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The beginning of the legends concerning the Diet of Worms can be traced back to Luther himself. He declared, only a year after the event, shortly after his departure from the Wartburg, in a letter of July 15, 1522, intended for a few friends and not for German readers: “I repaired to Worms although I had already been apprised of the violation of the safe-conduct by the Emperor Charles.”

He there says of himself, that, in spite of his timidity, he nevertheless ventured “within reach of the jaws of Behemoth [the monster mentioned in Job xl.]. And what did these terrible giants [my adversaries] do? During the last three years not one has been found brave enough to come forward against me here at Wittenberg, though assured of a safe-conduct and protection”; “rude and timorous at one and the same time” they would not venture “to confront him, though single-handed,” or to dispute with him. What would have happened had these weaklings been forced to face the Emperor and all-powerful foes as he had done at Worms? This he says to the Bohemian, Sebastian Schlick, Count of Passun, in the letter in which he dedicates to him his Latin work “Against Henry VIII of England.”[165] It is worth noting that Luther did not insert this dedication in the German edition, but only in the Latin one intended for Bohemia and foreign countries where the circumstances were not so well known.

Luther always adhered obstinately to the idea, which ultimately passed into a standing tradition with many of his followers, that no one had been willing to dispute with him at Worms or elsewhere during the period of his outlawry; that he had, in fact, been condemned unheard; that his opponents had sought to vanquish him by force, not by confronting him with proofs, and had obstinately shut their ears to his arguments from Holy Scripture. He finally came to persuade himself, that they were in their hearts convinced that he was right, but out of consideration for their temporal interests had not been willing or able to give in.

He expressly mentions Duke George of Saxony, as an opponent who had taken up the latter position, also the influential Archbishop Albrecht of Mayence, and, above all, Johann Eck. “Is it not obdurate wickedness,” he exclaims in one of his outbursts, “to be the enemy of, and withstand, what is known and recognised as true? It is a sin against the first Commandment and greater than any other. But because it is not their invention they look on it as nought! Yet their own conscience accuses them.”[166] In another passage, in 1528, he complains of the persecutors in Church and State who appealed to the edict of Worms; “they sought for an excuse to deceive the simple people, though they really knew better”; if they act thus, it must be right, “were we to do the same, it would be wrong.”[167]

Yet,even from the vainglorious so-called “Minutes of the Worms Negotiations” (“Akten der Wormser Verhandlungen”), published immediately after at Wittenberg with Luther’s assistance,[168] it is clear that the case was fully argued in his presence at Worms, and that he had every opportunity of defending himself, though, from a legal point of view, the Bull of Excommunication having already been promulgated, the question was no longer open to theological discussion. In these “Minutes” the speeches he made in his defence at Worms are quoted. Catholic contemporaries even reproached him with having allowed himself to be styled therein “Luther, the man of God”; his orations are introduced with such phrases as: “Martin replied to the rude and indiscreet questions with his usual incredible kindness and friendliness in the following benevolent words,” etc.[169]

In order still further to magnify the bravery he displayed at Worms, Luther stated later on that the Pope had written to Worms, “that no account was to be made of the safe-conduct.”[170] As a matter of fact, however, the Papal Nuncios at Worms had received instructions to use every effort to prevent Luther being tried in public, because according to Canon Law the case was already settled; if he refused to retract, and came provided with a safe-conduct, nothing remained but to send him home, and then proceed against him with the utmost severity.[171] It was for this reason, according to his despatches, that Aleander took no part in the public sessions at which Luther was present. Only after Luther, on the return journey, had sent back the herald who accompanied him, and had openly infringed the conditions of the Imperial safe-conduct, did Aleander propose “that the Emperor should have Luther seized.”[172]

