ng penitence seemed necessary to atone for the faults of his
boyhood. He too, like Erasmus, became a monk, not forced into it--for
his father knew better what the holy men were like, and had no wish to
have son of his among them--but because the monk of Martin's imagination
spent his nights and days upon the stones in prayer; and Martin, in the
heat of his repentance, longed to be kneeling at his side.

In this mood he entered the Augustine monastery at Erfurt. He was full
of an overwhelming sense of his own wretchedness and sinfulness. Like
St. Paul, he was crying to be delivered from the body of death which he
carried about him. He practised all possible austerities. He, if no one
else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed nights in the chancel
before the altar, or on his knees on the floor of his cell. He weakened
his body till his mind wandered, and he saw ghosts and devils. Above
all, he saw the flaming image of his own supposed guilt. God required
that he should keep the law in all points. He had not so kept the
law--could not so keep the law--and therefore he believed that he was
damned. One morning, he was found senseless and seemingly dead; a
brother played to him on a flute, and soothed his senses back to
consciousness.

It was long since any such phenomenon had appeared among the rosy friars
of Erfurt. They could not tell what to make of him. Staupitz, the prior,
listened to his accusations of himself in confession. 'My good fellow,'
he said, 'don't be so uneasy; you have committed no sins of the least
consequence; you have not killed anybody, or committed adultery, or
things of that sort. If you sin to some purpose, it is right that you
should think about it, but don't make mountains out of trifles.'

Very curious: to the commonplace man the uncommonplace is for ever
unintelligible. What was the good of all that excitement--that agony of
self-reproach for little things? None at all, if the object is only to
be an ordinary good sort of man--if a decent fulfilment of the round of
common duties is the be-all and the end-all of human life on earth.

The plague came by-and-by into the town. The commonplace clergy ran
away--went to their country-houses, went to the hills, went
anywhere--and they wondered in the same way why Luther would not go with
them. They admired him and liked him. They told him his life was too
precious to be thrown away. He answered, quite simply, that his place
was with the sick a