Luther's relations with Zwingli, the Swiss reformer, show more clearly than anything else the character of the reformer, his assurance of his divine mission and his absolute confidence that he has a Heaven-directed mission. Zwingli would not agree with Luther's interpretation of the doctrine of the Last Supper. They proceeded to anathematize each other, and when induced by friends they met at a conference, each claimed the victory in the argument. The Zwinglians seem, indeed, to have recognized the force of Luther's contentions, but dared not yield entirely, and when they returned to their homes Zwingli spoke very contemptuously of his antagonist's arguments and loudly claimed that he had completely vanquished him. This drew from Luther some bitter denunciations, and among other things Luther wrote to Jacob Probst of Bremen as follows: "In boasting that I was vanquished at Marburg the sacramentarians act as is their wont. For they are not only liars, but falsehood, deceit, and hypocrisy itself, as Carlstadt and Zwingli show both in deeds and words. They revoked at Marburg, as you can see from the articles drawn up there, the things hitherto taught in their pestilential books concerning baptism, the use of the sacraments, and the preaching of the word. We revoked nothing. But when they were conquered also in the matter of the Lord's Supper they were unwilling to renounce their position even though they could see it was untenable, for they feared their people, to whom they could not have returned if they had recanted." {251} He never forgave Zwingli, and when some time later the Swiss reformer, acting as a chaplain to the Swiss Protestant Army in a battle with the Swiss Catholic cantons, was killed, Luther pronounced this event a special dispensation of Providence. He was fully persuaded that the special spirit of prophecy had come down over him and that he had been inspired to denounce Zwingli and to declare that his doom was not far off. After the news of Zwingli's sad, untimely end, he wrote to his friend Link: "We see the judgment of God a second time--first in the case of Münzer, and now of Zwingli. I was a prophet when I said, God will not long endure these mad and furious blasphemies with which they overflow, laughing at our God-made bread, and calling us carnivora, savages, drinkers of blood, and other horrible names." This exaggeration of his own importance and conviction of his intimate relations with the Deity became more and more manifest as time goes on. The spectacle is not at all unfamiliar, though it is usually pathological, and the surprise always is how many followers such characters are able to gather around them at any time in the history of the race. It is this aspect of Luther's life and the psychic development of his career that have attracted the special attention of historians in recent years and received ample illustration from hitherto unused original documents.