The Wittenberg Professor makes use of scathing reproofs such as had never before been heard. A good deal of his criticism was justifiable, and he was certainly not wrong in applying it judiciously in his own special domain to much that had hitherto been accepted as true. It is refreshing to those engaged in historical research to note how he cuts himself adrift from the legends of mediæval hagiography, and how he writes on one occasion requesting Spalatin to copy out some particulars for him from Jerome’s book which he might use for a sermon on St. Bartholomew, “for the fables and lies of the ‘_Catalogus_’ and ‘_Legenda aurea_’ make my gorge rise.”[741] Criticism of ecclesiastical conditions was also quite permissible when made in the right way and in the proper quarters; examples of such criticism were not wanting among the saintly mediæval reformers, and they might have been acceptable to the authorities of the Church, or, at any rate, could not have been repudiated by them. But when Luther is dealing with the faults of the clergy, secular or regular, he looks at everything with a jaundiced eye as being saturated with arrogance, avarice and every vice, and seems to fancy all have become traitors to God’s cause. His love of exaggeration and his want of charity override everything, nor do these faults disappear with advancing years, but become still more marked. Never was there an eye more keen to detect the faults of others, never a tongue more ready to amplify them. And yet he, who does not scruple to support his fierce and passionate denunciations by the coarsest and most unfair generalisations, is himself the first to admit in his Commentary on Romans that: “There are fools who put the fault they have to find with a priest or religious to the account of all and then abuse them all with bitterness, forgetting that they themselves are full of imperfections.”[742]