Luther, from the very commencement, stigmatised the Diet of Worms as the “Sin of Wormbs, which rejected God’s truth so childishly and openly, wilfully and knowingly condemned it unheard”;[173] to him the members of the Diet were culpably hardened and obdurate “Pharaohs,” who thought Christ could not see them, who, out of “utterly sinful wilfulness,” were determined “to hate and blaspheme Christ at Wormbs,” and to “kill the prophets, till God forsook them”; he even says: “In me they condemned innocent blood at Wormbs; … O thou unhappy nation, who beyond all others has become the lictor and executioner of End-Christ against God’s saints and prophets.”[174] An esteemed Protestant biographer of Luther is, however, at pains to point out, quite rightly, that the Diet could “not do otherwise than condemn Luther.” “By rejecting the sentence of the highest court he placed himself outside the pale of the law of the land. Even his very friends were unable to take exception to this.” It is, he says, “incorrect to make out, as so many do, that Luther’s opponents were merely impious men who obstinately withstood the revealed truth.” This author confines himself to remarking that, in his own view, it was a mistake to have “pronounced a formal sentence” upon such questions.[175]

That Luther, at the Diet of Worms, bore away the palm as the heroic defender of entire freedom of research and of conscience, and as the champion of the modern spirit, is a view not in accordance with a fair historical consideration of the facts.

He himself was then, and all through life, far removed from the idea of any freedom of conscience in the modern sense, and would have deemed all who dared to use it against Divine Revelation, as later opponents of religion did, as deserving of the worst penalties of the mediæval code. “It is an altogether one-sided view, one, indeed, which wilfully disregards the facts, to hail in Luther the man of the new age, the hero of enlightenment and the creator of the modern spirit.” Such is the opinion of Adolf Harnack.[176]

At Worms, Luther spoke of himself as being bound by the Word of God. It is true he claimed the freedom of interpreting Holy Scripture according to his own mind, or, as he said, according to the understanding bestowed on him by God, and of amending all such dogmas as displeased him.

But he would on no account cease to acknowledge that a revealed Word of God exists and claims submission from the human mind, whereas, from the standpoint of the modern free-thinker, there is no such thing as revelation. The liberty of interpreting revelation, which Luther proclaimed at Worms, or, to be more exact, calmly assumed, marked, it is true, a great stride forward in the road to the destruction of the Church.

Luther failed to point out at Worms how such liberty, or rather licence, agreed with the institutions established by Christ for the preservation and perpetual preaching of His doctrine of salvation. He was confronted by a Church, still recognised throughout the whole public life of the nations, which claimed as her own a Divine authority and commission to interpret the written Word of God. She was to the Faithful the lighthouse by which souls struggling in the waves of conflicting opinions might safely steer their course. In submitting his own personal opinion to the solemn judgment of an institution which had stood the test of time since the days of Christ and the Apostles, the Wittenberg Professor had no reason to fear any affront to his dignity. Whoever submitted to the Church accepted her authority as supreme, but he did not thereby forfeit either his freedom or his dignity; he obeyed in order not to expose himself to doubt or error; he pledged himself to a higher, and better, wisdom than he was able to reach by his own strength, by the way of experience, error and uncertainty. The Church plainly intimated to the heresiarch the error of his way, pointing out that the freedom of interpretation which he arrogated to himself was the destruction of all sure doctrine, the death-blow to the truth handed down, the tearing asunder of religious union, and the harbinger of endless dissensions.—We here see where Luther’s path diverged from that followed by Catholics. He set up subjectivity as a principle, and preached, together with the freedom of interpreting Scripture, the most unfettered revolt against all ecclesiastical authority, which alone can guarantee the truth. The chasm which he cleft still yawns; hence the difference of opinion concerning the sentence pronounced at Worms. We are not at liberty to conceal this fact from ourselves, nor can we wonder at the conflicting judgments passed on the position then assumed by Luther.

