“When shall we at last listen to reason,” he cries,[736] “and understand that we must spend our valuable time more profitably [than in the study of philosophy]? ‘We are ignorant of what is necessary,’ thus we should complain with Seneca, ‘because we merely learn what is superfluous.’ We remain ignorant of what might be of use to us while we busy ourselves with what is worse than worthless.”[737] He speaks thus because others were not alive to the state of things, or had not the courage to open their mouths: “Perhaps they would not be believed, but I have spent years in these studies, have seen and heard much and know that they are vain and perverse” (“_studium vanitatis et perditionis_”). Therefore let us rise and destroy them! “We must learn to know Jesus Christ, and Him Crucified.... Is it not a strange madness to praise and belaud philosophy, a doctrine which is merely the perverse wisdom of the flesh advocated by so-called wise men and theologians!” “Those fools” who do not even know what grace is.... “Who can bear with their blasphemous ideas?” “They do not know what sin or remission of sin is.” “Our theologians see sins only in works, and do not teach us how to change our minds and how to implore grace with humble sighing.... They make proud men, men who after due performance of their works look on themselves as righteous, and seek not to fight against their passions. That is the reason why Confession is of so little use in the Church and why backsliding occurs so frequently.”[738] His hatred for theology leads him to make the following false and bitter charges: “The Scholastics teach that it is only necessary to fulfil the law outwardly, in deed, not with the heart; they do not even show how this is to be done, and thus the faithful are left in the impossibility of doing good, because they will never be able to fulfil the commandments unless they do so with the heart. These teachers do not even stretch out a finger towards the fulfilment of the law, I mean, they do not make its fulfilment depend even in the slightest on the heart, but merely on outward acts. Hence they become vain and proud.”[739] An esteemed Protestant historian of dogma, in a recent work, speaks of Luther’s knowledge of Scholasticism as follows: “Luther does not appear to have been acquainted with the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, more especially Thomas of Aquin. About this statement, which Denifle constantly repeats, there seems to me to be no doubt.”[740]