The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect, and ended with steady affection. The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving God thanks. He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their adventures together. 'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals, where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she ought not to be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask me. '"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the brother of the Margrave?"' She was an odd woman. 'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and seldom?' Katie might have spoken for herself. Luther, to the last, spent hours of every day in prayer. He advised her to read the Bible a little more. She said she had read enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. 'Ah!' he said, 'here begins weariness of the word of God. One day new lights will rise up, and the Scriptures will be despised and be flung away into the corner.' His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. The recollection of his own boyhood made him especially gentle with them, and their fancies and imaginations delighted him. Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. 'Children,' he said, 'imagine heaven a place where rivers run with cream, and trees are hung with cakes and plums. Do not blame them. They are but showing their simple, natural, unquestioning, all-believing faith.' One day, after dinner, when the fruit was on the table, the children were watching it with longing eyes. 'That is the way,' he said, 'in which we grown Christians ought to look for the Judgment Day.' His daughter Magdalen died when she was fourteen. He speaks of his loss with the unaffected simplicity of natural grief, yet with the faith of a man who had not the slightest doubt into whose hands his treasure was passing. Perfect nature and perfect piety. Neither one emotion nor the other disguised or suppressed. You will have gathered something, I hope, from these faint sketches, of what Luther was; you will be able to see how far he deserves to be called by our modern new lights, a Philistine or a heretic. We will now return to the subject with which we began, and resume, in a general conclusion, the argument of these Lectures. In part, but not wholly, it can be done in Luther's words. One regrets that Luther did not know Erasmus better, or knowing him, should not have treated him with more forbearance.