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With the same firmness and decision with which Luther condemned all disorderly and violent proceedings in support of the gospel, he had also long been warning its persecutors of the inevitable storm which they would bring upon themselves. Other evangelical preachers, however, as for instance, Eberlin and Strauss, mingled with their popular preaching all sorts of suggestions of social reform.
Thus in 1523 he recommended the conversion of the cloisters of the Mendicant Orders into schools 'for boys and girls. The same advice was offered by Eberlin, already mentioned, who was then living at Wittenberg, and who made the suggestion to the magistrates of Ulm.
Eberlin von Gunzburg, who shortly after began to wield his pen as a popular writer on reform, called these two men 'two chosen messengers of God. A German Litany, which appeared early in 1521, implored God's grace and help for Martin Luther, the unshaken pillar of the Christian faith, and for the brave German knight Ulrich Hutten, his Pylades.
Eberlin, with his extraordinary energy, not content with the most comprehensive and far-reaching schemes of ecclesiastical reform, plunged into questions affecting the wants of municipal, social, and political life, which Luther, in his Address to the German Nobility, had only briefly alluded to, and had carefully distinguished from his own particular work in hand.
First and foremost was Eberlin of Gunzburg, formerly a Franciscan at Tubingen; next, the Augustine monk Michael Stifel of Esslingen, who came himself to Wittenberg and joined there the circle of friends; and lastly, the Franciscan Henry von Kettenbach at Ulm.
Towards the end of April they achieved a crowning triumph by their victorious entry into Erfurt, where the preacher, Eberlin of Gunzburg, with true loyalty and courage, but all in vain, had striven, with words of exhortation and warning, to pacify the armed multitude encamped outside the town, and their sympathisers and associates inside.
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