and opportunity for all kinds of villainy, for the common world cannot accept or understand it.-But it may be said, If, then, Christians do not need the temporal power or law, why does St. Paul say to all Christians: 'Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers' (Rom. 13, 1)? In reply to this, it is to be said again that Christians among themselves and by and for themselves require no law or sword, for to them they are not necessary or useful. But because a true Christian on earth lives for and serves not himself, but his neighbor, so he also, from the nature of his spirit, does that which he himself does not need, but which is useful and necessary to his neighbor. The sword is a great and necessary utility to the whole world for the maintenance of peace, the punishment of wrong, and the restraint of the wicked. So the Christian pays tribute and tax, honors civil authority, serves, assists, and does everything he can do to maintain that authority with honor and fear." (p. 73 ff.) In his _Appeal to the German Nobility_ (10, 266 ff.) Luther says: "Forasmuch as the temporal power has been ordained by God for the punishment of the bad and the protection of the good, therefore we must let it do its duty throughout the whole Christian body, without respect of persons, whether it strike Popes, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, or whoever it may be. If it were sufficient reason for fettering the temporal power that it is inferior among the offices of Christianity to the offices of priest or confessor, to the spiritual estate,-if this were so, then we ought to restrain tailors, cobblers, masons, carpenters, cooks, cellarmen, peasants, and all secular workmen from providing the Pope or bishops, priests and monks, with shoes, clothes, houses, or victuals, or from paying them tithes. But if these laymen are allowed to do their work without restraint, what do the Romanist scribes mean by their laws? They mean that they withdraw themselves from the operation of temporal Christian power, simply in order that they may be free to do evil, and thus fulfil what St. Peter said: 'There shall be false teachers among you, . . . and through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you' (2 Pet. 2, 1. 3). Therefore the temporal Christian power must exercise its office without let or hindrance, without considering whom it may strike, whether Pope or bishop, or priest. Whoever is guilty, let him suffer for it.-Whatever the ecclesiastical law has said in opposition to this is merely the invention of Romanist arrogance. For this is what St. Paul says to all Christians: 'Let every soul' (I presume, including the Popes) 'be subject unto the higher powers. . . . Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same, . . . for he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil' (Rom. 13, 1-4). Also St. Peter: 'Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake; . . .