To quiet the conscience, to find some inward support for one’s actions in the exercise of one’s own will, this is what Luther constantly insists on in the moral instructions he gives, at the same time pointing to his own example.[232] What was the nature of his own example? His rebellion against the Church’s authority was to him the cause of a long, fierce struggle with himself. He sought to allay the anxiety which stirred his soul to its depths by the reassuring thought, that all doubts were from the devil from whom alone all scruples come; he sternly bade his soul rest secure and as resolutely refused to hearken to any doubts regarding the truth of his new Evangel. His new and quite subjective doctrines he defended in the most subjective way imaginable and, to those of his friends whose consciences were troubled, he recommends a similar course of action; he even on several occasions told people thus disturbed in mind whom he wished to reassure, that they must listen to his, Luther’s, voice as though it were the voice of God. This was his express advice to his pupil Schlaginhaufen[233] and, in later days, to his friend Spalatin, who also had become a prey to melancholy.[234] He himself claimed to have been delivered from his terrors by having simply accepted as a God-sent message the encouraging words of Bugenhagen.[235] “Conscience is death’s own cruel hangman,” so he told Spalatin; from Ambrose and Augustine the latter should learn to place all his trust not in conscience but in Christ.[236] It scarcely needs stating that here he is misapplying the fine sayings of both these Fathers. They would have repudiated with indignation the words of consolation which not long after he offered the man suffering from remorse of conscience, assuring him that he was as yet a novice in struggling against conscience, and had hitherto been “too tender a sinner”; “join yourself to us real, big, tough sinners, that you may not belittle and put down Christ, Who is the Saviour, not of small, imaginary sinners, but of great and real ones”; thus it was that he, Luther, had once been consoled in his sadness by Staupitz.[237] Here he is applying wrongly a perfectly correct thought of his former Superior. Not perhaps quite false, but at any rate thoroughly Lutheran, is the accompanying assurance: “I stand firm [in my conscience] and maintain my attitude, that you may lean on me in your struggle against Satan and be supported by me.” Thus does he direct Spalatin, “who was tormented by remorse, to comfort himself _against_ his conscience.”[238]