“To love is to hate and condemn oneself, yea even to wish evil to oneself.” “Our good is hidden so deeply that it is concealed under its opposite; thus life is hidden under death, real egotism under hatred of self, honour under shame, salvation under destruction, a kingdom under exile, heaven under hell, wisdom under foolishness, righteousness under sin, strength under weakness; indeed all our affirmation of any good is concealed under its negation in order that faith in God, Who is the negation of all, may remain supreme ... thus ‘our life is hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. iii. 3), i.e. in the negation of all that can be felt, possessed and apprehended.... That is the good which we must desire for ourselves,” he says to his brother monks, “then only are we good when we recognise the good God and our evil self.”[697] He says elsewhere regarding vows: “All things are, it is true, free to us, but by means of vows we can offer them all up out of love; when this has once taken place, then they are necessary, not by their nature but on account of the vow which has been taken voluntarily. Then we must be careful to keep the vows with the same love with which we took them upon us, otherwise they are not kept at all.”[698] In many points he goes further than the Rule itself in the mystical demands he makes upon the members of the Order. In other respects Luther’s requirements not only fall far short of what is necessary, but even the ordinary monastic duties fare badly at his hands. If it is the interior word which is to guide the various actions, and if without the “spirit” they are nothing, indeed would be better left undone, then what place is left to the common observance of the monastic Rule and the numerous pious practices, prayers and acts of virtue to which a regular time and place are assigned? From the standpoint of his pseudo-mystical perfection he criticises with acerbity the recitation of the Office in Choir; also the “unreasonableness and superstition of pious founders of benefices,” who, as it were, “desired to purchase prayers” at certain fixed times. Founders of a monastery ought not to have prescribed the recitation of the Office in Choir on their behalf; by so doing they wished to secure their own salvation and well-being before God, instead of making their offerings purely for God’s sake.[699] Such remarks plainly show that he was already far removed in spirit from a right appreciation of his Order. He had also expressed himself against the mendicancy practised by the Augustinians, and yet the Order was a Mendicant Order and the collecting of alms one of its essential statutes.[700]