We may perhaps be permitted to quote a Protestant opinion which throws some light on Luther’s “championship of entire freedom of conscience.” It is that of an experienced observer of the struggles of those days, Friedrich Paulsen: “The principle of 1521, viz. to allow no authority on earth to dictate the terms of faith, is anarchical; with it no Church can exist. … The starting-point and the justification of the whole Reformation consisted in the complete rejection of all human authority in matters of faith. … If, however, a Church is to exist, then the individual must subordinate himself and his belief to the body as a whole. To do this is his duty, for religion can only exist in a body, i.e. in a Church.”[177] … “Revolution is the term by which the Reformation should be described … Luther’s work was no Reformation, no ‘reforming’ of the existing Church by means of her own institutions, but the destruction of the old shape, in fact, the fundamental negation of any Church at all. He refused to admit any earthly authority in matters of faith, and regarding morals his position was practically the same; he left the matter entirely to the individual conscience. … Never has the possibility of the existence of any ecclesiastical authority whatsoever been more rudely denied.”[178]

“It is true that this is not the whole Luther,” he continues. “The same Luther who here advocates ecclesiastical ‘anarchy’ at a later date was to oppose those whose conscience placed another interpretation on God’s Word than that discovered in it by the inhabitants of Wittenberg.” Paulsen quotes certain sentences in which Luther, shortly afterwards, denounced all deviations from his teaching: “My cause is God’s cause,” and “my judgment is God’s judgment,” and proceeds: “Nothing was left for the Reformers, if there was to be a Church at all, but to set up their own authority in place of the authority of the Popes and the Councils. Only on one tiresome point are they at a disadvantage, anyone being free to appeal from the later Luther to the Luther of Worms.” “Just as people are inclined to reject external authority, so they are ready to set up their own. This is one of the roots from which spring the desire for freedom and the thirst for power. It was not at all Luther’s way to consider the convictions of others as of equal importance with his own.” This he clearly demonstrated in the autocratic position which he claimed for the Wittenberg theology as soon as the “revolutionary era of the Reformation had passed.”

“The argument which Luther had employed in 1521 against the Papists, i.e. that it was impossible to confute him from Scripture, he found used against himself in his struggle with the ‘fanatics’ who also urged that no one could prove them wrong by Scripture. … For the confuting of heretics a Rule of faith is necessary, a living one which can decide questions as they arise. … One who pins his faith to what Luther did in 1521 might well say: If heretics cannot be confuted from Scripture, this would seem to prove that God does not attach much importance to the confutation of heretics; otherwise He would have given us His Revelation in catechisms and duly balanced propositions instead of in Gospels and Epistles, in Prophets and Psalms. … On the one hand there can be no authority on earth in matters of faith, and on the other there must be such an authority, such is the antinomy which lies at the foundation of the Protestant Church. … A contradiction exists in the very essence of Protestantism. On the one hand the very idea of a Church postulates oneness of faith manifested by submission; on the other the conviction that if faith in the Protestant sense is to exist at all, then each person must answer for himself; … it is my faith alone which helps me, and if my faith does not agree with the faith and doctrine of others, I cannot for that reason abandon it. … The fact is, there has never been a revolution conducted on entirely logical lines.”[179]

That “authority in matters of faith” which Luther began to claim for himself, did not prevent him in the ensuing years from insisting on the right of private judgment, though all the while he was interpreting biblical Revelation in accordance with his own views. As time went on he became, however, much more severe towards the heretics who diverged from his own standpoint. But this was only when the “revolutionary era of the Reformation,” as Paulsen calls it, was over and gone. So long as it lasted he would not and could not openly refuse to others what he claimed for himself. Even in 1525 we find him declaring that “the authorities must not interfere with what each one wishes to teach and to believe, whether it be the Gospel or a lie.” He is here speaking of the authorities, but his own conduct in the matter of tolerating heretics was even then highly inconsistent, to say nothing of toleration of Catholics.

From the above it is easy to see that the freedom which Luther advocated at Worms cannot serve as the type of our modern freedom of thought, research and conscience.

To return to the historical consideration of the event at Worms, the words already mentioned, “God help me, Amen!” call for remark.

The celebrated exclamation put into Luther’s mouth: “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me, Amen!” usually quoted as the briefest and most characteristic expression of his “exalted, knightly act” at Worms, is a legend which has not even the credit of being incorporated in Luther’s Latin account of his speech.

