Cornerstone as Saint Peter did (Matt. 16:18) and seek the perseverance [imparted] by the divine will. He will surely establish you upon the Rock (Ps. 40:2). Your ways will be right. Seek only straightway the righteousness of God and take up courageously the cause of the gospel! For God stands so close to you that you wouldn’t believe it! Why do you want then to shudder before the specter of a man (Ps. 118:6)? Look at our text well [Dan. 2:13]. King Nebuchadnezzar wanted to kill the wise men because they could not interpret the dream for him. That was a deserved reward, for they wished to rule his whole kingdom with their cleverness and yet could not even do that for which they had been installed. Such is also the case of our clerics now, and I say this to you for a truth. If you could only as clearly recognize the harm being [done] to Christendom and rightly consider it, you would acquire just the same zeal as Jehu the king (II Kings, chs. 9 and 10); and the same as that which the whole book of Revelation proclaims. And I know for a certainty that you would thereupon hold yourselves back only with great effort from [letting] the sword exert its power. For the pitiable corruption of holy Christendom has become so great that at the present time no tongue can tell it all. Therefore a new Daniel must arise and interpret for you your vision and this [prophet], as Moses teaches (Deut. 20:2), must go in front of the army. He must reconcile the anger of the princes and the enraged people. For if you will rightly experience the corruption of Christendom and the deception of the false clerics and the vicious reprobates,* you will become so enraged at them that no one can think it through. Without doubt it will vex you and go right to your heart that you have been so kindly after they, with the very sweetest words, misled you into the most shameful conceptions (Prov. 6:1 ff.) against all established truth. For they have made fools of you so that everyone swears by the saints that the princes are in respect to their office a pagan people. They are said to be able to maintain nothing other than a civil unity. O beloved, yea, the great Stone there is about to fall and strike these schemes of [mere] reason and dash them to the ground, for he says (Matt. 10:34): I am not come to send peace but a sword. What should be done, however, with the same? Nothing different from [what is done with] the wicked who hinder the gospel: Get them out of the way and eliminate them, unless you want to be ministers of the devil rather than of God, as Paul calls you (Rom. 13:4). You need not doubt it. God will strike to pieces all your adversaries who undertake to persecute you, for his hand is by no means shortened, as Isaiah (ch. 59:1) says. Therefore he can still help you and wishes to, as he supported the elect King Josiah and others who defended the name of God. Thus you are angels, when you wish to do justly, as Peter says (II, ch. 1:4). Christ commanded in deep gravity, saying (Luke 19:27): Take mine enemies and strangle them before mine eyes. Why? Ah! because they ruin Christ’s government for him and in addition want to defend their rascality under the guise of Christian faith and ruin the whole world with their insidious subterfuge.** Therefore Christ our Lord says (Matt. 18:6): Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones, it is better for him that a millstone be hung about his neck and that he be thrown in the depth of the sea. You can gloss over here and there as much as you like—these are the words of Christ. Now if Christ can say, Whosoever offends one of the little ones, what should one say then if somebody offends a great multitude in their faith? That is what the archvillains do, who vex the whole world and make it forsake the true Christian faith and say: No one may know the mystery of God. Everyone should behave himself according to their words and not according to their works (cf. Matt. 23:3). They say that it is not necessary for faith to be tried like gold in the fire (I Peter 1:7; Ps. 140:10). But in this way Christian faith would be worse than a dog’s faith where he hopes to get a piece of bread because the table is being set. This is the kind of faith the false divines juggle before the blind world. This is not remarkable after all, for they preach only for the stomach’s sake (Phil. 3:19). They cannot say anything further from
* The reference is primarily to the Lutheran clergy.
** Here [ . . .] Müntzer is reinterpreting the politically conservative text of Rom. ch. 13, into a revolutionary document. By reversing the sequence of ch. 13:1–4 and construing vs. 1 f. as the sequel of vs. 3 f., he would make the Ernestine princes, by hortatory anticipation, the executers of God’s wrath against the godless and the protectors of the revolutionary saints. But he warns them that if they fail to identify themselves with the covenantal people, the sword will revert to the people.
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