IT is exactly four hundred years ago since the brave reformer, Martin Luther, nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door of Wittenberg in Germany. He then began a public work of reformation which, by God’s blessing, bore the noblest fruit among all ranks of society. He re-stated the fundamental doctrines of the gospel as against the delusive errors of the Church of Rome, and spoke in trumpet tones of remonstrance and appeal against the many forms of practical iniquity which these errors produced and encouraged. He also translated the Holy Bible, which had been bound up for centuries in a foreign tongue, into the common language of the German people, a translation which proved a source of untold blessing to multitudes. Though the German people in recent times have grievously departed from the Bible and its sacred principles, Luther is in nowise responsible for their apostasy. We do not say he was perfect in idea or practice—he was newly out of Rome’s darkness—but we maintain that the vast proportion of his teaching was entirely wholesome and beneficial. He plucked up by the roots the false doctrine of justification by human works, and proclaimed in words of clear and burning eloquence the grand gospel truth of justification by faith in Jesus Christ and His perfect substitutionary righteousness. He declared in no uncertain terms the truth that the human will was in bondage through sin, and that they only were free indeed, whom the Son of God made free. Let there be no mistake about it, Luther was a spiritual Samson who, endued with power from on high, broke the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder, which “the Man of sin” had forged and fastened to the moral and spiritual destruction of whole nations. And who that has ever read without prejudice the inner history and life of this noble-hearted man, and observed his daily wrestlings with sin, his close communion with God, his cordial, loving warmth to his friends, and his generous liberality to the needy, but has felt that
here was a burning and a shining light, a living epistle of Christ, to be known and read of all men? Assuredly Martin Luther is among the wise who have turned many to righteousness, and shall shine as the stars for ever and ever. If the German people had held by Luther’s doctrines, there would have been no war to-day.
Some of our readers may wonder why we are wielding our pen so strongly in defence of Luther at the present moment. Well, the reason is now to be explained. The public press (as represented by the Scotsman newspaper) has been during the past month the witness of the most abusive and unwarrantable attack on Luther’s fair fame and teaching that ever we remember having seen in this Protestant country, and we feel bound to raise our testimony on behalf of the great reformer. The details of the matter are as follows: Since the present year began, members of the Scottish Reformation Society have suggested that there should be a public commemoration of Luther and of the Reformed principles for which he contended, as four hundred years would elapse on 31st October since Luther began his work as a reformer. It would appear that this suggestion was viewed with intense dislike by some in our midst. The Professor of French in Edinburgh University (Dr. Sarolea to name), who is a Belgian and a Roman Catholic, has gone out of his way to attack Luther and his work. He took as the subject of the opening lecture of his classes, “French Calvinism, German Lutheranism, and the War.” The Scotsman next day contained a brief summary of what he said on the subject of German Lutheranism, in which the following sentences occur: “There had never been any Protestantism in any of the German Lutheran Churches. The first negative achievement of Dr. Luther was that he had broken the splendid unity of the Christian commonwealth, the continuity of the Catholic religion. He was the religious anarchist of the sixteenth century, even as the Kaiser was the political anarchist of the twentieth. The Lutheran reformation was not only the rebellion of anarchism against the unity of Christendom, it was also the revolt of the German against the Latin, of barbarism against civilisation. Lutheranism had insured for two hundred years the triumph of obscurantism in Germany. In fact, Lutheranism did not bring religious freedom; it brought religious despotism.” Proceeding in this fashion, he makes Lutheranism responsible for the War. As was well said by Professor W. A. Curtis, D.D., of the Established Church, in a letter next day, “It would be hard to find a group of historical sentences as shallow, as prejudiced, as misleading, as fundamentally unjust.” If Professor Sarolea had been lecturing to Roman Catholic students, within the walls of a Roman Catholic college, he could not have spoken with more unblushing commendation of “the splendid unity” of the Church before the Reformation, and with more ignorant denunciation of Luther as a religious anarchist, and his reformation as the revolt of barbarism against civilisation. He
certainly went entirely beyond his rights as a Professor of French in a Protestant University to deal with the Lutheran Reformation as he has done. If the Edinburgh University authorities were consistent and faithful Protestants, a Roman Catholic would never have occupied a professor’s chair within their walls. Dr. Sarolea’s own Church never shows that degree of toleration under any circumstances to others, and yet he takes advantage of the excessive charity of Protestants, who placed him where he is, to rend one of their noblest leaders, comparing him most unjustly to “the Kaiser” of present notoriety. Under cover of “the War,” and Germany, Sarolea has made a base Jesuitical attack on the Reformation, and, from a religious point of view, he is as dangerous as any “Hun” to society among us. Dr. W. A. Curtis, Dr. Charles A. Salmond, and others have written well in answer to his attack, and in defence of Luther.
