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After making his profession the young religious was set by his Erfurt superiors to study theology, which was taught privately in the monastery.

The theological fare served up by the teachers of the Order was not very inviting, consisting as it largely did of the mere verbalism of a Scholasticism in decay. With the exception of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the students at the Erfurt monastery did not study the theological works of the great masters of the thirteenth century; neither Thomas of Aquin, the prince of scholastic theology and philosophy, nor his true successors, not even Ægidius Romanus, himself a Hermit of St. Augustine, were well known to them. The whole of their time at Erfurt, as elsewhere also, was devoted to the study of the last of the schoolmen who, indeed, stood nearer in point of time, but who were far from teaching the true doctrine with the fulness and richness of the earlier doctors. They were too much given to speculation and logical word-play. The older schoolmen were no longer appreciated and nominalistic errors, such as were fostered in the school of William of Occam, held the field. One of the better schoolmen of the day was Gabriel Biel. His works, which have a certain value, together with some of the writings of the Fathers of the Church, formed the principal arsenal from which Luther drew his theological knowledge, and upon which he exercised his dialectics. In addition to this, he also studied the theological tractates of John Gerson and Cardinal Peter d’Ailly, works which, apart from other theological defects, contain various errors concerning the authority of the Church and her Head; that these particular errors had any deeper influence on the direction of Luther’s mind cannot, however, be proved. What we do find is that the one-sidedness of this school, with its tendency to hairsplitting, had a negative effect upon him. At an early date he was repelled by the scholastic subtleties, for which, according to him, Aristotle alone was responsible, and preferred to turn to the reading and study of the Bible. He nevertheless made the prevalent school methods so much his own as to apply them often, in a quite surprising fashion, in his earliest sermons and writings.

The man who exercised the greatest influence on the theological study in the Erfurt monastery was the learned Augustinian, Johann Paltz, who was teaching there when Luther entered. He was a good Churchman and a fair scholar, and was also much esteemed as a preacher. By his side worked Johann Nathin, who has already been mentioned, likewise one of the respected theologians of the Order.[27] Luther’s teachers, full of veneration for the Holy Scriptures as the revealed Word of God, were not at all displeased to see their pupil having frequent recourse to the Bible, in order to seek in the well of the Divine Word instruction and enlightenment, by which to supplement the teachings of the schoolmen and the Fathers.

Luther had, moreover, already become acquainted with the Bible in the library of the Erfurt University, whilst still engaged in studying philosophy. He had, however, not prosecuted his reading of the Bible, though the same library would doubtless have supplied him with numerous well-thumbed commentaries on Holy Writ. In the monastery a copy of the Bible was given him at the beginning of his theological course. It was, as we learn from him incidentally, a Latin translation bound in red leather, and remained in his hands until he left Erfurt. The statutes of the Order enjoined on all its members “assiduous reading, devout hearing and industrious study of the Holy Scriptures.”

The young monk immersed himself more and more in the study of his beloved Bible when Staupitz, the Vicar, advised him to select the same as his special subject in order to render himself a capable “localis and textualis” in the Holy Scriptures.

The Superior seems to have had even then the intention of making use later of Luther as a public professor of biblical lore. So ardently was the Vicar’s advice followed by Luther that, in his preference for reading the Bible and studying its interpretation, he neglected the rest of his theological education, and his teacher Usingen was obliged to protest against his one-sided study of the sacred text. So full was Luther of the most sacred of books, that he was able (at least this is what he says later) to show the wondering brothers the exact spot in his ponderous red volume where every subject, nay even every quotation, was to be found. It was with great regret that, on leaving this community, he found himself prohibited by the Rule from taking the copy away with him. Later, as an opponent of the religious life, he states that no one but himself read the Bible in the monastery at Erfurt, whilst of his foe Carlstadt, a former Augustinian, he bluntly says that he had never seen a Bible until he was promoted to the dignity of Doctor. Of course, neither assertion can be taken literally.

