even those of the Papists, were to be punished by the authorities. If everyone is to be punished who teaches “that Christ has not died for our sins but that each one must himself make satisfaction for them,”[918] (a doctrine unjustly foisted on the Papists by Luther), or who “condemns the public ministry and draws the people away from it,” or who “insists that our baptism and preaching are not Christian and therefore that our Church is not the Church of Christ,”[919] etc.,—then many Catholics could not but fall victims to the sword of the authorities. How often did not Luther designate every specifically Catholic doctrine as rank “blasphemy,” and stigmatise every Catholic practice as idolatry? Blasphemy and idolatry were, however, according to him, to be rooted out by violence. Truly his words gave promise of an abundant harvest of persecution. As a reason of his animus against heretics within his own fold Luther finally brings forward those personal considerations which are familiar to all who have followed his controversies. His natural foes are those who in their “peculiar wisdom” “seek to teach something besides Christ and beyond our preaching.”[920] Hence he was fond of insisting that Christ was slaying the Papacy through him, and of rejecting all who “make a great pother” and “claim to know something new.” They come, and, like Carlstadt, want to “seize upon the prize and poach upon my preserves.” Had not Carlstadt come along “with the fanatics, Münzer and the Anabaptists, all would have gone well with my undertaking.”[921] These men want to “darken the sun of the Evangel” so that the world “may forget all that has hitherto been taught by us.”[922] “They want to have nothing to do with me,” he complains of the fanatics, “and I want to have nothing to do with them. They boast that they have nothing from me, for which I heartily thank God; I have borrowed even less from them, for which, too, God be praised.”[923] The rupture with the Swiss came about because they “wished to be first.”[924] In all these dissensions he finds many a one saying to the Christians: “I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin.” And yet he alone had the right to call himself the “great Doctor” “to whom God first revealed His Word to preach.”[925] But did not his very self-reliance finally broaden the ideas of the preacher of coercion? Did not Luther in a sermon preached at Eisleben on Feb. 7, 1546, as good as repudiate his former exclusivism?