p. 358 | HOW MARTIN LUTHER WAS CURED

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · June 3, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 23

HOW MARTIN LUTHER WAS CURED.

Ordinarily the great reformer Luther was less liable to doubts and gloom than his friend Melancthon. But he was a man of terrible impetuosity; and when he did fall into a fit of darkness he drove all before him. At one time, when danger threatened, and nothing seemed to prosper in the mighty work he was doing, he became so despondent that his friends were alarmed. He did not sit and mope as other men do when they are melancholy; for Luther was not one of the silent kind. It was this fact that made his mood dreadful. He was like a strong steed running with a broken rein. His strange actions and bitter words led some to fear that his great labors and burdens had shaken his reason.

His fellow-reformers and his best friends (some of them rich and powerful ones) shook their heads and said, “We must get Doctor Martin out of the way. He needs rest. Who knows but he’ll say or do something to wreck the whole cause?” This time, however, they were puzzled to know how to manage it. Once they had shut him up a year in Wartburg Castle to save his own life. It seemed absurd enough to think of shutting up Luther to save the reformation; but they must do something. It was hardly safe now, as it usually had been, to let him alone till his grand faith worked itself out of its eclipse.

Finally they concluded to try a method common among the old prophets, who often taught and rebuked great men by enigmas and parables. Luther’s wife, the good and gentle Catherine Bora, was taken into confidence, and her love and solicitude for him made her, no doubt, the best person who could have been chosen to administer medicine to the gloomy man’s mind.

The next time Luther went to his house, he found

it silent. To miss his welcome at the door was a surprise to him, and changed the current of his thoughts a little. Men in sour humors will say there is nothing bright, but they never like to be taken at their word. He went through the rooms seeing no one, till he reached the parlor, and there his wife sat dressed in deep mourning, and weeping as if her heart would break.

“Why, Kate, what is the matter?” asked Luther, now thoroughly startled.

No answer but sobs and tears.

“Is the baby dead?”—thinking of his youngest child, who had been ailing.

“No; worse than that, a great deal worse—I thought you knew;” and then a fresh burst of tears.

“Kate—wife! what in the world can you mean? Tell me quick!” exclaimed the astonished reformer.

“O husband, hasn’t the awful news reached you? Haven’t you heard that our Heavenly Father is dead, and his cause in the world has all gone to ruin?”

The horrified expression on Luther’s face changed at once. He stood a moment looking at his wife, and then he began to shake with laughter. He laughed as loud, and as long, and as heartily, as he had ever laughed in his life—and that is saying much, for naturally Martin was a very merry-hearted man.

“Ah, Kate, Kate, my good wife,” he said presently, “I read your riddle. God is not dead, but I have acted as though he were. You have taught me a good lesson.”

And Martin Luther never forgot the lesson his wife taught him when she showed him his black fancies in their own absurd funeral dress.—Selected.