This opposition to a principle, common to the Church and to monasticism, as to the necessity in which men generally and religious in particular stand of performing good works if they wish to please God, is the first deviation from the right path which we notice in him. He called it a fight against “holiness by works” and self-righteousness, and in this fight he went still further. He made his own the deadly error that man by his natural powers is unable to do anything but sin. To this he added that the man who, by God’s grace, is raised to justification through divinely infused faith and trust must, it is true, perform good works, but that the latter are not to be accounted meritorious. All works avail nothing as means for arriving at righteousness and eternal salvation; faith alone effects both. Not at the outset, but gradually, did he make his antagonism to good works the foundation of a doctrine built up under the influence of a lively imagination, a powerful and undisciplined self-confidence and other factors which will be mentioned below. In his controversy with the “holy by works” he had exclaimed (p. 81) “there is no greater pest in the Church to-day than those men who go about saying ‘we must do good works.’” His real enemies were soon the traditional Catholic belief and practice regarding good works and personal activity in general; he did not confine himself to expressing his dissatisfaction with the Observantines in his own Order or the possible excesses of other supporters of outward works. It is easy to recognise how this opposition to works runs like a dark thread through the first beginnings of his teaching of the new doctrine and onward through the whole course of his life. We may here, starting at the commencement, anticipate his history somewhat. “At the first,” so he says himself in later years, “my struggle was against trust in works,”[278] and this is confirmed by the MS. Commentary on Romans which he commenced in 1515 (see below, chap. vi. 3). The first occasion in his correspondence in which he allows his new views to appear is in 1516, in a recommendation to a friend that “he should cultivate disgust with his own righteousness and despair of himself,” that this was better than to do as “those who plague themselves with their works until they think they are fit to stand in God’s sight.”[279] He expresses himself in a similar strain on self-righteousness in sermons preached at this time.[280]