Scarcely had he finished his course of studies as a learner than he already began to wax eloquent against various abuses. In his characteristic love of exaggeration of language he did not fear to use the sharpest epithets, nor to magnify the evil, whether in his academic lectures or in the pulpit, or in his letters and writings. He wrote, for instance, to Spalatin in 1516 to dissuade the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, from promoting Staupitz to a bishopric: he who becomes a bishop in these days falls into the most evil of company, all the wickedness of Greece, Rome and Sodom were to be found in the bishops; Spalatin should compare the carryings-on of the present bishops with those of the bishops of Christian antiquity; now a pastor of souls was considered quite exemplary if he merely pursued his worldly business and built up for himself with his riches an insatiable hell.[111] In his first lectures at Wittenberg he complains that “neither monasteries nor colleges, nor Cathedral churches will in any sort accept discipline.”[112] The clergy, he says, in another place, generalising after the fashion common among preachers, should be the eyes of the Church, but to-day they do not direct the body, i.e. the Faithful, for they are blinded: they are the soul, but they do not give life, but rather kill by their deadly example; about nothing do they trouble less than about souls.[113] In similar language he, in these lectures, represents the bishops and priests as simply “full of the most abominable unchastity”; according to him, they bring to the pulpit nothing but “their views and fables, nothing but masquerading and buffoonery,” so that the Church can do nothing but cry aloud over the misery in which it is sunk. “The strength of her youth has forsaken her.”[114] One of the earliest portions of Luther’s correspondence which has been preserved and which takes us back to his little world at Wittenberg, throws a clearer light on his character at that time. It deals with an unpleasant dispute with his brother monks at Erfurt, which he became involved in owing to his having taken his doctorate at Wittenberg instead of at Erfurt. The Erfurt monastery reproached him with a serious infringement of the rules and disrespect for the Theological Faculty there; he had, they said, entered the teaching Corporation of Erfurt in virtue of the oath which he had taken in the customary manner on his appointment as Sententiarius, and was therefore under strict obligation to take his degree of Doctor in this Faculty and not elsewhere. Other unknown charges were also made against him, but were speedily withdrawn. It is highly probable that the tension between Observantines and Conventuals increased the misunderstanding.