As a preacher he was able often enough to tell the various classes quite frankly what he found to censure in them. At the Court, for instance, he could, when occasion arose, reprove the nobles for their drunkenness, and that in language not of the choicest.[789] He was not the man to wear kid gloves, or, as an old German proverb he himself quoted said, to let a spider spin its web over his mouth. A saying attributed to him characterises him very well, save perhaps in its latter end: Come up bravely, speak out boldly, leave off speedily.[790] “I have warned you often enough,” so we read in the notes of a Wittenberg sermon of Sep. 24, 1531,[791] “to flee fornication, and yet I see that it is again on the increase. It is getting so bad that I shall be obliged to say: Bistu do zurissen, sso lop dich der Teuffl.”[792] The preacher then turns to the older hearers, begging them to use their influence with the younger generation, to prevail on them to abstain from this vice. As to his subject-matter, he was fond of urging Biblical texts and quotations, wherein he displayed great skill and dexterity. In general, however, his attacks on Popery are always much the same; he dwells with tiresome monotony on the holiness-by-works and the moral depravity of the Papists. Though his theory of Justification may have proved to him a never-failing source of delight, yet his hearers were inclined to grow weary of it. He himself says once: “When we preach the ‘_articulum justificationis_’ the people sleep or cough”; and before this: “No one in the people’s opinion is eloquent if he speaks on justification; then they simply close their ears.” Had it been a question of retailing stories, examples and allegories he could have been as proficient as any man.[793] Mathesius has incorporated in his work some of Luther’s directions on preaching which might prove a good guide to any pulpit orator desirous of being of practical service to his hearers.[794] Some of these directions and hints have recently appeared in their vigorous original in the Table-Talk edited by Kroker. It was his wish that religious addresses in the shape of simple, hearty instructions on the Epistles and Gospels should be given weekly by every father to his family.[795] He himself, in his private capacity, set the example as early as 1532 by holding forth in his own home on Sundays, when unable to preach in the church, before his assembled household and other guests. This he did, so he said, from a sense of duty towards his family, because it was as necessary to check neglect of the Divine Word in the home as in the Church at large.[796] He also himself catechised the children at home, in order, as he declared, to fulfil the duties of a Christian father; on rising in the morning he was also in the habit of reciting the “Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Our Father and some Psalm as well” with the children.