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he is the Lord of Satan.' Some short time after, when the vital heat had been a little revived by frictions, and the application of hot pillows, he asked his wife, Where is my little heart, my well-beloved little John?' When the child was brought, he smiled at his father, who began saying, with tears in his eyes, 'Poor dear little one, I commend you to God, you and your good mother, my dear Catherine. You are penniless, but God will take care of you. He is the father of orphans and widows. Preserve them, O my God; inform them, even as thou hast preserved and informed me up to this day.' He then spoke to his wife about some silver goblets. Thou knowest,' he added, 'they are all we have left.' He fell into a deep sleep, which recruited his strength; and on the next day, he was considerably better. He then said to doctor Jonas, Never shall I forget yesterday. The Lord takes man into hell, and draws him out of it. The tempest which beat yesterday morning on my soul, was much more terrible than that which my body underwent towards evening. God kills, and brings to life. He is the master of life and death.""

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"For nearly three months, I have been growing weaker, not in body, but in mind; to such a degree, that I can scarcely write these few lines. This is Satan's doing." (October 8th, 1527.) "I want to reply to the Sacramentarians, but shall be able to do nothing except my soul be fortified." (Nov. 1st, 1527.) I have not yet read Erasmus, or the Sacramentarians, with the exception of some three sheets of Zwingle. It is well done of them to trample me so mercilessly under foot, so that I may say with Jesus Christ, He persecuteth the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart.' I alone bear the weight of God's wrath, because I have sinned towards him. The pope and Cæsar, the princes, the bishops, the whole world, hates and assails, but yet 'tis not enough without my very brother come to torment me. My sins, death, Satan and his angels, rage incessantly against me. And who would keep or comfort me if Christ were to desert me; for whose sake I have incurred their hate? But he will not desert the wretched sinner when the end cometh; for I think I shall be the last of all men. Oh! would to God that Erasmus and the Sacramentarians were to undergo for a quarter of an hour only the misery of my heart!" (Nov. 10th, 1527.) "Satan tries me with marvellous temptations, but I am not

goes

left without the prayers of the saints, albeit the wounds of my heart are not easy to cure. My comfort is, that there are many others who have to sustain the same struggles. No doubt, there is no suffering so great that my sins do not deserve it. But what gives me life and strength is, the consciousness that I have taught, to the salvation of many, the true and pure word of Christ. This it is which burns up Satan, who would wish to see me and the word drowned and lost. And so I suffer nothing at the hands of the tyrants of this world, while others are killed, burnt, and die for Christ; but I have so much the more to suffer spiritually from the prince of this world." (August 21st, 1527.) "When I wish to write, my head is filled as it were with tinklings, thunders, and if I did not stop at once, I should faint outright. I have now been three days, unable even to look at a letter. My head is wearing into a small chapter; and if this on, it will soon be no more than a paragraph, a period (caput meum factum est capitulum, perget verò fietque paragraphus tandem periodus). The day I received your letter from Nuremberg, Satan visited me. I was alone. Vitus and Cyriacus had left me. This time he was the stronger. He drove me out of my bed, and forced me to go and seek the face of men." (May 12, 1530.) Although well in bodily health, I am ever ill with Satan's persecutions; which hinder me from writing or doing anything. The last day, I fully believe, is not far from us. Farewell, cease not to pray for poor Luther." (Feb. 20th, 1529.) "One may overcome the temptations of the flesh, but how hard is it to struggle against the temptation of blasphemy and despair! We neither comprehend the sin, nor know the remedy." After a week of constant suffering, he wrote: "Having all but lost my Christ, I was beaten by the waves and tempests of despair and blasphemy." (Aug. 2d, 1527.)

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Luther, far from receiving support and comfort from his friends, whilst undergoing these internal troubles, saw some lukewarm and timidly sceptical, others fairly embarked in the path of mysticism which he had himself opened up for them, and wandering further from him daily. The first to declare himself was Agricola, the leader of the Antinomians. We shall hereafter see how Luther's last days were embittered by his controversy with so dear a friend. "Some one has been

telling me a tale of you, my dear Agricola, and with such urgency that I promised him to write and make inquiry of you. The tale is, that you are beginning to advance the doctrine of faith without works, and that you profess yourself ready to maintain this novelty against all and sundry, with a grand magazine of Greek words and rhetorical artifices. . . warn you to be on your guard against the snares of Satan.

