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.

And it was this method which, in 1529, during the discussions with the Calvinists, made him so obstinate, when he wrote on the table in front of him, “This is my body,” and sternly disregarded the tears and outstretched hand of Zwingli.  He had never been narrower and yet never mightier—­the fear-inspiring man who had won his conviction in the most violent inward struggles against doubt and the Devil.  It was an imperfect method, and his opponents attacked it, not without success.  With it his doctrine became subject to the fate of all human wisdom.  But in this method there was also a vivid emotional process in which his own reason and the culture and the inward needs of his time found better expression than he himself knew.  And it became the starting-point from which a conscientious spirit of investigation has wrought for the German people the highest intellectual freedom.

With such tremendous trials there came also to the outcast monk at the Wartburg other minor temptations.  He had long ago, by almost superhuman intellectual activity, overcome what were then regarded with great distrust as fleshly impulses; now nature asserted herself vigorously, and he several times asked his friend Melanchthon to pray for him on this account.  Then Fate would have it that during these very weeks the restless mind of Carlstadt in Wittenberg fell upon the question of the marriage of priests, and reached the conclusion, in a pamphlet on celibacy, that the vow of chastity was not binding on priests and monks.  The Wittenbergers in general agreed—­first of all, Melanchthon, whose position in this matter was freest from prejudice, since he had never received ordination and had been married for two years.