Luther had not come to the convent to study theology; he had entered it to save his soul. These studies were part of the convent discipline; to engage in them, part of his vow of obedience. He worked hard at them, and pleased his superiors greatly; worked because he was a submissive monk. They left a deeper impress on him than most of his biographers have cared to acknowledge. He had more of the Schoolman in him and less of the Humanist than any other of the men who stood in the first line of leaders in the Reformation movement. Some of his later doctrines, and especially his theory of the Sacrament of the Supper, came to him from these convent studies in d’Ailly and Occam. But in his one great quest—how to save his soul, how to win the sense of God’s pardon—they were more a hindrance than a help. His teachers might be Augustinian Eremites, but they had not the faintest knowledge of Augustinian experimental theology. They belonged to the most pelagianising school of mediæval Scholastic; and their last word always was that man must work out his own salvation. Luther tried to work it out in the most approved later mediæval fashion, by the strictest asceticism. He fasted and scourged himself; he practised all the ordinary forms of maceration, and invented new ones; but all to no purpose. For when an awakened soul, as he said long afterwards, seeks to find rest in work-righteousness, it stands on a foundation of loose sand which it feels running and travelling beneath it; and it must go from one good work to another and to another, and so on without end. Luther was undergoing all unconsciously the experience of Augustine, and what tortured and terrified the great African was torturing him. He had learned that man’s goodness is not to be measured by his neighbour’s but by God’s, and that man’s sin is not to be weighed against the sins of his neighbours, but against the righteousness of God. His theological studies told him that God’s pardon could be had through the Sacrament of Penance, and that the first part of that sacrament was sorrow for sin. But then came a difficulty. The older, and surely the better theology, explained that this godly sorrow (_contritio_) must be based on love to God. Had he this love? God always appeared to him as an implacable Judge, inexorably threatening punishment for the breaking of a law which it seemed impossible to keep. He had to confess to himself that he sometimes almost hated this arbitrary Will which the nominalist Schoolmen called God. The more modern theology, that taught by the chief convent theologian, John of Paltz, asserted that the sorrow might be based on meaner motives (_attritio_), and that this attrition was changed into contrition in the Sacrament of Penance itself. So Luther wearied his superiors by his continual use of this sacrament. The slightest breach of the most trifling conventual regulation was looked on as a sin, and had to be confessed at once and absolution for it