To a scholar the monastery had great attractions, even in that age.  It was still invested with poetic associations and consecrated usages; it was indorsed by the venerable Fathers of the Church; it was favorable to study, and free from the noisy turmoil of the world.  But with all these advantages Luther was miserable.  He felt the agonies of an unforgiven soul in quest of peace with God; he could not get rid of them, they pursued him into the immensity of an intolerable night.  He was in despair.  What could austerities do for him?  He hungered and thirsted after the truth, like Saint Augustine in Milan.  He had no taste for philosophy, but he wanted the repose that philosophers pretended to teach.  He was then too narrow to read Plato or Boethius.  He was a self-tormented monk without relief; he suffered all that Saint Paul suffered at Tarsus.  In some respects this monastic pietism resembled the pharisaism of Saul, in the schools of Tarsus,—­a technical, rigid, and painful adherence to rules, fastings, stated prayers, and petty ritualisms, which, originally framed as aids to grace, by repetition lose their power; based on the enormous error that man may win heaven by external practices, in which, however, he can never perfect himself, though he were to live, like Simeon Stylites, on the top of a pillar for twenty years without once descending; an eternal unrest, because perfection cannot be attained; the most terrible slavery to which a man can be conscientiously doomed, verging into hypocrisy and fanaticism.

It was then that a kind and enlightened friend visited him, and recommended him to read the Bible.  The Bible never has been a sealed book to monks; it was ever highly prized; no convent was without it:  but it was read with the spectacles of the Middle Ages.  Repentance meant penance.  In Saint Paul’s Epistles Luther discovers the true ground of justification,—­not works, but faith; for Paul had passed through similar experiences.  Works are good, but faith is the gift of God.  Works are imperfect with the best of men, even the highest form of works, to a Mediaeval eye,—­self-expiation and penance; but faith is infinite, radiating from divine love; faith is a boundless joy,—­salvation by the grace of God, his everlasting and precious boon to people who cannot climb to heaven on their hands and knees, the highest gift which God ever bestowed on men,—­eternal life.

Luther is thus emancipated from the ideas of the Middle Ages and of the old Syriac monks and of the Jewish Pharisees.  In his deliverance he has new hopes and aspirations; he becomes cheerful, and devotes himself to his studies.  Nothing can make a man more cheerful and joyful than the cordial reception of a gift which is infinite, a blessing which is too priceless to be bought.  The pharisee, the monk, the ritualist, is gloomy, ascetic, severe, intolerant; for he is not quite sure of his salvation.  A man who accepts heaven as a gift is full of divine