commands through the Church at the confessional. The Reformers
themselves, and Luther especially, fully recognised the value of
being able to pour out the inner temptations of the heart to some
Christian father-confessor, or even to some other brother in the
faith, and to obtain from his lips that comfort of forgiveness which
God, in His love and mercy, bestows freely on the faithful. But
nothing of this kind, they said, was to be found in the
confessional. The conscience was tormented with the enumeration of
single sins, and burdened with all sorts of penitential formalities;
and it was just with a view that everyone should be drawn to this
discipline of the Church, should use it regularly, and should seek
for no other way to make his peace with God, that the educational
activity of the Church, both with young and old, was especially
directed.

Luther, in after life, as we have already remarked, always
recognised and found comfort in the fact that, even under such
conditions as the above, enough of the simple message of salvation
in the Bible could penetrate the heart, and awaken a faith which, in
spite of all artificial restraints and perplexing dogmas, should
throw itself, with inward longing and childlike trust, into the arms
of God's mercy, and so enjoy true forgiveness. He received, as we
shall see, some salutary directions for so doing from later friends
of his, who belonged to the Romish Church, nor was that character of
ecclesiastical religiousness, so to speak, stamped everywhere, or to
the same degree, on Christian life in Germany during his youth.
Nevertheless, his whole inner being, from boyhood, was dominated by
its influence; he, at all events, had never been taught to
appreciate the Gospel as a child. Looking back in later years on his
monastic days, and the whole of his previous life, he declared that