Talking at table about a thunder-clap which had been heard in winter, he quite agreed with Bugenhagen “that it was downright Satanic.” “People,” he complains, “pay no heed to the portents of this kind which occur without number.” Melanchthon had an experience of this sort before the death of Franz von Sickingen. Others, whom Luther mentions, saw wonderful signs in the heavens and armies at grips; the year before the coming of the Evangel wonders were seen in the stars; “these are in every instance lying portents of Satan; nothing certain is foretold by them; during the last fifteen years there have been many of them; the only thing certain is that we have to expect the coming wrath of God.”[878] Years before, the signs in the heavens and on the earth, for instance the flood promised for 1524, had seemed to him to forebode the “world upheaval” which his Evangel would bring.[879] Luther shared to the full the superstition of his day. He did not stand alone when he thus interpreted public events and everyday occurrences. It was the fashion in those days for people, even in Catholic circles, superstitiously to look out for portents and signs. In 1537[880] Luther relates some far-fetched tales of this sort. The most devoted servants of the devil are, according to him, the sorcerers and witches of whom there are many.[881] In 1540 he related to his guests how a schoolmaster had summoned the witches by means of a horse’s head.[882] “Repeatedly,” so he told them in that same year, “they did their best to harm me and my Katey, but God preserved us.” On another occasion, after telling some dreadful tales of sorcery, he adds: “The devil is a mighty spirit.” “Did not God and His dear angels intervene, he would surely slay us with those thunder-clubs of his which you call thunderbolts.”[883] In earlier days he had told them, that, Dr. “Faust, who claimed the devil as his brother-in-law, had declared that ‘if I, Martin Luther, had only shaken hands with him he would have destroyed me’; but I would not have been afraid of him, but would have shaken hands with him in God’s name and reckoning on God’s protection.”[884] According to him, most noteworthy of all were the diabolical deeds then on the increase which portended a mighty revulsion and a catastrophe in the world’s history. Everything, his laboured calculations on the numbers in the biblical prophecies included, all point to this. Even the appearance of a new kind of fox in 1545 seemed to him of such importance that he submitted the case to an expert huntsman for an opinion. He himself was unable to decide what it signified, “unless it be that change in all things which we await and for which we pray.”[885] The change to which he here and so often elsewhere refers is the end of the world. 2. Luther’s Fanatical Expectation of the End of the World. His hopeless Pessimism