The generation of Luther and the generations after him have had this particular teaching of Luther before them four hundred years. What effect has it had on human progress in every field of secular activity in Protestant lands? Has it created that chaos and confusion which Catholics claim it must inevitably lead to? Quite the contrary has happened. And now let the patrons of the theory of human free will measure their own success as recorded by history against that of Protestants. 25. "The Adam and Eve of the New Gospel of Concubinage." This is the honorary title which Catholics bestow upon Martin Luther and Catherine von Bora, who were married June 13, 1525, during the Peasants' War. Luther was forty-two years old at the time and his bride past twenty-six. She had left the cloister two years before her marriage, and had found employment during that time in the home of one of the citizens of Wittenberg. Their first child, Hans, was born June 7, 1526. The grounds on which Catholics object to this marriage are, chiefly, three. In the first place, they declare the marriage the outcome of an impure relation which had existed between Luther and Catherine prior to their marriage. The marriage had virtually become a matter of necessity, to prevent greater scandal. Moreover, in this impure relationship Luther with his lascivious and lustful mind, in which fleshly desires were continually raging, had been the prime mover. The second ground on which Catholics object to Luther's marriage is, because Luther held professedly low views of the virtue of chastity and the state of matrimony. He had stripped matrimony of its sacramental character, and regarded it as a mere physical necessity and a social and civil contract. Thirdly, Catholics criticize Luther's marriage because it was entered into by both the contracting parties in violation of a sacred vow: Luther had been a monk and Catherine a nun, both sworn to perpetual celibacy.