The older Church had exhorted all who held a cure of souls to be zealous in seeking out such as had become careless or hostile. When, however, someone asked Luther, in 1540, how to behave towards those who had never been inside a church for about twenty years, he replied: “Let them go to the devil, and, when they die, pitch them on the manure-heap.” The zeal for souls displayed by Luther was zeal for his own peculiar undertaking, viz. for the Evangel which he preached. Zeal for the general spread of the kingdom of God amongst the faithful, and amongst those still sunk in unbelief, was with him a very secondary consideration. In reality his zeal was almost exclusively directed against the Papacy. The idea of a universal Church, which just then was inspiring Catholics to undertake the enormous missionary task of converting the newly discovered continents, stood, in Luther’s case, very much in the background. Though, in part, this may be explained by his struggle for the introduction of the innovations into those portions of Germany nearest to him, yet the real reason was his surrender of the old ecclesiastical ideal, his transformation of the Church into an invisible kingdom of souls devoted to the Evangel, and his destruction of the older conception of Christendom with its two hinges, viz. the Papacy established for the spiritual and the Empire for the temporal welfare of the family of nations. He saw little beyond Saxony, the land favoured by the preaching of the new Gospel, and Germany, to which he had been sent as a “prophet.” The Middle Ages, though so poor in means of communication and geographical knowledge, compared with that age of discovery, was, thanks to its great Catholic, i.e. world-embracing ideas, inspired with an enthusiasm for the kingdom of God which found no place in the ideals of Lutheranism. We may compare, for instance, the heroic efforts of those earlier days to stem the incursions of the Eastern infidel with the opinion expressed by the Wittenberg professor on the war against the Crescent, where he declared the resistance offered in the name of Christendom to the Turks to be “contrary to the will of the Holy Ghost,” an opinion which he continued to hold, in spite of, or perhaps rather because of, its condemnation by the Pope (p. 76 ff., and p. 92). We may contrast the eloquent appeals of the preachers of the Crusades—inspired by the danger which threatened from the East—for the delivery of the Holy Land and the Holy Sepulchre, with Luther’s statement quoted above, that God troubled as little about the Tomb at Jerusalem as He did about the Swiss cows (p. 168). In Luther’s thoughts the boundaries of the Christian world have suddenly become much less extensive than in the Middle Ages, whilst ecclesiastical interests, thanks to the new territorial rights of the Princes, tend to be limited by the frontiers of the petty States.[649]