On the other hand, Luther could well note with satisfaction the inability of the heretics to bring forward anything positive of importance. They were dwarfs compared with him. With his knowledge of the Bible it was child’s play to him to overthrow the fanatics’ often ludicrous applications of Scripture. Of Zwingli, too, it was easy for him to get the better by dint of sticking to the literal sense of Christ’s words of institution: “This is My Body.” Luther was not slow in pointing out the blemishes of the “fanatics,” their vanity and blind obedience to ambition and self-will, and the impracticability of their fantastic, and often revolutionary, theories. The very truth of his strictures, for all his lack of miracles, raised him in his own eyes, far above these clumsy teachers; this perhaps enables us to understand better the utter contempt he expresses for them. _His Anger with Lemnius and Others_ One had but to praise those whom he condemned to call forth Luther’s implacable anger. This was the experience in 1538 of the humanist, Simon Lemnius (Lemchen) of Wittenberg, a man otherwise kindly disposed to the new teaching. A humanist above all, he had won Melanchthon’s favour on account of his talent. Lemnius had thoughtlessly dared to publish two books of epigrams in which he not only attacked with biting sarcasm certain Wittenberg personages, but actually ventured to praise Archbishop Albert of Mayence, Luther’s powerful opponent. The poet, no doubt, was anxious to curry favour with the Archbishop so as to find in him a Mæcenas; he even went so far as to extol him as the man who “had kept alive the olden faith.” The censorship for which Melanchthon as Rector of the University was then responsible, was caught napping. Lemnius was indeed arrested by the University, but he escaped and fled from Wittenberg. On Trinity Sunday, June 16th, Luther read out from the pulpit a Mandate in which he abused Archbishop Albert in disgraceful terms, and scourged as a criminal act the praise bestowed in the “shameful, shocking book of lies” on Bishop Albert, “a devil out of whom it made a saint.” In it he also declared that, “by every code of law, and no matter whither the fugitive knave had fled, his head was forfeit.”[1055] Thus Lemnius was as good as outlawed—though no Court of Justice had yet sentenced him. On July 4th Melanchthon formally expelled him from the University on account of “faithlessness, perjury and slander.”[1056] The “perjury” consisted in his having fled, in defiance of the obedience he owed to the University, so as to evade the harsh penalties he had reason to apprehend. The whole edition of the Epigrams was destroyed.