As early as 1515 Luther, with the insufficient knowledge he possessed, accused the Scholastics generally of teaching that “man by his natural powers is able to love God above all things, and substantially to do the works commanded, though not, indeed, according to the ‘intention’ of the lawgiver, i.e. not in the state of grace.” “Therefore, according to them,” he says, “grace was not necessary save by a new imposition demanding more than the law (‘_per novam exactionem ultra legem_’); for, as they teach, the law is fulfilled by our own strength. Thus grace is not necessary to fulfil the law, save by reason of God’s new exaction which goes beyond the law. Who will put up with these sacrilegious views?” Assuredly his indignation against Scholasticism would have been righteous had its teaching really been what he imagined. In the same way, and with similarly strong expressions, he generalises what he had learnt in his narrow world at Erfurt and Wittenberg, and ascribes to the whole of Christendom, to the Popes and all the schools, exactly what the Occamists said of the results of original sin being solely confined to the lower powers. Here, and in other connections too, he exclaims: “the whole Papacy has taught this, and all the schools of Sophists [Scholastics].” “Have they not denied that nature was ruined by sin when they assert that they are able to choose what is good according to the dictates of right reason?”[356] From his antagonism to such views, an antagonism we find already in 1515, when he was preparing for his lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, sprang his own gloomy doctrine of the death of free will for good, and the poisoning of human nature by original sin. With its first appearance in the lectures mentioned we shall deal later. Here a more general question must first receive an answer. How came the youthful Luther to absorb into his life the views above described without apparently shrinking in the least from the opposition to the Church’s teaching manifest in them?