In Luther’s remarks about sinning to spite the devil we have always heard an echo from his life at the cloister.  One’s judgment about the monastic life is somewhat mitigated when one hears how Dr. Staupitz and the brethren in the convent at Erfurt would occasionally speak to Luther about the latter’s sins.  Staupitz called them “Puppensuenden.”  It is not easy to render this term by a short and apt English term; “peccadillo” would come near the meaning.  A child playing with a doll will treat it as if it were a human being, will dress it, talk to it, and pretend to receive answers from it, etc.  That is the way, good Catholics were telling Luther, he was treating his sins.  His sins were no real sins, or he had magnified their sinfulness out of all proportion.  This same advice Luther hands on to another who was becoming a hypochondriac as he had been.  When the mind is in a morbid state it imagines faults, errors, sins, where there are none.  The melancholy person in his self-scrutiny becomes an intolerant tyrant to himself.  He will flay his poor soul for trifles as if they were the blackest crimes:  In such moments the devil is very busy about the victim of gloom and despair.  Luther has diagnosed the case of Weller with the skill of a nervous specialist.  He counsels Weller not to judge himself according to the devil’s prompting, and, in order to break Satan’s thrall over him, to wrench himself free from his false notions of what is sinful.  In offering this advice, Luther uses such expressions as:  “Sin, commit sin,” but the whole context shows that he advises Weller to do that which is in itself not sinful, but looks like sin to Weller in his present condition.  When Luther declares he would like to commit a real brave sin himself as a taunt to the devil, he adds:  “Would that I could!” That means, that, as a matter of fact, he could not do it and did not do it, because it was wrong.  What bold immoral act did Weller commit in consequence of Luther’s advice?  What immoralities are there in Luther’s own life?  Luther’s letters did not convey the meaning to his morbid young friend that Catholic writers think and claim they did.

Luther’s advice to Melanchthon which is so revolting to Catholics that they have made it the slogan in their campaign against Luther refers to a state of affairs that is identical with what we noted in our review of the correspondence with Weller.  It is contained in a letter which Luther wrote August 1, 1521, while he was an exile in the Wartburg.  He says to his despondent friend and colleague at the University of Wittenberg:  “If you are a preacher of grace, do not preach a fictitious, but the true grace.  If grace is of the true sort, you will also have to bear true, not fictitious, sins.  God does not save those who only acknowledge themselves sinners in a feigned manner.  Be a sinner, then, and sin bravely, but believe more bravely still and rejoice in Christ, who is the Victor over sin, death,