Luther entered the convent with a faith in the authority of the Church and in the efficacy of its rites as serious and entire as that of any monk. "If it was possible," he said afterwards, "to reach Heaven by monkery, I was resolved to reach it by that road." For years he shrank from nothing that might render God propitious; he multiplied his acts of devotion and his works of penance. There is a striking analogy between the experiences of Luther under the monachal regime and those of Saul of Tarsus under the discipline of the Pharisaic Law. The _denoument_ was the same. For the second time, the system of pious works was found powerless to appease a conscience which roused against itself the rigour of its own ideal. This struggle against an external law could only exasperate the sense of sin to the point of despair. Paul and Luther, in precisely the same manner, experienced the inward emptiness and radical worthlessness of the religious system in which they had been trained. The more they had tried to realise it in its perfection, the more had they found it wanting. Catholicism, considered as a means of salvation, was rejected by the religious and moral consciousness of Luther, before it was condemned by exegesis and by reasoning. To reach this sentence without appeal the Saxon monk had but to maintain inflexible the demands of the divine law and to measure, without illusion, the abyss that separated him from God, and that no human works could fill. It was in this way that he found himself shut up to the essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; he found the peace that fled from him in the pure and simple acceptance of the glad tidings of the paternal love of God, in the confidence that He gives gratuitously that which man can never conquer for himself, namely, the remission of sins and the certitude of eternal life. What then is faith? Is it still intellectual adhesion to dogmas or submission to an external authority? No. It is an act of confidence, the act of a childlike heart, which finds with joy the Father whom it knew not, and Whom, without presumption, it is happy henceforth to hold with both its hands. That is what Luther found in Paul's great words: "The just shall live by faith." In this radical transformation of the notion of faith restored to its evangelical meaning is to be found the principle of the greatest religious revolution effected in the world since the preaching of Jesus.