66 The modern Egyptian 'ud is the direct descendant of the Arabic lute, and, according to Lane, is strung with seven pairs of catgut strings played by a plectrum. A specimen in the Victoria and Albert Museum, given by the khedive, has four pairs only, which appears to have been the old stringing of the instrument. When frets (crosslines dividing the neck or finger-board to show the fingering) are employed they are of catgut disposed according to the Arabic scale of seventeen intervals in the octave, consisting of twelve limmas, an interval rather less than our equal semitone, and five commas, which are very small but quite recognizable differences of pitch. The lute family is separated from the guitars, also of Eastern origin, by the formation of the sound body, which is in all lutes pear-shaped, without the sides or ribs necessary to the structure of the flat-backed guitar and cither. Observing this distinction, we and the large double-necked Roman chitarrone, not infrequently include with the lute the little Neapolitan mandoline of 2 ft. long 6 ft. long. Mandolines are partly strung with wire, and are played with a plectrum, indispensable for metal or short strings. Perhaps the earliest lutes were so played, but the large lutes and theorbos the length permitting this more sympathetic means of producing the strung with catgut have been invariably touched by the fingers only, tone. LUTE (Arabic, al'ud, the wood"; Fr. luth; Ital. liuto; | the paintings of the Buddhist cave-temples of Ajanta, Several Span. laud; Ger. Laute; Dut. luit), an ancient stringed representations of the barbiton are extant from the classical Roman period. musical instrument, derived in form as well as name from the Arabs. The complete family consisted of the pandura, tanbur or mandoline as treble, the lute as alto or tenor, the barbiton or theorbo as bass, and the chitarrone as double bass. The Arab instrument, with convex sound-body, pointing to the resonance board or membrane having been originally placed upon a gourd, was strung with silk and played with a plectrum of shell or quill. It was adopted by the Arabs from Persia. Instruments with vaulted backs are all undoubtedly of Eastern origin; the distinct type, resembling the longitudinal section of a pear, is more specially traced in ancient India, Persia and the countries influenced by their civilization. This type of instrument includes many families which became known during the middle ages of western Europe, being introduced into southern Europe and Spain by the Moors, into southern Russia by the Persians of the Sassanian period, into Greece from the confines of the Byzantine Empire. As long as the strings were plucked by fingers or plectrum the large pear-shaped instrument may be identified as the archetype of the lute. When the bow, obtained from Persia, was applied to the instrument by the Arabs, a fresh family was formed, which was afterwards known in Europe as rebab and later rebec. The largest member, of the ancient lute family-the bass lute or theorbo-has been identified with the barbiton. Until recently the existence of these ancient stringed instruments was presumed on the evidence of the early medieval European instruments and of the meagre writings extant, such as those of Fārābi.1 But a chain of plastic evidence can now be offered, beginning with the Greek post-Mycenaean age (c. 1000 B.C.). A statuette of a female musician playing upon a large lute with only an embryonic neck, on which nevertheless the left hand is stopping strings, was unearthed in Egypt in a tomb of the XXth Dynasty in the cemetery of Goshen by the members of the British School of FIG. 1.-Post-Mycenaean terra-cotta figure, with ancient lute (1000 B.C.) from the cemetery at Goshen. Archaeology in Egypt, under the Praetorius, writing when the lute was in universal favour, mentions seven varieties distinguished by size and tuning. The string, the "chanterelle," often a single string, lower in pitch. smallest would be larger than a mandoline, and the melody Praetorius calls this an octave lute, with the chanterelle C or D. The two discant lutes have respectively B and A, the alto G, the tenor E, the bass D, and the great octave bass G, an octave below the alto lute which may be taken as the model lute cultivated by the amateurs of the time. The bass lutes were theorbos, that is, double-necked lutes, as described below. The accord ance of an alto lute was founded upon that of the original eight-stringed European lute, to board, and bass strings, double or single, known as diapasons, one of the most celebrated lute Museum by Major-General Cunninghan presented to the British being proverbial. formed the risers of steps leading to the tope at Jumal Garhi, dating from the 1st century A.D are represented scenes of music and dancing. Here the archetype of the lute appears several times; it had four strings, and the head was bent back at right angles to the neck. In the 6th century A.D. illustrations of this early lute are no longer rare, more especially on Persian silver-work of the Sassanian period and in 1 See Latin translation by J. G. L. Kosegarten, Alii Ispahenensis Liber... Arabice editur adjectaque translatione adnotationibusque illustratus (Greifswald, 1840). 