“The superstition of the Pope exceeds that of the Jews.” Though the Pope drags countless souls down to hell, yet we may not say to him: “For shame! Why act you thus?” “Had not his prestige been overthrown by the Word [i.e. by my preaching] even the devil would have vomited him forth. But this deliverance [from the Pope] we esteem a small matter and have become ungrateful. God, however, will send other forms of darkness to avenge this ingratitude; we still have this consolation, that the Last Day cannot be far distant; for the prophecy of Daniel has been entirely fulfilled, where he describes the Papacy as though he had actually seen its doings.”[354] “At Rome,” so he assures his readers, “they pull the noses of us German fools,” and then say, that “it is of Divine institution that none can be made bishop without the authority of Rome. I can only wonder that Germany ... has a farthing left for this horde of unspeakable, intolerable Roman fools, scoundrels and robbers.”[355] “Worse even than this rapacious seizing of the money of foreigners is the Pope’s usurped right of deciding matters of faith. He acts just as he pleases in accordance with the imaginary interior inspirations which he believes he receives.” “He does just the same as Thomas Münzer and the Anabaptists, for he treads under foot the outward Word of God, trusts entirely to higher illumination and gives vent to his own fond inventions against Holy Scripture; which is the reason why we blame him. We care not for mere human thoughts; what we want is the outward Word.”[356] “In short, what shall I say? No error, superstition or idolatry is too gross to be admitted and accepted; at Rome they even honour the Pope as God. And the heathen also had a god, whose name it was not lawful to utter.”[357] _The Catholics._ If we turn from the Pope-God or Pope-devil to the Papists, from the Roman Curia to the Catholics, we find them scourged in similar language. Amidst a wealth of imagery quite bewildering to the mind, one idea emerges clearly, viz. that he has been summoned by God for the purpose of rebuilding Christianity from the very foundation. Nothing but such a mission could justify him in forcing upon himself and others the belief, that the existing Church had been utterly corrupted by the devil and that everybody who dared to oppose him was inspired by Satan. “No one can be a Papist unless he is at the very least a murderer, robber or persecutor,” for “he must agree” that the “Pope and his crew are right in burning and banishing people,”[358] etc. The worst thing about the Papists is the Mass; he would rather he had “kept a brothel, or been a robber, than have sacrificed and blasphemed Christ for fifteen years by saying Mass.”[359]