His state of fear, however, as already indicated, proceeded not merely from the numerous temptations of which he himself speaks, but also from his own inward depression, from an affection, partly psychical and partly physical, which often prostrated him in terror. Only later, with the help of other facts of his inner life, will it be possible to deal with this darker side of Luther (vol. vi. xxxvi.). He imagined that during these fits, in which troubles of conscience also intervened, and which, according to his description, were akin to the pains of hell, he was forsaken by God, and sunk in the eerie night of the soul of which the mystics treat. He also considered them at an early period as a trial sent by God and intended to prepare him for higher things. In trying to escape from this feeling of terror, at the time of his change he embraced all the more readily ideas of false security which seemed to be offered by the appropriation of the merits of Christ, and the rejection of all attempt to acquire merit on one’s own account. Psychologically, it is comprehensible that this solution seemed to him to let a beam of sunlight into the darkness of his terror. Anxious to escape from fear he threw himself frantically into the opposite extreme, into a system of self-pacification hitherto unknown to theology. But even this new system did not serve to calm him in the first stage of his error. There was still something lacking, so he felt, in his doctrine, and to this he attained only in the second stage of the process by his discovery that the seal is set on inward peace by the doctrine of the absolute assurance of salvation imparted by Faith. (See chap. x.) Morbid fears prevented any childlike trust in God taking root in a mind so inexplicably agitated as his. With what great fervour he prepared himself for his priestly ordination, and for celebrating his first Mass, may here be illustrated by his own statement, that he then read Gabriel Biel’s book on the Mass (“_Sacri canonis missæ expositio literalis ac mystica_”) “with a bleeding heart.” So he himself says later, when he also speaks of the work, then widely used, as “an excellent book, as I then thought.”[295] From the tone of his letter of invitation to his first Mass we can judge of his state of commotion. The confusion and trouble which he experienced at his first Mass, and the fear which seized him during the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, lead us to conclude that he was readily overcome by vain apprehensions combined with physical excitement. Here also belongs Luther’s later statement concerning the fears which he (and others too) experienced when in the monastery at the smallest ritual blunders, as though they had been great sins; such an assertion, though exaggerated and untrue, is probably an echo of his own troubled state during the liturgical ceremonies.