So far he had said nothing concerning mercy towards the prisoners; this he was to do only later. In his circular-letter he protests--it is to be hoped to some purpose--“I do not wish to encourage the ferocious tyrants, or to approve their raging, for I hear that some of my young squires are behaving beyond measure cruelly to the poor people.” Now, he speaks strongly, though rather late in the day, against the “ferocious, raging, senseless tyrants who even after the battle are not sated with blood,” and even threatens to write a special pamphlet against such tyrants. “But such as these,” so he excuses himself concerning his previous utterances, “I did not undertake to instruct,” but merely “the pious Christian authorities.” His opponents, who sympathised with the lot of the vanquished, asked why he did not also admonish the authorities who were not pious. He replies that this was not part of his duty: “I say once more, for the third time, that I wrote merely for the benefit of those authorities who were disposed to act rightly and in a Christian manner.”[583] Even in this letter he again incites against the peasants, everyone who can and by whatever means: he allows, as stated above, anyone to kill the rebels, openly or by stealth, nor does he retract the sentence, that “every man” who would and was able ought to act towards them as both “judge and executioner”; finally he declares that he is unable to blame the severity of such authorities as do not act in a Christian manner, i.e. “without first offering terms.” In a word, he absolutely refuses to remedy the mistakes into which his passion had hurried him, but takes pleasure in still further exaggerating them in spite of the scandal caused.