions, and the more he confessed them and repented of them, the more numerous they became. As he himself put it, "The more we wash ourselves the fouler we become." Although he was sorry for his sins, he never felt that he had won God's forgiveness. This made him do

999

penance in an extreme and immoderate manner, torturing his body, fasting to excess, and imperiling his bodily health, until his Superior Staupitz either persuaded or compelled him to moderate his practices. Thus he spent two years in the monastery amidst these inward strivings and sufferings. He became the admiration of his less ascetic, or perhaps more normal, brethren, and began to be spoken of in the other monasteries of the Order as a saint. He himself tells us afterwards that he felt himself to be "a proud saint" and enjoyed the importance that his superior sanctity gave him amongst his brethren. His moods were alternately those of exaltation and depression, and in the latter his sufferings became so great that he feared he would die.

Thus he tells us later on, when speaking of the torments of purgatory, of a man, who doubtless was himself, how he had often endured such agony so hellish in its violence . . . that, had it lasted longer, even for half an hour, or only five minutes, he must have died then and there, and his bones have been consumed to ashes. He himself saw afterwards in these pains, visitations of a special kind, such as God does not send to everyone.

10

The young Luther began to regard himself as a vessel of reprobation, inevitably to be damned, and his physical and mental condition became completely morbid. Evidently his Prior became alarmed for the young monk's life under such circumstances, and, at the next visit of the Provincial John Staupitz, the case was laid before him, and the latter for the first time came in contact with the "gifted, thoughtful, and melancholy young man." Staupitz's first care was to steady Luther and restrain the violence of his ardor, and especially to free his mind from the consuming doubts that had taken possession of it concerning his ultimate salvation.

He treated Luther, both in conversation and letter, with fatherly confidence, and Luther unlocked to him, as to a father, his heart and its cares. Upon his wishing to confess to him all his many small sins, Staupitz insisted first on distinguishing between what were "Je langer wir uns waschen je unreiner wir werden.”

10 Köstlin, op. cit., pp. 49-50.

really sins and what were not; as for self-imagined sins, or such a patchwork of offences as Luther laid before him, he would not listen to them; that was not the kind of seriousness, he would say, that God wished to have. Luther tormented himself with a system of penance, consisting of actual pain, punishments, and expiations. Staupitz taught him that repentance in the Scriptural meaning, was an inward change and conversion, which must proceed from the love of holiness and of God; and that, for peace with God, he must not look to his own good resolutions to lead a better life, which he had not the strength to carry out, or to his own acts, which could never satisfy the law of God, but must trust with patience to God's forgiving mercy, and learn to see in Christ, whom God permitted to suffer for the sins of man, not the threatening Judge, but rather the loving Savior.11

Gustave Freytag goes more into detail in describing these sufferings of Luther:

At odds with his father, full of terror at the thought of eternity which he could not understand, intimidated by the wrath of God, he entered, with almost convulsive energy, on a life of renunciation, devotion, and penance. He found no peace. . . . That the good were persecuted while the bad were fortunate, that God had damned the race of men with the awful curse of sin because an ignorant woman bit into an apple, and that, on the other hand, the same God bore our sins with love, indulgence and patience; that Christ had on one occasion sent away honest people with harshness, and another time received harlots, publicans, and murderers-"the wisdom of human reason must become foolishness in the face of such things." At such times he would complain to his spiritual adviser, Staupitz: "Dear Doctor, the Lord proceeds so horridly with men; who can serve Him if He strikes about Himself so recklessly?" If the answer was made, "How else could He subdue the stubborn heads?" that intelligent argument could not console the youth. . .

Every worldly thought, all the impulses of youthful blood, to him became abominable wrongs; he began to despair of himself; he wrestled in endless prayer, fasted and mortified the flesh. On one occasion the brothers were obliged to force an entrance to his cell, in which he had lain for days in a condition not far remote from insanity. The warmest sympathy moved Staupitz as he looked upon these convulsive torments, and he would attempt to comfort him by rather rude speeches. Once, when Luther had written to him: “Ó my sin, sin, sin!" the spiritual adviser answered: "You want to be without sin and have no real sin. Christ is the pardon of real sins. If Christ is to help you, you should have a register enumerating the real sins, and not approach Him with such trifling and doll sins, and make of every bubble a sin." 11

11 Ibid., pp. 52-3

(All this has been beautifully expressed by Staupitz in his little book entitled Ein Buchlin von der Nachfolgung des willigen Sterbens Christi. Leipzig, 1515.)

12

Freytag, Martin Luther, translated by Heinemann, pp. 26-7. Chicago, 1897.

