And yet he confesses to a certain nervousness: “At first I trembled and I prayed while burning the Papal books and the Bull. But now I am more rejoiced at this than at any previous act of my life; they [the Romanists] are a worse pestilence than I had thought.” This he writes to his same fatherly friend, Staupitz.[127]
His perturbation, which had become to him almost a life-element, served to dispel his fears and his doubts: “I am battling with the floods and am carried away by them (“_fluctibus his rapior et volvor_”). “The noise [of strife] rages mightily. Both sides are putting their heart into it.”[128] Catholics discern with grief in this uncanny joy a sad attempt on his part to find encouragement in the preposterous notion he fostered of the “devilishness” of the Papacy. They will also perceive in his outbursts of rage, and in the challenges to violence in which he indulges in unguarded moments, the effect of the excommunication working on a mind already stirred to its innermost depths. When we hear him declare in a popular pamphlet, after the arrival of the Papal Bull, that it would not be surprising were the Princes, the nobility and laity to hit the Pope, the bishops, priests and monks over the head and drive them out of the land,[129] we find that such language agrees only too well with his furious words in his tract written in 1520 against Prierias, where he compares the Pope and his followers to a band of cut-throats.
If murderers are punished with the sword, why then should we not proceed with still greater severity against those “teachers of perdition” who are determined not to repent? “Why do we not attack them with every weapon that comes to hand and wash our hands in their blood, if we thereby save ourselves and ours from the most dangerous of flames? How happy are those Christians who are not obliged like us, the most miserable of men, to live under such an Antichrist.” Recognising the ominous character of the passage “_Cur non ... manus nostras in sanguine istorum lavamus_,” etc., later Lutherans added certain words which appear first in the Jena edition (German translation) in 1555: “But God Who says (Deut. xxxii. 35, Rom. xii. 19) ‘Vengeance is mine’ will find out these His enemies in good time, who are not worthy of temporal punishment, but whose punishment must be eternal in the abyss of hell.” These words, which are not found in the original edition of 1520, are given in Walch’s edition of Luther, vol. xviii., p. 245. The argument in exoneration of Luther, based upon them by a recent Lutheran, thus falls to the ground. The addition will be sought for in vain in the Weimar edition (6, p. 347 f.), and in that of Erlangen (“Opp. Lat. var.” 2, p. 107). Paulus has proved that the falsification of the text was the work of Nicholas Amsdorf, who was responsible for the Jena edition, though in the Preface he protests that his edition of Luther’s works is free from all correction or addition.[130]