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THE BRITISH LUTHER COMMEMORATION OF 1883–1884 IN EUROPEAN CONTEXT*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2015

J. M. R. BENNETT
J. M. R. BENNETT*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, University of Oxford
*
Christ Church, St Aldate's, Oxford, ox1 1dpjoshua.bennett@chch.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

In 1883 and early 1884 the controversial commemoration of the four-hundredth birthday of Martin Luther, celebrated in Germany and worldwide, captured much British public attention. The examination of this celebration offered here will improve current understanding of late Victorian religious controversies and indicate their continuing centrality to a range of cultural and historical debates in the period. The commemoration invigorated historic antagonisms in the British religious landscape, yet it also did far more than this. The commemoration provided a platform for those who wanted to foster Protestant unity in the face of what was widely perceived to be a revived threat from ‘popery’ and religious indifference at home and abroad. Whereas some religious and not-very-religious commentators, often belonging to a younger generation, wanted closely to associate Luther's world-historical role with liberalizing intellectual and social progress, others – sceptics, Catholics, high Anglicans, older Protestants – resisted this. Arguments about Luther's life and teaching often became more broadly Victorian discussions of the family, Anglo-German affinities or antagonisms, and the nature of modernity. By relating themes in the study of modern religious history to current concerns in the history of historical writing, this article will point to wider lacunae in scholarly approaches to nineteenth-century culture.

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Articles
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The Historical Journal , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 543 - 564
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

‘There has been little else talked of during the past few days’, a writer deep in East Anglia observed – approvingly – in mid-November 1883, ‘but the life and times of Martin Luther.’Footnote 1 His claim was well founded: in the days surrounding Luther's four-hundredth birthday on 10 November, music halls, meeting rooms, churches, and chapels across Britain resounded to the din of lectures, sermons, and hymnal concerts given to instruct the populace in their debts to the sixteenth-century Reformer who, according to his enthusiastic admirers, exposed the rottenness of the medieval church and ushered in a new age of purified Christianity and religious and political freedom. An exhibition of texts, engravings, and Luther relics had opened beforehand in the British Museum.Footnote 2 Newspapers and periodicals spread word of the meetings and reviewed and advertised the extensive and varied historical literature published to coincide with the proceedings; debate and dissensions rumbled on into 1884. From Exeter Hall in London to the music hall in Aberdeen and a school-room in Bodmin, crowds gathered to hear moralizing, combative, and lengthy laudations of the great Reformer.Footnote 3

Well before the November celebrations at home, British readers were becoming acquainted with the large-scale Luther commemoration in Germany, an illustration of how the rapid spread of mass print media in the nineteenth century helped to foster international religious solidarity beyond more localized contexts.Footnote 4 The German celebrations unfolded over several months, not necessarily taking their cue from Kaiser Wilhelm I's decree of May 21 that Luther's four-hundredth birthday should be celebrated in all Protestant churches and schools on 10 and 11 November.Footnote 5 A correspondent from the Manchester Guardian arrived in Erfurt, where Luther had studied and lived for a time as a monk, in time for its August festival. An editorial-writer for the paper remarked that the celebration of the 1483 anniversary on this scale was quite new. Previously, he said, the Germans had only marked anniversaries of 31 October 1517, the date on which Luther had nailed the Ninety-Five Theses, protesting against the sale of indulgences, to the door of Wittenberg's Schlosskirche. He attributed the new celebrations to the growth of historical consciousness, which had made Luther a hero to all Protestant Germans irrespective of creed, and to a desire to counter the growth of Catholic ‘fanaticism’ evident during the recently ended Kulturkampf.Footnote 6

The German celebrations gathered pace. The next month, at Wittenberg, a festival took place drawing together over 1,000 clergy from all parts of Protestant Germany, where the crown prince opened a Luther museum and delivered an address.Footnote 7 Britons were notably present in the proceedings. Two surfaced who purported to be Luther's descendants, according to the correspondent for the Daily News.Footnote 8 The Free Church of Scotland sent a five-strong deputation.Footnote 9 The commemorations climaxed on 10 and 11 November, when celebrations took place across Protestant Germany. The Times reported that on 10 November, a Saturday, ‘Berlin shone in holiday array’ and schoolchildren overflowed from the Protestant churches into public halls.Footnote 10 Famous theologians and historians, including Albrecht Ritschl and Heinrich von Treitschke, addressed audiences at Kiel, Göttingen, Darmstadt, Breslau, and elsewhere; poets also found themselves stirred.Footnote 11

I

Whilst the Luther commemoration in Germany has received some scholarly attention, the British and international dimensions of the celebration have not. The following analysis of the British commemoration, in its transnational context, will contribute to the growing if still fragmentary literature on the interaction between historical and religious thought in the nineteenth century by unpicking the surprisingly numerous layers of significance in how understandings of the religious past and a distracted present were brought together at one heated moment in the books, sermons, pamphlets, and speeches it occasioned.Footnote 12

At one level, the Luther commemoration in both Britain and Germany represented an attempt by national and local Protestant organizers to define their own collective religious and national identity with reference to an appropriated past, against what they took to be the dangers represented by reviving Catholicism in their home countries and further afield: a phenomenon which energized ‘culture wars’ across contemporary Europe.Footnote 13 History was a crucial arena in which the relative merits of Protestantism and Catholicism could be fought over. In Germany, these debates interlocked with deep confessional divisions over the meaning of national identity, which the course of German unification under Prussian leadership, completed in 1871, had exposed and helped to intensify. As the Manchester Guardian observed, these were exacerbated by the Kulturkampf, which in 1883 had only recently ended.

