To such a one even the “wounds of Christ” offer no assurance and no place of refuge. They only speak to man of the God of revelation, not of the mysterious, unsearchable God. The untenable and insulting comparison between the mysterious and the revealed Supreme Being which Luther was later on to institute is here already foreshadowed. He explains in detail how the will of man does not in the least belong to the person who wills, or the road to the runner. “All is God’s, who gives and creates the will.” We are all instruments of God, who works all in all. Our will is like the saw and the stick—examples which he repeatedly employs later in his harshest utterances concerning the slavery of the will. Sawing is the act of the hand which saws, but the saw is passive; the animal is beaten, not by the stick, but by him who holds the stick. So the will also is nothing, but God who wields it is everything.[476] Hence he rejects most positively the theological doctrine that God foresees the final lot of man as something “_contingenter futurum_,” i.e. that he sees his rejection as something dependent on man and brought about by his own fault. No, according to Luther, in the election of grace everything is preordained “_inflexibili et firma voluntate_,” and this, His own will, is alone present in the mind of God. Luther speaks with scorn of “our subtle theologians,” who drag in their “_contingens_” and build up an election by grace on “_necessitas consequentiæ, sed non consequentis_,” in accordance with the well-known scholastic ideas. “With God there is absolutely no ‘_contingens_,’ but only with us; for no leaf ever falls from the tree to the earth without the will of the Father.” Besides, the theologians—so he accuses the Scholastics without exception—“have imagined the case so, or at least have led to its being so imagined, as though salvation were obtained or lost through our own free will.”[477] We know that here he was wrong. As a matter of fact, true Scholasticism attributed the work of salvation to grace together with free will, so that two factors, the Divine and the human, or the supernatural and the natural, are mutually engaged in the same. But Luther, when here reporting the old teaching, does not mention the factor of grace, but only “_nostrum arbitrium_.” He then adds: “Thus I once understood it.” If he really ever believed salvation to be exclusively the work of free will, then he erred grievously, and merely proves how defective his study, even of Gabriel Biel, had been.