Luther had said, that, with the law, God “wished to do no more than make us feel our helplessness, our weakness and our sickness.”[560] The critic asks: “Why not also to make us eschew evil and do good, 1 Peter iii.?” On the other hand, Luther will have it that the “Law makes all of us sinners so that not even the smallest tittle of these commandments can be kept even by the most holy.” “Such is in short Luther’s doctrine concerning the Law and the Commandments of God. There he lets it rest, as though the ground and contents of the Law and God’s intention therein—which was centred on Christ—were nothing.... Of this doctrine, particularly, the common people can make nothing save that God has given us His commandments, not in order that we may keep them by means of His Grace, but only that we may thereby come to the knowledge of sin.”[561] “Why should we hate our life in this world ... and follow Christ? Nay, why take pains at all to enter in at the narrow gate and to seek the strait way to life everlasting (Mt. vii.) if it is possible to reach heaven along the broad way on which so many walk who are called Lutherans, and to enter in through the wide gate which they make for themselves!”[562] Two other points of doctrine which in the same connection Schwenckfeld censures in the strongest terms as real stumbling blocks in ethics, are the preaching of predestination and the denial of free-will. How, at the outset, the “learned had soared far too high” with their article of predestination “and, by means of their human wisdom, reached a philosophical, heathen conception [presumably the ancient ‘_fatum_’] can readily be seen from their books, especially from Luther’s against free-will and Melanchthon’s first Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.”[563] “Luther writes that no one is free to plan either good or evil, but only does as he is obliged; that, as God wills, so we live.... _Item_, that the man who does evil has no control over himself, that it is not in man’s power to do evil or not, but that he is forced to do it, ‘_nos coacti facimus_.’” “God,” so Philip tells us, “does all things by His own power.”[564] “They have treated of predestination in accordance with heathen philosophy, forgetful of Christ and the Grace of the Gospel now made manifest; they wrote of it from a human standpoint; and though Luther and Philip, after they had seen the evil results, would gladly have retracted it, yet because what they had formerly taught was very pleasing to the flesh, it took root in men’s hearts so deeply that what they afterwards said passed almost unheard.”[565] “This aberration,” says Ecke, “was to Schwenckfeld a further sign that their method of reformation was not that of good missionaries.”[566]