e judgment of God
already awaits "the drunken and mad princes." He quotes the phrase:
"Deposuit potentes de sede" (Luke i. 52), and adds "that is your case,
dear lords, even now when ye see it not!" After an admonition to
subjects to refuse to go forth to war against the Turks, or to pay
taxes towards resisting them, who were ten times wiser and more godly
than German princes, the pamphlet concludes with the prayer: "May God
deliver us from ye all, and of His grace give us other rulers!"
Against such utterances as the above, the conventional exhortations to
Christian humility, non-resistance, and obedience to those in
authority, would naturally not weigh in a time of popular ferment. So,
until the momentous year 1525, it was not unnatural that,
notwithstanding his quarrel with Muenzer and the Zwickau enthusiasts,
and with others whom he deemed to be going "too far," Luther should
have been regarded as in some sort the central figure of the
revolutionary movement, political and social, no less than religious.

But the great literary and agitatory forces during the period referred
to were of course either outside the Lutheran movement proper or at
most only on the fringe of it. A mass of broadsheets and pamphlets,
specimens of some of which have been given in a former volume (_German
Society at the Close of the Middle Ages_, pp. 114-28), poured from the
press during these years, all with the refrain that things had gone on
long enough, that the common man, be he peasant or townsman, could no
longer bear it. But even more than the revolutionary literature were
the wandering preachers effective in working up the agitation which
culminated in the Peasants' War of 1525. The latter comprised men of
all classes, from the impoverished knight, the poor priest, the
escaped monk, or the travelling scholar, to the peasant, the mercenary
soldier out of employment, the poor handicraftsman, of even the
beggar. Learned and simple, they wandered about from place to place,
in the market place of the town, in the common field of the village,
from one territory to another, preaching the gospel of discontent.
Their harangues were, as a rule, as much political as religious, and
the ground tone of them all was the social or economic misery of the
time, and the urgency of immediate action to bring about a change. As
in the literature, so in the discourses, Biblical phrases designed to
give force to the new teaching abounded. The more thorough-g