"God has as much to clear away as to
create. If He were not continually carrying things off, men would have
filled the world with rubbish long ago." And if God often punishes
those who fear Him worse than those who have no religion, he appears
to Luther to be like a strict householder who punishes his son oftener
than his good-for-nothing servant, but who secretly is laying up an
inheritance for his son; while he finally dismisses the servant. And
merrily he draws the conclusion, "If our Lord can pardon me for having
annoyed Him for twenty years by reading masses, He can put it to my
credit also that at times I have taken a good drink in His honor. The
world may interpret it as it will."

He is also greatly surprised that God should be so angry with the
Jews. "They have prayed anxiously for fifteen hundred years with
seriousness and great zeal, as their prayer-books show, and He has not
for the whole time noticed them with a word. If I could pray as they
do I would give books worth two hundred florins for the gift. It must
be a great unutterable wrath. O, good Lord, punish us with pestilence
rather than with such silence!"

Like a child, Luther prayed every morning and evening, and frequently
during the day, even while eating. Prayers which he knew by heart he
repeated over and over with warm devotion, preferably the Lord's
Prayer. Then he recited as an act of devotion the shorter Catechism;
the Psalter he always carried with him as a prayer-book. When he was
in passionate anxiety his prayer became a stormy wrestling with God,
so powerful, great, and solemnly simple that it can hardly be compared
with other human emotions. Then he was the son who lay despairingly at
his father's feet, or the faithful servant who implores his prince;
for his whole conviction was firmly fixed that God's decisions could
be affected by begging and urging, and so the effusion of feeling
alternated in his prayer with complaints, even with earnest
reproaches. It has often been told how, in 1540, at Weimar, he brought
Melanchthon, who was at the point of death, to life again. When Luther
arrived, he found Master Philip in the death throes, unconscious, his
eyes set. Luther was greatly startled and said, "God help us! How the
Devil has wronged this _Organan_," then he turned his back to the
company and went to the window as he was wont to do when he prayed.
"Here," Luther himself later recounted, "Our Lord had to grant my
petition, for I chal