On the eighteenth of April, 1521, a thirty-seven-year-old excommunicated monk stood alone in a crowded hall at Worms and refused an order backed by the two highest powers on earth — the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Posterity gave him a ringing phrase he almost certainly never said. What Martin Luther verifiably declared was quieter, and far more radical: that his conscience, captive to the Word of God, would not recant — because it is neither safe nor right to go against