ale shall be
allowed to marry two wives; and all and each males are earnestly
reminded, and shall be often warned, _from the pulpit_ also, to so
comport themselves in this matter; and care shall be taken that he shall
fully and with becoming discretion diligently endeavor, so that, as a
married man, to whom is granted that he take two wives, he not only take
proper care of both wives, but avoid all misunderstanding among them."
At that time, we see, matters that are to-day kept under strictest
secrecy, were often discussed as of course from the pulpit itself.

But not commerce alone was at a standstill. Traffic and industry had
been extensively ruined during this protracted period; they could
recover only by little and little. A large part of the population had
become wild and demoralized, disused to all orderly occupations. During
the wars, it was the robbing, plundering, despoiling and murdering
armies of mercenaries, which crossed Germany from one end to the other,
that burned and knocked down friend and foe alike; after the wars, it
was countless robbers, beggars and swarms of vagabonds that threw the
population into fear and terror, and impeded and destroyed commerce and
traffic. For the female sex, in particular, a period of deep suffering
had broken. Contempt for woman had made great progress during the times
of license. The general lack of work weighed heaviest on their
shoulders; by the thousands did these women, like the male vagabonds,
infest the roads and woods, and filled the poorhouses and prisons of the
Princes and the cities. On top of all these sufferings came the forcible
ejectment of numerous peasant families by a land-hungry nobility.

Compelled, since the Reformation, ever more to bend before the might of
the Princes, and rendered ever more dependent upon these through court
offices and military posts, the nobility now sought to recoup itself
double and threefold with the robbery of peasant estates for the injury
it had sustained at the hand of the Princes. The Reformation offered the
Princes the desired pretext to appropriate the rich Church estates,
which they swallowed in innumerable acres of land. The Elector August of
Saxony, for instance, had turned not less than three hundred clergy
estates from their original purpose, up to the close of the sixteenth
century.[54] Similarly did his brothers and cousins, the other
Protestant Princes, and, above all, the Princes of Brandenburg. The
nobility on