The religious divide invited and informed conflicting representations of German history. Especially before the success of unification made the need to advance the argument less pressing, Protestant historians liked to celebrate Prussia's progressive role in renewing the national Geist, and consistently emphasized the historically Protestant character of German Kultur, with Luther and the Lutheran Bible placed at the centre of a deliberately constructed national canon. Catholic and particularly Ultramontane historians, especially once unification made older, grossdeutsch attacks on Prussia's unpatriotic restlessness obsolete, aimed to subvert the pieties of the new establishment by painting roseate cultural-historical pictures of German cultural, intellectual, and social strength in the middle ages before the alien poisons of Roman law, the Renaissance, and the Reformation began to enervate and ultimately destroy the Volksleben; the Frankfurt schoolteacher Johannes Janssen was the pre-eminent representative of this approach.Footnote 14 These historico-political frictions were noisily expressed in 1883.Footnote 15 Protestant critics assailed Janssen's Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, which had been appearing in successive volumes since 1876, and he quickly returned fire.Footnote 16 Janssen targeted some of his remarks at Germany's leading Luther scholar, the Protestant historian and Halle professor Julius Köstlin, who in 1883 published a derogatory tract on Janssen and Luther, together with a new edition of his two-volume study of the life and writings of the Reformer, and shorter works for youthful and popular consumption.Footnote 17 The writings of both figures came to be deployed by British controversialists for their own ends.Footnote 18

In Britain, too, Protestants used the occasion of Luther's four-hundredth birthday to define themselves and their country against the system from which Luther had broken. Anti-Catholic evangelical invective rang out from London's Exeter Hall, long a byword for Protestant haranguing; and parts of the country with groups who counted themselves particularly afflicted by Romanism – such as Belfast, Glasgow, and Liverpool – were notably observant of the event.Footnote 19 British Protestants were as affronted as their continental cousins by the expansion of religious orders and the heightened confidence of the papacy characteristic of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival. The commemoration was thus an opportunity for Protestants to draw together in opposition to this alarming trajectory.Footnote 20 Debates over the historic character of Catholicism and the nature of the Reformation also brought to a high pitch historic tensions within the Church of England, inflamed and partially realigned earlier in the century by the evangelical revival and the Oxford Movement.

These features of the commemoration in Britain and Germany will not come as a surprise to scholars familiar with the growing literature on how commemorating the past has functioned as a crucial medium for shaping and sacralizing identities in modern Europe, and how thoroughly such historical engagement percolated at a popular level.Footnote 21 What may be less expected is how debate over Luther and his legacy, in the platform speeches, sermons, books, and tracts stimulated by the British celebration of the anniversary, contributed to a wider complex of nineteenth-century cultural arguments, from which the Victorian discussion of religious history has often implicitly been separated by later scholars. The remarks of Luther's proponents (and detractors) indicate the importance of characterizations drawn from the history of religion to Victorian constructions of race and gender. The sense of belonging to a century of liberalism and historicism frequently drew thinkers to chart the history of religious, intellectual, political, and social freedoms; this concern linked the work of John Addington Symonds, William Lecky, and the Whig constitutional historians.Footnote 22 The Luther commemoration exemplifies the centrality of religious concerns to this many-sided strand of contemporary discussion. It raised and intensified discussion of the long-standing question of the relationships between the Reformation and progress, and between the Reformation and the Renaissance.

Statements made by participants in the commemoration debates about the origins of the Reformation, whether the new beginning lay in providential action, the revival of criticism, or self-willed petulance, were also statements about the nature, progressiveness, and purpose of Protestant religion in the present day. These arguments, which were often made with approving or condemnatory reference to the world of contemporary German thought, must be studied as historians start to see beyond that ‘Feuerbachian residue’ which still lingers in much of the literature on the modern history of religion, in which religion is only taken to be historically significant in terms of class, nation, or gender, which is to say in terms of what is not religion.Footnote 23 The more old-fashioned evangelicalism characteristic of public meetings in 1883, although it exulted in the role of the Reformation in inaugurating freedom and accelerating social progress, tended to stress the evils of Catholicism and to insist that Luther was an agent of providence, the doctrines he represented being definitive for all time. While also supportive of the commemoration, religious liberals celebrated Luther on different grounds, taking him to represent a spirit of private judgement and doctrinal progressivism in religion. Historians of Catholicism have already shown how dynamic approaches to later church history such as those of Newman or Ranke could be seen to conflict with professedly immutable dogmas; there were analogous tensions within Protestantism, and not just in the sphere of biblical criticism with which historians interested in them have so far mainly concerned themselves.Footnote 24

These tensions were inflected by a generational change in religious sensibility. Although the evangelicalism redolent of Hilton's ‘Age of Atonement’ was still voluble, it tended to be promoted, although not exclusively, by older figures with memories of the Protestant crusades of the early Victorian period. Few of the commemoration's leading figures were young: the ageing evangelical campaigner and philanthropist Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh earl of Shaftesbury, had been born in 1801; John Charles Ryle, the bishop of Liverpool, in 1816; William Ince, Oxford's Regius Professor of Divinity, in 1825.Footnote 25 A rising generation with different intellectual and religious experiences, in England as in Scotland, was slowly subduing the voice of the older evangelicalism. Although fresh kinds were heard, as from the doctrinally conservative yet widely sympathetic younger Free Church historian Thomas Lindsay, the commemoration also exposed newer strands of late Victorian thought discontented with any kind of dogmatic Protestantism. The organizers of the commemoration did not succeed in monopolizing interpretation of the Reformer, and high Anglicans and Roman Catholics were not the only figures who dissented from their opinions. Socialist concerns informed the youthful secularist Karl Pearson's condemnation of Luther, and in the contemporary press there were signs that individuals interested in the commemoration, but not especially religious, were growing disenchanted with the high Victorian Puritanism, still yet diminishingly powerful, which in 1883 sought to make Luther its own.

The Luther commemoration came together in a climate where the relationship between religion and modern thought and culture was the subject of acute debate. This was not something which took place in hermetically sealed national contexts. Although many admirers tried to make the association between Britain and Luther as close as possible, he could never become a ‘national’ hero; the centrality of the nation to nineteenth-century historical experience ought not to conceal overlapping but distinct phenomena, such as the religious internationalism which has become an active area of historical investigation.Footnote 26 This internationalism was not solely a matter of co-operation between organizations for evangelical and humanitarian purposes, but of cultural outlook and intellectual contact.Footnote 27 The commemoration in Britain accordingly revealed significant engagement with German intellectual life and what this was taken to represent.

