an the supersensitive prudishness that squirms and
blushes, or pretends to blush, at the remotest reference to such
matters. It all depends on the thoughts which the heart connects with
the words which the mouth utters. This applies also to the manner in
which former centuries have spoken about drinking. We sometimes begin to
move uneasily, as if something Pecksniffian had come into our presence,
when we behold the twentieth century sitting in judgment on the manners
and morals of the sixteenth century.

In Luther's remarks about sinning to spite the devil we have always
heard an echo from his life at the cloister. One's judgment about the
monastic life is somewhat mitigated when one hears how Dr. Staupitz and
the brethren in the convent at Erfurt would occasionally speak to Luther
about the latter's sins. Staupitz called them "Puppensuenden." It is not
easy to render this term by a short and apt English term; "peccadillo"
would come near the meaning. A child playing with a doll will treat it
as if it were a human being, will dress it, talk to it, and pretend to
receive answers from it, etc. That is the way, good Catholics were
telling Luther, he was treating his sins. His sins were no real sins, or
he had magnified their sinfulness out of all proportion. This same
advice Luther hands on to another who was becoming a hypochondriac as he
had been. When the mind is in a morbid state it imagines faults, errors,
sins, where there are none. The melancholy person in his self-scrutiny
becomes an intolerant tyrant to himself. He will flay his poor soul for
trifles as if they were the blackest crimes: In such moments the devil
is very busy about the victim of gloom and despair. Luther has diagnosed
the case of Weller with the skill of a nervous specialist. He counsels
Weller not to judge himself according to the devil's prompting, and, in
order to break Satan's thrall over him, to wrench himself free from his
false notions of what is sinful. In offering this advice, Luther uses
such expressions as: "Sin, commit sin," but the whole context shows that
he advises Weller to do that which is in itself not sinful, but looks
like sin to Weller in his present condition. When Luther declares he
would like to commit a real brave sin himself as a taunt to the devil,
he adds: "Would that I could!" That means, that, as a matter of fact, he
could not do it and did not do it, because it was wrong. What bold
immoral act did Weller commit in cons