The rest of the document, apart from pious admonitions, consists of the declaration, that they give their “testimony that, in a case of necessity,” they were “unable to condemn” bigamy, and that, accordingly, his “conscience may be at rest” should the Landgrave “utilise” the Divine dispensation. In so many words they sanction the request submitted to them, because “what was permitted concerning matrimony in the Mosaic Law was not prohibited in the Gospel.” Concerning the circumstances of the request they, however, declined “to give anything in print,” because otherwise the matter would be “understood and accepted as a general law and from it [i.e. a general sanction of polygamy] much grave scandal and complaint would arise.” The Landgrave’s wish that they should speak of the case from the pulpit, is also passed over in silence. Nor did they reply to his invitation to them to consider by what ways and means the matter might be brought publicly before the world. On the contrary, they appear to be intent on burying in discreet silence a marriage so distasteful to them. It even looks as though they were simple enough to think that such concealment would be possible, even in the long run. What they fear is, above all, the consequences of its becoming common property. In no way, so they declare, was any universal law, any “public precedent” possible, whereby a plurality of wives might be made lawful; according to its original institution marriage had signified “the union of two persons only, not of more”; but, in view of the examples of the Old Covenant, they “were unable to condemn it,” if, in a quite exceptional case, “recourse were had to a dispensation ... and a man, with the advice of his pastor, took another wife, not with the object of introducing a law, but to satisfy his need.”