Usingen mentions the “report,” possibly exaggerated, that at one time some three hundred apostate monks were in residence at Erfurt; many ex-nuns were daily to be seen wandering about the streets.[1011] Most of these auxiliaries who had flocked to the town in search of bread, were uneducated clerics who drew upon themselves the scorn of the Humanists belonging to the new faith. Any of these clerics who were capable of speaking in public, by preference devoted themselves to invective. Usingen frequently reproached his foes with their scurrility in the pulpit, their constant attacks on the sins and crimes of the clergy, and their violent reprobation and abuse of institutions and customs held in universal veneration for ages, all of which could only exercise a pernicious influence on morality. “Holy Scripture,” he says in a work against the two preachers Culsamer and Mechler, “commands the preacher to point out their sins to the people and to exhort them to amendment. But the new preaching does not speak to the people of their faults but only of the sins of the clergy, and thus the listener forgets his own sins and leaves the church worse than he entered it.” And elsewhere: “Invective was formerly confined to the viragoes of the market-place, but now it flourishes in the churches.” “Even your own hearers are weary of your everlasting slanders. Formerly, they say, the gospel was preached to us, but such abuse and calumny was not then heard in the pulpit.”[1012] It could not be but regarded as strange that Luther himself, forgetful of his former regard, went so far as to egg on his pupils and friends at Erfurt against his old professor. Usingen certainly had never anticipated such treatment at his hands. “He has, as you know,” Luther wrote to Lang, on June 26, “become hard-headed and full of ingrained obstinacy and conceit. Therefore, in your preaching, you must draw down upon his folly the contempt that such coarse and inflated blindness deserves.” As from his early years he had never been known to yield to anyone, Luther gave up the hope of seeing the stubborn sophist “yield to Christ”; he sees here the confirmation of the proverb: “No fool like an old fool.”[1013] Carried away by his success at Erfurt, Luther urged the preachers not to allow their energies to flag.