Of his later statements it will suffice to mention the following: “If I will not leave sin and become pious,” he says of the struggle against evil, “I may indeed strive to become the master, and God’s property, and to be free, but nothing will come of it.”[271] Or again: “As long as we live here, evil desires and passions remain in us which draw us to sin, against which we must strive and fight, as St. Peter says (1 Peter ii. 11 f.). We must therefore always exercise ourselves and pray always and fight against sin ... as often as you feel yourself tempted to impatience, pride, unchastity or other sins ... you must forthwith think how best to withstand these arrows, and beg the Lord Jesus that your sin may not gain the upper hand and overcome you, but that it may be conquered by His grace.”[272] “Do you wish to keep all the commandments,” he says later, “to be free from your evil desires and from sin, as the commandments require and demand, then see you believe in Christ.”[273] Further, if we consider those passages in Luther’s earlier writings alleged as proofs of his belief in the irresistibility of concupiscence, we find that in every case they merely emphasise the inevitable continuance of concupiscence in man, without in any way implying the necessity of our acquiescing in the same, and without excluding grace. In the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 he says for instance, “Why do we hold concupiscence to be irresistible? Well, try and do something without the interference of concupiscence. Naturally you cannot. So then your nature is incapable of fulfilling the law.”[274] Elsewhere also Luther lays much stress upon the indestructibility and the impossibility of rooting out of man the smouldering fire of evil, the “_fomes peccati_,” though he is wrong in making this condition equivalent to a culpable non-fulfilling of the law by man; he is mistaken not only in his common statement that man’s evil inclination, even though involuntary, is sinful in God’s sight, that it is in fact original sin, and that it would carry man to damnation were God not to impute to him Christ’s righteousness; he also errs by unduly magnifying the power of concupiscence, as though the practice of virtue, prayer and the reception of the Sacraments did not weaken it much more than he is willing to admit.