The instructions given to the Hessians showed him plainly that the Landgrave was determined not to conceal his bigamy any longer, or to have it branded as mere concubinage; the theologians, so the document declares, would surely never have advised him to have recourse to sinful concubinage. That he was not married to his second wife was a lie, which he would not consent to tell were he to be asked point-blank; his bigamy was really a dispensation "permitted by God, admitted by the learned, and consented to by his wife." If "hard pressed" he must disclose it. To introduce polygamy generally was of course quite a different matter, and was not to be thought of. 1 Needless to say, Luther was ready enough to back up this last stipulation, for his own sake as much as for the Landgrave's.
During the first session of the conference, held in the Rathaus at Eisenach, Luther formally and publicly committed himself to the expedient at which he had faintly hinted even previously. He unreservedly proposed the telling of a lie. Should a situation arise where it was necessary to reply "yes" or "no," then they must resign themselves to a downright "No." "What harm would it do," he said on July 15, according to quite trustworthy notes, 2 "if a man told a good, lusty lie in a worthy cause and for the sake of the Christian Churches?" Similarly he said on July 17 : "To lie in case of necessity, or for convenience, or in excuse, such lying would not be against God; He was ready to take such lies on Himself." 3
The Protestant historian of the Hessian Bigamy says in excuse of this: "Luther was faced by the problem whether a lie told in case of necessity could be regarded as a sin at all"; he did not have recourse to the "expedient of a mental reservation [as he had done when recommending an ambiguous reply]"; he merely absolved "the 'mendacium officiosum' [the useful lie] of sinfulness. This done, Luther could with a good conscience advise the telling of such a lie." 4
1"Philipps Brief wechsel," 1, p. 369 f.
2Ibid., p. 373. Concerning the notes which the editor calls the "Protokoll," see N. Paulus in " Hist.-pol. Bl.," 135, 1905, p. 323 f.
3Ibid., p. 375.
4Rockwell, ibid., p. 179. The Protestant theologian Th. Brieger says ("Luther und die Nebenehe," etc., "Preuss. Jahrb.," 135, 1909, p. 46): "As is known, in the summer of 1540, when the matter had already been notorious for months, Luther gave the Landgrave the advice, that he should give a flat denial of the step he had taken. . . . A lie of necessity was not against God; He was ready to take that upon Himself. Just as in our own day men of the highest moral character hold similar views concerning certain forms of the lie of necessity."
