Concerning Christian Liberty | Page 3

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Concerning Christian Liberty
by Martin Luther

CONCERNING CHRISTIAN LIBERTY
LETTER OF MARTIN LUTHER TO POPE LEO X
Among those monstrous evils of this age with which I have now for three years been
waging war, I am sometimes compelled to look to you and to call you to mind, most
blessed father Leo. In truth, since you alone are everywhere considered as being the cause
of my engaging in war, I cannot at any time fail to remember you; and although I have
been compelled by the causeless raging of your impious flatterers against me to appeal
from your seat to a future council--fearless of the futile decrees of your predecessors Pius
and Julius, who in their foolish tyranny prohibited such an action--yet I have never been
so alienated in feeling from your Blessedness as not to have sought with all my might, in
diligent prayer and crying to God, all the best gifts for you and for your see. But those
who have hitherto endeavoured to terrify me with the majesty of your name and authority,
I have begun quite to despise and triumph over. One thing I see remaining which I cannot
despise, and this has been the reason of my writing anew to your Blessedness: namely,
that I find that blame is cast on me, and that it is imputed to me as a great offence, that in
my rashness I am judged to have spared not even your person.
Now, to confess the truth openly, I am conscious that, whenever I have had to mention
your person, I have said nothing of you but what was honourable and good. If I had done
otherwise, I could by no means have approved my own conduct, but should have
supported with all my power the judgment of those men concerning me, nor would
anything have pleased me better, than to recant such rashness and impiety. I have called
you Daniel in Babylon; and every reader thoroughly knows with what distinguished zeal
I defended your conspicuous innocence against Silvester, who tried to stain it. Indeed, the
published opinion of so many great men and the repute of your blameless life are too
widely famed and too much reverenced throughout the world to be assailable by any man,
of however great name, or by any arts. I am not so foolish as to attack one whom
everybody praises; nay, it has been and always will be my desire not to attack even those
whom public repute disgraces. I am not delighted at the faults of any man, since I am
very conscious myself of the great beam in my own eye, nor can I be the first to cast a
stone at the adulteress.
I have indeed inveighed sharply against impious doctrines, and I have not been slack to
censure my adversaries on account, not of their bad morals, but of