It was not long before Luther’s pseudo-mysticism translated itself into deeds. He persuades himself that he is guided in all his actions and resolutions by a sort of Divine inspiration. A singular sort of super-naturalism and self-sufficiency gleams in the words he once wrote to Lang. After reminding him of the unquestioned truth, that “man must act under God’s power and counsel and not by his own,” he goes on to explain defiantly, that, for this reason, he scorns once and for all any objections the Erfurt Augustinians might urge against the “paradoxical theses” he had sent them a little earlier, also their charge that he had shown himself hasty and precipitate: God was enough for him; of their counsel and instruction he stood in no need.[365] As though real wisdom and true mysticism did not teach us to welcome humbly the opinion of well-meaning critics, and not to trust too implicitly our own ideas, particularly in fields where one is so liable to trip. But the “Theology of the Cross,” sealed by his fears, now seemed to him above all controversy. During his temptations he had come to see its truth, and it also fell in marvellously with his changed views on the duties of a religious and with his renunciation of humility and self-denial. At a time when mysticism and the study of Tauler still exercised a powerful influence over him he was wont in his fits of terror to revert to Tauler’s misapprehended considerations on the inward trials of the soul. In pursuance of this idea and hinting at his own mental state he declares in his “_Operationes in psalmos_” (1519-21), that, according to St. Paul (Rom. v. 3 f.), tribulations work in us patience and trial and hope, and thus the love of God and justification; tribulation, however, consisted chiefly of inward anxiety, and trial called for patience and calm endurance of this anxiety; the greater the tribulation, the higher would hope rise in the soul. “Thus it is plain that the Apostle is speaking of the assurance of the heart in hope,[366] because, after anxiety cometh hope, and then a man feels that he hopes, believes and loves.” “Hence Tauler, the man of God, and also others who have experienced it, say that God is never more pleasing, more lovable, sweeter and more intimate with His sons than after they have been tried by temptation.”[367] It is quite true that Tauler said this; he also teaches that the greater the desolation by which God tries the souls of the elect, the higher the degree of mystical union to which He wishes to call them; for death is the road to life. It is quite another thing, however, whether Tauler would have approved of Luther’s application of what he wrote.