It was indeed imperative that Luther should use his reason, for a certain degree of criticism upon the Holy Scriptures was necessary. He did not set an equal value upon all the books of the New Testament: it is known that he had doubts about the Revelations of St. John, and he did not much value the Epistle of St. James; but objections to particular parts never disturbed his faith in the whole; his belief in the verbal inspiration of the Holy Scriptures (with the exception of a few books) could not be shaken; they were to him what was dearest on earth, the groundwork of his whole knowledge; he was so thoroughly imbued with their spirit, that he lived as it were under their shadow. The more deeply he felt his responsibility, the more intense was the ardour with which he clung to the Scriptures.[37] A powerful instinct for what was rational and judicious helped him over many dangers; his penetration had nothing of the hair-splitting sophistry of the old teachers; he despised unnecessary subtleties, and with admirable tact he left undecided what appeared to him not essential. But if he was not to become a frantic or godless man, nothing remained to him but to ground his new doctrines on the words which were spoken and written fifteen hundred years before him, and he fell in some case into what his opponent Eckius called "Black-letter style." Under these restraints his method was formed. If he had a question to solve, he collected all the passages in Scripture which appeared to him to contain an answer; he examined each passage to understand their mutual bearing, and thus arrived at his conclusions. By this mode of proceeding, he brought the Scriptures within the compass of an ordinary understanding; for example, in the year 1522, he undertook, out of the Holy Scriptures, to place marriage on a new moral foundation; he severely criticised the eighteen reasons given by ecclesiastical law, forbidding and dissolving marriages, and condemned the unworthy favouring of the rich in preference to the poor. It was this same system which made him so pertinacious in his transactions with the Reformers in the year 1529, when he wrote on the table before him: "This _is_ my body;" and looked gloomily on the tears and outstretched hands of Zwinglius. Never had that formidable man shown more powerful convictions, convictions won in vehement wrestling with his doubts and the devil. It may be considered by some as an imperfect system; but there was a genial strength in it, that made his own view more available to the cultivation and heart-cravings of his time, than even he himself anticipated. Besides these great trials, the proscribed monk at the Wartburg was exposed to smaller temptations: he had long, by almost superhuman spiritual activity, overcome, what great self-distrust led him to consider as merely sensual inclinations; still nature stirred powerfully in him, and he many times begged of his dear Melancthon to pray for him concerning this.