and so on.  He felt deep sympathy for these poor souls.  He wrote in their behalf and traveled to find them shelter in respectable families.  Sometimes indeed he felt it too much of a good thing, and the hordes of runaway monks were an especial burden to him.  He complains that “they wish to marry immediately and are the most incompetent people for any kind of work.”  Through his bold solution of a difficult question he gave great offense.  He himself had painful experiences; for among those who now returned in tumult to civil life there were, to be sure, high-minded men, but also those who were rude and worthless.  Yet all this never made him hesitate for a moment.  As usual with him, he was made the more determined by the opposition he met.  When, in 1524, he published the story of the sufferings of a novice, Florentina of Oberweimar, he repeated on the title page what he had already so often preached:  “God often gives testimony in the Scriptures that He will have no compulsory service, and no one shall become His except with pleasure and love.  God help us!  Is there no reasoning with us?  Have we no sense and no hearing?  I say it again, God will have no compulsory service.  I say it a third time, I say it a hundred thousand times, God will have no compulsory service.”

So Luther entered upon the last period of his life.  His disappearance in the Thuringian forest had caused an enormous stir.  His adversaries trembled before the anger which arose in town and country against those who were called murderers.  But the interruption of his public activity became fateful for him.  So long as in Wittenberg he was the central point of the struggle, his word, his pen, had held sovereign control over the great intellectual movement in north and south; now it worked without method in different directions, in many minds.  One of the oldest of Luther’s allies began the confusion.  Wittenberg itself became the scene of a strange commotion.  Then Luther could endure the Wartburg no longer.  Once before he had been secretly in Wittenberg; now, against the Elector’s will, he returned there publicly.  And there began a heroic struggle against old friends, and against the conclusions drawn from his own doctrine.  His activity was superhuman.  He thundered without cessation from the pulpit, in the cell his pen flew fast; but he could not reclaim every dissenting mind.  Even he could not prevent the rabble of the towns from breaking out in savage fury against the institutions of the ancient Church and against hated individuals, nor the excitement of the people from brewing political storms, nor the knights from rising against the princes, and the peasants against the knights.  What was more, he could not prevent the intellectual liberty which he had won for the Germans from producing, even in pious and learned men, an independent judgment about creed and life, a judgment which was contrary to his own convictions.  There came the gloomy years of the Iconoclasts, the Anabaptists, the Peasant Wars, the regrettable dissensions over the sacrament.  How often at this time did Luther’s form rise sombre and mighty over the contestants!  How often did the perversion of mankind and his own secret doubts fill him with anxious care for the future of Germany!