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That the preaching of the new Evangel had a great part in the origin of the frightful peasant rising of 1525 is a fact, which has been admitted even by many non-Catholic historians in modern days.

“We are of opinion,” P. Schreckenbach writes in 1895, “that Luther had a large share in the revolution,” and he endorses his opinion by his observations on “Luther’s warfare against the greatest conservative power of the day,” and the “ways and means he chose with which to carry on his war.”[519] Fr. v. Bezold, in 1890, in his “History of the German Reformation,” remarked concerning Luther’s answer to the hostile treatment he received from the Diet at Nuremberg (1524), and his allusions to “the mad, tipsy Princes”: “Luther should never have written in such a way had he not already made up his mind to act as leader of a Revolution. That he should have expected the German nation of those days to listen to such passionate language from the mouth of its ‘Evangelist’ and ‘Elias’ without being carried beyond the bounds of law and order, was a naïveté only to be explained by his ignorance of the world and his exclusive attention to religious interests. Herein lies his greatness and his weakness.”[520] Concerning the effects of such language upon the people, the same historian wrote, as late as 1908: “How else but in a material sense was the plain man to interpret Luther’s proclamation of Christian freedom and his extravagant strictures on the parsons and nobles?”[521]

Luther’s Catholic contemporaries condemned in the strongest manner his share in the unchaining of the revolt; they failed entirely to appreciate the “greatness” referred to above.