revived by Leo X in 1517, half the proceeds to go to the
Archbishop of Mentz, that he might pay back a loan to Fugger of
Augsburg. The banker's agent went round with the appointed preacher
and kept the strong box. Tetzel, a Dominican, preached the indulgence
in Saxony, though not in the territory of the elector, and he employed
to the utmost the arguments authorised by the custom of the day.
Speaking of him and of his colleagues, Benedict XIV said that they
were the cause of all the trouble that followed.

Many people thought the indulgences, as then practised, a mischief,
because people took them as equivalent to absolution; and the general
of the Augustinians spoke of them as an encouragement to sin. But the
extreme point was the theory that payment of a few pence would rescue
a soul from purgatory. Therefore, when Luther raised a protest
against such propositions, he said no more than what many other people
were saying, and less than some. And he had no idea that he was not
speaking in thorough harmony with the entire Church, or that the
ground he occupied was new. The Dominicans stood by Tetzel and made
his cause their own. They were able to say of him that he had only
uttered current doctrine, though it had not the sanction of former
ages. Three hundred of them were present when he received a degree at
Frankfort on the Oder, and the Dominicans at Rome defended even the
most extreme and grotesque of the sayings attributed to him.

Leo committed the whole business to Silvester Prierias, Master of the
Sacred Palace and official theologian of the Holy See. Prierias was
not a reputable defender of any religious cause. In one of his books
he advises a judge that he may obtain a confession by a promise of
mercy, meaning mercy to the community, and charges the notary to put
down in what sense the words were spoken. Accordingly he made the
worst possible defence. St. Thomas, discussing indulgences as they
were in his time, urges that they may be accepted as they are given by
authority. Prierias, an ardent Thomist, regards this as a valid
argument for the practices that were now contested. The problem of
right is settled by the evidence of fact. The questors, as they were
called, acted as legitimate agents of the Holy See. To deny what
authority tacitly approves, is to deny authority; and to appeal from
the Pope to the Bible, is to appeal from a higher authority to a
lower. This was to ignore the difficult