h
Aristotle at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, a year
later he returned to Erfurt, but was again called to Wittenberg to
lecture on the Bible, a position he held all his life. [Sidenote: 1511]

During his first ten years in the cloister he underwent a profound
experience. He started with the horrible and torturing idea that he
was doomed to hell. {65} "What can I do," he kept asking, "to win a
gracious God?" The answer given him by his teachers was that a man
must work out his own salvation, not entirely, but largely, by his own
efforts. The sacraments of the church dispensed grace and life to the
recipient, and beyond this he could merit forgiveness by the asceticism
and privation of the monastic life. Luther took this all in and strove
frantically by fasting, prayer, and scourging to fit himself for
redemption. But though he won the reputation of a saint, he could not
free himself from the desires of the flesh. He was helpless; he could
do nothing. Then he read in Augustine that virtue without grace is but
a specious vice; that God damns and saves utterly without regard to
man's work. He read in Tauler and the other mystics that the only true
salvation is union with God, and that if a man were willing to be
damned for God's glory he would find heaven even in hell. He read in
Lefevre d'Etaples that a man is not saved by doing good, but by faith,
like the thief on the cross.

In May, 1515, he began to lecture on Paul's Epistles to the Romans, and
pondered the verse (i, 17) "The just shall live by his faith."
[Sidenote: Justification by faith only] All at once, so forcibly that
he believed it a revelation of the Holy Ghost, the thought dawned upon
him that whereas man was impotent to do or be good, God was able freely
to make him so. Pure passivity in God's hands, simple abandonment to
his will was the only way of salvation; not by works but by faith in
the Redeemer was man sanctified. The thought, though by no means new
in Christianity, was, in the application he gave it, the germ of the
religious revolution. In it was contained the total repudiation of the
medieval ecclesiastical system of salvation by sacrament and by the
good works of the cloister. To us nowadays the thought seems remote;
the question which called it forth outworn. But to the {66} sixteenth
century it was as intensely practical as social reform is now; the
church was everywhere with her claim to rule over men's daily