Both sides are in the wrong and numerous examples of the same abound.”[97] In the case of such dissensions between parents and children, he says in an instruction to Spalatin which was printed later, the son “must be sent to the profane, i.e. Imperial Courts of Justice, under which we live in the flesh, and thus you will be relieved of the burden.” Preachers, according to him, as “evangelists,” have nothing to do with legal questions, but merely with peaceable matters; “where there is strife and dissension the Kaiser’s tribunal [the secular courts] must decide.... Should the son get no redress from the secular court, then there is nothing for him but to submit to his father’s tyranny.”[98] Naturally neither Luther nor the parties concerned found much satisfaction in such expedients. The handing over of the marriage questions to the State was to prove a source of endless and increasing trouble and vexation to Luther in the ensuing years, particularly in connection with the “secret” marriages just referred to. Luther even appealed from the then practice of the lawyers to the law of the old Roman Empire, which exaggerated the paternal rights to the extent of making the children’s marriages altogether dependent on the will of the parents. In the letter to Spalatin, printed in the Wittenberg edition of Luther’s German works, we find the following marginal note which expresses Luther’s opinion: “The old Imperial and Christian laws decree and ordain that children shall marry with the knowledge, consent and advice of their parents, and this the natural law also teaches. But the Pope, like the tyrant and Antichrist he is, has determined to be the only judge in questions of marriage and has abolished the obedience due by children to their parents.”[99] The truth is, that Canon Law, whilst strongly urging both sons and daughters to obey and respect their parents, nevertheless recognised as valid a marriage contract when concluded under conditions otherwise lawful, and this because it saw no reason for depriving the contracting parties of the freedom which was theirs by the natural law. Luther, greatly incensed by the opposition of the lawyers, at length, in a sermon preached in 1544, launched forth the most solemn condemnation possible of the so-called secret unions contracted without the paternal consent. He declared: “I, Dr. Martinus, command in the name of the Lord our God, that no one shall enter into a secret engagement and then, after the event, seek the parents’ ratification ... and, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I condemn to the abyss of hell all those who assist in furthering such devil’s work as secret engagements. Amen.”[100]