Not only does he deny the distinction between natural and supernatural goodness, essential as it is for forming an ethical estimate of man, but he practically destroys both the natural and supernatural order. Even in other points of Luther’s doctrine we can notice the abrogation of the fundamental difference between the two orders; for instance in his view of Adam’s original state, which, according to him, was a natural not a supernatural one, “no gift,” as he says, “apart from man’s nature, and bestowed on him from without, but a natural righteousness so that it came natural to him to love God [as he did], to believe in Him and to acknowledge Him.”[186] It is, however, in the moral domain that this peculiarity of his new theology comes out most glaringly. Owing to his way of proceeding and the heat of his polemics he seems never to have become fully conscious of how far-reaching the consequences were of his destruction of all distinction between the natural and the supernatural order. Natural morality, viz. that to which man attains by means of his unaided powers, appears to him simply an invention of the pagan Aristotle. He rounds on all the theologians of his day for having swallowed so dangerous an error in their Aristotelian schools to the manifest detriment of the divine teaching. This he does, for instance, at the commencement of his recently published Commentary on Romans. He calls it a “righteousness of the philosophers and lawyers” in itself utterly worthless.[187] A year later, in his manuscript Commentary on Hebrews, he has already reached the opinion, that, “the virtues of all the philosophers, nay, of all men, whether they be lawyers or theologians, have only a semblance of virtue, but in reality are vices (‘_vitia_’).”[188]