exhorted her to rest solely on God's Word. He then asked, 'Where is my darling little Hans?' The child smiled at his father, who commended him with his mother to the God who is the Father of the fatherless and judges the cause of the widow. He pointed to some silver cups which had been given him, and which he wished to leave his wife. 'You know,' he added, 'we have nothing else.' After a profuse perspiration he grew better, and the next day he was able to get up to meals. He said afterwards that he thought he was dying, in the hands of his wife and his friends, but that the spiritual paroxysm which had preceded had been something far more difficult for him to bear. Luther, after recovering from this attack, still complained of weakness in the head, and his inward oppression and spiritual anguish was renewed and became intensified. On August 2 he told Melancthon, who was then busy with his visitation in Thuringia, that he had been tossed about for more than a week in the agonies of death and hell, and that his limbs still trembled in consequence. Whilst he was still in this state of suffering, news came that the plague was approaching Wittenberg, nay, had actually broken out in the town. It is well known how this fearful scourge had repeatedly raged in Germany, and how ruinous it had been, from the panic which preceded and accompanied it. The university, from fear of the epidemic, was now removed to Jena. Luther resolved, however, together with Bugenhagen, whom he was assisting as preacher, to remain loyally with the congregation, who now more than ever required his spiritual aid; although his Elector wrote in person to him saying, 'We should for many reasons, as well as for your own good, be loth to see you separated from the university.... Do us then the favour.' He wrote to a friend, 'We are not alone here; but Christ, and your prayers, and the prayers of all the saints, together with the holy angels, are with us.' The plague had really broken out, though not with that violence which the universal panic would have led one to suppose. Luther soon counted eighteen corpses, which were buried near his house at the Elster Gate. The epidemic advanced from the Fishers' suburb into the centre of the town: here the first victim carried off by it, died almost in Luther's arms--the wife of the burgomaster Tilo Denes. To his friends elsewhere Luther sent comforting reports, and repressed all exaggerated accounts. His friend Hess at Breslau asked him 'if it was befitting a Christian man to fly when death threatened him.' Luther answered him in a public letter, setting forth the whole duty of Christians in this respect. Of the students, a few at any rate remained at Wittenberg. For these he now began a new course of lectures.