Your “Squire Luther,” he says to Bora, “behaves himself very impudently and proudly”; “he fancies he can fly, that he is treading on roses and is ‘_lux mundi_’”; he forgets that God has commanded us to keep what we have vowed; people gladly obeyed the Emperor, yet God was “an Emperor above all Emperors,” and had still more right to fealty and obedience. Was she ignorant of Christ’s saying: “No man having put his hand to the plough and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of God” (Luke ix. 62)? He reminds her of the severe penalties imposed by the laws of the Empire on those religious who were openly unfaithful to their vow, and, particularly, of the eternal punishment which should move her to leave the “horrid, black monk” (the Augustinians wore a black habit), to bewail like “St. Magdalene the evil she had done” and, by returning to the convent, to make “reparation for her infidelity to God.” St. Ambrose’s booklet on the fallen nun might lead her, and her companions in misfortune, to a “humble recognition” (of their sin), “and enable her to flee from the swift wrath of God and return to the fold of Christ, attain to salvation together with us all and praise the Lord for all eternity.” We catch a glimpse of the gulf which divided people’s minds at that time in the very title of the reply by Euricius Cordus: “The Marburg literary society’s peal of laughter over the screed against Luther of two Leipzig poets.”[574] Two satirical and anonymous replies immediately appeared in print at Wittenberg, the one entitled: “New-Zeittung von Leyptzig,” of which Luther “was not entirely innocent,” and the other quite certainly his work, viz. “Ein newe Fabel Esopi newlich verdeudscht gefunden.”[575] In the first reply spurious epistles are made to relate how the two Leipzig letters had been brought by a messenger to Luther’s house, and had then been carried by the servants unread to the “back-chamber where it stinketh.” “The paper having duly been submitted to the most ignominious of uses it was again packed into a bundle and despatched back to the original senders by the same messenger.”[576] In his “Newe Fabel” (of the Lion and the Ass) Luther implicitly includes von der Heyden, all the defenders of the Pope, and the Pope himself under the figure of the Ass (with the cross on its back); “there is nothing about the Ass that is not worthy of royal and papal honours.”[577] The author of the letter he calls an ass’s head and sniveller; the very stones of Leipzig would spit upon him; he was the “horse-droppings in which the apples were packed”; his art had brought on him “such an attack of diarrhœa that all of us have been bespattered with his filth”; “If you wish to devour us, you might begin downstairs at the commode,” etc.[578]