2 See Hyksos and Israelite Cities, by W. M. Flinders Petrie and J. Garrow Duncan, 1906 (double volume), Brit. Sch. of Arch. 3J. de Morgan, Délégation en Perse (Paris, 1900), vol. i. pl. viii. Nos. 8, 7 and 9. See "The Treasures of the Oxus," catalogue of the Franks Bequest to the British Museum by Ormonde M. Dalton (London, 1905), pl. xxvi. No. 190; see also J. R. Aspelin, "Les antiquités du nord," No. 608; also for further references, Kathleen Schlesinger, "Precursors of the Violin Family," pt. ii. of The Instruments of the Orchestra, pp. 407-408, and appendix B, pp. 492-493; and Gazette archéologique (Paris, 1886), vol. xi. pl. x. and p. 70. The lute was in general use during the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 18th it declined; still J. S. Bach date we have met with of an enwrote a "partita" for it. The latest graved publication for the lute is 1760. FIG. 2.-Lute, by Venere of The large double-necked lute, with two sets of tuning pegs, the lower for the finger-board, the higher for the diapason strings, was known as the theorbo; also, and especially in England, as the archlute; and, in a special form, the neck being then very long, as the chitarrone. Theorbo and chitarrone appear together at the close of the 16th century, and their introduction was synchronous with the rise of accompanied monody in music, that is, of the oratorio Peri, Caccini and Monteverde used theorbos to and the opera. 6 By John Griffiths (London, 1896), vol. ii. pl. 105, cave I. 10, e. Syntagm. Music. pt. ii., "Organographie " (Wolfenbüttel, 1618), pp. 30 and 58-61. accompany their newly-devised recitative, the invention of which in Florence, from the impulse of the Renaissance, is well known. The height of a theorbo varied from 3 ft. 6 in. to 5 ft., the Paduan being always the largest, excepting the Roman 6-ft. long chitarrone. These large lutes had very deep notes, and doubtless great liberties were allowed in tuning, but the strings on the finger-board followed the lute accordance already given, or another quoted by Baron (Untersuchung des Instruments der Lauten, Nuremberg, 1727) as the old theorbo or "violway (see Mace, Musick's Monument, London, 1676); We find again both these accordances varied and transposed a tone higher, perhaps with thinner strings, or to accommodate local differences of pitch. Praetorius recommends the chanterelles of theorbos being tuned an octave lower on account of the great strain. By such a change, another authority, the Englishman Thomas Mace, says, the life and spruceness of airy lessons were quite lost. The theorbo or archlute had at last to give way to the violoncello and double bass, which are still used to accompany the " recitativo secco " in oratorios and operas. Handel wrote a part for a theorbo in Esther (1720); after that date it appears no more in orchestral scores, but remained in private use until nearly the end of the century. 66 Young Martin went to the village school at Mansfeld; to a school at Magdeburg kept by the Brethren of the Common Lot; then to the well-known St George's school at Eisenach. At Magdeburg and Eisenach Luther was a poor student," i.e. a boy who was received into a hospice where he lived rent-free, attended school without paying fees, and had the privilege of begging for his bread at the house-doors of the town; in return for which he sang as a chorister in the church to which the school was attached. Luther was never a " wandering student "; his parents were too careful of their child to permit him to lead the life of wandering licence which marked these pests of medieval German scholastic life. At Eisenach he attracted the notice of the wife of a wealthy merchant of Eisenach, whom his biographers usually identify as Frau Cotta. After three happy years at Eisenach, Luther entered the Hans Luther had been prospering, and was more than ever university of Erfurt (1501), then the most famous in Germany, resolved to make his son a lawyer. Young Luther entered his name on the matriculation book in letters which can still be read "Martinus Ludher ex Mansfelt," a free student, no longer embarrassed by great poverty. In Luther's time Erfurt was the intellectual centre of Germany and its students were exposed to a variety of influences which could not fail to stimulate young men of mental ability. Its theology was, of course, scholastic, but of what was then called the modern type, the Scotist; its philosophy was the nominalist system of William of Occam, whose great disciple, Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), had been one of its most famous professors; Nicholas de Lyra's (d. 1340) system of biblical interpretation had been long taught there by a succession of able teachers; Humanism had won an early entrance to the university; the anti-clerical teaching of John of Wessel, who had himself taught at Erfurt for fifteen years (1445-1460), had left its mark on the place and was not forgotten. Hussite propagandists, even in Luther's time, secretly visited the town and whispered among the students their anti-clerical Christian socialism. Papal legates to Germany seldom failed to visit the university and by their magnificence bore witness to the majesty of the Roman church, The lute and the organ share