“Not only from Holy Scripture,” he said in a conversation in 1540, “but also from my violent inner combats and temptations have I learnt that Christ is God incarnate, and that there is a Trinity. I now know it even better from experience than by faith that these articles are true. For in our greatest temptations nothing can help us but the assurance that Christ became man and is now our intercessor at the right hand of the Father. There is nothing that excites our confidence to such a degree.... God, too, has championed this article from the beginning of the world against countless heretics, and even to-day defends it against Turk and Pope; He incessantly confirms it by miracles and permits us to call His Son, the Son of God and true God, and grants all that we ask in Christ’s name. For what else has saved us even till the present day in so many perils but prayer to Christ? Whoever says it is Master Philip’s and my doing, lies. It is God Who does it for Christ’s sake.... Therefore we hold fast to these articles in spite of the objections of reason. They have remained and will continue.”[919] Luther often had recourse to prayer, especially when he found himself in difficulty, or in an awkward situation from which he could see no escape; in his letters he also as a rule asks for prayers for himself and for the common cause of the new Evangel. It is impossible to take such requests as a mere formality; his way of making them is usually so full of feeling that they must have been meant in earnest. In 1534 he wrote a special instruction for the simple and unlearned on the way to pray.[920] Many parts of this booklet recall the teaching of the great masters of prayer, though unfortunately it is imbued with his peculiar tenets. He urges people to pray fervently against “the idolatry of the Turk, of the Pope, of all false teachers and devil’s snares”; he also mocks at the prayers of the “parsons and monks,”[921] unable to refrain from his bitter polemics even in an otherwise edifying work. Yet the body of the booklet teaches quite accurately, in a fashion recalling the directions given by St. Ignatius, how the Our Father and other daily prayers may be devoutly recited, with pauses after the various petitions or words, so as to form a sort of meditation. He himself, so he assures his readers, was in the habit of “sucking” in this way at the Paternoster, and was also fond of occupying himself with a similar prayerful analysis of the Psalter.