His melancholy conception of God comes to light not only in the various passages where he speaks of predestination, but also in the dark pictures, which, in his morbid frame of mind, he paints of the wickedness and sin of man pitting his unquenchable concupiscence against God, the All Holy.[461] In order to adore this stern and cruel God in his own way he had already built up on his false mysticism a practical theory of resignation and self-surrender to whatever might be the Divine Will, even should it destine him to damnation. In the first pages of the Commentary on Romans his idea of God enables him to proclaim loudly and boldly, and with full knowledge of what he is doing, his opposition to the religious practice of his many zealous contemporaries, whether clerics or laymen. Many have, according to him, an idea of God different from his: “Oh, how many there are to-day who do not worship God as He is, but as they imagine Him to be. Look at their singularities and their superstitious rites, full of delusions. They give up what they ought to practise, they choose out the works by which they will honour Him, they fancy that God is such that He looks down upon them and their works.” “There is spread abroad to-day a sort of idolatry by which God is not served as He is. The love of their own ideas and their own righteousness entirely blinds mankind, and they call it ‘good intention.’ They imagine that God is thereby graciously disposed to them, whereas it is not so: and so they worship their phantom God rather than the true God.”[462] Neither do they understand how to pray, because they do not know the awfulness of God. Does not the Scripture say; he asks them: “Serve ye the Lord with fear and rejoice unto Him with trembling” (Ps. ii. 11), and “with fear and trembling work out your salvation” (Phil. ii. 12)? Not wanting to look at their own works as “bad and suspicious” in the eyes of this God, “they do not assiduously call upon His grace.” They assume that their good intention arises out of themselves, whereas it is a gift of God, and desire to prepare themselves for the infusion of grace.[463] “Pelagian notions are at the bottom of all this. No one acknowledges himself now to be a Pelagian, but many are so unconsciously, with their principle that free will must set to work to obtain grace.”[464]