As years passed Luther went further; forgetful of his admission that the Pope had not made matrimony sinful, he exclaimed: To him and to his followers marriage is a sin. The Church had hitherto treated marriage as something “non-Christian”;[412] the married state she had “handed over to the devil”;[413] her theologians look down on it as a “low, immoral sort of life,”[414] and her religious can only renounce it on the ground that it is a kind of legalised “incontinence.”[415] In reality, however, religious, when taking their vow, merely acted on the Christian principle which St. Augustine expresses as follows: Although “all chastity, conjugal as well as virginal, has its merit in God’s sight,” yet, “the latter is higher, the former less exalted.”[416] They merely renounced a less perfect state for one more perfect; they could, moreover, appeal not only to 1 Cor. vii. 33, where the Apostle speaks in praise of the greater freedom for serving God which the celibate state affords, but even to Luther himself who, in 1523, had interpreted this very passage in the same sense, and that with no little warmth.[417] His later and still more extravagant statements concerning the Catholic view of marriage can hardly be taken seriously; his perversion of the truth is altogether too great. He says, that married people had not been aware that God “had ordained” that state, until at last God, by His special Grace, and before the Judgment Day, had restored the dignity of matrimony no less than that of the secular authority and the preaching office, “through His Word [i.e. through Luther’s preaching].” The blame for this state of things went back very far, for the Fathers, like Jerome, “had seen in matrimony mere sensuality,” and for this reason had disparaged it.[418] The Prophet Daniel had foreseen the degradation of marriage under the Papacy: It is of the Papal Antichrist “that Daniel says [xi. 37], that he will wallow in the unnatural vice which is the recompense due to contemners of God (Rom. i. [27]), in what we call Italian weddings and silent sin. For matrimony and a right love and use of women he shall not know. Such are the horrible abominations prevailing under Pope and Turk.”[419] “The same prophet,” he writes elsewhere, “says that Antichrist shall stand on two pillars, viz.: idolatry and celibacy. The idol he calls Mausim, thus using the very letters which form the word Mass.” The Pope had deluded people, on the one hand by the Mass, and, on the other, “by celibacy, or the unmarried state, fooling the whole world with a semblance of sanctity. These are the two pillars on which the Papacy rests, like the house of the Philistines in Samson’s time. If God chose to make Luther play the part of Samson, lay hold on the pillars and shake them, so that the house fall on the whole multitude, who could take it ill? He is God and wonderful are His ways.”[420]