Fury had stood by the cradle of Luther’s undertaking and under its gloomy auspices his cause continued to progress. Without repeating what has already been said, it may suffice to point out how his excitement frequently led him to take even momentous steps which he would otherwise have boggled at. Only too frankly he admitted to his friend Lang in 1519 and soon after to Spalatin, that Eck had so exasperated him that he would now shake himself loose and write and do things from which he would otherwise have refrained. His early “jest” at Rome’s expense would now become a real warfare against her[411]—as though Rome was to be made to suffer for Eck and his violence. In 1521, from apprehension of his violence and out of consideration for the Court, Spalatin had kept back two of Luther’s writings which the latter wished to be printed. “I shall get into a towering rage,” so the author wrote to him, “and bring out much worse things on this subject afterwards if my manuscripts are lost, or you refuse to surrender them. You cannot destroy the spirit even though you destroy the lifeless paper.”[412]—This incident at so early a date shows how deeply seated in him was his tendency to violence; even at the outset it was to some extent personal animus which led him to shape his action as he did. Self-esteem and the plaudits of the mob had even then begun to dim his mental vision. The part played by the first person is great indeed in Luther’s writings. “We should all have fallen back into the state of the brute!” “Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great graces on any bishop as on me.” “I, wonderful monk that I am,” have, by God’s grace, overthrown the devil of Rome; “I have stamped off the heads of more than twenty factions, as though they had been worms.” Countless other such utterances are to be found in what has gone before.[413] “He,” so he declares, “was surely far too learned to allow himself to be taught by the Swiss theologians”; this was one of the sayings that led the friends of the latter to speak of his “tyrannical pride.”[414] Here come the fractious Sacramentarians, he says, and want a share in my fame; they want to celebrate a “glorious victory” as though it was not from me that they got everything. This is how things turn out, “one labours and some other man takes the fruit.”[415] Carlstadt comes forward and seeks to become a new doctor; “he is anxious to detract from my importance and to introduce among the people his own regulations.”[416] A character where the first person asserted itself so imperiously could not but be a disputatious one. Down to his very last years Luther’s whole life was filled with strife: quarrels with the jurists; with his own theologians; with the Jews; with the Princes and rapacious nobility; with the Popish foemen and with his own colleagues and followers, even with the preachers and writers dearest to him.