When the day drew nigh for him to celebrate his first Mass as newly ordained priest, he invited not only his father but several other guests to be present at a ceremony which meant so much both to him and to his friends. Thus, in a letter of invitation to Johann Braun, Vicar in Eisenach, who had shown him much kindness and help during his early years in that town, he says that: “God had chosen him, an unworthy sinner, for the unspeakable dignity of His service at the altar,” and begged his fatherly friend to come, and by his prayers to assist him “so that his sacrifice might be pleasing in the sight of God.” He also expressed to him his great indebtedness to Schalbe’s College at Eisenach, which he would also have gladly seen represented at the ceremony. This is the first letter of Luther’s which has been preserved and with which the critical edition of his “Correspondence,” now being published, commences.[28] The first Mass took place on Cantate Sunday, May 2, 1507. Luther relates later, with regard to his state of mind during the sacred ceremony, that he could hardly contain himself for excitement and fear. The words “Te igitur clementissime Pater,” at the commencement of the Canon of the Mass, and “Offero tibi Deo meo vivo et vero,” at the oblation, brought so vividly to his mind the Awful, Eternal Majesty, that he was hardly able to go on (“totus stupebam et cohorrescebam”); he would have rushed down from the altar had he not been held back; the fear of making some mistake in the ceremonies and so committing a mortal sin, so he says, quite bewildered him.[29] Yet he must have known, with regard to the ceremonies, that any unintentional infringement of them was no sin, and least of all a mortal sin, although he attributes the contrary opinion to the “Papists” after his apostasy.

His father Hans assisted at the celebration. His presence in the church and in the refectory was the first sign of his acquiescence in his son’s vocation. But when the latter, during dinner, praised the religious calling and the monastic life as something high and great,[30] and went on to recall the vow he had made at the time of the thunderstorm, asserting that he had been called by “terrors from Heaven” (“de cœlo terrores”), this was too much for his level-headed father, who, to the astonishment of the guests, sharply interposed with the words: “Oh, that it may not have been a delusion and a diabolical vision.” He could not overcome his dislike for his son’s resolve. “I sit here and eat and drink,” he cried, “and would much rather be far away.” Luther retorted he had better be content, and that “to be a monk was a peaceful and heavenly life.”[31] The statement with regard to the elder Luther agrees with the character of the man and with the severity which he had displayed long before to Martin.

Here an assertion must be mentioned made by George Wicel, a well-informed contemporary; once a Lutheran, he was, from 1533-8, Catholic priest at Eisleben. Two or three times he repeats in print, that Hans Luther had once slain a man in a fit of anger at his home at Möhra. Luther and his friends never denied this public statement. In recent years attempts have been made to support the same by local tradition, and the fact of the father changing his abode from Möhra to Mansfeld has thus been accounted for.[32] According to Karl Seidemann, an expert on Luther (1859), the testimony of Wicel may be taken as settling definitively the constantly recurring dispute on the subject.[33]

The following facts which have been handed down throw some light on the inward state of the young man at this time and shortly after.

At a procession of the Blessed Sacrament he had to accompany Staupitz, the Vicar, as his deacon. Such was the terror which suddenly seized him that he almost fled. On speaking afterwards of this to his superior, who was also his friend, he received the following instructive reply: “This fear is not from Christ; Christ does not affright, He comforts.”[34]

One day that Luther was present at High Mass in the monks’ choir, he had a fit during the Gospel, which, as it happened, told the story of the man possessed. He fell to the ground and in his paroxysms behaved like one mad. At the same time he cried out, as his brother monks affirmed: “It is not I, it is not I,” meaning that he was not the man possessed.[35] It might seem to have been an epileptic fit, but there is no other instance of Luther having such attacks, though he did suffer from ordinary fits of fainting. Strange to say, some of his companions in the monastery had an idea that he had dealings with the devil, while others, mainly on account of the above-mentioned attack, actually declared him an epileptic. We learn both these facts from his opponent and contemporary, Johann Cochlæus, who was on good terms with Luther’s former associates. He asserts positively that a “certain singularity of manner” had been remarked upon by his fellows in the monastery.[36] Later on his brother monk, Johann Nathin, went so far as to assert that “an apostate spirit had mastered him,” i.e. that he stood under the influence of the devil.[37]

