Luther sought to safeguard his cause on every side, even at the cost of concessions at variance with his duty, or by grovelling subserviency to the Princes, whether he actually granted their desire,[417] or, as in the case of the bigamy of Henry VIII of England, merely threw out a suggestion.[418] His new ethical principles should surely have been attested in his own person, above all by truthfulness. In this connection we must, however, recall to mind the observations made elsewhere. (Above, vol. iv., p. 80 ff.) Who is the lover of truth who does not regret the advice Luther gave from the Coburg to his followers at the Diet of Augsburg, viz. to make use of cunning when the cause seemed endangered? Where does self-betterment come in if “tricks and lapses” are to form a part of his life’s task, even though “with God’s help” they were afterwards to be amended;[419] if, when treating of the most important church matters, “reservation and subterfuge (‘_insidiæ_’)” are not only to be used but even to be represented as the work of Christ? Wherever the principle holds: Against the malice of our opponents everything is lawful,[420] there, undoubtedly, the least honest will always have the upper hand. As to how far Luther thought himself justified in going in order to conceal his real intentions we may see from his letters to the Pope, particularly from the last letter he addressed to him, where the public assertion of his devotion to the Roman Church coincides with his private admission to friends that the Pope was Antichrist and that he had sworn to attack him.[421] * * * * * In his relentless polemics against the Church—where he does not hesitate to bring the most baseless of charges against both her dignitaries and her institutions—we might dismiss as not uncommon his tendency to see only what was evil, eagerly setting this in the foreground while passing over all that was good; his eyes also served to magnify and distort the dark spots into all manner of grotesque shapes. But what tells more heavily against him is his having evolved out of his own mind a mountain of false doctrines which he foists on the Church as hers, though in reality not one of them but the very opposite was taught in and by the Church. The Pope, he writes, for instance, in his “Vermanũg” from the Coburg, wants to “forbid marriage” and teaches that the “love of woman” is to be despised; this is one of the abominations and plagues of Antichrist, for God created woman for the honour and help of man.[422] The state of celibacy, willingly embraced by many under the Papacy, Luther decried in the same violent writing as a “state befitting whores and knaves,”[423] and he even connects with it unmentionable abominations.