He there says: “For the monks I know not how to plead. For I am well aware you would rather they were all of them given over to the devil, please God, whether they take wives or not.”[765] In these words he erroneously takes for granted that all ecclesiastics shared his own hatred for the monks. He boasts in this writing that he “had destroyed the monks by his teaching”;[766] he trusts that “the Bishops will not allow such bugs and lice to be stuck again on their fur cappas.”[767] The reason why his doctrine had destroyed the monks was, because it had revealed how they were merely “intent upon works.” “For what else could come of it? If a conscience is intent on its works and builds on them, then it is stablished on loose sand which is ever slipping and sliding away; it must ever be seeking for works, for one and then for another and ever more and more, until at last even the dead are clothed in monks’ cowls the better to reach heaven.”[768] The last words are a caricature, a misrepresentation of a pious custom by which no one ever dreamt infallibly to win heaven. The “loose sand” is, however, a favourite expression with him when speaking of his teaching on works. It is the same teaching that he wants to bring before the eyes of all by means of his fiction. How, at that time, his thoughts were harking back to his former life in the convent is plain from a letter of consolation he then wrote to his “tempted” pupil Weller. He tells him that he himself had also had his sadnesses and temptations, but that what he had suffered as a monk had in the end proved a schooling for his present high calling.[769] Had he really been the butt of such “temptations” as the legend depicts and contrived so successfully to vanquish them by his doctrine on justification, then we might expect to find some trace of this in his first writings subsequent to his change of outlook. Now, in the Commentary on Romans we have a vivid document bearing on his change of opinions, yet, full as it is of information about the author, we may seek in vain for the legend. On the contrary it breathes a high esteem for the religious state.[770] In the “Resolutions” to the Indulgence-Theses likewise, Luther speaks of the phases through which he had passed and of the mystical sufferings he had endured.[771] Yet here again the features of the legend are wanting. Is it not somewhat remarkable that an author usually so candid and talkative as Luther should have kept silence about those experiences of which, just at that time, i.e. at the beginning of his public struggle, he must have been so full? Nor is the legend to be found in Luther’s writings dating from between 1520 and 1530. All the passages quoted above date from a later period.