the balance whether the insurgent bands might not carry all before them.
In this terrible pamphlet Luther hounded on the princes to crush the
rising. It is this pamphlet, all extenuating circumstances being taken
into account, which must ever remain an ineffaceable stain on his noble
life and career.(324)
As for himself, the Peasants’ War imprinted in him a deep distrust of all
who had any connection with the rising. He had not forgotten Carlstadt’s
action at Wittenberg in 1521-1522, and when Carlstadt was found attempting
to preach the insurrection in Franconia and Swabia, Luther never forgave
him. His deep-rooted and unquenchable suspicion of Zwingli may be traced
back to his discovery that friends of the Zurich Reformer had been at
Memmingen, had aided the revolutionary delegates to draft the Twelve
Articles, and had induced them to shelter themselves under the shield of a
religious Reformation. What is perhaps more important, the Peasants’ War
gave to Luther a deep and abiding distrust of the “common man” which was
altogether lacking in the earlier stages of his career, which made him
prevent every effort to give anything like a democratic ecclesiastical
organisation to the Evangelical Church, and which led him to bind his
Reformation in the chains of secular control to the extent of regarding
the secular authority as possessing a quasi-episcopal function.(325) It is
probably true that he saved the Reformation in Germany by cutting it loose
from the revolutionary movement; but the wrench left marks on his own
character as well as on that of the movement he headed. Luther’s enemies
were quick to make capital out of his relations with the peasants, and
Einser compared him to Pilate, who washed his hands after betraying Jesus
to the Jews.
§ 7. Germany divided into two separate Camps.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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