As things are “ever growing worse,” he says, “let our Lord God take away His own. He will remove the pious and then make an end of Germany.” “I am very weary of life,” he declared, “may Our Lord come right speedily and take me away, and, above all, may He come with His Judgment Day! I will reach out my neck to Him that He may strike me down with His thunderbolt where I am. Amen.”[1397]—As early as June 11, 1539 (?), when he was wished another forty years of life, he said that, even were he offered a Paradise on earth for forty years, “I would not accept it. I would rather hire an executioner to chop off my head. So wicked is the world now! And the people are becoming real devils, so that one could wish him nothing better than a good death and then away!”[1398]
Do you know, he said on one occasion, who it is that holds back God’s arm? “I am the block that stops God’s way. When I die He will strike. No doubt we are despised; but let them gather up the leavings when they are most despised; that is my advice.”[1399]
That, “even in our own lifetime, the world should thus repay us,” seemed to him intolerable.[1400] “I hold that, for a thousand years, the world has never been so unfriendly to anyone as to me. I am also unfriendly to it, and know of nothing in life that I take pleasure in.”[1401]
Of the sudden death that confronted him he had, however, no idea. On the contrary, in 1543, when he was suffering from severe trouble in the head, he said to Catherine Bora, that he would summon his son Hans from Torgau to Wittenberg to be present at his death, which now seemed near at hand; but, he added: “I shall not die so suddenly, I shall first take to my bed and be ill; but I shall not lie there long. I have had enough of the world and it has had enough of me.… I give thanks to Thee My God that Thou hast numbered me in Thy little flock which endures persecution for the sake of Thy Word.”[1402]
Incidentally he declared: “If I die in my bed it will be to defy the Papists and put them to shame.” Why? Because they will not have been able to do me the harm “they wished, and, in fact, were in duty bound to have done me.”[1403]
The thought of death often made his hatred of the Catholics to flame up more luridly. “Only after my death will they feel what Luther really was”; should he fall a prey to his adversaries before his time, he would carry with him to the grave “a long train of bishops, priestlings and monks, for my life shall be their hangman, my death their devil.” He announces angrily, “They shall not be able to resist me,” and that, “in God’s name, he will tread the lion and the dragon under foot,” but of all this, according to him, they were to have only a taste during his lifetime; only after his death would matters be carried out in earnest.[1404]
Brooding over his own death he says of the death of the believing Christian, viz. of the man who puts his trust in the Evangel: “If a man seriously meditates in his heart on God’s Word, believes it and falls asleep and dies in it, he will pass away before he realises that death has come, and is assuredly saved by the Word in which he has thus believed and died.”[1405] These words he wrote on Feb. 7, 1546, to an Eisleben gentleman in a copy of his Home-Postils. He prefaced them with a passage from Scripture in which he himself doubtless had often sought comfort: “He that keepeth my Word shall not taste of death for ever” (John viii. 51). In one of his last lengthy notes he also seeks to make his own this believing confidence: “Christ commands us to believe in Him. Although we are not able to believe as firmly as we should yet God has patience with us.” “I hide myself under the shelter of the Son of God; Him I hold and honour as my Lord to Whom I must fly when the devil, sin or any other ill assails me. For He is my shield, extending beyond the heavens and the earth and the foster-hen under whose wings I creep from the wrath of God.” Thus he was so steeped in the delusion of faith alone that he could thus wish to die in sole reliance on the “Word of God,” thanks to which he is to escape “the devil, death, hell and sin.”[1406] We may remember that, in one of his earliest controversial sermons, where a glimpse of his new doctrine is already to be detected, he had used the simile of the foster-hen. Now, in his old age, he returns to it, the richer by the experience of a long lifetime, albeit he now sees that it is difficult, nay impossible, “to believe as firmly as we should.”
In Jan., 1546, Luther set out for the third time for Mansfeld, in order to settle the business of Count Albert of Mansfeld; only as a corpse was he to return home.
The Elector did not look with approval on Luther’s arduous labours as peacemaker, while Chancellor Brück even went so far as to characterise the Counts’ interminable lawsuits about the mines and the rest as a “pig-market.” Luther, nevertheless, set out again on Jan. 23, regardless of his already impaired health, betaking himself this time to Eisleben. He was accompanied by his three sons, their tutor and his famulus Aurifaber, the editor of the German Table-Talk. At Halle they were detained three days in the house of Jonas on account of the floating ice and the flooded state of the Saale. “We did not wish to take to the water and tempt God,” so he wrote to Catherine on Jan. 25, “for the devil bears us a grudge and also dwells in the water; and, moreover, ‘discretion is the best part of valour’; nor is there any need for us to give the Pope and his myrmidons such cause for delight.”[1407]