The sums required for these passports to glory varied according to the rank and wealth of the applicant. For ordinary indulgence a king, queen, or bishop was to pay twenty-five ducats (a ducat being about a dollar of our money); abbots, counts, barons, and the like were charged ten ducats; other nobles and all who enjoyed annual incomes of five hundred florins were charged six ducats; and so down to half a florin, or twenty-five cents.
But the commissioner also had a special scale for taxes on particular sins. Sodomy was charged twelve ducats; sacrilege and perjury, nine; murder, seven or eight; witchcraft and polygamy, from two to six; taking the life of a parent, brother, sister, or an infant, from one to six.
[8] A writer of the Roman Church, in a vein of somewhat mingled sarcasm and seriousness, remarks: "The university had reason to be proud of Luther, whose oral lectures attracted a multitude of strangers; these pilgrims from distant quarters joined their hands and bowed their heads at the sight of the towers of the city, like other travelers before Jerusalem. Wittenberg was like a new Zion, whence the light of truth expanded to neighboring kingdoms, as of old from the Holy City to pagan nations."
[9] Glapio, the confessor of Charles V., stated to Chancellor Brück at the Diet of Worms: "The alarm which I felt when I read the first pages of the Captivity cannot be expressed; they might be said to be lashes which scourged me from head to foot."
[10] The Bull was issued June 15, 1520. It specified forty-one propositions out of Luther's works which it condemned as heretical, scandalous, and offensive to pious ears. It forbade all persons to read his writings, upon pain of excommunication. Such as had any of his books in their possession were commanded to burn them. He himself, if he did not publicly recant his errors and burn his books within sixty days, was pronounced an obstinate heretic, excommunicated and delivered over to Satan. And it enjoined upon all secular princes, under pain of incurring the same censure, to seize his person and deliver him up to be punished as his crimes deserved; that is to be burnt as a heretic.
[11] Audin, in his Life of Luther, says: "A monk who wore a cassock out at the elbows had caused to the most powerful emperor in the world greater embarrassments than those which Francis I., his unsuccessful rival at Frankfort, threatened to raise against him in Italy. With the cannon from his arsenal at Ghent and his lances from Namur, Charles could beat the king of France between sunrise and sunset; but lances and cannon were impotent to subdue the religious revolution, which, like some of the glaciers which he crossed in coming from Spain, acquired daily a new quantity of soil."—Vol. i. chap. 25. Again, in chap. 30, he says of the emperor: "The thought of measuring his strength with the hero of Marignan was far from alarming him, but a struggle with the monk of Wittenberg disturbed his sleep. He wished that they should try to overcome his obstinacy."
[12] "The reception which he met with at Worms was such as he might have reckoned a full reward of all his labors if vanity and the love of applause had been the principles by which he was influenced. Greater crowds assembled to behold him than had appeared at the emperor's public entry; his apartments were daily filled with princes and personages of the highest rank; and he was treated with all the respect paid to those who possess the power of directing the understanding and sentiments of other men—a homage more sincere, as well as more flattering, than any which pre-eminence in birth or condition command."—Robertson's Charles V., vol. i. p. 510.
[13] A Romanist thus describes the picture: "When the approach of Luther was heard there ensued one of those deep silences in which the heart alone, by its hurried pulsations, gives sign of life. Attention was diverted from the emperor to the monk. On the appearance of Luther every one rose, regardless of the sovereign's presence. It inspired Werner with one of the finest acts of his tragedy.... Heine has glorified the appearance at Worms. The Catholic himself loves to contemplate that black gown in the presence of those lords and barons caparisoned in iron and armed with helmet and spear, and is moved by the voice of 'that young friar' who comes to defy all the powers of the earth."—Audin's Life of Luther.
"All parties must unite in admiring and venerating the man who, undaunted and alone, could stand before such an assembly, and vindicate with unshaken courage what he conceived to be the cause of religion, of liberty, and of truth, fearless of any reproaches but those of his own conscience, or of any disapprobation but that of his God."—Roscoe's Life of Leo X., vol. iv. p. 36.
Luther himself, afterward recalling the event, said: "It must indeed have been God who gave me my boldness of heart; I doubt if I could show such courage again."