Men renounce God less unwillingly than they give up the devil, as the apostates of all times have proved abundantly. Speedily subdivided by anarchy, the disciples of Luther had but one bond of belief in common; all had faith in Satan, and this spectre, magnifying in proportion as their spirit of revolt took them the farther from God, reached terrible proportions at last. Carlostad, archdeacon of Würtemberg, being one day in the pulpit, saw a black man enter the temple, take a seat in front of him and stare at him with dreadful fixity through the entire length of his sermon. He became anxious, left the pulpit and questioned the assistants; but no one had seen the phantom. Carlostad returned home in a state of dismay; he was met by the youngest of his sons, who said that a stranger in black had inquired for him and promised to return in three days. There was no room for doubt in the mind of the hallucinated archdeacon; that stranger was the spectre of his vision. A fever was brought on by his terror, he retired to bed and died before the third day. These unhappy heretics were afraid of their own shadows; their consciences had remained catholic and consigned them to hell without pity. Walking one evening with his wife Catherine de Bora, Luther looked up to heaven, which was bright with stars, and said in an undertone, as he sighed deeply: “Ah, beautiful sky, which I shall never see!” “What!” exclaimed his wife. “Do you then think that you are condemned?” Luther answered: “Who knows whether God will not punish us for having been unfaithful to our vows?” Supposing that Catherine, seeing his lack of self-confidence, had cursed and left him, it may be that the reformer, overcome by the Divine Warning, would have recognised his criminal offence in betraying that Church which was his first spouse and would have turned weeping towards the cloister which he had left wilfully. But God, Who withstands the proud, doubtless found him unworthy of this saving affliction. The sacrilegious comedy of Luther’s marriage was the providential punishment of his pride, and as he remained obstinate in his sin, that punishment was always with him and derided him to the end. He died between the devil and his wife, appalled at the one and exceedingly embarrassed by the other.