Almost on the same page the pessimistic mystic speaks of that resignation to hell which has a place in his new system of theology. “Because we have sin within us we must flee happiness and take on what is repugnant, and that, not merely in words and hypocritically; we must resign ourselves to it with full consent, must desire to be lost and damned. What a man does to him whom he hates, that we must do to ourselves. Whoever hates, wishes his foe to be undone, killed and damned, not merely seemingly but in reality. When we thus, with all our heart, destroy and persecute ourselves, when we give ourselves over to hell for the sake of God and His Justice, then indeed we have already satisfied His Justice and He will deliver us.”[736] It can hardly be considered normal that a monk should wish to live—among brethren, who rejoiced in the promises of Christ and in the Church’s means of grace—the life of a lonely mystic sunk in the depths of an abyss, where “a man does not strive after heaven but is perfectly ready never to be saved, but rather to be damned, and where, after having been reconciled by grace, a man fears, not God’s punishments, but simply to offend Him.”[737] Luther’s recollections of the mental ailments he went through as a monk also undoubtedly had their effect on the legend. We know that Luther never rightly understood the nature of these ailments and that he regarded his fits of terror, his nervousness and his gloom as anything but what they really were. It would appear that, in his old age, he simply lumped all his sad experiences together as typical of the sort of poison which Popery and Monkery, owing to their false doctrines, offered to their adepts. Nothing seemed to him to show better from what horrors he had snatched mankind. Whether involuntary self-deception played a part here, or whether, by dint of constant repetition, he came to believe in the truth of his tale, who can now venture to say? In any case his spirit of bitterness led him to make of his own sufferings a sort of spectre of terror common to all, who, like himself, had raved that they were zealously serving God whether in the monastery or in Popery at large. Even “great Saints” had, according to him, lived amidst the “devil’s factions and errors, under Rules and in monasteries and institutions,” but had finally “cut themselves loose and been saved by faith in Jesus Christ.”[738]