His description of marriage “as an outward, material thing, like any other worldly business,[460] was certainly not calculated to raise its repute;” and in the same passage he proceeds: “Just as I may eat and drink, sleep and walk, ride, talk and do business with a heathen or a Jew, a Turk or a heretic, so also I may contract marriage with him.”[461] Matrimonial cases had formerly belonged to the ecclesiastical courts, but Luther now drives the parties concerned to the secular judge, telling them that he will give them “a good hog,” i.e. a sound trouncing, for having sought to “involve and entangle him in such matters” which “really concerned the secular authority.”[462] “Marriage questions,” he says, “do not touch the conscience, but come within the province of the secular judge.”[463] Previously, parties whose rights had been infringed were able to seek redress from the ecclesiastical tribunals, the sentences of which were enforced by Canon Law under spiritual penalties, to the advantage of the injured party. Luther, on the other hand, after having secularised marriage, finds himself unable to cope with the flood of people clamouring for justice: “I am tired of them [the matrimonial squabbles] and I have thrown them overboard; let them do as they like in the name of all the devils.”[464] He is also determined to rid the preachers of this business; the injured parties are, he says, to seek for justice and protection “in the latrines of the lawyers”; his own conduct, he hopes, will serve as a model to the preachers, who will now repel all who solicit their help.[465] The increase in the number of matrimonial misunderstandings and quarrels, the haste with which marriage was entered upon and then dissolved, particularly in the Saxon Electorate and at Wittenberg, was not merely the result of the new Evangelical freedom, as Luther and his friends sadly admitted, but was due above all to the altered views on marriage. In the new preaching on marriage the gratification of the sensual impulse was, as will be shown below, placed too much in the foreground, owing partly to the fanatical reaction against clerical celibacy and religious vows. “To marry is a remedy for fornication”; these words of Luther’s were again and again repeated by himself and others in one form or another, as though they characterised the main object of marriage. Nature was persistently painted as excessively weak in the matter of chastity, and as quite captive under the yoke of passion. People were indeed admonished to curb their passions with the help of Grace, but such means of acquiring God’s Grace as mortification and self-conquest were only too frequently scoffed at as mere holiness-by-works, while as for the means of grace sought by Catholics in the Sacraments, they had simply been “abolished.”