Likewise, the moderate middle-class and a large section of the lower nobility joined him, and even princes were drawn into the torrent.While the former believed the day had come in which to wreak vengeance upon all their oppressors, the latter only wished to break the power of the clergy, the dependence upon Rome, the Catholic hierarchy, and to enrich themselves through the confiscation of church property.The parties became separated from each other, and each found a different spokesman.Luther had to choose between the two.Luther, the protégé of the Elector of Saxony, the respected professor of Wittenberg who had become powerful and famous overnight, the great man who was surrounded by a coterie of servile creatures and flatterers, did not hesitate a moment.He dropped the popular elements of the movement, and joined the train of the middle-class, the nobility and the princes.Appeals to war of extermination against Rome were heard no more.Luther was now preaching peaceful progress and passive resistance.(Cf.To the nobility of the German nation, 1520, etc.)Invited by Hutten to visit him and Sickingen in the castle of Ebern, the centre of the noble conspiracy against clergy and princes, Luther replied :
"I should not like to see the Gospel defended by force and bloodshed.The world was conquered by the Word, the Church has maintained itself by the Word, the Church will come into its own again through the Word, and as Antichrist gained ascendancy without violence, so without violence he will fall."Out of this turn of mind, or, to be more exact, out of this definite delineation of Luther's policy, sprang that policy bartering and haggling over institutions and dogmas to be retained or reformed, that ugly diplomatising, conceding, intriguing and compromising, the result of which was the Augsburg Confession, the final draft of the constitution the reformed middle-class church.It was the same petty trading which, in the political field, repeated itself ad nauseam in the recent German national assemblies, unity gatherings, chambers of revision, and in the parliaments Erfurt.The Philistine middle-class character of the official reformation appeared in these negotiations most clearly.
There were valid reasons why Luther, now the recognised representative of middle-class reform, chose to preach lawful progress.The mass of the cities had joined the cause of moderate reform; the lower nobility became more and more devoted to it; one section of the princes joined it, another vacillated.Success was almost certain at least in a large portion of Germany.
Under continued peaceful development the other regions could not in the long run withstand the pressure of moderate opposition.Violent convulsions, on the other hand, were bound to result in a conflict between the moderates and the extreme plebeian and peasant party, thus to alienate the princes, the nobility, and a number of cities from the movement and to leave open the alternative of either the middle-class party being overshadowed by the peasants and plebeians, or the entire movement being crushed by Catholic restoration.How middle-class parties, having achieved the slightest victory, attempt to steer their way between the Scylla of revolution and the Charybdis of restoration by means of lawful progress, we have had occasions enough to observe in the events of recent times.
It was in the nature of the then prevailing social and political conditions that the results of every change were advantageous to the princes, increasing their power.Thus it came about that the middle-class reform, having parted ways with the plebeian and peasant elements, fell more and more under the control of the reform princes.Luther's subservience to them increased, and the people knew very well what they were doing when they accused him of having become a slave of the princes as were all the others, and when they pursued him with stones in Orlamuende.
When the peasant war broke out, becoming more predominant in regions with Catholic nobility and princes, Luther strove to maintain a conciliatory position.He resolutely attacked the governments.He said it was due to their oppression that the revolts had started, that not the peasants alone were against them, but God as well.On the other hand, he also said that the revolt was ungodly and against the Gospel.He advised both parties to yield, to reach a peaceful understanding.
Notwithstanding these sincere attempts at conciliation, however, the revolt spread rapidly over large areas, including such sections as were dominated by Protestant Lutheran princes, nobles and cities, and rapidly outgrew the middle-class "circumspect" reform.The most determined faction of the insurgents under Muenzer opened their headquarters in Luther's very proximity, in Thuringia.A few more successes, and Germany would have been one big conflagration, Luther would have been surrounded, perhaps piked as a traitor, and middle-class reform would have been swept away by the tides of a peasant-plebeian revolution.There was no more time for circumspection.
