The Edict of Worms, intended to proscribe and suppress throughout Germany the heretic and his writings, was published in the different states and towns by the princes and magistrates; but the power, and partly also the will, was wanting to enforce its execution. At Erfurt, shortly after Luther's passage through the town upon his way to Worms, the interference of the clergy against a member of a religious institution which had taken part in the ovation accorded to the Reformer, gave the first occasion to violent and repeated tumults. Students and townspeople attacked upwards of sixty houses of the priests, and demolished them. Luther told his friends at once, that he saw in this the work of Satan, who sought by this means to bring contempt and legitimate reproach upon the gospel. Elsewhere, and above all at Wittenberg, his followers busied themselves in his absence with putting into practice what he had defended with his words. Calmly and with mature deliberation and courage, Luther took part in their labours from the solitude of his watch-tower. He had a very lively and, as he himself confesses, often painful consciousness of his own responsibility, as the one who had put the first match to the great fire, and whose first duties lay with his Wittenberg brethren, as their teacher and pastor. Shortly after his arrival at the Wartburg, he received the news that Bartholomew Bernhardi of Feldkirchen, provost in the little town of Kemberg near Wittenberg, had publicly, and with the consent of his congregation, taken a wife. He was not the first priest who had ventured to break the unchristian prohibition of marriage by the Romish Church. But he was the most distinguished of such offenders hitherto, besides being a particular disciple of Luther and a man of unimpeachable integrity. Luther wrote about it to Melancthon, saying: 'I admire the newly married man, who in these stormy times has no fears, and has lost no time about it. May God guide him.'