So far as the dialectic battle was concerned, Eck had been victorious. He had done what he had meant to do. He had made Luther declare himself. All that was now needed was a Papal Bull against Luther, and the world would be rid of another pestilent heretic. He had done what the more politic Miltitz had wished to avoid. He had concentrated the attention of Germany on Luther, and had made him the central figure round which all the smouldering discontent could gather. As for Luther, he returned to Wittenberg full of melancholy forebodings. They did not prevent him preparing and publishing for the German people an account of the Disputation, which was eagerly read. His arguments had been historical rather than theological. He tried to show that the acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome was barely four hundred years old in Western Europe, and that it did not exist in the East. The Greek Church, he said, was part of the Church of Christ, and it would have nothing to do with the Pope; the great Councils of the Early Christian centuries knew nothing about papal supremacy. Athanasius, Basil, the Gregories, Cyprian himself, had all taken Luther’s own position, and were heretics, according to Eck. Luther’s speeches at Leipzig laid the foundation of that modern historical criticism of institutions which has gone so far in our own days. In some respects the Leipzig Disputation was the most important point in the career of Luther. It made him see for the first time what lay in his opposition to Indulgences. It made the people see it also. His attack was no criticism, as he had at first thought, of a mere excrescence on the mediæval ecclesiastical system. He had struck at its centre; at its ideas of a priestly mediation which denied the right of every believer to immediate entrance into the very presence of God. It was after the Disputation at Leipzig that the younger German Humanists rallied round Luther to a man; that the burghers saw that religion and opposition to priestly tyranny were not opposite things; and that there was room for an honest attempt to create a Germany for the Germans independent of Rome. Luther found himself a new man after Leipzig, with a new freedom and wider sympathies. His depression fled. Sermons, pamphlets, letters from his tireless pen flooded the land, and were read eagerly by all classes of the population. § 4. The Three Treatises.(171)