Chapter XXII: Luther and Lying (5)

In his “Newe Fabel” (of the Lion and the Ass) Luther implicitly includes von der Heyden, all the defenders of the Pope, and the Pope himself under the figure of the Ass (with the cross on its back); “there is nothing about the Ass that is not worthy of royal and papal honours.”[577] The author of the letter he calls an ass’s head and sniveller; the very stones of Leipzig would spit upon him; he was the “horse-droppings in which the apples were packed”; his art had brought on him “such an attack of diarrhœa that all of us have been bespattered with his filth”; “If you wish to devour us, you might begin downstairs at the commode,” etc.[578]

We find nothing in either writing in the nature of a reply--of which indeed he considered the Leipzig authors unworthy--except the two following statements: firstly, Luther had sufficiently instructed his faithful wife, and the world in general, “that the religious life was wrong”;[579] secondly, Ambrose, Jerome, or whoever wrote the booklet, “had stormed and raved like a demon” in that work, which was “more heretical than Catholic, against the nun who had yielded to her sexual instincts; he had not spoken like a Doctor, ... but as one who wished to drive the poor prostitute into the abyss of hell; a murderer of souls pitted against a poor, feeble, female vessel.”[580] Hence Luther’s views are fairly apparent in the replies.

The Church, yea, even the Church of the earliest times, was made to bear the curse of having degraded woman and of having, by the religious life, declared war on marriage.

A contemporary, Petrus Silvius, who read Luther’s writings with indignation and disgust, wrote, in 1530: “Luther, with his usual lies and blasphemy, calumniates the Christian Church and now says, that she entirely rejected and condemned matrimony.”[581]

In what has gone before these falsehoods concerning the earlier degradation and his own exaltation of woman have been refuted at some length; the detailed manner in which this was done may find its vindication in the words of yet another opponent of Luther’s, H. Sedulius, who says: “It must be repeated again and again, that it is an impudent lie to say we condemn marriage.”[582]