“Some argue,” we read in the memorandum of the Wittenbergers published in 1536, “that the secular authorities have no concern whatever with ghostly matters. This is going much too far.… The rulers must not only protect the life and belongings of their underlings, but their highest duty is to promote the honour of God and to prevent blasphemy and idolatry,” etc.[913] The memorandum was intended for Philip of Hesse. As Luther was aware that the Landgrave was loath to proceed to extremities with the Anabaptists, he added to the memorandum a note of his own. “Seeing that His Serene Highness the Landgrave reports that certain leaders and teachers of the Anabaptists … have not kept their promise (viz. to quit the land) Your Serene Highness may with a good conscience cause them to be punished with the sword, for this reason also, to wit, that they have not kept their oath or promise. Such is the rule. Yet Your Serene Highness, needless to say, may at all times allow justice to be tempered with mercy, according to the circumstances.”[914] If meant in earnest the latter recommendation to mercy does the speaker credit and is the more noteworthy because, in his later years, we do not often hear him pleading for the heretics. As a rule he is all too intent on emphasising the wickedness of what he terms “blasphemy and idolatry,” i.e. of whatever was at variance with his own teaching. But what—and this is the main objection—entitles Luther’s doctrine to be regarded as the standard of belief? This point Luther usually evaded. He says: Those heretics are to be punished “whose teaching is at variance with the public articles of the faith which are plainly grounded on Scripture and believed throughout the world by the whole of Christendom.”[915] “Such articles, common to the whole of Christendom, have already been sufficiently tested, examined, proved and determined by Scripture and by the confession of the whole of Christendom, confirmed by many miracles, sealed by the blood of the holy Martyrs, witnessed to and defended by the books of all the Doctors and are not now to become the prey of faultfinders or cavillers.”[916] A sharp answer, one very much to the point, was given by Bullinger of Zürich, who spoke of it as “truly laughable” that his opponent should suddenly appeal to the fact “of the Church having so long held this.” “If Luther’s argument, based on longstanding usage, be admitted, then is Popery quite in the right when it harps on the Church and her age. But then the whole of Luther’s own doctrine tumbles over, for his teaching is not that which the Roman Church has held for so long.”[917]—Nor is it easy to tell which points of doctrine Luther, in his elastic fashion, included among the articles “clearly founded on Scripture” and held unquestioningly by the whole of Christendom. His words occasionally presuppose that all divergent doctrines, not only those of the Sacramentarians and Anabaptists, but