After having in the above examined Luther’s conception of the Church, irrespective of its mode of growth, we may now turn our attention to the genesis and historical development of this conception. _Origin and Early Outbuilding of the New Idea of the Church_ A curious psychological process accompanies the growth of Luther’s idea of the Church. We know that, even long after he had fallen a victim to his theory of justification by faith alone, he had still no thought of breaking away from the Church’s communion or of questioning the conception then in vogue of the Church. It was only when the olden Church refused to come over to his new doctrine and prepared to condemn it, that he decided, after great struggles within, to cut himself adrift, and it was in order to justify this step to himself and to vindicate it to the world that he gradually formed his new views on the Church. (Cp. above, vol. i., p. 321 ff.) Characteristically enough we find a first trace of what was to come, in his sermon on the power of the Papal Ban, which he published in Latin in 1518 and in German in the following year. Here, of course, he had to deal with the question of the effects of the threatened excommunication; in so doing he reached the false proposition, censured amongst his 41 errors in the Bull Exsurge Domine of May 16, 1520: “Excommunications are merely outward penalties and do not rob a man of the Church’s common spiritual prayers.”[1117] Not long after, according to his wont, he went a step further. Among the condemned Theses we find the paradoxical one: “Christians must be taught to love excommunication rather than to fear it.”[1118] At Dresden on July 25, 1518, when he was found fault with on account of his Wittenberg Sermon on Excommunication (which was then probably not yet known in its entirety), he seems to have shown scant respect for the supreme authority in the Church. Emser, his then opponent, writes expressly that Luther had declared he cared nothing for the Pope’s Ban.[1119] Some weeks later, on Sep. 1, Luther himself wrote to Staupitz, his superior, that his conscience told him he was in the right and with the truth on his side; “Christ liveth and reigneth yesterday, to-day and for ever”; he also tells him, that, in his “Resolutions,” and in his replies to Prierias he had spoken freely, and in a language that would wound the Romanists, and that he was ready, nay anxious, to give the brassy Romans an even ruder German answer in the service of Christ, the Shepherd of the people. “Have no fear; I shall continue untrammelled my study of the Word of God without any fear of the citation [to Augsburg].”[1120]