He came to the so-called Scala Santa at the Lateran, and saw the Faithful, from motives of penance, ascending the holy steps on their knees. He turned away from this touching popular veneration of the sufferings of the Redeemer, and preferred not to follow the example of the other pilgrims. An account given by his son Paul in 1582 says that he then quoted the Bible verse: “The just man liveth by faith.” If it be a fact that he made use of these words which were to assume so great importance and to be so sadly misinterpreted in his subsequent theology, it was certainly not in their later sense. In reality we have here in all probability an instance of a later opinion being gratuitously anticipated, for Luther himself declares that he discovered his gospel only after he had taken his Doctor’s degree, and this we shall show abundantly further on. Older Protestant writers have frequently represented the scene at the steps of the Lateran in unhistorical colours owing to their desire to furnish a graphic historical beginning of the change in Luther’s mind. Mylius of Jena was one of the first to do this.[72] Mylius, in 1595, quite falsely asserts that Luther had already commented on the Epistle to the Romans previous to his journey to Rome, and adds that he had already then noted the later interpretation of the Bible text in question. It is true that his son Paul, where he speaks of Luther’s exclamation as having been communicated to him by his father, expressly states that “he had _then_, through the spirit of Jesus, come to the knowledge of the truth of the holy gospel.” But Köstlin’s Biography of Luther rightly denies this, and describes it as an “exaggeration”[73]—“error” would have been better—for the assumption to which Luther’s friends still cling with such affection, namely, that from the very commencement of his journey to Rome he had been “haunted by the Bible text concerning justification by faith,” at a time “when he still was striving to serve God by his own works,” must be struck out of history as a mere fiction.[74]