When his official work was done he set about seeing the Holy City with the devotion of a pilgrim. He visited all the famous shrines, especially those to which Indulgences were attached. He listened reverently to all the accounts given of the relics which were exhibited to the pilgrims, and believed in all the tales told him. He thought that if his parents had been dead he could have assured them against Purgatory by saying Masses in certain chapels. Only once, it is said, his soul showed revolt. He was slowly climbing on his knees the _Scala Santa_ (really a mediæval staircase), said to have been the stone steps leading up to Pilate’s house in Jerusalem, once trodden by the feet of our Lord; when half-way up the thought came into his mind, _The just shall live by his faith_; he stood upright and walked slowly down. He saw, as thousands of pious German pilgrims had done before his time, the moral corruptions which disgraced the Holy City—infidel priests who scoffed at the sacred mysteries they performed, and princes of the Church who lived in open sin. He saw and loathed the moral degradation, and the scenes imprinted themselves on his memory; but his home and cloister training enabled him, for the time being, in spite of the loathing, to revel in the memorials of the old heroic martyrs, and to look on their relics as storehouses of divine grace. In later days it was the memories of the vices of the Roman Court that helped him to harden his heart against the sentiment which surrounded the Holy City. When Luther returned to Wittenberg in the early summer of 1512, his Vicar-General sent him to Erfurt to complete his training for the doctorate in theology. He graduated as Doctor of the Holy Scripture, took the Wittenberg Doctor’s oath to defend the evangelical truth vigorously (_viriliter_), was made a member of the Wittenberg Senate, and three weeks later succeeded Staupitz as Professor of Theology. Luther was still a genuine monk, with no doubt of his vocation. He became sub-prior of the Wittenberg convent in 1512, and was made the District Vicar over the eleven convents in Meissen and Thuringia in 1515. But that side of his life may be passed over. It is his theological work as professor in Wittenberg University that is important for his career as a reformer. § 5. Luther’s early Lectures in Theology.