And yet, on the other hand, to conclude our survey of his “abasement of practical Christianity,” he is so ultramodern on a capital point of his ethics as to merit being styled the precursor of modern subjectivism as applied to morals. For all his new ethical precepts and rules, beyond the Decalogue and the Natural Law, are devoid of objective obligation; they lack the sanction which alone would have rendered them capable of guiding the human conscience. _The Lack of Obligation and Sanction_ Luther’s moral instructions differed in one weighty particular from those of the olden Church. As he himself insists at needless length, they were a collection of personal opinions and exhortations which appeared to him to be based on Holy Scripture or the Law of Nature—and in many instances, though not always, actually did rest on this foundation. When he issued new pronouncements of a practical character, for instance, concerning clandestine espousals, or annulled the olden order of public worship, the sacraments, or the Commandments of the Church, he was wont to say, that, it was his intention merely to advise consciences and to arouse the Evangelical consciousness. He took this line partly because he was conscious of having no personal authority, partly because he wished to act according to the principles proclaimed in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” or, again, in order to prevent the rise of dissent and the resistance he always dreaded to any attempt to lay down categorical injunctions. Thus his ethical regulations, so far as they differed from the olden ones, amounted merely to so many invitations to act according to the standard set up, whereas the character of the ethical legislation of Catholicism is essentially binding. Having destroyed the outward authority of the Church, he had nothing more to count upon than the “ministry of the Word,” and everything now depended on the minister’s being able to convince the believer, now freed from the ancient trammels. He himself, for instance, once declared that he would “assume no authority or right to coerce, for I neither have nor desire any such. Let him rule who will or must; I shall instruct and console consciences as far as I am able. Who can or wants to obey, let him do so; who won’t or can’t, let him leave it alone.”[228] He would act “by way of counsel,” so he teaches, “as in conscience he would wish to serve good friends, and whoever likes to follow his advice must do so at his own risk.”[229] “He gives advice agreeably to his own conscience,” writes Luthardt in “Luthers Ethik,” “leaving it to others to accept his advice or not on their own responsibility.”[230]