As early as 1522 Thomas Blaurer, a youthful student at Wittenberg, wrote: “No abuse, however low and shameful,” must be spared until Popery is loathed by all.[1143] Thus the object in view was to besmirch the Papacy by pelting it with mire. When, in 1558, Tilman Hesshusen, an old Wittenberg student, became Professor of Theology and General Superintendent at Heidelberg and thundered with much invective against his opponents and in favour of the Confession of Augsburg, even his friends asked the question, “whether the thousand devils he was wont to purvey from the pulpit helped to promote the pure cause of the Lutheran Evangel?” At Bremen, preaching against Hardenberg, a follower of Melanchthon’s, he declared, that he had turned the Cathedral into a den of murderers.[1144] In 1593 Nigrinus incited the people to abuse the Papists with the words: “Up against them boldly and fan the flames so that things may be made right warm for them!” George Steinhausen remarks in this connection in his History of German Civilisation: “Luther became quite a pattern of violent abuse and set the tone for the anti-popish ranters, who, most of them, belonged to the lowest class. On their side the Catholics, for instance, Hans Salat of Lucern or the convert Johann Engerd, were also not behindhand in this respect.... The preachers, however, were always intent on egging them on to yet worse attacks.”[1145] The manner in which Luther in his polemics treated his opponents, wrote Döllinger in his “Sketch of Luther,” “is really quite unparalleled. He never displays any of that kindly charity, which, while hating the error, seeks to win over those who err; on the contrary, with him all is abuse and anger, defiance and contemptuous scorn voiced in a tempest of invective, often of a most personal and vulgar kind.... It is quite wrong to say that Luther in this respect merely followed in the wake of his contemporaries; this is clear enough to everyone familiar with the literature of that age and the one which preceded it; the virulence of Luther’s writings astonished everybody; those who did not owe him allegiance were not slow to express their amazement, to blame him and to emphasise the harmful effects of these outbursts of abuse, whilst his disciples and admirers were wont to appeal to Luther’s ‘heroic spirit’ which lifted him above the common herd and, as it were, dispensed him from the observance of the moral law and allowed him to say things that would have been immoral and criminal in others.”[1146] Especially his obscene abuse of the Pope did those of Luther’s contemporaries who remained faithful to the Church brand as wicked, immoral and altogether unchristian. “What ears can listen to these words without being offended?” wrote Emser, “or who is the pious Christian who is not cut to the quick by this cruel insult and blasphemy offered to the vicar of Christ? Is this sort of thing Christian or Evangelical?”[1147] _Protestant Opinions Old and New._