“Why did I endure such hardships in the cloister? Why did I torment my body by fasting, vigils and cold? I strove to arrive at the certainty that thereby my sins were forgiven.”[631] The martyrdom he endured from the cold alone was agonising enough: “For twenty years I myself was a monk and tormented myself with praying, fasting, watching and shivering, the cold by itself making me heartily desirous of death.”[632] Besides his penances another main feature of his later picture is his extraordinary, albeit misguided, piety and virtue. It is not enough for Luther to say that he had been a pious monk, “an earnest monk,” who “would not have taken a farthing without the Prior’s permission,” and who “prayed diligently day and night”;[633] he will have, that “if ever a monk got to heaven by monkery then I should have got there; of this all my brother monks will bear me witness.”[634] He had been more diligent in his monastic exercises of piety than any of the Papists who took the field against him.[635] Nay, “he had been one of the very best.”[636] He “confessed daily” [Is this a reference to the Confession made in the Mass?] and “tried hard” to find peace, but did not succeed.[637] Daily, he tells us, he “said Mass and imposed on himself the severest hardships,” in order, “by his own works, to attain to righteousness.”[638] It was because the devil had remarked his righteousness, that he tempted him when engaged in prayer in his cell by appearing to him in the shape of Christ, as already narrated.[639] God, however, tried him by temptations just as He tries those of the elect through whom He intends to do great things for the salvation of mankind.[640] He, like the other cloistral Saints, had been so penetrated with his sanctity, that, after Mass, he “did not thank God for the Sacrament but rather God had to thank him.”[641] He fancied himself in “the angel-choirs,” but had all the while been “among the devils.”[642] Cloistral life was indeed “a latrine and the devil’s own sweet Empire.”[643] Other characteristic lines of the picture are, first, the dreadful way in which his mind was torn by doubts concerning his own salvation, doubts arising simply from his works of piety, and, secondly, his speedy deliverance from such sufferings and attainment of peace and tranquillity as soon as he had discovered the Evangel of faith. He cannot find colours sombre enough in which to paint his former state of misery, which is also the inevitable experience of all pious Papists.