Nevertheless, in a letter to Melanchthon of June 29, 1530, he praised the comfort of his place of residence. Above all he was able to report that “the spirit who formerly beat me with fists [in mind] seems to be losing heart.”[1391] Yet, alluding to his bodily pains, he says sadly: “I fancy that another has taken his [the other tormentor’s] place and plagues my body; but I prefer to endure this torture of the body rather than that hangman of the spirit. But he has sworn to have my life, this I feel plainly, and will never stop until he has gobbled me up.”[1392]
But when he had returned safe and sound to Wittenberg he was disposed to look back with utter horror on what he had gone through, physically and mentally, when at the Coburg. “Now my shoulders are really beginning to feel the weight of my years,” he writes to trusty Amsdorf; “and my powers are going. The angel of Satan has indeed dealt hardly with me.”[1393]
“My thoughts did me more harm than all my work,” he said, in May, 1532, speaking of those which came by night (“curæ nocturnæ”).[1394] Nothing, so he says elsewhere, had brought him so nigh to death as these; with them all his labours, to which the great numbers of letters he received bore witness, were not to be compared.[1395] To young Schlaginhaufen Veit Dietrich related, as a memory of the Coburg days, how Luther had said to him there: “Were I to die now and be cut open, my heart would be found all shrivelled up in consequence of my distress and sadness of spirit.”[1396]
His having to wrestle with such moods is also in great part responsible for the stormy and extravagant tone of the works he wrote during, or shortly after, his stay at the Coburg.[1397]
“I should have Died without any Struggle”
In 1537, in his second serious illness, at Schmalkalden, and on the return journey from this town to Wittenberg, Luther displayed the same stubborn spirit as in 1527. In 1537 it was an attack of stone which brought him to the brink of the grave. Later on he himself declared of this crisis, that he would have died quite easily and trustfully. Into his deepest feelings at that time we have, of course, no means of probing, but it may be, that, by dint of persistently repressing his earlier scruples, he had indeed reached the state of calm resignation he depicts. At the same time his great bodily exhaustion will probably have reacted on his spirit, his very weakness thus explaining the silence of the inward voices.
“At Gotha [on my way back],” so he told his friends in 1540, “I was quite certain I was to die; I said good-bye to all, called Bugenhagen, commended to him the Church, the school, my wife and all else, and begged him to give me absolution.... Thus I should have died in Christ with a perfectly quiet soul and without a struggle. But the Lord wished to preserve me in life. My ‘Catena’ [Katey] too,” so he goes on to speak of one of his wife’s illnesses, “when once we had already given up all hopes for her life, would have died gladly, and readily, and with a quiet soul; she merely repeated a thousand times over the words: ‘In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped, I shall not be confounded for ever.’” From such experiences in her case and in his own Luther draws the conclusion, that “at times the devil desists from tempting to blasphemy.” “At other times God allows him,” so he thinks, “to try us thereby, so that we may not become indolent but may learn to fight. At the end of our life, however, all such temptations cease; for then the Holy Spirit is at the side of the faithful believer, restrains the devil by force and pours into the heart perfect peace and security.”[1398]
Such was his interpretation of the case.
At other times Luther expresses wonder at the wrong-headed sectarians who can with such confidence look even death itself in the face. He refuses to apply to them what has just been said; it is no real peace that they die in, rather they are blinded by Satan’s delusions. “This new sect of the Anabaptists,” he says indignantly, “grows marvellously, they live with a great show [of the spirit] and boldly face death by fire and water.”[1399] He is thinking of the Anabaptists who were executed in 1527—“May God have mercy on these poor captives of Satan.... They cannot be coerced either by fire or by the sword; so greatly does Satan rage in this hour because it is his last.” And yet the whole thing was little more than a joke of Satan’s.