During this so-called “Evangelical War” five thousand burghers and mercenaries of the town of Brunswick, shouting their war-cry: “The Word of God remaineth for ever,” set out, on July 21, 1542, against the monastery of Riddaghausen; there they broke down the altars, images and organs, carried off the monstrances, mass vestments and other treasures of the church, plundering generally and perpetrating the worst abominations. The mob also broke in pieces the images and pictures in the monastery of Steterburg and then demolished the building. Nor did the abbey of Gandersheim fare much better. The prebendaries there complained to the Emperor, that all the crucifixes and images of the Saints had been destroyed together with other objects set up for the adornment of the church and churchyard outside.[773] The Lutheran preacher, K. Reinholdt, looking back two decades later on the devastation wrought in Germany, reminded his hearers that Luther himself had repeatedly preached that, “it would be better that all churches and abbeys in the world were torn down and burnt to ashes, that it would be less sinful, even if done from criminal motives, than that a single soul should be led astray into Popish error and be ruined”; “if they would not accept his teaching, then, so Luther the man of God had exclaimed, he would wish not merely that his doctrine might be the cause of the destruction of Popish churches and convents, but that they were already lying in a heap of ashes.”[774] At Hamburg iconoclastic disturbances began in Dec., 1528. The Cistercian convent, Harvestehude, where the clergy still dare to say Mass, was rased to the ground.[775] At Zerbst, in 1524, images and church fittings were destroyed, part of these being used to “keep up the fire for the brewing of the beer”;[776] stone sculptures were mutilated and then used in the construction of the Zerbst Town-Hall, whence they were brought to light at a much later date, when a portion of the building was demolished. The statues, headless, indeed, but still gleaming with gold and colours, gave, as a narrator of the find said, “an insight into the horrors of the iconoclasm which had run riot in the neighbouring churches.”[777]