At that time the report of such frivolous talk among the great ones led him to broach the subject in the lectures on Genesis which he happened to be delivering.[853] Here, if we may trust the reporter, he reverts to the doctrine he had defended in his “_De servo arbitrio_,” viz. that all things happen of entire necessity (“_esse omnia absoluta et necessaria_”).[854] He retracts nothing, but merely says, that he had emphasised the necessity of paying attention only to the revealed God; in this artifice he finds a means of preventing any frivolous abuse of the theory of predestination, any despair or recourse to the complaint “I cannot believe.” In another letter he gives encouragement, no less doubtful in character, to an unknown person, who, in the anxiety caused by his apprehension of being predestined to hell, had applied to him. Luther boldly re-affirms the existence of such absolute predestination: “God rejected a number of men and elected and predestined others to everlasting life before the foundation of the world, such is the truth.” “He whom He has rejected cannot be saved, even though he should perform all the works of the Saints; such is the irrevocable nature of the Divine sentence. But do you gaze only upon the Majesty of the Lord Who elects, that you may attain to salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” In Christ, he proceeds, we have that revealed Majesty of God, Who wills to save all who believe in Christ; “whom He has predestined to salvation, He has also called by the gospel, that he may believe and be justified by faith.”[855]--Yet, strangely enough, this letter also contains a sentence which denies absolute predestination to hell, the only such denial known to have been made by Luther.[856] The text of the letter has, however, not yet been verified critically. The words in question appear to be a quotation from Augustine added by another hand in extenuation of Luther’s doctrine. Although Luther did not put forth his rigid doctrine of predestination to hell either in his popular or strictly theological writings, yet, to the end of his life, he never surrendered it; that he “never retracted it” is emphasised even in Köstlin and Kawerau’s Life of Luther.[857]