The reason why Luther longed with such ardour for the coming of the Last Day has already been shown to have been his growing pessimism and the depression resulting from the sad experiences with which he had met (above, vol. v., p. 245 ff.). In his elastic way he, however, manages, when preaching to the people, to give a rather different reason for his prediction of the fall of Antichrist and the coming of the end. In Popery, he declares, we were not allowed to speak of the Last Judgment; “how we dreaded it”; “we pictured Christ to ourselves as a Judge to Whom we had to give account. To that we came, thanks to our works.” But now it is quite otherwise. “Now on the contrary I should be glad if the Last Day were to come, because there is no greater consolation.”[501] Here he speaks as though inspired solely by the purest of intentions when he looked forward to the coming of the vanquisher of Antichrist. * * * * * The wickedness of his opponents and the weapons to be used against them constitute a second group of ideas. Here, once again, the psychological or pathological appreciation of Luther’s strange and morbid train of thought makes imperative a further investigation of certain points already discussed in other connections. Often Luther seems unable to stem the torrent of charges and insults that streams from him as soon as adversaries appear in his field of vision. Frequently it almost looks as though some superhuman agency outside himself had opened the sluice-gates of his terrible eloquence. He is determined to rage against them “even to the very grave”; his wrath against them “refreshes his blood.” It is actually when expressing his hatred in the most incredible language that he is most sensible of the “nearness of God.” Do not his Popish foes deserve even worse than he, a mere man, is able to heap on them? Those scoundrels who “only seek a pretext for telling lies against us and misleading simple folk, though quite well aware that they are in the wrong.”[502] Their palpable obstinacy, in spite of their better judgment, was so great, so he argued, that it was only because Luther advocated it that they refused to hear of any moral reform, for instance, of the clergy marrying, etc., otherwise they would have held it “quite all right.” He does not shrink from demanding that such roguery should “be hunted down with hounds,” no less than the wickedness of these “most depraved of brothel-keepers, open adulterers, stealers of women and seducers of maidens.”[503]