For this concession he was sharply rebuked by the pope.

[Sidenote: 1545] The Diet of Worms contented itself with expressing its general hope for a "Christian reformation." [Sidenote: 1545] During his later years Luther's polemic never flagged.

His last book, _Against the Papacy of Rome, founded by the Devil_, surpassed Cicero and the humanists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of its invective against "the most hellish father, St.Paul, or Paula III" and his "hellish Roman church." "One would like to curse them," he wrote, "so that thunder and lightning would strike them, hell fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them"-- and so on for page after page.

Of course such lack of restraint largely defeated its own ends.

The Swiss Reformer Bullinger called it "amazingly violent," and a book than which he "had never read anything more savage or imprudent." Our judgment of it must be tempered by the consideration that Luther suffered in his last years from a nervous malady and from other painful diseases, due partly to overwork and lack of exercise, partly to the quantities of alcohol he imbibed, though he never became intoxicated.
Nevertheless, the last twenty years of his life were his happiest ones.
His wife, Catherine von Bora, an ex-nun, and his children, brought him much happiness.