“He often had to endure such pains, though in every instance they were but momentary; they were, however, so great and so hellish that no tongue can tell, no pen describe, no one who has not felt them believe what they were. When at their worst, or when they lasted for half an hour, nay, for the tenth part of an hour, he was utterly undone, and all his bones turned to ashes. At such times God and the whole of creation appears to him dreadfully wroth. There is, however, no escape, no consolation either within or without, and man is ringed by a circle of accusers. He then tearfully exclaims in the words of Holy Scripture: ‘I am cast away, O Lord, from before Thy eyes’ [Ps. xxx. 23], and does not even dare to say: ‘Lord, chastise me not in Thy wrath’ [Ps. vi. 1]. At such a time the soul, strange to tell, is unable to believe that it ever will be saved; it only feels that the punishment is not yet at an end. And yet the punishment is everlasting and may not be regarded as temporal; there remains only a naked longing for help and a dreadful groaning; where to look for help the soul does not know. It is as it were stretched out [on the cross] with Christ, so that ‘all its bones are numbered.’ There is not a nook in it that is not filled with the bitterest anguish, with terror, dread and sadness, and above all with the feeling that it is to last for ever and ever. To make use of a weaker comparison: when a ball travels along a straight line, every point of the line bears the whole weight of the ball, though it does not contain it. In the same way, when the floods of eternity pass over the soul, it feels nothing else, drinks in nothing else but everlasting pain; this, however, does not last but passes. It is the very pain of hell, is this unbearable terror, that excludes all consolation!… As to what it means, those who have experienced it must be believed.”[316] A physical accompaniment of these fears was, in Luther’s case, the fainting fits referred to now and again subsequent to the beginning of his struggle against the Church. On the occasion of the attack of which we are told by Ratzeberger the physician, when he was found by friends lying unconscious on the floor, he had been “overpowered by melancholy and sadness.” It is also very remarkable that when his friends had brought him to, partly by the help of music, he begged them to return frequently, that they might play to him “because he found that as soon as he heard the sound of music his ‘_tentationes_’ and melancholy left him.”[317] According to Kawerau the circumstances point to this incident having taken place in 1523 or 1524.[318]