If he looked upon penance and confession in this light, then, indeed, they were not of a nature to satisfy and tranquilise him.[776] We may, however, remark that in the time of his great crisis an earnest and devout fear of God the Judge would have availed him more than all his extravagant mysticism with its tendency to cast off the bonds of fear and abolish the keeping of the law. We shall not be wrong if we assume that the frequent states of terror—of which the cause lay in his temperament rather than in his will—had their part in his aversion to fear and to the idea of God’s judgment. He felt himself impelled to escape at any cost from their dominion. Other passages which Luther wrote at a later date on fear and contrition read rather differently and seem to advocate fear as a motive. We see thereby how hard he found it to cut himself adrift from the natural and correct view taught by theology. He declares, for instance, later, with great emphasis, that “true penance begins with the fear and the judgment of God.”[777] He betrays in this, as in other points, his confusion and inconsequence.[778] He is utterly unfair to the Church and to her theology when he falsely asserts that she had admitted contrition from fear alone, i.e. to the utter exclusion of love; every kind of fear, he says maliciously, was recognised as sufficient for receiving absolution, even that “gallows grief” which abhorred sin solely from fear of punishment and with the intention of returning to it if no punishment existed (_timor serviliter servilis_, as it was subsequently termed by theologians). This reproach did not strike home to the theologians or to the Church. Theological and moral treatises there were in plenty, which, like the Fathers of the Church and the mediæval Doctors, taught in express terms the advantage of perfect contrition and exhorted the faithful to it. Indeed, most of the popular manuals merely taught that sin must be repented of for God’s sake, from love of God, without even mentioning simple attrition. It was not only generally recognised and taken for granted that the lower, imperfect contrition, i.e. that which arises from fear, in order to be a means of forgiveness in the Sacrament of Penance, must include a firm resolution of not returning to sin, but it was set down as requisite that this so-called “servile” fear (_timor servilis_) must be coupled with a commencement of love of God, or else be of such a nature as to lead up to it. It is sufficient to open the works in circulation in the theological schools at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to see at what length and with what care these questions were discussed. It cannot, however, be denied that some few of the later scholastic theologians—among them, significantly enough, Johann Paltz, preceptor in the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt at the time Luther entered—did not express themselves clearly, and