Another explanation, this time a theological one, of Luther’s disregard for the laws of truth is to be found in the theory he set up of the permissibility of lies. Previously, even in 1517, he, like all theologians, had regarded every kind of lie as forbidden. Theologians of earlier times, when dealing with this subject, usually agreed with Augustine and Peter Lombard, the “_Magister Sententiarum_” and likewise with Gratian, that all lies, even lies of excuse, are forbidden. After the commencement of his public controversy, however, strange as it may appear, Luther gradually came to assert in so many words that lies of excuse, of convenience, or of necessity were not reprehensible, but often good and to be counselled. How far this view concerning the lawfulness of lying might be carried, remained, however, a question to be decided by each one individually. Formerly he had rightly declared: A lie is “contrary to man’s nature and the greatest enemy of human society”; hence no greater insult could be offered than to call a man a liar. To this he always adhered. But besides, following St. Augustine, he had distinguished between lies of jest and of necessity and lies of detraction. Not merely the latter, so he declared, were unlawful, but, as Augustine taught, even lies of necessity or excuse--by which he understands lies told for our own or others’ advantage, but without injury to anyone. “Yet a lie of necessity,” he said at that time, “is not a mortal sin,” especially when told in sudden excitement “and without actual deliberation.” This is his language in January, 1517,[335] in his Sermons on the Ten Commandments, when explaining the eighth. Again, in his controversy with the Zwinglians on the Sacrament (1528), he incidentally shows his attitude by the remark, that, “when anyone has been publicly convicted of falsehood in one particular we are thereby sufficiently warned by God not to believe him at all.”[336] In 1538, he says of the Pope and the Papists, that, on account of their lies the words of Chrysippus applied to them: “If you are a liar you lie even in speaking the truth.”[337] Meanwhile, however, his peculiar reading of the Old Testament, and possibly no less the urgent demands of his controversy, had exerted an unfortunate influence on his opinion concerning lies of convenience or necessity.