Luther was well aware that to lend at interest was already “usual” and even “common in all classes.”[262] It was also, as a Protestant contemporary complained in 1538, twice as prevalent in the Lutheran communities than among the Catholics.[263] Still Luther insists obstinately that, “it was a very idle objection, and one that any village sexton could dispose of when people pleaded the custom of the world contrary to the Word of God, or against what was right.… It is nothing new or strange that the world should be hopeless, accursed, damned; this it had always been and would ever remain. If you obey its behests, you also will go with it into the abyss of hell.”[264] Though in his instructions to the pastors he condemns indiscriminately, as a “thief, robber and murderer,” everyone who charges interest, still he wants his teaching to be applied above all to the “great ogres in the world, who can never charge enough per cent.” “The sacrament and absolution” were to be denied them, and “when about to die they were to be left like the heathen and not granted Christian burial” unless they had first done penance. To the “small usurer it is true my sentence may sound terrible, I mean to such as take but five or six on the hundred.”[265] All, however, whether the percentage they charge be small or great, he advises to bring their objections to him, or to some other minister, “or to a good lawyer,”[266] so as to learn the further reasons and particulars concerning the prohibition of receiving interest. Every pastor was to preach strongly and fearlessly on its general unlawfulness in order that he may not “go to the devil” with those of his flock who charge interest. Not that Luther was very hopeful about the results of such preaching. “The whole world is full of usurers,” he said in 1542 in the Table-Talk, and to a friend who had asked him: “Why do not the princes punish such grievous usury and extortion?” Luther answers: “Surely, the princes and kings have other things to do; they have to feast, drink and hunt, and cannot attend to this.” “Things must soon come to a head and a great and unforeseen change take place! I hope, however, that the Last Day will soon make an end of it all.”[267]