One might go more exhaustively into the evidence, but the materials here submitted will suffice to convince most men that, while Luther’s advice to Philip did create a bigamous relation, Luther was not a defender of bigamy.  Every one who has had to deal with questions relating to married life knows that situations arise in the matrimonial relation which simply cannot be threshed out in public, and in which the honest advice of a pious person is invoked to find a way out of a complication.  That was the situation confronting Luther:  what he advised was meant as an emergency measure to prevent something that was worse.  In the same manner Luther had expressed the opinion that it would have been easier to condone a bigamous relation in Henry VIII of England than the unjust divorce which the king was seeking.  As a matter of fact, however, Luther and his Wittenberg colleagues were grossly hoodwinked in the matter, both by the Landgrave himself and, what is worse, by the Landgrave’s court-preacher, Bucer.  Had the true facts been known, the advice, as Luther clearly states, would never have been given.  But we can well understand how Luther can declare that under the circumstances under which he thought he was acting he could not have given any different advice.  Personally, we have always resented the veiled threat in the Landgrave’s request that he would apply to the Pope or the Emperor.  Perhaps the remark was not understood as a threat, but as an expression of despair.  At any rate, Philip was confident of getting from Rome what he was not sure of obtaining from Luther.

Ought not this remark of the Landgrave caution Luther’s Catholic critics to be very careful in what they say about the heinousness of Luther’s offense in granting a dispensation from a moral precept?  Have they really no such thing as a “dispensation” at Rome?  Has not the married relationship come up for “dispensation” in the chancelleries of the Vatican innumerable times?  Has not one of the canonized saints of Rome, St. Augustine, declared that bigamy might be permitted if a wife was sterile?  Was not concubinage still recognized by law in the sixteenth century in Ireland?  Did not King Diarmid have two legitimate wives and two concubines?  And he was a Catholic.  What have Catholics to say in rejoinder to Sir Henry Maine’s assertion that the Canon Law of their Church brought about numerous sexual inequalities?  Or to Joseph MacCabe’s statement that not until 1060 was there any authoritative mandate of the Church against polygamy, and that even after this prohibition there were numerous instances of concubinage and polygamic marriages in Christian communities?  Or to Hallam in his Middle Ages, where he reports concubinage in Europe?  Or to Lea, who proves that this evil was not confined to the laity? (See Gallighan, Women under Polygamy, pp. 43. 292. 295. 303. 330. 339.)