In defying the organized Church, Luther had done something else. He had broken the dam of medieval discipline. By his reasoning, every man could be his own priest, a conclusion he himself would reach in 1520–1521. Moreover, as fragmentary accounts of the Gospels began to circulate, the peasantry learned that the sympathies of Christ and his apostles had lain with the oppressed, not with the princes who had presumed to speak in his name.
