At any rate, and this is what is most true in the above statements regarding Luther’s connection with Hus, the feeling against Rome which Hus had stirred up, and the memory of the latter, proved of assistance to Luther when he came forward and brought him a speedier success; he himself says on one occasion: “It is a tradition among honest people that Hus suffered violence and injustice,” and calls the belief that Hus was condemned by false judges “_robustissima_,” so that no Pope, or Kaiser or University can shake it.[256] Protestant biographers, as is well known, are fond of representing the inward process through which Luther went in the monastery, agreeably with his own descriptions in later years.[257] Unable to find peace of conscience and assurance of salvation in the “works” of his monastery life or of the Papacy, his one aim had been to arrive at the knowledge of a “merciful God,” and for this purpose he had been obliged to unearth in Holy Scripture the long-forgotten doctrine of justification by faith. Some Protestant writers dwell not so much upon his longing for certainty of salvation as upon his desire for virtue and true righteousness. “Oh, when wilt thou become pious and do enough?”[258] Others again complete the picture by laying stress upon his recognition of the concupiscence which is always reigning in man and which is sin, and of man’s inability to keep the commandments; it was his recognition of this which “produced Luther’s theology; his whole doctrine of justification culminated in the warfare against sin.” All these descriptions are, however, based on an uncritical acceptance of Luther’s later accounts of his life in religion, accounts plainly inspired by his polemic against the old Church, and intended to illustrate his false assertion that, in the cloister and in the Papacy, the way to obtain grace from God was utterly unknown. Here we will mention only cursorily some of Luther’s later statements, purporting to give a picture of his life as a monk. To these belong the assertion that in the monastery he had not prayed with faith in Christ, because “no one knew anything” about Christ: that there the Saviour was known only as a strict Judge, and that he had therefore wished there were no Saviour: “I wished there had been no God.” “None of us” believed at all that Christ was our Saviour, and, by dint of works, we “lost our baptism.” We were always told: “Torment yourself in the monastery ... whip yourself until you destroy your own sin; that was the teaching and faith of the Pope.”[259] “It was a cursed life, full of malignity, was the life of that monkery.”[260] The apostate monk’s object in all those statements regarding his interior or exterior experiences in the monastery was to strike at the Catholic Church.