We may distinguish between the earliest private and the earliest public appearance of Luther’s idea of the Papal Antichrist. Its first unmistakable private trace is to be met with in a letter of December 11, 1518, to his brother-monk and sympathiser Wenceslaus Link. Luther was at that time labouring under the emotion incident on his interrogation at Augsburg, of which he had just published the “_Acta_.” Sending a copy to his friend he declares, that his pen is already at work at much greater things, that he knew not whence the ideas that filled his mind came, but that he would send Link whatever writings he published, that he might see “whether I am right in my surmise that the real Antichrist, according to Paul [2 Thess. ii., 3 ff.], rules at the Roman Curia.”[400] The first public expression of this idea is, however, to be found in the pronouncement he made subsequent to the Leipzig Disputation in the summer of 1519, viz. that if the Pope arrogated to himself alone the power of interpreting Scripture, then he was exalting himself above God’s Word and was worse than Antichrist.[401] Not long after Luther showed how deeply he had drunk in the ideas of Hus; in February, 1520, he confessed to being a Husite, since both he and Staupitz too had hitherto taught precisely Hus’s doctrine, though without having recognised him as their leader; the plain, evangelical truth had been burnt a hundred years before in the person of Hus. “I am so astonished I know not what to think when I contemplate these terrible judgments of God upon men.”[402] On March 19 he sent to Spalatin a copy of Hus’s writing, which had just been printed for the first time, praising the author as a “marvel of intellect and learning.”[403] In his conception of Antichrist Luther differed from antiquity in that he applied the term not so much to a person as to a system, or a condition of things: the ecclesiastical government of Rome, with its “pretensions” and its “corruption,” appears to him in his apocalyptic dreams as the real Antichrist. That he finally came to see in the person of the Pope more and more an embodiment of Antichrist was, however, only to be expected; when one wearer of the Papal tiara died, the mask of Antichrist passed to his successor, a matter of no difficulty since, as the end of the world was nigh, the number of the Popes was in any case complete.