“The nobles scrape money together, rob and plunder”; “like so many devils they grind the poor churches, the pastors and the preachers.” “The burghers and peasants do nothing but hoard, are usurers and cheats and behave defiantly and wantonly without any fear of punishment, so that it cries to heaven for vengeance and the earth can endure it no longer.” “On all hands and wherever we turn we see nothing in all classes but a deluge of dreadful ingratitude for the beloved Evangel.”[692] “Nowadays the Gospel is preached, and whoever chooses can hear it ... but burghers, peasants and nobles all scorn their ministers and preachers.”[693] “I have often said that a plague must fall upon Germany; the Princes and gentry deserve that our Lord God should play them a trick; there will be such bloodshed that no one will know his own home.”[694] “Now that all this [the Evangel] is preached rightly and plainly, people cannot despise it enough. In old days monasteries and churches were built with no regard for cost, now people won’t even repair a hole in the roof that the minister may lie dry; of their contempt I say nothing, it is enough to move one to tears to witness such scorn. Hence I say: Take care, you are young; it may be you will live to see and experience the coming misfortune that will break over Germany. For a storm will burst over Germany, and that without fail.... I do not mind so much the peasants’ avarice and the fornication and immorality now on the increase everywhere, as the contempt for the Evangel.... That peasants, burghers and nobles thus contemn the Word of God will be their undoing.”[695] To the question whence the moral decline amongst the adherents of the new teaching came, Luther was wont to give various answers. Their difference and his occasional self-contradictions show how his consciousness of the disorders and the complaints they drew from every side drive him into a corner. The most correct explanation was, of course, that the mischief was due to the nature of his teaching on faith and good works; to this, involuntarily, he comes back often enough.