§ 1. The words of Daniel 7:21 are: “I was looking, and behold, that horn was making war against the saints and prevailing over them, until the Ancient of Days came and gave judgment to the saints of the Most High; and the time came, and the saints obtained the kingdom.” And thus he says: “The fourth beast will be the fourth kingdom upon the earth, which will be greater than all kingdoms, and it will devour the whole earth and trample and crush it. Moreover, the ten horns of that kingdom will be ten kings; and another will arise after them, and he will be mightier than those before him, and he will humble three kings. And he will speak words against the Most High and wear down the saints of the Most High; and he will think that he can change times and laws, and they will be delivered into his hand until a time and times and half a time.”
The words of Daniel the Prophet in chapter 8 are: “And after their reign, when iniquities have increased, a king shameless of face and understanding propositions will arise; and his strength will be made strong, but not by his own powers; and beyond what can be believed he will lay waste all things, and he will prosper and act. And he will kill the mighty and the people of the saints according to his will; and deceit will be directed in his hand, and he will magnify his heart, and amid an abundance of all things he will kill very many; and he will rise against the Prince of princes, and without a hand he will be crushed. And the vision of evening and morning which was spoken is true. You, therefore, seal the vision, because it will be after many days.”
And chapter 11:36: “And the king will act according to his will, and he will be raised up and magnified against every god; and against the God of gods he will speak great things, and he will prosper until the wrath is completed, for the determination has been accomplished. And he will have no regard for the God of his fathers, and he will be among the lusts of women, nor will he care for any of the gods, because he will rise against all things. But he will venerate the god Maozim in his place, and a god whom his fathers did not know he will worship with gold and silver and precious stone and precious things; and he will act so as to fortify Maozim with the foreign god whom he has known, and he will multiply glory and give them power over many, and he will divide the land freely. And at the appointed time the king of the South will fight against him, and like a tempest the king of the North will come against him in chariots and horsemen and a great fleet; and he will enter the lands and crush and pass through, and he will enter the glorious land, and many will fall.” They say that the Pontiff does all these things. I shall report them from Paul Laurentius, for many write the same things.
First, he says in sermon 1 that the Pope’s legate Tetzel taught that the red cross bearing the Pope’s insignia had the same power as the cross of Christ.
Second, that indulgences are justifying grace.
Third, that through indulgences sins are forgiven without repentance.
Fourth, that he even remits future sins. These concern doctrine.
Fifth, that the Pope is called המלך, “that king”—the certain king who corresponds to Antiochus in malice and crimes.
Sixth, that Boniface VIII denied confirmation to Albert, saying that he himself was both king and Pontiff; that he also went about in royal attire and said, “Behold the two swords here.”
Seventh, that he wrote to Philip, King of France: “We wish you to know that in both spiritual and temporal matters you are subject to us.”
Eighth, that he is above the law and wishes to be judged by no one.
Ninth, that he will do whatever he wishes.
Tenth, that he will exalt himself against God.
Eleventh, that he says he can do all things which God can do.
Twelfth, that he makes himself God, distinction 96, canon 7, Satis, and sermon 2.
Thirteenth, that he calls himself the vicar of Christ.
Fourteenth, that he equates an Agnus Dei with the blood of Christ. Thus Urban V sent one to a certain Emperor of Greece and wrote: “It breaks sin as does the blood of Christ, and constrains it.”
Fifteenth, that he abolishes marriage and permits the other lusts.
Sixteenth, that he worships Mauzim and becomes an idolater.
Seventeenth, that Pius IV ordered eighty Evangelicals to be killed, and that others instituted many persecutions.
Matthias Hoë, in the preface to Luther the Wonder-Man, says that under Julius II one million were killed.
§ 2. But these things have been related partly with the greatest falsehood and partly with the greatest malice. Let us interpret Scripture, though it is best to begin with chapter 7, verse 24:
“Moreover, the ten horns of that kingdom will be ten kings, and another will arise after them, and he will be mightier than those before him, and he will humble three kings.”
In the Chaldean it is מִנַּהּ מַלְכוּתָא, minnah malkhuta, “from the kingdom,” for they will arise from the kingdom. But that other one is said to be mightier than they—or, as the Chaldean has it, יִשְׁנֵא, “differing,” surpassing the others, or differing beyond the others. The Roman Greek edition interprets this not simply of power, but of impiety: ὃς ὑπερίσει κακοῖς πάντας τοὺς ἔμπροσθεν, “who will surpass in evils all those before him”; other editions, however, have omitted the expression τοῖς κακοῖς, “in evils.” Porphyry formerly said that the little horn was Antiochus, who was called Noble, or Epiphanes. So also Bruchthon, Junius, and Tremellius, who enumerate these ten horns as follows:
- Seleucus Nicanor.
