# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 05 17_S74
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

possible forbearance, outwardly kept the peace for some years thereafter, although in secret he harbored a bitter grudge against Luther. Such false brethren did the Gospel far more harm than its open enemies.

From this time on, Luther remained in Wittenberg, and no one dared to lay a hand on him. Among other things, he wrote very sharply that same year (1522) against the ungodly conduct of unspiritual clergy, rebuking them both for their false doctrine and for their scandalous lives, and admonishing them to repentance; but he did not spare kings and the mighty either, for when the King of England, Henry VIII, had issued a highly venomous work against Luther's treatise "On the Babylonian Captivity," Luther dispatched this proud and ignorant defender of the papal abominations with words as blunt as he deserved. That work had probably been composed by a more learned man than the king — in Luther's own supposition, the famous Erasmus.

In all his labors for the Church of God, in which he far surpassed all his fellow workers, Luther sought no earthly reward. His annual salary in the year 1523 amounted, in all, to no more than five dollars in our money, and yet he would ask for no more; and when he did ask, he did so only to obtain support for others — indeed, poor as he was, he was himself so compassionate that whatever gifts he happened to receive he again distributed generously among the needy. Nor did he accept the least payment for his numerous writings, doing this, as he himself explained, for the sake of his dear Lord Jesus Christ, who had likewise shed His blood for him freely. All the more richly did God bless him, and through his labors bless many thousands with every kind of spiritual blessing in heavenly gifts through Christ.

The year 1523, too, was very rich in such blessing; but space does not permit even listing all the writings that appeared that year, so only three very important ones shall be named. These are: "Grounds and Reasons from Scripture, that a Christian Congregation has the Right and Power to Judge All Doctrine, to Call Teachers, and Also to Install and Depose Them"; further: "A Letter to the Council and Congregation at Prague, on How to Choose and Install Ministers of the Church." Finally: "On the Order of Divine Worship in the Congregation," a writing which Luther expanded three years later, and according to which the worship service at Wittenberg, and afterward in many other places, was arranged, so that this writing must be regarded as the foundation of all Lutheran liturgical orders. Luther also laid, through his unsurpassed hymns, the foundation of the rich treasury of hymns that so remarkably distinguishes the Lutheran Church.

In the year 1524, the so-called heavenly prophets, also called Anabaptists, caused Luther much worry and trouble. They boasted of direct divine revelations, spoke constantly only of the spirit of Scripture, which they alone claimed to possess, and despised the written and preached Word of God as a dead letter; they rejected infant baptism and all manner of Christian order, and generally abused liberty as a cloak for wickedness — all this, however, under the dazzling pretense of wanting to carry through more powerfully and completely the feebly begun Reformation. Through their fanatical zeal they stirred up the easily misled masses; not a few fell away entirely from the Word of God; others at least came to regard Luther's teaching with suspicion. This mischief had already spread from Zwickau to Wittenberg as early as 1521. Above all others, Thomas Müntzer preached this pernicious doctrine, and later, from 1524 onward, Carlstadt did so anew, who moreover was the first to put forward again the soul-destroying error that in the Holy Supper the body and blood of Christ were not substantially present and consequently were not received with the mouth. Luther now sought to check this hellish mischief of the heavenly prophets by the Word of God; he preached to the people in several places and engaged in discussions with those who had been led astray; but all this proved not only entirely fruitless — indeed, in Orlamünde the fury of the people against Luther grew so great that he had to flee the town, with some cursing after him and crying: Go, in the name of a thousand devils, and may you break your neck before you get out of town! Ah, with what deep sorrow must Luther have observed such and similar fruits of the tares that the enemy had sown, while from Luther only the good seed of wholesome doctrine had been sown! Yet even then he continued undaunted, indeed all the more zealously, in his labor of husbandry, and God granted growth to his planting and watering in many places, even in distant lands, of which he testified his heartfelt joy in various letters, faithfully encouraging the new confessors to steadfastness in the Gospel and powerfully comforting them in all that they would suffer on its account. It was also in this year (1524) that Luther left the monastery altogether, after all the monks had already done so before him. He now also laid aside the monk's cowl that he had worn for eighteen years, and on the twentieth Sunday after Trinity he stepped into the pulpit for the first time in a black clerical gown (such as Lutheran ministers still customarily wear today), the cloth for which the Elector had given him as a gift.

But Satan devised new means by which Luther's name might be defamed and his teaching suppressed or at least disgraced; and just as the heavenly prophets had abused Christian liberty as a cloak of shame for ecclesiastical licentiousness, so now the rebellious peasants abused that same liberty for civil lawlessness — indeed, this latter was but a fruit of the former, for it was the head of the heavenly prophets, Thomas Müntzer, who called himself the servant of God with the sword of Gideon, who knew how to so inflame men's minds over the oppression of nearly unbearable taxes that the Peasants' Revolt broke out already in 1524 in Swabia and, in the following year, spread like a swiftly-spreading fire through Franconia, along the Rhine, as far as Thuringia, and so through almost every region of Germany. At first the peasants turned to Luther and chose him as arbiter. In this Luther proved himself neither a servant of the peasants nor a servant of the princes, but a servant of God. He did indeed declare many of the peasants' demands to be just and fair; their first article of grievance was: "It is our desire that henceforth we shall have the right and power that an entire congregation shall itself choose and elect a pastor, and also have the power to depose him again should he conduct himself improperly"; on this Luther, among other things, issued the following judgment: "This article is right. You cannot in fairness deny the right to elect a pastor. — No authority can or should oppose this. Indeed, authority should not hinder what everyone wishes to teach and believe, be it Gospel or lies; it is enough that they prevent the teaching of rebellion and unrest." (Luther's Works, Halle ed., XVI, 64, 84). Yet Luther also showed the peasants how wrongly they acted in their violence; he wrote to them: "If your undertaking were to be right, then everyone would become a judge against everyone else, and no power or authority, order or law would remain in the world, but only sheer murder and bloodshed. For as soon as one saw that someone had wronged him, he would rush in and judge and punish that person himself. Now if this is unjust and not to be tolerated from a single person, then it is likewise not to be tolerated from any band or mob. — I say all this, my dear friends, to warn you faithfully that in this matter you should abstain from the Christian name and from boasting of Christian right. For however right you may be, it befits no Christian to go to law or to fight, but rather to suffer wrong and endure evil; nothing else can come of it (1 Corinthians 6:7). — Since you wish to defend your own cause yourselves and not suffer violence or wrong, you may do and refrain from doing whatever God does not forbid you. But the Christian name — the Christian name, I say — leave that alone, and do not make it a cloak of shame for your impatient, unpeaceable, unchristian undertaking. — Christians do not themselves fight with the sword or with guns, but with the cross and with suffering; just as your Duke, Christ, does not wield the sword but hangs upon the cross. Therefore your victory, too, consists not in prevailing, ruling, and using force, but in yielding and in weakness (2 Corinthians 10:4)."