meant was that the papal supremacy in the
government of the Church had endured so long that the divine sanction
was upon it. He did not trace it much farther back than the twelfth
century. But that, he considered, constituted a legitimate claim.

Luther, who was a profound conservative and a reluctant innovator, and
who felt the fascination that belongs to lapse of time, employed on
behalf of the Papacy an argument by which Dante had defended the
Empire. Machiavelli derived right from success, and Luther from
duration. In reality he held both doctrines, for he thought Zwingli's
death in battle an evident judgment on his low sacramental theory.
Promoted at the same time by the two most powerful writers in the
world, the idea that heaven is responsible for results acquired
immense prestige, and long influenced European thinking. The argument
by which he justified the Papacy amounted, in fact, to a negation of
its claim to divine institution; and at the time when he produced it,
early in 1519, he had come to reject not only the excesses of Tetzel,
but the entire scheme of indulgences. Although he held to the Papacy
only by an ingenious sophism, beyond the Pope there was the Council;
and he might still deem himself a Catholic after the manner of Gerson
and the Gallican divines of Constance, who depreciated Rome. That was
possible, if nothing in the sequence of his views came into collision
with any decree of a General Council.

This was now the question of the day, the question for the summer of
1519. The man who brought it to an issue was John Eck, a theologian
of Ingolstadt University, who came to Leipzig to dispute with Luther's
colleague Carlstadt, and ended by a disputation with Luther himself.
He imagined that Luther did not perceive the consequences. Because he
defied the Popes, it did not follow that he would defy the Councils,
especially a Council held in Germany, under the protection of a German
Emperor, a Council zealous for reform and honoured by Germans, as
their avenger on the national enemy John Hus. Luther had no special
preference for an assembly which burnt an obnoxious professor of
theology, and no great interest in reforms which he deemed external,
and not making for inward change. He said that there were points on
which Hus was right, and the sentence that condemned him was wrong.
He admitted, in the end, that Councils as well as Popes might be
against him, and that the authority by which h