The Pope, according to Luther, had made such a huge “mess in the Church by means of the Greater Excommunication that the swine could not get to the end with devouring it.”[447] Christians, according to him, ought to be taught rather to love the ban of the Church than to fear it. We ourselves, he cries, put the Pope under the ban and declare that “the Pope and his followers are no believers.” Later on, however, he came to see better the use of ghostly penalties for unseemly conduct and made no odds in emphasising the right of the community as such to make use of exclusion as a punishment; in view of the increase of disorders he essayed repeatedly to reintroduce on his own authority a sort of ban in his Churches.[448] As early as 1519 Luther had expressed his disapproval of the canonising of Saints by the Church, a practice which stimulated the moral efforts of the faithful by setting up an ideal and by encouraging daily worship; he added, however, that “each one was free to canonise as much as he pleased.”[449] In 1524, however, he poured forth his wrath on the never-ending canonisations; as a rule they were “nothing but Popish Saints and no Christian Saints”;[450] the foundations made in their honour served “merely to fatten lazy gluttons and indolent swine in the Churches”; before the Judgment Day no one could “pronounce any man holy”; Elisabeth, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Bernard and Francis, even he regarded as holy, though he would not stake his life on it, seeing there was nothing about them in Holy Scripture; “but the Pope, nay, all the angels, had not the power of setting up a new article of faith not contained in Scripture.”[451]