Strictures on the use of Indulgences occur, however, among his criticisms dating from this time. He attacks the “unlearned preachers” whose promises of Indulgences in return for donations for the building of churches, or similar pious objects, attract the people, though the latter are “altogether careless about fulfilling the duties of their calling.” He lays to the charge of the Pope and the Bishops not merely the real abuses in the preaching of Indulgences—as though they had been aware of them all—but also the making of Indulgences to depend on offerings; all the Bishops are, however, on the path to hell, and intent on seducing the people from the true service of God.[744] He had, as we have seen, praised the worldly authorities at the expense of the ecclesiastical dignitaries, and now we find him introducing into his theological lectures a strange eulogy of Frederick, his Elector: “You, Prince Frederick, are yet to be guided by a good angel, therefore be on the watch. How greatly have you already been tried by injustice, and how rightly might you have taken up arms! You have suffered, you remained peaceable. I wonder, were you calling to mind your sins, and wishing thereby to confess them and do penance?” To this the mystic himself prudently replies: “I know not,” and adds: “Perhaps it was merely the fear of possibly getting the worse.”[745] The exhortations he sees fit to address to his sovereign are directed not so much against selfishness or other faults, but rather against his supposed excessive piety; he is blamed for frequently postponing audiences on the plea that he must be present at prayers or Divine Service, and yet, Luther thinks, “we ought to be resigned and indifferent to go wherever the Lord calls us and not attach ourselves obstinately to anything”;[746] another complaint was that the Elector was too much given to imitating the Bishop in the collecting of relics. The Elector’s love for rare relics was indeed notorious, and, as a matter of fact, Luther himself was of service to the Elector in this very matter at the time when Staupitz was negotiating for him at St. Ursula’s in Cologne. We hear of this in a letter, in which Luther also sends his thanks to the Elector for his present of a new cowl (_cucullus_) “of really princely cloth.”[747]