In a friendly letter he comforts, as follows, an Augustinian at Erfurt, Georg Leiffer, regarding his spiritual troubles: “The Cross of Christ is distributed throughout the whole world and each one gets a small piece of it. Do not throw yours away, but lay it, like a sacred relic, in a golden shrine, i.e. in a heart filled with gentle charity. For even the wrongs which we suffer from men, persecutions, passion and hatred, which are caused us either by the wicked or by those who mean well, are priceless relics, which have not indeed, like the wood of the cross, been hallowed by contact with our Lord’s body, but which have been blessed by His most loving heart, encompassed by His friendly, Divine Will, kissed and sanctified. The curse becomes a blessing, insult becomes righteousness, suffering becomes an aureole, and the cross a joy. Farewell, sweet father and brother, and pray for me.” 5. Excerpts from the Earliest Letters The above letter of Luther’s is one of the few remaining which belong to that transition period in his life. His letters are naturally not devoid of traces of the theological change which was going forward within him, and they may therefore be considered among the precursors of his future doctrine. His new theological standpoint is already apparent in the charitable and sympathetic letter of encouragement which, as Rural Vicar, he sent to one of his brother monks about that time. “Learn, my sweet brother,” he writes to George Spenlein, an Augustinian of the monastery of Memmingen, “learn Christ and Him Crucified, learn to sing to Him, and, despairing of your own self, say to Him: Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am Thy sin; Thou hast accepted what I am and given me what Thou art; Thou hast thus become what Thou wast not, and what I was not I have received.... Never desire,” he exhorts him, “a purity so great as to make you cease thinking yourself, nay being, a sinner; for Christ dwells only in sinners; He came down from heaven where He dwells in the righteous in order to live also in sinners. If you ponder upon His love, then you will become conscious of His most sweet consolation. What were the use of His death had we to attain to peace of conscience by our own trouble and labour? Therefore only in Him will you find peace through a trustful despair of yourself and your works.”[201] A similar mystical tone (we are not here concerned with the theology it implied) shows itself also here and there in Luther’s later correspondence. The life of public controversy in which he was soon to engage was certainly not conducive to the peaceful, mystical tone of thought and to the cultivation of the interior spirit; as might have been expected, the result of the struggle was to cast his feeling and his mode of thought in a very different mould. It was impossible for him to become the mystic some people have made him out to be owing to the distractions and excitement of his life of struggle.[202]