We feel it our duty to complete this remarkable picture of passion, defiance and struggle by some few additional traits taken from Luther’s writings at that time.
On the question of the vow of chastity and priestly celibacy a rude though perfectly justified answer was supplied him by many writers on the Catholic side, yet he ignored them all, and on the contrary proceeded on his way with even greater fury and passion. He proclaims a sacred command to marry, a command not one whit less binding than the Decalogue. Here, as in the case of other questions of morals and dogma, he is carried forward by passion, rather than by a calm recognition of the truth. He exclaims somewhat later: “Just as it is a matter of stern necessity and strict command when God says: ‘Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ so there is also stern necessity and strict command, nay a still greater necessity and yet more stringent command: ‘Thou shalt marry, Thou shalt have a wife, Thou shalt have a husband.’ For there stands God’s Word (Gen. i. 27), ‘God created man ... male and female he created them’! The consciences of the unmarried must be importuned, urged and tormented until they comply, and are made at length to say: ‘Well, if it must be so, then let it so be.’”[431]
When it was pointed out to him, that in the New Testament celibacy embraced from love of God was presented as one of the evangelical counsels, he straightway denied both the existence and the authority of the evangelical counsels. And when his opponents replied that Christ frequently counselled acts of great virtue without making of them strict commands, but mere counsels of perfection, for instance with the words: “If one smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also,” Luther will have it that Christ, even here, gave the strict command to allow ourselves to be smitten also on the left cheek.
In his attack on the Mass, in his excitement, he went so far as to state: No sin of immorality, nay not even “manslaughter, theft, murder and adultery is so harmful as this abomination of the Popish Mass.” He adjured the authorities to take steps against the blinded parsons “who run to the altar like hogs to the trough,” “the shame of the scarlet woman of Babylon” must be laid bare in order that the “dreadful anger of God may not be poured forth like a glowing furnace upon the negligence” of those who fail to use the “sword entrusted to them by God.” These were his words to the people in a sermon of the year 1524.[432]