He was also keenly alive to the harm these dissensions were doing to his reputation. Nor must we forget the threatening and highly insulting behaviour of many of these heretics. Taking all things together, it is easy to understand how a temper such as his was lashed to fury when denouncing the “presumption and foolhardiness” of his foes.[1063] “A muddled and obstinate head” sits on the neck of the fanatics’ ringleader; “his horns must be blunted.”[1064]—“Carlstadt and Zwingli behave with insolence and defiance”; “We must needs decry the fanatics as damned”; “they actually dare to pick holes in our doctrine; ah, the scoundrelly rabble do a great injury to our Evangel even in the outland and enable our foes to scoff at us.”[1065]—“Their pride and audacity will bring about their downfall.”[1066] In truth, he says, “Carlstadt blasphemed himself to death.”[1067]—Œcolampadius saw the “curse” of God fulfilled in himself, “and withered away with fear the night after Zwingli had been struck down” (at Cappel).[1068] Zwingli himself, like the rest, was urged on merely by “his boundless ambition.”[1069]—Egranus (Johann Wildenauer) was a “proud donkey.”[1070]—Bucer is a “gossip,”[1071] “a miscreant through and through, in every case, inflection and rule of grammar; I trust him not at all, for Paul says [Titus iii. 10] ‘A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, avoid.’”[1072]—Sebastian Franck is a “wicked, venomous knave and it is a wonder to me that those at Ulm care to keep him.”[1073] “He only loved to do harm, is inconstant and boasts of the spirit; but his wife has plenty of spirit and it is she who inspirits him with her spirit.”[1074]—Schwenckfeld deserves as little as Franck to be written against. “Agricola is only puffed up with hatred and ambition.”[1075] He “is and should be called a godless man who denies God, which is what the Sacramentarians do.”[1076]—“Of false brethren we must above all things beware.”[1077]—With such a one “there is no hope of repentance; he is bold, impudent.”[1078]—“He remains obdurate,” he says of one of these heretics, “a cunning, evil-minded scoffer”; he betrays us as “Judas betrayed Christ.”[1079] The depth of the yawning abyss between the heretics and Luther and also the hatred they bore him on account of his treatment of them is plain from the words of Münzer and Ickelsamer already quoted.[1080] 3. The Church-Unseen, its Origin and Early History His doctrine of the Church may in many respects be regarded as the key-stone and centre of the rest of Luther’s theology.