The healthy sensualism of the Middle Ages found in Luther its classic interpreter. We have here to do, not so much with the religious reformer, as with Luther the man. On the human side, Luther's robust primeval nature stepped forward unadulterated; it compelled him to express his appetite for love and enjoyment forcibly and without reserve. His position, as former Roman Catholic clergyman, had opened his eyes. By personal practice, so to speak, had he learned the unnaturalness of the life led by the monks and nuns. Hence the warmth with which he warred against clerical and monastic celibacy. His words hold good to this day, for all those who believe they may sin against nature, and imagine they can reconcile with their conceptions of morality and propriety, governmental and social institutions that prevent millions from fulfilling their natural mission. Luther says: "Woman, except as high and rare grace, can dispense with man as little as she can with food, sleep, water and other natural wants. Conversely, also, neither can man dispense with woman. The reason is this: It is as deeply implanted in nature to beget children as to eat and drink. Therefore did God furnish the body with members, veins, discharges and all that is needed therefor. He who will resist this, and prevent its going as Nature wills, what else does he but endeavor to resist Nature's being Nature, that fire burn, water wet, that man eat, drink or sleep?" And in his sermon on married life he says: "As little as it is in my power that I be not a man, just so little is it in your power to be without a man. For it is not a matter of free will or deliberation, but a necessary, natural matter that all that is male must have a wife, and what is female must have a husband." Luther did not speak in this energetic manner in behalf of married life and the necessity of sexual intercourse only; he also turns against the idea that marriage and Church have anything in common. In this he stood squarely on the ground of the olden days, which considered marriage an act of free will on the part of those who engaged in it, and that did not concern the Church. On this head he said: "Know, therefore, that marriage is an outside affair, as any other earthly act. The same as I am free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, ride, deal, speak and trade with a heathen, a Jew, a Turk or a heretic, likewise am I free to enter into and remain in wedlock with one of them. Turn your back upon the fool laws that forbid such a thing… A heathen is a man and woman, created by God in perfect form, as well as St. Peter and St. Paul and St. Luke; be then silent for a loose and false Christian that you are." Luther, like other Reformers, pronounced himself against all limitation of marriage, and he was for also allowing the re-union of divorced couples, against which the Church was up in arms. He said: "As to the manner in which marriage and divorce are to be conducted among us, I claim that it should be made the business of the jurists, and placed under the jurisdiction of earthly concerns, because marriage is but an earthly and outside matter." It was in keeping with this view that, not until the close of the seventeenth century, was marriage by the Church made obligatory under Protestantism. Until then so-called "conscience marriage" held good, i. e., the simple mutual obligation to consider each other man and wife, and to mean to live in wedlock. Such a marriage was considered by German law to be legally entered into. Luther even went so far that he conceded to the unsatisfied party – even if that be the woman – the right to seek satisfaction outside of the marriage bonds "in order to satisfy nature, which cannot be crossed."⁴⁷ This conception of marriage is the same that prevailed in antiquity, and that came up later during the French Revolution. Luther here set up maxims that will arouse the strongest indignation of a large portion of our "respectable men and women," who, in their religious zeal, are so fond of appealing to him. In his treatise "On Married Life,"⁴⁸ he says: "If an impotent man falls to the lot of a hearty woman, and she still cannot openly take another, and does not wish to marry again, she shall say unto her husband: 'Lo, dear husband, thou shalt not be wronged by me. Thou hast deceived me and my young body, and hast therefore brought my honor and salvation into danger. There is no glory to God between us two. Grant me to cohabit secretly with thy brother or nearest friend, and thou shalt have the name, so that thy property come not to strange heirs; and allow thyself to be, in turn, willingly deceived by me, as thou did deceive me without thy will." The husband, Luther goes on to show, is in duty bound to grant the request. "If he declines, then has she the right to run away from him to another, and to woo elsewhere. Conversely, if a woman declines to exercise the conjugal duty, her husband has the right to cohabit with another, only he should tell her so beforehand."⁴⁹ It will be seen that these are wonderfully radical, and, in the eyes of our days, so rich in hypocritical prudery, even downright "immoral" views, that the great Reformer develops. Luther, however, expressed only that which, at the time, was the popular view.⁵⁰

The passages quoted from the writings and addresses of Luther on marriage, are of special importance for the reason that these views are in strong contradiction with those that prevail to-day in the Church. In the struggle that it latterly has had to conduct with the clerical fraternity, the Social Democracy can appeal with full right to Luther, who takes on the question of marriage a stand free from all prejudice.

