According to Luther, even Christ offered Himself for hell whole and entire. Luther does not make the slightest distinction in the agony in the Garden between mere exterior and real interior separation from God. Christ was ever united hypostatically with God, and His human nature never ceased to enjoy the vision of God. Luther, however, merely says: “He found Himself in a state of condemnation and abandonment which was greater than that of all the saints. His sufferings were not easy to Him, as some have imagined, because He actually and in truth offered Himself to the eternal Father to be consigned to eternal damnation for us (‘_quod realiter et vere se in æternam damnationem obtulit Deo patri pro nobis_’). His human nature did not behave differently from that of a man who is to be condemned eternally to hell. On account of this love of God, God at once raised Him from death and hell, and so He overcame hell (‘_eum suscitavit a morte et inferno et sic momordit infernum_’; cp. Osee xiii. 14). All His saints must follow this example, some more, some less; and according to the degree of their perfection in love they find this harder or easier. But Christ bore the most severe form of it (‘_durissime hoc fecit_’), and for this reason He laments in many passages (in the Messianic Psalms) the pains of hell.”[632] In the light of passages such as these we can understand to some extent the lurid, fanciful, mystic description which he gives early in 1518, clearly on the strength of his own states of mind. He tells how a man fancies himself at certain moments plunged into hell, and feels his breast pierced by all the pangs of everlasting despair, because he apprehends God’s “frightful ire” and the impossibility of ever being delivered. This grotesque picture of a soul, with which we shall deal more fully later, although it is partly taken almost word for word from the earlier descriptions of the mystics, reveals its morbid character more especially by the fact, that the hope, which, in the case of the devout, remains in the depths of the soul even throughout the most severe interior trials, seems entirely absent. God is seen as He appeared to Luther, i.e. as an inexorable, arbitrary punisher of His creature.[633] Luther’s mysticism is veritably a mysticism of despair and the “_humilitas_,” with its love ready even for hell, which he belauds as the anchor of safety, is a forced expedient really excluded by his system, and which he himself discarded as soon as he was able to replace it by the (God-given) _fides_, in the shape of faith in personal justification and salvation. 10. The Commentary on Romans as a Work of Religion and Learning The Commentary purports to be as much a religious as a learned work. Its religious value can be shortly summed up from the above.