What he says is, however, rather spoilt by a dangerous admission. “Should there be anyone who has something better to offer and to whom more has been revealed than to me, I am ready to submit to him my sense and reason and not to force my opinion upon him, but to obey him.”[244] He, of course, felt that he could convict the so-called “fanatics” of error, and was sure beforehand that his professed readiness to submit to others would not endanger his position. His whole cause depended on the maintenance of outward order and his own authority at Wittenberg; he knew, moreover, that he was backed by the Elector.
His success against his adversaries, who, to tell the truth, were no match for him, was complete. Wittenberg was saved from the danger of open adherence to “fanaticism,” though the movement was still to give Luther much trouble secretly at Wittenberg and more openly elsewhere, particularly as Carlstadt, in his disappointment, came more and more after 1522 to make common cause with the Zwickauers.[245]
The success of his efforts against the fanatics secured for Luther the favour of his Ruler and his protection against the consequences of his outlawry by the Empire. Luther was thus enabled to carry on his work as professor and preacher at Wittenberg in defiance of the Emperor and the Empire; from thence, till the very end of his life, he was able, unmolested, to spread abroad, with the help of the Press, his ideas of ecclesiastical revolution.
In view of the movement just described, and of others of a like nature, he published towards the close of his Patmos sojourn the work entitled “A True Admonition to all Spirits to Avoid Riot and Revolt.”[246] This, however, did not prevent him shortly after from furthering the idea of the use of force with all his habitual incautious violence in the tract “Against the Falsely-called Spiritual Estate of the Pope and the Bishops” (1522),[247] in which, in language the effect of which upon the masses it was impossible to gauge, he incites the people to overthrow the existing Church government.
“Better were it,” he cries in the latter work, “that all bishops were put to death, and all foundations and convents rooted out, than that one soul should suffer. What then must we say when all souls are lost for the sake of vain mummery and idols? Of what use are they but to live in pleasure on the sweat and toil of others and to hinder the Word of God?” A revolt against such tyrants could not, he says, be wicked; its cause would not be the Word of God, but their own obstinate disobedience and rebellion against God. “What better do they deserve than to be stamped out by a great revolt? Such a thing, should it occur, would only give cause for laughter, as the Divine Wisdom says, Proverbs i. 25-26: ‘You have despised all my counsel and have neglected my reprehensions. I also will laugh in your destruction.’”[248]