Luther also speaks of our freedom and our responsibility for our personal salvation in his Commentary on the Psalms: “My soul is in my own keeping; by the freedom of my will I can make it eternally happy or eternally unhappy by choosing or rejecting Thy law.” Therefore Psalm cxviii. 109 says, “My soul is always in my hands,” and although I am free to do either, yet I have not “forgotten Thy law.”[263] He defends the principle of the theologians, that God does not refuse His grace to him who does his best (“_facienti quod est in se, Deus non denegat gratiam_”).[264] He teaches also that it is possible to prepare for grace which is always at hand.[265] “Whoever keeps the law,” he writes in the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, at a time when he had already denied the freedom of the will for good, “is in Christ, and grace is given him according as he has prepared himself for it to the best of his power.”[266] Without grace man is, it is true, unable to do anything that is good in God’s sight, but “the law of nature is known to everyone, and therefore no one is excusable” who does not follow it and fight against evil.[267] Grace, according to him, sets the enslaved will in the righteous free again to work for his salvation. “After he has received grace, he has been set free, at least to work for his eternal salvation.”[268] This remarkable passage together with its continuation will be considered later when we deal more fully with the Commentary on Romans. We may also draw attention to the fact, that in his Notes on Tauler’s sermons, written about the same time as the Commentary, quite against the supposed utter inability of the will for good, he acknowledges the natural inclination in man towards good—the so-called Syntheresis, or moral good conscience.[269] In his lectures on Romans he insists that, “by means of works of penance and the cross,” concupiscence must be fought against without intermission, forced back and diminished; “the body of sin” must, according to the Apostle, be destroyed.[270] Luther must therefore certainly have regarded man as capable of resisting his evil passions, at any rate with assistance from above.