2 October 1536.
Grace and peace in Christ. Most gracious Lord! I do not know much more about Your Grace's writing concerning the marriage between H. S. and L. P.'s daughter than I have written before. The peasants and the rough people, who seek nothing but carnal freedom, and then the jurists, who always give the opposite verdict to our sentences, have made me so tired that I have thrown the matrimonial matters away from me and have written to some that they may do as they please in the name of the devil. Let the dead bury their dead. For though I counsel much, yet afterward I cannot help men, when they are deprived and afflicted of it. The world wants the pope; so let it have him, if it cannot be otherwise. Although it is true that God does not forbid such a case of marriage, because the mob abuses such an example, I would not like to let it become mean. Moreover, I cannot burden myself with the risk or danger of a greater displeasure in the inheritance; since I have not yet had a lawyer
I have no one who wants to stand with me and with me against the pope in such or such cases, so that they do not even think of awarding my honor and beggars to my children, nor to a priest. This is also your and other masters' fault, which strengthen them and press us theologians. But I still say this: if it can be obtained from the pope with money that it may be called right, then I would rather that one let the Antichrist have the N. thunder and let it stand, and each one dared it on his conscience with God, without where the raw people abuse it. Therefore, it depends on what you masters want to allow in it, who can change it afterwards, when the will of courage becomes too great. We theologians can do nothing, nor do we count for anything; of this I am glad and well satisfied, and say: Sinite mortuos sepelire mortuos (Let the dead bury their dead). Hereby commanded to God, Amen. Thursday after Michaelmas, Anno 1536.
E. G.
Martinus Luther, D.