- Antiochus Soter.
- Antiochus Θεός, Theos.
- Seleucus Callinicus.
- Ptolemy Euergetes.
- Seleucus Ceraunus.
- Antiochus the Great, or Hierax.
- Ptolemy Philopator.
- Seleucus Philopator.
- Antiochus Epiphanes.
Three kings humbled by Epiphanes:
Ptolemy Philopator.
Seleucus, brother of Epiphanes.
Demetrius.
§ 3. This opinion is easily refuted by all those arguments by which it is proved that the little horn belongs to the fourth beast, which is the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, that error of the Calvinists is advantageous to us, because from it it is evident that the conjecture concerning the Pontiff is uncertain, since the leading men among them do not at all extend this prophecy to Christian times. But because we rely upon truth, not upon another’s error, let us refute this opinion also.
First, that opinion contains an ἀνισορίαν, an inconsistency in its reckoning. For either, when they make him the tenth, they enumerate only the Seleucid kings of Syria—and in that manner Epiphanes would be the eighth—or, if they add the two Ptolemies Euergetes and Philopator, then by the same reasoning Ptolemy son of Lagus must be joined to them, who, as Josephus attests in book 13 of the Antiquities, occupied Syria and the city; and also Ptolemy’s son, who was called Philadelphus, under whom the translation by the seventy-two interpreters was made.
Second, they do not agree concerning the three humbled kings. Porphyry judges them to have been Philometor and Euergetes, the Egyptians, and Artaxias the Armenian. The Calvinists appoint this Demetrius. But he did not greatly humble the Egyptians, for he was forced to depart with his purpose unaccomplished. Nor was Epiphanes mightier than the others, but was wretched and needy after the treasury had been exhausted, as the history of the Maccabees testifies. Certainly Seleucus Nicanor, after defeating Lysimachus, ruled more widely, as did Antiochus the Great himself and others.
The other opinion is that the little horn is the Turk; so Annius, Pintus, Vatablus, Luther himself, and Strigel. But among them there is nevertheless no agreement concerning the three kings whom the Turk humbled. Some name the Arabian, Egyptian, and Asiatic kingdoms. In place of the Arabian kingdom Luther put the Greek kingdom. And he adds that the Turk will cast down no more before the final day of judgment. But if that is true, neither Germans nor Italians can be held in fear of that tyrant; even Pannonia itself will not dread his proximity. Daniel refutes this opinion when he says that they are kings, not kingdoms, and that kings are to be cast down. When Luther boldly pronounces that the Roman Monarchy was divided into ten kingdoms—namely Syria, Egypt, Asia, Greece, Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, Germany, and England—he speaks in his own manner, more freely than considerately. For what shall we say of Illyricum, the regions of Istria, and even Mesopotamia? Then the Turk holds several kingdoms: Syria, Egypt, Asia, Greece, and Africa. To say nothing of the Spains possessed by the Saracens for eight hundred years, five or six horns, therefore, have been cast down.
§ 4. Impious and blasphemous is the opinion of the Jews that the little horn is Christ the Lord, who began from small beginnings—the son of a carpenter and companion of robbers upon the cross—and whose Apostles were fishermen. Second, he spoke immense things: that he was the Son of God. Third, he changed times and laws. Fourth, he reigned for a time and times and half a time, for from his baptism to the cross are three and a half years. Fifth, this horn was crushed by the people of the saints, by the Synagogue. But Christians and Turks receive them with hisses, particularly because after this horn was crushed the kingdom was not given to the people of God, that is, to the Jews; rather, destruction befell them and captivity lasting so many centuries. Then, if the little horn is the kingdom of the Christians, how does it obtain only three kingdoms in the Roman Empire? Which are those three, and which the remaining seven? Then it was not Christians who destroyed Judaea, but enemies of the Christians—Vespasian, Hadrian, and others. That the remaining details do not agree will be said in the explanations that follow.
The sectarians of our time imitate these men, and what they do not dare direct against Christ they vomit forth against his vicars.
§ 5. The true opinion, therefore, is that of very many Fathers: that the little horn is Antichrist. “Therefore let us say,” Jerome says upon this passage, “what all ecclesiastical writers have handed down: that at the consummation of the world, when the kingdom of the Romans is to be destroyed, there will be ten kings who will divide the Roman world among themselves; then an eleventh, little king will arise, who will separate three kings from those seven, that is, the kings of Egypt, Africa, and Ethiopia; and after these have been killed, the other seven kings also will submit their necks to the victor.”
