Luther, as he here says, is only willing, “for the sake of peace, to allow the bishops to be princes and lords,” and this only on condition that “they help to administer the Evangel”—i.e. take his part; in that case they “would be free to appoint clerics to the parishes and pulpits.” His offer is, “that we and the preachers should teach the Evangel in your stead,” and “that you should back us by means of your episcopal powers; only your personal mode of life and your princely state would we leave to your conscience and to the judgment of God.”[1233] In the meantime, on account of the Catholic faith to which they clung, he calls them “foes of God,” speaks of their “anti-Christian bishopry,” and, because of the infringements of the law of celibacy, scourges them as the “greatest whoremongers and panders upon earth.”[1234] In his controversies with the Catholics he often enough found himself faced by the objection, that the true Church could not be with him, because on his side all the fruits of holiness were wanting; the Church being essentially holy should needs be able to point to her good influence on morals. Thus, for instance, a Dominican adversary had written: According to Luther the Gospel had been under the bench for the last four hundred years; but, now, surely enough, “it is under the bench even more than heretofore, for the Gospel and the whole of Scripture have never been so despised as at present owing to Luther’s teaching, who excludes all love of God and man, all concord between lords and serfs, priests and laity, men and women, rejects all good works and discipline, obscures the truth and replaces it by nothing but lies and introduces hatred and envy, unchastity, blasphemy and disobedience.”[1235] In his replies to such arguments against the truth of his Church Luther was loath to attempt the difficult task of proving the existence of holiness in the domain of the Evangel. On the contrary, with surprising candour, he usually meets his opponents half-way as regards the facts. Thus, in his “Wider Hans Worst,” in 1541, he admits that things are just as bad as they had been in Jerusalem in the days of the prophets, “with us too there is flesh and blood, nay, the devil among the sons of Job. The peasants are savage, the burghers avaricious and the nobles grasping. We shout and storm our best, helped by the Word of God, and resist as far as we can.… Willingly we confess and frankly that we are not as holy as we should be.”[1236] Such admissions are followed by astonishing attempts to evade the force of the objection and by coarse attacks on the immorality of the Papacy which he exaggerates beyond all measure.