Melanchthon was afterwards to hear from Luther’s own lips something of the dark states of terror from which he had suffered since his youth. When he speaks of them at the commencement of his biographical eulogy on his late friend[38] he connects Luther’s strange excitement in the days before his entrance into religion with a certain event in his later history at a time when he was engaged in public controversy. “As he himself related, and as many are aware,” says Melanchthon, “when considering attentively examples of God’s anger, or any notable accounts of His punishments, such terror possessed him (‘tanti terrores concutiebant’) as almost to cause him to give up the ghost.” He describes how, as a full-grown man, when such fears overcame him, he would actually writhe on his bed. He suffered from these terrors (terrores) either for the first time, or most severely, in the year in which he lost his friend by death in an accident, i.e. before his admission to the monastery. “It was not poverty,” Melanchthon continues, “but his love of piety which led him to choose the religious life, and, while pursuing his theological and scholastic studies, he drank with glowing fervour from the springs of heavenly doctrine, namely, the writings of the prophets and apostles (i.e. the Old and New Testament) in order to instruct his spirit in the Divine Will and to nourish fear and love with strong testimony. Overwhelmed with these pains and terrors (‘dolores et pavores’), he plunged only the more zealously into the study of the Bible.”

According to Melanchthon’s account, the same old Augustinian who once had directed Luther’s attention in an attack of faint-heartedness to the Christian’s duty of recalling the article of the forgiveness of sins, also quoted him a saying of St. Bernard: “Only believe that thy sins are forgiven thee through Christ. That is the testimony which the Holy Ghost gives in thy heart: ‘Thy sins are forgiven.’ Such is the teaching of the apostle, that man is justified by faith.”[39]

Such words of Catholic faith and joyful trust in God might well have sufficed to reassure an obedient and humble spirit. Luther began to read more and more the mystic writings of the saint of Clairvaux, but as to how far they served to bring him peace of conscience no one can now say; certain it is that, at a later date, he placed a foreign interpretation upon the above-mentioned text and upon many other similar sayings of St. Bernard, which, taken in a Catholic sense, might have been of comfort to him, in order to render them favourable to the methods by which he proposed to make his new teaching a source of consolation. He accustomed himself more and more to follow “his own way,” as he calls it, in mind and sentiment. Though in later times he speaks often and at length of his spiritual trials in the monastery, we never hear of his humbling himself before God with childlike, trustful prayer in order to find a way out of his difficulties.

If we consider the temptations of which he speaks, we might be tempted to think that he, with his promising disposition and proneness to extremes, had been singled out in a quite special manner by the tempter. During the term of novitiate, writes Luther when more advanced in years, the evil spirit of darkness, so he has learned, does not usually assail so bitterly the monk who is striving after perfection. Satan generally tempts him but slightly, and, more especially as regards temptations of the flesh, the novice is left in comparative peace, “indeed, nothing appears to him more agreeable than chastity.”[40] But, after that time, so he tells us, he himself had to bewail not only fears and doubts, but also numberless temptations which “his age brought along with it.”[41] He felt himself at the same time troubled with doubts as to his vocation and by “violent movements of hatred, envy, quarrelsomeness and pride.”[42]

“I was unable to rid myself of the weight; horrible and terrifying thoughts (‘horrendæ et terrificæ cogitationes’), stormed in upon me.”[43] Temptations to despair of his salvation and to blaspheme God tormented him more especially.

He had often wondered, he says on one occasion to his father Hans, whether he was the only man whom the devil thus attacked and persecuted,[44] and later he comforted one who was in great anxiety with the words: “When beset with the greatest temptations I could scarcely retain my bodily powers, hardly keep my breath, and no one was able to comfort me. All those to whom I complained answered ‘I know nothing about it,’ so that I used to sigh ‘Is it I alone who am plagued with the spirit of sorrow!’”[45]

He thinks that he learned the nature of these temptations from the Psalms, and that he had by experience made close acquaintance with the verse of the Bible: “Every night I will wash my bed: I will water my couch with my tears” (Ps. vi. 7). Satan with his temptations was the murderer of mankind; but, notwithstanding, one must not despair. Luther here speaks of visions granted him, and of angels who after ten years brought him consolation in his solitude; these statements we shall examine later.

