# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S142
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

142 The Lutheran Church and the Union.

took it up into himself, but it had no power over him. The development and the activity of his life went, from the very beginning to the end, toward one thing alone: "what must I do that I may be saved?" Zwingli, conversely, had at first walked solely the path of humanistic learning and its interests. Not the question, "how shall I be saved?" but the question, "how do I attain, for myself and for my people, a greatness similar to that of classical antiquity" — this was originally his motive. He later took up, sincerely and warmly, the evangelical motive as well into his heart, but without giving up the former, without a conversion, without any awareness of their sharp opposition, but rather by mingling the two together. Zwingli's individuality also stood far beneath Luther's. "Luther was, in every respect, the man to give his age its name. The center of his being is his heroism of faith and his ripeness of faith, which filled his whole doing and thinking. Besides this he was also endowed with the highest human gifts in everything pertaining to the spiritual realm, much as Caesar was for the whole worldly domain. He had the gift of theology, which in the history of Christendom is unsurpassed. He had, too, the gift of the poet.. He had the gift of the philosopher.. Besides, Luther was a whole, full human being. There was nothing human that he did not carry warm and living in his soul. Strength and gentleness, holy earnestness and humor, the ideal and the soberly vigorous real, world-moving deeds and the smallest personal relations, zeal for the inviolable Word and command of God and recognition of every individuality and its free, innate impulse, the heights and the depths of society, the worth of what has been inherited and the task of the new creation — all this was his in equal measure." "Zwingli, on the other hand, was likewise endowed with a distinguished gift for scholarly and practical understanding and manly courage, vigorous in thought, vigorous in deeds, versed in the learned culture of his time, of a warmth of feeling, a faithfulness in all personal relations toward friends and fatherland, of a plain, cheerful, cordial nature. But there runs through his whole cast of mind a strain of sobriety which at times borders on flatness. The sound common sense which he possessed in such rich measure easily turned, in him, into the common man's common sense. Accordingly he makes everything plain to himself, and has the confidence that he can make everything plain, and what he cannot make plain, that he does not find credible.. With this is joined in him a bent for making even conditions plain, i.e. tabula rasa. From this there springs, on the one hand, a vigorous, rough, sober bent toward the practical; on the other, a killing-off of the ideal, the mysterious, and the historical." In keeping with this difference of their bent and their individuality, the reformations of the two men differ as well. Luther's reformation is, in the first place, a founding (position); Zwingli's reformation is, in the first place, a negation: the struggle against human ordinances. With Luther