Luther, with characteristic disregard of logic, calls the earlier Church a “Holy place of abominations.” She was a “holy place,” for “there, even under the Pope, God maintained with might and by wonders first Holy Baptism; secondly, in the pulpits, the text of the Holy Gospel in the language of each country; thirdly, the Forgiveness of Sins and Absolution both in Confession and publicly; fourthly, the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar; … fifthly, the calling or ordination to the preaching office.… Many retained the custom of holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying and reminding them of the sufferings of Christ on which they must rely; finally, prayer, the Psalter, the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments, item many good hymns and canticles both in Latin and in German. Where such things survived there must undoubtedly have been a Church, and also Saints. Hence Christ was assuredly there with His Holy Spirit, upholding in them the Christian faith though everything was in a bad way, even as in the time of Elias, when the 7000 left were so weak that Elias fancied himself the only Christian still living.”[1258] Nevertheless, this was the selfsame Church, which not only connived at the teaching of heretical abominations but actually herself taught all the depravities which Luther describes in the same writing, such as her peculiar doctrine of priestly ordination, of the validity of the secret Canon of the Mass, of the spiritual authority of the bishops, of justification, good works and satisfaction, of purgatory, saint-worship, etc. That here he does not condemn the olden Church off-hand and fling her to the jaws of the dragon as he was wont to do is a casual inconsistency; his moderation here is to be explained by the necessity he was under then (after the Diet of Augsburg), of showing that he could claim a certain continuity with the Church of the past, and also by his desire to influence those Catholics who were still sitting on the fence and whom he would gladly have drawn over to his own side by seeming concessions, in accordance with his tactics at Augsburg. Yet, in spite of the above concessions, the Mediæval Church remains in his eyes a “place of abominations”; her members, though validly baptised, are not members of the Church; they might indeed sit in the Church, but only as Antichrist sits in the Temple of God (2 Thess. ii. 4); her children would be saved if they died before coming to a full knowledge of the Popish Church, but if they grew up and followed her lying preaching then they would become devil’s whores;[1259] even as I myself “was stuck fast in the behind of the devil’s whore, i.e. of the Pope’s new Churches, so that it is a grief to us to have spent so much time and pains in that shameful hole. But praise and thanks be to God Who has delivered us from the Scarlet Woman!”[1260]