On the Restraint of the First Electors of Saxony in Adopting and Establishing Luther's Doctrine, Volume 2

We shall bring them forward without hesitation. He attacks JOHN HUSS in the first place, and calls his execution—which is termed a martyrdom—a fabrication, and he calls the doctrines handed down by him controversies of theologians full of sophistries, which the dull and slow-witted nature of the Bohemians could not possibly grasp. He claims that the disciples of Huss supported his doctrine, which had not spread beyond Bohemia, in order that they might be under their own law, no longer dependent on anyone’s power, and that they might cloak their defection and rebellion under the pretense of maintaining freedom of opinion concerning sacred things. Having left Huss, he turns to LUTHER, and opines that he—impelled by Staupitz, his superior—offered opposition because the Augustinian monks were burning with capital envy against the Dominicans, to whom the trade in those documents that granted pardon and immunity for sins had been committed—or rather, ought to have been committed—to them. He accuses the same man of bringing forward doubtful statements, supported by new arguments, and of taking great pleasure in the fact that he had found a time to pronounce his opinion more freely, to which he had indulged himself without moderation and with great impotence. There are many things by which he thinks that neither the divine providence—which nevertheless governs all things by its own nod—nor a just ardor for defending the truth, but rather a lust for wrangling, ignorance, a thirst for glory, and other unbridled desires, opened the way for restoring sacred things and disseminated them far and wide.