Elsewhere he again recounts how Staupitz encouraged him and the manner in which he interpreted his advice reveals a singular self-esteem. Staupitz had pointed out to him the interior trials endured by holy men, who had been purified by temptation, and, after having been humbled, had risen to be powerful instruments in God’s hand. Perhaps, said Staupitz, God has great designs also for you, for the greater good of His Church. This well-meant encouragement remained vividly impressed upon Luther’s memory, not least because it seemed to predict a great future for him. “And so it has actually come to pass,” he himself says later, “I have become a great doctor though in the time of my temptations I could never have believed it.”[46] Speaking later of a reference made by Staupitz to the temptations which humbled St. Paul, he says: “I accepted the words which St. Paul uses: ‘A sting of my flesh was given me lest the greatness of the revelation should exalt me’ (2 Cor. xii. 7), wherefore I receive it as the word and voice of the Holy Spirit.” Such reflections as these, to which Luther gave himself up, certainly did not tend to help him to rid himself completely of the temptations, and to vanquish his melancholy thoughts of predestination. As a result of following “his own way” and cultivating his morbid fears, he never succeeded in shaking himself free from the thought of predestination. This will appear quite clearly in his recently published Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, written in 1515-16. In fact, the whole of the theology which he set up against that of the Catholic Church was in some sense dominated by his ideas on predestination.

We must, however, pay him this tribute, that during the whole of his stay in the Erfurt monastery he strove to live as a true monk and to keep the Rule. Such was the testimony borne by an old brother monk, as Flacius Illyricus relates, who had lived with him at Erfurt and who always remained true to the Church.

Though such may well have been the case, we cannot all the same accept as reliable the accounts, exaggerated and distorted as they clearly are, which, long after his falling away, he gives of his extraordinary holiness when in the monastery. He there attributes to himself, from controversial motives, a piety far above the ordinary, and speaks of the tremendous labours and penances which he imposed upon himself in his blindness. Led away by his imagination and by party animus, he exalts his one-time “holiness by works,” as he terms it, to be the better able to assure his hearers—ostensibly from his own experience and from the bitter disappointment he says he underwent—that all works of the Papists, even those of the most pious, holy and mortified, were absolutely worthless for procuring true peace for the soul thirsting after salvation, and that the Catholic Church was quite unable by her teaching to reconcile a soul with God. History merely tells us that he was an observant monk who kept the Rule, and, for that reason, enjoyed the confidence of his superiors.[47]

Relying upon his ability and his achievements, Staupitz, the Vicar, summoned him in the autumn of 1508, to Wittenberg, in order that he might there continue his studies and at the same time commence his work as a teacher on a humble scale.

As Master of Philosophy Luther gave lectures on the Ethics of Aristotle and probably also on Dialectics, though, as he himself says, he would have preferred to mount the chair of Theology, for which he already esteemed himself fitted, and which, with its higher tasks, attracted him much more than philosophy. In March, 1509, he was already the recipient of a theological degree and entered the Faculty as a “Baccalaureus Biblicus.” This authorised him to deliver lectures on the Holy Scriptures at the University.

In the same year, however, probably in the late autumn, Luther’s career at Wittenberg was interrupted for a time by his being sent back to Erfurt. With regard to the reasons for this nothing is known with certainty, but a movement which was going forward in the Congregation may have been the cause. In the question of the stricter observance which had recently been raised among the Augustinians, and which will be treated of below, Luther had not sided with the Wittenberg monastery but with his older friends at Erfurt. He was opposed to certain administrative regulations promoted by Staupitz, which, in the opinion of many, threatened the future discipline of the Order. At any rate, he had to return to Erfurt just as he was about to become “Sententiarius,” i.e. to be promoted to the office of lecturing on the “Magister Sententiarium.” For these lectures, too, he had already qualified himself. His second stay at Erfurt and the part—so important for the understanding of his later life—which he played in the disputes of the Order, are new data in his history which have as yet received little attention.

