...Leo X., the keen Florentine, the pupil of Politian, the friend of Raphael, the Greek philosopher with the triple crown, bestowed by the Conclave, probably because he suffered from a disease, nowise due to Christian abstinence, which was then very dangerous, Leo of Medici, how he must have smiled at the poor, chaste, simple-minded monk who imagined that the evangelic gospels were the chart of Christianity, and that this chart must be a truth! Perhaps he never comprehended what Luther was aiming at, for at that time he was busily occupied with the building of St. Peter's Cathedral, the cost of which was defrayed by the money derived from these sales of absolutions, so that sin actually furnished the means wherewith to build this church, which became thereby, as it were, a monument to the lusts of the flesh, like that pyramid which an Egyptian girl built with the money she had earned by prostitution. Of this house of God it perhaps might be said more truly than of Cologne Cathedral, that it was built by the devil. This triumph of spiritualism, compelling sensualism itself to build its most beautiful temple--this reaping from the multitude, by concessions made to the flesh, the means wherewith to beautify spiritualism, was not understood in the German North. For there, more easily than under the burning skies of Italy, was it possible to practice a Christianity that should make the fewest concessions to the senses. We Northerners are cold-blooded, and needed not so many price-lists of absolution for sins of the flesh as the fatherly Leo sent us. The climate makes the exercise of Christian virtues easier for us; and when, on the 31st of October 1517, Luther nailed to the door of St Augustine's Church his thesis against indulgences, the city moat of Wittenberg was, perhaps, already frozen over with ice thick enough for skating, which is a chilly pleasure, and therefore no sin.