Luther, it is true, had an excuse ready. He pleaded that the freedom of the Gospel was not yet rightly understood. “The masses,” he wrote to Margrave George of Brandenburg, on Sep. 14, 1531, “have now fallen under the freedom of the flesh, and there we must leave them for a while until they have satisfied their lust. Things will be different when the Visitation is in working order [the first Visitation in the Margrave’s lands had taken place as early as 1528]. It is quick work pulling down an old house, but building a new one takes longer.... Jerusalem, too, was built very slowly and with difficulty.... Under the Pope we could not endure the constraint, and the lack of the Word; now we cannot endure the freedom and the superabundant treasure of the Gospel.”[545] Amidst all these disorders Luther found great consolation in contemplating the anti-Christian character of the Popish Church and Daniel’s supposed prophecy of Antichrist’s enmity for woman.[546] His preachers only too eagerly followed in his footsteps. George Wicel speaks of the preachers, who, while themselves leading loose lives, used Daniel’s prophecy against the Catholic view of marriage.[547] “They mock at those who wish to remain single or who content themselves with one wife, and quote the words of Daniel: ‘He shall not follow the lust of women nor regard any gods,’ so that anyone belonging to this sect who is not addicted to the pursuit of women, is hardly safe from being taken for Antichrist. The words of St. Paul in Cor. vii., of Our Lord in Mat. xix., concerning the third sex of the eunuchs, and of St. John in Apoc. xiv., on those who have not defiled themselves with women, and, again, of St. Paul when speaking of the ‘_vidua digama_’ in 1 Tim. v., don’t count a farthing in this Jovinian school[548].... It is an Epicurean school and an Epicurean life and nothing else.” With biting satire, in part the result of the controversy thrust upon him, in part the outcome of his temper, he had declared shortly before, that Lutheranism was all “love of women,” was “full of senseless lust for women”; he uses “gynecophiles” as an adjective to qualify it, and speaks of its “gynecomania”; by this means men were to become better Christians, and be more secure of salvation than all the Saints of God ever were in the ancient apostolic Church. “See there what Satan is seeking by means of this exalted respect for the love of women, and by his glib, feminist preachers in Saxony. Hence his and his followers’ concern for women, to whom they cling so closely that they can hardly get into their pulpits without them, and, rather than live a celibate life, the Evangelist would prefer to be the husband, not of one wife, but of three or four.”[549]