After the clothing began the novitiate, which lasted a whole year. During this period the candidate had not only to undertake a series of exercises consisting in prayer, manual labour and penitential works, but had also to discharge certain humiliating offices, which might help him to acquire the virtue of humility as practised in the Order. Out of consideration for the University and his academic dignity Luther was, however, speedily exempted from some of the latter duties. It appears that during his noviceship he was attentive to the rules, and that the superiors treated him with fatherly kindness. Although some members of the community may have observed the Rule from routine, while others, as is often the case in large communities, may not have been conspicuous for their charity—Luther refers to something of this kind in his Table-Talk—yet the spirit of the Erfurt monastery was, like that of most of the other houses of the Congregation, on the whole quite blameless. The novice himself, as yet full of goodwill, was not only satisfied with his calling, but even looked on the state he had chosen as a “heavenly life.”[18] From the very first, however, as he himself complains later, he was constantly “worried and depressed”[19] by thoughts connected with religion. He was sorely troubled by the fear of God’s judgment, by gloomy thoughts on predestination, and by the recollection of his own sins. Although he made a general confession in the monastery and renewed it again later, his confessions never gave him any satisfaction, so that his director laid on him the obligation not to hark back to things which caused him sadness of spirit nor to dwell on the details of his sins. “You are a fool,” he once said to him; “God is not angry with you, but it is you who are angry with Him.”