Mingled with blood.—Blood is a symbol of death‐dealing doctrine, and this teaches that Luther did not get entirely free from error. The following illustrates this point: “There gradually developed a group of radicals who were convinced that Luther had not the courage of his convictions. They proposed to abolish the idolatry of the Mass and all other outward signs of what they deemed the old superstitions. Luther’s colleague at Wittenberg, Carlstadt, began denouncing the monastic life, the celibacy of the clergy, the veneration of images; and before the end of 1521 we find the first characteristic outward symptoms of Protestantism. In January 1522, Carlstadt induced the authorities of Wittenberg to publish the first evangelical church ordinance. The service of the Mass was modified, and the laity were to receive the elements in both kinds. Reminders of the old religious usages were to be done away with, and the fast‐days were to be no longer observed. These measures led Luther to return to Wittenberg in March, 1522, where he preached a series of sermons attacking the impatience of the radical party. In 1525 the conservative party, which had from the first feared that Luther’s teaching would result in sedition, received a new and terrible proof, as it seemed to them, of the noxious influence of the evangelical preachers. “The peasant movements which had caused so much anxiety at the diet of Augsburg in 1518, culminated in the Peasant Revolt in which the common man, both in country and town, rose in the name of God’s justice to avenge long‐standing wrongs and establish his rights. Luther was by no means directly responsible for the civil war which followed, but he had certainly contributed to stir up the ancient discontent. He had asserted that, owing to the habit of foreclosing small mortgages, ‘Any one with a hundred gulden could gobble up a peasant a year.’ The German feudal lords he pronounced hangmen, who knew only how to swindle the poor man. Yet in spite of this harsh talk about princes, Luther relied upon them to forward the reforms in which he was interested. The peasants demanded that the gospel should be taught them as a guide in life, and that each community should be permitted to choose its pastor and depose him if he conducted himself improperly. More radical demands came from the working classes in the towns. The articles of Heilbronn demanded that the property of the Church should be confiscated and used for the community; clergy and nobility alike were to be deprived of all their privileges, so that they could no longer oppress the poor man. The more violent leaders renewed the old cry that the parsons must be slain. Hundreds of castles and monasteries were destroyed by the frantic peasantry, and some of the nobles were murdered with shocking cruelty. Luther, who believed that the peasants were trying to cloak their dreadful sins with excuses from the gospel, exhorted the government to put down the insurrection. ‘Have no