Yet, on the very next page, the same subject crops up again. A lay figure serves to introduce it. To him Luther says: “There you come again dragging in your Pope with you, though I wanted to have no more to do with you. Well, as you insist on annoying me with your unwelcome presence I shall give you a thoroughly Lutheran reception.” He then proceeds to enlarge in “Lutheran” fashion on the fact, that the Pope “condemns the wedded life of the bishops and priests.” “If a man has seduced a hundred maidens, violated a hundred honourable widows and has besides a hundred prostitutes behind him, he is allowed to be not merely a preacher or parson but even a bishop or Pope, and though he keeps on in his evil ways he would still be tolerated in such an office.” “Are you not mad and foolish? Out on you, you rude fools and donkeys!… Truly Popes and bishops are fine fellows to be the bridegrooms of the Churches. Better suited were they to be the bridegrooms of female keepers of bawdy houses, or of the devil’s own daughter in hell! True bishops are the servants of this bride and she is their wife and mistress.” According to you “matrimony is unclean, and a merdiferous sacrament which cannot please God”; at the same time it is supposed to be right and a sacrament. “See how the devil cheats and befools you when he teaches you such twaddle!” Further on he begins anew: “To violate virgins, widows and married women, to keep many prostitutes and to commit all sorts of hidden sins, this he is free to do, and thereby becomes worthy of the priestly calling; but this is the sum total of it all: The Pope, the devil and his Church are enemies to the married state as Dan. (xi. 37) says, and are determined to abuse it in this way so that the priestly office may not thrive. This amounts to saying that the state of matrimony is adulterous, sinful, impure and abominated of God.” Bidding farewell to Popery, Luther gives it a truly “Lutheran” send off: “So for the present let us be done with the Ass-Pope and the Pope-Ass, and all his asinine lawyers. We will now get back to our own affairs.” This, however, he only partially succeeds in doing. After discussing the 6th and 7th mark of the Church the “spirit” once more seizes him. The caricature of Popery with which he is wont to pacify his conscience here again figures with the whole of the inevitable paraphernalia: “[Holy] water, salt, herbs, tapers, bells, images, Agnus Dei, pallia, altar, chasubles, tonsures, fingers, hands. Who can enumerate them all? Finally the monks’ cowls,” etc. A page further we again read: “Holy water, Agnus Dei, bulls, briefs, Masses and monks’ cowls.… The devil has decked himself out in them all.”