Apart from his peculiar belief in the devil, of which he was never to rid himself, there was the pessimism which loomed so large in his later years;[1198] there was also his habit of regarding himself and his work as the pet aversion and chief object of Satan’s persecution, for since, according to his own contention, his great struggle against Antichrist was in reality directed against the devil, the latter naturally endeavoured everywhere to bar his way. If great scandals arise as the result of his sermons, it is Satan who is to blame; “he smarts under the wounds he receives and therefore does he rage and throw everything into confusion.”[1199] The disorderly proceedings against the Catholics at Erfurt which brought discredit on his teaching were also due to the devil. The Wittenberg students who disgrace him are instigated by the devil. Dr. Eck was incited against him by Satan. The Catholic princes who resist him, like Duke George of Saxony, have at least a “thousand devils” who inspire them and assist them. Above all, it is the devil himself who delivers his oracles through the mouthpiece of those teachers of the innovations who differ from Luther, deluding them to such an extent that they lose “their senses and their reason.”[1200] If Satan can do nothing else against the Evangel he sends out noisy spirits so as to bolster up the heresy of the existence “of a Purgatory.”[1201] Such ideas became so habitual with him, that, in later years, the conviction that the devil was persecuting his work developed into an abiding mania, drawing, as it were, everything else into its vortex. Everywhere he hears behind him the footsteps of his old enemy, the devil. “Satan has often had me by the throat.... He has frequently beset me so hard that I knew not whether I was dead or alive ... but with God’s Word I have withstood him.”[1202] He lies with me in my bed, so he says on one occasion; “he sleeps much more with me than my Katey.”[1203] His struggle with him degenerates into a hand-to-hand brawl, “I have to be at grips with him daily.”[1204] His pupils related, that on his own giving, when he was an old man “the devil had walked with him in the dormitory of the [former] monastery ... plaguing and tormenting him”; that “he had one or two such devils who were in the habit of lying in wait” for him, and, “that, when unable to get the better of his heart, they attacked and troubled his head.”[1205] Whether the narrators of these accounts are referring to actual apparitions or not does not much matter.