“I want to hand over a downright sinner to the Judgment Seat of our Lord God; for though I myself may not have actually been guilty of adultery, still that has not been for lack of good-will.”[621]—The latter phrase was a saying of the populace, and does not in the least mean that he ever really had the intention of committing the sin. “I confess of myself,” he says in a sermon in 1532, “and doubtless others must admit the same [of themselves], that I lack the diligence and earnestness of which really I ought to have much more than formerly; that I am much more careless than I was under the Papacy; and that now, under the Evangel, there is nowhere the same zeal to be found as before.” This he declares to be due to the devil and to people’s carelessness, but not to his teaching.[622] On other occasions he admits of his party as a whole, more particularly of its leaders, viz. the theologians and Princes, that they fell more or less short of what was required for a Christian life; among them he expressly includes himself: “It is certain with regard to ourselves and our Princes that we are not clean and holy, and the Princes have vices of their own. But Christ loves a frank and downright confession.”[623] Among such “confessions” made by Luther we find some concerning prayer. Comparing the present with the past he says: “People are now so cold and pray so seldom”; this he seeks to explain by urging that formerly people were more “tormented by the devil.”[624] A better explanation is that which he gave in his Commentary on Galatians: “For the more confident we are of the freedom Christ has won for us, the colder and lazier we are in teaching the Word, praying, doing good and enduring contradictions.”[625] We possess some very remarkable and even spirited exhortations to prayer from Luther’s pen; on occasion he would also raise his own voice in prayer to implore God’s assistance with feeling, fervour and the greatest confidence, particularly when in anxiety and trouble about his undertaking. (See vol. iv., xxv. 3.) He refers frequently to his daily prayer, though he admits that the heretics, i.e. the Anabaptists, also were in the habit of praying—in their own way. His excessive labours and the turmoil of his life’s struggle left him, however, little time and quiet for prayer, particularly for interior prayer. Besides, he considered the canonical hours of the Catholics mere “bawling,” and the liturgical devices for raising the heart mere imposture. During the latter years he spent in the cloister outside cares left him no leisure for the prayers which he was, as a religious, bound to recite. Finally, towards the end of his life, he often enough admits that his prayers were cold.[626] Frequently he was obliged to stimulate his ardour for prayer as well as work by “anger and zeal”;[627] “for no man can say,” as he puts it, “how hard a thing it is to pray from the heart.”[628]