In his attack on the Mass, in his excitement, he went so far as to state: No sin of immorality, nay not even “manslaughter, theft, murder and adultery is so harmful as this abomination of the Popish Mass.” He adjured the authorities to take steps against the blinded parsons “who run to the altar like hogs to the trough,” “the shame of the scarlet woman of Babylon” must be laid bare in order that the “dreadful anger of God may not be poured forth like a glowing furnace upon the negligence” of those who fail to use the “sword entrusted to them by God.” These were his words to the people in a sermon of the year 1524.[432] How deeply his experiences with the fanatics excited and enraged him is apparent, for instance, from this statement concerning Carlstadt: “He is no longer able to go back, there is no hope for this orator, inflated and hardened as he is by the applause of the crowd” (“_plausu vulgi inflatus et induratus_”).[433] Carlstadt and his followers, according to him, “are always on the look-out for a chance of incriminating the evangel.”[434] Luther in these struggles felt bitterly that he himself, the originator of the great movement, had already become to many a byword and a jest, “a target for malice, for deceit, for buffoonery--by reason of my simplicity.”[435] It is true he had a fellow-sufferer at his side, Melanchthon, who at that time “was brought to the brink of the grave”[436] by cares and want of sleep; yet none of his friends suffered as much as he, for the whole burden of care settled upon him. To-day he has to dispute with a “sly and cunning monk,” who ill-uses his wife because she desires a separation, and, then, when she actually leaves him, wishes to marry another; Luther flings the desired permission after him (“if others will allow him so to do, I am content”).[437] On the morrow he has to go to Wittenberg to take steps “against a new sort of prophets arrived from Antwerp,” who deny the Godhead of the Holy Ghost, which, they say, is not founded on the “Word,”[438] On the day following he is assailed with complaints regarding the encroachments of the Lutheran authorities. “How does Satan rage,” he cries in view of the above, “how he rages everywhere against the Word!”[439] When the news of the fanatics with their revelations concerning the “Word” arrived from Thuringia, and of the iconoclastic tumult at Rothenburg-on-the-Tauber, he again exclaims: “Thomas Münzer at Mühlhausen, not only teacher and preacher, but also king and emperor!” “Thus Satan rages against Christ now that he finds Him to be the stronger.”[440]