To what lengths he was prepared to go, even where members of Reformed sects were concerned, may be seen in one of his many unjust outbursts against Zwingli and Œcolampadius. Although they were suffering injustice and violence, yet he denounced them mercilessly. They were to be proclaimed “damned,” even though this led to “violence being offered them”; this was the best way to make people shrink from their false doctrines.[253] His own doctrines, on the other hand, he says, are such that not even Catholics dared to condemn them. On his return to Wittenberg from the Coburg he preached, that the Papists had been forced to admit that his doctrine did not offend against a single article of the Faith.[254]--Of Carlstadt, his theological child of trouble, he asserted, that he wished to play the part of teacher of Holy Scripture though he had never in all his life even seen the Bible,[255] and yet all, Luther inclusive, knew that Carlstadt was not so ignorant of the Bible and that he could even boast of a considerable acquaintance with Hebrew. Concerning Luther’s persecution of Carlstadt, a Protestant researcher has pointed to the “ever-recurring flood of misrepresentations, suspicions, vituperation and abuse which the Reformer poured upon his opponent.”[256] Such being his licence of speech, what treatment could Catholics expect at his hands? One instance is to be found in the use he makes against the Catholics of a well-known passage of St. Bernard’s. St. Bernard, says Luther, had declared the religious life to be worthless and had said: “_Perdite vixi_” (“I have shamefully wasted my life”). The great Saint of the religious life, the noblest patron and representative of the virtues of the cloister, Luther depicts as condemning with these words the religious life in general as an abominable error; he would have him brand his own life and his attention to his vows, as an existence foreign to God which he had too late recognised as such! By this statement, says Luther, he “hung up his cowl on the nail,” and proceeds to explain his meaning: “Henceforward he cared not a bit for the cowl and its foolery and refused to hear any more about it.”[257] Thus, so Luther assures us, St. Bernard, at the solemn moment of quitting this world, “made nothing” (“_nihili fecit_”) of his vows.[258]