The views of the Occamists or “Moderns” exhibited yet other weak points. Man, so they taught, is able to merit grace “_de congruo_.” They admitted, it is true, that grace was a supernatural gift, “_donata_” and “_gratuita_,” as they termed it, but they saw in man’s natural love of God, and in his efforts, an adequate disposition for arriving at the state of saving grace.[349] The great Schoolmen on the contrary taught with St. Thomas, that the preparation and disposition for saving grace, i.e. all those good works which precede justification, do not originate in us but are due to the grace of Christ. As for the teaching regarding natural and supernatural love of God, the keeping of the commandments and the predisposition for grace, Luther, in 1516, appears to have scarcely been acquainted with the opinion of any of the better representatives of Scholasticism, to whom he had access. It was only in 1518 that his attention was directed to Gregory of Rimini (General of the Augustinian Hermits in 1357), an eclectic whose views were somewhat unusual, and in this case, Luther, instead of making use of the good which was to be found in him in abundance, preferred to disregard his real opinion and to set him up as opposed to the teaching of the Schoolmen.[350] In 1519, labouring under a total misapprehension of the truth as regards both Gregory and the Schoolmen, he wrote: “the ‘Moderns’ agree with the Scotists and Thomists concerning free will and grace, with the one exception of Gregory of Rimini, whom they all condemn, but who rightly and effectively proves them to be worse than the Pelagians. He alone among all the Scholastics agrees with Augustine and the Apostle Paul, against Carlstadt and all the new Schoolmen.”[351] As though all Scholastics, old and new, had taught what Luther here attributes to them, viz. that “it is possible to gain heaven without grace,” because, according to them, “a good though not meritorious work can be done” without grace. On the contrary, not the Thomists only, but also many other theologians were opposed to the thesis that the will could, of itself, always and everywhere, conform itself to the dictates of right reason and thus arrive at grace, but Gregory of Rimini, whom Luther favours so much as a Doctor of his own Order, declares that the keeping of the whole law was only possible through grace, and that therefore God had, with His law, imposed nothing impossible on man.[352] According to Luther, however, God had demanded of human nature what was impossible. Occam and his school deviate somewhat from the rest of the Scholastics in the application of the well-known axiom: “_Facienti quod est in se Deus non denegat gratiam._”[353]