Again, in 1522, Luther declares in his sermons at Wittenberg,[457] that “it was God Who had set him to work on this scheme” (the reform of the faith), and had given him the “first place” in it. “I cannot escape from God but must remain so long as it pleases God my Lord; moreover, it was to me that God first revealed that the Word must be preached and proclaimed to you.” Hence his revelation was similar to that of the prophets, for he is alluding to the prophet Jonas when he says that he could “not escape from God.”[458] The Wittenbergers, he says, ought therefore to have consulted him before rashly undertaking their own innovations under Carlstadt’s influence: “We see here that you have not the Spirit though you may have an exalted knowledge of Scripture.”[459] Hence, on the top of his knowledge of Scripture, he himself possesses the “Spirit.” From the twelvemonth that followed Luther’s spiritual baptism at the Wartburg also date the asseverations he makes, that his doctrine was, not his, but Christ’s own,[460] and that it was “certain he had his doctrines from heaven.”[461] “By Divine revelation,” as we learn from him not long after, “he had been summoned as an anti-pope to undo, root out and sweep away the kingdom of malediction” (the Papacy).[462] In 1527 he assures us: This doctrine “God has revealed to me by His Grace.”[463] And, at a later period, though rather more cautiously, he does not shrink from occasionally making use of the word revelation. From the pulpit in 1532 he urged opponents in his own camp to lay aside their peculiar doctrines, because, “God has enjoined and commanded _one man_ to teach the Evangel,” i.e. himself.[464] So familiar is this idea to him that it intrudes itself into his conversations at home. It was the “Holy Ghost” who had “given” to him his doctrine, so he told his friends and pupils in his old age.[465] At Wittenberg, according to his own words which Mathesius noted down, they possessed, thanks to him, the divine revelation. “Whoever, after my death, despises the authority of the Wittenberg school, provided it remains the same as now, is a heretic and a pervert, for in this school God has revealed His Word.” He also complains in the same passage that the sectarians within the new fold who turned against him had fallen away from the faith.[466] At that time, i.e. during the ’forties, the idea of an inspiration grew stronger in him. He boasts that his understanding of Romans i. 17 was due to the “illumination of the Holy Ghost,” and tells how he suddenly felt himself “completely born anew,” as if he had passed “through the open portals into Paradise itself,” and how, “at once, the whole of Scripture bore another aspect.”[467] Thus his idea of the revelation with which he had been favoured gradually assumed in his mind a more concrete shape.