ere around him, the burning
villages and slaughtered men. If he had been a mere fanatic he would
have ended in despair; but above the stormy disquiet, which is
perceptible in him up to his marriage, a bright light shone; the
conviction that he was the guardian of the divine law amongst the
Germans, and that in order to protect social order and morals, he was
bound to guide and not to follow the opinions of men. However eagerly
and warmly he might declaim in individual cases, he appears now
decidedly conservative and more firmly self-contained than ever. He
had, moreover, the impression that it was ordained that he should not
live much longer, and many were the hours in which he looked forward
with a longing to martyrdom. He concluded his marriage in full harmony
with his convictions. He had entered fully into the necessity of
marriage and its conformity with Scripture, and he had for some years
pressed all his acquaintances to marry, at last even his own opponent
the Archbishop of Mentz. He himself gives two reasons for his decision.
He had robbed his father for many years of his son; it would be to him
a kind of expiation, in case he should die first, to leave old Hans a
grandson. Besides this, it was also an act of defiance; his opponents
triumphed that Luther was humbled, all the world was offended with him,
and by this he would give them still more offence.

He was a man of strong passions, but there was no trace of coarse
sensuality; and we may assume that the best reason, which he did not,
however, avow to any of his friends, was yet the most decisive, and
that was, that there had long been gossip amongst people, and he
himself knew that Catherine was favourably disposed towards him. "I am
not passionately in love, but am very fond of her," he writes to one of
his dearest friends. And this marriage, concluded contrary to the
opinion of his cotemporaries, and amidst the derision of his opponents,
was an act to which we Germans owe as much, as we do to all the years
in which, as an ecclesiastic of the old Church, he had by deeds
supported his theology. For from henceforth the father, husband, and
citizen became also the reformer of the domestic life of his nation;
and that which was the blessing of his earthly life, in which Roman
Catholics and Protestants to this day have an equal interest, arose
from a marriage contracted between an outcast monk and a fugitive nun.
He had still, for one-and-twenty laborious years,