Here I have given only some of the mildest of his onslaughts. Everybody was reading them. Everybody was believing them. Ploughboys and tapsters stood around their more literate companions while they conned aloud the latest pamphlet of the great debate. Glorious Johannes Gutenberg, what a debt to thee and thy printer’s art, owe all who love truth, justice, and the freeing of the human soul! But Hutten had not spoken alone. Louder and clearer than his sounded the voice from Wittenberg. Dr. Luther had anticipated the tardily fashioned Bull. The Wittenberg printing-presses had scattered his pamphlets to wide Germany. It was not to the learned Latinists that he was speaking now. “The time for silence is gone, and the time for speaking has come.” So in the words of Ecclesiastes, did the Augustinian friar begin his “_Address to the German Nobility_,”--the work that more than any other one book split Christendom into two hostile camps. On July 20, 1520, just as I was reëntering Germany, it was published. I met my first copy a few days later at Nuremberg. I remember sitting up late into the night in the hot room of my inn to finish it. In the morning I discovered that five other guests in the selfsame inn had burned out their candles doing the like. Men could talk of nothing else. I was not amazed to hear that very soon the presses of Leipzig and Strassburg were busily reprinting. I fear that if I had seen this book before seeking my audience with Leo I would have turned back silent, and hazarding nothing. The Wittenberg preacher had thrown away the scabbard. Such plainness of speech had not been used against Rome since pagan emperors had ceased to persecute. I leave to historians and theologians to tell our children’s children of this book. Cold enough seems the invective now, perhaps, as the fleeting years bring us German Protestants slothful safety. But let it be read as I and a million others read it,--with the great issue trembling on the brink, with the vast fabric of the One Catholic Church and the One Vicar of Christ its head tottering as to their fall,--old rooted ideas and beliefs, things men had sucked in with their mothers’ milk, things men had learned to believe as certainly as that the sun crosses the sky toward the west, all these in short seemingly about to perish, and _then_ perchance some of the glow and battle spirit might come, some of the hope, fear, trembling, exaltation.