There was no imperial power at that time which might have deemed it necessary or expedient to track out the man who had been condemned by the Edict of Worms. The Emperor had left Germany again, and was engaged in a war with France.
In his quiet solitude Luther threw himself again without delay into the work of his calling, so far as he could here perform it. This was the study of Scripture and the active exercise of his own pen in the service of God's Word. He had now more time than before to investigate the meaning of the Bible in its original languages. 'I sit here,' he writes to Spalatin ten days after his arrival, 'the whole day at leisure, and read the Greek and Hebrew Bible.'
His sojourn at the castle began in the festival time between Easter and Whitsuntide. He wrote at once an exposition of the sixty-eighth Psalm, with particular reference to the events of Ascension and Whitsuntide.
For the liberation of the laity from the Papal yoke, he set at once further to work by composing a treatise 'On Confession, whether the Pope has power to order it.' He commends confession, when a man humbles himself and, receives forgiveness of God through the lips of a Christian brother, but he denounces any compulsion in the matter, and warns men against priests who pervert it into a means of increasing their own power. He now expressed his public thanks to Sickingen, and dedicated the book to him--'To the just and firm Francis von Sickingen, my especial lord and patron.' In this dedication he repeats the fears he had long expressed of the judgment that the clergy would bring upon themselves by their hatred of improvement and their obstinacy. 'I have,' he says, 'often offered peace, I have offered them an answer, I have disputed, but all has been of no avail: I have met with no justice, but only with vain malice and violence, nothing more. I have been simply called on to retract, and threatened with every evil if I refused.' Then speaking of the critical moment at which he was obliged to withdraw, 'I can do no more,' he says, 'I am now out of the game. They have now time to change that which cannot, and should not, and will not be tolerated from them any longer. If they refuse to make the change, another will make it for them, without their thanks, one who will not teach like Luther with letters and words, but with deeds. Thank God, the fear and awe of those rogues at Borne is now less than it was.' And again, speaking of Roman insolence: 'They push on blindly ahead--there is no listening or reasoning. Well, I have seen; more water-bubbles than even theirs, and once such an outrageous smoke that it managed to blot out the sun, but the smoke never lasted, and the sun still shines. I shall continue to keep the truth bright and expose it, and am as far from fearing my ungracious masters as they are ready to despise me.'