He invites the authorities on this occasion to “lay hands on” such property and to apply to the common fund all that remained over after the obligations attaching to the property had been complied with, and restitution made to such heirs of the donors as demanded it on account of their poverty. In giving this advice he was anxious, as he says, to disclaim any responsibility in the event of “such property as had fallen vacant being plundered owing to the estates changing hands and each one laying hold on whatever he could seize.” “Should avarice find an entry what then can be done? It must not indeed be given up in despair. It is better that avarice should take too much in a legal way than that there should be such plundering as occurred in Bohemia. Let each one [i.e. of the heirs of the donors] examine his own conscience and see what he ought to take for his own needs and what he should leave for the common fund!”[148] The setting up of such a “common fund” was also suggested in other Lutheran towns as a means of introducing some sort of order into the confiscation of the Church’s property. The direct object of the funds was not the relief of the poor. This was merely included as a measure for palliating and justifying the bold stroke which the innovators were about to take in secularising the whole of the Church’s vast properties. This, however, makes some of Luther’s admonitions in his preface to the regulations for the Leisnig common fund sound somewhat strange, for instance, his injunction that everything be carried out according to the law of love. “Christian charity must here act and decide; laws and enactments cannot settle the difficulties. Indeed I write this counsel only out of Christian charity for the Christians.” Whoever refuses to accept his advice, he says at the conclusion, may go his own way; only a few would accept it, but one or two were quite enough for him. “The world must remain the world and Satan its Prince. I have done what I could and what it was my duty to do.” He was half conscious of the unpractical character of his proposals, yet any failure he was determined to attribute to the devil’s doing.