He himself declared frankly, about the end of 1524, that “by his writings he had done more harm to the images than Carlstadt with all his storming and fanaticism will ever do.”[733] In the course of the next year he boasted of having “brought contempt” on the images even before Carlstadt’s time. He had repudiated the latter’s acts of violence and his ill-judged appeal to the law of Moses;[734] on the other hand, he had undermined the very foundations of image-worship by his Evangelical doctrines; this was a better kind of “storming,” for in this way those who once had bowed to images now “refused to have any made.” As much as the most fanatical of the iconoclasts, he too wished to see the images “torn out of men’s hearts, despised and abolished,” but he “destroyed them [the images] outwardly and also inwardly,”[735] and so went one better than Carlstadt, who attacked them only from the outside. He had, so he continues, speaking to the German people, “consented” that the images should be “done away with outwardly so long as this took place without fanaticism and violence, and by the hand of the proper authorities.”[736] “We drive them out of men’s hearts until the time comes for them to be torn down by the hands of those whose duty it is to do this.”[737] Meanwhile, however, it was “every man’s duty” to “destroy them by the Evangel,” “especially the images of God and other idolatrous ones.”[738] In his Church-sermons he makes his own the complaint, that, though these images which attracted a great “concourse of people” should be “overthrown,” the bishops were actually attaching indulgences to them and thus increasing the disorder.[739] In his sermons against Carlstadt at Wittenberg he had said things, and afterwards disseminated them in print, little calculated to impose restraint on the zeal of the multitude: “It were better we had none of these images on account of the tiresome and execrable abuse and unbelief.”[740] The iconoclasts at Wittenberg were anxious, he says, to set about hewing down the images. His reply was: “Not yet! For you will not eradicate the images in this way, indeed you will only establish them more firmly than ever.”[741]