What is also noteworthy in the memorandum for the people of Erfurt is that, in order to defend the legal standing of the preachers, he insists on the fact of their having been recognised by their congregation, who are willing to listen to them as their shepherds. Here we have the revival of an old idea of his, viz. that the soul-herd was really appointed by the people and in their name. In his later years he tended to revert to this view, though, in reality, the people never had a say in the matter. After having, in 1542, consecrated Amsdorf as “Bishop” of Naumburg, in the ensuing controversies he referred to the will of the “Church,” i.e. of the Naumburg Lutherans. “All depends,” so he wrote, “whether the Church and the Bishop are at one, and whether the Church will listen to the Bishop and the Bishop will teach the Church. This is exemplified here.”[1224] _Controversies with the Catholics on the Question of the Church_ In what Luther wrote against the Catholics we occasionally meet some fine sayings on the unfettered authority of the Church in its relations to the secular rulers,[1225] so greatly was his versatile mind governed by the spirit of opportunism. It was from motives of expediency that, in 1529, in his “Vom Kriege widder die Türcken” he makes out Emperors and kings to be no protectors of the Church; these worldly powers are “as a rule the worst foes of Christendom and the faith.” “The Emperor’s sword has nothing to do with the faith, but only with bodily and worldly affairs.”[1226] It must be remembered that he wrote this just before the dreaded Diet of Augsburg.—Again, in 1545, in the Theses against the “Theologists of Louvain” who had requested the State to protect the Catholic faith as heretofore, Luther says: “It is not the duty of Kings and Princes to confirm right doctrine; they have themselves to bow to it and obey it as the Word of God and God Himself.”[1227]—If the “Emperor’s sword” and the “Kings and Princes” had been on his side, then his language would have been quite different. As it was, however, whenever he thought it might prove useful, he was not unwilling to come back even later to the standpoint of his writing “Von welltlicher Uberkeytt.”[1228] When the Catholics, for instance at the Diet of Augsburg, reproached his party with having completely secularised the Church and with prohibiting Catholic worship with the help of the Princes who favoured him, his replies were eminently characteristic both of his temper and his mode of controversy.