allowed his
elect to have two wives.

And it was this method which, in 1529, during the discussions with the
Calvinists, made him so obstinate, when he wrote on the table in front
of him, "This _is_ my body," and sternly disregarded the tears and
outstretched hand of Zwingli. He had never been narrower and yet never
mightier--the fear-inspiring man who had won his conviction in the
most violent inward struggles against doubt and the Devil. It was an
imperfect method, and his opponents attacked it, not without success.
With it his doctrine became subject to the fate of all human wisdom.
But in this method there was also a vivid emotional process in which
his own reason and the culture and the inward needs of his time found
better expression than he himself knew. And it became the
starting-point from which a conscientious spirit of investigation has
wrought for the German people the highest intellectual freedom.

With such tremendous trials there came also to the outcast monk at the
Wartburg other minor temptations. He had long ago, by almost
superhuman intellectual activity, overcome what were then regarded
with great distrust as fleshly impulses; now nature asserted herself
vigorously, and he several times asked his friend Melanchthon to pray
for him on this account. Then Fate would have it that during these
very weeks the restless mind of Carlstadt in Wittenberg fell upon the
question of the marriage of priests, and reached the conclusion, in a
pamphlet on celibacy, that the vow of chastity was not binding on
priests and monks. The Wittenbergers in general agreed--first of all,
Melanchthon, whose position in this matter was freest from prejudice,
since he had never received ordination and had been married for two
years.

So at this point a tangle of thoughts and moral questions was caused
from without in Luther's soul, the threads of which were destined to
involve his whole later life. Whatever heartfelt joy and worldly
happiness was granted him from this time on depended on the answer
which he found to this question. It was the happiness of his home-life
which made it possible for him to endure the later years. Only in it
did the flower of his abundant affection develop. So Fate graciously
sent the lonely man the message which was to unite him anew and more
firmly than ever with his people; and the way in which Luther dealt
with this question is again characteristic. His pious disposition and
the conservative str