He himself gives the conclusion as simply: “God help me, Amen,” a formula which has nothing emphatic about it, was customary at the end of a discourse and is to be found elsewhere in Luther’s own writings. Its embellishment by the historic addition was produced at Wittenberg, where it was found desirable to render “the words rather more forcible and high-sounding.” “There is not the faintest proof that the amplification came from anyone who actually heard the words.”[180] The most that can be said is that it may have grown up elsewhere.[181] The enlarged form is first found in the two editions of the discourse printed by Grüneberg at Wittenberg in 1521, one in Latin and the other in German, which are based as to the remaining portion on notes on the subject emanating from Luther. Karl Müller, the last thoroughly to examine the question, opines that Luther’s concluding phrase may very easily have been amplified without the co-operation of Luther or of any actual witness. The proposal made in 1897 in Volume vii. of the Weimar edition of Luther’s works to accept as reliable Grüneberg’s edition which contains the altered form of the phrase, must, according to Karl Müller, be regarded as “a total failure,” nor does he think much better of the Weimar edition in its account of the Worms Acts generally.

How little the exclamation can pretend to any special importance is clear from a note of Conrad Peutinger’s, who was present during the address and committed his impression to writing the following day. When Luther had finished his explanation, so it runs, the “official” again exhorted him to retract, seeing he had already been condemned by higher councils. Thereupon Luther retorted that the Councils “had also erred and over and over again contradicted themselves and come into opposition with the Divine Law. This the ‘official’ denied. Luther insisted that it was so and offered to prove it. This brought the discussion suddenly to an end, and there was a great outcry as Luther left the place. In the midst of it he recommended himself submissively to His Imperial Mt. [Majesty]. Before concluding he uttered the words: May God come to my help.” According to this account the words were interjected as Luther was about to leave the assembly, in the midst of the tumult and “great outcry” which followed his recommending himself to the Imperial protection.

In view of the circumstances just described, P. Kalkoff, years ago, admitted that Luther’s words as quoted above had “no claim to credibility,”[182] while, quite recently, H. Böhmer declared that “it would be well not to quote any more these most celebrated of Luther’s words as though they were his. Many will be sorry, yet the absence of these words need not affect our opinion of Luther’s behaviour at Worms.”[183] W. Friedensburg is also of opinion that “we must, at any rate, give up the emphatic conclusion of the speech—‘Here I stand,’ etc.—as unhistorical; the searching examinations made in connection with the Reichstagsakten have rendered it certain that Luther’s conclusion was simply: ‘God help me, Amen.’ ” Of this Karl Müller adduced conclusive proofs.[184]

The immense success of the legend of the manly, decisive, closing words so solemnly uttered in the assembly is quite explicable when we come to consider the circumstances. The Diet, an event which stands out in such strong relief in Luther’s history, where his friends seemed to see his star rising on the horizon only to set again suddenly behind the mountain fortress, was itself of a nature to invite them to embellish it with fiction.

Apart from the legends in circulation among Luther’s friends, there were others which went the rounds among his opponents and later polemics. Such is the statement to the effect that Luther played the coward at Worms, and that his assumed boldness and audacity was merely due to the promises of material assistance, or, as Thomas Münzer asserts, to actual coercion on the part of his own followers.

According to all we have seen, Luther’s chief motive-force was his passionate prepossession in favour of his own ideas. It is true that, especially previous to the Diet, this was alloyed with a certain amount of quite reasonable fear. He himself admits, that when summoned to Worms, he “fell into a tremble” till he determined to bid defiance to the devils there.[185] On his first appearance before the Diet on April 17, he spoke, according to those who heard him, “in an almost inaudible voice,” and gave the impression of being a timid man.[186] Later his enthusiasm and his boldness increased with the lively sense of the justice of his cause aided by the applause of sympathisers. There can be no doubt that he was stimulated to confidence not merely by the thought of the thousands who were giving him their moral support, but by the offers of material help he had received, and by his knowledge that the atmosphere of the Diet was charged with electricity. “Counts and Nobles,” he himself says later, “looked hard at me; as a result of my sermon, as people in the know think, they lodged in court a charge of 400 Articles [the ‘Gravamina’] against the clergy. They [the members of the Diet] had more cause to fear me than I to fear them, for they apprehended a tumult.”[187] It was his fiery conviction that he had rediscovered the Gospel and torn away the mask of Antichrist, combined with his assurance of outward support, that inspired him with that “mad courage” of which he was wont to talk even to the end of his life: “I was undismayed and feared nothing; God alone is able to make a man mad after this fashion; I hardly know whether I should be so cheery now.”[188]

The unfavourable accounts, circulated from early days among Luther’s opponents concerning his mode of life at Worms, must not be allowed to pass unchallenged.

