Of a later period, when the fruits of the change of religion had still further ripened, Melanchthon’s friend Camerarius says: “Mankind have now attained the goal of their desires--boundless liberty to think and act exactly as they please. Reason, moderation, law, morality and duty have lost all value, there is no reverence for contemporaries and no respect for posterity.”[686] The Elector Augustus of Saxony goes more into particulars when he writes: “A disgraceful custom has become established in our villages. The peasants at the high festivals, such as Christmas and Whitsuntide, begin their drinking-bouts on the eve of the festival and prolong them throughout the night, and the next day they either sleep through the morning or else come drunk to church and snore and grunt like pigs during the whole service.” He reproves the custom of making use of the churches as wine-cellars, the contempt displayed for the preachers, the scoffing at sacred rites and the “frequent blasphemy and cursing.” “Murder and abominable lasciviousness” were the consequences of such contempt for religion. But any improvement was not to be looked for seeing that there were hardly any schools remaining, and the cure of souls was left principally in the charge of ministers such as the Elector proceeds to describe. The nobles and the other feudal lords, he says, “appoint everywhere to the ministry ignorant, destitute artisans, or else rig out their scribes, outriders or grooms as priests and set them in the livings so as to have them all the more under their thumb.”[687] The state of things in Saxony provided the Landgrave with a serviceable weapon against Luther when the latter showed an inclination to repudiate the bigamy, or to say he had merely “acted the fool” in sanctioning it. The passage has been quoted above (p. 56), where the Landgrave exhorted him to pay less attention to the world’s opinion, but rather to set himself and all the preachers in the Saxon Electorate to the task of checking the “vices of adultery, usury and drunkenness which were no longer regarded as sins, and that, not merely by writings and sermons, but by earnest admonition and by means of the ban.” It is true that the conditions which accompanied the introduction of his new system were a trial to Luther, which he sought to remedy. The Landgrave could not reproach him with actual indifference. Not merely by “writings and sermons,” but also by “earnest admonition” and even by re-introducing the “ban of the Church” he strove to check the rising tide of moral evil. But the evil was the stronger of the two, and the causes, for which he himself was responsible, lay too deep. We have an example of the way in which he frequently sought to curb the mischief, in his quarrel with Hans Metzsch, the depraved Commandant of Wittenberg, whom he excluded from the Supper.[688]