He repeatedly accuses the writer of downright lying. What he charges me with concerning my treatment of the Apostle John, “is a palpable falsehood. Never, even in my dreams, did the words which he quotes as mine enter my mind.” Such a lie he can have “welded together” only by joining two expressions used in other contexts.[602] As for his alleged blasphemy concerning Christ’s birth from the Virgin Mary, Erasmus protests: “I can swear I never said anything of the kind either in a letter, as Luther makes out, though he fails to say which, or in any of my writings.” Moreover he was a little surprised to find Luther, whose own language was not remarkable for modesty, suddenly transformed into a champion of cleanliness of speech: “Everything, bridegroom, bride and even best man, seems of a sudden to have become obscene to this Christian Luther,” etc. Erasmus also points out that the passage concerning the Creed being a mere fable had been invented by Luther himself by means of deliberate “distortion” and shameful misinterpretation: “No text,” he exclaims, “is safe from his calumny and misrepresentation.” As for what Luther had said, viz. that “whoever tells untruths lies even when he speaks the truth,” and that he would refuse to believe Erasmus even were he to make an orthodox profession of faith, Erasmus’s retort is: “Whoever spoke this bit of wisdom was assuredly out of his senses and stood in need of hellebore” (the remedy for madness). As to the charge of deliberately leading others into infidelity he does not shrink from telling Luther, that “he will find it easier to persuade all that he has gone mad out of hatred, is suffering from some other form of mental malady, or is led by some evil genius.”[603] Luther took good care to say nothing in public about the rebuff he had received from Erasmus; nor did he ever make any attempt to refute the charge of having “lied.” In the circle of his intimate friends, however, he inveighed all the more against the leader of the Humanists as a sceptic and seducer to infidelity. After Erasmus’s death he declared that, till his end (1536), he lived “without God.” He refused to give any credence to the report that he had displayed faith and piety at the hour of death. Erasmus’s last words were: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I will extol the mercies of the Lord and His judgments.”[604] Luther, on the other hand, in his Latin Table-Talk says: “He died just as he lived, viz. like an Epicurean, without a clergyman and without comfort.... ‘_Securissime vixit, sicut etiam morixit_,’” he adds jestingly. “Those pious words attributed to him are, sure enough, an invention.”[605]