In July, 1521, in a letter from the Wartburg to his friend Melanchthon, while repudiating, in the somewhat bombastic fashion of the Humanists, Melanchthon’s praise, he makes the following confession: “Your good opinion of me shames and tortures me. For I sit here [instead of working for God’s cause as you fondly imagine] hardened in immobility, praying, unhappily, too little instead of sighing over the Church of God; nay, I burn with the flames of my untamed flesh; in short, I ought to be glowing in the spirit, and instead I glow in the flesh, in lust, laziness, idleness and drowsiness, and know not whether God has not turned away His face from me because you have ceased to pray for me. You, who are more rich in the gifts of God than I, are now holding my place. For a whole week I have neither written, prayed nor studied, plagued partly by temptations of the flesh, partly by the other trouble.” The other trouble was the painful bodily ailment mentioned above, to which he returns here in greater detail. “Pray for me,” he concludes this letter--in which he seeks to confirm his friends in the course upon which they had set out,--“pray, for in this solitude I am sinking into sin.”[199] And in another letter, in December, we again have an allusion to his besetting temptations: “I am healthy in body and am well cared for, but I am also severely tried by sin and temptations. Pray for me, and fare you well.”[200] He here speaks of sins _and_ temptations, but it may well be that under “sins” he here, as elsewhere, comprehends concupiscence, which he, in accordance with his teaching, looked upon as sin. “Believe me,” he says in a letter of that time to Nicholas Gerbel of Strasburg, “in the quiet of my hermitage I am exposed to the attacks of a thousand devils. It is far easier to fight against men, who are devils incarnate, than against the ‘spirits of wickedness dwelling in high places’ (Eph. vi. 12). I fall frequently, but the right hand of the Lord again raises me up.”[201]