Antichrist, therefore, is one king who will subject three kings reigning at the same time, as Theodoret rightly says. “But if,” he says, “they did not rule at the same time, but singly succeeded those before them, different men succeeding others, how will he humble these three predecessors at the same time?” Graser, in The Plague on Revelation 13, says that that chapter of John leads us into the citadel of Antichrist and agrees with Daniel 7. But I prove in explicit words that these things have no relation to the Pontiff.
§ 6. First, the Pontiff did not humble three kings. For either we speak of his temporal dominion, and this is contained within no great part of Latium, or of his spiritual power, and that was always over all Christian kings and kingdoms, not merely over three. Germany, Gaul, Italy, Spain, Poland, and other kingdoms still acknowledge it. Accordingly, nothing in this part coheres, and an invincible argument for the Catholic faith arises: the Roman Pontiff did not arise after the ten kings who held the Roman world divided, nor did he humble three of those kings; therefore the Pontiff is not this little horn.
From here I proceed to the other matters. In the judgment of very many, the Pontiff is not this little horn, nor can he be; therefore he is also not that king treated in chapter 8, nor the apocalyptic beast. For the sectarians affirm that this horn, that king, and the apocalyptic beast are one kingdom or monarchy. If, therefore, this horn has no relation to the Pope’s kingdom, neither do those beasts. For things which do not agree with something also do not agree with that which is identical with that something.
Then verse 25: “And he will speak words against the Most High,” and so forth.
The Chaldean text which Daniel used says מִלִּין לְצַד עִלָּאָ, which properly means: “He will speak words toward the side, or on the part, of the Most High.” The Septuagint translates: λόγους πρὸς τὸν ὕψιστον λαλήσει—“He will speak words toward the Most High.” Symmachus, according to Jerome’s testimony, translates: “He will speak words as God,” so that he who assumes the power of God also claims for himself words of divine majesty. Second Thessalonians 2: “He will show himself as though he were God.” The Pontiff does not do this; therefore he is not that horn of which the Prophet Daniel speaks. The minor premise is certain among all legitimate judges. For the Pontiff professes himself to be a man, a sinner, a servant of God, the servant of the servants of God. Every day he confesses his sins to God, and often also to priests; he prostrates himself upon his face before God. All these things belong to a man, and to a man who knows God and groans over his own weakness, not to one who aspires to divinity.
§ 7. Here they all rise up. First: he who wishes to be judged by no one makes himself God; but the Pope wishes to be judged by no one; therefore he aspires to divinity. For if the Pope drags innumerable souls with him to hell, such is his pride that he does not wish anyone to say to him, “Why do you act thus?” I shall transcribe for you the complete passage from the epistle of the most holy Archbishop of Mainz and martyr Boniface, for part of it is found in distinction 40, canon 6, Si Papa. Boniface’s words are as follows:
“The holy Roman Church, made by divine and human privilege of special authority the head of all churches after Christ Jesus, affects the members of the whole of Christendom according to the character and health of its Bishop or ruler, so that they answer to its soundness with their own soundness and rejoice with it; and, no less, accord with its illnesses by their own illness. And just as, according to the Apostle, they are glorified together with its glory, so are they cast down by its abasement, so that in it especially that prophetic saying is found to be fulfilled: ‘Every head is diseased and every heart grieving; from the sole of the foot even to the crown there is no soundness in it.’ And, in truth, all men look up to the summit of the aforesaid Apostolic See with such reverence that some seek the discipline of the holy canons and the ancient institution of the Christian religion more from the mouth of its prelate than from the sacred pages and paternal traditions. They so investigate his willing and his refusing that, according to his judgment, they themselves relax or intensify their conduct.
“But if—as is supremely expedient for himself and all—consumed without interruption by zeal for the house of God, existing as a faithful and prudent steward, he shall have striven to preserve himself irreproachable before God and men in deed and speech, then, to speak almost truly, he makes nearly the whole world, astonished and solicitous, run with him after God; he leads in ranks peoples of each sex and of diverse profession, condition, and age, to be set by their Lord over all his goods. But if he is found negligent of his own and his brethren’s salvation, useless and remiss in his works, and moreover silent concerning the good—which harms himself and all men more—he nevertheless leads innumerable peoples in ranks with himself, as the first slave of Gehenna, to be scourged with him by many blows for eternity. No mortal presumes to reprove his faults here, because, although he is to judge all, he is to be judged by no one, unless perhaps he is found to have strayed from the faith. For his perpetual condition the whole body of the faithful prays the more earnestly, the more keenly they perceive their salvation after God to depend upon his soundness.
