Under the Pope’s yoke he and all other Papists had been made to feel to their “great and heavy detriment” what it spelt when one tried to become pious by means of works. We grew more and more despondent concerning sin and death.… For the more they do the worse their state becomes.[661] “Thus I, and all those in the convent, were bondsmen and captives of Satan.”[662]—“We hoped to find salvation through our frock.”[663]—With us all it was “rank idolatry,” for I did not believe in Christ, etc.[664]—Because we endured so many “sufferings of heart and conscience and performed so many works,” no one must now come and seek to excuse Popery.[665]—“We fled from Christ as from the very devil, for we were taught that each one would be placed before the judgment seat of Christ with his works”[666]—a teaching which is, indeed, almost word for word that of St. Paul (2 Cor. v. 10). Remembering the other utterances in which he makes all Papists share in his alleged experiences, for instance, in his “unbelief,” we soon perceive how unreliable are all such statements of his concerning the history of his personal development. The whole is seen to be primarily but a new form of controversy and self-vindication; only by dint of cautious criticism can we extract from it certain traits which possibly serve to illustrate the course of his mental growth in the monastery. Again, several details of the picture—quite apart from the obvious effort to burden the olden Church with a monstrous system of holiness-by-works—warn us to be sceptical. First of all there is the customary rhetoric and playing to the gallery. The palpable exaggeration it contains, its references to the howling by day and by night, to the scourgings, to the tortures of hunger and cold, to the endless prayers and watchings, and to the ravings of the woebegone searchers after peace, do not prepossess us in favour of the truth of the account. Luther, in so much of what he says on the point, has shown us how little he is to be taken seriously, that one cannot but wonder how his statements, even when exaggerated to the verge of the ludicrous, can ever have been regarded in the light of real authorities. He is not telling the truth when he assures us that, as Doctor of Divinity, he had never rightly understood the Ten Commandments, and that many other famous doctors had not known “whether there were nine, or ten, or eleven of them; much less did we know anything of the Gospel or of Christ.”[667] After outward works, indeed, we ran, but “what God has commanded, that we omitted … for the Papists trouble themselves about neither the Commandments nor the promises of God.”[668] In choir the community daily chanted Psalm li. (l.), in which joy in the Lord is extolled, but “there was not one who understood what joy to the pious is a firm trust in God’s Mercy.”[669]