# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26 Melanchthon's Day of Death.

that cut him to the quick. M. was by no means a gentle man; he was
soft-natured, but he could flare up violently, and even when the flare-up
soon subsided, a bitter feeling nevertheless remained in his troubled,
sensitive nature. His attempts to come forward independently failed
completely; the result of this was that a definite opposition to Luther
took shape within him, which from time to time vented itself in ill humor
over the "autocrat." This comes out most, and unfortunately least
nobly, after Luther's death, in a letter to Carlowitz, where he writes:
"I formerly bore an almost shameful servitude, since Luther often let
himself be guided more by his temperament, which was very much
inclined to contentiousness, than by his person and the common good."
Accordingly he also gave Luther a rather cool funeral oration. The
drifting-apart of the two, already under way earlier, becomes quite
conspicuous from 1532 on and increases with every year, so that M. felt
ever more uneasy in Wittenberg and wished to be delivered from his
"Caucasus."

M. thus made the attempt to be independent, and found himself
even less hindered in this after Luther's death. But he was not the man
who could stand on his own feet in so decisive and perilous a position, at
the head of a Church that still had to fight its way through. The
marshal's baton was far too heavy in his hand; apart from the fact that
he lacked Luther's deeper experience and strength of faith, he was also
far too cautious and anxious, easily lost his head in doubtful
circumstances, and let himself be determined from outside whenever the
power of events worked upon him. For this reason he withdrew from
Luther's influence really only in order to surrender himself to other
influences, which tossed him back and forth and never let him come to
unity with himself. This is plain to see from his doctrinal outlook. It is
not cast from a single piece; it is put together out of conflicting
components. He approached the Roman Church in this, that he would
gladly have kept its episcopal church government, for which reason he
also spoke up for the papacy. To be sure, he wished to grant this only a
human right; yet he could easily have gone further, since he obscured or
set aside the invisible Church and the universal priesthood beneath the
authority of the visible Church.*) Connected with this are the two other
doctrines, that he ascribed to the human will a kind of independent
cooperation in conversion, and declared good works necessary to
salvation. No less openly did he express his fondness for the ceremonies
of the Roman Church. On the other hand, it is very striking what
position he took in the sacramentarian controversy. One would have
expected that he would have gone even further than Luther, and

*) In the altered Augsburg Confession, Article 7, on the Church, is likewise altered,
and in such a way that hypocrites too are counted as belonging to the Church. The new
doctrine of the Church is accordingly indeed symbolical — but only if one counts the
altered Augsburg Confession among our symbolical books! That is why our opponents,
too, prefer to cite Melanchthonian definitions of the Church rather than Luther's.
                                                                        L. u. W.