and am none the worse.”[911] “God usually protects the ministers of His Word,” he writes in 1538, “if one does not run in and out of the inns and lie in the beds; confessions there is no need to hear, for we bring the Word of Life.”[912] The fact that he could boast of having braved the plague and remained at his post naturally tended to increase his influence with his congregation.[913] He had passed through a severe mental struggle previous to the epidemic of 1529. Only by dint of despairing efforts was he able to overcome his terrors of conscience concerning his doctrine and his own personal salvation. This inner combat so hardened him that he was fearless where others were terrified and fled. Of his own qualms of conscience he wrote to a friend in April, 1529: If it be an apostolic gift to fight with devils and to lie frequently at the point of death, then he was indeed in this a very Peter or Paul, however much he might lack the other apostolic characters.[914] Here we have the idea of his Divine calling, always most to the front in times of danger, which both strengthens him and enables him to inspire others with a little of his own confidence. “I and Bugenhagen alone remain here,” he wrote during the days of the plague, “but we are not alone, for Christ is with us and will triumph in us and shelter us from Satan, as we hope and trust.”[915] * * * * * We already are acquainted with some of his admissions of his own weakness and acknowledgments of the greater gifts and achievements of others--confessions which have been extolled as a proof of his real humility. “I have no such foolish humility,” so he says, “as to wish to deny the gifts God has bestowed on me. In myself I have indeed enough and more than enough to humble me and teach me that I am nothing. In God, however, we may well pride ourselves, and rejoice and glory in His gifts and extol them, as I myself do on account of my German Psalter; for I studied the Psalter, thanks be to God, with great fruit; but all to the honour and glory of God to Whom be praise for ever and ever.” This he wrote to Eobanus Hessus, the poet, in a high-flown letter thanking him for translating the German Psalter into excellent Latin.[916] Of his own virtues or sinfulness he preferred to speak humorously, as his manner was. Thus, he says, for instance, in 1526, in his suppressed “Widder den Radschlag der Meintzischen Pfafferey,” that “he had not defiled any man’s wife or child,” “had not robbed anyone of his goods ... nor murdered or assaulted anyone or given help or counsel thereto”; his sin consisted in “not pulling a long face but in insisting on being merry”; also in eating meat on forbidden days. People might defame his life, but he was not going to heed “the dirty hogsnouts.”[917]