It was during his visits to Erfurt that Staupitz came in contact with the gifted, thoughtful, and melancholy young monk. He treated Luther, both in conversation and letter, with fatherly confidence, and Luther unlocked to him, as to a father, his heart and its cares. Upon his wishing to confess to him all his many small sins, Staupitz insisted first on distinguishing between what were really sins, and what were not; as for self-imagined sins, or such a patchwork of offences as Luther laid before him, he would not listen to them; that was not the kind of seriousness, he would say, that God wished to have. Luther tormented himself with a system of penance, consisting of actual pain, punishments, and expiations. Staupitz taught him that repentance, in the Scriptural meaning, was an inward change and conversion, which must proceed from the love of holiness and of God; and that, for peace with God, he must not look to his own good resolutions to lead a better life, which he had not the strength to carry out, or to his own acts, which could never satisfy the law of God, but must trust with patience to God's forgiving mercy, and learn to see in Christ, whom God permitted to suffer for the sins of man, not the threatening Judge, but rather the loving Saviour. To Christ above all he referred him, when Luther pondered on the secret eternal will of God, and was near despair. God's eternal purpose, he would say, shines clearly in the wounds of Christ. Did his temptations not cease, he bade him see in them means to draw him to the love of God. The thoughts of Staupitz turned in this on the temptations to pride, which might themselves be the means of curing that pride, and on the great things for which God wished to prepare him. In a simple, practical manner, and from the experiences of his own life, he would thus counsel and converse with Luther. During the long course of a confidential intercourse with his friend, his own theology in later years became visibly developed, and his pupil of earlier days became afterwards his teacher. But Luther, both then and throughout his life, spoke of him with grateful affection as his spiritual father, and thanked God that he had been helped out of his temptations by Dr. Staupitz, without whom he would have been swallowed up in them and perished.