What Charity Pirkheimer, the sister of the learned Nuremberg patrician, wrote of her native city is applicable to many other towns: “I frequently hear that there are many people in this city who are almost in despair and no longer go to any sermons, but say the preaching has led them astray so that they really do not know what to believe, and that they are sorry they ever listened to it.”[990] The magistrates of Nuremberg, by dint of violent measures, sapped all Catholic life little by little and prevailed on the chief families to embrace Lutheranism. The religious Orders were prohibited from undertaking the cure of souls, the clergy were ordained civilly, while, to those who proved amenable, stipends were assured for life. The monastery of St. Ægidius surrendered to the magistrates in 1525 with its community numbering twenty-five persons, likewise the Augustinian priory from which no less than twenty-four religious passed over to Lutheranism, likewise the Carmelite monastery with fifteen priests and seven lay brothers, of whom only a few remained staunch, and finally the Carthusian house, where most of the monks became Lutherans. All these changes took place in 1525. The Dominicans held out longer. At last the five surviving Friars surrendered their convent to the magistrates in 1543. The Franciscan Observantines, however, made the finest stand, enduring every kind of persecution and the most abject poverty until the last died in 1562. Together with the sons of St. Francis mention must also be made of the convent of Poor Clares, subject to them, and presided over as Abbess by Charity Pirkheimer, a lady equally clever and pious. The Poor Clares, eighty in number, were, like the nuns of the other convents in the town, deprived of their preachers and confessors and forced to listen to the evangelical pastors, which they did grudgingly and with many a murmur. For five years they were forcibly prevented from receiving the Blessed Sacrament. The priests of the town could only bring them spiritual assistance at the peril of their lives, and the consolations of the Church had eventually to be conveyed to them from a distance, from Bamberg and Spalt, by priests in disguise. One after another the inmates died in heroic fidelity to the Catholic religion; those who survived clung even more closely to the faith of their fathers and to the strict observance of their Rule. It is touching to read in the “Memoirs” of Charity Pirkheimer how the poor nuns passed through the misery of bodily privations and spiritual martyrdom in union with our suffering Saviour, in an inward peace which nothing could destroy; how they worked actively for their friends, the poor of the city, and even celebrated now and then little family festivals in joyful, sisterly love.