sent him first to the hot bath of Pfeffers, and then to a quiet retreat on the island of Ufnau in the
Lake of Zürich, under medical care. But he soon died there, of the incurable disease of his youth,
in August, 1523, in the Prime of life (thirty-five years and four months of age), leaving nothing but
his pen and sword, and the lesson: "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord
of hosts" (Zech. 4:6).
With Hutten and Sickingen the hope of a political reconstruction of Germany through means
of the Reformation and physical force was destroyed. What the knights failed to accomplish, the
peasants could still less secure by the general revolt two years later. But notwithstanding these
checks, the Reformation was bound to succeed with spiritual weapons.
§ 43. Luther’s Crusade against Popery. 1520.
After the disputation at Leipzig, Luther lost all hope of a reformation from Rome, which was
preparing a bull of excommunication.
Here begins his storm and pressure period,^233 which culminated in the burning of the Pope’s
bull, and the protest at the Diet of Worms.
Under severe mental anguish he was driven to the conviction that the papacy, as it existed
in his day, was an anti-christian power, and the chief source and support of abuses in the Church.
Prierias, Eck, Emser, and Alveld defended the most extravagant claims of the papacy with much
learning, but without any discrimination between fact and fiction. Luther learned from the book of
Laurentius Valla, as republished by Ulrich von Hutten, that the Donation of Constantine, by which
this emperor conferred on Pope Sylvester and his successors the temporal sovereignty not only
over the Lateran Palace, but also over Rome, Italy, and all the West, was a baseless forgery of the
dark ages. He saw through the "devilish lies," as he called them, of the Canon law and the
pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. "It must have been a plague sent by God," he says (in his "Address to
the German Nobility"), "that induced so many people to accept such lies, though they are so gross
and clumsy that one would think a drunken boor could lie more skillfully." Genuine Catholic
scholars of a later period have exposed with irrefragable arguments this falsification of history. His
view of the Church expanded beyond the limits of the papacy, and took in the Oriental Christians,
and even such men as Hus, who was burned by an oecumenical council for doctrines derived from
St. Paul and St. Augustin. Instead of confining the Church, like the Romanists, to an external visible
communion under the Pope, he regarded it now as a spiritual communion of all believers under
Christ the only Head. All the powers of indignation and hatred of Roman oppression and corruption
gathered in his breast. "I can hardly doubt," he wrote to Spalatin, Feb. 23, 1520, "that the Pope is
the Antichrist." In the same year, Oct. 11, he went so far as to write to Leo X. that the papal dignity
was fit only for traitors like Judas Iscariot whom God had cast out.^234
Luther was much confirmed in his new convictions by Melanchthon, who had independently
by calm study arrived at the same conclusion. In the controversy with Eck, August, 1519,
(^233) Sturm- und Drangperiode is an expressive German phrase.
(^234) In the midst of a Latin letter to Spalatin, from the beginning of June, 1520 (De Wette, I. 453), he gives vent to his wrath against
popery in these German words:"Ich meine, sie sind zu Rom alle toll, thöricht, wüthend, unsinnig, Narren, Stock, Stein, Hölle, und Teufel
geworden." In the same letter he mentions his intention to publish a book"ad Carolum et totius Germaniae nobilitatem adversus Romanae
curiaetyrannidem et nequitiam."