“The priest,” says Luther thoughtfully, when giving detailed
instructions on the subject, “will easily be able to arrange that the
common people learn nothing of it, and take no scandal.”[949] “How
the priests are to behave with regard to the Canon,” he wrote in his
Instruction for the Visitors in the Saxon Electorate, “they know well
from other writings, and there is no need to preach much about this
to the laity.” One would have thought, nevertheless, that the “common
people,” no less than the learned, had a perfect right to the truth and
to being instructed.
Luther was also anxious that the innovation at communion should be
introduced in an unobtrusive manner. “Avoid anything unusual or any
attempt to oppose the masses.”[950]
Although to receive under both kinds was regarded as the only
“evangelical” way, agreeable “to Christ’s institution,” yet the weak
were to be permitted to receive under the form of bread only and
the reception of the chalice not to be prescribed “until we make
the Evangel better known throughout the world.”[951] “But if anyone
is so weak in this matter as rather to omit receiving the Sacrament
altogether than to receive under one kind only, he was also to be
indulged and allowed to live according to his conscience.”[952] In
justification of all this Luther declared that the practice of the
new religion must be introduced gently and “without detriment to
charity.” That it was really a question of preventing disturbances and
preserving charity, Cochlæus and others could not be made to see; this
writer, in his work on Lutheranism, goes so far as to speak of Luther’s
“hypocritical deception” of the masses.
Later, the advocate of this sagacious method of procedure could
declare: “Thank God, in indifferent matters our churches are so
arranged that a layman, whether Italian or Spaniard, unable to
understand our preaching, seeing our Mass, choir, organs, bells,
chantries, etc., would surely say that it was a regular papist church,
and that there was no difference, or very little, between it and his
own.” He rejoiced that, in spite of the hot-heads, no more had been
altered in the ritual than was absolutely necessary to conform it to
his teaching.[953]
Such is the course to pursue, he says, “If our churches are not
to be shattered and confused and nothing to be effected among the
Papists.”[954] As a matter of fact, the system he recommended did in
some districts “effect much” among Papists who would otherwise have
refused to have anything to do with him, the poor people not dreaming
of the wide gulf which separated the new worship from the old. The
people would not voluntarily have given up their faith in the truly
sacrificial character of the Eucharist, in transubstantiation and
sacrifice generally; as Melanchthon himself admitted: “The world is so
much attached to the Mass that it seems well-nigh impossible to wrest
people from it.”[955]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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