ther and Melanchthon.
Butzer justified his opinion with the argument: To possess several wives
at once was not against the evangelium. St. Paul, who said much upon the
subject of who was not to inherit the kingdom of God, made no mention of
those who had two wives. St. Paul, on the contrary, said "that a Bishop
was to have but one wife, the same with his servants; hence, if it had
been compulsory that every man have but one wife he would have so
ordered, and forbidden a plurality of wives." Luther and Melanchthon
joined this reasoning, and gave their assent to double marriages, after
the Duke's wife herself had consented to the marriage with the second
wife under the condition "that he was to fulfil his marital duties
towards her more than ever before."[51] The question of the
justification of bigamy had before then--at the time when the issue was
the consenting to the double marriage of Henry VIII of England--caused
many a headache to Luther, as appears from a letter to the Chancellor of
Saxony, Brink, dated January, 1524. Luther wrote to him that, _in point
of principle, he could not reject bigamy_ because it ran not counter to
Holy Writ;[52] but that he held it scandalous when the same happened
among Christians, "who should leave alone even things that are
permissible." After the wedding of the Duke, which actually took place
in March, 1540, and in answer to a letter of acknowledgment from him,
Luther wrote (April 10): "That your Grace is happy on the score of our
opinion, _which we fain would see kept secret; else, even the rude
peasants_ (in imitation of the Duke's example) might finally produce as
strong, if not stronger, reasons, whereby we might then have much
trouble on our hands."

Upon Melanchthon, the consent to the double marriage of the Duke must
have been less hard. Before that, he had written to Henry VIII "every
Prince has the right to introduce polygamy in his domains." But the
double marriage of the Duke made such a great and unpleasant sensation,
that, in 1541, he circulated a treatise in which polygamy is defended as
no transgression against Holy Writ.[53] People were not then living in
the ninth or twelfth century, when polygamy was tolerated without
shocking society. Social conditions had very materially changed in the
meantime; in a great measure the mark had had to yield to the power of
the nobility and the clergy; it had even extensively disappeared, and
was further uprooted after the unhappy i