# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1846 01 10_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Eck; he found himself there in the midst of his enemies, and the agitation of the people, stirred up by papist incitement, gave cause to fear the worst, since he wrote to Spalatin: "If I perish, the world will not come to an end for that, and I must die sometime anyway." In particular, on his heroic journey to Worms in 1521, Luther was continually in danger of perishing by some means at the hands of his enemies, since they feared his personal appearance at the Diet and did everything to prevent it. Luther did travel under the escort of an imperial herald for safe conduct, but the prince of darkness would nevertheless have had Luther killed, had God not protected his faithful servant through the escort of holy angels. In Worms itself, Luther's enemies would gladly have brought it about that he, like Hus before him, should be burned alive as a heretic. Finally, Luther was more than once in great mortal danger at Orlamünde in 1524 among Karlstadt's followers, as well as in the following year among the rebellious peasants, while he waited to carry out his office of admonition.

Three times the plague raged in Wittenberg, even in Luther's own house. Many fled from death, but not Luther; he fearlessly continued to comfort the sick and dying with words from God's Word, and behold, God protected him according to his promise, "from the pestilence that walketh in darkness, from the destruction that wasteth at noonday." Psalm 91:6.

The dear Luther was also afflicted in his life by many illnesses, some of them very severe, so that he could say of himself: "I am a true Lazarus, well tried in sicknesses." In particular, he lay very gravely ill in 1527, and had at the same time to feel in his soul the fiercest blows of Satan's fist; he sank into a deep swoon, and in human eyes there was nothing to expect but his speedy end.

Also at the assembly in Schmalkalden in 1537 he fell mortally ill and firmly believed that the time of his departure was at hand. Something similar happened in 1542. In both of these illnesses he set his house in order and made his will. Yet in his case, too, the word was fulfilled: "The LORD will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing; thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness." Psalm 41:4.

Thus Satan and his instruments often threatened Luther with death, but Luther, in firm faith, despised all their threats, as he testifies in a public letter to Hartmuth von Cronberg in 1522, in which he writes: "They threaten us with death; if they were as wise as they are foolish, they would instead threaten us with life. It is a mocking, shameful threat, to frighten Christ and his Christians with death, seeing that they are in fact lords and victors over death." (Luther's Works XV, 1983.)

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In a special writing concerning the two imperial edicts against him and his followers, from the years 1521 and 1524, he challenges all his enemies, with unparalleled heroic courage, to demonstrate their power over him; yet he also testifies to them that this lies not in their hands but in God's, and that God will avenge his blood. Thus he writes: "Now, my dear princes and lords, you hasten almost together with me toward death; and when that has happened, you will have won. But if you had ears to hear, I would tell you something strange. What if Luther's life counted for so much before God that, were he not living, none of you would be secure in his life or his rule, and that his death would be the ruin of you all? It is not wise to trifle with God. Go on, then, freely — throttle and burn. I will not yield, God willing. Here I am! And I ask you most kindly that, once you have killed me, you do not raise me up again and kill me a second time. God has given me, as I see, not reasonable men to deal with, but German beasts are to kill me — if I am worthy of it — just as if wolves or swine were to tear you apart. Yet I advise everyone who believes there is a God to refrain from such a deed. For although God has given me the grace not to fear death as I once did, and will also help me to die willingly and gladly, they should nevertheless not do it before my hour has come and my God calls me, however much they may rage and rave. For he who has now kept me alive for the third year against their will and beyond all my hope can also prolong my life further, though I do not greatly desire it. And even if they now kill me, let them commit such a killing as neither they nor their children shall ever get over. Of this I would rather have warned them, and I truly do not wish it upon them. But it is no use; God has blinded and hardened them." (Luther's Works XV, 2713 ff.)

How ready Luther was, even to endure a martyr's death himself, if God so willed, is made clear by one of his letters to Dr. Staupitz, which he wrote in 1518, in the very midst of the hottest battles against indulgences, and in which he says: "I have neither property nor money, nor do I desire any. If I have had a good reputation and honor, let him who began it now bring it to nothing without ceasing. This one useless body, weakened by much and constant danger and misfortune, is all that remains; if they put it to death, by cunning or by force (in God's service), they truly do me a great injury, shortening the time of my life by perhaps an hour or two — and thereby helping me all the sooner to heaven. I content myself with this, that I have in my dear Lord Jesus Christ a sweet Redeemer and faithful High Priest, whom I will praise and glorify as long as I live." (Luther's Works XV, 511.)

These, then, were no empty phrases, but a joy in the faith wrought by the Holy Spirit, even in the face of death, when Luther closed his hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, etc. with these heroic words:

Let goods and kindred go,
this mortal life also;
The body they may kill:
God's truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.

Ah, how many think themselves good Lutherans when they merely sing these words after Luther, while in their lives they strive for nothing more than those visible things and for nothing less than the kingdom of God, and, in order to gain the latter, are unwilling to lose the least bit of the former!

Although Luther desired a martyr's death, he nevertheless considered himself wholly unworthy of so high an honor. He testifies to this in his answer to the King of England's slanderous writing in 1527, in the following words: "There have now been three popes, as many cardinals, kings, princes, bishops, priests, monks, great crowds of the learned, and the whole world, all of whom are, or would gladly be, betrayers, murderers, and executioners of Luther's blood; and the devil too, with his own. Shame on me — I am an enemy to my own blood, when I think that I should have such splendid, precious executioners and murderers. Such an honor should befall the Turkish emperor, not such a poor beggar as I am. But since they indeed wish to be so, I must suffer such honor and make of their wrath and rage a joy and a game for my heart." (Luther's Works XIX, 508.) And in his account of the blessed martyrdom of Leonhard Kaiser in 1527, Luther exclaims: "Ah, Lord God, that I had been worthy, or might yet be worthy, of such a confession and such a death. What am I? What do I do? How ashamed I am, when I read this history, that I have not long since (though I have deserved it ten times more before the world) become worthy to suffer likewise. Well then, my God, if it must be so, then so be it; thy will be done." (Luther's Works XXI, 213.)

Although God did not let it come to pass that Luther died a martyr's death, he nevertheless deserves, with full right, to be placed among the number of the martyrs, and indeed foremost among the Lutheran ones, as C. Rabus has also done in his famous Book of Martyrs. For Luther, especially in the last thirty years of his life, had to suffer, for Christ's sake, in body and soul, no less — indeed far more and far heavier things — than many martyrs before and after him. He could confess with all the saints of the Old and New Testament: for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us. Psalm 44:23; Romans 8:36–37.

From his thirty-third year to his sixty-third, Luther hovered, knowingly and unknowingly, in constant mortal danger — on his many journeys, during his stays in foreign places in the midst of his enemies, in church, in the academic lecture hall, at banquets, on his walks in and around Wittenberg, in his own house, amid the great, unceasing press of visiting strangers from almost every land, to whom he always gave himself with the greatest kindness: how easily, on any such occasion, could his precious life have been brought to a violent end in a single moment, had God not always guarded him so wonderfully, as the apple of his eye!

In the face of the many warnings of his anxious friends, near and far, to be more on his guard, he showed an undaunted courage in not holding his own life too dear, and trusted far more in God's protection than in his own caution. Yet he did not recklessly court danger either, but made use of the means God offered him for the protection of his life. Thus he did not