In his volume on grace, Roman Catholic theologian Joseph Pohle (1852-1922) wrote the following as part of his critique of various Protestant theologies of grace:
Another weighty objection against the Lutheran theory of justification is that it disregards the law of causation. According to Luther a man is justified by the firm belief and trust that his sins are forgiven. This "belief" is either true or false. If it is false, I can have no certainty with regard to my salvation, but am deceiving myself. If true, it presupposes that which it is to effect, in other words, it puts the cause before the effect. An orthodox Lutheran theologian of the old school would probably retort. My sins are actually forgiven by virtue of the atonement, because all men without exception are redeemed through the merits of Jesus Christ. If this be true, then why not be consistent and say: All men are justified because all are redeemed, consequently there is no need of faith and sacraments, and keeping the commandments is a matter of indifference! It is at this point that the incompatibility of Luther's teaching with the Bible and sound ethics becomes most glaringly apparent. True, Luther himself at times emphasized the necessity of good works; but this merely proves that he had lucid intervals when his honest nature rebelled against the inconsistency of his teaching. (Joseph Pohle, Grace, Actual and Habitual: A Dogmatic Treatise [St. Louis: B. Herder, 1915; repr., Bibliobooks, n.d.], 294; an online version of the work can be found here)
