Because we endured so much “pain and such martyrdom of heart and conscience” no one must now seek to excuse the Papacy; on the contrary “we cannot blame and scold the Pope enough”; “that he should have so wasted the beautiful years of my youth, and martyred and plagued my conscience is really too bad.” Popery is the “scarlet whore of Rome, the arch-whore, the French whore, chock-full of blasphemies”; “we must thank our Lord God that He has revealed and discovered to us the Pope as the dragon with his head, belly and tail.”[800]—The monks are a “devilish crew,” and monkery a “hellish cauldron”; by day and by night Christ is to all monks a “hangman and devil”; even the best and most learned, and St. Thomas of Aquin himself, were all driven to despair and died of the ghostly poison.[801] The last words occur in the work he wrote in self-defence against Duke George of Saxony (1533), who had twitted him with having committed perjury in breaking his religious vows. The thought of his own infidelity and his abuse of the graces of the religious life was at times quite enough in itself to fill him with fury. At any rate his whole picture of his earlier years is steeped in polemics and the spirit of hate. CHAPTER XXXVIII END OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. THE CHURCH-UNSEEN AND THE VISIBLE CHURCH-BY-LAW 1. From Religious Licence to Religious Constraint _Freedom as the Watchword_ In the early days of his public protest against the olden Church, when Luther proclaimed the “universal priesthood of all Christians,” there could as yet be no question of any compulsion in matters of doctrine, seeing that he expressly conceded to the Christian congregations the right and power to weigh all doctrines and “to set up or send adrift their teachers and soul-herds.” Every Christian, so he wrote, who saw that a true teacher was lacking, was taught and consecrated by God as a priest and was also bound, “under pain of the loss of his soul and of incurring the Divine displeasure, to teach the Word of God.”[802] It is not necessary after all we have already said[803] to point out how impossible it is to square such far-reaching concessions to freedom with any idea of a positive body of doctrine. The concessions may, however, have appealed to him particularly because he himself was disposed to claim the utmost freedom in respect of the dogmas of Catholicism. In those days he was delighted to hear himself extolled as the champion of freedom and the right of private judgment. The interests of his party made such extravagant toleration commendable, for any attempt at compulsion in doctrinal matters, particularly at the beginning, would have lost him many friends. He was also anxious that it should be said of the new Church that it had spread of its own accord and only owing to the power of the Word.