It is true that after such strong outbursts as the above, Luther would often moderate his language. Thus he says, shortly after the utterance just quoted: “I do not wish to disparage virginity nor to tempt people away from it to the conjugal state. Let each one do as he is able and as he feels God has ordained for him.... The state of chastity is probably better on earth as having less of trouble and care, and not for its own sake only, but in order to allow one to preach and wait upon the Word of God, as St. Paul says 1 Corinthians vii. 34.”[298]
But then he continues, following up the idea which possesses him: “He who desires to live single undertakes an impossible struggle”; such people become “full of harlotry and all impurity of the flesh, and at last drown themselves therein and fall into despair; therefore such a vow is invalid, being contrary to the Word and work of God.”[299] Most of the younger religious, he declares elsewhere in a description which is as repulsive as it is untrue, were unable to control themselves, for it is not possible to take from fire its power of burning; among them, and the clergy, there prevailed “either harlotry under the name of a spiritual and chaste life, or an impure, unwilling, wretched, forlorn chastity, so that the wretchedness is greater than anyone could believe or tell.”[300]
What Luther says would leave us under the impression--to put the most charitable interpretation upon his words--that he had lived in sad surroundings; yet what we know of the Augustinian monasteries at Erfurt and Wittenberg affords as little ground for such an assumption as the conditions prevailing in the other friaries, whether Franciscan or Dominican, with which he was acquainted. He speaks again and again as though he knew nothing of the satisfaction with their profession which filled whole multitudes who were faithful to their vows, and which was the result of serious discipline and a devout mind. He goes on: “They extol chastity loudly, but live in the midst of impurity.... These pious foundations and convents, where the faith [according to his teaching] is not practised stoutly and heartily,”[301] must surely be gates of hell. Those who refrain from marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven are, he considers, “so rare, that among a thousand men there is scarcely to be found one, for they are a special miracle of God’s own.”[302] He who enters a monastery, he writes (not in the least afraid of speaking as though this had been his own experience), can, in reality, never avoid sinning against his vow. The Pope leaves such a one to be, as it were, burnt and roasted in the fire; he accordingly might well be compared to the sacrifice which the children of Israel offered to Moloch the fiery idol. “What a Sodom and Gomorrha,” he cries in another passage, “has the devil set up by such laws and vows, making of that rare gift chastity a thing of utter wretchedness. Neither public houses of ill fame, nor indeed any form of allurement to vice, is so pernicious as are these vows and commandments invented by Satan himself.”[303] Such are his words in his “Postils,” written for general, practical use.