Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/77

 gladly and joyfully put his trust in God and will start such a game with the Cardinal of Mayence as few people expect. Get together, dear Bishops ; you may be fighting-men, but you will not put this Spirit to silence or deafen Him. If you un- expectedly become a laughing-stock, remember that I have warned you.

Wherefore I write to tell your Grace that if the idol is not taken down, my duty to godly doctrine and Christian salvation will absolutely force me to attack your Grace pub- licly, as I did the Pope, and oppose your undertaking, and lay all the odiimi which Tetzel once had upon the Archbishop of Mayence, and show all the world the diflference between a bishop and a wolf. Your Grace will now know how to act. If I am despised another will come who will despise the de- spiser, as Isaiah says.* I have admonished your Grace enough ; henceforth it is time to act on the teaching of St. Paul,* and openly rebuke the open offenders before the whole world, reprove them and laugh them to scorn, so that the cause of oflfence may be removed from the kingdom of God. ^' Moreover, I beg your Grace to leave in peace the priests who, to avoid unchastity, have betaken themselves to mar- riage,* or desire to do so. Do not deprive them of their God- given rights. Your Grace has no authority, reason nor right to persecute them, and arbitrary crime does not become a bishop. What do you bishops accomplish by resorting so boldly to force and embittering men's hearts against you, when you will not and cannot show either right or reason for your course? Have you all become giants and Nimrods from Babylon? Do you not know, poor things, that arbitrariness and tyranny cannot long endure, because they have an evil ap- pearance and run counter to the common prayer of Christians ? Why do you hasten, like madmen, to your destruction? It will come soon enough of its own accord.

Let your Grace beware, lest if you do not stop it the evan- gelical party will raise an outcry, and point out that it would become the bishops to cast first the beams out of their

1 Isaiah xxxiii, i. ■ I Corinthians v.

'The Archbishop had summoned Bemhardi to appear before him. Vidt supra no. $02, p. 51, n. 4.

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