That was the essence also of Luther's protest. Every individual Christian was once again called upon to deal directly with his God. So far the Lutheran teaching was in complete harmony with the whole drift of Erasmus' thought. But here we find another illustration of similar conclusions reached by different ways. Erasmus was quite satisfied to let the whole speculative side of the question take care of itself. Luther could not rest until he had harmonised his practical aims with some theological principle, which should give them consistency and support. That principle he found in the Augustinian doctrine of predestination and the unfree will. Erasmus was content, as the Church was, to accept both sides of the controversy at once, and trim them to suit each other. Luther cared little for nice distinctions, but convinced himself that the salvation of his cause lay in emphasising, so far as a mind so eminently sound and human as his could do, the idea of a divine fate, responsible--yes, he would even say this if he must--responsible even for the seeming evil of this world. Now it is obvious that, viewed abstractly, the whole group of ideas we call "Augustinian" are open to the gravest question. They seem to sap the foundations of Christian morality and to throw men back upon the dreary fatalisms from which it was the mission of Christianity to release them. In fact, however, it cannot be denied that from time to time they have worked, where other means have failed, to recall men sharply and uncompromisingly to the sense of sin and thereby to a more vivid and convincing moral purpose. Such a time was come once more in the day of Luther and Erasmus and Calvin. This theology may have been illogical, but it worked. It ought, perhaps, in all reason, to have sent men flying off into a mad indifference to morality, since nothing they could do would influence their ultimate fate; but for every weak and shuffling conscience which broke under this burden there were a hundred others that were steeled and nerved by it to a complete moral regeneration. The doctrine of the impotent will has produced some of the most masterful wills before which the world has ever had to bend.