At the earliest inception of Luther’s theological errors other elements may however be perceived which help to explain more easily his growing antipathy to so-called holiness by works. First, there was the real abuse then prevalent in the practice of works. Here we find a weak spot in the religious life of the time, nor is it unlikely that grave faults and repulsive excesses were to be found even in the Augustinian monasteries with which Luther was acquainted. We have already drawn attention to the formalism which in many cases had affected the clergy and the monastic houses. The often one-sided cultivation of exterior works, which, for instance, by the Indulgence-preachers, were proclaimed unfailing in their effects; the popular excesses in saint-worship; far-fetched legends and exhortations to imitate the extraordinary practices of saintly heroes; the stepmotherly treatment meted out in the pulpit to the regular and ordinary duties of a Christian; the self-interest, avarice and jealousy rampant in confraternities, pilgrimages and other public expressions of worship, faults which had slipped in partly owing to the petty egotism of the corporations and Orders, partly to the greed of their members, partly to a mania for false piety; all this may well have made a painful impression on the Wittenberg Professor, and have called forth his eloquent reproof. His tendency to look at the worst side of things doubtless contributed, together with the above reasons, to fill him with distaste for good works in general. The extraordinary exaggerations of which he was guilty must, however, be imputed to himself alone. It has been said to his excuse that, as Rural Vicar, he had been able to acquire correct information regarding the state of things. But, as it happens, his frequent and unrestrained outbursts against abuses belong, at least in great part, to the time when he was a simple monk, who, apart from his journeys to Rome and Cologne and his stay at Erfurt, had seen little outside his cell beyond the adjoining walls of Wittenberg. His lectures on the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans both offer strange examples of such exaggerations, though both were delivered before he had had any experience as Rural Vicar. Finally his own morbid personal condition must be taken into account; the after-effects of his passing fit of scrupulosity, and the lasting feeling of fear which sometimes quite overmastered him. His inclination to doubts concerning his election remained, and therewith also the moral results which the fear of being predestined to hell would naturally exercise upon his peculiar temperament. He remained an outspoken predestinarian of the most violent type. (See chap. vi. 2.) He had to come to terms with this fear of hell, and his system shows the result; in many respects it appears as a reaction against the oppressive burden of the thought of eternal rejection.