His father, a curt, sturdy, vigorous man, firm in his resolves, and of unusual, shrewd common sense, had worked his way, after hard struggles, to considerable prosperity.  He kept strict discipline in his household.  Even in later years Luther thought with sadness of the severe punishments he had endured as a boy and the sorrow they had caused his tender, childish heart.  But Old Hans Luther, nevertheless, up to his death in 1530, had some influence on the life of his son.  When at the age of twenty-two Martin secretly entered the monastery the old man was violently angry; for he had already planned a good match for him.  Friends finally succeeded in bringing the angry father to consent to a reconciliation; and as his imploring son confessed that a terrible apparition had driven him to the secret vow to enter the monastery, he replied with the sorrowful words, “God grant that it was not a deception and trick of the devil;” and he still further wrenched the heart of the monk by the angry question, “You thought you were obeying the command of God when you went into the monastery; have you not heard also that you shall obey your parents?” These words made a deep impression on the son, and when, many years after, he sat in the Wartburg, expelled from the Church and outlawed by the Emperor, he wrote to his father the touching words:  “Do you still wish to tear me from the monastery?  You are still my father and I your son.  The law and the power of God are on your side—­on my side human weakness.  But look that you boast not yourself against God, he has been beforehand with you,—­he has taken me out himself.”  From that time on it seemed to the old man as if his son were restored to him.  Old Hans had once counted upon having a grandson for whom he would work.  He now came back obstinately to this thought, caring nothing for the rest of the world, and soon urged his son to marry; his encouragement was not the least of the influences to which Luther yielded, and when his father, advanced in years, at last a councillor of Mansfeld, lay in his death throes and the minister bent over him and asked the dying man if he wished to die in the purified faith in Christ and the Holy Gospel, old Hans gathered his strength once more and said curtly, “He is a wretch who does not believe in it.”  When Luther told this later he added admiringly, “Yes that was a man of the old time.”  The son received the news of the father’s death in the fortress of Coburg.  When he read the letter, in which his wife inclosed a picture of his youngest daughter Magdalena, he uttered to a companion merely the words, “Well, my father is dead too,” rose, took his psalter, went into his room, and prayed and wept so hard that, as the faithful Veit Dietrich wrote, his head was confused the next day; but he came out again with his soul at peace.  The same day he wrote with deep emotion to Melanchthon of the great love of his father and of his intimate relations with him.  “I have never despised death