Note 13 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

As naturally the crushed peasantry turned away from the Reformation in despair. Luther had in the first instance approached them, not they him. Before the revolt the reformers had made the peasant a kind of hero in their propaganda;13 and when in the first and moderate stage of the rising its motives were set forth in sixty-two articles, these were purely agrarian. “There is no trace of a religious element in them, no indication that their authors had ever heard of Luther or of the Gospel.”14 Then it was that Luther commended them; and thereafter “a religious element began to obtrude.”15 When the overthrow began, doubtless sincerely reprobating the violences of the insurgents, he hounded on the princes in their work of massacre, Melanchthon chiming in. Thereafter, as Melanchthon admitted, the people showed a detestation of the Lutheran clergy;16 and among many there was even developed a kind of “materialistic atheism.”17