But this great gift, to Luther’s mind, was a moral impossibility, the rarest of God’s Graces, nay, a “miracle” of the Almighty. Hence he teaches that such a privilege must not be laid claim to, that the monastic vow of chastity was therefore utterly immoral, and clerical celibacy too, to say nothing of private vows of virginity; in all such there lurked a presumptuous demand for the rarest and most marvellous of Divine Graces; even to pray for this was not allowed. At the conclusion of his theses for Melanchthon, Luther enforces what he had said by the vilest calumnies against all who, in the name of the Church, had pledged themselves to remain unmarried. Were it known what manner of persons those who profess such great chastity really are, their “greatly extolled chastity” would not be considered fit “for a prostitute to wipe her boots on.” Then follow his further unhappy outbursts at the Wartburg on religious vows (vol. ii., p. 83 ff.) consummating his perversion of the Church’s teaching and practice regarding celibacy and marriage. In marriage he sees from that time forward nothing by the gratification of the natural impulse; to it every man must have recourse unless he enjoys the extraordinary grace of God; the ancient Church, with her hatred of marriage, her professed religious and celibate clergy, assumes in his imagination the most execrable shape. He fancies that, thanks to his new notions, he has risen far above the Christianity of the past, albeit the Church had ever striven to guard the sanctity of marriage as the very apple of her eye, by enacting many laws and establishing marriage-courts of her own under special judges. He becomes ever more reckless in casting marriage matters on the shoulders of the State. In the Preface to his “Trawbüchlin,” in 1529, he says, for instance, “Since wedlock and marriage are a worldly business, we clergy and ministers of the Church have nothing to order or decree about it, but must leave each town and country to follow its own usage and custom.”[472] From that time forward, particularly when the Diet of Augsburg had embittered the controversy, Luther pours out all the vials of his terrible eloquence on the bondage in which marriage had been held formerly, and on the contempt displayed by Rome for it. He peremptorily demands its complete secularisation. And yet he ostentatiously extols marriage as “holy and Divine,” and even says that wedlock is most pleasing to God, a mystery and Sacrament in the highest sense of the word. Of one of these passages Emil Friedberg, the Protestant canonist, remarks in his “Recht der Eheschliessung”: “Luther’s views as here expressed completely contradict other passages, and this same discrepancy is apparent throughout the later literature, and, even now, prevents [Protestants] from appreciating truly the nature of marriage.”[473]