Catholic writers ask the world not to believe Luther’s tales about the city of Rome.  Luther, they say, came to Rome as a callow rustic comes to a metropolis.  To the wily Italians he was German Innocence Abroad; they hoaxed him by telling him absurd tales about the Popes, the priests, the wonders of the city, etc., and the credulous monk believed all they told him.  He left Rome with his faith in the Church unimpaired.  Later in life, after his “defection” from Rome, he told as true facts and as reminiscences of his visit at the Holy City many of the false stories which had been palmed off on him.  This is said to have given rise to the prevailing Protestant view that during his visit at Rome Luther’s eyes were opened to the corruption of the Roman Church and his resolution formed to overthrow that Church.  Luther himself is said to be responsible for this false view.  He fostered it by his tales of what he had seen and heard at Rome with disgust and horror.  His horrid impressions are declared pure fiction, and simply serve to show how little the man can be trusted in anything he states.

To leave a way open for a decent retreat, Catholics also point to a difference in temperament between the phlegmatic Luther coming from a northern clime, which through its atmospheric rigors begets somber reflections and gloomy thoughts, and the airy, fairy Italians, who revel in sunshine, flowers, and fruits, drink fiery wines, and naturally grow up into a freedom of manners and lack of restraint that is characteristic of people living in southern climes.  All of which means—­ if it means anything serious—­that the Ten Commandments are subject to revision according to the geographic latitude in which a person happens to be.  When your austere gentleman, raised among the fens and bogs of the Frisian coast, sees something in a grove in Sicily which he denounces as wicked, you must tell him that there is nothing wrong in what he has seen.  He has only omitted to adjust his temperament to the locality.  If you follow out this line of thought to the end, you will come to a point where you strike hands with Rudyard Kipling, who has sung enthusiastically about a certain locality beyond Aden where the Ten Commandments do not exist.  And to think that this plea is made by people who have charged Luther with having put the Ten Commandments out of commission for himself and others!  Italians, lovers of freedom and unrestraint, were the first to fill the world with tales about the moral besottedness of Luther!  This goes to show that in any application of the Ten Commandments it matters very much who does the applying.