II

At the centre of preparations for a British Luther commemoration was the committee of ‘the Luther Commemoration for Great Britain and Ireland’, which formed in September 1883 under Shaftesbury's presidency. It drew up a preliminary statement giving a basis for co-operation, which it planned to send to the 30,000 ministers of all ‘Protestant’ denominations in England. This consisted of four points, emblemized by Luther's life and teaching: that Holy Scripture was the complete and infallible rule of faith; that the people had a right to read it; that Protestants had a duty constantly to protest against Roman error; that Christ had authority over the church and the nations. From the first, the evangelical protagonists aimed to present an image of interdenominational unity: the vice-presidents of the new grouping included the duke of Westminster; the bishops of Worcester, Liverpool, Kilmore, Sodor and Man; the Moderators of all the Presbyterian churches in Scotland and Ireland; the presidents of the Wesleyan Conference and Baptist Union, and numerous others.Footnote 28 The Record was to serve as a principal means of disseminating the committee's plans for the commemoration and for mobilizing clerical interest. Almost forty years previously, the anti-Maynooth Committee had taken shape along similar lines: and just as that earlier attempt to foster Protestant solidarity had faltered amidst divisions over Establishment, Luther's commemorators, in seeking to draw attention to Reformation history, could not but also bring into view historic and more recent ecclesiological and doctrinal divisions.Footnote 29 Of those bishops who served as vice-presidents of the committee, only one – the staunchly evangelical Bishop Ryle of Liverpool – addressed one of the London rallies.

The centrepieces of the Shaftesbury committee's efforts were great meetings held at London's Exeter Hall – a venue long associated with anti-popery rallies such as those of the Maynooth agitation – on Saturday 10 and Monday 12 November, where evangelicals from different denominations shared the platforms. Their speeches, emphasizing the social and doctrinal benefits of the Reformation as opposed to the sinfulness of Romanism, and the importance of providence in securing these advances, were of a piece with Exeter Hall's traditions; these messages resonated deeply with evangelical writers and preachers elsewhere. At the Monday afternoon meeting, Stanley Leathes, professor of Hebrew at King's College, London, presented the Reformation as the cause of great advances in human knowledge; Sir Thomas Chambers, QC, the same evening, celebrated the liberation of productive land from inefficient mortmain and the greater equality before the law secured by the abolition of benefit of clergy.Footnote 30 Still more, evangelicals affirmed the importance of recalling Protestants to the searing, God-given clarity of Reformed doctrine, over which, so they believed, an enlightened humanistic cloudiness had descended in recent years. Shaftesbury, opening the inaugural meeting at Exeter Hall, warned that unless the people turned away from their present blasphemies and instead reverenced the past, and all that God had done for mankind during it, then the nation would be on ‘the border of the greatest convulsion of heart and soul that it is possible for the mind of man to conceive’.Footnote 31 Participants beyond the major public meetings shared Shaftesbury's anxiety. ‘There is a growing desire to amalgamate all differences of creed’, so wrote ‘a Protestant Churchman’ supportive of the commemoration to the editor of The Record, ‘and the result is the distinctive doctrines of God's Word which were restored to us at the Reformation are again being obscured, and as a consequence the laws which constitute our Christian Government are being one after another repealed’.Footnote 32 William Ince told his audience in Oxford's University Church that ‘a revival of the positive principles of the Reformation would be a remedy alike of dead orthodoxy and undogmatic liberalism’.Footnote 33 In a move significant for a secondary literature dominated by themes of Anglo-German theological tension in the nineteenth century, he even proposed that the time had come for the early links he identified between the Anglican and Lutheran churches to be revived.Footnote 34

This internationalism, the corollary of evangelicals’ controversial insistence that the Reformation was an essentially unified movement, was a pronounced feature of the British commemoration, just as it had been characteristic of efforts at evangelical ecumenism earlier in the century.Footnote 35 Adolf Stoecker, a Berlin Protestant Hofprediger since 1874, German Conservative deputy in the Reichstag since 1881, and a chief instigator of the anti-Semitic agitations in Berlin between 1879 and 1881, gave a sermon during a service at Exeter Hall on Tuesday 13 November, where 300 children from the German schools of London sang Lutheran hymns. A pastor from Neuchâtel joined the platform at a further meeting at Mildmay Hall the next day.Footnote 36 Regional celebrations sometimes shared the international character of the London meetings. German expatriates in Liverpool organized a ‘Deutsche Lutherfeier’, addressed by English clergymen; Arnoldian caricatures of the provincialism of the provinces may be rather misleading.Footnote 37

The trenchant celebration of dogmatic Protestantism characteristic of the organized public platforms was accompanied by vehement anti-Catholicism, where ministers of different Protestant denominations wished to focus on points of agreement rather than division. The Reverend Dr Verner White delivered a paper at the Monday afternoon conference in Exeter Hall entitled ‘Romanism, the parent of disloyalty, pauperism, and crime’.Footnote 38 At the Mildmay Hall meeting, Stevenson Blackwood, secretary of the Post Office, cited figures for the great increase of priests and religious houses in Britain to support his claim that ‘the licentiousness of the seventeenth century and the apathy of the eighteenth were not so dangerous as some of the tendencies…manifested in the nineteenth’.Footnote 39 Fears of Roman Catholic revival at home and abroad here blended with antagonism towards the recent growth of ritualism in the Church of England.Footnote 40 Bishop Ryle, presiding at Mildmay Hall, worried that ‘within the last twenty years there have been found on a platform clergymen of the Church of England comparing Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer to Robespierre and Marat’.Footnote 41 In Bristol, Protestant churchmen joined with dissenters at public gatherings to condemn Anglican ritualism as an insidious reversal of what the Reformation had achieved.Footnote 42

The pamphlet literature generated by the commemoration showed the same fear of the continuing, and reviving, danger of the Catholicism challenged but not defeated in the sixteenth century. James Anthony Froude, who retained in some respects a trenchantly Protestant cultural outlook despite experiencing an archetypal Victorian crisis of personal faith, penned a short biography which described the papacy against which Luther struggled as ‘painted wood’ and ‘the wolf disguised in an innocent sheepskin’, who would soon revert to his old ways ‘if ever he recovers his power’.Footnote 43 Froude presented his text as a condensed rendering of Luthers Leben, a biography based on an earlier two-volume work by Köstlin. Köstlin's findings were firmly Protestant, yet also showed the emollience of an establishment mouthpiece; Froude introduced into these his own livelier preoccupations, stressing the deadness of Catholicism more vividly than did Köstlin by omitting the moments at which the professor paused to explain Catholic doctrine or analyse moments at which reconciliation seemed possible.Footnote 44

