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 left unsaid, as upon the respective emphasis to be laid on the various things he said, and on the meaning his words were likely to convey to his readers. His first tract on the subject, written and published in the early days of the movement, distributed blame with an impartial but lavish hand. He could not countenance the use of force, but many of the peasants' demands were undeniably just, and their revolt was the vengeance of God for the Princes' sins. Both parties could, and no doubt did, interpret this as a pronouncement in their favour; and, indeed, stripped of its theology, violence, and rhetoric, the tract was a sensible and accurate diagnosis of the case. But, although the Princes may have deserved his strictures, a prudent man who really believed the revolt to be evil would have refrained from such attacks at that moment. Luther, however, could not resist the temptation to attribute the ruin which threatened the Princes to their stiffnecked rejection of Lutheran dogma; and his invectives poured oil on the flames of revolt. Its rapid progress filled him with genuine terror, and it is probably unjust to ascribe his second tract merely to a desire to be found on the side of the big battalions. It appeared in the middle of May, 1525, possibly before the news of any great defeat inflicted on the insurgent bands had reached him, and when it would have required more than Luther's foresight to predict their speedy collapse.

Yet terror and his proximity to Thuringia, the scene of the most violent and dangerous form of the revolt, while they may palliate, cannot excuse Luther's efforts to rival the brutal ferocity of Miinzer's doctrines. He must have known that the Princes' victory, if it came at all, would be bloody enough without his exhortations to kill and slay the peasants like mad dogs, and without his promise of heaven to those who fell in the holy work. His sympathy with the masses seems to have been limited to those occasions when he saw in them a useful weapon to hold over the heads of his enemies. He once lamented that refractory servants could no longer be treated like " other cattle " as in the days of the Patriarchs; and he joined with Melanchthon and Spalatin in removing the scruples of a Saxon noble with regard to the burdens his tenants bore. "The ass will have blows," he said, "and the people will be ruled by force"; and he was not free from the upstart's contempt for the class from which he sprang. His followers echoed his sentiments; Melanchthon thought even serfdom too mild for stubborn folk like the Germans, and maintained that the master's right of punishment and the servant's duty of submission should both be unlimited. It was little wonder that the organisers of the Lutheran Church afterwards found the peasants deaf to their exhortations, or that Melanchthon was once constrained to admit that the people abhorred himself and his fellow-divines.

It is almost a commonplace with Lutheran writers to justify Luther's action on the ground that the Peasants' Revolt was revolutionary,