locality. If you follow out this line of thought to the end, you will
come to a point where you strike hands with Rudyard Kipling, who has
sung enthusiastically about a certain locality beyond Aden where the Ten
Commandments do not exist. And to think that this plea is made by people
who have charged Luther with having put the Ten Commandments out of
commission for himself and others! Italians, lovers of freedom and
unrestraint, were the first to fill the world with tales about the moral
besottedness of Luther! This goes to show that in any application of the
Ten Commandments it matters very much who does the applying.

We have in a previous chapter briefly reviewed the Popes that were
contemporaries of Luther. Their character was stamped on the life of the
Holy City: The Popes and their following gave Rome its moral, or
immoral, face. The chroniclers of those days have described the existing
conditions. Luther need not have said one word about what wicked things
he had seen and heard at Rome, either ten years, or twenty years, or
thirty years after he had been there, and the world would still know the
record of the residence of the Popes. Luther really saw very little of
what he might have seen, and it is probable that he has told less. But
what he did see and hear are facts. He did not grasp their full meaning
nor see their true bearing at the time. The real import of his Roman
experiences dawned on him at a later period. He spoke as a man of things
that he had seen as a child. But that does not alter the facts.

Luther was shocked at the levity of Italian monks who were babbling
faulty Latin prayers which they did not understand and remarked laughing
to him: "Never mind; the Holy Ghost understands us, and the devil flees
apace."

Luther's confidence in the boasted unity of the Roman Church was