But the bishop had excited the active enmity of a resolute and suspicious foe. In forbidding the Franciscan monks entrance to any pulpit within his jurisdiction, he had, even before the advent of Lefèvre and the reformed teachers, incurred their violent animosity.[158] The new movement, while arousing their indignation, gave them the opportunity they coveted for invoking the power of the university and of parliament. At first the bishop was bold enough to denounce the doctors of the Sorbonne as Pharisees and false prophets,[159] while in his private correspondence he stigmatized the clergy as "the estate _by the coldness of which all the others are frozen_,"[160] or even as "_that which is the ruin of all the rest_."[161] But, frightened by the incessant clamor and attacks of his enemies, he began gradually to waver, and presently lost all courage. In the end he yielded so far as to suffer to be published in his name official documents which were intended to overturn from the foundation the very fabric he had been striving to rear. In one of these, a "Synodal Decree" addressed to the faithful of his diocese, the bishop was made to condemn the books of Martin Luther, and to denounce Luther himself as one who was plotting the overthrow of "the estate which _keeps all the rest in the path of duty_."[162] Quite another description of the clergy this from either of the descriptions which he gave to Margaret of Angoulême! The other document was a letter to the clergy of his diocese, warning them against certain preachers "brought in by himself to share his pastoral cares," who, under cover of proclaiming the Gospel, had "dared, in defiance of the evangelical truth, to preach that purgatory does not exist, and that, consequently, we must not pray for the dead, nor invoke the very holy Virgin Mary and the saints."[163] The precise time of Briçonnet's pusillanimous defection, as marked by the publication of these pastoral letters, is involved in some obscurity; for assuredly the date affixed to the transcripts that have come down to us conflicts too seriously with the well-known facts of history to be accepted as correct.[164]