of monastic seclusion, for meditation and
study. He was a monk, like other monks; but it seems he had religious
doubts and fears more than ordinary monks. At first he conformed to the
customary ways of men seeking salvation. He walked in the beaten road,
like Saint Dominic and Saint Francis; he accepted the great ideas of the
Middle Ages, which he was afterwards to repudiate,--he was not beyond
them, or greater than they were, at first; he fasted like monks, and
tormented his body with austerities, as they did from the time of
Benedict; he sang in the choir from early morn, and practised the usual
severities. But his doubts and fears remained. He did not, like other
monks, find peace and consolation; he did not become seraphic, like
Saint Francis, or Bonaventura, or Loyola. Perhaps his nature repelled
asceticism; perhaps his inquiring and original mind wanted something
better and surer to rest upon than the dreams and visions of a
traditionary piety. Had he been satisfied with the ordinary mode of
propitiating the Deity, he would never have emerged from his retreat.

To a scholar the monastery had great attractions, even in that age. It
was still invested with poetic associations and consecrated usages; it
was indorsed by the venerable Fathers of the Church; it was favorable to
study, and free from the noisy turmoil of the world. But with all these
advantages Luther was miserable. He felt the agonies of an unforgiven
soul in quest of peace with God; he could not get rid of them, they
pursued him into the immensity of an intolerable night. He was in
despair. What could austerities do for _him_? He hungered and thirsted
after the truth, like Saint Augustine in Milan. He had no taste for
philosophy, but he wanted the repose that philosophers pretended to
teach. He was then too narrow to read Plato or Boethius. He was a
self-tormented monk without relief; he suffered all that Saint Paul
suffered at Tarsus. In some respects this monastic pietism resembled the
pharisaism of Saul, in the schools of Tarsus,--a technical, rigid, and
painful adherence to rules, fastings, obtrusive prayers, and petty
ritualisms, which form the essence and substance of all pharisaism and
all monastic life; based on the enormous error that man deserves heaven
by external practices, in which, however, he can never perfect himself,
though he were to live, like Simeon Stylites, on the top of a pillar for
twenty years without once descending; an eternal