The champion of the Church, the alleged fool, was sufficiently clear-sighted and frank to predict the Peasant-War as the end of all the godless commotion, and to prophesy that the result of the general religious subversion would be the ruin of his German Fatherland. A fanatical preacher in the town had appealed to the mattocks of the peasants. Him the Augustinian asks: “If the Word of God suffices in the Church, why have you in your sermons appealed for help to the pickaxes, mattocks and spades of the peasants?” “Why do you tell the people that the peasant must come from the field with these weapons to assist the Evangel, if your own and your comrades’ words prove of no avail? Do you not know with what audacity the peasants are already rising against their lords?” “The new preaching,” he complains, even where it is not directly inflammatory, “renders the people, who are already desirous of innovations and dearly love the freedom of the flesh, only too much inclined for tumults, and this daily foments the spirit of unrest.”[1037] “Do you not know that the mob is a hydra-headed monster, a monster that thirsts for blood? Are you anxious to promote your cause with the help of cut-throats?”[1038] Owing to the iconoclasts, the ancient greatness of Constantinople fell, and the Roman Empire of the East faded away; in like manner, so gloomily he predicts, the religious struggle now being waged in Germany will bring about the ruin of the Western Empire and the loss of its ancient greatness.[1039] The help which the innovators received from the Erfurt magistrates induced the leaders of the party to pin their trust on the support of the secular authorities. Even this was justified by appeals to Scripture. Lang, on presenting to Hermann von Hoff, the president of the Erfurt town-council, a translation which he had made of the Gospel of St. Matthew, stated in the accompanying letter, that he had done so “in order that all may know and take heed to the fact, that whatever they undertake against the Gospel is also directed against you. It is necessary, unfortunately, to defend the Gospel by means of the sword.”[1040] In July, 1521, an agreement had, it is true, been entered into which brought some guarantee of safety to the clergy, more particularly the Canons of St. Mary’s and St. Severus, yet in the ensuing years the Chapters were forced to make endless protests against the preachers’ interference in their services and the encroachments of the magistrates on their personal liberty, all in direct contravention of the agreement.