Commemorative activity beyond the metropolis often appealed to particular anti-Catholic sentiment in certain localities, but this does not fully explain the attraction of the commemoration in places less disturbed by sectarianism. Meetings and sermons drew Protestant crowds in Belfast and Dublin.Footnote 45 Anti-Catholic feeling was pronounced at the interdenominational meeting in St Andrew's Hall in Glasgow, a city with a large Irish immigrant population. There, the Reverend Dr John Lang, Church of Scotland minister of the Barony Church in Glasgow, warned (in what might qualify his contemporary and subsequent reputation for liberalism) that there was no difference of heart between the current pope, Leo XIII, and his namesake Leo X who had excommunicated Luther; James Campbell, MP, afterwards arose to lament that less than 10 per cent of the world's population were Protestants, ironically blaming this on Protestantism's opposition to ‘Old Adam’, to which Rome had profitably reconciled herself.Footnote 46 Perhaps reflecting the particular strength of sectarianism in Merseyside, where Irish immigrants had flocked in large numbers after the famine, another Liverpool meeting, at the Philharmonic Hall on Monday 12 November, unexpectedly overflowed into Hope Hall.Footnote 47 On 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, ‘a great demonstration of Orangemen was held in St James's Hall, Manchester’, to mark the commemoration.Footnote 48 It is nevertheless significant that public meetings also took place in towns and cities without unusually strong anti-Catholic or anti-Irish traditions; there were evidently other reasons why the commemoration garnered such extensive interest. Protestants in Exeter, Reading, Sheffield, and York also organized meetings; in Scotland, the anniversary was observed in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee, and a host of smaller towns.Footnote 49

Evangelical essays, sermons, and tracts, as well as public meetings, were crucial in spreading awareness of the celebration. The Times reported on 12 November that the Religious Tract Society, which released a list of publications for the anniversary, was struggling to keep pace with the popular demand for Luther literature: one of its cheap lives of Luther was then in its eightieth thousand, and its broadsheet depicting Luther's portrait and the chief dates of his life, aimed at schools, was selling thousands of copies daily.Footnote 50 Such texts typically echoed and embellished the messages heard at the public meetings, offering a fairly standardized Protestant hagiography of Luther. Tract after tract related Luther's mortifications while an Augustinian monk, as he vainly tried to make himself righteous in God's sight by works, in the end discovering that the route to salvation lay instead through the Bible and simple, personal faith. They typically stressed that his life had been an extended ethical test of the truth of Roman doctrines; this may have represented an attempt to revivify Protestant doctrinalism now that more scholastic arguments had fallen out of fashion. Luther's biography ‘ought to lead every candid mind to the conclusion, that if the peculiar doctrines of that Church were really of divine origin, Luther would have found rest, peace, and satisfaction there’, one commentator observed in the Churchman, a periodical which aimed to bring high churchmen and evangelicals in the Church of England to stand together on the scriptural doctrines adopted at the Reformation.Footnote 51 His nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg, and his epochal affirmation of the right of private judgement at the Diet of Worms, marked him out for manliness, heroism, and active providential guidance. In the seclusion of the Wartburg, where his protectors placed him for his own security after the Diet, he took the equally historic step of translating the Bible into the vernacular.Footnote 52

Many drew close connections between Luther and biblical predecessors in the work of salvation history, which implied a strong belief in the activity of providence in history – an idea threatened, as will be seen, by what seemed to them to be secularizing intellectual trends. The dean of Chester, speaking at Exeter Hall, called his period of seclusion on the Wartburg ‘a providential pause’, like those of Moses on Mount Horeb, or St Paul in Arabia, or St John on Patmos.Footnote 53 Another Anglican who controversially supposed a unified Reformation movement, Henry Law, the elderly dean of Gloucester, notably declined to conceptualize the Christian liberty he took as the subject of his commemoration tract even partly in idolatrous terms of earthly liberty. He saw it as the liberty granted to man from ‘Satan's dungeons’ and ‘the curse of the law’ by the sole merit of Christ's atonement, and pointed to times in Old Testament history where hideous irreligion had been dispelled by the actions of a prophet, citing Noah and Abraham and placing Luther in the same tradition. The Record memorialized him, following his death in 1884 at the age of eighty-seven, as offering ‘the clear, assured, definite, and pronounced proclamation of the Gospel…which we seem to miss in the teaching of the younger generation’.Footnote 54 James Aitken Wylie, a Scottish Free Church minister and historian born in 1808, wrote of Luther as a new Moses, led by the Holy Spirit to ‘the sole and supreme authority of the Bible’. He also denied, as modern infidelity was inclined to suggest, that the Reformation grew out of the Renaissance: it was in fact the Reformation that had turned the Renaissance to worthy ends, such as the development of manufactures and constitutional government.Footnote 55 On the strongly evangelical account – which, as will be seen, was not the only one available to his admirers – Luther's example showed that God was as active in modern as in biblical time, and had directly used Luther as an instrument to restore the original purity of the gospel.

While these writings brought together the providentialism, ebullient dogmatism, and anti-Catholicism also typical of public platforms, they point additionally to the other layers of Victorian discussion with which the Luther commemoration connected and which it energized. To many of his admirers, Luther seemed to embody the familial and sexual benefits of historic Protestantism. Luther's decision to reject his monastic oath of celibacy and marry Catherine von Bora brought widespread applause: he had not only taught, but lived, like the ideal Protestant and a muscular Christian. The famous Baptist preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, extolled the manliness of Luther's independent-mindedness, connected his physical to his moral strength, and admired his fathering and love of children.Footnote 56 From his pulpit at St Margaret's, Westminster, the church traditionally associated with the House of Commons, the liberal Anglican, Frederic William Farrar, criticized those married Anglican clergy who sneered at Luther, forgetting that it was he who ‘reconciled nature and duty, purity and passion’, and ‘made woman the faithful helpmeet of God's servants, as of other men’.Footnote 57 Stanley Leathes, conveying a message reminiscent of the heavily sexualized language of European anti-clericalism to the meeting at Exeter Hall on Monday afternoon, counted it a mercy that the Reformation had broken the ‘unknown and incalculable’ influence of the priest on the privacy of the family, as did John Mayor, professor of Latin at Cambridge.Footnote 58 Shocking and secretive goings-on in the confessional between women and their priests surfaced regularly in anti-Catholic polemic – Protestant and secular – across the continent; a favourite trope of liberal newspapers during the German Kulturkampf was the wily Jesuit who lured women into the confessional, to turn them into spies within their own families.Footnote 59

