He had even once declared that poisoning was a regular business with Satan: “He can bring death by means of a leaflet from off a tree; he has more poison phials and kinds of death at his beck and call than all the apothecaries in all the world; if one poison doesn’t work he uses another.”[858] He had long been convinced that the devil was able to carry through the air those who made themselves over to him; “we must not call in the devil, for he comes often enough uncalled, and loves to be by us, hardened foe of ours though he be.... He is indeed a great and mighty enemy.”[859] Towards the end of his life, in 1541, it came to his ears that the devil was more than usually busy with his poisons: “At Jena and elsewhere,” so he warns Melanchthon, “the devil has let loose his poisoners. It is a wonder to me why the great, knowing the fury of Satan, are not more watchful. Here it is impossible any longer to buy or to use anything with safety.” Melanchthon was therefore to be careful when invited out; at Erfurt the spices and aromatic drugs on sale in the shops had been found to be mixed with poison; at Altenburg as many as twelve people had died from poison taken in a single meal. Anxious as he was about his friend, his trust was nevertheless unshaken in the protection of God and the angels. I myself am still in the hands of my Moses (Katey), he adds, “suffering from a filthy discharge from my ear and meditating in turn on life and on death. God’s Will be done. Amen. May you be happy in the Lord now and for ever.”[860] “A new art of killing us,” so he tells Melanchthon in the same year, had been invented by Satan, viz. of mixing poison with our wine and milk; at Jena twelve persons were said to have died of poisoned wine, “though more likely of too much drink”; at Magdeburg and Nordhausen, however, milk had been found in the possession of the sellers that seemed to have been poisoned. “At any rate, all things lie under Christ’s feet, and we shall suffer so long and as much as He pleases. For the nonce we are supreme and they [the Papist ‘monsters’] are hurrying to destruction.... So long as the Lord of Heaven is at the helm we are safe, live and reign and have our foes under our feet. Amen.” Casting all fear to the winds he goes on to comfort Melanchthon and his faint-hearted comrades in the tone of the mystic: “Fear not; you are angels, nay, great angels or archangels, working, not for us but for the Church, nay, for God, Whose cause it is that you uphold, as even the very gates of hell must admit; these, though they may indeed block our way, cannot overcome us, because at the very beginning of the world the hostile, snarling dragon was overthrown by the Lion of the tribe of Juda.”[861]