Long before this other Catholic writers had instanced certain peculiarities in Luther’s mental state, though they, like almost all recent writers, with the exception of Hausrath, were ignorant of one of the most remarkable elements to be taken into consideration, viz. the fits of terror to which Luther had been subject from early youth. The treatment of this matter was made all the harder by the fact that Luther’s extravagant after-accounts of his life in the monastery, and the growth of his ideas, were received with too much credulity, and that his letters, his Table-Talk and many details of his life were but little known. Maximilian Prechtl, Abbot of Michaelfeld (†1832), though he refuses to regard Luther as insane, nevertheless calls attention to the many “phantoms of a sick brain” which he had seen; “Luther believed,” so he says, “that he often saw the devil, and that under different shapes.”[581] The learned Abbot brought out a new annotated edition of Luther’s “Against the Papacy founded by the Devil,” which he published at the time of the Reformation-Festival in 1817, in order to show the mad fury, hate and mental confusion to which its author had fallen a victim. Luther’s writing betrays, so he opines, “no common fury but the insane passion of the man, then almost at death’s door.”[582] Too great stress must not be laid on some of the opinions he here advances, which overstep the limits he himself had traced and appear to credit Luther with insanity. Prechtl spoke out more strongly in his “Rejoinder” to the attacks made on his remarks. He emphasises “the incontrovertible proofs” to be found in Luther “of a troubled fancy,” and asserts that “he was not always in his right mind.” Somewhat earlier, in 1810, the Catholic layman Friedrich von Kerz, who continued Stolberg’s “Geschichte der Religion Christi,” published a book “Über den Geist und die Folgen der Reformation” in which he comes to a far too unfavourable opinion of Luther’s mental state, which he seeks to bolster up by statements incapable of historical proof. In a nutshell, what he tentatively advances is, that, “owing to the shock following the death of a friend struck down at his side, Luther had lost his reason”; “the symptoms of a twisted mind soon became apparent.” “Luther not seldom appears in the light of an inexplicable moral enigma, so that we are led, not indeed willingly, to wonder whether a certain recurrent mental aberration and periodic madness was not in reality the first and perhaps the only source of his vocation as a Reformer, of all his public acts and of the greater part of his reforms.”[583] As against Kerz, Schön and even Prechtl, we must urge that we have no proof that Luther was actually the slave of his morbid fancies, or mentally diseased; no such proof to support the hypothesis of insanity is adduced by any of the writers named. Of the temporary clouding of the mind they make no mention.