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. -- 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. Far, far beneath, the noise of tempest dieth, And silver waves chime ever peacefully, And no rude storm, how fierce soe'er it flieth, Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea. We have had glimpses of the hidden depths in Luther's mind: his thought reaches down to the lowest depths of human misery, and then goes deeper still towards the limits of God's rescuing love and conquering grace which human mind has never reached. For these divine profundities no plummet will ever sound. He who could surrender himself wholly to the study of the greatness and beauty of Luther's constructive thought would enjoy a spiritual luxury and be drawn into that sublime and solemn peace of God which passes all understanding. He would behold this strenuous man; who has been shown mostly in his working-clothes in these pages, in his holiday-attire, with that Sabbath in his heart which occurs wherever Christ is the loved and adored object of the thinker's contemplation. End of Project Gutenberg's Luther Examined and Reexamined, by W. H. T. Dau