The broader antithesis between manly Protestantism and servile, effeminate Catholicism shaped the Congregationalist John Stoughton's remarks in his popular Homes and haunts of Luther, one of the publications on the Religious Tract Society's list. Stoughton, one of the many figures of the time who made pilgrimages to sites connected with famous literary figures, had travelled between successive shrines in Saxony linked in some way to Luther's battles. Stepping into his study at Wittenberg, Stoughton first recalled the spidery depiction of Philip II of Spain sketched by J. L. Motley: bent over his writing table, ‘his frame slight, his digestion weak’, spinning threads over Europe; how different was Luther when he was at his desk, ‘in the vigour of his manhood, with burly frame, strong digestion’ and pushing forwards Europe's progress by earnest scriptural study.Footnote 60 While England's experience of the nineteenth-century culture wars was distinct from the continent's because its own dynamic pitched Dissent against the Anglican Church, rather than the state against Catholicism, a focus on the language of British anti-clericalism lessens the appearance of the islands’ exceptionalism.Footnote 61

The notion that Luther typified and accentuated the virtues of the Germanic races, or the subtly different idea that Protestantism held the potential to lift up Latins and Celts, brought together Protestant self-congratulation and racial thought. Stoecker told his Exeter Hall audience that the Reformation was on the one hand like a rainstorm which had fallen on Jews, Romans, and Greeks alike; on the other, the progress of morality, religion, literature, industry, society, and politics had been strikingly bound up with the histories of the Teutonic peoples since the Reformation.Footnote 62 In Carlisle, the popular lecturer James Christie introduced Luther as the benefactor of ‘the peoples of the Teutonic family’, and cited Froude's contention that, without him, the English, Americans, and Germans ‘would be thinking differently, would be acting differently, would be altogether different men and women from what they are at this moment’.Footnote 63 The emphasis on the Teutonic character of Luther and Reformed religion generally helped rhetorically to connect Germany's achievement to Britain's. William Thomson, the archbishop of York, preached a commemoration sermon in Westminster Abbey in which he drew contrasts between the economic fortunes of the Celtic races of Scotland and Ireland, and between the industry of Swiss cantons of Latin race, but Reformed, and the poverty of those of German race, but Catholic, implying that acceptance or rejection of Protestantism was the key variable in the fortunes of peoples.Footnote 64 Many of Luther's admirers did not make an issue of race, and some kinds of racialism were publicly unacceptable: Bishop Ryle condemned the anti-Semitic comments Stoecker had made to a gathering at St Stephen's Club during his visit, and Shaftesbury later regretted that he had been involved in the commemoration at all.Footnote 65 But by emphasizing the place of religion in shaping the historic character of races, rather more so than the capacity of race to shape religion that was perhaps more characteristic of those who wanted to localize and so to dismiss Luther's message, Luther's commemorators were contributing to a central Victorian debate.Footnote 66

Those against whom it was targeted pungently answered the groundswell of Protestant agitation, often by challenging the moral and racial typologies which supported it; Luther's abandonment of monastic vows, and his German character, were denounced as well as praised. One anonymous Roman Catholic writer accused Luther of flattering human nature, as could be expected of one who abandoned apostolic austerity in order to marry, and, rejecting the positive view of German Christianity pushed by the opposing side, said that he shared the German vice of intellectual mischief-making; the more sensible Celts were typically Catholic because they always placed ‘le vrai’, ‘le beau’, and ‘le bien’ alongside pure reason when choosing what to believe.Footnote 67 Such anti-Protestant retaliations circulated widely; one salacious Catholic tract attacking Luther ran to over 20,000 copies.Footnote 68

Perhaps more alarming for the commemoration's supporters than Romanist opposition was the faint praise or open antagonism of high Anglicans, who resisted the close connections which conservative Protestants or liberal Anglicans sought to draw between the English and German reformations.Footnote 69 The Oxford historian and future contributor to Lux Mundi, Aubrey Lackington Moore, wrote a leader for the high church Guardian newspaper condemning Luther along what were by then traditional high church lines. He played down the affinities between Luther and the Church of England: the latter rejected Luther's conception of the sacramental presence and held to the Pauline, not the Lutheran, doctrine of justification. Replying particularly to the four-point programme of Shaftesbury's committee, he doubted that Luther had supported the Bible by separating it from the revelation of which it was a ‘part’ and applying to it that arbitrary rationalism which redefined the scriptural canon in accordance with personal taste, which had made contemporary Germany religiously dead.Footnote 70 These tropes had featured prominently in party controversy at the time of the Oxford Movement, and the 1883 controversy encouraged partisans to turn to essays first circulated decades previously. Evangelicals commended the liberal Anglican historian Julius Hare's rebuttal of Tractarian and philosophical misrepresentations of Luther. High churchmen preferred the authority of James Bowling Mozley, an Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity who in a long essay of 1848 had presented Luther as more destructive than reformative, a promoter of rationalism and sensuality. ‘His character, combining warmth with looseness, and poetry with scepticism, betrays strongly the German type.’Footnote 71