“For, with the mystery of divine omnipotence preserved as is fitting, in the place second after him that saying of blessed Job can not unfittingly be applied to the holy Roman Church: ‘If he destroys, there is no one who may build; and if he shuts a man in, there is none who may open to him; if he withholds the waters, all things will be dried up; and if he sends them forth, they will overthrow the earth.’ Nor is this without reason, since she especially retains in Peter the reins of heaven and earth. Since she is the spiritual mother of all the faithful in Christ, no one ought to refuse to be struck by her discipline or corrected by her censure, according to those Proverbs of Solomon: ‘Do not forsake the law of your mother; bind it continually upon your heart. For he who casts away discipline is unhappy, and a foolish man despises his mother’; and again: ‘He is accursed by God who provokes his mother, and the curse of a mother uproots foundations.’ Those things, indeed, which arrogantly are divided from her see—to which it was said, ‘You are Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my Church’—are proved to have been placed upon the sand of carnal desire or human presumption. The course of a stream can by no means prosper if it is divided from its source.”
§ 8. This is the passage which fills everyone’s books, as though we attributed such great right to the Pope. Here come exclamations and stamps of the feet. Yet it is right that we too be heard. First, the words are those of Boniface, a holy man. Second, the words can have a true sense. For the sense of the whole canon is what its title presents: “An Apostolic Pontiff who is negligent of his own and his brethren’s salvation is condemned.” For there are two antithetical statements. The first is: “A Pope who is a faithful steward makes the world run after God.” The other is: “But if he is negligent, he nevertheless leads many peoples with himself who are to be scourged in Gehenna.” For because of either his examples or his negligence many perish. Condemnation, therefore, hangs over him if he is negligent.
But this gives offense: that no one reproves his faults. Yet the sense of this too is not that no one is permitted to admonish the Pontiff; for many grave men admonished many Pontiffs, and Paul gave an example when he resisted Peter to his face. Certainly a confessor can reprove and rebuke him, and no less can Cardinals, Bishops, and those whose concern it is. What, then, does Boniface mean when he denies that the Pontiff can be reproved? What he adds: “Because, although he is to judge all, he is to be judged by no one.” It is because there is no tribunal before which he can be summoned as a subject. For no subject can judge anyone by authority.
And this is what is said in cause 17, question 4, canon 30, Nemini; cause 9, question 3, canon 17, Cuncta; and other places. For judicial reproof is excluded. Nor ought this to appear astonishing to our sectarians, who so exempt kings from every judgment that they say kings are nearest to God and that above them there is only almighty God. See William Barrett’s books On Royal Right, in which he places truth and flatteries side by side, yet is overcome by the desire to flatter. If, therefore, kings are not compelled to stand as defendants before the tribunals of their subjects, why should the Pontiff be compelled, since he too is not the subject of other Bishops and kings?
§ 9. They object, second, that Antichrist wears down the saints of the Most High; the Pontiff does this; therefore he is that horn, he is Antichrist.
But it will be easier for me to interpret those words so as to show the Pontiff’s innocence and to turn them back against our adversaries. The words themselves indicate a great persecution: לְקַדִּישֵׁי עֶלְיוֹנִין יְבַלֵּא, leqaddishe ʿelyonin yeballeʾ, “he will wear down the saints of the Most High,” or “of the high ones.” For it uses that עֶלְיוֹנִין, “high ones,” just as the Hebrews use אֱלֹהִים, Elohim, in the plural number. Accordingly, some do not translate correctly, “the highest or supreme saints”; since they did not attend to the government of the word, they ought not to have preferred themselves to the Septuagint interpreters, who translated τοὺς ἁγίους τοῦ ὑψίστου, “the saints of the Most High.” “He will wear down.” The Roman edition of the Septuagint has παλαιώσει, “he will make old,” or “consume with age”; the Genevan, however, πλανήσει, “he will deceive”; Justin, καταφθείρει, “he will overthrow”; others, ταπεινώσει, “he will humble.” The question is whether the Pontiff has done these things. They bring forward various matters, but examples from their own people. For what the Lutherans think of the Calvinist martyrs, and conversely what the latter think of the former, I have said in the Jubilee and in the instruction On Chronology.
