We can understand his followers, in their enthusiasm, crediting him with a true gift of prophecy, but it is somewhat difficult to believe that he himself shared their conviction. Although the belief of his disciples can be traced as clearly to Luther’s own assurances, as to the fulfilment of what he predicted, yet it is uncertain whether at any time his self-confidence went to this length. Whoever is familiar with Luther’s mode of speech and his habit of talking half in earnest half in jest, will have some difficulty in persuading himself that the disciples always distinguished the shade of their master’s meaning. The disasters imminent in Germany, and the religious wars, might quite well have been foreseen by Luther from natural signs, and yet this is just the prophecy on which most stress is laid. Melanchthon, who was more sober in his judgments in this respect, speaks of Luther as a prophet merely in the general sense, as for instance when he says in his Postils: “Prophets under the New Law are those who restore again the ancient doctrine; such a one was Dr. Martin Luther.”[474] “What Luther, the new Elias and Paul, has prophesied cannot but come true,” writes a preacher in 1562, “and those who would doubt this are unbelieving and godless, Papists, Epicureans, Sodomites or fanatics. Everything has become so frightful and bestial, what with blasphemy, swearing, cursing, unchastity and adultery, usury, oppression of the poor and every other vice, that one might fancy the last trump was sounding for the Judgment. What else do the countless, hitherto unheard-of signs, wonders and visions indicate, but that Christ is about to come to judge and punish?”[475] Luther was most diligent in collecting and making use of any prophetical utterances which might go to prove the exalted character of his mission. The supposed prophecy of Hus, that from his ashes would arise a swan whose voice it would be impossible to stifle, he coolly applied to himself.[476] He was fond of referring to what a Franciscan visionary at Rome had said of the time of Leo X.: “A hermit shall arise and lay waste the Papacy.” Staupitz, he says, had heard this prophecy from the mouths of many at the time of his stay in Rome (1510). He himself had not heard it there, but later he, like Staupitz, had come to see that he “was the hermit meant, for Augustinian monks are commonly called hermits.”[477]