old Pantheon, stared at the head of John the Baptist in San Silvestro in Capite, tried, but failed to read the famous Saturday mass at San Giovanni, the oldest and greatest sanctuary of Christianity, rested from a fatiguing tour through the Lateran in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where Pope Sylvester II, the Faustus of the Italians, was carried away by the devils, went through the catacombs with its 6 martyred Popes and 176,000 other martyrs, etc., etc.

Looking back to this visit later, Luther remarked, “I believed everything” Just what official Rome expected every devout pilgrim to do, just what it expects them to do to-day.  And these Romanists want to point the finger of ridicule at the simpleton, the easy dupe, the holy fool Luther!  Does Rome perhaps think the same of all the pious pilgrims that annually crowd Rome?  Luther heard himself called “un buon Christiano” at Rome and discovered that that meant as much as “an egregious ass.”  But he considered that a part of Italian wickedness.  The Church, he was sure, approved of all that he did, in fact, had taught him to do all that.  It required ten years or more to disabuse his mind of the frauds that had been practised on him, and then he declared that he would not take 100,000 gulden not to have seen with his own eyes how scandalously the Popes were hoodwinking Christians.  If it were not for his visit at Rome, he says, he might fear that he was slandering the Popes in what he wrote about them.

While Luther’s visit at Rome, then, brought about no spiritual change in him, it helped to give him a good conscience afterwards when his conflict with Rome had begun.

13.  Pastor Luther.

Luther’s famous protest against the sale of indulgences, published October 31, 1517, in the form of ninety-five theses, is represented by Catholic writers as an outburst of Luther’s violent temper and an assault upon the Catholic Church that he had long premeditated.  By this time, it is said, Luther had become known to his colleagues as a quarrelsome man, loving disputations and jealous of victory in a debate.  His methods of teaching at the university were novel, in defiance of the settled customs of the Church.  His dangerous innovations caused the suspicion to spring up that he was plotting rebellion against the authority of the Church.  The arrival of the indulgence-hawker Tetzel in the neighborhood of Wittenberg gave him the long-looked-for occasion to strike a blow at the sacred teachings of the Church which he had solemnly promised to support and defend against all heretics, and from whose teachings he had already apostatized in his heart.