The noteworthy utterance about the last flicker of the Lutheran Evangel occurs also in the Table-Talk collected by Mathesius dating from the years 1542 and 1543. “I believe that the Last Day is not far off. The reason is that we now see the last effort of the Evangel; this resembles a light; when a light is about to expire it sends up at the last a sudden flame as though it were going to burn for quite a long while and thereupon goes out. And, though it appears now as though the Evangel were about to be spread abroad, I fear it will suddenly expire and the Last Day come. It is the same with a sick man; when at the point of death he seems quite cheerful and on the high road to recovery, and, then, suddenly, he is gone.”[927] The Table-Talk from the Mathesius collection recently published by Kroker, among other curious utterances of Luther’s on the end of the world, contains also the following: In view of the dissensions by which the new Evangel was torn the speaker says, in 1542-43: “If the world goes on for another fifty years things will become worse than ever, for sects will arise which still lie hidden in the hearts of men, so that we shall not know where we stand. Hence, dear Lord, come! Come and overwhelm them with Thy Judgment Day, for no improvement is any longer to be looked for.”[928] Here too he repeatedly declares that he himself is tired of the world: “I have had enough of the world,” he says, and goes on to introduce the ugly comparison alluded to above.[929] He adds: “The world fancies that if only it were rid of me all would be well.” He is saddened to see that many of his followers make little account of him: “If the Princes and gentry won’t do it, then things will not last long.”[930] Of the want of respect shown to his preachers he says: “Where there is such contempt of the Divine Word and of the preachers, shall not God smite with His fist?” “But if we preachers were to meet and agree amongst ourselves, as has been done in the Papacy, there would be less need for this. The worst of it is that they are not at one even amongst themselves.” He finds a makeshift consolation for the divergency in teaching in the thought that “so it always was even from the beginning of the world, preachers always having disagreed amongst themselves.” “There is a bad time coming, look you to it”; things may go on for another fifty years now that the young have been brought up in his doctrine, but, after that, “let them look out. Hence, let no one fear the plague, but rather be glad to die.”[931] Not only did he look forward to his own death, but, as we know, to that of “all his children,” seeing that strange things would happen in the world.[932]