It was then that he produced, with marvellous fecundity, a series of pamphlets unequalled by him and unexcelled anywhere, both in the incisive power of their attack on existing institutions and in the popular force of their language.
[Sidenote: _To the Christian Nobility_, 1520] His greatest appeal to his countrymen was made in his _Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation on the Improvement of the Christian Estate_.

In this he asserts the right of the civil power to reform the spiritual, and urges the government to exercise this right.
The priests, says he, defend themselves against all outside interference by three "walls," of {71} which the first is the claim that the church is superior to the state, in case the civil authority presses them; the second, the assertion, if one would correct them by the Bible, that no one can interpret it but the pope; the third, if they are threatened with a general council, the contention that no one can convoke such a council save the pope.

Luther demolishes these walls with words of vast import.

First, he denies any distinction between the spiritual and temporal estates.

Every baptized Christian, he asserts, is a priest, and in this saying he struck a mortal blow at the great hierarchy of privilege and theocratic tyranny built up by the Middle Ages.