He was made very welcome by his brothers at Erfurt, at once took up his work as “Sententiarius” and, for about a year and a half, held forth on that celebrated textbook of theology, the Book of Sentences.

He was also employed in important business for the monastery and accompanied Dr. Nathin on a mission in connection with the question of the statutes of the Congregation and the above-mentioned dispute. Both went to Halle to Adolf of Anhalt, Provost of Magdeburg Cathedral, for the purpose of defending the “observance in the vicariate.” The monk made an excellent impression on the Provost of the Cathedral.[48] The esteem which Luther enjoyed while he was at Erfurt exposes the futility of those old fables, once widely circulated and generally believed, that whilst there he had entered into a liaison with a girl and had declared that he intended to go as far as he could until the times permitted of his marrying in due form.[49]

Of Luther’s lectures at that time some traces are to be found in a book in the Ratsschul-Library at Zwickau, these being the oldest specimens of his handwriting which we possess. They were made public in 1893 in volume ix. of the “Kritische Gesamtausgabe” of Luther’s works now appearing, and consist of detailed marginal notes to the Sentences of the Lombard of which the book in question is a printed copy.[50] The notes consist chiefly of subtle dialectic explanations or corrections of Peter Lombard and are quite in the theological style of the day. The vanity and audacity of the language used is frequently surprising; for instance, when the young master takes upon himself to speak of the “buffoonery” of contemporary theologians and philosophers, or of an ostensibly “almost heretical opinion” which he discovers in Venerable Duns Scotus; still more is this the case when he expresses his dislike of the traditional scholastic speculation and logic, alluding to the “rancid rules of the logicians,” to “those grubs, the philosophers,” to the “dregs of philosophy” and to that “putrid philosopher Aristotle.”

It is worthy of note in connection with his mental growth that, on the very cover of the book, he, most independently, declares war on the “Sophists,” though we do not mean to imply that such a war was not justifiable from many points of view. As a torch, however, for the illuminating of theological truth he is not unwilling to use philosophy. Very strong, nay emphatic, is his appeal to the Word of God on a trivial and purely speculative question relating to the inner life of the Trinity. He says: “Though many highly esteemed teachers assert this, yet the fact remains that on their side they have not Holy Scripture, but merely human reasons: but I say that on my side I have the Written Word that the soul is the image of God, and therefore I say with the Apostle ‘Though an angel from Heaven, i.e. a Doctor of the Church, preach to you otherwise, let him be anathema.’”

In these glosses we may, however, seek in vain for any trace, even the faintest, of Luther’s future teaching. The young theologian still maintains the Church’s standpoint, particularly with regard to the doctrines which he was afterwards to call into question.

He still speaks correctly of “faith which works through charity and by which we are justified.” Equally blameless are his statements regarding concupiscence in fallen man and the exercise of free will in the choice of good under the influence of Divine Grace. Once, it is true, he casually speaks of Christ as “our righteousness and sanctification,” but, in spite of the weight which has been laid on this expression, it is in no wise remarkable, and merely voices the Catholic view of St. Augustine, or better still, of St. Paul. To Romans i. 16 f., to which he was later to attach so much importance in his new system, he refers once, interpreting it correctly and agreeably with the Glossa ordinaria; clearly enough it had not yet begun to interest him and his harmless words afford no proof of the statement which has been made, that already at the time he wrote “the birth-hour of the reformation had rung.”

That Luther also studied at that time some of the writings of St. Augustine we see from three old volumes of the works of this Father in the Zwickau Library, which contain notes made in Luther’s handwriting on the De Trinitate, on the De Civitate Dei, and other similar writings. These notes, made about the same time, are correct in their doctrine. According to Melanchthon, already at Erfurt he had begun a “very thorough study” of the African Father of the Church.

In the latter notes, which were also published in the Weimar edition of Luther’s works,[51] he once flies into a violent fit of indignation with the celebrated Wimpfeling, who was mixed up in a literary dispute with the Augustinian Order. He calls the worthy man “a garrulous barker and an envious critic of the fame of the Augustinians, who had lost his reason through obstinacy and hate, and who requires a cut of the knife to open his mole’s eyes”; he, “with his brazen front, should be ashamed of himself.”[52] Glibness of tongue, combined with intelligence and fancy, and, in addition to unusual talents, great perseverance in study, these were the qualities which many admired in the new teacher. Whoever had to dispute with so sharp and fiery an opponent, was sure to get the worst of the encounter. The fame of the new teacher soon spread throughout the Augustinian province, but his originality and want of restraint naturally raised him up some enemies.

