In his excitement he depicts himself as in the very jaws of death and Satan. Fear of the rebellious peasants now so wroth with him, and self-reproach on account of the marriage blamed by so many even among his friends, inflamed his mind to such a degree that his statements, now pessimistic, now defiant, now humorous, now reeking with pseudo-mysticism, furnish a picture of chaos. The six grounds he alleges for his marriage only prove that none of them was really esteemed by him sufficient; for, that it was necessary for him to take pity on the forsaken nun, that the Will of God and of his own father was so plain, and that he was obliged to launch defiance at the devils, the priestlings and the peasants by his marriage, all this had in reality as little weight with him as his other pleas, such as, that the Catholics looked on married life as unevangelical, and that it was his duty to confirm the Evangel by his marriage even in the eyes of his Evangelical critics.[698] To many of his friends his marriage seemed at least to have the advantage of shutting the mouths of those who calumniated him. He himself, however, preferred to say, that he had had recourse to matrimony “to honour God and shame the devil.”[699] When once Luther had entered upon his new state of life all remaining scruples regarding his vows had necessarily to be driven away. As was his wont he tried to reassure himself by going to extremes. “The most successful combats with the devil,” so he tells us, are waged “at night at Katey’s side”; her “embraces” help him to quell the foe within.[700] He declares even more strongly than before, that marriage is in fact a matter of downright necessity for man; he fails to think of the thousands who cannot marry but whose honour is nevertheless untarnished; he asserts that “whoever will not marry must needs be a fornicator or adulterer,” and that only by a “great miracle of God” is it possible for a man here and there to remain chaste outside the wedded state; more and more he insists, as he had already done even before, that “nothing rings more hatefully in his ear than the words monk and nun.”[701] He seizes greedily on every tale that redounds to the discredit of the monasteries, even on the silly story of the devils dressed as spectral monks who had crossed the Rhine at Spires in order to thwart him at the Diet. In all this we can but discern a morbid reaction against the disquieting memory of his former state of life, not, as the legend asserts, peace of mind and assurance of having won a “Gracious God,” thanks to his change of religion. The reaction was throughout attended by remorse of conscience. These struggles of soul in order to find a Gracious God, which lasted, as he himself says (above, vol. v., pp. 334 f.; 350 f.), even down to his later years, constitute a striking refutation from his own lips, of the legend of the wonderful change which came over him in the monastery.