uther concludes as follows:
"Away therefore with all those prophets who say to Christ's people
'Peace, peace!' when there is no peace, but welcome to all those who bid
them seek the Cross of Christ, not the cross which bears the papal arms.
Christians must be admonished to follow Christ their Master through
torture, death, and hell, and thus through much tribulation, rather
than, by a carnal feeling of false security, hope to enter the kingdom
of heaven."

The Catholics objected to this doctrine of salvation advanced by Luther
that, by trusting to God's free mercy, and by undervaluing good works,
it led to moral indolence. But, on the contrary, it was to the very
unbending moral earnestness of a Christian conscience, which, indignant
at the temptations offered to moral frivolity, to a deceitful feeling of
ease in respect to sin and guilt, and to a contempt of the fruits of
true morality, rebelled against the false value attached to this
indulgence money, that these theses, the germ, so to speak, of the
Reformation, owed their origin and prosecution. With the same
earnestness he now for the first time publicly attacked the
ecclesiastical power of the papacy, in so far namely as, in his
conviction, it invaded the territory reserved to himself by the heavenly
Lord and Judge. This was what the Pope and his theologians and
ecclesiastics could least of all endure.

On the same day that these theses were published, Luther sent a copy of
them with a letter to the archbishop Albert, his "revered and gracious
lord and shepherd in Christ." After a humble introduction, he begged him
most earnestly to prevent the scandalizing and iniquitous harangues with
which his agents hawked about their indulgences, and reminded him that
he would have to give an account of the souls intrusted to his episcopal
care.

The next day he addressed himself to the people from the pulpit in a
sermon he had to preach on the festival of All Saints. After exhorting
them to seek their salvation in God and Christ alone, and to let the
consecration by the Church become a real consecration of the heart, he
went on to tell them plainly, with regard to indulgences, that he could
only absolve from duties imposed by the Church, and that they dare not
rely on him for more, nor delay on his account the duties of true
repentance.

Theologians before Luther, and with far more acuteness and penetration
than he showed in his theses, had already assailed the whole sy