ate. Where civil government alone
rules, there would be hypocrisy, though its laws were like God's
commandments themselves; for without the Holy Spirit in the heart none
can be pious, whatever good works he may perform. Where the spiritual
estate rules over land and people, there will be unbridled wickedness
and opportunity for all kinds of villainy, for the common world cannot
accept or understand it.-But it may be said, If, then, Christians do not
need the temporal power or law, why does St. Paul say to all Christians:
'Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers' (Rom. 13, 1)? In
reply to this, it is to be said again that Christians among themselves
and by and for themselves require no law or sword, for to them they are
not necessary or useful. But because a true Christian on earth lives for
and serves not himself, but his neighbor, so he also, from the nature of
his spirit, does that which he himself does not need, but which is
useful and necessary to his neighbor. The sword is a great and necessary
utility to the whole world for the maintenance of peace, the punishment
of wrong, and the restraint of the wicked. So the Christian pays tribute
and tax, honors civil authority, serves, assists, and does everything he
can do to maintain that authority with honor and fear." (p. 73 ff.)

In his _Appeal to the German Nobility_ (10, 266 ff.) Luther says:
"Forasmuch as the temporal power has been ordained by God for the
punishment of the bad and the protection of the good, therefore we must
let it do its duty throughout the whole Christian body, without respect
of persons, whether it strike Popes, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, or
whoever it may be. If it were sufficient reason for fettering the
temporal power that it is inferior among the offices of Christianity to
the offices of priest or confessor, to the spiritual estate,-if this
were so, then we ought to restrain tailors, cobblers, masons,
carpenters, cooks, cellarmen, peasants, and all secular workmen from
providing the Pope or bishops, priests and monks, with shoes, clothes,
houses, or victuals, or from paying them tithes. But if these laymen are
allowed to do their work without restraint, what do the Romanist scribes
mean by their laws? They mean that they withdraw themselves from the
operation of temporal Christian power, simply in order that they may be
free to do evil, and thus fulfil what St. Peter said: 'There shall be
false teachers among you, . . . and thro