We have, for instance, his remarkable saying, that he had looked upon it as a deadly sin for a monk ever to come out of his cell without his scapular, even though otherwise fully dressed. Yet no reasonable man acquainted with the religious life, however observant he might be, would have been capable of such fears. Luther declares that he had seen a sin in every infringement of the rule of his Order; yet the Rule was never intended to bind under pain of sin, as indeed was expressly stated. He asserts that he had believed, that, had he made but a slight mistake or omission in the Mass, he “would be lost”; yet no educated priest ever believed such a thing, or thought that small faults amounted to mortal sins. As an instance of the Papal tyranny over consciences he was wont to tell in his old age how he had tortured himself on the Saturday by reciting the whole of the Breviary that he had omitted to say during the week owing to his other occupations. “This is how we poor folk were plagued by the Pope’s decretals; of this our young people know nothing.” His account[670] of these repetitions varies considerably in the telling. He expects us to believe he was not aware of the fact, familiar to every beginner in theology, that the recitation of the Hours and the Breviary is imposed as an obligation for the day, which expires as soon as the day is over, so that its omission cannot be afterwards made good by repetition. From his account it would on the contrary appear that the “Pope’s decrees” had imposed such subsequent making good. Even should he really, in his earlier days when he first began to neglect the Breviary, have occasionally repeated the task subsequently, yet it is too bad of him to make it part of the monkish legend and an instance of how “we poor fellows were tormented.”[671] “It is an astonishing and dreadful thing,” he proceeds, “that men should have been so mad!” Those who live in the religious life and according to man-made ordinances “do not deserve to be called men nor even swine”;[672] a “hateful and accursed life” was it, with “all their filth!”[673] The young monk too—could we trust Luther’s account—must have been seriously wanting in discretion where mortification was concerned, and a like indiscretion was evinced by all others who took the religious vocation in earnest. But the extravagant asceticism such as Luther would have us believe he practised, and the theological assumption underlying it, viz. that salvation depends on bodily mortification, are quite against the older teaching in vogue in his time. We may quote a few instances of the teaching to the contrary.