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Luther inspired by Satan.

We have in this strange, rude picture[8] a device of contemporary caricature to cast ridicule upon the movement of which Martin Luther was the conspicuous figure. It is reduced from a large wood-cut which appeared in Germany at the crisis of the lion-hearted reformer's career, the year of his appearance at the Diet of Worms, when he said to dissuading friends, "If I knew there were as many devils at Worms as there are tiles upon the houses, I would go." The intention of the artist is obvious; but, in addition to the leading purpose, he desired, as Mr. Chatto conjectures, to remind his public of the nasal drawl of the preaching friars of the time, for which they were as proverbial as the Puritans of London in Cromwell's day. Such is the poverty of human invention that the idea of this caricature has been employed several times since Luther's time—even as recently as 1873, when a London draughtsman made it serve his turn in the contentions of party politics.

The best humorous talent of Christendom, whether it wrought with pencil or with pen, whether it avowed or veiled its sympathy with reform, was on Luther's side. It prepared the way for his coming, co-operated with him during his life-time, carried on his work after he was gone, and continues it to the present hour.

Recent investigators tell us, indeed, that the Reformation began in laughter, which the Church itself nourished and sanctioned. M. Viollet-le-Duc, author of the "Dictionnaire d'Architecture," discourses upon the gradual change which church decorators of the Middle Ages effected in the figure of the devil. Upon edifices erected before the year 1000 there are few traces of the devil, and upon those of much earlier date none at all; but from the eleventh century he "begins to play an important rôle," artists striving which should give him the most hideous form. No one was then audacious enough to take liberties with a being so potent, so awful, so real, the competitor and antagonist of the Almighty Lord of Heaven and Earth. But mortals must laugh, and familiarity produces its well-known effect. In the eyes of men of the world the devil became gradually less terrible and more grotesque, became occasionally ridiculous, often contemptible, sometimes silly. His tricks are met by tricks more cunning than his own; he is duped, and retires discomfited. Before Luther appeared on the scene, the painters and sculptors, not to mention the authors and poets, had made progress in reducing the devil from the grade of an antagonist of deity and arch-enemy of men to that of a cunning and amusing deceiver of simpletons. "The great devil," as the author just mentioned remarks, "sculptured over the door of the Autun Cathedral in the twelfth century is a frightful being, well designed to strike terror to unformed souls; but the young devils carved in bas-reliefs of the fifteenth century are more comic than terrible, and it is evident that the artists who executed them cared very little for the wicked tricks of the Evil Spirit." We may be sure that the artist who could sketch the devil fiddling upon a pair of bellows with a kitchen dipper had outgrown the horror which that personage had once excited in all minds. Such a sketch is here reproduced from a Flemish MS. in the library of Cambrai.

But this could not be said of the great mass of Christian people for centuries after. Luther, as the reader is aware, speaks of the devil with as absolute an assurance of his existence, activity, and nearness as if he were a member of his own household. God, he once said, mocks and scorns the devil by putting under his nose such a weak creature as man; and at other times he dwelt upon the hardness of the conflict which the devil has to maintain. "It were not good for us to know how earnestly the holy angels strive for us against the devil, or how hard a combat it is. If we could see for how many angels one devil makes work, we should be in despair." Many devils, he remarks with curious certainty, are in forests, in waters, in wildernesses, in dark pooly places, ready to hurt and prejudice people; and there are some in the thick black clouds, which cause hail, lightnings, and thunderings, and poison the air, the pastures, and grounds. He derides the philosophers and physicians who say that these things have merely natural causes; and as to the witches who torment honest people, and spoil their eggs, milk, and butter, "I should have no compassion upon them—I would burn them all." The Table-talk of the great reformer is full of such robust credulity.

Luther represented, as much as he reformed, his age and country. In these utterances of his we discern the spirit against which the humor and gayety of art had to contend, and over which it has gained a tardy victory, not yet complete. Let us keep in mind also that in those twilight ages, as in all ages, there were the two contending influences which we now call "the world" and "the church." In other words, there were people who took the devil lightly, as they did all invisible and spiritual things, and there were people who dreaded the devil in every "dark pooly place," and to whom nothing could be a jest which appertained to him. Humorous art has in it healing and admonition for both these classes.

