No, replies Luther, they must not do so for they would be committing the same sin as the Kings of Israel when they “slew the true prophets”; but on account of the injustice of such slaughter, we are not to make nought of the law or refrain from stoning the false prophets. “Pious authorities will not punish anyone unless they see, hear, learn or know for certain that they are blasphemers.”[908]—Even should Kaiser Charles come and tell us, that he is convinced that “the doctrine of the Papists is true, and that he must therefore, in accordance with God’s command, use all his power to extirpate our heretical doctrines in his Empire,” we must answer, that: “We know he is not certain of this, and, in fact, cannot be certain.”[909] But does this not come to much the same as imposing faith by some sort of compulsion? No, is his answer. “The faith is not thereby forced on anyone, for he is free to believe what he pleases. He is only forbidden to indulge in that teaching and blaspheming whereby he seeks to rob God and Christians of their doctrine and Word, whilst all the while enjoying their protection and all temporal advantages. Let him go where there are no Christians and have things his way there.”[910] The severity of his demands is hardly mitigated or excused by the right he gives people to leave the country. At any rate those who do not see eye to eye with him must get themselves gone, for, as he frequently remarks, whoever wishes to dwell among the burghers must not disregard the laws of the borough.[911] “By all this, however,” so he says on another occasion, “no one is forced into the faith but the common man is merely set free from troublesome and obstinate spirits, and the knavery of the hole-and-corner preachers is checked.”[912] Thus, if the man who thinks otherwise wishes to lock up his convictions in his own breast, he is quite free to do so. Within, he may enjoy the most far-reaching freedom, since no earthly power extends to his thoughts. The reply of those concerned was, however, obvious; what right, they asked, had the new religious tribunal to prevent a man from revealing his convictions and openly living up to them, and was not the order to keep silence tantamount to a stifling of conscience and to forcing people to become hypocrites? Hence, in the ensuing discussions, we find that Luther and his friends were ever making fresh efforts to meet the objections; in itself this was a sign of the weakness of the exclusivism adopted by the Lutherans, in spite of all they had formerly said, as soon as they had succeeded in winning the favour of the State.