The denial of free-will seems to him in this regard quite attractive--such at least is the impression conveyed. For, when we deny the freedom of the will, so much becomes contradictory and mysterious to our reason. But so much the better! “Reason speaks nothing but madness and foolishness, especially concerning holy things.”[805] “Faith,” so he declares at great length, “has to do with things that do not appear (Heb. xi. 1); in order that true faith may enter in, everything that is to be believed must be wrapped in darkness. But things cannot be more completely concealed than when what is seemingly contradictory is presented to the mind, to the senses and to experience.”[806] In the present case, according to Luther, the apparent injustice of God in the “seemingly unjust” punishment of sinners, who are not free agents, is a grand motive for faith in His Justice.[807] Luther here displays his love of paradox. Even more than in his other writings plentiful opportunity for paradox presents itself in the “_De servo arbitrio_,” and of it he makes full use. “God makes alive by putting to death,” he writes in the passage under consideration, “He renders guilty and thereby justifies; He drags down the soul to hell and thereby raises it to heaven.” Among the forcible expressions by which, here as elsewhere, he attempts to convince both himself and others, that he is in the right, are the following: “Liberty of choice is a downright lie (‘_merum mendacium_’).”[808] “Whoever assigns free-will to man, thereby makes him Divine, and thus commits the worst form of sacrilege.”[809] “To get rid altogether of the term free-will would be the best and most pious work (‘_tutissimum et religiosissimum_’).”[810] Whoever follows the road of Erasmus “is rearing within himself a Lucian--or a hog of the breed of Epicurus.”[811] “Erasmus concedes even more to free-will than all the sophists hitherto.”[812] “He denies Christ more boldly than the Pelagians,”[813] and those who hold with him are “double-dyed Pelagians, who merely make a pretence of being their opponents.”[814] But he himself, Luther, had never fallen so low as to defend free-will: “I have always, up to this very hour, advocated in my writings the theory that free-will is a mere name.”[815] In this last assertion he repudiates his Catholic days and refuses even to take into account the works dating from that time; in his Commentary on the Psalms he had expressly admitted free-will for doing what is good and for the choice in the matter of personal salvation; it is true, however, that he never published this work. But in many of the writings composed and published even after his apostasy he had clearly assumed free-will in man and made it the basis of his practical exhortations, as shown above (p. 239). Now, however, he prefers to forget all such admissions.[816]