Luther’s “wealth” was thus described by Adolf Hausrath: “Every word Luther utters plays in a hundred lights and every eye meets with a different radiance, which it would gladly fix. His personality also presents a hundred problems. Of all great men Luther was the most paradoxical. The very union, so characteristic of him, of mother-wit and melancholy is quite peculiar. His wanton humour seems at times to make a plaything of the whole world, yet the next moment this seemingly incurable humorist is oppressed with the deepest melancholy, so that he knows not what to do with himself.... In one corner of his heart lurks a demon of defiance who, when roused, carries away the submissive monk to outbursts which he himself recognises as the work of some alien force, stronger than his firmest resolutions. He was the greatest revolutionary of the age and yet he was a conservative theologian, yea, conservative to obstinacy.... He insisted at times upon the letter as though the salvation of the entire Church depended upon it, and yet we find him rejecting whole books of the Bible and denying their Apostolic spirit. Reason appears to him as a temptress from the regions of enchantment, intellect as a mere rogue, who proves to his own satisfaction just what he is desirous of seeing proved, and yet, armed with this same reason and intellect, Luther went out boldly into the battle-fields of the prolonged religious war.”[46] 2. From the Congregational to the State Church Secularisations In the first stage of his revolt against the Church, Luther had imagined that the new order of things could be brought about amongst his followers merely by his declaiming against outward forms; repeatedly he asserted that the Christian life consisted wholly in faith and charity, that faith would display its power spontaneously in good works, and that thus everything would arrange itself; a new and better Church would spring up within the old one, though minus a hierarchy, minus all false doctrine and holiness-by-works. Up to the commencement of the ‘twenties his efforts had, in fact, been directed not to the setting up of new congregations but to the reconstruction of the existing Church system. Previous to his drafting of the plan comprised in the writing he sent to Prague, on the appointment of ecclesiastical ministers (vol. ii., p. 111 f.), in which we find the congregational organisation proposed as a model for the German Church, he was as yet merely desirous of paving the way for what he looked on as a reformation within the already existing Church, and this by means of the rulers and nobles.