But Luther himself never surrendered his favourite idea in spite of his anxiety and horror at the effect his preaching produced on the people, who seized upon his theory of human helplessness and the sole action of grace as a pretext for moral indolence. In 1531 he was again to be heard stating--this time in a public sermon, a very unusual thing--that man lacks free-will. Here he connects this doctrine with the impossibility of “keeping the Commandments without the grace of the Spirit.” In Popery they indeed preached, as he himself had also done at one time, “_quod homo habeat liberum arbitrium_,” to keep the Commandments by means of his natural powers; but this was an error which had grown up even in the time of the Apostles.[845]--As a matter of fact, however, the Church did not teach that fallen man could, at all times, keep all the Commandments without grace. When, in August, 1540, someone said to him: “People are merely getting worse through this preaching on grace,” he replied: “Still, grace must be preached because Christ has commanded it; and though it has been preached for a long time, yet at the hour of death the people know nothing about it; it is to the honour of God that grace should be preached; and, though we make the people worse, still God’s Word cannot be set aside. But we also teach the Ten Commandments faithfully, these must be insisted on frequently and in the right place.”[846] The Antinomians had just then attacked the preaching of the Decalogue on the pretext of Luther’s own doctrine regarding man’s incapacity.