As to the relationship between the Law and the Gospel: Whereas the Law does not express the relation between God and man, the Gospel does. The latter teaches us that we may, nay must, be assured of our salvation previous to any work of ours, in order, that, born anew by such faith, we may be ready to fulfil God’s Will as free, Christian men. The Law, on the other hand, reveals the Will of God, on pedagogic grounds, as the foundation of a system of merit or reward. It is indeed necessary as a negative preparation for faith, but its demands cannot be complied with by the natural man, to say nothing of the fact that it seems to make certainty of salvation, upon which everything depends in our moral life, contingent on the fulfilment of its prescriptions.[20] From this one can see how inferior to the Gospel is the Law. The Law speaks of “_facere_, _operari_,” of “deeds and works” as essential for salvation. “These words”—so Luther told the students in his Disputations in 1537 on the very eve of the Antinomian controversy—“I should like to see altogether banished from theology; for they imply the notions of merit and duty (“_meritum et debitum_”), which is beyond toleration. Hence I urge you to refrain from the use of such terms.”[21] What he here enjoins he had himself striven to keep in view from the earliest days of his struggle against “self-righteousness” and “holiness-by-works.” These he strove to undermine, in the same measure as he exalted original sin and its consequences. Psychologically his attitude in theology towards these questions was based on the renegade monk’s aversion to works and their supposed merit. His chief bugbear is the meritoriousness of any keeping of the Law. For one reason or another he went further and denied even its binding character (“_debitum_”); caught in the meshes of that pseudo-mystic idealism to which he was early addicted we hear him declaring: the Christian, when he is justified by “faith,” does of his own accord and without the Law everything that is pleasing to God; what is really good is performed without any constraint out of a simple love for what is good. In this wise it was that he reached his insidious thesis, viz. that the believer stands everywhere above the Law and that the Christian knows no Law whatever.[22] In quite general terms he teaches that the Law is in opposition to the Gospel; that it does not vivify but kills; and that its real task is merely to frighten us, to show us what we are unable to do, to reveal sin and “increase it.” The preaching of the Law he here depicts, not as “good and profitable, but as actually harmful,” as “nothing but death and poison.”[23]