Oldest Drawing in the British Museum, A.D. 1320.

It was in those centuries, also, that men of the world learned to laugh at the clergy, and, again, not without clerical encouragement. In the brilliantly illuminated religious manuscripts of the two centuries preceding Luther, along with other ludicrous and absurd images, of which specimens have been given, we find many pictures in which the vices of the religious orders are exhibited. The oldest drawing in the British Museum, one of the only two that bear the date 1320, shows us two devils tossing a monk headlong from a bridge into a rough and rapid river, an act which they perform in a manner not calculated to excite serious thought in modern minds.

In the old Strasburg Cathedral there was a brass door, made in 1545, upon which was engraved a convent with a procession of monks issuing from it bearing the cross and banners. The foremost figure of this procession was a monk carrying a girl upon his shoulders. This was not the coarse fling of an enemy. It was not the scoff of an Erasmus, who said once, "These paunchy monks are called fathers, and they take good care to deserve the name." It was engraved on the eternal brass of a religious edifice for the warning and edification of the faithful.

Nothing more surprises the modern reader than the frequency and severity with which the clergy of those centuries were denounced and satirized, as well by themselves as by others. A Church which showed itself sensitive to the least taint of what it deemed heresy appears to have beheld with indifference the exhibition of its moral delinquencies—nay, taken the lead in exposing them. It was a clergyman who said, in the Council of Siena, fifty years before Luther was born: "We see to-day priests who are usurers, wine-shop keepers, merchants, governors of castles, notaries, stewards, and debauch brokers. The only trade which they have not yet commenced is that of executioner. The bishops surpass Epicurus himself in sensuality, and it is between the courses of a banquet that they discuss the authority of the Pope and that of the Council." The same speaker related that St. Bridget, being in St. Peter's at Rome, looked up in a religious ecstasy, and saw the nave filled with mitred hogs. She asked the Lord to explain this fantastic vision. "These," replied the Lord, "are the bishops and abbés of to-day." M. Champfleury, the first living authority on subjects of this nature, declares that the manuscript Bibles of the century preceding Luther are so filled with pictures exhibiting monks and nuns in equivocal circumstances that he was only puzzled to decide which specimens were most suitable to give his readers an adequate idea of them.

From mere gayety of heart, from the exuberant jollity of a well-beneficed scholar, whose future was secure and whose time was all his own, some of the higher clergy appear to have jested upon themselves and their office. Two finely engraved seals have been found in France, one dating as far back as 1300, which represent monkeys arrayed in the vestments of a Church dignitary. Upon one of them the monkey wears the hood and holds the staff of an abbot, and upon the other the animal appears in the character of a bishop.

Bishop's Seal, A.D. 1300.

One of these seals is known to have been executed at the express order of an abbot. The other, a copy of which is given here, was found in the ruins of an ancient château of Picardy, and bears the inscription, "LE: SCEL: DE: LEUECQUE: DE: LA: CYTE: DE: PINON"—"The seal of the bishop of the city of Pinon." This interesting relic was at first thought to be the work of some scoffing Huguenot, but there can now be no doubt of its having been the merry conceit of the personage whose title it bears. The discovery of the record relating to the monkey seal of the abbot, showing it to have been ordered and paid for by the actual head of a great monastery, throws light upon all the grotesque ornamentation of those centuries. It suggests to us also the idea that the clergy joined in the general ridicule of their order as much from a sense of the ludicrous as from conviction of its justice. In the British Museum there is a religious manuscript of the thirteenth century, splendidly illuminated, one of the initial letters of which represents a young friar drawing wine from a cask in a cellar, that contains several humorous points. With his left hand he holds the great wine-jug, into which the liquid is running from the barrel; with his right he lifts to his lips a bowlful of the wine, and from the same hand dangle the large keys of the cellar. If this was intended as a hint to the younger brethren how they ought not to behave when sent to the cellar for wine, the artist evidently felt also the comic absurdity of the situation.

