The Catholics are trying to divert attention from their own unwarranted and violent proceedings by charging Luther with preaching a war of extermination against their hierarchy.  How did they treat the just claims and reasonable demands of the German nation for measures that were admitted to be crying needs of the times?  No German diet met but a long list of grievances was submitted by the suffering people.  It was of no avail.  The haughty clergy rode over the people’s rights and prayers rough-shod.  The tyrannous devices which their cunning had invented were executed with brazen impudence.  How had they treated simple laymen in whose possession a Bible was found?  What was their inquisitorial court but the anteroom to holy butchers’ shambles, the legal vestibule to murder that had been sanctioned by the Popes?  How had they treated Luther?  If the papal nuncio at the Diet of Worms had had his way with the emperor and the princes, Luther would not have left that city alive.  They openly declared to the emperor that he was not obliged to keep his plighted word for a safe-conduct to a heretic.  These people come now at this late day prating about violence that they have suffered from this sacrilegious and bloodthirsty Luther.  They themselves were the perpetrators of the most appalling violence against God and men:  their whole system rests, as Johann Gerhard in his famous Confessio Catholica rightly asserts, on Fraus et Vis, that is, Fraud and Violence.

23.  Luther, Anarchist and Despot All in One.

Extremes met, with most disastrous effect-so Catholic writers tell us-in Luther’s views of the political rights of men.  At one time he was so outspoken in his condemnation of the oppression which the common people were suffering from the clergy, the nobility, and their aristocratic governors that he incited them to discontent with their humble lot in life, to unrest, and to open rebellion against their magistrates.  At another time he became the spokesman for the most pronounced absolutism and despotism.  He turned suddenly against the very people whose cause he had so signally championed, and who hailed him as their prophet and leader.  When the poor, downtrodden people needed him most, Luther cowardly deserted them, and by frenzied utterances excited the nobility to slay the common people without mercy in the most ruthless fashion, and even promised the lords whom he had denounced as tyrants heaven for enacting the barbaric cruelties to which he was urging them.  This is the Catholic portrayal of Luther during the Peasants’ War.

The relation of the peasant uprising to Luther’s preaching is grossly misrepresented when the impression is created that Luther had before this sad upheaval worked hand in glove with the malcontent rustics for the overthrow of the government.  Disturbances of this kind had been periodical occurrences in Europe for many hundreds of years.  The heavy taxes and tithes, and the forced labor which the lords exacted