The preceding remarks on Luther’s misrepresentations of the Church’s teaching concerning worldly callings lead us to consider his utterances on the Church’s depreciation of the female sex and of matrimony. 5. Was Luther the Liberator of Womankind from “Mediæval Degradation”? Luther maintained that he had raised the dignity of woman from the depths to which it had fallen in previous ages and had revived due respect for married life. What the Church had defined on this subject in the past he regarded as all rubbish. Indeed, “not one of the Fathers,” he says, “ever wrote anything notable or particularly good concerning the married state.”[404] But, as in the case of the secular authority and the preaching office, so God, before the coming of the Judgment Day, by His special Grace and through His Word, i.e. through the new Evangel, had restored married life to its rightful dignity, “as He had at first instituted and ordained it.” Marriage, so Luther asserts, had been regarded as “a usage and practice rather than as a thing ordained by God. In the same way the secular authorities did not know that they were serving God, but were all tied up in ceremonies. The preaching office, too, was nothing but a sham consisting of cowls, tonsures, oilings,” etc.[405] In short, by his teaching on marriage he had ennobled woman, whereas the Catholics had represented matrimony as an “unchristian” state, only permitted out of necessity, even though they called it a Sacrament.[406] _Conspectus of Luther’s Distortion of the Catholic View of Marriage._ Luther based his charges chiefly on the canonical enforcement of clerical celibacy and on the favour shown by the Church to the vow of chastity and the monastic life. How this proved his contention it is not easy to see. Further, he will have it, that the Church taught that true service of God was to be found only in the monastic state, and that vows were a sure warrant of salvation--though, as a matter of fact, neither Church nor theologians had ever said anything of the sort.[407] In his remarks on this subject in 1527 he openly accused the Papists of saying that “whoever is desirous of having to do with God and spiritual matters must, whether man or woman, remain unmarried,” and “thus,” so he says, “they have scared the young from matrimony, so that now they are sunk in fornication.”[408] At first Luther only ventured on the charge, that matrimony had been “_de facto_” forbidden, though it had not actually been declared sinful, by the Pope;[409] by forbidding the monks to marry he had fulfilled the prophecy in 1 Timothy iv. 1 ff., concerning the latter times, when many would fall away from the faith and forbid people to marry. “The Pope forbids marriage under the semblance of spirituality.”[410] “Squire Pope has forbidden marriage, because one had to come who would prohibit marriage. The Pope has made man to be no longer man, and woman to be no longer woman.”[411]