His conviction that God was proving his mission by signs and wonders sometimes assumed unfortunate forms, for instance, when he superstitiously seeks its attestation in incidents of his own day.
We see an example of this in the meaning he attached to the huge whale driven ashore near Haarlem, in which he saw a sign of God’s wrath against the Papists. “The Lord has given them an ominous sign,” he writes, on June 13, 1522, to Speratus, “if so be they enter into themselves and do penance. For He has cast a sea monster called a whale, 70 feet in length and 35 feet in girth, on the shore near Haarlem. Such a monster it is usual to regard as a certain sign of wrath. May God have mercy on them and on us.”[417] Other natural phenomena, amongst them an earthquake in Spain, led him to write as follows to Spalatin at the beginning of the following year: “Don’t think that I shall creep back into a corner however much Behemoth and his crew may rage. New and awful portents occur day by day, and you have doubtless heard of the earthquake in Spain.”[418]
When, in 1536, extraordinary deeds were narrated of a girl at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and attributed to demoniacal possession (she could, for instance, produce coins from all sorts of impossible places, even out of men’s beards), Luther, we are told, utilised in the pulpit these terrible signs and portents, “as a warning to abandoned persons who deem themselves secure, in order that now, at last, they may begin to fear God and to put their trust in Him.”[419]
At Freiberg in Saxony, towards the end of 1522, a cow was delivered of a deformed calf. On this becoming known, people, as was then the vogue, set about discovering the meaning of the portent. An astrologer of Prague first took the extraordinary phenomenon to refer to Luther, whose hateful and wicked behaviour was portrayed in the miscarriage. Luther, on the other hand, discovered that the monstrosity really represented a naked calf clothed in a cowl (the skin was drawn up into strange creases on the back), and that it therefore indicated the monkish state, of the worthlessness of which it was a true picture, and God’s wrath against monasticism. In a tract published in the spring, 1523, he compared in such detail and with such wealth of fancy the creature to the monks that the work itself was termed monstrous.[420] The cowl represented the monkish worship, “with prayers, Masses, chanting and fasting,” which they perform to the calf, i.e. “to the false idol in their lying hearts”; just as the calf eats nothing but grass, so “they fatten on sensual enjoyments here on earth.” “The cowl over the hind-quarters of the calf is torn,” this signifies the monks’ “impurity”; the calf’s legs are “their impudent Doctors” and pillars; the calf assumes the attitude of a preacher, which means that their preaching is despicable; it is also blind because they are blind; it has ears, and these signify the abuse of the confessional; with the horns with which it is provided it shall break down their power; the tightening of the cowl around its neck signifies their obstinacy, etc. A woodcut of the calf helped the reader to understand the mysteries better. To show that he meant it all in deadly earnest, he adduced texts from Scripture which might prove how “well-grounded” was his interpretation. He declares, that he only speaks of what he is quite sure, and that he refrains from a further, i.e. a prophetic, interpretation of the “Monk-Calf” because it was not sufficiently certain, although “God gives us to understand by these portents that some great misfortune and change is imminent.” His hope is that this change might be the coming of the Last Day, “since many signs have so far coincided.” Hence his strange delusion concerning the calf goes hand in hand with his habitual one concerning the approaching end of the world.