"If there would be no one to fight for that principle."

War is never a pleasant affair. When men are forced to fight for what is
dearer to them than life, they will strike hard and deep. It is silly to
expect a soldier to walk up to his enemy with a fly brush and shoo him
away, or to stop and consider what posterity would probably regard as
the least objectionable way for dispatching an enemy. Luther was called
to be a warrior; he had to use warriors' methods. Any general in a
bloody campaign can be criticized for violence with as much reason as is
shown by some critics of Luther.


5. The Popes in Luther's Time.

To judge intelligently the activity of Luther it is necessary to
understand the state of the Church in his day and the character of the
chief bishops of the Church. When reading modern censures of Luther's
attacks upon the papacy, one wonders why nothing is said about the thing
that Luther attacked. Catholic critics of Luther surely must know what
papal filth lies accumulated in the _Commentarii di Marino Sanuto,_ in
Alegretto Alegretti's _Diari Sanesi,_ in the _Relazione di Polo
Capello,_ in the _Diario de Sebastiano di Branca de Tilini,_ in the
_Successo di la Morte di Papa Alessandro,_ in Tommaso Inghirami's _Fea,
Notizie Intorno Rafaele Sanzio da Urbino,_ and others. Ranke worked with
these authorities when he wrote his _History of the Popes_. What about
the authorities which Gieseler cites in his _Ecclesiastical History_--
Muratori, Fabronius, Machiavelli, Sabellicus, Raynaldus, Eccardus,
Burchardus, etc.? A compassionate age has relegated the exact account of
the moral state of the papacy in Luther's days to learned works, and
even in these they are given mostly in Latin footnotes. In the language