Luther, when preaching to the people, often denounced the prevalent habit of drinking, a circumstance which must not be overlooked when passing judgment upon him. The German vice of drunkenness which he saw increasing around him in the most alarming manner caused him such distress, that he exclaimed in one of his postils: “Our poor German land is chastised and plagued with this devil of drink, and altogether drowned in this vice, so that life and limb, possessions and honour, are shamefully lost while people lead the life of swine, so that, had we to depict Germany, we should have to show it under the image of a sow.”[1014] Only “the little children, virgins and women” were exempt from the malady; “unless God strikes at this vice by a national calamity everything will go down to the abyss, all sodden through and through with drink.”[1015] Was this the way to be grateful “to the light of the Evangel” which had burst upon Germany?[1016] His question shows that he was speaking primarily of the conditions prevailing under the new Evangel. Looking back on the Catholic past he has perforce to admit, that, although this vice was by no means unknown then, yet “I remember that when I was young it [drunkenness] was looked upon by the nobility as a great shame, and that worthy gentry and Princes sought to combat it by wise prohibitions and penalties; but now it is even worse and more prevalent amongst them than amongst the peasants; so far has it come that even Princes and men of gentle birth learn it from their squires, and are not ashamed of it; it is regarded as honourable and quite a virtue by Princes, nobles and burghers, so that whosoever refuses to become a sodden brute is despised.”[1017] In powerful passages such as these he assails the vice from both the natural and the supernatural standpoint. Yet his chief complaint is not so much its existence as its appalling extent; his reproofs are intended for those who “get drunk daily,” for those “maddened and sodden with drink,” for those who “day and night are ever pouring the liquor down their throats.” He expressly states that he is willing to be lenient in cases where a man is drunk only now and again. “It may be borne with and overlooked,” he says in the sermon quoted, “if from time to time a person by mistake takes a glass too much, or, after being exhausted by labour and toil, gets a little the worse for drink.”[1018]