# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S25
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Melanchthon's Day of Death. 25

further to report. The Church would have been spared many struggles.
But it is not so, and since it is not so, we must recognize in it the
dispensation of God. We turn now to the reverse side of M.'s life, which
we let come out more fully here, not in order to cast the more shadow
upon M., but because it is here that our question is chiefly to be
resolved.

M. was more the scholarly theologian; he had not grounded himself
as deeply as Luther, and without Luther, Nitzsch thinks, he would not
have gotten much beyond Erasmus. One may therefore regard him as a
spiritual son of Luther, who in the most decisive questions of life was
referred to his spiritual father, because he never developed the
independence that would have let him stand up against the whole world
and champion his cause with the certainty of faith. Hence, when Luther
drew the ultimate grounds of his actions from his own experience and
from Scripture, these grounds, in M.'s case, very often lay — and that
precisely in chief matters — mainly in his scholarship, save that this must
not be taken to deny him sincere piety and true faith. This M. showed
on more than one occasion. At Speyer in 1529 he was thoroughly put
out that the evangelical estates lodged the well-known Protestation from
which they received the name Protestants. In his view they ought to
have shown themselves more yielding and made more concessions than
they were permitted to make. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 he grew
so unsure of the good cause that he let slip the words: "he had followed
Luther, as the head in this matter, only for the sake of his authority."
Luther was very displeased at this remark and wrote back to him: "God
has set this matter in a place that you will not find in your Rhetorica,
nor in your Philosophia either; the place is called faith, in which all
things stand that we neither see nor grasp." A proof of how correctly
Luther saw through his friend.

The intimate relationship between the two could, under these
circumstances, only have continued if M. had subordinated himself, or
had withdrawn into silence on all the chief questions where he was in
doubt. That was not possible. M. was by no means without feeling; but
a certain sober-mindedness, often verging on coldness, prevailed in this
man of scholarship and asserted itself more and more with his riper
years. So it came about that he could not agree with some of Luther's
doctrines and views, particularly concerning the person of Christ and
the sacraments. As the "Teacher of Germany" he nevertheless also had a
conscience and felt his responsibility not to teach according to notions
borrowed from others. He had to try to become independent, and he
was driven still further to this by circumstances. Given the difference in
character between the two chief figures, two parties formed themselves
unnoticed, still without any fixed opposition between them. M., as the
head of his party, later called the Philippists, had to represent it as well.
So it happened repeatedly that he met with the most decided opposition
from Luther's side, and heard such speeches directed at himself as