Luther rudely retorts: “You lie in your throat; God is served not by works but by faith; faith must do everything that is to be done as between God and ourselves.” That the priests and monks should vaunt their religious exercises as spiritual treasures, he brands as a “Satanic lie.” “The works of the Papists such as organ-playing, chanting, vesting, ringing, smoking [incensation], sprinkling, pilgriming and fasting, etc., are doubtless fine and many, grand and long, broad and thick works, but about them there is nothing good, useful or profitable.” 3. “Know that there are no good works but such as God has commanded.” What, apart from faith, makes a work a good one is solely God’s express command. Luther, while finding fault with the self-chosen works of the Catholics, points to the Ten Commandments as summing up every good work willed by God. “There used to be ecclesiastical precepts which were to supersede the Decalogue.” “The commandments of the Church were invented and set up by men in addition to and beyond God’s Word. Luther therefore deals with the true worship of God in the light of the Ten Commandments.”[175] As for the Evangelical Counsels so solemnly enacted in the New Testament, viz. the striving after a perfection which is not of obligation, Luther, urged on by his theory that only what is actually commanded partakes of the nature of a good work, came very near branding them as an invention of the Papists. They have “made the Counsels twelve” in number,[176] he says, “and twist the Gospel as they please.” They have split the Gospel into two, into “_Consilia et præcepta_.” “Christ,” so he teaches, “gave only one Counsel in the whole of the Gospel, viz. that of chastity, which even a layman can preserve, assuming him to have the grace.” He sneers at the Pope and the Doctors because they had established not only a clerical order which should be superior to the laity, but also an order of the counsels the duty of whose members it was to portray the Evangelical perfection by the keeping of the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “By this the common Christian life and faith became like flat, sour beer; everyone rubbed his eyes, despised the commandments and ran after the counsels. And after a good while they at last discovered man-made ordinances in the shape of habits, foods, chants, lessons, tonsures, etc., and thus God’s Law went the way of faith, both being blotted out and forgotten, so that, henceforth, to be perfect and to live according to the counsels means to wear a black, white, grey or coloured cowl, to bawl in church, wear a tonsure and to abstain from eggs, meat, butter, etc.”[177]