What Bugenhagen achieved, thanks to the ecclesiastical regulations for poor relief, for which he was directly or indirectly responsible, gave “good hopes, at least at first, of bringing the difficult social problem of those days nearer to a solution.” At any rate they were a “successful attempt to bring some order into the whole system of relief, by means of the authorities and on a scale not hitherto attempted by the Church.”[166] It is true that he, like those who were working on the same lines, e.g. Hedio, Rhegius, Hyperius, Lasco and others, often merely transplanted into a new soil the rules already in vogue in the Catholic Netherlands and the prosperous South German towns. Hedio of Strasburg, for instance, translated into German the entire work of Vives, the opponent of Lutheranism, and exploited it practically and also sought to enter into epistolary communication with Vives. The prohibition of mendicancy, the establishment of an independent poor-box apart from the rest of the Church funds, and many other points were borrowed by Bugenhagen and others from the olden Catholic regulations. Such efforts were in many localities supplemented by the kindliness of the population and, thanks to a spirit of Christianity, were not without fruit. As, however, everybody, Princes, nobles, townships and peasants, were stretching out greedy hands towards the now defenceless possessions of the olden Church, a certain reaction came, and the State, in the interests of order, saw fit to grant a somewhat larger share to the ecclesiastical authorities in the administration of Church property and relief funds. The Lutheran clergy and the guardians of the poor were thus allowed a certain measure of free action, provided always that what they did was done in the name of the sovereign, i.e. the principal bishop. The new institutions created by such men as Bugenhagen soon lost their public, communal or State character, and sank back to the level of ecclesiastical enterprises. Institutions of this stamp had, however, “been more numerous and better endowed in the Middle Ages and were so later in the Catholic districts.” Owing in part to a technical defect in the Protestant regulations, dishonesty and carelessness were not excluded from the management and distribution of the poor fund, the administration falling, as a matter of course, into the hands of the lowest class of officials. Catholics had good reason for branding it as a “usury and parson’s box.”[167] The reason why, in Germany, Protestant efforts for poor relief never issued in a satisfactory socio-political system capable of relieving the poor and thus improving the condition of both Church and State, lay, not merely in the economic difficulties of the time, but, “what is more important, in the social and moral working of the new religion and new piety which Luther had established.”[168] _Influence of Luther’s Ethics. Robbery of Church Property Proves a Curse_