In the face of the detailed quotations from actual sources already given in the present chapter, all such opinions--not merely Luther’s own appeal to a “secret of confession,” invented by himself--are seen to be utterly unhistorical. Particularly so is the reference to the Catholic Middle Ages. It was just the Middle Ages, and the ecclesiastical tradition of earlier times, which excited among Luther’s contemporaries, even those of his own party, such opposition to the bigamy wherever news of the same penetrated in any shape or form.[190] In the following we shall quote a few opinions of 16th-century Protestants not yet mentioned. With the historian their unanimous verdict must weigh more heavily in the scale than modern theories, which, other considerations apart, labour under the disadvantage of having been brought forward long after the event and the expressions of opinion which accompanied it, to bolster up views commonly held to-day.[191] The bigamy was so strongly opposed to public opinion and thus presumably to the tradition handed down from the Middle Ages, that Nicholas von Amsdorf, Luther’s friend, declared the step taken by Philip constituted “a mockery and insult to the Holy Gospel and a scandal to the whole of Christendom.”[192] He thought as did Justus Jonas, who exclaimed: “Oh, what a great scandal!” and, “Who is not aghast at so great and calamitous a scandal?”[193] Erasmus Alber, preacher at Marburg, speaks of the “awful scandal” (“_immane scandalum_”) which must result.[194] In a letter to the Landgrave in which the Hessian preacher, Anton Corvinus, fears a “great falling away” on account of the affair, he also says, that the world will not “in any way” hear of such a marriage being lawful; his only advice was: “Your Serene Highness must take the matter to heart and, on occasion, have recourse to lying.”[195] To tell a deliberate untruth, as already explained (pp. 29, 53), appeared to other preachers likewise the only possible expedient with which to meet the universal reprobation of contemporaries who judged of the matter from their “mediæval” standpoint. Justus Menius, the Thuringian preacher, in his work against polygamy mentioned above, appealed to the universal, Divine “prohibition which forbids and restrains us,” a prohibition which applied equally to the “great ones” and allowed of no dispensation. He also pointed out the demoralising effect of a removal of the prohibition in individual cases and the cunning of the devil who wished thereby “to brand the beloved Evangel with infamy.”[196] Philip had defiled the Church with filth (“_fœdissime_”), so wrote Johann Brenz, the leader of the innovations in Würtemberg. After such an example he scarcely dared to raise his eyes in the presence of honourable women, seeing what an insult this was to them.[197]