and Luther had to assure his father that he had not gone into the herd
of monks to seek what people believed men sought in that profligate
company. For that reason, too, he had chosen the Augustinian order,
because a strong reform movement had been started in that order, and its
reputation was better than that of the other orders. Luther meant to be
a monk of the original type.

Since the days of Alexander of Hales, Albert the Great, and Thomas
Aquinas the Roman Church teaches that there is in the Church a treasury
of supererogatory works, that is, of good works which Christ and the
saints have performed in excess of what is ordinarily demanded of every
man in the way of upright living. We shall meet with this idea again in
another connection. It flows from the monastic principles. Monks must
have not only enough sanctity for their own needs, but to spare. Of this
superfluous sanctity they may make an assignment in favor of others. Do
not smile incredulously; monks actually make such assignments. Luther
may not have thought of this when he entered the cloister, but he
rejoiced in this scheme of substitutive sanctity later. He thought he
had found in monkery a gold-mine of holiness that would be sufficient
not only for himself, but also for his parents. While at Rome some years
later, he was in a way sorry that his father and mother were not already
in purgatory. He had such a fine chance there to accumulate
supererogatory good works which he might have transferred to them to
shorten their agonies, or release them entirely.

In order to make a successful monk, one must be either a Pharisee or an
epicurean. The Pharisee takes an inventory of the works named in the Law
of God, and sets out to perform these in an external, mechanical manner.
He adds a few works of his own invention for good measure. Every work
performed counts; it constitutes merit. On the basis of his two pecks