Henceforth there was no room for compromise. The papacy, now fairly aroused to the magnitude of the situation, replied in 1520, at Eck's prompting, with its last weapon, the bull of excommunication. This weapon fell absolutely harmless. The academic youth of Wittenberg, with Luther at their head, marched in festive procession to the Elstergate, kindled a bonfire, and threw into it the offending document. But this was not all. Papal bulls had often met this fate before, without serious loss of prestige for the authority which lay behind them. This time, however, not merely the bull in question, but also a copy of the Canon Law, the whole body of legal authority on which the power to issue bulls rested, was committed to the flames. That meant, not merely that Luther and all who supported him refused to obey this particular decree, but that they proposed to emancipate themselves, once for all, from the control of the whole system which it represented. With this step the Lutheran movement passed from the stage of Reformation to the stage of Revolution. At this point the eminently constructive nature of Luther's genius began to display itself. He had not rejected one authority in order to escape all authority. He had not thrown aside one ecclesiastical order, to leave the Church without any order at all. In those splendid proclamations of the year 1520, "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church," the "Address to the Christian Nobility of Germany," and the "Freedom of the Christian Man," he unfolded his programme for a new and purified church order on the basis of the Christian state. Luther's apologists in Germany have sought to save him from the charge, dreadful to German ears, of being a revolutionist. Let us, citizens of a nation to which revolution has meant only the entrance into a larger and a better-ordered public life, admit frankly that the action of North Germany in the years following 1520 was, so far as church matters were concerned, revolutionary, and that only as such can it be justified or understood. True, it was defended then and has been defended ever since as being merely a return to an order of things once realised in the early Church. But when a body of institutions have held their own for a thousand years their overthrow cannot be disguised by any gentle figures of speech about mere reformation and restoration.