In his controversy with Agricola we can detect a tendency on his part “to revert to Melanchthon’s doctrine concerning repentance.”[70] He insisted far more strongly than before[71] on the necessity of preaching the Law in order to arouse contrition; he even went so far along Catholic lines as to assert, that “Penance is sorrow for sin with the resolve to lead a better life.”[72] He also admitted, that, at the outset, he had said things which the Antinomians now urged against the Law, though he also strove to show that he had taken pains to qualify and safeguard what he had said. Nor indeed can Luther ever have expected that all the strong things he had once hurled against the Law and its demands would ever be used to build up a new moral theology. And yet, even at the height of the Antinomian controversy, he stood firmly by his thesis regarding the Law, fear and contrition, viz. that “Whoever seeks to be led to repentance by the Law, will never attain to it, but, on the contrary, will only turn his back on it the more”;[73] to this he was ever true. “Luther,” says Adolf Harnack, “could never doubt that only the Christian who has been vanquished by the Gospel is capable of true repentance, and that the Law can work no real repentance.”[74] The fact however remains, that, at least if we take his words as they stand, we do find in Luther a doctrine of repentance which does not claim faith in the forgiveness of sins so exclusively as its source.[75] The fact is that his statements do not tally.[76] Other Protestant theologians will have it that no change took place in Luther’s views on penance,[77] or at least that the attempts so far made to solve the problem are not satisfactory.[78] Stress should, however, be laid on the fact, that, during his contest with Antinomianism Luther insisted that it was necessary “to drive men to penance even by the terrors of the Law,”[79] and that, alluding to his earlier statements, he admits having had much to learn: “I have been made to experience the words of St. Peter, ‘Grow in the knowledge of the Lord.’” Of the converted, i.e. of those justified by the certainty of salvation, he says in 1538 in his Disputations against Agricola: The pious Christian as such “is dead to the Law and serves it not, but lies in the bosom of grace, secure in the righteousness imputed to him by God.... But, so far as he is still in the flesh, he serves the law of sin, repulsive as it may sound that a saint should be subject to the law of sin.”[80] If Luther finds in the saint or devout man such a double life, a free man side by side with a slave, holiness side by side with sin, this is on account of the concupiscence, or as Luther says elsewhere, original sin, which still persists, and the results of which he regarded as really sinful in God’s sight.