On the journey such was his boldness that he disregarded the Imperial prohibition to preach, though he feared that this violation of the conditions laid down would be taken advantage of by his opponents, and cause him to forfeit his safe-conduct. He himself says of the sermons which he delivered at Hersfeld and Eisenach, on May 1 and 2, that they would be regarded as a breach of the obligations he had undertaken when availing himself of the safe conduct; but that he had been unable to consent that the Word of God should be bound in chains. He is here playing on the words of the Bible: “_Verbum Dei non est alligatum_.” “This condition, even had I undertaken it, would not have been binding, as it would have been against God.”[161] After the journey had been resumed the well-known surprise took place, and Luther was carried off to the Wartburg on May 4. In his lonely abode, known to only a few of his friends, he awaited with concern the sentence of outlawry which was to be passed upon him by the Emperor and the Estates. The edict, in its final form of May 8, was not published until after the safe-conduct had expired. “To-morrow the Imperial safe conduct terminates,” Luther wrote on May 11 from the Wartburg to Spalatin; “ ... It grieves me that those deluded men should call down such a misfortune upon their own heads. How great a hatred will this inconsiderate act of violence arouse. But only wait, the time of their visitation is at hand.”[162] The proclamation of outlawry was couched in very stern language and enacted measures of the utmost severity, following in this the traditions of the Middle Ages; Luther’s writings were to be burnt, and he himself was adjudged worthy of death. Of Luther the document says, that, “like the enemy of souls disguised in a monk’s garb,” he had gathered together “heresies old and new.” The impression made by Luther on the Emperor and on other eminent members of the Diet, was that of one possessed.[163] There was, from the first, no prospect of the sentence being carried into effect. The hesitation of the German Princes of the Church to publish even the Bull of Excommunication had shown that they were not to be trusted to put the new measures into execution.