Never did event come more unexpectedly upon me than the fall of Ecolampadius and of Regius. And what have I not now to fear for those who have been my intimate friends! It is not surprising that I should tremble for you also, whom I would not see separated in opinion from me for aught that the world can bestow." (Sept. 11th, 1528.) "Wherefore should I be provoked with the papists? They make open war upon me. We are declared enemies. But they who do me most evil are my dearest children, fraterculi mei, aurei amiculi mei ; they who, if Luther had not written, would know nothing of Christ and the Gospel, and would never have thrown off the papal yoke; at least, who, if they had had the power, would have lacked the courage. I thought that I had by this time suffered and exhausted every calamity; but my Absalom, the child of my heart, had not yet deserted his father, had not yet covered David with shame. My Judas, the terror of the disciples of Christ, the traitor who delivered up his master, had not yet sold me: and now all this has befallen me.

"A clandestine, but most dangerous persecution is now going on against us. Our ministry is despised. We ourselves are hated, persecuted, and suffered to die of hunger. See what is now the fate of God's word. When offered to those who stand in need of it, they will not receive it. ... Christ would not have been crucified, had he left Jerusalem. But the prophet will not die out of Jerusalem, and yet it is only in his own country that the prophet is without honor. It is the same with us. It will soon come to pass that the great of this duchy will have emptied it of ministers of the word; who will be driven from it by hunger, not to mention other wrongs." (Oct. 18th, 1531.)

"There is nothing certain with regard to the apparitions about which so much noise has been made in Bohemia: many deny the fact. But as to the gulfs which opened here, before my own eyes, the Sunday after Epiphany, at eight o'clock in

the evening, it is a certainty, and has been noticed in many places as far as the sea-coast. Moreover, in December, doctor Hess writes me word, the heavens were seen in flames above the church of Breslaw; and another day, he adds, two beams were in flames, and a tower of fire between. These signs, if I mistake not, announce the last day. The empire is falling, kings are falling, priests are falling, and the whole world totters; just as small fissures announce the approaching fall of a large house. Nor will it be long before this happen, unless the Turk, as Ezekiel prophesies of Gog and Magog, lose himself in his victory and his pride, with the pope, his ally." (March 7, 1529.) "Grace and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ. The world hastens to its end, and I often think that the day of judgment may well overtake me before I have finished my translation of the Holy Scriptures. All temporal things predicted there are being fulfilled. The Roman empire inclines to its ruin, the Turk has reached the height of his power, the splendor of the papacy suffers eclipse, the world is cracking in every corner, as if about to crumble to pieces. The empire, I grant, has recovered a little under our emperor Charles, but 't is, perhaps, for the last time; may it not be like the light which, the moment before it goes out for ever, emits a livelier flash. . . . The Turk is about to fall upon us. Mark me; he is a reformer sent in God's wrath." (March 15th.)

Ve

"There is a man with me, just come from Venice, who asserts that the doge's son is at the court of the Turk: so that we have been only fighting against the latter until pope, netians, and French openly and impudently turn Turks. The same man states that there were eight hundred Turks in the army of the Frenchmen at Pavia; three hundred of whom, sick of the war, have returned safe and sound to their own country. As you have not mentioned these monstrosities to me, I conclude you to be ignorant of them; but they have been told me both by letters and personal informants, with details which do not allow me to doubt of their truth. The hour of midnight approaches, when we shall hear the cry, "The bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him.'" (May 6th, 1529.)

BOOK THE THIRD.

A. D. 1529-1546.

CHAPTER I.

A. D. 1529-1532.

The Turks.-Danger of Germany.-Augsburg, Smalkalde.-Danger of Protestantism.

LUTHER was roused from his dejection, and restored to active life, by the dangers which threatened the Reformation and Germany. When that scourge of God, whose coming he awaited with resignation, as the sign of the judgment, burst in reality on Germany, when the Turks encamped before Vienna, Luther changed his mind, called on the people to take up arms, and published a book against the Turks, which he dedicated to the landgrave of Hesse. On the 9th of October, 1528, he wrote to this prince, explaining to him the motives which had induced him to compose it :- "I cannot," he says, "keep my peace. There are, unfortunately, preachers among us who exhort the people to pay no attention to the invasion of the Turks; and there are some extravagant enough to assert that Christians are forbidden to have recourse to temporal arms under any circumstances. Others, again, who regard the Germans as a nation of incorrigible brutes, go so far as to hope they may fall under the power of the Turks. These mad and criminal notions are imputed to Luther and the Gospel, just as, three years since, the revolt of the peasants was, and as, in fact, every ill which befalls the world invariably is; so that I feel it incumbent on me to write upon