The effort to attain to perfection by the observance of poverty, chastity and obedience was at first so attractive to Luther, that, for a while, as we have already pointed out, he really allowed it to cost him something. Some years later, when he had already begun to paint in stronger hues his virtues as a monk, he said, perhaps not exaggerating: “It was no joke or child’s play with me in Popery.” His zealous observance was, however, confined to his first stay at Erfurt. A brother monk of his whom Flacius Illyricus chanced to meet in that town in 1543 also bore witness to Luther’s piety there as a monk. The “old Papist,” then still a faithful Augustinian, had told him, writes Flacius, how he had spent forty years in the Erfurt monastery where Luther had lived eight years, and that he could not but confess that Luther had led a holy life, had been most punctilious about the Rule and had studied diligently. To Flacius this was a new proof of the “mark of holiness” in the new Church.[693] Nor are statements on the part of the young monk wanting which prove, in contradiction with the legend he invented later, that his theoretical grasp of the religious life was still correct even at a time when he had already ceased to pay any great attention to the Rule.[694] Even as late as 1519, i.e. but two years before he wrote his book against monastic vows, he still saw in these vows a salutary institution. In a sermon he advised whoever desired “by much practice” to keep the grace of baptism and make ready for a happy death “to bind himself to chastity or join some religious Order,”[695] the Evangelical Counsels still appeared to him, according to statements he made in that same year, “a means for the easier keeping of the commandments.”[696] It was only after this that he began to think of tampering with the celibacy of the priesthood, and that only in the hope of winning many helpers in his work of apostasy. A little later he attacked with equal success the sacred obligations freely assumed by the monks. Yet we find nothing about the legend in his writings and letters of this time, though it would have been of great service to him. Everything, in fact, followed a much simpler and more normal course than the legend would have us imagine: The spirit of the world and inordinate self-love, no less than his newly unearthed doctrine, were what led to the breaking of his vows.