especially when he describes the natural incapacity of men for what is good. Along with this change in language, and evidently related to it, we find evidence that Luther was beginning to think less highly of the monastic life and its external renunciations. Predestination, meaning by that not an abstract metaphysical dogma, but the thought that the whole of the believer's life and what it involved depended in the last resort on God and not on man, came more and more into the foreground. Still there did not appear any disposition to criticise or repudiate the current theology of the day.
But about the middle of 1516 Luther had reached the parting of the ways, and the divergence appeared on the practical and not on the speculative side of theology. It began in a sermon he preached on the theory of Indulgences in July, 1516, and increased month by month-the widening divergence can be clearly traced step by step-until he could contrast "our theology," the theology taught by Luther and his colleagues at Wittenberg, with what was taught elsewhere and notably at Erfurt. The former represented Augustine and the Bible; the latter was founded on Aristotle. In September, 1517, his position had become so clear that he wrote against the scholastic theology, declaring that it was at heart Pelagian and that it obscured and buried out of sight the Augustinian doctrines of grace. He bewailed the fact that the current theology neglected to teach the supreme value of faith and of inward righteousness, that it encouraged men to seek to escape the due reward of sin by means of Indulgences, instead of exhorting them to practise that inward repentance which belongs to every genuine Christian life. It was at this stage of his own inward religious development that Luther felt himself forced to stand forth in public in opposition to the sale of Indulgences in Germany.
Luther had become much more than a professor of theology by this time. He hacMbecome a power in Wittenberg. His lectures seemed like a revelation of the Scriptures to the Wittenberg students; grave burghers from the town matriculated at the University in order to attend his classes; his fame gradually spread, and students began to flock from all parts of Germany to the small, poor, and remote town; and the Elector grew proud of his University and of the man who had given it such a position. In these earlier years of his professoriate Luther undertook the duties of the preacher in the town church in Wittenberg. He became a great preacher, able to touch the conscience and bring men to amend their lives. Like all great preachers of the day who were in earnest he denounced prevalent sins; he deplored the low standard set by the leaders of the Church in principle and in practice; he declared that religion was not an easy thing; that it did not consist in externals; that both sin and true repentance had their roots in the heart; and that until the heart had been made pure all kinds of external purifications were useless. Such a man, occupying the position he had
