We might expect to find in the Commentary the most noticeable progress where he deals with preparation for grace, for this was surely the point on which he was bound to come into conflict with other doctrines. It is, however, hard to tell whether he realised the difficulty. It is true that much less stress is laid upon preparation for justification as the work proceeds, whereas at the commencement the author speaks unhesitatingly of the cultivation of the will which must be undertaken in order to bring down grace. (See above, p. 214.) This, however, might merely be accidental and due to the fact that, in the last chapters, St. Paul is dealing mainly with the virtues of the justified. Towards the end of the Epistle, in connection with what the Apostle says on charity and faith in the righteous, the nature of that “_humilitas_” which Luther so eulogises as a preliminary and accompaniment of the appropriation of the righteousness of Christ undergoes a change and appears more as faith with charity, or charity with faith. Luther’s manner of speaking thus varies according to the subject with which Paul is dealing. If we take the middle of the year 1515 as the starting-point of Luther’s new theology, then many of the statements in his Commentary on the Psalms, especially in its latter part, become more significant as precursors of Luther’s errors. The favourable view we expressed above of his work on the Psalms, as regards its agreement with the theology of the Church, was only meant to convey that a Catholic interpretation of the questionable passages was possible; this, however, cannot be said of the theses in the Commentary on Romans which we have just been considering. We now understand why unwillingness to allow any ability in man to do what is good is the point in which Luther’s work on the Psalms goes furthest. There the doctrine of his “_profundior theologia_” is: “We must account ourselves as nothing, as sinful, liars, as dead in God’s sight; we must not trust in any merits of our own.” There, too, we find paradoxes such as the following: “God is wonderful in His saints, the most beautiful is to Him the most hideous, the most infamous the most excellent; whoever thinks himself upright, with him God is not pleased.... In the recognition of this lie the pith of the Scripture and the kernel of the heavenly grain.”[676] Such expressions are, it is true, not unlike what we sometimes hear from the Church’s theologians and saints, but in the light of the Commentary on Romans they become more important as signs of transition. * * * * *