Even those senior Anglican clergy who welcomed the commemoration, such as Farrar, Ince, and William Thomson, mainly did so from pulpits rather than join platform agitation. The anti-Catholic associations of Exeter Hall, past and present, undoubtedly contributed to their distancing of themselves from the mainstay of the commemoration committee's preparations. Perhaps in part as a result of the criticism of the divisiveness of the commemoration publicly voiced by the ritualist dean of York, Arthur Purey-Cust, to which Thomson had firmly replied, the archbishop's sermon was notably generous in its assessment of medieval, and so present, Catholicism.Footnote 72 He accepted that Gregory VII's reform programme had sprung, if only in conception, from holy motives; he also recognized that for many, the Church of Rome was a ‘guide in eternal things’.Footnote 73 Thomson's circumspection was not unusual; the Record regretted that no bishops had been present at the principal meetings in Exeter Hall.Footnote 74 The ritualistic Church Times claimed to be pleased that the commemoration had been mainly a Dissenting celebration, protesting, perhaps too much, that it had been ‘a pitiful fiasco’, and dismissed Bishop Ryle's involvement as that of a man who had ‘lost his old reputation for sturdy common-sense’.Footnote 75 To the Record's chagrin, a proposal pushed by the University's broad-church vice-chancellor, Benjamin Jowett, to express Oxford's formal sympathy with Protestant Germany on the occasion of Luther's birth was defeated in Convocation; the paper blamed this on an unholy alliance of ‘advanced Liberals’ and ‘extreme High Churchmen’. The Times, however, attributed it to a disinclination among members to involve the University in religious controversy.Footnote 76 Perhaps there was more truth in the Record's analysis: the Puseyite medievalist William Stubbs is known to have opposed the proposal.Footnote 77 Scores of dons – as varied as Jowett, William Ince, H. G. Liddell, and Mark Pattison – responded to the defeat by sending their own unofficial address to the emperor.Footnote 78

Luther's place in religious history, strongly deprecated by critics of the commemoration, evidently also divided its supporters. Traditional, no-popery Protestantism, fearful of the retributions wrought by God in history, confident that the struggles of the Reformation era had delivered the last word on scriptural truth, was, as the involvement of Jowett, Farrar, or Pattison indicates, not the only disposition favourable to Luther's legacy. Liberal and, increasingly, younger figures wanted to understand Luther in a potentially secular-sounding social and intellectual context, which could in turn be used to liberate the abiding relevance of the Reformation as a critical principle from the particular and historically locatable dogmatic and critical statements of its leaders which, it appeared to some, were no longer intellectually defensible. This attitude was especially pronounced in the more extended historical reflections encouraged by the commemoration away from public platforms. The Manchester Unitarian Charles Beard's 1883 Hibbert Lectures and the liberal Church of Scotland grandee John Tulloch's commemoration edition of his Leaders of the Reformation both stressed the ethical and critical character of the Reformation.

On their account, the movement had grown out of the revival of letters, reformatory stirrings in medieval Catholicism, and the blossoming spirit of independence in medieval German states and cities; its roots lay more immediately in human experience than in the divine action old-fashioned evangelicals wondered at. Because the Reformation was partly limited by the scholastic spirit against which it only incompletely reacted, the spirit of criticism and private judgement which it elevated above tradition ought today to clear away Protestant ecclesiasticism on questions such as justification by faith alone or scriptural infallibility, just as it had swept out its Catholic forerunner. Beard pushed this line of reasoning to the point of arguing that the pre-scientific cosmogonies of the Atonement and the Fall ought to give way before the critical spirit. Tulloch, who kept religion at the heart of his conception of the Reformation in a way Beard did not, would elsewhere apply his understanding of the religious past, partially indebted to the pietistic and liberalizing sensibility of the German ecclesiastical historian, Augustus Neander, to argue more conservatively that the Calvinistic Westminster Confession, a source of much controversy in Victorian Scotland, was not an infallible religious document.Footnote 79

Beard and Tulloch, born in 1827 and 1823 respectively, represented older varieties of religious liberalism, but younger figures were often drawn to their historical approaches. The religiously sceptical recent Cambridge graduate, Arthur Ropes, historian, poet, and thespian, approved of Beard's lectures, who ‘like the best of modern historians, wishes to study events as the marks of a general development of human thought’.Footnote 80 Younger historians belonging to conservative denominations were also open to newer ideas. Thomas Lindsay, born in 1843 and with no memory of the stresses of the Disruption, denounced the corruptions of medieval Catholicism in his contribution to the meeting at Glasgow, but his popular handbook, The Reformation, re-issued in December 1883 as a result of the demand evident during the commemoration period, offered a significantly more nuanced analysis.Footnote 81 Although Rome had become ‘a synagogue of Satan’ by the 1500s, Lindsay presented the history of Catholic religion in the pre-Reformation period – though not that of the corrupt prelacy – as a progressive development. Francis of Assisi had taught that the Christian ideal was separation from the world by the imitation of Christ, but he misconstrued this in terms of a mechanical external rule; the mystics improved on Francis's holy aspiration by making separation from the world a matter of heart religion. Luther learned his own deep piety from the mystics, but added to this the epochal realization that the answer to the Christian's yearning for pardon lay in trusting Christ rather than human effort.Footnote 82 Developments tending towards Reformation were not only religious, but also political and social, encompassing the emergence of nationality – here, Rankean notes were apparent – and the spread of the critical principles of the Renaissance. Lindsay accordingly confessed the difficulty of attributing to the Reformation a single starting point.Footnote 83

The newer approach to the Reformation, though certainly controversial – in Birmingham R. W. Dale, probably alluding to Beard's recent performance, attacked that ‘theory of history’ which saw the heathen Renaissance, rather than Luther's heroic agency under God, as the cause of the Reformation – was to gain more and more acceptance in the years towards and beyond 1900.Footnote 84 But it was still, at this time, only rarely a self-consciously secular approach, whatever its opponents may have feared. Lindsay emphasized the fundamental origin of the Reformation in an ethicized Christian yearning for fellowship with God, against the orthodox but Hegelian-inflected interpretation of the ecclesiastical historian Isaak Dorner. This might betray the influence of Albrecht Ritschl, conservatively interpreted, as Lindsay's later work certainly did; Lindsay adopted a German reaction against speculative historical philosophy for his own apologetic ends. In his conclusion, he even positively contrasted the doctrine of predestination, a bête noir of liberal theology, with ‘the theory of communion with God through the Pope and his bishops’.Footnote 85 Whereas the classical evangelicalism of the Maynooth era was an ageing intellectual force by 1883, the engagement with German thought visible in debates surrounding the German Reformer might refresh as well as challenge evangelical perspectives; this contact helped to shape Lindsay as well as Tulloch. The change in theological emphasis during the late century from the Atonement to the Incarnation could moreover be used to invest social and intellectual developments with intrinsic religious significance, as the gradual leavening of history by Christian moral precepts. Mandell Creighton, already making his name as a historian of the Reformation-era papacy, remarked in his later Hulsean Lectures that the ‘development of society’ was the work of the Incarnation.Footnote 86

