To what monstrous and repulsive images he can have recourse when painting the “whore Church” of the Papacy, the following from “Wider Hans Worst” will serve to show: You are, so he there writes in 1541 of the Catholics, “the runaway, apostate, strumpet-Church as the prophets term it”; “you whoremongers preach in your own brothels and devil’s Churches”; it is with you as though the bride of a loving bridegroom “were to allow every man to abuse her at his will. This whore—once a pure virgin and beloved bride—is now an apostate, vagrant whore, a house-whore,” etc. “You become the diligent pupils and whorelings of the Lenæ, the arch-whores, as the comedies say, till you old whores bear in your turn young whores, and so increase and multiply the Pope’s Church, which is the devil’s own, and make many of Christ’s chaste virgins who were born by baptism, arch-whores like yourselves. This, I take it, is to talk plain German, understandable to you and everybody else.”[1242] Without following him through all he says we shall merely draw the reader’s attention to a proverb and a picture Luther here uses. The proverb runs: “The sow has been washed in the pond and now wallows again in the filth. Such are you, and such was I once.”[1243] In the picture “the Pope’s Church,” i.e. hell, is represented as a “great dragon’s head” with gaping jaws, as it is depicted in the old paintings of the Last Judgment; “there, in the midst of the flames, are the Pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, emperors, kings, princes and men and women of all sorts (but no children). Verily I know not how one could better paint and describe the Church of the Pope,”[1244] etc. After such rude abuse he comes back in the same writing to his usual apology. There was, he says, no object in alluding to the moral evils in the Lutheran Churches because of the Church being of its very nature invisible.[1245] Everything depends on the doctrine “which must be pure and undefiled, i.e. the one, dear, saving, holy Word of God without anything thrown in. But the life that ought to be ruled, cleansed and hallowed daily by such teaching is not yet altogether pure and holy because our carrion of flesh and blood still lives.” Yet “for the sake of the Word whereby he is healed and cleansed all this is overlooked, pardoned and forgiven him, and he must be termed clean.”[1246]