§ 10. Before all others Sigismund Evenius objects to this in the Secular Lutheran-Evangelical Palm, page 27:
“After the descent from these kings to their subjects had been made—just as immediately at the beginning of the Reformation the Papists, and in the year 1524 the Archbishop of Mainz, raged against the Evangelicals even here in our Halle—they sowed one persecution after another and multiplied martyrdoms without end, so much so that from the year 1550
to 1580, within the span of thirty years, nine hundred thousand men were slain and butchered by Antichrist. Nor were all of them commoners, but 39 Princes, 148 Counts, 235 Barons, 147,511 Nobles, and the rest from the common people. The histories establish how much Christian blood the Parisian nuptials poured out in the year ’72: more than 30,000 miserably perished in that slaughter. When the Duke of Alba was about to bid farewell to the Low Countries, he boasted that within a span of six years he had killed 18,000 on account of religion. And while Charles V was still alive, as many as fifty thousand Christians were butchered in the same Low Countries; likewise, from the year ’76 until the Pacification of Ghent, 30,000 had perished under Spanish tyranny.
“Nor did they rage only against the living, but corpses were not spared. Hence the bodies of Bucer and Fagius were dug up and burned in 1556 at Cambridge in England, under the pious pretext that not only had both of them spread pernicious and erroneous doctrine, but both had also led a family among the sectarians; that not only had they themselves strayed from the Catholic Church, but by defecting from it had also given others an example; and that it was contrary to the sacred decrees and discipline for even the bodies of such persons to be given ecclesiastical burial.
“To these were added fires and poisons, by which certain agents might destroy and butcher those freed from these snares. Various fires were heard of throughout Saxony around the year ’41; finally, several of the arsonists were detected and captured in different places. When put to the question, most testified even to their last breath that, after receiving money from the officials and household of Henry of Brunswick—against whose calumnies Luther had written in the same year in invective writings, because he had proclaimed the Duke of Saxony a heretic, seditious, a Cain, a monster, an Aesop endowed with no virtue either of body or soul—they had been hired and sent to do this.
“Indeed, concerning the Roman Pontiff, Antichrist and instrument of Satan, it was spread abroad by trustworthy persons in the year ’46, when the war of the Protestants was raging—a war of which the Pope himself was the principal author—that not only had he afflicted Saxony grievously by fire through hired arsonists during several preceding years, but that at that time he had also purchased poisoners to corrupt wells and standing waters, so that these men might destroy by poison whatever survived the sword and weapons. Therefore the Protestants admonished all men generally, and especially those under their dominion, to take care that those commissioners be apprehended and, when the crime was established under torture, pay the penalty. For John William, son of the Elector, adds that not long before, not far from Weimar, a certain man suspected of being an Italian had been apprehended, who confessed that money had been given at Rome to him and certain others in the name of the Pontiff, so that throughout Germany they might do as much damage as they possibly could by fires and poison.
“Nor does Satan cease to be like himself. For in the most recent year 1610, on the eleventh day of June, a monk who had disfigured by fire two villages belonging to the Emperor’s Master of the Horse was brought as a prisoner to Prague and handed over to the Archbishop, together with a list found upon him of other Bohemian nobles whose estates he was to set on fire.
“I pass over exiles. How great a tyranny occurred in them is evident from this alone: as Maurice, Duke of Saxony, wrote to the Estates in the year ’52, they everywhere cast preachers and ministers of the Church beyond the boundaries of the Empire, and await the decree not only of no legitimate council, but not even of a papist one, and they regulate the matter immediately from the execution itself. I pass over prisons and the other kinds of punishments inflicted under and by the Roman Antichrist.”
§ 11. Thus he speaks. If he considers that Lutherans were driven into exile by Lutherans and by Calvinists, he will marvel not at all that Catholics also did this at some time. But the matter itself teaches that this accusation is unjust, for the Pope neither ordered all those men to be killed, nor were there so many. But that they were not saints of the Most High, since most were Calvinists, and that these were not martyrs, the Secular Palm itself teaches. On page 55 it has this:
“The martyrdoms appeared both too weak as ὀρθοδοξίας τεκμήρια, proofs of orthodoxy—since they not rarely embrace heretics and ruined scoundrels—and inflicted for the Lutheran profession and the abnegation of papal tyranny, not for Zwinglian novelty and blasphemies. The very slight straws or splinters of opinions which they vaunt are instead the thickest beams of errors and of most impious blasphemies against God’s omnipotence, holiness, and mercy and Christ’s merit. Finally, the deception in their confessions and reformations is more manifest than to require adjudication, since practice has not rarely uncovered it until now.”
Then he believes the Calvinists concerning the number of martyrs, which he ought not to have done, since on the same fifty-fifth page of the Palm he says: “Among the reckoning of these falsehoods—of which a very fertile crop is to be found among the Sacramentarian nation, so that blessed Luther not undeservedly judged that the Zwinglians should no longer be called liars, but falsehood itself—that claim is almost chief,” and so forth.
