Luther went to Italy at almost the same time on an errand from the Saxon Augustinians to the general chapter at Rome. He travelled as a monk, stopping at the houses of his order along the way. At Rome he visited all the shrines of the saints, like the most pious of pilgrims. He was almost sorry, he says, that his parents were living, so many were the advantages offered to the souls of the departed at these altars of divine grace. He performed his commission, went back to his place, and continued for seven years longer to fulfil his duties as monk, priest, and teacher, without any outward show of hostility to the Roman system. Only in his preaching and writing, one can trace the steady advance of confidence in his guiding principle of "faith" as the one sufficient guarantee of a life "justified" or "adjusted" to the divine requirement. He did not seek the fight; he waited in his place until the battle sought him out and then he dared not refuse the challenge. Compare again the animating principle of these two men. If it be true that faith alone is the sufficient basis of all justification before God, then it would seem to follow that the individual will has little to do with determining the fate of man either here or hereafter. Superficially viewed, this doctrine seems to place man within the circle of a kind of blind fatalism. Such reproaches have been heard ever since the days of Augustine, whenever this subject has been prominently before men's minds. "Has Christianity brought us out of the old fatalism of the Greeks only to plunge us into a new fatalism, as hard, but not as picturesque, as the old one?" was asked in Augustine's own time. Nor had the Augustinian party ever failed to draw more or less strictly the evident conclusion from its own premises. It had always insisted that the will of man was not morally free, but was enslaved by a certain principle of evil, which had entered into man with the "fall of Adam" and been transmitted from father to son ever since.