For instance, according to his own statements made in private, he is determined to assail the Pope as Antichrist, yet at the same time, in his official writings, he declares any thought of hostility towards the Pope to be alien to him. It is only necessary to note the dates: On March 13, 1519, he tells his friend Spalatin that he is wading through the Papal Decretals and, in confidence, must admit his uncertainty as to whether the Pope is Antichrist or merely his Apostle, so miserably had Christ, i.e. the truth, been crucified by him in the Decretals.[222] Indeed, even in the earlier half of Dec., 1518, he had been wondering whether the Pope was not Antichrist; on Dec. 11, writing to his friend Link, he said he had a suspicion, that the “real Antichrist” of whom Paul speaks ruled at the Court of Rome, and believed that he could prove that he was “even worse than the Turk.”[223] In a similar strain he wrote as early as Jan. 13, 1519, that he intended to fight the “Roman serpent” should the Elector and the University of Wittenberg allow him so to do;[224] on Feb. 3,[225] and again on Feb. 20, 1519,[226] he admits that it had already “long” been his intention to declare war on Rome and its falsifications of the truth.--In spite of all this, at the beginning of Jan., 1519, he informed the Papal agent Miltitz that he was quite ready to send a humble and submissive letter to the Pope, and, as a matter of fact, on Jan. 5 (or 6), 1519, he wrote that strange epistle to Leo X in which he speaks of himself as “the dregs of humanity” in the presence of the Pope’s “sublime majesty”; he approaches him like a “lambkin,” whose bleating he begs the Vicar of Christ graciously to give ear to. Nor was all this merely said in derision, but with a fixed purpose to deceive. He declares with the utmost solemnity “before God and every creature” that it had never entered his mind to assail in any way the authority of the Roman Church and the Pope; on the contrary, he “entirely admits that the power of the Church extends over all, and that nothing in heaven or on earth is to be preferred to her, except Jesus Christ alone, the Lord of all things.” The original letter still exists, but the letter itself was never despatched, probably because Miltitz raised some objection.[227] Only through mere chance did the Papal Curia fail to receive this letter, which, compared with Luther’s real thought as elsewhere expressed, can only be described as outrageous.[228] In his dealings with his Bishop, Hieronymus Scultetus the chief pastor of Brandenburg, he had already displayed a like duplicity.