It is this road, according to him, that the Papists tread and that he himself, so he assures us, had followed when a monk. There he had been obliged to grind himself on the Law, i.e. had been forced to fight his way in despair until at last he discovered justification in faith.[39] One thing that is certain is his early antipathy—due to the laxity of his life as a religious and to his pseudo-mysticism—for the burdens and supposed deadening effect of the Law, an antipathy to which he gave striking expression at the Heidelberg Disputation.[40] Luther remained all his life averse to the Law.[41] In 1542, i.e. subsequent to the Antinomian controversy, he even compared the Law to the gallows. He hastens, however, to remove any bad impression he may have made, by referring to the power of the Gospel: “The Law does not punish the just; the gallows are not put up for those who do not steal but for robbers.”[42] The words occur in an answer to his friends’ questions concerning the biblical objections advanced by the Catholics. They had adduced certain passages in which everlasting life is promised to those who keep the Law (“_factores legis_”) and where “love of God with the whole heart” rather than faith alone is represented as the true source of righteousness and salvation. Luther solves the questions to his own content. Those who keep the Law, he admits, “are certainly just, but not by any means owing to their fulfilment of the Law, for they were already just beforehand by virtue of the Gospel; for the man who acts as related in the Bible passages quoted stands in no need of the Law.... Sin does not reign over the just, and, to the end, it will not sully them.... The Law is named merely for those who sin, for Paul thus defines the Law: ‘The Law is the knowledge of sin’ (Rom. iii. 20).”—In reality what St. Paul says is that “_By the Law_ is the knowledge of sin,” and he only means that the Old-Testament ordinances of which he is speaking, led, according to God’s plan, to a sense of utter helplessness and therefore to a yearning for the Saviour. Luther’s very different idea, viz. that the Law was meant for the sinner and served as a gallows, is stated by W. Walther the Luther researcher, in the following milder though perfectly accurate form: “In so far as the Christian is not yet a believer he lacks true morality. Even in his case therefore the Law is not yet abrogated.”[43] “A distinction must be made,” so Luther declares, “between the Law for the sinner and the Law for the non-sinner. The Law is not given to the righteous, i.e. it is not against them.”[44]