the race, came upon his supreme insights in sudden epoch-making
revelations or illuminations by which he found himself on a new level,
with the line of march shifted and all values altered. His conversion
and dedication to religion was an instance of this type. So, too, was
his discovery of the way of Faith. Legend has very likely coloured our
accounts of this experience, but for purposes of valuation it is of
little moment to us whether the dynamic flash came to him in his cell
at Wittenberg as he was studying the Epistle to the Romans, or whether
it came while he was climbing the penitential stairway in Rome.[7] When
all legendary coverings are stripped away we have left an inner event
of the first importance, a _live idea_ bursting into consciousness like
a new star on the field of vision. By processes much deeper and richer
than those of logical argument, his mind leaped to the certainty of
infinite grace and forgiving love in God as revealed in Christ. In a
word, this baffled and despairing monk, striving in vain to heap up
merits enough to win {6} divine favour, suddenly discovered a new God
who filled his whole world with a new light and freedom and joy. His
name for this discovery was Faith ["Glaube"], but Faith in its first
intention for Luther meant a personal experience or discovery of God,
brought into full view and clear apprehension in Christ. "No one can
understand God or God's Word," Luther once wrote, "unless he has it
revealed immediately ["on Mittel"] by the Holy Ghost, but nobody can
receive anything from the Holy Ghost unless he experiences it. In
experience the Holy Ghost teaches as in His own school, outside of
which nothing of value can be learned."[8]

Not only was Faith for Luther thus possessed of a mystical character as
an inward discovery and as a personal experience which laid hold on God
immediately, but it also owed its illuminating birth in his
consciousness largely to the influence of the writings and the lives of
the mystics. However suddenly the "revelation" seemed to burst into
his mind, there had nevertheless been a long period of psychological
gestation and preparation for it before the epoch-making moment finally
came. He had already in his early convent days come under the spell of
St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Gerson, and many another guide into the
deep regions of inward personal religion, and his intimate friend, the
Vicar-general Staupitz, had been to him in some sense