After the refusal of the Princes and nobles to listen to his appeal to amend the state of Christendom, he determined to take his stand on the congregational principle. He fondly expected that, thanks to the supposed inward power of reform in the new communities, all his proposals would soon be put into execution, the old system of Church government swept away and a new order established more in accordance with his views. Hence in the writing to the magistrates and congregation of Prague, “_De instituendis ministris ecclesiæ_” (Nov., 1523), which, without delay, he caused to be translated into German,[467] he strove to show, how, everywhere, the new Church system was to be established from top to bottom by the selection of pastors by members of the congregation filled with faith (“_iis qui credunt, hæc scribimus_”).[468] According to this writing, the Visitors and Archbishop yet to be chosen by the zealous clergy, were to live only for the sake of the pastors and the congregations, whom they had to better by means of the Word. The faithful congregations “will indeed be weak and sinful”—Luther had no hope of setting up a Church of the perfect—but, “seeing they have the Word, they are at least not ungodly; they sin indeed, but, far from denying, they confess the Word.”[469] “Luther’s optimism,” says Paul Drews, “saw already whole parishes converted into congregations of real Christians, realising anew the true Church of the Apostolic ideal.”[470] In the same year, 1523, on Maundy Thursday, he for the first time spoke publicly, in a sermon delivered at Wittenberg, of the plan he had long cherished of segregating the “believing” Christians from the common herd. This was when publishing a new rule on the receiving of the Supper, making Penance, or at least a general confession of sin, a condition of reception. In future all were no longer to be allowed to approach the Sacrament indiscriminately, but only those who were true Christians; hence communion was to be preceded by an examination in faith, i.e. by the asking of certain questions on the subject. The five questions, and the answers, which were printed with a preface by Bugenhagen, practically constituted an assurance of a sort to the dispensers of the Sacrament that the communicants approached from religious motives and that they received the Body and Blood of Christ as a sign of the forgiveness of their sins.