The Catholics objected to this doctrine of salvation advanced by Luther, that by trusting to God's free mercy and by undervaluing good works, it led to moral indolence. But on the contrary, it was to the very unbending moral earnestness of a Christian conscience, which, indignant at the temptations offered to moral frivolity, to a deceitful feeling of ease in respect to sin and guilt, and to a contempt of the fruits of true morality, rebelled against the false value attached to this indulgence money, that these Theses, the germ, so to speak, of the Reformation, owed their origin and prosecution. With the same earnestness he now for the first time publicly attacked the ecclesiastical power of the Papacy, in so far namely as, in his conviction, it invaded the territory reserved to Himself by the Heavenly Lord and Judge. This was what the Pope and his theologians and ecclesiastics could least of all endure.
On the same day that these theses were published, Luther sent a copy of them with a letter to the Archbishop Albert, his 'revered and gracious Lord and Shepherd in Christ.' After a humble introduction, he begged him most earnestly to prevent the scandalising and iniquitous harangues with which his agents hawked about their indulgences, and reminded him that he would have to give an account of the souls entrusted to his episcopal care.
The next day he addressed himself to the people from the pulpit, in a sermon he had to preach on the festival of All Saints. After exhorting them to seek their salvation in God and Christ alone, and to let the consecration by the Church become a real consecration of the heart, he went on to tell them plainly, with regard to indulgences, that he could only absolve from duties imposed by the Church, and that they dare not rely on him for more, nor delay on his account the duties of true repentance.
Anyone who has heard that the great movement of the Reformation in Germany, and with it the founding of the Evangelical Church, originated in the ninety-five theses of Luther, and who then reads these theses through, might perhaps be surprised at the importance of their results. They referred, in the first place, to only one particular point of Christian doctrine, not at all to the general fundamental question as to how sinners could obtain forgiveness and be saved, but merely to the remission of punishments connected with penance. They contained no positive declaration against the most essential elements of the Catholic theory of penance, or against the necessity of oral confession, or of priestly absolution, and such subjects; they presupposed, in fact, the existence of a purgatory. Much of what they attacked, not one of the learned theologians of the middle ages or of those times had ever ventured to assert; as, for instance, the notion that indulgences made the remission of sins to the individual complete on the part of God. Moreover, the ruling principles of the theology of the day, which defended the system of indulgences, though resting mainly on the authority of the great Scholastic teacher Thomas Aquinas, were not adopted by other Scholastics, and had never been erected into a dogma by any decree of the Church. Theologians before Luther, and with far more acuteness and penetration than he showed in his theses, had already assailed the whole system of indulgences. And, in regard to any idea on Luther's part of the effects of his theses extending widely in Germany, it may be noticed that not only were they composed in Latin, but that they dealt largely with Scholastic expressions and ideas, which a layman would find it difficult to understand.