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Nor did even an unfortunate military enterprise, undertaken at this time against the Archbishop of Treves by Sickingen, who, while fighting for his own power and the interests of the German nobles, announced his wish also to break road for the Gospel, produce those disastrous results for the evangelical cause in Germany which its enemies had anticipated and hoped for.

Reuchlin, Erasmus, Hütten, Sickingen, and others have been named, but the list might be extended, and yet no one be found endowed with the qualities to accomplish the work that was needed and that was accomplished. The Saxon Elector, Frederick the Wise, was the worthiest, most popular, and most influential ruler then in Europe.

Sickingen, who had grasped the situation in a practical spirit, advised him to moderate his impatience, and sought, for his own part, to keep on good terms with the Emperor, in whom Hutten accordingly renewed his hopes. Each, in short, had overrated the influence which Sickingen really possessed with the Emperor.

Martin Luther and his disciples" . "A Very Pleasant Dialogue and Remonstrance from the Sheriff of Gaissdorf and his pupil against the pastor of the same and his assistant" . The popularity of "Karsthans," an anonymous tract, amongst the people is illustrated by the publication and wide distribution of a new "Karsthans" a few months later, in which it is sought to show that the knighthood should make common cause with the peasants, the dramatis personæ being Karsthans and Franz von Sickingen.

Yet practically all the knights were intensely proud of their German nationality. It was the knights, who, under the leadership of such fiery patriots as Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen, had forcefully contributed in 1519 to the imperial election of Charles V, a German Habsburg, in preference to non-German candidates such as Francis I of France or Henry VIII of England.

Martin Butzer, the theologian from Schlettstadt, happened then to be with Sickingen; he had already met Luther at Heidelberg in 1518, had then learned to know him, and had embraced his opinions. He was now commissioned to convey this invitation to him at Oppenheim, which lay on Luther's road. But Luther continued on his way. He told Butzer that Glapio would be able to speak with him at Worms.

The treatise on the acquired rights of man was too technical to attract popular attention and too unorthodox to receive the general approval of professional students of the law. The Franz von Sickingen was too deficient in dramatic action to be presented on the stage and too artificial in literary form to be read in the library.

From the German nobility, whose sympathy and co-operation Luther had once so boldly and hopefully invoked in his contest with the Papacy, it was vain, since the fatal enterprise of Sickingen, which Luther himself had been forced to condemn, to expect any material assistance in furtherance of the Evangelical cause.

Peter at the gate of heaven. In the latter Peter confesses that he has never heard of the right "to loose and to bind," of which his successors say so much. He refuses to discuss military matters with Sickingen, but calls in St. George, who is supposed to be conversant with the art of war. In another satire, a vacation visit of St. Peter to the earth is described.

Lassalle traced the development of the German laws of inheritance from the Roman concept of the immortality of the legal personality. Marx would have derived them from the conditions of life among the Germans themselves. In Franz von Sickingen and his cause Lassalle thought he saw a glimpse of the revolutionary spirit of modern times.