Although we have left this phase of popular thought so recently behind us, we can even now scarcely imagine ourselves back into it.

The idea of ordinary men, or of the vast majority, holding their religion as anything else than a very pious opinion absolutely unconnected with their daily life, public or private, has already become almost inconceivable to us.

In all the writings of the time, the theological interest is in the forefront.
The economic and social groundwork only casually reveals itself.

This it is that makes the reading of the sixteenth-century polemics so insufferably jejune and dreary.

They bring before us the ghosts of controversies in which most men have ceased to take any part, albeit they have not been dead and forgotten long enough to have acquired a revived antiquarian interest.
The great bombshell which Luther cast forth on June 24, 1520, in his address to the German nobility,[11] indeed, contains strong appeals to the economical and political necessities of Germany, and therein we see the veil torn from the half-unconscious motives that lay behind the theological mask; but, as already said, in the popular literature, with a few exceptions, the theological controversy rules undisputed.
The noticeable feature of all this irruption of the _cacoethes scribendi_ was the direct appeal to the Bible for the settlement not only of strictly theological controversies but of points of social and political ethics also.