Third, this same man of ours acknowledges that those accused men who were slain had committed offenses. Second, that they were Sacramentarians. Third, that they were punished by the sectarians themselves. Fourth, that those men procured those dangers for themselves. Fifth, that they acted impetuously and were punished by the Lutheran populace. Sixth, that the Calvinists themselves act cruelly where they hold power. On folio 94 he describes all these things:
It is known how in the year ’29 the Sacramentarian spirit began the Reformation at Basel with iconoclasm. For when a certain man tore down with his spear the statue of one of the saints so that it fell to the earth and was broken, on that occasion hands were then laid upon several more, and three hundred armed men were sent to the church to demolish everywhere in the churches the idols, or statues. And when certain men from the Senate came running to quiet the disturbance, the iconoclasts answered: “What you have already been deliberating for a whole three years—whether it ought to be done—we shall complete in one hour, so that henceforth there may be no dissension among us on account of idols.” On the third day nine piles were assembled before the principal church and, when set on fire, were burned.
The Waldensians followed this example in the year ’61; they similarly cast images and altars to the ground and broke them. Something similar happened in Dauphiné in the year ’62, where it was decreed that destroyers of statues should by no means be called seditious, since, having undertaken the defense of truth, they said it was their duty to remove from men’s sight so detestable a spectacle, hateful to all the pious.
Especially in the year ’66, such great violence of iconoclasts gained strength throughout the whole of the Low Countries that within the span of a few days it overran Antwerp and very many neighboring places with the greatest tumult and great speed. They thrust a sword into the side of one statue; they cut off the head of another with an axe; with ropes they pulled down from on high an image of Christ hanging from the cross; after pulling it down, they crushed it into pieces; they overturned altars, cast down and plundered reliquaries, ornaments,
and the other apparatus of sacred things; and finally they perpetrated things which no sane or prudent man ever approved. At The Hague the people had been so inflamed against statues and idols that they professed that they would not be quiet until not only those which remained in the churches, but also all the statues which some men kept hidden in their own houses, were brought into the public square and crushed into little pieces, putting an end to their fury.
But this rashness and sedition did not lack its own reward. For the confederate nobles and other patrons of the churches, unwilling to be called by the hateful name of iconoclasts, not only severely disapproved the deed of the statues cast down in this manner, but, after collecting an irregular soldiery for these operations, seized very many everywhere and put them upon the cross in various places.
This the Prince of Orange also accomplished at Antwerp, when he apprehended the principal seditious men and on 18 October put them upon the cross in the public square, so that they might be a terror to others. But if the same thing had been done in the Palatinate, Anhalt, Hesse, and other places, the riotous Sacramentarians, constrained by their own great evil, would certainly have experienced less danger and fewer disturbances.
Certainly, in 1605, when in the Marburg Reformation, in the second of three articles proposed for changing doctrine and ceremonies, it was determined that statues and images were to be cast out of the churches, and on the sixth day of August the same thing was inculcated in a sermon, such disturbances and tumults followed from this single violent principle that the Calvinist theologians were almost punished with death by blows and beatings from the maddened populace, says Artus in volume 10 of the continuation of Sleidan, book 4, page 50. Such catastrophes must, to be sure, follow methods of reforming alien to the word of God.
Da man alles schnell Purdi/ Purdi anfengt/ mit Fäusten hinein treibet/ vnnd so unvorsichtig hinein plumpet/ vnnd noch den Ruhm dauon haben wil/ als sey man besser/ denn ein ander.
These things follow when action is suddenly taken with weapons, when men rush in without foresight, and nevertheless seek from it a reputation for excellence above others. Thus Luther wrote in the year ’22 concerning the similar Carlstadt Reformation, adding the wise ἐπικρίσει, judgment:
Da hastu weit gefehlet/ du wilt Gott damit dienen/ vnd weist nit/ dass dit eben des Teuffels Vorlauffer bist/ der hat dich auff das Kleinen Narrenwerck geführet/ das Sacrament anzugreiffen/ vnd sihet mich gleich an/ als hetten die ienigen/ so dieses Spiel angefangen haben/ ihren Ruhm gesuchet/ so hat auch ihnen der Teuffel ihren Lohn gegeben.
“You have strayed far. You wished to perform service for God, and you do not know that you are precisely the Devil’s forerunner, who reduced you to such folly that you violated the Sacraments. It is entirely evident to me that those who began the business sought their own glory. Therefore the Devil gave them their reward.” Thus Luther.
