e. He was friendly to Luther, and repressed preaching
against him; and the Elector of Saxony ordered that the controversy
should not be revived. Luther replied that he would destroy the
Elector rather than obey him; the Thesis had been posted in vain, and
the spirit of Tetzel was abroad once more; he gave the Archbishop a
fortnight, after which he would let the world see the difference
between a bishop and a wolf. The prelate gave way, and having
arrested one of his priests, who had married, he consented, at the
reformer's request, to release him.

The most important result of the stay at the Wartburg was the
translation of the New Testament, which was begun towards the end of
the year, and was completed in about three months. There were already
eighteen German Bibles, and he knew some of them, for a particular
blunder is copied from an edition of 1466. All those that I have
seen, and I have seen nearly all in Dr. Ginsburg's collection, are
unwieldy folios. Luther's translation was published at a florin and a
half, and may now be had for sixty guineas. It was reprinted
eighty-five times in eleven years. The text as we know it was revised
by his friends twenty years later. It was his appeal to the masses,
and removed the controversy from the Church and the school to the
market-place. The language had to be modified for the people of the
South, and almost rewritten for the North; but it ended by impressing
central German as the normal type for the whole country. It was the
first translation from the Greek, and it was the work of the greatest
master of German.

During the eclipse at the Wartburg Leo X was succeeded by Adrian of
Utrecht, the Regent of Spain, a man of learning and devout life, who
proceeded to reverse his predecessor's policy. He addressed a Brief
to the Diet at Nuremberg, saying that of all those in authority at
Rome none were without reproach, and the evils from which the Church
was suffering had been caused and propagated by the papal court. To
this memorable exhibition of integrity his envoy added that Luther
deserved to be idolised if he had been content with the exposure of
abuses, and that the real offender was Leo X. This change of front
removed the charge from the outer branch to the centre. Luther had
been hitting the wrong man. It was now avowed that the transgressor
was not an obscure itinerant, but the sovereign pontiff himself, and
that Luther's adversaries were in the wrong.