This view of the "regular" was shared, moreover, by not a few of the secular clergy themselves.

Humanists, who were subsequently ardent champions of the Church against Luther and the Protestant Reformation--men such as Murner and Erasmus--had been previously the bitterest satirists of the "friar" and the "monk." Amongst the great body of the laity, however, though the religious orders came in perhaps for the greater share of animosity, the secular priesthood was not much better off in popular favour, whilst the upper members of the hierarchy were naturally regarded as the chief blood-suckers of the German people in the interests of Rome.

The vast revenues which both directly in the shape of _pallium_ (the price of "investiture"), _annates_ (first year's revenues of appointments), _Peter's-pence_, and recently of _indulgences_--the latter the by no means most onerous exaction, since it was voluntary--all these things, taken together with what was indirectly obtained from Germany, through the expenditure of German ecclesiastics on their visits to Rome and by the crowd of parasitics, nominal holders of German benefices merely, but real recipients of German substance, who danced attendance at the Vatican--obviously constituted an enormous drain on the resources of the country from all the lay classes alike, of which wealth the papal chair could be plainly seen to be the receptacle.
If we add to these causes of discontent the vastness in number of the regular clergy, the "friars" and "monks" already referred to, who consumed, but were only too obviously unproductive, it will be sufficiently plain that the Protestant Reformation had something very much more than a purely speculative basis to work upon.

Religious reformers there had been in Germany throughout the Middle Ages, but their preachings had taken no deep root.

The powerful personality of the Monk of Wittenberg found an economic soil ready to hand in which his teachings could fructify, and hence the world-historic result.