As God was the source of all good, so, for Luther, the Devil was the author of everything harmful and bad.  The Devil interfered perniciously in the course of nature, in sickness and pestilence, failure of crops and famine.  But since Luther had begun to teach, the greater part of the Enemy’s activity had been transferred to the souls of men.  In them he inspired impure thoughts as well as doubt, melancholy, and depression.  Everything which the thoughtful Luther stated so definitely and cheerfully rested beforehand with terrible force upon his conscience.  If he awoke in the night, the Devil stood by his bed full of malicious joy and whispered alarming things to him.  Then his mind struggled for freedom, often for a long time in vain.  And it is noteworthy how the son of the sixteenth century proceeded in such spiritual struggles.  Sometimes it was a relief to him if he stuck out of bed the least dignified part of his body.  This action, by which prince and peasant of the time used to express supreme contempt, sometimes helped when nothing else would.  But his exuberant humor did not always deliver him.  Every new investigation of the Scriptures, every important sermon on a new subject, caused him further pangs of conscience.  On these occasions he sometimes got into such excitement that his soul was incapable of systematic thinking, and trembled in anxiety for days.  When he was busy with the question of the monks and nuns, a text struck his attention which, as he thought in his excitement, proved him in the wrong.  His heart “melted in his body; he was almost choked by the Devil.”  Then Bugenhagen visited him.  Luther took him outside the door and showed him the threatening text, and Bugenhagen, apparently upset by his friend’s excitement, began to doubt too, without suspecting the depth of the torment which Luther was enduring.  This gave Luther a final and terrible fright.  Again he passed an awful night.  The next morning Bugenhagen came in again.  “I am thoroughly angry,” he said; “I have only just looked at the text carefully.  The passage has 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.