the most part on the spur of the moment, and when the fire burned.  His words fell into souls full of the fermenting passion of the times.  They drank in with eagerness the thoughts that all men were equal before God, and that there are divine commands about the brotherhood of mankind of more importance than all human legislation.  They refused to believe that such golden ideas belonged to the realm of spiritual life above."[26]

When, therefore, the religious reformation was fairly launched, a great uprising of the poor people speedily followed.  It seemed to them that the return to Christ meant, for them, the breaking of yokes and the enlargement of opportunity, and they proceeded to claim for themselves some portion of the liberty that belonged to them.  Their demands, as voiced in their “Twelve Articles,” were by no means extravagant, from our point of view.  The abuses of which they complained were flagrant, the rights they claimed were far less than are now, even in despotic Russia, fully granted to the humblest people.  And they protested most earnestly that they “wanted nothing contrary to the requirements of just authority, whether civil or ecclesiastical, nor to the gospel of Christ.”

It would, however, have been unreasonable to expect that such people would confine their protest within the bounds of law and order.  It was, in fact, a revolution, and it discerned no way to its goal but the way of violence.  That, indeed, is the path that most of the seekers after liberty have felt constrained to take.

What was Luther’s relation to this uprising?  It cannot be said that he had kindled the flame, but he had fanned it to a conflagration.  And yet when it began to rage, he found himself unable to control it.  It had come to pass, in the exigencies of the warfare he was waging, that his allies were the German princes.  Only through them, as he believed, could he hope to win the fight he was making against the Roman hierarchy.  If he put himself at the head of the peasants’ movement he would alienate the princes, and it seemed to him that the Protestant cause in Germany would he stamped out in blood.  And therefore, after vainly attempting to quiet the insurrection, with whose principal aims he had confessed himself in sympathy, he turned upon the peasants in almost savage wrath, and in his tract “Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,” he urged the princes to crush the insurrection.  “In the case of an insurgent,” he says, “every man is both judge and executioner.  Therefore, whoever can should knock down, strangle, and stab such publicly or privately, and think nothing so venomous, pernicious, and devilish as an insurgent....  Such wonderful times are these that a prince can merit heaven better with bloodshed than another with prayer.”