That Luther was perfectly content “without anything out of the common” is confirmed by other writers, and concerning the general frugality of his household there can be no question. In this respect we may well believe what Mathesius says, for he was a regular attendant at Luther’s evening table in the forties of the century. His assertion that Luther “drank but little” must, however, be considered in the light of other of his statements. What Mathesius thought of the “sleeping-draught” and the feasts at which, so he relates, Luther assisted from time to time, appears from a discourse incorporated by him in his “Wedding-sermons.” Here he speaks of the “noble juice of the grape and how we can make use of it in a godly fashion and with a good conscience”; he is simply the mouthpiece of Luther. Like Luther, he condemns gluttony and “bestial drunkenness,” but is so indulgent in the matter of cheerful carousing that a Protestant Canon in the eighteenth century declared, that Mathesius had gone astray in his sermon on the use of wine.[1023] Mathesius says that we must have “a certain amount of patience” with those who sometimes, for some quite valid reason, “get a little tipsy,” or “kick over the traces,” provided they “don’t do so every day” and that “the next morning they are heartily sorry for it”; the learned were quite right in distinguishing between “_ebriositas_” and “_ebrietas_”; if a ruling Prince had worked industriously all day, or a scholar had “read and studied till his head swam,” such busy and much-tired people, if they chose “in the evening to drink away their cares and heavy thoughts, must be permitted some over-indulgence, particularly if it does not hinder them in the morning from praying, studying and working.”[1024] This is the exact counterpart of Luther’s theory and practice as already described, in the distinction made between “_ebriositas_” and “_ebrietas_,” in the statement that drunkenness is no more than a venial sin, in the unseemly and jocose tone employed when speaking of tipsiness, and in the license accorded those who (like Luther) had much work to do, or (again, like Luther), were plagued with “gloomy thoughts.” The other conditions are also noteworthy, viz. that it must not be of “daily occurrence” and that the offender must afterwards be “heartily sorry”; in such a case we must be tolerant. All this agrees with Luther’s own teaching.