with the sin that ever besets us. He knew that with all his conventional
religiousness he could not pass muster before God. Over his wash-basin
he was overheard moaning: "The more we wash, the more unclean we
become." He felt like Paul when he groaned: "O wretched man that I am,
who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7, 24.) He was
sorrowing for his poor soul. He was hungering and thirsting for
righteousness. "When will I ever attain to that state of mind that I am
sure God is pleased with me?" he mused distractedly. What he could not
find while engaged in his secular pursuits, that, he was told, the
cloister could give him. To obtain that he entered the monastery. If
ever Rome had an honest applicant for monkery, Luther is that man.

Nor did he act precipitately. As shown, the thought of this act had been
quietly forming in him for years. When he made his rash vow to St. Anna,
he still allowed two weeks to pass before he put his resolution into
action. Try and picture to yourself his state of mind during those
fourteen days! Moving about in his customary surroundings, he was daily
probing the correctness of his contemplated change of life. He fought a
soul-battle in those days, and the remembrance of his father made that
battle none the easier. From the Catholic standpoint Luther deserves an
aureole for that struggle. After entering the cloister, he was still at
liberty for a year and a half to retrace his fatal step. But his first
impressions were favorable; monkery really seemed to bring him heart's
ease and peace, and there was no one to disabuse his mind of the
delusion. After nearly two years in the monastery, while sitting with
his father at the cloister board on the event of his ordination to the
priesthood, he declares to his father that he enjoys the quiet,
contemplative life that he has chosen. Surely, he made a mistake by
becoming monk, but Catholics cannot fault him for that mistake. If the
life of monks and nuns is really what they claim that it is: the highest