He completely shuts his eyes to the fact that both his fears concerning predestination and his morbid states of terror accompanied by fainting fits recurred in his case even in later life, and, that, after his apostasy he had in addition to suffer from remorse of conscience on account of his doings against the Church. Nor does he seem to see that he himself betrays the falsity of what he says of the general depression to which all monks were subject when he relates above, that _he alone_ had gone about in the monastery labouring under such oppression and that no one had understood him or been able to console him (above, p. 113); hence, according to this, his brother monks cannot have suffered from the terrors he afterwards attributed to them. _The Monkish Nightmare_ The strange “terrors” under which he was labouring when he first knocked at the gate of the Augustinian convent at Erfurt were, according to Melanchthon’s definite assurance already quoted, closely bound up with his habitual states of fear. They were extraordinary states of mental perturbation (“_terrores_”) and can only be explained when looked at in the light of his other mental troubles.[739] Of the incidents that impelled him to enter the convent[740] Luther himself says in a passage which has also been quoted above, that (on the occasion of his first Mass) he had tried to reassure his father Hans by pointing out that he had been called “by terrors from heaven” (“_de coelo terrores_”); to which his father had harshly replied: “Oh, that it may not have been a delusion and a diabolical vision” (“_illusio et præstigium_”).[741] The happenings immediately previous to his entering the monastery are of a rather mysterious character. The inmates of the Erfurt convent declared at that time in consequence of what they had gathered from Luther, that he, like “another Paul, had been miraculously converted by Christ.”[742] Oldecop, who began his studies at Wittenberg in 1514, speaks in his Chronicle of “strange fears and spectres” on account of which Luther had taken the habit.[743] Still more remarkable is the report based on the account of Luther’s intimate friend Jonas, and dating from 1538. He says: When Luther, as a student, was returning to Erfurt after having been to Gotha to buy some books “there came a dreadful apparition from heaven which he then interpreted as signifying that he was to become a monk.”[744] If these statements were correct it would appear as though we have here already an instance of hallucination worthy of being classed with the “sights and visions” elsewhere mentioned. Even his earliest monastic days would assume a suspiciously pathological character if, even then, he was convinced of having been the recipient of heavenly messages. It must, however, remain doubtful whether Jonas’s report means exactly what it seems to mean and whether his sources are to be relied upon.