The hostility of the Papists to Lutheranism, had, so Luther thought, been manifestly punished by Heaven in the defeat of Henry of Brunswick; it had “already been foretold in the prophecies pronounced against him,” which had forecasted his destruction as the “son of perdition”; he was a “warning example set up by God for the tyrants of our days”; for every contemner of the Word is “plainly a tyrant.”[862] Luther was very suspicious of Melanchthon, Bucer and others who leaned towards the Zwinglian doctrine on the Supper. So much had Magister Philippus, his one-time right-hand man, to feel his displeasure and irritability that the latter bewails his lot of having to dwell as it were “in the very den of the Cyclopes” and with a real “tyrant.” “There is much in one’s intercourse with Luther,” so Cruciger said confidentially, in 1545, in a letter to Veit Dietrich, “that repels those who have a will of their own and attach some importance to their own judgment; if only he would not, through listening to the gossip of outsiders, take fire so quickly, chiding those who are blameless and breaking out into fits of temper; this, often enough, does harm even in matters of great moment.”[863] Luther himself was by no means unwilling to admit his faults in this direction and endeavoured to make up for them by occasionally praising his fellow-workers in fulsome terms; Yet so deep-seated was his suspicion of Melanchthon’s orthodoxy, that he even thought for a while of embodying his doctrine on the Sacrament in a formulary, which should condemn all his opponents and which all his friends, particularly those whom he had reason to mistrust, should be compelled to sign. This, according to Bucer, would have involved the departure of Melanchthon into exile. Bucer expressed his indignation at this projected “abominable condemnation” and at the treatment meted out to Melanchthon by Luther.[864] Bucer himself was several times the object of Luther’s wrath, for instance, for his part in the “Cologne Book of Reform”: “It is nothing but a lot of twaddle in which I clearly detect the influence of that chatterbox Bucer.”[865] When Jakob Schenk arrived at Wittenberg after a long absence Luther was so angry with him for not sharing his views as to refuse to receive him when he called; he did the same in the case of Agricola, in spite of the fact that the latter brought a letter of recommendation from the Margrave of Brandenburg; in one of his letters calls him: “the worst of hypocrites, an impenitent man!”[866] From such a monster, so he said, he would take nothing but a sentence of condemnation. As for his former friend Schenk, he ironically offers him to Bishop Amsdorf as a helper in the ministry. On both of them he persisted in bestowing his old favourite nicknames, Jeckel and Grickel (Jakob and Agricola). _Luther’s Single-handed Struggle with the Powers of Evil_