His letter to his friend Tschertte in Vienna (1530) also contains a “loud lamentation and outburst of anger against Luther’s work.” We can see that he has entirely broken with it.[100] In this letter he says: “I admit that at first I too was a good Lutheran, like our departed Albert [Dürer]. We hoped thereby to better the Roman knavery and the roguery of the monks and parsons.” But the contrary was the result; those of the new faith were even worse than those whom they were to reform. Members of the Council had also hoped for a general improvement of morals, but had found themselves shamefully deceived. He knows for certain--a valuable admission in view of the unhistorical idea of some Catholics that Luther’s partisans were all frivolous men--that “many pious and honourable men” lent a willing ear to his teaching; “hearing beautiful things said of faith and the holy Gospel, they fancy all is real gold that glitters, whereas it is hardly brass.”[101]
Another statement against Luther, made by this same scholar in 1528, is still stronger: “Formerly almost all men applauded at the sound of Luther’s name, but now nearly all are seized with disgust on hearing it ... and not without cause, for apart from his audacity, impudence, arrogance and slanderous tongue he is also guilty of lying to such an extent that he cannot refrain from any untruth; what he asserts to-day he does not scruple to deny to-morrow; he is instability itself.”[102]
We see also from the example of Albert Dürer of Nuremberg, who is rightly accounted one of the greatest masters of Art, how overwhelming an influence the stormy energy, the calls for reform and the religious tone of Luther’s writings could exert on the susceptible minds of the day. Of a lively temper,[103] full of imagination and religious idealism, as his sixteen wonderful illustrations to the Apocalypse proved in 1498, he, like his Nuremberg friend Willibald Pirkheimer, gave himself up from the very first to the influence of the Lutheran writings, with which to a certain extent he was in sympathy. In his enthusiasm for freedom he considered that Christianity was too much fettered by oppressive rules of human invention, and was profoundly troubled by the desecration of holy things introduced in many regions by the greed and avarice of a worldly-minded clergy.