So little did Luther’s reformation tend to realise the sublime moral principle of the union and comradeship of the nations, that, on the contrary, he encouraged nationalism and separatist tendencies even in Church matters. Where his idea of a National Church prevailed, there the strongest bond of union disappeared completely.[460] The more the authority of the Empire was subverted by the separatists, by religious Leagues and violent inroads of princes and sovereign towns within the Empire, the more the idea of unity, which at one time had been so great a power for good, had to suffer. He complained that the nations and races were as unfriendly to each other as devils. But for him, the rude Saxon, to abuse all who dwelt outside his borders in the most unmeasured terms, and to pour out the vials of his wrath and vituperation on the Latin nations because they were Catholic could hardly be regarded as conducive to better harmony. When he persistently declared in his writings and sermons that the real Turks were to be found at home, or when he fanned the flames of fraternal hatred against the Papists within the Fatherland, such action could scarcely promote a more effectual resistance to the danger looming in the East. The Bible, according to him, was to serve as the means of uniting the people of God. He flung it amongst the people at a time when everything was seething with excitement; yet he himself, in spite of all his praise of Bible study, was moved to execrate the results. It seemed, so he declared, as though it had been done merely “in order that each one might bore a hole where his snout happened to be.”[461] As to subjectivism, the dominant evil of the age, he himself carried it to its furthest limits, relentlessly condemning everywhere whatever did not appeal to him and exalting his personal views and feelings into a regular law; subjectivism pervades and spoils his whole theology, and, in the domain of ethics, puts both personality and conscience on a new and very questionable basis.[462] The subjective principle as used by him and exalted into an axiom, might be invoked equally by any religious faction for its own ends. We need only recall Luther’s theory of the lonely isolation of the individual in the matter of faith.