by their own negligence. Then, when we say, "Christendom does not
err," we shall also be saying that they do not err, since
Christendom believes it to be so. So no pilgrimage can be wrong,
no matter how obviously the Devil is a participant in it. No
indulgence can be wrong, regardless of how horrible the lies
involved. In other words, there is nothing there but holiness!
Therefore to this you reply, "It is not a question of who is and
who is not condemned." They inject this irrelevant idea in order
to divert us from the topic at hand. We are now discussing the
Word of God. What Christendom is or does belongs somewhere
else. The question here is: "What is or is not the Word of God?
What is not the Word of God does not make Christendom.

We read that in the days of Elijah the prophet there was
apparently no word from God and no worship of God in Israel. For
Elijah says, "Lord, they have killed your prophets and destroyed
your altars, and I am left totally alone" [I Kings 19]. Here King
Ahab and others could have said, "Elijah, with talk like that you
are condemning all the people of God." However God had at the
same time kept seven thousand [I Kings 19]. How? Do you not also
think that God could now, under the papacy, have preserved his
own, even though the priests and monks of Christendom have been
teachers of the devil and gone to hell? Many children and young
people have died in Christ. For even under the anti-Christ,
Christ has strongly sustained baptism, the bare text of the gospel
in the pulpit, the Lord's Prayer, and the Creed. By this means he
sustained many of his Christians, and therefore also his
Christendom, and said nothing about it to these devil's teachers.

Now even though Christians have done some parts of the papal