there were some things from which Christians should refrain even if they were not forbidden. After the marriage of the landgrave, which actually took place during March 1540, he wrote (April 10) in reply to a letter of appreciation from him: “I am glad that Your Grace is pleased by the advice we have given; but we should prefer to have secrecy maintained. Otherwise the coarse peasants, seeking to follow the example set by the landgrave, might present the same or even better causes, which would give us no end of trouble.” Melanchton probably had fewer scruples in giving his consent to the double marriage of the landgrave, for he had previously written to Henry VIII, that every sovereign was entitled to introduce polygamy in his realm. But the double marriage of the landgrave caused so much unpleasant notoriety in his country, that in 1541 he had a pamphlet distributed in which polygamy was defended on the ground that it was not in opposition to the Holy Scripture. But conceptions had been greatly modified since the ninth or twelfth century when polygamy was accepted without averse criticism. The double marriage of the landgrave of Hessia was however not the only one that gave offense to wide circles. Such princely double marriages were repeated both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as will be shown. When Luther declared the satisfaction of sensual desire to be a law of nature, he only expressed what his contemporaries thought and what the men claimed as their privilege. By the reformation, which did away with the celibacy of the clergy and abolished the monasteries in the Protestant countries, he gave to hundreds of thousands of men and women the possibility to seek legitimate satisfaction of their natural desires. Hundreds of thousands of others, of course, remained excluded from this possibility by the existing forms of property and the laws founded upon them. The reformation was the protest of the rising bourgeoisie against the constraint of feudal conditions in church, state and society. This rising bourgeoisie struggled for liberation from the narrow bonds of the guild, the court and the papal anathema; it strove for centralization of the powers of the state, simplification of the extravagant church affairs, and the abolition of the numerous abodes of idle persons, the monasteries.