must
protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is
an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that
I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should
have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'

He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the
moderate respectable people--the people who thought like Erasmus--those
who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the
world's opinion--such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with
remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar
situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and
your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the
whole world in my way.'

Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good
family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent.
She was an ordinary, unimaginative body--plain in person and plain in
mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance--but a decent, sensible,
commonplace Haus Frau.

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