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In respect to the battle against Catholic Churchdom and dogma, the controversy between Luther and Erasmus presents no new issue or further development. But in company with their old master, other Humanists also, the leading champions of the general culture of the age, dissociated themselves from Luther, and returned, as his enemies, to their allegiance to the traditional system of the Church.
His bitter scoffs at what he termed theologic absurdities and superstitions and his terrific rebuffs to ministers who appealed to him for money, undoubtedly called forth a considerable share of the odium which was hurled upon him. He defied the anathemas of organized churchdom; he took hold of the commercial world and shook it harshly and emerged laden with spoils.
Luther's further writings against the Romish Churchdom and dogma do not possess the same interest for us as his earlier ones, inasmuch as they no longer show the progress and development of his own views on the Church.
Even in this summary of belief, intended as it was for common acceptance and for submission to a Council, Luther emphasised, with all the fulness and keenness peculiar to himself throughout the struggle, his antagonism to Roman Catholic dogma and Churchdom. Fondly as he clung at that time to reconciliation among the Protestants, he saw no possibility of peace with Rome.
And it was only when in this battle the Pope and the hierarchy sought to rob him of his evangelical doctrine of salvation, and of the joy and comfort he derived from the knowledge of redemption by Christ, that, from his stand on the Bible, he laid his hands upon the strongholds of this Churchdom.
If we consider the powerful influences then at work to further the ecclesiastical movement in Germany, it seems reasonable to suppose that they would succeed in accomplishing its ends through the power of the Word alone, without any such bloodshed and political convulsions as were feared; and that Germany, therefore, though vexed with spiritual tempests the 'tumult and uproar' whose outburst Luther already discerned must inevitably rid herself of the forms and fetters of Romish Churchdom, by the sheer force of her new religious convictions.
Luther's controversy with Erasmus, the most important of the champions of Catholic Churchdom, had terminated, it will be remembered, so far as Luther was concerned, with his treatise 'On the Bondage of the Will. To the new tract which Erasmus published against him, in two parts, in 1526 and 1527, and which, though insignificant in substance, was violent and insulting enough in tone, Luther made no reply.
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