His theological system finally became the pivot around which his thoughts revolved; to it he looked for help. He had created it under the influence of other factors to which it is not here needful to refer again; particularly it had grown out of his own relaxation in the virtues of his Order and religious life.[352] His system, however, had for its aim to combat despair, overmastering concupiscence and the consciousness of sin by means of a self-imposed tranquillity. He was determined to arrive by main force at peace and certainty. Only little by little, so he wrote in 1525, had he discovered, “God leads down to hell those whom He predestines to heaven, and makes alive by slaying”; whoever had read his writings “would understand this now very well”; a man must learn to despair utterly of himself, and allow himself to be helplessly saved by the action of God, i.e. by virtue of the forgiveness won by fiducial faith.[353] How he himself was led by God down to hell he sets forth in his “_Resolutiones_,” in the account of his mental sufferings given above (p. 101 f.), a passage which transports the reader into the midst of the pains which Luther endured in his anxiety. The man most deeply initiated into the darker side of Luther’s temptations and struggles was the friend of his youth, the Augustinian, Johann Lang. He, too, apparently suffered severely beneath the burden of temptations regarding predestination and the forgiveness of sins. It was in a letter to him, that, not long after the nailing up of the Wittenberg Theses, Luther penned those curious words: They would pray earnestly for one another, “that our Lord Jesus may help us to bear our temptations which no one save us two has ever been through.”[354] Shortly before this Luther had commended to the care of his friend, then prior at Erfurt, a young man, Ulrich Pinder of Nuremberg, who had opened his heart to him at Wittenberg; on this occasion he wrote that Pinder was “troubled with secret temptations of soul which hardly anyone in the monastery with the exception of yourself understands.”[355] He also alludes to the temptations peculiar to himself in that letter to Lang, in 1516, in which he describes his overwhelming labours, which “seldom leave him due time for reciting the hours or saying Mass.” On the top of his labours, he says, there were “his own temptations from the world, the flesh and the devil.”[356] To this same recipient of his confidences Luther was wont regularly to give an account of the success attending his attacks on the ancient Church and doctrine; he kindled in him a burning hatred of those Augustinians at Erfurt who were well disposed towards scholasticism and Aristotle, and forwarded him the controversial Theses for the Disputations at the Wittenberg University embodying his new doctrine of the necessity of despairing of ourselves and of mystically dying, viz. the new “Theology of the Cross.”