The dignity of his chair at Wittenberg is exalted by him to giddy heights. “This university and town,” he said of Wittenberg, may vie with any others. “All the highest authorities of the day are at one with us, like Amsdorf, Brenz and Rhegius. Such men are our correspondents.” In comparison, the sects are simply ludicrous in their insignificance. Woe to those within the fold who dare to run counter to Luther, “like ‘Jeckel’ and ‘Grickel’; they imagine that they alone are clever and that they, like ‘Zwingel’ also, never learnt anything from us! Yet who knew anything 25 years ago? Who stood by me 21 years since, when God, against both my will and my knowledge, led me into the fray? Alas, what a misfortune is ambition!” This he said in 1540,[520] but already eight years before he had complained bitterly: “Each one wants to make himself out to be alone in knowing everything.… Everywhere we find the same Master Wiseacre, who is so clever that he can lead a horse by its tail.” Though one alone has received from God the mission of preaching the Gospel, yet “there are others, even among his pupils, who think they know ten times more about it than he.… Then, hey presto, another doctrine is set up.”[521] “Deadly harm” to Christianity is the result; nevertheless, according to Christ’s prophecy, “factions and sects” there must be; but their source is and remains the devil[522]—who, according to Luther, is the true God of this world in which indeed his finger can everywhere be seen. (See above, vol. v., p. 275 ff.) Strange indeed is the frame of mind here presented to the observer. So much is Luther the plaything of his fancy and the feeling of the moment, that, at times he seems the victim of a sort of self-suggestion and to be following blindly the idea which happens to hold the field. His judgment being seen to be so confused, it becomes easier to estimate at their right value certain of his ideas, particularly his conviction that he and his cause owed their preservation to a series of palpable miracles. He contrived to spread among his pupils the belief that “holy Luther” was the greatest prophet since the time of the Apostles.[523] Yet anyone who reflects how Luther could devote a special tract to proving that so everyday an occurrence as the “escape” of a nun from her convent was worthy of being deemed a great miracle for all time, can only marvel at the facility with which Luther could delude himself.[524] _Other Abnormal Lines of Thought and Behaviour_