If, as is but natural, we ask, how Christ came so strictly to enjoin what was almost impossible, Luther replies that He gave His command only for Christians, and that real Christians were few in number: “In point of fact Christ is speaking only to His dear Christians [when He says, ‘that Christians must not go to law,’ etc.], and it is they alone who take it and carry it out; they make no mere Counsel of it as the Sophists do, but are so transformed by the Spirit that they do evil to no one and are ready willingly to suffer evil from anyone.” But the world is full of non-Christians and “them the Word does not concern at all.”[217] Worldlings must needs tread a very different way: “All who are not Christians belong to the kingdom of the world and are under the law.” Since they know not the command “Resist not evil,” “God has given them another government different from the Christian estate, and the Kingdom of God.” There ruleth coercion, severity, and, in a word, the Law, “seeing, that, amongst a thousand, there is barely one true Christian.” “If anyone wished to govern the world according to the Gospel ... dear heart, what would the result be! He would be loosening the leashes and chains of the wild and savage beasts, and turning them astray to bite and tear everybody.... Then the wicked would abuse the Christian freedom of the Gospel and work their own knavery.”[218] Luther clung to the very end of his life to this congeries of contradictory theories, which he advocated in 1523, in his passionate aversion to the ancient doctrine of perfection. In 1539 or 1540 he put forth a declaration against the “Sophists” in defence of his theory of the “Counsels,” directed more particularly against the Sorbonne, which had insisted that the “_consilia evangelica_,” “were they regarded as precepts, would be too heavy a burden for religion.”[219] “They make out the Counsels,” he says, “i.e. the commandments of God, to be not necessary for eternal life and invite people to take idolatrous, nay, diabolical vows. To lower the Divine precepts to the level of counsels is a horrible, Satanic blasphemy.” As a Christian “you must rather forsake and sacrifice everything”; to this the first table of the Law (of Moses, the Law of the love of God) binds you, but, on account of the second table (the law of social life), you may and must preserve your own for the sake of your family. As a Christian, too, you must be willing to suffer at the hands of every man, “but, apart from your Christian profession, you must resist evil if you wish to be a good citizen of this world.”[220] “Hence you see, O Christian brother,” he concludes, “how much you owe to the doctrine which has been revived in our day, as against a Pharisaical theology which leaves us nothing even of Moses and the Ten Commandments, and still less of Christ.”