Elsewhere he again recounts how Staupitz encouraged him and the manner in which he interpreted his advice reveals a singular self-esteem. Staupitz had pointed out to him the interior trials endured by holy men, who had been purified by temptation, and, after having been humbled, had risen to be powerful instruments in God’s hand. Perhaps, said Staupitz, God has great designs also for you, for the greater good of His Church. This well-meant encouragement remained vividly impressed upon Luther’s memory, not least because it seemed to predict a great future for him. “And so it has actually come to pass,” he himself says later, “I have become a great doctor though in the time of my temptations I could never have believed it.”[46] Speaking later of a reference made by Staupitz to the temptations which humbled St. Paul, he says: “I accepted the words which St. Paul uses: ‘A sting of my flesh was given me lest the greatness of the revelation should exalt me’ (2 Cor. xii. 7), wherefore I receive it as the word and voice of the Holy Spirit.” Such reflections as these, to which Luther gave himself up, certainly did not tend to help him to rid himself completely of the temptations, and to vanquish his melancholy thoughts of predestination. As a result of following “his own way” and cultivating his morbid fears, he never succeeded in shaking himself free from the thought of predestination. This will appear quite clearly in his recently published Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, written in 1515-16. In fact, the whole of the theology which he set up against that of the Catholic Church was in some sense dominated by his ideas on predestination. We must, however, pay him this tribute, that during the whole of his stay in the Erfurt monastery he strove to live as a true monk and to keep the Rule. Such was the testimony borne by an old brother monk, as Flacius Illyricus relates, who had lived with him at Erfurt and who always remained true to the Church.