Provincial, and to other persons. Encloses copies of these letters and authorizes him to show them to the Pope. Fears, however, that these letters will have no greater effect than his solemn edict given at Worms, and that the diet will assemble in spite of them. The evil, it is to be- feared, will increase so much that it will be found impossible to eradicate it after- wards.
Two remedies only present themselves to him: either he must go to Germany, and punish the heretics with severity, or a general council must be convoked. As it is impossible to go soon to Germany, he begs the Pope to decide what he ought to do. Promises his Holiness, as a good son of the Church, to stake his person and his states to suppress a sect which is evidently dangerous to all religious authority. As the Germans have asked the Legate, Cardinal Campeggio, to propose to the Pope a general council to be held in Ger- many, it would be well if his Holiness would anticipate the conventicle at Spires by the convocation of a general coun- cil at Trent. The Germans consider Trent as a German city, although it is, properly speaking, Italian. Although the coun- cil ought to be convoked at Trent early next spring, it can afterwards be prorogued and transferred to another city in Italy ; Rome, for example, or wherever the Pope likes. Prom- ises to obey the orders of the Holy Father.
^i. LUTHER TO THE ELECTOR FREDERIC AND DUKE
JOHN OF SAXONY.
Dc Wcttc, li, 539. German. (Wittenberg, July), 1524.
Enders, iv, 372. Weimar, xv, 199^.
From the town of Allstedt, where he had settled in the spring of X523» Thomas Miinzer was proclaiming the doctrines of the radical Reformation. He taught that the old forms of worship must be abol- ished and the Mosaic law substituted for the law of the land, and as- serted the right of armed revolt for the correction of social ills, resting his teaching upon the claim to immediate inspiration by the Holy Ghost The spread of his doctrines had already given Luther deep concern (cf, supra no. 593). This letter is dated by De Wctte "August 21," but Miinzer had seen it before August 3 (Forstemann, Neues Urkundenbuch, p. 248) ; it must therefore have been written in July.
Grace and peace in Qirist Jesus our Saviour. God's holy
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