The earlier opinions expressed by Luther, especially in his Address to the German Nobility, might have led one to expect that the new Church system conformably to his ideas would have to be built up, to use a modern expression, from below, that is to say, on the basis of the universal priesthood of all baptized Christians, who should now therefore, after hearing and receiving the Word of the Gospel, have proceeded to organise and embody themselves into a new community. Luther had also, in that treatise, as we have seen, allotted certain duties to the civil authorities in regard even to ecclesiastical matters; and it was now from profound and painful conviction that he confessed that the great bulk of the people were as yet not genuine Christians, but needed public means of attraction to draw them to Christianity. Later on we met with his idea of a 'German Mass,' involving a voluntary union and assembly of genuine Christians, as explained by him three years before in a sermon. There were elements here at least, one might have thought, sufficient to constitute an independent system of congregations. Shortly afterwards, in October 1526, a Hessian synod, convoked by the Landgrave Philip at Homberg, actually adopted the draft of a constitution, which provided that those Christians who acknowledged the Word of God should voluntarily enrol themselves as members of a Christian Evangelical Brotherhood or congregation, who should elect in assembly their pastors and bishops, and that the latter, together with other deputies, should constitute a general synod for the national Church. But Luther, true to his conviction, previously expressed, that there were not the men fitted for such an institution, stated now his opinion to Philip, that he had not the boldness to carry out such a heap of regulations, and that people were not as fit for them as those who sat and made the regulations imagined. Moreover he could not tolerate the idea that the mass of those who remained outside this community, and who were looked upon, according to the Homberg scheme, as heathens, should be left to their fate, without preachers of the Word, and above all, without either baptism or the Christian education of their children. Added to this, he adhered strenuously to his belief, which we have noticed long before, that certain duties with reference to religion and the Church were incumbent on the civil authorities, the princes and magistrates, in common with all the rest of Christendom. It was their duty, he declared in those earlier writings of his, to prohibit, by force if necessary, the proceedings of those priests who were hostile to the gospel. He now applied the idea and definition of external, idolatrous practices to the Papal system of public worship and the sacrifice of the mass. To suppress these practices, he said, was the duty of those authorities who watched over the external relations of life: such was his demand against the Catholics at Altenburg.