One of the signs of the times was the enthusiasm displayed in the imperial cities for the cause of Luther. The way had been prepared. Burgher songs had for long described the ecclesiastical abuses, and had borne witness to the widespread hatred of the clergy shared in by the townsfolk. Wolfgang Capito and Frederick Mecum (Myconius), both sons of burghers, inform us that their fathers taught them when they were boys that Indulgences were nothing but a speculation on the part of cunning priests to get their hands into the pockets of simple-minded laity. Keen observers of the trend of public feeling like Wimpheling and Pirkheimer had noticed with some alarm the gradual spread of the Hussite propaganda in the towns, and had made the fact one of their reasons for desiring and insisting on a reformation of the Church. The growing sympathy for the Hussite opinions in the cities is abundantly apparent. Some leading Reformers, Capito for instance, told their contemporaries that they had frequently listened to Hussite discourses when they were boys; and the libraries of burghers not infrequently contained Hussite pamphlets. Men in the towns had been reading, thinking, and speaking in private to their familiar friends about the disorders in the life and doctrine of the Church of their days, and were eager to welcome the first symptoms of a genuine attempt at reform. The number of editions of the German Vulgate, rude as many of these versions were, shows what a Bible-reading people the German burghers had become, enables us to wonder less at the way in which the controversial writers assume that the laity knew as much of the Scriptures as the clergy, and lends credibility to contemporary assertions that women and artisans knew their Bibles better than learned men at the Universities.