Matt. 19, 12, in the first part of the verse.  Luther had his flesh fairly well in subjection to the Spirit.  History has not recorded those acts of immorality which his enemies insinuate or openly charge him with.  The illegitimate children which are imputed to him were born in Catholic fancy.  His constitutional amorous propensities, too, are fiction.  Though Luther admits a few months prior to his marriage that he wears no armor plate around his heart, it is known that he had been all his life anything rather than a ladies’ man.

Luther’s courtship of Catherine—­if we may call it that—­was almost void of romance.  The nine nuns who had fled from the cloister at Nimpschen to escape “the impurities of the life of celibacy,” had turned to Wittenberg in their trouble.  They were not seeking new impurities, but running away from old ones.  What was more natural than that they should seek the protection of the man whose teaching had opened the road to liberty for them.  They did not come to Wittenberg to surrender themselves to Luther, but to seek his protection, advice, and help in beginning a new, natural life after the unnatural life which they had been leading.  Luther responded to the call of distress.  He did not receive them into his own domicile in the cloister where he lived, but found shelter for them with kind citizens of the town.  Next, he found husbands for them.  In less than two years after the escape from the cloister all had been respectably married, except Catherine.  A love-affair of hers with Jerome Baumgaertner of Nuernberg had terminated unhappily, in spite of Luther’s urging the young man.  Another choice which Luther proposed to her—­Dr. Glatz of Orlamuende—­was declined peremptorily by Catherine, because, it seems, she had read the man’s character.  In declining this second offer, Catherine had made complaint to Luther’s friend Amsdorf that Luther was trying to marry her against her will.  She appears to have been a frank and resolute woman; in her conversation with Amsdorf she remarked that her decision would be altogether different if either he or even Luther were to ask for her hand.  This was not, as has been said, a bald invitation to either of these two gentlemen, but only Catherine’s energetic way of explaining what sort of a husband she would like, and why she would not take Glatz.  Amsdorf so understood her remark and made nothing of it.  By an accident he came to relate it to Luther six months later, when the latter had written to him in great despondency, describing his lonely life and the disorderly state of his domicile which needed very much the care of a woman’s hand.  Then it was that Amsdorf related what Catherine had remarked.  Luther had never thought of her in such a relation.  He had been attracted, it seems, by another of the nine escaped nuns, Ave von Schoenfeld, but whatever affection he may have entertained for her must have been a passing incident, never seriously entertained, for it must be remembered that at that time Luther