Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/344

Rh 326 REFORMATION burg, a young and ambitious voluptuary, caring for little but pleasure and display. On the great prelates the ex- tortion of Rome sometimes fell not less heavily than on the laity ; and the archbishop, before he could receive his pallium, was called upon to pay the sum of 30,000 gulden into the papal exchequer. Leo X. was at that time intent on carrying out the great design of his predecessor, the rebuilding of St Peter's. It has been observed by Palla- vicino that the millions devoted to the erection of the material church were acquired at the cost of many more millions to the spiritual church. Leo proclaimed a fresh issue of indulgences, and the archbishop Albert was appointed his commissioner to carry out the sale in a large portion of Germany. He seized the occasion to prevail upon the pope to allow him to appropriate one half of the money collected for the indulgences in order to pay for Tetzel's his pallium. As his chief agent in the sale he imprudently <*"?- selected one Tetzel, a Dominican friar, whose unscrupulous- P 3 * 11 - ness in such work was so notorious that the papal collector at Mainz refused to employ him. In the course of his progress Tetzel came to J liter bogk, near Wittenberg, and his superstitious traffic and the impudent devices which he employed to cajole the people were thus brought directly under the notice of Luther. The young professor seized the opportunity of directing the attention of the university, where he was already highly popular, to the abuses associated with the sale of indulgences. He did not as yet impugn the doctrine of indulgences itself, and he expressed his conviction that their good father the pope must be altogether unaware of the extent to which such abuses were allowed to prevail. His celebrated theses were forwarded by himself to the archbishop, as well as to the elector of Saxony, his patron, and also the muni- ficent founder of the university. The elector, who had seen with no slight dissatisfaction the manner in which his provinces were being plundered in order to pay for the extravagance of a neighbouring prelate, extended his protection to the courageous polemic, and Luther thus gained the all-precious interval of freedom from molesta- tion which enabled him to compose the memorable treatises whereby he produced such an immense effect on the minds and consciences of his countrymen. The nailing of his theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, it is to be noted, was a very common method of procedure on the part of a university disputant ; and nearly a year passed away before the events which so deeply agitated Witten- berg were recognized in their full importance by the world at large. Luther himself, indeed, in his notable letter to Leo X., written in 1518, tells us 1 that, contrary to his wishes, his theses were translated into German, and circulated throughout the nation, and that his antagonists declared that he had set the world in flames. But.in this language there is evidently something of exaggeration. Some two months after the appearance of Luther's theses Tetzel, by way of rejoinder, published at the university of Frankfort-on-the-Oder a hundred and six anti-theses, and these were subsequently burnt by the students of Wittenberg in the market-place. To Leo, however, the vague reports that reached Rome conveyed only the im- pression of a dispute between the two monastic orders of which Luther and Tetzel were respectively the representa- tives. He declared that Luther was a man of genius, and refused to interfere. Even Ulrich von Hutten, at that time residing not far from Wittenberg, seems to have shared in this misapprehension, and, writing to his patron, he expresses the hope that the two contending parties may eventually tear each other to pieces. But in the course of a few months the importance of the struggle began to be more clearly apprehended. John Eck 1 Werke, ed. 18837 i- 528. of Ingoldstadt drew attention to the resemblance between Luthe; the doctrines put forth in the theses and those of the rdatio Hussites, and at the mention of that undoubted heresy not Wltl1 1 a few of Luther's supporters recoiled. His conduct was * " >1Hi ' certainly not wanting in astuteness, however genuine his enthusiasm. In 1518 he republished his theses, with addi- tions and explanations, under the title of Solutions. Like Hutten, he selected the supreme pontiff himself as the person to whom he dedicated the treatise. In the letter of dedication (the letter above referred to) he professes to make his unqualified submission to him whom he addresses, and at the same time endeavours to exculpate himself for thus republishing the theses. Notwithstanding the popular form, the vernacular language, in which they had already appeared, they were still so encumbered with the techni- calities of the schools that he could not conceive how they could be intelligible to the laity at large ("sic editse ut mihi incredibile sit eas ab omnibus intelligi "). He was therefore anxious, with the pontiffs sanction and approval, to republish them in a form less liable to misinterpretation. If, however, that sanction were withheld, he could only bow to Leo's decision as to that of God's vicegerent on earth ("vocem tuam vocem Christi in te prsesidentis et loquentis agnoscam "). While Luther was thus labouring under mis- apprehension, affected or real, with respect to the kind of doctrinal teaching that was likely to find favour in Rome, it would seem that Leo himself was very imperfectly in- formed regarding the state of feeling in Germany. The conditions which moulded his political action and his personal sympathies alike tended to distract his attention from the events which had recently been occurring in Saxony. The representative of a princely house, well versed in European affairs and in questions of statecraft, gifted with more than an ordinary share of Italian subtlety and powers of dissimulation, he was well qualified to cope with the difficulties by which he found himself surrounded. But his aims, chief among which was his desire to establish his brother Julian on the throne of Naples, were directed more to family aggrandizement than to national unity. They ran strongly counter to the growth of Spanish influ- ence, while with that stern policy which guided the rule of Ximenes, dictated by the desire to restore medieval doctrine and discipline and to suppress heresy, he had no sympathy. The ecclesiastic was almost lost in the patron of the arts, the urbane and polished scholar and voluptuary, the admirer of wit and epigram. In politics it was his main purpose to trim the balance between France and Spain ; in church matters it was chiefly to stifle contro- versy. So indifferent was he to German affairs, and so little cognizant of the state of feeling among the people, that at the very moment when irritation at the extortion of his emissaries was at its height, and the fraudulent nature of that extortion had been thus ably exposed by Luther, he conceived it to be a suitable time for levying a contribution throughout the empire under pretext of an expedition against the Turks. The proposal roused a spirit of opposition even among the clergy themselves ; and one of their number, a prebendary at Wiirzburg, issued a mani- festo, in the form of a pamphlet, in which he roundly de- clared that the true Turks were to be found in Italy. This pamphlet fell into Luther's hands, and with the instinct of genius he recognized the opportunity afforded by such a state of feeling for an appeal to a wider audience than he had hitherto addressed. He now took his stand as the de- nouncer both of abuses in the matter of discipline and of the extortion and oppression under which his countrymen laboured. And from that day to the day of his death he filled a place in their affection and esteem to which no other of their leaders could make pretence. The turning- point in his public career is marked by his appearance at