Such were Luther’s temptations, of which, afterwards, he did not scruple to boast. “Often did they bring us to death’s door,” he says of the mental struggles in which his new doctrine and practice of sheltering himself behind the merits of Christ involved him. But, nevertheless, “I will hold fast to that Man alone, even though it should bring me to the grave!”[484] Again, in 1532, we hear him making his own the words: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord” (Ps. cxxix. 1). The prophet is not complaining of any mere “worldly temptations,” but of “that anguish of conscience, of those blows and terrors of death such as the heart feels when on the brink of despair and when it fancies itself abandoned by God; when it both sees its sin and how all its good works are condemned by God the angry Judge.… When a man is sunk in such anxiety and trouble he cannot recover unless help is bestowed on him from above.… Nearly all the great saints suffered in this way and were dragged almost to the gates of death by sin and the Law; hence David’s exclamation: ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord!’”—The whole trend of what he says, likewise the counsels he gives on the remedies that may bring consolation, show plainly his attachment to this dark night of the soul and his conviction that he is but treading in the footsteps of the “great Saints” and “Prophets.”[485] At any rate there is no room for doubt that this opened out a rich field for delusion; what he says depicts a frame of mind in which hallucinations might well thrive; we shall, however, leave it to others to determine how far pathological elements intervene.