The third wall falls with the other two. It is nonsense to say that _the Pope alone can call a Council_. We are plainly taught in Scripture that if our brother offends we are to tell it to the Church; and if the Pope offends, and he often does, we can only obey Scripture by calling a Council. Every individual Christian has a right to do his best to have it summoned; the temporal powers are there to enforce his wishes; Emperors called General Councils in the earlier ages of the Church. The straw and paper walls having been thus cleared away, Luther proceeds to state his indictment. There is in Rome one who calls himself the Vicar of Christ, and who lives in a state of singular resemblance to our Lord and to St. Peter, His apostle. For this man wears a triple crown (a single one does not content him), and keeps up such a state that he needs a larger personal revenue than the Emperor. He has surrounding him a number of men, called cardinals, whose only apparent use is that they serve to draw to themselves the revenues of the richest convents, endowments, and benefices in Europe, and spend the money thus obtained in keeping up the state of a great monarch in Rome. When it is impossible to seize the whole revenue of an ecclesiastical benefice, the Curia joins some ten or twenty together, and mulcts each in a good round sum for the benefit of the cardinal. Thus the priory of Würzburg gives one thousand gulden yearly, and Bamberg, Mainz, and Trier pay their quotas. The papal court is enormous,—three thousand papal secretaries, and hangers-on innumerable; and all are waiting for German benefices, whose duties they never fulfil, as wolves wait for a flock of sheep. Germany pays more to the Curia than it gives to its own Emperor. Then look at the way Rome robs the whole German land. Long ago the Emperor permitted the Pope to take the half of the first year’s income from every benefice—the _Annates_—to provide for a war against the Turks. The money was never spent for the purpose destined; yet it has been regularly paid for a hundred years, and the Pope demands it as a regular and legitimate tax, and uses it to pay posts and offices at Rome. “Whenever there is any pretence of fighting the Turk, they send out commissions for collecting money, and often proclaim Indulgences under the same pretext.... They think that we, Germans, will always remain such great fools, and that we will go on giving money to satisfy their unspeakable greed, though we see plainly that neither _Annates_ nor _Indulgence-money_ nor anything—not one farthing—goes against the Turks, but all goes into their bottomless sack, ... and all this is done in the name of Christ and of St. Peter.”