character of the teaching they contained. The /Obelisks/ was prepared
hastily and was not intended for publication, but it was regarded as
so important that copies of it were circulated freely even before it
was given to the world. Luther replied in the /Asterisks/, a work full
of personal invective and abuse. A Dominican of Cologne, Hochstraten,
also entered the lists against Luther, but his intervention did more
harm than good to the cause of the Church by alienating the Humanist
party whom he assailed fiercely as allies and abettors of Luther.
These attacks, however, served only to give notoriety to Luther's
views and to win for him the sympathy of his friends. His opponents
made one great mistake. Their works were intended in great part only
for the learned, while Luther aimed principally at appealing to the
masses of the people. The Augustinians represented him as the victim
of a Dominican conspiracy, and to show their high appreciation of his
services they selected him to conduct the theological disputation at a
chapter meeting held at Leipzig six months after the publication of
his theses (1518). At this same meeting Luther defended the view that
free will in man and all power of doing good were destroyed by
original sin, and that everything meritorious accomplished by man is
really done by God. His old opponent at the university, Bodenstein
(surnamed Carlstadt from his place of birth), declared himself openly
in favour of Luther's teaching on free will, and published a reply to
Eck.

As a result of this controversy between Eck and Carlstadt it was
arranged that a public disputation should be held at Leipzig (27 June-
15 July, 1519). The Catholic teaching was to be defended by Eck
against his two opponents, Luther and Carlstadt. A hall in the castle
of Pleissenburg was placed at the disposal of the disputants by Duke
George of Saxony, who was a convinced Catholic himself, and who