He knew very well, so he wrote in 1530, “that the Prince’s office and the preacher’s are not one and the same, and that the Prince as such ought not to do this [i.e. prohibit the Mass].” But in this the Prince was acting, not as a Prince, but as a Christian. It is also “a different thing whether a Prince ought to preach or whether he ought to consent to the preaching. It is not the Prince, but rather Scripture, that prohibits ‘winkle-masses’”; if a Prince chose to take the side of Scripture that was his own business.[1229] Another answer of Luther’s was to the effect that the abominations of Catholic worship which were being abolished by the secular authorities were, after all, outward things, and that the power of the sovereign without a doubt stretched over “_res externæ_.”[1230] Of these attempts at justification and of his doctrine of the Church in general, Köstlin’s observations hold good: “We cannot escape the fact that, here, there is much vacillation and that Luther stands in danger of contradicting himself.” “We must admit that he had not studied deeply enough the questions arising out of the relations of the authorities to matters ecclesiastical.”[1231] “The decision [of the sovereigns] as to what constituted right doctrine was final as regards the substance of the preaching in their lands.” “A nobleman who had received orders from his sovereign, the Duke of Saxony, to expel the Evangelical preachers, was told by Luther—though what he said was undeniably at variance with other utterances—that the sovereign had no right to do this because God’s command obliged him to rule only in secular and not in spiritual concerns.” “In fact the only answer he could give to the Popish persecutors when they alleged they were forced by _their_ office and conscience to act as they did was: ‘What is that to me?’ for it was clear enough that they were using their authority wantonly.”[1232] But how are we to explain his apparent readiness at the time of the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 to recognise the olden Church, and the power of the bishops, and even himself to submit to them if only they would allow him and his followers freedom to preach the Evangel? The statements to this effect in his “Vermanug” of this year have been widely misunderstood through being taken apart from their setting. He does not for a moment imagine, as he has been falsely credited with doing, that it was not “his vocation to found a new Church separate from Catholicism”; neither has he any desire to remain united with his foes “in one communion under the Catholic bishops.”