Luther was said to have “distinguished himself by drunkenness,” and to have indulged in moral “excesses.” Incontrovertible proof would be necessary to allow of our accepting such statements of a time when he was actually under the very eyes of the highest authorities, clerical and lay, and a cynosure of thousands. We should have to ask ourselves how he came to prejudice his judges still further by intemperance and a vicious life. The accounts appealed to do not suffice to establish the charge, consisting as they do of general statements founded partly on the impression made by Luther’s appearance, partly on reports circulated by his enemies. That the friends of the Church were all too ready to believe everything, even the worst, of the morals of so defiant and dangerous a heretic, was only to be expected. The reports were not treated with sufficient discernment even in the official papers, but accepted at their face-value when they suited the purposes of his foes. Luther seemed deficient in the recollection looked for in a religious, though he wore the Augustinian habit; the self-confidence, which he never lost an occasion of displaying, had the appearance of presumption and excessive self-sufficiency; it may also be that the manners which he had inherited from his low-born Saxon parents excited hostile comment among the cultured members of the Diet; if he indulged a little in the good Malvasian wine in which his friends pledged him, this would be regarded by strangers as betraying his German love of the bottle; at the same time it is true that, when starting for Worms, and likewise during the journey, it is reported how, with somewhat unseemly mirth, he had not scrupled to indulge in the juice of the grape, perhaps to dispel sad thoughts.

Caspar Contarini, the Venetian ambassador, who was present at Worms, wrote to Venice: “Martin has scarcely fulfilled the expectations cherished of him here by all. He displays neither a blameless life nor any sort of cleverness. He is quite unversed in learning and has nothing to distinguish him but his impudence.”[189] Perhaps the remark concerning Luther’s want of culture and wit, on which alone the Venetian here lays stress, was an outcome of Luther’s behaviour at his first interrogation; we have already seen how another witness alludes to the nervousness then manifested by him, but over which he ultimately triumphed.[190]

The second authority appealed to, viz. the Nuncio, Hieronymus Aleander, writes more strongly against Luther than does Contarini. It is not however certain that he was an “eye-witness,” as he has been termed, at least it is doubtful whether he ever saw Luther while he was in the town, though he describes his appearance, his demeanour and look, as though from personal observation.[191] Aleander speaks much from hearsay, collects impressions and tittle-tattle at haphazard, and enters into no detail, save that he sets on record the “many bowls of Malvasian” which Luther, “being very fond of that wine,” drank before his departure from Worms. It is he who wrote to Rome that the Emperor, so soon as he had seen Luther, exclaimed: “This man will never make a heretic of me.” Aleander merely adds, that almost everybody looked on Luther as a stupid, possessed fool; and that it was unnecessary to speak of “the drunkenness to which he was so much addicted, and the many other instances of coarseness in his looks, words, acts, demeanour and gait.” By his behaviour he had forfeited all the respect the world had had for him. He describes him as dissolute and a demoniac (“dissoluto, demoniaco”).[192] Yet Count Hoyer of Mansfeld, who will be referred to more particularly below, and who blames Luther’s moral conduct after his stay at the Wartburg, alleging it as his reason for forsaking his cause, admits that, while at Worms, he, the Count, had been quite Lutheran; hence nothing to the prejudice of Luther’s morals can have reached his ears there. In the absence of any further information we may safely assume that it was merely Luther’s general behaviour which was rather severely criticised at the great assembly of notables.

A capital opportunity for a closer study of Luther’s mind is afforded by his life and doings in the Wartburg.