The Pope, he says, had forbidden the married state; he and his followers, “the monks and Papists,” “burn with evil lust and love of fornication, though they refuse to take upon themselves the trouble and labour of matrimony.”[534] “With the help of the Papacy Satan has horribly soiled matrimony, God’s own ordinance”; the fact was, the clergy had been too much afraid of woman; “and so it goes on: If a man fears fornication he falls into secret sin, as seems to have been the case with St. Jerome.”[535] He saw sexual excesses increasing to an alarming extent among the youth of his own party. At table a friend of the “young fellows” sought to excuse their “wild, immoral life and fornication” on the ground of their youth; Luther sighed, at the state of things revealed, and said: “Alas, that is how they learn contempt for the female sex.” Contempt will simply lead to abuse; the true remedy for immorality was prayerfully to hold conjugal love in honour.[536] Luther, however, preferred to dwell upon the deep-seated vice of an anti-matrimonial Papacy rather than on the results of his teaching upon the young. “Every false religion,” he once exclaimed in 1542 in his Table-Talk,[537] “has been defiled by sensuality! Just look at the |!”--[He must here have used, says Kroker, “a term for _phallus_, or something similar,” which Caspar Heydenreich the reporter has suppressed.][538] “What else were the pilgrimages,” Luther goes on, “but opportunities for coming together? What does the Pope do but wallow unceasingly in his lusts?... The heathen held marriage in far higher honour than do the Pope and the Turk. The Pope hates marriage, and the Turk despises it. But it is the devil’s nature to hate God’s Word. What God loves, e.g. the Church, marriage, civic order, that he hates. He desires fornication and impurity; for if he has these, he knows well that people will no longer trouble themselves about God.” _The New Matrimonial Conditions and the Slandered Opponents._ It is a fact witnessed to by contemporaries, particularly by Catholics, that Luther’s unrestraint when writing on sexual subjects, his open allusions to organs and functions, not usually referred to, and, especially, the stress he laid on the irresistibility of the natural impulse, were not without notable effect on the minds of the people, already excited as they were. In 1522, after having explained his new views on divorce, he puts himself the question, whether this “would not make it easy for wicked men and women to desert each other, and betake themselves to foreign parts”? His reply is: “How can I help it? It is the fault of the authorities. Why do they not strangle adulterers?”[539]