A long list of statements from respected Protestant contemporaries is given by Janssen, who concludes: “The whole system of poor relief was grievously affected by the seizure and squandering of Church goods and of innumerable charitable bequests intended not only for parochial and Church use but also for the hospitals, schools and poor-houses.”[173] The testimonies in question, the frankness of which can only be explained by the honourable desire to make an end of the crying evil, come, for instance, from Thomas Rorarius, Andreas Musculus, Johann Winistede, Erasmus Sarcerius, Ambrose Pape and the General Superintendent, Cunemann Flinsbach.[174] They tend to show that the new doctrine of faith alone had dried up the well-spring of self-sacrifice, as indeed Andreas Hyperius, the Marburg theologian, Christopher Fischer, the General Superintendent, Daniel Greser, the Superintendent, Sixtus Vischer and others state in so many words. The incredible squandering of Church property is proved by official papers, was pilloried by the professors of the University of Rostock, also is clear from the minutes of the Visitations of Wesenberg in 1568 and of the Palatinate in 1556 which bewail “the sin against the property set aside for God and His Church.”[175] And again, “The present owners have dealt with the Church property a thousand times worse than the Papists,” they make no conscience of “selling it, mortgaging it and giving it away.” Princes belonging to the new faith also raised their voice in protest, for instance, Duke Barnim XI in 1540, Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg in 1540 and Elector Johann George, 1573. But the sovereigns were unable to restrain their rapacious nobles. “The great Lords,” the preacher Erasmus Sarcerius wrote of the Mansfeld district in 1555, “seek to appropriate to themselves the feudal rights and dues of the clergy and allow their officials and justices to take forcible action.… The revenues of the Church are spent in making roads and bridges and giving banquets, and are lent from hand to hand without hypothecary security.”[176] The Calvinist, Anton Prætorius, and many others not to mention Catholic contemporaries, speak in similar terms. Of the falling off in the Church funds and poor-boxes in the 16th century in Hesse, in the Saxon Electorate, in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, in Hamburg and elsewhere abundant proof is met with in the official records, and this is the case even with regard to Würtemberg in the enactments of the Dukes from 1552 to 1562, though that country constituted in some respects an exception;[177] at a later date Duke Johann Frederick hazarded the opinion that the regulations regarding the fund “had fallen into oblivion.” The growth of the proletariate, to remedy the impoverishment of which no means had as yet been discovered, was in no small measure promoted by Luther’s facilitation of marriage.