# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S131
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How the Simple, and Especially the Sick, Are to Be Instructed in Christianity, etc. 131

...gathered in. Then the guide suddenly steps up to him again, with Andrew or Philip, comforting him kindly. While he listens to him, he catches sight of the image of the Crucified One, which he had seen in the spring, facing him on the wall, but wasted and pitiful. In this moment the guide touches his breast and, pointing to Christ, says: "You must become like this One" — and Myconius awakes. Fearing mockery, he told the dream to no one, but interpreted it, though not with complete certainty, as referring to the exchange he had made of worldly life for the monastic life. For seven years, at Annaberg, Leipzig, and in Weimar, where he received priestly ordination, he now tormented himself with monkish works, wrestling for peace of conscience and true godliness, but his heart grew ever more desolate; grave doubts about his election let him taste the pains of hell, and his companions at last grew weary of offering him comfort. Then Luther's theses appeared, and instantly he recognized in Luther the guide in the wilderness. "God opened," he says, "at once my eyes and ears; indeed He seized me through him, led me to the spring, and cast me upon Christ. To Him I attached myself at once, in the year 1517, in the confession of the doctrine." Then followed seven other years, in which he joyfully and fearlessly preached the Gospel, though on the part of his fellow monks every storm of persecution broke over him because of it. Five times excommunicated by the monks, sentenced, while they ate, to crawl on the ground and kiss their feet, and to endure the heaviest scourgings in silence — indeed threatened with being walled up alive — he at last fled his tormentors on a journey meant to destroy him. In that same year he was called as superintendent to Gotha, a post which he administered with rich blessing for the whole of Thuringia until his end. Two years later (1526) he married, following Luther's example. His tireless zeal and high gifts showed themselves in the founding of schools, the endowment of preaching positions, in his church visitations, and in the prevention and suppression of the Peasants' Revolt in his district through the persuasive power of his word. But in other regions too he was a diligent laborer in the Lord's harvest — so in the Cleves country; in England, where, as a member of the delegation sent to England at Henry VIII's request by the Protestant princes, he victoriously defended the Augsburg Confession throughout an entire summer. In Leipzig he proved himself, as J. Jonas says, the true apostle of the Leipzigers. "The roof-flowers [i.e., the papal doctors of the university there] wilted before the heat and splendor of the sun of God's Word" in a public disputation. After a stay of a year and a half there, he returned (1540) to his congregation at Gotha, which awaited him with longing, but with weakened health. A consumption, soon fully developed, took from him all hope of a longer life. Then came Luther's letter: "Fare thee well, my dear friend Friedrich; may the LORD not let me hear that so