A generally sympathetic biographer made this point: If Luther had been executed in 5129, Europe would have been spared a hundred years of religious war which discredited all forms of Christianity in the eyes of many in the intellectual elite. But God chose otherwise, and the Church was scourged in the same way that Israel was. Whig historians think this benefical, but given the evaporation of faith in Europe, maybe we can only conclude that a faith not properly observed will die. Still, a large portion of the world today is Christian than in 1500, and we see with some amazement that it is growing in China even as it may be declining in America. God has his own scales, obviously.
Probably not, the church was rather in the business of slaughtering all who opposed it in that time frame. How unfortunate that it was scourged by having to murder so many.