Whilst questions of the deepest kind about the means of salvation, and the grounds and rules of Christian truth, had been opened up for the first time by Luther during the contest about indulgences, the abuses, encroachments, and acts of tyranny committed by the Pope on the temporal domain of the Church, and closely affecting the political and social life of the people, had long been the subject of bitter complaints and vigorous remonstrances throughout Germany. These complaints and remonstrances had been raised by princes and states of the Empire, who would not be silenced by any theories or dogmas about the Divine authority and infallibility of the Pope, nor crushed by any mere sentence of excommunication. And in raising them they had made no question of the Divine right of the Papacy. Was it not natural that, in the indignation excited by their wrongs, they should turn to the man who had laid the axe to the root of the tree which bore such fruit, and at least consider the possibility of profiting by his work? Luther, on his part, showed at first a singularly small acquaintance with the circumstances of their complaints, and seemed hardly aware of the loud protests raised so long on this subject at the Diets. But with the question of indulgences the field of his experience broadened in this respect. The care he evinced in this matter for the care of souls and true Christian morality made him the ally of all those who were alarmed at the vast export of money to Rome, about which he had already said in his theses that the Christian sheep were being regularly fleeced. In another respect, also, the ecclesiastical policy of the Papal see was closely interwoven with the political condition and history of Germany. If in theory the Pope claimed to control and confirm the decrees even of the civil power, in practice he at least attempted to assert and maintain an omnipresent influence. And with regard to Germany it was all-important to him that the Empire should not become so powerful as to endanger his authority in general and his territorial sovereignty in Italy. However loftily the Popes in their briefs proclaimed their immutable rights, derived from God, and their plenary power, and took care to let theologians and jurists advance such pretensions, they understood clearly enough in their practical conduct to adjust those relations to the rules of political or diplomatic necessity.