“The reason of my journey to Rome,” he declares, “was to make a confession from the days of my boyhood and to become pious.”[593] “But at Rome I came across the most unlearned of men.”[594]—God “led me, all unwittingly, into the game [his struggle].”[595] “I behaved with moderation, yet I brought the greatest ruin on them all.”[596] “I thought I was doing the Pope a service yet I was condemned.”[597]—“One, and that not the least of my joys and consolations, is, that I never put myself out of the Papacy. For I held fast to the Scarlet Woman and served the murderess in all things most humbly. But she would have none of me, banished me and drove me from her.”[598] “I only inveighed against abuses and against the godless collectors of alms and [indulgence] commissioners from whom even Canon Law itself protects the Pope. The Pope wanted to defend them contrary to his own laws; this annoyed me. Had he thrown them over I should in all likelihood have held my tongue, but the hour had rung for his downfall; hence there was nothing to be done for him, for when God intends to bring about a man’s fall He blinds and hardens him.”[599] “I was utterly dead to the world until God thought the time had come; then Junker Tetzel stung me with his indulgences, and Dr. Staupitz spurred me on against the Pope.”[600] “Silvester [Prierias] thereupon entered the lists and sought to overwhelm me with the thunders of the following syllogism: Whoever raises doubts against any word or deed of the Roman Church is a heretic; Martin Luther doubts, etc. With that the ball began.”[601] Generally speaking, however, Luther prefers to trace the whole of his quarrel with the Church back to Tetzel and to his righteous censure of the abuse of indulgences. He seems to have completely forgotten the deep theological chasm that separated him from the Church even before his quarrel with Tetzel. His theological attitude at that time, the starting-point of his whole undertaking, has disappeared from his purview; he has forgotten his burning desire to win the day for his own doctrines against free-will, against the value of works, against justification as taught by Catholic tradition, and for his denial of God’s Will that all men should be saved. His early antagonism to the theological schools and to Canon Law as a whole has lapsed into oblivion.[602] In the preface to the 1545 edition of his Latin works Luther asserts, as a fact, that he had been estranged from the Church only through the indulgence controversy. He had, so we there read, taken his vocation as a monk quite in earnest; he “feared and dreaded the Day of Judgment and yet had longed with all his heart to be saved.… It was not my fault that I became involved in this warfare, as I call God Himself to witness.”