Never man went into a monastery with purer motives. Never a man went
through the duties, drudgeries, and humiliations of the novitiate of
convent-life with more unshrinking fidelity. Never man endured more
painful mental and bodily agonies that he might secure for himself an
assured spiritual peace. Romanists have expressed their wonder that so
pure a man thought himself so great a sinner. But a sinner he was, as
we all; and to avert the just anger of God he fasted, prayed, and
mortified himself like an anchorite of the Thebaid. And yet no peace
or comfort came.

A chained Bible lay in the monastery. He had previously found a copy
of it in the library of the university. Day and night he read it,
along with the writings of St. Augustine. In both he found the same
pictures of man's depravity which he realized in himself, but God's
remedy for sin he had not found. In the earnestness of his studies the
prescribed devotions were betimes crowded out, and then he punished
himself without mercy to redeem his failures. Whole nights and days
together he lay upon his face crying to God, till he swooned in his
agony. Everything his brother-monks could tell him he tried, but all
the resources of their religion were powerless to comfort him or to
beget a righteousness in which his anguished soul could trust.

It happened that one of the exceptionally enlightened and
spiritual-minded monks of his time, _John Staupitz_, was then the
vicar-general of the Augustinians in Saxony. On his tour of inspection
he came to Erfurt, and there found Luther, a walking skeleton, more
dead than alive. He was specially drawn to the haggard young brother.
The genial and sympathizing spirit of the vicar-general made Luther
feel at home in his presence, and to him he freely opened his whole