In the same way as others who leave their Church, fling themselves into the turmoil and distractions of the world in order to escape their scruples, Luther too, allayed the reproach of his conscience by precipitating himself into the midst of the storm he had evoked; with this advantage, that the sharp weapons of abuse and scorn he employed could be turned against the enemy both without and within. Accustomed as he was to treat the voice of conscience as the voice of Satan, he willingly clung to the doubtful consolation that the stronger his abuse of his opponents the greater his own encouragement. The evil which he detected in Popery seemed to him to load the scale in his own favour. He even admits this with the most engaging frankness. “I am quite ready to allow that the Pope’s abomination is, after Christ, my greatest consolation. Hence those are hopeless simpletons who say we should not abuse the Pope. Don’t be slow in abuse, particularly when the devil attacks you on Justification.” He intends “to infuse courage into himself by considering the abomination and horror” of the Pope; and to “hold it up under the devil’s nose.”[1077] Döllinger remarks justly: “Here [in these anxieties of conscience] is to be found at least a partial psychological explanation of that wealth of bitter abuse which marks off Luther’s writings from all other literary products, ancient or mediæval.... Not seldom he sought to deaden the interior terrors of a reproving conscience with the noisy clamour of his vituperation.”[1078] We have just heard Luther promise to hold up the Pope’s abomination to the devil’s nose. This saying brings us to the principal explanation of the phenomenon under consideration. _Connection of Luther’s Abusiveness with his Mystic Persuasion of his Special Call._ Luther had brought himself to such a pitch as to see in the existing Church the devil’s kingdom, to overthrow which, with its Antichrist, was his own sublime mission. This theological, anti-diabolical motive for his anger and boundless invective, throws all others into the shade. “Even were I not carried away by my hot temper and my style of writing,” he says, “I should still be obliged to take the field, as I do, against the enemies of truth” (“children of the devil” he calls them elsewhere). “I am hot-headed enough, nor is my pen blunt.” But these foes “revel in the most horrible crimes not merely against me, but even against God’s Word.” Did not Christ Himself have recourse to abuse, he asks, against the “wicked and adulterous generation of the Jews, against the brood of vipers, the hypocrites and children of the devil”? “Whoever is strong in the consciousness of the truth, can display no patience towards its furious and ferocious enemies.”[1079]