A Quotation from His Books enough to destroy the Luther legend

by Arnold Lunn
MR. Peter Wiener's booklet' on Martin Luther is a brilliant re-statement of facts better known
on the continent, where the Luther legend was killed by Denifle. than in this country, where Denifle has yet to be translated. Peter Wiener is a German by birth, a Protestant by religion, and a master at Stowe School by occupation.
There is one passage which will come as a shock even -to those who have long realised that " there is," as Dr. Inge has remarked. " very little to be said for this coarse and foul-mouthed
Arnold Lunn
leader of a revolution." here is the passage in question. " Christ," says Luther, " committed /adultery first of all with the v.eiman al the well. about whom Saint John tells us. Was not everybody about Him saying: Whatever has be been doing with her ?' Secoodly, with Mary Magdalene, and thirdly with the woman taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus even Christ, who was so righteous, must have been guilty of fornication before He died."
I for one was not prepared to believe that a man who has been accepted by devout and scholarly Christians as a great religious leader could have been capable of such obscene blasphemy, so I went to the London Library to check the reference from The classic Weimar
edition, and there it was 107)2 without comment excepting for a few donnish footnotes such as "So ist wohl zu lesen und nicht mit Prager Nro." It is significant that though this edition had been in the London Library since 1913, I was the first to cut its. pages and the first to read the particular page containing (with no word of comment fiom the pious editor) this unparalleled enormity. Obviously the Luther legend survives because Luther's admirers do not read "Luther."
Why Unknown Apologisss for Luther. as 1 have since discovered, capitulate at once when confronted with this passage. Why, then, is the passage, comparatively unknown ? Why was the heresiarch allowed by Catholics to get away with this enormity ? The ineffectiveness of our anti-Luther propaganda is indirect evidence for our belief that the indestructibility, of the Church, whose decease has so often been predicted by Our enemies, is due to divine guidance rather than to that superb organisation with which we are credited by our enemies. kunck-Brentano in his laudatory bingraphy of Luther insists that " the authenticity of the Table Talk has never been questioned. The admirableHuguenot writer, Pierre Bayle, of the seventeenth century, after the Table Talk had been published, regretted the publication, but never attempted to deny their authenticity or their veracity. The reporters made their notes almost under the dictation of the reformer, in any case while he spoke. We have sometimes the same reports by two or three different reporters, independent of each other. Their reports agree in everything of importance which they report." The basic difference between Luther and the vilest ot contemporary Catholics is that Catholics do not deny that sin is sin. Luther rationalised his own incontinence by imputing his sin to Christ. He Luthcranised Christ. It was this new thing which came into the world with Luther. a general debasement of standards and ideals. The Flight front Reason began with Luther. " Reason," he exclaims, " is the Devil's greatest whore. .,. Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. . . She should deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest • place in the house: to the closet " (clearly Streicher and Coebbels have merely played the sedulous .ape to this great master of German invective).
The New Morality
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The New Morality began with Luther. He refers to himself as " a famous lover " who has." three wives " but " no intention whatever to marry." " It is not forbidden " he wrote, " that a man should have more than one wife." Clearly the prophet who harped on the impossibility of continence was rationalising his own -incontinence. In a famous letter he insisted that a woman who could not bear a child tia her husband should bear a child to another man. Husbands whose wives proved difficult were urged to seduce the servant. When Koppe and a gang of brutes invaded a convent and raped the nuns, Luther compared him to Christ. After describing him as a " holy rbbbee," he adds, "like Christ you have taken these poor souls out of the prison of human tyranny. You have achieved this at a moment providentially indicated, at this moment of Easter, where Christ has released from captivity his own.' "
Luther condoned and advised the
bigamy of Philip of Hesse. , He anticipated Hiller in preaching the impoi lance of lying. He lured the peasants into revolt and then called upon the Prince.,s to slay them. The man, whose " fundamenta: Christianity " Was praised by the late Dr. Moffat iii to the debased Christianity of Rome, anticipated the horrors of Dachau. " The rulers," he wrote, " must drive, heat. throttle. hang, burn, behead and torture, so as to make themselves feared and to keep the people in check." No wonder that Hitler exclaimed. " It' Luther could Ise with us he would give us his blessing," or that the late Archbishop Temple should have insisted that " it is easy to hoe how Luther prepared the way for Hitler."
From Luther to Hitler Mr, Wiener is at his hest in the effective chapter, " From Little-1 to Hitler." He reminds us that The German Lutheran God was put " in store " after 1918, when Germans were admitting other gods to prove their devotions to international ideas. Eminent Lutherans. who were much feted in this country, re-emerged as political Lutheran Nationalists when the Nazi !evolution began. The great heresy of the last century was the foolish doctrine that it mat teredvery little what a man believed. There is always a tragic gulf between creed and code, but when standards are lowered there is a corresponding degradation of conduct. When people begin, as Luther began. to preach what they practise, it is not long before they are practising what they had never durcd to preach Luther's ciao followers were horrified by the moral collapse in the Germany which had accepted Luther. Thus Pirkheinner, who was one of Luther's disciples, wrote: " Things have got JO bad that the scoundrels of the new Gospel make those of Popery seem pious by contrast ": and the great Heresiarch himself on his deathbed confessed that his disciples evere " seven times more scandalous " than any of their predecessors. It is not only the Luther legend which this hook will help to kill, but the myth to which Dr. Coulton has devoted his lifethe myth that there is something in Catholicism which almost compels the Catholic historian to distort the truth. Dishonest historians are to be found in all communions, but there is nothing' in the long records of Catholic apologetics to set beside the conspiracy to represent this obscene blasphemer as e great religious leader. Fie was, on the contrary, 4 Dr. Inge has pointed out in The Church of England Newspaper, "the worst evil genius " of Getmaey ; a conclusiou at which Dr. Inge arrives after comparparing Dr. Luther with Hitler.
bull references are given for every statement in this article either in Wiener's borik or in Denifle's classic. Now. Denifle is, as even Fa Coulton concedes. one of the greatest authorities in the Middle Ages, a scholar of immense erudition. but the facts mentioned above willnot be found in a book called In Defence of the Reformer tion by an author who has devoted many years of his life to a hitter attack on Cardinal Gasquet for suppressing facts unfavotrrable to pre-Reformation monasticism. # Martin Luther, Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor By Peter W. Wiener. (Flutchinson. 2s. 6d.) a Christus adulterer. Cluistus 1st am ersten ebrechet worden Job 4, bei dem brunn c-um muliere; quia jill dicebanl : Nemo significat, quid facit cum ea ? Item cum Magdalena, item cum adultera Joan 8, die er so leicht dauon lies. Also mus der from Christus such ersten ein ebrecher werden, cheer starb "