t
conservatives that ever lived; and his biographer, Juergens, makes the
more discriminating remark that history knows of no man who was at once
so great an insurgent and so great an upholder of order as he.[223]
Neither of these writers understood that the same principle lies at the
root both of revolution and of passive obedience, and that the
difference is only in the temper of the person who applies it, and in
the outward circumstances.

Luther's theory is apparently in opposition to Protestant interests, for
it entitles Catholicism to the protection of Catholic Powers. He
disguised from himself this inconsistency, and reconciled theory with
expediency by the calculation that the immense advantages which his
system offered to the princes would induce them all to adopt it. For,
besides the consolatory doctrine of justification,--"a doctrine
original, specious, persuasive, powerful against Rome, and wonderfully
adapted, as if prophetically, to the genius of the times which were to
follow,"[224]--he bribed the princes with the wealth of the Church,
independence of ecclesiastical authority, facilities for polygamy, and
absolute power. He told the peasants not to take arms against the Church
unless they could persuade the Government to give the order; but
thinking it probable, in 1522, that the Catholic clergy would, in spite
of his advice, be exterminated by the fury of the people, he urged the
Government to suppress them, because what was done by the constituted
authority could not be wrong.[225] Persuaded that the sovereign power
would be on his side, he allowed no limits to its extent. It is absurd,
he says, to imagine that, even with the best intentions, kings can avoid
committing occasional injustice; they stand, therefore, particularly in
need--not of safeguards against the abuse of power, but--of the
forgiveness of sins.[226] The power thus concentrated in the hands of
the rulers for the guardianship of the faith, he wished to be used with
the utmost severity against unregenerate men, in whom there was neither
moral virtue nor civil rights, and from whom no good could come until
they were converted. He therefore required that all crimes should be
most cruelly punished and that the secular arm should be employed to
convert where it did not destroy. The idea of mercy tempering justice he
denounced as a Popish superstition.[227]

The chief object of the severity thus recommended was, of course,
efficaciously to pr