The vast cellars still to be seen under ancient monasteries and priories, as well as the kitchens, not less spacious, and supported by archways of the most massive masonry, tell a tale of the habits of the religious orders which is abundantly confirmed in the records and literature of the time. "Capuchins," says the old French doggerel, "drink poorly, Benedictines deeply, Dominicans pint after pint, but Franciscans drink the cellar dry." The great number of old taverns in Europe named the Mitre, the Church, the Chapel-bell, St. Dominic, and other ecclesiastical names, point to the conclusion that the class that professed to dispense good cheer for the soul was not averse to good cheer for the body.[9]

If the clergy led the merriment caused by their own excesses, we can not wonder they should have had many followers. In the popular tales of the time, which have been gathered and made accessible in recent years, we find the priest, the monk, the nun, the abbot, often figuring in absurd situations, rarely in creditable ones. The priest seems to have been regarded as the satirist's fair game, the common butt of the jester. In one of these stories a butcher, returning home from a fair, asks a night's lodging at the house of a priest, who churlishly refuses it. The butcher, returning, offers in recompense to kill one of his fine fat sheep for supper, and to leave behind him all the meat not eaten. On this condition he is received, and the family enjoy an excellent supper in his society. After supper he wins the favor first of the priest's concubine and afterward of the maid-servant by secretly promising to each of them the skin of the sheep. In the morning, after he has gone, a prodigious uproar arises, the priest and the two women each vehemently claiming the skin, in the midst of which it is discovered that the butcher had stolen the sheep from the priest's own flock.

From a merry tale of these ages a jest was taken which to-day forms one of the stock dialogues of our negro-minstrel bands. The story was apparently designed to show the sorry stuff of which priests were sometimes made. A farmer sends a lout of a son to college, intending to make a priest of him, and the lad was examined as to the extent of his knowledge. "Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob," said the examiner: "who was Jacob's father?" The candidate, being unable to answer this question, is sent home to his tutor with a letter relating his discomfiture. "Thou foole and ass-head!" exclaims the tutor. "Dost thou not know Tom Miller of Oseney?" "Yes," answered the hopeful scholar. "Then thou knowest he had two sons, Tom and Jacke: who is Jacke's father?" "Tom Miller." Back goes the youth to college with a letter to the examiner, who, for the tutor's sake, gives him another chance, and asks once more who was Jacob's father. "Marry!" cries the candidate, "I can tell you now: that was Tom Miller of Oseney."

We must be cautious in drawing inferences from the popular literature of a period, since there is in the unformed mind a propensity to circulate amusing scandal, and the satirist is apt to aim his shaft at characters and actions which are exceptional, not representative. In some of the less frequented nooks of Europe, where the tone of mind among the people has not materially changed since the fifteenth century, we still find priests the constant theme of scandal. The Tyrolese, for example, as some readers may have observed, are profuse in their votive offerings, and indefatigable in their pilgrimages, processions, and observances—the most superstitious people in Europe; but a recent writer tells us that they "have a large collection of anecdotes, humorous and scandalous, about their priests, and they take infinite delight in telling them." They are not pious, as the writer remarks, "but magpious." The Tyrolese may judge their priests correctly, but a person who believes in magpious humbug may be expected to lend greedy ears to comic scandal, and what the Tyrolese do to-day, their ancestors may have done when Luther was a school-boy.

But of late years the exact, methodical records of the past, the laws, law-books, and trials, which are now recognized to be among the most trustworthy guides to a correct interpretation of antiquity, have been diligently scrutinized, and we learn from them that it was among the commonest of criminal events for clergymen, in the time of Edward III. of England, to take part in acts of brigandage. A band of fifty men, for example, broke into the park and warren of a lady, the Countess of Lincoln, killed her game, cut down two thousand pounds' worth of timber, and carried it off. In the list of the accused are the names of two abbots and a prior. Several chaplains were in a band of knights and squires who entered an inclosure belonging to the Archbishop of Canterbury, drove off his cattle, cut down his trees, harvested his wheat, and marched away with their booty. In a band of seventy who committed a similar outrage at Carlton there were five parsons. Two parsons were accused of assisting to break into the Earl of Northampton's park and driving off his cattle. The prior of Bollington was charged with a robbery of horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs. Five clergymen were in the band that damaged the Bishop of Durham's park to the extent of a thousand pounds. These examples and others were drawn from a single roll of parchment of the year 1348; and that roll, itself one of three, is only one of many sources of information. The author of the "History of Crime" explains that the rolls of that year consist of more than one hundred and twenty skins of parchment, among which there are few that do not contain a reference to some lawless act committed by knights or priests, or by a band consisting of both.[10]

This is record, not gossip, not literature; and it may serve to indicate the basis of truth there was for the countless allusions to the dissoluteness of the clergy in the popular writings and pictures of the century that formed Luther and the Lutherans.