the distinction of being the first instruments for which the oldest instrumental compositions we possess were written. For the lute, however, they were not written in our present notation, but in tablature, "lyrawise," a system by which as many lines were drawn horizontally as there were pairs of strings on the finger-board, the frets, distributed at intervals of a semitone, being distinguished by the letters of the alphabet, repeated from A, representing the open string, for each line. This was the English and French manner; the Italian was by numbers instead of letters. The signs of time were placed over the stave, and were not repeated unless the mensural values changed. (A. J. H.; K. S.) LUTHARDT, CHRISTOPH ERNST (1823-1902), German Lutheran theologian, was born at Maroldsweisach, Bavaria, on the 22nd of March 1823. He studied theology at Erlangen and Berlin, and in 1856 became professor ordinarius of systematic theology and New Testament exegesis at Leipzig. In 1865 he was made a counsellor to the consistory, in 1871 canon of Meissen cathedral, and in 1887 a privy councillor to the church. He died at Leipzig on the 21st of September 1902. A strictly orthodox theologian, and a clear writer, though not a very profound scholar, Luthardt became widely appreciated as the author of apologetic lectures. These were collected under the title Apologie des Christentums (vol. i., 1864, 14th ed. 1896; vol. ii. 7th ed., 1901; vol. iii. 7th ed., 1898; vol. iv. 2nd ed., 1880), a work of which the first three volumes have been trans-learning. He attended none of the Humanist lectures, but he lated into English. In 1868 he founded and edited the Allgemeine evang.-lutherische Kirchenzeitung, with its supplement the Theologisches Litteraturblatt, and in 1880 became editor of the Zeitschrift für kirchl. Wissenschaft und kirchl. Leben. His other works include Das Johanneische Evangelium erklärt (1852-1853; 2nd ed. in 2 vols., 1875-1876), Offenbarung Johannis erklärt (1861), Lehre von den letzten Dingen (1861; 3rd ed. 1885); Kompendium der Dogmatik (1865; 9th ed., 1893), Geschichte der christlichen Ethik (2 vols., 1888-1893), Gnade und Wahrheit (1874), Das Wort des Lebens (1877) and Gnade und Frieden (1880). His autobiography was published with the title Erinnerungen aus vergangenen Tagen (1889; 2nd ed., 1891). LUTHER, MARTIN (1483-1546), the great German religious reformer, was born at Eisleben on the 10th of November 1483. His father, Hans Luther (Lyder, Luder, Ludher), a peasant from the township of Möhra in Thuringia, after his marriage with Margarethe Ziegler, had settled in Mansfeld, attracted by the prospects of work in the mines there. The counts of Mansfeld, who, many years before, had started the mining industry, made a practice of building and letting out for hire small furnaces for smelting the ore. Hans Luther soon leased one, then three. In 1491 he became one of the four elected members of the village council (vier Herren von der Gemeinde); and we are told that the counts of Mansfeld held him in esteem. The boy grew up amid the poor, coarse surroundings of the German peasant life, imbibing its simple beliefs, He was taught that the Emperor protected the poor people against the Turk, that the Church was the "Pope's House," wherein the Bishop of Rome had all the rights of the house-father. He shared the common superstitions of the time and some of them never left him. A study of the scholastic philosophy was then the preliminary training for a course of law, and Luther worked so hard at the prescribed studies that he had little leisure, he said, for classical read a good many of the Latin authors and also learned a little Greek. He never was a member of the Humanist circle; he was too much in earnest about religious questions and of too practical a turn of mind. The young Humanists would have gladly welcomed him into their select band. They dubbed him the "philosopher," the "musician," recalled in after days his fine social disposition, his skill in playing the lute, and his ready power in debate. He took the various degrees in an unusually brief time. He was bachelor in 1502 and master in 1505. His father, proud of his son's steady application and success, sent him the costly present of a Corpus Juris. He may have begun to study law. Suddenly he plunged into the Erfurt Convent of the Augustinian Eremites and after due noviciate became a monk. The action was so unexpected that his contemporaries felt bound to give all manner of explanations which have been woven into accounts which are legendary. Nothing is known about the cause of the sudden plunge but what Luther has himself revealed. He has told us that he entered the monastery because he doubted of himself, and that his action was sudden because he knew that his father would have disapproved of his intention. The word "doubt" has made historians think of intellectual difficulties of the "theological scepticism" taught by Occam and Biel, of the disintegrating criticism of Humanism. But there is no trace of any theological difficulties in Luther's mind in the struggles which sent him into the convent and distracted him there. He was driven to do what he did by the pressure of a practical religious need, the desire to save