of religion and the attacks made upon the dignity of the priest, and conjured the emperor to tread in the way marked out for him by his predecessors. Having thus by feigned modesty insinuated himself into the hearts of his audience, he raised his head boldly, gave vent to the passion by which he was animated, and brought into play the powerful artifices suggested to him by the Evil One.[121] He hurled the thunders of his eloquence at his adversaries; he aimed a thousand shafts at them, and subdued his audience. But if his violence took the assembly by surprise, he shocked many, who thought with amazement: 'We might fancy we were listening to a man who had descended from the abode of the gods on Olympus to announce the secrets he had learned from Jupiter,' 'He was seized,' said one of his hearers, 'with a diabolical fury, and seemed like a priest of the mysteries, gesticulating and leaping in a chorus of the Furies.'[122] He laid siege to the mind of the emperor, and inflamed the princes with hatred of the divine doctrine. This he distorted and defamed; and he strove by all means to extinguish the salutary light of the Gospel which God had rekindled in the midst of the darkness. Turning towards the emperor and the princes, he proclaimed in a prophetic voice, that God would not be favorable to them until they should have destroyed the apostates with fire and sword. He did not conclude his discourse till he thought he had constrained his hearers by his thundering eloquence to burn all the Lutherans. [Sidenote: HE INSTIGATES TO PERSECUTION.] Nevertheless it was quite manifest that the emperor did not always use such diligence as De Soto demanded of him in his seditious discourses. Disquieted, therefore, and saddened because the monarch appeared 'backward to persecution,' he appealed to him in private, urging him to make confession; and it was in the retired chamber in which he received as a penitent the master of the world that he sought, by striking great blows, to drive Charles on to persecution. 'Most sacred Majesty,' he said, 'you are the monarch whom God has raised to the highest pitch of honor, in order that you may defend the Church and take vengeance on impiety, and I am the man whom God has appointed to govern your conscience. Power has been given me, as your majesty is aware, to remit and to retain sins. If your majesty does not purify the Church from pollution, I can not absolve you, _ego non possum te absolvere_.' He even menaced him with the anger of God and the pains of hell. Charles, who was easily intimidated--even, as we know, by the approach of a comet--'imagined himself already plunged into the abyss of hell.'[123] The monk, perceiving this, pressed his point, and did not pronounce absolution until he had extorted from the sovereign a promise to put the heretics to death.