The following indignant reference of Onno Klopp’s must be included amongst the Protestant statements, since it was written some time before the eminent historian joined the Catholic Church: “The revolting story has left a blot on the memory of Luther and Melanchthon which oceans of sophisms will not avail to wash away. This, more than any other deed, brought to light both the waywardness of the new Church and its entire dependence on the favour of Princes.”[187] As for the concealment, and the secrecy in which the sanction of the bigamy was shrouded, G. Ellinger considers, that the decision of Luther and his friends “became absolutely immoral only through the concealment enjoined by the reformers.” In consequence of the matter being made a secret of conscience, “the second wife would seem to the world a concubine”; hence not only the first wife, but also the second would suffer degradation. The second wife’s relatives had given their consent “only on the hypothesis of a real marriage”; this too was what Philip intended; yet Luther wished him to tell the Emperor that she was a mere concubine; the Landgrave, however, refused to break the word he had given, and “repudiated Luther’s suggestion that he should tell a lie.”[188] Another Protestant, the historian Paul Tschackert, has recently characterised the Hessian affair as “a dirty story.” “It is, and must remain,” he says, “a shameful blot on the German Reformation and the life of our reformers. We do not wish to gloss it over, still less to excuse it.”[189] Yet, notably in modern theological literature, some Protestants have seemed anxious to palliate the affair. An attempt is made to place the Wittenberg advice and Luther’s subsequent conduct in a more favourable light by emphasising more than heretofore the secrecy of the advice given, which Luther did not consider himself justified in revealing under any circumstances, and the publication of which the Landgrave was unjustly demanding. It is also urged, that the ecclesiastical influence of the Middle Ages played its part in Luther’s sanction of the bigamy. One author even writes: “the determining factor may have been,” that “at the critical moment the reformer made way for the priest and confessor”; elsewhere the same author says: “Thus the Reformation begins with a mediæval scene.” Another Protestant theologian thinks that “the tendency, taken over from the Catholic Church,” to treat the marriage prohibitions as aspects of the natural law was really responsible; in Luther’s evangelical morality “there was a good lump of Romish morality, worthless quartz mingled with good metal”; “Catholic scruples” had dimmed Luther’s judgment in the matter of polygamy; to us the idea of bigamy appears “simply monstrous,” “but this is a result of age-long habits”; in the 16th century people thought “very differently.”