Add the prisons by which they rage against those who contradict their error, as Crell did in the year ’91. He had prepared a prison in the castle of Hohnstein for Doctor Martin Mirus, the Saxon court preacher; but by the just judgment of God, after the death of Christian I, he himself was accused of having advised Duke Christian to change the religion in Saxony and introduce Calvinism, and of having resolved to remove from their midst all who opposed this purpose of his, and so forth. Ordered to mount the cart, he was fastened into it before the eyes of a very great multitude of men.
All these and many other things are so great, so insidious, and so atrocious that to guard against them, preserve life and fortunes safely, and keep doctrine itself undefiled by them plainly lies ὑπὲρ ἀνθρώπους, beyond human powers. But it is by God’s grace that we have not been entirely consumed. For although he sometimes, as it were, closed his eyes and fell asleep, and loosened the reins for Sacramentarian lust, yet at last, as a father, he undertook the defense of his cause, routed and confounded the enemies by himself alone, and furnished to his people and Church a most ardently desired liberation, so that mighty Ilium fell, great Troy perished in one moment, and the fable of the Sacramentarians passed out into a fable and ended in a joyful καταστροφήν, catastrophe, which they had resolved in their own mind to close with a τραγικωτάτῳ, most tragic, ending.
§ 12. Finally, why does a Lutheran object to us the punishments of the Calvinists as though they were innocent men, when he knows that they dared monstrous things in France and the Low Countries, such as historians describe, since they cannot believe those men when they boast of their innocence?
For first, on folio 55: “Among the reckoning of these falsehoods—of which a very fertile crop is to be found among the Sacramentarian nation, so that blessed Luther not undeservedly judged that the Zwinglians should no longer be called liars, but falsehood itself—that claim is almost chief by which, throughout nearly this whole century, they have not feared to proclaim blessed Luther the first author of the Sacramentarian conflict.”
If they are falsehood itself—falsehood itself, I say—why do you believe falsehood itself when it asserts its innocence against the Kings of France and Spain and other Princes? First examine the proceedings of the judgments and the archives; and do not so hate the Pontiff that you prefer to believe not merely liars, but falsehood itself, rather than refrain from defaming him and the Most Christian and Catholic Kings.
But I meet you in your own house; you will fight among your own defenses. The Calvinists say that those afflicted with martyrdom by the Pontiff are martyrs—that is, innocent men killed for the true faith. If you believe this, admit testimony against your own men also. For why are martyrs worthy of trust against us, but, if their words act against your men, incapable of giving testimony? You order the Calvinist Scultetus on page 59 to swallow back, together with the rest, the calumny which he breathed out. Then you proceed: “If there were a mind to discuss these calumnies individually, the day would fail me sooner than speech.”
We shall show a compendium of the calumnies. They called the teachers of our churches: men most stupid; fanatics; self-lovers; petty theologians; vain talkers; most wicked sophists; sycophants; theosophists; corporalists; morose; ambitious; papal proscribers; men keeping the minds of Princes in ignorance through their calumnies; progenitors of Pandora; men driven by madness; forgetful of all moderation and shame; proud; fierce; most infamous tyrants over faith; Nestorians; Eutychians; patrons of Mohammedanism; obstinate; introducers of paradoxes and scandals; inhuman; bewitched by hatred and ambition; men offering vinegar mixed with gall to those hanging upon the cross; fathers of ubiquity; new dogmatists; dinner-table sophists; word-artificers; men contentious and obstinate beyond every measure; recent Capernaïtes; malicious old deceivers; infamously and impiously fickle; Ubiquitarians; sworn enemies of truth; most shameless cavillers; revivers of the Acephali and the Eutychian heresy; phantasmatics who mock the true incarnation of Christ; a conspiratorial faction of schismatics; restorers of bread-worship; delirious Sacramentarians; assertors of sincere doctrine concerning the Lord’s Supper who, like pirates sailing through the Church upon ambition and opinions, plunder truth together with peace;
men blinded by hatred and envy; most wicked sophists; new masters of the faith; deceivers; enemies of truth and peace; conspirators for the oppression of truth; most shameless cavillers; men infamously ignorant of the matters; manifest enemies and deniers of God’s omnipotence; pseudo-Lutherans and a Flacian faction; ἀνθρωποφάγους, κρεωφάγους, σαρκοφάγους—carnivores.