his soul. The fires of hell and the shades of purgatory, which are the constant background of Dante's " Paradiso," were present to Luther from | always appeared to him as an implacable judge, threatening punishment breaking law which keep. childhood was the greatest religious genius which the 16th Ple confessed to himself that he often it was impossibile toys will century produced, and the roots of the movement in which he was the central figure must be sought for in the popular religious life of the last decades of the 15th and opening decades of the 16th centuries-a field which has been neglected by almost all his biographers. When it is explored traces of at least five different types of religious sentiment can be discovered. Pious parents, whether among the burghers or peasants, seem to have taught their children a simple evangelical faith. Martin Luther and thousands of children like him were trained at home to know the creed, the ten commandments, the Lord's prayer, and such simple hymns as Ein Kindelein so lobelich, Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist and Crist ist erstanden; and they were taught to believe that God for Christ's sake freely pardons sin. They learned that simple faith which Luther afterwards expounded in his Small Catechism and called the Kinderlehre. When lads trained like himself entered school and college they came in contact with that religious revival which characterized the last half of the 15th century. Fear seemed to brood over the peoples of Western Europe. The plague devastated the badly drained towns, new diseases spread death, the fear of the Turks was permanent. All this went to feed revival, which, founded on fear, refused to see in Jesus Christ anything but a stern judge, and made the Virgin Mother and Anna the "grandmother" the intercessors; which found consolation in pilgrimages from shrine to shrine; which believed in crude miracles, and in the thought that God could be best served within convent walls. Luther's mind was caught in this current of feeling. He records how it was burnt into him by pictures which filled his boyish imagination. Jesus in the painted window of Mansfeld church, stern of face, sword in hand, sitting on a rainbow, coming to judge; an altarpiece at Magdeburg, in which a ship with its crew was sailing on to heaven, carrying no layman on board; the deeds of St Elizabeth emblazoned on the window of St George's parish church at Eisenach; the living pictures of a young nobleman who had turned monk to save his soul, of a monk, the holiest man Luther had ever known, who was aged far beyond his years by his maceration; and many others of the same kind. Alongside this we can trace the growth of another religious movement of a different kind. We can see a sturdy commonsense religion taking possession of multitudes in Germany, which insisted that laymen might rule in many departments supposed to belong exclusively to the clergy. The jus episcopale which Luther afterwards claimed for the secular authorities had been practically exercised in Saxony and Brandenburg; cities and districts had framed police regulations which set aside ecclesiastical decrees about holidays and begging; the supervision of charity was passing from the hands of the church into those of laymen; and religious confraternities which did not take their guidance from the clergy were increasing. Lastly, the medieval Brethren were engaged in printing and distributing tracts, mystical, anti-clerical, sometimes socialist. All these influences abounded as Luther was growing to manhood and laid their marks upon him. It was the momentary power of the second which drove him into the convent, and he selected the monastic order which represented all that was best in the revival of the latter half of the 15th century-the Augustinian Eremites. In the convent Luther set himself to find salvation. The last word of that Scotist theology which ruled at the close of the middle ages was that man must work out his own salvation, and Luther tried to do so in the most approved later medieval fashion by the strictest asceticism. He fasted and scourged himself; he practised all the ordinary forms of maceration and invented new ones, all to no purpose. His theological studies, part of the convent education, told him that pardon could be had through the Sacrament of Penance, and that the first part of the sacrament was sorrow for sin. The older theology declared that such sorrow must be based on love to God. Had he this love? God which Scotist theology called God. The later theology, taught in the convent by John of Palz and John Nathin, said that sorrow might be based on a meaner motive provided the Sacrament of Penance was continually resorted to. Luther wearied his superiors with his attendance at the confessional. He was looked upon as a young saint, and his reputation extended throughout the convents of his order. The young saint felt himself to be no nearer the pardon of God; he thought that he was "gallows-ripe." At last his superiors seemed to discover his real difficulties. Partly by their help, partly by study of the scriptures, he came to understand that God's pardon was to be won by trusting to His promises. Thus after two years of indescribable