belonging to Saxony, and, over and above this, look on the world and on all reason as rags fit only for the closet”—such is a fair sample of the language—and, moreover, treat everything in a Popish, Roman, Cardinalitial way, but, please God, our Lord God will by our prayers one day compel your Electoral Highness to sweep out all the filth yourself. In the first letter he had threatened fiercely the hated Cardinal with publishing what he knew (or possibly only feigned to know) of his faults; he would not “advise him to stir up the filth any further”; here in the second letter he charges him in a general way with robbery, petty theft and fraud in the matter of Church property, also with having cheated a woman of the town whom he used to keep; he deserved to be “hanged on a gallows three times as high as the Giebichstein,” where Schönitz had been executed. Incidentally he promises him a new work that shall reveal all his doings. The threatened work was, however, never published, Albert’s family, the Brandenburgs, having raised objections at the Electoral Court of Saxony. Albert, however, offered quite frankly to submit the Schönitz case and the grievances raised by his relatives to the judgment of George of Anhalt, one of the princes who had gone over to Lutheranism, who was perfectly at liberty to take the advice of Jonas, nay, even of Luther himself. “In this we may surely see a proof that he was not conscious of being in the least blameworthy.”[394] At any rate he seems to have been quite willing to lay his case even before his most bitter foe.[395] * * * * * Such was Luther’s irritability and quickness of temper, even in private concerns, that, at times, even in his letters, he would pour forth the most incredible threats.