But they called the doctrine of our churches, contained in the symbols of the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord: a most infamous error; an unhappy offspring; a Pandora; a phantom and specter; a theatrical mask; a most absurd impiety; a most putrid and sophistical vanity; a heresy mixed from the Eutychian and Nestorian; phantastical imaginations; a most insane opinion; an execrable blasphemy; a ludicrous fiction; a sacrilegious impanation; an idol and fiction of bodily presence; doctrine worthy of impostors, not theologians; a trifling fiction; an execrable theology; Nestorianism; Antichristian worship; an idolatrous dogma; and six hundred other epithets of this kind—the judgments of these men’s brotherly affection toward us.
If, as is right, we bear all these things with perfect indifference, behold the snares prepared for the life and persons of orthodox Doctors! Doctor Mylius says in the Synopsis of the Meissen Comedy: you would see spies appointed after the death of Elector Augustus to observe the sayings and deeds of the more sincere theologians; men hired to bring unjust suits against them and, when they could not prevail by the cases themselves, at least to overcome their spirits merely by the proceeding; prayers and supplications, dangerous admonitions, seditious defenses, and accusations all beginning to be regarded and named capital offenses. For the space of several months the crossroads of the public ways in both directions not far from the city were beset. These men opened and searched the baggage of all messengers traveling either to the city or even back from it, seeking all letters written either by the Wittenberg theologians to others or by others to them, so that from those unsealed letters they might draw out something from which they could create dangers for the theologians’ heads.
Indeed, there was something more atrocious. Fictitious letters were written to the theologians, in which great συμπάθεια, compassion, toward the miserable face of religion was signified; consolation concerning aid that would follow was communicated; assistance was promised to those who would be exiled; and, moreover, splendid gifts were sent together with these fictitious letters, so that, if they held anything most deeply hidden in their breast by whose disclosure danger could be created for them, their interrogators might extract it by this device. In this business that John Major, the Wittenberg poet, was industrious; by this art he stripped and despoiled the excellent man and distinguished theologian Doctor John Matthaeus both of his academic station and of this mortal life.
The altered Augsburg Confession—a buskin suited to either foot—perfidy, and similar impostures served this scheme; by them Peucer and his associates formerly circumvented, mocked, and deceived their supreme Magistrate. Ambiguous writings and defamatory little books came together, accepted almost as though by some right of their own by men of this kind, and indeed most recently defended publicly. In them the reputation of good men is marked and traduced without shame and without source, so that a nearer step might be laid toward the unjust condemnation both of teachers and of doctrine. Edicts and decrees served it, concerning the Sacramentarians’ not being named or condemned, and concerning their blasphemies in sermons to the people, with threats added of banishment or exile and other more horrible penalties—those bloody scourges finally not resting until fulfilled in the deed itself. Indeed, fulfilled through so many exiles and similar penalties, in which men scarcely more merciful than Antichrist himself appeared.
The words of that courtier in the time of Christian I, Duke of Saxony, are known: “If those βλακικοὶ—fools—continue to be troublesome to you, at least cast them out on this ground, because they attempt to canonize Ubiquity.” And another saying of the same man: “Affairs will never proceed rightly unless the veterans, and those who possess a memory of earlier times, are first rolled away from the midst.” I shall say nothing of personal contentions and appeals to a Synod.
How can an unjust death be inferred from such things, or how can you, who judge them to be such men, make the severity of Christian Princes an object of hatred because by just vengeance they exercised the force of the laws against them? If you truly judge them martyrs, acknowledge those deeds of your men. You proclaim them scarcely more merciful toward your men than Antichrist himself, bestow upon your men the encomium of martyrs, and afterward canonize Ubiquity. Would you do these things if hatred and envy had left you any remnant of prudence? Read their deeds. A single year or two saw more Catholics slaughtered by Calvinist furies in France and the Low Countries alone than papal tribunals removed as guilty men in the whole of six hundred years.
But if we truly consider the times, we shall find among the Calvinists’ saints the Berengarians, Wycliffites, Hussites, and even Copronymus, the Isaurian Leos, the Henries, and others whom they canonize through hatred of the Pontiff. Accordingly, from Scripture I argue against the Lutherans in this manner:
The little horn, or Antichrist, will wear down the saints of the Most High and stir up a persecution as great as none has been from the time when men began to exist; but the Pontiff has not instituted so great a persecution against the Lutherans, for they afflicted far more Catholics with death, exile, and prisons than they themselves suffered from us. For how many Lutherans perished on account of faith? What Ubiquitarian gave his blood? For they can complain only concerning pure Lutherans and Lutherans of one nation; as for the others, they acknowledge that other scoundrels mingled with them. But we deny the claim concerning the whole of Lutheranism. Did they not rule nearly the whole of Germany and accomplish such slaughters that even now the mournful altars lie squalid in ruined churches?