For instance, he says that he wrote the pamphlet against the seditious peasants in obedience to a Divine command; “therefore my little book is right and will always be so, though all the world should be incensed at it.”[296] “It is the Lord Who has done this,” he had declared of the Peasant Rising when he recognised in it elements favourable to his cause; “It is the Lord Who has done this and Who conceals these menaces and dangers from the eyes of the Princes, and will even bring it about Himself by means of their blindness and violence.” That the Princes are threatened with destruction, that “I firmly believe the Spirit proclaims through me.”[297] Later on he was no less sure that he could foresee in the Spirit the coming outbreak of a religious war in Germany; only the prayers which he—who had the Divine interests so much at heart—offered, could avail to stave off the war; at least the delay was mainly the result of this prayer: “I am assured that God really hearkens to my prayer, and I know that so long as I live there will be no war in Germany.” Never does he tire of declaring that the misfortunes and deaths which his foes have to deplore are the result of the intervention of heaven on behalf of his cause.[298] He was convinced that he had repeatedly been cured in sickness and saved from death by Christ, by Him, as he says in 1534, “in Whose faith I commenced all this and carried it through, to the admiration even of my opponents.”[299] He, “one of the Apostles and Evangelists of Germany, is,” so he proclaims in 1526 in a pamphlet, “a man delivered over to death and only preserved in life by a wonder and in defiance of the wrath of the devil and his saints.”[300] In February, 1520, he speaks of the intimation he has received of a great storm impending, were God not to place some hindrance in the way of Satan. “I have seen Satan’s cunning plans for my destruction and that of many others. Doubtless the Divine Word can never be administered without confusion, tumult and danger. It is a word of boundless majesty, it works great things and is wonderful on high.” This was to be his only guide in his undertaking. He was compelled, so he declared on the same occasion, “to leave the whole matter to God, to resign himself to His guidance and to look on while wind and waves make the ship their plaything.”[301]