No Protestant hitherto has used terms so strong to describe Luther’s overwrought nerves as his most recent biographer, Hausrath, the Heidelberg theologian, in his first edition of his “Life of Luther.” His assertions do undoubtedly err on the side of exaggeration.[549] For instance, when he says, that, owing to his illness in the monastery Luther had more than once been in danger of sinking into “the abyss of religious melancholia.”[550] Erroneously regarding the “temptations”—in reality mere remorse of conscience—from which Luther suffered, as the outcome of his morbid bodily and mental state, he even ventures to hint expressly at the nature of the malady: “The regularity with which the attacks return during all the years spent in the monastery and after he had commenced his public career, leads us to infer a recurrent psychosis, the attacks of which became less frequent after his marriage, but never altogether ceased.”[551] In recent times, apart from Hausrath, two other writers, both of them non-Catholics, have looked more closely into Luther’s pathology. Dr. Berkhan in an article in the “Archiv für Psychiatrie” entitled “Die nervösen Beschwerden Luthers,” and Gustav Kawerau in the study “Etwas vom kranken Luther,” printed in the “Deutsch-evangelische Blätter.” The two Protestants, Küchenmeister and Ebstein, who also dealt with Luther’s maladies,[552] failed to discuss the psychological phenomena here under consideration; what interested them was more Luther’s ordinary illnesses though, it is true, they bring forward various data which may prove of interest here; these, nevertheless, must be cautiously used, as the authors are somewhat deficient in historical criticism. Older writers who treated of Luther’s illnesses, e.g. the Protestant pastor Friedrich Siegmund Keil, Garmann, the Chemnitz physician and an anonymous writer in the “Neues Hannöversche Magazin” are even less satisfactory. Of the two first mentioned, Kawerau supplies a careful review of those statements of Luther’s which concern his nervous maladies, not, however, carrying them back to his earliest years. He gives us the picture “of a man occupying a most responsible position, ever in friction with his surroundings” and “in a state of nervous overstrain due to too much work of body and mind.”[553] With these words he seeks to pave the way for a psychological appreciation of all that, as he says, “so often appears repulsive or regrettable in Luther, for instance, his waxing irritability, his unbridled anger, the excesses he commits by word and pen, and his sudden changes of mood.” He even opines that “the spiritual temptations may be accounted for by his all-too-great labours and anxieties, and their effect upon his constitution”;[554] his conclusion is that a fuller knowledge of Luther’s ailments “helps us to understand him aright and better to appreciate his greatness.”[555]