Finally, in the sermons on John vi.-viii. which he began in 1530 after his return from the Coburg to Wittenberg and continued till 1532 we have the legend more or less complete: He had been a monk and had kept the nightly watches (i.e. had chanted the usual matins), had “fasted and prayed, scourged his body and tormented it”; he had been one of the pious and earnest monks who took their life seriously, “who, like me, were at some pains and examined and plagued themselves, and wanted to attain to what Christ is in order to be saved. But what did they gain thereby?”[778] At the same time he begins to enlarge in the most incredible way on the beliefs and habits of the Papists with regard to their own merits and the merits of Christ. All had held their tongues concerning the Saviour, so he says, and he emphasises his statement by adding: “I myself, I should have blushed to say that Christ was the Saviour.” Thus in a sermon of Dec., 1530.[779] In the period that follows, what he says of his piety, and especially of his works of penance, grows more and more emphatic. The argument at the back of his mind is this: “If even so mortified, penitent, and holy a monk as he could find no peace in Popery but only black despair, must not then all admit that he was in the right in protesting against both the Church and her vows?” So strictly had he kept his Rule, that, if ever monk got to heaven, it should have been he; he had plagued himself to death with watching, prayer, study and other labour.[780] This was the time when he “sought to be a holy monk and to be reckoned among the most pious.”[781] “If ever a monk was earnest then it was I.… I was at the utmost pains to keep the ordinances” (of the Fathers). He “had been one of the best”[782] and was “wholly given over” to “fasting, watching and prayer”;[783] “I nearly killed myself with fasting, watching and cold … so mad and foolish was I.”[784] By fasting, sleeplessness, hard work and coarse clothing “my body was dreadfully broken and worn out.”[785] In short, he had “sunk deeper into the quagmire [of mortification, obedience to the Church and monastic piety] than many an other”; so much so that “it had been hard and bitter” to him to cut himself adrift from the ordinances of the Pope; “God knows how hard I found it!”[786]