Melanchthon was afterwards to hear from Luther’s own lips something of the dark states of terror from which he had suffered since his youth. When he speaks of them at the commencement of his biographical eulogy on his late friend[38] he connects Luther’s strange excitement in the days before his entrance into religion with a certain event in his later history at a time when he was engaged in public controversy. “As he himself related, and as many are aware,” says Melanchthon, “when considering attentively examples of God’s anger, or any notable accounts of His punishments, such terror possessed him (‘_tanti terrores concutiebant_’) as almost to cause him to give up the ghost.” He describes how, as a full-grown man, when such fears overcame him, he would actually writhe on his bed. He suffered from these terrors (_terrores_) either for the first time, or most severely, in the year in which he lost his friend by death in an accident, i.e. before his admission to the monastery. “It was not poverty,” Melanchthon continues, “but his love of piety which led him to choose the religious life, and, while pursuing his theological and scholastic studies, he drank with glowing fervour from the springs of heavenly doctrine, namely, the writings of the prophets and apostles (i.e. the Old and New Testament) in order to instruct his spirit in the Divine Will and to nourish fear and love with strong testimony. Overwhelmed with these pains and terrors (‘_dolores et pavores_’), he plunged only the more zealously into the study of the Bible.” According to Melanchthon’s account, the same old Augustinian who once had directed Luther’s attention in an attack of faint-heartedness to the Christian’s duty of recalling the article of the forgiveness of sins, also quoted him a saying of St. Bernard: “Only believe that thy sins are forgiven thee through Christ. That is the testimony which the Holy Ghost gives in thy heart: ‘Thy sins are forgiven.’ Such is the teaching of the apostle, that man is justified by faith.”[39] Such words of Catholic faith and joyful trust in God might well have sufficed to reassure an obedient and humble spirit. Luther began to read more and more the mystic writings of the saint of Clairvaux, but as to how far they served to bring him peace of conscience no one can now say; certain it is that, at a later date, he placed a foreign interpretation upon the above-mentioned text and upon many other similar sayings of St. Bernard, which, taken in a Catholic sense, might have been of comfort to him, in order to render them favourable to the methods by which he proposed to make his new teaching a source of consolation. He accustomed himself more and more to follow “his own way,” as he calls it, in mind and sentiment. Though in later times he speaks often and at length of his spiritual trials in the monastery, we never hear of his humbling himself before God with childlike, trustful prayer in order to find a way out of his difficulties.