The chief attraction, however, was not that of sight-seeing, but the spiritual blessings that he hoped to receive. It was his purpose to make while there an unreserved confession of all the sins that he had ever committed. Although he had made such confession twice before at Erfurt, he expected an especial blessing from the same confession, if made in the “Holy City.” Mass he celebrated a number of times, and actually wished that his parents were dead, because, by such services at Rome, he thought that he could have been able to deliver them from purgatory. But in all this he found no satisfaction for his mind; on the contrary, there was aroused in him a consciousness of another way to salvation which had previously taken root in his heart. While he was painfully climbing on his knees in devout prayer the steps of the identical staircase, as was superstitiously believed, which formerly led up to the palace of Pilate in Jerusalem—in order to receive the rich blessings promised by several popes upon all who would perform this meritorious deed—again and again as he struggled up the stairway, the words of Paul—“the just shall live by faith”—came to him as though uttered in tones of thunder. But Luther never became sensible of any blessing. Even Rome did not give to his soul the peace for which he longed. On the contrary, his sojourn in the “Holy City,” brief though it was, sufficed to convince him that Rome could never supply the needs of his spiritual nature. The high ideals of the sanctity of the worship of the saintly life of the pope and the other ecclesiastical dignitaries, which filled his own soul with aspirations and stimulated him to like endeavors, were rudely shattered. What he saw and heard in Rome was the very opposite of what he had expected. Instead of piety he found levity; instead of holiness he met lasciviousness; instead of seeing pure spirituality, he beheld nothing but carnal-mindedness, greed and self-seeking. Religion was but the cloak which covered up the shame and vice. The white garments of the Church were polluted with the stains of the most disgraceful and carnal manner of living. Wherever he turned he saw hypocrisy and sin. Everything that was to him an object of holy adoration was made the butt of blasphemous jests. Of the impressions made on his mind he wrote: Nobody can form an idea of the licentiousness, vice and shame that is in vogue in Rome. Nobody would believe it unless he could see it with his own eyes and hear it with his own ears. Rome was once the holiest city, now it is the vilest. It is true what has been said, “If there be a hell, Rome must be built over it.”