mental conflicts Luther found peace. The struggle marked him for life. His victory gave him a sense of freedom, and the feeling that life was given by God to be enjoyed. In all external things he remained unchanged. He was a faithful son of the medieval church, with its doctrines, ceremonies and usages. Soon after he had attained inward peace, Luther was ordained. He continued his studies in theology, devoting himself to the more experimental" portions of Augustine, Bernard and Gerson. He showed himself a good man of business and was advanced in his order. In 1508 he was sent with some other monks to Wittenberg to assist the small university which had been opened there in 1502 by Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony. It was there that Luther began to preach, first in a small chapel to the monks of his order; later taking the place of one of the town's clergy who was in ill-health. From Wittenberg he was sent by the chiefs of the German Augustinian Eremites to Rome on a mission concerning the organization of the order. He went up with the feelings of the medieval pilgrim rather than with the intoxication of the ardent Humanist. On his return (1512) he was sent by Staupitz, his vicar-general, to Erfurt to take the necessary steps for higher graduation in theology, in order to succeed Staupitz himself as professor of theology in Wittenberg. He graduated as Doctor of the Holy Scripture, took the Wittenberg doctor's oath to defend the evangelical truth vigorously (viriliter), became a member of the Wittenberg Senate, and three weeks later succeeded Staupitz as professor of theology. From the first Luther's lectures in theology differed from those ordinarily given at the time. He had no opinions on theological subjects at variance with the theology taught at Erfurt and elsewhere. No one attributed any heretical views to the young Wittenberg professor. He differed from others because he looked at theology in a more practical way. He thought it ought to be made useful to guide men to the grace of God and to tell them how to persevere in a life of joyous obedience to God and His commandments. His teaching was "experimental" from the beginning. Besides he believed that he had been specially set apart to lecture on the Holy Scriptures, and he began by commenting on the Psalms and on the Epistles of St Paul. He never knew much Hebrew and was not specially strong in Greek; so he used the Vulgate in his prelections. He had a huge widely printed volume on his desk, and wrote the notes for his lectures on the margins and between the lines. Some of the pages survive. They contain in the germ the leading thoughts of what became Lutheran theology. At first he expressed himself in the phrases common to scholastic theology,' when these were found to be inadequate in words borrowed from the mystical writers of the 14th and 15th centuries, and then in new phrases more appropriate to the circle of fresh thoughts. Those new thoughts at first simply pushed aside the ordinary theology taught in the schools without staying to criticize it. Gradually, however, Luther began to find that there was some real opposition between what he was teaching and the theology he had been taught in the Erfurt convent. It appeared characteristically enough on the practical and not on the speculative side of theology in a sermon on Indulgences preached in July 1516. Once begun the breach widened, until Luther could contrast | sinners, and books appeared giving lists of sins and what were our theology" with what was taught at Erfurt, and by September he began to write against the scholastic theology, to declare that it was Pelagian at heart, that it repudiated the Augustinian doctrines of grace, and neglected to teach the supreme value of that faith" which throws itself upon God." These lectures and the teaching they contained soon made a great impression. Students began to flock to the small obscure university of Wittenberg, and the elector grew proud of the teacher who was making his university famous. It was at this interesting stage of his own religious career that he felt himself compelled to stand forth in opposition to what he believed to be a great religious scandal, and almost unconsciously to become a Reformer. (91 Luther began his work as a Reformer by proposing to discuss the true meaning of Indulgences. The occasion was an Indulgence proclaimed by Pope Leo X., farmed by the archbishop of Mainz, and preached by John Tetzel, a Dominican monk and a famed seller of Indulgences. Many of the German princes had no great love for Indulgence sellers, and Frederick of Saxony had prohibited Tetzel from entering his territories. But it was easy to reach most parts of Electoral Saxony without actually crossing the frontiers. The Red Cross of the Indulgence seller had been set up at Zerbst and at Jüterbogk, and people had gone from Wittenberg to buy the Papal Tickets. Luther believed that the sales were injurious to the morals of the townsmen; he had heard reports of Tetzel's sermons; he had become wrathful on reading the letter of recommendation of the archbishop; and friends had urged him to interfere. He protested with a characteristic combination of caution and courage. The church of All