We are sorry to state, however, that Dr. Sarolea has also had his supporters in the correspondence column of The Scotsman, and one of these has been a prominent Scottish nobleman, the Duke of Argyll. Woe worth the day that has come upon the family of Argyll, when such hostility to the name of Luther animates its chief representative! The Duke has even outdone the professor in his abuse of the reformer. In a letter of some length, but of dubious composition, grammar, and temper, he denounces in the most unqualified terms, to use his own words, “Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther,” whom he actually describes as “a couple of long dead aliens who worked nothing but evil destruction in their lives, and whose fruits we see in the charnel house of Europe centuries after they have passed to their account,” and again as “the apostates who tore the unity of the West in twain.” These statements have their condemnation written upon their face. If the Duke is not a professed Papist, he is something worse, a Papist in heart with a Protestant cloak on his shoulders. And then he proceeds not only to put most unjustly the blame of the war upon Luther, but also the blame of the materialism and infidelity that have been taught in German Universities in recent years. He attributes the admiration that Professor Curtis and others entertain for Luther to the circumstance that they studied for a time at these Universities, and imbibed according to his opinion, this evil teaching. The Duke poses, by the way, as the defender of a kind of orthodoxy that is opposed to materialism. It cannot be the orthodoxy of the Protestant Church; it must therefore be the orthodoxy of Rome. And this he discloses more fully as he draws his letter to a close. He refers “all professors and doctors who hanker after Luther” to what he calls an “admirable new work” containing “the fullest and fairest account that has yet appeared.” And who is the author? A certain Professor Hartmann Grisar of Innsbruck University, a Jesuit father and an Austrian to boot. The authority to which the Duke of Argyll will refer Scottish Protestants to find the last and truest
word about Luther, the honest and courageous witness against all Jesuitry, is a Jesuit! Truly things are coming to a pass indeed, when any man, high or low, could have the effrontery to make such a suggestion. Moreover, after condemning students from Scotland for having gone to learn at German Universities, he goes to a Prussian University himself to get a Professor to teach them about Luther. This is the ludicrous self-condemnatory climax of his argument against the “aliens.” Dr. Salmond, in a vigorous reply to the Duke’s letter, well describes it as “a tangle of incoherent and pernicious nonsense.”
In concluding our remarks, we desire to repeat once again what has been already affirmed, that Germany’s views and conduct to-day are not derived from Martin Luther at all, but are directly in the teeth of his teaching and example. He was the stout upholder of the Holy Bible as the divine and infallible guide, to whose supreme authority all, rich and poor, were bound to defer. He boldly stood by God’s truth in defiance of all the demands of Pope and Emperor. It is a slander upon his testimony and work to affirm that they produced either religious or political despotism. The Papacy is the greatest despotism, both in religion and politics, that the world has ever seen, and they who advocate its so-called splendid unity and false orthodoxy, and condemn Christ’s faithful witnesses, are as great enemies to our country’s weal as ever “the Huns” have been, or can be. What present-day Germans are doing is entirely beside the mark in the present controversy. The name of Martin Luther, along with the names of Calvin, Knox, Wycliffe, and many other noble witnesses, is still dear to lovers of the truth as it is in Jesus, and of “the glorious gospel of the blessed God,” and shall continue dear and honoured to the end of time.
The Vatican and Belgium.—In an illuminative article in the October number of the Contemporary Revue, a writer who has evidently intimate knowledge of the Vatican and its intrigues, says, in regard to Belgium: “It might have been worth while examining the disconcerting attitude of the Papal Nuncio to the Belgian Government, Monsignor Tanci Porcelli, who deserted his diplomatic post at Le Havre, and established himself in Brussels at the seat of the German Government—or discussing the prohibition in Rome of the Requiem service in commemorating thirty-seven murdered Belgian priests—or the official and solemn celebration of William’s birthday—or analysing the famous interview granted to the Paris journalist Latapie—or commenting on the strange letter to Cardinal Luçon, who tried in vain to call forth a Papal protest against the bombardment of Rheims.” All this clearly shows that the Pope, in his Peace efforts, is not unbiased, though he professes to be. The Papal sympathies evidently lean heavily towards the Germanic Powers.