was ordained priest. During the celebration of his first Mass he was
so overcome by a sense of his own unworthiness to offer up such a pure
sacrifice that he would have fled from the altar before beginning the
canon had it not been for his assistants, and throughout the ceremony
he was troubled lest he should commit a mortal sin by the slightest
neglect of the rubrics. At the breakfast that followed, to which
Luther's relatives had been invited, father and son met for the first
time since Luther entered the monastery. While the young priest waxed
eloquent about the happiness of his vocation and about the storm from
heaven that helped him to understand himself, his father, who had kept
silent throughout the repast, unable to restrain himself any longer
interrupted suddenly with the remark that possibly he was deceived,
and that what he took to be from God might have been the work of the
devil. "I sit here," he continued, "eating and drinking but I would
much prefer to be far from this spot." Luther tried to pacify him by
reminding him of the godly character of monasticism, but the
interruption was never forgotten by Luther himself or by his friends
who heard it.

After his ordination the young monk turned his attention to theology,
but, unfortunately, the theological training given to the Augustinian
novices at this period was of the poorest and most meagre kind.[4] He
studied little if anything of the works of the early Fathers, and
never learned to appreciate Scholasticism as expounded by its greatest
masters, St. Thomas or St. Bonaventure. His knowledge of Scholastic
Theology was derived mainly from the works of the rebel friar William
of Occam, who, in his own time, was at constant war with the Popes,
and who, during the greater part of his life, if not at the moment of
his death, was under sentence of excommunication from the Church. The
writings of such a man, betraying as they did an almost complete