To the period subsequent to his ordination must be assigned assurances such as the following, the tone of which becomes more and more crude the older he grows. “From that time [of his first Mass] I said Mass with great horror, and thank God that He has delivered me from it.”[652] “When I looked on [a figure of] Christ I fancied I was looking at the devil. That is why we say: O, Mary, pray for us to thy beloved Son and appease His wrath.” If I follow the principles of the monks and Papists, then “I lose Christ my Healer and Consoler and make Him into the taskmaster and hangman of my poor soul.”[653] “As long as I remained a Papist I should have blushed with shame to speak of Christ; Jesus is a womanish name; we preferred to speak of Aristotle or Bonaventure.”[654] He also says: “Often have I trembled at the name of Jesus; when I saw Him on the cross it was like a thunderbolt and when His Name was mentioned I would rather have heard the devil invoked, for I raved that I had to go on doing good works until I had thereby made Christ friendly and gracious to me.”[655] They used to say: “Scourge yourself until you have yourself blotted out your sin. Such is the Pope’s doctrine and belief.”[656] Thus, in the monastery, I had “long since lost Christ and His baptism. I was of all men the most wretched, day and night there was nothing but howling and despair which no one was able to calm. Thus I was bathed and baptised in my monkery and went through the real sweating sickness. Praise be to God that I did not sweat myself to death.”[657] Those Protestants who take Luther’s statements too readily, without probing them to the bottom and eliminating the rhetorical and fabulous element, are apt to urge that Luther’s descriptions of the monastic state show that nothing but mental derangement could result from such a life. Dr. Kirchhoff, a medical man, basing his remarks on Luther’s accounts, is inclined to assume the existence of some severe temperamental malady. He even goes so far as to say that, at any rate, countless numbers of monks lost their reason. “In the course of time,” he adds, Luther “acquired a greater power of resisting the temptations, and, possibly, in his quieter after-life the physical causes may have diminished; it would appear that the accompanying conditions disquieted him greatly.”[658] The fact is that Protestant authors as a rule fight shy of undertaking any criticism of Luther’s account of himself. They accord it far too ready credence and usually see in it a capital pretext for attacking the olden Church.