The Doctor believed that more sheaves are grown than there are people, but still more people than stacks of grain.  “But a stack of grain yields hardly a bushel, and a man cannot live a whole year on that.”  Even a dunghill invited him to deep reflection.  “God has as much to clear away as to create.  If He were not continually carrying things off, men would have filled the world with rubbish long ago.”  And if God often punishes those who fear Him worse than those who have no religion, he appears to Luther to be like a strict householder who punishes his son oftener than his good-for-nothing servant, but who secretly is laying up an inheritance for his son; while he finally dismisses the servant.  And merrily he draws the conclusion, “If our Lord can pardon me for having annoyed Him for twenty years by reading masses, He can put it to my credit also that at times I have taken a good drink in His honor.  The world may interpret it as it will.”

He is also greatly surprised that God should be so angry with the Jews.  “They have prayed anxiously for fifteen hundred years with seriousness and great zeal, as their prayer-books show, and He has not for the whole time noticed them with a word.  If I could pray as they do I would give books worth two hundred florins for the gift.  It must be a great unutterable wrath.  O, good Lord, punish us with pestilence rather than with such silence!”

Like a child, Luther prayed every morning and evening, and frequently during the day, even while eating.  Prayers which he knew by heart he repeated over and over with warm devotion, preferably the Lord’s Prayer.  Then he recited as an act of devotion the shorter Catechism; the Psalter he always carried with him as a prayer-book.  When he was in passionate anxiety his prayer became a stormy wrestling with God, so powerful, great, and solemnly simple that it can hardly be compared with other human emotions.  Then he was the son who lay despairingly at his father’s feet, or the faithful servant who implores his prince; for his whole conviction was firmly fixed that God’s decisions could be affected by begging and urging, and so the effusion of feeling alternated in his prayer with complaints, even with earnest reproaches.  It has often been told how, in 1540, at Weimar, he brought Melanchthon, who was at the point of death, to life again.  When Luther arrived, he found Master Philip in the death throes, unconscious, his eyes set.  Luther was greatly startled and said, “God help us!  How the Devil has wronged this Organan,” then he turned his back to the company and went to the window as he was wont to do when he prayed.  “Here,” Luther himself later recounted, “Our Lord had to grant my petition, for I challenged 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.