On what terms did Luther stand with respect to Erasmus, the leader of the Humanists, before their great and final estrangement? As he speaks of Erasmus in a letter of 1517 to Lang as “our Erasmus,” we may infer that until then he was, to a certain extent, favourably disposed towards him. He rejoiced on reading his humanistic writings to find that “he belaboured the monks and clergy so manfully and so learnedly and had torn the veil off their out-of-date rubbish.”[89] Yet, on the same occasion, he confesses that his liking for Erasmus is becoming weaker. It was not the attitude of Erasmus to the Church in general which even then separated Luther from him, but his new teaching on Grace, the origin of which will be treated of later. It is true Luther conveyed to him through Spalatin his good wishes for his renown and progress, but in the same message he admonished him not to follow the example of nearly every commentator in interpreting certain passages where Paul condemns “righteousness by works” as referring only to the Mosaic ceremonial law, and not rather to all the works of the Decalogue. If such are performed “outside the Faith in Christ,” then though they should make of a man a Fabricius, a Regulus, or a paragon of perfection, yet they have as little in common with righteousness as blackberries have with figs”; it is not the works which justify a man, but rather our righteousness which sanctifies the works. Abel was more pleasing to God than his works.[90] The exclusive sense in which Luther interprets these words, according to which he does not even admit that works of righteousness are of any value for the increase of righteousness, is a consequence of his new standpoint, to which he is anxious to convert Erasmus and all the Humanists. He had the Humanists in his mind when he wrote as follows to Johann Lang: “The times are perilous, and a man may be a great Greek, or Hebrew [scholar] without being a wise Christian.... He who makes concessions to human freewill judges differently from him who knows nothing save Grace alone.”[91] But this is to forestall a development of his error, which will be described later. At the time that his new doctrine originated he was far more in sympathy with the theories of certain groups of late mediæval mystics than with the views of the Humanists, because, as will appear later, he found in them the expression of that annihilation of the human by means of Grace, of which the idea was floating before his mind, and because he also discovered in them an “inwardness” which agreed with his own feelings at that time.