His God was to him entirely as father and head of the family. He liked to meditate on the economy of nature: he was filled with astonishment at the quantity of wood which God must always be creating. "No one can reckon what God requires to nourish merely sparrows and useless birds: in one single year they cost Him more than the income of the King of France; and then think of all that remains." "God understands all trades: as a tailor He can make a coat for the deer, which might last a hundred years; as a shoemaker He gives him shoes to his feet, and by means of the dear sun He is a cook. He could become rich indeed, if He chose, if He were to withhold the sun and air, and threatened the Pope, Emperor, bishops, and doctors with death, if they did not pay Him a hundred thousand gulden on the spot. He does not do this, yet we are thankless miscreants." He seriously reflected whence came the means of nourishment for so many men. Old Hans Luther had maintained that there were more men than sheaves of corn; the doctor indeed thought that there were more sheaves than men, but that there were more men than shocks. "A shock of corn, however, hardly yields a bushel, and that will not nourish one man a whole year." Even a dung-heap was a subject of pleasant reflection to him. "God is obliged to clear away as well as to create; if He had not continually done so, the world would long ago have become too full." "When God chastises the godly more severely than the godless, He deals with him as a strict father of a family with his son, whom he more frequently punishes than the bad servant: but he secretly collects treasures as an inheritance for his son, whilst he finally casts the servant off." Luther comes joyfully to this conclusion: "If God can forgive me for having during twenty years offended Him by saying mass, He can also excuse my having sometimes had a good drink to his honour--let the world think what it will." It surprised him much that God should be so very wrath with the Jews. "For fifteen hundred years they have prayed fervently with great zeal and earnestness, as their little prayer-books show; and He has not revealed himself to them during the whole time by the smallest word. I would give two hundred florins' worth of books if I could pray as they do. It must be a great and unspeakable anger. Ah! dear Lord, punish me with pestilence, rather than be thus silent!"