145. Thus encouraged, Luther, who gave way at times to his naturally violent disposition, became threatening, and suggested that the civil power should punish the churchmen and force them to reform their conduct. "We punish thieves with the gallows, bandits with the sword, heretics with fire; why should we not, with far greater propriety, attack with every kind of weapon these very masters of perdition, the cardinals, popes, and the whole mob in the Roman Sodom?" "The die is cast," he writes to a friend; "I despise Rome's wrath as I do her favor; I will have no reconciliation or intercourse with her in all time to come. Let her condemn and burn my writings. I will, if fire can be found, publicly condemn and burn the whole papal law." [Sidenote: Luther's and Hutten's appeal to the German people.] [Sidenote: Luther's _Address to the German Nobility_.] Hutten and Luther vied with one another during the year 1520 in attacking the pope and his representatives. They both possessed a fine command of the German language, and they were fired by a common hatred of Rome. Hutten had little or none of Luther's religious fervor, but he could not find colors too dark in which to picture to his countrymen the greed of the papal curia, which he described as a vast den, to which everything was dragged which could be filched from the Germans. Of Luther's popular pamphlets, the first really famous one was his _Address to the German Nobility_, in which he calls upon the rulers of Germany, especially the knights, to reform the abuses themselves, since he believed that it was vain to wait for the Church to do so. He explains that there are three walls behind which the papacy had been wont to take refuge when any one proposed to remedy its abuses. There was, first, the claim that the clergy formed a separate class, superior even to the civil rulers, who might not punish a churchman, no matter how bad he was. Secondly, the pope claimed to be superior to a council, so that even the representatives of the Church might not correct him. And, lastly, the pope assumed the sole right to interpret the meaning of the Scriptures; consequently he could not be refuted by arguments from the Bible. Thus the pope had stolen the three rods with which he might have been punished. Luther claimed to cast down these defenses by denying, to begin with, that there was anything especially sacred about a clergyman except the duties which he had been designated to perform. If he did not attend to his work he might be deprived of his office at any moment, just as one would turn off an incompetent tailor or farmer, and in that case he became a simple layman again. Luther claimed that it was the right and duty of the civil government to punish a churchman who does wrong just as if he were the humblest layman. When this first wall was destroyed the others would fall easily enough, for the dominant position of the clergy was the very corner stone of the mediæval Church.[280]