The bad example given by Landgrave Philip tended to increase the evil.[648] A harmful influence was exercised not only by the Landgrave’s Court but also by certain preachers, such as Johann Lening,[649] who enjoyed Philip’s favour. Elisabeth, Duchess of Rochlitz, the Landgrave’s sister, and a zealous patron of the Evangel, like the Prince himself, cherished rather lax views on morality. At first she was indignant at the bigamy, though not on purely moral grounds. The sovereign met her anger with a threat of telling the world what she herself had done during her widowhood. The result was that the Duchess said no more.[650] The Landgrave’s Court-preacher, Dionysius Melander, who performed the marriage ceremony with the second wife, had, five years before, laid down his office as preacher and leader of the innovations at Frankfort on the Maine, “having fallen out with his fellows and personally compromised himself by carrying on with his housekeeper.” He was a “violent, despotic and, at times, coarse and obscene, popular orator whose personal record was not unblemished.”[651] A Hessian church ordinance of 1539 complains of the moral retrogression: Satan has estranged men from the communion of Christ “not only by means of factions and sects, but also by carnal wantonness and dissolute living.”[652] The old Hessian historian Wigand Lauze writes, in his “Life and deeds of Philip the Magnanimous, Landgrave of Hesse,” that, the people have become very savage and uncouth, “as though God had given us His precious Word, and thereby delivered us from the innumerable abominations of Popery and its palpable idolatry, simply that each one might be free to do or leave undone whatever he pleased”; “many evil deeds were beginning to be looked upon by many as no longer sinful or vicious.” He accuses “the magistrates, ministers and governors” of corrupting the people by themselves transgressing the “good, Christian regulations” which had been set up, and charges both preachers and hearers with serving Mammon, and with “barefaced extortion,” “not to mention other sins and vices.”[653]