Luther and all the Reformers went even further in the marriage question, true enough, only for opportunist reasons, and out of complaisance towards the Princes whose strong support and permanent friendship they sought to secure and keep to the Reformation. The friendly Duke of Hessen, Philip I, had, besides his legitimate wife, a sweetheart, willing to yield to his wishes, but only under the condition that he marry her. It was a thorny problem. A divorce from the wife, in the absence of convincing reasons, would give great scandal; on the other hand, a marriage with two women at a time was an unheard of thing with a Christian Prince of modern days; it would give rise to no less a scandal. All this notwithstanding, Philip, in his passion, decided in favor of the latter step. The point was now to establish that the act did no violence to the Bible, and to secure the approval of the Reformers, especially of Luther and Melanchthon. The negotiations, set on foot by the Duke, began first with Butzer, who declared himself in favor of the plan, and promised to win over Luther and Melanchthon. Butzer justified his opinion with the argument: To possess several wives at once was not against the evangelium. St. Paul, who said much upon the subject of who was not to inherit the kingdom of God, made no mention of those who had two wives. St. Paul, on the contrary, said "that a Bishop was to have but one wife, the same with his servants; hence, if it had been compulsory that every man have but one wife he would have so ordered, and forbidden a plurality of wives." Luther and Melanchthon joined this reasoning, and gave their assent to double marriages, after the Duke's wife herself had consented to the marriage with the second wife under the condition "that he was to fulfil his marital duties towards her more than ever before."⁵¹ The question of the justification of bigamy had before then – at the time when the issue was the consenting to the double marriage of Henry VIII of England – caused many a headache to Luther, as appears from a letter to the Chancellor of Saxony, Brink, dated January, 1524. Luther wrote to him that, in point of principle, he could not reject bigamy because it ran not counter to Holy Writ;⁵² but that he held it scandalous when the same happened among Christians, "who should leave alone even things that are permissible." After the wedding of the Duke, which actually took place in March, 1540, and in answer to a letter of acknowledgment from him, Luther wrote (April 10): "That your Grace is happy on the score of our opinion, which we fain would see kept secret; else, even the rude peasants (in imitation of the Duke's example) might finally produce as strong, if not stronger, reasons, whereby we might then have much trouble on our hands."

Upon Melanchthon, the consent to the double marriage of the Duke must have been less hard. Before that, he had written to Henry VIII "every Prince has the right to introduce polygamy in his domains." But the double marriage of the Duke made such a great and unpleasant sensation, that, in 1541, he circulated a treatise in which polygamy is defended as no transgression against Holy Writ.⁵³ People were not then living in the ninth or twelfth century, when polygamy was tolerated without shocking society. Social conditions had very materially changed in the meantime; in a great measure the mark had had to yield to the power of the nobility and the clergy; it had even extensively disappeared, and was further uprooted after the unhappy issue of the Peasant Wars. Private property had become the general foundation of society. Beside the rural population, that cultivated the soil, a strong, self-conscious handicraft element had arisen, and was dominated by the interests of its own station. Commerce had assumed large dimensions, and had produced a merchant class, which, what with the splendor of its outward position and its wealth, awoke the envy and hostility of a nobility that was sinking ever deeper into poverty and licentiousness. The burghers' system of private property had triumphed everywhere, as was evidenced by the then universal introduction of the Roman law; the contrasts between the classes were palpable, and everywhere did they bump against one another. Monogamy became, under such conditions, the natural basis for the sexual relations; a step such as taken by the Duke of Hessen now did violence to the ruling morals and customs, which, after all, are but the form of expression of the economic conditions that happen at the time to prevail. On the other hand, society came to terms with prostitution, as a necessary accompaniment of monogamy, and an institution supplemental thereto; – and tolerated it.

In recognizing the gratification of the sexual impulses as a law of Nature, Luther but uttered what the whole male population thought, and openly claimed for itself. He, however, also contributed – through the Reformation, which carried through the abolition of celibacy among the clergy, and the removal of the cloisters from Protestant territories – that to hundreds of thousands the opportunity was offered to do justice to nature's impulses under legitimate forms. True again, – due to the existing order of property, and to the legislation that flowed therefrom, – hundreds of thousands of others continued to remain excluded. The Reformation was the first protest of the large-propertied bourgeois or capitalist class, then rising into being, against the restrictions imposed by feudalism in Church, State and society. It strove after freedom from the narrow bonds of the guild, the court and the judiciary; it strove after the centralization of the State, after the abolition of the numerous seats of idlers, the monasteries; and it demanded their use for practical production. The movement aimed at the abolition of the feudal form of property and production; it aimed at placing in its stead the free property of the capitalist, i. e., in the stead of the existing system of mutual protection in small and disconnected circles, there was to be unchained the free individual struggle of individual efforts in the competition for property.

