Then it was said that the far-seeing teacher of Wittenberg had from the very first directed his attention to the reformation of the whole Church, which he found sunk in abuses, and had therefore commenced with a doctrinal reform as a necessary preliminary. As though Luther—this is what this childish view presupposes—had before him from the beginning the plan of his whole momentous work, or sat down to draw up a general programme for the reformation of doctrine, commencing with the fall of Adam. We are to believe that the Monk at once severed all connecting ties with the whole of the past, in faith as well as in the practical conception of the Church’s life; that he went through no previous long inward process, attended for him by a weary conflict of soul; that, in fact, such a world-stirring revolution had been dependent on the will of one man, and was not the result of the simultaneous action of many factors which had, at the outset, been ignored and not taken into consideration. The whole struggle for the “betterment of the Church” was a gradual development, and the co-operating elements led their originator, both in his teaching and his practical changes, far beyond what he had originally aimed at. When Luther, brooding over original sin, grace and justification, first began to set up his new ideas against the so-called self-righteous and “little Saints” of his immediate surroundings, he did, it is true, now and again speak excitedly of the reforms necessary to meet certain phases of the great decline in the public life of the Church; but the Doctor of Holy Scripture was, as a matter of fact, far more preoccupied with the question of the theology of Paul and Augustine than with the abuses in the Church and outer world, which were, to tell the truth, very remote from the Monk’s cell and lecture-room. The third view is also incorrect which has it that it was rivalry between two Orders, viz. dissatisfaction and envy on the part of the Augustinians against the Dominicans, which set the Monk on his career. The Augustinians, it was said,[245] were annoyed with the rival Order because the preaching of the Indulgence had been entrusted to its members and not rather to so capable a man as Luther. Notwithstanding the early date at which this charge was made, even by Luther’s own contemporaries, the fact remains, that not only were there Augustinian Indulgence-preachers, as, for instance, Johann Paltz, but that Luther’s erroneous teaching had already made its appearance before he had as yet commenced his struggle with Tetzel, and before he had even thought of the Dominicans Prierias and Cardinal Cajetan. Jealousy against his adversaries, the Dominicans, afterwards added fuel to the flame, but it was not the starting-point.