Nor did the progress of the overthrow of the Church throughout the Duchy bear the least stamp of moral reform. The very violence used forbids our applying such a term to the work. The Catholic worship at the Cathedral was at once abolished and replaced by Lutheran services and preaching. The priests were driven into exile, the bishop alone being permitted to carry on “his godless papistical abominations and practices openly in his own residence” (the Castle of Stolpen). At the demand of the Wittenbergers the professors at Leipzig University who refused to conform to the Lutheran doctrine were dismissed. Melanchthon insisted, that, if they refused to hold their tongues, they must be driven out of the land as “blasphemers.” The new preachers publicly abused the friends, clerical and lay, of the late Duke to such an extent that the Estates were moved to make a formal complaint. Churches and monasteries were plundered and the sacred vessels melted down.[456] Maurice, the son of Duke Henry, who succeeded in 1541, showed himself even more violent and relentless in extirpating the olden system. The profoundly immoral character of this reformation, the interference with the people’s freedom of conscience, the destruction of religious traditions which the peaceable inhabitants had received a thousand years before from holy missionaries and bishops, merely on the strength of the new doctrines of a man who claimed to have a better Gospel—all this was expressly sanctioned and supported by Luther. He wrote in a memorandum on the proceedings: “There is not much room here for discussion. If my gracious Duke Henry wishes to have the Evangel, then His Highness must abolish idolatry, or not afford it protection ... otherwise the wrath of heaven will be too great.” As a “sovereign appointed by God” the ruler “owed it to Him to put down such horrible, blasphemous idolatry by every means in his power.” This was nothing more than “defending Christ and damning the devil”; an example had been given by the “former kings of Juda and Israel,” who had abolished “Baal and all his idolatry,” and later by Constantine, Theodosius and Gratian. For it was as much the duty of princes and lords as of other people to serve God and the Lord Christ to the utmost of their power. Away, therefore, with the abbots and bishops “since they are determined to remain blasphemers ... they are blind leaders of the blind; God’s wrath has come upon them; hence we must help in the matter as much as we can.”[457]