Besides such necessary concerns of the church, there are countless temporal matters that need reform. There is discord among princes and political estates. Usury and avarice have burst in like a deluge and have taken on the color of legality. Wantonness, lewdness, extravagance in dress, gluttony, gambling, vain display, all manner of vice and wickedness, disobedience of subjects, domestics, and laborers, extortion in every trade and on the part of peasants—who can enumerate everything?—these have gained the ascendancy to such an extent that ten councils and twenty diets would not be able to set things right again.

Martin Luther, The Smalcald Articles in Theodore G. Tappert, ed., The Book of Concord the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Mühlenberg Press, 1959), 290.

Editor’s Note: Be sure to watch the upcoming Heidelvideo miniseries on gambling.

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