sword with bare hand and unshielded head? It is no
different when we essay, with our reason, to defend God's law,
which should rather be our weapon.

From this, I hope, it is clear that the flimsy argument of this
prattler fails utterly, and, together with everything he
constructs upon it, is found to be without any basis whatever.
But that he may the better understand his own mummery, even in
case I should grant that a process of reasoning might be entirely
valid without the Scriptures, I will show that neither of his
arguments is valid, neither the first, A, nor the second, B.

[Sidenote: The Argument Answered]

The first, A, is that every community on earth must have one
visible head under Christ. This is simply not true. How many
principalities, castles, cities, and houses we find where two
brothers or lords reign--and with equal authority. The Roman
empire governed itself for a long time, and very well, without
the one head, and many other countries in the world did the same.
How does the Swiss confederacy govern itself at present? Thus in
the government of the world there is not one single overlord, yet
we are all one human race, descended from the one father, Adam.
The kingdom of France has its own king, Hungary its own, Poland,
Denmark, and every other kingdom its own, and yet they are one
people, the temporal estate in Christendom, without one common
head; and still this does not cause these kingdoms to perish. And
if there were no government constituted in just this manner, who
could or would prevent a community from choosing not one, but
many overlords, all clothed with equal power? Therefore it is a
very poor procedure to measure the things which are of God's
appointing by such vacillating analogies of worldly things, when
they do not hold even in the appointments of men. But suppose I
should grant this dreamer that his dream is true, and that no
community can exist without one visible head; how does it follow
that it must likewise be so in the Church?[21] I know very well
that the poor dreamer has a certain conception, according to
which a Christian community is the same as any other temporal
community.[22] He thus reveals plainly that he has never learned
to know what Christendom, or the Christian community, really is.
I had not believed it possible to meet such dense, massive,
stubborn error and ignorance in any man, much less in a saint of
Leipzig.

For the benefit, therefore, of this numskull, an