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 most strongly to his own individuality, while he neglected those which, like St James' Epistle, did not suit his doctrines. But he could hardly refuse a like liberty to others, and was thus soon involved in a struggle with Reformers who like himself started from the denial of the authority of the Roman Church, but pressed further than he did his own arguments on the freedom of the will and the weight attaching to Scripture.

Luther's seclusion at the Wartburg did not allay the intellectual ferment at Wittenberg or impair the influence it exercised over the rest of Germany. At Wittenberg both the University and the town defied alike the papal Bull and the imperial Edict. Scholars flocked to the University from all quarters, and it became the metropolis of the reforming movement. Melanchthon forsook the Clouds of Aristophanes to devote himself to the Epistles of St Paul; and his Loci Communes formed one of the most effective of Lutheran handbooks. But he lacked the force and decision of character to lead or control the revolutionary tendencies which were gathering strength, and Luther's place was taken by his old ally Carlstadt. Carlstadt's was one of those acute intellects which earn for their possessors the reputation of being reckless agitators because they are too far in advance of their age; and the doubts which he entertained of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and of the identity of the Gospels, as they then existed, with their original form, were considered to be evidence of the instability of his character rather than of the soundness of his reasoning faculties. He was not, however, free from personal vanity or jealousy of Luther, and his rival's absence afforded him the opportunity of appearing as the leader of the movement. Declining an invitation from Christian II to Denmark, he united with Gabriel Zwilling in an attempt to destroy what Luther had left of the papal system. He attacked clerical celibacy in a voluminous treatise, demanding that marriage should be made compulsory for secular priests and optional for monastics. He denounced the whole institution of monachism, and pronounced the adoration of the Eucharist and private masses to be sinful. On December 3, 1521, there was a riot against the Mass, and the University demanded its abolition throughout the country. The Town Council refused its concurrence in this request, but on Christmas-Day Carlstadt administered the Sacrament of the Altar in both elements, omitting the preparatory confession, the elevation of the Host, and the "abominable canon," which implied that the celebration was a sacrifice. Zwilling next inveighed against the viaticum and extreme unction as being a financial trick on the part of the priests, and entered upon an iconoclastic campaign, inviting his hearers to burn the pictures in churches« and to destroy the altars.

Reminiscences of Hussite doctrine may have predisposed the Saxon population living on the borders of Bohemia in favour of Carlstadt's proceedings, and he was now reinforced by the influx from Zwickau of