In a few days more than sixty parsonages had been pulled down, libraries destroyed and the archives and tithe registers of the ecclesiastical authorities ransacked; little regard was shown for human life. A little later seven clergy-houses were again set on fire. Meanwhile the Lutheran preachers, with the fanatical Lang at their head, were at liberty to stir up the people.[1000] The ruin of the University was imminent; many parents withdrew their sons, fearing lest they should be infected with the “Husite heresy.” The customary Catholic services were, however, performed as usual, but the end of Catholic worship could be foreseen owing to the ever-increasing growth of “evangelical freedom.” Renegade monks, especially Luther’s former Augustinian comrades, preached against “the old Church as the mother of faithlessness and hypocrisy”; Lang spoke of the monasteries as “dens of robbers.” Under the attacks of the preachers one human ordinance after another fell to the ground. Fasting, long prayers, founded Masses, confraternities, everything in fact, disappeared before the new liberty, value being allowed only to temporal works of mercy. The avarice of the “shorn, anointed priestlings” was no longer to be stimulated by the people’s money. “Ruffianly crowds showed their sympathy with the preachers by yelling and shouting in church. Theological questions were debated in market-places and taverns, men, women and boys expounded the Bible.”[1001] Luther, through Lang, urged the Augustinians at Erfurt, who still remained true to their monastic Rule, to apostatise; he merely expressed the wish that there should be no “tumults” against the Order. Lang was to “defend the cause of the Evangel”[1002] at the next Convention of the Saxon Augustinians, a meeting which took place at Epiphany, 1522 (above, p. 337). Lang justified his apostasy in a work in which he expressly appeals to the new doctrines on faith and good works. The exodus of the monks from their convent was not, however, carried out as quietly as Luther would have wished; he dreaded the “slanders of the foes of the Evangel” and was depressed by the immorality of the inhabitants of Erfurt, and by his own experience with his followers. He spoke his mind to Lang: “The power of the Word is still concealed, or else you pay too little heed to it. This surprises me greatly. We are just the same as before, hard, unfeeling, impatient, sinful, intemperate, lascivious and combative, in short, the mark of the Christian, true charity, is nowhere to be found. Paul’s words are fulfilled in us: We have God’s Word on our lips, but not in power (cp. 1 Cor. iv. 20).”[1003] In 1524 Lang married the rich widow of an Erfurt fuller. Those who had been unfaithful to their vows and priestly obligations, and then acted as preachers of the new faith, gave the greatest scandal by their conduct.