The ruthless handling of the Black Monastery at Wittenberg, which had been bestowed on Luther after the dissolution of the Augustinian community, was to set a bad example. The fittings of the church there were scattered and the mediæval images and vestments which, though perhaps only of small material value, would yet be carefully treasured by any museum to-day, were calmly devoted by Luther to destruction. “Now at last,” he says, “I have sold the best of the pictures that still remained, but did not get much for them, fifty florins at the most, and with this I have clothed, fed and provided for the nuns and the monks—the thieves and rascals.” He had already remarked that the best of the “church ornaments and vessels” had gone; at the “beginning of the Evangel everything had been laid waste” and “even to this very day they do not cease from carrying off ... each man whatever he can lay hands on.”[728] No one can adequately describe the material damage which the Catholic parsonages and benefices, convents and bishoprics had to suffer on their suppression. A simple list of the spoliations from the hundreds of cases on record, would give us a shocking picture of the temporal consequences involved in the ecclesiastical upheaval. Apart from the injustice of thus robbing the churches and, incidentally, the numberless poor who looked to the Church for help, it was regrettable that there was no other institution ready to take the place of the olden Church, and assume possession of the properties which fell vacant. The Catholic Church was a firmly knit and well-established community, capable of possessing property. The new Churches on the contrary did not constitute an independent and united body; the universal priesthood, the invisibility of the Church of Christ and its utter want of independence were ideas altogether at variance with the legal conception of ownership upon which, in the topsyturvydom of that age of transition it was more than ever necessary to insist.