“I am old and worked out—‘old, cold and out of shape,’ as they say—and yet cannot find any rest, so greatly am I tormented every day with all manner of business and scribbling. I now know rather more of the portents of the end of this world; that it is indeed on its last legs is quite certain, with Satan raging so furiously and the world becoming so utterly beastly. My only remaining consolation is that the end cannot be far off. Now at last fewer false doctrines will spring up, the world being weary and sick of the Word of God; for if they take to living like Epicureans and to despising the Word, who will then have any hankering after heresies?... Let us pray ‘Thy will be done,’ and leave everything to take its course, to fall or stand or perish; let things go their own way if otherwise they will not go.” “Germany,” he says, “has had its day and will never again be what it once was”; divided against itself it must, so he fancies, succumb to the devil’s army embodied in the Turks. This to Jakob Probst, the Bremen preacher.[802] Not long after he wrote to the same: “Germany is full of scorners of the Word.... Our sins weigh heavily upon us as you know, but it is useless for us to grumble. Let things take their course, seeing they are going thus.”[803] To Amsdorf he says in a letter that he would gladly die. “The world is a dreadful Sodom.” “And, moreover, it will grow still worse.” “Could I but pass away with such a faith, such peace, such a falling asleep in the Lord as my daughter [who had just died]!”[804] Similarly, in another letter to Amsdorf we read: “Before the flood the world was as Germany now is before her downfall. Since they refuse to listen they must be taught by experience. It will cry out with Jeremias [li. 9]: ‘We would have cured Babylon, but she is not healed; let us forsake her.’ God is indeed our salvation, and to all eternity will He shield us.”[805] “We will rejoice in our tribulation,” so he encourages his former guest Cordatus, “and leave things to go their way; it is enough that we, and you too, should cause the sun of our teaching to rise all cloudless over the wicked world, after the example of God our Father, Who makes His sun to shine on the just and the unjust. The sun of our doctrine is His; what wonder then if people hate us.” “Thus we can see,” so he concludes, that “outwardly we live in the kingdom of the devil.”[806] Plunged in such melancholy he is determined, without trusting in human help, so he writes to his friend Jonas, “to leave the guidance of all things to Christ alone”; of all active work he was too weary; everything was “full of deception and hypocrisy, particularly amongst the powerful”; to sigh and pray was the best thing to do; “let us put out of our heads any thought and plans for helping matters, for all is alike useless and deceitful, as experience shows.”[807]