Seeing that Luther, in teaching the contrary, appealed to the power of divine grace which ostensibly does all, obliterating every free deed, it is worth our while to point out the scriptural proofs by which the Church vindicated man’s liberty even under the action of grace. Ecclesiastical writers, even in the days immediately before Luther’s time, were fond of laying stress on the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles: “We exhort you that you receive not the grace of God in vain”; or, again, on that other passage where he says of himself: “His grace in me was not void, but I laboured more than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God in me.” It was because he was conscious of freedom and of the power of abusing grace that the Apostle exhorted the Philippians as follows: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”[619] Catholic writers likewise pointed out that the same inspired teaching concerning the liberty of choice in those called to the state of grace was also to be found in the Old Testament: “Choose therefore life that thou mayst love the Lord thy God,” an exhortation prefaced by the most solemn assurance: “I call heaven and earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing.”[620] True Catholic mysticism also laid great stress on free-will, and if some mystical writers, led astray by semi-pantheistic or quietistic ideas, erred from the right path, at any rate their views were never sanctioned by the Church. Some mystics also were not rightly understood and the denial of free-will was attributed to them, whereas all there is to censure in them is their vague mode of expression. This is the case with the “Theologia Deutsch,” which Luther esteemed so highly but did not rightly comprehend. What the Frankfurt knight of the Teutonic Order says in this work, viz.: “When a man is in the state of grace and agreeable to God, he wills and yet it is not he who wills, but God, and there the will is not its own,” may sound equivocal, though it really is perfectly harmless, for the words which follow show that he does not deny man’s will, and that when he says that God Himself wills in man he is merely emphasising the harmony between the human and the Divine will: “And there nothing else is willed but what God wills, for there God wills and not man, the will being united to the Eternal Will.”[621] The will which thus acts in union with the Eternal Will is the free-will of man on earth.