There were, nevertheless, anti-religious possibilities available in the late century attempt to situate Luther in the context of social and intellectual change. The young Karl Pearson, who had rebelled against compulsory divinity lectures and chapel attendance while a Cambridge undergraduate in the 1870s, and who was at this time more a historian than the famous statistician and eugenicist he later became, made them explicit.Footnote 87 He dispatched impatient letters to the Athenaeum criticizing the unhistorical apologetic peddled by the ‘Lutheran theologian’ Köstlin and the British Museum, wishing for impartial historical scholarship which would clear away childish views of the pope as Antichrist and Luther as a second St Paul.Footnote 88 Pearson followed these with a Westminster Review essay which condemned the effect of the Reformation on the material and intellectual welfare of Germany, whilst pointedly refusing to engage with the doctrinal questions which so preoccupied clerical commentators. Turning German Catholic historical scholarship, above all Janssen's, to secularizing, socialist purposes, he decried how the Lutheran revolution had destroyed the social protections provided by the church. Moreover – and here the notes of German Catholic influence were less pronounced – the Reformers swept the educational values of the humanists aside, plunging German intellectual life into a stupor from which it only began to emerge during the Enlightenment.Footnote 89

Outright condemnation of the Reformer was not the only option available to more secular elements of the late Victorian generation, tired of evangelical earnestness. The Observer claimed that few who celebrated Luther's legacy on 11 November would really be concerned with his theology; his popularity owed much more to the fact that he was a son of the people, rough-speaking, fond of wine and women. Indeed, the widespread sympathy for Luther may partly be ascribed to the ease with which his character could appeal to the broader and not necessarily religious cultural dispositions of the late Victorian era. Hebraism was out; Hellenism was in. Oscar Wilde was a new name. Gothic high seriousness was making way for Queen Anne ‘sweetness and light’.Footnote 90 The Observer editorial continued: ‘these likings of his give him a human individuality which is wanting in zwingh [sic], huss, melancthon, and wicklyffe…and fixes his place in the affections of healthy minded men’.Footnote 91 In his essay on Beard's Hibbert Lectures, Arthur Ropes agreed. ‘In almost all the other Reformers’, he wrote, ‘there is some barrier to shut us off from full comprehension of their characters and full sympathy with their thought.’ Melanchthon showed ‘timorous and yielding coldness’; Calvin was a remorseless ‘theological machine’; Zwingli was too ‘bourgeois’. These men were ‘bachelors at heart’, showing despite their rejection of celibacy ‘a sort of detachment from the common joys and relationships of human life’, a survival from monasticism. Only Luther was really ‘natural and healthy’.Footnote 92 The Luther whom evangelicals celebrated as a man and a latter-day prophet others admired only as a man.Footnote 93

III

The many-layered Victorian engagement with the Reformation deserves more historical attention. There, in a religious event, many contemporaries identified intellectual, social, and political trends which were, in some way, recognizably their own. The Record felt that ‘luther's individuality is still one of the living forces which move mankind’: he connected ‘the Middle Age and the Modern Age…there is perhaps no one else whose life so distinctly marks an epoch’.Footnote 94 Others who acknowledged this relationship between Luther and modernity found it more regrettable. A high church tradition, visible in the writings of Mozley and Stubbs, and in the Literary Churchman, judged the French Revolution to have been the intellectual consequence of the first modern destruction of an ancien régime: that unleashed by Luther.Footnote 95 The sceptic Pearson, for whom the future lay with the progressive, educational ways of Erasmus rather than with the impetuosity and dogmatism of Luther, believed that the closer study of the Reformation was urgent because those investigating current social problems ‘find themselves perpetually driven back to the sixteenth century as the critical instant in the historical development of our modern troubles’.Footnote 96 As this article has aimed to show, the 1883 debates belonged to much wider nineteenth-century discussions of how, for better or worse, Protestantism had created modern thought and culture, and the relation which it should bear towards them in the present. These arguments transcended national boundaries in important ways. Historians have long been aware that history was a crucial location of intellectual and cultural argument during the age of historicism; but their sense of the breadth and religious extent of that location should be considerably enlarged.

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Jane Garnett, Brian Young, and the Historical Journal's anonymous readers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

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69 William Thomson said that fourteen of the Thirty-Nine Articles were often taken word for word from the Lutheran Confessions of Augsburg and Wittenberg; John Mayor, professor of Latin at Cambridge, dwelled on this similarity in a sermon, as did the vicar of Lymington, Benjamin Maturin, in his commemoration tract: Record, 16 Nov. 1883, p. 1141; Mayor, Luther, pp. 10–11; Maturin, English Reformation, pp. 8–9.

70 [A. L. Moore], ‘Luther and the Luther commemoration’, Guardian, 7 Nov. 1883, pp. 1672–3; for attribution, see the reprint in idem, Lectures and papers on the history of the Reformation in England and on the continent (London, 1890), pp. 475–82Google Scholar; R. England, ‘Moore, Aubrey Lackington (1848–1890)’, ODNB.

71 Hare, J. C., Vindication of Luther against his recent English assailants (2nd edn, London, 1855)Google Scholar, and recommended by Savile, B. W., Martin Luther and the Reformation (London and Exeter, 1883), p. 39Google Scholar, William Thomson and the Record, 16 Nov. 1883, pp. 1141, 1149. Against Hare, J. B. Mozley, ‘Luther’, in idem, Essays historical and theological (2 vols., London, 1878)Google Scholar, i, p. 433, and commended by the Literary Churchman & Church Fortnightly, 23 Nov. 1883, p. 511, and Robert Eyton's letter to the Times, 10 Nov. 1883, p. 4. The Oxford Movement did not invent Anglican self-distancing from the continental Reformation, strands of which stretched back to the (first) period of the Counter-Reformation: Milton, A., Laudian and royalist polemic in seventeenth-century England: the career and writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007), pp. 91–2Google Scholar.

