In man, because he is “depraved by sin, all works, all words, all thoughts, in a word his whole life, is wicked and ungodly. If God is to work and live in him all these vices and this wickedness must be stamped out.” This he calls “the keeping of the day of rest, when our works cease and God alone acts within us.” We must, indeed, “resist our flesh and our sins,” yet “our lusts are so many and so diverse, and also at times under the inspiration of the Wicked One so clever, so subtle and so plausible that no man can of his own keep himself in the right way; he must let his hands and feet go, commend himself to the Divine guidance, trusting nothing to his reason.... For there is nothing more dangerous in us than our reason and our will. And this is the highest and the first work of God in us, and the best thing we can do, for us to refrain from work, to keep the reason and the will idle, to rest and commend ourselves to God in all things, particularly when they are running smoothly and well.” “The spiritual Sabbath is to leave God alone to work in us and not to do anything ourselves with any of our powers.”[311] He harks back here to that idea of self-surrender to the sole action of God, under the spell of which he had formerly stood: “The works of our flesh must be put to rest and die, so that in all things we may keep the ghostly Sabbath, leaving our works alone and letting God work in us.... Then man no longer guides himself, his lust is stilled and his sadness too; God Himself is now his leader; nothing remains but godly desires, joy and peace together with all other works and virtues.”[312] Though, according to the peculiar mysticism which speaks to the “unschooled laity” out of these pages, all works and virtues spring up of themselves during the Sabbath rest of the soul, still Luther finds it advisable to introduce a chapter on the mortification of the flesh by fasting. Fasting is to be made use of for the salvation of our own soul, so far but no further, as or than each one judges it necessary for the repression of the “wantonness of the flesh” and for the “putting to death of our lust.”[313] We are not to “regard the work in itself.” Of corporal penance and mortification, and fasting in particular, he will have it, that they are to be used exclusively to “quench the evil” within us, but not on account of any law of Pope or Church. Luther dismisses in silence the other motives for penance recommended by the Church of yore, in the first place satisfaction for sins committed and the desire to obtain graces by reinforcing our prayers by self-imposed sacrifices.[314] He fancies that a few words will suffice to guard against any abuse of the new ascetical doctrine: “People must beware lest this freedom degenerate into carelessness and indolence ... into which some indeed tumble and then say that there is no need or call that we should fast or practise mortification.”[315]