He sojourned for longer or shorter periods in Strasbourg, Augsburg, Ulm, and other cities, but nowhere was he safe from his enemies, and he always faced the prospect of banishment even from his place of temporary sojourn. {69} Furious declarations were passed against him by the Schmalkald League in 1540, for to his anti-Lutheran views on the sacraments he had now added teachings on the nature of Christ which the theologians pronounced unorthodox. Three years later he sent a messenger to Luther in hope of a friendly understanding. Luther's answer was brief and final: "The stupid fool, possessed by the devil, understands nothing. He does not know what he is babbling. But if he won't stop his drivel, let him at least not bother me with the booklets which the devil spues out of him."[11] At the ministerial Council of Protestant States in 1556 Schwenckfeld was denounced in the most vituperous language of the period, and the civil authorities were urged to proceed against him as a dangerous heretic. He always had, notwithstanding this pursuit of theological hate, many powerful friends, and a large number of brave and devoted followers who were glad to risk goods, home, and life for the sake of what was to them the living Word of God. He died--or as his friends preferred to say, he had a quiet and peaceful "home passage"--at Ulm in 1561. Of the purity, the brave sincerity, the nobility, the outward and inward consistency of his life there is no question. His enemies had no word to say which reflected upon the motives of his heart or upon the genuine piety of his life. His religion cost him all that he held dear in the outer world--he had not taken "the cross at the softest spot"--and he practised his faith as the most precious thing a man could possess in this world or in any other.