This is how Luther wrote—confusing the events and suppressing the principal point—when, towards the end of his life, he penned for posterity a record of what had occurred. Otto Scheel, in a compilation of the texts bearing on Luther’s development prior to 1519, rightly places this later account, together with the other statements made by him in old age, under the heading: “second and third rate authorities.”[603] What, however, are we to think when the considered narrative, written by a man of such eminence, of events in which he was the chief actor, has to be relegated to the category of second-rate and even third-rate authorities?[604] To enumerate some other misrepresentations not connected with his monkish days: Luther assures us that sundry opponents of his “had blasphemed themselves to death”; men who had the most peaceful of deathbeds he alleges to have died tortured by remorse of conscience and railing at God. He boasts aloud that it was the Papists who made a “good theologian” of him, since, “at the devil’s instigation,” they had so battered, distressed and frightened him out of his wits, that he necessarily came to obtain a more profound knowledge.[605] Boldly and exultingly he points to the many “miracles” whereby the Evangel had been proved.[606] He says of the Diets, that the Papists always succeeded in wriggling out of a hole by dint of lies, so that they looked quite white and “without ever a stain.”[607] Of his own writings he says, that he “would gladly have seen all his books unwritten and consigned to the fire.”[608] This in 1533, and again in 1539.[609] Before this, however, he had declared he would not forswear any of his writings, “not for all the riches of the world,” and that, at least as a good work wrought by God, they must have some worth.[610] In such wise does the picture he gives of his life vary according to his moods. He does not hesitate to sacrifice the sacred rights of truth when this seems to the advantage of his polemics (see above, vol. iv., p. 80 ff.), and, owing to the peculiar constitution of his mind, the fiction he so often repeats becomes eventually stamped as a reality to which he himself accords credence. _The Legend about his Years of Monkish Piety_ We may now turn to Luther’s fictions regarding his monkish days, prefacing our remarks with the words of Luther’s Protestant biographer, Adolf Hausrath. “The picture of his youth is forced to tally more and more with the convictions of his older years. What he now looks upon as pernicious, he declares he had found in those days to be so by his own experience.… The oftener he holds up to his listening guests the warning picture of the monk sunk in the abyss of Popery, the more gloomy and starless does the night appear to him in which he once had lived.”[611]