“Come O Lord Jesus, Amen! The breath of Thy mouth dismays the diabolical gainsayer.” “Satan’s hate is all too Satanic.”[1036] Oh, that the devil’s gaping jaws were crushed by the blessed seed of the woman![1037] How little is left for God.[1038] “The remainder is swallowed by Satan who is the Prince of this world, surely an inscrutable decree of Eternal Wisdom.”[1039] “Prodigies everywhere daily manifest the power of the devil!”[1040] Against such a devil’s world, as Luther descried, what can help save the approaching “end of all”? “The kingdom of God is being laid waste by Turk and Jew and Pope,” the chosen tools of Satan; but “greater is He Who reigns in us than he who rules the world; the devil shall be under Christ to all eternity.”[1041] “The present rage of the devil only reveals God’s future wrath against mankind, who are so ungrateful for the Evangel.”[1042] “We cannot but live in this devil’s kingdom which surrounds us”;[1043] “but even with our last breath we must fight against the monsters of Satan.”[1044] Let the Papists, whose glory is mere “devil’s filth,” rejoice in their successes.[1045] As little heed is to be paid to them as to the preachers of the Evangel who have gone astray in doctrine, like Agricola and Schwenckfeld; they calmly “go their way to Satan to whom indeed they belong”;[1046] “they are senseless fools, possessed of the devil.” The devil “spues and ructates” his writings through them; this is the devil of heresy against whom solemnly launch the malediction: “God’s curse be upon thee, Satan! The spirit that summoned thee be with thee unto destruction!”[1047] Luther’s letters during his later years are crammed with things of this sort. The thought of the devil and his far-spread sphere of action, to which Luther had long been addicted, assumes in his mind as time goes on a more serious and gloomy shape, though he continues often enough to refer to the Divine protection promised against the powers of darkness and to the final victory of Christ.