72 Bentley, Ritualism and politics, pp. 23–4; for letter exchanges, York Herald, 20 Oct. 1883, p. 6, 27 Oct. 1883, p. 7; Times, 1 Nov. 1883, p. 8, 5 Nov. 1883, p. 4, 7 Nov. 1883, p. 10; Purey-Cust, A. P., The use and disuse of commemorations (London, 1883)Google Scholar.

73 Record, 16 Nov. 1883, pp. 1140–1.

74 Record, 16 Nov. 1883, p. 1149.

75 Church Times, 9 Nov. 1883, p. 813, 16 Nov. 1883, p. 827, 23 Nov. 1883, p. 851.

76 Oxford University Gazette, xiv (1883–4), 5 Nov. 1883, p. 85; Record, 16 Nov. 1883, p. 1147; compare Times, 12 Nov. 1883, p. 9.

77 Hutton, W. H., ed., Letters of William Stubbs: bishop of Oxford 1825–1901 (London, 1904), pp. 124–6Google Scholar. I am grateful to James Kirby for this reference.

78 Times, 22 Nov. 1883, p. 8.

79 Beard, C., The Reformation of the sixteenth century in its relation to modern thought and knowledge (London and Edinburgh, 1883)Google Scholar; Tulloch, J., Luther and other leaders of the Reformation (3rd edn, Edinburgh and London, 1883)Google Scholar; [J. Tulloch], ‘Augustus Neander’, British Quarterly Review, 24 (Nov. 1850), pp. 297–337; Oliphant, M., A memoir of the life of John Tulloch, D. D., LL.D. (3rd edn, Edinburgh, 1889), pp. 217–23Google Scholar, 424–5; A. Gordon, rev. R. K. Webb, ‘Beard, Charles (1827–1888)’, ODNB. For Scottish debates over the Westminster Confession in this period, see Drummond, A. L. and Bulloch, J., The church in late Victorian Scotland, 1874–1900 (Edinburgh, 1978)Google Scholar. In line with the approach of Beard and Tulloch, F. W. Farrar and Thomas Lindsay both credited the Reformation with establishing the principle that Scripture was to be read in its historical sense, challenging both the common evangelical belief in verbal inerrancy and the high church and Romanist deprecation of Luther as planting the seeds of later German rationalism: Farrar, F. W., ‘The Reformers as expositors. II. Luther’, Expositor, 7 (1884), pp. 214–29Google Scholar; Lindsay, T. M., The Reformation (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 1883), pp. 187–91Google Scholar.

80 A. R. Ropes, ‘Mr Beard's lectures on the Reformation’, Modern Review: A Quarterly Magazine (Oct. 1883), p. 756; J. Parker, rev. K. Chubbock, ‘Ropes, Arthur (1859–1933)’, ODNB.

81 Glasgow Herald, 13 Nov. 1883, p. 5; Lindsay, Reformation, p. vi; R. S. Rait, rev. J. Kirk, ‘Lindsay, Thomas (1843–1914)’, ODNB.

82 Lindsay, Reformation, pp. 171–6.

83 Ibid., pp. v–vi, 3, 169–70.

84 Birmingham Daily Post, 12 Nov. 1883, p. 5; Beard, C., Martin Luther and the Reformation in Germany until the close of the Diet of Worms, ed. Smith, J. Frederick (London, 1889)Google Scholar; Lindsay, T. M., Luther and the German Reformation (Edinburgh, 1900)Google Scholar; Creighton, M., A history of the papacy during the period of the Reformation (5 vols., London, 1882–94)Google Scholar.

85 Lindsay, Reformation, pp. 185–7, 194. Lindsay did not cite Ritschl, but did so in his later History of the Reformation (2nd edn, 2 vols., 1907–8), i, pp. 426–52. Ritschl's Rechtfertingung und Versöhnung, which also targeted Dorner, was available in English translation from 1872: Ritschl, A., A critical history of the Christian doctrine of justification and reconciliation, trans. Black, J. S. (Edinburgh, 1872), pp. 16–19Google Scholar; compare Dorner, I. A., History of Protestant theology particularly in Germany viewed according to its fundamental movement and in connection with the religious, moral, and intellectual life, trans. Robson, G. and Taylor, S. (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1871), i, pp. 220–62Google Scholar. On Ritschl and Dorner, see Pfleiderer, O., The development of theology in Germany since Kant, and its progress in Great Britain since 1825, trans. Smith, J. Frederick (London and New York, NY, 1890), pp. 154–61Google Scholar, 183–94, 373–4.

86 Creighton, M., Persecution and tolerance: being the Hulsean lectures preached before the University of Cambridge in 1893–1894 (London, 1895)Google Scholar, pp. 117–19.

87 J. Woiak, ‘Pearson, Karl [formerly Carl] (1857–1936)’, ODNB.

88 Athenaeum, 22 Sept. 1883, p. 368, 13 Oct. 1883, pp. 464–5, 27 Oct. 1883, pp. 530–1.

89 [Pearson], ‘Martin Luther’. The essay only alludes to Janssen, but he was certainly there: Porter, T. M., Karl Pearson: the scientific life in a statistical age (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2004), pp. 91–105Google Scholar.

90 Girouard, M., Sweetness and light: the Queen Anne movement, 1860–1900 (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar.

91 Observer, 11 Nov. 1883, p. 4.

92 Ropes, ‘Mr Beard's lectures’, pp. 762–3.

93 An interest that was not new: Roper, L., ‘Martin Luther's body: the “stout doctor” and his biographers’, American Historical Review, 115 (2010), pp. 351–84CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

94 Record, 16 Nov. 1883, p. 1149.

95 Mozley, ‘Luther’, pp. 353–4; Stubbs, W., ‘The Reformation to the Diet of Augsburg, 1530’, in Hassall, A., ed., Lectures on European history (London, New York, NY, and Bombay, 1904)Google Scholar, p. 61; Literary Churchman & Church Fortnightly, 3 Aug. 1883, p. 325.

96 Athenaeum, 27 Oct. 1883, pp. 530–1.