In spite of his pseudo-mystical schemes for the establishment of a Church on the Apostolic model; in spite of his abandonment of doctrines to which Luther clung as to an heirloom of the ancient Church; regardless of his antagonism to Luther—which the latter repaid with relentless persecution—this cultured fanatic expressed in his numerous writings and letters his lasting gratitude to, and respect for, Luther on account of the services which the latter had in his opinion rendered in the restoration of truth. He extols his “wonderful trumpet-call,”[542] and without any trace of hypocrisy, says: “What Martin Luther and others have done aright, for instance in the expounding of Holy Scripture ... I trust I will, with God’s help, never underrate.”[543] At the same time, however, he is not slow to express it as his conviction, that, “At the beginning of the present Evangel the said [Lutheran] doctrine was far better, purer and more wholesome than it is now.”[544] “Dr. Martin led us out of Egypt, through the Red Sea and into the wilderness, and there he left us to lose ourselves on the rough roads; yet he seeks to persuade everybody that we are already in the Promised Land.” This he said in 1528.[545] “Although Luther has written much that is good,” “that has been and still may be profitable to believers, for which we give praise and thanks to God the Lord, still he has also written much that is evil, and in the end it will be proved that his and his people’s doctrine or _theologia_ was neither apostolic, nor pure, nor perfect ... which certainly might have been seen long since by its fruits.”[546] His criticisms of Luther, which, in spite of his harsh treatment at the latter’s hands, are throughout temperately expressed and with a certain aristocratic reticence, deal on the one hand with the fruits of the Wittenberg Reformation, and, on the other, with certain main features of the ethical teaching of his master and one-time friend; his strictures thus form a recapitulation of what has gone before. _On the hoped-for Moral Revival_ “The reformation of life has not taken place,” this is what Carl Ecke, Schwenckfeld’s latest biographer, represents as the honest conviction of the “apostolic” preacher of the faith in Silesia.[547] “The religion of Lutheranism as it then was did not, in Schwenckfeld’s opinion, as a whole reach the standard of Bible Christianity.”[548] “The greater part of the common herd,” says Schwenckfeld, “who are called Lutherans do not know to-day how they stand, whether with regard to works, or in relation to God and to their own conscience.”[549]