The sin that still dwells within us “forces” man to prevent faith and works coming to their own.[135] For “he is not yet without sin, though he has the forgiveness of sins and is sanctified by the Holy Ghost.” In consequence of the “foulness” within him “the longer he lives the worse he gets.” “We cannot get rid of our sinful body.”[136] For this reason even the “best minds” so often are indifferent to eternal life. On account of the evil taint in our flesh we are unable to rise as high as we ought.[137] But if original sin and its workings were declared really sinful in man (for even the very motions against “heartfelt pleasure” in God’s service are, so we are told, “sins”[138]), then it is no wonder that Luther should have been confronted with the question of which he speaks: “If sin be in me, how then can I be pleasing to God?”—a question which formerly could not have been asked of those whose original sin had been washed away in baptism. The teaching of the olden Church had been, that original sin was blotted out by baptism, but that the inclination to evil persisted in man to his last breath, though without any fault on his part so long as consent was lacking.[139] Still less to be wondered at was it, that many, unable to regard themselves as responsible or guilty on account of the involuntary motions of original sin, began to doubt whether any responsibility existed for evil actions or whether moral effort was within the bounds of possibility. Further, according to Luther, our constant exercise of ourselves in faith and our “rubbing” ourselves against sin was finally to lead “not merely to our sins being forgiven but to their being altogether rooted up and swept away; for your shabby, smelly body could not enter heaven without first being cleansed and beautified.”[140] Taking for granted his mystic assumption that sinful concupiscence can at last be “swept away,” he insists on our continuing hopefully “to amend by faith and prayer our weakness and to fight against it until such a change takes place in our sinful body that sin no longer exists therein,”[141] though, in his opinion, this cannot entirely be until we reach heaven. Yet experience, had he but opened his eyes to it, here once again contradicted him. The “_fomes peccati_,” as the Catholic Church rightly teaches, cannot be extinguished so long as man is on this earth, though it may be damped, and, by the practice of what is right and the use of the means of grace, be rendered harmless to our moral life. The Church expected nothing unreasonable from man, though her moral standards were of the highest. Luther, however, by abandoning the Church’s ethics, came to teach a strange mixture of perverted, unworkable idealism and all too great indulgence towards human frailty. _Luther’s Vacillation between the Two Faiths, Old and New, in the Matter of Morality and the Assurance of Salvation_