Three years before this he complains that no one is strong enough in belief in the devil; the “struggle between the devils and the angels” affrights him; for it is to be apprehended that “the angels whilst fighting for us often get the worst for a time.”[1189] His glance often surveys the great world-combat which the few who believe wage on Christ’s side against Satan, and which has lasted since the dawn of history; now, at the very end of the world, he sees the result more clearly. Christ is able to save His followers from the devil’s claws only by exerting all His strength; they, like Luther, suffer from weakness of faith, just as Christ Himself did in the Garden of Olives(!); they, like Luther, stumble, because Christ loves to show Himself weak in the struggle with the devil; mankind’s and God’s rights have come off second best during the age-long contest with the devil. In Jewry, for which Luther’s hatred increases with age, he sees men so entirely delivered over to the service of the devil that “all the heathen in a lump” are simply nothing in comparison with the Jews; but even the “fury of the Jews is mere jest and child’s play” compared with the devilish corruption of the Papacy. “The devil is there; he has great claws and whosoever falls into them him he holds fast, as they find to their cost in Popery. Hence let us always pray and fear God.” This in 1543.[1190] But we must also fear the devil, and very much too, for, as he solemnly declares in 1542: “Our last end is that we fear the devil”; for the worst sins are “delusions of the devil.”[1191] “The whole age is Satanic,”[1192] and the “activity of the devil is now manifest”; the speaker longs for “God at length to mock at Satan.”[1193] “The devil is all-powerful at present, several foreign kings are his train-bearers.... God Himself must come in order to resist the proud spirit.... Shortly Christ will make an end of his lies and murders.”[1194] The whole of his work, the struggle for the Evangel, seems to him at times as one long wrestling with the boundless might of Satan.[1195] All his life, so he said in his old age, he had forged ahead “tempestuously” and “hit out with sledge-hammer blows”; but it was all against Satan. “I rush in head foremost, but ... against the devil.”[1196] As early as 1518, however, he knew the “thoughts of Satan.”[1197] It is not difficult to recognise the different elements which, as Luther grew older, combined permanently to establish him in his devil-mania.