Saints (the castle church) was closely connected with the university of Wittenberg. Its doors were commonly used for university proclamations. The Elector Frederick was a great collector of relics and had stored them in his church. He had procured an Indulgence for all who attended its services on All Saints' Day, and crowds commonly gathered. Luther nailed ninety-five theses on the church door on that day, the Ist of November 1517, when the crowd could see and read them. The proceeding was strictly academic. The matter discussed, to judge by the writings of theologians, was somewhat obscure; and Luther offered his theses as an attempt to make it clearer. No one was supposed to be committed to every opinion he advanced in such a way. But the theses posted somehow touched heart and conscience in a way unusual in the common subjects of academic disputation. Every one wanted to read them. The University Press could not supply copies fast enough. They were translated into German, and were known throughout Germany in less than a fortnight. Within a month they had been heard of all over western and southern Europe. Luther himself was staggered at the way they were received. He said he had never meant to determine, but to debate. The theses were singularly unlike what might have been expected from a professor of theology. They made no attempt at theological definition, no pretence at logical arrangement; they were anything but a brief programme of reformation. They were simply ninety-five sledge-hammer blows directed against the most flagrant ecclesiastical abuse of the age. They were addressed to the common man and appealed to his common sense of spiritual things. دو The practice of offering, selling and buying Indulgences (see INDULGENCE) was everywhere common in the beginning of the 16th century. The beginnings go back more than a thousand years before the time of Luther. In the earliest church life, when Christians fell into sin, they were required to make public confession before the congregation, to declare their sorrow, and to vow to perform certain acts which were regarded as evidence of the sincerity of their repentance. When the custom of public confession before the congregation had changed to private confession to the clergy, it became the confessor's duty to impose these satisfactions. It was thought only right that there should be some uniformity in dealing with repentant supposed to be suitable satisfactions. When the sins confessed were very heinous the satisfactions were correspondingly severe and sometimes lasted over many years. About the 7th century arose a custom of commuting or relaxing these imposed satisfactions. A penance of several years fasting might be commuted into saying so many prayers, or giving an arranged amount in alms, or even into a money-fine. In the last case the analogy of the Wergeld of the German tribal codes was commonly followed. The usage generally took the form that any one who visited a church, to which the Indulgence had been attached, on a day named, and gave a contribution to its funds, had his penance shortened by one-seventh, one-third or one-half, as might be arranged. This was the origin of Indulgences properly so-called. They were always mitigations of satisfactions or penances which had been imposed by the church as outward signs of inward sorrow, tests of fitness for pardon, and the needful precedents of absolution. Luther uttered no protest against Indulgences of this kind. He held that what the church had imposed the church could remit. This old and simple conception of Indulgences had been greatly altered since the beginning of the 13th century. The institution of penance had been raised to the dignity of a sacrament, and this had changed both the place and the character of satisfactions. Under the older conception the order had been Sorrow (Contritio), Confession, Satisfaction (or due manifestation of sorrow in ways prescribed) and Absolution. Under the newer theory the order was Sorrow, Confession, Absolution, Satisfaction, and both satisfaction and sorrow took new meanings. It was held that Absolution removed guilt and freed from eternal punishment, but that something had to be done to free the penitent from temporal punishment whether in this life or in purgatory. Satisfactions took the new meaning of the temporal punishments due in this life and the substitute for the pains of purgatory. The new thought of a treasury of merits (thesaurus meritorum) introduced further changes. It was held that the good deeds over and above what were needed for their own salvation by the living or by the saints in heaven, together with the inexhaustible merits of Christ, were all deposited in a treasury out of which they could be taken by the pope and given by him to the faithful. They could be added to the satisfactions actually done by penitents. Thus Satisfactions became not merely signs of sorrow but actual merits, which freed men from the need to undergo the temporal pains here and in purgatory which their sins had rendered them liable to. By an Indulgence merits could be transferred from the storehouse to those who required them. The change made in the character of Sorrow made Indulgences all the more necessary for the indifferent