“In the convent I had no thought of goods, wealth or wife, but my soul shuddered and quaked at the thought of how to make God gracious to me, for I had fallen away from the faith and my one idea was that I had angered God and had to soothe Him once more by my good works.”[644] “As a young Master at Erfurt I always went about oppressed with sadness.”[645] But, after his discovery he had felt himself “born anew,” as though “through an open door he had passed into Paradise.” The words Justice of God suddenly became “very sweet” to him and the Bible doctrine in question a “very gate of heaven.” “Holy Scripture now appeared to me in quite a new light.”[646] He had, indeed, studied the Bible diligently in his early monkish years, but he had, nevertheless, been greatly tempted and plagued by the “real difficulties”; his confessors had not understood him. “I said to myself: No one but you suffers from this temptation.” And he had become “like a corpse,” so that his comrades asked him why he was “so mournful and downhearted.”[647] Particularly the doctrine of penance had, he says, so borne him down that “it was hardly possible for him, at the price of great toil and thanks to God’s grace, to come to that hearing that gives joy [Ps. 1. 10].” For “if you have to wait until you have the requisite contrition then you will never come to that hearing of joy, as, in the cloister, I often found to my cost; for I clung to this doctrine of contrition, but the more I strove after rue, the more I smarted and the more did the bite of conscience eat into me. The absolution and other consolations given me by my confessors I was unable to take because I thought: Who knows if such consolations are to be trusted.”[648] On one occasion, however, the master of novices strengthened and encouraged him amidst his tears by asking him: Have you forgotten that the Lord Himself commanded us to hope?[649] Nevertheless, according to the strange description given by Luther in a sermon in 1531, his keen anxiety about his confessions lasted until after his ordination. “I, Martin Luther,” so he told the people, “when I went up to the altar after confession and contrition felt myself so weighed down by fear that I had to beckon to me another priest. After the Mass, again, I was no more reassured than before.” His trouble—which was possibly caused, or at any rate heightened, by the spirit of obstinacy and scepticism he describes—was, however (and it is on this that he lays stress), common to all Papists whose consciences could never be at rest. “They became its victims chiefly at the hour of death. How much did we dread the Last Judgment!… That was our reward for our works.”[650] The truth is, that, on his own showing, he scarcely knew what inward contrition was, and that he remained too much a stranger to the motive of holy fear.[651]