On one occasion, when referring to his administration, Staupitz told Luther, that at first he had sought to carry out his plans for the good of the Order, later he had followed the advice of the Fathers of the Order, and, then, entrusted the matter to God, but, now, he was letting things take their course. Luther himself adds when recounting this: “Then I came on the scene and started something new.”[782] It is a proof of the weakness which was coming upon the institution, that a man holding principles such as Luther was advocating in his lectures and sermons should have been allowed to retain for three years the position of Vicar with jurisdiction over eleven monasteries. When he laid down his office in the Chapter at Heidelberg in 1518 we do not even learn that the Chapter carried out the measures which had meanwhile been decreed against Luther by the General of the Augustinians at Rome. The election of the Prior of Erfurt, Johann Lang, Luther’s friend and sympathiser, as his successor, and the Heidelberg disputation in the Augustinian monastery of that town, of which the result was a victory for the new teaching, show sufficiently the feelings of the Chapter. This election was the final triumph of the non-Observantine party. A later hand has added against Lang’s name in the Register of the University of Erfurt the words “_Hussita apostata_,”[783] intended to stigmatise his falling away to the Lutheran heresy comparable only with that of Hus. On leaving the Order he wrote an insulting vindication of his conduct, in which among other things he says all the Priors are donkeys. While he was Prior at Erfurt, a Prior was appointed at Wittenberg whom Luther, as Rural Vicar, raised to this dignity almost before he had finished his year of noviceship. Only Luther’s strange power over men can account for the fact that so many of the monks were convinced that he was animated by the true Spirit of God in his new ideas with regard to conventual life and religion generally, and even in his overhauling of theology. Later, when the Catholic Church had spoken, they did not see their way to retract and submit, but preferred to marry. Staupitz himself, the inexperienced theologian, deceived by his protégé’s talents, often said to him: “Christ speaks through you.” It is true, that, at a later date, he sternly represented to Luther that he was going too far. After most of the monks had ranged themselves under the new standard, their apathetic and disappointed Superior withdrew to a Catholic monastery at Salzburg, where he expired in peace in 1524 as a Benedictine Abbot. * * * * *