[Sidenote: 1545]

During his later years Luther's polemic never flagged. His last book,
_Against the Papacy of Rome, founded by the Devil_, surpassed Cicero
and the humanists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of
its invective against "the most hellish father, St. Paul, or Paula III"
and his "hellish Roman church." "One would like to curse them," he
wrote, "so that thunder and lightning would strike them, hell fire burn
them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and
all diseases attack them"--and so on for page after page. Of course
such lack of restraint largely defeated its own ends. The Swiss
Reformer Bullinger called it "amazingly violent," and a book than which
he "had never read anything more savage or imprudent." Our judgment of
it must be tempered by the consideration that Luther suffered in his
last years from a nervous malady and from other painful diseases, due
partly to overwork and lack of exercise, partly to the quantities of
alcohol he imbibed, though he never became intoxicated.

Nevertheless, the last twenty years of his life were his happiest ones.
His wife, Catherine von Bora, an ex-nun, and his children, brought him
much happiness. Though the wedding gave his enemies plenty of openings
for reviling him as an apostate, [Sidenote: June 13, 1525] and though
it drew from Erasmus the scoffing jest that what had begun as a tragedy
ended as a comedy, it {124} crowned his career, symbolizing the return
from medieval asceticism to modern joy in living. Dwelling in the fine
old friary, entertaining with lavish prodigality many poor relatives,
famous strangers, and students, notwithstanding unremitting toil and
not a little bodily suffering, he expanded in his whole nature,
mellowing in the warmth of a happy fireside climate. His daily routine
is known to us intimately through the adoring assiduity of his
disciples, who noted down whole volumes of his _Table Talk_.

[Sidenote: Death and character of Luther]

On February 18, 1546, he died. Measured by the work that he
accomplished and by the impression that his personality made both on
contemporaries and on posterity, there are few men like him in history.
Dogmatic, superstitious, intolerant, overbearing, and violent as he
was, he yet had that inscrutable prerogative of genius of transforming
what he touched into new values. His contemporaries bore his invective
because of his earnestness; they bowed to "the