penitent. On the older theory Sorrow (Contritio) had for its one basis love to God; but on the newer theory the starting-point might be a less worthy king of sorrow (Attritio) which it was held would be changed into the more worthy kind in the Sacrament of Penance. The conclusion was naturally drawn that a process of penitence which began with sorrow of the more unworthy kind needed a larger amount of Satisfactions or penance than what began with Contrition. Hence for the indifferent Christian, Attrition, Confession and Indulgence became the three heads in the scheme of the church of the later middle ages for his salvation. The one thing which satisfied his conscience was the burdensome thing he had to do, and that was to procure an Indulgence a matter made increasingly easy for him as time went on. This doctrine of Attrition had not the undivided support of the theologians of the later medieval church; but it was taught by the Scotists and was naturally a favourite theme with the sellers of Indulgences. Nor were all theologians at one upon the whole theory of Indulgences. The majority of the best theologians held that Indulgences had nothing to do with the pardoning of guilt, but only with freeing from temporal penalties in this life or in purgatory. But the common people did not discriminate, and believed that when they bought an Indulgence they were purchasing pardon from sin; and Luther placed himself in the position of the ordinary Christian uninstructed in the niceties of theological distinctions. His Ninety-five Theses made six different assertions about Indulgences and their efficacy:-- i. An Indulgence is and can only be the remission of a merely ecclesiastical penalty; the church can remit what the church has imposed; it cannot remit what God has imposed. ii. An Indulgence can never remit guilt; the pope himself cannot do such a thing; God has kept that in His own hand. iii. It cannot remit the divine punishment for sin; that also is in the hands of God alone. iv. It can have no efficacy for souls in Purgatory; penalties imposed by the church can only refer to the living; death dissolves them; what the pope can do for souls in Purgatory is by prayer, not by jurisdiction or the power of the keys. v. The Christian who has true repentance has already received pardon from God altogether apart from an Indulgence, and does not need one; Christ demands this true repentance from every one. vi. The Treasury of Merits has never been properly defined; it is hard to say what it is, and it is not properly understood by the people; it cannot be the merits of Christ and of His saints, because these act of themselves and quite apart from the intervention of the pope; it can mean nothing more than that the pope, having the power of the keys, can remit ecclesiastical penalties imposed by the church; the true Treasure-house of merits is the Holy Ghost of the grace and glory of God. The unexpected effect of the Theses was that the sale of Indulgences began to decline rapidly, and the archbishop of Mainz, disappointed in his hopes of revenue, sent a copy to Rome. The pope thinking that the whole dispute was a monkish quarrel, contented himself with asking the general of the Augustinian Eremites to keep his monks quiet. This was not easy. Tetzel, in conjunction with a friend, Conrad Wimpina, had published a set of counter-theses. John Mayr of Eck, a noted controversialist and professor of theology in the university of Ingolstadt, scented the Hussite heresy in the Theses, and denounced them in a tract entitled Obelisks. Luther at once answered in his Asterisks. A controversy raged in Germany. Meanwhile, at Rome, Silvester Mazzolini of Prierio, a Dominican monk and Inquisitor, had been studying the Theses, was profoundly dissatisfied with them, and wrote a Dialogue about the Power of the Pope, against the presumptuous conclusions of Martin Luther. This book reached Germany about the middle of January 1518, and increased the tumult. defend the man who had made his university so famous. His action compelled the Roman Curia to pause. Germany was on the eve, it was believed, of an election of a king of the Romans; it was possible that an imperial election was not far distant; Frederick was too important a personage to offend. So the condemnation by the Cardinal-Legate was withdrawn for the time, and the pope resolved to deal with the matter otherwise. He selected one of his chamberlains, Charles von Miltitz, the elector's private agent at Rome, and commissioned him to deal with the matter as he best could. Miltitz received the "golden rose to give to Frederick, and was furnished with several letters in all of which the pope spoke of Luther as a "child of the devil." His holiness had probably forgotten the fact when he addressed Luther some months later as "his dear son." When Miltitz arrived in Germany he discovered that the movement was much more important than the Roman Curia had imagined. He had not to deal with the opposition of a recalcitrant monk, but with the awakening of a nation. He resolved to meet with Tetzel and with Luther privately before he produced his credentials. Tetzel he could not see; the man was afraid to leave his convent; but he had lengthy interviews with