It is obvious that Ickelsamer and his party went too far when they asserted that not one man who led an honest life was to be found among the Lutheran preachers, for in reality there was no lack of well-meaning men who, like Willibald Pirkheimer and Albrecht Dürer, were bent on making use of their powers in the interests of what they took to be the pure Gospel. This, however, was less frequently the case with the apostate priests and monks. The thoughts of the impartial historian revert of their own accord to the moral disorders prevalent in the older Church. We are not at liberty to ignore the fact that it was impossible for the Catholics at that time to point to any shining examples on their side which might have shamed the Lutherans. They were obliged to admit that the abuses rampant in clerical and monastic life had, as a matter of fact, prepared the way for and facilitated the apostasy of many of those who went over to Luther and became preachers of the new faith. The Church had to lament not only the fate of those who turned their back on her, but the earlier decay of many of her own institutions; under the influence of the spirit of the age this decay was hourly growing worse. At the same time the secession of so many undesirable elements was itself a reason for not despairing of recovery. A great contrast to the lives of the apostate monks and clergy is nevertheless presented in an account which has been preserved by one of the adherents of the new faith of the conditions prevailing in certain monasteries where the friars, true to the Rule of their founder, kept their vows in the right spirit. The Franciscan Observants of the Province of Higher Germany were then governed by Caspar Schatzgeyer, a capable Bavarian Friar Minor, and, notwithstanding many difficulties, numbered in 1523 no less than 28 friaries and 560 members. In the course of the fifteenth century the Franciscan Observantines had spread far and wide as a result of the reform inaugurated within the Order and approved of by Rome. The Franciscan foundations at Heidelberg, Basle, Tübingen, Nuremberg, Mayence, Ulm, Ingoldstadt, Munich and other cities had one after the other made common cause with the Observants and, unlike the Conventuals, observed the old Rule in all its primitive strictness.