That the world of Europe in 1520 felt itself involved in a work of revolution is abundantly proved by the action of every party concerned. That the papacy should so regard it was self-evident. All reformation which should go beyond the stage of merely commending virtue and condemning vice must seem to it revolutionary. Its fundamental proposition was that all which was had, in its essence, always been, and that every innovation must therefore tend to destroy something essential to the very nature of the Church. From the moment when the papal government began at all to comprehend the meaning of the German revolt, it began to treat it as revolution. More striking still, however, is the rapidity with which all the restless elements of society recognised that here was an idea closely akin to their own instinct of revolution. Hardly had Luther's first propositions, temperate and modest as they were, been put forth, when, in his immediate circle of influence, men were found who were ready to draw the last logical consequences from them. If it was true that men were justified in the sight of God solely by faith, then obviously there was no need of any mediating agency whatever. Away with all forms, priesthoods, ceremonies, and sacraments as so much useless rubbish piled up by centuries of wrong! If it was true that God's dealing with man was direct and not indirect, then why might not men look for immediate inspiration of the divine spirit as of old before all this machinery of priests and forms had been invented? If the word of God was not to be bound by a papacy, why let it be bound by an ancient book, in which, as was well known, there was a plenty of errors and falsities? Had God, then, ceased to communicate with man? All these questions were asked by men of thought and education; and the answers were not slow in coming. They came, as in times of great social unrest they always come, in the form of wild theories and passionate claims, none of which was quite without a basis of reason, but which, taken together, called up a ghastly spectre that could bear no other name than Revolution. The message of deliverance from the bondage of personal sin without the aid of a corrupt and greedy church establishment swelled rapidly into a summons to deliverance from every form of restraint and oppression. The men of theory, the Carlstadts and the Münzers, carried the word to the men of action and of suffering. From 1522 to 1524 the gospel of freedom through faith was being worked over to suit the needs of the vast peasant population of Middle and Western Germany. In 1524 and 1525 it burst out in the furious cry of these oppressed classes for equality of rights as the social expression of the equality of salvation. Subtle economic causes were, as always, at work and were leading in the same direction.