It was at this period that he first became aware of the fact that something was wrong with his head. He insisted that when he first became a monk he "stormed the very heavens," that he "nearly perished in the cold," that he "so afflicted and tortured his body that he could not have stood it very long"; and of having prayed, fasted, watched, and inflicted punishment on his body, and "so seriously injured his head that he had not recovered, and never should as long as he lived."

Later he says:

" 13

"I verily kept the rules of the Order with great diligence and zeal. I often fasted till I was sick and well-nigh dead. Not only did I observe the rules straitly, but I took on myself other tasks, and had a peculiar way by myself. My seniors strove against this my peculiarity, and with good reason. I was a shameful persecutor and destroyer of my own body; for I fasted, prayed, watched, and made myself weary and languid beyond what I could endure. Doubts all the while cleaved to my conscience, and I thought within myself, Who knoweth whether this is pleasing and acceptable to God, or not. . . . Even when I was the most devout, I went as a doubter to the altar, and as a doubter I came away again. If I made my confession, I was still in doubt; if, upon that, I left off prayer, I was again in doubt, for we were wrapped in the conceit that we could not pray and should not be heard, unless we were wholly pure and without sin, like the saints in heaven.

"When I was a monk, I used oft-times to be very contrite for my sins, and to confess them all as much as possible; and I performed the penance that was enjoined unto me as straightly and as rigorously as I could. Yet for all this, my conscience could never be tranquil and assured, but I was always in doubt, and said to myself, This or that thou has not done rightly; thou wast not sorrowful enough for thy sins; this and that sin thou didst forget in thy confession." Though he "confessed every day, it was all in vain." “The smart and anguish of conscience," he elsewhere says, "were as great in the cowl as they were before out of it." "

This last remark is enlightening as showing us that he suffered from this obsessional over-repression even before he was a monk, and that it was a symptom that had appeared at, or shortly before, puberty. Sears goes on to tell us that

Luther's mind had an individuality which separated him from the mass and heightened his solitude. In the mental processes through which he passed, he was alone and without sympathy. He was driven at last, almost to phrensy. Often was his bodily frame overpowered by the intensity of his excited feelings, and there was no skilful physician of the soul at hand to prescribe for his case.. "In my huge temptation, which consumed my body so that I wellnigh lost my breath, and hardly knew whether I had still any brain or not, there was no one to comfort me." If he opened his heart to 18 Sears, Luther, p. 78. 14 Ibid., pp. 78-81.

any one, the only reply he received was, "I know nothing about such temptations," and he was left to the gloomy conclusion, that he "was to be alone in this disconsolate state." [At one time] he says, "When I was young, I loved allegories to such a degree that I thought every thing must be turned into allegories." [Writing in after days] to George, Duke of Saxony, [about this period of his life he describes his hopelessness as follows:] "When only a small temptation of death or of sin came upon me, I fell away, and found no succor either in baptism or in the monastic state. Then was I the most miserable man on earth; day and night there was nothing but lamentation and despair, from which no one could deliver me." We shall also quote from Lamprecht, who says:

16

He was more than painstaking in his observance of the rules of the Order; he fasted beyond measure, he chastised himself, was engrossed with endless meditations, and persevered in the narcosis of ecstasy until he believed himself among the angelic choirs. No works-possibility of the old Church for justification in perfection but was exhausted. But what Luther especially sought he did not find. Neither faintness from bodily flagellation, nor occasional ecstatic union with a pantheistic, etherealized god decoyed him from the ever more mighty demand of his soul to possess a personal, enduring relation to God. It was the opposite that took place. The more all the means of the Church were exhausted, even those of the sacraments, particularly of penance, in which his confessors did not understand him, the more frightful was the lonesomeness, the Godforsakeness of his position. He was tending towards the abyss of despair and of insanity, etc.1

After his novitiate of two years he was ordained a priest, which brought to his unstable mind new fears and fresh anxieties. During the celebration of his first mass, he was so overpowered with awe at the sacredness of the occasion, that he could scarcely remain at the altar, and was like a dead man, as he afterwards expressed it.

Staupitz not only endeavored to free his mind from its cankering doubts by resolving these doubts directly, but in addition, not satisfied with this, he also changed his mental and physical environment by bringing him back with him to Wittemberg to lecture on philosophy. The change was a happy one, and does eminent credit to Staupitz's judgment; for, instead of the hopelessness, the morbid introspection, and the submissive placidity of the cloister, his mind took on an extraordinary development of buoyancy, of external vision, and of self-confidence. His judgment cleared, and his mind sought saner scope for its activities. In this office he was not long in gradually obtaining control of himself and, in some measure, verging to the other extreme of excessive selfconfidence. At times he even surprised himself by indulging in a certain 15 Ibid., pp. 82, 83, 85, 88, 89.

18 Deutsche Geschichte, Vol. V, p. 225.

17 Quoted from Denifle's Luther und Luthertum, Volz translation, p. 386. The italics are mine.