“The devil,” so he begins, “has, by means of the gainsayers of our faith and our chief foes [presumably the Catholics], sent here certain prostitutes to seduce and ruin our young men. Hence I, as an old and tried preacher, would paternally implore you, my dear children, to believe that the Wicked One has sent these prostitutes hither, who are itchy, shabby, stinking and infected with the French disease as, alas, experience daily proves. Let one good comrade warn the other, for one such infected strumpet can ruin 10, 20, 30, or even 100 sons of good parents and is therefore to be reckoned a murderess and much worse than a poisoner. Let one help the other in this poisonous mess, with faithful advice and warning, as each one would himself wish to be done by!” He then threatens them with the penalties of the Ruler, which dissolute students had to fear, “in order that they may take themselves off, and the sooner the better”; “here [at Wittenberg] there is a Christian Church and University to which people resort to learn the Word of God, virtue and discipline. Whoever wants to drab had better go elsewhere.” Were he able, he would have such women “bled and broken on the wheel.” Young people ought, however, to resist concupiscence and fight against “their heat”; it was not to no purpose that the Holy Ghost had said: “Go not after thy lusts” (Eccl. xviii. 30). He concludes: “Pray God He may send you a pious child [in marriage], there will in any case be trouble enough.”[781] Some polemics have characterised such exhortations of Luther’s as mere “hypocrisy.” Whoever knows his Luther, knows, however, how unfounded is this charge. Nor was there any hypocrisy about the other very urgent exhortation which Luther caused to be read from the pulpit at Wittenberg in 1542, when himself unable to preach, and which is addressed to both burghers and students. He there implores “the town and the University for God’s sake not to allow it to be said of them, that, after having heard God’s Word so abundantly and for so long, they had grown worse instead of better.” “Ah, brother Studium,” he says, “spare me and let it not come to this that I be obliged like Polycarp to exclaim, ‘O my God, why hast Thou let me live to see this?’” He points to his “grizzly head” which at least should inspire respect.[782] _The Preacher and Catechist._