previous proposition, might not feel absolutely and finally sure that he was right, or might even recognise the force of the saying that it is well to die for the truth, but not for every truth. Eck joined with Cajetan in urging the strongest measures of repression. A different line of policy suggested itself, in the spirit of Erasmus. It was to hail Luther as an auxiliary, as the most powerful leader in the work of eradicating evils which were a familiar scandal to all religious men, and the constant theme of ineffective Cardinals on every solemn occasion Then they might have confronted whatever was to follow with cleaner hands and a better conscience.
In June 1520, after a year's deliberation, Luther was condemned as the teacher of forty-one heresies; and in January, after he had made a bonfire of the Papal Bull and of the Canon Law, he was excommunicated. According to imperial constitutions three centuries old, the next step was that the civil magistrate, as the favourite phrase was, would send the culprit through the transitory flames of this world to the everlasting flames of the next. If that was not done, it might come to pass that the zeal of Prierias, Cajetan, and Eck would serve to inform the world that the medieval reign was over, and that the pen of an angry, rude, and not very learned monk was stronger than the Papacy and the Empire. It was known from the first that the Elector of Saxony would defend Luther, without being a Lutheran. Indeed, he shocked him by his zeal for indulgences and his collection of 19,000 relics. But he protected Luther as the most famous teacher of his university. They never met, and when the Elector on his deathbed sent for him, Luther was away. Since the Disputation of Leipzig he was the most conspicuously popular man in Germany. What he had said about the use and abuse of indulgences had not inflamed the nation. But the appeal to Scripture was definite and clear, and it met many objections and many causes of opposition.
When Luther was discussing the value of indulgences here and in the other world he meant no more and saw
