No demagogue had ever before filled Germany with such noisy abuse of the Princes as Luther now did in works intended for the masses, where he declared, for instance, that “God has sent our Rulers mad”; that “they command their subjects just what they please”; that they are “scamps” and “fools”; that he is forced to resist, “at least by word,” these “ungracious Lords and angry squires” on account of their “blasphemies against the Divine Majesty.”[52] He denounced them to the populace as having heaped together their “gold and goods” unjustly, just as “Nimrod had acquired his goods and his gold.”[53] He accuses them “of allowing everything to drift, and of hindering one another”; “plenty of them even vindicate the cause of Antichrist,”[54] therefore the Judgment of God must fall upon our “raving Princes.” “God has blinded them and made them stupid that they may run headlong to destruction.”[55] This he wrote on the eve of the fearful events of the Peasant Rising. Thus his ideal of the future was now shattered, viz. the spiritual society and new Christendom which he had planned to establish with the help of the Princes. “This dream passed rapidly away. All that remained was a deep-seated pessimism.... From that time the persuasion grew on him that the world will always remain the same, that it can never be governed according to the Evangel and can never be rendered really Christian; likewise, that true Christians will always be but few in number.”[56] Hence these few Christians must become the object of his solicitude. He is more and more inspired by the fantastic notion that Popery is to be speedily overthrown by God Himself, by His Word and by the breath of His Mouth. In the meantime he expects the new Church to develop spontaneously from the congregations by the power of God, even though at first it should consist of only a small number of faithful souls.