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Germany.—In Germany, the cradle of printing, the pamphlet (Flugschrift) was soon a recognized and popular vehicle of thought, and the fierce religious controversies of the Reformation period afforded a unique opportunity for its use. The employment of the pamphlet in this connexion was characteristic of the new age. In coarse and violent language the pamphlets appealed directly to the people, whose sympathy the leaders of the opposing parties were most anxious to secure, and their issue on an enormous scale was undoubtedly one of the most potent influences in rousing the German people against the pope and the Roman Catholic Church. In general their tone was extremely intemperate, and they formed, as one authority has described those of a century later, “a mass of panegyric, admonition, invective, controversy and scurrility.” Luther was one of the earliest and most effective writers of the polemical pamphlet. His adherents quickly followed his example, and his opponents also were not slow to avail themselves of a weapon which was

proving itself so powerful. So intense at this time did this pamphlet war become that Erasmus wrote “apud Germanos, vix quicquam vendible est praeter Lutherana ae anti Lutherana.”