“Learn,” he says, thus unwittingly laying bare the aim of his fiction, “learn from my example.” “The more I scourged myself, the more was I troubled by remorse of conscience.”[620] “We did not then know what original sin was; unbelief we did not regard as sin.”[621] Their “unbelief,” however, consisted in that we Papists fancied “that we had to add our own works” (to the merits of Christ).[622] “Hence, for all my fervour, I lost the twenty years I spent in the cloister.”[623] But I did not want to “stick fast and die in sin and in this false doctrine”;[624] for such a pupil of the law must in the end say to himself “that it is impossible for him to keep the Law”; indeed he cannot but come to say: “would there were no God.”[625] Roughly, this is the tone of the testimony he gives of himself. It is not our intention here simply to spurn it, but to examine whether there is any call to accept it unconditionally—simply because it comes from Luther’s lips—and whether it comprises a certain quota of truth.[626] First, it must be noted that he represents himself as a sort of fanatical martyr of penance. He assures us: Even the heroic works of mortification I undertook brought me no peace in Popery: “_Ergo_,” etc. He here opens an entirely new page in his past. He tells his friends, for instance: “I nearly killed myself by fasting, for often, for three days on end, I did not take a bite or a sip. I was in the most bitter earnest and, indeed, I crucified our Lord Christ in very truth; I was not one of those who merely looked on, but I actually lent a hand in dragging Him along and nailing Him. May God forgive me! … for this is true: The more pious the monk the worse rogue he is.”[627] “I myself,” he says in his Commentary on Genesis, “was such an one [a pious monk]. I nearly brought about my death by fasting, abstinence and penance in work and clothing; my body became dreadfully emaciated and was quite worn out.”[628] The menace of death is also alluded to in a sermon of 1537: “For more than twenty years I was a pious monk,” “I said Mass daily and so weakened my body by prayer and fasting that I could not have lived long had I continued in this way.”[629] Elsewhere he says that he had allowed himself only two more years of life, and that, not he alone, but all his brethren were ripe for death: “In Popery in times bygone we howled for everlasting life; for the sake of the kingdom of heaven we treated ourselves very harshly, nay, put our bodies to death, not indeed with sword or weapon, but, by fasting and maceration of the body we begged and besought day and night. I myself—had I not been set free by the consolation of Christ in the Evangel—could not have lived two years more, so greatly did I torment myself and flee God’s wrath. There was no lack of sighs, tears and lamentations, but it all availed us nothing.”[630]