The Catholic members of the Diet are there represented as “obstinate and stiff-necked,” and as “bloodhounds raging wantonly”; they had hitherto, but all to no purpose, “tried fraud and trickery, force and anger, murder and penalties.” To the bishops he cries: “May the devil who drives them dog their footsteps, and all our misfortunes fall on their head!” He puts them on a level with “procurers and whoremongers,” and trounces them as “the biggest robbers of benefices, bawds and procurers to be found in all the world.”[367]—There had been many cases of infringement of the law of celibacy among both lower and higher clergy previous to Luther’s advent, while the Wittenberg spirit of freedom set free in the German lands helped considerably to increase the evil amongst the ranks of the Catholic clergy; but to what unheard-of exaggerations, all steeped in hate, did not Luther have recourse the better to inflame the people and to defend the illicit marriages of those of the clergy who now were the preachers of the new religion? He was about “to sweep out of the house the harlots and abducted spouses” of the bishops, and not merely to show up the bishops as real “lechers and brothel-keepers” (a favourite expression of his), but to drag them still deeper in the mire. It was his unclean fancy, which delighted to collect the worst to be found in corrupt localities abroad, that led him to say: “And, moreover, we shall do clean away with your Roman Sodom, your Italian weddings, your Venetian and Turkish brides, and your Florentine bridegrooms!”[368]