Alongside of his readiness in controversy which some admired, many remarked in him quarrelsomeness and disputatiousness. He never learnt how to live “at peace” with his brothers,[53] as some of the old monks afterwards told the Humanist Cochlæus. His Catholic pupil Johann Oldecop, says of his leaving Erfurt for Wittenberg, that the separation was not altogether displeasing to the Augustinians of Erfurt, because Luther was always desirous of coming off victor in differences of opinion, and liked to stir up strife.[54] Hieronymus Dungersheim, a subsequent Catholic opponent who watched him very narrowly, writes that he “had always been a quarrelsome man in his ways and habits,” and that he had acquired that reputation even before ever he came to the monastery.[55] Dungersheim questioned those who had known him as a secular student at Erfurt. The above statements come, it is true, from the camp of his adversaries, but they are not only uncontradicted by any further testimony, but entirely agree with other data regarding his character.

Luther, in his own account of himself which he gave later, tells us that he was then and during the first part of his career as a monk, so full of zeal for the truth handed down by the Church that he would have given over to death any denier of the same, and have been ready to carry the wood for burning him at the stake. He also says in his queer, exaggerated fashion, that in those days he worshipped the Pope. At the same time he announces that his study of the Bible at Erfurt had already shown him many errors in the Papist Church, but that he had sought to soothe his conscience with the question: “Art thou the only wise man?” though by so doing he had retarded his understanding of the Holy Scriptures.[56] He also asserts later that his father’s words spoken at the banquet which followed his first Mass, viz. that his religious vocation was probably a delusion, had pierced ever deeper into his mind and appeared to him more and more true. Yet he likewise tells us elsewhere of his persevering zeal in his profession, and of his excessive fastings and disciplines.

It is hard to find the real clue in this tangle of later statements, all of them influenced by polemical considerations.

He says quite seriously, and this may very well be true, that what he was wont to hear at times outside the monastery from unbelieving “grammarians,” i.e. humanists, regarding the great difference between the teaching of Holy Scripture and that of the existing Church, made a deep impression on him.[57] He had, however, calmed himself, so he says, with the thought that this was other people’s business. In the monastic library he once came across some sermons of John Hus. Their contents appeared to him excellent, nevertheless, so he writes, from aversion for the author’s name, he laid aside the book without reading any further, though not without surprise that such a man should have written in many ways so well and so correctly. Johann Grefenstein, his master at Erfurt, had once let fall the remark in his presence that Hus had been put to death without any previous attempt being made to instruct or convert him.

At that time, Hus failed to make any impression on him. Doubts, however, assaulted him in the shape of temptations. Those he repulsed, well aware of the danger. In June, 1521, writing at the Wartburg, he says that more than ten years before, much that was taught by Popes, Councils and Universities had appeared to him absurd and in contradiction with Christ, but that he had put a bridle on his thoughts in accordance with the Proverb of Solomon: “Lean not upon thy own prudence.”[58] Certain it is that his clear mind must early have perceived that the Church of that day fell far short of the ideal, and it is possible that even in those early years, such a perception may have awakened in him doubts and discontent and have led him to take a too gloomy view of the state of the Church.

In any case, Luther’s own testimony as given above leads us to suspect the presence in his mind at an early date of a deep-seated dissatisfaction which foreboded ill to the monk’s future fidelity to the Church.[59]

A strong moral foundation would have been necessary to save a mind so singularly constituted from wavering, and if we may believe the statement of his contemporary, Hieronymus Dungersheim of Leipzig, this was just what Luther had always lacked. Dungersheim, in a pamphlet against Luther the heretic, harks back to the years he spent at Erfurt as a secular student and accuses him of evil habits, probably contracted then, but the after effects of which made themselves felt when he had entered into religion and caused him to rebel against his profession. If Luther, so he says, was now persuaded that no religious could keep the vow of chastity, in his case the inability could only be due to a certain “former bad habit,” of which stories were told, and to his neglect of prayer.[60] In another writing the same opponent accuses him openly of having indulged in the grossest vice during his academic years, and mentions as his informant one of the comrades who had, later on, accompanied Luther to the gates of the monastery.[61] He says nothing, perhaps, indeed, he knew nothing more definite, and with regard to Luther’s life in religion, he is unable to adduce anything to his discredit.

