A man, who, owing to his wife’s illness was prevented from matrimonial intercourse, wished, on the strength of Carlstadt’s advice, to take a second wife. Luther thereupon wrote to Chancellor Brück, on Jan. 27, 1524, telling him the Prince should reply as follows: “The husband must be sure and convinced in his own conscience by means of the Word of God that it is lawful in his case. Therefore let him seek out such men as may convince him by the Word of God, whether Carlstadt [who was then in disgrace at Court], or some other, matters not at all to the Prince. For if the fellow is not sure of his case, then the permission of the Prince will not make him so; nor is it for the Prince to decide on this point, for it is the priests’ business to expound the Word of God, and, as Zacharias says, from their lips the Law of the Lord must be learned. I, for my part, admit I can raise no objection if a man wishes to take several wives since Holy Scripture does not forbid this; but I should not like to see this example introduced amongst Christians.... It does not beseem Christians to seize greedily and for their own advantage on everything to which their freedom gives them a right.... No Christian surely is so God-forsaken as not to be able to practise continence when his partner, owing to the Divine dispensation, proves unfit for matrimony. Still, we may well let things take their course.”[258] On the occasion of his own marriage with Bora we may remember how he had declared with that defiance of which he was a past master, that he would take the step the better to withstand the devil and all his foes. (Vol. ii., p. 175 ff.) A curious echo of the way in which he could set conscience at defiance is to be met with in his instructions to his assistant Justus Jonas, who, as soon as his first wife was dead, cast about for a second. Luther at first was aghast, owing to Biblical scruples, at the scandal which second marriages on the part of the regents of the Church would give and entreated him at least to wait a while. When he found it impossible to dissuade Jonas, he warned him of the “malicious gossip of our foes,” “who are ever eager to make capital out of our example”; nevertheless, he goes on to say that he had nothing else to urge against another union, so long as Jonas “felt within himself that spirit of defiance which would enable him, after the step, to ignore all the outcry and the hate of all the devils and of men, and not to attempt, nay, to scorn any effort to stop the mouths of men, or to crave their favour.”[259] The “spirit of defiance” which he here requires as a condition for the step becomes elsewhere a sort of mystical inspiration which may justify an action of doubtful morality.