Pastor and Flock. (From the Window of a French Church, Sixteenth Century.)

It is scarcely possible in the compass of a chapter to convey an idea of the burst of laughter that broke the long spell of superstitious terror, and opened the minds of men to receive the better light. Such works as the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, which to modern readers is only interesting as showing what indecency could be read and uttered by fine ladies and gentlemen on a picnic in 1350, had one character that harmonized with the new influence. Their tone was utterly at variance with the voice of the priest. The clergy, self-indulgent, preached self-denial; practicing vice, they exaggerated human guilt. But the ladies and gentlemen of the "Decameron," while practicing virtue, made light of vice, and brought off the graceful profligate victorious. Later was circulated in every land and tongue the merry tale of "Reynard the Fox," which children still cherish among the choicest of their literary treasures. Reynard, who appears in the sculptures of so many convents and in the illuminations of so many pious manuscripts, whom monks loved better than their missal, exhibits the same moral: witty wickedness triumphant over brute strength. The fox cheats the wolf, deludes the bear, lies to King Lion, turns monk, gallops headlong up and down the commandments, only to be at last taken into the highest favor by the king and made Prime Minister. It is not necessary to discover allegory in this tale. What made it potent against the spell of priestly influence was the innocent and boisterous merriment which it excited, amidst which the gloom evoked by priestly arts began to break away. Innocent mirth, next to immortal truth, is the thing most hostile to whatever is mingled with religion which is hostile to the interests of human nature.

And "Reynard," we must remember, was only the best and gayest of a large class of similar fables that circulated during the childhood of Columbus and of Luther. In one of the Latin stories given by Mr. Wright in his "Selection," we have an account of the death and burial of the wolf, the hero of the tale, which makes a most profane use of sacred objects and rites, though it was written by a priest. The holy water was carried by the hare, hedgehogs bore the candles, goats rang the bell, moles dug the grave, foxes carried the bier, the bear celebrated mass, the ox read the gospel, and the ass the epistle. When the burial was complete, the animals sat down to a splendid banquet, and wished for another grand funeral. Mark the moral drawn by the priestly author: "So it frequently happens that when some rich man, an extortionist or a usurer, dies, the abbot or prior of a convent of beasts [i.e., of men living like beasts] causes them to assemble. For it commonly happens that in a great convent of black or white monks [Benedictines or Augustinians] there are none but beasts—lions by their pride, foxes by their craftiness, bears by their voracity, stinking goats by their incontinence, asses by their sluggishness, hedgehogs by their asperity, hares by their timidity (because they were cowardly when there was no fear), and oxen by their laborious cultivation of their land." Unquestionably this author belonged to another order than those named in his tirade.

A book with original life in it becomes usually the progenitor of a line of books. Brandt's "Ship of Fools," which was published when Luther was eleven years old, gave rise to a literature. As soon as it appeared it kindled the zeal of a noted preacher of Strasburg, Jacob Geiler by name, who turned Brandt's gentle satire into fierce invective, which he directed chiefly against the monks. The black friars, he said, were the devil, the white friars his dame, and the others were their chickens. The qualities of a good monk, he declared, were an almighty belly, an ass's back, and a raven's mouth. From the pulpit, on another occasion, he foretold a coming reformation in the Church, adding that he did not expect to live to see it, though some that heard him might. The monks taunted him with looking into the "Ship of Fools" for his texts instead of the Scripture; but the people heard him eagerly, and one of his pupils gave the public a series of his homely, biting sermons, illustrated by wood-cuts, which ran through edition after edition. Badius, a noted scholar of the time, was another who imitated the "Ship of Fools," in a series of satirical pieces entitled "The Boats of Foolish Women," in which the follies of the ladies of the period were ridiculed.