He would fain, so he says, “point out the Christian sense of this text” as against that read into it by the hierarchical Church; nevertheless, at his first effort he cannot rise above a coarse witticism. “For very fear,” on approaching this text “Thou art Peter,” etc., something “might easily have happened had I not had my breeches on; and I might have done something that people do not like to smell, so anxious and affrighted was I.” Why did not the Pope appeal rather to the text: “In the beginning Cod created the heavens—that is the Pope—and the earth, that is the Christian Church,” etc. This is the first answer. The second is a perversion of the Catholic view; he accuses the Pope of deducing from the text under discussion, that he has “all power in heaven as well as on earth” and authority “over all the Churches and the Emperor to boot.” This parody of the truth Luther proceeds triumphantly to demolish as “blasphemous idolatry.”—There follows thirdly an appeal to the “Emperor, Kings, Princes and nobles” to seize upon the Papal States which the Pope has stolen by dint of “lying and trickery” and to slay as blasphemers him and his Cardinals. He goes on to explain the Bible passage in question by proving, fourthly, against the “wicked, shameless, stiff-necked” Papists from Eph. iv. 15, and from Augustine and Cyprian, “that the whole of Christendom throughout the world has no other head set over it save only Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The true sense of Eph. iv. 15 and the real teaching of both the Fathers in question are too well known for us to need to waste words on them here.—Fifthly, he brings forward John vi. 63: “My words are Spirit and life” and argues: “According to this the words Matt. xvi. 18 [concerning Peter and the rock] must also be Spirit and life.… The upbuilding must here mean a spiritual and living upbuilding; the rock must be a living and spiritual rock; the Church a living and spiritual assembly, nay, something that lives for all eternity.”—These facts, however, had always been admitted by Catholic commentators without causing them any apprehension as to the primacy or the visible Church.—Sixthly, he seeks to demonstrate that the Church can only be built on the rock indicated by Christ “by faith”; this, however, excludes the primacy of Peter, for “whoever believes is built upon this rock.”—Seventhly: “It is thus that St. Peter himself interprets it, 1 Peter ii. 3 ff.,”—though this is a fact only credible to one who is already of Luther’s opinion.—Eighthly, he will have it that, in the famous passage, Christ meant to say no more than: “Thou art Peter, that is a rock, for thou hast perceived and named the Right Man, viz. Christ, Who is the true Rock, as Scripture terms Him. On this rock, i.e. on Me, Christ, I will build the whole of My Christendom.”