e spiritual powers at Rome, must, they thought, sympathise
with their revolt against far worse abuses at home. They were bitterly
to be disappointed. From Luther and the band of scholastic Reformers
that had gathered round him, they were to receive neither aid, guidance
nor sympathy. The learned and cultured Melanchthon, Luther's right hand,
denounced their demand that serfdom should be abolished as an insolent
and violent outrage (_ein Frevel und Gewalt_), and preached passive
obedience to any and every established authority. "Even if all the
demands of the peasants were Christian," he said, "the uprising of the
peasants would not be justified; and that because God commands obedience
to the authorities." Luther's attitude was much the same. Though a son
of a peasant, and evidently realising that the demands of the peasants
were just and moderate, and "not stretched to their advantage," he at
first assumed a somewhat neutral attitude, which, however, he soon
relinquished; and in a pamphlet to which his greatest admirers must wish
he had never put his name, and which shocked even his own times and
many of his own immediate followers, he proclaimed that to put down the
revolt all "who can shall destroy, strangle, and stab, secretly or
openly, remembering that nothing is more poisonous, hurtful and devilish
than a rebellious man."

The rulers did not fail to better his instruction. In defence of their
privileges, the German princes, spiritual and temporal, catholic and
evangelical, united their forces, and the uprising was put down in a sea
of blood. The peasants, comparatively unarmed, were slaughtered by
thousands, and the yoke of serfdom was firmly re-fastened on the necks
of the people, until, some three hundred years later, in 1807, the
Napoleonic invasion compelled the ruling classes voluntarily to
relinquish some of their most cherished privileges. From a popular and
religious, the Reformation in Germany degenerated into a mere political
movement, and fell almost entirely into the hands of princes and
politicians to be exploited for their own purposes. The reorganisation
of the Churches, which the Reformation rendered necessary in those
States where it was maintained, was for the most part undertaken by the
secular authorities in accordance with the views of the temporal rulers,
whose religious belief their unfortunate subjects were assumed to have
adopted. The activities of the Lutheran Reformers were soon engrossed