Fancying himself the passive tool of Divine Providence, it becomes lawful for him deliberately to scatter over the world his literary bomb-shells, exclaiming: God wills it, for, did He not, He could prevent it! He flings broadcast atrocious charges of a character to arouse men’s worst passions, and, at the same time, writes to his friends: If it is too much, God at our prayer must provide a remedy.[512] Hence it is God Who must bear the blame for everything, seeing that He works through Luther. God made him a Doctor of Holy Scripture, let Him therefore see to it. He “throws down the keys at the door” of God when the work goes ill. Why did He will it? “I cannot stop the course of events,” he says somewhat more truly in 1525, “for matters have gone too far”; he adds, however: “I will shut my eyes and leave God to act; He will do as He pleases.”[513] This way of thinking was nothing new in Luther, but may be traced in his earliest literary efforts, which only shows how deeply it was rooted in his mind. “In all I do I wish to be led, not by the rede and deed of man, but by the rede and deed of God!” so he said in 1517, when declining the advice of those who only wished to serve his best interests; yet, in the same letter in which these words occur, he confesses his “precipitancy, presumption and prejudice,” qualities “on account of which he was blamed by all.”[514] Later, too, as we know, he saw in things both great and small the hand of God at work in him; all his efforts and even his very mistakes were God’s, not his. It was by God that, while yet a monk, he had been “forcibly torn from the Hours,”[515] i.e. freed from the duty of reciting the Divine Office; God had led him like a blinkered charger into the midst of the battle; it was God, again, Who had “flung him into matrimony” and Who had laid upon him, the “wonderful monk,” the burden of preaching to the great ones and the tenor of his message. “Hence you ought to believe my word absolutely … but, even to this day, people do not believe that my preaching is the Word of God.… But, on it I will stake my soul, that I preach the true and pure Word of God, and for it I am also ready to die.… If you believe it you will be saved, if you don’t you will be damned.”[516] Seeing the tumults and disorders that had arisen through him, he cries: “It is the Lord Who does this”; “we see God’s plan in these things”; “It was God Who began it”; “in our doings we are guided by the Divine Counsel alone.”[517]