The writer, who seasons his counsel with so much bitterness, had plainly little hope of the conversion of the man he was addressing; his attack was centred on Catharine Bora. This was even more so the case with von der Heyden, a man of lively character who delighted in controversy; even from his first words it is clear that he had no intention of working on her kindlier feelings: “Woe to you, poor deluded woman.” He upbraids her with her fall from light into darkness, from the vocation of the cloister into an “abominable and shameful life”; by her example she has brought “many poor, innocent children into a like misery”; formerly they had, as nuns, “lived in discipline and purity,” now they are “not merely in spiritual but in actual bodily want, nay, the poorest of the poor and have become the most despicable of creatures.” Many of them now earned a living in “houses of ill-fame,” they were frequently forced to pawn or sell their poor clothing, and sometimes themselves; they had hoped for the true freedom of the spirit that had been promised them, and, instead, they had been cast into a “horrible bondage of soul and body.” Luther “in his pestilential writings had mistaken the freedom of the flesh for the true liberty of the spirit, in opposition to St. Paul, who had based this freedom solely on the Spirit of the Lord, as in 2 Cor. iii. 17: ‘Where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty’” Luther’s preaching on liberty was one big lie, and another was his opinion that the “vow of virginity, where it was observed, was wicked and sinful, which statement was contrary to God and the whole of Scripture,” and more particularly opposed to St. Paul, who strongly condemned those who broke their plighted faith to Christ; St. Paul had quite plainly recommended clerical celibacy when he wrote, that he who is without a wife is solicitous for the things that are the Lord’s, but that the husband is solicitous for the things of the world, how best he may please his wife (1 Cor. vii. 32 f.).