After a few months, he decided to write a formal explanation, in an open letter to Caspar Muller, entitled "An Open Letter on the Harsh Book Against the Peasants". He defends his previous writings, and states that it is the duty of a Christian to "suffer injustice, not to seize the sword and take to violence". He defends the ‘harshness’ that he used stating that “a rebel is not worth rational arguments, for he does not accept them. You have to answer people like that with a fist, until the sweat drips off their noses”.