He is, for instance, neglecting a distinction when he repeatedly asserts that Occam, his “Master,” denied the biblical truth that the Holy Ghost is necessary for the performance of a good work. As a matter of fact, the Occamists, like the Scotists, did not here differ essentially from the Thomists, although differences are apparent in their teaching on the supernatural habit, and on the preparation for the attainment of this supernatural righteousness, i.e. for justification.[369] He is wronging his own “_factio occamica_” when, from its teaching that man could, by his natural powers, acquire a love of God beyond all things, he at once infers that it declared infused grace to be superfluous,[370] and further, when, for instance, he asserted that the axiom quoted above, and peculiarly beloved of the Occamists, “_Facienti quod est in se Deus non denegat gratiam_,” was erroneous, as though it placed a “wall of iron” between man and the grace of God.[371] No Occamist understood the axiom in the way he wishes to make out. Luther went so far in his gainsaying of the Occamist doctrine of the almost unimpaired ability of man for purely natural good, that he arrived at the opposite pole and began to maintain that there was no such thing as vitally good acts on man’s part; that man as man does not act in doing what is good, but that grace alone does everything. The oldest statements of this sort are reserved for the quotations to be given below from his Commentary on Romans. We give, however, a few of his later utterances to this effect. They prove that the crass denial of man’s doing anything good continued to characterise him in later life as much as earlier. In the Gospel-homilies contained in his “Postils,” he teaches the people that it was a “shameful doctrine of the Popes, universities, and monasteries” to say “we ought by the strength of our free will to begin [exclusive of God’s help?] by seeking God, coming to Him, running after Him and earning His grace.” “Beware, beware,” he cries, “of this poison; it is the merest devil’s doctrine by which the whole world is led astray.... You ask: How then must we begin to become pious, and what must we do that God may begin in us? Reply: What, don’t you hear that in you there is no doing, no beginning to be pious, as little as there is any continuing and ending? God only is the beginning, furthering and ending. All that you begin is sin and remains sin, let it look as pretty as it will; you can do nothing but sin, do how you will ... you must remain in sin, do what you will, and all is sin whatever you do alone of your free will; for if you were able of your own free will not to sin, or to do what is pleasing to God, of what use would Christ be to you?”[372]