a millennialist, Thomas Müntzer could call for rooting up the tares, claiming that the time of harvest had come. Martin Luther preached a sermon on the parable in which he affirmed that only God can separate false from true believers and believed that killing heretics ends any opportunity they may have for salvation: From this observe what raging and furious people we have been these many years, in that we desired to force others to believe; the Turks with the sword, heretics with fire, the Jews with death, and thus outroot the tares by our own power, as if we were the ones who could reign over hearts and spirits, and make them pious and right, which God's Word alone must do. But by murder we separate the people from the Word, so that it cannot possibly work upon them and we bring thus, with one stroke a double murder upon ourselves, as far as it lies in our power, namely, in that we murder the body for time and the soul for eternity, and afterwards say we did God a service by our actions, and wish to merit something special in heaven. He concluded that "although the tares hinder the wheat, yet they make it the more beautiful to behold". Several years later, however, Luther emphasized that the magistrates should eliminate heretics: "The magistrate bears the sword with the command to cut off offense. ... Now the most dangerous and atrocious offense is false teaching and an incorrect church service." Ironically, the Catholic Church considered Martin Luther and the rest of the Protestant Reformers to be heretics themselves. The struggle between Catholics and Protestants was a pretext enabling many armed conflicts, most notably the bloody Thirty Years War, which greatly weakened the Catholic Holy Roman Empire, which even afterwards in more peaceful times became embroiled in internal power struggles between the Catholic majority and the Protestant minority. Roger Williams, a Baptist theologian and founder of Rhode Island, used this parable to support government toleration of all of the "weeds" (heretics) in the world, because civil persecution often inadvertently hurts the "wheat" (believers) too. Instead, Williams believed it was God's duty to judge in the end, not man's. This parable lent further support to Williams' Biblical philosophy of a wall of separation between church and state as described in his 1644 book, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution. The Protestant John