s 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.

For no man is entirely transformed by the great thoughts and deeds of
his manhood. We ourselves do not become new through new deeds. Our
mental life is based upon the sum of all thoughts and feelings that we
have ever had. Whoever is chosen by Fate to establish new greatness by
destroying the greatness of the old, shatters in fragments at the same
time a portion of his own life. He must break obligations in order to
fulfil greater obligations. The more conscientious he is, the more
deeply he feels in his own heart the wound he has inflicted upon the
order of the world. That is the secret sorrow, the regret, of every
great historical character. There are few mortals who have felt this
sorrow so deeply as Luther. And what is great in him is the fact that
such sorrow never kept him from the boldest action. To us this appears
as a tragic touch in his spiritual life.

Another thing most momentous for him was the attitude which he had to
take toward his own doctrine. He had left to his followers nothing but
the authority of Scripture. He clung passionately to its words as to
the last effective anchor for the human race. Before him the pope,
with his hierarchy, had interpreted, misinterpreted, and added to the
text of the Scriptures; now he was in the same situation. He, with a
circle of dependent friends, had to claim for himself the privilege of
understanding the words of the Scriptures correctly, and applying them
rightly to the life of the times. This was a superhuman task, and the
man who undertook i