His rebellious spirit found nourishment in these humiliations.  Owing to his melancholy temperament and gloomy fits, he made no friends.  He felt himself misunderstood everywhere.  Even the little season of sunshine that came into his young life at the Cotta home in Eisenach did not cure him of the morbid feeling that nobody appreciated him.  He began to loathe the studies which he was pursuing in accordance with the wish of his father.  To certain occurrences, like the slaying of a fellow-student, an accident with which he met on a vacation trip, and a sudden thunderstorm, he gave an ominous interpretation which deepened his despondency.  At last he determined, “inconsiderately and precipitately,” to enter a cloister.  His friends “instinctively felt he was not qualified or fitted for the sublime vocation to which he aspired, and they accordingly used all their powers to dissuade him from the course he had chosen.  All their efforts were fruitless, and from the gayety and frolic of the banquet” which he had given his fellow-students as a farewell party “he went to the monastery.”  He was so reckless that he took this step even without the consent of his parents.  “He knew little about the ways of God, and was not well informed of the gravity and responsibilities of the step he was taking.”  “He was not called by God to conventual life; . . . he was driven by despair, rather than the love of higher perfection, into a religious career.”  Catholics feel so sure that they have a case against Luther that in all seriousness they ask Protestants the question:  Did he act honestly when he knelt before the prior asking to be received into the order?

Luther has later in life given various reasons for entering the monastery.  His case was not simple, but complex.  One reason, however, which he has assigned is the severe bringing up which he had at his home.  Hausrath is satisfied with this one reason, and many Catholic writers adopt his view.  But this remark of Luther is evidently misapplied if it is made to mean that Luther sought ease, comfort, leniency in the cloister as a relief from the hard life which he had been leading.  Luther had grasped the fundamental idea in monkery quite well:  flight from the secular life as a means to become exceptionally holy.  He sought quiet for meditation and devotion, but no physical ease and earthly comforts.  He knew of the rigors of cloister-life.  He willingly bowed to “the gentle yoke of Christ”—­thus ran the monkish ritual—­which the life of an eremite among eremites was to impose on him.  His hard life in the days of his boyhood and youth had been an unconscious preparation for this life.  He had been strictly trained to fear God and keep His commandments.  The holy life of the saints had been held up to him as far back as he could remember as the marvel of Christian perfection.  Home and Church had cooperated in deepening the impressions of the sanctity of the monkish life in him.  When he saw the emaciated Duke of Anhalt in monk’s