“The devil’s malice!” This is another explanation to which Luther and others not unfrequently had recourse. The devil could do such extraordinary and apparently contradictory things! He could even teach men to “pray fervently.” In the Table-Talk, for instance, when asked by his wife why it was, that, whereas in Popery “we prayed so diligently and frequently, we are now so cold and pray so seldom,” Luther put it down to the devil. “The devil made us fervent,” he says; “he ever urges on his servants, but the Holy Ghost teaches and exhorts us how to pray aright; yet we are so tepid and slothful in prayer that nothing comes of it.”[700] Thus it might well be the devil who was answerable for the misuse of the Evangel. On another occasion, in order to counteract the bad impression made on his contemporaries by the fruits of his preaching, he says: “Our morals only look so bad on account of the sanctity of the Evangel; in Catholic times they stood very low and many vices prevailed, but all this was unperceived amidst the general darkness which shrouded doctrine and the moral standards which then held; now, on the other hand, our eyes have been opened by a purer faith and even small abuses are seen in their true colours.” His words on this subject will be given below. It even seemed to Luther that the decay of almsgiving and the parsimony displayed towards the churches and the preachers proved the truth of the Evangel (“_signum est, verum esse evangelium nostrum_”), for, so he teaches in a sermon preached at Wittenberg in 1527, “the devil is the Prince of this world and all its riches, as we learn from the story of Christ’s Temptation. He is now defending his kingdom from the Evangel which has risen up against him. He does not now allow us so many possessions and gifts as he formerly did to those who served him (i.e. the Papists), for their Masses, Vigils, etc.; nay, he robs us of everything and spends it on himself. Formerly we supported many hundred monks and now we cannot raise the needful for one Evangelical preacher, a sign that our Evangel is the true one and that the Pope’s empire was the devil’s own, where he bestowed gifts on his followers with open hands and incited them to luxury, avarice, fornication and gluttony. And their teaching was in conformity therewith, for they urged those works which pleased them.”[701] The observer may well marvel at such strange trains of thought. Luther’s doctrine has become to him like a pole-star around which the whole firmament must revolve. Experience and logic alike must perforce be moulded at his pleasure to suit the idea which dominates him.