# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S336
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

336 Luther and Melanchthon.

bound him to the great reformer. This relationship of friendship did not remain untroubled. It was in the order of things that Melanchthon's individuality, lifted out of its joints by the first enthusiasm for Luther, should gradually reclaim its due. Melanchthon recognized that, for all his subordination to Luther as preeminently the personality of the Reformation, he nevertheless had a task of his own to fulfill. As against the polemical vehemence with which Luther struck his opponent to the ground, he found his own gentleness justified; as against Luther's thoroughgoing zeal, the standpoint of mediation; as against the striving — increasingly pronounced in the second half of Luther's reforming course — to give the reforming doctrines a fixed form and ecclesiastical authority, the freedom, breadth, and capacity for development of the Protestant principle. As is the way human affairs develop, such a reaction could hardly occur without contradiction and friction, in which partisans on both sides also did their part. Yet it never came to a breach. It cannot be denied that Melanchthon, through a nature that was gentle yet also irritable, was led into judgments and outpourings to the men of his confidence which one cannot read without pain and regret. But even then, when Melanchthon gave way to himself like this, one sees that he cannot get outside the circle into which the power of Luther's personality had, as it were, spellbound him. He compares the wrathful Luther to the heroes of antiquity — an Achilles, a Philoctetes, and a Marius. When, after Luther's death, he wrote that in every respect lamentable letter to Carlowitz, in which he confessed to this shrewd statesman of the Elector Moritz: Tuli antea servitutem paene deformem, cum saepe Lutherus magis suae naturae, in qua φιλονειχία erat non exigua quam vel personae suae vel utilitati communi serviret [I have borne before now a nearly disgraceful servitude, since Luther often served his own nature — in which there was no small contentiousness — more than either his own person or the common good], he sought, in a letter to Maltzan, to defend this judgment by explaining that φιλονειχία, that is, combativeness, is a trait of all heroic natures, to which Luther belonged. All these clouds could not shake the firmament of the friendship that bound Luther and Melanchthon together. This cooperation of two such richly gifted powers became decisive for the cause of the Reformation. Those two paths that prepared the way for the Reformation — the evangelical, and the one I would call the path of world-historical progress — converged, so to speak, in Luther and Melanchthon. Like the Waldensians, Wyclif, Huss, Savonarola, and others, Luther proceeded from the evangelical faith, which after hard struggles had become the center of his soul, even before he thought of any protest against the medieval Church — until, driven into opposition by the contradiction of his adversaries, he declared at Worms, before emperor and empire, that he recognized no authority but Scripture. But what gave Luther's word the success that his forerunners had not found was the clarity of his position upon the Word of God, the ground already prepared by his age, and the might and power of an extraordinary personality, of which