In a similar fashion Luther, in his controversial writings, heaps opprobrious epithets upon his other opponents, Tetzel, Eck and Emser. It is true that in their censures on Luther his opponents were not backward in the use of strong language, thus following the custom of the day, but for fierceness the Wittenberg professor was not to be surpassed. Luther was not appealing to the nobler impulses of the multitude who favoured him when, in 1518, he sought to incite his readers against another of his literary opponents, the Dominican Inquisitor, Jakob van Hoogstraaten, and his fellow-monks, with the violent assertion that Hoogstraaten was nothing but a “mad, bloodthirsty murderer, who was never sated with the blood of the Christian Brethren”; “he ought to be set to hunt for dung-beetles on a manure heap, rather than to pursue pious Christians, until he had learned what sin, error and heresy was, and all else that pertained to the office of an Inquisitor. For I have never seen a bigger ass than you ... you blind blockhead, you blood-hound, you bitter, furious, raving enemy of truth, than whom no more pestilential heretic has arisen for the last four hundred years.”[32] Is it correct to characterise such outbursts in the way Protestants have done when they mildly remark, that Luther fought with “boldness and without any fear of men,” and that, though his onslaught was “fierce and violent,” yet he was ever fearful “lest he should do anything contrary to the Will of God”?[33] Luther, on the other hand, as early as 1518, made the admission: “I am altogether a man of strife, I am, according to the words of the Prophet Jeremias, ‘A man of contentions.’”[34] Hieronymus Emser, who had met Luther at the Leipzig Disputation and before, might well reproach him with his passionate behaviour, so utterly lacking in calmness and self-control, and liken him to “the troubled sea which is never at rest day or night nor allows others to be at peace; yet the Spirit of the Lord only abides in those who are humble, in the peaceable and composed.”[35] In another work he laments in a similar way that, “in the schools and likewise in his writings and in the pulpit Luther neither displays devotion nor behaves like a clergyman, but is all defiance and boastfulness.”[36]