e stood was the divine
revelation. That is how "the Bible, and the Bible only," became the
religion of Protestants.

Having succeeded in forcing Luther from his original positions, Eck
carried the matter to Rome. A theory so uncertain in its method, so
imperfectly tested by the regulated comparison of authorities, might
crumble to pieces if all its consequences were made manifest. It was
conceivable that a man who had raised such a storm without looking up
his books, without weighing the language of Councils or thinking out
his thoughts, upon whom the very obvious objections of Cajetan and Eck
came as a surprise, who at every step abandoned some previous
proposition, might not feel absolutely and finally sure that he was
right, or might even recognise the force of the saying that it is well
to die for the truth, but not for every truth. Eck joined with
Cajetan in urging the strongest measures of repression. A different
line of policy suggested itself, in the spirit of Erasmus. It was to
hail Luther as an auxiliary, as the most powerful leader in the work
of eradicating evils which were a familiar scandal to all religious
men, and the constant theme of ineffective Cardinals on every solemn
occasion. Then they might have confronted whatever was to follow with
cleaner hands and a better conscience.

In June 1520, after a year's deliberation, Luther was condemned as the
teacher of forty-one heresies; and in January, after he had made a
bonfire of the Papal Bull and of the Canon Law, he was excommunicated.
According to imperial constitutions three centuries old, the next step
was that the civil magistrate, as the favourite phrase was, would send
the culprit through the transitory flames of this world to the
everlasting flames of the next. If that was not done, it might come
to pass that the zeal of Prierias, Cajetan, and Eck would serve to
inform the world that the medieval reign was over, and that the pen of
an angry, rude, and not very learned monk was stronger than the Papacy
and the Empire. It was known from the first that the Elector of
Saxony would defend Luther, without being a Lutheran. Indeed, he
shocked him by his zeal for indulgences and his collection of 19,000
relics. But he protected Luther as the most famous teacher of his
university. They never met, and when the Elector on his deathbed sent
for him, Luther was away. Since the Disputation of Leipzig he was the
most conspicuously popular man in G