But yet another of Luther’s later adversaries has strong words for our hero’s early life. His testimony, which has not so far been dealt with, must be treated of here because such charges, if well founded, doubtless contribute much to the psychological explanation of the processes going forward in Luther. This testimony is given by Hieronymus Emser of Dresden, who, it is true, was himself by no means spotless, and who, on that account, was roundly reprimanded by the man he had attacked. In his rejoinder to Luther, a pamphlet published in 1520, and the only one preserved, he says: “Was it necessary on account of my letter that you should hold up to public execration my former deviations which are indeed, for the most part, mere inventions? What do you think has come to my ears concerning your own criminal deeds (‘flagitia’)?” He will be silent about them, he says, because he does not wish to return evil for evil, but he continues: “That you also fell, I must attribute to the same cause which brought about my own fall, namely, the want of public discipline in our days, so that young men live as they please without fear of punishment and do just what they like.”[62] We must remember that at Erfurt Emser and Luther had stood in the relation of teacher and disciple. His words, like those of Dungersheim written from Leipzig, voice the opinion on Luther later on current in the hostile University circles of Erfurt.

When Luther in his later years speaks of the “sins of his youth,” this, in his grotesquely anti-catholic vocabulary, means the good works of his monastic life, even the celebration of Holy Mass. Once, however, at the end of his tract on the Last Supper (1528),[63] speaking of the sins of his youth, he seems to distinguish between the Catholic works above referred to and other faults of which he accuses himself in the same general terms.

In the young Augustinian’s Erfurt days he was prevented by the Rule from cultivating any intimate and distracting friendship with persons in the world. We only know that he, and likewise his brother monk Johann Lang, had some friendly intercourse with the Humanist Petreius (Peter Eberbach), who not long after, in a letter dated May 8, 1512, greets Lang—then already with Luther at Wittenberg—in these words: “Sancte Lange et Sancte Martine orate pro me.” Mutianus, the Gotha canon and chief of the Humanists, who was very unorthodox in his views, in a letter to Lang of the beginning of May, 1515, seems to remember Luther, for he sends greetings to the “pious Dr. Martin.”

His intercourse with the Humanists led Luther to make use of philology in the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. He thus entered upon a useful, we may even say indispensable, course, in which he might have done great service. At Erfurt he continued constantly to study his copy of the Bible, which had become an inseparable companion. “As no one in the monastery read the Bible” (at any rate not with his zeal) he was able to flatter himself with being first in the house in the matter of biblical knowledge; indeed in this field he was probably the greatest expert in the whole Congregation.

In addition to this, he began to turn his busy mind to the study of Hebrew, and contrived to provide himself with a dictionary, which at that time was considered a treasure. Lang, with his humanistic culture, was able to assist him with the Greek.

Meanwhile the dispute in the Order with regard to the observance had reached a point when it seemed right to the party to which Luther belonged to seek the intervention of Rome in their favour, or to anticipate an appeal on the part of their opponents. The choice of seven houses “of the observance” resulted in Luther being chosen as the delegate to represent them in Rome. So little opposed to the Church was Luther’s theology and Bible interpretation in his Erfurt days, and so considerable was the number of brethren, even in other Observantine houses who held him to be a faithful monk, that they deemed him best suited for so difficult a mission. What Cochlæus, according to information drawn from Augustinian sources, relates later sounds, however, quite reasonable, viz. that he was selected on account of his “cleverness and his forceful spirit of contradiction,” which promised a complete victory over the other faction.[64]

Luther’s journey to Rome, according to Oldecop, was undertaken from Erfurt.