Still, he was untiringly active in furthering his cause by means of lectures and circular letters, as well as by an extensive private correspondence. He scattered the seeds of his peculiar doctrines amongst the nobility in particular and their dependents in country parts. Many people of standing either belonged or were well-disposed to his school, as Duke Christopher of Würtemberg wrote in 1564; according to him there were many at Augsburg and Nuremberg, in the Tyrol, in Allgäu, Silesia and one part of the Mark.[290] “The well-known intolerance of the Reformation and of its preachers,” remarks the Protestant historian of Schwenckfeld, “could not endure in their body a man who had his own views on the Sacraments and refused for conscience sake to take part in the practices of their Church.... He wandered, like a hunted deer, without hearth or home, through the cities and forests of South Germany, pursued by Luther and the preachers.”[291] As late as 1558 Melanchthon incited the authorities against him, declaring that “such sophistry as his requires to be severely dealt with by the princes.”[292] Not long after Schwenckfeld departed this life at Ulm in 1561. His numerous following in Silesia migrated, first to Saxony, then to Holland and England, and finally to Pennsylvania, where they still exist to this day. Luther’s indignation against Schwenckfeld knew no bounds. In conversation he spoke of him as Swinesfield,[293] and, in his addresses and writings, still more commonly as Stinkfield, a name which was also repeatedly applied by his followers to the man they so disliked.[294] In his Table-Talk Luther refers to that “rascal Schwenckfeld,” who was the instigator of numerous errors and deceives many people with his “honeyed words.”[295] He, like the fanatics, so Luther complains, despises “the spoken word,” and yet God willed “to deal with and work in us by such means.”[296] In 1540 he told his friends that Schwenckfeld was unworthy of being refuted by him, no less unworthy than Sebastian Frank, another gifted and independent critic of Luther and Lutheranism.[297] In 1543, when Schwenckfeld attempted to make advances to Luther and sent him a tract together with a letter, Luther sent down to the messenger a card on which he acknowledged the receipt of the book, but declared that “the senseless fool, beset as he is by the devil, understands nothing and does not even know what he is talking about.” He had better leave him, Luther, alone and not worry him with his “booklets, which the devil himself discharges through him.” In the last lines he invokes a sort of curse on Schwenckfeld, and all “Sacramentarians and Eutychians” of whom it had been said in the Bible (Jer. xxiii. 21): “I did not send prophets, yet they ran: I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesy.”[298]