Looking back to this visit later, Luther remarked, "I believed
everything" Just what official Rome expected every devout pilgrim to do,
just what it expects them to do to-day. And these Romanists want to
point the finger of ridicule at the simpleton, the easy dupe, the holy
fool Luther! Does Rome perhaps think the same of all the pious pilgrims
that annually crowd Rome? Luther heard himself called "un buon
Christiano" at Rome and discovered that that meant as much as "an
egregious ass." But he considered that a part of Italian wickedness. The
Church, he was sure, approved of all that he did, in fact, had taught
him to do all that. It required ten years or more to disabuse his mind
of the frauds that had been practised on him, and then he declared that
he would not take 100,000 gulden not to have seen with his own eyes how
scandalously the Popes were hoodwinking Christians. If it were not for
his visit at Rome, he says, he might fear that he was slandering the
Popes in what he wrote about them.

While Luther's visit at Rome, then, brought about no spiritual change in
him, it helped to give him a good conscience afterwards when his
conflict with Rome had begun.


13. Pastor Luther.

Luther's famous protest against the sale of indulgences, published
October 31, 1517, in the form of ninety-five theses, is represented by
Catholic writers as an outburst of Luther's violent temper and an
assault upon the Catholic Church that he had long premeditated. By this
time, it is said, Luther had become known to his colleagues as a
quarrelsome man, loving disputations and jealous of victory in a debate.