Of his principles the following must be borne in mind. Man’s attitude towards things Divine is just that of the dumb, lifeless “pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was changed”; “he is not one whit better off than a clod or stone, without eyes or mouth, without any sense and without a heart.”[2] Human reason, which ought to govern moral action, becomes in matters of religion “a crazy witch and Lady Hulda,”[3] the “clever vixen on whom the heathen hung when they thought themselves cleverest.”[4] Like reason, so the will too, in fallen man, behaves quite negatively towards what is good, whether in ethics or in religion. “We remain as passive,” he says, “as the clay in the hands of the potter”; freedom there is indeed, “but it is not under our control.” In this connection he refers to Melanchthon’s “_Loci communes_,”[5] whence some striking statements against free-will have already been quoted in the course of this work.[6] It is only necessary to imagine the practical application of such principles to perceive how faulty in theory Luther’s ethics must have been. Luther, however, was loath to see these principles followed out logically in practice. Other theories of his which he applies either not at all or only to a very limited extent in ethics are, for instance, his opinions that the believer, “even though he commit sin, remains nevertheless a godly man,” and, that, owing to our trusting faith in Christ, God can descry no sin in us “even when we remain stuck in our sins,” because we “have donned the golden robe of grace furnished by Christ’s Blood.” In his Commentary on Galatians he had said: “Act as though there had never been any law or any sin but only grace and salvation in Christ”;[7] he had declared that all the damned were predestined to hell, and, in spite of their best efforts, could not escape eternal punishment. (Vol. ii., pp. 268 ff., 287 ff.) In view of all the above we cannot help asking ourselves, whence the moral incentive in the struggle against the depravity of nature is to come; where, granted that our will is unfree and our reason blind, any real ethical answerableness is to be found; what motive for moral conduct a man can have who is irrevocably predestined to heaven or to hell; and what grounds God has for either rewarding or punishing?