What, according to Luther, is the general character of faith? Fear and struggles, so he teaches, are not merely its usual accompaniments, but are also the “sure sign that the Word has touched and moved you, that it exercises, urges and compels you”; nay, Confession and Communion are really meant only for such troubled ones, “otherwise there would be no need of them”—i.e. they would not be necessary unless there existed despair of conscience and anxiety concerning faith. It was a mistaken practice, he continues, for many to refrain from receiving the Sacrament, “preferring to wait until they feel the faith within their heart”; in this way all desire to receive is extinguished; people should rather approach even when they feel not at all their faith; then “you will feel more and more attracted towards it”[264]—though this again, according to Luther, is by no means quite certain. The “inward experience of faith” too often becomes simply the dictate of one’s whim. But a whim and order to oneself to think this or that does not constitute faith as the word is used in revelation, nor does a command imposed on the inward sense of right and wrong amount to a pronouncement of conscience. Though Luther often held up himself and his temptations regarding faith, as an example which might comfort waverers, Protestants have nevertheless praised him for the supposed firmness of his faith and for his joy of conscience. But was not his “defiant faith” really identical with that imposition he was wont to practise on his conscience and to dignify by the name of inspiration? Yet, in spite of all, he never found a secure foundation. “I know what it costs me, for I have daily to struggle with myself,” he told his friends in 1538.[265] “I was scarcely able to bring myself to believe,” he said in a sermon of the same year, “that the doctrine of the Pope and the Fathers was all wrong.”[266] His faith was as insecurely fixed, so he quaintly bewailed on another occasion, “as the fur trimming on his sleeve.”[267] “Who believes such things?” he asks, wildly implicating all people in general, at the conclusion of a note jotted down in a Bible and alluding to the hope of life everlasting.[268] In 1529 he repeatedly describes to his friends how Satan tempts him (“_Satanas fatigat_”) with lack of faith and despair, how he was sunk in unspeakable “bitterness of soul,” and, how, for this reason as he once says, he was scarce able “with a trembling hand” to write to them.[269] Calvin, too, was aware of the frequent terrors Luther endured. When Pighius, the Catholic writer, alleged Luther’s struggles of conscience and temptations concerning the faith as disproving his authority, Calvin took good care not to deny them. He boldly replied that this only redounded to Luther’s honour since it was the experience of all devout people, and particularly of the most famous divines.[270]