The marriage of Luther in 1525 was followed by a burst of caricature. The idea of a priest marrying excited then, as it does now in a Catholic mind, a sense of ludicrous incongruity. It is as though the words "married priest" were a contradiction in terms, and the relation implied by them was a sort of manifest incompatibility, half comic, half disgusting. The spectacle occasionally presented in a Protestant church of a clergyman ordained and married in the same hour is so opposed to the Catholic conception of the priesthood that some Catholics can only express their sense of it by laughter. Equally amazing and equally ludicrous to them is the more frequent case of missionaries coming home to be married, or young missionaries married in the evening and setting out for their station the next morning. We observe that some of Luther's nearest friends--nay, Luther himself--saw something both ridiculous and contemptible in his marriage, particularly in the haste with which it was concluded, and the disparity in the ages of the pair, Luther being forty-two and his wife twenty-six. "My marriage," wrote Luther, "has made me so despicable that I hope my humiliation will rejoice the angels and vex the devils." And Melanchthon, while doing his best to restore his leader's self-respect, expressed the hope that the "_accident_" might be of use in humbling Luther a little in the midst of a success perilous to his good sense. Luther was not long abased. We find him soon justifying the act, which was among the boldest and wisest of his life, as a tribute of obedience to his aged father, who "required it in hopes of issue," and as a practical confirmation of what he had himself taught. He speaks gayly of "my rib, Kate," and declared once that he would not exchange his wife for the kingdom of France or the wealth of Venice. But the caricaturists were not soon weary of the theme. Readers at all familiar with the manners of that age do not need to be told that few of the efforts of their free pencils will bear reproduction now. Besides exhibiting the pair carousing, dancing, romping, caressing, and in various situations supposed to be ridiculous, the satirists harped a good deal upon the old prophecy that Antichrist would be the offspring of a monk and a nun. "If that is the case," said Erasmus, "how many thousands of Antichrists there are in the world already!" Luther was evidently of the same opinion, for he gave full credit to the story of six thousand infants' skulls having been found at the bottom of a pond near a convent, as well as to that of "twelve great pots, in each of which was the carcass of an infant," discovered under the cellars of another convent. But, then, Luther was among the most credulous of men.