Luther in the house of Spalatin the chaplain and private secretary of the elector Frederick. There he disowned the sermons of the pardonsellers, let it be seen that he did not approve of the action of the Legate, and so prevailed with Luther that the latter promised to write a submissive letter to the pope, to exhort people to reverence the Roman See, to say that Indulgences were useful to remit canonical penances, and to promise to write no more on the matter unless he happened to be attacked. Luther did all this. A reconciliation might have taken place had the Roman Curia supported Miltitz. But the Curia did not support Miltitz, and placed more faith in Eck, who was eager to extinguish Luther in a public discussion. Luther had been spending the time between his interview with the Legate at Augsburg (Oct. 1518) and the Leipzig Disputation (June 1519) in severe and disquieting studies. He had found that all his opponents had pursued one line of argument: the power to issue an Indulgence is simply one case of the universal papal jurisdiction; Indulgences are what the pope proclaims them to be, and to attack them is to attack the power of the pope; the pope represents the Roman church, which is actually the universal church, and to oppose the pope is to defy the whole church of Christ; whoever attacks such a long-established system as that of Indulgences is a heretic. Such was the argument. Luther felt himself confronted with the pope's absolute supremacy in all ecclesiastical matters. It was a plea whose full force he felt. The papal supremacy was one of his oldest inherited beliefs. He re-examined his convictions about justifying faith and whether they did lead to his declarations about Indulgences. He could come to no other conclusion. It then became necessary to examine the papal claims. He set himself to study the Decretals, and to his amazement and indignation he found that they were full of frauds. It is hard to say whether the discovery brought him more joy or more grief. His letters show him half-exultant and half-terrified. While he was in this state of mind he received Eck's challenge to dispute with him at Leipzig on the papal supremacy. Luther's friends had been provokingly silent about the Theses; but in April 1518, at the annual chapter of the Augustinian Eremites held at Heidelberg, Luther heard his positions temperately discussed, and found somewhat to his astonishment that his views were not acceptable to all his fellow monks. On his return to Wittenberg he began an answer to his opponents. He carefully considered his positions, found them unassailable, and published his Resolutions, the most carefully written of all his works. The book practically discarded all the ideas and practices concerning Indulgences which had come into the medieval church since the beginning of the 13th century, and all the ingenious explanations of the scholastic theologians from Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas downwards. The effect of the controversy was a great decrease in the sale of Indulgences in Germany, and the Papal Curia saw with alarm a prolific source of revenue decaying. It was felt that Luther must be silenced. He was accordingly summoned to Rome. To obey would have meant death; to refuse in his own name would have been contumacy. But the peremptory summons could be construed as an attack on the university of Wittenberg, and both the elector of Saxony and the emperor Maximilian so regarded it. The result was that Pope Leo cancelled the summons, and it was arranged that Luther should appear before the papal Legate to the German Diet, Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajedtan, at Augsburg. The interview was not very successful. At its conclusion Luther wrote two appeals-one from the pope ill-force Luther into some admission which would justify opponents informed to the pope well-informed, and the other to a General Council. True to his habit of taking the German people into his confidence, he wrote an account of his interview with the Legate, and published it under the title of the Acta Augustana. The publication greatly increased the sympathy of almost all classes in Germany for Luther. They saw in him a pious man, an esteemed professor, who had done nothing but propose a discussion on the notoriously intricate subject of Indulgences, peremptorily ordered to recant and to remain silent. The elector Frederick shared the common feelings and resolved to This Leipzig Disputation was perhaps the most important point in Luther's career. He met Eck in June 1519. It soon appeared that the intention of that practised debater was to in accusing him of holding the opinions of Huss, who had been condemned by the great German Council of Constance. In this he was eminently successful. Eck left Leipzig triumphant, and Luther returned to Wittenberg much depressed. As usual he wrote out and published an account of the Disputation, which was an appeal to his fellow Germans. The result surpassed his expectations. The Disputation made him see that his protest against the abuses of Indulgences was no criticism of an excrescence on the medieval ecclesiastical system, but an attack on its centre of existence. He saw that he stood for the spiritual |