Before this, according to other notes, he had said to his table companions, that he was daily “at grips with Satan”;[1292] that during the attacks of the devil he had often not known whether he were “dead or alive.”[1293] “The devil,” so he assures them, “brought me to such a pitch of despair that I did not even know if there was a God.”[1294] “When the devil finds me idle, unmindful of God’s Word, and thus unarmed, he assails my conscience with the thought that I have taught what is false, that I have rent asunder the churches which were so peaceful and content under the Papacy, and caused many scandals, dissensions and factions by my teaching, etc. Well, I can’t deny that I am often anxious and uneasy about this, but, as soon as I lay hold on the Word, I again get the best.”[1295] To the people he said, in a sermon in 1531: “The devil is closer to us than we dream. I myself often feel the devil raging within me. Sometimes I believe and sometimes I don’t, sometimes I am cheerful and sometimes sad.”[1296]—A year later he describes in a sermon how the devil, who “attacks the pious,” had often made him “sweat much and his heart to beat,” before he could withstand him with the right weapon, viz. with God’s Word, namely, the office committed to him and the service he had rendered to the world, “which it was not his to belie!”[1297] Some ten years before this he had spoken still more plainly to his hearers at Wittenberg, telling them, strange to say, of his experience in early days of the good effects of confession: “I would not for all the treasures of the world give up private confession, for I know what strength and comfort it has been to me. No one knows what it can do unless he has fought often and much with the devil. Indeed, the devil would long ago have done for me, had not confession saved me.” In fact whoever tells his troubles to his brother, receives from him, as from God, comfort “for his simple conscience and faint heart”; seldom indeed did one find a “strong, firm faith” which did not stand in need of this; hardly anyone could boast of possessing it. “You do not know yet,” he concludes, “what labour and trouble it costs to fight with and conquer the devil. But I know it well, for I have eaten a mouthful or two of salt with him. I know him well, and so does he know me.”[1298] After all these remarkably frank admissions there can remain no doubt that a heavy mist of doubts and anxieties overshadowed Luther’s inner life.