lenged Him and filled His ears with all the
promises of prayer which I could remember from the Scriptures, so that
He had to hear me if I was to put any trust in His promises." Then he
took Melanchthon by the hand saying, "Be comforted, Philip, you will
not die;" and Melanchthon, under the spell of his vigorous friend,
began at once to breathe again, came back to consciousness, and
recovered.

As God was the source of all good, so, for Luther, the Devil was the
author of everything harmful and bad. The Devil interfered
perniciously in the course of nature, in sickness and pestilence,
failure of crops and famine. But since Luther had begun to teach, the
greater part of the Enemy's activity had been transferred to the souls
of men. In them he inspired impure thoughts as well as doubt,
melancholy, and depression. Everything which the thoughtful Luther
stated so definitely and cheerfully rested beforehand with terrible
force upon his conscience. If he awoke in the night, the Devil stood
by his bed full of malicious joy and whispered alarming things to him.
Then his mind struggled for freedom, often for a long time in vain.
And it is noteworthy how the son of the sixteenth century proceeded in
such spiritual struggles. Sometimes it was a relief to him if he stuck
out of bed the least dignified part of his body. This action, by which
prince and peasant of the time used to express supreme contempt,
sometimes helped when nothing else would. But his exuberant humor did
not always deliver him. Every new investigation of the Scriptures,
every important sermon on a new subject, caused him further pangs of
conscience. On these occasions he sometimes got into such excitement
that his soul was incapable of systematic thinking, and trembled in
anxiety for days. 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 ha