A coarser tale is the one he related about the same time. A minister came to him complaining of giddiness and asking for a remedy. His answer was: “Lass das Loch daheime,” which, so the narrators explain, meant, “that he should not go to such excess in chambering.”[524]--A similar piece of advice is given by Luther in the doggerel verses which occur in his Table-Talk: “Keep your neck warm and cosy,--Do not overload your belly.--Don’t be too sweet on Gertie;--Then your locks will whiten slowly.”[525]--On one occasion he showed his friends a turquoise (“_turchesia_”), which had been given him, and said, following the superstition of the day, that when immersed in water it would make movements “_sicut isti qui eveniunt juveni cum a virgine in chorea circumfertur_,” but, that, in doing so, it broke.[526] On account of the many children he had caused to be begotten from priests and religious, he, as we already know, compared himself to Abraham, the father of a great race: He, like Abraham, was the grandfather of all the descendants of the monks, priests and nuns and the father of a mighty people.[527] We may not pass over here Luther’s frequent use of filthy expressions, which, though they agree well with his natural coarseness, harmonise but ill with the high ideals we should expect in one whose vocation it was to rescue marriage and feminine dignity from the slough of the Papacy. He is fond of using such words in his abuse of the Popish teaching on marriage: At one time, he writes, the Papists make out marriage to be a Sacrament, “at another to be impure, i.e. a sort of merdiferous Sacrament.”[528] The Pope, who waywardly teaches this and other doctrines, “has overthrown the Word of God”; “if the Pope’s reputation had not been destroyed by the Word of God, the devil himself would have ejected him” (‘_a posteriori_’).[529] Elsewhere he voices his conviction as to the most fitting epithet to apply to the Pope’s “human ordinances.” One thing in man, he explains, viz. “the ‘_anus_,’ cannot be bound; it is determined to be master and to have the upper hand. Hence this is the only thing in man’s body or soul upon which the Pope has not laid his commands.”[530] “The greatest blessing of marriage,” he tells his friends, “lies in the children; this D.G. [Duke George] was not fated to see in his sons, ‘_quos spectatissima principissa cacatos in lucem ederat_.’”[531] The Pope and his people, he says in a sermon, had “condemned and rejected matrimony as a dirty, stinking state.” “Had the creation of human beings been in the Pope’s power he would never have created woman, or allowed any such to exist in the world.”[532] “The Pope, the devil and his Church,” he says in 1539, “are hostile to the married state.... Matrimony [in their opinion] is mere fornication.”[533]