“When they are most angry I say to the Papists,” he cries in his “Warnunge an seine lieben Deudschen,” “My dear sirs, leave the wall, relieve yourselves into your drawers and sling it round your neck.... If they do not care to accept my services, then the devil may well be thankful to them!” etc.[432] “Oh, the shameful Diet, such as has never before been held or heard of ... an everlasting blot on the whole Empire! What will the Turk say ... to our allowing the accursed Pope with his minions to fool and mock at us, to treat us as children, nay, as clouts and blocks, to our behaving contrary to justice and truth, nay, with such utter shamelessness in open Diet as regards their blasphemies, their shameful and Sodomitic life and doctrines?”[433] These were the words in which he described the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. We may here recall the saying of Valentine Ickelsamer the Anabaptist. At one time he had thought of espousing Luther’s cause, but “owing to the diabolical abuse” which he piled on “erring men” it was possible to regard him only “as a non-Christian.” Luther wanted to overthrow his opponents simply by words “of abuse”; these “Saxon rogues of Wittenberg,” “when unable to get what they want by means of a few kind words, invoke on you all the curses of the devil.” Heinrich Bullinger complains repeatedly, and quite as bitterly, of the frightful storm into which Luther’s eloquence was apt to break out. It is noteworthy that he applies what he says to Luther’s polemics, not merely against the Swiss, but against other opponents. “Here all men have in their hands Luther’s King Harry of England, and another Harry as well, in his unsavoury Hans Worst; _item_, they have Luther’s book on the Jews with its hideous letters of the Bible dropped from the posterior of the pig, which the Jews may swallow, indeed, but never read; then, again, there is Luther’s filthy, swinish Schemhamphorasch, for which some small excuse might have been found had it been written by a swine-herd and not by a famous pastor of souls.”[434] “And yet most people,” so Bullinger says, “even go so far as to worship the houndish, filthy eloquence of the man. Thus it comes that he goes his way and seeks to outdo himself in vituperation.... Many pious and learned people take scandal at his insolence, which really is beyond measure.” He should have someone at his side to keep a check on him, so Bullinger tells Bucer, for instance, his friend Melanchthon, “so that Luther may not ruin a good cause with his wonted invective, his bitterness, his torrent of bad words and his ridicule.”[435] And yet Luther at this very time, in his “Warnunge,” calls himself “the German Prophet” and “a faithful teacher.”[436]