# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S337
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther and Melanchthon. 337

it may be said without rhetorical exaggeration that their like has not been seen in the Church since the days of the Apostles. What the national spirit had sought for centuries was flesh and bone in this purest and greatest expression of the German folk-spirit; what mysticism had striven after had come to ripeness in this man of deeply inward, contemplative spirit, united with God in a mysterious bond of faith, nourished by the German theology of Bernard and Tauler, out of whose body streams of living water welled forth, and who was led by the mystic Staupitz out of the cloister onto the stage of the world; and what, finally, the protest that had for centuries gone forth from the theological chair had willed, found its man in the professor of the University of Wittenberg, whom Augustine accompanied from the Augustinian cloister to the professorial chair, and whose beginnings of world-historical activity were the theses of a disputation. But all these elements of life — national spirit, mysticism, theological scholarship — which were united in him, had their governing center in his evangelical faith. Melanchthon, on the other hand, had approached the faith of the Reformation by way of humanism, and never disowned the humanistic foundation of his position toward the Reformation. Luther was and remained the man of life, while Melanchthon was and remained the man of the school. While Luther — a thoroughly knightly nature, descended, according to credible evidence, from a knightly line of Thuringia — developed his heroic nature amid the struggles he himself had provoked, for Melanchthon's quiet scholarly nature the struggles into which he was drawn were only disturbances and sacrifices, from which he gladly returned to the fair plantations of his school. How many sighs over this his letters contain. In the year 1541 he wrote to Charles V: Sum scholasticus, et alienus ab omnibus aulicis negotiis et colo scholasticas amicitias. And when the struggles of the Reformation would not let him come to scholarly quiet at all, then the life beyond appeared to him like a holy academy for the sweet pursuit of truth (spero me brevi venturum in coelestem academiam, in qua dulcia erunt studia veritatis), like an august Collegium (ex hac mortali vita ad collegium in coelo candidius brevi accedam). If we look more closely at the relation of Luther and Melanchthon to scholarship, the well-known judgment that Melanchthon was more learned than Luther is, in general, correct. But this judgment needs qualification and explanation. Luther's classical education, not inconsiderable in itself, cannot come into consideration beside the mastery of Melanchthon, who was admirably well-read in the writings of the Greek and Roman ancients, even in the most remote of them, who intervened epoch-makingly in the study of grammar through his textbooks of Greek and Latin grammar, who wrote Latin so lucid, flowing, and elegant, who drew in the most capable and most lastingly effective schoolmen, such as Sturm and Troßendorf, and in general, for centuries, gave the Protestant world of scholars their

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