We can only marvel at the ease with which, in his zeal for the supposed glory of the Saviour, he closes his eyes to the devastation which such teaching must work in the spiritual domain. He declares that he is not in the least afraid of the consequences. He fancies he has at last placed the whole motive force of human action in its true light and estimated it at its real value. For “it is above all else necessary and wholesome for the Christian to know that God foresees nothing conditionally, but that He knows all things beforehand unconditionally, determines them and carries them out by His unchangeable, eternal and infallible Will.”[756] He builds up piety, humility and all consolation on the basis of this abnegation of the will. “Christian faith,” he says, would be “altogether destroyed, God’s promises and the whole gospel would be trodden under foot were we not to believe in God’s indispensable foreknowledge and that all happens through necessity; on the other hand, the greatest and only consolation for Christians in the trials they encounter is to know, that God does not lie but invariably performs all things, that there is no resisting His will and no possibility of change or hindrance.”[757] Herein, according to him, lies “the only possibility of leading man to entire self-abnegation, and to perfect humility towards God.” Therefore “this truth must be proclaimed aloud, everywhere and at all times”; here, as in the service of the Word in general, any _prosopolepsia_, _topolepsia_, _tropolepsia_, or _kœnolepsia_ is pernicious and damnable. The Protestant theologian from whom the last sentences are taken remarks: “We have here a peculiar form of piety, and it may remain an open question whether the same is to be judged pathologically or not.”[758] Luther seems to ignore--if indeed he ever was acquainted with them--the reliable solutions to the problem of the Divine prescience and omnipotence in relation to human free-will, furnished both by philosophy and by theology from the times of the Fathers. He dismisses with utter contempt the distinctions and definitions of the greatest theologians of earlier ages. On the other hand, he turns upon Erasmus and the theology of the Church with the formal charge: “You have denied God Himself by taking away faith in Him and fear of Him, you have shaken all God’s promises and menaces.” Without being clearly conscious of the fact, he is actually changing the true idea of God and seeking to set up a Being, who governs with the blind force of fate, in the stead of a God Who rules with wisdom, controlling His own power and restraining Himself with goodness and condescension.[759] Free-will, he says, belongs to God alone, Who alone is able to do what He wills in heaven and on earth.