pity on Nuns._ _How very dangerous it is that priests have not wives_ (the
frontispiece represents the marriage of a priest by a bishop, in the
background the marriage of two monks, and two musicians on a raised seat).
_Why there is no money in the country._ _Against the false clergy,
bare-footed monks, and Franciscans_, etc., etc. He exposes as trenchantly
as Luther did the systematic robbery of Germany to benefit the Roman
Curia—300,000 gulden sent out of the country every year, and a million
more given to the begging friars. He wrote fiercely against the monks who
take to this life, because they were too lazy to work like honest people,
and called them all sorts of nicknames—_cloister swine_, _the Devil’s
landsknechts_, etc., twenty-four thousand of them sponge on Germany and
four hundred thousand on the rest of Europe. He tells of a parish priest
who thought that he must really begin to read the Scriptures: his
parishioners are reading it, the mothers to the children and the
house-fathers to the household; they trouble him with questions taken from
it, and he is often at his wit’s end to answer; he asked a friend where he
ought to begin, and was told that there was a good deal about priests and
their duties in the Epistles to Timothy and Titus; he read, and was
horrified to find that bishops and priests ought to be “husbands of one
wife,” etc. Eberlin had been a Franciscan monk, and was true to the
revolutionary traditions of his Order. He preached a social as well as an
evangelical reformation. The Franciscan Order sent forth a good many
Reformers: men like Stephen Kampen, who had come to adopt views like those
of Eberlin without any teaching but the leadings of his heart; or John
Brissmann, a learned student of the Scholastic Theology, who like Luther
had found that it did not satisfy the yearnings of his soul; or like
Frederick Mecum (Myconius), whose whole spiritual development was very
similar to that of Luther. Pamphlets like those of Eberlin, and preaching
like that of Kampen, had doubtless some influence in causing popular
risings against the priests that were not uncommon throughout Germany in
1521, after the Diet of Worms had ended its sittings—the Erfurt tumult,
which lasted during the months of April, May, June, and July, may be
instanced as an example.
§ 10. The Spread of Luther’s Teaching.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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