When giving vent to his grudge against Schwenckfeld in his Table-Talk shortly after this, he declared: “He is a poor creature, with neither talent nor an enlightened spirit.... He bespirts the people with the grand name of Christ.... The dreamer has stolen a few phrases from my book, ‘_De ultimis verbis Davidis_’ [of 1543], and with these the poor wretch seeks to make a great show.” It was on this occasion that Catherine Bora took exception to a word used by her husband, declaring that it was “too coarse.”[299] In his “Kurtz Bekentnis vom heiligen Sacrament” (1545) Luther again gives vigorous expression to his aversion to the “Fanatics and foes of the Sacrament, Carlstadt, Zwingli, Œcolampadius and ‘Stinkfield’”; they were heretics “whom he had warned sufficiently” and who were to be avoided.[300] He had refused to listen to or to answer that “slanderer Schwenckfeld” because everything was wasted on him. “This you may well tell those among whom, no doubt, Stinkfield makes my name to stink. I like being abused by such slanderers.” If by their attacks upon the Sacrament they call the “Master of the house Beelzebub, how should they not abuse His household?”[301] 7. Self-Improvement and the Reformation of the Church Self-betterment, by the leading of a Christian life and, particularly, by striving after Christian perfection, had in Catholic times been inculcated by many writers and even by first-rank theologians. In this field it was usual to take for granted, both in popular manuals and in learned treatises, as the general conviction, that religion teaches people to strive after what is highest, whether in each one’s ordinary duties of daily life, or in the ecclesiastical or religious state. The power of the moral teaching was to stand revealed in the struggle after the ideal thus set forth. _Did Luther Found a School of True Christian Life?_ Luther, of set purpose, refused to make any attempt to found, in the strict sense of the term, a spiritual school of Christian life or perfection. He ever found it a difficult matter even to give any methodical instructions to this end. Though he dealt fully and attractively with many details of life, not only in his sermons and commentaries, but also in special writings which still serve as inspirations to practical Christianity, yet he would never consent to draft anything in the shape of a system for reaching virtue, still less for attaining perfection. On one occasion he even deliberately refused his friend Bugenhagen’s request that he would sketch out a rule of Christian life, appealing to his well-known thesis that “the true Christian has no need of rules for his conduct, for the spirit of faith guides him to do all that God requires and that brotherly love demands of him.”[302]