Voice answered voice. The religious houses all Germany over were like kennels of hounds howling to each other across the spiritual waste. If souls could not be sung out of purgatory, their occupation was gone. Luther wrote to Pope Leo to defend himself; Leo cited him to answer for his audacity at Rome; while to the young laymen, to the noble spirits all Europe over, Wittenberg became a beacon of light shining in the universal darkness. It was a trying time to Luther. Had he been a smaller man, he would have been swept away by his sudden popularity--he would have placed himself at the head of some great democratic movement, and in a few years his name would have disappeared in the noise and smoke of anarchy. But this was not his nature. His fellow-townsmen were heartily on his side. He remained quietly at his post in the Augustine Church at Wittenberg. If the powers of the world came down upon him and killed him, he was ready to be killed. Of himself at all times he thought infinitely little; and he believed that his death would be as serviceable to truth as his life. Killed undoubtedly he would have been if the clergy could have had their way. It happened, however, that Saxony just then was governed by a prince of no common order. Were all princes like the Elector Frederick, we should have no need of democracy in this world--we should never have heard of democracy. The clergy could not touch Luther against the will of the Wittenberg senate, unless the Elector would help them; and, to the astonishment of everybody, the Elector was disinclined to consent. The Pope himself wrote to exhort him to his duties. The Elector still hesitated. His professed creed was the creed in which the Church had educated him; but he had a clear secular understanding outside his formulas. When he read the propositions, they did not seem to him the pernicious things which the monks said they were. 'There is much in the Bible about Christ,' he said, 'but not much about Rome.' He sent for Erasmus, and asked him what he thought about the matter. The Elector knew to whom he was speaking. He wished for a direct answer, and looked Erasmus full and broad in the face. Erasmus pinched his thin lips together. 'Luther,' he said at length, 'has committed two sins: he has touched the Pope's crown and the monks' bellies.' He generously and strongly urged Frederick not to yield for the present to Pope Leo's importunacy; and the Pope was obliged to try less hasty and more formal methods. He had wished Luther to be sent to him to Rome, where his process would have had a rapid end. As this could not be, the case was transferred to Augsburg, and a cardinal legate was sent from Italy to look into it.