The spot where this happened is still shown outside the Elster Gate at Wittenberg, under asturdy oak surrounded by an iron railing.^285
Several hundred students tarried at the fire, which had been kindled by a master of the
university, some chanting the Te Deum, others singing funeral dirges on the papal laws; then they
made a mock procession through the town, collected piles of scholastic and Romish books, and
returning to the place of execution, threw them into the flames.
Luther, with Melanchthon, Carlstadt, and the other doctors and masters, returned home
immediately after the act. He at first had trembled at the step, and prayed for light; but after the
deed was done, he felt more cheerful than ever. He regarded his excommunication as an emancipation
from all restraints of popery and monasticism. On the same day he calmly informed Spalatin of the
event as a piece of news.^286 On the next day he warned the students in the lecture-room against the
Romish Antichrist, and told them that it was high time to burn the papal chair with all its teachers
and abominations.^287 He publicly announced his act in a Latin and German treatise, "Why the Books
of the Pope and his Disciples were burned by Dr. Martin Luther." He justified it by his duties as a
baptized Christian, as a sworn doctor of divinity, as a daily preacher, to root out all unchristian
doctrines. He cites from the papal law-books thirty articles and errors in glorification of the papacy,
which deserve to be burned; and calls the whole Canon-law "the abomination of desolation" (Matt.
24:15) and antichristian (2 Thess. 2:4), since the sum of its teaching was, that "the Pope is God on
earth, above all things, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and temporal; all things belong to the Pope,
and no one dare ask, What doest thou?" Simultaneously with this tract, he published an exhaustive
defense of all his own articles which had been condemned by the Pope, and planted himself upon
the rock of God’s revelation in the Scriptures.
Leo X., after the expiration of the one hundred and twenty days of grace allowed to Luther
by the terms of the bull, proceeded to the last step, and on the third day of January, 1521, pronounced
the ban against the Reformer, and his followers, and an interdict on the places where they should
be harbored. But Luther had deprived the new bull of its effect.
The burning of the Pope’s bull was the boldest and most eventful act of Luther. Viewed in
itself, it might indeed have been only an act of fanaticism and folly, and proved a brutum fulmen.
But it was preceded and followed by heroic acts of faith in pulling down an old church, and building
up a new one. It defied the greatest power on earth, before which emperors, kings, and princes, and
all the nations of Europe bowed in reverence and awe. It was the fiery signal of absolute and final
separation from Rome, and destroyed the effect of future papal bulls upon one-half of Western
Christendom. It emancipated Luther and the entire Protestant world from that authority, which,
"Quia turbasti nos, exturbet te Dominus in die hac." In the Revised E. V., the whole passage reads: "Why hast thou troubled us? The Lord
shall trouble thee this day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burnt them [in Hebrew ] with fire after they had stoned them
with stones."(^285) A tablet contains the inscription: "Dr. Martin Luther verbrannte an dieser Stätte am 10 Dec. 1520 the päpstliche Bannbulle."
(^286) "Anno MDXX, decima Decembris, hora nona, exusti sunt Wittembergae ad orientalem portam, juxta S. Crucem, omnes libri Papae:
Decretum, Decretales, Sext. Clement. Extravagant., et Bulla novissima Leonis X.: item summa Angelica [a work on casuistry by Angelus
Carletus de Clavasio, or Chiavasso, d. 1495], Chrysoprasus [De praedestinatione centuriae sex, 1514] Eccii, et alia ijusdem autoris,
Emseri, et quaedam alia, quo adjecta per alios sunt: ut videant incendiarii Papistae, non esse magnarum virium libros exurere, quos
confutare non possunt. Haec erunt nova." De Wette, I. 532. Further details about the burning and the conduct of the students we learn
from the report of an unnamed pupil of Luther: Excustionis antichristianarum decretalium Acta, In the Erl. ed. of Op. Lat., V. 250-256.
(^287) Ranke, i. 307; Köstlin, i. 407; Kolde, i. 290.