A Squabble Between Two Monks

[GHansen]

   This first controversy between Luther and [indulgence seller] Tetzel was in itself of no great importance, and might have been easily settled, if if Leo X. had possessed either the ability or the disposition to treat it prudently. It was, in fact, a private contest between two monks, as to how far the Roman pontiffs were empowered to remit the punishments of sins. Luther admitted the pope’s authority to excuse the human penalties for sin, or those appointed by the church and the papal see; but denied his power to release from the divine penalties, either of the present, or the future world; maintaining, on the contrary, that these divine punishments must be removed either by the merits of Jesus Christ, or by voluntary penances undertaken by the sinner. Tetzel, on the other hand, expressed a belief in the pontiff’s power to release also from divine punishments, whether in the present, or the future life. 

     This subject had in preceding times been often discussed, and the pontiffs had passed no decrees about it. But the present dispute, being at first neglected, and then treated unwisely, gradually increased, till from small beginnings it involved consequences of the highest importance.

5. Luther was applauded by the best part of Germany, which had long borne, very impatiently, the various artifices of the Roman pontiffs for raising money, and the impudence and impositions of papal tax-gatherers. But loud murmurs rose from sycophants of the pontiffs, and none made more noise than the Dominicans, who considered, like all monks, their whole order grievously injured by Luther, in the person of Tetzel.

Von Mosheim, J. L. (1850). Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, vols. 1–4. (H. Soames, Ed., J. Murdock, Trans.) (Second Revised Edition, Vol. 3, pp. 98-100). London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman.