Many abuses dating from Catholic times were prevalent amongst both people and parochial clergy. Concubinage in particular had increased greatly in the clerical ranks under the influence of the new ideas. Luther himself boasted of having advised “several parish-priests under Duke George to marry their cook secretly.”[625] But much greater disorders than had previously existed crept in everywhere at the commencement of the change. Luther himself was soon at a loss to discover any religious spirit or zeal for ecclesiastical affairs, either in the ruler or in his councillors. The Duke seemed to him “old, feeble and incapable.” He complained, on March 3, 1540, to his friend Anton Lauterbach, then minister at Pirna: “I see well enough, that, at the Dresden Court there is an extraordinary unwillingness to advance the cause of God or man; there pride and greed of gain reign supreme. The old Prince can’t do anything, the younger Princes dare not, and would not even had they the courage. May God keep the guidance of His Church in His own Hands until He finds suitable tools.”[626] On the moral conditions at the Ducal Court he passes a startling and hasty judgment when he says, writing to his Elector in 1540, that there the “scandals were ten times worse” than those caused by the Hessian bigamy. He was annoyed to find that, even after the introduction of the new teaching, the courtiers and nobles thought only of replenishing their purses. He speaks of them as the “aristocratic harpies of the land,” and exclaims: “These courtiers will end by eating themselves up by their own avarice.”[627] They refused to support the ministers of the Word and disputed amongst themselves as to whose duty it was to do so; they did not hide their old contempt for Wittenberg, i.e. for its theologians and theology, and yet they expected Wittenberg to carry out the Visitations free of cost. “Even should you get nothing for the Visitation,” he nevertheless instructs one of the preachers, “still you must hold it as well as you can, comfort souls to the best of your power and, in any case, expel the poisonous Papists.”[628] The unexpected and apparently so favourable change in the Duchy really did little to dispel his gloom, though he occasionally intones a hymn of gratitude and admiration for the working of Providence displayed in the change of rulers.