With such a view the form of worship described above seems scarcely to tally. A well-defined outward order of worship was first proposed, and then prescribed; it would, according to Luther’s statement, have imposed itself even on the assemblies of true believers. It is true, he says, that only considerations of charity and public order compel such outward regulations, that it was not his doing nor that of any other evangelical authority. Still it is a fact that they were enjoined, that a service according to the choice of the individual was, even in Luther’s day, regarded with misgivings, and that even in the 16th century it fell to the secular prince to sanction the form of worship in church and to punish those who stayed away, those who failed to communicate and those who did not know their catechism.[527] We have here another instance of the same contradiction apparent in matters of dogma, where Luther bound down the free religious convictions of the individual—supposed to be based on conscience and the Bible—in cast-iron strands in his catechism and theological hymns. The catechism, even in the matter of confession, and likewise the theology of the hymns, closely trenched on the regulations for Divine worship. The Ten Commandments, the Our Father, etc., were also put into verse and song. Moreover, those who presented themselves for communion had to submit at least to a formal examination into their faith and intentions, and also to a certain scrutiny of their morals—a strange limitation surely of Evangelical freedom and of the universal priesthood of all believers. According to Kawerau, the best Protestant liturgical writers agree, that a “false, pedagogic conception of worship” finds expression in Luther’s form of service.[528] To make the aim of the public worship of the congregation—whatever elements the latter might comprise—a mere exercise for the young and a method of pressing “Christianity” on non-believers was in reality to drag down the sublime worship of God, the “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” as Luther himself sometimes calls it, to an undeservedly low level.