According to Martin Luther, he lived "constantly in a state of adultery and fornication." Philip accordingly wrote Luther for his opinion about the matter, alleging as a precedent the polygamy of the patriarchs, but Luther replied that it was not enough for a Christian to consider the acts of the patriarchs, rather that he, like the patriarchs, must have special divine sanction. Since such sanction was clearly lacking in this case, Luther advised against bigamous marriage, especially for Christians, unless there was extreme necessity, as, for example, if the wife was leprous, or abnormal in other respects. Despite this discouragement, Philip gave up neither his project to secure a bigamous marriage nor his life of sensuality, which kept him for years from receiving communion. Philip was affected by Melanchthon's opinion concerning the case of Henry VIII, where the Reformer had proposed that the king's difficulty could be solved by his taking a second wife better than by his divorcing the first one. To strengthen his position, there were Luther's own statements in his sermons on the Book of Genesis, as well as historical precedents which proved to his satisfaction that it was impossible for anything to be un-Christian that God had not punished in the case of the patriarchs, who in the New Testament were held up as models of faith. It was during an illness due to his excesses that the thought of taking a second wife became a fixed purpose. It seemed to him to be the only salve for his troubled conscience and the only hope of moral improvement open to him. He accordingly proposed to marry the daughter of one of his sister's ladies-in-waiting, Margarethe von der Saale. While the landgrave had no scruples in this matter whatsoever, Margarethe was unwilling to take the step unless they had the approval of the theologians and the consent of the elector of Saxony, John Frederick I, and of Duke Maurice of Saxony. Philip easily gained his first wife's consent to the marriage. Bucer, who was strongly influenced by political arguments, was won over by the landgrave's threat to ally himself with the Emperor if he did not secure the consent of the theologians to the marriage, and the Wittenberg divines were worked upon by the plea of the prince's ethical necessity. Thus the "secret advice of a confessor" was won from Luther and Melanchthon (on 10 December 1539), neither of them knowing that the bigamous wife had already been chosen.