The same simile is, of course, employed even more frequently of the
peasants. “To-day the peasants are the merest hogs, whilst the people
of position, who once prided themselves on being bucks, are beginning
to copy them.”[951]--The Papists have “stamped the married state under
foot”; their clergy are “like pigs in the fattening-pen,” “they wallow
in filth like the pig in his sty.”[952]--The Papists are fed up by
their literary men, as befits such pigs as they. “Eat, piggies, eat!
This is good for you.”[953]--We Germans are “hopeless pigs.”[954]
Henry of Brunswick is “as expert in Holy Writ as a sow is on the
harp.” Let him and his Papists confess that they are “verily the
devil’s whore-church.”[955] “You should not write a book,” Luther
tells him, “until you have heard an old sow s----; then you should
open your jaws and say: Thank you, lovely nightingale, now I have the
text I want. Stick to it; it will look fine printed in a book against
the Scripturists and the Elector; but have it done at Wolfenbüttel.
Oh, how they will have to hold their noses!”[956]
Another favourite image, which usually accompanies the sow, is
provided by the donkey. Of Clement VII. and one of his Bulls Luther
says: “The donkey pitched his bray too high and thought the Germans
would not notice it.”[957] Of Emser and the Catholic Professors he
writes: “Were I ignorant of logic and philosophy you rude asses
would be after setting yourselves up as logicians and philosophers,
though you know as much about the business as a donkey does about
music.”[958] Of Alveld the Franciscan he says: “The donkey does not
understand music, he must rather be given thistles.”[959] The fanatics
too, naturally, could not expect to escape. All that Luther says of
heavenly things is wasted upon them. “They understand it as little as
the donkey does the Psalter.”[960]
The devil, however, plays the chief part. Luther’s considered judgment
on the Zwinglians, for instance, is, that they are “soul-cannibals and
soul-assassins,” are “endeviled, devilish, yea, ultra-devilish and
possessed of blasphemous hearts and lying lips.”[961]
_The Lawyers._
Luther’s aversion for the “Jurists” grew yearly more intense. His
chief complaint against them was that they kept to the Canon Law and
put hindrances in his way. Their standpoint, however, as regards Canon
Law was not without justification. “Any downright abrogation of Canon
Law as a whole was out of the question. The law as then practised, not
only in the ecclesiastical but even in the secular courts, was too
much bound up with Canon Law; when it was discarded, for instance, in
the matrimonial cases, dire legal complications threatened throughout
the whole of the German Empire.”[962] To this Luther’s eyes were not
sufficiently open.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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