Above we heard him speak of the “quagmire” in which he was sunk; in the same connection he remarks: “_We_ wore out the body with fasting,” etc., “and some even went crazy through it.” Then follows the inference: “And, at last, _we_ lost our very souls.” For, to our “great and notable injury,” _we_ were made to feel “in our anxious and troubled conscience” what it means “to try to become pious by works and so to redeem ourselves from sin.” “_We_ would gladly have had a cheerful conscience,” but “it was all of no use, and _we_ naturally became more and more downhearted about sin and death, so that no folk more unhappy are to be found on earth than the priestlings, monks and nuns who are wrapped up in their works.” “The more _they_ do, the worse things fare with them.” But, since my doctrine has come into the world, people have unlearnt their faintheartedness: “_We_ run to the Man Who is called Christ and say: Yes indeed, we must take it from the Man without any merit whatsoever [on our part].… He gives me freely that for which formerly I had to pay a high price. He gives me, without any works or merit, that for which formerly I had to stake body, strength and health.”[791] His supposed experiences as a monk are even made to do service in his interpretation of Holy Scripture. In order to understand the Scriptures, so he argues, deep inward experience is called for. This he maintained when withstanding the fanatics and their system of illuminism. Here he actually carries back the beginning of his own experience to his convent days. Already in the convent, so he declares, he had been compelled to bow to the idol of scepticism, because he, and all the rest, knew nothing of any real faith in the Gospel. Far less had he learned to pray Evangelically. “That Christ was a mystery, as St. Paul says, I looked upon formerly, when I had to submit to being called a Doctor of Holy Scripture, as a lying statement which I very well understood. But now that, praise be to God, I have once more become a poor student of Holy Writ, and that, the longer I live, the less I know of it, I begin to see the marvel of such sayings, and find by experience that they must necessarily remain mysteries.… Our experience must bear witness to this, how amply, fully and clearly we now possess this same Word of Christ.”[792] But, by the Pope, it was “gruesomely murdered.”[793] Of the Saints of their Order the monks made their God, and of their miracles they made their Gospel. “For know you this, that I, Dr. Martin Luther, who am now living and write this, was also one of the crowd who were forced to believe and worship such things [lying fables]. And had anyone been so bold as to doubt one whit of it, or to raise a finger against it, he would have gone to the stake or to some other evil end.”[794] That the latter was an exaggeration and the merest invention Luther was perfectly well aware.