He adds that he would be ready to defend it even now were things in the same state as then.—But where did he discern any difference? According to him, people then, before he had instructed them concerning its origin and office, had no idea of what secular authority really was. “Princes and lords who desired to be pious, looked upon their position and office as of no account, not as being the service of God, and became mere priests and monks.” But then he had written his “Von welltlicher Uberkeytt” (1523). Having reinstated the secular authority, so long “smothered and neglected,” he was loath to see it summoned against the Turks by the Pope. Besides, he is quite confident that the Pope had never been in earnest about the Turkish War; his real aim was to enrich his exchequer.[202] Luther also explains that from the first he had been inclined to oppose the granting of any aid against the Turks on the theological ground embodied in his condemned proposition, viz. that God visits our sins upon us by means of the Turks. Here again he will not admit himself to have been in the wrong, for Christians must “endure wrong, violence or injustice ... not resist evil, but allow and suffer all things” as the Gospel teaches. Characteristically enough, he appeals to that “piece of Christian doctrine” according to which the Christian is to offer his left cheek to him who smites him on the right, and leave his cloak to the man who takes away his coat. Now, what our Lord taught in His Sermon on the Mount (Matt. v. 39 f.), was not, as he had already pointed out, a mere counsel of perfection, but a real command; but the “Pope with his schools and convents had made of this a counsel which it was permissible not to keep, and which a Christian might neglect, and had thus distorted the words of Christ, taught the whole world a falsehood, and cheated Christians.”[203] A way out of the fatal consequences which must ensue, Luther fancies he is able to find in the distinction between the true Christian and mere worldly citizen; it was not incumbent on the latter to perform everything that was binding on the former.