Luther certainly never dreamt of making so bold and hazardous an assertion so long as a spark of hope remained in him that the Church of Rome would fall in with his doctrines. It was only gradually that the phantom of a personal revelation grew upon him, and, even later, its sway was never absolute, as we can see from our occasional glimpses into his inward struggles of conscience. We may begin with one of his latest utterances, following it up with one of his earliest. Towards the end of his life he insisted on the suddenness with which the light streamed in upon him when he had at last penetrated into the meaning of Rom. i. 17 (in the Tower), thus setting the coping-stone on his doctrines by that of the certainty of salvation.[449] Again, at the outset of his public career, we meet with those words of which Adolf Harnack says: “Such self-reliance almost fills us with anxiety.”[450] The words Harnack refers to are those in which Luther solemnly assures his Elector that he had “received the Evangel, not from man, but from heaven alone, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This he wrote in 1522 when on the point of quitting the Wartburg.[451] In the same year in his “Wyder den falsch genantten geystlichen Standt,” full of the spirit he had inhaled at the Wartburg, he declared that he could no longer remain without “name or title” in order that he might rightly honour and extol the “Word, office and work he had from God.” For the Father of all Mercies, out of the boundless riches of His Grace, had brought him, for all his sinfulness, “to the knowledge of His Son Jesus Christ and set him to teach others until they too saw the truth”; for this reason he had a better right to term himself an “Evangelist by the Grace of God” than the bishops had to call themselves bishops. “I am quite sure that Christ Himself, Who is the Master of my doctrine, calls and regards me as such.” Hence he will not permit even “an angel from heaven to judge or take him to task concerning his doctrine”; “since I am certain of it I am determined to be judge, not only of you, but, as St. Paul says (Gal. i. 8), even of the angels, so that whoever does not accept my doctrine cannot be saved; for it is God’s and not mine, therefore my judgment also is not mine but God’s own.”[452] Such Wartburg enthusiasm, where all that is wanting is the actual word revelation, agrees well with his statement about the sort of ultimatum (“_Interminatio_”) sent him by God: “Under pain of eternal wrath it had been enjoined on him from above,” that he must preach what had been given him; he describes this species of vision as one of the greatest favours God had bestowed on his soul.[453] Nor did he scruple to make use of the word “revelation.”