When he was busy with the question of the monks and
nuns, a text struck his attention which, as he thought in his
excitement, proved him in the wrong. His heart "melted in his body; he
was almost choked by the Devil." Then Bugenhagen visited him. Luther
took him outside the door and showed him the threatening text, and
Bugenhagen, apparently upset by his friend's excitement, began to
doubt too, without suspecting the depth of the torment which Luther
was enduring. This gave Luther a final and terrible fright. Again he
passed an awful night. The next morning Bugenhagen came in again. "I
am thoroughly angry," he said; "I have only just looked at the text
carefully. The passage has a quite different meaning." "It is true,"
Luther related afterward, "it was a ridiculous argument--ridiculous, I
mean, for a man in his senses, but not for him who is tempted."
Often he complained to his friends about the terrors of the struggles
which the Devil caused him. "He has never since the creation been so
fierce and angry as now at the end of the world. I feel him very
plainly. He sleeps closer to me than my Kaethe--that is, he gives me
more trouble than she does pleasure." Luther never tired of censuring
the pope as the Anti-Christ, and the papal system as the work of the
Devil. But a closer scrutiny will recognize under this hatred of the
Devil an indestructible piety, in which the loyal heart of the man was
bound to the old Church. What became hallucinations to him were often
only pious remembrances from his youth, which stood in startling
contrast to the transformations which he had passed through as a man.
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