His premonition of failure was only too soon realised at Leisnig. The new scheme could not be made to work. The magistrates refused to resign the rights they claimed of disposing of the foundations and similar charitable sources of revenue or to hand over the incomings to the coffer-masters, for the latter, they argued, were representatives, not of the congregation but of the Church. Hence the fund had to go begging. Luther came to words with the town-council, but was unable to have his own way, even though he appealed to the Elector.[149] He lamented in 1524 that the example of Leisnig had been a very sad one, though, as the first of its kind,[150] it should have served as a model. Of Tileman Schnabel, an ex-Augustinian and college friend of Luther’s at Erfurt, who had been working at Leisnig as preacher and “deacon,” Luther wrote, that he would soon find himself obliged to leave if he did not wish to die of hunger. “Incidents such as these deprive the parsonages of their best managers. Maybe they want to drive them back to their old monasteries.”[151] Thus the parochial fund of Leisnig, which some writers have extolled so highly, really never came into existence. It lives only in the directions given by Luther. So ill were parson and schoolmaster cared for at Leisnig, in spite of all the Church property that had been sequestered, that, according to the Visitation of 1529, the preacher there had been obliged to ply a trade and gain a living by selling beer. In 1534, so the records of the Visitations of that date declare, the schoolmaster had for five years been paid no salary. Link, the Altenburg preacher, was also unsuccessful in his efforts to carry out a similar scheme. He complained as early as 1523, in a writing entitled “Von Arbeyt und Betteln,” that this Christian undertaking had so far “not only not been furthered but had actually gone backward” in spite of all his efforts from the pulpit. He, too, addresses himself to the “rulers” and reminds them that it is their duty “to the best of their ability to provide for the poverty of the masses.”[152] To Luther’s bitter grief and disappointment Wittenberg (see above, p. 49) also furnished anything but an encouraging example. Here the incentive to the introduction of the common fund by Carlstadt had been the resolve of the town council “to seize on the revenues of the Church, the brotherhoods and guilds and divert them into the common fund, to be employed for general purposes, and for paying the Church officials.… No less than twenty-one pious guilds were to be mulcted.”[153] Yet the Wittenberg measures were so little a success, in spite of all Luther’s efforts, that in his sermons he could not sufficiently deplore the absence of charity and prevalence of avarice and greed amongst both burghers and councillors.[154] The Beutelordnung continued indeed in existence, but merely as an administrative department of the town council.