The second, more momentous, fault which Luther committed was to fly to the extreme even in doctrine, abolishing all that displeased him and setting up as his main thesis, that man can do nothing, absolutely nothing, good. Not only did he say: “I learnt nothing in scholastic theology worth remembering; I only learnt what must be unlearnt, what is absolutely opposed to Holy Scripture” (“_omnino contraria divinis litteris_”).[337] He also asserted at a very early period that Holy Scripture teaches that God’s grace does everything in man of itself alone without his vital participation, without liberty, without resolve, without merit. Such a statement does not indeed appear in the Commentary on the Psalms, but it will be found in his academic lectures on the Pauline Epistles, more especially in the Commentary on Romans. For a moment he thought he had discovered in St. Augustine the necessary weapons against the formalism of his school of theology, but now St. Paul appeared to him to give the loudest testimony against it; the Apostle is so determined in his denunciation of the pride of human reason and human will, and in presenting the Gospel of the Son of God, faith and grace, as the only salvation of mankind. Luther imagined he had found in Paul the doctrines which appealed to him: that all human works were equally useless, whether for eternal salvation or for natural goodness; that man’s powers are good for nothing but sin; if grace, which the Apostle extols, is to come to its rights, then we must say of original sin that it has utterly ruined man’s powers of thinking and willing so far as what is good in God’s sight is concerned; original sin still lives, even in the baptised, as a real sin, being an invincible attraction to selfishness and all evil, more particularly to that of the flesh; by it the will is so enslaved that only in those who are justified by grace can there be any question of freedom for good.