You have here two epistles, gentle reader, which you will indeed read with great benefit, provided that you entirely set aside all sinister affection, whether favourable or unfavourable, so that you may on the contrary be able to discern and make out, as though with the eye of rightful and good intention, what is true, decent, and godly. For it is written: ‘If your eye is single, your whole body will be light. But if your eye is wicked, your whole body will be dark’. If you are a Catholic, therefore, the king's answer will not displease you in the least, since it everywhere manifests its integrity, erudition, and piety.

If you are a Lutheran, however, it may perhaps displease you to see Luther portrayed this way. But stop a while and ponder, as you read the first letter, whether it is appropriate for someone who wants to be reckoned an evangelist, a prophet, a preacher, a man of God, the Apostle of Germany, and all the rest, to display such inconsistency, that he both condemns himself to his adversary for inconsistency; and now freely wishes to recant in a published book (provided only that he understands by the merest hint that it would be well received) what previously he wrote completely seriously and asserted with such certainty (if you believe him), making out that he had it all from heaven; now craving forgiveness with womanish endearments from an opponent whom he assailed so fiercely and arrogantly, contrary to all sound principles and especially to evangelical charity and kindness. Heedless of what the princes and politicians, and the wisest people, whom he boasts of having on his side, will say, because he has so wickedly deceived them and now, to their enormous embarrassment, wants to recant. So that at last he gives them the same reward that he previously gave the peasants, most wickedly deceived and so wretchedly slaughtered, if he can just find himself some foreign protector.