ympathies men declared that the devil or the Holy
Ghost spoke through Luther.

[Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity, 1520]

Though less popular both in form and subject, _The Babylonian Captivity
of the Church_ was not less important than the _Address to the German
Nobility_. It was a mortal blow at the sacramental system of the
church. In judging it we must again summon the aid of our historical
imagination. In the sixteenth century dogmas not only seemed but were
matters of supreme importance. It was just by her sacramental system,
by her claim to give the believer eternal life and salvation through
her rites, that the church had imposed her yoke on men. As long as
that belief remained intact progress in thought, in freedom of
conscience, in reform, remained difficult. And here, as is frequently
the case, the most effective arguments were not those which seem to us
logically the strongest. Luther made no appeal to reason as such. He
{73} appealed to the Bible, recognized by all Christians as an
authority, and showed how far the practice of the church had
degenerated from her standard. [Sidenote: Sacraments] In the first
place he reduced the number of sacraments, denying that name to
matrimony, orders, extreme unction and confirmation. In attacking
orders he demolished the priestly ideal and authority. In reducing
marriage to a civil contract he took a long step towards the
secularization of life. Penance he considered a sacrament in a certain
sense, though not in the strict one, and he showed that it had been
turned by the church from its original significance of "repentance" [1]
to that of sacramental penance, in which no faith was required but
merely an automatic act. Baptism and the eucharist he considered the
only true sacraments, and he seriously criticized the prevalent
doctrine of the latter. He denied that the mass is a sacrifice or a
"good work" pleasing to God and therefore beneficial to the soul either
of living or of dead. He denied that the bread and wine are
transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus, though he held that
the body and blood are really present with the elements. He demanded
that the cup be given to the laity.

The whole trend of Luther's thought at this time was to oppose the
Catholic theory of a mechanical distribution of grace and salvation
(the so-called _opus operatum_) by means of the sacraments, and to
substitute for it an individual conception of religion