y convinced of the purity of his life, that the charges were
treated with contempt.

Luther's life from the age of puberty to his marriage was, indeed, a
fight against temptations to unchastity. Is it anything else in the case
of other men? The physical effects of adolescence, as we remarked
before, are a natural and morally pure phenomenon; Luther's frank way of
speaking of them does not make them impure. But this physical condition
in a growing young man or woman may become the occasion for impure acts.
Against these Luther strove as every Christian strives against them who
has not the special grace of which our Lord speaks Matt. 19, 12, in the
first part of the verse. Luther had his flesh fairly well in subjection
to the Spirit. History has not recorded those acts of immorality which
his enemies insinuate or openly charge him with. The illegitimate
children which are imputed to him were born in Catholic fancy. His
constitutional amorous propensities, too, are fiction. Though Luther
admits a few months prior to his marriage that he wears no armor plate
around his heart, it is known that he had been all his life anything
rather than a ladies' man.

Luther's courtship of Catherine--if we may call it that--was almost void
of romance. The nine nuns who had fled from the cloister at Nimpschen to
escape "the impurities of the life of celibacy," had turned to
Wittenberg in their trouble. They were not seeking new impurities, but
running away from old ones. What was more natural than that they should
seek the protection of the man whose teaching had opened the road to
liberty for them. They did not come to Wittenberg to surrender
themselves to Luther, but to seek his protection, advice, and help in
beginning a new, natural life after the unnatural life which they had
been leading. Luther responded to the call of distress. He did not
receive them into his own domicile in the cloister where he lived, but
found shelter for them with kind citizens of the town. Next, he found
husbands for them. In less than two years after the escape from the
cloister all had been respectably married, except Catherine. A
love-affair of hers with Jerome Baumgaertner of Nuernberg had terminated
unhappily, in spite of Luther's urging the young man. Another choice
which Luther proposed to her--Dr. Glatz of Orlamuende--was declined
peremptorily by Catherine, because, it seems, she had read the man's
character. In declining this second offer, Catherine