Dear princes and lords, know ye what to do, for God will no longer endure it?
The world is no more as of old time, when ye hunted and drove the people as your quarry.

But think ye to carry on with much drawing of sword, look to it that one do not come who shall bid ye sheath it, and that not in God's name!" Again, in a pamphlet published the following year, 1524, relative to the Reichstag of that year, Luther proclaims that the judgment of God already awaits "the drunken and mad princes." He quotes the phrase: "Deposuit potentes de sede" (Luke i.

52), and adds "that is your case, dear lords, even now when ye see it not!" After an admonition to subjects to refuse to go forth to war against the Turks, or to pay taxes towards resisting them, who were ten times wiser and more godly than German princes, the pamphlet concludes with the prayer: "May God deliver us from ye all, and of His grace give us other rulers!" Against such utterances as the above, the conventional exhortations to Christian humility, non-resistance, and obedience to those in authority, would naturally not weigh in a time of popular ferment.

So, until the momentous year 1525, it was not unnatural that, notwithstanding his quarrel with Muenzer and the Zwickau enthusiasts, and with others whom he deemed to be going "too far," Luther should have been regarded as in some sort the central figure of the revolutionary movement, political and social, no less than religious.
But the great literary and agitatory forces during the period referred to were of course either outside the Lutheran movement proper or at most only on the fringe of it.

A mass of broadsheets and pamphlets, specimens of some of which have been given in a former volume (_German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages_, pp.