The chicanery used to get possession of German benefices for officials of the Curia, the exactions on the bestowal of the _pallium_, the trafficking in exemptions and permissions to evade laws ecclesiastical and moral, are all trenchantly described. The most shameless are those connected with marriage. The Curial Court is described as a place “where vows are annulled; where a monk gets leave to quit his cloister; where priests can enter the married life for money; where bastards can become legitimate, and dishonour and shame may arrive at high honours, and all evil repute and disgrace is knighted and ennobled; where a marriage is suffered that is in a forbidden degree, or has some other defect.... There is a buying and selling, a changing, blustering, and bargaining, cheating and lying, robbing and stealing, debauchery and villainy, and all kinds of contempt of God, that Antichrist himself could not reign worse.” The plan of reform sketched includes—the complete abolition of the power of the Pope over the State; the creation of a national German Church, with an ecclesiastical Council of its own to be the final court of appeal for Germany, and to represent the German Church as the Diet did the German State; some internal religious reforms, such as the limitation of the number of pilgrimages, which were destroying morality and creating a distaste for honest work; reductions in the mendicant orders and in the number of vagrants who thronged the roads, and were a scandal in the towns. “It is of much more importance to consider what is necessary for the salvation of the common people than what St. Francis, or St. Dominic, or St. Augustine, or any other man laid down, especially as things have not turned out as they expected.” He proposes the inspection of all convents and nunneries, and permission given to those who are dissatisfied with their monastic lives to return to the world; the limitation of ecclesiastical holy days, which are too often nothing but scenes of drunkenness, gluttony, and debauchery; a married priesthood, and an end put to the degrading concubinage of the German priests. “We see how the priesthood is fallen, and how many a poor priest is encumbered with a woman and children, and burdened in his conscience, and no one does anything to help him, though he might very well be helped.... I will not conceal my honest counsel, nor withhold comfort from that unhappy crowd who now live in trouble with wife and children, and remain in shame with a heavy conscience, hearing their wife called a priest’s harlot, and their children bastards.... I say that these two (who are minded in their hearts to live together in conjugal fidelity) are surely married before God.” The appeal concludes with some solemn words addressed to the luxury and licensed immorality of the German towns.