“Our mad and raving Princes,” he says, “are now raging and blustering and planning to root out this teaching. Whoever is desirous of devoting himself to Christ must daily be ready to suffer any peril to life and limb.” Amongst the grounds for encouragement he adduces is the fact that even his very foes admitted, “that we preach and teach God’s Word; the only thing amiss being, that it was not done at their bidding, but that we at Wittenberg started it all unknown to them.” He calls the angry Princes “great merd-pots,” who are “kings and rulers of the pig-sty of the earth where the belly, the universal cesspool, reigns supreme.” “But we will be of good cheer and put our fingers to our noses at them”; because we hold fast to Christ therefore we suffer persecution from the world. “Who is the Pope, that he should be angry?... A sickly, smelly scarecrow.” “The Pope says: I will excommunicate you, thrust you down to the abyss of hell. [I tell him] Stick your tongue in my----. I am holy, am baptised, have God’s Word and His Promises to proclaim, but you are a sickly, syphilitic sack of maggots. It is thus that we should learn to make use of these words.”[1058] 3. The Psychology of Luther’s Abusive Language _Various Psychological Factors._ Psychologically to appreciate the phenomenon in question we must first of all take into account Luther’s temperament. To every unprejudiced observer it must be clear, that, without the unusual excitability natural to him, many of his utterances would be quite inexplicable; even when we have given due weight to Luther’s ungovernable temper and all too powerful imagination they still present many difficult questions to the observer. Luther himself, as early as 1520, excuses to Spalatin his offensive language on the ground of his natural “hot-bloodedness”; as everybody knew what his temper was, his opponents ought not to annoy him as they did; yet these “monsters” only provoked him the more, and made him “overstep the bounds of modesty and decency.”[1059] It is perfectly true that some of his foes did provoke him by their mode of attack, yet on the other hand his own violence usually put theirs in the shade. (See below, xxvii., 4.) In addition to his natural impetuosity which furnishes the chief basis of the phenomenon under consideration, several other factors must also be envisaged, depending on the objects or persons arousing his indignation.