Luther’s saying: “If I have a can of beer, I want the beer-barrel as well,”[967] has often been cited against him, the fact being overlooked, that he only made use of this expression in order to illustrate, by a very common example, the idea, expressed in the heading of the chapter in which it occurs, viz. that “No one is ever satisfied.” Everyone, he continues, desires to go one step higher, everyone wants to attain to something more, and, then, with other examples, he gives that mentioned above, where, for “I,” we might equally well substitute “we,” which indeed we find employed elsewhere in this same connection: “If we have one Gulden, we want a hundred.” Another passage, alleged, strange to say, by older writers, proves nothing: “We eat ourselves to death, and drink ourselves to death; we eat and drink ourselves into poverty and down to hell.” Here Luther is merely speaking against the habit of drinking which had become so prevalent, and dominated some to such an extent that death and hell were the lamentable consequences to be feared. (See below, p. 308 f.) Luther, wishing to drive a point home, says that he is not “drunk,”[968] but is writing “in the morning hours.”[969] Must we infer, then, that he was in the habit of writing when drunk, or that in the afternoon he was not usually sober? Must he be considered drunk whenever he does not state plainly that he is sober? The truth is that such expressions were merely his way of speaking. In the important passage here under consideration he writes: “Possibly it may be asserted later that I did not sufficiently weigh what I say here against those who deny the presence of Christ in the Sacrament; but I am not drunk or giddy; I know what I am saying and what it will mean to me on Judgment Day and at the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.”[970] Thus he is speaking most seriously and uses this curious verbal artifice simply to emphasise his earnestness. Were additional proof necessary it might be found in other passages; for instance: “Christ was not drunk when He said this,” viz. the Eucharistic words of consecration, the literal meaning of which Luther is upholding against the Strasburg Sacramentarians.[971]