It is only after 1530 that we find Luther’s legend of his monkish life fully developed. Before this we see only the first hints of the tale. It cannot be argued that, till then, he had been silent on his inward experiences as a monk, or that the MSS. of the Table-Talk only commence subsequent to 1530. That, even before this, he had frequently spoken of his earlier spiritual experiences is evident from the passages already quoted, and might be proved by many others; moreover the absence of any recorded Table-Talk is a detail, since the latter is far from being our sole source in the present question. We are justified in assuming that the idea matured in 1530, during his stay at the Castle of Coburg where he had to wage so severe a struggle with himself. Amid the trials he endured during his days of retirement at the Wartburg he had found time to pen his violent attack on monastic vows; so also, it was in the quiet of the Coburg, amidst the ghostly conflicts and delusions, that he wove the caricature of his own monkish life into the web of his history. At the very time when Luther was at the Coburg the burning question of German monasticism was being debated at the Diet of Augsburg; the Catholic Estates hoped that recognition might again be won for it from the Protestants, or that it might at least secure toleration in the districts where allegiance was divided. It was also at the Coburg that Luther penned many of the furious passages of his “Warning to the Clergy forgathered at Augsburg.”