The first unavoidable step was that he must use his reason, for a certain critical treatment even of the Holy Bible was necessary. Nor did Luther fail to see that the books of the New Testament were of varying worth. It is well known that he did not highly esteem the Apocalypse, and that the Epistle of James was regarded by him as "an epistle of straw." But his objection to particular portions never shook his faith in the whole. His belief was inflexible that the Holy Scriptures, excepting a few books, contained a divine revelation in every word and letter. It was for him the dearest thing on earth, the foundation of all his learning. He had put himself so in sympathy with it that he lived among its figures as in the present. The more urgent his feeling of responsibility, the warmer the passion with which he clung to Scripture; and a strong instinct for the sensible and the fitting really helped him over many dangers. His discrimination had none of the hair-splitting sophistry of the ancient teachers. He despised useless subtleties, and, with admirable tact, let go what seemed to him unessential; but, if he was not to lose his faith or his reason, he could do nothing, after all, but found the new doctrine on words and conditions of life fifteen hundred years old, and in some cases he became the victim of what his adversary Eck called "the black letter." Under the urgency of these conditions his method took form. If he had a question to settle, he collected all the passages of Holy Scripture which seemed to offer him an answer. He sought earnestly to understand all passages in their context, and then he struck a balance, giving the greatest weight to those which agreed with each other, and for those which were at variance patiently striving to find a solution which might reconcile the seeming contradiction. The resulting conviction he firmly established in his heart, regardless of temptations, by fervent prayer. With this procedure he was sometimes bound to reach conclusions which seemed, even to ordinary human understanding, vulnerable. When, for instance, in the year 1522, he undertook, from the Scriptures, to put matrimony on a new moral basis, reason and the needs of the people were certainly on his side when he subjected to severe criticism the eighteen grounds of the Ecclesiastical Law for forbidding and annulling marriages and condemned the unworthy favoring of the rich over the poor. But it was, after all, strange when Luther tried to prove from the Bible alone what degrees of relationship were permitted and what were forbidden, especially as he also took into consideration the Old Testament, in which various queer marriages were contracted without any opposition from the ancient Jehovah. God undoubtedly had sometimes allowed his elect to have two wives.