They even advocated papal infallibility, although this was as yet an open question in the Roman Church, and remained so till the Vatican decree of 1870. They could produce no arguments for the doctrine and practice of indulgences from the Word of God, or even from the Greek and Latin fathers, and had to resort to extravagant views on the authority of the Pope. But they injured their cause in public estimation by the weakness of their defence. These opponents represented three universities and the ruling scholastic theology of the Angelic Doctor St. The chief writers against Luther were Tetzel of Leipzig, Conrad Wimpina of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and the more learned and formidable John Eck of Ingolstadt, who was at first a friend of Luther, but now became his irreconcilable enemy. One of them told him, "You tell the truth, good brother, but you will accomplish nothing go to your cell, and say, God have mercy upon me." 198 198 Albert Krantz of Hamburg, who died Dec. Luther himself, then a poor, emaciated monk, was at first frightened by the unexpected effect, and many of his friends trembled. Spalatin, in his own writings and his letters to Luther and Melanchthon, nowhere refers to it.īut, on the other hand, the Theses were strongly assailed and condemned by the episcopal and clerical hierarchy, the monastic orders, especially the Dominicans, and the universities, in fact, by all the champions of scholastic theology and traditional orthodoxy. No trace of such a dream can be found before 1591. Burkhardt, the librarian, is only a copy of the eighteenth century. But that MS., according to the testimony of Dr. Merle d’Aubigné relates the dream at great length as being, "beyond reasonable doubt, true in the essential parts." He appeals to an original MS., written from the dictation of Spalatin, in the archives of Weimar, which was published in 1817. The Elector Frederick dreamed, in the night before Luther affixed the Theses, that God sent him a monk, a true son of the Apostle Paul, and that this monk wrote something on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg with a pen which reached even to Rome, pierced the head and ears of a lion (Leo), and shook the triple crown of the Pope. Fleck, "the man has come who will do the thing." Reuchlin thanked God that "the monks have now found a man who will give them such full employment that they will be glad to let me spend my old age in peace." 197 197 The prophetic dream of the Elector, so often told, is a poetic fiction. They found a hearty response with liberal scholars and enemies of monastic obscurantism, with German patriots longing for emancipation from Italian control, and with thousands of plain Christians waiting for the man of Providence who should give utterance to their feelings of indignation against existing abuses, and to their desire for a pure, scriptural, and spiritual religion. They sounded the trumpet of the Reformation. The Theses of Luther were a tract for the times. 126 sqq.), Bratke, and Dieckhoff, as quoted in § 31. On the details of the controversy, see Jürgens (III. Tetzel’s Anti-Theses, 2 series, one of 106, the other of 50 sentences, are printed in Löscher’s Ref. Letters of Luther to Archbishop Albrecht, Spalatin, and others, in De Wette, I. 380–393) Resolutiones disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute, August, 1518, dedicated to the Pope (I. 278–316) Freiheit des Sermons päpstlichen Ablass und Gnade belangend, June, 1518, against Tetzel (I. 257–265) Asterisci adversus Obeliscos Eckii, March, 1518 (I. 248–256, in Latin under the title Instructio pro Confessione peccatorum, p. Luther’s Sermon vom Ablass und Gnade, printed in February, 1518 (Weimar ed.
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