received, until the perplexed lad was ordered to cease confession until he had committed some sin worth confessing. His brethren believed him to be a miracle of piety. They boasted about him in their monkish fashion, and in all the monasteries around, and as far away as Grimma, the monks and nuns talked about the young saint in the Erfurt convent. Meanwhile the “young saint” himself lived a life of mental anguish, whispering to himself that he was “gallows-ripe.” Writing in 1518, years after the conflict was over, Luther tells us that no pen could describe the mental anguish he endured.(138) Gleams of comfort came to him, but they were transient. The Master of the Novices gave him salutary advice; an aged brother gave him momentary comfort. John Staupitz, the Vicar-General of the Congregation, during his visits to the convent was attracted by the traces of hidden conflicts and sincere endeavour of the young monk, with his high cheek-bones, emaciated frame, gleaming eyes, and looks of settled despair. He tried to find out his difficulties. He revoked Nathin’s order that Luther should not read the Scriptures. He encouraged him to read the Bible; he gave him a _Glossa Ordinaria_ or conventual ecclesiastical commentary, where passages were explained by quotations from eminent Church Fathers, and difficulties were got over by much pious allegorising; above all, he urged him to become a good _localis_ and _textualis_ in the Bible, _i.e._ one who, when he met with difficulties, did not content himself with commentaries, but made collections of parallel passages for himself, and found explanations of one in the others. Still this brought at first little help. At last Staupitz saw the young man’s real difficulty, and gave him real and lasting assistance. He showed Luther that he had been rightly enough contrasting man’s sin and God’s holiness, and measuring the depth of the one by the height of the other; that he had been following the truest instincts of the deepest piety when he had set over-against each other the righteousness of God and the sin and helplessness of man; but that he had gone wrong when he kept these two thoughts in a _permanent_ opposition. He then explained that, according to God’s promise, the righteousness of God might become man’s own possession in and through Christ Jesus. God had promised that man could have fellowship with Him; all fellowship is founded on personal trust; and trust, the personal trust of the believing man on a personal God who has promised, gives man that fellowship with God through which all things that belong to God can become his. Without this personal trust or faith, all divine things, the Incarnation and Passion of the Saviour, the Word and the Sacraments, however true as matters of fact, are outside man and cannot be truly possessed. But when man trusts God and His promises, and when the fellowship, which trust or faith always creates, is once