Holy men, of real zeal, had always been able to discern the good side by side with the bad. But the youthful Luther sees on every side, and everywhere nothing but false teaching (“_scatet totus orbis_,” etc.), nay, a very “deluge of filthy doctrines.”[716] To be made a bishop is to him tantamount to branding oneself a “Sodomite”; so full of vice is the episcopate that those wearers of the mitre were the best who had no sin on their conscience beyond avarice.[717] As for the men of learning, they rank far below Tauler, and, thanks to their narrowness, had made the age “one of iron, nay, of clay.”[718] When setting faith and grace against the alleged heathenism of the scholars he goes so far as to say, that his man is he “who outside of grace knows nothing.”[719] As early as 1515 he thinks himself qualified to attack the authorities and the highest circles because “his teaching-office lent him apostolic power to say and to reveal what was being done amiss.”[720] Why, we may, however, ask, did not the reformer of the Church begin with himself, seeing that, in the lectures on the Psalms just mentioned, he already laments the coldness of his own religious life?[721] Even then he felt temptations pressing upon him; already in consequence of his manifold and distracting labours he had lapsed into a state in which prayer became distasteful to him, and of which he writes to an intimate friend in 1523: “In body I am fairly well but I am so much taken up with outward business that the spirit is almost extinguished and rarely takes thought for itself.”[722] These words and other earlier admissions (above, vol. i., p. 275 ff.) throw a strange light on the legend according to which he had wrestled in prayer by day and by night.