If Luther, in consequence of his study of these Occamist doctrines, fell into error regarding the supernatural, the consequences were even worse when, with his head full of such Occamistic ideas, he proceeded to expound the most difficult of the Pauline Epistles, with their dim and mysterious handling of grace, and, at the same time, to ponder on the writings of St. Augustine,[382] that deep-thinking Doctor of grace. Such studies could only breed fresh confusion in his mind. The result was as follows: regarding imputation, i.e. one of the foundations of his theology, Luther quotes Occam in such a way as to represent him as teaching as a fact what he merely held to be possible. He declares sanctifying grace to be not merely superfluous, but also non-existent, and erects the theory of Divine acceptation into a dogma. This alone would be sufficient to demonstrate his positive dependence on Occamism. The theories of acceptation, which were peculiar to the Occamists and which Luther took over—though what they called by this name he prefers to call imputation—had not only met with approval, but had also been widely applied by this school. According to d’Ailly, evil is not evil on account of its special nature, but only because God forbids it (“_præcise, quia lege prohibitum_”); a law or rule of conduct does not exist by nature, for God might have willed otherwise (“_potest non esse lex_”); He has, however, decreed it in the present order of things. Similar views appear in Luther’s Commentary on Romans, where little regard is paid to the objective foundation of the moral law.[383] According to Occam, God acts according to whim. D’Ailly actually discovers in him the view that it is not impossible to suppose that the created will might deserve well by hating God, because God might conceivably command this. In Luther we at least find the opinion that God knows of no grounds for His action and might therefore work what is evil in man, which then, of course, would not be evil in God in consequence of His not imputing it to Himself as such. The Divine imputation or _pactum_ plays its part in the Occamistic sense in Luther’s earliest theological lectures on the Psalms. “Faith and Grace,” he there says, “by which we are justified to-day, would not justify us of themselves save as a consequence of the ‘_pactum Dei_.’” In the same place he teaches that, as a result of such an “agreement and promise,” those who, before Christ, fulfilled the law according to the letter, acquired a supernatural merit _de congruo_.[384] Luther’s dependence on Occamism caused him, as Denifle expresses it, to be always “on bad terms with the supernatural”;[385] we must not, however, take this as meaning that Luther did not do his best, according to his own lights, to support and to encourage faith in revelation, both in himself and in others.