The historic importance of the attack upon ecclesiastical celibacy is by no means fully gauged if we merely regard it as an effective method of securing preachers, allies and patrons for the new Evangel. It was, indeed, closely bound up with Luther’s whole system, and his early theories on holiness by works and self-righteousness. His war on vows was too spontaneous, too closely connected with his own personal experience, to be accounted for merely by the desire of increasing the number of his followers. The aversion to the practice of good works which marked the commencement of his growth, his loathing for the sacrifices entailed by self-denial, the very stress he lays on the desires of nature as opposed to the promptings of grace, the delusion of evangelical freedom and finally his hatred of those institutions of the old Church which inspired her adherents with such vigorous life wherever they were rightly understood and practised--all this served as an incentive in the struggle. A strange element which, according to his own statements, formed an undercurrent to all this and which indicates his peculiar state of mind, was that he looked upon the temptations of the flesh as something altogether insignificant in comparison with the exalted spiritual assaults of “blasphemy and despair” of which he had had personal experience.[310] In the passage already referred to, where he chides the Fathers with their “childish temptations,” he says: Why on earth did they make such efforts for the preservation of their beloved chastity, or exert themselves for something entirely, or almost entirely, impossible of attainment? The temptations of the flesh are nothing at all, he proceeds, “compared with the Angel of Satan who buffets us; then indeed we are nailed to the cross, then indeed childish things such as the temptations which worried Jerome and others become of small account.” In Paul’s case, according to him, the “_angelus colaphizans_” (the angel who buffeted him, 2 Cor. xii. 7) was not a sting of the flesh at all, but exalted pangs of the soul, such as those to which the Psalmist alluded when he said: “God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” where he really means: “God, Thou art become my enemy without a cause,” or again, that a sword has pierced his bowels (pains of the soul). He himself, Luther, had endured such-like things, but “Jerome and the other Fathers never experienced anything of the sort.”[311] * * * * * Luther complains as early as 1522, i.e. at the very outset of this “Evangelical” movement, of the character of the auxiliaries who had been attracted to him by his attack on priestly and monastic continence.