This change of standpoint reminds us of another instance of the same sort. Luther’s teaching on the terrifying character of the divine action is much the same as his theological teaching that fear is the incentive to good deeds. While, as a rule, he goes much too far in seeking to rid the believer of any fear of God as the Judge, preaching an unbounded confidence and even altogether excluding fear from the work of conversion, yet, elsewhere, he emphasises most strongly this same fear, as called for and quite indispensable; this he did in his controversies with the Antinomians and, even earlier, as on the occasion of the Visitations, on account of its religious influence on the people. No change or alteration is, however, apparent in the accounts he gives above of the cases in which he came in touch with the other world; he sticks firmly by his statement that he had experienced such things both mentally and palpably. Hence the difficulty of coming to any decision about them. * * * * * But there are further alleged experiences, also detailed at length, which have a place here, viz. the apparitions of the devil himself. In 1530 Luther was thrown into commotion by a glimpse of the devil, under the shape of a fiery serpent, outside the walls of the Coburg. One evening in June, about nine o’clock, as his then companion Veit Dietrich relates, Luther was looking out of the window, down on the little wood surrounding the castle. “He saw,” says this witness, “a fiery, flaming serpent, which, after twisting and writhing about, dropped from the roof of the nearest tower down into the wood. He at once called me and wanted to show me the ghost (‘_spectrum_’) as I stood by his shoulder. But suddenly he saw it disappear. Shortly after, we both saw the apparition again. It had, however, altered its shape and now looked more like a great flaming star lying in the field, so that we were able to distinguish it plainly even though the weather was rainy.” Here the pupil undoubtedly did his best to see something. On his master, however, the firm conviction of having seen the devil made a deep impression. He had just enjoyed a short respite after a bout of ill-health. The night after the apparition he again collapsed and almost lost consciousness. On the following day he felt, so Dietrich says, “a very troublesome buzzing in the head”; the apparition leads the narrator to infer that Luther’s bodily trouble, which now recommenced in an aggravated form, had been entirely “the work of the devil.”[413] So certain was Luther of having seen the devil that he mentioned the occurrence in 1531 at one of the meetings held for the revision of his translation of the Psalms. The words of the Psalmist concerning “_sagittæ_” and “_fulgura_,” etc. (Ps. xviii. (xvii.) 15), he applies directly to his own personal experiences and to the incident in question, “Just as I saw my devil flying over