We may mention incidentally, that Luther declares concerning the fame which his printed “Propositions against Tetzel’s Articles” brought him: “It did not please me, for, as I said, I myself did not know what the Indulgence was,”[244] although his first sermons are a refutation, both of his own professed ignorance and of that which he also attributes “to all theologians generally.”--Finally, Luther was very fond of intentionally representing the Indulgence controversy as the one source of his opposition to the Church, and in this he was so successful that many still believe it in our own times. The fact that, long before 1517, his views on Grace and Justification had alienated him from the teaching of the Church, he keeps altogether in the background. At length the Church intervened with the Ban and Luther was summoned before the Emperor at the Diet of Worms. Three years later, at the cost of truth, he had already contrived to cast a halo of glory around his public appearance there. For instance, we know how, contrary to the true state of the case, he wrote: “I went to Worms although I knew that the safe conduct given me by the Emperor would be broken”; for the German Princes, otherwise so staunch and true, had, he says, learned nothing better from the Roman idol than to disregard their plighted word; when he entered Worms he had “taken a jump into the gaping jaws of the monster Behemoth.”[245] Yet he knew well enough that the promise of a safe conduct was to be kept most conscientiously. Only on the return journey did he express the fear lest, by preaching in defiance of the prohibition, he might make people say that he had thereby forfeited his safe conduct.[246] Yet again it was no tribute to truth and probity, when, after the arrival in Germany of the Bull of Excommunication, though perfectly aware that it was genuine, he nevertheless feigned in print to regard it as a forgery concocted by his enemies, to the detriment of the Evangel. In confidence he declared that he “believed the Bull to be real and authentic,”[247] and yet at that very time, in his “Von den newen Eckischenn Bullen und Lugen,” he brought forward four reasons for its being a forgery, and strove to make out that the document was, not the work of the Pope, but a “tissue of lies” woven by Eck.[248] His tactics had been the same in the case of an edict directed against him by the Bishop of Meissen, the first of the German episcopate to take action. He knew very well that the enactment was genuine. Yet he wrote in reply the “Antwort auff die Tzedel sso unter des Officials tzu Stolpen Sigel ist aussgangen,” as though the writer were some unknown opponent, who ... “had lost his wits on the Gecksberg.”[249]