As he himself gradually came to believe in his extraordinary “holiness-by-works” it may be that his thoughts dwelt too exclusively to his earlier days as a monk, i.e. on those passed at Erfurt, during which he certainly was more zealous than in later years, though never such a fanatic as he afterwards makes out. He may also have compared his life as a monk with the small efforts after virtue he made subsequent to his public apostasy, and the contrast may have led him to make too much of his piety in the convent. The contrast, indeed, often troubled him, and we find him seeking for grounds to excuse his later lukewarmness in prayer, so different from his earlier fervour.[787] This also helps us to explain the line of thought followed in the legend. The true character of the legend becomes clearer when Luther begins to exploit it in his polemics. He depicts himself as a sort of “caricature of the monastic saint,”[788] and then complains: This damnable life could not but keep me ever in a state of fear, and yet the Popish Church recommends and sanctions it; the more zealous I grew the further I withdrew from Christ—nay, brought even my baptism into danger! He had never been able to “find comfort in it,” nay, he had been compelled to “lose” it, to “lend a hand in denying it.” “This is the upshot and reward of their doctrine of works.”[789] He even goes so far as to say that the Papists “truly and indeed made nought of the baptism” of Christ, for which reason “their doctrine is as baneful as that of the Anabaptists”; they “make of us Jews or Turks, as though we had never been baptised.” Luther’s persistent and obtrusive exploitation of his legend in his controversies must not be lost to sight. In his new-found zeal he not only as a rule passes too confidently from the _I_ (_I_ did so and so) to the _we_, or _they_, the better to clap the blame attaching to himself on the monks in general, the Pope and all the Papists, and then to conclude with the praise of the new Evangel, but—and this reveals even more plainly the origin of the invention,—he also follows the reverse order, speaking first of the New Evangel, then of the senseless martyrdom endured by all the monks with their works, and, lastly, of his own personal experiences, as though they had been necessarily implied in his earlier premisses. _I_ cruelly disciplined my body, he says, and goes on: “_They_ plagued and tormented themselves”; for all that, “did they find Christ? Christ says: ‘You shall die in your sins.’ To this they came.” “The Pope, too, labours and seeks,” to find what Christ is; “but never will he find it.” All this leads to the conclusion: “But now God has given His Grace, so that every town and thorp has the Gospel.”[790]