Luther had ample reason to dread the demoralizing effect of the indulgence-venders’ activity upon the common people.  In the sermons of Tetzel the church where he happened to do business was raised to equal dignity with St. Peter’s at Rome.  Instead of confessing to an ordinary priest, he told the masses they had now the rare privilege of confessing to an Apostolical Vicar, specially detailed for this work.  With consummate skill he worked on the tender feelings of parents, of mothers, who were mourning the loss of children, or of children who had lost their parents.  He impersonated the departed in their agonies in purgatory, he made the people hear the pitiful moaning of the victims in the purgatorial fires, and transmitted their heartrending appeals for speedy help to the living.  He clinched the argument by playing on the people’s covetousness:  for the fourth part of a gulden they could transfer a suffering soul safely to the home of the eternal paradise.  Had they ever had a greater bargain offered to them?  Never would they have this indispensable means of salvation brought within easier reach.  Now was the time, now or never! “0 ye murderers, ye usurers, ye robbers, ye slaves of vice,” he cried out, “now is the time for you to hear the voice of God, who does not desire the death of the sinner, but would have the sinner repent and live.  Turn, then, O Jerusalem, to the Lord, thy God!” He declared that the red cross of the indulgence-venders, with the papal arms, raised in a church, possessed the same virtue as the cross of Christ.  If Peter were present in person, he would not possess greater authority, nor could he dispense grace more effectually than he.  Yea, he would not trade his glory as an indulgence-seller with Peter’s glory; for he had saved more souls by selling the indulgences than Peter by preaching.  Every time a coin clinked in his money chest a liberated soul was soaring to heaven.

Catholic writers declare that the people were told that they must repent in order to obtain forgiveness.  So they were, in the manner aforestated.  Repenting meant buying a letter of pardon from the Pope.  That is the reason why Luther worded the first two of his Ninety-five Theses as he did:  “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ in saying:  Poenitentiam agite! meant that the whole life of the faithful should be repentance.  And these words cannot refer to penance—­that is, confession and satisfaction.”  The Latin phrase “poenitentiam agere” has a double meaning:  it may mean “repent” and “do penance.”  Our Lord used the phrase in the first, the indulgence-sellers in the second sense.  Since the people had been raised in the belief that the Church had the authority from God to impose church fines on them for their trespasses, by which they were to remove the temporal punishment of their sins, this was called “doing penance,”—­they were actually led to believe that the were obeying a command of Christ in buying a letter of indulgence.  And not only did the people believe that they were purchasing release from temporal punishment, but from the guilt of sin and all its effects.  The common man from the fields and the streets did not make the fine distinction of the hair-splitting theologians:  his bargain meant to him that hell was closed and heaven open for him.