Accordingly it was then his own opinion that they should be “abolished” and “overthrown,” particularly such images as were held in peculiar veneration; in 1528 he again admitted that this was his object, when once more proposing his own less noisy and more cautious policy as the more effectual; in his sermons on the Ten Commandments printed at this time he declared that the way to “hew down and stamp out the images was to tear and turn men’s hearts away from them.”[742] Then the “images would tumble down of their own accord and fall into disrepute; for they [the faithful] will say: If it is not a good work to make images, then it is the devil who makes them and the pictures. In future I shall keep my money in my pocket or lay it out to better advantage.”[743]—“The iconoclasts rush in and tear down the images outwardly. To this I do not object so much. But then they go on to say that it must be so, and that it is well pleasing to God”; this, however, is false; it is a mistake to say that such a Divine command exists to tear them down.[744] The grounds on which he opposed the old-time use of images were the following: By erecting them people sought to gain merit in God’s sight and to perform good works; they also trusted in images and in the Saints instead of in Christ, Who is our only ground for confidence; finally—a reason alleged by him but seldom—people adored the images and thus became guilty of idolatry. Here it is plain how much his peculiar theology on good works and the worship of the saints contribute to his condemnation of the ancient Catholic practice. In his zeal against the existing abuses he overlooks the fact, that to invoke before their images the Saints’ intercession with Christ was not in the least opposed to belief in Christ as the one mediator. As for the charge of adoring the images to which he resorts exceptionally—more with the object of making an impression and shielding himself—it amounted to an act of injustice against all his forefathers to accuse them of having been so grossly stupid as to confuse the images with the divinity; even he himself had elsewhere sufficiently absolved them of the charge of adoring saints, let alone images.[745] The real cause of this premature attack on images found in these sermons was the storm called forth by Carlstadt, which Luther hoped to divert and dominate[746] by the attitude he assumed; otherwise it is very likely he would have refrained from assailing the religious feelings of the people in so sensitive a spot for many years to come, or at any rate would not have done so in the manner he chose by way of reply to Carlstadt.