as we did willingly or voluntarily or with pleasure or joy.  It was hard enough for our hearts, but we could not prevent it, we thought to give his conscience such counsel as we could.—­I have indeed learned several confessional secrets, both while I was still a papist and later, which, if they were revealed, I should live to deny or else publish the whole confession.  Such things belong not to the secular courts, nor are they to be published.  God has here His own judgment, and must counsel souls in matters where no worldly law nor wisdom can help.  My preceptor in the cloister, a fine old man, had many such affairs, and once had to say of them with a sigh:  ’Alas, alas! such things are so perplexed and desperate that no wisdom, law, nor reason can avail; one must commend them to divine goodness.’  So instructed, I have, accordingly, in this case also acted agreeably to divine goodness.—­But had I known that the Landgrave had long before satisfied his desires, and could well satisfy them with others, as I have now just learned that he did with her of Eschwege, truly no angel would have induced me to give such counsel.  I gave it only in consideration of his unavoidable necessity and weakness, and to put his conscience out of peril, as Bucer represented the case to me.  Much less would I ever have advised that there should be a public marriage, to which (though he told me nothing of this) a young princess and young countess should come, which is truly not to be borne and is insufferable to the whole empire.  But I understood and hoped, as long as he had to go the common way with sin and shame and weakness of the flesh, that he would take some honorable maiden or other in secret marriage, even if the relation did not have a legal look before the world.  My concession was on account of the great need of his conscience—­such as happened to other great lords.  In like manner I advised certain priests in the Catholic lands of Duke George and the bishops secretly to marry their cooks.—­This was my confessional counsel about which I would much rather have kept silence, but it has been wrung from me, and I could do nothing but speak.  But the men of Dresden speak as though I had taught the same for thirteen years, and yet they give us to understand what a friendly heart they have to us, and what great desire for love and unity, just as if there were no scandal or sin in their lives, which are ten times worse before God than anything I ever advised.  But the world must always smugly rail at the moat in its neighbor’s eye, and forget the beam in its own eye.  If I must defend all I have said or done in former years, especially at the beginning, I must beg the Pope to do the same, for if they defend their former acts (let alone their present ones), they would belong to the devil more than to God.—­I am not ashamed of my counsel, even if it should be published in all the world; but for the sake of the unpleasantness which would then follow, I should prefer, if possible, to have kept it secret.  Martin Luther, with his own hand.” (21b, 2467; transl. by Preserved Smith.)