[Illustration: Fig. 28.--Münzer (his execution in the background.) From an old woodcut.]
In answer to this charge, Luther referred to his treatise 'On the Secular Power,' and to other of his writings. 'I know well,' he was able to say with truth, 'that no teacher before me has written so strongly about secular authority; my very enemies ought to thank me for this. Who ever made a stronger stand against the peasants, with writing and preaching, than myself?' Among the Estates of the Empire, not even the most violent enemies of evangelical doctrine could venture now to turn their victorious weapons against their associates in arms who espoused that doctrine, with whom they had achieved the common conquest, and from whose midst had sounded the most vigorous call to battle and to victory. Luther, on the contrary, was not afraid at this moment to exhort the Archbishop, Cardinal Albert, of whose friendly disposition to himself, his friend Rühel had recently informed him, to follow the example of his cousin, the Grand Master in Prussia, by converting his bishopric into a temporal princedom, and entering the state of matrimony, and to name, as the chief motive for so doing, the 'hateful and horrible rebellion,' wherewith God's wrath had visited the sins of the priesthood.
Thus did Luther, in these stormy times, whatever might be thought of the violence of his utterances, take up his position clearly and resolutely from the first, and maintain it to the end;--sure of his cause, and safe against the new attack which he saw now the devil was making; unyielding and defiant towards his old Papal enemies and their new calumniations. And in this frame of mind he took just now a step, calculated to sharpen all the tongues of slander, but one in which he saw the fulfilment of his calling. Freed from unchristian monastic vows, he entered into the holy state of matrimony ordained by God. We first hear him speaking decidedly on this subject in a letter to Rühel of May 4. After referring to the devil as the instigator of the insurgent peasants, and of the murderous deeds which made him anxious to prepare himself for death, he continues with the following remarkable words: 'And if I can, in spite of him, I will take my Kate in marriage before I die. I hope they will not take from me my courage and my joy.'