But his sweetest comfort is in reflecting that it is his preaching which has brought his manifold afflictions upon him.  Poor Luther is always wrong:  the Sacramentarians and Anabaptists hate him worse than they hate the Pope, and the Pope hates him worse than he hates other heretics, because they all fight against the Gospel which Luther preaches. (22, 1015.) If I were to keep silent, he says, or preach as I used to do, concerning indulgences, pilgrimages, adoration of the saints, purgatory, the carnival of the Mass, I could easily keep the favor and friendship of the great. (8, 569.) But for the sake of the true doctrine and those who profess it,—­whom his opponents wish to suppress, Luther is willing to suffer hatred, persecution, calumnies, and everything else that his enemies may devise against him. (5, 587.) What have I done, he exclaims, to deserve the enmity of the Pope and his rabble, except that I have preached Christ? (8, 569.) He is convinced from the papists’ own confession that he is being persecuted for no other reason than because he is preaching the Gospel. (8, 399.}

Knowing the reason why he is hated, Luther glories in his tribulations.  Duke George, he says, calls me a desperate, low-bred, perjured knave:  I shall consider those ugly names my emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. (19, 457.) He would fear that there must be something wrong about his teaching if the people whom he knows would not fight against him:  if these people do not condemn his doctrine, his doctrine cannot be acceptable to God. (10, 351.) He prefers to have them rage against him.  Their violence shall not disturb him greatly, because he has championed the Lord’s cause, and that, in all sincerity, without malice toward any person. (21a, 301.) .  Let the papists exhaust themselves in slanders against him:  he knows he has the Scriptures on his side, and they have the Scriptures against them. (5, 310.) They intend to grind Luther to pieces, not a hair of him is to remain; he knows that they will not be able to harm a hair on his head. (8, 119.)

Thus Luther thought and spoke of his detractors and defamers.  Such was his comfort and his courage in the face of base calumnies and undeserved hatred.  Those who know him best will continue to love him, and admire him the more for the enemies he has made.

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If the reader of this book has had the sensation of a traveler in a storm-tossed vessel, he has experienced mentally what Luther faced in dread reality during almost the whole of his agitated life.  He had to weather many a squall, and storm, and hurricane.  Outwardly his life seems a continuous hurly-burly.  Yet there is in this man’s heart a great and holy calm.  The tumult of his life is all on the surface.  He reminds one of the lines in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Hymn”: 

     When winds are raging o’er the upper ocean,
     And billows wild contend with angry roar,
     ’T is said, far down beneath the wild commotion,
     That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore.