It was in this frame of mind, and in the midst of all this manifold business, that Luther threw himself into the controversy on man’s free-will. It was his object to establish a literary foundation for his new doctrines as a whole by vindicating a pet doctrine on account of which he had been so mercilessly attacked.[615] 3. The Religion of the Enslaved Will. The Controversy between Luther and Erasmus (1524-1525) That the will is free is one of the most indisputable facts of our inner consciousness. Where there is reason there must needs be a corresponding freedom, i.e. freedom from interior necessity. Freedom is the basis of all worship of God, and if external compulsion is rightly excluded from the idea of religion, surely still more opposed to it is the assumption that the will lacks freedom when it seeks and serves God. The true dignity of the soul’s worship of God consists in the voluntary payment of homage to the highest of all beings in the natural as well as the supernatural order. “God has made you without your co-operation,” says Augustine, “but He will not save you without it.”[616] God’s greatness and omnipotence are enhanced by His creation of beings gifted with the power of self-determination, who can will or not, who are free to choose this or that and are in a position to embrace what is good instead of what is evil. The consensus of the human race as a whole in the belief in free-will finds its expression in the acknowledgment of the sense of duty. Virtue and vice, command and prohibition are written on every page of history since the world began. If however there is such a thing as a moral order, then free-will must exist. The misuse of the latter is followed, owing to the spontaneous protest on the part of nature, by a feeling of guilt and remorse, whence Augustine, the champion of grace and free-will, could say: “The feeling of remorse is a witness both to the fact that the individual who feels it has acted wrongly and that he might have acted aright.”[617] The doctrine of the Church before Luther’s time was, that free-will had not been destroyed by original sin, and that, in one who acts aright, it is not interfered with by God’s grace. The fall of our first parents did not obliterate but merely weakened and warped the freedom of moral choice by giving rise to concupiscence and the movements of passion. Among the many proofs of this appealed to in Holy Scripture were the words spoken by God to Cain: “Why art thou angry?... If thou do well, shalt thou not receive? but if ill, shall not sin forthwith be present at the door? but the lust thereof shall be under thee, and thou shalt have dominion over it.”[618] It was well known that Scripture always credited even the fallen will with power over the lower impulses, as well as with the choice between good and evil, life and death, the service of God and the service of idols.