mself scanty in words. Once,
when his wife appeared much delighted at being able to serve up
different kinds of fish from the pond in their little garden, the
doctor was heartily pleased to see her joy, and did not fail to take
the opportunity of making a pleasant remark upon the happiness of
contentment. Another time, when he had been reading to her too long in
the Psalter, and she said that she heard enough upon sacred subjects,
that she read much daily, and could talk about them, "God only grant
that she might live accordingly," the doctor sighed at this sensible
answer, and said, "Thus begins a weariness of the word of God; new
trifling books will come in the place of the Scriptures, which will
again be thrown into a corner." But this close union between these two
excellent persons was still for many years disturbed by a secret
sorrow. We only learn what was gnawing at the soul of the wife, by
finding, that when as late as the year 1527, Luther, being dangerously
ill, took a last leave of her, he spoke these words:--"You are my true
wedded wife, of that you may feel certain."

Luther's spiritual life was as much a reality to him as his earthly
one. All the holy personages of the Bible were to him as true friends;
through his lively imagination he saw them in familiar forms, and with
the simplicity of a child he liked to picture to himself the various
circumstances of their life. When Veit Dietrich asked him what kind of
person he thought the Apostle Paul was, Luther answered quickly, "He
was an insignificant, lean little man, like Philip Melancthon." He
formed a pleasing image of the Virgin Mary: he used to say, admiringly,
"She was a pretty, delicate maiden, and must have had a charming
voice."

He preferred thinking of the Redeemer as a child with his parents; how
he took his father's dinner to the timber-yard, and how when he had
been absent too long, Mary asked him, "Where have you been so long,
little one?"

The Saviour should be thought of, not as in his glory, nor as the
fulfiller of the law, conceptions too high and terrible for man; but
only as a poor sufferer, who lived among and died for sinners.

His God was to him entirely as father and head of the family. He liked
to meditate on the economy of nature: he was filled with astonishment
at the quantity of wood which God must always be creating. "No one can
reckon what God requires to nourish merely sparrows and useless birds:
in one single year they c