About this time the Pope was in great need of money:  this was Leo X. He not only squandered his vast revenues in pleasures and pomps, like any secular monarch; he not only collected pictures and statues,—­but he wanted to complete St. Peter’s Church.  It was the crowning glory of papal magnificence.  Where was he to get money except from the contributions of Christendom?  But kings and princes and bishops and abbots were getting tired of this everlasting drain of money to Rome, in the shape of annats and taxes; so Leo revived an old custom of the Dark Ages,—­he would sell indulgences for sin; and he sent his agents to peddle them in every country.

The agent in Saxony was a very vulgar, boisterous, noisy, bullying Dominican, by the name of Tetzel.  Luther abhorred him, not so much because he was vulgar and noisy, but because his infamous business derogated from the majesty of God and religion.  In wrathful indignation he preached against Tetzel and his practices,—­the abominable traffic of indulgences.  Only God can forgive sins.  It seemed to him to be an insult to the human understanding that any man, even a pope, should grant an absolution for crime.  These indulgences were the very worst form of penance, since they made a mockery of virtue.  And it was useless to preach against them so long as the principles on which they were based were not assailed.  Everybody believed in penance; everybody believed that this, in some form, would insure salvation.  It consisted in a temporal penalty or punishment inflicted on the sinner after confession to the priest, as a condition of his receiving absolution or an authoritative pardon of his sin by the Church as God’s representative.  And the indulgence was originally an official remission of this penalty, to be gained by offerings of money to the Church for its sacred uses.  However ingenious this theory, the practice inevitably ran into corruption.  The people who bought, the agents who sold, the popes who dispensed, these indulgences used them for the vilest purposes.

Fortunately, in those times in Germany everybody felt he had a soul to save.  Neither the popes nor the Church ever lost that idea.  The clergy ruled by its force,—­by stimulating fears of divine wrath, whereby the wretched sinner would be physically tormented forever, unless he escaped by a propitiation of the Deity,—­the common form of which was penance, deeds of supererogation, donations to the Church, self-expiation, works of fear and penitence, which commended themselves to the piety of the age; and this piety Luther now believed to be unenlightened, not the kind enjoined by Christ or Paul.