The impetuous author, following his mistaken tendency to independence, disdains to be guided by the heritage of ecclesiastical and theological truth, as the Catholic professor is wont to be in his researches in theology and in his explanations of Holy Scripture. Luther, though by no means devoid of faith in the Church, and in the existence in her of the living Spirit of God, lacks that ecclesiastical feeling which inspired so many of his contemporaries in their speculations, both theological and philosophical; we need only recall his own professor, Johann Paltz, and Gabriel Biel to whom he owed so much. Impelled by his subjectivism, and careless of the teaching of preceding ages, he usually flies straight to his own “profounder theology” for new solutions. Here the habits engendered by the then customary debates in the schools exercise a detrimental effect on him. He is heedless of the fact that his hasty and bold assertions may undermine the foundations which form the learned support to the Church’s dogmas. Important and assured truths become to him, according to this superficial method, mere “soap bubbles” which his breath can burst, “chimeras of fancy” which will melt away in the mist. This is the case, for instance, with the traditional doctrines of saving grace, of the distinction between original and actual sin, and of meritorious good works. Whoever does not agree with his terrible doctrine of predestination is simply reckoned among the subtle theologians, who are desirous of saving everything with their vain distinctions.[576] We cannot, of course, measure Luther by the standard of the Tridentine decrees, which embodied these and other questions in distinct formularies of which the Church in his time had not yet the advantage. Yet the principal points which Luther began to agitate at this time were, if not already actual dogmas, yet sufficiently expressed in the body of the Church’s teaching and illuminated by ecclesiastical theology. That he still adheres in the Commentary to the principle of the hierarchy is apparent from the fact that he declares its office to be sublime, and loudly bewails the fact that so many unworthy individuals had forced themselves at that time into its ranks; he says in his curious language: “It is horrifying and the greatest of all perils that there can be in this world or the next; it is simply the one biggest danger of all.”[577] In the hierarchy, he says, God condescended to our weakness by choosing to speak to us and come to our assistance through the medium of men, and not directly, in His unapproachable and terrible majesty.[578]