On the religious field, Luther was the representative of these bourgeois aspirations. When he took a stand for the freedom of marriage, the question could not be simply about civic marriage, which was realized in Germany only in our own age through the civil laws and the legislation therewith connected, – freedom to move, freedom of pursuit, and freedom of domicile. In how far the position of woman was thereby improved will be shown later. Meanwhile things had not matured so far at the time of the Reformation. If, through the regulations of the Reformation many were afforded the possibility to marry, the severe persecutions that followed later hampered the freedom of sexual intercourse. The Roman Catholic clergy having in its time displayed a certain degree of tolerance, and even laxity, towards sexual excesses, now the Protestant clergy, once itself was provided for, raged all the more violently against the practice. War was declared upon the public "houses of women;" they were closed as "Holes of Satan;" the prostitutes were persecuted as "daughters of the devil;" and every woman who slipped was placed on the pillory as a specimen of all sinfulness.

Out of the once hearty small property-holding bourgeois of the Middle Ages, who lived and let live, now became a bigoted, straight-laced, dark-browed maw-worm, who "saved-up," to the end that his large property-holding bourgeois successor might live all the more lustily in the nineteenth century, and might be able to dissipate all the more. The respectable citizen, with his stiff necktie, his narrow horizon and his severe code of morals, was the prototype of society. The legitimate wife, who had not been particularly edified by the sensuality of the Middle Ages, tolerated in Roman Catholic days, was quite at one with the Puritanical spirit of Protestantism. But other circumstances supervened, that, affecting, as they did, unfavorably the general condition of things in Germany, joined in exercising in general an unfavorable influence upon the position of woman.

The revolution – effected in production, money and trade, particularly as regarded Germany, – due to the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies, produced, first of all, a great reaction on the social domain. Germany ceased to be the center of European traffic and commerce. Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, took successively the leadership, the latter keeping it until our own days. German industry and German commerce began to decline. At the same time, the religious Reformation had destroyed the political unity of the nation. The Reformation became the cloak under which the German principalities sought to emancipate themselves from the Imperial power. In their turn, the Princes brought the power of the nobility under their own control, and, in order to reach this end all the more easily, favored the cities, not a few of which, in sight of the ever more troubled times, placed themselves, of their own free will, under the rule of the Princes. The final effect was that the bourgeois or capitalist class, alarmed at the financial decline of its trade, raised ever higher barriers to protect itself against unpleasant competition. The ossification of conditions gained ground; and with it the impoverishment of the masses.

Later, the Reformation had for a consequence the calling forth of the religious wars and persecutions – always, of course, as cloaks for the political and economic purposes of the Princes – that, with short interruptions, raged throughout Germany for over a century, and ended with the country's complete exhaustion, at the close of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. Germany had become an immense field of corpses and ruins; whole territories and provinces lay waste; hundreds of cities, thousands of villages had been partially or wholly burnt down; many of them have since disappeared forever from the face of the earth. In other places the population had sunk to a third, a fourth, a fifth, even to an eighth and tenth part. Such was the case, for instance, with cities like Neurenberg, and with the whole of Franconia. And now, at the hour of extreme need, and with the end in view of providing the depopulated cities and villages as quickly as possible with an increased number of people, the drastic measure was resorted to of "raising the law," and allowing a man two wives. The wars had carried off the men; of women there was an excess. On February 14, 1650, the Congress of Franconia, held in Nuerenberg, adopted the resolution that "men under sixty years of age shall not be admitted to the monasteries;" furthermore, it ordered "the priests and curates, if not ordained, and the canons of religious establishments, shall marry;" "moreover every male shall be allowed to marry two wives; and all and each males are earnestly reminded, and shall be often warned, from the pulpit also, to so comport themselves in this matter; and care shall be taken that he shall fully and with becoming discretion diligently endeavor, so that, as a married man, to whom is granted that he take two wives, he not only take proper care of both wives, but avoid all misunderstanding among them." At that time, we see, matters that are to-day kept under strictest secrecy, were often discussed as of course from the pulpit itself.