It was a mistake, so he declared in 1528 concerning the grounds of his verdict against the images, to “invoke them specially, as though I sought to give great honour or do a great service to God with the images, as has been the case hitherto.” The “trust” placed in the images has cost us the loss of our souls; the Christians whom he had instructed were now opposed to this “trust” and to the opinion “that they were thereby doing a special service to God.”[748] Amongst them memorial images might be permitted, i.e. such as “simply represent, as in a glass, past events and things” but “are not made into objects of devotion, trust or worship.”[749]—It is dreadful to make them a pretext for “idolatry” and to place our trust in anything but God. “Such images ought to be destroyed, just as we have already pulled down many images of the Saints; it were also to be wished,” he adds ironically, “that we had more such images of silver, for then we should know how to make a right Christian use of them.”[750]—“I will not pay court to such idols; the worship and adoration must cease.”[751] Whoever “with his whole heart has learnt to keep” the First Commandment would readily despise “all the idols of silver and gold.”[752]—Yet of the “adoration” of the images he had said in a letter of 1522 to Count Ludwig von Stolberg, that the motive of his opposition was not so much fear of adoration, because adoration of the Saints—so he hints—might well occur without any images; what urged him on was, on the contrary, the false confidence and the opinion of the Catholics that “they were thereby doing a good work and a service to God.”[753] We have just quoted Luther’s reservation, viz. that he was willing to tolerate the use of images which “simply represent, as in a glass, past events and things.” Statements of this sort occur frequently in his writings. They go hand in hand with a radical insistence on inward disdain for image-worship, and a tendency to demand its entire suppression in the churches. It was on these lines that the Elector of Saxony acted when ordering the destruction of the images in the principal church of Wurzen (above, p. 202); images which represented “serious events” and those overlaid with gold were not to be hewn to pieces.