“What wonder,” the same historian says, “that when the social revolution broke out in the spring, Luther’s persecuted followers thought they recognised the beginning of the change, and in many instances made common cause with the peasants and the lower classes of the towns. Luther himself had no wish to carry through his religious enterprise with the help either of the knights or of the peasants, but his followers were not equal to making the necessary distinction between the spiritual and the temporal.”[528] Luther and his preachers had so frequently brought forward such disparaging and degrading charges against the secular, and still more against the spiritual authorities,[529] that clear-sighted contemporaries, such as Bartholomew von Usingen, foretold a revolution[530] as the result of such discourses and writings. The destruction of the episcopal power, which, under the conditions then prevailing, was so closely bound up with the secular, meant a radical revolution in the law of property obtaining in the German Empire. The “Christian freedom” of all, the equality of high and low in the common priesthood, was proclaimed in the most incautious and seductive terms. The peasants were taught by itinerant and often fanatical preachers, concerning their real or alleged rights as vouched for by Holy Scripture. Thus the esteemed Strasburg preacher, Caspar Hedio, of the Rhinegau, in a sermon which he delivered on the Wachholder Heide, near Erbach, explained to the people his views on the customary payment of tithes; his words acting like a charm: He thought the peasants should pay tithes only under protest, though they were nevertheless not to attempt to abrogate the payment by force. Once roused, however, who was to keep the crowd within these limits? In 1524 Hedio had two sermons, preached on this subject in Strasburg, printed together with a circular letter addressed to the inhabitants of the Rhinegau, “which, there can be no doubt, exercised a certain influence upon the rising there.”[531] In the circular he proposed, that the people themselves should go in search of capable preachers if the ecclesiastical authorities did not send such.[532]